The North King crept across the South Atlantic toward Buenos Aires at a steady eight knots, taking more than four weeks for the journey. When the ship finally docked on August 26, 1949, it was springtime in the Argentine capital. But for Josef Mengele the promise of better days ahead was short-lived. From the moment “Helmut Gregor” stepped ashore, things began to go wrong.
Mengele was expecting an acquaintance to greet him at dock-side, a doctor he had met once in 1939 and to whom he referred in his diary as “Rolf Nuckert.” But the man was nowhere to be seen. As Mengele went through customs, there was another hitch. An inquisitive officer wanted to inspect one of Mengele’s suitcases, the one containing his research notes and specimens. The customs agent asked Mengele what was in the suitcase. Mengele matter-of-factly told him “biological notes.” There was an awkward moment as the port doctor was called in to examine the documents. Not understanding a word of German, the doctor stared at the documents, shrugged his shoulders, and waved Mengele through.1
Friendless and without a place to stay, Mengele decided to take a taxi to the city center to find a place to sleep. Then he realized he had no Argentine pesos, as he had been unable to change his currency at the port. Cursing to himself, he turned to two Italians he had befriended on the voyage. They took him to a run-down hotel called the Palermo, “third class,” as he noted, where he shared a room with his two companions and used a toilet and washbasin down the hallway.
Armed with the address of an engineer in the textile business to whom Mengele’s diary also gives a fictitious name, “Schott,” he went in search of work. On the way to the engineer’s office, Mengele passed the Casa Rosado, the presidential palace of Argentina’s new dictator, Juan Perón. Admiring the smartly dressed soldiers clasping their swords as they guarded the palace gates, Mengele reflected that tradition, “especially military tradition, is still one of the most stabilizing influences in politics” and that it was only the Germans who were “doing their best to destroy tradition in their offering of collective guilt.” Unhappily for Mengele, when he eventually arrived at the office he discovered that “Schott” could not give him a managerial job. He did offer him one on the factory floor, however, as a wool comber. As an inducement, “Schott” told Mengele that he would be working alongside the grandson of a notable Argentine statesman. Mengele was not impressed on either count and decided to look elsewhere.2
The experience may have had a sobering effect, even on Mengele’s overdeveloped estimate of his own worth. As a farmhand in southern Bavaria he had already tumbled a long way from the omnipotent post he had held at Auschwitz. But at least he was never far from Günzburg and his powerful family. Now in his downfall he plumbed new depths, alone, with a shared pensione room for a home, shuffling around the city in search of a menial job. He finally settled for one as a carpenter because it came with a room in the Vicente Lopez district of Buenos Aires. The room had no windows and still he had no privacy, having to share it with an engineer.
His roommate, noticing that Mengele’s bags included some medical instruments such as hypodermics, deduced that he was a doctor. At first Mengele denied this, but he relented after the engineer’s daughter became quite ill and he pleaded with Mengele to stop lying about his medical past and treat the child. Mengele isolated her in the storehouse and treated her with cold compresses to reduce the fever, prescribing a diet of chamomile tea and sulfonamide tablets. Mengele also swore the engineer to secrecy regarding his true profession.
Mengele’s concern about his medical past becoming public knowledge was just one of the strains that weighed upon him during his early months in Buenos Aires. The trauma of fugitive life in a strange city 6000 miles from home must have been severe. Since his arrival in South America, he had begun to keep a daily diary, reflecting in his writings the many crises he faced. But for some unexplained reason his diary stops abruptly in mid-sentence at this point. In a 1975 letter to his son, Rolf, Mengele informed the family that he wrote of his time in Argentina, but the family claims not to know the whereabouts of this part of his diary. The family may have deliberately destroyed it in order to protect the reputations of Karl Sr. and Alois, who, contrary to the family’s indignant denials, employed Mengele as a salesman for much of this time. The diary does not resume for another ten years, until May 1960, the month that Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina. Significantly, perhaps, it was also at that point that Mengele ceased to work for the Günzburg firm.
Nevertheless, much can be gleaned from the many letters Mengele wrote home to his family. In his early letters, Mengele, although bothered by his fugitive existence, expressed surprise at the ease with which he was settling into Buenos Aires life.* By selecting Argentina as his South American country of exile, Mengele had unwittingly chosen a nation so advanced that the culture shock was greatly reduced. By the end of the 1940s Argentina had become the technological leader of South America, boasting more than half the continent’s telephones, televisions, and railway lines. It had enormous natural resources as well as the healthiest and most literate population on the continent. And whatever Argentina was in 1949, Buenos Aires was a microcosm. It was certainly the most culturally advanced and sophisticated city in South America. There were eighteen major daily newspapers, three of them in German. The arts were extensively represented: the Colon theater, which Mengele frequented, was modeled on the elaborate Paris Opera and presented some of the world’s finest classical musicians and operatic performers. Mengele proved to be an avid theater-goer. To his delight, he found the city had forty-seven functioning theaters, more than either London or New York. Academically it was flourishing too, with six universities turning out more lawyers and doctors than all the other South American countries combined.
