A tense psychodrama—with the two warring factions under one roof—had developed on the farm at Serra Negra. Mengele and the Stammers were now inexorably joined within the same four walls, each dependent on the other, and there was no retreat from the developing friction between them.
Mengele had never lived alone in South America, and he felt that he needed the protection of the Stammers. He was prepared to pay any price—and that was why the Stammers needed him. Mengele bought a one-half interest in the spartan Serra Negra farm with the money he made from his business ventures in Argentina and land sales in Paraguay. Although they had no electricity or telephone, their standard of living had noticeably improved thanks to Mengele. They had bought new farm machinery, and the Mengele family in Günzburg had financed a new car.*
But sharing their lives so intimately with this authoritarian intruder was exacting a terrible strain on the Stammers. During the thirteen years Mengele stayed with them, he tried increasingly to dominate the household. He interfered in almost every part of their daily lives. He told them how to spend their money, and he criticized them for failing to provide their children a “classical” education. He interfered in their married life, often counseling Gitta on what he considered the “character flaws” in her husband. Mengele even forbade the Stammers to speak their native Hungarian in the house or at the dinner table. He became so paranoid that he thought they were plotting against him whenever they spoke in Hungarian. Gitta recalls, “He said, ‘I forbid it. In my presence you have to speak German.’ ”
To make matters worse, Geza Stammer enjoyed provoking Mengele. A carefree Hungarian who liked to drink and sing and enjoy the good life, Geza resented the authoritarian and grumpy Mengele. He might also have suspected that his wife and Mengele had more than a platonic relationship. Geza thought it was good sport to taunt Mengele by ridiculing his race theories: “We are a different race. We are Hungarians. But we are certainly every bit as good as you Aryans.” Mengele would get furious. There were shouting matches, sometimes lasting day and night. “They were always fighting; they were never close,” says Gitta. Wolfram Bossert, Mengele’s last protector, once told Mengele that he should respect the opinions of the Stammers since he was merely a guest in their house. Mengele shouted, “I own half of all of this and I will do as I please.”
Since Geza Stammer refused to be intimidated by Mengele, and the Stammer children, Miki and Roberto, tried to ignore him, only Gitta was left for Mengele’s abuse. Through the years, Gitta became an intellectual punching bag for Mengele. Usually she was the only audience for his interminable lectures on evolution, philosophy, morality, and housekeeping budgets. The decadence and decline of West Germany was a favorite theme: “The new stratum of leaders in Germany is made up for the most part of traitors, separatists, deserters, rats and clerical shady characters,” Mengele wrote in his diary.1
But it was his sermons on parental discipline—advising the Stammers on their two children’s education, urging them to be stricter—that they found hardest to take. The Stammers’ eldest boy, Roberto, grew to resent Mengele, because he attempted to behave like a father when Geza was away. “My son detested him,” said Gitta. “Peter was always ordering him to do this, do that. My son would say, ‘Well, why should I? You’re not my father.’ ”
To the Stammers, Mengele was becoming an impossible man, now cold, distant, as well as authoritarian. “As time passed he even began to behave as if he was a superior human being,” said Gitta Stammer. What’s more, there seemed to be no escape. “We were far away, isolated, alone,” she said, “far away from everything and everybody. We waited and things became more complicated because everybody was nervous and tense.”2
As Rolf Mengele later learned, the tension became unbearable:
The relationship was terrible for both my father and the Stammers. He was very organized and precise and they were much more like the local Brazilians. It used to drive him crazy, even little things. For instance, he would put pencils and pens in one place. They would use them and leave them scattered everywhere. It used to make him furious. They were very different people.3
At times of crisis, Wolfgang Gerhard appeared and tried to calm things. During one explosive period in 1969, Hans Rudel suggested to Gerhard that Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” who was hiding in Bolivia, was willing to provide refuge for Mengele. But Mengele balked at the idea. He did not want to move again. He had become used to his solitary life, sinking deeper into a state of isolated introversion, seeking refuge in a newfound passion for flowers, Mozart, Haydn, existentialism, and German philosophers. “Time and again,” Mengele wrote, “I find consolation with Goethe, Weinheber, Morike, Rilke, Novalis and all the others. Because of them it’s worth being German.”4
To the farmhands, their boss, “Pedro,” remained a complete enigma—silent, morose, patrolling the coffee plantation and cattle fields with an entourage of fifteen or more yapping mongrel dogs. As one farmhand described them, they were “thin, skeletal-like, standing next to him like toothpicks.” And always there was the bush hat, pulled down over the prominent forehead that he feared was his Achilles’ heel. To “Pedro” all visitors were still deeply suspect. Mengele would ask, “Who are these people? What side are they on? What are their politics?”
As at Auschwitz, orders were signaled, not spoken—a finger waved in disapproval, with a frown. Monotonously, he complained to the Stammers that the Brazilians were work-shy. “He was hard to work for,” said farmhand Ferdinando Beletatti. “I never saw him smile.”5 “Pedro” did not tolerate mistakes. Gitta recalls one incident in which a farmhand finished a small construction job poorly: “Peter started a fight with the worker. He even wanted to stab the old man. We tried to calm him down because we were afraid of the police. We gave the old man money [
250] and sent him away.”
Mengele’s hero, according to another farmhand, was Hitler. “He told me he was a German who came to Brazil after the Second World War,” said José Siloto. “I asked him what he thought about Hitler. He said Hitler was a great and very intelligent man.”* At the mention of Jews he just went “totally cold,” according to Gitta Stammer. “He didn’t talk much about Jews but when he did he did not fly into a rage. He said they were a people who had no reason to be in Germany.”6
To avoid the increasing conflicts Mengele spent more time in solitary pursuits. Carpentry became a favorite pastime. After five years of manual labor, he had begun to show real skill as a craftsman. He completely remodeled and rebuilt the farmhouse. He relaid the floorboards and rebuilt the windows, doors, and ceilings too. Mengele displayed a curious fascination for arches. He used them everywhere in his building work, on bookshelves, tables, even the windows in his watchtower.
Early in 1969, the Stammers moved to within twenty-five miles of São Paulo because their two sons had finished school and Geza wanted to be nearer the city for his job. They bought a comfortable four-bedroom house set on two acres on a hilltop at Caieiras, in Jardin Luciana, in the state of São Paulo. Mengele financed half the purchase of the new house with the proceeds of the Serra Negra sale, which he had helped buy in 1962.7 This time Mengele stayed behind for several months and joined the Stammers only when all the arrangements were completed.
At Caieiras Mengele tried to spend more time working on the grounds and less time arguing with the Stammers. He built a stout log fence around the farmhouse, with a white wooden gate and a secure lock. He devoted much care to planting lemon trees and lovingly tended young shrubs. He also developed a fondness for an elderly horse and felt safe enough to be photographed feeding it, the first photographs he allowed the Stammers to take. He was an eccentric figure, fifty-eight years old now, white-haired, still wearing the hat, puttering around the grounds, sometimes unshaven, wearing knee-high boots. “He was clearly an educated man,” said Luiz Carlos Luz, who was friendly with the Stammer children. “But he didn’t speak Portuguese very well, and sometimes I had difficulty understanding him.”8 Laerte de Freitas, who later bought the Stammers’ house, thought he had an “intelligent and contented face. When I went to the house Pedro would meet me at the gate, make conversation and get me something to drink. When he talked about a plant or a tree he showed that he really enjoyed it.”9
But the change in scenery did nothing to relieve the tension between the Stammers and Mengele. “The same old story happened again,” said Gitta. “He had just become an impossible man.” Wolfgang Gerhard, realizing the relations between the two sides were approaching the breaking point, played one last card. He decided there was no choice but to integrate Mengele into another set of friends in the hope that they would eventually take him off the Stammers’ hands.
The couple he chose, Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, were Austrians like himself. Politically, the Bosserts were, as Gerhard later said, “reliable.” Wolfram was a former German army corporal and spoke passionately of the injustice Germany had suffered in being “dragged before the victors.” In Bossert Gerhard discerned a quality that was missing in the Stammers. Wolfram was something of a philosopher, known to his neo-Nazi circle of friends as “Musikus.” He and Gerhard had often discussed German literature, politics, and philosophy, though Gerhard confessed to being rather out of his depth. Mengele would be a more suitable conversational partner in every way. Bossert wanted to broaden his horizons. Gerhard calculated that he would be an ideal student and recipient of Mengele’s monologues.
One day soon after Mengele and the Stammers had moved to Caieiras, Gerhard appeared with the Bosserts. Wolfram Bossert remembers his introduction to Mengele:
It was only when I moved to the vicinity of São Paulo, to Caieiras, where I worked as a maintenance manager with a paper manufacturing company . . . [that] Gerhard took the opportunity to find another discussion partner for Mengele, who was leading a very isolated life.
I was introduced to Mengele—he introduced himself as Peter Hochbichler. The Stammer family knew him only as Peter, while the other people called him Señor Pedro. After that, some form of mutual relationship developed.10
Even though the Bosserts did not know that “Peter” was a Nazi fugitive, it is doubtful that would have made any difference. “When I discovered who he was I felt sorry for him,” said Wolfram. “He was the most hunted, persecuted man in the world.” Liselotte Bossert shared her husband’s sympathy when she discovered he was the Auschwitz doctor:
I found out a bit later than Wolfram. I know that I was shocked and that I felt it unfair he had involved a family with small children. But, somehow, we had already developed friendly relations, and for humanitarian reasons, and out of Christian love for one’s neighbor, we simply went along with it. Although the man was being sought, we only knew him as a highly cultivated gentleman. And we carried on as though we didn’t know anything.
There was some sort of suppression psychosis in that we simply pushed it out of the way. Because it was simply too dangerous to think about it, to realize that this was the man. And that’s how we left it. And because our children were still very young, he was simply the Uncle for us and for our children.11
As Gerhard predicted, a solid relationship was established, and soon Mengele became a regular guest at the Bosserts’ home. Every Wednesday, Wolfram collected him from the Stammer farm, and drove Mengele to his comfortable home a little over a mile away. There Mengele had supper, played with the Bosserts’ two children, talked, and listened to music. Shortly before midnight, Bossert drove Mengele back to the Stammers’.
At the weekly meetings, Bossert and Mengele talked longingly of the “eternal values” of prewar German life. Personality differences surfaced but politically, ideologically, philosophically, they thought as one. Mengele developed a powerful hold over Bossert, who came from humbler origins, having finished the war as an army corporal. In Mengele, Bossert found a spiritual home for his obsession about restoring “the virtues of race, creed, class, and kind.” He admired Mengele. Bossert fondly recalls their discussions:
Since he lived in a permanent state of fear, fear that someone, somewhere, might find him, he was filled with an anxiety and a tension. This tension was released in his chats with me. He sometimes became very agitated in discussions, very authoritarian, very domineering.
The talks between Mengele and myself were very interesting at all times. . . . We hardly ever talked about political matters. It was generally about our views of the world, the future of mankind, the evolution of man, archeology, and the ecological problems, i.e., the destruction of nature and about the evil of materialism.
These were perhaps the main topics of our discussions. And these always took place at a certain intellectual level, because Mengele was a doctor of philosophy [sic—Mengele’s PhD was in anthropology] as well as medicine. I tried to follow his thoughts and contributed as an interested layman, so to speak. I could imagine that, in earlier days, he would have been the life and soul of café society—a person who liked to look elegant and to be surrounded by beautiful women, a witty talker, always at the center of things, organizing parties.12
Not only did Bossert fawn over Mengele but they also shared the same views on important ideological issues. They both held the elitist racial view that “it is a fact that the poorer strata of society, the more primitive people, the intellectually less endowed, have large numbers of children, while those who are more intelligent and who have got somewhere in academic or material terms hardly have any children.” They favored forced sterilization, “although we realized that this would be difficult,” in order to reduce the number of “primitive births.” Mengele and Bossert also shared the same anti-Semitic bias. Bossert recalls that he and Mengele agreed that Jews had created their own problems during the war by dominating most of the professions, and “dishonorable money businesses, like money-lending and money-changing,” before the war.
In Bossert, Mengele had found a true ideologue and soulmate. Even today, six years after Mengele’s death and confronted by the mass of evidence of Mengele’s wartime crimes, Bossert defends his former friend: “He was not an evil person. He always had the greatest respect for human life. I believe only a fraction of all the things he is accused of.” Not once did Bossert think of handing Mengele over to the police:
Once you know someone well and become friends, someone who likes nature, children, animals, and is interested in literature and philosophy, it becomes very difficult to believe that this person could have committed such cruel crimes. It’s easy to say that knowing a criminal, every citizen has an obligation to denounce him. But if you know someone intimately, even if he’s a wanted man—I just couldn’t do it.13
Soon after Mengele formed his friendship with the Bosserts, Hans Sedlmeier flew in from Germany, on behalf of the Giinzburg clan, to test the rising temperature in the Mengele-Stammer feud. He tried to pacify the Stammers, promising that alternative arrangements would be made but apparently not offering any more money.14 Sedlmeier asked Bossert to report on the state of both parties. Bossert, despite his admiration of Mengele, later confided one criticism: “He thinks everybody else ought to devote themselves to him in a selfless fashion, while he himself must only use them according to his own aims.” In another dispatch to Sedlmeier, Bossert described the tensions produced by the complex interdependence between the Stammers and Mengele:
From one side—cleverly—an ensnaring net of human and financial threads is being woven, from which the other side is struggling to escape in order to get away from this attrition of nerves.15
The Bosserts certainly did what they could to defuse the situation, offering to take Mengele on a jungle exploration holiday with them in the autumn of 1969. Mengele was delighted. For the first time, his diary betrays just how unhappy he had become with his fugitive life. After years of isolation and feuding with the Stammers this simple holiday, Mengele’s first in a decade, was an adventure of a lifetime:
The sun had come up and “sang as of old,” white flags hung in the sky which started to pile up in large shapes in a southerly direction. A wind, full of morning freshness, from the northeast, kept these cloud ships moving softly and rustled through the leaves of the neighboring eucalyptus trees. The beautiful day had been well chosen for the start of the holiday and promised to give our journey a good start. All I needed was my traveling companion and the Volkswagen that went with him.
