Rolf Mengele’s first reaction to the news of his father’s death was one of enormous relief. “I basically had a conflict that could never be resolved,” he said. “On the one hand he was my father; on the other hand there were these allegations, these horrific pictures of Auschwitz. I was very relieved that this solution came about and not another, like maybe a trial, as important as it might have been.”1
Word of the “Uncle’s” demise reached the Mengele family by letter from Wolfram Bossert to Sedlmeier:
It is with deep sorrow that I fulfill the painful duty of informing you and the relatives of the death of our common friend. Right up to his last breath of air he fought heroically, just as he had done during his life full of turmoil.2
The funeral had been a rushed and traumatic affair. It was all over within twenty-four hours. Immediate disposal of the body was urgently required in that subtropical heat, yet formalities had to be completed. Liselotte Bossert had to cope with them alone because her husband was recovering in the hospital from his rescue attempt. He was so exhausted that the doctor told her she was lucky not to have lost him too.
Shortly before his death, Mengele had told the Bosserts he wished to be cremated. Given the time and regulations, that had not been possible to arrange. “In this mainly Catholic country there are still strict rules to follow concerning this,” Bossert explained to Sedlmeier. The Brazilian authorities required a signature from a close relative guaranteeing that all the surviving members of the deceased’s family agreed to cremation.
Anticipating this problem and unknown to Mengele, Wolfgang Gerhard had made provision for a burial plot next to his own mother’s at Our Lady of the Rosary Cemetery, on a hillside at Embu, twelve miles west of São Paulo. On his brief visit in 1976, Gerhard had even taken the trouble to prepare the cemetery director, Gino Carita, for the arrival of a “sickly older relative.”
But when Gerhard’s plan was put into action, it almost backfired. The corpse had been put in a coffin at a first aid station and taken straight to the local coroner, Dr. Jaime Edson Andrade Mendonca, who just prodded the body. At 2 a.m. he was in no mood for a complete postmortem. Liselotte Bossert heard the man who had brought in the coffin say: “Well, it’s obvious, the person has drowned.” Mendonca then issued a death certificate in the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, aged fifty-three.
Confronted with a simple white coffin and a certificate showing the death of the man who had actually booked the burial plot, Gino Carita was very curious. Then came the most awkward moment of all. Carita said he wanted to open the coffin and see the body. Liselotte Bossert recalls the event:
When he saw the name Wolfgang Gerhard, quite a rare name in these parts, he immediately remembered him and said: “It can’t be possible—he mentioned an old uncle and now he is here himself!” He said to me that we should, perhaps, look at him now. And then I knew straightaway that this was the last thing I had to do, that nobody should discover that it was the body of Mengele—nobody must ever know this—and that’s why I became hysterical and said, “No, I don’t want to, I can’t. My husband is ill and I don’t know how he is, and I am all alone here and I want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.” The man said he respected my wishes, especially as a body pulled out of the water is never a pretty sight . . . so he went along with my wishes.3
Carita relented, not wishing to offend a grieving friend of the deceased, and Mengele’s secret was taken to the grave.
The irony is that had Mengele’s wish for cremation been carried out, his life in Brazil would probably have remained a secret forever. It was the exhumation of his bones six years later that provided scientific proof of his identity. Anything less would undoubtedly not have satisfied his hunters, raised on a diet of press fantasies about his superhuman powers of escape. Certainly it had never been the intention of the Bosserts and the Mengele family to divulge the truth.
On the face of it, the Mengele family’s decision not to announce Josef’s death seems a surprising one. In strictly commercial terms, an announcement of Mengele’s death could only have benefited the family firm in Günzburg, vulnerable as it was to accusations of complicity in his continuing freedom. At least that is what everyone assumed. “There is no reason for the family not to announce his death,” commented a skeptical police superintendent, Menachem Russek, head of the Nazi crimes section of Israel’s police, when news first broke of Mengele’s hillside grave. “It’s a trick. He’s still alive.” In fact, the family had calculated that the financial benefits from an announcement were far outweighed by the torrent of questions that this would raise about their forty years of collaboration. As they had done in the past, the Mengele family had placed their own financial interests as the top priority, ignoring any moral obligation to Mengele’s hunters or survivors to announce the death and end the case. “They [the Mengele family] replied in a letter that naturally the case was much too dangerous to be revealed and that much water would have to flow under the bridge before this could be expected,” said Wolfram Bossert. Moreover, the final decision rested with Mengele’s next of kin, his son, Rolf. And Rolf decided “out of consideration to those who had helped my father” that the world should be left to go on guessing. At least, for a while.
Nondisclosure was certainly what the Bosserts desired, though for even more perverse reasons. “Not only does it avoid personal inconvenience but it also keeps the opposing side wasting money on something that is antiquated,” Wolfram Bossert wrote to Sedlmeier.4
Since Wolfgang Gerhard had died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months before Mengele, Bossert suggested that Gerhard’s children be paid a “settlement allowance” because the Günzburgers would need their collaboration for the paperwork if they decided to transport Mengele’s body back to Germany for a proper funeral. The Mengeles preferred to leave matters as they were.
For the second time in two years, Rolf flew to São Paulo, this time to collect his father’s effects and settle his affairs. He flew under his own name and passport, leaving Frankfurt on a regularly scheduled airliner. He spent Christmas with the Bosserts, not returning to West Germany until January 3, 1980. The Bosserts were rewarded handsomely for sheltering his father. Rolf gave them the 
1000 cash left over from the 5000 he had brought his father during the 1977 trip. Rolf also gave the house at 5555 Alvarenga Road to be equally divided between the Bosserts and the Stammers. It may have been run-down, but it was worth 25,000. The Stammers eventually sold their share to the Bosserts, who took over the entire property. The Bosserts were grateful to Rolf for his generosity and thanked him in a subsequent letter “for allowing us to achieve a lifelong dream.”
Rolf took his father’s gold watch, letters, diaries, and pictures. “Emotionally, I believe, as you probably would, it is best to burn all of it,” Bossert had written to Sedlmeier. “On the other hand his fate is too remarkable. The descendants do deserve an intellectual heritage, even if the current generation doesn’t consider it important.”5 (These lofty ideals faded six years later when Mengele’s corpse was discovered at Embu. Representatives of Stern magazine beat a path to the Bosserts’ door and paid them a handsome fee for some unimportant remnants of Mengele’s papers and photographs they had hidden from Rolf on his 1979 trip.)
After gathering his father’s personal material, Rolf proceeded to Rio and checked in to the posh Othon Palace hotel, where he had stayed two years earlier under a false name. That caused one of the most awkward moments in his life. “Ah, Mengele,” said the concierge. “Do you know you have a very famous name around here?” Rolf feigned a jolly laugh. Inside, he was shaking like jelly. He hid the duffle bag in the dropped ceiling of his hotel room. “Any professional search would have found the material in less than a minute,” said Rolf, “but it was the best I could do.”
Why did it take six years for the secret of Mengele’s Brazilian exile and his death to emerge? Aside from a small circle of unrepentant Nazis like Hans Rudel, there were by now almost forty close friends and family who knew but never said a word. Among these were Rolf, his first wife, Irmi, and her parents; his second wife, Almuth, and her parents, the Jenckels; Mengele’s first wife, Irene; her husband, Alfons Hackenjos; their son, Jens, and his wife, Sabine, who was Rolf’s secretary; Mengele’s nephews, Dieter and Karl Heinz, and their wives; his nieces, Ute and Monika, and their husbands; Mengele’s second wife, Martha, and her son, Wolf Ensmann, from her first marriage; Rolf and Almuth’s friend, Wilfried Busse; the pharmacist and his wife in Munich, Mengele’s friends who had provided him safe shelter in 1945; the Stammers and their two children; the Bosserts and their two children; the Glawes and their son; and of course the dissembling Hans Sedlmeier, his wife, and their two children, one a doctor and the other a lawyer. It is extraordinary that such loyalty to a man so patently evil, and to his family, overrode any consideration of higher morality or public duty—stranger still that from somewhere in the supposedly enlightened ranks of the younger Mengeles not a word was leaked to the authorities, even after his death.
The truth had to be wrested from this arcane and amoral brotherhood, which was divided by bitter jealousies over money and power but united in the common goal of saving their necks and the neck of one of the nastiest men ever known to have inhabited the earth. In the end it was public pressure that forced the authorities to go on the offensive and flush out the facts.
That process began late in 1977, with the very people who had helped create the myth of Mengele’s invincibility and his high-level protection in Paraguay—the Nazi-hunters and amateur sleuths. The idea of Paraguay as Mengele’s permanent home had long been ingrained in the public consciousness. It was the frustrating lack of progress in confirming this established “fact” that persuaded the United States and Israel to resolve the Mengele mystery once and for all.
In August 1977, a dubious story in a glossy Argentine magazine reported that Josef Mengele had been seen driving a black sedan through the streets of Asunción. Simon Wiesenthal went a step further. In September he told Time magazine that Mengele had two posh houses and was always surrounded by armed bodyguards with walkie-talkies. Mengele wore dark glasses, he said, and was an active member of a “surviving network of Nazi bigwigs known as Die Spinne [The Spider].” According to Wiesenthal, Mengele was a frequent visitor to the German Club in Asunción, where he often made a spectacle of himself by slamming his pistol on the bar.6
Time also reported the claims of a recent visitor to Paraguay, Professor Richard Arens of the law faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia. Arens claimed that Paraguayan defense officials had told him that Mengele was in the country as President Stroessner’s close advisor on torture techniques and that he had been experimenting on defenseless Ache Indians in the Chaco. Despite the best efforts of the American embassy in Asunción to persuade Time that the story was probably fictitious, the magazine went ahead and published it.
Inaccurate as it was, the Time article lit a slow-burning fuse on the Mengele hunt, which had been curiously absent from the front pages for three years. Those first wisps of smoke appeared with an inquiry to the state department from Senator Alan Cranston, Jr., in January 1978. The assistant secretary for congressional relations, Douglas J. Bennett, Jr., replied that although the state department could not confirm that Mengele was in Paraguay, it was “difficult for the United States Government to become directly involved in the Mengele case . . . because Mengele does not reside in the United States and the crimes of which he is accused did not occur in United States territory.”7
Just to be certain, the department cabled the U.S. embassy in Asunción, requesting any “hard information on Mengele’s presence (past or now), in Paraguay and his activities, or at least detailed comments on the Mengele reference in the Time article.”8 The following day the embassy cabled back Paraguayan interior minister Sabino Montonaro’s response. He said that Mengele “took out citizenship in 1959; lived in Paraguay for about two years, or until 1961–1962; Mengele has not re-entered Paraguay since that time; if you do not believe me I will be glad to show you the police record.”9 The trouble was that no one any longer believed a word the Paraguayans said. Their public denials during the 1960s of Mengele’s Paraguayan citizenship and their refusal to actively assist in the hunt, coupled with their appalling record on human rights, had irreparably damaged their credibility.
The state department, however, had detected a shift in the Paraguayan government’s attitude since President Jimmy Carter came to power in 1976. Now Paraguay was wrestling with an image problem caused by the Carter administration’s highlighting of its record of torture and detention without trial. With Time magazine having resurrected the specter of Asunción as a haven for the world’s most wanted man, the government faced a major public relations crisis. Paraguay was certainly a refuge for many wanted men. But even Montonaro bridled at what seemed to be a rerun of all the old allegations that Mengele and Stroessner were close friends.
The subject of Mengele soon became a regular topic of conversation for Ambassador Robert White when he took the Paraguayans to task over their repressive regime:
When I got to Asunción, the Paraguayan government would say to me, “What can we do to improve our image abroad?” I would reply that one of the things they could do was cancel Mengele’s citizenship. We discussed it quite a bit.10
In March 1979, the CBS Sixty Minutes program screened a shortened version of a British documentary on the hunt for Mengele. With the assistance of a resourceful German doctor, John Ware and Mike Beckham of Granada Television had obtained secretly filmed conversations with several of Mengele’s former Paraguayan friends, including Alban Krug, Armando Raeynarts, a hotelier who had met him, and Werner Schubius, who knew him in Asunción. For the first time there was on the record evidence that Mengele had been sheltered, at least for a time, in Paraguay after the Eichmann kidnapping.
In the documentary, Krug evaded questions as to when exactly he had sheltered Mengele and muttered threats about “not advising anyone to come looking for him here.” Granada had also obtained for the first time a copy of Mengele’s Paraguayan citizenship document. When Israel’s former ambassador in Asunción, Benjamin Varon, appeared in the film saying Mengele had “one of his homes in Paraguay at least until 1972,” the overall effect of the program was to indicate that the government of Paraguay still had something to hide.11 Seen by 20 million viewers, the program made a significant impact. Americans were outraged. Congress was petitioned with letters and telephone calls demanding that America take action to force Paraguay’s hand.
Responding to the public outcry, in June 1979, Senator Jesse Helms submitted Senate resolution number 184:
. . . it is the sense of the Senate that the President of the United States should immediately call upon Paraguay to apprehend and extradite Josef Mengele to stand trial in the Federal Republic of Germany.12
In the debate that followed, Senator Helms referred to Mengele’s “work in genetic engineering” as the “Frankenstein project of the century.” Helms expressed a view that seemed to shake the United States out of its postwar apathy:
The fact that Josef Mengele should remain today in freedom, never having been brought to trial, makes him a living symbol of the Holocaust we cannot continue to tolerate. To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.
The Senate unanimously passed the resolution urging the president to demand that Paraguay act to arrest and extradite Mengele. In the House of Representatives, fifty-seven congressmen signed a petition that was delivered to the Paraguayan ambassador to Washington, Mario Lopez Escobar, demanding the same action.
Paraguayan government-inspired demonstrations against President Carter’s tough new approach on human rights had already strained relations between Asunción and Washington. But there was never any doubt about who held the whip. Aid was held back and defense cuts were threatened. Now Ambassador White pressed home the congressional demands about Mengele: “Eventually the Paraguayans responded to my suggestion that his citizenship be revoked. They said, ‘What a great idea.’ ”13
On August 5, 1979, Interior Minister Montonaro held a press conference and laid the groundwork for the revocation of Mengele’s citizenship. He denied that Mengele was in the country and said truthfully that he had left Paraguay “a long time ago.” On August 8, Montonaro directed the Paraguayan attorney general, Clotildo Gimenez Benitez, to ask the supreme court to revoke the citizenship, which it did that same day. The court stated that it had reached its decision because Mengele had been “absent from the country since 1960.”
When Mengele’s citizenship was revoked, Ambassador White assumed Mengele must have died. “I must say that up until that time I always believed that actually he was in Paraguay,” he said.14 The ambassador was right, of course, about Mengele’s death, though he did not know what had happened in Brazil. The question is, did President Stroessner know?
According to Ambassador White, it is inconceivable that Montonaro would have revoked Mengele’s citizenship without the president’s authority, since he views the status of Paraguayan nationality as sacrosanct. “Stroessner must have been consulted,” said Ambassador White. If he is right, it suggests that Stroessner was privy to Mengele’s death in Brazil within six months of its occurrence but nonetheless allowed the world to go on guessing for another six years.
No doubt that this is the kind of game that Stroessner would have enjoyed, if only to avenge the false accusations that his country had harbored Mengele for twenty years. But almost certainly Stroessner did not know Mengele had died.
The president’s close friend, Hans Rudel, was privy to the secret, although according to Rolf, he did not know exactly where Mengele had been buried. And just as the Mengele family had reached a pact with the Bosserts never to disclose the death, Rudel too was bound by that oath of silence. Had Stroessner known the exact details, no amount of allegiance to Hans Rudel would have prevented him from laying to rest once and for all the Auschwitz ghost that had haunted his country for so long.
The Nazi-hunters were certain that Mengele was still alive and that Stroessner’s decision to revoke his citizenship was an elaborate plot to extend him even greater presidential protection. The first of their salvos aimed at exposing this sinister move was fired by Simon Wiesenthal. Scornful of Montonaro and the Paraguayan supreme court’s decision, Wiesenthal said it “meant nothing” and offered a new 50,000 reward for Mengele’s capture. He also urged Paraguay to issue another arrest warrant and offered to pay the police 10,000 for his arrest.
