History Extra podcast: The Mongols: everything you wanted to know on Apple Podcasts - "'The Mongols are not the only civilization in the world at this time who rear their children to shoot, to shoot bows or other ranged weapons. Most societies will raise their children to shoot some kind of ranged weapon, whether it's a slingshot or a light bow or a long bow or other, other such weapons. And so many agricultural societies were capable of offering, returning fire, shooting back when the Mongols shot at them. And the Mongol seem to have been particularly, several sources said the Mongols were fairly nervous fighting large formations of crossbows. In fact when a Papal legate went to visit the Mongols, partly to conduct diplomacy, although of course he was also, tried to sort of work out how their war machine worked and therefore how to break it, he came back, one of his top tips for any commander in future marching to fight the Mongols was to equip themselves with crossbows. Because something that armies, particularly armies such as in the Crusader states were very good at, was to equip themselves with very very large shields. The size of a good sized table in modern day um parlance as it were. And they had lined these these these um huge shields up and the crossbow then shoot through the gaps. It's a very hard formation for the Mongols to break. And crossbows have a long range. The disadvantage of the crossbow of course is that you can only shoot maybe one or two bolts a minute and it'll be less than that if you're maneuvering at the same time whereas the Mongols, even if they are maneuvering can loose five, six, seven possibly more arrows in a minute. So the Mongols have a very faster rate when it comes to shooting arrows, whereas crossbows on the other hand have very strong penetrative power. There's no armor around in this era that can stop a crossbow bolt and that would also go some way to explaining why the Mongols were nervous of soldiers armed with crossbows...
There was a relative of Chinggis Khan among the Mongol besiegers and that relative was killed as part of the fighting. Now resisting the Mongols and refusing to submit to them was seem to be a very serious crime, a very serious problem by the Mongols. Killing a member of Chinggis Khan's family, that is a much bigger deal, even so. And the Mongols are famous for, famously decreed that because of that not only would the garrison and everyone inside the walls of that stronghold be killed, but every living thing, down to the last bird would be killed in the surrounding area, just to make the point that, this community had not merely resisted the Mongols and their perceived rights to rule the world, but they had dared to harm a member of Chinggis Khan's family and so the consequences are that much higher...
People have wondered why the Mongol invasion stopped where they did. And in many areas it's not, it's not um armies that are stopping them. It's the landscape. The Mongols are a nomadic people. They need vast areas of grazing and I mean even an army of say 10,000 troops, by Mongol standards isn't particularly large. It will still have vast herds of of sheep and goats and horses. Not to mention all the wagons they um bring with them. And these animals all need grazing. And in some parts of what is today Eastern Europe there is such grazing and that's possible. But once you get into, get, the further you get West, you start to hit hit thick areas of deciduous forest and mountain, and it's much less conducive to those vast area, those vast areas of grazing required by Mongol armies. So historians have speculated that even if the Mongols did invade Western Christendom, they may not have been successful. Not because their armies would have been stopped in battle necessarily, but simply because their way of life couldn't continue in that region and people have made similar argu, arguments for Southeast Asia, because jungle regions, and again thick forest, it's just not suitable for a nomadic way of life'"
The triumph of Joan of Arc | HistoryExtra - "'What Joan of Arc did was to persuade the French that they could win. Napoleon once said uh that morale is three quarters of a war. Only the other quarter is numbers, tactics, and the rest. And that is quite an interesting statement by a great master of the Art of War and it's very much borne out by the story of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc did not command armies, she did not, except in one important case which I'll come to, she did not determine strategy. That was done by professional uh soldiers who found her rather uh interfering and a bit of a nuisance and tried to form their strategies when she was asleep or somewhere else. She didn't even fight herself. She told her judges at her trial that she had never ever killed a man. She said that she carried her standard in her hand so that she wouldn't be able to use her sword arm. So although she wore a sword she never drew it in anger...
