Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  On his brief visit to Brazil, Gerhard also asked Ernesto Glawe, a textile engineer of German ancestry, to look in on his ageing relative, ‘Peter Gerhard’, from time to time. That was why Glawe’s young son, Norberto, and his fiancée, were saying goodbye to Mengele on Sunday, 16 May 1976, when he suddenly lost control of speech and movement as a sharp pain stabbed the right side of his head. Within seconds, he could no longer move his left arm or leg. Norberto Glawe drove him to a hospital, where he was admitted and diagnosed as having suffered a stroke. Asked to pay a deposit, he produced a crisp new US hundred-dollar bill.

  Norberto Glawe took note of this as well as the identity card on which ‘Don Pedro’ purported to be the Wolfgang Gerhard the Glawes knew – and mentioned these details to his father. When Mengele, who regained the use of his limbs next day, was discharged from the hospital two weeks later, young Norberto moved in with him for a fortnight as a sort of male nurse. His father dropped around from time to time. When he found a farm-machinery catalogue from Mengele & Sons lying around, Ernesto Glawe says he ‘put two and two together’, but didn’t take his arithmetic to the police. In a letter to Sedlmeier, Mengele complained about having ‘to pay friends for their silence’.

  ‘In 1977,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘we learned from a reliable source that Mengele’s son, Rolf, employed by an investment company in West Berlin, was about to travel to Brazil. We intended to let two persons shadow him, as we had no doubt that Rolf would somehow establish contact with his father in Latin America. Unfortunately, the Documentation Centre lacked the necessary funds for their operation. . .

  ‘We therefore approached a popular Dutch newspaper, suggesting they pay the expenses in exchange for exclusive rights to the story of our manhunt. But the Dutch newspaper considered the sum involved – 8000 dollars! – too risky. So we had to call the operation off.’

  It is hard to imagine Simon Wiesenthal at that stage of his career –with Eichmann, Stangl, and more than a thousand other Nazi scalps on his belt and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination on the table – being unable to raise 8000 dollars, but this was shortly before the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Centre came into being in Los Angeles and went into high fund-raising gear. And perhaps Wiesenthal had cried wolf too often where the wolf was named Mengele. Besides, Rolf Mengele was a lawyer in Freiburg, not a banker in Berlin, 400 miles away; routine fact-checking would have given any editor pause before investing further in such an adventure in pinpointing. As with his 1964 Sedlmeier tip, however, Simon’s information about Rolf’s first visit to his father in twenty-one years was right on target.

  Briefed by Sedlmeier and bearing greetings and 5000 dollars in cash from his cousin and stepbrother Karl-Heinz, and a passport he had stolen from a friend named Wilfried Busse, Mengele’s thirty-three-year-old son Rolf stepped off a Varig charter flight from Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro on Monday, 10 October 1977. After an overnight stay in Rio’s most luxurious hotel, the Othon Palace, Rolf took a domestic flight to São Paulo and then three taxis (to make sure he wasn’t followed) to Wolfram Bossert’s house at Rua Missuri 7. Bossert drove him in an ancient Volkswagen bus to his father’s bungalow at Estrada de Alvaranga 555 on an unpaved street in the suburb called El Dorado.

  ‘The man who stood before me,’ Rolf recalled years later, ‘was a broken man, a haunted creature.’ After a distant embrace and a few preliminaries, Rolf asked his father to tell him about Auschwitz and answer the accusations against him. The interrogation went on for days and nights. With lawyerly detachment, Rolf first listened to his father’s case, asking as few questions as possible pending cross-examination. Leftist in politics, embittered by the deception that ‘Onkel Fritz’ was his father, which had kept him in the dark until he was sixteen in 1960, and resentful that his father had always favoured Karl-Heinz over him, Rolf Mengele held no brief for the man he was meeting for the first time in his adult life.