Wiesenthal’s skepticism about the Paraguayan action was shared by a group of Jewish industrialists in New York, who with the help of a prominent local Jewish spokesman, actually hatched an elaborate plot to kidnap Mengele. Word reached the group, which included one survivor of Auschwitz, that two Paraguayan intelligence officers were prepared to betray Mengele for 500,000. After several weeks’ negotiations, the Paraguayans agreed to arrest Mengele when he arrived at a bank in Asunción where he was said to come regularly. Mengele would then be taken to the Brazilian border town of Foz de Iguaçu. When his identity had been confirmed, he would be handed over to the authorities. On receipt of a telephone call from one of the industrialists, 500,000 would be transferred from a Bahamian bank to a special account for the Paraguayans.
Early in November 1979, 500,000 was deposited in the Bahamian bank. When the Paraguayans were satisfied the money was there, they signaled to the New Yorkers that they were ready to move in. Two American bounty hunters, one a Vietnam veteran, traveled to Foz de Iguaçu, where they waited for news of the arrest. On November 22 the Americans were told by the Paraguayans that Mengele would be picked up at the bank the following day. On November 23 there was no sign of Mengele or the Paraguayans. Although their money was safe, the Americans had been the victims of a crude shakedown by two corrupt Paraguayan policemen. The incident showed how seriously reports of Mengele hiding in Paraguay were taken even after his citizenship was revoked. The New York industrialists were not men given to precipitate action.15
Meanwhile Wiesenthal’s claims became more extreme. Mengele was hiding in a special Nazi colony in Chile; he had gone to Bolivia but the police would not cooperate; no, he was in Uruguay; he had heart trouble and was about to give himself up to a West German embassy; he had been seen “five times recently . . . his capture could happen in the next several weeks.”
But even Wiesenthal’s vivid imagination could not match the best of the stories claiming Mengele was still alive. Early in 1981, the hunt switched to a wealthy suburb in the United States. Billboards advertising Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post screamed: “Angel of Death in Westchester County.” The paper was reporting the Life magazine claim that from 1978 to 1979 Mengele had lived in a private house near the Ohel Shmuel Yeshiva on Haines Road in Bedford Hills, about thirty miles north of New York City. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” was the laconic reaction of Allan Ryan, Jr., chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.
He was not the only skeptic. But the Life story did contain several genuinely interesting facts about the Mengele family’s financial interests in the United States, and this brought the U.S. closer to launching its final hunt. Life reported that Mengele’s nephew, Dieter, was a part owner in an American corporation, KMN International Farm Equipment, Inc., a distributor of farm machinery. Incorporated in October 1973, the company listed Dieter as its legal representative. KMN stands for three equal partners: “K” is for Bernard Krona GmbH; “M” is for Mengele & Sons; and “N” is for H. Niemayer and Sons. Subsequent inquiries showed outlets in Arkansas and Wisconsin. Although Dieter said he sold his interest in this firm in 1982, further investigations show he retained an ownership share in another U.S. company, the BSD Farm Corporation of Delaware, founded in November 1979. The Mengele family also reportedly bought four hundred acres of farmland in Greencastle, Indiana, in December 1979, valued at 1.2 million.16
In April 1984, there seemed to be another Mengele skeleton in America’s closet. There was a report that he would have been caught by the FBI on a flying visit to Miami in 1979 but for a last minute tip-off. This time the source appeared to be reliable. An assistant United States attorney in Miami, Jerry Sandford, claimed he had been given the secret task of arresting Mengele at the airport after the FBI received word that he would be flying in from Asunción on board Braniff flight 974, arriving at 6:30 a.m. on August 29, 1979.
