Gerhard told the Stammers that not only was ”Hochbichler” an experienced cattle breeder but had also recently inherited some money that he wanted to invest in Brazilian real estate. To the Stammers it was an attractive proposition, particularly since an extra pair of hands would fill the gap left by Geza when his job as a surveyor took him away for several weeks at a time.
Eventually agreement with the Stammers was reached, and ”Peter” moved in with them to manage the farm at Nova Europa. But he declined any payment. According to Gitta Stammer, Mengele arrived at the farm looking thin and pale: ”. . . he seemed to be ill. . . Gerhard said he suffered from a certain disease and his stay with us would help him recover. He showed us a document, a simple paper with no photograph, that had allowed him to cross the border from Austria to Italy. This was the only identification document I saw with this name. But we were not suspicious about him. He seemed simple enough, as he wanted just his food and laundry.”
In their attempt to convince skeptics that they were just innocent dupes, the Stammers insist that at first there was nothing suspicious about ”Peter Hochbichler” or his refusal to take a salary. Nor did his parcels of letters and newspapers from Germany strike them as strange. But the farmhands who suddenly found themselves in Mengele`s charge realized something was amiss. They noted that ”Peter” read philosophy and history and loved classical music, especially Mozart. They also found that their new boss had a sharp temper, which exploded as he struggled to make his orders understood in Portuguese. ”I didn`t like him but I couldn`t do anything about it,” said Francisco de Souza, who was working for the Stammers when Mengele arrived.
”He loved giving orders and kept saying that we should work more and harder. The worst of it was that he didn`t seem to understand much about farming or heavy work.”
Unbeknownst to the Stammers and the farmhands, the reason Mengele was ill at ease initially was that he did not like the farm or his work. In this first phase of his Brazilian exile, Mengele found it hard to come to terms with his new lowly status. And despite his greater security at remote Nova Europa, his fear of capture by the Israelis plagued him.
Mengele`s fear of an Israeli strike was well grounded. Since the beginning of 1961, following a failed kidnap attempt in Buenos Aires, a formidable task force of Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agents had been assembled to track him down. Indeed, many members of the new Mengele task force had also been on Operation Eichmann.
The team was headed by Zvi Aharoni, the agent who had provided the crucial confirmation that Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires under the name Lement, pinpointed his house and interrogated him after his abduction.
The Mossad`s starting point was Paraguay, and their strategy was to try to establish links with those who knew Mengele well in order to have ready access to reliable information on his location at any given time. Only when that was accomplished could the Israelis give serious thought to actually kidnaping Mengele.
Even to this day Mossad agents disagree about exactly how close they got to Mengele in Paraguay and about how much protection he received. Isser Harel, then head of Mossad, said his men became convinced in 1961 that Mengele was in Paraguay and was being sheltered by Alban Krug. ”By the end of the year we knew that he was moving between Paraguay and Brazil,” said Harel. ”He was completely panicked by the Eichmann abduction.”
The conflicting statements about Mengele`s movements in the early 1960s reflects the soul-searching that surfaced within Israel`s intelligence community after Mengele`s death was disclosed. The discovery in June, 1985, that Mengele had lived in Brazil for most of his fugitive life raised questions as to why the Israelis had never found him, much less apprehended him.
Meanwhile, the more sedentary West German hunt was now progressing on three fronts. In February, 1965, Bonn extended its extradition request from Argentina to Brazil. The CIA reported that Mengele was ”rumored to have gone to Mato Grosso, Brazil.” In Asuncion Peter Bensch, the charge d`affaires at the West German embassy, also continued to make inquiries: ”My own view was that Mengele was moving between Paraguay and Brazil at this time, but we had no precise information on him. The supreme court did tell me that if he was found in Paraguay, it would not be possible to extradite a Paraguayan citizen.”
Amidst the confusion over exactly where Mengele was, only one country knew for certain, and that was Israel. According to a senior Mossad man, they had received reports that Mengele was in Brazil. But the Mossad kept this information to itself. The Six Day War in 1967 had confirmed the view of Gen. Meir Amit, chief of the Mossad, that resources had to be concentrated on meeting the Arab threat. There appeared to be no justification for funding a special task force to review the leads on Mengele developed by Harel`s agents in the early 1960s. In the wake of the war Israel also underwent a major shift in foreign policy. Israel decided to open an embassy in Asuncion. It would have been an ideal base from which to pursue the Mengele hunt clandestinely, but Benjamin Weiser Varon, the Israeli ambassador from 1968 to 1972, had a much more straightforward mission. ”I was sent there to create friends and influence people,” he said.
The decision to open an embassy in Asuncion was made soon after Jan. 1, 1968, when tiny Paraguay assumed disproportionate power on the world diplomatic stage by becoming one of two Latin American countries in the UN Security Council. In Varon`s view the council had been a ”kangaroo court against Israel for far too long.” His special task was to persuade Paraguay to ”join a small minority that occasionally still cast a vote for Israel.”
Hardly a week passed without Varon asking the Paraguayan foreign minister, Dr. Raul Sapena Pastor, for a vote in Israel`s favor at the UN. Raising the subject of Mengele was not likely to assist that goal. On his appointment Varon was thus ”not given any instructions by the foreign office on Mengele of any kind. It wasn`t even mentioned.”
Nor was Varon told that the Mossad had had teams in Paraguay and Brazil from 1960 to 1962, or that Harel had considered a commando raid on a Brazilian farmhouse. Indeed, Varon heard of this only after he left office, when Britain`s Granada Television screened a special program on Mengele in November, 1978: ”It was strange that I had to learn all this from the script of the program. It proved that it had not been deemed wise to burden me with that knowledge when I set out on my mission in Paraguay. It also proved that Israel`s secret service acts in complete independence of the foreign ministry.”
Although Varon was not privy to the policy of Gen. Amit`s Mossad, he did experience firsthand one of the reasons the Mossad had placed other priorities over hunting Nazis. On May 2, 1970, two PLO gunmen charged into his embassy and began shooting wildly. Four Israeli officials were wounded, and one was killed. When the terrorists finally reached the ambassador`s office, they kicked open the door and aimed at Varon`s head. Mercifully for him, all he heard was the click of the gun. Both gunmen had exhausted their bullets. Before they could reload, the Paraguayan police arrived and arrested them. Embarrassed that a diplomatic mission, especially one so newly established, should have been violated on its own soil, Paraguay sentenced the PLO men to 15 years at hard labor.
In the absence of a ”Mengele policy,” Varon developed a standard answer to the tips that came in to the embassy about the fugitive`s latest hideout:
the Israeli government was not searching for Mengele; the Federal Republic of Germany was. ”I must confess I was not so eager to find Mengele,” Varon said. ”He presented a dilemma. Israel had less of a claim for his extradition than Germany. He was, after all, a German citizen who had committed his crimes in the name of the Third Reich. None of his victims was Israeli–Israel came into existence only several years later.”
Mengele bought a one-half interest in the Stammers` farm with the money he made from his business ventures, and over the 13 years they spent together, the Stammers prospered enough to sell the farm and buy a large new house in the state of Sao Paulo, but their relationship with the dictatorial Mengele disintegrated.
The ”new,” confident Mengele had also become a man of property. He now owned a $7,000 apartment in a high-rise building in the center of Sao Paulo, which he rented out. As he tried to develop some financial independence, a further boost to Mengele`s confidence came in 1971 when he inherited a priceless Brazilian identity card. It belonged to Wolfgang Gerhard.
With the help of Wolfram Bossert, a competent amateur photographer, Mengele accomplished a tolerable forgery. Bossert took dozens of passport-size photos of Mengele and then selected the one that best fit Gerhard`s description. The laminated identity card was spliced open, a picture of the mustachioed Mengele, his hair neatly combed, was stuck over the photograph of his Nazi friend, and the card was relaminated. All the other details remained Gerhard`s, including his thumb print and his date of birth, which transformed Mengele, then 60, into a very old-looking 46-year-old, the age listed on the card.
In July, 1972, Mengele fell ill. Over the years he had lived in such a state of tension and anxiety that he had developed a nervous habit of biting the end of his walrus mustache. Eventually he swallowed so much hair that it developed into a ball that blocked his intestines. His condition became so painful and dangerous that he took the risk of admitting himself to a hospital in Sao Paulo. For the first time his new identity card was put to the test, and it nearly failed. A puzzled doctor treating Mengele told Bossert that his patient seemed physically very old for a 47-year-old man. Bossert told the doctor that the date of birth was incorrectly entered on the identity card, and that the Brazilian government had promised to correct it with a new card. The doctor accepted the barely credible explanation.
