Braving the intimidating stares of President Stroessner’s secret police, Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld was testing the limits of Paraguayan free speech. “President Stroessner, you lie when you say you don’t know where SS Mengele is,” her banner proclaimed in May 1985. It was unfurled on the steps of the supreme court that had granted Mengele Paraguayan citizenship a quarter of a century before. An hour later, the patience of the police ran out. Mrs. Klarsfeld had attracted a small but resolute band of young opponents of Stroessner’s unsavory regime, and she was told to move on. Back at the Guarani Hotel in Asunción, the management asked Beate Klarsfeld to pack her bags. Disrespect to the aging dictator is not tolerated by the fawning acolytes of his ruling Colorado party.
Throughout her visit, Beate Klarsfeld had been challenged by an indignant presidential spokesman, Anibal Fernandez, and the owner of a pro-government TV station, Simon Bo, to back her allegations about Mengele with proof. Bo accused her of “making a business of hunting Dr. Mengele.” Fernandez said, “She says he is here, but tell us where he is.” Beate Klarsfeld could only respond, “If you think logically, there is nowhere else he could be.”1
Two weeks later, on a brilliant autumn afternoon, Josef Mengele’s bones were exhumed from a weed-covered tomb, his skull held triumphantly aloft for all the world to see. The place was Embu, Brazil, twenty-five miles from Sao Paulo, seven hundred miles east of Asunción.
But the Klarsfelds were not the only casualties of the discovery of the grave at Embu. Simon Wiesenthal, who often claimed to have been a breathless few paces behind Mengele, had also been “one hundred percent sure” he was hiding in Paraguay. For those who have wondered at Wiesenthal’s elevation to a kind of international Sherlock Holmes, his charge was typically absolute. For the Klarsfelds, whose real successes as self-appointed Nazi-hunters are no idle boast, their certitude in this case was an untimely lapse. How, then, did Paraguay endure as part of the Mengele myth? The Klarsfelds and Wiesenthal alone cannot be blamed. They were just part of a stream of bounty hunters and journalists, the authors included, who were certain that somewhere in the darker recesses of the Paraguayan jungle lurked the “Angel of Death.”
President Stroessner himself carries a share of the guilt for a wound to his country’s reputation that was largely self-inflicted. As Beate Klarsfeld pointed out, “If Mengele left, the police must know it; it must be in their files.” Stroessner tried to persuade the world that Mengele had left in 1961 or 1962. Not once did he or his police attempt to find out exactly where Mengele had gone. That his government could have done so through Hans Rudel or Alban Krug is not in doubt. The real question is why no one believed Paraguay’s claim that their most infamous citizen had flown.
The myth was based on fact. Josef Mengele had been in Paraguay, and as the West German chargé d’affaires, Peter Bensch, discovered in 1961, he had become a citizen. Thereafter, the onus was on the government of Paraguay to prove that he was no longer there. It was largely the diplomatic skirmishes between the West Germans and the Paraguayans, and their failure to resolve the mystery of Mengele’s whereabouts, that allowed fiction to develop out of fact.
Certainly for most of the 1960s and much of the 1970s, the West German government led everyone to believe that Mengele was likely to be in Paraguay.* As early as 1963, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, in one of his last major decisions in office, offered President Stroessner 10 million deutschemarks, about 
2.5 million, to extradite Mengele. Eckart Briest, the West German ambassador in Asunción, was told that Adenauer’s offer would not be accepted. The suspicion lingered, therefore, not just that Mengele was in the country but that he was being actively protected by the top echelons of the government.2
On February 7, 1964, several months after the Adenauer offer had been rebuffed, the foreign ministry in Bonn issued the following statement:
We can confirm that Mengele is in fact a citizen of Paraguay. He has obtained an identification card and citizenship in Paraguay. The Paraguayan Division of Investigations issued Mengele’s file 425.0066 in 1959. That file says that Mengele first visited Paraguay in 1959. The identification document given him in 1959 was 293.348 and on November 27, 1959, citizenship number 809 was issued by the supreme court and signed by Werner Jung and Alejandro von Eckstein.
