At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  He affected a professorial air in the conduct of his experiments, even though many of them were pointless or were the product of his wilful curiosity. He bound up breasts, to observe the effect on strangled milk, and removed healthy kidneys, to watch the body slowly poison itself. Women were de-sexed in dozens and their wombs invaded with instruments, X-rays and excoriating drugs. Healthy teeth were pulled and inmates’ blood-streams flushed with unmatched blood and fascinating doses of detergents. He looked for faster means of castrating young men – dispensing first with anaesthetic. Some he sentenced to scientific deaths in icy water. Others were grilled with electricity or seeded with poison bullets. Mengele then gathered up the data – the blood loss, the saliva flows, the rectal cramps – and sent it all off to the Institute in Frankfurt. He made collections of racial curios – skulls and different-coloured eyeballs – and sent them off too, in parcels marked ‘Urgent’. The Nazi medical establishment marvelled at his industry.

  His humdrum work at the camp was in the selection of those new inmates who should die and those who should work. He’d never regret the slaughter that was perpetrated to his order, although in later years he’d prefer to emphasise the numbers of those he ‘saved’. The numbers weren’t indulgent; of the last 509 arrivals, in November 1944, only forty-eight were spared. The rest were gassed. For these, his freshly laundered powers of life and death, he would always be known to Auschwitz survivors as the ‘Angel of Death’.

  In January 1945 Auschwitz was liberated, but Mengele had fled ten days before. He was seen departing in a chauffeur-driven car. It was just the beginning of his life of cat-and-mouse. Over the next four years, there are few clues as to where he went. Then, in 1949, he resurfaced in Buenos Aires; a chemical salesman. He’d joined a fashionable bridge club and had listed himself in the telephone directory as ‘Mengele, Dr, Josef ’. It was as if nothing had happened, not the eyeballs, not the ice, not the agony nor the grief. He became ever more confident. He took a holiday in Switzerland. For ten years he lived like this, and then, in 1959, the Nazi-hunters found him; his address had been arrogantly scattered among his wife’s divorce papers. An arrest warrant was issued by the West Germans, but as the Argentines dithered, Mengele made good his escape. He took off for Paraguay.

  By this time, the Paraguayan presidency had recovered from the bad case of self-righteousness that it had suffered in February 1945. Stroessner was now in power and he expressed his distaste for the accusations that were being levelled at the Nazis. He scoffed at the figure of six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, but even if it was true, it didn’t bother him.

  ‘That is a European problem,’ he said, ‘not one of ours.’

  Paraguay, for Nazi war criminals, became an attractive alternative to Argentina and Brazil. There was the large German population who, regardless of its shortcomings, had seen Nazism as the force needed to throttle communism. Among them was plenty of support for the Spider’s Web – Die Spinne – the Nazi escape organisation. Of the 5,000 ex-Nazis who made their way to South America, around 300 were thought to have been in Paraguay at one time or another. Among the least charming was Eduard Roschmann, an SS captain who’d been responsible for 33,000 Jewish deaths in Riga, Latvia. Although he died in the pauper’s hospital in Asunción, he was richly immortalised in The ODESSA File (the second of Frederick Forsyth’s villains to find himself in Paraguay).

  There were also plenty of Nazis who had the ear of the President. One of them was Hans Rudel, a former Luftwaffe ace and an accomplished weaver with Die Spinne. He gladly took up Mengele’s case. Another was Alejandro Von Eckstein, a White Russian who’d fought under Stroessner’s command in the Chaco War. Von Eckstein had arrived in Paraguay in the twenties, a feeble-minded snob on the run from the Bolsheviks. He was still prickling with indignation and alarming prejudices.

  ‘Most of the Jews were communists in the Red Army,’ he squeaked. ‘Who killed the Russian imperial family? Commissar Sverdlov, another Jew!’

  Although he professed to be an ardent Nazi, he wasn’t averse to a little racial intertwining. Soon after his arrival in Paraguay, he’d joined an expedition into the Chaco with the Russian anthropologist, Ivan Belaieff. It proved an excellent opportunity for combining a little science with pleasure; whilst Belaieff was busy studying the Stone Age Chamacocos, Von Eckstein was busy thrusting himself into their daughters. Years later, he was forced to admit his carnality but with admirable dexterity – and churns of sentimentality – he managed to recast the affair as ‘a romance in the Garden of Eden’.

  With friends like this, Mengele’s application for a Paraguayan passport was assured. As a Paraguayan citizen, Mengele was now immune from extradition. The passport wasn’t revoked until twenty years later, in 1979, by which time all records of how it was obtained had been destroyed. For the time being, Mengele had found himself a useful bolt-hole.

  ‘And when he got here,’ my friends insisted, ‘he went to live in Altos.’

  The bus passed the aerials and the end of the drain but I decided to carry on into Altos, the hotbed – perhaps – of Nazism.

  Further on was a sign for ‘The German School for Dogs’ and soon afterwards the bus pulled up on a common fringed with low, colonnaded buildings and a church. There was no sign of life. Perhaps Altos was in the seventh day of a siesta. The first person I found was a cowboy, asleep on a plinth. His hat was pulled down low over his whiskers and it didn’t seem right to wake him and ask him about Nazis. I studied the monument above his head. It was dedicated to Estigarribia, war hero and head of state. In 1939, the propeller had sheared off his aeroplane somewhere over Altos, bringing to an end his life and the most promising presidency of the century.

  The debris of a fairground was scattered across the grass, arthritic chair-o-planes and flakes of eggshell. Rum bottles were heaped in little cairns, monuments to a forgettable evening. The village dogs came sniffing across the common and it occurred to me that I must have looked like they did: scavenging, hopeful and aimless. What did I expect to find in Altos? What should a hotbed look like? I knew that there was another Deutsche Verein somewhere in the village and so I detached myself from the dogs and went off to look for it.

  The clubhouse was on the other side of the common, a buttery blockhouse with yellow shutters and a tiled roof.

  ‘If you want the keys to get inside, ask Julia at the shop.’

  I’d been caught scavenging. I turned to find a man with pale hair and raw pink skin. Although he was young, his eyes were goggled with misfortune. He introduced himself: Guillermo Copens Büttner, tractor driver and grandson of Baron Copens, an early colonist. I gave him my notebook and he wrote his name in it, in great looping copperplate.

  Julia appeared with the keys. Julia de Weiberlen was copper-jowled but with hair dyed a shade of German. Her husband, she explained, was from Germany (though what she meant was that his grandparents were). She unlocked the doors and turned on the lights in the club room. It was almost bare. The buttery paint had surged over everything except one wall and the red-chequered tile floor. On the unbuttered wall was a mural: half of it depicted Paraguayan countryside, a thatched farm, a peón sucking on a cup of maté and a mortar for grinding manioc; the other half was Germany, an exotic Silesian farm and a stickman in a Homburg hat, smoking a curly pipe.

  ‘Have either of you been to Germany?’

  They shook their heads. ‘That,’ said Guillermo, jutting his chin at the throbbing colours of Silesia, ‘is as near as we’ll get.’

  I don’t think Julia saw any point in going to Germany. It was all here. ‘We have two balls a year,’ she said, ‘and an Oktoberfest.’

  ‘There used to be other dances too,’ added Guillermo, sadly, ‘but no one has the money any more.’

  We exchanged auf Wiedersehens and I retraced my path back across the eggshells towards the aerials. On the way, I stopped at the German cemetery. I found Baron Copens, bedded down under his Iron Cross, alongside all those who’d lived and struggled w
ith him on these hills. For some, the struggle had been short – infants carried off by outlandish diseases – and for others it had been a battle with homesickness. One settler was buried under an anchor, a thousand miles from the nearest sea. Another had words of Goethe dangling over his head.

  For some reason, I found the colonists’ names strangely pleasing and I wrote them down. Even as I read them back, I can picture the settlers, feel a crackling handshake or hear their dry, mirthless laughter: the Dohmens and the Ottos, Stelmacher from Berlin, the Baumans and Hasses, the Spindlers and the weedy Kunzles.

