Nazi Hunter (44 page)

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 issued 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 communist
⁴⁶
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.

* * *

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: