Josef Mengele is the Prince of European Darkness. He is also the arrogant doctor who tortured, dissected and burned children, and the cossetted son of a wealthy family who sent 400,000 wholly innocent human beings to death by asphyxiation. In The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Verso, 217pp, £11.99), translated by Georgia de Chamberet, Olivier Guez describes how such a man escaped justice for decades thanks to the active complicity of the German police, the German intelligence services, and a succession of US-supported Latin American dictatorships. Based on meticulous research, Guez makes remarkable use of a kind of docufiction, imagining the...