Buenos Aires reminded Mengele of Paris—the sculpted plazas, the iron-gray roofs, the diagonal layout of streets intersecting at sharp angles, the impeccably dressed children, the high ceilings over French windows, and the innumerable outdoor cafés in Art Nouveau style. Mengele also discovered a parochial and elitist attitude amongst Argentineans that was reminiscent of that held by the most fervent German National Socialists. The “primitives” of Paraguay and Peru were held in contempt. Argentineans often said they were “traveling to South America” when visiting Brazil or Chile. Mengele found the Argentine attitude of superiority comforting, certainly not alien.*
But despite its rapid progress, in 1949 Argentina was also a country stricken with serious problems. Just beyond the Parisian-style facades could be seen the villas miserias, the shantytowns, crammed with half a million people enduring the most squalid and degrading conditions. The rift between rich and poor was vast. A cattle aristocracy controlled the nation. These Argentine lords of the land held positions comparable with the aristocracy in the feudalistic Austro-Hungarian empire—an oligarchy of some 200 families closely interlocked by matrimonial ties, established over several generations of social primacy and aristocratic tradition. Economic conditions were deteriorating. The budget deficit was enormous, unemployment substantial, government salaries in arrears, and tax collections haphazardly enforced. The black market was rampant; for fugitives like Mengele, the scope for bribes was unlimited.
The religious climate also was compatible for Mengele. Argentineans were not only passionately parochial, they were religiously conservative, bordering on institutionalized anti-Semitism. The official state religion, Roman Catholicism, was largely represented by an inflexible and intolerant church hierarchy. The Church’s influence was such that it was able to sponsor a constitutional amendment limiting the presidency of the republic to Roman Catholics, and its indirect political influence prevented Jews from attaining cabinet-level positions until 1951.
There were other major advantages to Argentina as a sanctuary. Before the war a large and powerful German community had firmly established itself. Some schools in the more fashionable suburbs of Buenos Aires actually taught in German. In all but name these neighborhoods were reminiscent of Germany, and many of their residents held prominent civic and business positions. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, two of the city’s German newspapers adopted a strong pro-Nazi slant. By the time the German Army had blasted its way into Poland, most Germans in Argentina supported Hitler. Nazi sentiment ran so high, in fact, that the Argentine government ordered an investigation into its growth among German Argentineans to determine whether it posed a serious threat. On November 28, 1941, the Investigating Commission on Anti-Argentine Activities concluded that thousands of German immigrants were “controlled by the German Reich” and that many of them received financial help from Nazi Germany in order “to foment a Third Reich in Argentina.” The commission noted the new Reich’s racial policies toward Jews and said that “anti-Semitism is a fundamental principle of the new immigrants.”3
The commission provided voluminous evidence to support its allegations: bank transfers from Nazi accounts in Germany and Switzerland to German front organizations and businesses in Argentina; organizational charts which showed the Nazi hierarchy and levels of authority in Argentina and the connection to Europe; dozens of Third Reich pamphlets and periodicals espousing that Argentina be made a southern-hemisphere Nazi state.
By the time the commission issued its report, however, the Argentine government was firmly pro-Axis. Nazi counterintelligence, the Abwehr, had established an active network of agents throughout the country. The proliferation of Allied embassies and business interests made technically neutral Argentina one of the most attractive listening posts outside Europe. During its peak operational period, from 1942 to 1944, the Abwehr employed more than 1500 agents and informers in Argentina. Most of these agents returned to normal lives after the war, but they provided a nucleus that allowed Nazi fugitives to move freely about the country. Strong and reliable contacts had been forged with the Argentine police and intelligence service. They were contacts that were to prove indispensable to men like Mengele.
Behind this administrative labyrinth of Nazi sympathies was Argentina’s new president, Juan Domingo Perón. He seized power on June 4, 1943, in a military coup, having decided that “Argentina needed saving.” Perón had become infatuated with fascism while serving as military attaché to Italy. Mussolini’s histrionics and his concept of the Fascist corporate state held a fascination for Perón. Once in power, he instituted radical reforms of his own and did more for the working class than had any of his predecessors. Perón thus became a hero to the descamisados, the “shirtless ones.” While European Fascists were symbolized by black and brown shirts, Perón, not to be outdone, said Argentina “will be represented by the shirtless ones.”4
Alarmed by his rise to power and his popularity, rival Argentine leaders had Perón arrested in October 1945. After a short exile on the island of Plata he was released, thanks to the leadership skills of a young blonde radio announcer, Eva Duarte. Despite the best efforts of U.S. Ambassador Spruille Braden, who published a state department “blue book” documenting Perón’s wartime pro-Axis activities and his close personal business ties to leading Nazis, he won the popular election easily in June 1946 and was restored to power.
Before his brief exile, Perón had set aside 10,000 blank Argentine passports and identity cards for use by ranking Nazi fugitives. He also dispatched a personal agent, Carlos Pineyro, to Copenhagen as a member of the Argentine legation to help channel Nazis into escape routes. Pineyro was not a great success. On December 6, 1945, the Danes expelled him, claiming that he was using his diplomatic status to “smuggle Nazis out of Denmark to South America.”5
Although Perón continued to believe that a reconstructed Germany would return to Nazism within a decade to fulfill Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich, his reasons for helping escaping Nazis was not just ideological. There was much money to be made as well. Perón was strongly suspected of having benefited from the booty that the Nazi hierarchy had smuggled out of Europe as a postwar nest egg in the event of defeat. From August 1942 through 1944, crates with markings like “Auschwitz” and “Treblinka” were sent directly to the Reichsbank in Berlin. The bank’s senior clerk, Albert Thoms, said:
The incoming quantities of gold teeth grew by leaps and bounds, as did other valuables. Once we received twelve kilos of pearls in a single shipment. I’ve never seen such a mass of sparkling baubles in all my life.6
Reichsbank records show that more than 3500 ounces of platinum, 550,000 ounces of gold, and 4638 carats of diamonds, as well as hundreds of works of art, were then packed into special pouches, along with millions of gold marks, pounds sterling, dollars, and Swiss francs. The treasure was shipped by six German U-boats in an operation code-named Aktion Feuerland, “Operation Land of Fire.”7 It was handled on arrival in Argentina by four German “trustees”: Ludwig Freude, a well-known German Argentine banker with close Nazi ties; Ricardo Staudt, a prominent Argentine businessman listed as the number-two Nazi in the state department’s “blue book” (he was also a lieutenant in the Argentine naval reserve and the German ambassador without portfolio); Dr. Heinrich Dorge, a former aide to Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazis’ financial wizard, who arrived in Argentina in the 1930s as a representative of German banking interests and later became a consultant to the Argentine central bank; and Ricardo von Leute, an officer of the Banco Aleman Transatlantico.
These four German representatives turned the incoming booty into currency and gold and deposited it in vaults in the Banco Germanico, and the Banco Tourquist. All deposits were made in the name of Perón’s then mistress and future wife, Eva Duarte.8 After Perón married Eva on October 21, 1945, they consolidated their hold over the Nazi hoard and eliminated any possible interference from the four German trustees. First, Freude was “investigated” on a variety of charges including espionage and fraud. Then, as suddenly as it began, the investigation ended. On September 6, 1946, it was announced that the “investigation of Ludwig Freude was terminated by presidential decree.” This was Perón’s warning to the four Germans that they were in his country and subject to his whims. Over the course of the next seven years they all died violently. Heinrich Dorge’s body was found in a Buenos Aires street in 1949; Ricardo von Leute was murdered in the city in December 1950; then Ricardo Staudt died in a hit-and-run accident; finally Ludwig Freude was found slumped over his breakfast table in 1952. He had drunk poisoned coffee.
This then was the country where Josef Mengele arrived in September 1949; a hotbed of Nazi intrigue ruled by a dictator who had lined his pockets with death-camp booty. It was not a country that was going to inquire too deeply into the background of any German bearing a Red Cross passport and claiming to be a war refugee. Nor was its immigration service likely to take an interest in the address in Buenos Aires that the new immigrant gave upon disembarkation. Had they done so, they would have found a spacious colonial-style house at Calle Arenales 2460 in the posh suburb of Florida, the house of a man named Gerard Malbranc, who had been listed by the Investigating Commission on Anti-Argentine Activities as a suspected Nazi sympathizer. Mengele moved in there after spending several grim weeks in the seedy one-room lodging he shared with the engineer in Vicente Lopez.*
At the Malbrancs’, Mengele was known as a model tenant, giving no hint of the tantrums and authoritarian behavior he was to inflict on other hosts in years to come. Visitors to the house included survivors of the German battleship Graf Spee, scuttled in the River Plate after being crippled by three British warships in the first months of the war. Before long Mengele joined a circle of prominent Argentineans and Nazis who had held important jobs in the Third Reich. All in their different ways gave help to Mengele over the next decade and encouraged him not to lose heart in his darker moments of despair.
One of the first of these contacts was a former Abwehr officer, Willem Sassen, whose entry to Argentina had been smoothed by the remnants of the Nazi spy network that had so efficiently operated there during the war. Sassen was born in Holland, but he became a member of the SS. His counterintelligence work involved him with the Abwehr’s disinformation unit, Skorpion. Since arriving in South America in 1948, Sassen’s activities had included acting as a spokesman for Adolf Eichmann. He later gave public-relations advice to unsavory South American dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner.
Interviewed by Britain’s Granada Television in 1978, when Mengele was still alive, the chain-smoking Sassen spoke up for his friend, whom he said he first met in 1949. He described Mengele as a “brilliant man from an intellectual point of view, a good philosopher, historian, and a very good medical man.” Sassen went on:
So if you take his case and see the horrible stories they are talking about, selecting eyes and I don’t know what all, there are no means, we have no means at our disposal, to prove to the contrary. If you take the fact that this man, whom I really knew closely I can say, and who talked to me about the experiments he had done during the war, experiments for example with volunteers, crippled people and others from the armed forces of Germany, in order to know how a man reacts under circumstances of duress, such as cold or heat or water—experiments which are today continued by the Americans [and] British commandoes as well—so those experiments were, of course, done on the bodies of those volunteers. Now there is another question: that it seems that those experiments were done with prisoners as well, but of course there is no proof of it.9
In 1952 Sassen introduced Mengele to Adolf Eichmann, who was living in Buenos Aires under the alias “Ricardo Klement.” Stripped of his SS colonel’s uniform, Eichmann cut a pathetic figure as he shuffled around Buenos Aires in shabby civilian clothes. Unlike Mengele, Eichmann was being actively hunted, his role as the logistical organizer of the Final Solution having been mentioned in the Nuremberg trials numerous times. The two men met from time to time at the ABC city center café, but they never became close friends. Mengele did not like the downtrodden aura of fear surrounding Eichmann, whom he regarded as a broken man. Moreover Eichmann was virtually penniless, whereas Mengele was getting support from the family in Giinzburg, as Sassen explained:
I mean, they are two completely different kinds of people, Eichmann and Mengele. Moreover Mengele does dispose, could dispose of, his own means, which Eichmann never had. He [Eichmann] was a tragic figure because in reality, that [the Final Solution] was not his business. He would have liked to have been a common soldier on the front. That was his dream.10
Soon after his arrival Mengele also met the man he later called his “dear, dear friend,” who “gave me heart when I despaired.” Of all Mengele’s many mentors during this period of his fugitive life, none was more valued than Frederico Haase, a distinguished architect who lived in Buenos Aires. Haase knew everyone who might be important to Mengele. His wife was the daughter of the man who became Paraguay’s finance minister when President Stroessner seized power in 1954. She and her husband provided an invaluable link to the influential Paraguayans who smoothed Mengele’s path to citizenship there in 1959. Haase also introduced Mengele to another vital contact, Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, Hitler’s most decorated Luftwaffe ace whose extensive political and commercial network of friends would help Mengele in many important ways.11
During the war Rudel sank a cruiser and a battleship, and he was shot down and captured by the Russians. He escaped and was shot down again, this time losing a leg. Altogether he was credited with 2530 operations and 532 tank kills. His feats were so extraordinary that Hitler created a special award just for him: The Knight’s Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. Rudel’s name was associated with the escapes of many wanted Nazis from Europe, organized by a group informally called Kameradenwerk. Far from the clandestine role that some Nazi hunters have ascribed to men like Rudel, he was in fact a shameless publicist and like Mengele had a giant ego. Several glossy books featuring hundreds of photographs of his daring wartime exploits have been published, and he was especially anxious to be photographed in a variety of macho pursuits: high diving, hard tennis games, snow- and water-skiing. Rudel’s boundless energy despite the handicap of an artificial leg was all part of keeping alive the Reich’s lost spirit of German heroism, courage, and discipline.
When Mengele first met Rudel, he was in self-imposed exile in Argentina on the payroll of the Perón government as an advisor to the National Institute of Aeronautics in Córdoba.12 Rudel was also collaborating with Sassen by giving advice at the Argentine end of Kameradenwerk to newly arrived fugitives on such issues as where to obtain forged papers. Although Rudel was an unrepentant Nazi, attending neo-Nazi rallies and visiting SS shrines right up to his death in 1982, his close relationship with dictators Juan Perón and Alfredo Stroessner, and later Augusto Pinochet, made him attractive to several major German firms, including Siemens, as a roving ambassador. It was on one of Rudel’s frequent business trips to Paraguay in the early 1950s that Mengele made the first of many trips there to explore sales prospects for his father’s firm in Günzburg.
The date of this first visit to Paraguay was “around 1951, according to three separate reports,” recorded one CIA memorandum. “He worked for some time as a salesman [for a] West German farm machinery firm. . . . During the time that Mengele was in Paraguay he never tried to hide [his] identity or use a false name even during trips to Argentina and Brazil.”13 Cross-checked with Mengele’s surviving friends who remember this period, the report seems to be one of the few accurate pieces of information that the CIA managed to find on him. To this day, however, Mengele’s family denies any suggestion of financial support from the Günzburg firm. Dieter Mengele, Josef’s nephew—who now jointly runs the company with Mengele’s stepson, Karl Heinz—was quizzed by John Martin of ABC News as late as March 1985:
Martin: One of the most frequently cited rumors is that your grandfather [Karl Sr.] and the company must, for all these years, have been supporting Josef Mengele. It must be the source of his income. Is that true?
Dieter Mengele: That’s absolutely not true. The company . . . my grandfather bought the company in 1911. And then after the Second World War he put his two sons, Alois and Karl, into the company. And when these three died, Karl Heinz and I took over the company. And there’s no truth at all that Josef Mengele got money or has any shares of the company. That’s absolutely not true.
Martin: Do you have any idea how he has supported himself all these years?
Dieter Mengele: I have no idea. . . . I have no idea. I know that in Argentina, he has a little factory where he makes bolts. But that’s the only thing I know about how he survives.14
Dieter’s recollection is at odds with the facts. One of the first people Mengele met on his early business trips to Paraguay was a fellow Fascist, Werner Jung. Jung was the chief of a German youth group that was effectively the local Nazi party during the war.* He had emigrated to Paraguay in 1936 as an executive of a German company, Ferretaria Alemania, which acted as agent for several German companies and sold light machinery and tools. Although it was Frederico Haase who introduced the Jungs to Mengele, Jung’s wife, Margaret, recalled: “At the time that Dr. Mengele met my husband he was representing his Giinzburg company and was an acquaintance of Oberst [Colonel] Rudel.”
It was Rudel 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 southeast. Karl Sr. seems to have earmarked Josef to help the family firm’s South American sales drive after successfully exporting a large consignment of farm machinery for wood cutting and milling in the early 1950s.15 After Alois took over the business in 1954, when Karl Sr.’s health began to decline, Mengele products were sold through an Argentine company called Caffetti. Over the next few years Josef Mengele traveled to southeastern Paraguay and to farms deep in Chaco, the vast northwest region of the country, a flat wilderness of scrub thorn trees, dwarf shrubs, huge cacti, and scattered hardwoods.16 Werner Jung said, “He really started to push the family business from 1954 on. I remember he was especially trying to sell a device to distribute farm manure, and carts to haul dirt and equipment.”
