Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's diary up for sale

A diary kept by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is to be sold at auction in the US.

By Allan Hall in Berlin
Published: 7:51PM GMT 01 Feb 2010

Nazi memorabilia collectors are expected to push the price for the diary and letters of the "Angel of Death" responsible for thousands of murders at Auschwitz to at least £40,000.

Infamous as Hitler's "Angel of Death", Mengele experimented on prisoners at the death camp without anaesthetic and became obsessed with twins, hoping to be able to clone perfect specimens of the Aryan race.

His diary's eclectic and often mundane contents include praise for British rule in India and his love of Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago. But he also makes chilling references to his wartime atoricities. Unless the world adopts the breeding programmes of the kind he pursued in Auschwitz, he wrote, "mankind is doomed".

"Inferior mornons," he wrote when describing "lesser races" he believed should be exterminated. He then moved seamlessly on to how pleased he is with himself for freeing a cow trapped in mud.

The diary and letters were discovered recently in police files in Brazil, where he lived until his death in 1979.

The diary, which begins in 1960 when Mengele was 49, is to be auctioned in America by the historical artefacts house, Alexander Autographs, in Connecticut.

The auctioneers have refused to reveal the identity of the owner who acquired them in Brazil but have hinted it is someone "close" to Mengele's family in Germany.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7128912/Nazi-doctor-Josef-Mengeles-diary-up-for-sale.html