Paid by German Magazine : Mengele’s Protectors Turning Story to Cash

Wolfram Bossert, who says that he sheltered Josef Mengele during the fugitive Nazi’s last years of life, said Saturday that he wants to profit as much as possible by selling information about his infamous and long-hunted friend.

It was Bossert, 69, and his wife, Liselotte, 67, who admitted to Brazilian police early in June that they had arranged for the burial of Mengele’s body under a false name in 1979. Friday, an international team of forensic scientists confirmed “within a reasonable scientific certainty” that the remains, exhumed from a cemetery near Sao Paulo, were Mengele’s.

The Bosserts, who are Austrian expatriates, said at their Sao Paulo home Saturday morning that they could not be interviewed. Stern magazine of West Germany is paying them for exclusive rights to their information on Mengele, they said.

Nevertheless, the couple seemed to welcome an informal conversation at the door of the two-story, white house in a middle-class area named Brooklin. They hinted that their agreement with Stern might end in a week or two and that they might then be available for an interview.

No price was mentioned.

The couple declined to say how much Stern is paying them for Mengele documents, for other information on him and for “more than 100” photographs of him. They did say that they had turned down another publication’s offer of $10,000 for a single photograph of the former Auschwitz concentration camp doctor, held responsible for the deaths of up to 400,000 mostly Jewish prisoners during World War II.

Stern, they said, pays them a commission on the resale of their material to other publications.

“The more of it that is published, the more we make in commissions,” Wolfram Bossert said. “If we give out information to others, Stern will say it’s worth less to them.”

Wearing a brown bathrobe, Bossert leaned on the door frame behind a high, steel-railed gate. His wife, in a pink dressing gown, clung to his arm.

She was fired from her teaching job in the German-language Humboldt School after the couple admitted their nine-year friendship with Mengele.

“Neither one of us will be able to get another job,” said Wolfram Bossert, an unemployed industrial technician. So they want to capitalize on the dead Mengele, they said.

“This money will help,” Bossert said. “We need to get all we can.”

He said that he would like to write a book but that it would take too long by himself. If someone were to help him, he said, a book might be published while interest in Mengele is still high and the subject lucrative.

“I have a lot of information about Mengele up here,” Bossert said, smiling and touching his gray head. “Nobody knows more about him than we do.”

The Bosserts’ memories of Mengele are fond ones. They have told police that they met him in 1970, when he was living with a Hungarian family in Sao Paulo state.

They said that they visited often with Mengele--sometimes he spent the night at their house--and they apparently became his main protectors when he moved to a house in a nearby Sao Paulo suburb. They were vacationing at Bertioga Beach with him in February, 1979, when he suffered a stroke in the water and drowned, according to their police depositions.

Bossert has denied that he was part of any network for hiding hunted Nazis. Romeu Tuma, the chief of federal police in Sao Paulo, said Friday that he thought the couple were “Nazi sympathizers.”

Asked Saturday if he knew about the atrocities committed by Mengele while he served as medical director of Auschwitz during the war, Bossert said:

“There have been so many lies about those things since the war, I don’t believe most of them.”

For example, he said, charges that Mengele injected ink into the eyes of Jews to change the color are “ridiculous.”

“He was a scientist,” Bossert said. “They say he alone ordered the deaths of 400,000 people. . . . Knowing him, I can’t believe he did those things.”

But he added, “Of course, no one can know what is inside a person’s mind.”

The Bosserts said they understand that they could be prosecuted under Brazilian law for hiding an illegal alien, but they said they are not worried.

“The people of Brazil are very understanding,” Wolfram Bossert said. “If you don’t betray someone because he is your friend, they understand that.”

The Bosserts’ daughter, Sabine, told the newspaper Folha da Tarde that her parents have been receiving abusive and threatening telephone calls. She said they have decided to move soon to another home.