It was during a trip to Paraguay in 1954 that Mengele met another key contact, Alejandro von Eckstein. He was then a captain in the Paraguayan Army, and together with Jung, he sponsored Mengele’s bid for Paraguayan citizenship in 1959. Rudel was on a flying visit to Paraguay, having returned to Germany for an active role in neo-Nazi politics as a member of the Deutsche Reichspartei, when they had their first encounter, as von Eckstein described:
Dr. Mengele was a friend of Rudel and Jung, and Rudel and Jung were friends of mine. And we just happened to be presented to one another. And it was from that time on that we would meet, on a sort of regular basis. He came here through Rudel. Rudel met him in Argentina and really was doing well in business here, so he told Mengele. That’s why Mengele came here, to get in business.17
Alfredo Stroessner had just taken over Paraguay, ruling with the absolute power derived from Article 52 of the 1940 constitution.* Article 52 allowed him to declare a state of emergency and suspend habeas corpus. (This situation exists to the present day, Stroessner having declared himself President for Life.) Von Eckstein and the forty-four-year-old dictator were close friends, both being of German descent and having fought side by side in the 1930s in the Chaco war against the Bolivians. Both Stroessner and von Eckstein were decorated war heroes, as the president still likes to remind visitors when he appears at ceremonial occasions resplendent in gold braid, half his chest covered in ribbons and medals.
According to von Eckstein, it was on one of Mengele’s visits shortly after they met that Mengele was introduced to President Stroessner at a function with several others present. “The president didn’t know who he was and all they did was shake hands,” said von Eckstein. “But I remember Rudel telling Mengele that Paraguay under Stroessner was as fine a friend to expatriate Germans as Argentina under Perón.”18
Jung and von Eckstein both found Mengele reluctant to talk about the war, even with his newfound Nazi friends. Jung said:
We knew he was a doctor because he introduced himself as one. I didn’t find it odd that he was a doctor who was involved in commercial business. We didn’t talk about the war. Maybe if the Germans had won, there would have been a discussion as there always seems to be with the British and Americans, such as the inevitable question, “What did you do during the war?”
But for Germans it is best left unsaid unless the other person brings it up. Mengele never brought it up. Everyone knew that those Germans who had come to South America had started a new life and there was nothing else that we needed to know. They were there because they didn’t want to deal with the past.19
Mengele became a popular figure on his many visits to the Jungs. Their grand house on Calle General MacArthur in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción was a center for social activity. “We thought very highly of him,” said Mrs. Jung. “Like Oberst Rudel he was a nondrinker for health reasons. 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-eldest son to pass his biology exam.”20
Back in Argentina by early 1953, Mengele had moved into a city center apartment on the second floor at 431 Tacuari Street, after leaving his lodging with the Malbrancs.* By this time, Mengele had invested some family funds in a small carpentry business at the corner of Avenida Constituyente and Avenida San Martín, in the Florida district of Buenos Aires. Elsa Haverich, a secretary at the pharmaceutical company Fadro Farm, in which Mengele later became a principal owner, recalls his carpentry workshop:
Approximately in 1953 I met him as Doctor Gregor, that was in the Wander Laboratory [a pharmaceutical company in Buenos Aires]. He used to come every afternoon to visit Dr. Timmermann [a German medical friend who later became one of Mengele’s two partners in the Fadro Farm business], and we talked, well, about nothing important, you know. And at that time he had a carpentry or a toy factory. I don’t remember really if it was a furniture carpentry or a toy factory, but that is what he was doing at that moment. The factory had some winches and there some round things that could have been toys for children; they were made of wood and looked like little trains.21
Haverich remembers Dr. Gregor as “very kind, he was very nice. He always used to come in very happy and he was always making some jokes. He was calm, very calm.”
Profits from Mengele’s small workshop allowed him to buy a Borgward car, “Isabella” model, in 1954. His application for a license was granted after two friends, his former landlord, Gerard Malbranc, and a recent acquaintance, José Stroher, wrote that Mengele was a fine, upstanding member of the community in response to a police question as to the “moral condition of the applicant.” Stroher wrote in similar glowing terms a year later when Mengele needed a passport. Today Stroher becomes excitable when asked about the basis for his judgment on the Auschwitz doctor’s morality. “It’s all lies,” he shouts, “I don’t know anything.”22
Meanwhile, far away from Mengele’s bachelor existence, his estranged wife, Irene, was preparing to marry another man, Alfons Hackenjos, who owned a shoe-store business in Freiburg. She had met Hackenjos in 1948, shortly after he was released by the Americans after being captured while serving with Rommel in the Afrika Corps. At the time Mengele was still hiding in Germany on the Fischer farm. Karl Sr. informed his son, by letter, that Irene wanted a divorce, and Mengele did not stand in her way. He signed and notarized a power of attorney in Buenos Aires so that a local attorney in Günzburg could represent him and process the divorce by proxy. On March 25, 1954, their petition was approved by a court in Düsseldorf. Mengele was not especially heartbroken, nor was the Mengele family sorry to lose Irene. They had watched with disapproval as she had grown distant from Josef during the four years he was hiding on the farm in Mangolding. Irene’s parting shot to the family was to tell them proudly that she did not want a penny from them.23
That winter, in 1954, Mengele moved again, this time to a medium-size Spanish-style house at 1875 Calle Sarmiento in the fashionable and predominantly German suburb of Olivos. There he rented half the house and was remembered by the owner’s granddaughter as a model tenant. For a fugitive who had had such an impoverished start, life had by now become tolerably pleasant. Mengele had acquired a loyal clique of friends who shared his view of the world: embittered at losing the war, angered at Germany’s capitulation to the Allies in agreeing to hold “war crimes” trials, fundamentally racist toward his indigenous South American hosts—“mentally low-level chattering,” he once described their conversation. And there were regular visitors from home. His father once visited him, his old school friend Hans Sedlmeier, Alois’s right-hand man, was often in town, and Alois himself made an occasional visit, once with his wife, Ruth. Mengele had also become an increasingly successful entrepreneur. His workshop now employed half a dozen employees, having expanded into machine parts for the textile business. While the workshop ran itself, Mengele made additional monies from commissions earned on sales of the Karl Mengele & Sons products from Günzburg.24 As his fortunes increased he became a familiar figure at the leading German restaurants in the Argentine capital.
