Nazi Hunter (47 page)

In 1977, Wiesenthal informed
Time
Magazine that Josef Mengele was living in a spacious villa in San Antonio, a Paraguayan village in a remote area south-east of
Asunción, and also had a home in Puerto Stroessner, a town at the confluence of the Paraná and Iguaçú rivers. Both lay within a military enclave off limits to outsiders.
But Mengele also travelled within the Paraguayan hinterlands, visiting German-owned farms where die-hard Nazis lived in constant anxiety. ‘That is a part of their punishment,’
Wiesenthal told
Time
.

According to Wiesenthal, Mengele – escorted by four armed guards – would arrive in a black Mercedes 280SL. Prior to his entering even a trusted German home, two bodyguards would go
first and make sure it was safe before using their walkie-talkies to sound an all-clear to Mengele and two other guards in the car.

Of late, Wiesenthal went on, Mengele had been seen regularly at the German club in Asunción. Any time a stranger entered the bar, Mengele would don his sunglasses and remove them only
when he felt secure. Performing this exercise so annoyed Mengele that, once, he slammed his sunglasses on a table, breaking a lens. On another occasion, after too much to drink, he took out a
pistol and waved it wildly. Complete with photos of Wiesenthal, Mengele, and one of the fugitive’s ‘homes’ in Paraguay,
Time
called its story ‘Wiesenthal’s
Last Hunt: Tracking Down the Angel of Death’, and gave it a page and a half in the World section.

The only problem was that Mengele hadn’t set foot in Paraguay for sixteen years. But even as he perpetuated the myth of the bionic Mengele, his own words fuelled
Simon’s determination that, as he once put it to me, ‘in my lifetime and his, Mengele must be before a court as a man and not roaming free as a legend.’

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In reality, the ‘bionic’ Mengele had been floundering like a fish out of water since 1971, the year he lost a protector but gained a valuable identity card. Tragedy
had struck the family of Wolfgang Gerhard, the forty-six-year-old Hitler Youth who had lodged Mengele with the Stammers. Gerhard’s Brazilian wife Ruth was diagnosed as having stomach cancer;
his son, Adolf, bone cancer. His textile business and neo-Nazi journalism earnings couldn’t meet his doctor bills. Gerhard decided to go back to his native Austria to seek medical help and
financial fortune. Before departing, he gave Mengele his Brazilian foreign resident’s identity card; one report says Mengele paid 7000 dollars for it. Substituting his own photo, he left all
other details, including a fingerprint, the way they were.

In 1972, Mengele’s health began to decline – thanks, oddly enough, to the handlebar moustache he’d grown to hide his facial features and gapped teeth. Where others grind their
teeth or bite their lips to cope with nervous tension, Mengele’s mannerism had been to chew off the ends of his moustachioes. Over the years, these strands had formed a hairball–similar
to what befalls cats from licking their coats–blocking his intestines and requiring surgery.

When he checked into a hospital in São Paulo, a doctor noted that ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’ seemed much older than the forty-seven years shown on his identity card. Wolfram Bossert,
who had taken over Gerhard’s role as protector and accompanied Mengele to the hospital, hastily explained that the authorities had made an error in recording the birth date and promised to
correct it by issuing a new card soon. After his recovery, Mengele used the card as little as possible, but it remained his most plausible permit for being in Brazil and less dangerous than the
Paraguayan passport of José Mengele.

Before 1972 was out, Mengele had also been diagnosed as having an enlarged prostate gland and degenerating discs in the lower spine. Another complaint was financial: aside
from sending Sedlmeier, bearing cash, at irregular intervals, the Mengele family in Günzburg was letting its notorious black sheep live on an allowance of $100 to $150 a month; although he
lived frugally, crafted his own furniture, and never went anywhere, he still felt he deserved more. But the biggest pain in his life was living with the Stammers, which was proving intolerable for
everybody. When his relatives in Germany bought a car for the Stammers, Josef Mengele complained that they didn’t deserve it, the Stammers complained that it was too small, and everybody
complained when the Stammers produced some extra money they hadn’t told anybody they had and traded their gift in for a larger auto.

In 1974, Geza Stammer moved out of the house in Caieiras and took quarters in a hotel in São Paulo’s red-light district, insisting that he wouldn’t come back until Mengele
left. Knowing that the police could easily become involved, Bossert sent a warning to Günzburg (via a post office box Sedlmeier kept in Switzerland) that ‘the situation is
explosive.’ Sedlmeier made a flying visit and waved 5000 dollars before the three squabblers, but nobody rose to the bait. That November, the Stammers sold the house in Caieiras and, using
Mengele money which they’d hoarded over the years as well as their own savings, they bought a 900-square-metre (10,000-square-foot) villa just outside São Paulo. It was big enough for
them and their two sons (both of them officers in the Brazilian merchant marine) and their families. When they moved there the following month, Mengele was not invited to join them. The new owner
of the Caieiras house let him stay until February 1975.

The Stammers, never ones to pass up extra income, used Mengele’s $25,000 share of the price they received for the house he was living in to buy a bungalow in a seedy suburb of São
Paulo, register it in the name of their younger son, Miklos, and then rent it to Mengele. The new tenant’s electric bills were in the name of ‘Peter Stammer’; the neighbours knew
him as ‘Don Pedro’, and the authorities listed him as ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’.

His survival as ‘Gerhard’ was threatened in 1976, when Brazil changed the format of its foreign residents’ identity card. New photos, fingerprinting, and a personal visit to
the Department of
Public and Social Order were required to obtain one. When Mengele sent an SOS to Günzburg, Sedlmeier visited Gerhard in Austria, where his wife had
died the year before and his son Adolf was undergoing repeated surgery and expensive treatments for bone cancer. The fugitive’s stepson, Karl-Heinz, by then a director of Mengele & Sons,
was helping with the medical payments. Sedlmeier paid Gerhard to fly back to Brazil and renew his residence permit. While there, Gerhard not only visited Josef Mengele, but looked after his
idol’s eternal rest by visiting his own mother’s grave in Embu and telling the cemetery manager that, now that his wife was interred in Austria, he’d like to be buried in Europe,
too, but would the cemetery please reserve the adjacent plot for an ageing relative in Brazil?

On his brief visit to Brazil, Gerhard also asked Ernesto Glawe, a textile engineer of German ancestry, to look in on his ageing relative, ‘Peter Gerhard’, from time to time. That was
why Glawe’s young son, Norberto, and his fiancée, were saying goodbye to Mengele on Sunday, 16 May 1976, when he suddenly lost control of speech and movement as a sharp pain stabbed
the right side of his head. Within seconds, he could no longer move his left arm or leg. Norberto Glawe drove him to a hospital, where he was admitted and diagnosed as having suffered a stroke.
Asked to pay a deposit, he produced a crisp new US hundred-dollar bill.

Norberto Glawe took note of this as well as the identity card on which ‘Don Pedro’ purported to be the Wolfgang Gerhard the Glawes knew – and mentioned these details to his
father. When Mengele, who regained the use of his limbs next day, was discharged from the hospital two weeks later, young Norberto moved in with him for a fortnight as a sort of male nurse. His
father dropped around from time to time. When he found a farm-machinery catalogue from Mengele & Sons lying around, Ernesto Glawe says he ‘put two and two together’, but
didn’t take his arithmetic to the police. In a letter to Sedlmeier, Mengele complained about having ‘to pay friends for their silence’.

‘In 1977,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘we learned from a reliable source that Mengele’s son, Rolf, employed by an investment company in West Berlin, was about to
travel to Brazil. We intended to let two persons shadow him, as we had no doubt that Rolf would somehow establish
contact with his father in Latin America. Unfortunately, the
Documentation Centre lacked the necessary funds for their operation. . .

‘We therefore approached a popular Dutch newspaper, suggesting they pay the expenses in exchange for exclusive rights to the story of our manhunt. But the Dutch newspaper considered the
sum involved – 8000 dollars! – too risky. So we had to call the operation off.’

It is hard to imagine Simon Wiesenthal at that stage of his career –with Eichmann, Stangl, and more than a thousand other Nazi scalps on his belt and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination on the
table – being unable to raise 8000 dollars, but this was shortly before the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Centre came into being in Los Angeles and went into high fund-raising gear. And perhaps
Wiesenthal had cried wolf too often where the wolf was named Mengele. Besides, Rolf Mengele was a lawyer in Freiburg, not a banker in Berlin, 400 miles away; routine fact-checking would have given
any editor pause before investing further in such an adventure in pinpointing. As with his 1964 Sedlmeier tip, however, Simon’s information about Rolf’s first visit to his father in
twenty-one years was right on target.

Briefed by Sedlmeier and bearing greetings and 5000 dollars in cash from his cousin and stepbrother Karl-Heinz, and a passport he had stolen from a friend named Wilfried Busse, Mengele’s
thirty-three-year-old son Rolf stepped off a Varig charter flight from Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro on Monday, 10 October 1977. After an overnight stay in Rio’s most luxurious hotel, the Othon
Palace, Rolf took a domestic flight to São Paulo and then three taxis (to make sure he wasn’t followed) to Wolfram Bossert’s house at Rua Missuri 7. Bossert drove him in an
ancient Volkswagen bus to his father’s bungalow at Estrada de Alvaranga 555 on an unpaved street in the suburb called El Dorado.

‘The man who stood before me,’ Rolf recalled years later, ‘was a broken man, a haunted creature.’ After a distant embrace and a few preliminaries, Rolf asked his father
to tell him about Auschwitz and answer the accusations against him. The interrogation went on for days and nights. With lawyerly detachment, Rolf first listened to his father’s case, asking
as few questions as possible pending cross-examination. Leftist in politics, embittered by the deception that ‘Onkel Fritz’ was his father, which had kept him in the dark until he was
sixteen in 1960, and resentful that his father had always
favoured Karl-Heinz over him, Rolf Mengele held no brief for the man he was meeting for the first time in his adult
life.

For a fortnight, Dr Mengele assured his son that he had neither invented Auschwitz nor condoned it, but, forced to work there or lose his life, had made the same choices that confront a surgeon
in a field hospital: if a dozen dying casualties are brought in, he operates first on the handful that have a chance of survival, dooming the rest to certain death. ‘When people arrived at
the railhead half dead and infected with disease, what was I supposed to do?’ he asked rhetorically, answering that his job was only to classify those ‘able to work’ and
‘unable to work’ – and that he was as generous in his assessments as he could afford to be. He took personal credit for rescuing twins for research.

After his father had concluded his case by saying he felt no guilt, no repentance, Rolf asked him why he hadn’t turned himself in.

‘There are no judges. There are only avengers,’ Mengele replied, paying grudging tribute to Wiesenthal, Langbein, and others who, denied their day in court, had nonetheless trumpeted
his crimes and reduced him to a recluse in the custody of his own comeuppance.

Later, Rolf Mengele told biographers Posner and Ware: ‘I realized that this man, my father, was just too rigid. Despite all his knowledge and intellect, he just did not want to see the
basis and rules for the simplest humanity in Auschwitz. He didn’t understand that his presence alone had made him an accessory within the deepest meaning of inhumanity. There was no point in
going on.’