Since Sandford was running for local political office in 1984, it seemed an opportune moment to tell the electorate how close he had come to catching Mengele and how he had persisted with the hunt ever since. He chose the Jewish Floridian to break his story:
On a Friday afternoon I got a call from the justice department in Washington telling me that I had been selected to handle a matter of extreme delicacy. They refused to give me a name. They told me to tell no one, not even my boss, about this assignment.17
At 8 p.m. that night two FBI agents arrived at Sandford’s house to explain the mission. Sandford went on:
I was stunned. Suddenly it seemed as if I had lived just for this night. Then an hour later I got a call from Washington telling me Mengele had apparently been tipped off and wouldn’t be arriving. My disappointment was bitter.18
In fact there had been a tip to the FBI that Mengele was flying into Miami, but it was all an elaborate hoax. Members of Paraguay’s opposition political parties had made a reservation under the name “Josef Mengele,” in the hope that the recurring image of the “Angel of Death” would compromise the Stroessner government. Not knowing the source of the reservation, the West Germans had picked it up and asked the FBI to check.*
Afterward Sandford became convinced that Mengele might be tied up in a drug smuggling racket. As a former chief of the drug trafficking prosecution unit for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, Sandford put together a chart of what he called “possible links among anti-communist groups, terrorists, narcotics people, and pro-Nazi groups.” Although only conjecture, his suspicion was shared by the CIA. As early as 1972, CIA reports suggested that Mengele was using the name Dr. Henrique Wollman, and lived near Encarnación and “that [he] and others [are] heavily involved in narcotics traffic.”19 In November 1979, the CIA again speculated that Mengele might have been involved in drug dealing. An internal memorandum was drawn up in collaboration with the Drug Enforcement Administration, but it was never made public. A CIA officer coordinating foreign narcotics intelligence said that the article, “though a tantalizing bit of information, is based on very circumstantial and unsubstantiated evidence and does not warrant publication as finished intelligence.”20
Speculative as these reports were, their effect when they were disclosed early in 1985 added to mounting congressional pressure on the United States to throw its formidable resources into the Mengele hunt. The CIA, said Senator Alfonse d’Amato, had just let “the information hang there. No one pursued this.”
One premise never seemed to be in doubt: Mengele was alive, of that everyone was sure. In Frankfurt, Hans-Eberhard Klein, the prosecutor in charge of the West German investigation, said he had no reason to think Mengele was dead—but in view of the Bonn government’s inaction over the years, it is difficult to know the basis for Klein’s assertion. The West Germans had never inspired much confidence in their determination to exhaust all possible leads.
Six months before Mengele’s death was discovered, Serge Klarsfeld, the Paris-based Nazi-hunter, told Klein he believed Rolf Mengele had made a secret trip to Brazil using a false passport. Rolf’s Berlin apartment had been searched by one of Klarsfeld’s supporters, and Wilfried Busse’s passport was found.* It was stamped with a Brazilian visa. As it turned out, this was the passport that Rolf used on the first leg of his journey to Brazil in October 1977 to meet his father. But according to Klarsfeld, prosecutor Klein showed little interest in the lead. “We gave all the information to Klein,” said Klarsfeld. “But we couldn’t find out what he did with it because he always told us that anything to do with Mengele was an official secret.”21
The Israelis were certainly convinced that Mengele was alive. A respected member of New York’s Jewish community traveled to Jerusalem in late 1984 with information that suggested Mengele owned a large farm in Uruguay. There were several high-level government meetings over what seemed to be a new and decisive lead. What neither the New Yorker nor the Israeli government knew was that the two men who were the source of the information had a history of trying to sell invariably false stories about Nazis for large sums of money.
These two story brokers, Saul Stenzburg, a former Argentine policeman, and Herbert John, a West German journalist with shady contacts in the Nazi information business, also persuaded Paris Match and the New York Post to spend more than 50,000 on investigating the old man in Uruguay they said was Mengele. The Post sent an advance party of sleuths who returned with pictures of the suspect on his large hacienda, which was registered in the name of “Branaa.” For the Post, the most persuasive feature of the story was the evidence of a prostitute who Stenzburg said visited Branaa once a month. From such intimate contact, the girl had learned that “Señor Branaa” was German and that his friends called him “Doctor.”
