Alone in his subtropical slum, Josef Mengele rapidly declined. He did what he could to enliven his cheerless bungalow with its cracked hardwood floor and leaking roof. He painted his bedroom dark green and laid a tile path. But nothing could compensate for the loneliness that now tormented him. “My cage becomes more comfortable,” he wrote, “but it remains a cage.”1 “Mr. Pedro,” as he was known to his neighbors, sought out new friends with pathetic eagerness. Two old French women became occasional conversational partners. But he craved intellectual stimulation, and they could not satisfy his particular needs. Even Wolfram Bossert was never quite regarded as a true friend. “It is comradeship,” Mengele wrote to Hans Sedlmeier. “He [Bossert] does not seem to have had a friend in his life.”2 With his usual cynicism, Mengele said he was “willing to settle for this comradeship” because Bossert had helped him in his hour of need. But it was Bossert, said Mengele, who was fated to meet an intellect like him, not the other way around.
His financial worries had also worsened. After dining out at an expensive restaurant, he said, “More than one visit a year I cannot afford.” Income from his rented apartment left him with 
250 a month, not enough, he complained, to sustain his share of regular payments to Wolfgang Gerhard in Austria for his medical bills. “I have sent him 600 so far this year, which is more than I spend on myself; not only shall I discontinue my donation, but I’m asking you to do so too,” he wrote to Sedlmeier. Mengele suspected that Gerhard had exaggerated the cost of cancer treatment for his wife and son. In a subsequent letter, he also told Karl Heinz to stop sending any money to Gerhard until Gerhard provided proof of the real costs:
He shall report precisely, exactly what solutions he has in mind. To begin with, he shall take care of his sick wife. His further disposition will depend on the course of her disease, the end of which seems doubtful to me. . . . The first thing he got out of my plight was to turn it to his advantage and get something out of you . . . he wasn’t satisfied with what I sent him. I do not intend to buy any help from him but I’m afraid the solution to the “dumb man” [false identity card] could become expensive.3
So anxious had Mengele become about his financial state that he was not sure he could afford the record player and tape deck he planned to buy to relieve his boredom. “I am more than ever dependent on your help,” he wrote home. Gitta Stammer felt that his family could have done more for Mengele. “They were not very generous with him,” she said.
His health was also deteriorating. His blood pressure was too high, his spinal problem caused him great pain, and he suffered migraines, allergies, and insomnia; a prostate operation was pending. He had rheumatism in his hands, and an area of one leg was permanently swollen, the result of a tropical-insect bite in Paraguay. Fear of being kidnapped by the Israelis had also returned, as had his old anxiety about his forehead giving him away. Once he ventured out alone to a sausage shop and thought that a customer “scrutinized me too closely.” Terrified, he vowed never to go back again. Now living within reach of newspapers, he regularly read the coverage about him. “When there was a newspaper article about him he’d sit and think for hours,” said Wolfram Bossert. “He wanted to know where the news had come from and if it was true or if it was a police plant.”4 At night he slept with an old Mauser pistol by his bed.
