Nazi Hunter (46 page)

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.

In July 1962, the Stammers and their manager moved to a 111-acre coffee and cattle farm in Sierra Negra, more than a hundred miles closer to São Paulo. Half the capital for the purchase
had been put up by ‘Peter’, who busied himself with woodworking, carpentry, and, with the help of a local mason, an eighteen-foot-high stone
observation tower
from which he could scan the countryside with binoculars, watching the approach of visitors from the nearest town, Lindonia, five miles away. Eichmann had been hanged in Israel that June and,
although the Mengele manhunt was still focused on Paraguay and Argentina, there were six false-alarm ‘sightings’ of him in Brazil in less than a year, plus a recurrent rumour that
Israeli agents had already abducted Mengele and put him aboard a banana boat heading for Haifa. Reward money had quadrupled.

In 1963, Gitta Stammer read an illustrated magazine article about the missing Mengele and saw a photo of ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-three years old. Then I thought this face was
very familiar to me, and his smile with gaps between his teeth.’ When she saw ‘Peter’ that day, she told him: ‘This man looks a lot like you. You have many mysteries, but
please be honest and say whether it’s you.’

He blanched and left the room without saying a word. That night, he was very quiet at dinner – but, after the meal, he told Mr and Mrs Stammer: ‘Well, you’re right. I live here
with you and so you have the right to know that, unfortunately, I am that person.’

Around that time, Mengele noted in his diary: ‘Cold wind whistles around the house and in my heart there is no sunshine either.’ The Stammers drove to São Paulo and pleaded
with Wolfgang Gerhard to take Mengele back and put him somewhere else or they would consider informing the authorities.

Gerhard, whose first reaction had been to tell them they should be proud to have a place in history, now responded: ‘Do you really think it might be better that way? You should be very
careful, for if you do anything against him, you’ll have to take the consequences because he lives here with you. You should think about the future of your children.’

Threatened themselves, the Stammers backed down, but begged him to do something. Gerhard told them to be patient. They would wait another eleven years.

Instead of losing their unwanted guest, who grew more aggressive and abusive each day, the Stammers soon received another guest: a dapper, rotund German named Hans, who arrived bearing money.
Hans was Sedlmeier, sent by the Mengele family to make peace. At least 7000 dollars were changed into Brazilian cruzeiros, though much of the money went to Mengele. Sedlmeier promised he would look
for another place for Mengele, but, having placated the Stammers, he, too, took his time.

Over the years, Gerhard assured them he was negotiating havens for Mengele in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, or another Latin American country. Meanwhile, tension mounted as
Mengele, who rarely ventured far, went nowhere, on the farm or off, without the shrill accompaniment of fifteen stray dogs, most of them vicious. He’d given this pack ‘obedience
training’ to kill on command. One day, Gitta Stammer taunted him with: ‘You’re such a great man, so why do you live in hiding? At least your colleagues had the guts to live openly
and stand trial. Sure, some were hung. Our countrymen in Hungary, too, the non-communists, were killed by the Russians. But they were real men. They didn’t hide.’

Mengele raised his hand, but stopped himself from striking her and left the room.

To make matters worse, his hosts’ two sons were growing up and refusing to take orders from the star boarder. In 1969, when both boys had finished school, the Stammers gave up farming for
a living and bought a four-bedroom house on a two-acre hilltop plot in Caieiras, twenty miles from São Paulo, to enable Geza to work full time as an engineer in the city while their sons
went off to the Brazilian naval academy. Mengele paid for half the new house with funds from the sale of the Sierra Negra property.

When he moved in, the domestic war resumed. Once, his Austrian friend Bossert – a one-time German Army corporal whom Wiesenthal identifies as ‘a former member of the SS’
– took him aside and reminded him quietly that he was merely a guest in the Stammer home.

‘Half of this is mine!’ Mengele retorted. ‘I can do as I please.’

Back in Germany, the Mengele prosecution had been transferred to Frankfurt from his ex-wife Irene’s home city of Freiburg. From 1969 to 1975, a diligent Frankfurt
investigating judge named Horst von Glasenapp questioned hundreds of witnesses, starting with depositions from those who had given evidence in Freiburg, in order to ensure that, should any of them
die before Mengele was brought to justice, their testimony would be in proper legal form to be used against him. According to Wiesenthal, von Glasenapp ‘travelled half the world (Austria,
Italy, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Israel, the US, and Canada) to prepare as complete and solid an accusation sheet against Mengele as possible. In September
1970,
Sedlmeier was again interrogated, this time by von Glasenapp. And this time Sedlmeier had to admit having met Josef Mengele several times. The last meeting, he claimed, had been in 1961 – a
blatant lie.’

Actually, von Glasenapp’s formal questioning of Sedlmeier took place on 9 December 1971. While admitting that he had met Mengele during the doctor’s 1956 visit to Günzburg and
later in South America, Sedlmeier insisted that ‘I visited the accused solely for business reasons. If my memory serves me correctly, the last time I saw the accused was about ten years ago.
I seem to remember it was at the airport in Buenos Aires. I also heard that, around the time Eichmann was apprehended, the accused went to live in Paraguay. Since then, all connections with the
accused have been severed and there has been no further correspondence. I personally am in no position to state where the accused is residing nowadays . . .’

