On November 9, 1970, the president of West Germany, Gustav Heinemann, made an important announcement about the hunt for Josef Mengele. It implied defeat for the first time. Dr. Heinemann personally asked President Stroessner of Paraguay for assistance in finding Mengele. When none was forthcoming, his office issued the following statement:
We do not know where Mengele is in Paraguay. Before he lived in the frontier triangle formed by three countries, near the waterfall of Iguazu, and depending on the political situation he moved between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. He has access to houses of friends in the region, filled with many Germans, and he travels easily along the river [Parana]. The region is almost impossible to cross.
Paraguay has rejected a previous request for extradition saying that Mengele had already obtained Paraguayan citizenship. Even assuming Mengele is in Paraguay, it is impossible to attempt any further official measures.1
To placate the West Germans, Judge Antonio Perez Dominguez, of the First Section of the criminal court in Asunción, reminded the police that the warrant issued in 1962 for Mengele’s arrest was still in force. News of the directive soon leaked out. But as had happened so many times before, the result was a public relations fiasco. The judge’s action was interpreted by the press as an admission by Paraguay that Mengele was within her borders. In reality, it was a cynical exercise in public relations because the Paraguayans knew that Mengele had long since departed. But Paraguay’s ambassador to Bonn, Venceslao Benitez, was apparently caught off guard. Questioned by reporters, he was refreshingly candid:
I don’t believe these reports, but it is only my opinion and I have not received any communication from my government. This is a political conversation that is really only intended to take place between the Paraguayan embassy in Bonn and the German embassy in Asunción.
Benitez then made a most revealing statement. Pressed further, he said in exasperation: “Let’s talk about Brazil.” In hindsight, one wonders if Benitez was trying to signal that his government knew Mengele was in Brazil. But at the time the ambassador would not elaborate, saying that he knew nothing about Mengele, and: “I think it much better for my country to know nothing about him.”2
Into this murky sea of hints, half truths, and speculation jumped the irrepressible Tuvia Friedman, the Nazi-hunter from Haifa. His Nazi Crimes Documentation Center offered a 
50,000 reward for Mengele’s capture, and Friedman urged the West Germans to match it with a 10 million reward.* “That would be a dollar for every one of the ten million killed,” said Friedman, adding confidently: “It will help find him. We are not interested in killing him. That would be too good for him.”3
A few days after Friedman’s offer, he claimed he had found Mengele. Brandishing a postcard from South America, he claimed it “told me where Mengele has been for the past two months and it provides definite and precise information by which to identify him.”
Friedman’s reward offer was the first involving private funds, and it drew extensive coverage in the South American press. Simon Wiesenthal, not to be outdone, then dropped a bombshell. In a television interview with Israel’s former prime minister David Ben-Gurion, Wiesenthal claimed he had “new information that Dr. Mengele is in Puerto San Vincente in Paraguay. I hope the authorities in Bonn will act immediately.” He said the area was a military zone located in the Alta Parana region which civilian police could not enter. The Paraguayans responded that no such place as Puerto San Vincente even existed in the Alta Parana, and they were right. The Mengele affair had begun to look like a circus.
This was Wiesenthal’s first major statement on Mengele since November 1968, when he had claimed that his “agents” had snapped pictures of Mengele on the streets of Asunción. That too had been a mistake, and to his credit, Wiesenthal admitted as much twenty-four hours later.
The Israelis did nothing to relieve Wiesenthal’s discomfort about this new claim. A government spokesman said that Jerusalem “did not have conclusive evidence that Mengele is in Paraguay.” In fact, by then the Israelis had no up-to-date information on Mengele at all. The Mossad was no longer watching Mengele, since his capture had long since ceased to be a priority target under General Meir Amit’s administration. That policy was continued by Amit’s successor, Zvi Zamir, who ran the Mossad from 1969 to 1976. “I don’t think I spent more than about ten minutes on Mengele during my term of office,” said Zamir. “It was something to do with fingerprints, or something like that. Whatever it was, it didn’t come to anything.”4
One of the few people who did know Mengele’s precise location was tracked down by an Argentine reporter and his Italian colleague in February 1971. They persuaded Mengele’s estranged wife, Martha, to briefly answer questions from the balcony of her apartment in Merano, in northern Italy. Martha had maintained regular contact with Mengele ever since he went to live with the Stammers in 1961. She had also received letters from him. But, with a convincing act of complete ignorance, Martha breezily lied:
It’s been years since I heard anything. I’ve heard nothing from Herr Doctor. But the stories they print about him—they’re just stories. Lies. No, no, they’re just not true. He’s a very educated, very gentle, very affectionate man, a wonderful husband, a wonderful father.5
The following month, Wiesenthal claimed he had just missed catching Mengele on a lightning visit to Spain. Mengele, he said, had been seen driving a car. But by the time Wiesenthal had learned of the trip, it had been too late. Near misses became a familiar cry from Wiesenthal, but the world did not know there was no foundation to his claims. To Wiesenthal, the overriding purpose of his announcements was to keep Mengele in the public eye, something he achieved with great success.
By the end of 1971, Mengele’s name had attracted such notoriety that it was used by a fellow Nazi, Frederick Schwend, as a bargaining chip when he was arrested in Peru, suspected of murder. Schwend was the Third Reich’s master con man, a former SS major who tried to persuade Hitler to sink the British economy by dropping counterfeit pound notes all over the world. He fled Europe after helping to run an escape organization working for the American counter-intelligence corps, and ended up in Peru.
On December 31, 1971, one of Peru’s wealthiest men, Luis Branchero Rossi, was found shot dead at his palatial home outside Lima. Herbert John, a West German journalist, had once worked for Rossi and was still intrigued by the shadowy world of Nazis in South America. John told the investigating judge, Santos Chichizola, that he suspected Rossi had been murdered by a neo-Nazi group, of which Schwend was the mastermind. In mid-February the police arrested Schwend, who offered details about Mengele’s “involvement” in the case in return for immunity. The Peruvians jumped at the opportunity.
Schwend’s lively imagination did not desert him in his hour of need. He spun a whole series of stories about Mengele’s business interests in Rossi’s empire and even about Mengele’s plot to take it over. At first the Peruvians fell for the ruse. On March 5, 1972, Judge Chichizola announced that Mengele was a suspect in the case. Rossi’s glamorous secretary, Eugenia Sessareyo de Smith, and Juan Vilka Carranza, the nineteen-year-old son of a neighbor’s gardener, were already being held as suspects. The press speculated that Mengele had been the mastermind behind the killing, which took place when Rossi and Eugenia Sessareyo had gone to his home for an afternoon’s lovemaking.
On March 6 the Peruvian police announced that they had incontrovertible evidence that Mengele had visited Peru during 1971. Their inquiries suggested he had been in the country when Rossi was killed, then left shortly afterward. That same day Judge Chichizola said that Schwend was cooperating with their investigation into Mengele’s alleged involvement. This time Simon Wiesenthal showed an uncharacteristic degree of caution. He warned that Schwend was pulling the wool over the Peruvian police’s eyes, saying that Mengele was “not an appropriate suspect in the Rossi murder in Lima. It is a diversionary tactic.” Not long afterward, Judge Chichizola agreed and said so publicly. Schwend was released, and the gardener’s son was convicted of Rossi’s murder, though neither a motive nor Schwend’s involvement was ever properly established.
Another Nazi-hunter in Peru was not so restrained. Flushed with her success at identifying Klaus Altmann as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” Beate Klarsfeld announced that Mengele was living in a jungle zone 250 miles from Lima. She said that Martin Bormann might be there too. Soon afterward, Mrs. Klarsfeld issued a second bulletin on Mengele. She said that a knowledgeable German had told her that Bormann, Mengele, and sixteen other prominent Nazis lived in South America and had business ties in an organization called “Telerana.” She added that Bormann himself often lived in Bolivia disguised as a priest, and that she knew of a photograph of Bormann hiding in a fortress with Freddy Schwend. No trace of an organization dubbed “Telerana” was ever found, and Bormann’s survival of the war remained much in doubt. But Beate Klarsfeld was new to the Nazi-hunting business, and this was a salutory lesson in the hazards of relying on the tales spun by informants in the shadowy business of tracking Nazi fugitives.
Back in Bonn, the government’s hunt had halted. Following President Heinemann’s handwringing admission that no further progress could be made, a Catch-22 deadlock had taken hold. As far as Bonn was concerned, the hunt began and ended with Paraguay, which the government continued to believe was Mengele’s likeliest hideout. Since the Paraguayans had made it clear that as a citizen Mengele could not be extradited should he be found, Bonn was convinced Mengele was there and he was protected. Therefore the West Germans made no serious effort to search elsewhere. Although President Stroessner was in a position to provide the information that would have led the West Germans to Brazil, Bonn never played its ultimate card—threatening to withdraw foreign aid. West German conglomerates had too much to lose. Instead, the judiciary became bogged down in an exercise of secondary importance to the hunt.
Judge Schneider of the land court in Frankfurt, to whom the case had been transferred from Freiburg, ordered a review of the entire prosecution case. An exhausting program was begun, taking depositions before a judge from all the witnesses who provided evidence for the original arrest warrant in 1959. This was important in that it guaranteed that evidence from witnesses who might die before Mengele’s capture could still be brought before the court. But since the hunt had been effectively abandoned, the procedure was almost academic. Called Vorferschelung, it was the equivalent of a preliminary investigation, aimed not at finding Mengele and arresting him but at adding evidence to a record which was already abundantly clear.
The task of rehashing the old arrest warrant went to Horst von Glasenapp, an investigating judge who had ended the war as a master sergeant in an antiaircraft battalion in Berlin. Captured by the Russians, von Glasenapp spent May to October 1945 in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Unlike several other members of the German judiciary, von Glasenapp’s wartime background did not link him with Nazi atrocities.
Von Glasenapp went about his evidence-collecting task with some enthusiasm, not just because he wanted to unravel the horror of Mengele’s crimes but also because he liked to travel. From 1969 to 1975 he became a seasoned globe-trotter, interviewing three hundred witnesses and making several visits to Israel, Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Italy, and Austria. He assembled a formidable document, listing seventy-five witnesses who testified to the monumental scale of Mengele’s savagery.
Von Glasenapp had no authority to engage in a hunt for Mengele, but on December 9, 1971, he interviewed Hans Sedlmeier, who gave sworn evidence before him in a court in Ulm. Under paragraph 57 of the criminal code, Sedlmeier was warned that he could be prosecuted if he gave false evidence. But loyalty to Mengele and the Günzburg family caused Sedlmeier to do just that. He told von Glasenapp:
I also do not know what connections there are between the accused and his living brother [Alois] in Günzburg. I can even state with a certain amount of conviction that Alois Mengele does not know where the accused is residing. The son [Rolf] of the accused is now a lawyer in Freiburg, and I have known him since his childhood. I know he is very close to his family and frequently comes to Günzburg. My personal relationship with his son is such that I can categorically state that he would have told me had he any connection with his father, the accused.6
Sedlmeier was acting as the clearing center for letters from Mengele to Alois, Rolf, and other members of his family, and he posted back their replies, so the statement was clearly a lie. But Sedlmeier was confident that his dissembling could never be proved. Out came a further stream of lies:
I would like to say the following. The accused was once, in the 1950s, in Günzburg, after his divorce. I had the opportunity to speak to him then. Since then he has not been here and, I can safely assume, nowhere in the Federal Republic. Should he have been here, I would definitely have heard about it. He would have spoken to me. I would also like to say that I visited the accused when he was still a resident in Buenos Aires. These were business trips and I would like to emphasize that my trips were for business reasons. I visited the accused solely for business reasons. If my memory serves me right, the last time I saw the accused was about ten years ago. I seem to remember it was at the airport in Buenos Aires. I also heard that at about the time that Eichmann was captured, the accused went to live in Paraguay. Since then, all connections between Günzburg and the accused have been severed, and no more correspondence passed. I personally am not in a position to state where the accused is residing nowadays. . . . The accused has in no way been linked to company affairs.7
Virtually this entire statement was false. Sedlmeier had seen Mengele in Brazil—after the Eichmann kidnapping—when he visited the farm at Serra Negra. Mengele and Günzburg were in regular touch, and as their link man, Sedlmeier knew exactly where Mengele was. Von Glasenapp said he knew that Sedlmeier was lying but claimed he was powerless to act because he could not prove it:
We had stretched the system to its limits. There was nothing more to go on with Sedlmeier. Since we could not prove he was lying, we could not raid his house or get warrants to intercept his mail or his telephone. We did as much as we were legally entitled to do. In order to grant a warrant, there has to be reasonable grounds for suspicion. I was suspicious, but I had no grounds.8
Von Glasenapp had already been told by Fritz Steinacker, Mengele’s lawyer in Frankfurt, that he would be wasting his time talking to Sedlmeier and the Mengele family. Steinacker had represented Mengele in his divorce, and he assisted Dr. Hans Laternser in their unsuccessful appeal against the decision by Frankfurt and Munich universities to strip Mengele of all his professional degrees. “I knew Steinacker quite well,” said von Glasenapp, “but there was not much point in pressing him for information because of his confidentiality to his client. He did tell me, however, that he had received his instructions through a Swiss intermediary when he acted for Mengele in relation to his divorce and degrees. I don’t imagine he knew where Mengele was for that reason.”
Von Glasenapp decided not to travel to Günzburg, taking Steinacker’s advice that he would find the family and their close friends “had lost their memory.” He turned to Simon Wiesenthal, whose many claims to have known Mengele’s movements von Glasenapp had read:
I met Wiesenthal several times but I never got much out of him. I naturally wanted to know if he really did have anything of value. It was difficult to make that judgment from the various newspaper articles I had read.9
On one occasion von Glasenapp arranged to take evidence from Wiesenthal before a judge in Vienna:
I put my questions to the judge and he in turn put them to Wiesenthal. The hearing had been specially convened for Wiesenthal himself. I had told the judge that I was eager to learn the names and addresses of persons who might have accurate information as to Mengele’s whereabouts. Wiesenthal was quite angry that I had asked him these questions and he refused to answer them. He said he was bound by confidentiality to his informants, which I understood.
I left feeling he was eager to convey that he was leading the field on this question, that he was the man out in the front. Perhaps behind his refusal to answer the questions was a feeling that the people he had in mind were not so reliable after all. I myself remained a little skeptical and did not raise the subject with him again.10
For a man with a healthy degree of skepticism about Wiesenthal’s evidence, von Glasenapp’s relationship with another Nazi-hunter, who made even more extravagant claims, was strange. It raised serious questions about his integrity as a senior member of the West German judiciary.
At the end of 1972, Ladislas Farago, a best-selling American author and wartime naval intelligence officer, claimed to have pinpointed Mengele’s hideout. Farago was wrong, and his bogus information may have cost the life of an innocent man.
The origins of Farago’s relationship with von Glasenapp can be traced to the grueling circulation war in which Britain’s popular newspapers engage periodically. Late on the afternoon of November 26, 1972, word spread that the Daily Express was taking delivery of a very large order of newsprint for that night’s print run. The Express, which enjoyed an enviable reputation for exclusives, believed it had a major story. It was confident its circulation would rise dramatically.
Shortly before midnight, the paper’s first edition came out with the claim that reporters had tracked down Hitler’s elusive deputy, Martin Bormann, and the news was flashed around the world. The source of the Express’s “scoop” was Ladislas Farago, who said he had run Bormann to ground in Buenos Aires. Farago’s evidence was a balding man with a passing resemblance to Bormann. He turned out to be a respectable Argentine schoolteacher named Nicholas Siri.
In his Bormann article, Farago also claimed to have spoken to Josef Mengele, who he said was living under the alias “Dr. Nadich.” Farago said he had tracked Mengele to the Paraguayan border town of Pedro Juan Caballero. The Paraguayans scornfully invited reporters to the town to see if they could find him.
The discovery that the Bormann information was a fabrication provoked a bitter row between Farago and the Daily Express. The editor, Ian McColl, demanded that Farago repay a 5000 advance:
As far as producing Martin Bormann is concerned you have gone on record, on television and in print, saying that you know where he is, how he is living, and promising to produce him. . . . Perhaps you might consider that the honorable course at this stage would be to repay the advance, as you pledged.11
In the same letter, McColl said that he had learned from his reporters that documents Farago had supplied to support his Mengele claims were also fakes:
If, as you admit, you have been duped over one set of documents which have turned out to be Spanish translations of old articles extracted from Der Spiegel, it begs a number of supplementary questions. Are the other documents fakes as well? Have we been chasing the body that does not exist?12
Farago was mortified. He said his South American documents on Mengele and Bormann were genuine but that he had never claimed the Bormann picture was. He accused the Daily Express of jumping the gun:
I would like to remind you that I undertook the writing of the series under duress in a climate of phony competition conjured up by you. I had no choice but to go along with your demand that the series be written then and there, when you wanted and needed it, especially when I found out that you had already prepared a series of your own, to be by-lined by Mr. Steven [a Daily Express staff writer] alone, although based on my material. I have copies of this article in my possession, and it is a sad and sorry reminder of the lengths to which the Daily Express was willing to go to score this confounded scoop.13
Despite Farago’s denial that the onus was on him to “deliver Bormann . . . on a silver platter,” he went on to make some astonishing claims about having met Bormann in a convent high in the windswept Andes. This claim appeared in 1974, amid another spate of publicity for his book Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich.
When I was in contact with him in February 1973, he had just moved from Chile to southern Bolivia. A very sick man, he was cared for by four German nursing sisters of the Redemptionist Order in their convent near Tupiza, a remote region of Potosi Province in the Andes.14
Notwithstanding Farago’s extraordinary fabrications about Bormann and Mengele, it is clear from his voluminous files that some of his information was tantalizingly good. Farago certainly impressed respected historians like Lord Dacre, then Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, even after the Daily Express published the phony Bormann story. When Trevor-Roper was asked by the New York Times to vouch for Farago in their attempt to unravel the mystery of whether Bormann was dead or alive, the British historian was quite flattering, as he later told Farago himself:
I told them that you should be taken seriously and that although I had certain reservations about certain parts of your story (reservations which might well be dispelled when your evidence was produced in full), I considered your researches were valuable and that you had made an important contribution to the solution of the problem.15
But after Farago’s book was published, Trevor-Roper was not so sure:
My recollection is that when we met in London you told me that the [Bormann] photograph was not genuine and that this was before its falsity was publicly declared. I therefore deduced that the responsibility for printing that photograph rested not with you but with the Daily Express and that you had disapproved of its publication. Since you were heavily committed to the Express I can see that it would have been difficult for you, at that time, publicly to disown the photograph which they had printed. However the problem remains, how did the Express obtain the photograph and accept it as genuine? You do not in the text, that has been sent to me, refer to the matter; but it is a question which the critical reader is bound to ask and I would be very interested to know your answer to it.16
Farago never did provide a satisfactory answer.
Overeager though the Express may have been to publish a Bormann story, Farago bore a heavy share of responsibility for its publication. Farago made substantial payments to all his important sources, and in doing so attracted many unscrupulous informants who presented false documents to support their phony claims. Probably he had become so financially committed to his book publishers, Simon and Schuster, that he had to press on. But in casting his net so wide, Farago also attracted several civil servants from South America and West Germany who were officially working on the Bormann and Mengele cases.
One of Farago’s key informants was Judge Horst von Glasenapp, who was investigating both the Mengele and the Bormann allegations. They became well acquainted on von Glasenapp’s visits to the United States and on Farago’s research trips to West Germany. In January 1973, Farago paid von Glasenapp 500 in cash and a further 1000 by check in exchange for information.17 Von Glasenapp admitted he received the payments, but claimed they were entirely proper because they were “by private arrangement.”18 Yet von Glasenapp was using knowledge gained from his official position for private gain during his term of office. In most other countries this might be regarded as corruption.
Von Glasenapp, however, hoped to make even more money from Farago. On April 9, 1973, the judge reminded the writer:
I wanted to let you know that I still have one of the largest collections of documents on euthanasia in the Third Reich. Before it disappears . . . into an archive, I thought I’d at least let you know I have it.19
Von Glasenapp and Farago had several discussions about prospects for film rights. On August 19, von Glasenapp again wrote to Farago informing him of his schedule for a forthcoming visit to the United States, adding:
I am dying to know what the film people have to say. My situation is such that I could do at this moment with some additional income.20
It is clear therefore that von Glasenapp was depending on Farago to improve his financial state and that Farago needed von Glasenapp for information. Such a relationship between a serving judge and a commercial author peddling inadequately confirmed Nazi stories was unorthodox. But one tragic inadvertent consequence may have been the death of an innocent man.
