Memories of the homely embrace of Günzburg and the splendor of the rolling Bavarian pasture were now just nostalgic stabs of pain to Josef Mengele. South America was to be a life sentence after the Eichmann kidnapping, that much was clear. A period of gnawing anxiety followed while Mengele and other fugitives waited for news of Eichmann’s ultimate fate after word spread that he was missing, presumed kidnapped and in Israeli hands. “One of father’s friends, also an SS member, organized a network of checks at the harbors and airports,” said Eichmann’s eldest son, Nicholas. “There was no harbor, railway station, airport, or important intersection that did not have one of our men stationed there [in the hope of intercepting Eichmann when his abductors tried to move him out of the country]. This was how the ‘small fry’ came forward to help, while the ‘big fish’ simply ran away.”1
Lying low in Alban Krug’s farmhouse in southern Paraguay, one “big fish” was shaking like a jellyfish. The former Iron Cross hero was stricken with panic as his worst fears were confirmed by Ben-Gurion’s announcement to the Israeli parliament. A few days later Mengele wrote that the “situation [had] become unmanageable.” His decision to make a permanent move to Paraguay a year earlier had clearly dismayed his wife, Martha, who argued that he would still be safe in Buenos Aires. But Mengele had no intention of returning there:
It seems to me that things are coming to a head and might bring a drastic solution. Finally everyone will acknowledge how right an earlier conduct was, and that at the time, their advice was nonsense. That is now incontestable. But no one should blame the others. I alone knew and must know what I should and should not do. I hope my nearest will now respond cleverly and reasonably in order not to again endanger the new start. What is nevertheless depressing is how the entire situation has become unmanageable. Despite this, I am somehow in a good frame of mind and optimistic.2
To Mengele the situation had become “unmanageable” because, contrary to popular mythology, he did not have a network of armed guards and the protection of President Stroessner. Indeed, the Paraguayan interior minister, Edgar Ynsfran, was the only senior member of the government who had any idea about Mengele’s wartime background. It had been explained by Hans Rudel, confidentially, when he asked that Mengele’s citizenship application be expedited because of “problems back home.” The stark truth was that the only protection Mengele could rely on was that of Alban Krug. Krug may have been a muscular man, but his armory consisted of precisely one pistol. What Krug lacked in firepower, however, he made up for in loyalty to his fugitive guest. His brother, Ewald, explained:
How is it possible for one single man [Mengele] to have killed so many people? He actually saved several lives in Auschwitz. . . . Mengele did other things than what they say. He was there to select those who would live and those who would die. Don’t you think in reality he did this to save lives? Why do you think Rudolph Hess is still in prison? He is a very old man. Look what the Jews did to Eichmann—it was terrible. These people only want to shame the Germans.
It’s all the fault of the United States, which allows itself to be controlled by the Jews. The true war criminals, for having destroyed Germany, are in the United States. Germany was the last hope of the world to contain communism. But don’t you believe that Germany is destroyed. The United States did not win the war and there are people ready to help us here in South America.3
While Mengele was living in fear for his life in Paraguay, in Buenos Aires the bureaucratic hunt involving West Germany’s extradition request was progressing at a slow pace. Since Martha was still resident in Buenos Aires, the West Germans believed that Mengele would return there. But the arrest warrant took so long to process that by the time it had legal status in Argentina, Mengele was already hiding at Alban Krug’s farmhouse in Paraguay.
The extradition process had begun with all due urgency and secrecy. On June 7, 1959, two days after the arrest warrant was issued, the foreign office in Bonn cabled the West German embassy in Buenos Aires to make inquiries about the prospects for extradition. But then the delays began. His Excellency, the Ambassador, the ex-Nazi Werner Junkers, was in charge. (He had been von Ribbentrop’s special wartime plenipotentiary to the southeast region of Yugoslavia.) Junkers now claims not to remember anything connected with the Mengele case while his embassy was handling the extradition, although the case attracted enormous publicity in the European and South American newspapers at the time. It is worth recording in full a June 1985 German television interview with the former ambassador:
Interviewer: Were you confronted with the Mengele case in your time as ambassador?