The English had never succeeded in getting a foothold in French occupied territory in France, except under cover of a French Civil War… in the 1450s. Of course England was just beginning its own Civil War and that really put an end to any hope of recovery... It was very difficult for the English to imagine how an army that had achieved these extraordinary things and occupied much of northern France could possibly be defeated without treachery or gross incapacity. There wasn't much treachery. There was clearly gross incapacity. But the English would have lost out in any event… the English did not like paying taxes in the 15th century any more than they like paying taxes now. They therefore persistently refused to vote the taxes that were necessary to defeat the French/ It's arguable that England simply didn't have the economic capacity uh to raise taxes on the scale that would have defeated the French, but they were never prepared uh to even make an attempt at it. They took the view, and Parliament definitely took this view from the later years of the reign of Henry V onwards, they took the view that the conquest of France was a personal affair of the, of the English kings. Uh they claimed to be kings of France. This was a French Civil War. It was nothing to do with the English... that was an attitude which they maintained right up to the end of the 1420s and there were traces of it well beyond'"
Great Reputations: Oliver Cromwell | HistoryExtra - "‘It's not too far to call him a Puritan Jihadi if only because I've actually done it myself. You can use that kind of expression because first Cromwell divides the world into the friends of God and the enemies of God. And he does that right from the beginning after his conversion. And that means that the enemies of God deserve no mercy. He harries royalists mercilessly even before the Civil War breaks out. And once it breaks out he really enjoys killing. His very very first uh armed engagement which involves shots or blows being exchanged is almost a year into the Civil War in Lincolnshire. And he describes exultantly how he and his men chase the defeated royalists on horseback for six miles, doing execution on them. And that kind of attitude and that phrase runs through his entire career. He likes killing enemies, and his enemies are God's enemies. And I can't come up with a neater definition of Jihadi than that'"
Great Reputations: Cleopatra | HistoryExtra - "'Arab Scholars who don't have this very Western tradition, the Roman tradition. And they tend to see her as much more of as an intelligent woman, she's an author. She makes much more calculated decisions. Whereas we, because we've been influenced by Plutarch and then on by Shakespeare, we tend to see her as an emotional person who's guided by her heart and not her head. But actually I, I've always think that… the two alliances she makes with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony are very sensible political decisions. She couldn’t have known that Julius Caesar was going to be assassinated and she picked the wrong side with Mark Anthony but you probably would do. On paper he was the better, the better choice I think and she went for the better choice. It just happened to be wrong. So we've just got into the habit of thinking of her as as not a particularly intelligent person but a person driven by emotion rather than a brain but I suspect that she was really clever. She wouldn't have stayed on the throne as long as she did if she wasn't really clever... Artists have been inspired by the story of Cleopatra from quite early on but they've always tended to depict her as a sort of contemporary beauty because this assumption again that she's beautiful, that we're nowhere told that she's beautiful. We're told that she has a lovely voice but we're not told that she's beautiful and she's obviously massively charismatic I think but artists have depicted her with their own ideas of beauty because they can't imagine that she would have been able to attract these men unless she was beautiful, slightly forgetting the fact that she's also ruling a potentially very very wealthy country. So she had her different attractions... It just seems to happen quite often doesn't it with female rulers, that they attract attention and not necessarily for their own achievements, but for the wrong things. And we focus on the fact that they're female, rather than the fact that they are rulers. The Egyptians themselves didn't do this. I mean Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic is right at the end of the dynastic age but throughout ancient Egypt it was possible to have a female pharaoh. And once they were crowned that was it. They were the king, the female king. And the Egyptians were okay with that. But we suspect that there are a lot of women who actually ruled Egypt on behalf of younger sons and who did all the work, but are completely lost in history. And we can't see them, so the few that actually come to us, the four as female rulers, there very few of them... for some reason we choose to focus on the things that don't matter rather than the things that did matter at the time'"
Rocket women: America’s first female astronauts - History Extra podcast - "'Not all of them were in uniform and some of the things that they experienced, just like all, most women are not in uniform and everything. I think a great example of this is the infamous makeup kit. So every now and then the NASA history office will share a picture of the makeup kit and it gets all these opinions and I think most people just kind of go: ugh, I can't believe NASA would think to do that. But the reality is not every single woman was against having makeup in space and I can completely understand that. You know, they were public figures and cameras were on them for most of the time they were in space. And so I don't know about you but when I go do a public appearance I definitely want some makeup and so I completely understand maybe some did want it while others didn't'"
Great Reputations: Napoleon | HistoryExtra - "'It's really a very revolutionary vision. He's not there because of who his dad was. He's not there because of the bloodline. He's not not there because of an existing hereditary principle. He's made it happen because he wants it, because he can. And as a result that kind of destabilizes the whole principle of monarchy that other European powers you know have been, that have been at war with revolutionary France since, since 1792'"
Archaeology’s golden age: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'If you think think about for example, if you were to excavate in in Egypt or in Iraq. You didn't bring your whole team you hired people on the spots to work for you. And often these people had significant amount of experience with excavation, but again they're not remembered as archaeologists. So for example Leonard Woolley worked with M, who's the man who's often remembered as his foreman or as his main fixer for 40 years. So this man had 40 years experience in archaeology. But if you talk about him or if people write about him they always talk a bit about him as Leonard Woolley’s foreman but actually he had a crucial role. He was probably more like the field director or the co-director of the project, but we don't think about it in that way. So it's not just about including women but it's including all kinds of different communities. And about um including also the people perhaps who cooked. They're also part of the team. So what is it about archaeology that wants to create this exclusive club and also wants to make it very very narrow. And everybody has to look like the man with the hat and the whip in order to be an archaeologist"
Shakespeare: Past Master | 6. Macbeth | HistoryExtra - "'It was really common across Europe to to sort of look at skulls and the skull was a contemplative object. You know it was a Momento Mori as it's known. And you can see it in paintings, poets might have a skull on their desk, you know to kind of think about their own mortality, to remind them that you've got to live your life because you're going to end up like that. And even in Montaigne’s essay that I was talking about he talks about how the ancient Egyptians used to bring out an entire skeleton during their feasts to remind them to eat even more and to enjoy themselves like Epicurians because you're going to end up dead one day … we sanitize death really and many of us have never seen a real skull.'...
'In the 18th century Hamlet would have been seen quite differently from how he would have been seen in the uh restoration period. Hamlet is sort of picked apart by people like Samuel Johnson and uh and Voltaire who think that ghosts are ridiculous and that how can you put some, such a stupid device in a play that's asking really big important questions. What's really interesting is the Globe did a world tour of Hamlet um back in 2014 to 2016. And they went into about 150 countries. And we sent a couple of researchers along to do some interviews with audience afterwards. And how Hamlet is received in different parts of the world depends on beliefs and customs, there are some cultures who ghosts for them are real. They represent ancestry. And so the ghost of old Hamlet was hugely charged in some parts of the world and made the play even more believable. And yet in the west we're so skeptical about ghosts and so we kind of almost excuse that aspect of the play... When you you go out and see Hamlet being performed around the world through a kind of global appropriation of Shakespeare you see very different aspects of the play being highlighted and Hamlet himself coming across as a crybaby or as as whiny'"
Boston Tea Party | 1. Tea and taxes | HistoryExtra - "'The rights of Parliament were something that they had fought for in the 17th century and you know the idea that Parliament could violate British rights didn't make any sense, because Parliament was, you know the bearer of British rights against monarchical overreach. And so British people felt hey the wise men of parliament ought to be able to make laws for everyone throughout the Empire, Americans ought to have no problem with that. They are virtually represented, you know there are plenty of places in Great Britain that are not, you know, that that don't necessarily have perfect representation in accordance with their population. Rotten boroughs versus large cities that only had two members, right. Nevertheless right these wise men of Parliament had the foresight to represent everyone's interests. And so they didn't understand the Americans’ argument that just because the American colonies weren't directly represented in Parliament, that that ought to be some kind of problem. But the Americans had their own Colonial legislatures which taxed them, made laws for them. They were okay with that arrangement. These were local members of the colonial legislatures who understood their grievances and interests and economic capabilities. You know from the American perspective, those were the people who should be making decisions about who taxed colonists. Parliament should have had nothing to do with that. Parliament might have to regulate trade for the entire British Empire and they could obviously make determinations about where troops were sent, about diplomacy, about all sorts of other things, but the colonists really objected to the idea that Parliament ought to be able to raise direct taxes on the colonies. Americans in general had less of a tax burden than British subjects back on on the British Isles. And so the parliament is trying to rebalance that in the wake of the Seven Years War and charge the American colonists a little bit of money… hey, we fought a war on your behalf, we ought to be able to collect some tax revenue from you as well... In the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War, you know the British Empire has been triumphant. If you had asked most American colonists whether they felt loyal to the British Empire and to King George III and his wife, they would have said yes. They were proud British subjects'...
