Josef Mengele was a regular visitor to the best restaurants in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital. Naturally, he also visited the German Club—his black Mercedes 280SL regally sweeping up and armed guards jumping out, anxiously surveying the scene. One evening he made a spectacle of himself by slamming his pistol on the bar.1
To most people the source for this colorful story was a credible one. It was Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter from Vienna, a familiar figure on TV screens. The evidence had come from his network of informants who were said to be scattered around the globe.
Wiesenthal would often claim that his informants had “seen” Mengele. Sometimes they had “just missed” Mengele. One of the closest shaves, according to Wiesenthal, had occurred in the summer of I960, when Mengele was seeking refuge in Egypt. Concerned for his international image, President Nasser barred Mengele’s entry, and the doctor was taken by a former SS Obersturmführer Schrawz on a chartered yacht, together with his wife, Martha, to the tiny Greek island of Kythnos. “I was about to leave for Jerusalem to attend the Eichmann trial,” Wiesenthal wrote in his book about his sleuthing exploits:*
If I notified the Greek authorities through international channels, several weeks would be lost. This time, as I often had in the past, I chose a non-routine approach. I called up the editor of a large illustrated magazine in Germany with whom I had cooperated before. The magazine wanted the story. I wanted the man.2
Two days later, said Wiesenthal, a reporter from the magazine arrived by boat and was told by the owner of the island’s only inn that a “German and his wife left yesterday. A white yacht came into the harbor. The German and his wife went aboard and the yacht left again, heading west.”3 The reporter showed the owner a batch of photographs. “Without hesitation, the innkeeper picked a picture of Mengele. Two monks who happened to come in also agreed that this man had been there only yesterday.
“We had lost another round.”
Wiesenthal did hire a magazine reporter. His name was Ottmar Katz. But according to Katz, the rest of Wiesenthal’s story was fiction from beginning to end:
I got the OK from my editor after Wiesenthal asked us by letter to check. Not a single detail in the letter was correct. I spent four or five days on Kythnos. Mengele was certainly not there. There was no monastery. I spent two days with the local justice of the peace, who was strongly anti-Nazi, and we inspected the register of the only hotel, and the only name we thought that was worth checking we discovered belonged to a Munich schoolteacher. I did explain to Wiesenthal that it was all wrong and then seven years later I read his book and he said we’d missed Mengele by a few hours.4
In 1967 Wiesenthal claimed to have traced Mengele’s movements “quite exactly.” At various times he boasted of tracking him to Peru, to Chile, to Brazil, to military installations in Paraguay, always a few paces behind. Mengele was a “millionaire,” a “doctor”; he was “surrounded by comforts . . . moreover he lives very close to where Martin Bormann lives.” In 1978 a typical Wiesenthal bulletin on his hunt for Mengele read:
Mengele is living in Paraguay, where he is protected by the local junta, which is dominated by ethnic Germans. Mengele is Number One on our wanted list. Although his observation in Paraguay and the monitoring of his occasional trips abroad has cost us a lot of money, we have continued our activities against this arch criminal through 1977 and will continue to do so in the future.5
The extraordinary thing is that the myth of Wiesenthal’s hunt remained intact even after Mengele’s body was discovered. He told reporters that it was he who had tipped off the West Germans and persuaded them to raid the Günzburg home of Hans Sedlmeier, where coded letters giving Mengele’s Brazilian address were found. In fact, the breakthrough came from a university professor in whom Sedlmeier had confided his relationship with Mengele. The few—like Benjamin Varon, former Israeli ambassador to Paraguay—who dared to challenge Wiesenthal’s role as the world’s preeminent Nazi-hunter have been savaged by his supporters at the influential Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Gerald Margolis and Martin Mendelsohn, counsel to the Wiesenthal Center, complained about this statement by Varon:
He [Mengele] would be a prize catch for any Nazi-hunter. But no one has specialized in him. Simon Wiesenthal makes periodic statements that he is about to catch him, perhaps since Wiesenthal must raise funds for his activities and the name Mengele is always good for a plug.6
Varon’s observations drew an intemperate blast from Messrs. Margolis and Mendelsohn:
To denigrate Wiesenthal’s efforts, as Varon does, is to defame a man who has Successfully brought to justice 1,100 Nazi war criminals; a man who embarked on his sacred mission in 1945, unlike some recent arrivals who have embarked with much passion and fury and scant results in the 1980s.7
Varon’s response to them went to the very heart of the matter: money.
Sometimes in the seventies Wiesenthal confided to me in Boston that it was not at all easy to keep his outfit in Vienna going. [There was as yet none in Los Angeles.] He said that his lecture fees and the contributions of some 17,000 Dutch Gentiles went into it. I recounted in my article that Wiesenthal maintained for several years a steady flow of statements about Mengele sightings in different countries. He said in 1980: “Now I cannot say where he is, but . . . I am much closer to catching him than I was a year ago.” In 1982 he offered a 
100,000 reward for information leading to Mengele’s arrest and claimed that because of the reward “even his bodyguards would sell him out.” It is 1984, and none of these predictions have come true. Wiesenthal must be fully aware that just finding Mengele does not equal “catching” him. And how opportune is it to warn him every few months that he is about to be “caught”? On the other hand an award of 100,000, which is in no danger of ever having to be paid out, is subtle inducement for contributing to the Simon Wiesenthal Center: who wouldn’t gladly part with some money for the prospect of catching a genocidal monster?8
Margolis and Mendelsohn accused Varon of “profaning what is profound and trivializing the Holocaust”; Varon replied that the Holocaust was “no one’s private property and should not be invoked in vain.” It was an unseemly row, provoked by a man who avoided pursuing Mengele leads in South America while he was uniquely placed to do so as the Israeli ambassador. But Varon had raised an essential truth. As a survivor of several concentration camps, Wiesenthal’s sincerity was never in doubt. It was financial constraints and a knack of playing to the gallery that ultimately compromised his credibility. The truth is that for many years Wiesenthal’s Mengele file at his Vienna office had been a potpourri of information, which as the London Times said, “only sustained his self-confirmatory myths and gave scant satisfaction to those who apparently needed a definite answer to Mengele’s fate.”9
What no one can take from Wiesenthal is his missionary zeal, his success in ensuring that many people and some reluctant governments pursued Nazis when they would have preferred to forget. One must ask: if not Wiesenthal, who else would have performed that role? He really was the public conscience of the Holocaust when few others seemed to care. It was largely on Wiesenthal’s self-image of a tireless, dogged sleuth, pitted against the omnipotent and sinister might of Mengele and a vast Nazi network, that two full-length Hollywood films were made. Both Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil were box-office hits. They played an important part in keeping Mengele at the forefront of the public’s mind, an easily identifiable symbol of the Allies’ betrayed pledge to pursue Nazis wherever they fled. But these movies also created a mood of despair: Mengele was simply too powerful, he was too clever, he was “bionic,” he would never be caught. And yet . . . he was here, he was there, he was everywhere, said Wiesenthal. He had been seen: he really could be found.
Wiesenthal’s information was right on target sometimes, as when he pinpointed Hans Sedlmeier as a key figure in the Mengele conspiracy, as early as 1964. But often Wiesenthal’s pronouncements raised the public’s expectations, only to dash their hopes each time. But he was not alone. Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, in Paris, once claimed that Mengele was within their grasp. Tuvia Friedman, in Haifa, said his network of informants “provided definite and precise information by which to identify him [Mengele].”10*
And there were many others, quite independent of the full-time Nazi-hunters, who claimed to have seen Mengele. They seem to fall into three categories. The first consists of those people who were thirsting for what American artist Andy Warhol once called “the fifteen minutes of fame to which everyone is entitled in their lives.” The second category was made up of Fascists who got a sick satisfaction from disseminating false information to throw legitimate hunters off the track. This role was best exemplified by Wolfram Bossert, Mengele’s protector in Brazil for the last four years of his life. When Bossert wrote to the Günzburg clan informing them of Mengele’s death in 1979, he suggested that it should not be announced so that “the opposing side waste time and money.” The third category of Mengele “witnesses” were those who reported in all good faith that they had caught a glimpse of the world’s most elusive Nazi criminal.
Sonia Tauber, a survivor from Auschwitz-Birkenau, was a witness whose sincerity was not in doubt. She claimed she saw Mengele in April 1965, when he walked into her jewelry shop in the Casa Inolvidable in Asunción. She said she was paralyzed when she realized that the customer browsing through her showcase diamonds was the man who had spared her life with one flick of his thumb. Her husband said she ran to the back of the shop, ashen, and stammered: “Mengele, that was Mengele.”11
Even before the Israeli embassy had opened in Asunción, Ambassador Varon was swamped with Mengele sightings:
I was not yet installed in Asunción when a Paraguayan asked to be received. I let him come up to our hotel suite. He acted mysterious, lowered his voice, and said, “I know where you can find Dr. Mengele.” I did not know how to react. I suspected the man had mercenary motives and did not encourage him to go on. He assured me he was not out for the money, he just wanted to see justice done. He described a setting near the Brazilian border, where behind a wire fence surrounding his hideout, I would be able to see the doctor take his daily walk. I thanked my informer and took his name.
Any temptation to take the tips I received seriously was dispelled as soon as the embassy offices were inaugurated. Hardly a week passed without somebody dropping by to offer me news of Mengele’s whereabouts. The visitors were old and young, simple and educated, idealists and bounty hunters. But strangely enough, and no matter how sincere many of these informants were, no two tips I received during all these years coincided. Mengele seemed ubiquitous. He was in the north, east, and west. He was an army doctor, a farmer, a cobbler, an idler.12
Another witness whose sincerity was not in doubt was William Orbello, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel assigned to the American embassy in Asunción. Orbello said that on a visit to the Guarani Hotel in 1969, the Paraguayan army officer accompanying him pointed out Mengele:
My Paraguayan colleague pointed to this man of dapper appearance wearing a dark gray suit and with close-cropped hair. He told me that it was Mengele. I had no personal knowledge that it was Mengele, but I had no reason to doubt my colleague’s word.13
Sightings like those reported by Tauber and Orbello came from witnesses who genuinely thought they had seen Mengele. Almost certainly they had not. Mengele’s diaries, autobiography, and letters to his family describe his short excursions during the 1960s and 1970s. The overwhelming evidence is that Mengele never risked a venture into Paraguay after late I960. None of the Mengele sightings reported over the years coincides with a place and time where Mengele is now known to have been. Such sightings, although well-intentioned, mainly served to pinpoint Paraguay, the wrong country, as Mengele’s refuge.
Unlike those witnesses who genuinely thought they had seen Mengele, there were many others whose reports served to perpetuate the Wiesenthal fantasy of a fugitive who was armed, dangerous, and wielded presidential power. One imaginative example followed the violent death, in February 1965, of another Nazi on the run in South America, Herbert Cukurs. Cukurs had been a notoriously cruel SS officer, who supervised massacres at the Riga concentration camp from horseback. His battered body was found in a derelict house in Montevideo, Uruguay. He had been savagely bludgeoned to death by a group claiming to be Jewish avengers, as a cable from Bonn to a Montevideo newspaper announced:
Herbert Cukurs, the executioner of thousands of Jews in Riga, was murdered two days ago in Uruguay by THOSE WHO CANNOT FORGET. His body lies in a trunk in an abandoned house in Colombia Street near Carrasco.14
The Brazilian police became involved in the investigation because Cukurs had traveled to Montevideo from his home in São Paulo shortly before his death. At first they speculated that Cukurs may have been murdered by a group of fellow Nazi fugitives, whom Cukurs, having financial troubles, was preparing to sell out for a reward. But the police soon ruled this out when evidence of Jewish involvement came to light. However, years later, nationally syndicated Washington columnist Jack Anderson resurrected the Nazi reward story. Anderson claimed the fugitive Cukurs was about to betray Mengele himself:
Cukurs tried to make a deal with the Jewish underground after I published his whereabouts. In return for his own safety, plus 100,000 in cash, he offered to lead them to Mengele. . . . Mengele clearly was the bigger catch.
Cukurs informed the Jewish agents that Mengele was hiding out in Paraguay across the Parana River from the small Argentine town of Eldorado. . . . He warned that it would be impossible to approach the Mengele hideout without being spotted.
Cukurs offered, upon payment of 100,000, to fly the Jewish commandos into the area by seaplane. They could land secretly and approach the unsuspecting Mengele by water.
My sources say that Mengele got wind of Cukurs’ doublecross. Not long afterwards, two men showed up in Uruguay on a Lufthansa airliner from Düsseldorf, Germany.
