First World War

The First World War is presented less as a narrated battlefield event than as a turning point in a later ideological story. In Josef Mengele’s account to his son Rolf, the postwar West has reached a critical point, and Germany’s supposed civilizational decline becomes the premise he uses to defend Nazi rule and its racial project.

A Retrospective Turning Point

During his confrontation with Rolf, Josef Mengele places the First World War before a supposed crisis of Western civilization. He describes Germany as having reached an inexorable stage of development and blames modern technology, capitalism, mass society, individualism, and cosmopolitanism for its corruption. This is Mengele’s retrospective interpretation, not a neutral account of the war or its aftermath: the conflict functions in his speech as the threshold after which, he claims, Germany faced only two alternatives—decline or decisive action.

The War as Ideological Justification

Mengele turns that claimed crisis into an argument for Nazi racial policy. He presents Germans as a superior race and describes Nazi action as necessary to restore vitality to the national community and preserve the Nordic race. He invokes Adolf Hitler’s projected growth for Germany—from a base of 100 million people to 250 million in the medium term and a billion by 2200—to frame racial purity and population expansion as a historical mission. The First World War thus appears in his account as an explanation for what followed, but also as a device for recasting criminal policy as defensive necessity.

Postwar Political Contrasts

Elsewhere, the book sets this German retrospective against the postwar politics of Argentina. Juan Perón promises a national, social, and Christian order that will overcome the opposing failures he attributes to capitalism and communism; his government expands public services, strengthens its relationship with organized labor, and nationalizes strategic industries. Eva Perón gives that political program a popular face through her foundation, public appearances, and distribution of aid. These scenes show a different response to social conflict than Mengele’s racialized account of Germany: Peronism seeks to represent and incorporate mass constituencies, while Mengele’s speech treats mass society as evidence of decline.

By 1951, Juan Perón’s ambitions are also shaped by international events. After Douglas MacArthur is relieved of command in the Far East and the front stabilizes, Perón rages that the anticipated age of the centaur and a Third World War have been postponed, then turns toward re-election. The contrast places Mengele’s First World War recollection within a broader narrative of political projects built from competing interpretations of crisis, national destiny, and mass society.