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Monday, Jun. 24, 1985

By Pico Iyer.;William McWhirter/Gunzburg and Gavin Scott/Sao Paulo, with

other bureaus

Flashbulbs popped, klieg lights blazed. On the 17th floor of federal police headquarters in Sao Paulo last
week, Romeu Tuma, the mustachioed federal police superintendent who is Brazil's best-known detective,
stood amid a gaggle of reporters and television crewmen assembled for a regular briefing. Without delay,
Tuma came to the point. The evidence, he said firmly, was steadily mounting that the body, which had
been exhumed from a graveyard in the little town of Embu a few days earlier, was that of Josef Mengele,
the Nazi doctor who sent some 400,000 concentration-camp prisoners to their deaths during World War
II and cruelly experimented on thousands of others in his genetics research. What, cried a reporter,
about the news just in from West Germany that Mengele's son Rolf was certain the body was his
father's? That, said Tuma evenly, would support his own theory but not affect his investigation.

So it went virtually every day last week. As a team of Brazilian forensic experts examined the Embu
bones at Sao Paulo's Instituto Medico Legal to determine whether they were Mengele's or not, Tuma --
and others -- provided bits and pieces of fresh evidence in what could be the final act of a dramatic and
drawn-out manhunt, a bitter trail of false identities, narrow escapes and never-ending questions. For
more than a quarter-century, Nazi hunters from Israel and other countries had crisscrossed Europe and
much of South America trying to track down the elusive "Angel of Death." Was the hunt finally about to
end? Or would the searchers discover that they had been duped in a giant hoax, lured into an
ingeniously woven web of disinformation, implying that Mengele, a man with a $3.4 million reward on
his head, might still be at large?

As the story unfolded and the evidence grew, no final answers were available. For the moment at least,
even if the possibility of Mengele's death assumed greater plausibility, the great mystery remained
unsolved. In Sao Paulo, new witnesses came forward, telling the police or the press that they had known
the man alleged to be Mengele, fleshing out earlier claims that he had lived reclusively in Brazil between
1961 and 1979. In West Germany, Rolf Mengele broke the family's long silence not only to announce that
he had "no doubt" that the Embu bones were the remains of his father but to turn over to a West German
magazine photographs, letters and documents purportedly relevant to the Mengele story. Late last week,
moreover, U.S. handwriting analysts confirmed that the script on documents found in Brazil
corresponded with that on other Mengele papers.

Gerald Posner, an American lawyer who has assembled 25,000 pages of documents and interviewed 200

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witnesses in South America during a four-year search for the doctor of death, explained that when he
first heard of the find at Embu, he thought the story a hoax. After flying from New York City to Sao
Paulo, however, Posner said, "We have to await the forensic investigation, but I'm starting to think he
may be dead."

If Mengele is indeed dead, the discovery will, in a way, bring an end to an era -- even though the
troubling ghosts of World War II still arouse violent feelings, as evidenced most recently by the
controversy over President Reagan's visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. For many Germans,
Mengele, a top physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, embodies a dark
past they are hoping at last to exorcise and bury. By the same token, the Mengele hunters and the
survivors of the Holocaust, in which some 10 million people were killed, have mixed feelings about the
possibility that Mengele has been finally laid to rest. That prospect, says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, brings "a sad sense of relief." If Mengele is gone, he will never
be brought to justice; his crimes will be buried like his victims.

No matter how far the current investigation goes, moreover, the almost seamless skein of evidence
collected so far has been greeted with skepticism. For years, Mengele had displayed an uncanny
adeptness for eluding his pursuers. Suddenly, not long after the search intensified once again earlier this
year, the body was found and tidy explanations appeared. "The whole matter looks like a play with a
perfect script," said Simon Wiesenthal, who has tracked down more than 1,100 Nazis in a 38-year
campaign. "Mengele lives and breathes," said Menachem Rusek, director of Israel's police unit
investigating Nazi crimes, before flying to Sao Paulo last week. "He and his relatives have already
managed to play every sophisticated trick in the book to conceal his identity."