'The Navigation Acts had been in place for many years and the colonists would occasionally grumble about them, ignore them, smuggle in defiance of them. But things really come to a head in 1765. Well 1764 and 1765 with Parliament passing the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act. Uh the Sugar Act was actually going to lower duties on molasses to the point that it wouldn't be as profitable to smuggle but still some Americans are like, wait we still want to be able to trade freely with French sugar Islands etc. But then it's really the Stamp Act that seems almost perfectly positioned to create outrage among the American colonists. It taxes legal documents, it taxes newspapers, it taxes dice and playing cards. So in other words tavern goers, journalists or printers really and lawyers are the ones that you're particularly angering. You know and also seaports and merchants, right. Like customs documents having to do with that. So it's directly impinging on the people who are the most vocal to protest against these direct taxes. And so there are protests all up and down the Eastern seab board in objection to the Stamp Act in 1765’"
Americans today keep going on about how income tax is bad. But they hate(d) all forms of taxes
Caesar: Death of a Dictator | Master of his fate | HistoryExtra - "‘Her first meeting with Julia Caesar has been much mythologized. But what really happened there?’
‘She had to come back in a sort of clandestine fashion because she she wasn't in Egypt or she wasn't in Alexandria at that time. Ptolemy’s faction were in control of Egypt, were in control of Alexandria. Hence this whole story about her sneaking in to the palace wrapped in a carpet. Now the carpet is very cinematic, it's it's very dramatic. it's, I suppose looks like it's it's a sort of feasible for somebody to to carry a rolled up carpet uh with somebody uh wrapped up inside it. But it's a mistransation from the Greek. It's actually a sort of linen bed sack’"
Caesar: Death of a Dictator | The dogs of war | HistoryExtra - "This is the *something* Denarius of Brutus and uh if you look at it, the first thing which strikes you, is that we have Brutus's own portrait on the obverse. Which is absolutely amazing, given the fact that when Caesar did it, it was controversial. This is only two years later'...
‘Although Octavian was seeking to establish himself as Caesar's Heir, his first battle was not against Caesar's assassins, but with the formidable Mark Anthony, who was also in the Pro Caesar camp. In 43 BC, at Mutina in the province of Cisalpine Gaul, Octavian teamed up with the forces of Rome's two consuls to defeat Anthony, who himself had been besieging the third leading assassin, Decimus’"
Caesar: Death of a Dictator | The evil that men do | HistoryExtra - "Cleopatra leaves the battle, Anthony follows her cos he he wants to know where she’s going, what's going on. That is presented as they ran, they they fled, they abandoned their forces. But it's not for another year until Octavian goes to Egypt to finish things off and and during that that time, that year, there is a lot of diplomatic activity going back and forth between Cleopatra and Octavian, Anthony and Octavian. And this is a really interesting time because according to our sources Anthony, in the wake of the Battle of Actium, he tries to to gather up more troops from various places but they are understandably not so seen to to align themselves with him and he has something akin to a nervous breakdown. And he goes off into seclusion and spends a lot of time sort of feeling very sorry for himself and wondering how on earth has it come to this. While he's doing that, Cleopatra has clearly decided that their partnership has worn out its welcome. It no longer serves her. So for all that they do seem to have a lot of love and a lot of affection for each other, and a lot of passion as well, apparently, when it comes down to it what Cleopatra values more is her kingdom her dynasty and her children. She is prepared to sacrifice Anthony in order to ensure the survival of those things. So she is engaging with Octavian separately to Anthony. She's saying to him what do you want from me, what do you want me to do. I will give you Anthony. Or I will abdicate and retire to India and my children can rule instead of me. I can be loyal to you now instead of Anthony. And so she gives him a lot of options about how to try and ensure the survival of of Egypt as an independent Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Dynasty as an independent dynasty but Octavian is is not really taken with any of those things because what he's looking at are the the flashing pound signs... the Egyptian people are still very loyal to Cleopatra. After Cleopatra's death they they pay Octavian money to ensure that he doesn't melt down all of her statues... Cleopatra uses Anthony's feelings to manipulate him. She sends a message to him to tell him that she has committed suicide in the hope that he will commit suicide and and that removes him from the situation so she can negotiate with Octavian. And it works. He he gets the message. He he attempts to take his own life. He makes a bit of a hash of it so he doesn't die immediately. He has time to receive another message, possibly Cleopatra had second thoughts about this. Um that she's not actually dead, so so he goes to her and dies in her arms. And her response to this, she's she's heartbroken. So although politically and strategically she wanted him out of the way, he's still been her her lover her husband for a decade, he's still the father of three of her children and he's still bleeding all over her as he dies and the fact that she is so emotional about it when there's no one there to see apart from um uh enslaved people. And and as as far as uh ancient uh Greeks and Romans are concerned they're basically furniture anyway. So she's not performing for Octavian or anyone else. She's genuinely emotionally distraught'...
