The Boys from Brazil (novel)

Did You Know?

• The film was nominated for three Academy Awards.
• In 2025, Netflix ordered a miniseries adaptation from Peter Morgan, with Jeremy Strong leading the cast as Yakov Liebermann.
• The novel was adapted into a movie directed by Franklin J. Scaffner, written by Levin and Heywood Gould.

Plot

Yakov Liebermann, a Nazi hunter whose work was inspired by Simon Wiesenthal, operates a documentation center in Vienna focused on Holocaust crimes. Because Western governments lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals and his center’s bank collapsed, he had to relocate the operation to his own apartment. In September 1974, a young man from Brazil calls Liebermann. He says he just finished recording a meeting of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor known as the “Angel of Death.” According to the recording, Mengele is reactivating the ODESSA network for a bizarre mission: six former SS officers are to murder 94 men across Western Europe and North America. The targets are all civil servants, each must die around a specific date spread over several years, and each will be exactly 65 years old when killed. The caller is murdered before he can finish speaking. Liebermann, initially skeptical, checks the story and finds the killings are actually happening. While investigating, he notices by chance that two of the victims’ sons look identical. It turns out every one of the 94 men has a 13-year-old son who is a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler, secretly created by Mengele and placed, through corrupt adoption workers, with families whose lives mirror Hitler’s childhood. Mengele’s plan is to raise a new Führer for a reborn Nazi movement. The ODESSA eventually cancels the operation and pulls back the six killers, but an enraged Mengele decides to finish the murders himself and heads to the United States.

Reviews

The New York Times called it an "appallingly inventive plot." In a 2011 review for The Guardian, Sophia Martelli noted that although the book is now fairly dated, the inclusion of real or near-real characters added a chilling dimension at the time of publication. She wrote that what scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering, which in the 1970s belonged firmly in the realm of fiction but is now not nearly so far-fetched. The book became a best seller.