In the early part of the 1960s, he was often in the south of the country in the frontier of Argentina and Brazil. He later came to Asunción and stayed at the “Astra” boarding house under the name “Peter Fast.”
At this time he is in the triangle of three countries and may even be in Brazil.3
The statement drew an immediate rebuttal from Paraguayan interior minister Edgar Ynsfran. Smoothly fielding questions at a press conference, the British-trained lawyer noncommittally offered only that Mengele was “not in Paraguay at this time.”
For all the ambiguity in the German statement, they clearly believed Mengele was in Paraguay. The following day, Ambassador Briest met with President Stroessner in order to make one final attempt to secure some Paraguayan assistance in the Mengele hunt. In Bonn’s statement, the Germans had quoted the Paraguayan government’s own police file on Mengele as saying he had entered the country in 1959. That was wrong, of course, since Mengele’s first visit was in 1951. But Briest now sought to use this factual error as a reason for Stroessner withdrawing Mengele’s citizenship. Briest based his argument on the Paraguayan requirement that an applicant for citizenship reside in the country for five consecutive years prior to filing the application. Briest told Stroessner that since the Paraguayan police file listed Mengele’s entry as 1959, it was impossible that he had satisfied the five-year residency requirement for the citizenship granted in November 1959. His citizenship could be revoked, therefore, because it was granted on the basis of a false declaration. Once the citizenship hurdle was out of the way, Briest argued, Mengele could be extradited.
This time the president did not equivocate. Clearly Bonn had not believed his government’s numerous denials that Mengele was still on Paraguayan soil. Stroessner took this persistent skepticism as an attack on his personal integrity. He began to bang the table and raise his voice. “Once a Paraguayan, always a Paraguayan,” he thundered at Briest, who was warned that if he pursued the matter he would be declared persona non grata.4
The president’s tantrum had only one effect; it heightened the suspicion that Mengele was indeed in Paraguay, with Stroessner’s tacit approval. The absurdity was that for Stroessner the issue had little to do with the question of whether he was conniving with one of the twentieth century’s most evil men. It had everything to do with the sanctity of Paraguayan citizenship, which a close ally had dared to question. By such strange axioms did the president rule.
Following Ambassador Briest’s humiliating slap-down, the West German judicial authorities toughened their approach. In July 1964, Fritz Bauer, the indefatigable chief prosecutor for the state of Hesse, who was responsible for the Mengele case, raised the reward for his capture from 20,000 to 50,000 deutschemarks, the equivalent of 12,500.5 Much to the consternation of the West German foreign office, Bauer fired the opening shots in what became a war of words with Paraguay. Bauer’s secret dealing with the Israelis during the Eichmann case had shown that he was not a man to sit on the fence. This time, he went public.
Bauer charged that Mengele spent much of his time in Paraguay under his own name, visited Asunción, had a great deal of money and important friends, and freely visited southern Paraguay and a Paraguayan Indian reservation as well as Brazil. But Bauer had scrapped together just fragments of the truth. His information was long out of date. Yet in a truth contest between a senior and respected judicial figure like Fritz Bauer and the interior minister of a government that resembled a bargain-basement version of Benito Mussolini’s regime, Bauer was always going to win. Edgar Ynsfran’s response two days later—that Mengele was “definitely not in Paraguay but either in Brazil or Peru”—was greeted with contempt.
