Mengele’s instructions for his son’s secret visit resembled a set of military orders. From the moment he first suggested the idea in 1973, Mengele insisted that Rolf travel on a false passport and lay a series of false trails. “There must be no flaw in the plan,” he warned his son. “We must not make the-smallest mistake.”
Rolf had taken four years to decide that he would make the long journey to Brazil—“an odyssey,” as his father later called it. Father and son, joined by blood, separated by history, had different reasons for wanting this extraordinary reunion. Rolf, torn by doubts about his father’s monstrous past, torn by loyalty to his own flesh and blood, could not postpone the confrontation any longer. “I was fed up with the written arguments,” he said. “I wanted to talk to my father, confront him personally.” Mengele awaited the moment with great anticipation, moved more by curiosity than by real affection, prepared for the only inquisition in his life. “You wish to have a dialogue,” he said. “Very well . . .”
Yet a real dialogue was almost certainly out of the question. It was clear to Rolf from the self-righteous tone in one of his father’s letters that he would not tolerate close scrutiny of the dark secrets of his past:
On the one hand I cannot hope for your understanding and compassion for my life’s course; on the other I do not have the minutest inner desire to justify or even excuse any decisions, actions or behavior regarding my life. . . . When it comes to indisputable traditional values, where I sense danger to those close to me or to the unity of my people, my tolerance has its limits.1
Nevertheless Mengele, lonelier than he had ever been in his life, hoped the visit would be a lengthy one:
It is not going to be easy for me to express how much I look forward to that meeting. Perhaps with the confession that it represents the next goal in my life. Therefore I want you to reflect on not making the stay too short.2
Despite this earnest plea, Mengele could still not resist a taunting sting for Rolf. He would never let Rolf forget that he had ignored him for most of his life. In one breath he thanked Rolf for sending greetings on his sixty-sixth birthday; in the next, Mengele jibed: “I am pretty sure you will care more about your mother’s birthday than mine.” In the same letter, Mengele could not resist another dig. Irene had been badly injured in a car accident. “Let’s stay with your mother and her bad luck,” he wrote. “When I learned of that event two months later from Uncle Ha [Sedlmeier], besides my own deep inner feelings I was disappointed that I was not informed by you.”3
With nothing else to do except fret about his health and financial problems, Mengele occupied himself with planning the trip down to the last detail. In May 1977, he wrote to Sedlmeier imploring him to ensure that Rolf use a false passport, or “dumb man,” and gave detailed instructions for his arrival in São Paulo:
The final meeting place cannot yet be divulged. It should not be given directly, but rather by an intermediary in order to detect possible shadowing. Having successfully passed through the airport controls, he should first go to the hotel . . . then by taxi to the Estacao do Metro [subway station] Vila Mariana. From there he will go by underground to the San Bento station, directly in the center. If he feels he is being shadowed during these travels, then the only solution is to go back to the hotel, to hang around town for a few days, and then to travel back home again.4
Mengele need hardly have worried since the West Germans were not giving the slightest priority to following any members of his family. But since he did not know that, his elaborate instructions to Rolf continued, with an echo from the past. “Use the subway in an inconspicuous manner,” he urged his son, advising him how to merge with the crowd on the platform just as he had done on his escape by train through Italy in 1949. He also told Rolf how to get to the Bosserts’ house. From there, Wolfram Bossert would lead him to the ramshackle bungalow on Alvarenga Road:
The reason for all this traveling, apart from security, is that there is no one in Mu’s [Bossert’s] house between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. Should the arrival not be between these times, then for security reasons it is still advisable to take the underground trip, only the traveler goes from San Bento back to Vila Mariana and takes a taxi there to Mu’s house. If I am given the exact time of arrival including the hour, then I can prepare things much better.5
He also asked Rolf to bring presents for the Bosserts—“a few engravings of towns, little objets d’art, etc. It won’t be very much.” Mengele criticized his family for not paying more attention to those who had helped him. “Just a note of thanks and a token gift would suffice to keep them all happy,” he complained to Sedlmeier. “I don’t understand, after the Ge + Gi [Stammers] disaster, that this still hasn’t dawned on you. Your response to my request, that you should send a few kind words to the Mus [Bosserts], is typical of your attitude to my friends.”6
For himself, he asked Rolf to bring a Latin-English dictionary, parts for his German-made electric razor, some tape recordings, and copies of Ovid’s Tristia (Elegies) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). He also asked Sedlmeier to buy Rolf and Karl Heinz a book just written by his friend Hans Ulrich Rudel, in which the Luftwaffe ace reaffirmed his faith in Hitler, and featured pictures of his wartime aerial exploits. “One day it will be of historical value,” Mengele forecast. The German Bundestag had just been in an uproar over the Luftwaffe’s presentation of a special honor guard for Rudel when he visited an air base to autograph copies. Mengele was outraged at the political storm. “I only read casual references to Uli’s affair,” he fumed. “Naturally, the whole mob of characterless subservients which nowadays tyrannizes Germany tear into him.” Mengele said the ultimate irony was that Israel could now teach Germany a lesson in national pride and military strength.
