Rolf Mengele’s meeting with his father finally relieved the conflict between his obligations as a lawyer and his blood ties as a son. He would not hand over his father to the authorities. “In the end he was my father,” said Rolf. “I couldn’t report him to the police.”1
But the fear that he might yet be discovered still preyed heavily on Mengele’s mind. Even in the final miserable year of his life, he never once lifted his guard. The Bosserts suggested that he move to a more cheerful neighborhood, but for Mengele a change of scenery carried an unacceptable risk. “Any widening of the circle of people you get to know inherently brings unpredictable dangers,” he said. “These have to be compared with the advantages to be expected.”2
More than ever now, he craved friendship and company. He told Rolf he had hopes of getting to know an Austrian couple that had moved nearby. But his highest hopes were pinned on his new housemaid, nearly forty years his junior, a small, sharp-featured woman with bleached blond hair. Elsa Gulpian de Oliveira had gone to work for the old man she knew only as “Don Pedro” in response to an advertisement. Mengele came to depend heavily on her for company. When she was there, he was happy. When she left, he moped.
Elsa grew fond of her boss. “He was well preserved, and good looking,” she said. “I admired his politeness, things that a woman would admire.”3 While she cleaned his house and cooked his food, Mengele wrote in his diary or went for long walks. He tried to introduce her to classical music and the arts. When her sister married, Mengele took Elsa’s hand for a dance. Soon there were expensive gifts—a gold bracelet, a ring, a white woolen shawl. Although he never once tried to kiss her, Elsa became the sole object of his emotional desire. For the third time in his life, Josef Mengele had fallen in love. Elsa recalls his possessiveness:
He never liked my having boyfriends. He always used to say, “This one isn’t going to work out,” or “That one doesn’t really care about you.” He started to ask me why I made myself look good to go out with young men but not when I went out with him. One day he invited one of my boyfriends to the house and as we came down the stairs holding hands he stared at us. Later he told me he was jealous of me holding hands with the young man and he confessed that he loved me and asked me to move in with him.4
Elsa refused. “I told him that I would not live with him unless he married me,” she said. “I told him I wanted to get married legally. If he had asked me, I would have married him.” But Mengele was distraught. “He started crying and said he couldn’t marry me, but he wouldn’t tell me why,” she said.5
Spurned so late in life, Mengele behaved like a lovesick boy. He pestered Elsa’s mother, promising he would give her daughter a good and homely life. He broke down in front of her and sobbed. “My mother and I used to get very nervous,” said Elsa. “My mother would say, ‘How crazy is that man?’ He even walked back and forth in front of our house, waiting for me.”6
Elsa had brought a new light into Mengele’s life. But in October 1978, she went out of it as quickly as she had come in when she announced that she intended to get married. Mengele never quite recovered from the shock. “He cried and said I must not marry my husband because he really didn’t care for me,” she said. “He cried and he said he was going to die soon.”
From then on Mengele declined rapidly. “I had a bad time of it these past two months,” he wrote to Sedlmeier, “barbaric pains, sleepless nights and disappointments.” Once more, thoughts of suicide entered his head. “Long-lasting pain of this kind causes one to be very nervous and sick of living.”7
Mengele was now plagued by high blood pressure, a severe inner ear infection, and a prostate condition. His degenerating spine was also very painful. Even his few friends had tired of his moaning. He complained that Wolfram Bossert had told him it was “a good thing that I lived alone because of all my moaning and sighing. I really wouldn’t wish my pain on this insensitive man.”8 And he accused his family of virtually abandoning him. “No one told me about the birth of Rolf’s baby,” he wrote to Sedlmeier.9 He was especially grieved by the silence from Rolf.
Amid the wretchedness of these last months came a sinister echo from his past. Rolf’s wife, Almuth, had aroused Mengele’s interest because she was a twin. “The nosiness of this old explorer of family heredity should be understandable,” he wrote. “For the first time one of us has chosen his partner from the north,” he said. “These incoming Nordic genes are to be appreciated and the best results are to be expected from this combination.”10 Mengele asked Almuth for more details of her family background. But he did not get a reply.
Life in Alvarenga Road now seemed empty and devoid of purpose. Mengele tried to fill the gaping hole left in his life by Elsa’s departure. Inez Mehlich, a maid who had worked part-time for him before, agreed to live in, sleeping in a makeshift wooden hut in his back garden. Sometimes, she said, Mengele behaved like a small child. “He was so anxious that he once pounded on the door of my hut in the middle of the night,” she said. “I opened it and he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry—I just wanted to make sure you were there. O.K. It’s all right. Goodnight.’ ”
By Christmas 1978 Mengele had lost the will to live. He walked around in an absentminded daze, not seeming to care what might happen to him. Once he nearly fell down a well in the backyard; another time he was almost killed when he ventured outside. Neighbors, startled by the screech of brakes, saw a bus straddling the road and amid the swirling dust, Mengele, grazed yet shuffling out of sight as if oblivious of his brush with death.