  Mengele lived some distance away from the settlers, up on a hog’s-back of orange earth and bitter scrub. Way below, the lake looked grey and inert. I walked back, almost to the aerials, and came upon a sculptor. He was working in a hide made of branches and leaves and had six children. They were all rubbing down elves and wood spirits with tiny stamps of sandpaper.

  ‘You want Men-gelly’s house?’ he echoed. He’d cut his thumb and the blood was pooling in his uninjured hand. He looked at it blankly and then thought about the question. ‘That’s the big estate opposite. It’s owned by some people in the town.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘Not really. I was only a kid at the time.’ He licked up some blood. ‘I wouldn’t advise you to go in there. It’s private.’

  I didn’t intend to. Trespass in Paraguay is often greeted with gunfire. Besides, what was there to see? Mengele was assiduous in covering his tracks, and when he moved, he took with him every crumb of proof that he’d ever lived. It was enough to peer through the barbed wire at the bottom of his driveway, at the drive that looped through the termite mounds before vanishing into cactus. It was enough to sit with the view that he’d had and to try – in vain – to untangle his thoughts.

  ‘On the one hand,’ he wrote to his son, back in Germany, ‘I can never hope from you for understanding and sympathy for the course of my life. I, on the other hand, have not the slightest inner cause to “justify” or to make apologies for any decision, any actions or any relationships in my life …’

  *

  Mengele’s time in Altos was not a happy one. His new wife (who also happened to be his brother’s widow) detested the emptiness of their lives up on the hill, and after a miserable year of marriage, she headed for home.

  Mengele himself was uneasy. Although at the start he’d often driven himself into Asunción, he became increasingly concerned about the interest in his whereabouts. He’d been spotted by two survivors of Auschwitz in a jeweller’s in Asunción and they alerted the world to his presence. Sympathisers in the capital then warned him of Jewish Nazi-hunters – in the city and asking awkward questions. When, in May 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires, Mengele was terrified and a virulent rash blossomed across his body.

  Soon afterwards he abandoned his hideout among the termite hills of Altos. Seized with panic, he bolted for the other end of the country, to the German colonies in the south.

  For the time being, he was lost again.

  47

  THE BUS TO Itá took longer than I expected. It was only twenty miles south, across low foothills of fruit orchards and lapachos. But the road was busy with country cars, surviving on luck and body-filler. Some of them had no doors or had windows cut from shopping bags. One had no bonnet-cover and its engine thrashed around in the driver’s face, like a bucket of eels. Down the road, there were ox-carts heaving monstrous, useless machinery back to the city, and a cattle truck crammed with mourners in straw hats and weeviled suits. A few miles before Itá, the procession wheeled to one side and we rolled clear, into the town.

  It was a pretty town of cobbled streets and rare excitement. There was a parrot loose in the draper’s, and bird and assistants were flapping round the shop, fouling the air and fouling the bolts of cloth. It was lunchtime, and the only sound in the market was of an old seamstress sucking marrow out of a bone. A cowboy rode into town on his horse, stopped outside the hardware store and called for a bag of cement. It was brought and heaved into the saddle and he turned and rode thoughtfully home. It occurred to me that if I was to come back here in fifty years, I would still find the people of Itá chasing parrots and chewing ox-bones. After all, it had hardly changed in the last three hundred years; its cathedral was finished in 1598, only sixty years after Irala’s first mewling litter of mestizos.

  One of the first Englishmen ever to settle in Paraguay had lived in Itá. He was Luke Crosser, a soldier and a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo. In 1825, he set out with an expedition to find a river route through to Peru. He got to Paraguay but no further. After a short spell in prison, he found himself a native wife and settled in Itá. He only left it again in 1865 when he realised he was about to die. For such an important occasion, he travelled up to Asunción, like Moses off to meet God.

  I asked everybody I met if there were still Crossers in Itá.

  ‘We’ve got Crotas,’ they told me.

  But others thought the Crotas were from Argentina. Luke’s progeny, it appeared, had simply soaked into the gene pool.

