Mengele

After his wartime service as a Hitler Youth leader in Graz, Austria, Gerhard remained a Fascist for the rest of his life. He even christened his son “Adolf.” “Wolfgang made no bones about being 150 percent Nazi,” a former workmate recalled. In Brazil he was vague about what he did, having variously owned a small textile printing plant and worked in a publicity agency and as a welder. But what made Gerhard useful to Mengele was that he dabbled in real estate.

According to the Stammers, Gerhard introduced Mengele to them—as “Peter Hochbichler,” a Swiss—as a suitable manager for a thirty-seven-acre farm in which they were planning to invest. It produced coffee, rice, fruit, and dairy cattle in a remote German community near Nova Europa, two hundred miles northwest of São Paulo. “Gerhard said he had a friend, an acquaintance, a lonely man who liked the country life far away from towns,” said Gitta Stammer. “He said he could be of much help to us.”* Gerhard told the Stammers that not only was “Hochbichler” an experienced cattle breeder but he had also recently inherited some money which he wanted to invest in Brazilian real estate. To the Stammers it was an attractive proposition, particularly since an extra pair of hands would fill the gap left by Geza Stammer when his job as a surveyor took him away for several weeks at a time.

One weekend, Gerhard brought Mengele to meet the Stammers, as Gitta Stammer explained:

For Mengele, the arrangements to move took a nerve-wrackingly long time. But as would so often be the case in years to come, it was Gerhard who smoothed his path. From that period on, Wolfgang Gerhard was there, counseling, protecting, encouraging. Even though he could sometimes barely feed his own children, Gerhard somehow always found the time and money to help Mengele when it was necessary.

As Mengele waited anxiously for Gerhard’s plan to materialize, he occupied himself with a temporary job in São Paulo. His diary suggests he was helping Gerhard with his textile business:

I have had a very busy week behind me. The work isn’t very enjoyable and comes right after sticking down paper bags. But it’s important for my host because it earns him a fortune.4

The grinding routine of the job and anxiety about his uncertain future had begun to wear Mengele down:

My life here is difficult, not only because of all the work (I have had to work a lot harder at times) but because of the entire situation: cramped conditions, monotony, primitiveness, noise and formlessness and which in the end, despite all this negativity, does not guarantee me any safety. I have only one aim and that is to change this, but unfortunately we haven’t come up with a good idea. “One” also isn’t in any great hurry because of all the other constantly unsolved problems. So I will persevere and continue to believe in my lucky star.5

Much to his irritation, Mengele also learned that further allegations—that he had dissected prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp—had appeared in the press:

As you can see, my present mood is pretty bad, especially since I have had to deal these last weeks with this nonsense about attempting to strip bodies in B. . . . In this mood one finds no joy in a radiant sunny sky. One is reduced to being a miserable creature without love for life or substance.6

In their attempt to convince skeptics that they were just innocent dupes, the Stammers insist that at first there was nothing suspicious about “Peter Hochbichler” or his refusal to take a salary. Nor did his parcels of letters and newspapers from Germany strike them as strange. But the farmhands who suddenly found themselves in Mengele’s charge realized something was amiss. They noted that “Peter” read philosophy and history and loved classical music, especially Mozart. They also found that their new boss had a sharp temper which exploded as he struggled to make his orders understood in Portuguese, an alien language. “I didn’t like him, but I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Francisco de Souza, who was working for the Stammers when Mengele arrived. “He loved giving orders and kept saying that we should work more and harder. The worst of it was that he didn’t seem to understand much about farming or heavy work.”8

Try as he would, Mengele failed to earn the respect of his workers. They were amused when one of his experiments with farm gadgetry flopped badly:

He was determined to build a machine to deal with the problem of hookworm and white ants that were spread all over the farm. He made me mount a hook on a cart. On the end of the hook he suspended a 175-pound weight, and with this crazy machine he accompanied me around the farm to destroy these enormous anthills, some of them three feet high. He just stared while I had to pull the weight up and release the rope. The weight smashed the mound, but within a few hours the ants were making a new home for themselves. We thought it was a crazy idea; it took hours and hours to prepare.9

Although the farmhands did not care for “Peter,” Gitta Stammer liked him. According to the farmhands in Nova Europa, from the moment “Peter” arrived, he and Gitta Stammer got on well together. They spoke in German, and she appreciated having a man on the premises since her husband was often away. But today Gitta Stammer tries to put a distance between herself and Mengele. She claims she mostly felt uneasy. “I don’t even want to remember those thirteen years that he lived with us,” she said. “He tried to order us—he was very authoritarian. Once he almost hit me.”11

Unbeknownst to the Stammers and the farmhands, Mengele was difficult initially because he did not like the farm or his work. In this first phase of his Brazilian exile, Mengele found it hard to come to terms with his new lowly status. And despite his greater security at remote Nova Europa, his fear of capture by the Israelis plagued him. It revived his insecurity over his prominent forehead, which he nearly had had altered by plastic surgery in Argentina. As he went about his work on the farm, Mengele always wore a hat, even in the heat of summer. “Whenever I got near him, he pulled the hat down over his face and dug his hands into his pockets,” said Enercio de Oliveira, who harvested corn with Mengele. Zaire Chile, a maid, said that Mengele usually wore a shirt buttoned at the collar and a raincoat. “I never saw anyone on a farm dress like that,” she said.12

Mengele’s fear of an Israeli strike was well founded. Since the beginning of 1961, following the failed kidnap attempt in Buenos Aires, a formidable task force of Mossad agents had been assembled to track him down. Indeed, many members of the new Mengele task force had also been on Operation Eichmann.

According to Harel and another senior Mossad agent, Rafi Eitan,* who was code-named “Gabi” in Operation Eichmann, Mengele felt so at risk that he occasionally traveled to another farm near São Paulo and went across the border to Paraguay. Gitta Stammer said that when Mengele first came to live with them, he “never ventured out.” But Eitan insisted that Mengele hid at Alban Krug’s farmhouse in Hohenau on several occasions in 1961 and 1962.

For the Paraguayan end of their operation, the Israelis resorted to a ruse to penetrate the Krug family and their circle of neo-Nazi friends. An Englishman working for the Mossad was asked to strike up a love affair with one of Krug’s daughters. He was not very successful. But Eitan, who spoke no German or Spanish, claimed he once got close enough to Krug to catch sight of Mengele. “I saw him with my own eyes,” he said. A Mossad colleague was more skeptical of Eitan’s claim. “I’m surprised Rafi should say this,” the Mossad man said. “How the hell he got that close I don’t know. He couldn’t even say gracias in Spanish.”13

Zvi Aharoni, coordinating the Mengele hunt from Paris, said he was certain no Mossad agent ever saw Mengele in Paraguay. “I made several trips to Paraguay in 1961,” he said. “I can tell you that we got nothing, not a thing from Paraguay.” But it was not for want of trying. Aharoni’s team adopted a variety of cover identities in the country. One agent was a financial consultant; another was a historian writing a book on the SS. He got as far as seeing the former Gauleiter of the Nazi party in Paraguay. “It was clear the man knew nothing about Mengele,” said Aharoni.

Meanwhile, the more sedentary West German hunt was now progressing on three fronts. In February 1961, Bonn extended its extradition request from Argentina to Brazil. Word had reached Fritz Bauer, prosecutor for the state of Hesse, that Mengele might have fled to Brazil. But Bauer’s information was more of a hunch than solidly based, perhaps nothing more tangible than what was available to the CIA station in Asunción at the time. The CIA reported that Mengele was “rumored to have gone to the Mato Grosso, Brazil.”16 In Asunción, Peter Bensch, the chargé d’affaires at the West German embassy, also continued to make inquiries. He had managed to procure a copy of Mengele’s citizenship document. But the embassy’s attempts to take evidence from Paraguayans who might have seen Mengele soon ran into trouble. “They told us that we had no right to mount what they said was a semi-judicial inquiry,” said Dr. Bensch. Bensch’s inquiries to the supreme court on the prospects of extradition were not very encouraging either:

My own view was that Mengele was moving between Paraguay and Brazil at this time, but we had no precise information on him. The supreme court did tell me that if he was found in Paraguay it would not be possible to extradite a Paraguayan citizen. I personally did not talk to President Stroessner about the matter, but we did tell Bonn that as long as Mengele was a Paraguayan citizen, extradition from Paraguay would probably be impossible.17

In Argentina, meanwhile, a legend was being born. Mengele, it seemed, had almost superhuman powers of escape. He was wealthy; he had an army of agents; he was one step ahead of the Israeli secret service; and he was armed and extremely dangerous. The evidence lay at the foot of the Andes mountains near the Argentine resort town of Bariloche, where an Israeli woman had mysteriously fallen to her death. Argentine newspapers asked if she might not have been a Mossad agent sent to seduce Mengele and kill him, but instead Mengele had killed her.

No one proved that Mengele had stayed there. But neither could they prove that he had not. Thus Mengele was reported as having accompanied Norit Eldad on her fatal walk. They had become lovers, according to the story, she with the purpose of setting him up for an ambush by a team of Israeli hit men waiting in a nearby hotel. A false-bottomed suitcase had been found by Mengele’s bodyguards while the couple were out: they had rushed out to tell Mengele; she was pushed over a precipice; Mengele had fled town. Now everything fit. The South American newspapers banner-headlined this news of Mengele’s mountaintop encounter with an Israeli assassin.

The Delaney case was followed by numerous press reports that the Mossad was back on Mengele’s trail. The most spectacular, in the London Sunday Dispatch, quoted “reliable sources” who claimed that the Israelis had been given orders to “liquidate Mengele before the start of the Adolf Eichmann trial,” scheduled to start on April 11. One of the five Mossad agents, code-named “David,” had been relentlessly tracking Mengele for two years according to this story.

That same day another report came thundering over the wire services from Hamburg, where a German businessman, Peter Sosna, said he was sure he had met Mengele on a recent trip to Brazil. Sosna said that while he was in the Mato Grosso, in the town of Corumbá, a group of unidentified Germans introduced him to a doctor. Sosna reported that the doctor had Indian bodyguards and the meeting was held in great secrecy. On his return to Hamburg, Sosna went straight to the German prosecutor’s office and after being shown photographs of Mengele, positively identified him as the man he had seen. Much credibility was given to the sighting. Sosna worked for a marine chandler supply company and seemed a reliable witness. The idea of Mengele living in a vast, virtually unexplored rain forest the size of Texas added a touch of drama to the reputation of the man fast becoming the world’s most elusive fugitive.

For four months the Argentine police simply ignored the request. On November 20, the West Germans sent a reminder to the foreign office, asking them to “please give attention to the request, which is urgent due to the character of the case.” Finally, in December, the prints were sent.21

Little of the chaos and indifference surrounding the hunt filtered through to the public. They were treated instead to an almost weekly diet of new sightings and follow-up police operations. It was precisely because Mengele was portrayed as being able to elude such “dragnets” that his reputation flourished as a wily fugitive with superhuman powers of evasion.

On the farm at Nova Europa, meanwhile, Mengele remained unaware of many of the more imaginative press reports. According to Gitta Stammer, they rarely received newspapers. The irony was that although they did not know he was on their soil, the most active police hunts were conducted by the Brazilians.

On January 23, 1962, the Brazilian papers carried the headline that Mengele had been captured in the small border town of Pozos de Caldos. The prisoner was using the name “Solomon Schuller.” He was German and he worked for Bayer, the German multinational conglomerate. He was said to be “definitely pro-Nazi, quiet and mysterious.” The area Interpol director, Amoroso Neto, ordered Schuller’s detention and was so confident he was Mengele that he released the story before fingerprint verification had been completed. Two days later the police withdrew the allegation. Fingerprints had arrived from the Germans and showed that Schuller was in fact Hans Epfenger, a former member of the Waffen SS who was not wanted for war crimes but used an alias nevertheless.

The following month a hotel manager, Elias Cardoso, told the police that a suspicious foreign visitor had checked in to his hotel in the frontier town of Auto Posto. He was German. Once when he got drunk, Cardoso heard a friend call him “doctor.” Later the mystery guest, in a drunken stupor, told Cardoso that he was a former member of the Gestapo and could not return home because the Germans “would slit my throat.” Cardoso told the police he thought his guest looked like Mengele. The local police called in the Brazilian federal police.

At dawn on February 28, 1962, twenty-five armed militiamen stormed into the room where the Mengele suspect was staying. The room was empty. The guest had checked out during the night without paying his bill. It was the sixth Brazilian alert in less than a year. Surely, said the newspapers, this was Mengele’s closest call?*

Midway through 1962, while several South American governments pursued a ghostlike fugitive, the real Mengele moved with the Stammers to a 111-acre coffee and cattle farm. Called “Santa Luzia,” the farm was in Serra Negra, 93 miles north of São Paulo. The dry heat at Nova Europa, said Gitta Stammer, had become oppressive. “We wanted cooler weather,” she recalls. Serra Negra is renowned for its rich soil, cool climate, and thermal springs amid gentle sloping mountains and woods. Once again Mengele provided capital, one half the purchase price of the farm.22

Although he had been against the move, once he arrived in Serra Negra Mengele began to relax for the first time in two years. He was involved in woodworking and construction on the farmhouse, work which he noted in his diary was “pleasing.” In his first diary entries after arriving at Serra Negra, Mengele wrote enthusiastically about the “beautiful landscape,” the “wondrous eucalyptus forests,” and the “high plateau that fills my soul with awe.” A month after his arrival, on August 19, 1962, Mengele summarized his feelings about his new hideout:

Now I have been here for four weeks already and I am splendidly settled. As much as I was opposed to the move, I now feel comfortable in this spot. No wonder—it has all that is necessary to provide home and solace to a peaceless man.23

Mengele may have felt more settled in Serra Negra, but his hosts did not. The Stammers became increasingly uneasy about their new farm manager. Something, said Gitta Stammer, was not “quite right.” He avoided meeting people; he was prone to quarreling with the farmhands, and would humiliate them. “His behavior,” she said, “was very unpleasant. We were used to getting on well with the farmhands. I called his attention to the fact that we were living in Brazil and that we shouldn’t be aggressive.”

Most tiresome were Mengele’s violent mood swings. One day he would be silent, brooding, a solitary man walking for hours. The next day, he was talkative, genial, captivating the Stammers with a sharp sense of humor. To them, it was clear that their guest was under great strain. They began to wonder who exactly was the man that Wolfgang Gerhard had brought into their lives. Their thoughts focused on the glaring inconsistencies in his background. Ultimately it was this that really aroused their suspicion. Whoever “Peter” was, his origins were not, as he had claimed, those of a man who had been farming all his life, as Gitta Stammer explained:

He used to say that his family were farmers, but as time passed we began to realize that he was an intelligent man and educated as well. For example, we, the family, used to read a lot. . . . When we made certain comments about books or radio programs, he sometimes forgot and gave an opinion well above the level of a farmer. This was a sign that something was wrong, something wasn’t true.

Then we began to realize that he was afraid of everybody. When somebody came to the farm he would always disappear. Sometimes we had visitors from São Paulo, friends or acquaintances. When this happened he looked very upset and started asking questions: “Who are these people? Are they real friends?”

You know, all this was very strange and we began to wonder why he behaved so strangely. We realized that something was wrong.24

Gitta soon discovered what was wrong. She claims it was in Serra Negra, on one of the rare occasions when there was a newspaper in the house, that she learned the true identity of “Peter Hochbichler”:

A businessman buying our fruit came to the farm and left a newspaper there. There was a piece of news about the Nazi executioners, as they said. I saw this photo there; he was a young man, about thirty or thirty-three years old. Then I thought that this face was very familiar to me, and his smile with gaps between his teeth. At that time he had such teeth. I showed him the photograph and told him that the man resembled him very much.

I told him, “You are so mysterious, you live here with us, so please be honest and tell us whether it’s you or not.” He was very upset after that, but he didn’t say anything and left. In the evening, after dinner, he sat very quiet. Suddenly he said, “Well, you’re right. I live here with you and therefore you have the right to know that unfortunately I am that person.”25

Geza Stammer was at the farm the weekend when Mengele admitted his true identity. He claims he was “very nervous, very upset,” that he wanted to immediately contact Wolfgang Gerhard and arrange to move Mengele. But since there was no telephone at Serra Negra, Geza had to wait for his next trip to São Paulo, nearly a week later. Gitta recalls, “We didn’t want to take any risks; we weren’t interested in politics; we didn’t want any confusions; we wanted to live our life without problems.”

In São Paulo Geza Stammer told Gerhard that he considered hiding Mengele “very dangerous.” “My husband told Gerhard that we were afraid, scared to keep a man hunted all over the world,” Gitta said. “Gerhard tried to calm us down by saying that no one would find out. He said we ought to be happy because before Mengele lived with us we were nothing. ‘Now there is something important in your life,’ he told us.”26 Gerhard urged the Stammers to be patient. He promised to contact the Mengele family directly, arrange to move Mengele, and then come back to the Stammers when everything was resolved.

Mengele’s younger brother, Alois, who was running the family firm in Günzburg, dispatched his old schoolfriend and most trusted confidant, Hans Sedlmeier, to Brazil to act as peacemaker. Gitta remembers what happened next: “One month later he [Gerhard] came over, by car, and brought an old man with him. This man was introduced to us as Mr. Hans, who came directly from Germany. Gerhard said the less we knew about him, the better.”

Sedlmeier brought with him 2000, which Geza Stammer changed into Brazilian cruzeiros. He stayed with the Stammers in Serra Negra for two days. According to Gitta, although at first resistant, Hans eventually “promised to do everything to find another place for him [Mengele].”

Yet Sedlmeier did not keep his promise. Mengele stayed with the Stammers and “the problems got worse.” Gitta recalls the deteriorating situation:

During this period of time, Peter was very upset, very nervous. Actually, it was very difficult to deal with him. Whenever we asked something he gave us an aggressive answer. He used to say, “What do you think? This isn’t a simple matter. There are many things at stake.” He almost accused us of being the cause of his misfortune.27

Once more, the Stammers turned to Gerhard to find a way out, this time saying they were considering betraying him to the authorities. Gerhard’s response was blunt, one that sounded to the Stammers like a threat. Gitta recalls:

Gerhard said, “Do you really think it might be better that way? You should be very careful, because if you do anything against him, you’ll have to take the consequences because he lives here with you. You should think about the future of your children. This is not so simple as you imagine. There are many obstacles, much difficulty.”28

The sudden decline in their relationship caused by the revelation of his identity plunged Mengele into anxiety over his future:

Again, outside flowers and trees give joy to that tired old heart. The cold wind whistles around the house and in my heart there is no sunshine either.29

For solace, Mengele immersed himself in studying flowers and trees and writing what he called his “childhood opus”:

That might be interesting later, looking back on them, on how everything came to be. I write them for my sons, R and K [Rolf and Karl Heinz], who will get to know much less about the past of the family than D [Dieter].30 *

He became more and more self-obsessed, devoting no less than forty pages of this “childhood opus” to his own birth, including one and a half pages about the placenta, a phenomenon that caused Professor Norman Stone, the Oxford historian, to remark that Mengele’s diaries were marked by “isolation, vanity, narcissism and nastiness.”31

Yet despite the confrontation created by the revelation of Mengele’s true identity, the Stammers remained loyal to him. Despite the risks they took in harboring Mengele and the abuse they endured from him, the Stammers stayed true to him for the rest of his life. They never breathed a word to the police, even after relations became so bad between them in 1975 that they went their separate ways. Nor did they consider going to the police after Wolfgang Gerhard had left Brazil in 1971 and was no longer a threat. Furthermore, the Stammers helped Mengele in his property deals right up to his death.†

The Stammer loyalty at first seems illogical. During the years they knew him, Mengele never threatened the Stammers. Nor were they paid direct protection money by the Mengele family in Günzburg. “If we had considered this necessity with G and G [Geza and Gitta Stammer] you might still have been together,” Hans Sedlmeier wrote to Mengele years later, after he and the Stammers had split.32 But the mystery of why the Stammers never gave Mengele up has several explanations. First, Mengele had become their business partner. He provided substantial capital that allowed the greedy Stammers to buy larger and better farms. They became financially dependent on him. Second, although a difficult person, Mengele’s views were not so alien to their own. Gitta Stammer herself betrayed her own brutal historical perspective of the Holocaust when she tried to rationalize Nazi crimes. “The Germans thought that the Jews were working against Germany, so they had to get rid of them,” she said. And she accepted Mengele’s word that he had never conducted experiments.

Finally, and maybe most important, Gitta’s unswerving loyalty to Mengele appears to be the result of a love affair between them. José Osmar Siloto, who helped harvest the coffee crop, said Mengele and she were “always together. They walked everywhere together and were always sitting and talking to each other.” Ferdinando Beletatti, who worked on the farm, said:

Mr. Stammer seldom came to the farm. Their children once told me that Peter and Gitta locked themselves in the bedroom to be by themselves, making it clear they had a romance.33

Wolfram Bossert, who sheltered Mengele later, says there was an “erotic relationship between Gitta and him [Mengele].” Evidence of the relationship is also scattered throughout Mengele’s diaries. He wrote of the “beautiful” Gitta, and dedicated love poems to her:

Quiet Love

We only met so late,

When we both had experienced how bitter life could be.

Your love is never loud,

And quiet your words and gestures,

A fine smile, our secret knowledge.

Yet Gitta tearfully denies she ever had an affair with Mengele. She claims he “satisfied his sexual desires by having brief affairs with almost every young female farmhand we hired.”34 But Gitta’s assertion that Mengele’s only sexual outlet was with local farm girls is contradicted by an episode recalled by Wolfram Bossert:

On one of my visits to the villa, I saw that a few girls had been invited to celebrate the coffee harvest, and one of them was a very pretty morena—that is to say, a dark girl. And Gerhard teased him [Mengele] later, saying that he had, surely, had a fling with her. Mengele got very cross and replied that he, as a race scientist, would never have an affair with a colored woman. You see, that’s how persistent and stubborn he was in pursuing his course. Once he had made up his mind on something, he would pursue the matter without compromise.35

Despite Gitta’s denials, the evidence is that Mengele and Gitta had an affair, which lasted until 1974, when she lost interest, according to Bossert, during her menopause.

Satisfactory though the carnal side of life might have been, Mengele’s prospects for a more fulfilling lifestyle looked distinctly dim. On June 1, 1962, he learned that his colleague Adolf Eichmann had been hanged at Israel’s Ramale jail. Most of Mengele’s invective was directed at postwar Germany, which he saw as the real villain in Eichmann’s fate:

The event which I learned of days later didn’t surprise me, but I was deeply affected. One is tempted to draw comparisons, then one drops it again because one is startled by the reality of the path of history over the last 2000 years. His people have betrayed him miserably. As a human this has been the most difficult and upsetting part. Herein lies the core of the problem of the case! One day the German people will be very ashamed of themselves! Otherwise they will never feel shame.36

Determined that Eichmann’s fate should not befall him, Mengele became obsessed with his own security. Whenever Mengele went for a walk he took a large number of dogs with him. “He had about fifteen strays,” Ferdinando Beletatti, the ex-farmhand, said, “but he never went far from the farm.” Beletatti was also ordered to build an eighteen-foot wooden watchtower. When he asked Gitta Stammer why, she said that she and her husband wanted it for bird-watching, but he never saw them use it. The construction was fastidiously supervised by Mengele. “He was very abrupt,” said Beletatti. “He spoke to me only when he was giving me orders on how to build it.”

For hours on end Mengele scanned the countryside from the watchtower. Perched on top of a hill, the farm afforded him a perfect view of the surrounding fields and dirt tracks. He also had a clear sight of Lindonia, the nearest town, five miles away. There were no guns, no dogs or electrified fences, no praetorian guard—just a middle-aged man with a pair of binoculars anxiously surveying the scene. “A lot of people find it strange that Mengele managed to survive for so long without the aid of an organization or security,” said Wolfram Bossert, who became one of Mengele’s few friends. “I think he managed that exactly because he had no security apparatus.”37

Mengele’s obsession with security weighed on his mind and cast him into deep depressions. At such times, he believed his capture was inevitable, as his diary showed: “Out of the beautiful house of our ideal plans, one stone after the other breaks down, and the final collapse comes nearer and nearer.” He even dreamed of death: “Occasionally, I dream of a double-headed guillotine.”

Yet Mengele need not have worried. Certainly by the summer of 1962, he had fooled the West Germans, who thought he was probably still in Paraguay. On August 11 the ambassador in Asunción, Eckart Briest, formally requested Mengele’s extradition. In November Judge Vincente Ricciardi of the Paraguayan Fourth Judicial Court issued a warrant for Mengele’s arrest after the West German embassy said that their information placed “Josef Mengele as either visiting Asunción or in the Alto Parana region.”38 The Paraguayans knew, however, that the bird had already flown. Stroessner himself had actually responded quite helpfully to Briest. According to one reliable source in the interior ministry, Stroessner told the ambassador, “I don’t know about extradition, but I can arrest him.” Stroessner then telephoned the interior minister, Edgar Ynsfran, and ordered that Mengele be arrested. Ynsfran, recalling that he had expedited Mengele’s citizenship at Rudel’s request, telephoned the ex-Luftwaffe ace, who told him, “Forget it, he’s gone to Brazil.” As a precaution, the warrant was issued all the same.39

The warrant put an end to any idea Mengele may have had of using Paraguay as a sanctuary had his luck run out in Brazil. Even his friend Alban Krug was powerless to help. Although Krug was an influential man, he did not have an open door to Stroessner’s palace; in fact he found the president quite intimidating. Once when Krug was summoned to the palace for a friendly chat, he mistakenly felt the atmosphere had relaxed enough for him to tell the president that many people in southern Paraguay felt the government was too remote. He also ventured to say that some of Stroessner’s ministers were “assholes.” When Krug realized he had gone too far, he began to feel uneasy and indicated that he would like to leave. But Stroessner kept him there for hours. Finally, when the president had finished, he walked Krug to the door, put his hand across Krug’s broad back, and warned him, “If these intriguers ever make a revolt against me I will resist until not a stone is left in Asunción.”

Since Stroessner seemed prepared, for the moment anyway, to have Mengele arrested, Krug could not risk giving him shelter, particularly since he was unaware that the president had ruled out extradition.

As for the Israelis, by the end of 1962, their hunt for Mengele had virtually ground to a halt, a casualty of competing priorities in a fast changing world. Once again the survival of Israel was threatened by President Gamal Nasser of Egypt. The cruel irony is that the hunt came to an end just as the Mossad made a spectacular breakthrough—one which in hindsight may well have ended in Mengele’s capture.

* According to papers in the local property registration office, the Stammers never owned the farm at Nova Europa. It was purchased by an Austrian couple, Anton and Edeltraud Wladeger, on May 20, 1953. When it was “sold” by the Stammers to Jorge Miguel Marum in 1962, the deed was transferred directly from the Wladegers, and the Stammers appeared nowhere on the ownership records.

* Rafi Eitan became the subject of headlines in the United States during November 1985, but not for his work on Mengele. Instead, he was identified as the chief of the Israeli intelligence unit that had spied on the United States government. The resulting investigation ended in the arrest of U.S. military officer, Jonathan J. Pollard, and a public apology from Israel.

* The South American press was riddled with sensational but false Mengele stories for the remainder of 1962. The most imaginative claimed that Mengele had been kidnapped by Israeli agents and was on a banana boat steaming for Haifa. The boat docked in Israel in front of a full complement of the press corps. It was filled with exotic fruit but, alas, no Mengele.

* Dieter Mengele, the son of Mengele’s younger brother, Alois, was at that time the only Mengele son living with his father.

† In 1985, when Gitta Stammer was asked if she would again provide shelter to Mengele, knowing what she does now, she said “I think . . . yes . . . politically speaking, in general, we help everybody.”

CHAPTER
9

The Man in the Watchtower

CHAPTER9

The Man in the Watchtower

CHAPTER
9