Sedlmeier, of course, knew exactly where Mengele was, stayed in constant touch with him, had recently visited him at his Brazilian hideaway, and helped disinform his hunters by hinting at a
Paraguayan address. At the time, though, while von Glasenapp knew Sedlmeier was lying, he couldn’t prove it.

Here, says Wiesenthal, von Glasenapp ‘made a serious mistake: he forgot to put Sedlmeier’s
⁴⁸
testimony under oath.’ Since
Germany had a five-year statute of limitations on the offence of aiding a felon, Sedlmeier could scarcely be prosecuted for the ‘ten-year-old’ contact with Mengele that he admitted to.
Had he been sworn, however, he would have faced a trial for perjury – or the threat of a trial, which could have elicited new information – as soon as any detail of his 1971 testimony
proved false.

With Sedlmeier admitting that he’d lied to Fritz Bauer seven years earlier, and with von Glasenapp openly sceptical about his latest testimony, Wiesenthal says ‘we took for granted
that the Attorney General would at least have Sedlmeier placed under sporadic investigation. We thought his mail would be checked and his telephone tapped intermittently. After all, Sedlmeier had
been a key figure since 1964.’ And in this assumption, he concedes, ‘the
Documentation Centre committed its second mistake’ – which sounds exactly
like its first: belief in Bauer.

When Judge von Glasenapp went to Vienna to take testimony from Wiesenthal, he was sorely disappointed. For legality’s sake, he arranged for an Austrian judge to repeat his questions at a
hearing convened just for Wiesenthal. The German judge began the charade – which sounded like a variation on the
Tell-your-mother-this, tell-your-father-that
overtures of a domestic
quarrel – by asking the Austrian judge to ask Wiesenthal, who was present, for the names and addresses of persons who might have accurate information about where Mengele was. According to von
Glasenapp:

Von Glasenapp later told American lawyer Posner and his British co-biographer, Ware, that ‘I met Wiesenthal several times, but never got much out of him. I naturally
wanted to know if he really did have something of value. It was difficult to make that judgement from the various newspaper articles I’d read.’

In the early 1970s, a delegation from Asunción’s Jewish community council – representing Paraguay’s 1000 Jews – visited Wiesenthal in Vienna to plead with him not
to do anything against Mengele on Paraguayan soil or they would suffer at the hands of some of their country’s 30,000 ethnic Germans
and
its government. When they showed him letters
they had received warning them not to molest Mengele, this reinforced his certainty that his quarry was in Paraguay.

Having ‘no alternative’ to heeding their appeal and having ‘received no co-operation from Latin American governments’, Wiesenthal says he sought a snatch somewhere
outside South America. Back in 1974, he told me: ‘I missed Mengele by eighteen hours in Torremolinos in 1971, by two days in Milan at Christmas time 1963, and I could have had him in Bermuda
in December
1970, but I was in London when word reached Vienna and then the man I tried to send from New York was in Tokyo, so it took five days before we could get anybody
there and Mengele was gone.’ Later, records would show that Mengele never was in any of those places at any of those times – or, with the exception of Milan, ever.

Benno Weiser Varon was Israel’s first ambassador to Paraguay, serving in Asunción from 1968 to 1972. Like Mengele, Varon had studied medicine. But Varon was forced to flee Vienna
when Hitler annexed Austria three months before he was due to become a doctor. During his four years in Paraguay, Varon saw no symptoms of Mengele’s presence there, though the man was always
on his mind and he followed up every tip that reached him.

‘Sometime in the seventies,’ says Varon, who later settled in the US, ‘Wiesenthal confided to me in Boston that it was not at all easy to keep his outfit in Vienna going. He
said that his lecture fees and the contributions of some 17,000 Dutch Gentiles went only so far.’ Varon came to the conclusion that, while ‘Mengele would be a prize catch for any
Nazi-hunter . . . no one has specialized in him. Simon Wiesenthal makes periodic statements that he is about to catch him, perhaps since Wiesenthal must raise funds for his activities and the name
Mengele is always good for a plug.’ In any event, Varon contended, ‘Simon Wiesenthal was always a Nazi-hunter, but never a Nazi-catcher.’

Wiesenthal admits that ‘we had to content ourselves with publicizing the Mengele case again and again’, a tactic which
The Times
of London – in a scathing 1985 article
entitled ‘What Next for the Mengele Industry?’ – said ‘only sustained [Wiesenthal’s] self-confirmatory myths and gave scant satisfaction to those who were seriously
seeking Mengele.’ But Simon’s severest critics have to acknowledge his sincerity and dedication as well as his astuteness in latching on to Sedlmeier as the key as early as 1964. Even
such Wiesenthal critics as Mengele biographers Posner and Ware, who contend ‘financial constraints and a knack of playing to the gallery . . . ultimately compromised his credibility’,
nevertheless go on to add: