They succeed in the abduction, but fail in bringing him to the west side. Sam Worthington as the young David meshes believably with Hinds as the older version of himself, and the fiery performance of Marton Csokas as the young Stefan (looking like a younger and even angrier Russell Crowe) outshines even Academy Award nominee Wilkinson. The German physicians who ran SS and Wehrmacht medical institutions, along with medical personnel at lower levels, participated actively in carrying out Nazi extermination plans. 25 overall in NFL draft, The prayerful goal for Bills and Sabres owner Kim Pegula: 'Full recovery', Springville teacher charged with possessing child pornography, Instagram mom convicted for fabricating story about kids' kidnapping, King Charles and Queen Camilla's will use thrones recycled from King George VI's coronation, Rare images captured of butterflies taking flight after emerging from chrysalis, Ride like royalty! Nicholas D. D'Angelo, an attorney from Niagara County, will serve six months in jail and also will be placed on sex offender probation for 10 . Eight of the photographs include Mengele. 'The Debt': History's Burden, And A Moral Calculus : NPR [79][80] When he returned to Argentina in September 1956, Mengele began living under his real name. [51], Twins were subjected to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes by Mengele or one of his assistants. / Such a living doll / in a prayer shawl As a matter of fact, the whole world is Jewish / Since I fell in love with you, Rose McGonigle!) would plotz at an English dame and a willowy, long-limbed future superstar fighting Nazis under the name Rachel Singer. And this Mengele, Jesper Christensen (Christensen, of course! Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. The movie is . Well, that is where the anomaly lay. [108], In 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received as a donation the Hcker Album, an album of photographs of Auschwitz staff taken by Karl-Friedrich Hcker. Lies have piled up, and one way or another all three agents will emerge as tragic figures. Under cover of night, the trio attempt their exfiltration atWollankstrasse Station, on a railway line along the sector boundary between East and West Berlin, and next to a mail depot. [64] Mengele fled Gross-Rosen on 18 February, a week before the Soviets arrived there, and traveled westward to atec in Czechoslovakia, disguised as a Wehrmacht officer. Copyright 2023 The Forward Association, Inc. All rights reserved. Dr. Lothaire D. Voegele, MD | Aiken, SC | Thoracic Surgeon | US News Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). His experiments focused primarily on twins, with no regard for the health or safety of the victims. [2] His remains were disinterred and positively identified by forensic examination in 1985. Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960,[109] in Cairo in 1961,[110] in Spain in 1971,[111] and in Paraguay in 1978, eighteen years after he had left the country. Although Mengele was initially registered under his own name, he was not identified as being on the major war criminal list due to the disorganization of the Allies regarding the distribution of wanted lists, and the fact that he did not have the usual SS blood group tattoo. Through November 1944, SS doctors undermined their efforts through selection, which sent the sickest prisoners (only Jews after August 1943 . If the rest of the year keeps up at this pace, podcasting will be in a good creative place. Also furrowing madly is Rachel's former colleague Stephan (Wilkinson), now Rachel's estranged husband and a high-up in the Israeli government. They returned to Israel as heroes. The Debt (2010) - Helen Mirren as Rachel Singer - IMDb The interactions between Rachel and Vogel surely show the most dramatic tension ever established while knicker-free and in gynecological stirrups. Dr. Lothaire D. Voegele is a Thoracic Surgeon in Aiken, SC. Hobby Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked. There he temporarily entrusted his incriminating documents to a nurse with whom he had struck up a relationship. Agents who were following Rudel's movements also failed to produce any leads. Several hundred Jewish women from various countries lived in two large rooms on the second floor of the building. So the three need to find Vogel and finish the job before people find out what really happened. Tel Aviv, Israel. Mengele also began selecting dwarves and persons with physical peculiarities (including inborn disabilities and the developmental defects that appear in dwarfism) from the Jewish transports brought to Birkenau for extermination, from the Jewish Theresienstadt Family Camp in Birkenau, and from the so-called Mexico (Sector BIII). [94], Meanwhile, Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents who had been involved in the Eichmann capture, was placed in charge of a team of agents tasked with tracking down Mengele and bringing him to trial in Israel. The Surgeon of Birkenau (Jesper Christensen), in East Berlin. The men are plainly awed by their sculpted, long-limbed female colleague, whom they must deliver to the medical office of Vogel, working incognito as a Think of the worst place on earth for a Jewish woman to be a patient, even a pretend patient. He then escapes into the night as the agents are left to assess their failure. The patients were isolated in separate barracks and several afflicted children were killed so that their preserved heads and organs could be sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz and other facilities for study. Masquerading as an infertile wife, Rachel engages the doctor in heavily allusive chats about experimental procedures before lunging at him with a sedating syringe. This process was repeated until all of the barracks were disinfected. If you are going to edit a lot, then make yourself a user and login. After going through quarantine, some of the prisoners whom Berger selected were sent in July and early August to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where they were killed in the gas chamber. They were so easy to victimize, so weak . Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. Nazi-Thriller The Debt Is Both Absurd and Gripping - Vulture To escape from them much as he can for deny his terrible war crimes against humanity (failed). Then there's an ingenious operation, which I will not describe, to spirit him out of his clinic and into captivity. Here the Mengele figure is called Dieter Vogel and played by Jesper Christensen as a Hannibal Lecter-like evil genius who can instantly read Jews' minds and press the exact buttons to make them. SS physicians assigned to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, played a special role. The film catapults between the mission and the present, in which there is ambiguity as to whether or not the mission actually succeeded, and that ambiguity needs to be resolved. Josef and Martha were married in 1958 while on holiday in Uruguay, and they bought a house in Buenos Aires. Describing the encounter to Stefan over the phone, Rachel declares she will not continue to lie about the 1965 mission. In 1965 a three person Mossad team of Rachel Singer, David Peretz and Stefan Gold went to East Berlin to capture an infamous Nazi doctor called The Surgeon of Birkenau. The Surgeon (2005) - News - IMDb Antagonizing Rachel and her team. At one point, he dares Rachel to slit his throat as she shaves him. Minutes into the movie after a rousing flashback in which Hollywood It Girl Jessica Chastain (as young Rachel) gets to show off some nifty Krav Maga moves one of the three present-day Mossadniks has an unhappy encounter with a truck. He has seen inside other Jews. Hi. The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toeprints were taken. Prisoner doctors. Privacy Policy and In East Berlin, during the Cold War, they killed Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), aka the Surgeon of Birkenau, infamous for his Dr. Mengele-like experiments on Jews. The film opens with the agents being welcomed on their return home to Israel. At great risk, and at considerable personal cost, the team's mission was accomplished--or was it? A timeline of Justin Bieber, Hailey Bieber, and Selena Gomezs love triangle. Here, he presents himself as a choreographer of brutal action sequences designed more to goose our senses than to stimulate reflection on the ethics of extra-legal revenge. There's a strange fillip of senior-action payoff in a Ukrainian hospital at the end, but by then you may be too worn out to harvest its moral significance let alone admire the twist ending. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. [37] In contrast to most of the other SS doctors, who viewed selections as one of their most stressful and unpleasant duties, he undertook the task with a flamboyant air, often smiling or whistling. Every so often, several dozen Jewish men and women prisoners were brought in. He is Vogel (Jesper Christensen), the notorious Surgeon of Birkenau, who conducted unspeakable procedures on his captives. [60] Witness Vera Alexander described how Mengele sewed two Romani twins together, back to back, in a crude attempt to create conjoined twins;[53] both children died of gangrene after several days of suffering. Now Rachel must travel to Kyiv to conclude what they should have done 30 years ago. But like many filmmakers transitioning between genres, Madden has focused his creative energies on retooling himself. The Surgeon of Birkenau (Jesper Christensen), in East Berlin. The Debt movie review & film summary (2011) | Roger Ebert The grant was used to build a pathology laboratory attached to CrematoriumII at AuschwitzII-Birkenau. Mengele eluded capture in spite of extradition requests by the West German government and clandestine operations by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. [3][4] He was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia iridum (eyes of two different colors), dwarfs, and people with physical abnormalities. [83][91] He stayed with Gerhard on his farm near So Paulo until a more permanent accommodation could be found, which came about with Hungarian expatriates Gza and Gitta Stammer. During his shift, David becomes violently enraged after Vogel explains his beliefs that Jews have many weaknesses, such as selfishness, making them easily subdued. Continuing newspaper coverage of his wartime activities, with accompanying photographs, led Mengele to relocate again in 1960. Aware that the publicity could lead to his Nazi background and wartime activities being discovered, he took an extended business trip to Paraguay and was granted citizenship there in 1959 under the name "Jos Mengele". Focus Features and Miramax have reimagined the film to include Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson, along with better costumes and dramatic music for chase scenes. [45] His research subjects lived in their own barracks, where they were provided with a marginally better quality of food and somewhat improved living conditions than the other areas of the camp. Shortly afterwards, the West German, Israeli, and U.S. governments launched a coordinated effort to determine Mengele's whereabouts. The SS physicians who carried out pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz included: Carl Clauberg experimented with sterilization in the camp. He was forced to return to work without painkillers. It details how she shot their captured target, Dieter Vogel, otherwise known as the "Surgeon of Birkenau," when he attacked her and tried to escape. [124] In 2011, a further 31 volumes of Mengele's diaries were soldagain amidst protestsby the same auction house to an undisclosed collector of World War II memorabilia for US$245,000. [59] Yitzhak Ganon, another survivor, reported in 2009 how Mengele removed his kidney without anesthesia. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures,[53] and those who survived the experiments were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected once Mengele had no further use for them. While the psychological depth of the older characters is deftly portrayed, Chastain as the young Rachel is too much of an incomprehensible cipher to carry a story of this weight. Recent developments in the Ukraine have cast doubt on the now legendary intelligence operation, which would cast the Mossad in the unfortunate light of either not knowing or not admitting what really happened in 1965. And yet its still gripping. It is a reunion of sorts for her and her ex-husband, Sarahs father, Stephan (Tom Wilkinson), the second of the Mossad agents who traveled to Berlin in 65. The term surgeon is used in the movie The Debt to describe the character named Dr. Dieter Vogel, who is based on the real-life Dr. Josef Mengele. To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. The Debt | Christianity Today [18], The ideology of Nazism brought together elements of antisemitism, racial hygiene, and eugenics, and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining more Lebensraum (living space) for the Germanic people. The three bought a coffee and cattle farm in Serra Negra in 1962, with Mengele owning a half interest. The software that cloned Drake and the Weeknds voices is easy to useand impossible to shut down. [76][77] He met with his son Rolf (who was told Mengele was his "Uncle Fritz")[78] and his widowed sister-in-law Martha, for a ski holiday in Switzerland; he also spent a week in his home town of Gnzburg. [43] Nyiszli and others reported that the twin studies may also have been motivated by an intention to uncover strategies for 'racially desirable' Germans to reproduce more twins. Years later, the Israeli secret police force known as the Mossad tracks down the. In close collaboration with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics, he studied the phenomena of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. Three Mossad agents Rachel (Jessica Chastair) Stephen (Martin Csokas) David (Sam Worthington) set out in 1965 to capture a Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen) the surgeon of Birkenau but when the film reverts to 1997 Rachel is Helen Mirren, Stephen is Tom Wilkinson and David is Ciaran Hinds. Similar procedures were used for later epidemics of scarlet fever and other diseases, with infected prisoners being killed in the gas chambers. "The Debt" opens in 1997, with two members of an elite, legendary Mossad team responsible for the capture and killing of a Nazi war criminal in East Berlin in 1966 coming together at a launch party for a book detailing their famous mission. Of the Nazis who got away, the one who most insistently haunts Jewish pop culture is Josef Mengele, the SS physician who performed monstrous experiments on inmates (many of them children) at Auschwitz and Birkenau and escaped (with the help of the organization known as ODESSA) to Brazil and later Paraguay, where he died at the age of 71. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. hide caption, With: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria. The younger versions of the characters have scenes that are intrinsically more exciting, but the actors playing the older versions are more interesting. (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). Three characters, six actors, and although the woman is always presumably Rachel, I was sometimes asking myself which of the two men I was seeing when younger. You see, the punch line spoiler alert is that the threesome didnt actually kill Vogel, as they told Israel and the world. Their mission: Enter East Berlin with secret identities, kidnap a Nazi war criminal and bring him to Israel for trial. The Debt | Movies | Detroit | Detroit Metro Times He is an evil and ruthless Nazi war criminal who got his nickname from his medical experiments on Jews during World War II in the times of the Holocaust. And now, justice calls. Helen Mirren and all of the others in this great film are fantastic. This movie does some timeshifting between the time when the team tracked down and captured and then lost the Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel, the feared Surgeon of Birkenau, in East Berlin and the late 90's when the score was finally settled.The closing scene will have you white-knucked while holding onto your chair. There's nothing intrinsically sacrilegious or vulgar about framing a Holocaust story as a thriller. Unfinished business; Israeli agents hailed for killing a Nazi war Uber offering horse drawn carriage rides in honor of royal coronation. In 1997 he ended up killing himself as a result. Fatal Attraction Works As Entertainment, Fails as Social Commentary, Prime Videos Citadel Traps Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden in Played-Out Spy Game, New York Philharmonic and Steven Spielberg Celebrate the Music of John Williams, A Piece of His Fire: Harry Belafonte (1927-2023). [70] His wife refused to accompany him, and they divorced in 1954. Now, Im not a purist I dont always believe that original versions of films are better (although actually, when I think about it, I cant think of a single remade version of a film that surpasses the first). The Mengele-at-large myth turns up in more complicated form in the new thriller The Debt, a remake of an Israeli film in which the doctor is used to explore/exploit the way Jews tend to live and re-live the capture of Nazis in their fantasies. Martha and her son Karl Heinz followed about a month later, and the three began living together. The director, John Madden, is canny enough to know where the true suspense lies: in the faces of the characters. [16], On 28 July 1939, Mengele married Irene Schnbein, whom he had met while working as a medical resident in Leipzig. In the case of "The Debt," it is definitely the latter. He goads, wheedles and whispers to each by turn, commenting on their personalities and relationships and pushing them to react. These preparations were given to prisoners suffering from contagious diseases, who had in many cases been deliberately infected. Occupation Laurie Sparham/Focus Features [125], "Mengele" redirects here. To see is to believe. If the real man didnt die at the hands of Jews, well Wouldnt it be pretty to think so? At a publishing ceremony, Rachel, her cheek conspicuously scarred, is asked to read aloud the chapter in which she and Vogel have their final, bloody confrontation a task she performs dutifully but with evident discomfort. The couple bought a farm in Nova Europa with the help of an investment from Mengele, who was given the job of managing for them. This film tells the story of the three agents. These books give us a record of our times via the moments best comic minds. [48] In his 1986 book, Lifton describes Mengele as sadistic, lacking empathy, and extremely antisemitic, believing the Jews should be eliminated as an inferior and dangerous race. The agents are left with no choice but to bring Vogel to their apartment and plan a new extraction. [3][4] With Red Army troops sweeping through German-occupied Poland, Mengele was transferred 280 kilometres (170mi) from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on 17 January 1945, ten days before the arrival of the Soviet forces at Auschwitz. . Rachel becomes romantically entangled with both men, and although they take care to stay incognito during the mission, they randomly break character for a night out at a German pub, calling one other by their real names. Settling A Tab? The sterilization experiments consisted of exposing the womens ovaries and the mens testes to X-rays. The Debt, by contrast, explores nothing, preferring to stake out positions through stock characters declaiming expository dialogue. Evil-doer The later scenes involve the publication of a book about the famous raid by Rachel's daughter. Not saying we should start prepping but we should start prepping. 