At about this time, Mengele struck up an extraordinary relationship with a German Jewish refugee, who has asked us not to mention his name, fearing the relationship would be misunderstood. The man is in his seventies now and ran a prosperous textile business in Buenos Aires. He arrived there before the war, escaping Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. In the early 1950s he met a German girl who had been a wartime nurse. Like so many German youngsters, she had been a member of the Hitler Youth Movement. The businessman nonetheless was greatly attracted to the girl. She had settled in Buenos Aires with her parents, who happened to know Mengele.
On one of the businessman’s visits to the girl’s house, he found Mengele there, and the girl introduced them to each other. Mengele gave his name as “José Gregori.” Neither the girl nor the businessman had any idea of his true identity. The two men soon found they were competing for the girl’s charms, a contest that “Gregori” eventually won. However, the girl was not the only interest that “Gregori” shared with the Jewish businessman: “Gregori” wanted to go into partnership with him. They had several discussions about the possibility of a joint venture, but nothing came of it. During the course of this unlikely friendship, Mengele discovered that his prospective partner was Jewish, but he never once uttered an anti-Semitic remark. This is perhaps not as significant as it sounds. There is plenty of evidence from Auschwitz of Mengele’s cynical exploitation of people whose skills he knew would further his career. And in the Jewish businessman he recognized someone with greater entrepreneurial skills than his own. “Gregori seemed to be quite a wealthy man,” said the businessman, “and I remember wondering where he got his money. Later the girl told me that he had told her father he was getting help from his father.”25
Karl Sr. had been helping in other ways as well. He wanted to see Josef married again. The girl he had in mind was Martha Mengele, widow of his youngest son, Karl, who had died when he was only thirty-seven years old, in December 1949. Martha was a handsome woman, “actually ravishingly beautiful,” as Rolf described his aunt. She had fallen in love with Karl Jr. while still married to a businessman named William Ensmann. In 1944, a son was born, Karl Heinz, whose paternity was disputed in the local courts after Martha divorced Ensmann in 1948. After considering all the evidence in intimate detail, the regional court in Memmingen ruled that the boy was in fact Karl Jr.’s son.26
According to Rolf, Karl Sr. arranged a meeting between Martha and Josef in the Swiss Alps, having deliberately sabotaged an affair that she was having with another Günzburg man. Rolf, then age eleven, was to be brought along as well to meet his long-lost “Uncle Fritz,” with whom he had walked through the Bavarian forests many years before. Behind Karl Sr.’s matchmaking lay a calculated plan to keep control of the Günzburg firm totally in the hands of the Mengele family. Karl feared that if Martha remarried someone outside the family, her voting rights, inherited from Karl Jr., could be influenced by that outsider. By marrying Josef, all key decisions would be made securely within the family. But there was another practical reason for the arranged marriage. Under German law, company assets in the amount of Josef’s inheritance could be seized if an arrest warrant for Josef was issued. Karl Sr. therefore persuaded Josef to renounce his inheritance by secret legal agreement, thereby averting the possibility of the company being financially paralyzed. But it was just a cosmetic move. In practice, once Josef married Martha he would benefit from her share in the company, and although he had lost his voting power, she would be directly influenced by him.27
The travel plans for Mengele’s reunion with Martha were laid months in advance. In April 1955, he applied to the Argentine federal police for a special passport for non-Argentine citizens. But first he had to satisfy the police that he had been a resident of “good conduct.” Again his friend José Stroher obliged with a testimonial as to his integrity. On September 1, the police granted Mengele a “good conduct” pass, which allowed him to apply to the courts for the passport. Unfortunately for Mengele, his arrangements were interrupted by a successful coup against President Juan Perón.
Although there had been three previous attempts to oust Perón, he appeared to be solidly in power. But on September 16, 1955, Admiral Isaac Rojas led the entire Argentine Navy into rebellion. Rojas sailed the venerable U.S. cruiser Phoenix, later renamed the General Belgrano* into Buenos Aires harbor and pointed its eight-inch guns in the direction of the presidential palace. Perón conceded: “Dammit, this fool Rojas is the sort of man who is likely to shoot.” He sought refuge in the Paraguayan embassy and later boarded a Paraguayan gunboat which took him into exile. Walking up the gangplank, Perón ingloriously slipped into the shallow water and almost drowned before he was pulled out by Paraguayan sailors.
The coup brought the government to a standstill and frightened some Nazis who had relied on Perón for their continuing safety. But they were soon assured that the new regime, composed of the military chiefs Rojas and Lonardi, intended to maintain a business-as-usual attitude toward Nazis. When Lonardi and Rojas were deposed in a second coup that November by another Prussian-style military reactionary, General Arambary, the Nazi community was even more pacified.