‘We know that she died and two of her handmaidens died with her, so this this immediately makes the asp story a little bit suspect, because trying to get a snake to bite three people in in quick succession, is both difficult to get a snake to do that, to cooperate with you, but also they just wouldn't have enough venom to to to kill three people that way. So there are different accounts from the very beginning uh in in antiquity, nobody was really sure… there was the snake story but there was also poisoned ointment, poisoned hair pin. Cleopatra was very experienced with with botany and poisons and and toxicology, and pharmacy. So there are accounts of her doing experiments and and trying to find out which poisons are best for, for which situation’...
'If Caesar had lived… the ultimate outcome might have been the same as what we got, which is to say the Roman Republic becomes the Roman monarchy, what we call the Roman Empire. But there might have been a different outcome. Caesar was not a healthy man. We know that Caesar suffered either from epilepsy or from a series of mini strokes, it's very difficult to diagnose this from our distance. One of the things that Cicero said, and he said many different things, was: why did they bother assassinating him? He was going to die soon anyhow. He might well have died in the East, and we don't know what would have happened then. The Roman Republic was fated to change. It had to change for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't fated to become a monarchy and it might have remained as an oligarchy, a reformed oligarchy. An oligarchy that brought in provincial notables as Pompey and Caesar had begun to do. But the Empire didn't have to be governed by one man, it could have been governed by committees as many empires had done. So if Caesar had not been assassinated that was a possible outcome as well. That it might have saved the Roman Republic in a way that another generation of Civil Wars couldn't have. The other generation of Civil Wars just swept everything uh out of the way so that's another reason that it mattered. Another reason that the assassination of Julius Caesar is so important is is not political or pragmatic so much as symbolic. It's one of the greatest symbols of assassination in history and the assassins claimed that they were killing a tyrant. They weren't just killing somebody who was trying to reform the Roman political system, they were killing a tyrant, and in my opinion they had some justification to say that. Whatever Caesar's original motivations and there's no reason to think that he grew up wanting to become the Tyrant of Rome, he really was flirting with... It's a tragedy that the assassins did not have the ruthlessness and the political cunning to make the assassination stick and to save the Republic. But if they could have saved the Republic and then if they had been willing to reform the Republic, and that's a very big if, that would have been a good thing for the world, if the world had been saved another generation of Civil War and everything that came afterwards'"
Nazi Germany: the myth of the innocent bystander | HistoryExtra - "Indifference and ignorance come in alongside impotence, because people find it easier to turn away, not to see the scenes of the crime and to sort of say it's dreadful but I don't want to know any more about it, I can't do anything about it. It's just awful, but what can I do? And I think that's such a common reaction to violence on that scale'...
‘Were there examples of people who actively resisted or examples of individuals kind of wrestling with the dilemma of what to do as these atrocities were unfolding?’
‘I think you've got to distinguish between the peacetime years and the wartime years, and it changes obviously quite radically once Germany is at war. During the peacetime years I think a lot of people managed to lead quite a double life. I've got examples of people who are doing absolutely the right Nazi things in public and still inviting Jews into their home, into social events in private, particularly if they were affluent, well off, lived in a nice house with a large garden, neighbors couldn't see, wouldn't comment... if you were in far more constrained circumstances, an ordinary working class mother whose husband is in a concentration camp for having engaged in communist activities and your kids are at school and at serious risk, you are going to conform and it's not going to be easy for you to want to say anything you shouldn't say and also be denounced… during war time it's extraordinary, it's so difficult because everyone, every German family has someone, some relative, some friend who's been called up to fight at the front. The Fatherland is at war and 17 or 18 million men were called up to fight at the front, of those fighting at the front certainly hundreds of thousands were involved in the persecution and mass murder of Jews on the Eastern Front/ We can't get exact figures, historians debate the exact figures, but either facilitating or participating in mass murder and certainly absolutely certainly witnessing, knowing about it, writing about it, writing home about it, so that across Germany news was coming in about atrocities on the Eastern Front. What do you do about it? Most people where you can see evidence of knowledge record it in their diaries almost as an isolated, so and so told me, and then go on back to their daily lives’...