Following Farago’s claim in the London Daily Express that he had tracked Mengele to Pedro Juan Caballero, Simon Wiesenthal, in May 1973, claimed he too knew Mengele was living there. Then came Tuvia Friedman, who said that his 50,000 reward had also led to information that Mengele might be hiding in the same small border town. On October 17, 1973, the Polish War Crimes Commission said that their inquiries also suggested Mengele was there. On October 25, West German justice officials in Bonn were quoted in the New York Times as saying that Mengele had indeed been located in Pedro Juan Caballero. The same report quoted Judge von Glasenapp as saying that he did not think Mengele would be caught, but that several witnesses he regarded as reliable had told him Mengele was in Paraguay and was willing to talk about his past. One of those “reliable” witnesses who had spoken to von Glasenapp was Ladislas Farago, who wrote in an early draft of his book:
In actual fact I was assured by Judge von Glasenapp that my Mengele material proved extremely useful for his own investigation. He told me that the pinpointing of Mengele’s place of residence by me, a third party, gave the German authorities an opportunity to raise the issue with President Stroessner of Paraguay during his semi-official visit to Germany in 1973.21
For one elderly farmer of German descent living near Pedro Juan Caballero, the cumulative effect of this amateur speculation, confirmed as it seemed to be with official statements from the Poles and West Germans, had the most disastrous result.
Late in November 1973, a group of men burst into the farmer’s home during the middle of the night, beat him, and shot him dead. His wife, who tried to intervene, was beaten and suffered internal injuries. Their three children were left unharmed. According to Aldolfino Paralta, the local police chief, the dead man’s name was Albert Fredrichi. He had lived on the outskirts of the town for nineteen years and was known as a recluse with eccentric ways. In the wake of the sustained publicity throughout 1973 about Pedro Juan Caballero being Mengele’s hiding place, the press speculated that Fredrichi was the Auschwitz butcher. The man’s widow, Endentran, described these reports as “absurd” as she packed her bags to leave for good. She said the murderers had not taken any valuables or goods and that they spoke a language she did not understand. She believed he was killed by a group of Jewish avengers.
Delving into Fredrichi’s past, newspapers claimed that he had been in the German army and had a history of violence and Nazi sympathies. According to a CIA report on the incident, Mrs. Fredrichi’s suspicion that her husband’s killers were Jews may well have been right:
He [informant] did say that the former German soldier by the name of Fredrichi had been beaten to death last year by Israeli terrorists who thought he was Mengele. Fredrichi’s wife lost portions of one of her ears and her stomach was cut open as a result of her beating. She survived the attempt and apparently wrote a letter to the German ambassador requesting a pension as a result of her husband being a former soldier.22
Von Glasenapp said that he could not remember whether he was the source of the New York Times story stating that West German justice officials believed that Mengele was hiding in Pedro Juan Caballero. Despite the fact that he received money from Farago and was discussing a possible film, von Glasenapp denied that he had been unduly influenced by Farago. “I know that Farago offered a list of rumors,” he said, “and I remember saying to him that I was not very satisfied with his material. There were a lot of what I call ‘information brokers’ in South America at the time.”23
Despite his questionable relationship with Farago, von Glasenapp did make one significant attempt to locate Mengele. When Alois died in February 1974, von Glasenapp authorized telephone intercepts on the Mengele family homes in Günzburg. On the day of the funeral, a grand and stately affair, von Glasenapp ordered the police to mingle with the mourners on the off chance that Mengele might have returned to pay his last respects:
We had the right to control telephones but there was no success at all, nothing happened. Nothing. Silence on the western front. All quiet on the western front!24
Telephone taps on the Mengele family were never authorized again. Von Glasenapp had played a hunch and lost. Had more hunches like that been pursued, the West Germans might eventually have succeeded.
* Had West Germany offered that sum to the public, rather than in the form of extra aid to the Paraguayan government as had former chancellor Konrad Adenauer, it might well have succeeded in bringing Mengele to justice. While the Bosserts and Stammers were unlikely to have been bought, there were two other people who learned of Mengele’s true identity in São Paulo before he died, and both said they would have been sorely tempted by a large sum. By the time the government and private rewards totaled 3.5 million in 1985, Mengele had been dead six years.