Nazi Hunter (50 page)

Still, says Simon, ‘people who are usually quite busy and tied down to their jobs – like Karl-Heinz Mengele, who is the head of a big factory – don’t waste their time
asking theoretical questions about someone who is not alive.’ He also points out that neither Frankfurt prosecutor Klein nor the Israeli police nor the US Office of Special Investigations
will pronounce Mengele dead. Neal Sher, head of the OSI, said Mengele’s death, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination, will never be laid to rest. But Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre, who thinks Mengele is dead, finds it significant that, since 1985, nobody has come forward to claim the rewards leading to his arrest.

Wiesenthal pounces on such trivia as an unexplained hole in the spine of the corpse exhumed at Embu (perhaps it was made by a nail hammered in to obliterate a tell-tale detail) and the lack of
any discrepancy between the corpse’s height of 1.74 metres (5' 8.5") and the identical height listed on Mengele’s wartime SS records (even though loss of hair and the shrivelling of age
should have subtracted a centimetre or two). He suggests that clever needlework by a dentist or a doctor like Mengele himself could have duplicated the perforation between his front teeth. And he
has endless questions about the suspicious behaviour of the Bosserts on the day Mengele died – and the day after, at the cemetery.

‘Just today,’ Wiesenthal told me happily on 27 December 1988, four days before his eightieth birthday, ‘I receive a letter from a Swiss man who says he met Mengele in Paraguay
lately. When I come back from Israel, I will look into it.’

A cruel but telling two-part editorial cartoon by Dana Summers in Florida’s
Orlando Sentinel
was syndicated worldwide in the summer of 1985. In the left-hand
panel, headlined ‘1945–1984’, a moustached
man who looked like Wiesenthal sat behind a desk labelled ‘Nazi Hunters, Inc.’ and, pondering
documents, told an aide: ‘Nobody has any information on Mengele. He seems to have disappeared into thin air!’ In the right-hand panel, titled ‘1985!!’, a news stand featured
headlines that shouted: ‘
I KNEW JOSEF
!’ . . . ‘
HOUSEWIFE SAYS
– “
WE HUNG OUT
TOGETHER
”’ . . . ‘
JOSEF FATHERED MY BABY
!’ . . . ‘
I GAVE SWIMMING LESSONS TO ANGEL OF DEATH
!’ . . .
‘
ALIEN BEINGS LIKED MENGELE
’ . . . and, inevitably, ‘“
WE WERE DRINKING BUDDIES
” –
SAYS
ELVIS
’
GHOST
’.

On the same page as Summers’ cartoon, the
International Herald Tribune
excerpted an editorial from
The Observer
, ‘Why Wasn’t Mengele Found?’, which
began by asking:

More often than not, the finger of blame for following false trails was pointed at Simon Wiesenthal – most devastatingly by Benno Varon, the ex-Viennese Israeli
ambassador to Paraguay, who called Wiesenthal’s periodic Mengele ‘sightings’ and posting of a reward that ‘is in no danger of ever having to be paid out’ and
proclamation of his imminent capture ‘subtle inducement for contributing to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Who wouldn’t gladly part with some money for the prospect of catching a
genocidal monster?’, and by Mengele’s biographers Posner and Ware, who said ‘Wiesenthal’s pronouncements raised the public’s expectations, only to dash their hopes
each time.’ In
Mengele: the Complete Story
, they remark:

The Wiesenthal Centre rose to Simon’s defence. Its director, Gerald Margolis, and Washington counsel Martin Mendelsohn took on Varon in the pages of the influential
Jewish magazine,
Midstream
:

And, in a 1986 interview with me, Rabbi Hier drew a bead on New York lawyer-biographer Posner as one of those Simons-come-lately: ‘What Posner skips is that he himself
had just completed a book and was about two weeks away from publication when the body was found in Brazil. In the book, he was going to give Mengele’s “actual” address in
Paraguay. Then the events occurred in Brazil which led him to write a new book. So why does he tell the world how wrong Wiesenthal was and forgets to say that he’d seven-eighths published a
book of interviews with high Paraguayan officers and generals and was about to pinpoint the exact location of Mengele in Paraguay? And yet he wants to fault someone else for making the same
mistake.

‘Over the years, you have to remember that, if Simon had not been in there looking for Mengele – and, later, the entry of Klarsfeld as well – the world would have forgotten
about him. A guy like Mengele wouldn’t have had to spend his last few years watching soap operas on TV in Brazil. He could have been back home in Bavaria or spending more time on the slopes
in Switzerland.’

In 1992, a team of British scientists flew to Germany to make DNA genetic tests comparing a blood sample from the corpse in Embu cemetery with a blood sample from Rolf Mengele, who has changed
his name. The match-up left the scientists ‘99.97 per cent certain’ that the body was indeed Josef Mengele’s. German authorities were quick to embrace these results. ‘As
prosecutors,’ they said, ‘we can assure all survivors of the Holocaust and their families that Mengele is dead.’

Simon Wiesenthal is not so sure, but when I called to find out how he was taking the news, he was taking it personally: ‘All day my phone has been ringing with people who say they can
prove Mengele is alive. And this is Mengele’s revenge on me.’