The storm that Ynsfran provoked broke in the midst of the long-running trial in Frankfurt of SS personnel from Auschwitz. Twenty-one officers, doctors, and guards had been in the dock since December 1963. Gruesome details had emerged about how clerks worked night and day, in shifts at seven typewriters, to make out death reports of prisoners selected by doctors to die in the gas chambers. One name that kept cropping up, and was made most notable by his absence, was that of Josef Mengele. Back came the chilling reminders of his satanic gaze at the railhead ramp. “His thumbs were in his pistol belt,” said one witness, Dr. Ella Lingens. “I also remember Dr. König, and to his credit I must say he always got drunk beforehand, as did Dr. Rhode. Mengele didn’t; he didn’t have to, he did it sober.”6
The trial itself was covered extensively by the press. Hundreds of witnesses were called, and twenty prosecutors and forty-five defense lawyers were involved. Now Bauer instructed his chief prosecutor, Hans Kuegler, to go on the offensive against the Paraguayan government. Bauer’s anger had been provoked by the Paraguayan claim that Mengele was in Peru. Bauer regarded this as a deliberate lie, based on a public-relations fiasco committed by the Lima government just the previous month. The Peruvian minister of government and police, Dr. Juan Languasco Dehabich, had said at a press conference that Mengele had been captured in a straw hut in the Peruvian jungles. His remark had sent newspaper reporters scurrying to Lima from all over the world. On the basis of this report, Bauer himself had asked Bonn to immediately process an extradition request to the Peruvians. The day following the announcement of the Mengele “arrest,” the Peruvian government said the minister had been wrong. An official statement claimed that he had thought a reporter was asking about the arrest of a communist agitator named David Livingstone Penn, not Mengele, and it had all been a “momentous misunderstanding.”
What had so angered Bauer was his belief that the Paraguayans had prompted the confusion in Peru. Bauer was convinced that the Paraguayans knew Mengele was not in Peru, and that Paraguayan interior minister Ynsfran had issued a public statement placing him in that country in the hope of taking the spotlight off Paraguay. Coupled with the genuine blunder of the Peruvian government regarding the Mengele “arrest,” it had been a cheap but effective ploy by the Paraguayans. Bauer did not want them to get off the hook so easily. The Frankfurt trial prosecutor, Hans Kuegler, did not mince words:
Paraguay is protecting Mengele. We are convinced the protection comes from the highest spheres of the Paraguayan government.7
The gloves were off. No statement could have been more precise, more deliberate, more provocative. Three days later, Bauer pursued the matter by calling a press conference to provide evidence for Kuegler’s claim.* He announced that he was in possession of “absolutely reliable” information that a Paraguayan of German descent, Werner Jung, had co-sponsored Mengele’s citizenship in 1959. He also claimed that the Paraguayans had adopted a new tactic:
Paraguay is now saying that the Paraguayan citizen José Mengele is not Josef Mengele, the wanted fugitive. But it does not sound as though Paraguay is serious in any effort to find Mengele. Interested parties are protecting him.8
This time the Paraguayan government did not respond. It was left to Ezequiel Gonzalez Alsina, editor-in-chief of Stroessner’s Colorado party newspaper, Patria, to tell a group of foreign correspondents that Bauer was “talking garbage.”9 Bauer had certainly got it wrong, well-intentioned though he was. But Ynsfran’s head-in-the-sand attitude, offering no proof, responding to the attacks with diplomatic grunts, and smearing Peru, led to Paraguay’s defeat in the public-relations battle. Most newspapers now firmly believed that Mengele was being hidden in Paraguay because that was what the West German chief prosecutor believed. What the German foreign office believed is not clear, although it was uniquely placed to find out from its embassy in Asunción. Their staff occasionally met Asunción’s seedy clutch of neo-Nazis, who had fastened on to the cocktail party circuit. It would not have been difficult to have gleaned some information from them.