A team of United States photo-identification experts were asked if they thought the photographs were of Mengele. The experts were among the most eminent in their field: Dr. Ellis R. Kerley, a forensic scientist who had been a consultant on the Warren Commission investigating the death of President John Kennedy (and was to be a member of the 1985 U.S. forensics team sent to Brazil to determine whether the bones at Embu were Mengele’s); Peggy C. Caldwell, consultant forensic anthropologist for the office of the medical examiner in New York City and a teacher at the prestigous Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and Dr. Lawrence Angel, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution.
All three experts conducted a series of independent experiments on the photographs, comparing them with verified pictures of Mengele. They made precise measurements and evaluated characteristics such as “adherence of ear auricle to skull,” “lobular appearance and shape of forehead,” “obliquity of palpebral slit.” Measurements and comparisons were made of the length of the nose, the nose root diameter, the length of the face, the nasal “breadth of the alae,” the base of the nose to the lip closure, and many other features.
The results of all three independently tested samples were remarkably similar. Phony pictures had been deliberately placed in each set of pictures. Each expert rejected these. Each expert also concluded that the Branaa photographs and the known pictures of Mengele were one and the same man. And they did not fudge their answers.
Dr. Kerley said, “The 1937 photographs [Mengele’s SS pictures] and the 1985 photograph are very probably the same individual. The conclusion is based on the compatibility of most of indices as indicated by the analysis of variance and on the high probability of .9505 [95 percent] that they are all from the same population.” Dr. Angel said that in his judgment the likeness was “pretty much like seeing an automobile coming down the street at about 50 feet away and saying, ‘That is a Mercedes.’ It is of that order. We ordinarily act on that kind of thing. On this comparison I would be willing to go to court if necessary.” Peggy Caldwell concluded that the 1937 and 1985 photographs were of “the same individual regardless of the difference in his age at the time the photographs were taken.” She said that the “dental data” clinched the verdict for her. “Yes, I would sentence a man to the electric chair on the basis of this,” she said.22
When the Israelis heard these verdicts, they sent their own men to Uruguay to check the story. At the same time, the TV networks learned of the new Mengele suspect. Fearing they might be scooped by NBC, which had shot several thousand feet of videotape of the old man washing his car, ABC approached Señor Branaa directly and asked, “Are you Dr. Mengele?” The poor man spent the rest of the day trying to convince the reporter that he was not the Auschwitz doctor. After Branaa introduced them to business colleagues and old friends and showed them school records, ABC was satisfied that the forensic scientists had made an enormous blunder.
Nevertheless, it was West German prosecutor Klein’s view that prevailed: Mengele was still alive. And reports from Europe seemed to bear this out. Two young British psychologists, Simon Jones and Kirn Rattan, researching a psychological profile of Mengele, thought they had made a breakthrough in contacting the elusive fugitive. Fritz Steinacker, the Frankfurt lawyer who acted for Mengele when he was divorced as well as when he was stripped of his medical and anthropological doctorates, had agreed to forward their written questions through an unidentified intermediary to Mengele. Steinacker promised that in three months they would receive an answer directly from the doctor himself. In hindsight it appears to be Steinacker’s perverse way of having some fun with serious Mengele researchers. “You could say that on that basis we believed Mengele was probably alive,” said Jones. “Steinacker was Mengele’s lawyer, after all.”
The U.S. government also believed Mengele was alive. They gave some credence to intelligence reports in 1984 that he had been seen in Paraguay. Slowly but inexorably, the momentum for American involvement in the Mengele hunt was gathering pace. In June 1984, in an uncharacteristically defeatist mood, Simon Wiesenthal complained that perhaps the time had passed for the hunt for Mengele. “After all, when you bring an old man to court, there is natural sympathy for him,” he sighed.
But congressional sympathy for that argument still had some distance to run. Two crucial events at the beginning of 1985 persuaded Congress that the Josef Mengele mystery had to be cleared up once and for all. Dead or alive.
* As of August 1984, Karl Heinz was listed as a limited partner in Mengele & Sohne Maschinenfabrik & Eisengiesserei Gmbh & Co., with 3.5 million deutschemarks’ worth of shares, worth approximately 1.25 million.
* Although Busse was his friend, Rolf did not trust him with the knowledge of his secret journey. Months later, Busse mentioned to Rolf that he had mysteriously lost his passport. Rolf feigned ignorance, commiserating with him.