To make matters worse for Simon, who had undergone prostate surgery a few years earlier: ‘The urologists are having a convention here. Many of them are Jewish and they all want to talk
with me about Mengele. But not one of them is asking how I am pissing.’

26

With a few exceptions (such as the apprehension of Gustav Wagner, which will be treated in this section), Simon Wiesenthal’s role as a serious sleuth and Nazi-hunter
ended somewhere between the extraditions of Franz Stangl in 1967 and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan in 1973. In that interim, Wiesenthal became more of a publicist and conscience than avenger and
researcher. Nowhere could his good use of his new-found power as a celebrity be better glimpsed than in his crusade for Raoul Wallenberg. Nowhere could his abandonment of his old talents be viewed
with more alarm (yet, even here, with some grudging admiration for the pain he caused villains) than in his campaign to unearth Dr Josef Mengele. But now, before exploring the New Wiesenthal of the
seventies and eighties, it is time to pause and appreciate the deftness, determination, and persistence of the Old Wiesenthal – and to detail three of his last hurrahs.

Nine months and five days before Simon Wiesenthal’s birth in Galicia, Franz Paul Stangl was born on 26 March 1908, in the Upper Austrian town of Altmünster on
Austria’s deepest lake, the Traunsee, to an attractive young mother and an ageing night watchman. His father, who hadn’t wanted him and wasn’t certain the boy was his, lived only
for his military past in the imperial dragoons. ‘His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe,’ Stangl recalled in 1971 in an interview with British
journalist Gitta Sereny. ‘He was a dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.’ His brutal father beat him so hard that, more than half a century
later, Stangl still recalled not just the pain, but his mother’s screams of ‘Stop it! You’re splashing blood all over my clean walls!’

Too old to fight in the First World War, Stangl’s father was nonetheless a casualty of the slaughter, for he died of malnutrition in 1916. ‘He was thin as a
rake,’ the son remembered with no overt pity. ‘He looked like a ghost, a skeleton.’ A year later, Stangl’s mother married a widower with two children of his own. As soon as
Franz was fourteen, his hard-pressed stepfather tried to put him to work in the steel mill where he was employed. ‘But I had my eye on working for the local textile mill,’ said Stangl.
‘That’s what I always wanted to do, and for that I had to be fifteen. So I got my mother and the school principal to say I had to stay in school another year.’

Leaving school at fifteen to become a weaver, Stangl finished his apprenticeship in three years: ‘When I was eighteen and a half, I did my exams and became the youngest master weaver in
Austria. I worked in the mill and only two years later I had fifteen workers under me.’ Playing the zither in a local club and giving music lessons at night, building his own sailboat on
weekends, he remembered those years proudly and fondly as ‘my happiest time’.

After five years, however, the happiness was wearing off. When he turned twenty-three in 1931, he realized that ‘without higher education, I couldn’t get further promotion. But to go
on doing all my life what I was doing then? Around me I saw men of thirty-five who had started at the same age as I and were now old men. The work was too unhealthy. The dust got into your lungs
– the noise. . .’

And the dragoon uniform hanging in his father’s closet was under his skin. He often looked at young policemen patrolling the streets and envied how spruce and secure they looked in their
uniforms. He applied to the Austrian federal police and, after an examination and interview, was ordered to report to their barracks in Linz, the Upper Austrian capital, for basic training.

When Stangl gave his notice at the mill, the owner said: ‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me about it instead of doing it secretly? I was planning to send you to school – in
Vienna.’

Telling about this almost four decades later, Stangl wept. When interviewer Sereny, who spent more than seventy hours with him, asked why he didn’t change his plans when his boss told him
that, Stangl answered through the tears: ‘He didn’t ask me to.’

Austria was already an armed camp when Stangl donned his police uniform and began courting Theresa Eidenböck, an Upper Austrian
perfumer’s
daughter a year older than he; they met in Linz, where she was studying midwifery at the School of Social Work. Austria’s two major contending parties – the progressive (but not
communist) Socialists (known as the Reds) and their conservative, heavily Catholic rival, the Christian Social Party (called the Blacks: the colour of priests’ robes) – each had its own
flag, its own anthem, its own paramilitary force: the leftists’
Schutzbund
(Workers’ Militia) vs the rightists’
Heimwehr
(Home Guard). Untrained in democracy
after a millennium of monarchy, the Austrian people gave to their political parties the loyalty most people give to their countries.

In 1931, the post-World War I question of Anschluss (which then meant union with Germany, but would later mean armed annexation) was revived. In a 1932 Cabinet crisis, the ruling Blacks’
Minister of Agriculture Engelbert Dollfuss became Chancellor, governing with a one-vote majority in Parliament and dependent upon his party’s armed
Heimwehr
to keep him in power.
Dollfuss, just turning forty, was an unimposing figure, not just because he stood not quite five feet tall, but also as the illegitimate son of peasants. Both his admirers and detractors were quick
to nickname him ‘
millimetternich
’ after a more astute statesman and master manipulator who had tyrannized Austria while remaking the map of Europe more than a century earlier.
Other enemies termed Dollfuss ‘the poisonous dwarf’.