Chastened by Stroessner’s attack on Ambassador Briest, the embassy was in fact adopting a very rigid stance. A speculative article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, in August 1964, claimed that Mengele had been seen recently in Paraguay. The article prompted the German embassy to ask the Paraguayans if this was so. On September 23, the Paraguayan government issued a statement saying that not only was Mengele not in Paraguay but that “he departed four years ago.” Although the statement was true, repeated angry and defensive rebuttals, with no evidence that they were prepared to help in the search for Mengele, had almost exhausted Paraguay’s credibility. President Stroessner had become his own worst enemy.10
The Spiegel article also drew an angry letter from Hans Rudel, who was described in it as one of Mengele’s closest friends. The article claimed the two men had recently been on a drinking spree and that Rudel also knew Alban Krug. Mengele, Rudel, and Krug were indeed friends, but the drinking spree was an unlikely event since Rudel was a teetotaler. Of course Rudel denied any knowledge of Krug, to whom he had introduced Mengele. Of more interest was the way he publicly disowned his friend, saying that the suggestion of the relationship was “libelous”:*
Both Mengele and myself lived in former years in South America and that is where I know him from. We were part of the German colonial community and participated in their events. Since then I have had no contacts with Mengele. I was not a friend of his, nor have I ever gone on a drinking spree with him, especially not two or three months ago. My last business trip to South America was in April of this year. I neither saw Mengele nor did I speak to him. I don’t know any farmer by the name of Krug and I never spent any time with him in his hunting lodge. I am asking you to print this correction and I would jappreciate if you would let me know your sources for those libelous stories about me.11
Six days after the Paraguayan announcement that Mengele had not lived in the country since I960, the West German justice minister, Ewald Bucher, wondered aloud if the solution to Stroessner’s intransigence might not be another Eichmann-style kidnapping. There could be no clearer message that Bonn believed Mengele to be hiding with presidential blessing. Bucher told the Haifa Nazi Crimes Documentation Center that his government could never contemplate such action, but perhaps the Israelis should. Behind Bucher’s remark lay an undeniable truth. Again and again, the record showed that information trickling through to Bonn was out of date and poorly researched. It was a deficiency that could be remedied by a full-time team of agents, such as the Israelis had deployed in the early 1960s and then abandoned.
But the Germans did not seriously consider extralegal methods of bringing Mengele to justice. Instead they pursued the case within the confines of their legal system. In an effort to make a breakthrough, the West German prosecutors applied to the courts for a search warrant to inspect the house of Hans Sedlmeier, Mengele’s longtime friend and family company executive. Fritz Bauer was convinced that if anyone in Germany maintained contact with the fugitive doctor, it was Sedlmeier. Simon Wiesenthal was also convinced that Sedlmeier was a key figure in the Mengele case, and he informed the German prosecutors of his suspicion in a 1964 letter. Their hunches were right. Not only was Sedlmeier the family courier for South American visits to Mengele, but he was also the “post office” for receipt of dozens of Mengele letters. However, when West German police agents burst into Sedlmeier’s home in mid-1964, they did not find one scrap of incriminating evidence.* According to Rolf Mengele, unknown to Fritz Bauer and the federal police, Sedlmeier had a high-ranking contact in the local police who warned him of the impending raid. Sedlmeier received a telephone call from his police friend and was told: “We are coming to search your house, make sure we do not find anything.” Sedlmeier had plenty of time to ensure that all relevant documents were removed. If there had not been police collusion with Sedlmeier, the Mengele case might very well have been over in 1964, and Mengele would have joined the ranks of defendants at the Frankfurt trial.
The abortive raid on Sedlmeier’s house was not publicly disclosed. Yet the Mengele case continued to maintain a high profile in West Germany, based in part on the deep mistrust of Paraguay’s public responses and in part on the publicity surrounding the Auschwitz trial. It was not a climate much given to sympathy for Mengele’s estranged wife, Martha, when she appealed against the decision by the universities of Frankfurt and Munich to strip Mengele of his medicine and anthropology degrees. In early 1964, Frankfurt University had publicly invited Mengele to come and defend himself against charges that he had violated the principles of the Hippocratic oath, an invitation he declined. Instead, Martha employed Dr. Hans Laternser, one of the defense lawyers at the Auschwitz trial, to act on Mengele’s behalf. Laternser claimed that the 1959 indictment against Mengele contained untried allegations, and that some other wartime doctors convicted of experimentation crimes had not forfeited their degrees. But the rectors of Frankfurt and Munich were not impressed. They rescinded his degrees “because of the crimes he committed as a doctor in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.”
As a foretaste of what might happen were Mengele ever brought to trial, the rectors’ judgment did not bode well. Having read the seventy-five pages of witnesses’ statements, they found the testimony credible enough to pronounce Mengele guilty.12 But most wounding to him must have been the unspoken judgment that academically his work had been devoid of any real scientific merit. Achieving academic status had always been Mengele’s driving ambition. The title “doctor” was important to him, as he showed later when he wrote to Rolf urging him to reconsider his decision not to take his doctorate in law:
From all the arguments you had concerning your intention not to get that doctorate level, I accept the one that says that you lack interest and diligence and hard work. I can’t find the right word to express myself . . . anyway, it has affected me badly. Getting the doctorate was actually the only desire which I asked of you in your whole life.13
Back in Asunción, meanwhile, Paraguayan credibility was dealt a mortal blow with the arrest of Detlev Sonnenberg, a former SS officer living in Zarzedo, Brazil. He told the police he had seen Mengele several times, the latest being in Paraguay in late 1965. Sonnenberg claimed that Mengele was then practicing medicine. While there was no doubt that Sonnenberg’s credibility was suspect—he was given to boasting of his contacts with wanted Nazis—the response by Paraguay’s interior minister, Edgar Ynsfran, was breathtaking. Having denied that Mengele was in Paraguay, Ynsfran then asserted that he did not even have Paraguayan citizenship.14
One of the few triumphs the West Germans could boast in their hunt for Mengele was a copy of his Paraguayan citizenship paper. Ynsfran’s remark was a blatant lie. It gave the West Germans and the press a wholly distorted view of the Paraguayan connection with Mengele, but one which the Paraguayans’ dissembling entitled them to hold.
When Hubert Krier succeeded Eckart Briest as ambassador in 1965, Bonn had given up trying to exert any more pressure on Paraguay. Krier said:
Before my departure I was given instructions not to do anything concerning the Mengele affair. I was given no explanation for this. An explanation for these instructions was later given to me in Paraguay by the secretary of state. On a visit, he told me that they had come to the conclusion that to demand the extradition of a Paraguayan citizen would be grotesque and senseless. It made sense. Mengele was a Paraguayan citizen and in the government’s opinion and my opinion it broke an unwritten international law, namely that a strong state should not demand of a weaker state that it extradite one of its own citizens.15
Krier certainly seems to have held to that advice. He adopted a most gentlemanly attitude when he made one inquiry about Mengele at a reception. As Alejandro von Eckstein, who co-sponsored Mengele’s Paraguayan citizenship, recalled:
The ambassador approached me and asked me if I could come by and have a word with him. I said, “Of course, I would be delighted.” I was a captain in the reserves then. And I went by and he wanted to talk to me about Dr. Mengele, and I told him that Dr. Mengele had left and I had not heard any more from him since he left. He said, “Excuse me, I’m just carrying out orders from Bonn. Excuse me.” We shook hands and that was it.16
West Germany’s decaying image as a country making amends for its Nazi past suffered another setback on June 30, 1968, with the untimely death of Fritz Bauer, the only man in the country’s judiciary who had consistently pursued Mengele. Bauer’s tendency to overreact in his public pronouncements had significantly influenced the Paraguayans to excessively defend the integrity of their president. The truth was a casualty lying somewhere in between. Nonetheless, as the New York Times recorded in Bauer’s obituary, he was a man who had “achieved international recognition for his work to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.”17
Amidst the confusion as to exactly where Mengele was, only one country knew for certain, and that was Israel. According to a senior Mossad man, they had received reports that Mengele was in Brazil. But the Mossad kept this information to itself. The Six Day War in 1967 had confirmed the view of General Meir Amit, chief of the Mossad, that resources had to be concentrated on the Arab threat. There appeared to be no justification for funding a special task force to review the leads developed by Harel’s agents in the early 1960s. In the wake of the war, Israel also underwent a major shift in foreign policy. Jerusalem decided to open an embassy in Asunción. It would have been an ideal base from which to pursue the Mengele hunt clandestinely. But Benjamin Weiser Varon, ambassador from 1968 to 1972, had a much more straightforward mission: “I was sent there to create friends and influence people,” he said.