I had just carried my luggage into the covered porch of the house when the pack of dogs, with their excited barking, announced the arrival of a vehicle on the approach road, which was hidden by woods. One can always rely on their announcement because our house mongrels can distinguish between an arriving car and one that is rushing past on the tarmac road.
Shortly afterward Mu* stopped in front of the house with prearranged holiday punctuality. As always, his even-tempered good-morning smile pleased me . . .
We were nevertheless still more than 400 kilometers away, and from base camp “O” of our expedition onward, we would have to carry these many kilos on our male shoulders. But even this proposition could not reduce our pleasure at the beautiful autumn day that we drove intfc. . . . Our guides took us through various little towns and industrial suburbs of the capital. Its dusty, smokey, and smelly ugliness we only perceived from the perimeter, because our senses were so preoccupied by the expectations and promises of the jungle days.
On the three-lane “highway” which had been built according to the most modern road construction techniques, zooming along at top speed one really had more of a sensation of flying than driving. . . . Pretty whitewashed farm and tourist houses greet us, light green patches of canna plants interrupt the monotonous tired green of the grazing land. . . . If a little village has been formed, then usually a pointed church spire sticks out, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately, also the ugly TV antennas.
Beautiful white clouds on a radiant blue sky remained our faithful companions throughout the rapid journey. . . . A mountain chain, which had appeared on the horizon, informed us that the end of our winged motorway journey was near.16
This holiday at the turn of the decade was a watershed for Mengele. It marked the point at which he finally felt able to venture out, sensing perhaps that the hunt for him had long since run out of steam. For nearly ten years Mengele had bided his time in rural isolation. The move within reach of the Sao Paulo suburbs changed all that. “Until he knew the language, until he got inside Brazilian life, he was afraid,” said Gitta Stammer. “But when we lived in Caieiras he felt more secure. He would go on a bus, go to the city, do some shopping, get the train.”17
The Bosserts were the motivating factors in Mengele’s change from strict isolation to a more open lifestyle. Liselotte Bossert recalls the gradual change:
Shortly before he came to Sao Paulo, he was incredibly shy, trying not to look if someone went by. But because we behaved normally, we helped him regain his normal social behavior, to become a social animal again. He realized that not everybody was seeking to find something else in him than the person he appeared to be.
I remember it well; in Caieiras, he was always frightened and wanted to escape if we met someone on our walks. So that we said to ourselves that this could not continue because otherwise the whole thing would become known and people would soon find out that he was somebody else.18
The Bosserts resolved to help bring Mengele out of his frightened shell. Wolfram began by persuading Mengele to stop wearing his hat in the middle of the sweltering Brazilian summer. He convinced him that by placing his hands in front of his face when people passed near him, he attracted attention as a suspicious person. Bossert had his children take Mengele on the subway so that he could learn how to use it and how to get around the city. He took many pictures of Mengele so that he could “become familiar and comfortable with his own appearance.” He even took Mengele into crowded public areas, so that he would realize that people did not recognize him as the Auschwitz doctor. Bossert recalls, “Once I took him to the supermarket. The tension and stress he was under in that place made him sweat. He thought all the people in there were looking at him and nothing else. But eventually, he managed to go into town by himself. He went to the doctor, the dentist, and even for walks on his own.” He had begun to lose his sense of fear.
* In his letters, Mengele often complained that his family was not providing him with enough money. Both Mengele and Geza Stammer thought the car was too small and cheap. Stammer eventually gathered the extra money and purchased a larger car. Mengele wrote a bitter letter to Günzburg telling them of the “luxurious” new car, bought without their assistance.
* Mengele’s writings offer conflicting opinions regarding Hitler. In a letter to Rolf dated August 17, 1975, Mengele referred to Hitler as the “Man of the Century,” and compared his regime to “those of Alexander the Great, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick the Great (of Prussia) or Napoleon.” However, in a July 27, 1962 diary entry, Mengele had not been so complimentary. He wrote that Hitler “was a mixture of brilliant intelligence with a smattering of superficial education, that necessarily led to oblique and wrong ideas.”
* Mengele’s code name for Wolfram Bossert.