Monday, February 1, 2010

Historical Horrors for Sale in Stamford

Since my primary source of cutting edge Stamford, Connecticut news is an Israeli newspaper, I was totally in the know about the Haaretz Daily's report on a disturbing piece of Holocaust history for sale by local Stamford auctioneer, Alexander Autographs.

Although Dr. Josef Mengele's diary was put up for auction on January 20/21st, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has not yet sold. Mengele was a Nazi officer best known for his brutal and criminally crazy medical experiments at Auschwitz. Proving that you can't make this stuff up, the diary is written in a children's book called "Illustrated Zoology." He wrote it after fleeing to Argentina following the war.

The auction house description of the diary makes it clear that Mengele was still festering with insanity in his later years. They note that [w]hat particularly strikes us [is] how easily Mengele is able to jump from an urgent plea that civilization undertake the "extermination" of genetically "inferior" "morons", to a child-like description of his first sighting of a monkey in the wild.

I believe I can safely say, yikes.

1 comment:

malerie said...

Rather disturbing. I'd say that the person who owns this diary will be cursed. In the voodoo way.