My sources believe he [Cukurs] was slain by the Nazi underground although he had been one of its heroes.
Did Mengele, on hearing of Cukurs’ offer to sell him out, order his assassination? My sources believe so.15
In fact, Cukurs was killed by a team from the Israeli Mossad.16 The Anderson story was a well-written piece of fiction, which enhanced the growing legend of Mengele. The image of the well-armed avenging demon was complemented by another from Simon Wiesenthal, portraying Mengele as a man with Houdini-like powers of escape. Wiesenthal claimed that a dozen Auschwitz survivors calling themselves “The Committee of Twelve” missed Mengele by minutes when they tried to kidnap him at the Paraguayan jungle hotel Tirol, near the Argentine border in March 1964. He wrote:
It was a hot dark night. . . . A few minutes before 1:00 a.m. the men entered the lobby of the Hotel Tyrol [sic], ran up the stairway, and broke open the door of bedroom No. 26. It was empty. The hotel owner informed them that “Herr Dr. Fischer” had left in a hurry ten minutes earlier after getting a telephone call. He had been in such a hurry that he hadn’t even bothered to take off his pyjamas.17
The story was embellished by Michael Bar-Zohar in his book The Avengers, in which he said one of the avenging group was found dead a few days later, shot in the head. According to Bar-Zohar, Wiesenthal claimed the gang first came to see him in Vienna.
I know about these men. . . . They came to see me, here in my office. They were after Mengele and they asked me for information as to where he was hiding. This “Committee of Twelve” had plenty of money and planned to kidnap Mengele to take him to a yacht and judge him when out at sea.18
The difficulty with this story is that the Hotel Tirol had no Room 26, or even a second floor. There was no telephone by which Mengele could have been warned. Finally, Paraguay is landlocked, making the possibility of an escape by yacht to the open sea somewhat ambitious. Nevertheless, the story flourished and was expanded in subsequent retellings.
Even sober people were infected by the fever of the mythical hunt. Alejandro von Eckstein, the Paraguayan army captain who co-sponsored Mengele’s Paraguayan citizenship, recalled that during 1965 he was told by the chief of Paraguayan security that Mossad agents were scouring Asunción, looking for Mengele. In fact, Israeli agents had not been in the country for several years. But von Eckstein did not know that:
I was told there were five Israelis that had come to Paraguay to search for Mengele. I was told to be very careful.
So I sent my wife to her sister’s house. I stuffed my bed with pillows under the sheets so it appeared that a man was sleeping there. Then I slept next to the front door, on the floor, with a pistol next to me. I was ready for them if they came to my house.19
The myth of the “bionic” Mengele was growing. The mere mention of Mengele’s name seemed to provoke a sense of awe and fear, as if anyone who followed his trail was sure to die. Rational people did not act in rational ways. The old pistol that von Eckstein kept by his side in readiness for a shootout with the Mossad was rusty and had not been fired for twenty years. Right up to the moment Mengele’s death was revealed, reporters were scouring the Hotel Tirol looking for souvenirs left by the fictional “Committee of Twelve.”
One other sensation-seeker on the Mengele trail also succeeded in fooling everyone right up to the day Mengele’s bones were found. Adolfo Cicero, a Brazilian TV reporter, claimed to have shot a three-second film clip of Mengele in 1966. This now famous film shows a slightly built man dressed in a light sport shirt, with dark receding hair and a moustache, half turning toward the camera. A blowup photograph from the film was used to illustrate every major Mengele story in newspapers, magazines, and TV stations around the world. For a time even camp survivors, the West German prosecutors, and the Nazi Crimes section of Israel’s police believed the picture was Mengele. It was also printed on Interpol memoranda. The skull shape, jawline, ears, and hairline of the man in the photograph did show a remarkable degree of consistency with known pre- and postwar photographs of Mengele. On this basis, Dr. Fritz Bauer, in charge of the West German judicial investigation, said he believed the picture was genuine.
The film was shot by Cicero for a documentary on Mengele by Czechoslovakian TV. Cicero claimed that he had paid for information from an Argentine intelligence agent, and that Mengele was traveling under the name “Dr. Engwald” from a jungle hideout in Paraguay to Eldorado, Argentina. He would be sailing up the River Parana on a boat called the Viking, named in honor of his Waffen SS division.
