This espionage thriller begins in 1997, as shocking news reaches retired Mossad secret agents Rachel and Stefan about their former colleague David. This trio tracked down Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel in East Berlin in 1965. Dieter Vogel was practicing gynecology in East Berlin and it was believed to be the surgeon of Birkenau. 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. Dr. Mengele allegedly did surgery for the purpose of torturing the prisoners at Birkenau. The latter was an extermination camp part of the Auschwitz complex. The Auschwitz complex was comprised of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as Buna–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps. Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, as the place of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”. On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The real surgeon of Birkenau was Joseph Mengele who was a German SS officer and a physician in the Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the “Angel of Death.” At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of studies on twins. After an experiment was over, the twins were usually killed and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Roma children were sewn together to create conjoined twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resented; this also caused gangrene. Mengele escaped to Argentina after the fall of the Third Reich and in his escape he had been assisted by the ODESSA network. The latter was an organization of SS officers. He found asylum in Paraguay and finally in Brazil.
Mengele was listed on the Allies’ list of war criminals as early as 1944. His name was mentioned in the Nuremberg trials several times, but Allied forces were convinced that Mengele was dead. In reality he had evaded capture for 34 years because the rich German community of Latin America aided him to diffuse his whereabouts. He died in 1979 in Brazil.
The film, written by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, is interested in the ways that the truth of the past can be shaded and illuminated by the imperatives of the present, and it probes, with perhaps more energy than clarity, the ethical and psychological complications that can lie hidden beneath a story of simple heroism.
Jessica Chastain as Rachel Singer in younger years is an emerging movie star, delicate to take down a war criminal or to grow up into the regal, world-weary Helen Mirren, Rachel Singer at an older age, provides “The Debt” with its emotional center of gravity. While the two Rachels don’t quite seem to be the same person (in spite of carefully matched scars on their cheeks), they are both, in their different ways, captivating: Jessica Chastain for her expressiveness and Helen Mirren for her stoicism.
It is a movie that you have to watch it. It captivates you from the first minute until the very last moment and it proves the brutality of the SS officers. Mengele never repented for the extermination of the Jews. Keep in mind that only 600 SS officers and guards were prosecuted in post-war Germany.
was Churchill’s the most highly decorated special agent in the war against the Nazis. Gestapo gave her the nickname “white mouse” for her uncanny ability to run rings around the German secret police in occupied France, in spite of a 5 million franc price on her head.