Junkers: I can’t remember.
Interviewer: In 1959, during your time, the first international arrest warrant was issued. Do you know about that?
Junkers: No, I don’t know anything about that.
Interviewer: In 1959 or I960, an extradition warrant went to the Argentine authorities. Do you know anything about that?
Junkers: No, I also don’t know anything about that.
Interviewer: While you were ambassador, did you ever hear the name “Josef Mengele” mentioned?
Junkers: Not that I can remember.4
Junkers’s amnesia aside, the first of many stages in a complex extradition request took an extraordinary length of time. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, the Argentine consul general in Munich, Alberto A. Maddonni, did not receive the warrant until March 11, 1960, a full nine months after it was issued. Another two months passed before Maddonni authenticated and signed the warrant on behalf of the West German court and sent it to his government in Buenos Aires.5 Once in Buenos Aires, the document had to go through the West German embassy to the Argentine ministry of foreign and religious affairs, who then gave it to the president of the senate, José Maria Guido. Guido sent it to the procurator general, who in turn assigned it to Judge Raul Centeno of Federal Court Number One. Finally, on June 30, 1960, one year and twenty-three days after extradition proceedings were begun, the case was assigned to Judge Jorge Luque of District Court Number Three. Only then could the police begin their search for Mengele. But the question of extradition, if Mengele were caught, would be decided by the court.6
News of the West German extradition request broke in the last week of June, while Argentine president Arturo Frondizi was on a state visit to Bonn. Frondizi told a press conference that his country had “no intention of sheltering criminals from the justice they deserve.” But, he said, the West Germans would have to provide proof of Mengele’s crimes before he was sent back for trial. Smarting from the Eichmann kidnapping just two months before, the president said, “Some form of reparations would be sought from the Israeli government.”7 By contrast, a letter to the Herald Tribune in Paris that day expressed a view shared by many people around the world:
Rather than considering the question of “punishment” of the Israeli “volunteers” for their abduction of Eichmann, would it not be better to send them back once more to gather up Mengele for us as well. . . . Surely something has gone quite wrong, and we have become somewhat distracted from the vital needs of justice, when we begin bickering and feeling that “sovereign rights have been dangerously imperiled”?8
In Paraguay, meanwhile, Mengele’s friends greeted with disbelief the news that he was wanted for atrocities in Auschwitz. Captain Alejandro von Eckstein said:
When it did start to come out, he told us he was forced to do some of those experiments and he really did not carry out the experiments that so much has been written about. He made the remark that he had to do what he was ordered to do because if he didn’t carry out the orders they would throw him in the same area as where the others were. He also said he helped many people who were very sick in the camp, but that none of his good work was reported.9
Mengele’s other citizenship sponsor, Werner Jung, said he was “shocked, really shocked. I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it because I had already gone back to Germany when it came out.” But Jung’s wife, Margaret, is still convinced that the allegations were lies. She even claimed that Mengele’s Auschwitz pathologist, Miklos Nyiszli, who provided the most detailed statement about his experiments, “is a pseudonym and never existed.”10
Werner Schubius, one of Jung’s business colleagues, who still lives in Asunción, also believed the allegations were invented:
When we met him we said, “He can’t possibly have done these things.” I’m convinced of that. If he did something it was only because he was acting under orders. I can imagine Mengele only as a human being and as a human being he has my sympathy. He was modest and well educated, much more educated than we are.11
But on the west coast of America, one former friend of Mengele’s was stunned. Opening his morning newspaper, the Jewish textile executive from Buenos Aires saw a picture of the man with whom he had nearly gone into partnership several years before. “I simply did not believe it,” he said. “I immediately telephoned the girl who had introduced us and I said to her, To think he’d been our friend.’ She said they had just got the newspapers too and all they had done was look at the picture in disbelief.”12
For Mengele, holed up on Alban Krug’s farmhouse in southern Paraguay, matters went from bad to worse. Late in July, Mengele’s great friend, Frederico Haase, the Argentinean architect who had introduced him to so many of his key Paraguayan contacts, fell off a ladder at a construction site in Asunción and died. It is clear from Mengele’s gloomy diary entry for July 31 that the combined effects of the Eichmann kidnapping, the Argentine warrant for his arrest, and Haase’s death had caused him to consider suicide:
Like the rain that has covered the earth, sorrow has come over me. A good old unselfish friend has left me forever. The loss of him is irreplaceable for me anyway. For the moment I can only force myself to believe that I will never be able to see that friend again, who was always optimistic and prepared for a joke in any kind of situation. He still lives in me.
The proof of his goodwill and helpfulness and comradeship are too much alive for me to imagine that only a couple of days ago we said good-bye forever. But thus it seems to be. The radio report has brought certainty. But his spirit and his love have left so much inextinguishable impact that this friend will always be present with us. It was he who told me to hold out and gave me new strength when I was doubting the future sense of life. “You must not give up now and lose your nerve! That’s exactly what the others want with their hunt,” he told me, and we said goodbye late in the night. Your words, my dear friend, will be your last legacy and my deepest duty.13
Mengele remained in this maudlin state for several days after Haase’s death, and he was too frightened to attend the funeral. On August 5 he wrote:
Again and again my thoughts are with the tragic fate of my good friend. He must be resting under the earth by now. If only I could help take care of his wife. Is the son back from D [Deutschland] yet? He does lose something irreplaceable in his father. The death of his father has caused a break in the course of his development, both mental and professional.
Mengele soon had another source of anguish. By August, detailed stories about his crimes were appearing in the German press. A batch of magazine and newspaper reports were delivered to him by a friend he called “Don C,” who landed at a private airstrip near the Krugs’ farm. “All of a sudden I heard the sound of an engine . . . it was the arrival of ‘Don C,’ ” Mengele wrote on August 15. “He had taken the chance to come by. We spent a nice Sunday afternoon and talked about the painful event and many personal questions.”
That night Mengele read through the press reports, “which fascinated me until deep into the night.” He went to bed deeply disturbed. Jews, he was sure, were behind the “lies” blackening his name:
It is unbelievable what is allowed to be slanderously written in German magazines. The magazines are the illustrated proof of the lack of character and lack of proper attitude of the current German government, that tolerates such self-defilement. The political lie triumphs and time and history have been warped and bowed. It drips of “humanitarianism and Christianity,” and in this “God” is the most often quoted. Behind all this stands only one thing: that is all the Old Testament hate toward everything in the German consciousness, heroic and truly superior.
At about this time, a typist in the West German embassy in Asunción came face to face with Mengele while visiting the German colony of Colonia Independencia, where she dislocated her ankle. On her return to Asunción she told the embassy staff that a German doctor named Mengele had reset it. She did not know that he was a wanted Nazi and asked why the embassy had no record of a German doctor by that name living in the area. The chargé d’affaires, Peter Bensch, went to southern Paraguay to investigate:
I made some inquiries and it was clear to me that Mengele had been there under his own name. He was not practicing as a doctor full time but on an occasional basis, I thought, because he depended on the goodwill of the local people. There was no secret about his name. But I personally never found him. I met Alban Krug. He did not admit that he had helped Mengele although it was clear that he had helped several Nazis coming over the border from Argentina.14
The incident raises important questions about the degree of coordination and determination of the West German hunt. Despite Bensch’s breakthrough in Paraguay, his colleagues in the Buenos Aires embassy a thousand miles away were pressing sedately on with their extradition request to the Argentineans. There appears to have been no attempt by the foreign office in Bonn to resolve these conflicting clues as to Mengele’s exact location by putting their own agents on the ground. The West Germans were hunting Mengele with pieces of paper, from embassies, relying on hunches, but never in the field. What made Bonn’s behavior even more questionable was their knowledge that the extradition request, despite President Frondizi’s optimistic words, was unlikely to succeed.
First, there was no extradition treaty with Argentina. As a result, the case had to be submitted to the Argentine solicitor general for a recommendation in accordance with Article 652 of the Argentine criminal code. If a recommendation was forthcoming, the foreign office had to decide if the extradition was “in the best interests of Argentina,” whatever that might have meant. If the foreign office decided it was in the best interest, the case would be left to the mercy of an Argentine court. But as Bonn had been informally warned, the Argentine attorney general was likely to object since the case was a “political matter, in which cases he generally refuses extradition.”15
Nevertheless, the West Germans placed a 20,000 mark reward on Mengele’s head in an attempt to excite some interest among Argentineans. It was the first time that Germany had offered cash for information leading to the capture of a Nazi sought for war crimes. The reward was widely publicized by the South American press in the hope of flushing out a reliable informant. None was forthcoming.
The search was left to the redoubtable Judge Jorge Luque, to whom the case had been entrusted by the Argentine foreign office. Although he set about his task with vigor, he did not know that Mengele had long since permanently fled Argentina. Luque was proud to take the case. He felt some old patriotic scores needed to be settled after the Eichmann affair:
It was a high-profile case and it presented me with an opportunity to accomplish something for Argentina. I desperately wanted to catch Mengele to show the world, particularly the Israelis, that Argentina was a law-abiding member of the international legal community. I wanted to show the Israelis that the use of illegal methods to obtain Eichmann had been unnecessary.16
It was a noble but somewhat naive aspiration in view of the cumbersome legal process that the Argentineans were insisting upon—legalities especially inexplicable since Mengele was not an Argentine citizen and had violated their immigration laws by making false declarations when he arrived in 1949. Nor was Luque helped by the fact that the first set of extradition papers were drafted in German when the law required them to be in Spanish. But what really exposed the West Germans’ feeble approach was the out-of-date information that the embassy had supplied on Mengele’s various haunts. Some of the addresses were just street names without a listing for the suburb. Since the province of Buenos Aires is roughly the size of Italy, the task of pinpointing the streets was almost impossible. For example, one address the Germans gave was 1875 Calle Sarmiento. It meant the police had to check on five different locations many miles apart before they could be sure they had covered every possibility. The failure of the Germans to provide precise addresses created additional delays in a case which had already been delayed far too long.
Some of the German addresses were just plain wrong. The first address they suggested should be checked was 968 Calle Vertiz. It simply did not exist. After a futile two-day search the police zeroed in on Calle Virrey Vertiz, the small cul-de-sac adjoining the backyard of Juan Perón’s former palace on Campo Grande Street in the Olivos suburb of Buenos Aires. Mengele’s house turned out to be number 970. Although residents reported knowing him, they all said they had not seen him for several months. The police reported back to Luque that there was no trace. But Luque was suspicious:
I was sure the police had obtained further information about Mengele’s whereabouts but were holding back on me. I have never been able to prove this, but it could have been a bribe by Mengele’s family.17
Another detachment of police traced Mengele to a boarding-house at 1074 Calle 5 de Julio in Vicente Lopez. Unknown to them, it was the same premises that the Israelis had checked in May. Unlike the Mossad agents, the police found Bergilda Jurmann, the German proprietor who Eichmann had told his interrogators was sheltering Mengele. But there was no sign of the American couple the Israelis had found running the boardinghouse. Perhaps Frau Jurmann had coincidentally rented out the house while the Israelis were investigating it. Questioned by the police, she admitted she knew Mengele’s wife, Martha, and stepson, Karl Heinz, whom she called “Carlos Enrique.” But she claimed she had never met Mengele himself.18
The police, meanwhile, were becoming frustrated by running from one faulty address to another. Luis Acerbo, heading the hunt in Police District Number Three, asked Luque if he could be removed from the case. “While we have been motivated with diligence to find and detain Josef Mengele,” he wrote, “none of the leads have proven positive, in part because the information provided on the locations of the houses in Olivos and Vicente Lopez has been incorrect.”
