Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  * * *

  Miles and miles and, as it turned out, light-years away from his quarry, Simon Wiesenthal boasted in his 1967 memoirs that ‘I have now been able to retrace Mengele’s movements quite exactly.’

  Stepping off on the wrong foot, Wiesenthal cited the early 1960 death of a forty-eight-year-old Israeli spinster named Nora Eldoc, who ‘had been sterilized by Dr Mengele’ in Auschwitz and found herself face to face with him in the Argentine resort of Bariloche. According to Wiesenthal, ‘the local police report does not say whether he recognized her. Mengele had “treated” thousands of women in Auschwitz. But he did notice the tattooed number on her lower left arm.’ For a few seconds, says Wiesenthal, victim and torturer stared at each other in silence. Then she turned and left the hotel ballroom without a word, but, a few days later, she disappeared. Her battered body was discovered in a mountain crevasse weeks later and police listed her death as a ‘climbing accident’. In telling these details, Wiesenthal wrote: ‘I cannot give the source of my information, but I can vouch for its reliability.’

  We now leave the realm of euphemism that pervaded so many Nazi reports to enter the world of the ‘factoid’, a postwar phrase popularized and exploited by Norman Mailer in his non-fiction novels. A factoid is a legend – possibly untrue, possibly exaggerated – that is repeated and embellished so much that it takes on a life, even a sub-culture, of its own. Wiesenthal’s ‘Nora Eldoc’ is one of those factoids: she recurs as Nora Aldot, alias Nourit Eldad, a possible Israeli secret agent, in Michael Bar-Zohar’s Avengers (1968): as Judith Aldot in Werner Brockdorff’s Flight from Nuremberg (1969); as Mengele’s mistress in the late Ladislas Farago’s Aftermath (1973); and as Nourit Eddad and Norita Eldodt in other works of ‘non-fiction’. Most significantly, she does not re-appear in any form, however, in Wiesenthal’s 1988 memoir.

  In actuality, she was Norit Eldad, born in 1910 in Frankfurt, though, in Wiesenthal’s defence, it was the Argentine hotel register that transformed her into ‘Nora Eldoc’. But she had left Germany in 1933 for Palestine and had never been in a concentration camp, never been tattooed or sterilized, and had never heard of Mengele, who almost certainly was not in Bariloche at the time of her death She was visiting her sister, who had emigrated to Argentina in 1933. On a climbing trip with a group of Jewish Argentines, she made a wrong turn on a poorly marked trail and fell off a precipice.

  A Buenos Aires newspaper had first muddled the matter by headlining her obituary ‘SECRET AGENT, HUNTING NAZI MENGELE, ASSASSINATED IN ARGENTINA’ and quoting a local police inspector:

  The apparent motive now is that she was searching for Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor. Now it is possible that Dr Mengele might have been staying in Bariloche.

  Such was the post-Eichmann climate in Argentina that this led to speculation that her Jewish Argentine companions were an Israeli hit team. On 21 March 1961, the Israeli Embassy felt compelled to issue an official denial that this prissy middle-aged secretary was any kind of Mata Hari sent to seduce the elusive Mengele; on the contrary, the embassy described Norit Eldad as ‘a timid and nervous person. Certainly it is not possible that she was an agent involved in a mission as difficult as finding Mengele.’ Argentine newspapers had refuted the rest of their competitor’s ‘exclusive’ – and all this had been public record for six years before Wiesenthal cited his ‘reliable source’ in print. Voilà, instant factoid!

  In 1962, just as Wiesenthal was preparing to go to Israel for the Eichmann trial, a trusted ex-Nazi tipped him off that Mengele was meeting his ex-wife Martha on the island of Kythnos. Hermann Langbein lined up a Greek scientist who had worked as a prisoner under Mengele in Auschwitz while Wiesenthal, short of time and resources, persuaded a large illustrated German weekly magazine to send a reporter to Kythnos, where, if he found Mengele, he would telephone the scientist to come there from Athens, identify Mengele from a short distance, and call the police. When the reporter arrived forty-eight hours later on one of the infrequent passenger ferries to Kythnos, where Wiesenthal said there were only two large buildings – an inn and a monastery – he went to the inn and was told, according to Wiesenthal, that the only guests, ‘a German and his wife’, had left by yacht twelve hours earlier. From a batch of photos, said Wiesenthal, the innkeeper and a couple of monks who dropped by all identified Mengele. Wiesenthal concluded: ‘We had lost another round.’

