Killing the SS

by Bill O'Reilly

  Blaschke’s recollections prove to be exact. The skull thought to be Bormann’s is an almost perfect match with the dental records. However, there is one significant problem: extensive dental work had been performed on the skull since 1945, including the addition of several crowns and fillings, using dental techniques that were not available in 1945.

  This stunning revelation is not publicized until 1976—three years after West Germany declared Bormann dead.3

  So it is that Simon Wiesenthal and others are certain that the Martin Bormann “discovery” in Berlin is a fraud. Wiesenthal is sure the heinous Nazi is alive and prospering with the help of ODESSA.

  But Simon Wiesenthal must prove it.

  He believes that Argentina is the place to do that.

  20

  MAY 16, 1976

  SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

  AFTERNOON

  The Angel of Death is not in Argentina. Nor is he in Paraguay. Or Uruguay. Or any of the places Simon Wiesenthal claims Josef Mengele has been spotted.

  Instead, he lives alone in a two-bedroom bungalow at 5555 Estrada Alvarenga in the seedy Brazilian neighborhood of Eldorado Paulista. Mengele’s roof leaks and he has painted the interior yellow and green. “My cage becomes more comfortable,” he wrote after laying tile on sections of the cracked hardwood floor, “but it is still a cage.”

  The sixty-five-year-old SS officer is racked by loneliness. He never drinks, for fear of slipping up and saying something incriminating that will lead the authorities to his door. The regular flow of funds being smuggled to him through the family business in Günzburg, Germany, is drying up. A new generation has taken over the company and is reluctant to entangle its livelihood with an infamous butcher. Hans Sedlmeier, the company go-between who acts as Mengele’s contact, is still active in caring for the Angel of Death, but the small envelopes of money now contain less than $150 per month.

  Mengele no longer risks using his own name, preferring a number of aliases to protect his identity. Sometimes he goes by “Don Pedro,” sometimes “Wolfgang Gerhard.” The real Wolfgang Gerhard, the Hitler Youth leader so fanatic he adorns his Christmas tree with swastikas, and who protected Mengele for so many years in Brazil, has returned to Germany to be with his wife as she dies from cancer. He has gifted Mengele with his Brazilian identity card, even though the Angel of Death is fourteen years older and six inches shorter than Gerhard.

  Mengele’s own wife, Martha, still keeps in touch but never visits from her home in Germany. Back when he lived on the farm outside São Paulo, Mengele sated his longing for feminine companionship by having an affair with the married woman for whom he managed the property. Blue-eyed Gitta Stammer is Hungarian. She came to Brazil with her husband, Geza, in 1948.

  Mengele had purchased half the farm, so their finances were intertwined. Their relationship grew strained as the Nazi began criticizing the way the Stammers were raising their two sons. Upon learning his true identity, Gitta furiously challenged him: “You’re such a great man, so why do you live in hiding? At least your colleagues had the guts to live openly and stand trial. Sure, some were hung … but they were real men. They didn’t hide.”

  But now Mengele’s days on the farm are over, as is his affair with Gitta Stammer. He has an enlarged prostate, degenerative discs in his back, and digestive problems caused by hair balls in his intestines from the nervous habit of chewing and swallowing the ends of his large mustache.

  Mengele’s only companion is a sixteen-year-old neighbor named Luis Rodriguez, who sometimes stops by to watch the Wonderful World of Disney on the doctor’s black-and-white television. A homesick Mengele bought the TV specifically to watch the 1976 Winter Olympics, being held in the Austrian Alps just 150 miles south of his hometown. Lonely, he hopes that his thirty-two-year-old son Rolf, a lawyer in the German city of Freiburg, might soon make the journey from Europe to pay him a discreet visit.

  On this Sunday afternoon, Mengele is elated to have several guests from the old country. Ernesto Glawe is an engineer from Germany who has come, along with his fiancée and son, to pay his respects. But this is not a social call, as Mengele believes. It is a visit arranged by the doctor’s contacts back in Europe, checking up on his state of mind. Glawe has been told that “Don Pedro” is a lonely widower.