Sedlmeier promised to do his best to get the presents, but a signed copy of Rudel’s book was proving more difficult. “Most bookshops don’t carry his books,” Sedlmeier wrote back. “Getting his signature might be even more difficult. Since his stroke he can hardly write with his left hand. If the young [Rolf and Karl Heinz] are interested in these, I’ll leave it to them to buy.”
At Mengele’s request, Sedlmeier was in charge of checking the security of Rolf’s travel plans. On May 27, 1977, he wrote to Mengele saying that Rolf intended to travel that September, by charter flight from Luxemburg to Rio de Janeiro, that he had obtained a false passport, and that he would stay for four weeks, three of them “at your disposal.” Sedlmeier explained:
On Monday I met Rolf. . . . We went through the plan in detail. . . . He won’t be able to hire a car for various reasons. Perhaps Mu could rent one for him since he doesn’t have a driver’s license that fits his passport. He will have to show his normal license if he is checked, but this is something you must decide there. I don’t need to go into detail about the plan. It’s bound to be a lot easier than you imagine. We both laughed at your instructions. . . . As soon as the flight is confirmed I will let you know the exact date. . . . Whether he is going to do the Rio—Sao Paulo stretch by internal flight or by train or bus, only he will decide at the time and place.
He wants to move around like a tourist without any constraints and make his decisions as and when the mood takes him. Don’t forget that he’s much traveled, speaks fluent English and is not afraid of hardship.7
Mengele was furious and alarmed that his instructions were not being obeyed to the letter. He wrote back to Sedlmeier and insisted that on no account should Rolf risk driving a car unless he had an international driver’s license that matched his false passport. And he demanded to know more details about the passport itself.
The first irrevocable demand is the perfect assistant [false passport], about which I did not learn a thing in your last letter. Recent information I got concerning entry controls suggests there could be serious problems. If all my conditions are respected, then, as you say, “everything will be much easier” and I won’t have to “imagine anything!” I don’t propose to signal my agreement until I know every detail about the assistant. I am also totally confused by your remark about a “tourist wanting to move around freely.” I’d always thought he was coming to see me!8
In the midst of these angry exchanges, Rolf delayed his trip a number of times. Sedlmeier began to lose patience with Rolf as well as his father. In August he asked Rolf to make up his mind: “You should have discussed things in more detail. . . . For the time being I won’t announce your new date, in order not to cause any confusion, especially since I can’t really give an excuse for this new change.”9
Two days later Sedlmeier was so exasperated that he wrote to Mengele asking to be relieved of his role as middleman in the travel plans. Mengele had accused him of inventing reasons for Rolf’s continued delays. Sedlmeier had tired of Mengele’s idiosyncracies and paranoia:
Unfortunately you misinterpreted my statements about the tourist business and of [Rolf] having no fixed dates for the journey. He should write to you himself about this as I think it only right that all further details to do with the trip, the reporting, and all the correspondence should be left to Rolf.10
But Mengele and his son were not able to resolve the final details, and the ever faithful Sedlmeier stepped in to mediate again. Finally the travel date was fixed: October 10. As a bonus, Sedlmeier held out the prospect of a special visit by Mengele’s old friend, Hans Rudel, who was convalescing after treatment for a stroke at the Mayo Clinic in the United States:
One week ago I was visiting Uli [Rudel] and spent a couple of hours there. . . . I have asked him to visit you in case he has time; he said he would see when it was possible. After he visits the U.S. he will visit La Paz, Paraguay and Brazil.11
To prepare Rolf for the meeting and to fully brief him about the background of his father’s circumstances in Brazil, Sedlmeier arranged a meeting with Karl Heinz, who through regular correspondence was on more intimate terms with Mengele than was his own son. It took place in August, in Sedlmeier’s garden in Günzburg. The trio also went over an outline travel plan and Karl Heinz gave Rolf 
5000 to take to Mengele. “We spent many hours in my garden and had an opportunity to discuss the undertaking in all its details,” Sedlmeier reported to Mengele. Finally, Sedlmeier had a word of warning for Mengele, locked as he was in a Nazi time warp. Rolf, he would find, represented a generation of German youth whose ideology and values were wholly different from his own:
The world, especially here with us, has changed tremendously and these changes have passed you by. . . . You have not been through these times with us. You have no right to criticize from afar. The preconditions that you take as a basis for all actions and thoughts simply no longer exist. You have stood still in the concepts of the old days, which unfortunately, yes, I use the word unfortunately, are no longer valid.12
Rolf departed for Rio de Janeiro from Frankfurt with a 600 charter ticket on Varig Airlines. He traveled on a passport which he had stolen from a friend, Wilfried Busse, when they were on holiday earlier that year.* Busse had left his passport in the car when he stopped to buy something from a shop. “I looked down and saw Wilfried’s picture,” said Rolf. “I thought to myself, ‘That looks just like me.’ My father had been going on and on about a foolproof passport. So I thought, That’s the one.’ ”13
As his father had instructed, Rolf brought with him gifts for the Bosserts and for his father, a Latin-English dictionary, an attachment for his electric razor, and the 5000 cash from Karl Heinz. An hour or so into the flight, Rolf began to have last-minute doubts. He said: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Should I really be going? It won’t change anything.’ But these misgivings were just nerves. I knew that I wouldn’t turn back once I got to Brazil. It was something I had to do. I’d been thinking about it for too long.”
Rolf was accompanied by a second friend, whose name he will not disclose, the only person outside his family circle whom he completely trusted to keep the secret. This friend held Rolf’s real passport in his pocket, to be produced in case Rolf was challenged by Brazilian immigration. Their plan was simple: once Rolf had safely entered Brazil, he would visit his father in São Paulo while his friend enjoyed the beaches in Rio. Rolf would return to Rio for the scheduled return charter flight to Germany, together with his friend.
“I wasn’t at all nervous about entering Brazil,” said Rolf. “My friend and I had traveled together before when we worked in the Middle East, and used to play games with each other’s passports . . . to see if we could get through immigration. On this occasion the Brazilians didn’t even give me a second look.”
Rolf spent his first night in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro’s poshest hotel, the Othon Palace, checking in as Wilfried Busse. The next day he boarded a commuter plane to São Paulo. Once there, in order to cover his trail and to ensure that he was not followed, he took three taxis in a circuitous route before arriving at the Bosserts’ house at 7 Missouri Street.
The final leg of the journey was accomplished in Bossert’s rickety old Volkswagen bus. As he pulled into Alvarenga, a dusty road full of potholes, Rolf Mengele experienced probably the strangest collection of emotions that any son has ever felt for his father. He was about to meet the most hated man in the world.
The Volkswagen stopped in front of Mengele’s house. “It was actually more of a hut,” said Rolf. “I was tired and suffering from nervous exhaustion.”
It had been twenty-one years since Rolf last saw his father—in the Swiss Alps when he knew him as a long lost uncle who had held him spellbound with tales of daring wartime exploits. During those twenty-one years his father had been revealed as a monster.
The man standing at the gate now was a shadow of the hero of old. The pride had gone. So had the self-assurance. There was a pathetically eager look about his father, as he raised his arms for an awkward embrace. “The man who stood before me,” said Rolf, “was a broken man, a scared creature.”
Josef Mengele was trembling with excitement. There were actually tears in his eyes. Rolf felt as if he were in the presence of a stranger. “That’s when I made a few gestures to overcome the unfamiliarity and the emotion,” he said, and he responded to his father’s offer of an embrace.
The bungalow his father was living in was small and simple. Mengele slept on the brick floor. Rolf had the bed.
And then the questioning began, cautiously at first, with Rolf affecting a conciliatory approach, getting his father to state his case, lulling him into a false sense of security so that Mengele might think that his son shared, after all, a sympathetic view. In fact, Rolf had adopted a lawyer’s approach, calculating that only by patiently drawing his father out, could he spot the weaknesses and flaws in his case, which would allow him to prepare for a robust and probing cross-examination:
I told my father I was interested in hearing about his time in Auschwitz. What was Auschwitz according to his version of events? What did he do there? Did he have a role in the things he was charged with? For tactical and psychological reasons I very cautiously touched upon this subject, trying to analyze it and separate out the more obscure and complex arguments my father was trying to inject.14
Night after night the inquisition went on. Mengele’s answers were so full of philosophical and pseudo-scientific verbiage that Rolf began to fear “my mind would be overrun.” His father kept straying off the essential points, justifying his racist views, falling back at one stage on a detailed critique of prehistoric evolution. When Mengele had finally exhausted his hand, Rolf launched his counteroffensive. Why, Rolf asked him, if he felt so sure of his ground, had he not turned himself in? “My father replied, ‘There are no judges, only avengers,’ ” said Rolf. How could his father explain that many crippled and deformed people had brilliant minds? “My father could not give me a proper answer to that. He just waffled on and on.” What precisely was his evidence for asserting that some races were superior to others? “Here most of his arguments were sociological, historical and political,” said Rolf. “They were quite unscientific.” Wasn’t such an attempt to categorize races in any case immoral and deeply inhuman? “My father knew that this was my route into Auschwitz and what he did there,” said Rolf. “He saw my approach and knew that I hadn’t accepted what he’d been saying.”
In the fourteen days and nights that Rolf spent with his father, he learned a lot about his father’s moods, his suicidal tendencies, his depression, his temper. He learned nothing about what his father did in the war. In a philosophical way, Mengele tried to justify what he had done without saying exactly what it was. But never once did he admit his guilt:
I proposed that whatever he or anyone else did or did not do in Auschwitz, I deeply detested it, since I regard Auschwitz as one of the most horrible examples of inhumanity and brutality. He said I did not understand. He went there, had to do his duty, to carry out orders.
He said everybody had to do so in order to survive, the basic instinct of self-preservation. He said he wasn’t able to think about it. From his point of view he was not personally responsible for the incidents at the camp. He said he didn’t “invent” Auschwitz. It already existed.
He said that he had wanted to help people in the camp but there had been a limit to what he could do. As far as selections were concerned, he said, the situation was analogous to a field hospital during time of war. If ten wounded soldiers are brought into the hospital in critical condition, the doctor must make almost instantaneous decisions about whom to operate on first. By choosing one, then necessarily another must die. My father asked me: “When people arrived at the railhead, what was I supposed to do? People were arriving infected with disease, half dead.” He said it was beyond anyone’s imagination to describe the circumstances there. His job had been to classify only those “able to work” and those “unable to work.” He said he tried to grade as many people “able to work” as possible.
What my father was trying to do was to persuade me that in this manner, he had saved thousands of people from certain death. He said that he did not order and was not responsible for gassings. And he said that twins in the camp owed their lives to him. He said that he personally had never harmed anyone in his life.15
The more that Mengele perverted the truth, the angrier he seemed to become. Sensing Rolf’s incredulity, he shouted at him: “Don’t tell me you, my only son, believe what they write about me? On my mother’s life I have never hurt anyone.” It was at this point that father and son agreed no useful purpose would be served in pursuing the debate. As Rolf explained:
I realized that this man, my father, was just too rigid. Despite all his knowledge and intellect, he just did not want to see the basis and rules for the simplest humanity in Auschwitz. He didn’t understand that his presence alone had made him an accessory within the deepest meaning of inhumanity. There was no point in going on. I had to resign myself to that fact. He did promise to write everything down. He kept saying that if I had time to study what he meant, I might see his point. But unfortunately he never did.16
In the end, said Rolf, it was impossible to discuss the concepts of evil or guilt because his father felt no guilt:
I tried. These allegations, these facts left me speechless; I tried to tell him that his presence in Auschwitz alone was unacceptable to me. I was hoping he’d say, “I tried to get a transfer to the front. I did this, I did that.” But it didn’t come to this preliminary agreement. Unfortunately I realized that he would never express any remorse or feeling of guilt in my presence.17
The confrontation between father and son was not visible to the neighbors and rare visitors. To neighbors, the young man who was seen staying with “Pedro” was his “nephew.” “A good-looking young man,” recalled Mengele’s housemaid, Elsa de Oliveira.
Despite the unbridgeable gap, Rolf found his father mentally alert. He spoke Latin and Greek and still had a lively and inquiring mind. They walked together and shopped together, buying a ceiling lamp to enliven the drab hallway. Rolf remembers that “everyone appreciated him and everyone liked him.” Together they visited the Bosserts, and they traveled to Mengele’s earlier homes in Serra Negra and Caieiras. Rolf recalls that owners at both farms were pleased at the visit and “proudly presented to us the well-done handwork of Señor Pedro.”