The decision to open an embassy in Asunción was taken soon after January 1,1968, when tiny Paraguay assumed disproportionate power on the world diplomatic stage by becoming one of two Latin American countries in the UN Security Council. In Varon’s view the Council had been a “kangaroo court against Israel for far too long.” His special task was to persuade Paraguay to “join a small minority that occasionally still cast a vote for Israel.” Hardly a week passed without Varon asking the Paraguayan foreign minister, Dr. Raul Sapena Pastor, for a vote in Israel’s favor at the UN. Raising the subject of Mengele was not likely to assist that goal. Thus, on his appointment Varon was “not given any instructions by the foreign office on Mengele of any kind. It wasn’t even mentioned.”18
Nor was Varon told that the Mossad had had teams in Paraguay and Brazil from I960 to 1962, or that Harel had considered a commando raid on a Paraguayan farmhouse. Indeed, Varon heard of this only after he left office, when Granada Television screened a special World in Action program on Mengele, researched by John Ware, in November 1978:
It was strange that I had to learn all this from the script of the program which Granada sent me after the docu-drama [sic] was shown in England. It proved that it had not been deemed wise to burden me with that knowledge when I set out on my mission in Paraguay. It also proved that Israel’s secret service acts in complete independence of the foreign ministry. On the other hand, Harel’s revelations coincided with conclusions that I had reached on my own.19
The autocracy of the Mossad aside, Jerusalem had one other good reason for not mentioning the issue to Varon: they knew that Mengele was living in Brazil. But the effect of the diplomatic furor between Asunción and Bonn—in which presidential protection of Mengele had become part of the mythology—soon made its presence felt, according to Varon:
I was standing with my family at the Buenos Aires airport en route to Paraguay. We met a young Jewish woman and her husband. She introduced us to his father, who was puzzled that Paraguay with its tiny Jewish community rated an Israeli ambassador. Suddenly he had an illumination: “I know why you’re going there,” he said with a wink, and as I stared at him incomprehensively he whispered into my ear, “Dr. M.” Strangely enough, I understood at once.20
Varon himself became a victim of the mythology. “Was Mengele really in Paraguay while I was serving there?” he later wrote. “I couldn’t have the slightest doubt about it.”21 What really persuaded Varon of this, he said, was the reaction of the government to the plethora of newspaper allegations that Mengele was there. The subject was raised with Varon on several occasions by the foreign minister, Dr. Sapena Pastor, at the request of President Stroessner. But Pastor always stopped short of denying that Mengele was in the country, a sign that Varon, with the notion of Mengele’s presence now deeply embedded in his subconscious, took to mean that “he really had at that time one of his homes in Paraguay.”22
The Paraguayan foreign minister once asked Varon about the source of the Mengele stories and what he could do about them. Many of these stories emanated from Tuvia Friedman, who ran a Nazi crimes documentation center in Haifa, Israel. As Varon explained, the minister was theoretically entitled to his “quid pro quo because of Paraguay’s support in the UN.” Varon’s task was to persuade him there was genuinely nothing he could do:
I said, “I hope you will understand the handicaps of a democratic regime. It is utterly beside the point that from government to government the relations between our two countries could be no better. You can believe me that Paraguay’s gallant stand at the United Nations is fully appreciated. But we have a free press; it may say whatever it likes. If tomorrow one of our papers were to say that Mr. Eshkol [then Israel’s Prime Minister] is a scoundrel and that Mrs. [Golda] Meir is a fool, nothing could be done about it. Now in Israel there are half a million survivors of the Holocaust. For you, Señor Canciller, the existence of Dr. Mengele may be a nuisance. For these half million survivors it’s an outrage, a provocation, an abomination. There is absolutely no way to silence Mr. Friedman.”23