  The town is said to have received another strange foreign visitor on 17 February 1959. He was a short, stubby oaf who throughout his life had bubbled with aggression and whose face was gravelled with scars. The son of a bricklayer, he’d enjoyed modest success as a petty criminal, but his adventures had too often ended in police cells. Then, in his mid-thirties, he discovered he had a flair for bullying and he tumbled into fascism. He hacked his way to the top, dispatching friends and foes with firing squads and gossip. In the end, he was the Robespierre of Hitler’s bunker: Martin Bormann.

  On that, his first visit to Itá, he arrived in a truck in the middle of the night. With him were Von Eckstein (now almost incapable of doing anything decent) and another scaly ex-Nazi called Werner Jung. Jung’s greatest moments had been in shorts – with the Hitler Youth – and he’d come to Paraguay in 1933 to prepare it for its glorious immersion in fascism. He was now an ironmonger in Asunción.

  The only strange thing about the Reichsminister’s visit to Itá is that he was already dead.

  For most people, Bormann committed suicide on 1 May 1945. Convention has it that he was with the Führer until the very end, in the Berlin bunker. During a break-out, he and Hitler’s surgeon, Dr Stumpfegger, had killed themselves by swallowing poison. Their bodies were supposed to have been found near the Lehrter Bridge, taken to the Ulap Fairground and buried. The exact circumstances of the deaths were, however, uncomfortably vague, and certainly vague enough for the War Crimes Tribunal to try Bormann in his absence, at Nuremberg in 1946. Whilst his past may have been obscure, they removed any doubts about his future: he was sentenced to death.

  The search for his body continued. The Americans interviewed his dentist, Dr Blaschke, who’d last seen Bormann in early 1945. They took detailed notes of the teeth they expected to find. The Ulap Fairground was dug over in July 1965 but nothing turned up. Then, in 1972, the digging was extended and – to everyone’s surprise – the corpses of Bormann and Stumpfegger were heaved out of the sand. Both corpses were positively identified from dental records – Bormann’s from Dr Blaschke’s recollections. For many, it was the end of the Bormann mystery.

  For others, there was something not quite right about the discovery.

  No one doubted that the skulls were those of Bormann and Stumpfegger, but there were odd features about them. Part of Stumpfegger’s skull had been sheared off but the missing piece was never found (it had been smashed off by the mechanical shovel, concluded the police). More troubling was Bormann’s skull. Although the teeth matched Dr Blaschke’s descriptions from 1945, he seemed to have forgotten several fillings and a lower jaw incisor bridge, a two-millimeter drift of the upper jaw bridge and a number of extractions. Perhaps he’d been thinking of an earlier time in Bormann’s dental history? But there was something else too: Bormann’s skull – only his skull – was covered in a thick red muck.


  For many, it was a great disappointment when Bormann turned up on the Ulap Fairground. They’d wanted him alive. It seemed so unsatisfactory that he should have died in the ruins of Berlin selfishly and secretly, leaving – until then – no trace of himself. People had learnt to enjoy the idea of him sweltering in a hideout in South America, brewing up nerve-gas or cloning little dolly Nazis. They’d feasted on newspaper titbits: ‘Eichmann’s Son tells Argentine Police Bormann is Alive’; ‘Letters in Eichmann’s Home are Bormann’s’; ‘Asunción Physician Dr Otto Biss Treated Bormann for Cancer, 1959’. It wasn’t much to go on, and when the corpse turned up on Ulap Fairground, these stories began to look rather tall.

  For the time being, people abandoned the idea that Bormann had lived in Paraguay. Then, in 1992, three years after Stroessner’s downfall, the secret files of La Técnica – the brain of his clowning pyragüés – were released for public inspection. The first people to take any interest in them were the old pyragüés, who cleaned up the carcass and looted the files of their guilt. One of those to survive was a curious document – on Bormann in Paraguay.

  The file suggested that he’d arrived in 1956 and had lived in Hohenhau. For some reason, the secret police had noted that he’d seen a dentist on Fulcrencio R. Moreno (the one next to my pensión). Then, in 1958, he’d complained of stomach pains and – according to the pyragüés – Dr Mengele had called to visit him. Unable to find out what was wrong, he’d referred Bormann to a physician (none other than Dr Biss), but the position was hopeless; the man was packed with cancer. He died – after some well-earned agony – on 15 February 1959.