Nazi Hunter (43 page)

In spite of their bi-monthly trysts on the Sinnsee, however, Irene and Josef Mengele’s marriage was deteriorating beyond redemption. Insanely jealous of the men she saw in Autenreid and
Günzburg between visits to him, he spent most of their time together berating her for her infidelity.

In mid-1948, after a dozen SS doctors, including a couple of his Auschwitz colleagues, had been hanged for offences less heinous (qualitatively and quantitatively) than his, Mengele disappeared
from the Fischer farm and returned to Günzburg, where friends and relatives hid him in homes, warehouses, and even at a convent school called the English Institute which, coincidentally, was
later attended by Petra Kelly, the half-American Army brat who grew up to be the first Green Party member of Germany’s Parliament.

With Karls Snr and Jnr denazified, and Josef’s other brother Alois home after four years in a prisoner of war camp in Yugoslavia, the Karl Mengele & Sons machinery company was thriving
by making wheelbarrows for the rebuilding of Germany.

In Günzburg, the only person who didn’t make Mengele feel welcome was his own wife. When he asked Irene to follow him to South America with their son Rolf soon after he’d send
word he’d arrived, she declined. She had already met Alfons Hackenjos, who would become her second husband when she divorced Mengele in 1954.

Günzburg, however, was not a retreat, but a rest stop on Mengele’s route to South America. As ‘Fritz Hollmann’, he crossed from Germany into Austria
by train on Easter Sunday, 17 April 1949, and made his way to an inn at Steinach, at the foot of the Brenner Pass. In the early hours of the next morning, with a full moon illuminating the
edelweiss, a shepherd – financed by his family through SS contacts in Günzburg – guided him across the Brenner into Italy in barely an hour. From there, he took two trains to
Vipiteno, where he registered at the Inn of the Golden Cross. He was there a month.

Whether his well-organized network of helpers were part of
ODESSA
is still being argued by Mengele biographers Gerald Astor in
The ‘Last’ Nazi
(1985)
and New York attorney Gerald L. Posner and British television producer John Ware in their
Mengele: the Complete Story
(1986). But even Posner and Ware, who dismiss
ODESSA
as ‘mythology’, have to concede that there was ‘plenty of cloak-and-dagger’.

At the Golden Cross, Mengele met an Italian code-named ‘Nino’, who asked for a passport photo and then provided him with a German identity card as ‘Helmut Gregor’. His
next visitor, code-named ‘Erwin’, was an old schoolfriend, Hans Sedlmeier, who had become sales manager of the Mengele company in Günzburg. Sedlmeier, who would be the
family’s go-between with its blackest sheep for thirty years, brought the doctor greetings from his father, dollars for the days ahead, and a small suitcase with scientific specimens,
including two glass slides with a blood sample between them, plus his precious notes from Auschwitz.

As ‘Helmut Gregor’, whose listed occupation of ‘technician’ covered a multitude of sins, Mengele moved on to Bolzano, the capital of the German speaking part of the South
Tyrol, which was ceded by Austria to Italy after the First World War. At home among hosts who had hoped Hitler would annex Bozen (as they still called Bolzano) into the Third Reich,
‘Gregor’ was briefed by a man named ‘Kurt’ on the last phase of his escape from Europe. ‘You will sail in July from Genoa to Argentina’, he told
‘Gregor’.

Going to Genoa for his emigration documents proved the most perilous part of ‘Gregor’s’ mission. He had no trouble obtaining an International Red Cross passport from the Swiss
consulate in Genoa, or passing the physical examination required by the Argentine
consulate; ‘Kurt’ supplied him with a fake vaccination certificate saying he had
been inoculated within the past fortnight. When he went for an Italian visa, however, the official whom ‘Kurt’ kept on a retainer had gone on vacation. His substitutes not only spotted
‘Gregor’s’ documents, particularly the vaccination certificate, as phony, but refused a 20,000-lire (thirty-dollar) bribe and threw him in jail to await investigation of how
he’d entered the country.

For three weeks, ‘Gregor’ languished in an Italian jail with cellmates he characterized as ‘disgusting rural rejects’, ‘communist rabble’, and ‘the
sewage of the big towns’. These included a dwarf street musician and a morphine-addicted doctor whose withdrawal symptoms Mengele diagnosed as due to ‘constitutional inferiority’.
Then, just as swiftly as he’d landed in jail, ‘Gregor’ was released. ‘Kurt’s’ contact had come back from vacation. Suddenly, the police who had been ignoring and
insulting ‘Gregor’ became very obsequious, and one of them even wondered aloud whether he was a Jew because so much influence had been brought to bear on his behalf. By way of amends,
‘Kurt’s’ corrupted Italian official used his own connections to upgrade ‘Gregor’ from tourist accommodation to second class on the
North King
for no extra
charge. He sailed in mid-July 1949.
⁴³

In Argentina, Mengele enjoyed easier going than Eichmann from the beginning. Upon arrival as ‘Helmut Gregor’, he continued to disguise his medical past by taking menial work as a
carpenter in Vicente Lopez, the same suburb where Eichmann later lived, because the job came with a room. It also came with a roommate: an engineer whose family boarded next door. When the
engineer’s daughter took sick, he asked ‘Gregor’ to treat her – having deduced his roommate’s real profession from the black bag in which he stored his Auschwitz
specimens and research notes. Mengele obliged by quarantining the child in the storehouse and prescribing cold compresses, camomile tea, and a sulfa drug.

Having been found out that easily, Mengele gave up manual labour after a few weeks and moved to the Spanish-colonial home of a Nazi sympathizer in a more elegant suburb called Florida. He
bought a dog and made the acquaintance of not just such fellow fugitives as Eichmann and his interviewer Willem Sassen,
⁴⁴
the Dutch SS man turned journalist, but legitimate figures like Jewish bridge partners (who accepted him as just another refugee from the war they’d fled) and Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel
(1916–82), Hitler’s most decorated air ace, the
Luftwaffe’s
‘Red Baron’ of World War II.

Credited with 2530 missions and 532 tank kills as well as sinking a battleship and a cruiser, Rudel escaped from Soviet imprisonment the first time he was shot down and lost a leg the second
time. After the amputation in 1944, he was entrusted by Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, with Operation Land of Fire: the transport (mostly by night flying) of tons of gold, huge bundles of
securities and shares, and crates of art to Argentina.

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.