This early period of the 1970s, when Mengele was integrating himself into modern-day life, also marked the start of a period of prolific correspondence with his family, particularly his son, Rolf, and his childhood friend Hans Sedlmeier.
Mengele`s private correspondence highlighted how much closer he was to Karl Heinz than to his own son, Rolf; he had corresponded regularly with Karl Heinz and Martha since they left South America in 1961. He tried to compensate for this by making overtures to Rolf, with whom he had no relationship worth speaking of. Always there was the question from strangers: ”Rolf Mengele? Not the son of Josef Mengele?” Awkwardly, Rolf would make light of the situation by saying, ”Oh, yes, and I`m also Adolf Eichmann`s nephew.”
When Mengele tried to open a dialogue with his grown-up son in the early 1970s, his barely repressed dislike for Rolf soon came to the surface. In almost every letter Mengele extended fatherly affection to his son in one sentence, only to take it back with hurtful chiding in the next. He treated Rolf in a cold and distant manner, much as his own father had treated him. A letter congratulating Rolf on his first marriage is a good example: ”From the photographs one can deduce that you are happy. And why shouldn`t such a good- looking young man and his pretty and lovable wife not be that? I think I have already shown too much fatherly pride in my newly acquired daughter. Unfortunately I hardly know her, or rather I only know her as much as the few photographs reveal. But do I know the son better? . . . The description accompanying the photos–you really could have tried a little harder. I myself would have realized that these were your friends and not your enemies that accompany you to the registry office!”
The Stammers decided to make the final break with Mengele by selling their farm and moving to Sao Paulo and not taking Mengele with them. When they moved to their new home in December, Mengele stayed at their house in Caieiras, 25 miles outside Sao Paulo, until February, 1975.
Mengele grew anxious about where he would live next. ”Now it is naturally much more difficult for me to find suitable housing,” he wrote in his diary. He did not want to move into his center-city apartment because he needed the monthly income from renting it out. He did not ask the Bosserts if he could move in with them because they and their two children lived in a small two-bedroom house that had no room for a boarder.
But before the end of January, 1975, Mengele`s housing worries were solved. The Stammers, who had given him a Christmas promise to help him, used $25,000 of the proceeds from the sale of their Caieiras farm to buy a small bungalow, which they then decided to rent out to him. It was little more than a shack, a yellow stucco bungalow with one gloomy bedroom, an antiquated bathroom and a tiny kitchen. It was in one of the poorer parts of town, at 5555 Alvarenga Rd. in the Eldorado suburb of Sao Paulo. It was only a few miles from the Bosserts, the only people he could depend upon for regular visits and support.
Mengele`s main companion for the first year of his new solitary life was a 16-year-old neighborhood gardener, Luis Rodrigues, who liked watching ”The Wonderful World of Disney” and soap operas on TV. Mengele was so lonely that sometimes he asked him to stay the night. Rodrigues recalled how Mengele loved music and how he sometimes whirled clumsily around the room to a waltz.
Toward the end of that year Mengele bought a $150 24-inch Telefunken black-and-white television set. He told the boy that he wanted the set to watch the Winter Olympics. He also confided to Hans Sedlmeier he thought the set might persuade ”my new housemate to stay.”
But Mengele`s television did little to relieve the pain of his loneliness. It did not persuade the boy to spend more time with him. And Mengele reported home that although it was a ”break in my monotonous life,” he got no enjoyment from the set because ”the channels hardly come through and the repeated interruptions by commercials really do disturb me.”
Deep depression and anxiety had now set in. He ended 1975 with a letter to Sedlmeier, noting that ”nothing can improve my mood.” Mengele`s spirits and health were sinking fast. He talked about suicide, saying it would be a blessed relief from his aches and pains and a world that cared nothing for him.
The beginning of the end came sooner than he thought. It began one Sunday night after an afternoon outing with the Stammers` elder son, Miki, and a friend, Norberto Glawe. When they dropped him off at the gate to his bungalow, Mengele felt quite dizzy and ill. Inside the house a ”sudden pain” hit him in the right side of his head. In Mengele`s own words, ”fluttering visions, vertigo, tingling sensations in the left half of my face and my left arm (like ants running), and difficulties with my speech and increasing pain in my head were the major symptoms. Later, this barbaric pain in my head was accompanied by nausea.”