A visit to the Stammers, however, was more strained:
My visit to the Stammers was welcome on the one hand because they were very curious about me. On the other hand they had a bad conscience, of course, caused by the way they got rid of him in the end. They had a terrible fear that their future daughter-in-law, who was present, would hear the name “Mengele,” the name under which I introduced myself to them. So I quickly changed to “Wilfried Busse” again.
The Stammers were building a new house. My father told me that the Stammers had an economic advantage over him during all those years. He could do nothing since he was dependent on them. They “borrowed” money from him and were surprised, even angry, when he wanted to have it back later. They were quite pleased when we left.
But while the Stammers gave Rolf a cool reception, the Bosserts were “completely different . . . extremely correct.” They tried their best to make Rolf’s stay a pleasurable one. Yet they sensed there was difficulty between father and son. Liselotte Bossert remembers the situation:
I didn’t think they got on very well, but there was some sort of respect between them. Because Rolf Mengele is part of present-day Germany, and probably has feelings of guilt that he was looking for in his father but didn’t find. Because his father didn’t feel guilty. He was a scientist and thought to have acted properly—from his point of view—in his earlier days.18
While the Bosserts analyzed Rolf and his relationship with his father, Rolf was drawing firsthand conclusions about the psychological dependencies and weaknesses that had formed between his father and his protectors, the Stammers and the Bosserts. Rolf could see why his father had fallen out with the former and had become friendly with the latter:
He [Mengele] didn’t realize how he had troubled the Stammers with his sharp intelligence, his pointed remarks, his logic, and his arguing. They must have considered him a senior schoolmaster and were certainly glad and relieved to finally get rid of him. At last they could live an illogical, disorderly, lazy, pleasure-seeking life again, their way of life, without a bad conscience and without playing the hypocrite of play-acting for him.
As for the Bosserts, he was the connection with the past, a justification for their own past. He intellectually stimulated them, and he explained to them a lot of things, so they were able to understand new things.
But mainly he was a person who needed their help and their devotion. A man who was also worth their devotion. A man who had been driven out, who was not understood. They helped him completely unselfishly. And, unlike the Stammers, when he got on their nerves, they simply said so to him or they just went away.
Since Rolf favored the Bosserts, he spent considerable time with them during his trip. They took his father to Bertioga, the beach where he was to die sixteen months later. At the Bosserts’ suggestion, Mengele took Rolf to a small jewelry shop in Eldorado, where he bought a 500 emerald ring for Rolf’s fiancée, Almuth.
As Rolf’s visit stretched into the second week, the Bosserts thought the relationship between father and son seemed to be improving. However, Rolf knew the brick wall he had encountered on the subject of the Holocaust would never break down. After only two weeks, Rolf decided it was time to go.
Their farewell at the São Paulo airport was a brief and formal affair. Mengele was too preoccupied with his fear that someone might be watching to openly express any emotion. “ ‘We shall try to meet again very soon, all of us,’ were his last words.” But Rolf knew he would never see his father again.
After meeting with his friend in Rio for a few days of sightseeing, Rolf flew home to Frankfurt. He re-entered West Germany using his real passport; no questions were asked about the fact that the son of Josef Mengele had just returned from South America, his father’s presumed sanctuary. The German customs officials even failed to notice that the passport lacked the required entry visa stamp for Brazil.
For Mengele, Rolf’s journey home was another anxious time. “I felt enormous tension,” he later wrote to him. “I didn’t know whether you’d need help considering the stricter controls at German points of entry. You didn’t confirm your arrival back in Germany so I was pretty nervous by the time your letter finally reached me four weeks later.”19
In this letter Mengele thanked Rolf for the “many endearing and unforgettable days” they spent together, complaining about the shortness of Rolf’s visit. But there had not been much left to say, he conceded, “facing the fact that you are not sensitive to my influence.” Notwithstanding the complaints, Rolf recognized that his father had discovered a newfound respect for his son:
He was proud of his son, like a soldier after a successful reconnaissance patrol. After all, he was like his son, even if different: pig-headed and spoiled by the postwar propaganda and by the stepfather’s home and education. All that will settle down. At least the son had found the right wife. Soon he would be a grandfather. That visit gave him a fresh impetus and new hope.
A month later Mengele wrote to Rolf again, this time to congratulate him and his second wife, Almuth, on their wedding. “If I had known how much you enjoyed precious stones, I would have sent you a bigger one,” Mengele told his new daughter-in-law. Now that Rolf had a wife, he said, it might help him get closer to his son.20 And then he expressed gratitude to Rolf for taking the trouble to see him after all those years apart: “Now I can die in peace.”