Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ‘The Gorby Document’, as it became known, proved to be a false clue that had actually been declassified a year and a half earlier by the Department of the Army after an administrative appeal by biographers Posner and Ware. Nevertheless, by suggesting that Mengele might have been in US custody as late as 1947, ‘the Gorby Document’ triggered an uproar in Washington. Attorney General William French Smith ordered an investigatory commission to look into the Mengele case and any US involvement in it. A special unit of US marshals began a country-by-country search for Mengele’s whereabouts. The Wiesenthal Centre posted a million-dollar reward, starting a sweepstake which escalated around the world. Israel offered a matching reward of a million dollars and so did the Unification Church guru Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times newspaper.

  ‘In order not to be outdistanced,’ says Rabbi Hier with some satisfaction, ‘the West German government increased its reward to a million marks – about 313,000 dollars at the time – from around 25,000 dollars. But without our publicizing the Gorby Document, the US government never would have entered the Mengele case and none of these other events would have happened so soon.’

  The contagion of Wiesenthal assertions and Beate Klarsfeld’s stormy visit unleashed a media circus in Asunción. The District Attorney of Brooklyn, ex-Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman – herself a twin and Jewish – arrived with a delegation which included the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn and a member of Children of Auschwitz Survivors. The New York Times put investigative reporter Ralph Blumenthal on the case and the Columbia Broadcasting System dispatched a team to Paraguay for its weekly magazine programme, ‘Sixty Minutes’. The CBS producer actually found a man who told him Mengele had drowned in Brazil, but nobody believed him. West German authorities received a similar tip that Mengele had perished ‘on the beaches of Brazil’, but a Brazilian official had responded with: ‘Which beach? We have 10,000 miles of beach.’

  Back in Europe, the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz rekindled memories of Mengele. In Israel, when Simon Wiesenthal participated in a mock trial of Mengele, he heard dozens of witnesses: twins, midgets, dwarfs, gypsies, many still showing the scars and ravages of the viruses and hormones, chemicals and poisons, amputations and anomalies Mengele inflicted on them and future generations; fathers who lost their whole families to him and mothers like Anna Sussman, who saw Mengele pitch her newborn son into a burning oven, and Ruth Eliaz, who made Wiesenthal weep as she told how Mengele bound her breasts to starve her infant daughter

  At the White House, when Elie Wiesel was pleading with Ronald Reagan not to visit the SS cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, the future Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke from his own Auschwitz experience of sons seeing their fathers die, mothers watching ‘their children die of hunger And then there was Mengele and his selections.’

  In early April 1985 in Vienna, Wiesenthal was saying: ‘If you ask me in what place I believe he is, he is in Paraguay. That is the safest place for him.’ Was he certain? ‘Well, we can bring some evidence that six or seven months ago he was there.’ A month later, Simon said he had informed German Chancellor Kohl of three independent sightings of Mengele the previous July in the German settlement of Capitán Miranda outside Hohenau in a zone of Paraguay closed to non-residents because General Stroessner had several presidential summer homes there. As late as 20 May 1985, Wiesenthal would declare: ‘There is without any doubt that he is alive.’

  In Günzburg, the Mengele family, which had stayed silent to protect those who had sheltered its black sheep, was feeling commercial pressure from customers who didn’t want that name on their tractors and manure-spreaders. Colonel Rudel and Alban Krug, who had shepherded Mengele from Argentina to Paraguay, had both died in 1982; Wolfgang Gerhard, his Brazilian benefactor, was buried in two places: Graz, Austria, and Embu, Brazil. The cemetery-keeper at Embu had prepared the plot Gerhard had reserved for his ageing relative, but when he saw Gerhard’s own name on the coffin that arrived in February 1979, he exclaimed: ‘It can’t be possible! He mentioned an uncle and now here he is himself!’

  Making the sign of the cross, the caretaker had suggested that they open the coffin. But he didn’t take much dissuading when Liselotte Bossert, whose husband had been hospitalized from trying to rescue Mengele, had hysterics. Remarking that ‘a body pulled out of water is not a pretty sight’, the man relented – and, as Posner and Ware put it, ‘Mengele’s secret was taken to the grave.’

  Six years later, Karl-Heinz and Dieter Mengele, who were running the firm in Günzburg, decided on damage control: a slow leak that might dredge up their uncle’s bones without directly implicating the Bosserts, the Stammers, Sedlmeier, or themselves. Dieter Mengele gave an interview to John Martin of the American Broadcasting Company in which he said blandly: ‘I think he’s dead. First of all, he’d be seventy-four. If it’s true what I’m reading that everybody’s looking for him, they’d have found him by now if he’s still alive.’

  Hearing the ABC interview, Mengele’s son Rolf, who hadn’t been consulted, remonstrated with his cousins. Reluctantly, they agreed that no further statements would be made until the Bosserts and Sedlmeier were dead.

  Sedlmeier had been questioned in December 1984 for only the third time in the two decades since Wiesenthal had warned West German prosecutors that this was the man to watch. A university professor from Giessen had met Sedlmeier and his wife, Renate, at a resort hotel in the Black Forest and, over dinner and drinks, Sedlmeier had waxed expansive, mentioning that he’d sent Mengele money for many years. In the hope of collecting the rewards he’d been reading about, the professor had reported this conversation to the police. Confronted by an investigator, Sedlmeier had said he had no recollection of these words and insisted he hadn’t seen Mengele since the early 1960s at Buenos Aires airport. He hadn’t even hinted that Mengele was dead.49

  On Friday, 31 May 1985, more than five months after his interrogation, the German federal police raided Sedlmeier’s house. It was their first raid since 1964, when they’d acted on Wiesenthal’s tip and Sedlmeier had been warned by a friend in the Günzburg police department. This time, apparently, he was not forewarned. Whether 1985’s raid was prompted by the worldwide clamour for Mengele to stand trial or his nephews’ need to purge the ghost is not absolutely certain; Simon thinks it was rather stagey.

  Sedlmeier ran for a jacket hanging in his closet. His investigators intercepted him and seized a pocket directory containing addresses and phone numbers, some of them in code. The search bore fruit when, to Sedlmeier’s apparent astonishment, the investigators found, in a room used by his wife, a complete photocopy file of letters from and to Mengele, the Bosserts, and the Stammers in Brazil. Renate Sedlmeier, who had been close to Mengele during the war and still had a crush on him, claimed to have copied them before Sedlmeier had them destroyed. ‘How could you do that?’ her husband wailed, calling her an ‘idiot’.

  Sedlmeier, who refused to answer questions, was placed under house arrest while the police sifted their finds. A 1979 letter from Wolfram Bossert reporting ‘with deep sorrow the death of our common friend’ cracked the case. After phone calls to Brazil and a few hours of interrogation by São Paulo police, the Bosserts broke – and the eyes of the world focused on Bertioga Beach and the hillside cemetery in Embu.

  Simon Wiesenthal was en route to New York for his semi-annual lecture tour when the story broke. Met by reporters at Kennedy Airport, he branded it a hoax:

  ‘This is Mengele’s seventh death. Only in Paraguay has he been dead three times, always with witnesses who say it’s him. On one of those occasions, we found the body of a woman.

  ‘If Mengele really died, then the whole world would have been informed five minutes after, not five years. His wife, children, relatives, besides friends and sympathizers, would have done everything to announce the death of Mengele so they could spend the rest of their lives in peace.’

  At best, Wiesenthal said, there was a one per cent chance the man was Mengele. I
n the ensuing weeks, however – as both ‘Wolfgang Gerhards’ were exhumed in Graz and Embu; as forensic specialists, including three Americans engaged by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles and three more by the US government in Washington, converged upon São Paulo to study the skull, a partial fingerprint, hairs and dental evidence – Wiesenthal raised his estimate to ‘I think it’s fifty-fifty it’s him.’

  In Günzburg, Hans Sedlmeier refused to co-operate with the police, but no charges could be placed against him, for the West German statute of limitations on the crime of aiding a fugitive – even a wanted war criminal – was only five years. This may have played a part in the surfacing of the letters in his wife’s boudoir, which Wiesenthal found ‘a little too perfect’.

  Rolf Mengele issued a statement confirming that his father had drowned in Brazil in 1979 and explaining that he had remained silent ‘out of consideration for the people who had been in contact with my father over the previous thirty years.’ His statement, handed out in Munich by his stepbrother Jens Hackenjos at a press conference Rolf didn’t attend, also extended ‘to all the victims and their relatives my own and our most profound sympathy.’ Those minimal remarks earned Rolf the enmity of the Günzburg Mengeles, who no longer speak to him.

  By Friday, 21 June 1985, when the bits and pieces of Josef Mengele were exhibited to the press on the twentieth floor of São Paulo police headquarters, Wiesenthal seemed convinced. The ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’ buried in Brazil was exactly Josef Mengele’s height, had his broken left finger, the same gap between two top front teeth, and the degenerating spine Mengele had complained about. A video image of his skull matched up perfectly with an authenticated photo of Mengele on to which it was superimposed. A similar montage matched the skeleton’s hip bones with Mengele’s medical measurements. John Martin of ABC asked Dr Lowell Levine if there was any doubt at all.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ the New York odontologist replied.

  Later, after deciphering obscure references in Mengele’s diary to a series of dental visits, two US consular officials in Brazil tracked down eight X-rays taken in 1976. Not only did they clearly show the unusual gap between Mengele’s two front incisors, but every detail exactly matched X-rays taken of the skull in mid-1985. Dr Levine announced that ‘reasonable scientific certainty’ had become ‘absolute certainty’.

  In Israel, when victim Ruth Eliaz heard the news from Brazil, she said: ‘Drowning is a horrible death. But, for Mengele, this death was too good, too fast, and too simple.’

  * * *

  Back in Vienna from his US trip, Simon Wiesenthal told me on 12 July 1985: ‘I am not satisfied that he is dead. I had hopes that the victims of his experiments would at least have the occasion to see his trial and tell what he has done to them. So I am dictating a letter to Germany. I am asking only that the million-Deutschmark reward for catching Mengele be divided up among his victims.’

  Listening between the lines and recognizing that he was thinking wishfully, I said: ‘So you’re convinced he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ Simon admitted. ‘In September, he will be declared officially dead.’

  ‘And you won’t contest it?’

  ‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘I am sure he is dead.’

  In his annual report for 1985 – dated 31 January 1986 – Simon Wiesenthal wrote:

  A post-mortem examination was carried out following the opening of the grave by an international team of forensic experts, and revealed with near certainty that the body buried in Brazil was that of Josef Mengele. For us, the case is thus concluded.

  Naturally, there are people who cannot accept this, and others who attempt from time to time to misinform Jewish organizations with news about Mengele, as has been the case throughout the last years.

  Late in 1988, however, it became apparent that one of these doubting troublemakers was Simon Wiesenthal himself.

  ‘I begin to have doubts that the body is the body of Mengele,’ he told me, ‘when the prosecution in Germany will not declare him dead. So I ask the chief prosecutor in Frankfurt, Dr [Hans-Eberhard] Klein, why not. He tells me that, like me, he keeps getting reports from people who have seen Mengele alive and well in Paraguay. Then there is a woman dentist in Brazil who says she treated Mengele in April 1979, two months after he was supposed to have drowned. The Brazilian police say she is just seeking publicity, but Klein and I would like to hear more from her side of the story. So Klein says that, as long as these reports are not laid to rest, he cannot declare Mengele dead. And I agree . . . Israel, too, still has not declared him dead.’

  Tantalized by tidbits, Wiesenthal makes much in his memoirs of a December 1982 visit by Sedlmeier and Mengele’s nephew and stepson Karl Heinz to Dr Hans Munch near Munich. Munch – one of Mengele’s closest friends at Auschwitz – was an SS lieutenant in a biological research station there who refused to do selection duty at the ramp. At a 1947 war-crimes trial in Cracow, Munch was the only Auschwitz doctor acquitted by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland; forty other doctors and SS men were convicted. In June 1985, Munch told Mengele biographers Posner and Ware that the visit’s apparent purpose was for Karl-Heinz Mengele, with Sedlmeier as his shepherd, to familiarize himself with (and, perhaps, rationalize himself out of) Josef Mengele’s actual activities at Auschwitz. Had he been involved in gas-chamber selections? Did he conduct experiments on human beings? Did he ever kill anybody with his bare hands? This was the nature of the questions Munch says he tried to answer as candidly and kindly as an old friend could. But Wiesenthal says the session was a moot-court kind of dry run to determine whether Dr Mengele stood a better chance before a judge if charged with conducting experiments or conducting selections. And he finds it significant that, if both of Munch’s visitors knew that Mengele had been dead for nearly four years, they nonetheless referred to him in the present tense. This, however, was Sedlmeier’s tactic right up to 1985.