  You can’t lose what you’ve never found. In a 1985 interview, the German magazine reporter, Ottmar Katz, remembered that ‘not a single detail was correct’ in Wiesenthal’s information: ‘I spent four or five days on Kythnos. Mengele was certainly not there. There was no monastery. I spent two days with the local judge, who was strongly anti-Nazi. We inspected the register of the only hotel. The only name we thought worth checking we discovered belonged to a Munich schoolteacher. I explained to Wiesenthal that it was all wrong and then, seven years later, I read his book and he said we’d missed Mengele by a few hours.’

  A few months later, when Wiesenthal learned that Martha Mengele had rented a house at Schwimmbadstrasse (Swimming Pool Avenue) 9 near Zürich’s Kloten Airport, while her son, Karl-Heinz, was studying in Montreux, he sent a Swiss friend, posing as the landlord’s household insurance agent, to check the house for repairs. Martha Mengele showed him around and he ascertained that she seemed to be living alone. Still, her location near a noisy airport hinted at convenient visits from afar, so Wiesenthal asked the Swiss authorities to keep an eye on her. Instead, they asked her to leave Switzerland, for, having stayed out of the war, they wanted to stay out of war crimes extraditions too. She moved to Merano, in Italy’s Germanic South Tyrol; in his 1988 memoir, Wiesenthal supplies Martha Mengele’s Merano address.

  Wiesenthal’s third round of shadow-boxing came in March 1964, when, he says, a ‘Committee of Twelve’ wealthy American survivors of Auschwitz tried to kidnap Mengele from the Hotel Tyrol, a bastion of Paraguay’s German colony in Hohenau, near the Argentine border. ‘I know about these men,’ Wiesenthal later told Michael Bar-Zohar when the Israeli author visited Vienna. ‘They came to see me, here in my office. They were after Mengele, and asked me for information where he was hiding.’ Their plan, Wiesenthal told Bar-Zohar, was ‘to take him to a yacht and judge him when out at sea. Six of them landed in Paraguay, while the others waited aboard the yacht.’

  In his first memoir, Wiesenthal said that ‘the Auschwitz trial was to begin in Frankfurt in 1964’ and contended this time that, instead of justice at sea, the would-be abductors’ aim was ‘to seize Mengele alive and bring him to Frankfurt.’ Simon picks up the yarn with:

  It was a hot, dark night. Half a dozen men had trailed ‘Dr Fritz Fischer’ to Suite 26 of the hotel . . . A few minutes before 1 a.m., the men entered the lobby of the Hotel Tyrol, ran up the stairway, and broke open the door of bedroom number 26. It was empty. The hotel-owner informed them that ‘Herr Dr Fischer’ had left in a hurry ten minutes earlier, after getting a telephone call. He was in such a hurry that he hadn’t even bothered to take off his pyjamas. He had put his suit on over them, raced down the stairway, and disappeared into the night.

  Mengele was still odd man out.

  Truth will out, too. Odder still, under the circumstances, are the following facts: Paraguay is landlocked – and it would have been easier to fly Mengele to Tel Aviv on an El Al ‘charter flight’ than bring him to justice at sea, even by yacht. The Auschwitz trial of twenty-one officers, doctors, and guards – in which chief prosecutor Hans Kuegler charged that ‘the highest spheres of the Paraguayan government’ were ‘protecting Mengele’ – had already begun in 1963 and was coming to a close in 1964. And the Hotel Tyrol was a rustic one-storey chalet with no upstairs, no room 26, and no telephone to warn Mengele.

  In July 1964, Wiesenthal notified Dr Fritz Bauer, the German Jewish Eichmann-hunter who was by then Attorney General of West Germany, that Hans Sedlmeier of the Mengele firm in Günzburg was ‘maintaining contact with Josef Mengele.’ Acting on the tip, Bauer ordered
a midnight raid on Sedlmeier’s home and found nothing. Interrogated by the Attorney General himself, Sedlmeier denied all. More than two decades later, it was learned that a friend on the local police force had phoned Sedlmeier to say: ‘We are coming to search your house. Make sure we don’t find anything.’

  Wiesenthal claims it was at this point that the Jewish Documentation Centre (not Simon himself!) made its ‘first mistake’, which he says was ‘our firm conviction that the West German Attorney General had used the information we gave him to have Sedlmeier shadowed by the German police as the most likely link to Mengele.’

  According to Wiesenthal, ‘Sedlmeier was on the lookout for a woman to manage Mengele’s household in South America. From a card index of persons who, over the years, had volunteered their services, I picked a woman and saw to it that Sedlmeier made her acquaintance. He was impressed by her qualifications and, after he’d had her meet Mengele’s brother Alois and wife Martha, Sedlmeier offered to pay her travel expenses to Latin America – he didn’t say where – and a generous salary for looking after his friend: he didn’t say who . . . But all of a sudden the deal was called off by the Mengele family. Alois Mengele was the one who told her. To this day, we don’t know why.’

  Wiesenthal had kept prosecutor Bauer informed of his effort, for ‘we had reason to fear for the woman’s safety. Israeli authorities were also notified in order to reduce her risk.’ When Wiesenthal visited Bauer in Frankfurt, the two men could only guess what had gone wrong: either someone had talked or Sedlmeier and the Mengeles had smelled a mole on their own, or else the position had been filled by someone already in South America.

  Both Wiesenthal and Bauer believed Mengele was still in Paraguay – partly because the last good detective work on the case had been done not by skilled investigators or Nazi-hunters, but by the staff of the West German Embassy in Asunción. In the summer of 1960, a typist from the embassy had dislocated her ankle while vacationing in the south Paraguayan resort of Colonia Independencia. When she limped back to work, she told her boss, Peter Bensch, the chargé d’affaires, that a German doctor named Mengele had treated her, and she wondered why he wasn’t on the embassy’s list of physicians. Bensch recognized the name and made a journey of nearly 300 miles to seek out Mengele. He never found him, even though he did meet Mengele’s host, Alban Krug, who denied knowing him. Anyway, Mengele appeared to have left. Back in Asunción, Bensch reported his clue to Bonn and, receiving no particular encouragement or discouragement from the German Foreign Ministry, went digging into the dictatorship’s public records and unearthed José Mengele’s acquisition of Paraguayan citizenship in 1959.

  Unfortunately, Paraguayan law forbade extradition of its citizens. In 1963, Konrad Adenauer, the eighty-seven-year-old West German Chancellor, had offered Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner, fifty-one, ten million Deutschmarks (then some $2.5 million) in aid if he would let Germany lay its hand on Mengele. Stroessner, knowing by then that the game was no longer on his soil and wanting to seem a man of principle, declined without denying Mengele’s presence, which tended to reaffirm it.

  On 8 February 1964, West German Ambassador Eckhard Briest visited General Stroessner to suggest that, since Mengele had lied in his application that he’d lived in Paraguay for five years, his citizenship could be revoked. Stroessner bristled at this. Pounding his desk with his fist, he told Briest, ‘Once a Paraguayan, always a Paraguayan!’, and warned the ambassador that he could be declared persona non grata if he persisted. As it was, the incident ended Briest’s effectiveness in the embassy, and Bonn recalled and replaced him not long thereafter. Although the German Embassy was well guarded by Paraguayan police, semi-official graffiti soon appeared on its walls: ‘JEWISH EMBASSY! HANDS OFF MENGELE! THIS IS A COMMAND!’ On 23 September 1964, the Paraguayan government issued a statement that Mengele had ‘departed Paraguay four years ago.’

  This was quite accurate, but who would take Stroessner’s word against Wiesenthal’s? Three years later, Wiesenthal concluded the Mengele portion of his memoirs with the ‘certainty’ that his quarry was in Paraguay:

  Mengele now lives as a virtual prisoner in the restricted military zone between Puerto San Vincente on the Asunción-São Paulo highway and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio Lopez on the Paraná River. There he occupies a small white shed in a jungle area cleared by German settlers. Only two roads lead to the secluded house. Both are patrolled by Paraguayan soldiers and police, who have strict orders to stop all cars and shoot all trespassers. And just in case the police should slip up, there are four heavily armed private bodyguards, with radios and walkie-talkies. Mengele pays for them himself.

  In truth, Mengele had been living a totally different life in Brazil for nearly seven years as a man called ‘Peter’.

  Wolfgang Gerhard, the ageing Hitler Youth, had taken Mengele out of Paraguay and into Brazil with him in early 1961, lodged him on his farm at Itapeceria, some forty miles outside São Paulo, and – to see whether the coast was clear – put him to work for a while helping out with routine chores at a textile firm he ran in São Paulo. Mengele, however, did not take to the city where Wiesenthal would soon be hunting concentration camp commandant Franz Stangl.

