Release Details

Title: The Search for Mengele
Release Date: 09/16/2008
Label/Distributor: First Run
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Prebook DVD: 08/12/2008
Retail Price: $24.95
Genre: Documentary Cast: Search for Mengele
Running Time: 78
DVD Video Options: Black & White,Color,DVD-Video,NTSC,Widescreen
DVD Audio Options: English;Original Language
DVD Extras: production notes, film gallery
UPC Code: 720229913409
THE STORY OF THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS NAZI FUGITIVE

The most notorious of 24 SS doctors at Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele, "The Angel of Death," sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths and performed appalling experiments on living children. For forty years after the Second World War, he was one of the world's most wanted war criminals - yet he was never brought to Justice. The Search for Mengele Examines his life through the eyes of those who knew him and traces his escape through Germany to Italy, then to Argentina, Paraguay and ultimately, Brazil, where he drowned in 1984.

Those who protected him talk of the infamous Nazi doctor living out his last years in poverty, cut off from his wealthy family back home - and subject to perhaps the final irony, hiding out amongst a multi-racial society. But is it too easy to simply dismiss Mengele as a monster? Was he alone responsible, or was he the product of a warped system of values? If so, could the whole gruesome episode of history be repeated in the future? And why was he never caught? "The Search for Mengele" seeks the answers to these questions.

Filmed in ten countries including Germany, Israel, Poland and Brazil and featuring numerous interviews The picture which emerges of Mengele from the interviewees in the film is often quite different from the standard view. They describe his years as a "likeable" and "outstanding" student in Germany, as a highly qualified young doctor, a "strikingly handsome" SS officer on the Eastern front and, later in life, as an embittered and paranoiac fugitive. Interviewees include Rolf Mengele, who visited his father in Paraguay in 1977 and pressed him to answer for his past actions. In Rolf's words, "'If they really wanted to get him, they could have, but there were long periods in his life when they did not want to."