The doubters initially focused their attention on the circumstances under which the latest trail opened
up on May 31. Following a tip from an unidentified informant, West German police raided the house in
Gunzburg, West Germany, of Hans Sedlmeier, a former employee of the Mengele family firm who was
said to have been in touch with Josef in South America. Inside, the agents discovered photographs and
letters from Brazil that pointed to an elderly Austrian couple, Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, who lived
near Sao Paulo. Searching their home, Brazilian police discovered other documents apparently belonging
to Mengele. The Bosserts said that they had first been introduced to Mengele in 1970 by an Austrian,
Wolfgang Gerhard; that the doctor of Auschwitz eventually took the name and identity papers of
Gerhard; and that after Mengele drowned at the beach resort of Bertioga in 1979, they buried him at
Embu, 20 miles south of Sao Paulo. After the body was exhumed, Superintendent Tuma declared that his
men had almost certainly located the world's most wanted man.

Yet the Bossert story raised almost as many questions as it answered. "Why would anyone keep such
incriminating letters or identity papers?" asked French Nazi Hunter Serge Klarsfeld, referring to the
documents found in the home of the Bosserts as well as in Sedlmeier's. Why had the Mengele family not
announced Josef's death six years ago, and so freed itself of all the negative publicity thrown up by the
case? What about the many sightings over the years of Mengele in Paraguay, even as recently as last
summer? And why had the Bosserts taken up with an infamous mass murderer in the first place? "If the
Bossert account is true," said West German Mengele Researcher Otmar Katz, "then it contradicts all the
information about Mengele for the past 20 years."

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As the forensic examination got under way last week, the medical investigators worked in strict secrecy.
Outside the third-floor multiroom lab at the Instituto Medico Legal, armed military policemen stood
guard around the clock. Within days, the original five-man team of examiners had grown to seven; early
on, they discovered signs of an injury in the pelvic area that might correspond to a broken hip Mengele
reportedly suffered in a wartime accident (though Rolf Mengele said he knew of no such injury). After
preliminary tests on the 208 bones before him, Coordinator Wilmes Roberto Teixeira reported that he
had found nothing to suggest that the body was not Mengele's.

Initially, the Brazilians' handling of the remains had been attended by some controversy. The circus
atmosphere in which the corpse had been exhumed, with TV cameras broadcasting live from grave-side
and remains passed casually out for public inspection, prompted foreign observers to charge Brazilian
officials with negligence. Fears mounted when the experts in Sao Paulo initially declined assistance from
abroad. Last week, however, the Wiesenthal Center supplied the Brazilians with the dossier it had
assembled on Mengele and prevailed on them to allow three U.S. experts to observe the forensic process.
"I understand that it is Brazil's national pride that is in question," said Rabbi Hier, "so it is difficult for
them to say that American experts are going to be the ones at the table. But that is exactly what is going
to happen." West Germany also sent over three forensic specialists to watch the proceedings.

In the doctor's homeland, meanwhile, where Federal Prosecutor Hans Eberhard Klein had nearly
despaired of ever getting cooperation from the close-mouthed Mengele family, Rolf Mengele's
unexpected statement about his father's fate stirred worldwide interest. It also revealed the eccentric
ways of the secrecy-loving clan. As reporters gathered outside the office of Munich Architect Jens
Hackenjos, young Mengele's stepbrother, Hackenjos sent his wife Sabine, accompanied by Herbert
Bauermeister, a free-lance journalist, to inform newspeople that her husband had already handed over
Rolf's statement to German wire-service agencies. At his own apartment Hackenjos opened his door just
a crack, checked identifications, prohibited photographs and demanded that the handful of journalists
he admitted give him receipts for copies of the statement.

For all that, Rolf's declaration was hardly momentous. In legalistic language, the son of the doctor
announced, "I have no doubt that the corpse exhumed at the cemetery in Embu is the remains of my
father. I am sure that the forensic tests will confirm this shortly . . . I have remained silent until now out
of consideration for the people who were in contact with my father for the last 30 years."

Two days later, the Mengeles divulged a few more details. Dieter, the nephew of the Auschwitz doctor
and one of the partners in the Mengele company, explained that the family had kept silent on the case
for so many years in order to protect Josef's friends. The same day, Rolf handed over, free of charge,
photographic and written material on Mengele, after his escape from Germany, to the weekly magazine
Bunte Illustrierte. The magazine's current issue carries the first installment of an article in which Rolf
explains that while he had ideological differences with his father, he sympathized with his plight.

