Nazi Hunter
Page 33
In July 1962, the Stammers and their manager moved to a 111-acre coffee and cattle farm in Sierra Negra, more than a hundred miles closer to São Paulo. Half the capital for the purchase had been put up by ‘Peter’, who busied himself with woodworking, carpentry, and, with the help of a local mason, an eighteen-foot-high stone observation tower from which he could scan the countryside with binoculars, watching the approach of visitors from the nearest town, Lindonia, five miles away. Eichmann had been hanged in Israel that June and, although the Mengele manhunt was still focused on Paraguay and Argentina, there were six false-alarm ‘sightings’ of him in Brazil in less than a year, plus a recurrent rumour that Israeli agents had already abducted Mengele and put him aboard a banana boat heading for Haifa. Reward money had quadrupled.
In 1963, Gitta Stammer read an illustrated magazine article about the missing Mengele and saw a photo of ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-three years old. Then I thought this face was very familiar to me, and his smile with gaps between his teeth.’ When she saw ‘Peter’ that day, she told him: ‘This man looks a lot like you. You have many mysteries, but please be honest and say whether it’s you.’
He blanched and left the room without saying a word. That night, he was very quiet at dinner – but, after the meal, he told Mr and Mrs Stammer: ‘Well, you’re right. I live here with you and so you have the right to know that, unfortunately, I am that person.’
Around that time, Mengele noted in his diary: ‘Cold wind whistles around the house and in my heart there is no sunshine either.’ The Stammers drove to São Paulo and pleaded with Wolfgang Gerhard to take Mengele back and put him somewhere else or they would consider informing the authorities.
Gerhard, whose first reaction had been to tell them they should be proud to have a place in history, now responded: ‘Do you really think it might be better that way? You should be very careful, for if you do anything against him, you’ll have to take the consequences because he lives here with you. You should think about the future of your children.’
Threatened themselves, the Stammers backed down, but begged him to do something. Gerhard told them to be patient. They would wait another eleven years.
Instead of losing their unwanted guest, who grew more aggressive and abusive each day, the Stammers soon received another guest: a dapper, rotund German named Hans, who arrived bearing money. Hans was Sedlmeier, sent by the Mengele family to make peace. At least 7000 dollars were changed into Brazilian cruzeiros, though much of the money went to Mengele. Sedlmeier promised he would look for another place for Mengele, but, having placated the Stammers, he, too, took his time.
Over the years, Gerhard assured them he was negotiating havens for Mengele in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, or another Latin American country. Meanwhile, tension mounted as Mengele, who rarely ventured far, went nowhere, on the farm or off, without the shrill accompaniment of fifteen stray dogs, most of them vicious. He’d given this pack ‘obedience training’ to kill on command. One day, Gitta Stammer taunted him with: ‘You’re such a great man, so why do you live in hiding? At least your colleagues had the guts to live openly and stand trial. Sure, some were hung. Our countrymen in Hungary, too, the non-communists, were killed by the Russians. But they were real men. They didn’t hide.’
Mengele raised his hand, but stopped himself from striking her and left the room.
To make matters worse, his hosts’ two sons were growing up and refusing to take orders from the star boarder. In 1969, when both boys had finished school, the Stammers gave up farming for a living and bought a four-bedroom house on a two-acre hilltop plot in Caieiras, twenty miles from São Paulo, to enable Geza to work full time as an engineer in the city while their sons went off to the Brazilian naval academy. Mengele paid for half the new house with funds from the sale of the Sierra Negra property.
When he moved in, the domestic war resumed. Once, his Austrian friend Bossert – a one-time German Army corporal whom Wiesenthal identifies as ‘a former member of the SS’ – took him aside and reminded him quietly that he was merely a guest in the Stammer home.
‘Half of this is mine!’ Mengele retorted. ‘I can do as I please.’
Back in Germany, the Mengele prosecution had been transferred to Frankfurt from his ex-wife Irene’s home city of Freiburg. From 1969 to 1975, a diligent Frankfurt investigating judge named Horst von Glasenapp questioned hundreds of witnesses, starting with depositions from those who had given evidence in Freiburg, in order to ensure that, should any of them die before Mengele was brought to justice, their testimony would be in proper legal form to be used against him. According to Wiesenthal, von Glasenapp ‘travelled half the world (Austria, Italy, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Israel, the US, and Canada) to prepare as complete and solid an accusation sheet against Mengele as possible. In September 1970, Sedlmeier was again interrogated, this time by von Glasenapp. And this time Sedlmeier had to admit having met Josef Mengele several times. The last meeting, he claimed, had been in 1961 – a blatant lie.’
Actually, von Glasenapp’s formal questioning of Sedlmeier took place on 9 December 1971. While admitting that he had met Mengele during the doctor’s 1956 visit to Günzburg and later in South America, Sedlmeier insisted that ‘I visited the accused solely for business reasons. If my memory serves me correctly, the last time I saw the accused was about ten years ago. I seem to remember it was at the airport in Buenos Aires. I also heard that, around the time Eichmann was apprehended, the accused went to live in Paraguay. Since then, all connections with the accused have been severed and there has been no further correspondence. I personally am in no position to state where the accused is residing nowadays . . .’
Sedlmeier, of course, knew exactly where Mengele was, stayed in constant touch with him, had recently visited him at his Brazilian hideaway, and helped disinform his hunters by hinting at a Paraguayan address. At the time, though, while von Glasenapp knew Sedlmeier was lying, he couldn’t prove it.
Here, says Wiesenthal, von Glasenapp ‘made a serious mistake: he forgot to put Sedlmeier’s48 testimony under oath.’ Since Germany had a five-year statute of limitations on the offence of aiding a felon, Sedlmeier could scarcely be prosecuted for the ‘ten-year-old’ contact with Mengele that he admitted to. Had he been sworn, however, he would have faced a trial for perjury – or the threat of a trial, which could have elicited new information – as soon as any detail of his 1971 testimony proved false.
With Sedlmeier admitting that he’d lied to Fritz Bauer seven years earlier, and with von Glasenapp openly sceptical about his latest testimony, Wiesenthal says ‘we took for granted that the Attorney General would at least have Sedlmeier placed under sporadic investigation. We thought his mail would be checked and his telephone tapped intermittently. After all, Sedlmeier had been a key figure since 1964.’ And in this assumption, he concedes, ‘the Documentation Centre committed its second mistake’ – which sounds exactly like its first: belief in Bauer.
When Judge von Glasenapp went to Vienna to take testimony from Wiesenthal, he was sorely disappointed. For legality’s sake, he arranged for an Austrian judge to repeat his questions at a hearing convened just for Wiesenthal. The German judge began the charade – which sounded like a variation on the Tell-your-mother-this, tell-your-father-that overtures of a domestic quarrel – by asking the Austrian judge to ask Wiesenthal, who was present, for the names and addresses of persons who might have accurate information about where Mengele was. According to von Glasenapp:
Wiesenthal was quite angry that I’d asked him these questions and he refused to answer them. He said he was bound by confidentiality to his informants, which I understood. I left feeling he was eager to convey that he was leading the field on [Mengele], that he was the man out front. Perhaps behind his refusal to answer was a feeling that [his sources] weren’t so reliable after all. I myself remained a little sceptical and never raised the subject with him again.
Von Glasenapp later told American lawyer Posner and his British
co-biographer, Ware, that ‘I met Wiesenthal several times, but never got much out of him. I naturally wanted to know if he really did have something of value. It was difficult to make that judgement from the various newspaper articles I’d read.’
In the early 1970s, a delegation from Asunción’s Jewish community council – representing Paraguay’s 1000 Jews – visited Wiesenthal in Vienna to plead with him not to do anything against Mengele on Paraguayan soil or they would suffer at the hands of some of their country’s 30,000 ethnic Germans and its government. When they showed him letters they had received warning them not to molest Mengele, this reinforced his certainty that his quarry was in Paraguay.
Having ‘no alternative’ to heeding their appeal and having ‘received no co-operation from Latin American governments’, Wiesenthal says he sought a snatch somewhere outside South America. Back in 1974, he told me: ‘I missed Mengele by eighteen hours in Torremolinos in 1971, by two days in Milan at Christmas time 1963, and I could have had him in Bermuda in December 1970, but I was in London when word reached Vienna and then the man I tried to send from New York was in Tokyo, so it took five days before we could get anybody there and Mengele was gone.’ Later, records would show that Mengele never was in any of those places at any of those times – or, with the exception of Milan, ever.
Benno Weiser Varon was Israel’s first ambassador to Paraguay, serving in Asunción from 1968 to 1972. Like Mengele, Varon had studied medicine. But Varon was forced to flee Vienna when Hitler annexed Austria three months before he was due to become a doctor. During his four years in Paraguay, Varon saw no symptoms of Mengele’s presence there, though the man was always on his mind and he followed up every tip that reached him.
‘Sometime in the seventies,’ says Varon, who later settled in the US, ‘Wiesenthal confided to me in Boston that it was not at all easy to keep his outfit in Vienna going. He said that his lecture fees and the contributions of some 17,000 Dutch Gentiles went only so far.’ Varon came to the conclusion that, while ‘Mengele would be a prize catch for any Nazi-hunter . . . no one has specialized in him. Simon Wiesenthal makes periodic statements that he is about to catch him, perhaps since Wiesenthal must raise funds for his activities and the name Mengele is always good for a plug.’ In any event, Varon contended, ‘Simon Wiesenthal was always a Nazi-hunter, but never a Nazi-catcher.’
Wiesenthal admits that ‘we had to content ourselves with publicizing the Mengele case again and again’, a tactic which The Times of London – in a scathing 1985 article entitled ‘What Next for the Mengele Industry?’ – said ‘only sustained [Wiesenthal’s] self-confirmatory myths and gave scant satisfaction to those who were seriously seeking Mengele.’ But Simon’s severest critics have to acknowledge his sincerity and dedication as well as his astuteness in latching on to Sedlmeier as the key as early as 1964. Even such Wiesenthal critics as Mengele biographers Posner and Ware, who contend ‘financial constraints and a knack of playing to the gallery . . . ultimately compromised his credibility’, nevertheless go on to add:
What no one can take from Wiesenthal is his missionary zeal, his success in ensuring that many people and some reluctant governments pursued Nazis when they would have preferred to forget. One must ask: if not Wiesenthal, who else would have performed that role? He really was the public conscience of the Holocaust when few others seemed to care. It was largely on Wiesenthal’s self-image of a tireless, dogged sleuth, pitted against the omnipotent and sinister might of Mengele and a vast Nazi network, that two full-length Hollywood films were made. Both Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil were box-office hits. They played an important part in keeping Mengele at the forefront of the public’s mind, an easily identifiable symbol of the Allies’ betrayed pledge to pursue Nazis wherever they fled. But these movies also created a mood of despair: Mengele was simply too powerful, he was too clever, he was ‘bionic’, he would never be caught. And yet . . . he was here, he was there, he was everywhere, said Wiesenthal. He had been seen: he really could be found.
In 1977, Wiesenthal informed Time Magazine that Josef Mengele was living in a spacious villa in San Antonio, a Paraguayan village in a remote area south-east of Asunción, and also had a home in Puerto Stroessner, a town at the confluence of the Paraná and Iguaçú rivers. Both lay within a military enclave off limits to outsiders. But Mengele also travelled within the Paraguayan hinterlands, visiting German-owned farms where die-hard Nazis lived in constant anxiety. ‘That is a part of their punishment,’ Wiesenthal told Time.
According to Wiesenthal, Mengele – escorted by four armed guards – would arrive in a black Mercedes 280SL. Prior to his entering even a trusted German home, two bodyguards would go first and make sure it was safe before using their walkie-talkies to sound an all-clear to Mengele and two other guards in the car.
Of late, Wiesenthal went on, Mengele had been seen regularly at the German club in Asunción. Any time a stranger entered the bar, Mengele would don his sunglasses and remove them only when he felt secure. Performing this exercise so annoyed Mengele that, once, he slammed his sunglasses on a table, breaking a lens. On another occasion, after too much to drink, he took out a pistol and waved it wildly. Complete with photos of Wiesenthal, Mengele, and one of the fugitive’s ‘homes’ in Paraguay, Time called its story ‘Wiesenthal’s Last Hunt: Tracking Down the Angel of Death’, and gave it a page and a half in the World section.
The only problem was that Mengele hadn’t set foot in Paraguay for sixteen years. But even as he perpetuated the myth of the bionic Mengele, his own words fuelled Simon’s determination that, as he once put it to me, ‘in my lifetime and his, Mengele must be before a court as a man and not roaming free as a legend.’
24
Death of a bionic ‘angel’
In reality, the ‘bionic’ Mengele had been floundering like a fish out of water since 1971, the year he lost a protector but gained a valuable identity card. Tragedy had struck the family of Wolfgang Gerhard, the forty-six-year-old Hitler Youth who had lodged Mengele with the Stammers. Gerhard’s Brazilian wife Ruth was diagnosed as having stomach cancer; his son, Adolf, bone cancer. His textile business and neo-Nazi journalism earnings couldn’t meet his doctor bills. Gerhard decided to go back to his native Austria to seek medical help and financial fortune. Before departing, he gave Mengele his Brazilian foreign resident’s identity card; one report says Mengele paid 7000 dollars for it. Substituting his own photo, he left all other details, including a fingerprint, the way they were.
In 1972, Mengele’s health began to decline – thanks, oddly enough, to the handlebar moustache he’d grown to hide his facial features and gapped teeth. Where others grind their teeth or bite their lips to cope with nervous tension, Mengele’s mannerism had been to chew off the ends of his moustachioes. Over the years, these strands had formed a hairball–similar to what befalls cats from licking their coats–blocking his intestines and requiring surgery.
When he checked into a hospital in São Paulo, a doctor noted that ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’ seemed much older than the forty-seven years shown on his identity card. Wolfram Bossert, who had taken over Gerhard’s role as protector and accompanied Mengele to the hospital, hastily explained that the authorities had made an error in recording the birth date and promised to correct it by issuing a new card soon. After his recovery, Mengele used the card as little as possible, but it remained his most plausible permit for being in Brazil and less dangerous than the Paraguayan passport of José Mengele.
Before 1972 was out, Mengele had also been diagnosed as having an enlarged prostate gland and degenerating discs in the lower spine. Another complaint was financial: aside from sending Sedlmeier, bearing cash, at irregular intervals, the Mengele family in Günzburg was letting its notorious black sheep live on an allowance of $100 to $150 a month; although he lived frugally, crafted his own furniture, and never went anywhere, he still felt he deserved more. But the biggest pain in his life was living with the Stammers, which was proving intolerable for everybody
. When his relatives in Germany bought a car for the Stammers, Josef Mengele complained that they didn’t deserve it, the Stammers complained that it was too small, and everybody complained when the Stammers produced some extra money they hadn’t told anybody they had and traded their gift in for a larger auto.
In 1974, Geza Stammer moved out of the house in Caieiras and took quarters in a hotel in São Paulo’s red-light district, insisting that he wouldn’t come back until Mengele left. Knowing that the police could easily become involved, Bossert sent a warning to Günzburg (via a post office box Sedlmeier kept in Switzerland) that ‘the situation is explosive.’ Sedlmeier made a flying visit and waved 5000 dollars before the three squabblers, but nobody rose to the bait. That November, the Stammers sold the house in Caieiras and, using Mengele money which they’d hoarded over the years as well as their own savings, they bought a 900-square-metre (10,000-square-foot) villa just outside São Paulo. It was big enough for them and their two sons (both of them officers in the Brazilian merchant marine) and their families. When they moved there the following month, Mengele was not invited to join them. The new owner of the Caieiras house let him stay until February 1975.
The Stammers, never ones to pass up extra income, used Mengele’s $25,000 share of the price they received for the house he was living in to buy a bungalow in a seedy suburb of São Paulo, register it in the name of their younger son, Miklos, and then rent it to Mengele. The new tenant’s electric bills were in the name of ‘Peter Stammer’; the neighbours knew him as ‘Don Pedro’, and the authorities listed him as ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’.
His survival as ‘Gerhard’ was threatened in 1976, when Brazil changed the format of its foreign residents’ identity card. New photos, fingerprinting, and a personal visit to the Department of Public and Social Order were required to obtain one. When Mengele sent an SOS to Günzburg, Sedlmeier visited Gerhard in Austria, where his wife had died the year before and his son Adolf was undergoing repeated surgery and expensive treatments for bone cancer. The fugitive’s stepson, Karl-Heinz, by then a director of Mengele & Sons, was helping with the medical payments. Sedlmeier paid Gerhard to fly back to Brazil and renew his residence permit. While there, Gerhard not only visited Josef Mengele, but looked after his idol’s eternal rest by visiting his own mother’s grave in Embu and telling the cemetery manager that, now that his wife was interred in Austria, he’d like to be buried in Europe, too, but would the cemetery please reserve the adjacent plot for an ageing relative in Brazil?