Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  A devout Nazi, though never a war criminal, Rudel was surely in the avant-garde of neo-Nazism. Immediately after the war ended, he emigrated to South America to pursue a lucrative and well-publicized career as a manufacturer’s representative and invincible Master Race superman extolling a Fourth Reich and perpetuating SS shrines while serving on Juan Perón’s payroll as a consultant to the National Institute of Aeronautics in Córdoba. An ardent sportsman who didn’t let an artificial right leg slow down his tennis, skiing, and waterskiing, he also formed Rudel Clubs in Europe and Latin America – ostensibly for flying lessons and competitions, but also as a Kameradwerk, an alumni association to assist ‘so-called war criminals’ in relocating to safer climes. This he admitted in 1960, eight years after a German neo-Nazi newspaper reported that ‘Rudel has been proclaimed Führer’ of the Fourth Reich.

  In his memoir, Trotzdem (Nonetheless), published in German in Buenos Aires, Rudel glorified war and Hitler in equal measure. In 1976, two West German air force generals were dismissed for defending his appearance at an official reunion of former Luftwaffe aviators.

  Though his biggest clients were aircraft manufacturers, one of the firms that Rudel represented was Karl Mengele & Sons of Günzburg, and so he was privy to the secret of ‘Helmut Gregor’s’ identity. On one of Rudel’s frequent trips to Germany, he recommended that ‘Dr Gregor’ be hired as the family firm’s own representative in Latin America, a burgeoning postwar sales area. After Rudel conjured up a vision of a fertile continent laid bare and thirsting to be worked with manure-spreaders, chain saws, and other Mengele exports, the family in Günzburg was convinced.

  Around 1951, Mengele had made a business trip to Paraguay with Rudel, who introduced him to his contacts and showed him the territory. ‘It was Rudel,’ write Mengele biographers Posner and Ware, ‘who persuaded Mengele that a lucrative market in farm machinery was waiting to be cornered in Paraguay, a country about the same size as California, especially in the well-watered luxuriant pastures of the south-east.’ When General Alfredo Stroessner, a fascist dictator of German extraction, seized power in 1952 and took firm control as President for Life, Paraguay was enhanced for Mengele as a potential escape hatch should the political climate in Argentina ever sour.

  In 1953, ‘Dr Gregor’ moved into the city of Buenos Aires, taking an apartment on the Calle Tacuari. But he had also put down roots in the suburb called Florida by investing in a small carpentry workshop there which made wooden toys for children and odd pieces of furniture. With Mengele’s family funds, it expanded into making nuts and bolts for textile factories, and soon was paying dividends which, along with his sales commissions from Karl Mengele & Sons, enabled ‘Gregor’ to live comfortably and frequent the best restaurants of Buenos Aires.

  Though the Mengele family in Günzburg to this day steadfastly denies it paid its prodigal son’s way, all evidence is to the contrary. Family ties were so strong that father Karl Snr, who first visited his eldest son in Argentina in 1954 to expedite Josef’s divorce from Irene before any court controversy could alert the Allies to his whereabouts, also arranged the fugitive’s second marriage: to Martha Weil Mengele, widow of Josef’s youngest brother, Karl Jnr, who had died of a heart attack at thirty-seven toward the end of 1949, not long after Josef had landed in Argentina.

  While such a union has its roots, ironically, in Jewish tradition whereby a bachelor is expected to marry his brother’s widow, it was a corporate manoeuvre by Karl Mengele Snr to keep the business in the family. True, Josef had signed a secret document renouncing his share in Mengele & Sons – just for ‘show’ in case any prosecutor or victim claiming reparations ever sought to attach or impound the firm’s earnings. Now, toward the end of his life, the patriarch worried that Martha, who had inherited her husband’s share, might remarry and a non-Mengele might sit in the boardroom; he had already broken up a relationship she was having with a Günzburg businessman. If Josef married Martha, Karl Snr knew his son would share profits and voting power through her.

  Martha Mengele required some persuading. This would be her third marriage, and it would uproot her and her ten-year-old son, Karl-Heinz. A voluptuous and sensuous woman, Martha had led a tangled love life which was the talk of Günzburg. Married to a businessman named Wilhelm Ensmann in 1944, when her son was born, she had testified, when divorcing Ensmann in 1948, that Karl Mengele Jnr was really the boy’s father – and a regional court in Memmingen had upheld Mengele’s paternity. Still ‘ravishingly beautiful’, according to Josef’s son Rolf, she was a hot potato that the other Mengeles were glad to export.