Having drawn a blank in the province of Buenos Aires, Judge Luque asked the Argentine police to deploy their resources for a countrywide search. At first Luque was not successful. His request was turned down by the chief of the federal police, Admiral Ezequiel Niceto Vega.* “He told me that he was not going to waste the time of the force looking for a foreigner who hadn’t committed any crimes in Argentina,” said Luque. Two weeks later, Vega relented. On July 19 the following message was telegraphed to all police stations.
All stations are to seek the capture of José or Josef Mengele, Identity Card number 3,940,848, son of Karl and Walburger [sic] Hupfauer, born March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, province of Bavaria, West Germany; he is married to his second wife, Marta [sic] Maria Will; he has been frequently at 1074 Calle 5 de Julio in San Isidro, province of Buenos Aires, and has lived at Virrey Vertiz 790 [sic] in Vicente Lopez, province of Buenos Aires. Case number 575 from the Federal Republic of Germany has requested the extradition of Josef Mengele, assigned to offices 674 and 704 of the Federal Judge of San Martin, Province of Buenos Aires, Doctor Jorge Luque.19
The chaos surrounding the Argentine hunt was not of much comfort to Mengele. News of the haphazard searches was brought to him by Martha and Karl Heinz, who still managed an occasional visit to his Paraguayan hideout on Krug’s farm. But it was not the Argentineans or the West Germans that Mengele feared—it was the Israelis, as his diary shows. “I am being taken care of in the best way by ‘Major Dommo’ and his son,” he wrote of Alban and Oscar Krug on August 24, 1960. What he did not know then was that the Israelis had a task force of agents, some permanently resident in South America, now operational. It included surveillance of Martha’s journeys from Buenos Aires, as well as Alban Krug and his family. The Mossad’s strategy was long-term. They had no illusions about the difficulty of finding and capturing the elusive Mengele.
By September 1960, Mengele decided that capture by the Israelis was inevitable as long as he stayed at the Krug farm. He resolved to get out of Paraguay and begin a new life elsewhere. The choice was Brazil. “The strong change in my surroundings will definitely be mirrored in my writings,” he wrote. For six weeks there were no diary entries. “So much happened in this time,” Mengele later explained, “for a certain reason that I cannot explain, I cannot write about it.”20 By late October, Mengele had left Krug’s farm and crossed the border into Brazil. There to bid him farewell were Alban Krug and Hans Rudel. Clasping his hands, Krug warned him: “For you the war is not over yet—be careful.” By October 24, Mengele was at his new location. He noted that he had just met a “guest friend” who is knowledgeable about “astronomy and astrophysics. . . . I have always wanted to meet someone who knows more about these things than the usual compendium of knowledge. To my surprise that wish was fulfilled in my new surroundings.”
These “new surroundings” were certainly a town, most likely São Paulo. His diary for October 27 spoke of a new life in a big city:
The spiritual horizon of my new surroundings is as different as the real horizon. Up to now the flat wide landscape was the main characteristic of the country, but now it is the “hills.” Ten meters from my window, the only shelter from the traffic is my hedge. The suburb traffic with cars, buses, and trucks is pulsing and especially in the early morning hours and evening when the city spits out its masses. With the passing of time one gets used to such noises of civilization, with which nowadays millions of people are able to live calmly.