He consoled himself with the prospect of a visit from Rolf, though no definite plans had yet been made. In his acutely anxious state, Mengele beseeched his son to leave nothing to chance. “Before I start to look forward to that meeting,” he wrote, “I want to know all the details about the planning.” Mengele told Rolf:
A visit would be an adventure that would have to be planned very well in advance. A faultless passport, in a different name, would be a prerequisite. If one has that, then one doesn’t need to make any great contortions. The preparatory work for this would be to make precise inquiries about all travel arrangements (visa, registration, etc.) and a watertight alibi. If all these requirements are met, then you have to plan this undertaking right down to the last detail and without self-deception. There must be no gap in the plan of operations and you must be able to have an overview from beginning to end, and it all has to be in your head.5
In another letter, Mengele told Rolf that the most important feature was the false passport—a “dumb man” as he called it:
If you aren’t holding a “dumb man,” we need not waste time thinking about it any more. If you don’t know what I mean have it explained to you by Uncle H [Sedlmeier]. This is an irrevocable demand without which any undertaking means a frivolous challenge with unforeseeable and dangerous consequences.6
In that same letter, Mengele revealed that his late brother Alois’s son, Dieter, now running the family firm with Karl Heinz, had rejected all his attempts at establishing a dialogue. “I do not know Dieter, and I have no information about him,” Mengele lamented. “He hasn’t answered my sympathy cards on the death of his father and his mother. He wants to avoid any contact with me.” Again Mengele implored Rolf to re-establish ties with the Günzburgers, whose wealth and power his son mistrusted. And again, much to Rol£s irritation, he praised Karl Heinz:
He has driven his ship these last two and a half years carefully and with insight and without any regard for himself. He uses his workmen’s expertise well and uses the experience of his assistants and has a good relationship with his workers and employees, and he is critical, modest, indefatigable and he knows what he wants. That’s the way it seems to me from here. . . . I do regret that you have left the Günzburg scene willingly.7
In his moments of deeper despair, Mengele resorted to splenetic outpourings of fascist rhetoric. He complained how “the selection, promotion and development of overaverage intelligence” was being “misconstrued, misrepresented and rejected” by what he called “supposedly democratic principles.” He savaged a book by Hitler’s armaments minister, Albert Speer, who confessed to having made a pact with the devil before he realized the implications. In Inside the Third Reich, written by Speer while serving his twenty-year jail sentence, he described Hitler as a megalomaniac. “To characterize him as the megalomaniacal architect of the nation is a useless attempt, and proves the inability of Speer, the ‘expert,’ to understand the intentions of the Order.” Mengele went on:
It’s a pity that so little of the greatness of the time has stayed in the memory of a man who was allowed to play in the game in such a favored position. Speer hasn’t heard either now, or in those days, the call of history. But his attempt to revise history cannot diminish the greatness of that time.
In Mengele’s view, Speer’s admission that he was wrong to follow Hitler was just an exercise in public self-flagellation:
If Speer’s confessions are real, he has to be accused of severe misuse of the friendship of his Führer, whom he has been trying to compromise. Speer lacked bravery and all the qualities that allow a great personality to be able to make more out of the friendship of his highest commander.
[H]e accuses himself and he takes on guilt which at times he isn’t even accused of and then he believes, or so he hopes, that this can be atoned by sitting in prison for a few years, now that his head has been pulled out of the noose. . . . Perhaps the nightmare of having to stand in the shadow of the other [Hitler] has always tortured him and has now turned into revenge.8
More than ever, in the closing stages of his life, Mengele yearned for contact with his family back home. He asked Sedlmeier to rent another post office box “for the acceleration of post traffic.” Mengele counseled Sedlmeier:
Picking up could be done by you or KH [Karl Heinz] or anybody else that is trustworthy. In order not to have only my mail in that box, you can send an envelope with a postcard from your occasional journeys to that box. This of course other people can do. That way the receiver stays out of the game except insofar as arranging for the p.o. box, a single effort that doesn’t seem unacceptable to me.9
In this way, Mengele argued, more letters could be exchanged without risk of being discovered. Mengele suggested that renting the post box in a big town would be safer and draw no attention, whereas in a small village—presumably Günzburg—“it would be a sensation.”
Mengele’s only contact outside his neighborhood was Wolfram Bossert, who brought him recorded cassettes of his favorite classical music. Sometimes he would go for an outing with the Bossert children, Sabine and Andreas, to whom he became a favored “uncle” having built a wooden paddleboat for them. His links with the Stammers were now strictly business. Gitta and Geza visited only when they brought cash for the apartment rent and money sent from Günzburg. Mengele was hurt to learn in 1975 that for the first time in twelve years, Geza Stammer had not invited him to his birthday party.
His main companion for the first year of his new solitary life was a sixteen-year-old neighborhood gardener, Luis Rodrigues, who liked watching The Wonderful World of Disney and soap operas on TV. Mengele was so lonely that sometimes he asked him to stay the night. Rodrigues recalled how Mengele loved music and how he sometimes whirled clumsily around the room to a waltz. Rodrigues recalled his early impressions of Mengele:
At first he was very serious with me and we only spoke about the job, work in the house or gardening. Then, after some time, he became friendlier with me, and he used to treat me very nicely, and he used to talk to me about what I liked, and how I was getting along, and how my family was. He once told me that I would one day be very proud I worked for him, and I would tell my children I had worked in his house.10
As the year’s end approached, at Rodrigues’s prompting Mengele bought a 150 twenty-four-inch Telefunken black-and-white television set. He told the boy that he wanted the set to watch the Winter Olympics. He confided to Hans Sedlmeier he thought it might persuade “my new housemate to stay.”
But Mengele’s television did little to relieve the pain of his loneliness. It did not persuade the boy to spend more time. And Mengele reported home that although it was a “break in my monotonous life,” he got no enjoyment from the set because “the channels hardly come through and the repeated interruptions by commercials really do disturb me.” Much of the program content, in any case, infuriated Mengele. Television was like a “lightning conductor for his moods—it gives him an opportunity to get worked up, to get angry, and to curse,” wrote Wolfram Bossert.11
Deep depression and anxiety had now set in as Mengele bided his time alone in Alvarenga Road, his one attempt at striking up a friendship having been rebuffed. He ended 1975 with a letter to Sedlmeier, noting that “nothing can improve my mood.” Mengele’s spirits and health were sinking fast. He talked about suicide, saying it would be a blessed relief from his aches and pains and from a world that cared nothing for him.
The beginning of the end came sooner than he expected. In May 1976, Mengele spent a Sunday with the Stammers’ elder son, Miki, and a friend, Norberto Glawe. When they dropped him off at his bungalow gate, Mengele felt quite dizzy and ill. Inside the house, a “sudden pain” hit him in the right side of his head. In Mengele’s own words, “fluttering visions, vertigo, tingling sensations in the left half of my face and my left arm (like ants running), and difficulties with my speech and increasing pain in my head were the major symptoms. Later, this barbaric pain in my head was accompanied by nausea.”
As a doctor, Mengele knew from the symptoms that he had suffered a stroke. “I couldn’t use either my left arm or my left leg, (paralyzing),” he wrote. Norberto Glawe went to a nearby clinic for advice about “Don Pedro,” and was told to take him immediately to the hospital.12
Lying awake that night, Mengele spent many anxious hours. “I thought, my friends will wonder ‘what to do with that old wreck.’ ”13* Early the next morning, Norberto Glawe and his mother arrived to take care of “Don Pedro.” Then the Bosserts came to take him to the Santa Marta Hospital in the Santo Amaro suburb of São Paulo, where doctors diagnosed a mild cerebral hemorrhage.* What Mengele did not know then was that his admission to the hospital had brought him within a whisker of having his cover blown.
Mengele had been introduced to Norberto Glawe and his parents as “Don Pedro” by Wolfgang Gerhard earlier in the year. Norberto’s father, Ernesto, was an Argentinean industrialist of German descent. The Glawes had moved to Brazil in 1959, where they met the Bosserts because Liselotte Bossert taught the Glawe children. The Bosserts introduced them to Gerhard.
Gerhard immediately struck Ernesto Glawe as “unbalanced.” He said Gerhard “had a true adoration for Adolf Hitler, made a point of showing himself to be a real Nazi, and wanted the return of the Nazi regime.” Both Gerhard and the Bosserts made a special point of asking the Glawes if they could help take care of their elderly friend, “Don Pedro,” who was in need of “spiritual and social help and friends.” Ernesto explained:
I thought it was a little strange since I didn’t know Gerhard at all well. But I saw nothing wrong in it either. Once a month I went to the old man and brought him chocolate and helped take care of him. We brought him food and we visited him eight or ten times maybe.14
Just as Gerhard had not confided Mengele’s secret to the Stammers when he first went to live with them, so he kept the Glawes in the dark. He asked the Glawes to take care of the old man because he had to return to Europe to care for his son Adolf, stricken with bone cancer. Gerhard’s wife had died of cancer in 1975. Yet despite this family crisis, Gerhard had taken the trouble to visit Mengele for a very special reason.
At Mengele’s expense, Gerhard flew back to São Paulo to renew his Brazilian identity card, which was about to expire, so that Mengele could continue to use his false identity. The laminated plastic card was opened up and Mengele’s picture was withdrawn, revealing Gerhard’s own picture underneath. It was then relaminated in a local shop so that Gerhard could present it for renewal at the Department of Public and Social Order. After it had been reissued, the plastic covering was reopened, Mengele’s photograph placed squarely over Gerhard’s, and then relaminated. As Mengele himself remarked, the new card—or “dumb man,” as he called it—was far from perfect. The differences in Gerhard’s age (fourteen years younger) and height (six inches taller) were glaring:
The “Old Swiss” is out of duty but the new “dumb man” is naturally not so ideal as it seemed to look at first. Remarkable is the stature, not to mention his age. Nevertheless, I hope it will be of sufficient use for me.15
It was precisely these anomalies that alerted one already suspicious person to the fact that “Don Pedro” was hiding a murky past. As young Norberto Glawe accompanied “Don Pedro” to the Santa Marta Hospital on May 17, 1976, he noticed that he was using the identity card of Wolfgang Gerhard, the “unbalanced” Nazi who had introduced them earlier that year. He also noticed that “Don Pedro” paid his admission fee with a crisp 100 bill.
Norberto’s father, Ernesto, said he had already begun to have doubts about Mengele’s real identity because of his conflicting accounts about what he did in the war. At first “Don Pedro” told him that he had been a sergeant in the German army. Later he said that he had served as a doctor at the front. “I never knew for sure whether he was Pedro or not,” said Ernesto Glawe.16
After two weeks in the hospital, “Don Pedro” was released. Norberto Glawe agreed to move in with him at his bungalow in Alvarenga Road while he convalesced. Cooped up together in such a confined space, “Don Pedro” began to get on the boy’s nerves, as his father explained:
My son spent two weeks with him. While Don Pedro recovered, he had a barbecue and invited several of his friends. But at the end of those two weeks, my son had an argument or disagreement with Don Pedro and he left. He was an egocentric and violent character. We never saw him again.17
By now the Glawes had a strong suspicion as to the real identity of this opinionated and self-righteous old man. “I found a catalogue from a company for agricultural machinery,” said Ernesto Glawe. “It had the name ‘Mengele’ on it. I put two and two together.”18 Finally there was a break-in in which Mengele’s mauser pistol was stolen. To Mengele’s embarrassment, the gun, registered in Geza Stammer’s name, was stolen while Norberto was there. The discovery of a pistol in Mengele’s house confirmed to the Glawes that “Don Pedro” was not an ordinary senior citizen.19
But like the Stammers, the Glawes did not act on their suspicions even though the evidence was now quite strong. “My problem was that I wasn’t positive and I was frightened,” Ernesto Glawe later told the São Paulo police when they discovered the relationship in June 1985. He also told the police that they had no further contact with “Don Pedro” after Norberto Glawe left the bungalow in the summer of 1976.
That was patently untrue. In his diary Mengele allotted the Glawes a code name, as he did for all the key conspirators who helped him. He called them the “Santiagos,” and his diary makes several references to meeting and exchanging gifts with them after the summer of 1976. It was clear that they were not the closest of friends, but neither were they enemies. For example, on January 14, 1977, Mengele wrote to his friend Hans Sedlmeier:
I visited the Santiagos shortly before Christmas and I gave a fruit press to the wife, who took good care of me in those days, a press which she asked for. They brought me a big decorated plate of Christmas cakes. It is going to stay at this level of contact and occasional visits and it is good this way.20
The following Christmas, 1977, Mengele told Sedlmeier that he had seen the Santiagos again: “Mus [Bossert] and I spent Christmas afternoon at the Santiagos.”21
When the Glawes’ relationship with Mengele was disclosed, they tried to put some distance between themselves and Mengele. In June 1985, Ernesto Glawe told ABC News:
Personally I never wanted to be an intimate friend of his. I have never avoided having Jewish friends and I have never been a Nazi. In fact I have two employees who are Jewish. I consider this idea of neo-Nazism totally passé. I feel very badly about it [the assistance to Mengele] now, because I helped someone who really did not deserve any assistance.22
But in his act of public contrition, Ernesto Glawe made one important omission. He failed to mention that they had received hush money from Mengele. By the summer of 1976 the Glawes knew precisely who Mengele was. The false identity card, the “Mengele” catalogue, the conflicting war stories—undoubtedly they confided their suspicions to their friends the Bosserts, who felt they could trust the Glawes with the secret. Despite his anger, Mengele felt obliged to pay the Glawes for their silence, as this letter from Sedlmeier to Mengele revealed:
In connection with the Santiago affair, you mentioned that you were disgusted that one had to pay friends for their services. Don’t we do the same with the tall man [Wolfgang Gerhard]? If we had considered this necessity with G + G [Gitta and Geza Stammer] you might still be together.23
Mengele’s fees to “the tall man,” which had risen since he acquired his identity card, were proving to be a considerable drain on his private funds. Marianne Huber, the Gerhards’ landlady in Graz, Austria, said that one of the children told her that “Gerhard had sold his ID card for 7,000.” In what currency, she did not know.24
To raise the extra cash, Mengele had to sell the São Paulo apartment he had bought in the Stammers’ name. “By selling the apartment I am getting rid of a lot of difficulties and bother even though I had to lose some hair,” he wrote.25 Mengele complained in his diary that he did not get much from the sale:
Ge [Geza Stammer] arrived in order to hand over the accounts for the apartment. That closing of accounts reveals the unimaginable misery with that property, on which I had worked so hard and in such drudgery! Alas, a part of my fate! When I deduct from the incoming 9000 US dollars the expenses of the last two years [around 1500], I get nothing more than just 7500 US dollars.26
Unknown to Mengele, his devoted nephew Karl Heinz had been paying a large share of Gerhard’s medical expenses.* News of Karl Heinz’s secret funding was revealed to Mengele only after he had his stroke. But Mengele did not like to be reminded of it:
I did not appreciate reading in your letter that KH has often been helping and reached deeply into his pocket. Even though I know “the right hand shouldn’t know what the left hand does,” it would be useful for me to be informed of any support action. I did expressly indicate that this type of grant should not become a permanent habit. The sick Burli [Adolf} and Christmas are special occasions and only such occasions can be appropriate for this. KH has written to me in a positive way and I would like to thank him for his generosity in this matter.27
In another letter home Mengele complained:
Despite his undoubted generosity it upsets me to be a financial burden to him. Everything comes out of his private funds. . . . One can’t ignore that these amounts have over time become a considerable sum, and even they were not enough . . .28
However, Mengele’s embarrassment did not stop him from begging Karl Heinz for more money after Gerhard told him that the cost of his son Burli’s treatment had escalated because the child needed more surgery. In a letter to Sedlmeier, Mengele said:
After more than a year my friend has finally written to me and naturally, not much good news . . . about Burli [Adolf}, he had to be operated on again for further medical care by the female cancer doctor, the doctor who the neurologists think is having some success, and for this medical care he did not have the means. He doesn’t say anything about how he intends to get those means, and leaves it to my intelligence to guess it. I guessed it—as of course you would have done. So we both know what he probably thinks or expects. What I mean is this: once you say “dumb man” [false identity card], then one must take the consequences and the consequences in this case are the sick son. How much, you want to know? Last time it was between 4,000-5,000 DMs [deutschemarks, approximately 1600]. Most likely it has not gotten any cheaper. Therefore I want you to explain these facts to Karl Heinz and ask him for his assistance in my name. When I wrote my letter to him it seemed inappropriate to mention it. He will understand that. This matter does not permit any delay.29