It was in this distracted frame of mind that Mengele left his bungalow at 5555 Alvarenga Road for the last time. He seemed to know that he might never return. After agonizing for several days, he finally accepted an invitation from the Bosserts to stay at their rented beach house at Bertioga, twenty-five miles south of São Paulo. It was late January 1979, the height of a sweltering Brazilian summer. “He kept wondering whether it would do his spirits any good,” Inez recalled. “He said he was very tired but in the end agreed to take the trip. ‘I am going to the beach because my life is at an end,’ he told me.”11
Alone, he took the two-hour bus ride to Bertioga, arriving there on February 5. Lisolette Bossert remembers “he started letting off steam right away. He seemed to be very irritated by something.” For most of the next two days, Mengele stayed inside the tiny two-bedroom beach house. Its shutters were closed despite the broiling heat. “It must have been like a steam bath inside,” said Arnaldo Santana, who lived behind the summer house. “I was working close by and I could hear talking, always in German.”
At 3 p.m. on February 7, Mengele finally emerged. “We thought a walk would soothe his mind, as he would see nature, the beach and the water,” said Liselotte. It was another hot day, the sunshine blazing down. He and Wolfram Bossert walked along the beach and then sat in the sun for a while. Bossert recalls that Mengele was heartsick for Germany:
I am convinced that he was longing to return to Germany. That was clear toward the end; on the last day he made it clear. I don’t know whether he knew death was coming, but he was sitting on a large rock by the sea, all by himself, looking out across the sea to the east. And he said: “Over there is my country. . . . I would like to spend the last days of my life in my native town of Günzburg, somewhere at the top of a mountain, in a little house, and to write the history of my native town.” That was what he really wanted. . . . At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, but knowing now what happened that day, I can remember it quite clearly.12
About 4:30 in the afternoon, to cool off from the burning sun, Mengele decided to chance the gentle Atlantic waves. Ten minutes later he was fighting for his life.
Young Andreas Bossert saw him first and shouted, “Uncle, come out, the current is too strong.” Alerted by his son, Wolfram Bossert looked up and saw a thrashing movement in the sea. He called out and asked Mengele if he was all right. A grimace of pain was the only response. Plunging into the sea, Bossert swam as fast as he could to rescue his friend. By the time he reached him, there was scarcely any movement left. Paralysis had seized his body. Young Andreas Bossert remembers a lifeless body lying lopsided on the water, bobbing up and down with the swell of the sea. Mengele had had a second stroke. Bossert recalls the frantic few moments:
I had to swim with one arm and drag him with the other, and the sea was dragging us both out. I fought and fought, trying to keep his head above water, never feeling any ground under my feet, so that I knew that we weren’t getting any closer to shore. I got to a stage where I felt I couldn’t hold on any longer. But then, somewhere in my subconscious I had a thought that I should use the force of the waves. So I dived, digging my heels into the sand and then holding the body above my head—he was still alive then.13
Suddenly and unexpectedly Mengele began to make a desperate last fight for life. His eyes now fixed earnestly ahead, he was trying to swim with one arm, his strokes getting stronger. For a moment it seemed that he had survived the worst. But then his face lost all its determination, his arm fell back, and there was no movement.
Bossert remembers his effort to just carry Mengele to shore:
I was left with this deadweight. . . . I surfaced and let myself be carried forward by the waves, then I dived again, dug my heels into the ground and held him above me, before coming up again. And this is how we managed to get ashore.
As Wolfram Bossert got nearer to dry land, a group of rescuers waded out to meet him and grabbed Mengele by his legs and arms, carrying him to the beach. Bossert was quite exhausted from his rescue attempt. So hard had he struggled that he nearly drowned, and he had to go to the hospital himself.
A clutch of people had gathered as news of the drama spread, Mengele’s now motionless body lying on the sand. A doctor who had seen it all massaged his heart and administered the kiss of life. For a few moments there was a flicker of response, but in the end the doctor’s efforts were to no avail.
The body was left on the beach until late that night. Every few minutes it had to be dragged farther up the sand because of the incoming tide. “I nearly had a screaming fit,” said Liselotte Bossert. “It was so undignified.” Then a policeman, Expeditio Dias Romao, came to take charge of the body.
Accidents were not uncommon on this popular stretch of sand, but Romao said he would always remember this one. Darkness had fallen by the time he arrived. Kneeling in an almost reverential pose was Liselotte Bossert, holding a candle at the dead man’s head and wailing, “The Uncle is dead. The Uncle is dead.”14