Where does it go, the past? In 1949, it went to Argentina. In Olivier Guez’s novel “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” that is the year the notorious Auschwitz physician, the so-called Angel of Death, begins life anew as a fugitive in Buenos Aires. At the time, Argentina was actively importing Mengele’s kind: the country was, in Mr. Guez’s words, a “melting pot of Nazis . . . Italian Fascists . . . Vichy French . . . killers, torturers and adventurers,” a “ghostly Fourth Reich” in the Southern Cone. President Juan Perón’s sense of military honor had been offended by the Nuremberg trials, and, he calculated, the brain trust of the former Axis could perhaps help him to forge a populist, authoritarian “Third Way” between the atheistic Communists and the Anglo-American imperialists. With the aid of high-ranking Catholic clergy who were kindly inclined toward Nazis, Mengele and his ilk made their way to South America, where they took up false identities, started new careers and sent for their families.