  For a fortnight, Dr Mengele assured his son that he had neither invented Auschwitz nor condoned it, but, forced to work there or lose his life, had made the same choices that confront a surgeon in a field hospital: if a dozen dying casualties are brought in, he operates first on the handful that have a chance of survival, dooming the rest to certain death. ‘When people arrived at the railhead half dead and infected with disease, what was I supposed to do?’ he asked rhetorically, answering that his job was only to classify those ‘able to work’ and ‘unable to work’ – and that he was as generous in his assessments as he could afford to be. He took personal credit for rescuing twins for research.

  After his father had concluded his case by saying he felt no guilt, no repentance, Rolf asked him why he hadn’t turned himself in.

  ‘There are no judges. There are only avengers,’ Mengele replied, paying grudging tribute to Wiesenthal, Langbein, and others who, denied their day in court, had nonetheless trumpeted his crimes and reduced him to a recluse in the custody of his own comeuppance.

  Later, Rolf Mengele told biographers Posner and Ware: ‘I realized that this man, my father, was just too rigid. Despite all his knowledge and intellect, he just did not want to see the basis and rules for the simplest humanity in Auschwitz. He didn’t understand that his presence alone had made him an accessory within the deepest meaning of inhumanity. There was no point in going on.’

  So the son became a tourist in his father’s world. They visited his previous addresses in Sierra Negra and Caieiras and went to Bertioga Beach, where he liked to swim. To his neighbours and cleaning woman, Elsa Gulpian, he introduced Rolf as his ‘nephew’. To the Bosserts and Stammers, there was no pretence, though the Stammers begged them not to mention the name Mengele in the presence of their future daughter-in-law.

  When father and son parted at São Paulo airport, Mengele’s last words to Rolf were: ‘We shall try to meet again, very soon, all of us.’ But they never did.

  In 1978, Wolfgang Gerhard died in Austria under what believers in the ‘bionic’ Mengele describe as ‘distinctly mysterious circumstances’: standing beside his auto, he fell on his head and, while unconscious, died of a heart attack. True, he had outlived his usefulness to the Mengeles, but there is no evidence to suggest anything more sinister than the thought that people who lead peculiar lives often die peculiar deaths.

  Biologically, Mengele was deteriorating rapidly. His 1976 stroke had left his left hand twisted. In 1978, he suffered an attack of shingles. To his prostate and spinal conditions were added diagnoses of high blood pressure and an inner ear infection, all of which combined to cause stumbling and near-collapses on the streets of El Dorado. Perhaps out of loneliness and a need to be taken care of, he fell in love with his small, sharp-featured, bleached-blonde, thirtyish housemaid, Elsa Gulpian; bought her a gold bracelet, a ring, and a white woollen shawl, and started taking her out for dinner, movies, concerts, and long walks. He even danced at her sister’s wedding. When he asked her to move in with him, she said he would have to marry her first. This he refused, without telling her why. He was still married to Martha and, besides, it was too risky for him to present his falsified identity card at the marriage registry. Elsa left his employ and his life in October 1978 when she became engaged to a dark-skinned Brazilian. ‘He is not the man for you,’ Mengele warned her in parting. ‘You deserve a better, more cultured person.’

  South of the equator, the seasons are the reverse of ours. In the midsummer heat of early February 1979, Mengele accepted an invitation to visit the Bosserts at their beach house in Bertioga, some forty miles north of São Paulo. Just before making the two-hour bus trip, he told Ines Mehlich, the maid who replaced Elsa: ‘I’m going to the beach because my life is coming to an end.’ By then, said Ines, her employer always ‘seemed distracted and spoke with difficulty. Once, he nearly fell into the well in the back yard.’

  Mengele arrived at Bertioga Beach on Sunday, 5 February 1979, but kept to himself until Tuesday the 7th, when he went for an afternoon walk along the shore with his host and the Bossert children. Perched on a large r
ock, he looked out to sea and told Wolfram Bossert: ‘Over there is my country. I’d like to spend the last days of my life in Günzburg writing the history of my town.’ Then, around 4.30 p.m., he went in for a dip.

  At Bertioga Beach, the waves are gentle and the Atlantic sand-shelf slopes slowly into the sea. A man Mengele’s size could walk out more than half a mile and not be in over his head. Mengele was an accomplished swimmer and there was nothing to worry about. But he had barely reached waist level when Bossert’s son, Andreas, on the beach with his father, cried out: ‘Onkel! Come out! The current’s too strong for you.’ Mengele was thrashing in the sea.