'It's totally self-contradictory when you look at people's own accounts of their own lives in Denazification reports for example. They very often combine lots of things. They say I never knew anything about it and yet I tried to help a Jewish person. There are so many accounts of I tried to help a Jew despite not having known anything about it... One of the real shifts comes with the trials of key Nazis and the trials of major concentration camps you know through the 60s to some extent in the 70s, where the notion of who is a perpetrator is narrowed and narrowed and narrowed until the perpetrator is seen as either a frontline killer or somebody at the top would’ve given the orders which people had to obey and so that sort of almost means everybody else must have been merely an Innocent bystander… A whole new construction of Nazi society is born which effectively excludes most of the population from having been complicit or in some way more actively involved in perpetration'"
Why did medieval Europe become Christian? | HistoryExtra - "'If one were a Christian in the third century or fourth, you still assume the old gods exist. They don't disappear for you… Anthony of Egypt… for him the old gods just become demons. But they don't disappear. The long shadows of the old Gods still follow Christians everywhere they go. So they don't think of the universe as totally Christian, it's still full of these old gods... One of the great seductive achievements of religion as I say earlier is a denial of history… if you are someone now who thinks that, say Christian or Muslim, whatever, you are exactly the same kind of person when you pray as someone who prayed a thousand years ago. That there's a continuity, that not just a continuity, it's the same kind of idea. That's not history… the idea that Christ is even important, fades, in much of the early medieval world... For a lot of people in the west what it means to be Roman without an Empire is to be Christian...
One of the great myths of sort that the Battle of Poitiers and all that that Islam was going to sweep through the West. No it wasn't. I mean if nothing else most Western writers just thought initially thought of Islam as a form of heresy'"
On the trail of a Nazi war criminal | HistoryExtra - "'It may be hard for people who haven't looked at World War II, but not every Nazi who went to a concentration camp to serve liked the work. Some were sadists and they enjoyed it. Some were pathological and they enjoyed it. But for many it was not considered a great assignment. It was out in Poland, the winters were freezing, the summers were, were hot. That was bad for the prisoners but also those who were at the camp… this is terrible, we get infected with the very same diseases in the camp, we have problems with typhus. No one likes it. We don't get extra pay... He volunteered for extra time in picking those who would live and die. That's something that a lot of the the doctors hated but Mengele said give me more time doing that...
South America was a popular destination first of all because it was far away… Although Argentina, which was the country that most of the Nazis went to was technically neutral in World War II, it was really the largest Nazi listening post for intelligence outside of Europe. And Juan Peron and Eva Peron… they were very pro-Nazi, they accepted Germans. There was a large German community inside of Argentina and that part of the German community that was in South America thought that the Germans had been punished too much after the war. They had paid what they called Victor's Justice. The Allies won the war, they put all of these Nazis on trial for war crimes and if it had been the other way around and Germany had won the war maybe they would have put on trial the British pilots firebombed Dresden and the American pilots who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki...
He started to feel as though the hunters, the Nazi Hunters, the Americans, the British, the others were looking for him weren't that interested. So much so he was so confident of this that at one point in the mid-50s he walks into the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires and says by the way my name is not really Helmut Gregor, that's the fake name that he had arrived on a fake passport in 1949. My real name is Josef Mengele. I'd like a passport in my real name and nobody in the West German Embassy said, you're German, at the right age for somebody who served in World War II, you're living here in Argentina, you arrived under a fake name and you're asking for this name. I'll check to see if it's on the Wanted list. It's a remarkable bit of incompetence and apathy that allows him to spend time in Argentina with, in great style and in great comfort... [He] felt so comfortable that not only did he get a legal document in his real name but a couple of years later in 1958 he's listed in the Argentine phone book on Buenos Aires under his real name which is remarkable. All you needed to do was know which city to look in and you would have found the name of Mengele there...
There had been sightings of him over a period of time and there were these books that had come out. There were movies about Mengele made essentially. The Marathon Man, Boys from Brazil, in which the common perception was that he's hiding somewhere in the jungle surrounded by, you know killer dogs and armed guards, riding around in a Mercedes limousine and being funded by his family. And that image of the fugitive is one of the reasons he got away. Because instead of doing that he was actually living a very low life. He had gone into the poorest parts of Brazil, he'd gone into the poorest barrios outside of Sao Paolo. He wasn't the superhuman Nazi fugitive living the Hollywood version of a Nazi existence. He was the Nazi who was doing anything to survive and and that kept him free in many ways'"
