WHEN I ARRIVED in Asunción, on February 9, 1984, the Mengele dossier, which I had brought with me, was several inches thick. We became interested in his case quite early, as it was unique for the degree of inhumanity shown in his so-called medical experiments on Jews and Romanies.
In 1973, our friend Lisa agreed to go to Paraguay to find out what she could about him. We knew that he was rich, that he had left Germany for Argentina a few years after the war ended, and that, just before Eichmann’s abduction in 1960, he had been warned by the German embassy about the attempts to extradite him from Argentina, where he was living under his own name. Mengele had fled to Paraguay, where the dictator Alfredo Stroessner granted him Paraguayan nationality in 1959.
Lisa returned from Paraguay with these conclusions:
[…] The most interesting contact I made was a businessman, the owner of several nightclubs and two ranches. He was part of President Stroessner’s entourage and accompanied him during his trip to Germany this summer. I spent a few days with him, but our meeting was too close to the end of my stay to be of any practical use. I am sure this man knows where Mengele is, but he is not going to divulge the information to anyone who asks. The key thing, if we want to get results, is to have plenty of time to earn these people’s trust and to wait for the right opportunity to bring up the subject of Mengele. I also stayed in a hostel run by German colonists. The manager, a young woman from the Hohenau colony—which is in the south, near the Argentine border—told me that Mengele had lived in that colony after the war, but that he had left years before, probably for Brazil. I had confirmation of this. A Belgian, the owner of the luxury hotel El Tirol del Paraguay, told me that Mengele had lived in Hohenau under his real name, but that he also had Argentine papers. He used to come to the hotel quite often before Eichmann’s abduction, but after that he disappeared. It is possible he is still in the region: it’s easy to hide here, the man told me. (I found out later that he was a Nazi, sentenced to death in Belgium.) After discussing the matter with many other people from German colonies during my month in Paraguay, it seems possible to me that Mengele is hiding in the region of Alto Paraná, near the Argentine border, or even in Brazil.
Lisa had guessed right.
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OUR OTHER CAMPAIGNS prevented us from going any further with this dossier, but we never forgot about it. In 1983, we met Hans-Eberhard Klein, the Frankfurt prosecutor in charge of the Mengele case. We believed that the Mengele family, which owned a large agricultural machinery business in Günzburg, was supporting him financially. Mengele’s family situation was complex: he had divorced his first wife, Irène (with whom he had a son, Rolf, in 1944), and married his brother Karl Thaddeus’s widow, Martha, in Uruguay in 1958. The son of Karl Thaddeus and Martha, Karl-Heinz Mengele (also born in 1944), ran the firm with his cousin Dieter. After her wedding to Josef Mengele, Martha and her son lived in Argentina until 1961, then left for Europe, settling in Zurich.
A search of the firm’s headquarters and the family members’ homes would probably have uncovered Josef Mengele’s whereabouts, but the prosecutor was afraid of making a blunder, and anyway, he could not follow Rolf, the son, on his travels beyond the borders of Germany. We did it for him, thanks to Lisa, who had just moved to Berlin.
Rolf was a lawyer, and he, too, lived in Berlin. Every morning, when the mail was delivered, Lisa would take his letters, open them, photocopy anything interesting—credit-card statements in particular—and put them back in his mailbox, before sending us the copies. One day, Lisa was bold enough to enter Rolf’s apartment. She had seen Rolf leave, then his wife, Almut, and their children, so she knew the coast was clear, but not for how long. A quick search allowed her to find a passport in a drawer: it belonged to a young man, Wilfried Busse, born on July 26, 1947, five feet eleven (the same height and more or less the same age as Rolf), and inside it there was a customs stamp for Brazil: “arrival August 11, 1977—departure August 23, 1977.” Lisa put the passport back in its drawer. This was valuable information. Rolf had gone to South America in 1977 to meet his father, using the identity of a far-right activist, Busse. Either he had gone to Brazil, or he had gone to Paraguay or another neighboring country via Brazil in order to cover his tracks. We communicated this information to the prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, but the prosecutor remained indifferent.
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I HOPED THAT my protests in Paraguay would persuade the prosecutor to search the Mengeles’ homes in Germany.
In Asunción, I met the minister of the interior, the minister of justice, and the president of the Supreme Court. All three assured me that they did not know Mengele’s whereabouts and that he had probably left the country after losing his Paraguayan nationality on August 8, 1979. This was possible, but I felt sure that Stroessner and his secret services knew where Mengele was hiding, whether that was in Paraguay or elsewhere.
To maintain pressure on the government, I convinced my contacts in the liberal opposition party to follow me to the courthouse in Asunción. There, at 10:30 a.m. on February 17, 1984, I protested, along with about thirty brave activists who were clearly not used to protesting in front of the police. I held up a sign written in Spanish that translates as: GENERAL STROESSNER, YOU PROTECTED MENGELE; BRING HIM TO JUSTICE. The police watched me closely, as well as anyone who went near me.
I left Paraguay on February 19, and the next day I gave a press conference in New York for the American Jewish Committee. It was standing room only. The United States was involved in this case, as it turned out that Mengele had been arrested in 1947 in the American occupation zone in Germany and then freed. An official investigation was opened. I took advantage of this to return to Paraguay on November 22, 1984, this time in the company of the Brooklyn prosecutor Elizabeth Holtzman; the chairman of the Bergen-Belsen survivors, Menachem Rosensaft; and a Catholic priest, René Valero, from Brooklyn. From our headquarters in the Hotel Casino Ita Enramada, we met daily with Paraguayan politicians and judges whom I had already met in February. This was the necessary groundwork for any progress to be made in Paraguay. Stroessner had protected Mengele for twenty years, so it would take concerted pressure to make him change his stance.
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IN ISRAEL THE next year, the twins on whom Mengele had experimented told their stories to an international jury. Mengele had often sent these children’s parents to the gas chambers while keeping the children themselves for his nightmarish medical experiments.
All over the world, pressure was mounting on the German courts. I went to Asunción again on May 17, 1985, armed this time with a wanted notice and a substantial reward for anyone who could provide information. The wanted notice was published in two Paraguayan newspapers, and another one was published in Brazil. I traveled to Buenos Aires, where I received a warm welcome from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared victims of the junta, who had not forgotten my protests in Argentina eight years before, when the repression was at its worst.
Back in Asunción, El Diario published articles every day accusing me of leading a campaign against Paraguay. On May 24, I led a small protest, described as “peaceful” by the police, who nevertheless ordered the protesters to leave the courthouse and disperse. I remained alone with my poster, written in Spanish, which translated as: STROESSNER, YOU LIE WHEN YOU SAY YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE MENGELE IS—DON’T GO TO GERMANY WITHOUT HIM. This was an attempt to prevent the dictator’s official visit to Germany, set for July 3.
I was subject to further harassments prior to my departure, including being expelled from my hotel because the owner considered my behavior “offensive and disrespectful.” By the time I returned to Europe, however, my main objectives had been met: (1) Stroessner had been forced to postpone his visit to Germany indefinitely (and he would never set foot there again). (2) The search that was finally carried out by the German police on May 31, 1985, in Günzburg led to the discovery of the truth about Mengele: he had died on February 7, 1979, while swimming off the coast of Brazil.
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I RETURNED TO Argentina on December 21, 1987, to campaign for the extradition of Josef Schwammberger, who ran the Przemysl Ghetto in Poland. In 1982, Serge had published the memoir of a survivor of this ghetto, Markus Wolfshaut. When Schwammberger was spotted in Buenos Aires and his extradition demanded by West Germany, we put together a dossier based on the eyewitness accounts of Wolfshaut and Henri Gourarier. These two men became plaintiffs in Stuttgart, on behalf of their murdered parents.
Extradition was granted in 1988 and, on May 12, 1992, Schwammberger was sentenced to life imprisonment.