Conspiracy of Silence : ‘Mengele’ in Brazil: A Life in Shadows

A gypsy life ended on this gentle stretch of pewter beach one bright summer’s day in 1979.

An old man who had lived for many years in Brazil in many guises died in the surf. Brazilian police say he was Nazi butcher Josef Mengele, the most hunted criminal of World War II, and that he died on vacation with friends who loved him.

The friends knew him not as a murderer who tortured Jews in a maniacal quest for racial purity and sent as many as 400,000 to their deaths at Auschwitz concentration camp, but as an old man who was fond of mongrel dogs, classical music and a swayback nag. They called him “uncle.”

His friends say they buried Josef Mengele under a false name. For six years, they protected the secret of his death as faithfully as they had guarded the secret of his long life in Brazil.

Hunt May Be Ending

Eleven days ago, the conspiracy of silence shattered. Final scientific corroboration is pending, but it appears that the 40-year international hunt for Josef Mengele may be ending.

Already, American, Brazilian and West German handwriting experts assert categorically that it was Mengele who penned the letters recovered from the conspirators who say they sheltered him and saw him drown.

Brazilian police are convinced that Mengele was here. Their conclusion is based not only on the handwriting samples and on the testimony of his collaborators but also on the assertions of ordinary Brazilians who have identified pictures of the man they knew as Peter or Pedro as Josef Mengele. Now, the police say, it is up to the scientists to prove that Mengele is dead and that it was his body exhumed from a grave in a suburb of Sao Paulo.

Compelling Evidence

At federal police headquarters, the investigative file on the Caso Mengele is detailed, well-documented and compelling.

Police say the evidence proves that during nearly 18 years in Brazil, a handful of expatriate collaborators sealed him in rural and suburban clandestineness that never leaked. He was troubled by illness, loneliness and fear of pursuit. But he was actually never pursued in Brazil.

The story of his life in Brazil was pieced together from the extraordinary Brazilian police documentation, as well as from interviews with Brazilians who knew him during his prolonged asylum, with his former neighbors, acquaintances and employees and from visits to the places where he lived.

The portrait that emerges is that of a fugitive who relaxed and became more confident as the pursuit grew more distant and intimations of mortality more persistent.

First he was suspicious and anxious, then arrogant and demanding. His trust was reserved for packs of watchdogs. He recoiled from the most casual visitors and wore a straw hat pulled low across his brow. He spent hours with binoculars atop a homemade watchtower on an isolated farm.

Near the end, however, as the fugitive endured old age and the aftermath of a debilitating stroke, he hungered for human contact. He made friends with a gardener, became distraught when his maid quit to get married and lent money to down-at-the-heels neighbors. He enjoyed soap operas and variety shows on television. He puttered about his house as a self-assigned handyman and buried his faithful mutt Lulu after she died of old age.

The foreigner his neighbors knew in Portuguese as “Senhor Pedro” even allowed his picture to be taken then. He wrote letters home and penned philosophical observations to himself in bold black ink. One friend remembers the haunting image of an empty old man shuffling alone in his tiny living room to the recorded strains of a waltz that must have awakened bittersweet memories.

If the Brazilian hypothesis wins scientific backing, the result will be greeted with mixed emotions around the world. Murderers should not eternally elude their posse. Monsters should not die vacationing in the surf.

Impregnable Assertion

Yet that is how Brazilian authorities say Josef Mengele lived and died. Their assertion, so initially improbable, so widely discounted, has thus far proved impregnable.

The many who hope that Mengele still lives and will one day face justice have yet to find a single important contradiction in the Brazilian paper chase. At this late stage, to fully disprove the mountain of Brazilian evidence, disbelievers would have to produce a living Mengele.

Mocking the relentless international search by Nazi hunters, the accumulated evidence suggests that for his last five years Mengele passed a humdrum elderly bachelor’s life a half hour’s cab ride from the Israeli, American and West German consulates in downtown Sao Paulo.

It may have been that Mengele was able to so confound his pursuers precisely because he cast so small a shadow.

He is known to have lived in at least four different places in Brazil. Amid growing confidence, each successive move took him closer to Sao Paulo, South America’s largest city. Toward the end, Mengele was sufficiently bold to chance solitary shopping expeditions in the throbbing heart of the city. Along crowded streets, the Auschwitz camp’s “Angel of Death” proved just one more old man.

In its homeliness, the Brazilian tale ridicules conventional demonology in which Mengele still furtively prowls from lair to lair in Paraguayan and Brazilian jungles, shielded by corrupt official sympathizers and a sophisticated international Nazi network.

Rather, police say, Mengele was a sedentary fugitive modestly supported financially by his family in West Germany and succored by two immigrant families, one Hungarian, the other Austrian. They at least accepted--police say they supported--a coverup directed in Brazil by an expatriate Austrian Nazi named Wolfgang Gerhard.

Police believe that after Mengele drowned here at Bertioga Beach on Feb. 7, 1979, he was buried as Wolfgang Gerhard, next to the real Gerhard’s mother, in grave 321 at Our Lady of the Rosary Cemetery at Embu, 12 miles west of Sao Paulo.

Gino Carita, then the cemetery administrator, said that only a single woman mourner came to the funeral. The mourner would later tell police that during his asylum in Brazil, there was one fear that Josef Mengele never escaped.

“He was always afraid that the Jews would catch him,” she said.

When Josef Mengele vanished from sight in South America is fairly well established. Why he made Brazil his asylum is a matter of speculation. Perhaps it was for no better reason than that Brazil, a country the size of the United States, was the biggest and closest refuge.

Mengele also had a lifeline in Brazil: true believer Wolfgang Gerhard, who joined the Nazi Party in 1944 and came to Brazil five years later at the age of 24. Police say Gerhard carried his Nazi convictions with him to his real grave in Austria in 1978 just months before Mengele purportedly died.

Undisputed documentation places Mengele in Buenos Aires in his own name and a variety of other identities in the 1950s. From Argentina, he is known to have gone to Paraguay and there, in 1959, to have acquired citizenship and Paraguayan identity documents in the name Jose Mengele.

In 1960, by all accounts, Mengele lived in southern Paraguay. For the next 25 years, the Mengele hunt continued but the many sightings of him were never confirmed.

Last month, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that Mengele had been seen in the southern Paraguayan town of Capitan Miranda in July, 1984. On a well-publicized visit last month to Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital, another Nazi hunter, Beate Klarsfeld, claimed Mengele was still in Paraguay.

It is one of the lesser ironies of the current tumult that if the Brazilians are right, then the Paraguayan government was also right these past two decades in its insistence that Mengele was no longer in the country.

In 1979, the Paraguayan Supreme Court lifted Mengele’s citizenship for reasons of prolonged absence. That convinced no one, but in retrospect it is interesting to note that the court acted about six months after the Brazilian police now say Mengele drowned here.

Did Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner, the hemisphere’s most enduring dictator, know all along? More pertinent, if Stroessner had spoken out six years ago, would anyone have believed him?

Although the international search has been focused on Paraguay, Brazilian police say they have amassed extensive testimony on the movements of the man they believe to be Mengele.

They say that Josef Mengele came to Brazil in 1961, and that he never left.

Square-jawed, blue-eyed Gitta Stammer is the linchpin in the Brazilian quest for Josef Mengele. She is a Hungarian who came to Brazil with her surveyor husband Geza from Austria in 1948. In 1959, they settled on a modest fruit and coffee farm in Araraquara near the town of Nova Europa in hot, dry hill country about 200 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

Stammer, who speaks accented Portuguese with a back country vocabulary, is a strong woman. In grueling appearances before police and reporters, only one question has shattered her poise. Was she Josef Mengele’s lover? Stammer furiously denies it.

Among people who have known her, Gitta Stammer is a woman with a good reputation.

“At first I didn’t believe this Mengele business, but if Dona Gitta says it is true then there is nothing more to say,” said Laerte de Freitas, a Sao Paulo paper manufacturer who has known Stammer for a decade and once bought a property from her.

In an astonishing deposition to police, Stammer matter of factly asserted that Mengele had been an unwelcome guest of her family for more than 13 years.

Police have since turned up corroborative witnesses who place the man they believe to be Mengele with the Stammer family from sometime in 1961 until February, 1975. Sao Paulo Federal Police Chief Romeu Tuma says Mengele was not unwelcome at the Stammer home.

Stammer said that she and her husband agreed to accept a house guest at Nova Europa at the request of Wolfgang Gerhard, whom they had met at a party of German-speaking immigrants.

“He told us he had a Swiss friend named Peter, a middle-aged man who had no one,” Stammer recalled. “Peter would be useful to us because he knew farming and cattle. My husband liked the idea. . . . I would not be left alone with the children while he was traveling.”

When the man arrived at Nova Europa, where many European immigrants have settled, he identified himself as Peter Hochbichlet. If he had ostensibly come to administer the farm, that is not how he behaved. “He acted less like a worker and more like an owner,” said Tuma.

Peter drew no salary. He paid for his food and his laundry. He didn’t allow his picture to be taken. He kept fierce dogs that frightened neighbors.

Stammer said, “For strangers, Peter was a smiling, friendly man who liked animals. To those of us who knew him better, he was difficult, irritable, even aggressive. In the years that he lived with us, he criticized the way we were bringing up our two sons, and the way we treated our employees. He said we were not demanding enough.”

Brazilian peasant Francisco Assis de Souza worked at the Nova Europa farm while Peter was there. He says Pedro spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. The stranger was nervous and bossy.

“I didn’t like him, but there was nothing I could do about it,” Souza told reporters. “He loved to give orders, but he didn’t understand anything about farming. He was totally unaccustomed to heavy work.”

The stranger was expert at another kind of work.

“Once there was a calf with a hernia. The Swiss man had me hold the calf. He cut under the belly with great skill. He fixed the hernia and sewed up the opening perfectly,” said Zaira Chile, a Stammer maid at Nova Europa.

Police say they are unable to document the entry to Brazil of a Peter Hochbichlet. They think he may have actually arrived sometime later in 1961 than Stammer recalls.

Whatever the precise date, it was Mengele’s good fortune to have come to Brazil at a time of unprecedented nation-building. Argentina, where he first settled, is a country mired in memories of better days. In Indian Paraguay, white men stand out.

In huge, brawny Brazil, by contrast, yesterday is already ancient history. What matters in Brazil is where to pour tomorrow’s concrete.

Not long after their mysterious guest arrived, the Stammers bought a larger farm “with a lot of coffee and cattle,” Stammer said. The man called Peter moved with the Stammers to the new farm in Serra Negra, about 100 miles north of Sao Paulo. Locally famous for its thermal springs and its cool climate, the town sits in a region of softly contoured mountains, attractive woods and rich red soil.

In Serra Negra, Peter again became known as a man who kept many dogs. Gitta Stammer says he was unflaggingly suspicious of visitors.

“Who are those people? What side are they on? What are their politics?” he would demand.

At the new farm, Peter displayed a flair for carpentry that would become his trademark in other houses where he later lived. He remodeled the Stammer’s rustic hillside bungalow, which lacked telephone and electricity.

Peter’s greatest contribution to home improvement was a three-story cement block tower that had a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. Last week, a procession of cityfolk turned up in Serra Negra to gawk at “Mengele’s Tower.”

Ferdinando Belletati, now 73, says he worked with Peter “five or six months” to build the tower with its red tile roof atop the white bungalow.

“I built the tower on Senhor Pedro’s orders, and he paid me. Dona Gitta said that the tower was to be an artist’s studio for her husband, but later I would see Pedro there making observations through binoculars,” Belletati said.

While Belletati was working on the tower, he said, Peter would spend long hours reading in the house. When he inspected a day’s progress, he often would shake a finger in rejection, demanding with hand motions and few words that some detail be redone more carefully.

“He was hard to work with. I never saw him smile,” said Belletati, who remembers that Peter kept “10 to 15 dogs” who discouraged visitors.

In her statement to police, Stammer, now 65, said that by the time the family reached Serra Negra, Peter’s suspicious nature had become so pronounced that she concluded he was on the run.

One day in 1962, she said, a produce buyer left a copy of a newspaper with Josef Mengele’s picture in it. She said she confronted Peter with the newspaper photograph. “After first evading the question, he finally said: ‘We’ve been together two years now, and you should know the truth: I am that man.”’

Stammer said: “It was like a bomb for the family. I did not want Josef Mengele living under the same roof.”

The Stammers summoned the real Wolfgang Gerhard. He came, and later, according to Stammer’s account, so did a man named Hans, who arrived from Germany as a representative of the Mengele family.

Last week, police said Stammer had identified photos of Hans Sedlmeier, a former director of the Mengele family’s farm equipment company in Germany, as the Hans who came to visit. It was Hans, Stammer swore, who brought money for Mengele.

The real “Gerhard told us: ‘You should be very happy that into your unimportant lives has come someone as important as he,’ ” Stammer recalled.

Stammer said she and her husband were told that the Mengele family was unable to arrange another refuge immediately. Peter would have to stay for the time being.

“Months went by and nothing changed,” Stammer said. “When we complained to Gerhard, he replied: ‘This is a serious matter which involves big interests on all sides. You had better think twice and not turn this man in because it could jeopardize your lives and those of your children.”’

Police have yet to question the woman’s husband Geza Stammer, who has been at sea on a Brazilian ship with one of the Stammers’ sons, a merchant marine officer.

By Gitta Stammer’s account, after she learned Peter’s true identity, Mengele became increasingly authoritarian. “He intruded in our family life,” she said. “He tried to boss us around. He shouted.”

Brazilian newspapers have quoted mason Belletati’s speculation that Gitta Stammer and Pedro became lovers in her husband’s absence. Beyond her fierce denials, Stammer has also repeatedly asserted: “I did not like that man. And, of course, I was afraid. You never know when a mess will blow up.”

In 1969, still with Peter in tow, the Stammer family moved again, this time to a four-bedroom hilltop house outside the town of Caieiras in Sao Paulo state that was more country home than farm. Still the surroundings were rural, and there was no electricity. Now, Mengele was only 25 miles from Sao Paulo itself.

At Caieiras, where a stout log fence encircled the property, Peter built a white wooden gate with an elaborate latch system. Neighbors came to know him as the old man in the ever present straw hat who liked to plant things. He devoted particular attention to young lemon trees. Again, he occupied himself with interior carpentry.

By then, his dog pack had been reduced to four or five animals, mostly small mongrels which had the run of the place, and a foul-tempered German Shepherd fenced during the day in a pen behind the house.

Perhaps at Caieiras, Mengele concluded that his international pursuers had lost his scent. He had moved repeatedly within Brazil but even a decade after his arrival, the search for him remained concentrated on Paraguay.

Memories of Peter at Caieiras sketch a more confident and easy-going individual. Gitta Stammer recalls that he was “a well-educated and intelligent man” who read deeply in history and philosophy and “loved Mozart.”

At Caieiras, people remember Mengele’s affection for a horse of monumental undistinction. He even allowed himself to be photographed feeding the animal.

“He was a gentleman,” said Laerte de Freitas, who later bought the Caieiras house from the Stammers. “When I would go to the house Pedro would meet me at the gate, make conversation and offer me something to drink. He was simple, calm and always very attentive. He appeared to be a contented man.”

As the Stammer family’s supposed hired man, Pedro cared for the grounds, and he liked to talk about his work.

“When he talked about a plant or a tree, he showed that he really enjoyed it,” Freitas said.

Freitas thought it strange that a man with such an intelligent face would be working in such a lowly job, “but he never gave any sign of being a bad element. He appeared to be a contented man, a man who lived a normal life like anyone else.”

One day not long after the Stammers’ move to Caieiras, the real Gerhard appeared there with Austrian-born, naturalized Brazilians Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert. They met Peter, and liked him. Not until sometime later, the Bosserts told police, did they learn that the man Gerhard had presented to them as a relative named Peter Gerhard was Josef Mengele. (It is not known when or why Mengele stopped using the name Peter Hochbichlet).

The Bosserts had come to Brazil from Austria in 1952. A former teen-age German army corporal, Bossert worked as a technician in factories around Sao Paulo. His wife became a teacher at a German language school in Sao Paulo. She was fired last week, during the Mengele furor.

Soon after they first met Peter, the Bosserts said, he stayed overnight once a week at their home at 7 Missouri St. in the Sao Paulo suburb of Brooklin.

Wolfram Bossert is now 59 but looks a decade older. Facing possible charges for harboring an illegal alien, Bossert collapsed during police interrogation last week and was briefly hospitalized. His wife says she has lost 12 pounds and that her hair is turning grayer every day.

In Wolfram Bossert’s original statement to police--its flow repeatedly interrupted by outbursts in German from his wife--he said he tried to help Peter “because he was very lonely and needed people to talk to. He used to come home for dinner, to talk and to listen to German music. I would take him back to Caieiras the next day.”

It was not long before the Bosserts learned that Peter was Josef Mengele. It did not trouble them greatly.

“I knew he had documents in various identities,” said Wolfram Bossert, “because I also knew he was wanted the world over.”

The Bosserts say they never reported Mengele’s death because they were afraid.

The Brazilian quest for Mengele was triggered by information obtained by West German police in a May 31 raid on Hans Sedlmeier’s house in Guenzburg, near Munich. Brazilian police staked out the Bossert house for several days, watching for signs of the man they now say is Mengele.

Finally, they raided the house, demanding, “Where is he?” The Bosserts knew immediately who they meant, and they led police to grave 321 in Embu.

‘Veneration’ for Mengele

“They had a certain veneration for Mengele,” said police chief Tuma. “As we were searching the Bossert house, Liselotte pointed to a book and said: ‘Yes, that one belonged to uncle.”’

There are some inconsistencies in the testimony on the precise date, but the witnesses agree that sometime around 1975, perhaps earlier, the real Wolfgang Gerhard resolved to return to Europe, where his wife Ruth was dying of cancer. Police say he returned briefly to Brazil in 1976.

By then, an identity switch was complete. Possibly with the help of Bossert, an avid and well-equipped photographer, a picture of the mustachioed Mengele was placed on Gerhard’s documents. Josef Mengele--also known as Peter Hochbichlet, also known as Peter Gerhard--became Wolfgang Gerhard, at least officially, and also became 15 years younger in the process.

In 1974, the Stammers sold their house in Caieiras, precipitating a last, lonely change in Mengele’s Brazilian passage.

He went to live by himself in a house at 5555 Estrada Alvarenga in the Sao Paulo suburb of Eldorado Paulista. According to the police, the small bungalow was owned by the Stammers when he moved. They sold it to the Bosserts after the drowning.

From the time he moved to the bungalow on a tree-lined street near a reservoir, the Bosserts became Mengele’s principal protectors. Gitta Stammer said she saw Mengele only infrequently after that, but neighborhood witnesses insist Geza Stammer appeared regularly with an envelope that obviously contained money.

“Senhor Pedro would pay us right after the man came,” said Elza de Oliveira. A frail and haggard-looking blonde, she worked two years as a maid in the musty two-bedroom bungalow that Mengele painted a cheery yellow. She made Pedro fruit salad for lunch. In the afternoons, he would sometimes send her to buy a piece of apple strudel.

By all accounts, his last years were the most tranquil part of Mengele’s life in Brazil. Clearly, they were also the most solitary. He continued his regular visits with the Bosserts, but there were many empty days.

He did some more carpentry work. He laid a tile path around the house and fixed up a one-room caretaker’s house at the back of the lot. He walked in the neighborhood, and occasionally lent small sums of money to neighbors who asked for it. Once he took Oliveira, as well as a neighborhood seamstress and the seamstress’ boy friend, to dinner at a local restaurant.

He was photographed smiling there, but he didn’t drink there, or ever--”not even a beer,” Oliveira recalls.

In 1976, Mengele suffered a stroke. Admission records show that Peter Gerhard--he apparently was still using that name though his picture was on Wolfgang Gerhard’s identification--as a patient at Santa Marta Hospital not far from his home.

Admitted to Hospital

Norberto Glawe, an Argentine of German descent who took him to the hospital, said Peter paid an admissions deposit with a $100 bill.

Glawe told police that before returning to Europe the last time, Wolfgang Gerhard had asked him and his father Ernesto to keep an eye on his relative Peter Gerhard, a lonely widower.

Norberto Glawe said he lived in the bungalow with Peter for about a month after the stroke, which partially paralyzed his right arm. Ernesto Glawe told police he was suspicious of Peter and one day found a catalogue from the Mengele family firm in the house.

He put two and two together, the elder Glawe said. He told police recently that he and his son left, and that neither ever returned. The elder Glawe said he did not report Mengele’s presence because he was not sure of his identification, and because he was frightened.

Mengele’s last group of friends were the sort of people that an SS doctor would never have cultivated. In his lonely old age, it seems, he sought human company with almost pathetic eagerness.

He often crossed the street to exchange small talk with Jaime dos Santos, the caretaker and watchman of a big house overlooking the reservoir.

“He always complained about the cost of living,” recalls Santos, 55. “If you asked what country he was from, he always said Europe, Europe. He didn’t talk about Germany.”

When Santos asked for a small loan, Senhor Pedro readily acceded. When Santos’ wife died, Senhor Pedro went to the funeral.

“I liked him a lot because he was always nice,” Santos says. “He never got angry or nervous.”

Housekeeper Elza de Oliveira also liked the old man, and perhaps felt sorry for him.

“He only got upset when he was alone. But when he had people around he wasn’t sad. He went to town a lot, because he didn’t like to be alone in the house,” said Oliveira, now 34.

Pedro became upset when she announced she was leaving to get married: “When I left, he got very depressed.”

Like Stammer, Oliveira furiously denies published speculation that she was Mengele’s lover.

“Journalists scream through the fence at me from six in the morning until 11 at night: ‘Did you have an affair with Mengele?’ It’s not true. My husband is getting very upset,” she complained.

On three occasions, according to Inez Mehlich, the maid who worked for Senhor Pedro for the last two years of his life, the old man visited her home.

“He liked to hear my daughter play the piano,” Mehlich said. She said the man believed to be Mengele sometimes asked her to stay after work to watch TV soap operas with him. One soap, about a winsome slave girl in 19th-Century Brazil, was his particular favorite, Mehlich said.

The old man’s loneliness was assuaged for two weeks in 1977 by a visit from his son Rolf, police say, and Rolf Mengele confirmed that last week in West Germany. Oliveira remembers “the good looking man who spoke German and Italian.” The old man told her his visitor was a nephew. Rolf sent an affectionate Christmas card to the Bosserts in 1983.

Luiz Rodrigues, the neighborhood gardener who became a friend, remembers Pedro’s love for classical music, and how a waltz on his cassette recorder would sometimes set the old man whirling clumsily around the room alone.

In February, 1979, at the height of the Brazilian summer, the Bosserts rented a two-bedroom stucco cottage four blocks from the sea here at Bertioga, a resort town 50 miles southeast of Sao Paulo. “Uncle Peter” went with his friends to the beach.

On the afternoon of Feb. 7, the ailing man chanced the docile waves in front of a resort hotel.

The Bosserts say a stroke killed him in the water. Wolfram Bossert tried so desperately to rescue his friend that he had to be hospitalized.

Lifeguards pulled “Peter” from the water. He was dead on arrival at Bertioga’s first aid clinic.

After cursory examination, a medical examiner certified death by drowning. There was no autopsy. Taking his information from the dead man’s identity documents, the doctor recorded his name as Wolfgang Gerhard, 53.

Josef Mengele would have then been 68. Forensic specialists examining remains that were exhumed here June 6 say the man buried as Wolfgang Gerhard was between 60 and 70 when he died.

At the burial on Feb. 8, there was no ceremony, no flowers. Liselotte Bossert was the sole mourner. She made sure that the white wooden coffin remained closed because cemetery director Carita had known the real Wolfgang Gerhard from his visits to his mother’s grave.

The few who suffered the old man’s death endured it silently. At the yellow bungalow, Pedro’s last dog--his only visible legacy--died abandoned and hungry a few weeks after he did. She was a mongrel bitch called “Cigana”--Portuguese for gypsy.