Mengele`s instructions for his son`s secret visit resembled a set of military orders. From the moment he first suggested the idea in 1973, Mengele insisted that Rolf travel on a false passport and lay a series of false trails. In May, 1977, he wrote to Sedlmeier imploring him to ensure that Rolf use a false passport, or ”dumbman,” and gave detailed instructions for his arrival in Sao Paulo.
Mengele need hardly have worried because the West Germans were not giving the slightest importance to following any members of his family. But since Mengele did not know that, his elaborate instructions to Rolf continued, with an echo from the past. ”Use the subway in an inconspicuous manner,” he urged his son, advising him how to merge with the crowd on the platform just as he had done on his escape by train through Italy in 1949. He also told Rolf how to get to the Bosserts` house. From there, Wolfram Bossert would lead him to the ramshackle bungalow on Alvarenga Street.
Rolf departed for Rio de Janeiro from Frankfurt with a $600 charter ticket on Varig Airlines. He traveled on a passport he had stolen from a friend, Wilfried Busse, when they were on holiday earlier in that year.
As his father had instructed, Rolf brought with him gifts for the Bosserts and, for Mengele himself, a Latin-English dictionary, an attachment for his electric razor and $5,000 in cash from Karl Heinz. An hour or so into the flight, Rolf began to have last-minute doubts: ”I remember thinking to myself, `Should I really be going? It won`t change anything.` But these misgivings were just nerves. I knew that I wouldn`t turn back once I got to Brazil. It was something I had to do. I`d been thinking about it for too long.”
It had been 21 years since Rolf last saw his father, in the Swiss Alps. During those years his father had been revealed as a monster.
The man standing at the gate now was a shadow of his old self. The pride had gone. And the self-assurance. There was a pathetically eager look about him as he raised his arms for an awkward embrace with his son. ”The man who stood before me,” said Rolf, ”was a broken man, a scared creature.”
Josef Mengele was trembling with excitement. There were actually tears in his eyes. Rolf felt as if he were in the presence of a stranger. ”That`s when I made a few gestures to overcome the unfamiliarity and the emotion,” he said, and he responded to his father`s offer of an embrace.
The bungalow his father was living in was small and simple. During his visit, Rolf had the bed; his father slept on the brick floor. There was a lot of questioning, cautiously at first, with Rolf affecting a conciliatory approach.
”I told my father I was intested in hearing about his time in Auschwitz. What was Auschwitz according to his version of events? What did he do there?
Did he have a role in the things he was charged with? For tactical and psychological reasons I very cautiously touched upon this subject, trying to analyze it and separate out the more obscure and complex arguments my father was trying to inject.”
Night after night the inquisition went on. Mengele`s answers were so full of philosophical and pseudo-scientific verbiage that Rolf began to fear ”my mind would be overrun.” His father kept straying off the essential points, justifying his racist views, falling back at one point on a detailed critique of prehistoric evolution. When Mengele had finally exhausted his hand, Rolf launched his counteroffensive.
Why, Rolf asked him, if he felt so sure of his ground, had he not turned himself in? ”My father replied, `There are no judges, only avengers,` ” said Rolf.
How could his father explain that many crippled and deformed people still had brilliant minds? ”My father could not give me a proper answer to that. He just waffled on and on.”
What precisely was Mengele`s evidence for asserting that some races were superior to others? ”Here most of his arguments were sociological, historical and political,” said Rolf. ”They were quite unscientific.”
Wasn`t such an attempt to categorize races in any case immoral and deeply inhuman? ”My father knew that this was my route into Auschwitz and what he did there,” said Rolf. ”He saw my approach and knew that I hadn`t accepted what he`d been saying.”
In the 14 days and nights that Rolf spent with his father, he learned a lot about the old man`s moods, his suicidal tendencies, his depression, his temper. He learned nothing about what his father did in the war. In a philosophical way Mengele tried to justify what he had done without saying exactly what it was. Never once did he admit any guilt.
In the end, said Rolf, it was impossible to discuss the concepts of evil or guilt because his father felt no guilt: ”I tried. These allegations, these facts left me speechless; I tried to tell him that his presence in Auschwitz alone was unacceptable to me. I was hoping he`d say: `I tried to get a transfer to the front. I did this, I did that.` Unfortunately I realized that he would never express any remorse or feeling of guilt in my presence.”
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 back yard. 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 and shuffling away as if oblivious to his brush with death.
It was in this distracted frame of mind that Mengele left his bungalow 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, 25 miles south of Sao Paulo. It was the height of a sweltering Brazilian summer.
Alone, he took the two-hour bus ride to Bertioga, arriving there on Feb. 5, 1979. Liselotte Bossert remembers that ”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.
At 3 p.m. on Feb. 7, Mengele finally came outdoors. ”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 Gunzburg, 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.” 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 water, 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 died of a second stroke.
Why did it take six years for the secret of Mengele`s Brazilian exile and his death and burial to emerge? Aside from a small circle of unrepentant Nazis like Hans Rudel, there were by now more than 30 close friends and family who knew but never said a word.
On Aug. 5, 1979, Paraguayan 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 that he had left Paraguay ”a long time ago.” On Aug. 8, Montonaro directed the Paraguayan attorney general to ask the supreme court to revoke Mengele`s 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, U.S. Ambassador Robert White assumed Mengele must have died. ”I must say that up until that time I always believed that he was actually in Paraguay,” he said. 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?
It is inconceivable that Montonaro would have revoked Mengele`s citizenship without the President`s authority, since he regards Paraguayan citizenship to be sacrosanct. ”I don`t think that Stroessner would ever have permitted the cancellation of something he considered so valuable,” said Ambassador White. If he is right, it suggests that Stroessner was privy to Mengele`s death in Brazil but nonetheless allowed the world to go on guessing for another six years.
There`s no doubt 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 20 years. Yet it is almost certain he did not know of Mengele`s death.
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.
