****SPOILERS*** In what turned out to be his last film role Charlton Heston turns in one of his-who at the time was suffering from Alzheimer disease- most shattering performances of his entire 50 plus year film career as the notorious "Angle of Death" of the Aushwitz-Birenau Nazi concentration camp Dr. Joseph Mengele. At the beginning of the film we see Mengele's estranged son 40 year old Hermann, Thomas Kretschmann, at his burial site in Brazil as his remains are dug up to confirmed of in fact they are those of Dr. Mengela. Attacked and spat upon by a number of holocaust survivors who hold Hermann responsible for his father's crimes he make no attempt to show his disgust not against his tormentors but his father whom he he hasn't seen, until 1979, since the end out the Second World War.
At Hermann's hotel room with an angry mob, throwing rocks & insults at him, gathering outside he grants an interview from New York Jewish Lawyer for holocaust survivors Paul Minsky, F. Murray Aberham, who feels that his father not only escaped justice by drowning while taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean on February 7, 1979 but may have faked his death and at 84 may be still alive and hiding from the long arm of the law. The movie goes into a number of flashbacks were we see a very disturbed and confused Hermann trying to track down his elusive,from the law, father and find out from him if the accusations against him as a major war criminal are true or not.
It's in South America, the home away from home for Nazi war criminals on the lamb, that Hermann finally finds his dad living under an assumed name in a shack in the steaming Brazilian jungle. At first attempting to turn his father into the local police with the help of also the son of a Nazi war criminal, who did turn his father into the police, Robert Dietrich-played by Thomas Heinze-Hermann gets cold feet in not wanting to be responsible for his dad ending up getting life or being executed as a Nazi war criminal. What Hermann and especially Robert, who was later arrested on trumped up charges as a terrorist, find out is that their's a major Nazi network working in Brazil as well as Argentina and Paraguay that"s protecting fleeing Nazis and going as far as murdering those who are out to apprehend them.
It's Hermann's father Joseph Mengele's own words in him trying to rid the world of inferior people in order to improve the breed of the human race that really turned Hermann off against him. Still Hermann just couldn't, when he had the chance, attempt to blow his father's brains out while he was asleep or turn him into the police that in not doing so left him a broken man. It's later during his interview with Minsky that it's reported, to Minsky's great disappointment, that the remains exhumed were indeed those of Joseph Mengele that Hermann finally feels that his long nightmare of being the "Angle of Death" son is finally over. As well as knowing that in some way that even by doing himself in, in what many people feel Mengele did, by drowning himself he got exactly everything that was coming to him: If not in the real world but in the world hereafter!
At Hermann's hotel room with an angry mob, throwing rocks & insults at him, gathering outside he grants an interview from New York Jewish Lawyer for holocaust survivors Paul Minsky, F. Murray Aberham, who feels that his father not only escaped justice by drowning while taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean on February 7, 1979 but may have faked his death and at 84 may be still alive and hiding from the long arm of the law. The movie goes into a number of flashbacks were we see a very disturbed and confused Hermann trying to track down his elusive,from the law, father and find out from him if the accusations against him as a major war criminal are true or not.
It's in South America, the home away from home for Nazi war criminals on the lamb, that Hermann finally finds his dad living under an assumed name in a shack in the steaming Brazilian jungle. At first attempting to turn his father into the local police with the help of also the son of a Nazi war criminal, who did turn his father into the police, Robert Dietrich-played by Thomas Heinze-Hermann gets cold feet in not wanting to be responsible for his dad ending up getting life or being executed as a Nazi war criminal. What Hermann and especially Robert, who was later arrested on trumped up charges as a terrorist, find out is that their's a major Nazi network working in Brazil as well as Argentina and Paraguay that"s protecting fleeing Nazis and going as far as murdering those who are out to apprehend them.
It's Hermann's father Joseph Mengele's own words in him trying to rid the world of inferior people in order to improve the breed of the human race that really turned Hermann off against him. Still Hermann just couldn't, when he had the chance, attempt to blow his father's brains out while he was asleep or turn him into the police that in not doing so left him a broken man. It's later during his interview with Minsky that it's reported, to Minsky's great disappointment, that the remains exhumed were indeed those of Joseph Mengele that Hermann finally feels that his long nightmare of being the "Angle of Death" son is finally over. As well as knowing that in some way that even by doing himself in, in what many people feel Mengele did, by drowning himself he got exactly everything that was coming to him: If not in the real world but in the world hereafter!