  In the fall of 1961, Gerhard approached Geza and Gitta Stammer, a Hungarian couple who had fled the Iron Curtain in 1948 and were working an eleven-acre farm on the dry plain of Nova Europa, some 200 miles from São Paulo. Gerhard told the Stammers he knew a ‘Swiss’ named ‘Peter Hochbichler’, a bachelor who liked the country life, had worked as a ‘cattle breeder’, and had also inherited some money he wanted to invest in Brazilian property.

  To the Stammers, this sounded like manna from heaven. They had their eyes out for a larger property with richer soil. And Geza, a civil engineer who made ends meet by going off on surveying jobs, needed a full-time manager to run the farm. A meeting was arranged and the Stammers found the thin and pale, clean and tidy man Gerhard brought with him ‘nothing exceptional’, but Mrs Stammer was impressed by his hands, which ‘showed he was used to working, for they were full of calluses’ (presumably from his days as a farmhand in postwar Bavaria). ‘He proved to be very gifted in the garden and with his hands,’ she said, ‘and all he wanted in return was bachelor quarters, meals, and laundry.’ A few weeks later – bearing two suitcases, clothes, and books – ‘Peter’ moved in with the Stammers to manage their farm.

  Though he organized the coffee harvest efficiently, pruned the fruit trees, and built new sheds, ‘Peter’ was not well liked by the Stammers’ farmhands, who called him ‘Pedro’. Having lived most of his postwar life alone, and not having formed a lasting relationship with Martha and her son during their two years together, Mengele had grown autocratic, opinionated, intolerant – and pretty intolerable to those who had to work under him. The hired men found it peculiar that their new boss went to work wearing a raincoat with his shirt buttoned at the collar and would pull his hat low to cover his face whenever they approached him. He had very little command of Portuguese or his violent temper. ‘He loved giving orders and kept saying we should work more and harder,’ one of the hired hands recalled. ‘The worst of it was that he didn’t seem to understand much about farming or heavy work.’

  What did impress them was when Mengele repaired a calf’s hernia. ‘He reached for some instruments and cut its belly open quite expertly,’ said Francisco de Souza, who held the calf. ‘He corrected the hernia and sewed up the cut. He said he could guarantee the calf would get better – and it did. I noticed he did everything with a high degree of dexterity.’

  Not so when he tried to set up his own mini-Auschwitz to exterminate white ants. ‘He made me mount a hook on a cart,’ one farmhand recalled. ‘On the end of the hook he suspended a 175-pounds weight and with this crazy machine he escorted me around the farm to destroy these huge ant-hills, some of them a yard high. He just stared while I had to pull the weight up and release the rope. Sure, the weight smashed the mounds, but, within a few hours, the
ants were making new homes for themselves. We thought it was a crazy idea that took hours and hours to prepare while the ants just worked faster.’

  His relations with the Stammers were no better. ‘He said we were too soft with our children,’ said Mrs Stammer. ‘He was always telling us to sack this worker or that one and that we were too slack with them. And he would argue with my husband.’ Since, however, ‘Peter’ asked for no pay and would help finance their move to a new farm, they put up with him as long as they could – which proved to be thirteen years.

  Though Mrs Stammer denies it, two recent Mengele biographies strongly suggest she had sexual relations with him. Posner and Ware say point blank that ‘Gitta’s unswerving loyalty to Mengele appears to be the result of a love affair between them.’ The co-authors of Mengele: the Complete Story (1986) quote one farmhand as saying she and he were ‘always together. They walked everywhere together and were always sitting and talking to each other.’ Another hand reported that when the head of the house was free to spend more time away from the farm, the Stammer children ‘once told me Pedro and Gitta locked themselves in the bedroom to be by themselves, making it clear they had a romance.’ In The Last Nazi (1985), Gerald Astor calls it ‘not unreasonable’ that she had an affair with ‘Peter’, only ten years her senior. Mengele’s diaries contain love poems written to the ‘beautiful Gitta’. Interviewed in 1985 by Der Stern, Mr and Mrs Wolfram Bossert, an Austrian couple who befriended Mengele as his relations with the Stammers ruptured, insisted that Gitta and ‘Peter’ were lovers until she ‘reached menopause, could no longer achieve orgasm, and was no longer interested in him as a sexual partner’ – an interpretation of female sexuality that casts its own dubious shadow.