In the midst of all this governmental reshuffling, the Argentine Court of First Instance finally issued Mengele a 120-day passport. In March 1956, Mengele flew to Switzerland with a two-hour stopover in New York. There to meet him at the Geneva airport was the ever-faithful Hans Sedlmeier, who drove him to Engelberg, where he checked in to the Hotel Engel, the best in town. At the hotel waiting to greet him were Martha, her son, Karl Heinz, and Mengele’s own son, Rolf, then twelve years old.
Over the next ten days “Uncle Fritz,” as he was introduced to the two Mengele boys, regaled them with adventure stories about South American gauchos and about his supposed experiences fighting partisans in the Second World War. Rolf was impressed with 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:
Uncle 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.28
Rolf also noticed how physically attentive “Uncle Fritz” was to his Auntie Martha, although he thought at the time that it was merely ordinary family affection. At the end of the holiday, Mengele traveled to Günzburg to tie up the legal arrangements that his father had prepared. Mengele visited his family for nearly a week, his first open visit to Günzburg since he had been on leave from Auschwitz in November 1944. Following his stay there, he drove in a rental car to Munich to visit his friends the pharmacist and his wife, who had assisted Mengele after the war. Mengele had barely arrived in Munich when he was involved in a minor auto accident. Although he was not injured, the accident attracted the attention of the local police. They questioned him regarding his South American identification papers and told him not to leave Munich until he checked with them. Nervous about his real identity being discovered, Mengele telephoned his family in Günzburg and requested their assistance. Karl Sr. drove to Munich and settled the matter with the police. According to Rolf, “My grandfather paid the police some money to forget about the accident.” Mengele left Europe the following day.29
Heartened by the prospect of more settled times with Martha, Mengele returned to Buenos Aires to unscramble the covert side of his fugitive life. In a moment of insecurity he had undergone one attempt at plastic surgery in Buenos Aires, haunted by a remark made by his first wife, Irene, predicting that his prominent forehead would give him away. Mengele himself stopped the surgery halfway through; he had had a local anesthetic and could see what was going on. “When he saw what the surgeon was doing, he realized he didn’t know his subject,” said Wolfram Bossert, who sheltered Mengele in Brazil during the last phase of his life. “He had scars at the top of his head that showed where the surgery was done. He permanently wore a hat because of what his wife had told him.”30
But he need not have resorted to such drastic measures because by 1956 there was still no sign of a warrant being issued for his arrest. He felt confident enough to publicly relaunch himself as Josef Mengele. Besides, everyday life had become too complicated for a man living under a false name. Mengele had plans to take out a mortgage on a house so that he and Martha could enjoy a proper family life. He had his eye on a white stucco property at 970 Virrey Vertiz, a secluded cul-de-sac in the Olivos suburb that bordered on the back of what had been President Perón’s palatial home. But the bank wanted proof of his identity. Also, his father had offered to set him up in partnership with a pharmaceutical company, for which, again, detailed evidence of his identity would be required.
Proving his real identity required a great deal of paperwork and the authority of the West German embassy, whom the Argentine police required to certify that “Helmut Gregor”—the name he was registered under—and Josef Mengele were one and the same man. Mengele had to explain to the embassy, therefore, that he had lived under an alias for the past seven years. He gave them his correct name, date of birth, date of his divorce from Irene, and addresses in Buenos Aires and Günzburg. On September 11, 1956, after checking with Bonn, the embassy issued Mengele a certificate stating that his real name was Josef Mengele and he was from Günzburg.31 “It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in the embassy to say, ‘Wait a minute, here we’ve got a man who clearly has a past to hide, let’s do some checking,’ ” said the Paris-based Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. “No one in that embassy seems to have checked with lists of war criminals. If they had, they would have found Mengele’s name on several of them.”32
Armed with the embassy identity certificate and his birth certificate, Mengele went before the national court in Buenos Aires to swear that he and “Gregor” were the same person. The court then issued a judicial certificate which he presented to the Argentine federal police. They noted that all the information he had given on his arrival to Argentina in September 1949 was false, but any questions the police might have had about this irregularity must have been perfunctory. In November they issued Mengele a new identity card, number 3.940.484. It listed his name as Josef Mengele, indicated that he was divorced and a manufacturer by profession, and gave his correct Buenos Aires address. Having got his new identity card courtesy of the West German embassy, Mengele returned to ask them for a passport, a mere formality now that the identity problem had been resolved. He even provided his own picture, passport-size, in which he sported a moustache, and he filled in the following personal details himself: “Height—1.74 meters; build—normal; form of face—oval; color of eyes—greenish brown.” The noninquisitive embassy duly issued him a West German passport, number 3.415.574.
One explanation for the embassy’s oversight might lie in the fact that the West German ambassador at the time, Werner Junkers, himself had been an active member of the Nazi party and a senior aide to Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (who was hanged at Nuremberg in October 1946 for war crimes). From 1944 to 1945, Junkers was one of Ribbentrop’s special envoys to Yugoslavia, where the Ustachi forces even outdid the SS in barbarity when dealing with Tito’s partisans. Quizzed about the lapse at the embassy, Junkers said: “Ask the man who ran the consular section. I didn’t know who Mengele was.”33
The man in charge of the consular section in 1956 was Werner Schattman. As of July 1985, he was the newly appointed West German ambassador to Prague. Schattmann insisted, “I didn’t know anything about Mengele.”34
In October 1956, Martha and her son moved to Argentina to join Mengele. For the next four years Mengele was effectively Karl Heinz’s father, a tie which was to form the basis of a firmer relationship than he had with his own son, Rolf, whom he had seen only twice since he was a baby. Mengele was secure in his life with Martha. He took out a mortgage on his new house in Virrey Vertiz and registered the deed and the mortgage in the Günzburg company name, “Karl Mengele & Sons.” Further evidence of just how secure he felt was shown by the fact that he allowed Martha to be listed in the telephone book under his name, Mengele.35
Meanwhile, using his brand-new passport, Mengele made a business trip to Santiago, Chile, in February 1957. According to Alejandro von Eckstein, Hans Rudel accompanied Mengele on the trip and they met Walter Rauff, the SS colonel who developed the mobile gas vans that killed 97,000 Jews, partisans, and Russians. (Rauff distinguished himself later in the war with the nickname “the Murderer of Milan,” earned for his torture and execution of Italian partisans.) Rauff was living in Ecuador in 1957, but he was making one of his exploratory trips to Chile, which later became his permanent home until his death in May 1984. Rudel, Rauff, and Mengele spent a week in Chile reminiscing about times past. Like Mengele, Rauff was an uncompromising anti-Semite. Shortly before he died, he wrote to a friend renouncing his Catholic faith and saying, “Himmler was my God. The SS was my religion. Why can’t people understand that all the big business in America is run by Jews.”36
Soon after Mengele returned to Buenos Aires, he and Martha decided that the time had come to get married. In July 1958, they flew to Montevideo, Uruguay, for a civil ceremony followed by a three-week honeymoon. Again Mengele registered under his own name, giving his occupation as “businessman,” the names of his parents, and his address in Germany. In mid-August, they returned to the house in Virrey Vertiz to resume a life that in all respects resembled that of a couple who felt they had nothing to hide.
Mengele’s efforts to rehabilitate himself publicly took yet another crucial step. With his father’s approval, he sold his workshop in Florida, and with the proceeds, bought a stake in a pharmaceutical company. Altogether, Mengele funded half of the 1 million Argentine pesos (approximately 
200,000) venture capital needed to expand the fledgling company called Fadro Farm KGSA. Fadro Farm manufactured drugs and specialized medical products. “Dr. José Mengele” was registered as one of the founding directors along with two Argentineans, Heinz Truppel and Ernesto Timmermann. Truppel recalls:
I saw Mengele for the first time in 1958, about the middle of July, because the Fadro Farm company had just been formed by two people, myself and Dr. Timmermann. This company started with the manufacture of products for the treatment of tuberculosis and we had our first factory, say office, at 1551 Acquenga Road in the federal capital [Buenos Aires].
Dr. Timmermann presented Dr. Mengele, who also had another name which was Dr. Gregor. Effectively, Dr. Mengele contributed some capital to the company. Dr. Mengele was not in our company too much of the time. But his contribution of capital allowed us to expand our production department. . . .
Dr. Mengele left the company within less than one year. When he worked here he used to do studies of new products for treatment of tuberculosis. He used to read many medical and scientific books. But I want everyone to know that he didn’t carry out any experiments on human beings as some people may think.37
At first, Mengele introduced himself to his new business partners as “Dr. Gregor.” Then he found that Elsa Haverich, the secretary who he had met three years before but had not seen since, was now working for Fadro Farm. She said:
He came into the office one afternoon. I called him “Dr. Gregor” at that moment because to me he was “Dr. Gregor.” Then he corrected me and told me that, “No, it is Dr. Mengele.” Joking a little bit, I asked him why he changed his name? He answered that it was for political reasons; when he got out of the war, he had to do it with another name.38
Mengele’s life had now stabilized into the comfortable and secure routine of a family man in a nine-to-five job with good prospects. After thirteen years on the run, he felt the worst was over. The worst was still to come. Before long Mengele’s luck began to change. Somehow he had attracted the attention of the Buenos Aires police on the suspicion that he might have been practicing as a doctor without a license. Exactly what triggered their interest is not known. A man who was a senior city detective at that time said Mengele was rounded up with several other doctors the police thought might have been involved in a back-street abortion clinic, where a young girl had died. The detective admitted to taking a 500 bribe for Mengele’s release, which he split with another officer. Police files confirm that Mengele was held for questioning and freed after three days. At the same time, back in Germany a determined effort to bring Mengele to trial had just begun. As of August 1958, Josef Mengele’s honeymoon had about a month to run.
* All letters from Josef Mengele to his family and friends before 1973 were later burned by the family, because the letters were handwritten and the family feared that their discovery would identify Mengele as the writer. After 1973, letters from Mengele were typewritten and were kept by the family. The contents of the early letters were attested to by Rolf and Irene Mengele.
* Argentina’s attitude of superiority in Latin America is best evidenced by its later refusal to allow the Peace Corps to operate in that country. An Argentine official told an American diplomat, “Why should Argentina have a Peace Corps? Do you send one to France?”
* During his stay at the Malbranc home, Mengele bought a dog, which his wife, Irene, requested that he call “Harry Lyons” in honor of one of her American relatives. Mengele did not think that “Harry” sounded Aryan and therefore dubbed the dog “Heinrich Lyons.”
* Paraguay had the first Nazi party in Latin America, formed in 1932, and the last one to be dissolved, in mid-1946.
* Now article 79 of the 1969 constitution.
* This several-month stay at Calle Tacuari was the only time Mengele resided within the city limits; all his other residences were in nearby predominantly German suburbs.
* The Belgrano was sunk by the British Royal Navy in the Falklands War in 1983, with the loss of more than 368 Argentine sailors.