To some degree, the revelations in West Germany complemented the stories provided by new witnesses
in Brazil. In her attractive white house in the affluent hillside community of Petropolis Park, outside Sao
Paulo, a nervous Gitta Stammer, who had earlier come forward to support and supplement the Bossert
account, told her story to TIME's Jacqueline Reditt. Her face pale and worried, her hands trembling, the

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slight, 65-year-old Hungarian-born woman described how she and her family had kept a longtime
lodger's secret for 22 anxious years.

In 1961, she said, she and her engineer husband Geza were living on a coffee and fruit farm in Nova
Europa, 175 miles north of Sao Paulo, when they were introduced at a social function to Wolfgang
Gerhard. Gerhard, an Austrian living in Brazil, asked the Stammers if they could take in a Swiss friend of
his named Peter Hochbichlet. The friend, Gerhard said, would be able to help out around the farm.
Agreeing to put up Peter, or "Pedro," in a separate house on their property, the family found him to be as
good as Gerhard's word: the man paid the Stammers a nominal rent and "mended fences, vaccinated
cows, picked fruit."

When, later that year, the Stammers moved to a farm in Serra Negra, 100 miles north of Sao Paulo, their
lodger went along, taking a room in their new home. One day, about two years after Pedro joined the
household, a visitor left a newspaper in the house that featured a picture of Dr. Josef Mengele as he
looked at Auschwitz. Despite the 20-year interval, said Stammer, she recognized in the picture the gap
between Pedro's top front teeth, and the bent head with which he gave his one-sided smile. Later that
day, she said, she showed her lodger the photo. He turned white. That evening he admitted that he was
indeed Mengele.

At that point, the Stammers asked Gerhard to find another home for his friend. He promised to do so,
but nothing happened. Weeks turned into months, months into years. Pedro stayed. Why did the
Stammers not report their guest to the police? Because, said Gitta, Gerhard told them their lives would
be in danger if they talked. Even after Gerhard had left Brazil, and died in Austria in 1978, said
Stammer, she feared retribution from his "friends" if ever she went to the authorities. Throughout, Pedro
never once threatened her family; he even went so far as to chide Gerhard for his show of force. "He
didn't get angry or violent," Stammer recalled. "He didn't seem like a fanatic Nazi. I think he was a cold
scientist." Still, the Stammers did find that their guest was imperious with servants, and he often urged
the couple to be stricter with their two sons.

On the subject of his past, the Stammers' lodger was reticent. "He always denied that he had committed
any crimes," Stammer said. He did, however, tell her once that the Germans had wanted to eliminate the
Jews because they were like a disease on the national body politic.

Pedro had the rough, callused hands of a seasoned laborer, Stammer remembered, but he was also a
person of some refinement. He enjoyed having her play the piano for him, and he liked reading books on
history and philosophy, metaphysics and chemistry. Among his favorites was The Decline of the West,
written by Oswald Spengler. For the most part, Stammer reported, her guest remained quiet.
"Sometimes," she recalled, "he went out of the house for six, seven hours at a time. I think he just went
walking." The Stammers finally separated themselves from their increasingly unwanted guest in 1974.
Moving to a small house in Santana, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, they left Pedro in their former home
in nearby Caieiras. After they sold the Caieiras property in 1975, they bought a home in the suburb of
Eldorado Paulista and permitted the old man to stay there. By then he had grown close to the Bosserts,
whom he had met through Gerhard in 1970. In Pedro's final years, said Stammer, she saw him only
rarely, including one chance encounter with his son Rolf. "I don't feel I was really guilty," said Stammer.
"I feel I was a donkey."

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As others who claimed to have known Pedro talked to the police and to the press, a vivid picture began to
emerge of the strange, solitary life of the man who may have been Mengele. Ernesto Glawe, an
Argentine-born engineer with a German father, described in a deposition how he had been drawn into
the expatriate circles of Gerhard and the Bosserts. Only one year after that initial meeting, said Glawe,
Gerhard asked him if he would help an old Austrian friend. Somewhat taken aback at this request,
Glawe eventually acquiesced and began paying monthly visits to the aging Pedro, bringing him biscuits
and chocolate. Surprisingly, said Glawe, Pedro spoke little about his life in Europe, though he said he
had served as a doctor in the German army. Glawe at last began to suspect that Pedro might be the
doctor of Auschwitz when he spotted in the old man's house a copy of a Mengele firm brochure.

The image of the mystery man gained further dimension as neighbors of the Stammers from their days at
Serra Negra began to speak up. Some remembered how he would climb to the top of an eight-foot
observation tower on the farm and scan the horizon through binoculars. Basilio Silotto, a farm worker,
reported that Pedro had told him once that Hitler was a great man. When a defective person was born,
the old European confided to Silotto in tones reminiscent of the Auschwitz researcher, he would soon
vanish.

Those who had run across the man in his final years in Sao Paulo described him as lonely; he received
visits only occasionally, from a son whom he introduced as a nephew and from a family emissary,
apparently Hans Sedlmeier, the Mengele firm clerk. Pedro got no mail, kept no telephone and
maintained no bank accounts. He slept with a Mauser pistol by his bedside, according to some reports;
often he had difficulty getting to sleep and read or wrote deep into the night.

In his final years, according to Sao Paulo papers, Pedro fell in love with a housemaid, Elza Gulpian de
Oliveira. But as the thin-faced, 34-year-old woman told it last week, the old man persistently refused to
marry her, without explaining why. When she married another man in 1978, Pedro moped and pined.
The last image of Pedro, from another former maid, Ines Mehlich, was his valediction as he left on his
fatal seaside trip with the Bosserts in 1979: "I'm going to the beach because my life is ending."

All these details emerged, of course, from nothing more than personal reminiscences of Pedro. Still, the
accounts of different witnesses did overlap in many details, all portraying an old man passing a
somewhat joyless life of solitary introspection. "Given that many of the witnesses are virtually illiterate
peasants," said Superintendent Tuma, "it is extremely unlikely they are participants in an elaborate
international conspiracy."

As the dimensions of the drama widened in Brazil, a little more light was shed upon some of its shadowy
supporting players. Wolfgang Gerhard, who seemed to have been Pedro's ubiquitous fixer, was, said
Austrian Consul-General Otto Heller in Sao Paulo, a fanatic Nazi who brought out a fascist propaganda
sheet called Der Reichsbrief (The Reich Letter). By the age of twelve, Gerhard had become a member of
the Hitler Youth and later boasted of being a committed Nazi. Nonetheless, in the Austrian town of Graz
last week, Gerhard's 26-year- old son Adolf firmly rejected the stories told of his father by the Bosserts
and Gitta Stammer. "It's easy to put the blame on my dead father," he said. In fact, he continued, he
himself knew nothing of Dr. Mengele, and could not "even remember a single unmarried man who would
have visited our parents while we were in Brazil."

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The Bosserts' part in their alleged protection of the former Nazi remained equally mysterious,
particularly given Wolfram Bossert's vigorous denial of any Nazi affiliation. After raiding the Bossert
home, Tuma noted that ! everything to do with the doctor was arranged lovingly and with great care.
Apparently, said Tuma, "the couple had veneration for Mengele as a great leader."

Elsewhere, tantalizing tidbits trickled out to support both sides of the Mengele argument. Six days before
the exhumation at Embu, Alfonz Dierckx, a Belgian photographer based in Paraguay, told the
Paraguayan paper Hoy that Mengele, whom he had known in the early 1960s, had gone to a German
colony in Brazil. There, said Dierckx, he had drowned some years earlier.

Arguing against at least one aspect of the Bossert story, the drowning, was the revelation of Marc
Berkowitz, who as a twelve-year-old in 1944 had been one of Mengele's guinea pigs, and also served the
doctor as a messenger boy. From his home in New City, N.Y., Berkowitz recalled that the doctor "had a
phobia about water. He was afraid of water-carried diseases." Mengele told Berkowitz that he never
swam in rivers or lakes. In Brazil, meanwhile, a dentist said that she had treated a man just like Mengele
two months after the alleged drowning. At the same time, the coroner in the port city of Santos claimed
that the dead man he examined in 1979 after the drowning at Bertioga was in his early 50s and could
not therefore have been Mengele, who would have been 67 at the time.

From the very beginning, the Mengele story has been riddled with irony and anomaly. Born in 1911 into
the affluent family that controlled Gunzburg's main industry, Josef mastered his studies with ease and
by his mid-20s had earned doctor of philosophy and medical degrees. After World War II broke out,
Mengele decided that he could best serve Hitler's Reich as an SS doctor. In 1943 he was assigned to
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Before long, the impeccably well-mannered and well-dressed young doctor had made his grisly mark.
Whenever cattle cars filled with detainees rolled into the camp, Mengele was there to greet the new
arrivals. With a nonchalant flick of his hand, he consigned some to labor duty, some to the gas
chambers. Those who survived often ended up as human guinea pigs in the doctor's special lab, where he
performed a variety of ghoulish experiments in genetics.

In the hope of turning brown eyes to blue, for example, Mengele injected the eyes of children with dyes
and poisons. He castrated men, forced miscarriages in women. He exposed healthy patients to yellow
fever and X-ray radiation and, when he was finished with an experiment, had his subjects exterminated.
Of particular interest to Mengele were twins and dwarfs: at a tribunal in Jerusalem last February,
Auschwitz survivors told of how he had had two toddler twins stitched together and of how, discovering a
Rumanian circus family of seven dwarfs, he exhibited them naked before an audience of 2,000 cheering
SS men. On the walls of one of the doctor's labs were, remembered one victim, rows upon rows of eyes
"pinned up like butterflies."

Yet Mengele maintained some method amid his madness. A few survivors remember him as a man of
sobriety and serenity, attending to his research with careful scientific discipline. He was also given to
occasional flourishes of gallantry: after transferring a pregnant Jewish doctor to Cracow to do research
for him, Mengele sent her flowers upon the birth of her son. Yet his sadism could cause even his

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colleagues to shudder. According to Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish prisoner-doctor forced to act as his
assistant, "in Mengele's presence, the SS themselves trembled."

When Soviet troops rolled into Auschwitz in January 1945 and liberated the camp's remaining prisoners,
they found no trace of the elusive doctor. By the following year, he is said to have settled in Freiburg.
Indeed, he seemed to have already developed Houdini-esque gifts as an escape artist. Last January,
former U.S. Army Private Walter Kempthorne told the Wiesenthal Center that in July 1945, he ran across
a red-faced, sweating German in the custody of U.S. Army soldiers at a camp near the German town of
Trier. Why, Kempthorne asked, was the man being put through such strenuous exertions? "We're getting
him in shape to be hung," replied one of the guards. "This here is Mengele, the bastard that sterilized
3,000 women in Auschwitz."

Somehow Mengele managed to slither out of the noose. Even more astonishing, he also apparently
slipped out of the hands of U.S. Army counterintelligence agents two years later. Last November the
Wiesenthal Center obtained from the U.S. Army a previously confidential report revealing that Mengele
had been briefly in the custody of U.S. operatives in Vienna. After being grilled on the abduction of 20
Jewish children from Auschwitz, Mengele was apparently let go, for reasons still unknown.

By 1949, however, the doctor was beginning to feel the pressure of his past. Spotted that year by an
Auschwitz survivor, he left Freiburg, making his way to Italy and from there through Spain to Argentina.
In Buenos Aires, he was assured of a warm reception: President Juan Domingo Peron was known to be
tolerant of former Nazis and had promised to protect them.

Soon after, according to published reports, Mengele was living in the well- to-do Buenos Aires suburb of
Olivos and practicing medicine with impunity, though without a license. On one occasion, it is said, a
patient died while Mengele was performing an abortion on her, and he found himself in jail. Two hours
later a friend posted bail, and the "Angel of Death" was free once again. In the late '50s, after Peron had
been exiled and the West German government had issued a request for Mengele's extradition, the doctor
moved again, this time to Paraguay.

Within a month he had persuaded two prominent members of the influential local German community
to swear, falsely, that he had resided in the country for five years and to sponsor him for citizenship. On
Nov. 27, 1959, he was issued nationality card No. 293348 and took up residence in Paraguay under the
name Jose Mengele. For the most part, he stayed in the lush farm country around Hohenau, near the
Brazilian border, where, according to Alejandro von Eckstein, one of the men who sponsored him for
citizenship, he remained "very reserved and very melancholy."

MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence agency, had in the meantime been stepping up its pursuit of Nazis
scattered across South America. In 1960, in a raid on a house in Buenos Aires, Israeli commandos seized
Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of Hitler's "final solution," and took him to Jerusalem to be tried --
and hanged. During the same campaign the Israelis descended on a house in the Vicente Lopez area of
the Argentine capital where they were sure they would catch Mengele. They arrived to find that the
doctor had vanished.

As Isser Harel, the head of MOSSAD at the time, recalls in his memoir, The House on Garibaldi Street,

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his men were convinced on at least three other occasions that they had cornered Mengele: in 1961 on a
farm near the sleepy Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, in 1962 on a farm near Sao Paulo, and a few
months later along the Paraguayan-Brazilian border. Each time they came away emptyhanded.

In 1964 a woman named Nora Eldoc, operating under a West German cover, apparently managed to get
close to Mengele; she was subsequently found dead. Five years later, a former Paraguayan policeman
working for the Israelis expressed confidence that he had tracked down the Nazi runaway; he
disappeared, never to be seen again.

In his effort to stay several steps ahead of his pursuers, Mengele was apparently helped by Paraguayan
Dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the grandson of a Bavarian cavalry captain and a man of pronounced
right-wing views. When, in July 1962, Bonn began agitating for Mengele's extradition from Paraguay,
Stroessner responded that he could be of no assistance since Mengele was a Paraguayan citizen and was
thus protected. Two years later, the West German Ambassador in Asuncion approached Stroessner again
with the request for Mengele, only to be told that it would be best to drop the matter.

The Paraguayan government has consistently tried since then to brush the Mengele issue aside, usually
by insisting that he had left the country in the early 1960s. In 1979 Paraguay's supreme court canceled
Mengele's citizenship. The official explanation for the revocation was that he had been absent from the
country for more than two years. The real reason, according to other assessments, was that Asuncion was
growing increasingly uncomfortable with the unpleasant publicity generated by the Mengele association.
(Not coincidentally, perhaps, the doctor had by then been the inspiration for two novels, Ira Levin's The
Boys from Brazil and William Goldman's The Marathon Man, that had been turned into popular
movies.)

"I deny categorically that Mengele is in Paraguay," Paraguayan Under Secretary of the Interior Miguel
Angel Bestrad said two months before the supreme court ruling. Stroessner himself told an interviewer
last March, "I don't know where Mengele is. The Mengele question is a repeat question, like a
long-playing record."

That is in large part because answers have been so hard to come by. During the past 15 years, Mengele
has vanished behind a curtain of supposition and speculation, becoming an almost mythic figure whom
many have claimed to have seen just about everywhere. The ubiquity is partly explained by the thesaurus
of aliases under which he operated. At one point, Mengele called himself "Fausto Ridon," at another
"Friederich Elder von Breitenbach." He also passed himself off as "Gregorio Gregori," "Jose Alvarez
Aspiazu" and "Pedro Caballero."

Over the years, his activities began to form a patchwork quilt of legend and rumor. He was reported to
have masterminded a heroin-trafficking ring in Paraguay; he was said to have been Stroessner's personal
physician, as well as the dictator's special adviser in a genocidal campaign against Paraguay's Ache
Indians. Like some dark spirit, he seemed to be everywhere at once, often hidden behind sunglasses; he
was sighted in Bolivia, Uruguay and Chile, and in the jungles of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

The U.S. Justice Department followed up one report that placed the doctor on a hacienda in Texas,
another that had him arriving on a Miami-bound plane. He was said to have taken vacations in Egypt,

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Italy and Greece, and by one account, to have spent time in Mount Kisco, N.Y. Often he was said to be
living in a heavily fortified villa in the Paraguayan hinterland, complete with a Mercedes-Benz 280SL
and four armed guards. According to Simon Wiesenthal, the doctor was most recently spotted last
summer in a Mennonite village in Paraguay called Valendam. One year earlier, in fact, Wiesenthal had
observed that the 10,000 members of that close-knit community would provide the perfect cover for the
fugitive. "To the people living there," said Wiesenthal, "he is a refugee, and they are not in a hurry to
deliver him to the police. The Mennonites believe in justice after death."

Among all the rumors, inevitably, there were some that insisted that the Angel of Death had all along
been dead. In 1948 Telford Taylor, who had served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war
crimes trials, announced that "Dr. Mengele is dead as of October 1946." In 1970, according to another
story, Mengele was buried in Asuncion under the name Flores. Three years later, Brazilian newspapers
reported that the doctor had been killed by Israeli agents in a hideout along the Brazil-Paraguay border.
"This is the fourth reported incidence of Mengele's death," was the verdict last week of John Loftus, 35, a
Nazi hunter who used to work for the Justice Department's office of special investigations. "That's a lot of
funerals for one guy."

Whatever the details of Mengele's life on the run, much of the time he has clearly been hiding in the
clannish fold of South America's German immigrant communities. Brazil is home to more than 3.6
million ethnic Germans; in many areas, the German language is still more prevalent than Portuguese,
and towns bear names such as Blumenau, Frederico Westphalen and Novo Hamburgo. Near the Chilean
city of Parral, 300 Germans have set up a closed community called Colonia Dignidad. Protected by a
high fence, the colony observes its own laws and has been reported to shelter at least two former ranking
Nazis.

Altogether, by Wiesenthal's estimate, some 5,000 former Nazis found refuge in South America after the
war. Protected and organized by a loosely knit network known as Kameradenwerk (Comrades'
Enterprise), some of them have been living under their own names, and in considerable prosperity.
Roughly 300 reportedly went to Paraguay. Eichmann and others lived in Argentina. Klaus Barbie, the
"Butcher of Lyon," made his home in Bolivia before he was extradited to France in 1983. Two major
catches of former Nazi bigwigs occurred in Brazil. In 1967 Sao Paulo police seized Franz Stangl, who was
allegedly responsible for the deaths of some 400,000 victims at the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration
camps. Stangl had been living under his own name, and was working at a local Volkswagen plant when
he was arrested. Eleven years later, Stangl's assistant, Gustav Franz Wagner, accused of involvement in
the killing of more than 250,000 at Treblinka and Sobibor, was discovered following a police raid on a
party of former Nazis celebrating Hitler's birthday. The Brazilian Supreme Court refused, in turn, bids by
West Germany, Poland, Austria and Israel to extradite him. Wagner, the "Human Beast," was a free man
when he committed suicide in 1980.

That background supported the instinct of more and more observers last week that Mengele might have
found refuge in Brazil between 1961 and 1979. Even some of the most skeptical of Nazi hunters were
beginning to entertain the possibility that the exhumed body might be Mengele's. Wiesenthal, who had
initially said there was a 99% chance that the affair was a hoax, had lowered his estimate to 40%. "The
testimony of witnesses," said the confident Tuma, "gives certainty to the fact that we are dealing with the
body of Josef Mengele."

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Perhaps so, but many problems still remained. West German investigators were careful to note that the
identification of the body and the matching of documents were not necessarily related to each other -- or
to the elusive doctor. The body might be Mengele's, but that would not prove that he had died six years
ago or in Brazil. The letters might be his, but that did not prove that Pedro was Mengele, or that the
Auschwitz doctor had ever lived among the Bosserts and the Stammers.

Even if the Mengele puzzle is solved, other questions will surely arise. Were there more Nazi guardian
angels like Gerhard? Might other expatriates in South America be sheltering Nazi fugitives? And was the
Nazi network even more extensive than has generally been supposed?

Few were ready to close the lid on the case of the Angel of Death forever. "When you imagine how
Mengele himself would organize his own death," suggested West German Mengele-Hunter Katz, "this is
the way he would do it. I can imagine him, a lone wolf sitting in his den and laughing at how the whole
world believes it." However fanciful, the point was well taken. Even a positive identification of the Embu
bones and a categorical verification of Mengele's presence in Brazil would not resolve all the
uncertainties. Nor would the laying to rest of the body bury memories of the deaths Mengele had caused
or the evil he embodied.

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