Cicero claimed that he waited for several days with ten-year-old photographs as his only reliable guide for identifying his quarry. Just as he was losing hope, Cicero spotted a man he thought was the fugitive doctor. Using an 8 mm camera, he immortalized him for precisely three and a half seconds:
Suddenly I saw him walking in front of me. It was so simple. Then when he realized he was being filmed, he ran off immediately.
Perhaps the next part of the Cicero adventure should have been more closely scrutinized by those who believed he had got his man:
I was told that night by a local policeman that I was running a high risk and playing with my life. He told me that within the past several weeks two bodies of Jewish avengers were found in the Parana, one mutilated but disguised as a priest.20
As a result of the Cicero story, everyone was looking for the wrong man. Notwithstanding worldwide media attention and distribution of wanted posters (with the wrong face), neither the man in the photo much less the real Auschwitz doctor was ever found. But Cicero’s initial credibility added to the feeling that Mengele was ubiquitous, with a finely honed sixth sense for danger. The sighting sickness spread.
“Gustav M.,” a German immigrant in Altos, on Paraguay’s border with Argentina and Brazil, told an Argentine journalist that Mengele lived on a large farm in Altos with “a beautiful woman. He certainly liked women. He looked great for his age; he looked fit and his skin was tight. And he liked to dance and socialize.”21
Detlev Sonnenberg, the former SS man who the Brazilian police were convinced was intimately linked with high-ranking fugitive Nazis, claimed in 1967 to have known “both Josef Mengele and Martin Bormann very well. I’ve recently seen Josef Mengele twice.” He said that Mengele was living in Paraguay and, like Bormann, had had plastic surgery. “I can even give you the hours they go out and the places they frequent in La Paz and Asunción,” Sonnenberg boasted.22
Joao Alves, a light-aircraft pilot, claimed that several times he had ferried Mengele under the alias “Dr. Fritz Fischer” between southern Brazil and a small hotel in southern Paraguay. “He was a peaceful man who liked to play with German watchdogs,” Alves said. “Another doctor accompanied him but I don’t remember his name. One day, a year ago, these two stopped coming here. It’s no fun to be around a Nazi, you know. These people are half crazy.”23
At the same time, a boatman named Osnelho Canilha claimed to have taken Mengele many times across the River Parana, which separates Paraguay from Brazil and Argentina:
I took this bearded man to Puerto Lopez. He remained silent but I recognized him even with his beard. He had a sport shirt on and did not carry any luggage. He was in a terrible hurry to get to Paraguay. We traveled alone and we did not say a word to each other. When we arrived he did not even thank me.24
However fanciful these sightings were, they made the South American authorities look inept and indifferent, and put them on the defensive. The Brazilian police, with commendable vigor, went on the offensive. But the result was a fiasco. In May 1966, they announced they had arrested Mengele at the frontier outpost of Cascavel, near the Paraguayan border. It was their sixth false alarm in five years. This “Mengele” turned out to be a young German wanderer whose requests, in German, for immediate release were misinterpreted by his Portuguese captors as a confession that he was the Nazi doctor.25 Before the mistake was discovered, prominent South American newspapers and foreign wire services had extensively covered the “arrest.”
This was soon followed by one of the most extravagant claims. The London Sunday Times, a paper not usually given to flights of fancy, reported the assertions of a former Nazi corporal, Erich Karl Wiedwald, that Mengele had joined the Paraguayan army as a doctor, with the rank of major, and was posted in a military zone in northeastern Paraguay. Wiedwald boasted that his inside knowledge stemmed from his days as “bodyguard to Martin Bormann,” who, he said, had undergone plastic surgery and was dying of stomach cancer. The giveaway was Wiedwald’s claim that SS Gruppenführer Richard Glucks, the second inspector of concentration camps, was alive in Chile. Actually Glucks had committed suicide in British custody at Flensburg prison on May 10, 1945. Yet the Mengele part of Wiedwald’s claims somehow stuck.26
There was one witness, however, whose sense of adventure on the Mengele hunt outmatched everyone else’s. Erich Erdstein, a former Brazilian policeman, actually claimed to have shot the man dead. Erdstein was born in Vienna but moved to South America, where he served in Brazil’s criminal investigation division in the state of Parana. As an ex-cop, Erdstein managed to convince some newspapers that he was about to kidnap Mengele, and he sold the European rights to his story in advance to a German correspondent representing a leading daily. He also sold the South American rights to the editor of Parana’s largest-circulation paper. The sight of Erdstein ludicrously decked out in wraparound dark glasses at all hours of the day and night, permanently carrying his “best friend,” a Taurus .38-caliber revolver, seems not to have alerted those newspapers to the possibility that they were dealing with a spinner of tales.
Erdstein claimed to have the approval of the Brazilian police for his kidnap plan. He said he would seize Mengele on one of his frequent trips from Argentina to Paraguay. Then he would hand him over to the Argentine frontier police. They in turn would dispatch Mengele to Judge Jorge Luque in Buenos Aires, who would activate West Germany’s long-standing extradition request.
Erdstein claimed to have four armed agents scouring southern Brazil for Mengele. He said they had succeeded in capturing Mengele, only to have him freed by corrupt police in the Parana state capital, Curitiba. But word soon reached Erdstein that Mengele planned to cross the River Parana from Porto Mendes, as he explained:
I took two of my best agents and my son to Pôrto Mendes and laid a trap for Mengele. He arrived with Walter Bernhardt, a former sailor from the battleship Graf Spee, who was to navigate him across to Paraguay.
This fiction appeared prominently as a blow-by-blow account in many reputable European newspapers and magazines, and later in Erdstein’s book, Inside the Fourth Reich. It went on to describe how Mengele was bundled onto a boat that was intercepted as they sped to rendezvous with an Argentine patrol boat:
Then an antiquated Paraguayan gunboat came out of the darkness and started shooting. Before we knew it, six men with submachine guns clambered aboard our boat and tried to take Mengele away. I drew my pistol and my son took out his gun. We opened up at the same time. I hit Mengele twice in the chest and neck and then I saw him slump over the side with his head and torso under the water and his feet caught in some ropes.
I was sure Mengele was dead. If the bullets didn’t kill him, he would have drowned because his head was under water for several minutes.27
The date Erdstein gave for succeeding where the Mossad and everyone else had failed was September 1968. In October, Erdstein fled South America. “After I killed Mengele, there was no way for me to stay,” he said. “I wouldn’t have lived long.”28 The real reason for Erdstein’s hurried departure was that he was wanted by the Brazilian police for passing bad checks. Today, at seventy-seven, he still sticks to his story. Confronted by the evidence that Mengele died of a stroke while swimming, the feisty Erdstein said, “Well, I must have shot a double then.”29
The only consolation to the authors of all these inventive accounts was that the world’s most touted gatherer of information, the Central Intelligence Agency, did not fare much better. On November 19, 1970, the CIA considered the following report from one informant worth recording:
He had heard from an unnamed friend that Dr. José [sic] Mengele was residing [at] Villa Curuguaty as recently as 25 October (Curuguaty located N.E. of Asunción approx 24 Kms from Brazilian border in department of Caaguaz). Mengele was working as an auto mechanic.30
The next day, however, unnamed informants told the CIA station in Asunción that, although others were skeptical, they “agree with the pronouncements of the GOP [Government of Paraguay] to [the] effect [that] no information has come to light in recent years to indicate Mengele in Paraguay.”31
It took ten years of wild rumors before this first sane glimmer of analysis appeared. Mengele may not have been a mechanic, but he was leading a mundane lifestyle. And as the report said, he was not in Paraguay.
Little of all this drama filtered through the Brazilian bush to “Pedro” on his farm in Serra Negra, cut off as he was from the daily news. Jungle hideouts with armed guards and killer dogs, face-to-face confrontations with Israeli secret agents, last-second reprieves from Wiesenthal’s worldwide network of sleuths, Eric Erdstein’s bullet through the head—no one would have marveled at his immortality more than the authoritarian farmhand at Serra Negra.
* The Murderers Among Us (London: Heinemann, 1967).
* Both Wiesenthal and Friedman claim to have found Adolf Eichmann. Wiesenthal says he proved that Eichmann was still alive; Friedman says that Eichmann’s first words to his Israeli kidnappers were: “Which of you is Friedman?” Isser Harel, chief of the Mossad team that captured Eichmann, denies that either Nazi-hunter played any role in finding Eichmann.