Nazi Hunter (48 page)

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 rock, 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

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:

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

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:

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:

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

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 emphatically’ 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.’