  Still, says Simon, ‘people who are usually quite busy and tied down to their jobs – like Karl-Heinz Mengele, who is the head of a big factory – don’t waste their time asking theoretical questions about someone who is not alive.’ He also points out that neither Frankfurt prosecutor Klein nor the Israeli police nor the US Office of Special Investigations will pronounce Mengele dead. Neal Sher, head of the OSI, said Mengele’s death, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination, will never be laid to rest. But Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who thinks Mengele is dead, finds it significant that, since 1985, nobody has come forward to claim the rewards leading to his arrest.

  Wiesenthal pounces on such trivia as an unexplained hole in the spine of the corpse exhumed at Embu (perhaps it was made by a nail hammered in to obliterate a tell-tale detail) and the lack of any discrepancy between the corpse’s height of 1.74 metres (5' 8.5") and the identical height listed on Mengele’s wartime SS records (even though loss of hair and the shrivelling of age should have subtracted a centimetre or two). He suggests that clever needlework by a dentist or a doctor like Mengele himself could have duplicated the perforation between his front teeth. And he has endless questions about the suspicious behaviour of the Bosserts on the day Mengele died – and the day after, at the cemetery.

  ‘Just today,’ Wiesenthal told me happily on 27 December 1988, four days before his eightieth birthday, ‘I receive a letter from a Swiss man who says he met Mengele in Paraguay lately. When I come back from Israel, I will look into it.’

  A cruel but telling two-part editorial cartoon by Dana Summers in Florida’s Orlando Sentinel was syndicated worldwide in the summer of 1985. In the left-hand panel, headlined ‘1945–1984’, a moustached man who looked like Wiesenthal sat behind a desk labelled ‘Nazi Hunters, Inc.’ and, pondering documents, told an aide: ‘Nobody has any information on Mengele. He seems to have disappeared into thin air!’ In the right-hand panel, titled ‘1985!!’, a news stand featured headlines that shouted: ‘I KNEW JOSEF!’ . . . ‘HOUSEWIFE SAYS – “WE HUNG OUT TOGETHER”’ . . . ‘JOSEF FATHERED MY BABY!’ .
. . ‘I GAVE SWIMMING LESSONS TO ANGEL OF DEATH!’ . . . ‘ALIEN BEINGS LIKED MENGELE’ . . . and, inevitably, ‘“WE WERE DRINKING BUDDIES” – SAYS ELVIS’ GHOST’.

  On the same page as Summers’ cartoon, the International Herald Tribune excerpted an editorial from The Observer, ‘Why Wasn’t Mengele Found?’, which began by asking:

  How was it possible that Josef Mengele eluded capture for thirty-five years? In the light of the evidence, catching him would not have been difficult. His protection and cover in South America was not at all elaborate.

  More often than not, the finger of blame for following false trails was pointed at Simon Wiesenthal – most devastatingly by Benno Varon, the ex-Viennese Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, who called Wiesenthal’s periodic Mengele ‘sightings’ and posting of a reward that ‘is in no danger of ever having to be paid out’ and proclamation of his imminent capture ‘subtle inducement for contributing to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Who wouldn’t gladly part with some money for the prospect of catching a genocidal monster?’, and by Mengele’s biographers Posner and Ware, who said ‘Wiesenthal’s pronouncements raised the public’s expectations, only to dash their hopes each time.’ In Mengele: the Complete Story, they remark:

  The extraordinary thing is that the myth of Wiesenthal’s hunt remained intact even after Mengele’s body was discovered. He told reporters it was he who had tipped off the West Germans and persuaded them to raid the Günzburg home of Hans Sedlmeier. . .

  The Wiesenthal Centre rose to Simon’s defence. Its director, Gerald Margolis, and Washington counsel Martin Mendelsohn took on Varon in the pages of the influential Jewish magazine, Midstream: