There had always been an intention to pursue men like Josef Mengele to the ends of the earth, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt pledged as early as October 1941:
The atrocities committed in Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Holland, Belgium and in particular behind the German Front in Russia exceed anything that has been known since the darkest and most bestial ages in humanity. The punishment of these crimes should now be counted among the major goals of the war.1
But when the time came, this pledge did not extend much beyond America and Great Britain’s agreement with the Soviet Union in August 1945 to try twenty-two Nazi leaders before an Allied military tribunal at Nuremberg, and a small fraction of SS murderers at a limited number of other trials. There was only one major Allied attempt to pursue the Reich’s murderous physicians in court. That took place in December 1946, when twenty-three SS doctors and scientists went before an American tribunal, also at Nuremberg, in the so-called Doctors Trial. One man who felt that Dr. Josef Mengele should have been among the defendants was Hermann Langbein, a left-wing political activist from Vienna who had been arrested by the Gestapo and shipped to Auschwitz, where he was put to work as a clerk in the chief physician’s office.
Although Langbein’s opposition to Nazi tyranny was well known, he survived Auschwitz and in the course of his imprisonment there became familiar with the gruesome activities of the SS doctors, having seen some of the paperwork connected with experiments. After the war he noticed that Mengele’s name cropped up at several trials of SS personnel.2 He also noticed, with dismay, how the determination of the Nuremberg trials lost some of its momentum after the Allies handed over prosecutorial responsibility to the German authorities and those in the countries where the atrocities had been committed. The record of the newly born Federal Republic of Germany proved to be exceptionally poor. Although German judicial authorities proudly point to 6215 convictions of Nazi criminals, they disingenuously fail to note that more than 70 percent of those convictions were the result of indictments brought under Allied jurisdiction. In all the cases brought by German prosecutors, only 403 defendants were convicted of premeditated murder. It became clear that the initiative for bringing Mengele to trial was never going to come from Bonn, and thus was the task left to the tireless industry of one man.
Langbein began by compiling a dossier of evidence against Mengele in the hope that the judicial authorities would take an interest. On his own initiative—he cannot remember exactly how—he discovered that Mengele had been divorced and that he had given power of attorney to a Buenos Aires lawyer to handle the arrangements with a Frankfurt lawyer, Fritz Steinacker, who later defended several prominent war criminals. Langbein also tracked down many Auschwitz survivors and recorded their statements in order to build a case against Mengele. In September 1958, only six weeks after Josef and Martha Mengele had settled down as newlyweds, Langbein took his file to the justice ministry in Bonn in an attempt to persuade them to issue a warrant for Mengele’s arrest. But his visit to the capital was not very encouraging. He encountered the first of many bureaucratic obstacles:
I saw an official in the state prosecutor’s office in Bonn. He told me that his office was not responsible for the question of Mengele. He said it was the responsibility of one of the eleven states of Germany—whichever one Mengele lived in. So he asked me, which state did Mengele live in? I had to tell him that I didn’t know. “In that case,” said the official, “I can do nothing until you find out.”3
Angered at the official’s obstructive behavior, Langbein left the file on the table, sternly telling him that he regarded Mengele as the German government’s responsibility. Coincidentally, in Buenos Aires that same September Mengele signed over power of attorney to his new bride, signaling that he intended to make himself scarce and needed someone to make decisions that he could trust. There were two drafts of this document, the first on September 13, 1958, the final one signed and notarized in front of his Argentine lawyer, Dr. Jorge H. Guerrico, on September 29. Three days later Mengele is reported to have entered Paraguay on a special ninety-day visa.4
At first sight these two events suggest that Mengele had somehow learned of Langbein’s interest in his wartime activities, particularly since Langbein was simultaneously trying to convince the state prosecutor’s office in Kiel to include Mengele in an investigation concerning his Auschwitz colleague Professor Carl Clauberg, who headed camp sterilization research. The likely explanation is far more prosaic, as are most answers to the mystery of Mengele’s amazing agility at evasion. The brush with the Argentine police regarding his alleged illegal practice of medicine certainly must have alarmed Mengele, perhaps even made him consider whether another haven might be more suitable. But the most compelling reason for his departure for an extended stay in Paraguay was probably nothing more dramatic than an attempt to sell a new manure spreader that the Günzburg firm had just manufactured. It had broken all sales records in Europe. Mengele’s Nazi friend, Werner Jung, who lived in Asunción, recalled that it was around this time that Hans Sedlmeier and Alois Mengele visited Paraguay, and that Mengele tried hard to sell the machine—without much success, however, according to Jung, who acted as agent for several major German companies:
I never thought that he would make much money trying to sell that sort of machinery. I believe that Sedlmeier and Alois came at the same time and they were talking about expanding the business. Mengele himself constantly tried to interest me in becoming the official representing his company. He said I’d do it better than him and he would have given me a healthy percentage. But at that time I was already thinking about packing up and going back to Germany. I didn’t want to take on new accounts.5
Jung’s words are especially interesting in light of the statement made under oath by the Günzburg firm’s purchasing director, Hans Sedlmeier, to the West German authorities in 1971 when they engaged in one of their periodic but halfhearted attempts to find Mengele. Sedlmeier told the investigating judge, Horst von Glasenapp:
Our company has kept up business connections with South America. But since I have been with the company, for the last twenty-seven years, no business connections with Paraguay have existed. The accused in no way has been linked to the company affairs. Business deals are organized by our representative agents and for that reason there is no room to employ individuals on a private basis.6
According to the Jungs, when in Asunción Mengele stayed at a boardinghouse called the Astra, owned by a mutual friend, Peter Fast. Martha and Karl Heinz came to visit him there. “She was nice, everyone liked her,” said Margaret Jung of Martha. She also remembered that Mengele had a preference for good German food, in sharp contrast to his later Brazilian tastes.7
Back in Germany, meanwhile, Hermann Langbein had made a breakthrough in his one-man effort to bring Mengele to trial. Although he had dumped his file of evidence with the obdurate bureaucrat in Bonn, Langbein had persevered in pinning down the state prosecutor’s office within whose jurisdiction the Mengele case should properly fall, so that an arrest warrant could be drawn up. From Mengele’s war service record, Langbein discovered that his last recorded visit to Germany was in November 1944, in Freiburg, on leave from Auschwitz, when he helped Irene move to Günzburg for the remainder of the war. Langbein took the case to the Freiburg prosecutor, Freiherr von Schowingen. “He was very helpful,” said Langbein. “He couldn’t have done more.”8
Langbein also followed up on a tip that Mengele might have studied medicine in Frankfurt. “By pure coincidence, the tip proved to be right,” said Langbein. “The university authorities would not let us see Mengele’s file, but they did give his date of birth, his date of graduation, and said that he was born in Günzburg.”9
On a visit to Günzburg, Langbein discovered the ubiquitous presence of “Karl Mengele & Sons.” It was clear to him that the Mengeles and Günzburg held many secrets about their absent son but that he was not going to be privy to them. All he could do was wait for von Schowingen to draw up the arrest warrant and hand it over to the foreign ministry for extradition proceedings. Although Langbein did not have Mengele’s exact address in Buenos Aires, he knew that he lived there from the Buenos Aires notarization of Mengele’s divorce papers.
How much news, if any, of Langbein’s efforts filtered through to the Mengele family and was relayed to Josef is not known. Langbein insisted that every move he made was conducted in the greatest secrecy. But the fact is that by March 1959, Mengele had decided that he would be safer living permanently in Paraguay.
The strain of tearing up his Argentine roots just as he felt they had taken hold soon showed itself to Mengele’s friends. On his return to Argentina from Paraguay early in 1959, the staff at the Fadro Farm laboratory noticed he had become edgy and that he often fell asleep in the afternoon. One of the directors, Heinz Truppel, said:
I suppose that he must have been thinking all the time that he would be found at any moment. That is why he used to sleep during the day and he looked very tired physically and mentally.
