LOS ANGELES/WARSAW (EJP)---The Simon Wiesenthal Center said that the anonymous acquisition of the Mengele diary, written by Auschwitz’s infamous ‘Angel of Death,’ Dr. Josef Mengele, “is an important contribution to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.”
Mengele was personally responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of people to the gas chambers and for conducting horrific experiments on women and children.
The 180 page long diary has been reportedly bought by a Jewish philanthropist on Tuesday.
It was offered in an auction by the well known auction house “Alexander Autographs”, based in Connecticut, United States, for a sum ranging between 60 and 80,000 US dollars.
Bill Panagopulos, President of Alexander Autographs, disclosed that the diary was sold to a Jewish philanthropist from the United States’ East Coast, who is the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor who encountered Mengele personally while he was an inmate at the concentration camp.
The philanthropist reportedly bought the diary for an undisclosed sum to prevent it from falling into neo-Nazi hands in the auction.
According to Panagopulos, the philanthropist intends to donate his acquisition to a Holocaust museum.
“I spoke to the family that acquired the diary this morning and learned that more than 100 of their close relatives were murdered in the concentration camps, including dozens who saw Dr. Josef Mengele in action at Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations.
“They want the world to know that their only motivation in acquiring the diary was to ensure that it remains in Jewish hands to serve as an integral part of the education of future generations about the infamy of history’s greatest crime.”
“At a time when Ahmadinejad’s Iran regularly denies the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews is back in vogue, this acquisition is especially significant,” Hier said.
"I am overjoyed that the manuscript is going where it belongs, where it will be available to historians and scholars", Panagopulos told American media.
According to Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mansfelt, the museum is currently attempting to contact the buyer so to persuade him that the diary should be placed in Auschwitz.
The original seller of the diary did not expose his identity but has revealed that he is close to Mengele’s family.
The diary begins in 1960, when Mengele was 49, and its content suggests that the nazi doctor had no change of heart regarding his philosophy or crimes.
"The real problem is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated”, he writes in the diary.
“Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized after the fifth child", he adds.
A Jewish Holocaust survivors group, the ‘American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants,’ has asked the State Attorney General in Connecticut to investigate into the authenticity of the diary.
Joseph Mengele is infamous for conducting experiments on identical twin children, in an attempt to research heredity.
Mengele was also one of the SS officers responsible for the infamous “selection” of incoming inmates for death or forced labor in Auschwitz.
After WWII, Mengele fled to South America, where he remained uncaught and never answered for his crimes. He reportedly died in 1979 in Brazil.