  Ernesto Glawe does not know Mengele’s true identity. He believes the lie that “Don Pedro” is the nickname for “Peter Gerhard,” who once served as a sergeant in the Wehrmacht infantry.

  The visit is friendly, but when it comes time to say good-bye, Mengele abruptly grabs the right side of his head as if struck a hard blow. When he tries to explain what is happening, the doctor is unable to speak. Mengele then falls hard to the floor; the muscles on the left side of his body completely paralyzed.

  But he is not dead.

  * * *

  “If I could get this man, my soul would finally be at peace,” Simon Wiesenthal tells Time magazine, for an issue that will go on sale September 26, 1977. Wiesenthal’s interview is conducted in the Vienna offices of the Jewish Documentation Center, as he now calls his company. The Nazi hunter would consider the capture of Dr. Josef Mengele to be the summation of his life’s work, but he is also comfortable with what he calls the “biological solution”—or simply, Mengele’s death by old age.

  These are not good times for Simon Wiesenthal. He is sixty-six and in failing health because of a heart condition. The bank holding all his finances has failed, rendering him and the Jewish Documentation Center without monetary resources. And he has become the subject of ridicule in Austria, thanks to an ongoing feud with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, a Socialist and Jew whom Wiesenthal has publicly charged with appointing Nazis to his cabinet.

  “Two old Jews fight,” Wiesenthal tells Time magazine, referring to himself and Kreisky, “and the SS men laugh.”

  For now, Wiesenthal has all but given up the search for Martin Bormann. He has continued to seek out lesser Nazis, but in his financial distress the aging hunter finds that Josef Mengele has become his unlikely ally. The public is fascinated by the Angel of Death’s whereabouts. Wiesenthal’s ongoing publicity campaign about Mengele’s likely location fuels this mystery—and results in the thousands of dollars in donations required to keep Wiesenthal’s foundation afloat.

  So even though the Nazi hunter has no real clue about where to locate the Angel of Death, he goes on record as stating that Mengele now lives in Paraguay, in the village of San Antonio. Wiesenthal tells Time that Mengele also has a villa in Puerto Stroessner, a city named for the Paraguayan president Alfredo Stroessner, who is offering the Angel of Death refuge. Wiesenthal talks about Mengele’s drinking problem and fondness for sunglasses. He claims that instead of ODESSA, the doctor is now protected by the Nazi group Die Spinne (The Spider). Like ODESSA, the actual existence of Die Spinne has never been proven. Sadly, Wiesenthal reports, Mengele is working with Stroessner and Die Spinne to subjugate the Aché Indians of Paraguay, using the same “German methods” once utilized in the concentration camps.1

  Wiesenthal cannot prove any of these theories that he presents as facts. The Nazi hunter would like to share another sliver of information about Mengele’s location, but he holds back. This is uncharacteristic but necessary. Wiesenthal has received a tip from a very good source that Mengele’s son, Rolf, is traveling to Brazil to see his father for the first time in twenty-one years.

  But there is no money in the bank to send a team to follow Rolf. Wiesenthal attempted to raise funds by contacting a Dutch newspaper with this secret, asking for an $8,000 advance in exchange for exclusive rights to the story. Even though the information is accurate, Wiesenthal has raised a false alarm too many times in the past.

  * * *

  On October 10, 1977, Rolf Mengele lands in Brazil. He carries $5,000 in cash for his father and travels on a stolen passport with the name Wilfried Busse. One day and three taxi rides later, the young attorney stands on the front porch at 5555 Estrada Alvarenga. Rolf is the exact same age as his
father was during his murderous time in Auschwitz.

  Dr. Josef Mengele answers the door. His left hand is twisted into a claw, the residue of his recent stroke. He is ecstatic to see his son. Tears in his eyes, Mengele raises his arms in a hug.

  Rolf is exhausted from his long journey and anxious to have a serious discussion with his father about Auschwitz. But rather than encountering the powerful man he remembers from his teenage years, Rolf greets a pathetic figure: “a broken man, a haunted creature,” Rolf will later recall.

  Rolf Mengele wraps his arms around his father just the same.

  * * *

  The clandestine visit lasts two weeks. In slurred words brought on by his stroke, Josef Mengele explains to his neighbors that his “nephew” has come to visit, and they will long remember the young man who spoke German and Italian fluently.

