HIS BONES DO NOT SATISFY. JOSEF Mengele had come to symbolize the entire Nazi killing project. The need was to capture him and put him on trial, hear his confession, put him at our mercy. For many, that anticipated event took on the significance of confronting the Holocaust and restoring a moral universe.
For Mengele has long been the focus of what could be called a cult of demonic personality. He has been seen as the embodiment of absolute evil, a doctor pledged to heal who kills instead. But this demonization made him something of a deity, a nonhuman or even superhuman force, and served as a barrier to any explanation of his behavior. One reason Auschwitz survivors have hungered for his capture and trial is to divest him of this status. One of them, for instance, spoke to me of his yearning to see ''this metamorphosis of turning him back into a person instead of God Almighty.'' Mengele was a man, not a demon, and that is our problem. Indeed, during recent weeks he had already begun to fall from grace as a symbol of pure evil. The most notorious Nazi fugitive, unsuccessfully pursued for decades, had suddenly appeared - as bones in a Brazilian grave. The world watched in fascination as scientific examination seemed to confirm that these were the right bones.
It was reported that Mengele had lived out much of his last 25 years in lonely, despairing isolation, that he had fallen in love with a housemaid. An exemplar of pure evil is not supposed to experience loneliness or to care for another person.
