freedom to escape, and we could move much more efficiency and have a lot of fun. >> "hop, skip, go," how the mobility revolution is transforming our lives. all communicators are open is podcast. .. >> former u.s. surgeon general will discuss the impact of loneliness on our health. and tara westover will detail her life growing up with survivalist parents. find more information and a full weekend schedule online at booktv.org or on your program guide. now here's david marwell on the life of nazi war criminal josef

mengele. >> hi, everybody. welcome to this broadcast. i'm sorry that we've had a little delay. one of our speakers, david goldman, has had trouble with his computer, and is so we are doing a little improvisation and work-around, so we will have him just on audio, and we'll see how that goes. but we hope that you can hear well enough if we do it this way. and let us know in the chat box if that's working for you. just a warm hello to all of you. i'm so happy to see that there are so many of you. my name is dorothea, i'm one of the openers of lab precipitate books, and i want to thank our speakers for being game to speak speak -- to switch to this new

medium, new for all of us, i think, of live stream. we are presenting that tonight in partnership with our very good friends at the princetop public library. i think -- princeton. i think we're all gripped by the precarious and frightening reality of this moment, but or there are so many books that can serve as antidotes, and this is certainly one of those antidotes. and i think it's in that spirit that we are sharing the next 45 minutes or hour or so tonight. and quickly before i introduce our speakers in more detail and then step aside or minimize or whatever it is that we do these days, i just want to say quickly that david marwell's book, fabulous book, "mengele," here it is, "unmasking the angel of death, is available here at

labyrinth or your local bookstore. all of us in the independent book selling world are trying to find a way through to the other side of this crisis and really use your support. if you do want to buy this book at labyrinth, it will ship for free. if you place your order over the phone, and we have phone hours and numbers that we'll post to the chat box and that are also on our web site. so that'll be the easiest way for you to get you that book. the logistics, i want to make sure that you can ask a question and know how to do that. in this platform the best way is to go to ask a question button at the bottom of your screen. that's better than putting questions in the chat box. and if you see a question that already or interests you too, there's a little arrow next to questions, you can click on the arrow and upload them, and i

will see this is a qume -- cumulative interest in questions and can focus on them a little bit. but now let's turn to what critics are considering sort of the definitive account of the nazi doctor and war criminal, josef mengele. david marwell's book is both a biography and a detective story, and he's uniquely prepared to tell this story. he is an american historian and former director of the jewish heritage museum in new york city. david marwell also worked, and this will be crucial as you'll see, at the justice department office of special investigations where together with israel and germany, the u.s. identified in

the 1980s, eventually identified mengele's remains. and not in view but on audio to interview david marwell about the many threads of the story is david goldman. so, one, hello to you, david, on audio. but, two, they are friends, and they have a deeply shared interest, i think, in helping us learn from the past in order, hopefully, not to repeat the kinds of atrocities. david goldman is a distinguished lawyer, andst he's the founder and chairman -- and he's the founder and chairman of the fellowship at auschwitz for the study of professional ethics. this is a special nonprofit organization, and through it students are brought together and brought to auschwitz to

examine moral and ethical issues that a arise from their chosen profession. and a fundamental premise of their work there is, i'm going to quote from the materials, the morality of government oppression can break down with devastating consequences. i think that what this, with this principle and insight we are sort of squarely inside of the story of josef mengele, and i will let david and david take it from here. >> thank you. i'm hoping that people can hear me. i'm disappointed that my ineptness makes it impossible to see me though i did have a suggestion see doe -- [laughter] and i -- tuxedo. >> [inaudible] david. >> well, thank you.

i should say that david and i have known each other for many years, and a problem with that is that we often finish each other's sentences. so one note of warning and that is that if david answers a question i've not yet asked, that could happen. or i might skip asking a question that i have in mind that i've already heard david answer. so so the q&a session will be important, i'm sure. i do want to say again by way of preface that i am fascinated by the perpetrators. the organization that i work with is an ethical leadership program where we begin by studying the perpetrators in nazi germany. asking what we can learn from them. so, again prefacing my questions to david, that my focus will be on, on mengele as perpetrator and who he, who he was.