  Mengele takes his son on trips to various locations in Brazil where he has lived over the past seventeen years. The two men go swimming at a favorite beach at Bertioga, a resort town fifty miles southeast of São Paulo where Mengele likes to relax for a few days each summer. The sand is flat for hundreds of yards out into the ocean, allowing them to walk far away from shore into the small waves.

  The Angel of Death takes his son to see the farm and watchtower in Serra Negra, where Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni came so close to capturing him in 1962.

  Rolf is impressed that his father is mentally alert, despite his physical frailties. Mengele is passionate about classical music and lapses fluently into Latin and Greek. He shows great consideration for his son, insisting that Rolf sleep on the bed each night while he sleeps on the floor.

  Rolf Mengele has some hard questions for his father, as he is horrified by his reputation. “These facts left me speechless,” he will later recall about the stories he has read about Auschwitz. “I tried to tell him that his presence in Auschwitz alone was unacceptable to me.”

  Each night, the two men square off in an intellectual debate. The topic is always the same. “I told my father I was interested in hearing about his time in Auschwitz,” Rolf will recall. “What did he do there? Did he have a role in the things he was charged with?”

  Josef Mengele is unrepentant. He swears that he was there to help the inmates and that he “never personally harmed anyone in his life.” He says that he was just doing his job and that he would have been harshly punished if he failed to do so. When asked about the gruesome experiments he performed on twins, Mengele claims that he was saving them from an even more horrible fate—that, in fact, he “rescued the twins,” who now owe him their lives.

  The Angel of Death compares himself to a triage surgeon on the battlefield: “If ten wounded soldiers are brought into the hospital in critical condition, the doctor must make almost instantaneous decisions about whom to operate on first. By choosing one, then necessarily another must die. When people arrived at the railhead, what was I supposed to do? People were arriving infected with disease, half dead.

  “My job was only to classify those able to work and those unable to work. I was as generous in my assessments as I needed to be,” Rolf will remember his father saying.

  The rambling arguments often make no sense to Rolf, which only infuriates his father. “Don’t tell me you, my only son, believe what they write about me? On my mother’s life, I never hurt anyone.”

  Mengele’s insistence on innocence, and the passion for which he argues his case, confounds his son. Many days, Rolf does not know what to believe. But as the two weeks come to an end, Rolf realizes one true fact: Josef Mengele will never admit any wrongdoing.

  “Why didn’t you turn yourself in?” Rolf finally asks.

  In words that will eventually provide Simon Wiesenthal with the peace for which he so desperately longs, Josef Mengele admits his grave fear of the Nazi hunter: “There are no judges, only avengers.”

  * * *

  Rolf Mengele says farewell to his father at the São Paulo Airport. It is an enormous risk for Josef Mengele to even appear in such a public place, but he is sad to see his son leave and is already planning their next visit.

  Mengele wraps his son in a final embrace. “We shall try to meet again very soon,” he promises.

  That will never happen.

  For the real angel of death is coming.

  21

  JULY 29, 1978

  ITATIAIA, BRAZIL

  10:00 A.M.

  A German shepherd bares its fangs at the journalists gathered in front of the Hotel Tyll. The dog’s handler keeps a tight hold on the leash but makes it clear the animal will be allowed to attack if the press attempts to enter the establishment. At his side, a fellow neo-Nazi taps a coiled whip against his thigh.

  A photographer raises his camera to take a picture of the hostile duo. This is a vital moment in the history of Nazi hunting, for inside the hotel is a gathering of the Kamaradenwerk, the highly secretive organization that counts the ODESSA and Die Spinne among its networks that continue to assist the Nazi cause. An estimated eight thousand to ten thousand Nazi fugitives are indebted to this group for smuggling them into South America after the war. “The Kamaradenwerk is anything but fiction,” a São Paulo rabbi named Henry Sobel recently told the local media. It is a brave act, for the rabbi knows that reprisal might mean death. “It is the international umbrella group that shelters all its subgroups and keeps them in touch with each other.”

  The Kamaradenwerk uses code phrases in its communiqués to identify its membership. Sometimes they call themselves “friends of the 20th of April,” in honor of Adolf Hitler’s birthday. One invitation to a previous meeting at the Hotel Tyll referred to the attendees as “friends who have embarked from the same station.”

  Brazilian police received an anonymous tip about that meeting three months ago. Nazis are not illegal in this nation, where Communists are considered the true threat. So the tipster misled the authorities into believing they would be raiding a Communist gathering. In the subsequent report, police noted that the guests were drunkenly singing the “Horst Wessel” song, a Nazi Party anthem. The dragnet picked up Gustav Franz Wagner, a former camp guard at Sobibór who was once fond of throwing Jewish babies into the air and impaling them on the tip of a bayonet. Wagner was known as the Human Beast. He came to Brazil with former compatriot Franz Stangl and has lived in fear of arrest ever since. Wagner is terrified of the Mossad—but not so fearful of the Brazilian police who arrested him.

  Inside the Hotel Tyll’s dining room, unseen by the journalists waiting on the lawn, the walls are lined with swastikas. A poster of Adolf Hitler is displayed prominently. “Songs of Germany” spins on a record player. On a side table, magazines with titles like “Quotations from the Führer” and “The End of the Lie of the 6 Million” are arranged alongside stickers proclaiming Nazi dominance. “Kauft Nicht Bei Juden,” reads one—“Don’t Buy from Jews.”

  Far more chilling is the banner proclaiming “We Are Back: The Day of Vengeance Is Come.”

  Outside, as the photographer snaps his photo, the small man with the whip lashes out. Two short flicks of his wrist send the unbraided end of the bullwhip quickly toward the paparazzo’s forearm. The tendrils tear away flesh, opening a pair of deep bloody wounds.

  Simultaneously, the man who calls himself only “Magno” releases his German shepherd, which bounds toward the media. “Swine,” he calls out as the reporters run. “Filthy bastards.

  “We are not Nazis,” Magno lies to the press. “And even if we were, it wouldn’t be a crime.”

  That fact is clear from the treatment accorded the arrested Gustav Franz Wagner. Despite his proven record of atrocities during the war, Brazilian authorities refuse to extradite him. Israel, Austria, Poland, and West Germany all request that Wagner be sent to their country to stand trial. They are refused.

  Wagner is released—a free man, safe from the long arm of justice.

  Or so it seems.

  Two years later, on October 3, 1980, an assassin comes for Gustav Wagner. Though his a
ttorney will later claim it was suicide, the Human Beast’s corpse is discovered with a knife blade buried to the hilt into his heart, a feat impossible for a man to do to himself.

  No one takes credit for the murder.

  * * *

  In the words of one Wehrmacht soldier now living in Brazil, “The Nazi spirit is merely sleeping in a good number of inhabitants of this region. All it needs to be awakened is one intelligent leader.”

  That man may be presently in the Bolivian capital of La Paz. Klaus Barbie is sixty-four years old, the son of a schoolteacher. He owes his life and fortune to the Kamaradenwerk. To the casual observer, Barbie is a kindly, white-haired old man who enjoys reading the newspaper in the Plaza Murillo, near the presidential palace. He takes his coffee at the Café La Paz, where he always sits with his back to the wall. But in reality, Klaus Barbie is secretly working with the Kamaradenwerk to overthrow the Bolivian government and install a new president sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Earlier this year, Barbie flew to Germany to recruit mercenaries. He is also involved with terrorist groups and intelligence organizations trying to bring regime change to La Paz.

  Despite the nickname “the Butcher of Lyon” for his atrocities as a Gestapo chief in France during the war, Klaus Barbie has shown himself to be remarkably diplomatic in dealing with those who should be trying to arrest him. For years after the war, he was protected by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its leader, Allen Dulles, who paid him a lavish $1,700 per month to spy on the new French government. Finally, when France demanded that Barbie be handed over for trial, the CIA lied, saying that he no longer worked for them. Using traditional ratlines, Dulles helped Barbie escape. Like so many other top Nazis, Barbie also received assistance from the Vatican and Red Cross, which arranged passports and Bolivian visas for himself, his wife, and their two children.