DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  As neither wanted to share their intelligence with the other, the United States was forced to act as an intermediary. Yet, when officials from the U.S. Department of Justice actually examined the “intelligence” available in the files of the Germans and Israelis, as well as whatever material the CIA possessed, they found it amounted to very little.

  There had not been a single reliable sighting of Mengele in over twenty years. There was no recent photograph known for certain to be of him.

  Although he was said to be in or around Paraguay, the experts who gathered to discuss the case agreed he could be anywhere. Four decades of sporadic hunts by various individuals had resulted in only a stream of rumors and dead ends. He had become a mythical creature. Fantastic tales-and few facts-about Dr. Mengele abounded.

  The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (051), which was conducting the search for the U.S. government, found itself deluged with an inordinate number of bizarre leads. Mengele was spotted in Las Vegas, in Westchester, and even playing in a marimba band in California. At one point, investigators were again directed to Miami Beach, to the Fontainebleau Hotel, where a clerk swore a man by the name of Mengele had checked in. When 051 officials arrived at the elegant resort, extremely popular with observant Jews, they found a Mr. Mengele was indeed registered. They hurried up to his room, banged on the door, and were greeted by Dieter Mengele-Lolo’s flustered son.

  The driving force behind the Justice Department’s inquiry was the memory of the Klaus Barbie investigation, which found that the United States had long been secretly involved with the infamous Butcher of Lyons. Because Mengele had remained at large for so many years and had never been tried, there was a suspicion the United States had helped him, too. But files at the National Archives-which had contained the damning evidence linking Barbie to American intelligence-were sketchy when it came to Mengele. The most intriguing document suggested that Mengele had been interrogated at a prisoner-of-war camp (something He alluded to in the autobiographical novel), then let go. But there was nothing to suggest an active involvement between the Auschwitz doctor and the American postwar government.

  Because of the scarcity of solid clues, the German, U.S. and Israeli team of investigators decided the surest way to find Mengele would be through his family. For years, Hans Sedlmeier, the trusted Mengele family assistant, had been suspected of maintaining links with the war criminal. Sedlmeier, who was now living quietly in Gunzburg, had openly admitted helping Mengele years earlier in an interview with American journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber published by The New York Times syndicate in the early 1970s. At the time, Sedlmeier’s admission went unnoticed; no one seemed to care.

  A surprise search by German authorities of Sedlmeier’s house in the spring of 1985 uncovered dozens of letters ostensibly from Mengele.

  Unbeknown to Sedlmeier, his wife had kept Copies of letters from the war criminal over the years. Searchers also found a notebook with the names and Brazilian addresses of both the Bosserts and the Stammers.

  Orders were immediately given to find and interview them. In the course of an interrogation, Liselotte Bossert quickly volunteered that Mengele was dead, and directed searchers to his gravesite.

  In June 1985, an international team of forensic experts gathered around the unkempt gravesite in Embu, Brazil, marking the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard. As hundreds of reporters and cameramen watched intently, the experts broke open the casket lid to reveal a grisly heap of bones.

  The scientists pulled out a pile of bones, some teeth, a few clumps of hair, and a pair of faded, rotting trousers. The scientists basked in the unprecedented media spotlight. Pressed to come up with instant answers to satisfy the curiosity of the journalists around them, they made rapid determinations based on superficial examinations and incomplete data. The scientists competed with each other for the attention of the television cameras. Within three days, they had declared with “scientific certainty” the remains were those of the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.

  Soon after, Wolfgang and Liselotte Bossert and Gitta Stammer emerged for the first time to talk to the press about their years aiding the Auschwitz doctor. The Bosserts showed several photographs they had kept of the war criminal, and even held up his beloved Burberry raincoat. Former neighbors of Mengele in Sao Paulo also surfaced to talk almost fondly about the private, elegant old man who kept to himself as he took long walks through the dilapidated neighborhood.

  Draping herself in the soft white shawl Mengele had given her years before, Elsa Gulpian wistfully recalled her years with the Auschwitz doctor. Elsa told story after story about the gentle old man she had fallen in love with years before, and who had refused to marry her.

  Meanwhile, Rolf Mengele also came forward to publicly assert that his father had indeed died in 1979. Rolf released a wealth of papers, diaries, notebooks, and photographs to the German magazine Bunte for publication. There are suspicions that Mengele’s son sought to profit from the publicity surrounding his father’s death. It has been claimed that he became involved in a book deal, and he even sought a Hollywood contract to make a movie about his father.

  The U.S. team of forensic pathologists was summoned to testify before Congress about the Embu skeleton. The scientists insisted the bones were indeed Mengele’s. Under oath, they swore there were no inconsistencies between the skeletal remains found in Embu and what was known about Mengele from his military and medical records. But an attorney at the World Jewish Congress, now the 051, raised questions about the doctors’ findings. All of them knew, after all, about Mengele’s teenage bout with osteomylitis, which appeared in his war records. The virulent bone disease ought to have turned up on the skeleton, and the scientists’ inability to find even a trace of the osteomylitis certainly represented an “inconsistency,” one, moreover, the forensic scientists ought to have revealed to Congress.

  As, one by one, Nazihunters like Wiesenthal and Serge and Beale Klarsfeld declared themselves satisfied with the findings, the German, American, and Israeli governments also called off their hunts. In Washington, then-attorney general Edwin Meese announced that the U.S. search for Dr. Mengele was over.

  Behind the scenes, however, investigators of all three governments were at first reluctant to close their Mengele files. The Mengele family had pledged to turn over medical records and X rays that could help identify the skeleton in Embu, but never did so. Nor was Germany able to turn up any X rays from Mengele’s youth that would have enabled scientists to show conclusively the remains were those of the Auschwitz doctor. In Washington, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem, experts continued to ponder the troubling question of the osteomylitis. Forensic scientists were asked again and again to reexamine the skeleton for signs of the disease, which, by all accounts, should have left marks, even years later.

  Anxious to settle the question once and for all, in 1986, the Justice Department even hired an expert from the Smithsonian Institute to fly to Brazil and reexamine the skeleton for traces of the osteomylitis.

  But he, too, could not find definite proof of the illness.

  With the exception of the dental forensic scientist, members of the U.S. team of experts never did submit a final report on their findings, a comprehensive study that would have laid to rest any lingering questions about the authenticity of the skeleton. Despite their rush to proclaim in front of TV cameras that the Embu skeleton was Mengele, the pathologists evidently would not put their findings on paper. Only with the discovery, nearly a year later, of dental X rays in Brazil believed to be Mengele’s, did one team member, forensic odontologist Dr. Lowell Levine, submit his own report to the Justice Department.

  It was never made public because the case was never closed.

  Meanwhile, a fickle public and press quickly forgot that no final report was ever issued on the Mengele investigation. Despite the vast amounts of money, time, and staffing devoted to the hunt, it was never possible to review the body of information the Justice Department had gathered. Although
privately, officials confidently insisted that Mengele was dead, they did not say so publicly. One problem hampering U.S. officials was an agreement made at the start of the 1985 hunt between Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, and Washington: that all three governments would publicize their Mengele reports at the same time. But in Israel, one man was reluctant to officially close the case, and because of his adamance, he succeeded in preventing Germany and the United States from doing so.

  After the discovery of the bones, veteran Nazihunter Menachem Russek had quietly undertaken an investigation of his own. A colonel in the Israeli police-and an Auschwitz survivor-Russek was profoundly disturbed by the speed with which other countries wanted to close their Mengele files. Russek flew to Brazil and Germany to interview individuals connected with the case. Russek also spent months going over the various diaries and notebooks said to have belonged to Mengele. Russek concluded the body was part of an elaborate hoax designed to throw the Western world off the scent.

  He prepared a scathing forty-page report, in which he wrote that “it is not yet time to ‘bury’ the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.” Russek thought the six-year-old “death by drowning” story on a Brazilian beach much too tidy. Although other top officials in the Israeli government believed the skeleton in Embu was that of Mengele, Russek kept stubbornly insisting the case should remain open.

  This veteran of Nazi hunts was mocked behind the scenes as an old sentimentalist who could not bring himself to admit Mengele was dead.

  The Israeli government would not even allow him to release his report.

  He was later edged out of his job, and pressured into retirement.

  Mengele’s twins do not for a moment believe their nemesis has died.

  They are sure the Auschwitz doctor has succeeded in tricking the world yet another time. Bewildered and betrayed, they cannot understand why the hunt for him has been abandoned.

  Mengele, who was an enigma in his youth, a riddle at Auschwitz, and elusive in his life after the war, remains a mystery even after his supposed death.

  MOSHE OFFER: Dr. Mengele was a very shrewd, a very clever man. I have a feeling he will never be caught. A man who gives children sweets, then terrible injections-do you really believe such a man would let himself be caught?

  In 1987, the German government awarded the Auschwitz twins thousands of dollars each in restitutiona small, belated attempt to make up for the pain they had endured, an effort to erase the past.

  Of course, none of Mengele’s children will ever be able to forget what happened. Images of the Auschwitz death doctor are still as vivid and terrifying as decades earlier. But thanks to Germany’s action, as well as the attention afforded to their plight during the mock trial and manhunt, a few of them have begun to find it in their hearts to forgive.

  With forgiveness comes a faint sense of optimism, a glimmer of the inner peace that has eluded Mengele’s twins for so long.

  VERA GROSSMAN: In the spring of 1987, I was invited by a German pastor of a church in Frankfurt to come and give a lecture. I was to go as a representative of the Mengele twins, and speak about “building bridges” between Israel and Germany, between the victims and the perpetrators.

  I agreed, excited about the opportunity of speaking to Germans about my experiences in the Holocaust.

  At the church, I found I was one of a panel of speakers-nearly all of them Germans. I gave my talk in English, and was praised and applauded.

  Afterwards, I went to a reception in my honor in the church hall.

  As I stood greeting people, I saw two middle-aged women come up to me.

  Very politely, they asked me if I was

  “Fraulein Grossman.” I said yes.

  It was then that they told me they were the daughters of Professor Otmar von Verschuer.

  I felt faint-I felt my legs go under. I started praying that I would not collapse-I prayed to my Jewish God inside this church that I would keep my composure.

  We began to talk. We went to sit on a bench in the church. They wanted to know what their father had done. I told them what I knew: that Verschuer had been both Mengele’s superior and his mentor. We spoke for nearly two hours.

  Then they told me their story. They told me they were little girls -ten and twelve years old-when Mengele would come to their house to visit their father. They remembered how the two would talk for hours about music and science.

  Mengele often brought candy and toys for them. They loved him!

  They even called him

  “Uncle Mengele.”

  Then they began to cry. They said they were sorry for what their father had done. They asked me to forgive them.

  I told them they had no need to ask my forgiveness. I told them I understood-we had all been little girls in the face of the horror, none of us had known what was going on.

  But Verschuer’s daughters kept on crying. They cried and cried.

  They could not stop crying.

  Afterword.

  The Roll Call.

  On January 27, 1945, the Russian Army marched into Auschwitz.

  The liberators entered a cold and forlorn barracks, and there they found approximately 160 of Mengele’s twins crouched within. Later, they discovered that another thirty or forty additional twins had also managed to survive. Still later, Israeli and Polish scholars learned that a total of three thousand twins had passed through Mengele’s experimental laboratories. Their survival rate had been less than 10 percent.

  Liberation had come in the wintry Chill of Polish soil, but the one simple, terrible historical fact was that more than twenty-eight hundred of the twins would not be coming back.

  Today, the surviving twins are spread out across four continents and at least ten countries. These wounded adults have never quite stopped thinking of themselves as Mengele’s child guinea pigs. And while their spiritual bond is deathless and infinite, they have scattered into the four winds. Today, they can be found everywhere from Brooklyn, New York, to Sydney, Australia; from Skokie, Illinois, to Zurich, Switzerland; from Jerusalem to Budapest; from Tel Aviv to Brussels.

  But wherever they are, wherever they go, the Children of the Flames will always awaken to the noise of Mengele’s footsteps, to the sounds of the Auschwitz Roll Call: Z,II T1I3 SAILOR Zyl Klein is Still sailing, though much closer to home. The most restless of Mengele’s twins now works for a local shipping company in his hometown of Ashdod, Israel His exotic voyages to distant lands have ended, but he still manages to be away at sea three or four days a week. The strapping Zyl, who is sixty years old, insists he has the stamina of far younger sailors. He lives with his wife, who has a son from her first marriage whom Zyl helped raise and loves as his own. The vagabond of yesteryear is now a grandfather of four. His only sadness comes from his continued estrangement from his twin brother.

  THE STERN SISTERS At sixty Hedvah and Leah are still inseparable.

  Neither has lost the optimism and sense of humor that enabled them to overcome Auschwitz. During the war, the Stern sisters were always delighted when the Red Cross trucks that transported them to Mengele’s laboratory could not come, and they were made to walk through the camp.

  Even though a stroll through Auschwitz could hardly be scenic or enjoyable, the twins were happy for the exercise and glad to be outdoors.

  And today, the sisters who loved fresh air, even Auschwitz air, are living out their lives on the Moshav, the communal farm they helped found in Ashdod. Both continue to work in the fields. Both are married, both have several children and grandchildren, and both are hoping, any day now, to become great-grandmothers. Occasionally, they pause and think wistfully back to their days growing up in Eastern Europe, when, together with the mother they adored and lost, they had hoped to open up a seamstress shop-The Stern Sisters.

  MOSHE OREER Moshe has a high-level job as a technician for Israeli television. But the images he sometimes glimpses in the course of his work have nothing to do with daily program fare. In the middle of the most innocuous daytime soap
opera,

  “Miki” sees his twin brother, Tibi, pale and sickly and entreating, the way he looked after returning from a session in Mengele’s laboratory. The images on the screen become mangled and confused.

  Other days, during a news show, perhaps, or the screening of an old movie, Offer is transported back to his parents’ estate in Transylvania, in those joyful years before the war, when he and Tibi were spoiled and lavished with gifts. He sees Tibi smiling and laughing in the horse-drawn carriage reserved just for the twins.

  Together, he and Tibi secretly take sips of the sweet, syrupy liqueur their father manufactures. The flickering images on the screen become clear again.

  At fifry-eight, the little boy who survived the loss of his parents, brothers, sisters, and finally of his twin, and who endured several nervous breakdowns, has rebuilt his life. Although he dearly loves his Iraqi-born wife and their many pretty dark-eyed daughters, the pride and joy of his life is his lone son Shai, who reminds him of Tibi.

  TIV1NS’ FATHER The oldest of Mengele’s twins, Zyl Spiegel is seventy-five now. The man who led an army of twins out of Auschwitz has slowed down. He retired several years ago from his job as an accountant and spends much of his time in his Tel Aviv home, enjoying the company of his wife, his two children, and five grandchildren.

  Occasionally, he will get calls or letters from his other children-the twins. That’s when he’ll drop everything and become Zwilingefater once more, listening to them with a sympathetic ear and attending to their every need.

  MAGDA SPIEGEL Zyl’s sister lives in Haifa with her husband, Nahman.

  Magda, whose six-year-old boy was sent to the crematorium by Mengele, is a mother of two and a grandmother of four. She is especially proud of her son, who became a doctor and has received many honors for his scientific research.

  But when Magda is alone in her Haifa apartment, she furtively pulls out the old photographs of the blond, angelic little boy she lost.