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, hypochondri…