The dictators who cried wolf
Even tyrants tell the truth sometimes. But why would anyone believe them?
I kicked off my Goodreads annual reading challenge (aiming to finish 30 books in 2023) with an audiobook of Gerald Posner’s Mengele: The Complete Story, a biography of the Nazi “angel of death” who carried out horrifying “experiments” on prisoners at the Auschwitz Death Camp. And, to paraphrase the late, great Norm MacDonald, I gotta say that the more I learn about Dr. Joseph Mengele, the more I don’t care about him at all.
There is kind of a public perception about Nazis who escaped to South America, that they were cunning and sophisticated and lived in compounds with armed guards and were protected by officials at the highest levels of power.
In Mengele’s case, it turns out that the man who - in contrast to his fellow Nazi doctors - didn’t have to get himself good and drunk while selecting people for the gas chambers became a sniveling, hypochondriac whiner who constantly complained about his lot in life and escaped justice largely through pure dumb luck.
But that’s kind of the way it is with psychopaths. Hannibal Lecter movies would have you believe they’re charming and fascinating, but the more reputable sources I’ve studied (true crime documentaries on Discovery+) make it clear that they’re kind of hollow inside and completely boring and tiresome once the initial charm wears off and you figure them out. In Mengele’s case, it’s not clear that the superficial charm was even there to begin with.
Several Nazi sympathizers who knew or were willfully blind to his background quickly grew sick of him and tried to fob him off on others. In his final years he was living in a run-down home near Sao Paulo, Brazil, desperately lonely and depressed before drowning at a beach in 1979.
So he actually did kind of meet a fitting end, didn’t he? No. He should have spent his golden years in a cell allowing him no more room to move than a Flair Airlines seat. But it was something, I guess.
Mengele might have been caught much earlier had he not been protected and financed by his family, a well-known manufacturer of farm equipment. Amazingly, agricultural machinery bearing the name “Mengele” was built and sold well into the eighties, making it arguably the worst-aged branding (or maybe second-worst) in history.
Mengele was reunited with his old bosses in 1979, but his death wasn’t confirmed until 1985, and rumors about his whereabouts were rampant until his bones were exhumed and identified.
The Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann kicked off a wave of Nazi hunting, carried out by governments (with varying degrees of enthusiasm, especially in the case of West Germany) and private organizations. The book portrays a kind of wild goose chase to track down Mengele, with his whereabouts rumored to be Argentina (where he first settled down after escaping Europe), Brazil (where he actually wound up), several other Latin American and Middle Eastern countries, and even New York and Florida.
Some people were wrongly identified as Mengele, and one unfortunate recluse was even murdered for it. (In a further ironic twist, he actually turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer himself, though he wasn’t the guy his killers thought they’d eliminated.)
It was Paraguay, a relatively obscure South American country most people don’t even think about except during major international soccer competitions (and not because of the players) that bore the brunt of most investigations and accusations. Mengele did indeed live there for a little while, between his longer stays in Argentina and Brazil, but long after he’d left, the Paraguayan government found itself constantly fending off accusations that they were harboring the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminal.
An ironic subplot which emerges in Mengele: The Complete Story is that Paraguay and its President Alfredo Stroessner, a brutal right-wing dictator straight out of central casting, maintained their innocence in the face of serious accusations by credible journalists and investigators, and they were telling the truth all along.
It struck me an historical example of a kind of “boy who cried wolf” phenomenon, where repressive governments that constantly lie about almost everything actually aren’t lying for once, but their credibility has been so thoroughly compromised that no one believes them.
Saddam Hussein’s insistence that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction comes immediately to mind. Then there’s the Katyn Massacre of 1940, when thousands of Polish military officers were summarily executed, allegedly by the Nazis. Goebbels’ media empire actually announced the discovery of the bodies in 1943, insisted Germany wasn’t responsible, and this one and only time, they really weren’t the perpetrators. The blood from Katyn was on Stalin’s hands, a point conceded by the Soviet Union half a century later.
Of course, Germany being innocent of this particular incident is kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer being acquitted and absolved of one of the sixteen murders with which he was charged. It doesn’t really change the overall dynamic about how the Nazis waged war, though it does put a spotlight on what the Red Army was doing.
Still, “truth is the first casualty of war” is a cliche because it’s true. Between the “fog of war” and the “good” guys’ own propaganda, it’s not at all uncommon for accusations against a brutal government to turn out false.
When the dust settles in Ukraine (and Crimea is back under this flag and a chastened Kremlin is under this one, hopefully) it will almost certainly turn out that some of what we’ve bed led to believe about the “special military operation” wasn’t accurate.
One example I found a few months ago was about that horrifying viral photo purporting to show a box of gold teeth forcefully extracted from Ukrainians’ mouths during torture by Russian forces. When later reports showed that it wasn’t true, RT was quick to trumpet Russia’s apparent vindication.
The thing is, RT’s website credited Germany’s Bild for uncovering the truth, but didn’t actually include a link. When you did read the original story in that German tabloid, it conceded that this particular allegation might have been false, but the Russians’ absolutely bloodthirsty and brutal actions in that captured region of Ukraine were all too true.
Even when they’re telling the truth once in a while, dictatorships still can’t stop themselves from lying, or at least blanketing the truth with half-truths.
Of course, democratic governments constantly lie for domestic and international consumption as well. No nation on earth has completely clean hands.
\And that’s why a free press, and the right to openly criticize your governments is so important. Many of America’s worst crimes, and the lies surrounding them, have been reported by American reporters in American newspapers and magazines.
And American Presidents have often retaliated in turn. But constitutional protections and a functioning judiciary tie their hands, while authoritarian rulers can do pretty much whatever they want.
There are times when it seems like a disadvantage for democracies, with their dirty laundry reported around the world while dictators get to hide the ball. That’s why have learned so much more about the death of George Floyd than, say, the re-education camps in Xinjiang. Or about the Trump Administration and CDC’s bungling of COVID-19 than what actually happened at the Wuhan infectious diseases lab.
But people still tend to believe or at least hear out democratic governments, while only tankies and neo-fascists take dictators at their word. Having the right to hold your government accountable is actually good for that government in the long run.
It wasn’t too long ago that the American military appeared totally humiliated and inept after leaving Afghanistan, while Russia’s large and modern armed forces looked set to slice through Ukraine like a Ginsu knife through a tomato soup can. And the United States had been ravaged by COVID-19 because of partisan bickering and conspiracy theories spread on social media, while China had thoroughly beaten it because its government had a free hand to do what needed to be done.
How did either of these work out for them?