  Wolfram Bossert ran and swam to his guest’s side as fast as he could. But Mengele had suffered another stroke and was paralyzed. He must have tumbled underwater and now was bobbing lifelessly on the surface. ‘I had to swim with one arm and pull him with the other, and the sea was dragging us both out,’ Bossert recalled in 1985. Upon fighting his way to shore with his dead weight, Bossert was hospitalized for exhaustion.

  No hospital, however, could help Josef Mengele any longer. A doctor on the shore massaged his heart and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. For a second or two, there was a flicker of life – and then eternity. The ‘Angel of Auschwitz’ had gone to hell.

  25

  Post-mortems

  In 1978, eighteen years after Dr Josef Mengele left Paraguay, Wiesenthal had written in his annual report: ‘Mengele is living in Paraguay, where he is protected by the local junta, which is dominated by ethnic Germans. Mengele is Number One on our wanted list. Although his observation in Paraguay and the monitoring of his occasional trips abroad has cost us a lot of money, we have continued our activities against this arch-criminal through 1977 and intend to do so in the future.’ In 1979, Wiesenthal wrote to Kurt Waldheim, then Secretary General of the United Nations, imploring his fellow Austrian to bring pressure on Paraguay:

  I appeal to you, in this International Year of the Child, to use all your influence so that the murder of hundreds of thousands of children by a doctor of medicine, who is enjoying his liberty within a UN member country, will not go unpunished.

  Waldheim responded by contacting the Paraguayan authorities, who revoked Mengele’s citizenship – for what it was worth to a dead man.

  In 1980, barely a year after Mengele drowned, Wiesenthal proclaimed: ‘I cannot say where he is, but he has been seen five times recently. I am much closer to catching him than I was a year ago. His capture could come in the next few weeks.’

  The following January, he described Mengele in his annual report

  . . . a criminal permanently on the run. For a short time, we thought we had located Mengele in the Colonia Dignidad, an isolated German settlement in Chile. But then it seemed we had been misled by people who wanted to give the Colonia Dignidad a bad name . . .

  Later, we managed to localize Mengele in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where he was together with a doctor friend of his. Unfortunately, he was gone again before we could act. The last serious information places Mengele in Rio Negro, Uruguay, in October 1980. As we are told, his state of health is not good.

  Applied to a man who had been dead for twenty-three months, this was the understatement of the year. But Wiesenthal concluded on an optimistic note:

  Now that we know somewhat more about Mengele’s friends and his circle of acquaintances, we hope for success at last in 1981.

  Mengele’s capture, Wiesenthal insisted, ‘is only a matter of time.’

  In early 1982, the man who couldn’t raise 8000 dollars five years earlier posted a $100,000 reward for information leading to Mengele’s arrest and said that for such a sum ‘even his bodyguards would sell him out.’ He added that he was ‘checking information that Mengele recently obtained a new passport from a Central American country. There is also a very trustworthy report that Mengele, suffering from stomach cancer, has sent his X-ray pictures to a well-known specialist who is studying them now.’ That April, Wiesenthal proclaimed he was ‘much closer than ever to capturing him’; that May and again in August he was still ‘very close’.

  A year later, Wiesenthal, who writes the way he talks, reported:

  According to latest informations – which we publish so that Mengele’s friends will know that we know – Mengele was repeatedly seen in Philadelphia in Paraguay. He was there for several short visits to the Mennonite villages located in that region.

  His acquaintance with the Mennonites dates back to his long stay in Paraguay. He sometimes gave them medical help and felt safe among them. His last visit took place between December 27 to 30, 1982. We also gave the public prosecutor in Frankfurt the names of several West German doctors of whom we have reason to think that they are still in contact with Mengele.