'The Debt': Getting in a little over its head? - Baltimore Sun The Debt (2010) Mengele was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmfhrer ('captain') in April 1943. Before their bodies were cold, they were subjected to autopsies and slides were made for Kremer of the liver, spleen, and pancreas. [84] Irene Mengele and the family in Gnzburg also alleged that he had died. Vogel is the famed and feared "Surgeon of Birkenau," who sent thousands of Jews to their deaths at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during the Holocaust. (There is no one better than Mirren at signaling discomfort with her eyes.) He was portrayed by Jesper Christensen, who also portrayed Mr. White in the James Bond films. Maybe the problem is a structure that cuts around in time. [11] In 1931 he joined Der Stahlhelm, a paramilitary organization that was absorbed into the Nazi Sturmabteilung ('Storm Detachment'; SA) in 1934. [74] Files released by the Argentine government in 1992 indicate that Mengele may have practiced medicine without a license while living in Buenos Aires, including performing abortions. They have been honored in their country by their action for more than 30 years. In 1942, SS-Hauptsturmfhrer Prof. Dr. August Hirt, chairman of the anatomy department at the Reich University in Strasbourg, set about assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. The original motion picture, Ha-Hov (The Debt) (2007), directed by Assaf Bernstein, was nominated for four Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars, but didnt garner much of an audience internationally. Its Munich-meets-Fast and Furious (Fast and Fuhrerious?). Rachel Singer (Dame Helen Mirren), Sarah's father Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson), who is paralytic in a wheelchair, and David Peretz (Ciarn Hinds), who is missing, are retired and Rachel is uncomfortable with the lie with which they have been living. [113] Worldwide interest in the case was heightened by a mock trial held in Jerusalem in February 1985, featuring the testimonies of over one hundred victims of Mengele's experiments. Image by Focus Features. In June 1943, Clauberg wrote to Heinrich Himmler: Like Clauberg, Horst Schumann was searching for a convenient means of mass sterilization that would enable the Third Reich to carry out the biological destruction of conquered nations by scientific methods through depriving people of their reproductive capacity. The so-called Surgeon of Birkenau, Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), escaped justice at the end of the war. You might expect some intelligent thought on the subject from director John Madden, who's chiefly known for the glum Edith Wharton adaptation Ethan Frome and the brainy romp Shakespeare in Love. He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers, [a] and was one of the doctors who administered the gas. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. [26][27] Prisoners were transported there by rail from all over Nazi-controlled Europe, arriving in daily convoys. [44], Mengele's research subjects were better fed and housed than the other prisoners, and temporarily spared from execution in the gas chambers. 28 clinic in the main camp, he carried out assessments of prisoners attempting to gain admission to the hospital. He used this document to obtain a West German passport using his real name and embarked on a trip to Europe. Their inquiries in Paraguay revealed no clues to his whereabouts, and they were unable to intercept any correspondence between Mengele and his wife Martha, who by this time was living in Italy. Turns out she needs that Krav Maga, too: Vogel, nicely played by Danish actor Jesper Christensen, is a piece of work straight out of a Boys' Own World War II comic. By Jordana Horn Assisted by a network of former SS members, he used the ratline to travel to Genoa, where he obtained a passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross under the alias "Helmut Gregor", and sailed to Argentina in July 1949. The Debt is adapted by British screenwriter Matthew Vaughn (with Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan) from the award-winning 2007 movie Hahov, which probed the morality of Mossad's pursuit of escaped Nazis a tender topic for the State of Israel and for Jews worldwide ever since the abduction and prosecution of Adolf Eichmann. [92] Gerhard had initially told the Stammers that the fugitive's name was "Peter Hochbichler", but they discovered his true identity in 1963. She leaves a note for the journalist and prepares to leave, but suddenly spots Vogel in his 80s by now among the other patients and follows him to an isolated area of the hospital. [72] After a few weeks, he moved to the house of a Nazi sympathizer in the more affluent neighborhood of Florida Este. The building was then cleaned and disinfected and the occupants of a neighboring block were bathed, deloused, and given new clothing before being moved into the clean block. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. The Debt (2010) - The Debt (2010) - User Reviews - IMDb You spent 30 years taking credit for it. How could he possibly be allowed to get away? You Jews never knew how to kill. Others, on the repugnance of their villains.