  A combined courtship and family reunion was arranged for a ski holiday in Switzerland in March 1956. Bearing an Argentine passport issued to foreign residents, ‘Helmut Gregor’ flew from Buenos Aires to Geneva, with a two hour stopover at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport in New York. He was met at Geneva Airport by Hans Sedlmeier, the family firm’s faithful envoy to its most notorious member. Sedlmeier drove Mengele to Engelberg, a Swiss ski resort an hour south of Lucerne. Waiting in the Hotel Engel were Martha, her son Karl-Heinz, and Mengele’s own son Rolf, who had been invited along as a playmate for Karl-Heinz and ‘to meet your Uncle Fritz from Argentina, who used to take you walking in the woods when you were little.’ The Mengeles were playing the same ‘uncle’ game that had worked with the Eichmann boys.

  For ten days, Onkel Fritz delighted both twelve-year-old Mengele boys – first cousins who would soon become unknowing stepbrothers – with his sagas of derring-do by gauchos and mestizos on the pampas of Argentina, as well as his own exploits against ‘partisans’ in Europe during the war. According to Posner and Ware, who interviewed the reclusive Rolf Mengele in August 1985: ‘Rolf was impressed by his dashing uncle, who dressed formally for dinner, had such exciting tales to tell, and gave him pocket money, his first allowance ever. Rolf recalls: “Onkel Fritz was a very interesting man. He told us stories about the war and at that time no adults spoke about the war. I liked him – as an uncle.” Rolf also noticed how physically attentive Onkel Fritz was to his Auntie Martha, although he thought at the time that it was merely ordinary family affection.’

  Emboldened by the ease with which he had transited America and entered Switzerland, Onkel Fritz decided to go home to Günzburg with his relatives for nearly a week. There, he continued his courtship of Martha and, when he left, they were informally engaged. Renting a car in Günzburg, he drove to Munich to visit the pharmacist and his wife who had sheltered him right after the war. In Munich, ‘Gregor’ was involved in a minor auto accident, after which the police warned him, as a foreign resident, not to leave Germany until the case was settled. Alarmed, Mengele phoned his family in Günzburg. Karl Snr drove to Munich and, according to Rolf, ‘paid the police some money to forget about the accident.’ The next day, ‘Gregor’ flew to Argentina.

  Looking for a home that would be suitable for Martha and Karl-Heinz, Mengele set his sights on a white stucco house at 970 Virrey Vertiz in the Olivos suburb of Buenos Aires. It bordered on the back of what had been Juan Perón’s residence until 1955, when the President was deposed by the Argentine Navy and shipped into Paraguayan exile. To take out a mortgage, however, meant furnishing stronger proof of identity than the provisional documents that sustained the myth of ‘Helmut Gregor’. With no alarms out, rewards for, or publicity about him, Mengele decided to brazen it out under his real name.

  He went to the West German embassy in Buenos Aires and gave a secretary his correct name, date and place of birth, marriage and divorce dates, addresses in Buenos Aires and Günzburg, and swore that he was Josef Mengele and had been living under the false name of Helmut Gregor for seven years. No further questions were asked. The embassy did check with Bonn, the federal capital of West Germany, but nobody consulted the Allied or West German ‘wanted’ lists; Mengele appeared on several, though his name was just one among many. If any details were verified, they were only the ones he gave.

  On 11 September 1956, the German Embassy i
ssued him a certificate of identity as Josef Mengele. He took it to the Argentine National Court, which issued a judicial certificate which he delivered to the federal police, who gave a new identity card, number 3.940.484, to ‘Josef Mengele, manufacturer’. Armed with this, Mengele returned to his embassy, which issued him West German passport number 3.415.574.

  The following month, Martha Mengele and her son emigrated to Argentina. They moved into the house their host had mortgaged on Virrey Vertiz in the very German suburb of Olivos and, while he and Martha weren’t married until 1958, in a civil ceremony in Uruguay, they led a bourgeois married life from the beginning. In 1957, Dr Mengele moved closer to the medical profession he had long ago left by selling his carpentry workshop and investing some $100,000 in founding, with two Argentine partners, a pharmaceutical firm called Fadro Farm. He was now known as Dr José Mengele.

  Soon after returning from his honeymoon with his brother’s widow in the summer of 1958, Mengele was taken into custody by Buenos Aires police as part of a round-up following the abortion death of a teenage girl. He and a number of other foreign doctors were held on suspicion of practising medicine without licences. While Mengele had no apparent connection with the case, he didn’t relish fingering in jail and worrying whether any of his past medical practices might surface. Besides, if any other country should move for his extradition, Juan Perón’s successors looked less kindly upon their Nazi constituents. A five-hundred-dollar bribe to two detectives turned Mengele loose after a few hours, but the scare was enough that, in September, he gave his bride power of attorney and set out on a sales trip to Paraguay.

  While he had little success peddling Karl Mengele & Sons’ new manure-spreader to Paraguayan farmers, he stayed on at the Astra, a German boarding house in the capital city, Asunción, to explore possibilities of settling permanently in General Stroessner’s fascistic dictatorship. Martha and her son, Karl-Heinz Mengele, visited him often, though she tried in vain to persuade him he was still safe in Buenos Aires.

  He prolonged his ninety-day visa several times and then, in 1959, after renting rooms on the Alban Krug farm in New Bavaria, a German colony of 60,000 near the Argentine border, José Mengele applied for Paraguayan citizenship. Both his residence and his application were arranged by Colonel Rudel. The Nazi air ace introduced him not just to the Krugs, but to Werner Jung, who had been chief of the Paraguayan Nazi Party during the war, and Alejandro von Eckstein, a close adviser to Stroessner. Jung and von Eckstein were Mengele’s two sponsors, swearing (falsely) in court that he had been a continuous resident of Paraguay for five years. Rudel also asked the Minister of Interior to expedite Mengele’s citizenship, which was granted shortly before the end of 1959.

  The Jung family lived in a palatial mansion on Calle General MacArthur in Asunción, and Mengele, who liked to swim in their pool, was always a welcome guest there when he was in the capital. ‘We thought very highly of him,’ Mrs Jung told Mengele biographers Posner and Ware in 1985. ‘He loved classical music, enjoyed reading good German poets, and praised our good and natural way of life. He was very good with the children and helped my second-oldest son pass biology.’

  Her husband bore an astonishing facial resemblance to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s missing deputy – and this coincidence, combined with one of Mengele’s rare attempts to practise medicine, could conceivably have led to Mengele’s capture in 1959. One early spring night at dinner, the host took violently ill. When Mengele tried to, but couldn’t, treat Jung’s stomach seizures, a woman guest went out in search of a doctor and brought back Dr Otto Biss, an Austrian physician practising in Asunción. Jung tried to talk to the doctor in halting Spanish, but Mengele, spotting his “colleague’ as a fellow Mitteleuropean, told Jung: ‘You may speak German.’

  Dr Biss prescribed a treatment for gastritis and left. A few days later, he saw pictures of Martin Bormann and insisted: ‘There was no possible doubt. The man I had seen was older than the man in the photographs, but it was the same man. He was certainly Martin Bormann.’ A few months later, when Mengele went to the top of the wanted list, just behind Eichmann, Dr Biss would swear that the other doctor in attendance was Mengele.

  Since most other experts, including Simon Wiesenthal, eventually were convinced by forensic evidence that a skeleton found near the bunker in which Hitler committed suicide was Martin Bormann’s,45 and inasmuch as it was easy to show that the sick man at Jung’s address was the host himself, the whole report was discredited. But it was a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water, for little credence was given Biss’s correct identification of Mengele.

  Mengele’s face had become familiar to the world thanks to a joint effort by two Austrian citizens: Wiesenthal, then in Linz, and Hermann Langbein, an earnest, solemn Viennese non-Jew who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was imprisoned as a communist46 first in Dachau and then in Auschwitz, where he used his job as a clerk in the chief physician’s office to compile evidence against Mengele and other ‘experimenters’. After the war, as general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee and the Association of Concentration Camp Ex-Prisoners, Langbein, considered the most thorough of all Nazi-hunters, supplied crucial evidence in the trial of Dr Karl Clauberg, chief of sterilization ‘experiments’, and the extradition of Clauberg’s colleague, Dr Horst Schumann, who specialized in X-ray sterilizations, from Ghana, where he was serving dictator Kwame Nkrumah as chief medical officer of the Ministry of Health.

  Langbein and Wiesenthal, three years his senior, had united to pressure German prosecutors to indict Mengele in the German university city of Freiburg, where his ex-wife Irene now lived. There, Langbein had found Mengele’s 1954 divorce papers and an address on the Calle Tacuari in Buenos Aires buried within the public record. On 5 June 1959, a Freiburg court ordered Mengele ‘to be taken into custody . . . on emphatic suspicion of murder and attempted murder.’ It listed only seventeen counts of premeditated murder, but the language was strong enough to force action against him for ‘killing numerous prisoners with phenol, benzene, and/or air injections [and] in the gas chambers; killing a fourteen-year-old girl by splitting her head with his dagger; injecting dyes into the eyes of women and children, which killed them; killing several twins of gypsy parents either with his own hands or by mixing lethal poison into their food, for the purpose of conducting specious medical studies on their bodies during autopsies; and ordering a number of prisoners to be shot because they would not write to their families saying they were being well treated.’

  When Bonn formally asked Argentina for Mengele’s extradition later that year, Argentina rejected it because Mengele no longer lived on the Calle Tacuari. The German Ambassador, an active Nazi and former adviser to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop,47 wasn’t inclined to pursue Mengele’s change of address, so Wiesenthal contacted a friend, who, on 30 December 1959, came up with Mengele’s last known address on Virrey Vertiz. The warrant was filed again in early 1960 and, this time, Argentine authorities insisted they had to decide whether the charges against Mengele were politically motivated; besides, he was no longer at Virrey Vertiz. All this foot-dragging somehow quickened Israeli hopes that snatching Eichmann might also lead to Mengele.

  By then, however, Mengele had returned to Buenos Aires several times to wind up his affairs there – selling his share of Fadro Farms pharmaceuticals to an Argentine. By 30 June 1960, when Argentina finally ordered Mengele’s extradition, he was entrenched in Paraguay, well out of the law’s reach. Nevertheless, he had much to worry about. Barely a month earlier, the Israelis had snatched Eichmann, lain in ambush for Mengele, and proclaimed he was next on their list. According to Wiesenthal in the uncharacteristic English translation of his 1988 memoir: ‘On the day Eichmann was seized, he skedaddled across the Paraguayan border.’ In fact, Israeli agents were shadowing Martha Mengele’s occasional visits to Paraguay and had even pinpointed her husband’s base as Alban Krug’s farm in New Bavaria, though they had yet to find him
there when they were. One of their agents, an Englishman, tried to penetrate the farm by wooing Krug’s daughter – to no avail. ‘It was not our intention at any stage to try to kill Mengele,’ Israeli intelligence chief Isser Harel explained later. ‘That would have defeated the whole purpose of the exercise. We wanted him back in Israel for a public trial.’

  In the fall of 1960, their prime bait, Martha Mengele, slipped away. She and her husband had agreed that living with a fugitive was no life for her and her son, so they separated and, when she and Karl-Heinz, sixteen, flew to Europe for Christmas in Günzburg, they used one-way tickets.

  With West Germany offering a 20,000-Deutschmark ($5000) reward for Mengele, there were enough opportunists around New Bavaria to necessitate another move and a new identity. Besides, even his best friends in Asunción were reading the horror stories from Auschwitz with the kind of disbelief that could turn to aversion or worse if just one per cent of it struck them as true. Even dictator Stroessner began to worry about Mengele. When he asked Rudel about him, the colonel said Mengele was a mere laboratory technician who had done none of the deeds Stroessner was reading in the papers. Stroessner was reassured, but, when Mengele again turned to Rudel for help in relocating, Rudel was more than glad to oblige.

  Riding to Mengele’s rescue, Rudel sent a former Austrian Hitler Youth chief named Wolfgang Gerhard, editor of an anti-Semitic hate newsletter called Reichsbrief, published in German in Brazil. Forever compensating for the misfortune of being born too late to fight at the front for the Third Reich, Gerhard was a man who hung a silver swastika instead of a star of Bethlehem atop his Christmas tree. His Brazilian wife, Ruth, even before she met Mengele, once gave her landlady – in the original 1943 wrappers – two bars of soap made from corpses of Auschwitz inmates. The Gerhards had christened their son Adolf. And Wolfgang Gerhard once said that his dream in life was to ‘put a steel cable to the leg of Simon Wiesenthal and drag his carcass behind my car’ for miles and miles.