  The Mennonites – a Protestant sect which, along with the Amish, comprises most of the people we call ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ – held Wiesenthal’s attention into 1985, when he reported

  ever-increasing indications that Josef Mengele is on very good terms with the inhabitants of the Mennonite settlements in Paraguay . . . particularly in respect to a group of German Mennonites from Russia who emigrated to Paraguay after the 1918 Revolution, as well as with regard to a group of Mennonites who left Germany and the Netherlands for Paraguay in 1947.

  In 1984, Wiesenthal warned Neal Sher, head of the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, on a visit to Vienna, that ‘the key to Mengele lies with Sedlmeier’, but he says he added naïvely: ‘He is surely being watched by the authorities in Frankfurt.’ As Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, pointed out later: ‘For twenty years, Simon had been telling this to the German prosecutors and urging them to maybe do at least a telephone tap on Sedlmeier, but nothing was ever done. In those twenty years, he kept getting tips, some of which he thought were serious, so he put out word that he was sure Mengele was hiding in Paraguay. Look, Wiesenthal is an individual. He gets his information from what other people supply: SS men, Displaced Persons, victims, survivors, refugees, informers, people on the run. And, in this case, almost all of them were wrong. But he’s not an agency. He’s not an intelligence organization with unlimited resources and hundreds of agents to look for one man. He’s not the CIA or Mossad [Israeli Intelligence]. Anyway, even the Mossad thought Mengele was in Paraguay. So did the Klarsfelds.’

  It was early in 1985 when Serge Klarsfeld – a Romanian-born French lawyer, Nazi-hunter and victim whose father died in Auschwitz – broke the logjam by having a friend search Rolf Mengele’s apartment. This turned up the passport he’d stolen from his friend Wilfried Busse. Stamped into it was a 1977 Brazilian visa, confirming Wiesenthal’s lead, but Klarsfeld and Wiesenthal never compared notes; Klarsfeld contends that Wiesenthal saw him as a rival instead of an ally. ‘He’s an egomaniac,’ says Klarsfeld. Wiesenthal, in turn, has naught but frosty contempt for Klarsfeld’s tactics, of which he considers stooping to burglary just the tip of an iceberg.

  Klarsfeld’s German-born wife, Beate (who, unlike her husband, is not Jewish), stepped up the pressure by visiting Asunción to prod Paraguay into revealing Mengele’s whereabouts. When the government insisted he hadn’t been there for twenty or twenty-five, years, she unfurled a banner reading ‘PRESIDENT STROESSNER, YOU LIE WHEN YOU SAY YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE SS MENGELE IS’ on the steps of the Supreme Court which granted ‘the devil’s doctor’ Paraguayan citizenship a quarter of a century earlier. Police chased her and a small band of supporters back to her hotel, where she was told to pack her bags and leave because she had ‘offended the Paraguayan people in the person of the president.’ Asked on television to ‘tell us where he is’, she replied: ‘If you think logically, there is nowhere else he could be.’ And she added: ‘It’s up to the government to prove he isn’t here.’

  Dictator Stroessner had scheduled a state visit to West Germany that July. When Chancellor Helmut Kohl, an admirer of Wiesenthal, wrote to Simon in March for help in assembling information to ‘raise emphatic
ally’ the issue of Mengele’s extradition, Wiesenthal gave Kohl the late doctor’s ‘latest’ Paraguayan whereabouts and said the Stroessner visit offered the best chance of delivering Mengele to justice. After the Klarsfelds made it clear that the general would be hounded by the media about Mengele, Stroessner cancelled his trip.

  Earlier, around the time when Serge Klarsfeld was having Rolf Mengele burgled, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre had invoked the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain a 26 April 1947 Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) letter from Benjamin J. M. Gorby, stationed in Regensburg, Bavaria, to the commanding officer of the 430th CIC detachment in Vienna, asking him to verify a newspaper report that Dr Mengele ‘has been arrested in Vienna’ and, if so, to please question him ‘with regard to the fate of a group of approximately twenty Jewish children who were alleged to have been removed by him from the Auschwitz camp in November 1944 and taken to an unknown place. The fact of the removal of the Jewish children from Auschwitz by Dr Mengele was confirmed to this office by the father of one of the children . . . Other parents of the children among the group are still alive and most eager to have news from or about their children.’