As a doctor Mengele knew from the symptoms that he had suffered a stroke. ”I couldn`t use either my left arm or my left leg (paralyzing),” he wrote. Norberto Glawe went to a nearby clinic for advice about ”Don Pedro,” and was told to take him immediately to the hospital.
Just as Gerhard had not confided Mengele`s secret to the Stammers when Mengele first went to live with them, so did he keep Glawe and his parents
–his father, Ernesto Glawe, was an Argentinian industrialist of German descent–in the dark when he asked them to take care of the stricken old man, saying he had to return to Europe to care for his son Adolf, who was suffering from bone cancer. Gerhard`s wife had died of cancer in 1975, but despite this family crisis, he had taken the trouble to visit Mengele for a very special reason.
At Mengele`s expense, Gerhard flew back to Sao Paulo to renew Mengele`s forged Brazilian identity card, which was about to expire. The plastic card was opened up again, Mengele`s picture was withdrawn to reveal Gerhard`s picture underneath, and the card was then relaminated in a local shop so that Gerhard could present it for renewal. The new renewed card was then slit open and relaminated after Mengele`s photograph was repositioned over Gerhard`s. Mengele himself noted that the new card, or ”dumbman,” as he called it, was far from perfect. The differences between the real Gerhard–14 years younger and 6 inches taller–and the ”Gerhard” of the photo were glaring.
It was precisely these anomalies that alerted one already suspicious person to the fact that ”Don Pedro” was hiding a murky past. As young Norberto Glawe accompanied ”Don Pedro” to the Santa Marta Hospital on May 17, 1976, he noticed that he was using the identity card of Wolfgang Gerhard, the ”unbalanced” Nazi who had introduced them earlier that year. He also noticed that ”Don Pedro” had paid his hospital admission fee with a crisp $100 bill.
After two weeks in the hospital, ”Don Pedro” was released. Norberto Glawe agreed to move in with him at his bungalow while he convalesced. Cooped up together in such a confined space, ”Don Pedro” began to get on the boy`s nerves.
By now the Glawes had a strong suspicion of who this opinionated and self-righteous old man really was. ”I found a catalogue from a company for agricultural machinery,” said Ernesto Glawe. ”It had the name `Mengele` on it. I put two and two together.”
But like the Stammers, the Glawes did not act on their suspicions. ”My problem was that I wasn`t positive and I was frightened,” Ernesto Glawe told the Sao Paulo police in June, 1985. He also told the police that they had no further contact with ”Don Pedro” after Norberto Glawe left the bungalow in the summer of 1976.
That was patently untrue. In his diary Mengele gave the Glawes a code name, as he did for all the key conspirators who helped him. He called them the ”Santiagos,” and his diary makes several references to meeting and exchanging gifts with them after the summer of 1976. It was clear that they were not the closest of friends, but neither were they enemies.
After the disclosure of their relationship with Mengele, the Glawes tried to put some distance between themselves and Mengele. In June, 1985, Ernesto Glawe told ABC News: ”Personally I never wanted to be an intimate friend of his. I have never avoided having Jewish friends and I have never been a Nazi. In fact, I have two employees who are Jewish. I consider this idea of neo-Nazism totally passe. I feel very badly about it (giving assistance to Mengele) now because I helped someone who really did not deserve my assistance.”
But in his act of public contrition, Ernesto Glawe made one important omission. He failed to mention that the Glawes had received hush money from Mengele. By the summer of 1976 they knew precisely who Mengele was, clued by the false identity card, the ”Mengele” catalogue, the conflicting war stories. Mengele then felt obliged, though with great reluctance, to pay the Glawes for their silence, a fact revealed in a letter from Sedlmeier to Mengele: ”In connection with the Santiago affair, you mentioned that you were disgusted that one had to pay friends for their services. Don`t we do the same with the tall man (Woflgang Gerhard)? If we had considered this necessity with G + G (Gitta and Geza Stammer), you might still be together.”
Mengele`s fees to ”the tall man,” which had risen since he acquired his identity card, were proving to be a considerable drain on his private funds. Marianne Huber, the Gerhards` landlady in Graz, Austria, said that one of the children told her that Gerhard had sold his ID card for $7,000, though in what currency, she did not know. To raise extra cash, Mengele also had to sell the Sao Paulo apartment he had bought in the Stammers` name.