Yet a permanent move to Paraguay had its compensations. It meant Mengele could spend more time developing the family business there. He also had his sights set on buying land in the remoter areas of Paraguay, land that according to Jung, Mengele thought was a “valuable long-term investment.” Perhaps, too, he feared that the climate toward men like him would change with the recent election in Argentina of President Arturo Frondizi. He was one of the most liberal leaders to come to power since the Second World War and was known to be sensitive to the first rumblings of international disquiet about Argentina becoming a Nazi sanctuary.
When Mengele returned to Buenos Aires from Paraguay to wind up his Argentine affairs, the 
200,000 share that he and his father had invested in Fadro Farm was bought by an Argentinean named Ernesto Niebuhr.10 Mengele’s departure from the company was an abrupt affair and took everyone by surprise. “He just called me,” said Heinz Truppel. “He told me he was leaving because of questions of different ideology. He said he was going to get out of the laboratory and out of the country.” Elsa Haverich recalled the moment vividly. Mengele, she said, seemed to be a frightened man:
I asked him “Why? What is going on?” I thought maybe it was his family, or an illness, or even an accident. Then he told me, very sadly, that no, it was because of political reasons. I didn’t ask too many questions, because he looked a bit worried. The following day, the day he had to go, he arrived later at noon. He looked very quiet that day. He was very sad, very worried. It was about half past five. He took some books to return to the library—he was always reading science and medical books—and we got in the car. He gave me a lot of advice about the company and what we should do and I said, “I’ll see you again?” Then he told me, “Elsa, we will never meet again.”11
Although Martha and Karl Heinz stayed in Buenos Aires, they regularly visited Mengele in Paraguay, relieving the tedium of his life as a salesman traveling from farm to farm. As a sanctuary, however, Paraguay held many attractions. It had already become more popular among war criminals than Argentina, once described by Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, as unser grosser Gönner, “our great benefactor.” Since the demise of Juan Perón in 1955, the Buenos Aires end of one of the more overt escape organizations had been raided by the Argentine police and a stash of false passports found.
Nazis had no such fear of robust police investigations in Paraguay. Far off the beaten track, impoverished and remote, Paraguay is still the most primitive country in South America. It is not the most captivating place for any fugitive to end his days. The World Health Organization lists tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, and hepatitis as endemic. Hookworm is the most common disease, and there is much venereal disease, goiter, and leprosy. It is a country where money buys everything. Its leading industry is smuggling. There is no proper tax system. American cigarettes, Japanese electronics, and whiskey of all nationalities provide substantial revenue, much of it finding its way into the pockets of Paraguayan government and military officials. Dozens of small seedy shops line the narrow streets, all selling contraband perfumes, cameras, transistor radios, and French nylons. Counterfeit Cartier and Rolex watches are sold on most street corners in the center of Asunción. Estimates of the illegal income produced by the contraband range up to 250 million a year. Middle-ranking officers claiming their fair share drive brand-new BMW and Mercedes automobiles and live on sprawling haciendas, even though their basic pay is only 500 a month.
For years senior military officers have been actively engaged in drug smuggling, according to an allegation by the U.S. state department in January 1985—an accusation that so stunned Paraguayan officials that for the first time in history the American ambassador was denied an audience with President Stroessner. Shortly after the state department’s charge, Ambassador Arthur Davis’s wife was killed in a mysterious Eastern Airlines crash on a flight from Asunción to La Paz, Bolivia. No evidence has been produced, but rumors abound that there was a link.
Presiding over this chaotic and corrupt state is the iron-fisted rule of Alfredo Stroessner. Despite irrefutable evidence of systematic torture and imprisonment without trial, he brands all allegations of human rights violations as “Communist inspired.” Those who share his philosophy have been welcomed with open arms—provided they keep their payments up. The deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza reportedly did not, and was blown to pieces one day as he walked toward his car. Ellio Massagrande and Gaetano Orlando, the two Italian Fascists who blew up banks and trains in their native Italy for the fascistic organization Ordine Nuovo, have made a new life for themselves in Asunción. There has been a stream of others, all scoundrels, heading for the last refuge in the world. Sooner or later Josef Mengele was bound to join them.
By May 1959, Mengele was settled in Paraguay, still under his own name, ready to begin a new life. He moved to the southeast, in a region known as the Alto Parana, which borders Argentina. It may not have been Bavaria but it was the next best thing. Known locally as Nueva Bavaria, “New Bavaria,” it is populated with settlers whose view of the world is still colored by the notions of one of the spokesmen of late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, Dr. Bernard Förster, a schoolteacher from Berlin. In 1881 Forster organized a petition, which was signed by 267,000 Germans, urging the compulsory registration of all Jews and their exclusion from mainstream German life. Unfortunately for Dr. Förster, his views did not coincide with those of Bismarck’s Second Reich, and he was so ostracized that he moved to Paraguay. There he established a colony of like-minded bigots. The result a century later is that 60,000 mainly fair-haired settlers live in squat Bavarian-style chalets set incongruously among dense palm trees. They have their own churches and cultural societies and schools, where portraits of the Führer and swastikas were prominently displayed during the war. Indeed, Nazi sentiment ran so deep in Paraguay that it did not declare war on Germany until February 1945, three months before the German surrender, and then only reluctantly as the foreign minister, Luis Maria Arganas, announced to a group of Paraguayan Germans:
The Axis powers will know full well what Paraguay’s real sentiments are and will take that into consideration when they finally triumph. But in the meantime it is imperative that Paraguay play along with the United States for urgent reasons of national self-interest.12
Mengele lodged at the home of one of the most diehard National Socialists in Nueva Bavaria, farmer Alban Krug, who was also head of the local farmers’ cooperative. They were introduced by Hans Rudel. For the next fifteen months Krug’s farmhouse in the hamlet of Hohenau, forty miles north of the border town of Encarnación, became Mengele’s home. The grinding routine of sales rounds was broken by occasional visits from Martha and Karl Heinz and by weekends when Mengele either took a bus or drove a jeep to Asunción to relax by the pool at Werner Jung’s palatial home.13
Everyday life in these new and austere surroundings was recorded in Mengele’s diary which resumed at this point after the mysterious ten-year gap. In the diary, he referred affectionately to his host, farmer Krug, as “Major Domo.” But he was not so charitable about the sophistication or intelligence of the Krug family:
Sometimes these people get up in the middle of the night—at 5:00 a.m.—to celebrate that solemn ceremony . . . slurping their mate [herbal drink]. For their health and productivity it would naturally be a lot better if they would sleep one or two hours longer, rather than wasting their time with useless and mentally low-level chattering. It is interesting that these people, as early risers, consider themselves morally superior to late sleepers.14
Mengele traveled widely in search of business, to a Mennonite colony near Rosario north of Asunción, to Filadelfia in the heart of the Chaco, across to Pedro Juan Caballero on Paraguay’s eastern border with Brazil, and to San Bernardino and Villarrica, southeast of the capital. “He was looking for business,” said his friend Captain von Eckstein. “He would go where he could make a sale and stay two or three days at a time.”15 There were also sightseeing trips with von Eckstein to Indian settlements, although according to the Jungs, Mengele did not find President Stroessner’s eccentric friend the most riveting of conversational partners. “Von Eckstein was a bit of a braggart,” said Werner Jung. “He always liked to seem more important than he was. He used to claim that he had royal blood in him. A baron he’s not.”
A month after Mengele arrived in Paraguay, Hermann Langbein’s efforts in West Germany to call him to account finally bore fruit. On June 5, 1959, a damning indictment of his butchery was drawn up by Judge Robert Müller of Court Number 22, Freiburg. The opening paragraph stated that “Josef Mengele was to be taken into custody . . . on emphatic suspicion of murder and attempted murder.” The arrest warrant set out seventeen counts of premeditated murder conducted by a man who had taken an oath to cure, not to kill. The full range of Mengele’s cruelty would not emerge for more than twenty years. All the same, the results of the court’s preliminary investigation were gruesome enough:
Killing numerous prisoners with phenol, benzene and/or air injections; killing numerous prisoners in the gas chambers; killing a fourteen-year-old girl by splitting her head with his dagger, the victim dying a slow, painful death; injecting dye 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; ordering a number of prisoners to be shot because they would not write to their families saying they were being well treated.16
The warrant was circulated to police stations and passed to the Foreign Office in Bonn, in order to begin extradition proceedings from Argentina, where Langbein believed Mengele was still living. Despite Langbein’s request that the proceedings be conducted in the utmost secrecy, according to Rolf Mengele, an informant in the Günzburg police tipped off the Mengele family that the warrant had been issued. Yet by the time the family was able to inform Mengele, by correspondence, of the gathering storm clouds back home, he had already made his initial application for Paraguayan citizenship. He applied for this citizenship as “José Mengele.” Had he learned earlier of the developments in the Freiburg court, we may assume that Mengele would have taken steps to change his identity and adopt one of the variety of aliases he later used when he fled to Brazil. As it was, Paraguayan citizenship afforded him additional protection should the West Germans seek his extradition. No formal extradition agreement existed between the two countries, and President Stroessner, although he relied on the Germans for substantial investment, was less likely to make an exception if the request concerned one of his citizens. Next to his self-esteem, the president regarded Paraguayan citizenship as sacrosanct. Citizenship also helped facilitate land ownership, and Mengele had shown an interest. According to a CIA report, Mengele was “trying to acquire land [in] the zone of Alta Parana across from the Argentine province of Misiones.”17
The lawyer chosen by von Eckstein to handle Mengele’s citizenship application was Dr. Caesar Augusto Sanabria. According to Jung, Sanabria “was a prominent Asunción attorney with good government contacts,” an important bonus since President Stroessner had a habit of taking a personal interest in new citizens of his country. Jung and von Eckstein both agreed to act as sponsors for Mengele. Dr. Sanabria clearly recalled them bringing him his new clients:
I remember some German acquaintances in the capital brought in another German and said he wanted to become naturalized. I had never seen the man before but his friends vouched for him and told me he had been living near the capital for nearly six years. The man was quite distinguished, very well mannered, and appeared in every respect very correct. The request for completing naturalization papers was something I did as a lawyer so there was nothing unusual in the request. Also he was being sponsored by two prominent citizens [von Eckstein and Jung].18
Meanwhile, news that the West German foreign office had made preliminary inquiries about extraditing Mengele from Argentina had leaked to the press. By late 1959, the World Jewish Congress was appealing for Auschwitz survivors to come forward to supplement the evidence already gathered by Langbein and the Freiburg court.
It seems clear that by now Mengele was considering the possibility of life without Martha and Karl Heinz. As Dr. Sanabria said: “The man sought naturalization only for himself. He didn’t have a wife or child with him and he didn’t mention that he had either.” As for Mengele’s request, Dr. Sanabria may not have seen anything “unusual,” but Jung and von Eckstein should have known the application was illegal. At that time, applicants for Paraguayan citizenship had to prove they had lived at least five continuous years in the country. Mengele had certainly made many visits but came nowhere near to satisfying the residence requirement even though von Eckstein and Jung swore in court that he did. Dr. Sanabria, perhaps, also ought to have been alerted to the deficiency, since Mengele gave his permanent address in Paraguay as that of Dr. Sanabria’s office, thereby suggesting that he did not actually have a home in the country. Airily dismissing any suggestion that he and Jung perjured themselves, von Eckstein said: “He asked me for citizenship and he asked Jung, and he asked me if we would be witnesses for him. I said of course I would, and so I signed it and I became a witness and he became a citizen.”19
Jung claimed he did not know the law specified a five-year permanent stay:
That would be silly because how could anyone say with certainty that a man had lived continuously in Paraguay for five years unless one had actually lived with him? But if the statement I signed is supposed to mean that I had known him for five years then it was true because I had. Mengele just asked me if I wanted to be a witness and I said yes. It was as simple as that. I thought it would be nice to have Mengele as a Paraguayan citizen.20
While Mengele’s citizenship papers were being prepared, he was involved in an incident which was used later by some researchers and authors as an important piece of evidence to show that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and closest confidant in the latter half of the war, was alive and associated with Mengele. A stream of Bormann sightings have been reported since then, to the embarrassment of the newspaper whose suspects on closer examination have turned out to be innocent South Americans with only a passing resemblance to Bormann. No proof has ever been provided to counter the conclusion of West German prosecutors in 1973 that a skeleton unearthed half a mile from the site of Hitler’s bunker, between the Weidenhammer bridge and the Lehrter Station in Berlin, was that of the former Reichsleiter. As of that date, the West German courts ordered all outstanding warrants to be quashed and future sightings of Bormann to be ignored. But the incident featuring Mengele was first reported in 1966, by a Time-Life television production entitled, “The Search for Vengeance,” and was later embroidered by Michael Bar-Zohar in his 1968 book, The Avengers. It was further embellished in 1973 by Ladislas Farago in Aftermath: Bormann and the Fourth Reich. All of this revived speculation that Bormann had after all eluded the Russian Army encircling Berlin in early May 1945.
The television documentary and both authors claimed that in the spring of 1959, an Asunción physician of Austrian nationality, Dr. Otto Biss, was escorted by a woman to the home of Werner Jung after Mengele had failed to diagnose the condition of a mystery guest who was seriously ill. Bar-Zohar reported Dr. Biss as saying:
I examined the sick man and spoke to him in German, but the sick man wouldn’t answer in that language or in any other of the European languages I know. He insisted on speaking in bad Spanish. So I found it rather difficult to get any help from him to establish the nature of his illness. The [other] doctor realized this, and he bent over the sick man and said, “You may speak German.” And to my great surprise the men then spoke in fluent German.
Dr. Biss, who said his mystery patient “had a scar on his forehead,” went on:
A few days later a friend of mine came to see me in great excitement. He told me he had met the woman who had come to me and that the man I had seen professionally was Martin Bormann. I got hold of some photographs of Hitler’s right-hand man at once. There was no possible doubt. The man I had seen was older than the man in the photos but it was the same man all right. He was certainly Martin Bormann.21
Ladislas Farago repeated Bar-Zohar’s interview in his book, published six years later, as one of many incidents, some based on documents of dubious origin, cited to prove that Bormann was alive. The whole episode is worth dredging up only because it is one of many interesting examples of the sometimes wishful thinking engendered by Nazi-hunters, the kind that created such an elusive aura around Mengele. Interviewed ten years later, at the age of eighty-five, Dr. Biss was still convinced that his patient was Martin Bormann.22 Had Jung been interviewed, a much more plausible interpretation would have emerged:
I don’t ever recall Mengele treating anyone in my house. But I myself was sick and I do remember being treated by Biss at my house for a stomach ailment. Mengele may have been there at the time, I don’t remember.23
Unfortunately for Werner Jung, pictures of him taken around 1959 show a remarkable likeness to the wartime photographs of Bormann, and these pictures convinced Dr. Biss that he had just treated the world’s most wanted war criminal.
The reality of fugitive life in Asunción at this time was much less Machiavellian. Bormann almost certainly was dead, and although Mengele was now wanted by the Germans, his application for citizenship, in his own name, was still proceeding smoothly. As a precaution, however, Hans Rudel asked the interior minister, Edgar Ynsfran, to expedite the case. Mengele knew he had succeeded when on October 24, 1959, he was issued an identity card as “José Mengele.” Two weeks later the Asunción police gave him a certificate of “good conduct and residency.”24 His citizenship papers were vouched for by the obliging Dr. Sanabria; his application was brought before Judge Luis Martinez Miltos.* Court proceedings show that the police good conduct certificate was enough to satisfy Judge Miltos that there were no “outstanding legal or police records which could hinder his obtaining Paraguayan citizenship through naturalization.” The judge was also satisfied that Mengele had “resided permanently in this country for more than five years” and that he had “shown repeatedly his intention to give up his former nationality as it is backed up by the statements of his witnesses Werner Jung and Alejandro von Eckstein.” By law Mengele had to deposit the sum of 5,000 guaranis, in 1959 the equivalent of 41. All that was required to complete the process was the rubber-stamp approval of the supreme court, where the papers were duly filed.
Almost at the time when the supreme court’s approval was due, Mengele received word in Asunción that his father had died. Any thoughts Mengele might have entertained of going to Günzburg for the funeral were eliminated when he read the warning from his family. Local police informers had notified them that two undercover agents from the LKA (the German FBI) would attend the funeral in the hope of finding the fugitive doctor. Mengele instead arranged to have a wreath delivered to the grave, marked only with a wide sash inscribed “Greetings from Afar.”*
Within days after Mengele learned of his father’s death, the West German embassy in Asunción discovered that Josef Mengele was in fact living right under their noses in Paraguay. On November 13, four days before Mengele’s father died, the West German consul, Winfried Engemann, asked the Paraguayan minister of the interior if he might make a brief inspection of Mengele’s file. The request in turn alerted the head of police investigations in Asunción to make further inquiries of the Argentine federal police concerning “José Mengele’s” background.25 However, before the Paraguayans allowed Engemann to review the Mengele file, they removed any relevant information, and Engemann found the file useless.
At the same time that the West Germans were reviewing the file in Asunción, Interpol headquarters in Paris asked the naturalization section of the Paraguayan ministry of the interior to forward a copy of his file to their offices in Buenos Aires and Paris.26 But Mengele had little to fear from this private organization, impressive though its membership list of more than one hundred countries seems to be. Interpol’s contribution to the Mengele hunt was desultory. Files in the Brazilian and Paraguayan branches of Interpol contain mostly secondhand information. This continued to be the pattern in Interpol’s approach.
Hunting war criminals has never been one of Interpol’s priorities. It claims its broad charter prohibits this on the grounds that Nazi crimes were of a “political nature” as opposed to crimes of “common law.” Its hierarchy also has an unhealthy history of close connections with National Socialism. In 1939 Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, was voted president of Interpol. In December 1941, Interpol moved its headquarters to the fashionable Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where it shared a villa with the Gestapo. Heydrich even made Interpol a division within the SD, the Security Police. When Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, Himmler chose Heydrich’s successor at the Gestapo, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to replace him as Interpol’s president. After Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg in October 1946, a Belgian member of Interpol’s executive committee, Florent E. Louwage, became president. He was succeeded in 1956 by Jean Nepote, who had collaborated with the wartime Vichy government in France. In 1968 Interpol elected Paul Dickopf president. He was found to have been an SS officer during the war, having worked in the very villa where Interpol was then headquartered. Nonetheless, he remained president until 1972.27
By mid-November 1959, both the Paraguayan interior ministry’s naturalization section and the Paraguayan police knew that an extradition request was under way for Josef Mengele for war crimes. Alejandro von Eckstein, President Stroessner’s friend, also admits to having known about this interest on the part of the West Germans and Interpol. But no one thought the circumstances warranted postponing Mengele’s application for citizenship. Nor is there any evidence that these august Paraguayan governmental bodies brought this new information to the attention of the supreme court. If they did, the court ignored them. On November 27, “José Mengele” was issued his naturalization certificate, number 809.28
On the other side of the world, meanwhile, another government had been taking an interest in the case of Josef Mengele. Unlike the West Germans, the Israelis had little faith in the slow, ponderous, bureaucratic machinations of extradition requests to South America. Their skepticism was fully justified. On October 27, the Argentine foreign ministry told the West German embassy in Buenos Aires informally that they must expect their extradition request to be refused on the grounds that the allegations against Mengele were of a “political nature.” For some time Israel’s view had been that as long as Bonn stuck to the strict boundaries of international law, they were unlikely to succeed in bringing Nazi fugitives to trial in West Germany. The Israelis preferred to act within the broader concepts of international justice, as Mengele himself soon discovered.
* Judge Miltos was later appointed Paraguayan envoy to the Vatican.
* A series of subsequent sensational newspaper reports said that Mengele did attend the funeral, using elaborate disguises including a nun’s habit. Petra Kelly, the current Green Party member of the West German parliament, grew up in Günzburg. She said: “Everyone in town talks about how Mengele attended his father’s funeral. It’s a rather reactionary town. I was told by a nun that Mengele had in fact stayed in my old convent school, the English institute.” One reported sighting came from Adolf Rogner, who had lived in Auschwitz and had been an engineer there for four years. “I know for a fact Mengele was here,” he said.
Although the myth around Mengele’s “visit” grew over the years, the overwhelming evidence, including his own diaries, is that he did not attend the funeral because of the timely police tip to his family.