Here we have a story that contains certain characters who are based
upon real people and a villain who was a real person.
Hermine Braunsteiner was made a warden of Majdanek death camp when she was in her mid-twenties. She earned the nickname of the Stomping Mare because she seemed to enjoy kicking the concentration camp inmates with her steel studded boots. She sent thousands of women and children to the gas chambers. After the war she married an American and moved to the United States but her past caught up with her. In 1971 she was deprived of her American citizenship and in 1973 she was extradited to Germany to stand trial for war crimes. She was sentenced to life in prison. At the time when The Boys from Brazil was being written there was a great deal in the news coverage dealing with her case and the possibility exists that the character Frieda Altschul may have based upon her to some degree.
The lead character in the book, Yakov Liebermann, is almost certainly based on Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. It was Wiesenthal who discovered that Hermine Braunsteiner was living in America and revealed her true identity to the world.
I recall reading his book, The Murderers Among Us, in 1967. I recommend it highly. It shows, not only the evil of the Nazi regime, but also the world's indifference to the evil that was wrought by that regime. Wiesenthal was a thorn in the side of those who would prefer to forget the holocaust.
Wiesenthal and his family, like most Jews in Europe during the 40's, suffered greatly from the rise of the Third Reich. His stepfather died in prison. His step-brother was shot. His mother was sent to Belzec death camp. Wiesenthal and his wife were sent to a forced labor camp. Almost all of the members of his family and his wife's family were killed. He weighed less than 100 pounds when the Allies liberated the camp where he was held.
After the war Wiesenthal set out to find the people responsible for the attempted genocide of the Jews. Number one on the list was Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of Hitler's Final Solution to the Jewish problem. When Wiesenthal's research revealed that Eichmann was living in Argentina, Israeli agents captured him and brought him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Wiesenthal and the volunteers who helped him found Karl Silberbauer (The man who arrested Anne Frank), Franz Stangl (The commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp), and many other Nazi war criminals.
The real person who appears in this fictional story is Dr. Joseph Mengele. At the time the novel was written the whereabouts of Dr. Mengele where unknown. In many monster movies we encounter mad scientists and they are generally the sort of crackpots we make fun of, but Mengele was no laughing matter. His experiments can only be called insane and his indifference to human suffering was far more monstrous than anything that's ever been depicted on film.
Mengele had a passion for twins. He conducted horrible, often senseless, experiments on almost 1500 sets of twins at the Auschwitz death camp. Some Nazis worked in the death camps reluctantly. Mengele volunteered for it with eagerness.
Mengele operated on these youngsters, often without benefit of anesthesia, injecting dyes into their eyes, changing their sexes, removing various organs, injecting them with lethal germs, causing one twin to impregnate the other, drawing blood so often that many of them bled to death, and preforming other mindless, unspeakable horrors.
This 'Angel of Death', as he came to be known, would sometimes treat the children kindly and bring them candy. Later he might be seen pinning one of their eyeballs to a bulletin board. If ever a monster lived, it was Mengele.
After the fall of the Reich he worked as a farmhand in Germany until he fled to Buenos Aires in 1949. Later he lived in Paraguay and Brazil. He died of a stroke in 1979. Unfortunately, Mengele was able to escape justice.
The Boys from Brazil begins with a meeting of what is left of the German hierarchy. In the book Mengele tells his followers that an incredibly important project is about to be launched. It is necessary for 94 men to die on or near certain dates. They do not seem to be important men. They are just low-level bureaucrats. They are fathers and husbands and not noteworthy in any way. But the destiny of the Aryan race depends on these people being killed on specific dates.
The Nazis are amazed and puzzled by Mengele's mysterious secret project, but not nearly as amazed and puzzled as Barry Koehler. Barry is an amateur Nazi-hunter and he's hit the jackpot. He's been able to plant a tape recorder right in this meeting of Hitler's elite. When he learns of Mengele's plan, he calls Yakov Liebermann, the world's most famous Nazi-hunter, and tells him what he's learned. But what, exactly, has he learned?
Liebermann frantically sets out to solve the riddle before Mengele's master plan can become a reality. Its a heart-pounding race between good and evil and you'll find yourself turning pages as rapidly as you can to learn the frightening details of a plan that is even more possible today than at the time when it was written. Like much of Levin's writing, this is a book that was far ahead of its time.
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LEVIN DIRECTORY |
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