Varon’s belief that Mengele was in Paraguay was further confirmed when Dr. Pastor seemed to hint that he could not solve the Mengele question alone and that perhaps it would best be dealt with by Israeli commandos. Varon interpreted that to mean that Mengele was hiding within the country’s borders, but that the matter was out of Pastor’s personal control:
Possibly it was an intimation of Sapena Pastor’s feelings—“Take him away, take him away out of our hands.” But he did not speak for the president. And in Paraguay, President Stroessner has the first and the last word.24
Although Varon was not privy to the policy of General Amit’s Mossad, he did experience firsthand one of the reasons the Mossad had placed other priorities over hunting Nazis. On May 2, 1970, two PLO gunmen charged into his embassy and began shooting wildly. Four Israeli officials were wounded and one was killed. When the terrorists finally reached the ambassador’s office, they kicked open the door and aimed at Varon’s head. Mercifully for him, all he heard was the click of the gun. Both gunmen had exhausted their bullets. Before they could reload, the Paraguayan police arrived and arrested them. Embarrassed that a diplomatic mission, especially one so newly established, should have been violated on its own soil, Paraguay sentenced the PLO men to fifteen years at hard labor.
In the absence of a “Mengele policy,” Varon developed a standard answer to the tips that came in to the embassy about his latest hideout: the Israeli government was not searching for Mengele; the Federal Republic of Germany was. Thus did Varon tell each informant that the appropriate recipient of their information was the West German embassy. “I must confess, I was not so eager to find Mengele,” Varon said. “He presented a dilemma. Israel had less of a claim for his extradition than Germany. He was after all a German citizen who had committed his crimes in the name of the Third Reich. None of his victims was Israeli—Israel came into existence only several years later.”25
Varon’s rationale seems heretical in view of the serious, frenzied search for Mengele that began fifteen years later, in 1985, as a last and desperate attempt by West Germany and Israel, at the behest of the United States, to salvage their collective consciences. As the world now knows, they were six years too late.
But into this fifteen-year vacuum, created by Israel’s abandonment of the hunt and West Germany’s conclusion that it could not locate nor extradite Mengele, jumped the self-appointed Nazi-hunters. The tragedy was that, laudable though their intentions were, their judgment became clouded by their need for publicity. By working to sustain the interest in their search, they inadvertently kept the spotlight on the wrong country—Paraguay.
* Indisputably, most amateur hunters looked in Paraguay most of the time. But there was police activity in neighboring countries too. In 1964 the Argentine federal police burst into a jungle compound in the north of the country and arrested an eccentric seventy-one-year-old Hungarian doctor on suspicion that he was Mengele. In Brazil, press reports circulated that an Israeli agent close on Mengele’s heels had been killed. And in Rio de Janeiro, a former Auschwitz inmate fainted when she saw a man she thought was Mengele. Nonetheless, Paraguay continued to be the focus of the hunt.
* In the midst of this diplomatic flap between Paraguay and West Germany a reporter for the magazine Bild Zeitung visited Günzburg to write about Mengele’s hometown. On July 8 he was beaten unconscious by a group of youths. No arrests were made.
* Mengele’s private correspondence, in fact, showed that he and Rudel maintained contact for the rest of their lives. Rudel even intended to visit Mengele in 1978, but had to postpone the trip due to medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic in the United States.
* On May 31, 1985, West German federal police raided Sedlmeier’s house and discovered letters from Mengele, which led directly to the South American protectors and the grave in Brazil. According to Rolf, the 1985 raid was successful because not only had Sedlmeier’s local police contact retired but the Mengele case had gone so high in the federal government hierarchy that the local police could no longer interfere.