so, david, i'd like to start maybe in a different place than many would, and i'd like to start with just asking who he was. who was josef mengele? i understand that we could merely say that he was born with horns on his head, that he was evil incarnate, but we know that that's not what your book is saying. so i'd like to learn a little bit more about him. what kind of child was he, david? what was he like as a kid? >> well, i don't really know what he was like as a kid, and there are not tremendously good sources on that. the best source on his childhood is actually his writingings on himself. mengele wrote an autobiography for his family that was written

in the '60s and, to the extent that it was finished, in the 1970s. he wrote it as a novel, as a function believing that if he were free from the rigorous telling the of facts, he could make of his life something else, more illustrative or more important as a means of teaching an important lesson. and when he talks about his childhood, he spends about a hundred pages about his birth. which says something about how important he thought he was. i say in the book that there's nothing in his childhood that gives any hint of the manning of the murder that mengele was to become. there's nothing about his childhood that fulfills our notion of what an incubator for that kind of future would have been. there's no stories of him, you

know, murdering pets in the backyard or being a bully or unkind. he grew up in a prosperous family, a loving family with household help, with parents who cared for him and with two younger brothers. but there's nothing in his childhood that suggests, that points to even the politics he was later to adopt. >> what kind of student -- can what did he study? what kind of student was he this. >> he went the academic route in germany. of he was a midling student. i is have his report cards -- i have his record cards. he did -- he was not outstanding in the classroom. part of that was because he had a serious illness as a child which played a role later on in our ability to identify his body. but it wasn't until he got to the university when he became a passionate student, and his

passion was devoted to science, to medicine, to anthropology. he had an elite education. he studied at munich on vienna and frankfurt. he had not only a medical degree, but also a ph.d. in anthropology. he studied with nobel prize winners either already laureates or those who would become prize winners in the future. he was considered a extremely able student and had extremely -- he writes in his autobiography about the impact of his teachers on hip. on him. and he's quite passionate about how he was moved by not only their skill, but also their devotion to the science of medicine and anthropology.

>> anything of political anything that gives a hint as to his politics while he was in university? >> so he, his university career coincides almost precisely with the rise of the nazi party and its assumption to power. he began his studies in april of 1930, in the summer semester of 1930, and he came from a home that was conservative, catholic, probably an element of anti-semitism but not anything that would set him on the course that he eventually took. >> is so tell us more about his

studying. what was he studying? what was the medicine that he was focused on? >> so it's important to understand that mengele's interest in medicine, in racial hygiene and in anthropology came at a time when these disciplines took on a new and important meaning for the state. hitler believed that, that physicians were extremely important in terms of car ilying out his -- carrying out his world view. and, you're, hitler said that national socialism was simply biology enacted. and the fact that mengele began to study these sciences when they took on a new status is extremely important. what does a new status mean? it means that these scientists had a kind of one one fellow called a symbiotic relationship with the state, that nazi

science provided a fundamental support for the nazi world view, and it also benefited from the kinds of things that scientists benefited from; funding from an elevation of its status. so that's extremely important. and the fact that mengele -- >> david -- >> go ahead. >> rogue signs? was it rogue medicine? >> no. no, the science was mainstream for germany at the time. a haven't guard -- avant-garde but not unconventional. i describe him as both the product and the promise of german science. and he did two dissertations, one in medicine which studied

the meter about of the cleft palate which led to support for the sterilization laws which meant that people who had cleft palates were subject to forced sterilization. and he had as his mentors in anthropology an extremely famous anthrothe position, and his medical dissertation adviser was otto -- [inaudible] who was the head of the racial hygiene institute at the university of frankfurt and later the head of the kaiser government in berlin. he was a promising young scientist on the cutting edge of german science and had probably a wonderful academic career in front of him. had the war not started and had

things happened differently. >> i want to get to the war in a minute, but till -- still about him, married? children? >> yeah. he married a woman that he met right before the beginning of the war. they had really no real married life together since the war came, and he had other things to do. they had one son who was born on mentioning la's to own birthday, march 16th, in 1943. >> do we know anything about his, his faith? how religious he was? >> yeah. his mother was a very devout catholic, and he writes about that in his memoir. he chose to have a church

wedding, which was unusual for an ss officer. so he had some -- that was out of respect for his mother or out of some nostalgic sense of belonging to the catholic church. but he didn't -- he was not regularly observant. although it had an impact on him, and he writes about it when his mother dies, he reflects on his catholic upbringing. >> let me jump around a little bit. thanks for that background. so when did, when did mengele become part of your life? i want to talk about you now. how did you become involved with him? >> well, i worked, as dorothea mentioned, i was with the department of justice this washington as a historian for the office of special investigations and was involved in the normal work of the office which was investigating or identifying and investigating and prosecuting nazi war criminals who were loving in the united states. -- living in the

united states. but i was also responsible for what we called special projects in the office, and i worked on a case in 1983 when it was alleged that krause barbie had worked for u.s. intelligence and we found that, in fact, was true and published a report in the summer of 1983. and in 1985, for reasons that are probably too complicated to go into in this conversation, mengele became the subject of intense public if interest. and the attorney general asked my office to investigate certain allegations that mengele had been used as -- had been interned by the americans and knowingly released and then eventually used by the americans sort of like barbie had. so we were asked to investigate those allegations. and that investigation then became an international manhunt when we were joined by another

office in the justice department, the u.s. marshal service, and the german prosecutor in frankfurt and the israeli government, both the justice administration and the mossad. >> okay. is so, david, how did he -- josef mengele, how did he, how did he get out of germany? how did that happen? >> so mengele left auschwitz in january of 1945 and was assigned to another camp. and by may when that camp had been liberated by the soviets, he found his -- he found himself making his way back toward germany. and he came upon a field hospital that was in the area just around check sho advantage

ya d czechoslovakia. and it so happens one of the people in the field hospital was a former colleague of his at the institute in frankfurt. and he asked if he could join the field hospital. he took off his ss uniform which marked him immediately as someone who would have been of intense interest for anyone who captured him and donned one of the uniforms. and this unit ended up being in an rare between the advancing -- in an area between the advancing red army and the advancing western allies in the area around the so-called airstrip area in eastern -- southeastern germany and czechoslovakia. and it was an area that was unoccupied for about six weeks between the beginning of may and the middle of june, unoccupied because the front lines of the red army in the east and the western allies in the west had frozen.

and so mengele had a chance to join this unit and build a convincing cover story no longer clad in an ss uniform. this field hospital decided wisely to, at some point that they needed to surrender, they decided not to surrender to the soviets which would have been unwise and took -- got in their trucks and drove to the american lines in bavaria and were taken into custody. and mengele spent two, was in two different u.s. p.o.w. camps. likely under his own name at least at the end, was probably released under his own name. there are three reasons why he was released by the americans even though he was on wanted lists that had been created by them. the first one was they were very

inefficiently distributed in the camps were mengele had been interned, had not received the wanted lists. second reason is that mengele had no longer the -- [inaudible] unit and was well integrated in the unit. but the most important reason is that mengele didn't have the ss tattoo under his left arm. the ss would a tattoo the blood type of their soldiers is so that if they were wounded, the medics would know what kind of blood to use for the transfusion. mengele did not have thed blood type tattoo which was the most common, telltale mark of someone who was in the ss. and he passed through what was an extremely effective, although crude litmus test which was to have intern -- interred soldiers take off their shirts and reveal their arms. and mengele was released by the

u.s. without further interrogation. he then secured false identity papers under another man's name and lived for about four years on a farm doing manual labor in a small farm in baa varian a ya and then -- bavaria and then made his way, with the help of his prosperous financially, over land into italy, to general what and then by ship to argentina where he arrived in the summer of 1949. >> is there, david, i any evidence of complicity with the americans, with any of the allies to get him out? >> no, there's no evidence of any, any contact with american forces. and the reason for that i explain in the book is that the family had color graphed a

ruse -- chore graphed a ruse that mengele had died. if you look in the files of the nuremberg war crimes trials, there's a card file, and in there, there's an indication that mengele had died, and the family was able to maintain that ruse. and with their prosperous, with the means they had, they were able to help mengele out of germany without any official help. they were able to purchase the services of experienced guides who were very practiced in getting people over the border and were able to purchase effective false identities for him. >> did the book, the book tells, as dorothea said, a bit of a background story of how you, with others, discovered what had happened to him, what his life was like inside america, how he

died. i'd like, if we have time, to come back to that. i want to make sure we spend time at auschwitz. what -- you spry into this. at one point you said you were quite anxious about how it might be received. you were concerned about how people might take the book. tell us about why you felt that, and that might help us understand a bit about how you feel about his work at auschwitz. >> yeah. i mean, i should say that when i worked on the case back in the '80s, i was, i believed the common picture of mengele as some kind of mad scientist, as

someone who was motivated by grotesque interest in, sadistic interest in odd things. he was interested in twins, he was interested -- i came across a document on another case where he had sent the head of a 12-year-old boy to the lab for fixing, you know, for having slides made and placed in formaldehyde. and i didn't have a great deal of curiosity about exactly what his science was all about, i simply accepted this kind of carrick ca cure which came along with tremendous support from popular culture. i had seen the boys from brazil and marathon man, and i'd read the deputy, and i had read time's arrow by martin ennis, and i had seen a number of these

films and read a number of books that portray him as this kind of prototype of evil. but i also knew that we didn't really know all that much about what he did at auschwitz. the science -- there are no records of his, very few, that really illustrate the exact nature of his experiments, the goals of the experiments, the procedures he used. all we had were the, what the testimony of his victims who, by and large, were young, traumatized children at the time of their encounter with mengele. we, and we also had the testimony of physicians who had been recruited by mengele.

i say recruited meaning they had been forced to help him with his, with his scientific work. mengele established an auschwitz a kind of research institute on the pattern of those that he had been associated with both in frankfurt and berlin. great medical talent from all over europe spilled out of the trains at the ramp of auschwitz, and he made sure he kept an eye out for talented physicians and pediatricians and medical illustrators and photographers and nurses so that he could assemble a team who could assist him in his work. so we have the testimony of these inmate physicians who were operating with mengele, assisting him not because they were interested in the work he did, but because they were essentially forced to do it, and

it offered a different future for them. their testimony, by and large -- although it describes some of the things that mengele did -- do not describe the intent of his experiments or the exact nature of the experiments, with a couple of exceptions. the only records we have, we have a few reports that he filed with the german research foundation which funded some of the research that he was engaged in. and we have the very very, very careful work of german historians of science which was, had been done in the last 10-15 years which was not available to us back in the 1980s. so i sat down and i read all of this stuff, and a picture emerged that was at odds with the testimony that had become kind of trope about mengele's

work. it was at odds in that it wasn't clear that what the testimony that came from survivors which alleged a particular goal for an experiment or a kind of experiment, they simply didn't match up with mengele's career, his training and his own personal ambition and goals which was to impress his mentors and to pursue his academic work. so i'm, i was concerned that when one rejects the testimony of people who had this tragic and traumatic encounter, that i might be misunderstood somehow, that i might be apologizing or trying to make less horrific what mengele was involved in. but in the end, i come up with a

different, a different answer, and that is i think it's somehow easier to describe mengele as a monster than to recognize the monstrous things that people who are the product and the promise of enshrined institutions are able to do. and to me, or it's a more unsettling picture than some renegade monster working without, working on his own and fulfilling base and primitive motive. >> we don't want to paint too pretty of a picture, obviously. he was doing experiments -- >> absolutely, no question about it. and the other thing about mengele's work at auschwitz is that when it comes to criminality -- and there's no question of criminality -- in terms of the scale and the

extent of his crimes, and these are crimes that he although he didn't believe they were crimes, they are crimes that he admitted to in his own discussions with his family, were his role in selections at auschwitz. both those who were arriving at the camp and those who were culled from the camp once they had been registered in the camp where he made this binary decision about whether they should die immediately or be exploited for their labor. >> if we look -- i understand that the selection, crime of the selection where he was choosing to murder people -- >> believed in it, yeah. >> and believe -- and if we go back to the experiments for which he is so known, we go back to that, what was motivating him? why was he doing the experiments? what excited him?

what motive, what got him up every day? >> well, i mean, he was -- part of it was that he found himself in a situation with no moral or ethical boundaries or limitations imposed on him. let's talk about his twin research. one of the inmate physicians, and this is one of the exceptions of people who claim to know the purpose of mengele's experiments, said that mengele was involved in working with twins because if he wanted to discover the secret of twin births so that he could use that knowledge to apply it to the german population and secure an aryan future by increasing the birthrate in germany. this is not true, and it ignores, first of all, i think, the proposition that if mengele was interested in the secret of twin birth, he would be equally

interested in the parents as he would be in the twins themself. and he showed no interest in the parents of twins. they were often sent to their death, and the twins were sent to the barracks where they were then used as unwilling subjects for his experiments. it also ignores the long tradition of twin experiments within germany. there were 200 dissertations written based on twin research during the nazi period. twin research was considered the gold standard of genetic research, and i won't go into the theory behind it, but it has to do with comparing the incidence of disease or -- between fraternal twins and identical twins. to tease out what was the result of nature and what was the result of nurturing, environment. mengele's work at auschwitz was an extension of the work that he was doing in germany before the

war. of course, at that time he didn't have the same supply and, so-called supply of research material. when the war started, twin research ended in germany because of the fact that young children and most twins -- most were children and when they get older, they diverging in their lives. most children were moved to the countryside the whole cost of the war in term of human infrastructure made it very difficult to continue twin research. until mengele got to auschwitz. and there he had before him a nearly unlimited -- at least an extreme number of twin subjects. for him, mengele -- auschwitz was a kind of cornucopia of possibilities because it offered

him the opportunity to continue his twin research, and there's twin research that was being conducted without any of the safe guards that were even present in germany for research on human beings. so for him, this was a kind of fantasy, and he mentioned to one of his colleagues that it would have been a crime against science for him not to have been able to carly on the experiments -- carry on the experiments. >> so if he would have -- i know you can't answer this, but if he would have been asked whether he was complying with the admonition to do no harm, what would he, what do you think he would have said? >> well, i talk in the book about how the medical profession was able through a kind of moral, ethical, intellectual slight of hand be consistent

with their own view of the hippocratic oath and also carry on the kind of racial hygienic work that was required of them as physicians in nazi germany. they simply substituted the patient. no longer was the individual the patient who deserved their care butting rath -- but, rather, the racial community, the folk which is translated to english, but the racial community was the patient that you had to, you had to no harm to the racial community. so that if you -- and the metaphor is there's a cancerous cell in the body, you destroy the cell to save the body to help the body. and so for mengele, the harming

jews was, was not an issue because he didn't consider them to be worthy of that consideration. >> so was he motivated by aunt semitism? -- anti-semitism? would you say his work was motivated by antisemitim or -- . >> it was a kind of racial anti-semitism by this notion of racial hygiene that races have inherent qualities, some races are better than ohs, some -- others, some deserve to live and some don't. >> so, david, you can see when i sort of come back onto the screen here because i'm keeping an eye on the time and because i see some questions that will actually field into, into this particular moment of the conversation and then, david goldman, if you have another sort of important question, by all means, ask that also. i just want to make sure we get

to some of the, some of the questions that i see in the queue. tyson is following up on the question of self-perception that you started to talk about here asking also about his health research both before and after '45 and his -- [inaudible] maybe you can say also something about that. >> sure. i end the book with an epilogue are which talks about a kind of confrontation that mengele had that had not been available to his victims or to those who sought him to prosecute him. it was a competition he had with his son who had been, who was born in 1944. mengele knew him once as a

toddler, or maybe a few times as a toddler, and then once again when mengele visited switzerland from south america in 1956 when rolf was then 12 years old. and then rolf only knew mengele as his uncle and until the eichmann trial when mengele's name became to be known -- especially during, when auschwitz, the frankfurt auschwitz trial was being conducted, mengele's name became much more well known within germany, and mengele's stepfather, rolf's stepfather decided to let him know who his real father was. and at that time rolf mengele began an awkward and, from his point of view, forced correspondence with his father who was living in bra. and if they had a -- in brazil.

they had an awkward relationship for many years. they would argue, and they didn't really understand each other. rolf was a student, a child of the '60s, radical progressive politics and didn't have any -- he had a kind of connection to his father but had intellectual battle. and he decided that he would confront the father rather than continue with the kind of labored conventions of written correspondence. so he went to brazil -- he swiped a friend's passport and went to brazil under some security precautions and met his father and had a real con upon conconfrontation with him where he challenged him about auschwitz, challenged him about his racial theories. i don't want to spoil the whole thing, but mengele essentially says, gets quite emotional, even

weeping, saying that it's so hurtful that his own son would believe what was written in the papers about him, that he, that people who arrived at auschwitz were already dead when he got there, and he was simply helping some people live a bit longer. and that -- and eventually this very emotional, very kind of bitter conversation just ends, and they both decide it's no longer useful to keep it up. then rolf comes back to germany, and mengele writes a letter to him later near the end of his life and says i'm glad that i was able to meet you. but -- it's a long letter, in the end he says but i don't need to justify myself to you or to anyone else. i've already explained what i did in clear term, and my

patience has a limit, and that limit is where i feel a threat to my family or to my -- and then he uses this really nazi term -- my racial community. which is exactly the same language he might have used in the summer of 1944. so there's absolutely no remorse on the part of mengele, and he's kind of frozen in time in a sense. in the way he looks at world. >> yeah. yeah. would connect to a question that other people are also having about, about other aspects of his life in argentina wondering whether he continued husband medical experiments -- his medical experiments at all in any way or in any ultimate form. >> so, no. he -- about his life in argentina, first of all, he spent four years on a farm with very, very hard physical labor, and when he got to argentina, to

buenos aires, he could go to libraries, bookstores and the theater and became involved with the german emigre community, some of which were right-wing and some nazis, eichmann there a few times, he did publish an article, i believe -- there's very good evidence for it -- on genetics in a german-language journal published in buenos aires in 1953. he then later invested in a pharmaceutical company in buenos aires which produced a medicine for tuberculosis that was a short-lived enterprise because by the time it really got going, he had to leave argentina and went to paraguay. so he did satisfy his interest in science a bit in terms of his work in the pharmaceutical company where he was kind of the chief scientist. but he didn't carry on as far as

we know any medical experiments. >> yeah. >> by the time he got to brazil, he was finished. >> yeah. i think some of that part of his life. there are two questions here that concerns the question of eichmann, and one being when eichmann's capture hurt efforts to also capture mengele, what the relationship there might be. and then a question of whether mengele knew eichmann in south america or whether they, there's anything you can say about what he thought of eichmann. >> yeah. there -- they met, apparently, three times. and they were, really came from different social backgrounds. mengele was from a prosperous upper middle class family and eichmann was not. there's an interesting contrast. when mengele was waiting to make

his way to genoa to argentina, he stayed at a hotel. when eichmann, under similar circumstances, he stayed in a monastery. he didn't have the money to stay in a hotel, and that kind of illustrates their differences. and also mengele was intellectual in a sense, and eichmann was not. so they didn't really get along very well. they weren't friends. it's a kind of misconception that mengele was still in buenos aires when eichmann was captured. it turns out that eichmann -- that mengele left argentina at the end of the summer of 1958. he got word that the german justice authority were interested in him, and at that moment he began to find a new place to live. he sold his interest in the

pharmaceutical company, he gave his wife power of attorney, and he went to paraguay in probably the late fall of 1958. he then moved to paraguay for good in 1959 in the spring. so by 1960 when eichmann was captured in buenos aires, mengele was long gone. the capture team that captured eichmann believed that mengele was still in buenos aires, and they made an attempt after eichmann was safely in the safehouse, and they interrogated him in part about mengele. they went to former addresses that they knew of for mengele and couldn't find him. he could not have been captured because he wasn't there. >> yeah, yeah. i wish we had time for all the questions. i don't think we will. there's another one here that asks a little bit of, about his

legacy, whether there is a scientific legacy in terms of the experiments that he did having -- or his research or his writing having had, having been taken up by any country in any way in the scientific community whether there's an afterlife of that at all. >> so we don't know. we don't have any of his medical files. we don't know what his experiments really were. we do know one series of experiments that he did which there was a disease called noma which was a kind of oral cancer where the face is eaten away by a kind of gangrene that had been, or cupid of disappeared -- kind of disappeared in the developed world. we still found it among some people with immune systems that were jeopardized. but this disease came back with

great force in the gypsy camp in auschwitz in 1943. mengele sought to find a cure for this disease, and he found a world famous czech jewish physician who was another part of the auschwitz compound and had him brought over to the gypsy camp. epstein began a series of experiments and new treatment protocols and found a, found a treatment that cured the disease. this was written up by an inmate physician who worked with dr. epstein in the lancet medical journal in 1976, and she wrote about what epstein had done and the treatments that were used as successful treatments for noma. the irony, of course, of all this, the grotesque irony is

noma was a part of the camp itself for condition of sanitary conditions. the second grotesque irony is none of the children who were cured of the disease survived the camp because they were murdered. so that's one part of the experiments and scientific work there that did find its way out into the scientific community through the writings of one of the physicians. >> yeah, interesting. >> david, if i could -- >> yeah. i was just going to give you the last question, david goldman. [laughter] so, please -- >> that's a lot of pressure. >> no, no, no. >> so, david, why, why did mengele become mengele? why did he become the trope, as you say? do you have a theory? why did we -- >> well, i mean -- >> yeah. >> why did he become the kind of symbol of -- >> yes. >> -- the holocaust, of auschwitz? i don't know.

i think a lot of it has to do with the way, the fact that he became such an attractive figure for people who create popular culture. i think that's, you know, i have a, i have a google alert on my phone which gives me a message several times a day every time mengele is mentioned in the world press or on any tv show. i got one this morning that one of the great german actors who portrayed him in some crazy film died yesterday. every single day mengele is promoted as either, east in a historic -- either in a historical sense, sometimes the inaccurately, or he's invoked. lately with the coronavirus, there are lots of metaphors or comparisons of mengele, whether we need a mengele there to help us find a solution or whether

trump will replace fauci with a mengele-like adviser. but more often than not also as a kind of benchmark for evil is this, you know, a bad manager in a bank, then he's the mengele of that bank or something. he is certainly has, as one scholar has said, been separated -- his name has been separated from his person. and part of what i tried to do in this book was to explain who that person really was. and if i hope -- and i hope i've done that. >> well, you most definitely have, david. it is and has this, you know, doubleness of the biography and a detective story, but it's also such a author eauly researched history -- thoroughly researched

history book. it's an amazing book, and i encourage all of you to get ahold of it. let me just thank david and david. i'm so sorry, david gold match, that we couldn't -- gold match, that we couldn't have you on screen, but i'm very happy that somehow this impro if sayings -- improvisation worked anyways. >> i admire your calm, dorothea. you were a good guide through all of this. >> well -- >> i believe it was everybody's good fortune, so it worked out perfectly. >> yeah. it did. it did. and all good conversations are ones that could continue on, and i feel that way about this one. maybe i can just say a couple of practical things in wrapping up. which is just to remind you that this is one of many events that labyrinth is hosting in this new medium both together and with the princeton public library.

we do separate events, we do joint events, so you can find those by signing up for our respective newsletters op our web sites or by following us on facebook, whichever way. you can also follow discuss on this podcast platform and then get notifications when we have the next thing. i also want to just take a second to mention something that david goldman offered. webinars that are very much related to tonight's conversation, and you can find out more about those, and you can register for those on the faspe-ethics.org. and then these are webinars that will explore in particular the way this which professional ethics and ethical leadership also in the current pandemic are

relevant and important questions to consider. so don't forget to buy if david marwell's book from an independent bookstore -- >> labyrinth books. >> from labyrinth books ideally. [laughter] but any independent bookstore. if you want to get it from labyrinth, best way is to give us a call. the phone number's op our web site, and our phone hours are tuesdays-saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. so maybe, maybe i'll end by saying that we have been so moved and heartened by the response from so many right now who are really recognizing, i think, that there are local businesses are businesses that they value in their lives and are supporting them. and labyrinth has been no exception. so i'm closing by thanking all of you and by thanking, once again most particularly, david

and david. so good bye, be well, be healthy and until next time. >> thank you. >> yes. >> thank you. >> as the coronavirus continues to impact the country, here's a look at how it's affecting the publishing industry. many bookstores in states that loosened their stay at home orders are trying to determine if they should reopen to customers or continue with online sales. in dallas, one of the few to open their doors are allowing no more than 10 people in the store at a time. in accordance with state guidelines to not exceed 25% capacity. as book selling remains predominantly online, bookstores have also my grated their author events to the virtual world. in a recent publishers weekly report, bookstores have found an effective way to remain connected with their customers and have garnered sizable a audiences but have had mixed results in transferring that to sales.

npd book scan reports book sales were flat for the week ending april 25th. nonfiction sales saw a 16% decline and are now down 10% for the year. and many book festivals and conferences that were forced to cancel are now offering attendees a virtual experience. the mississippi book festival announced the cancellation of their august literary lawn party and will now provide on line programs. the bay area book festival kicked off a month of virtual author talks last weekend, and the third annual bronx book festival will take place online june 3th. booktv continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. you can also watch all of our archived programs anytime at booktv.org. >> on our weekly author interview program "after words," or new york times reporter jennifer sign our chronicled the first year of the largest class of women ever elected to congress. here's a portion of that discussion. >> there had to be a gender

focus. often because, as we all know with women, often you didn't. many women have to be asked to running, in fact they have to be talked into running sometimes even when they're highly qualified. so if that's the case with women, you are going to have to recruit women directly. and, you know, i talked to a woman who had run in a primary in north carolina, and she was stunned to see how many women especially over 50 just didn't believe that another woman should, that a woman should have that job. so it's very regional, but it's really, it's taking a concerted effort. there has to be structural changes in place. >> to watch the rest of this interview and to find other episodes of "after words," visit our web site, booktv.org. click on the "after words" tab near the top of the page. >> sunday night on booktv on "after words," author tara

westover talks about growing up in the idaho mountains with survivalist parents in her book "educated." >> i think that my mother did a pretty, a decent job with home schooling. by the time i came along, she had sevenning kids, she was a midwife, or there wasn't a lot of home school going on. so i never took an exam, there was never anything like a lecture. >> then at 10 p.m. eastern former u.s. surgeon general with his book "to together," on the impact of loneliness on health. >> but then finding myself just mindlessly scrolling through my e-mail or through my social media feed or google. and i don't with need to do that, it's just so accessible, it's right there and i just fall into it. it does dilute the quality of our conversation. it defines very clearly that we cannot multitask. we're actually task switching

between one thing and another very rapidly. and this is why i think that it's so important for us to ask the question now how to we extract not only the quantity we have with people, but perhaps more importantly the quality of time. >> watch booktv this weekend on c-span2. .. over the next two hours you will hear from milton friedman, studs terkel, christopher agents, toni morrison and shelby foote but first, john hope franklin, author of the best-selling slavery to freedom, appeared on "in depth" in 2006. >>