The significance of Mengele’s hurried departure from Paraguay, within months of the Eichmann kidnapping, is that he did not feel he could rely on the complete protection of the Paraguayan government. Images created by some Nazi-hunters and newspapers—of an elusive fugitive flanked by armed guards—all dissolve. According to one German intimately connected with the Paraguayan government, Mengele’s name was not drawn to Stroessner’s attention until late 1960, when a newspaper reported that he may have been hiding in Paraguay. Stroessner telephoned the interior minister, Edgar Ynsfran, and asked him who Mengele was. “Ynsfran told him to ask Rudel,” said the German, “so he did. Rudel said he was just a lab expert who had worked in a chemical factory during the war and didn’t do anything that the newspapers said. That was good enough for Stroessner.”21
The man who gave Mengele his lifeline to Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old Nazi and former Hitler Youth chief in Austria, Wolfgang Gerhard. He had arrived in Brazil in 1948, leaving Europe because he could no longer tolerate “the oppressive Allied occupation,” even though he disliked Brazil since it was filled with “half-monkeys, people of a sick and secondary race.” He became the editor of an anti-Semitic fascist rag called Der Reichsbrief, the “Reichs Journal.” Gerhard is described, even by his close friends, as a “fanatical and fervent Nazi.” The link between Mengele and Gerhard was a fellow Nazi who knew both men—Hans Rudel. Rudel and Gerhard were friends, and both knew the family that Gerhard earmarked for Mengele in Brazil.
Mengele code-named the six-foot Gerhard “the Tall Man,” or Lange in German. Gerhard helped Mengele wind up his financial affairs in Paraguay by selling land for a reported 
20,000. By November 23, 1960, Mengele was confident that the arrangements Gerhard had made would ensure his survival. “I presume the best and consider the problem solved,” he wrote. His son, Rolf, said he thought his father had amassed a small fortune, “by South American standards of living,” from his Paraguayan land sales.
From this point on, Mengele’s life fundamentally changed. Being a fugitive’s wife was no life for Martha or her sixteen-year-old son. She and Mengele agreed to separate. Mengele had grown fond of Karl Heinz and treated him more as a son than his own boy, Rolf. Shortly before Martha and Karl Heinz flew home, Mengele wrote:
I do not have to worry about my family, at least not financially. Karl Heinz has tried hard at school and has already made good grades. These things are not very important but I do want to jot them down because they bring me joy. How unlucky I am that I can’t take care of the education of my own son. I especially would have liked to have started coaching Rolf, as far as that is possible through correspondence. As to Karl Heinz, I don’t have any worries about his philosophy in life in spite of his having lived in such an alien environment.22
But Rolf, then age sixteen, was struggling hard to come to terms with who his real father was. His mother, Irene, had recently allowed his stepfather, Alfons Hackenjos, to tell him the identity of the man he had called “Uncle Fritz” on his skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps in 1956. Rolf remembers the event and how it affected him at the time:
I was always told that my father had been missing in Russia. My father had always been Dr. Mengele who spoke Greek and Latin and who had been so brave.
It was about 1960 when Hacki [Alfons Hackenjos] told me that Uncle Fritz was the same man as my father. It was very unpleasant and awkward for me. Now I understood why one time, a couple of years earlier, when I had shown a picture of my father in uniform to Hacki, he was disappointed and didn’t like it.
Now that I was told the truth, I would have preferred another father.
The newspapers were full of stories about his father’s crimes. Young Rolf was confused. He was also rather jealous. When Karl Heinz and Martha returned to Günzburg, Rolf felt like an outsider. “Karl Heinz had lived with my father and I thought, That’s not his father, it’s my father,’ ” he said. At school his teachers complained that he was lazy. They put it down to a “father trauma”; it was only to be expected with a father like his, they said.23
Christmas 1960 was a bleak and wretched time for Mengele. His family had already left for Europe and Martha’s present did not arrive. On December 28 he wrote:
Again Christmas has passed. It was one of the most unenjoyable I have ever spent in my life. The details are so sad that I don’t even want to talk about it. But I will remember it for the rest of my days.
Fifteen years after Auschwitz, and at the age of forty-nine, Josef Mengele had finally begun, in a small way, to suffer for his crimes.
* Vega was more interested in lining his pockets with bribes than in chasing Nazis. On September 8, 1960, he and five other high-ranking federal police officers were arrested on a variety of corruption and internal collusion charges. As he was taken to jail he shouted, “It is better to have slightly corrupt policemen than no policemen at all!”