Mengele’s concern about his finances and his health provoked another major crisis. Although he had recovered movement in his limbs within the first twenty-four hours of hospital treatment, his stroke had left him in an acutely anxious state. Bossert wrote to Sedlmeier that “his relentlessness comes out in his physical disquiet; he can’t sit still, he constantly taps his fingers and clips his fingernails.” Mengele had become obsessed with his health. His letters home to Günzburg were marked with minutely detailed reports about his declining health and anxious state:
I suffer from an unusual phenomenon which doesn’t improve. It consists of a very strong reaction to a surprise stimulation (e.g., the noise of a car backfiring, not noticing a person is there, unexpectedly being spoken to). This exaggerated shock reaction embarrasses me so far as others noticing it is concerned; they laugh and wonder what’s going on. I can’t explain my “craziness” to everybody, who take me for an anxious fool. The trembling of my right hand during difficult work (e.g., handling a screwdriver) seems to have increased. Or do you think that these are general aspects of aging?30
Deprived of the ability to pursue his favorite pastime of making handicrafts, Mengele was reduced to aimlessly puttering about the house. His relationship with his neighbors had not advanced beyond a superficial state. They saw only a smiling facade, polite and self-contained. “If you asked what country he was from, he would always say, ‘Europe,’ ” said Jaime de Santos, a local caretaker. “I liked him. He was nice. He never got angry or nervous.” When de Santos was short of money and asked him for a loan, Mengele readily complied.31 But beneath this neighborly veneer his failing health and financial worries had created a deeply disturbed old man. In his diary Mengele wrote, “My mood is as if burned out. All what one does seems so senseless! All is so empty.” Mengele also wrote a letter to Sedlmeier in which he showed that he was again contemplating suicide:
The fact that again and again I have to come to you asking this type of favor [money] embarrasses me, but it seems to be part of the game. Sometimes I think I should finally give up. It is so hopeless all alone. But then again this type of despair doesn’t seem right to me. Everything in life that has special value is costly. Sometimes one gets these sudden passing phases, but you must not allow yourself to go crazy.32
As Mengele’s pleas for money to pay Gerhard became more desperate, Sedlmeier began to suspect that Gerhard was inflating his son’s medical expense claims for his own personal benefit:
I cannot yet say how KH will respond to the requests of the tall man [Gerhard]. He was informed by a copy of one of your letters to me, and he must decide for himself. I’ll keep my opinion about the tall man’s behavior to myself, but I have to say that I fear that he uses Burli’s [Adolf’s] condition to improve his finances, because his medical expenses and necessary cures will be refunded for the most part. Since my last reported meeting with the tall man I haven’t been back to him. I will let you know the decision that KH reaches in this matter as soon as I get a chance to talk with him.33
On the other hand, Mengele reminded Sedlmeier of just how valuable Gerhard had been in helping him evade capture:
He has done me an unrepayable favor. . . . A favorable conclusion to this business is important for me. He really offered me friendship and services that no amount can pay off.34
But Sedlmeier’s response did not give Mengele’s spirits much of a boost:
I don’t have a resolution from KH on the matter. I have reminded him but he has left the matter in abeyance. How important you consider this is evident from your last and second to last letters, of which I have sent him copies. I count on talking to him about that during the next few days and if not I will remind him.35
It was during this crisis period that Mengele found strength and hope in only one thought—the possibility that after a twenty-one-year separation he might at last see his only child, Rolf.
* Bossert was one friend who was not surprised that Mengele had suffered a stroke. He later wrote to Sedlmeier: “I am convinced that his stroke was due to an internal damming up because he has no professional life . . . his explosive nature is imposed on the people he lives with. The sudden isolation after ten years of relative security . . . together with the general stress and the worry about his existence . . . brought on the stroke.”
* One of the main problems facing the forensic scientists who examined the bones exhumed from the grave at Embu, near São Paulo, in June 1985 was the absence of Mengele’s recent medical records. The Santa Marta Hospital was unable to assist since they destroyed records after five years. All that was available was Mengele’s entry card under the alias he used—Wolfgang Gerhard—the length of stay, the sickness, and the name of the doctor responsible for his treatment.