DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (29 page)

But whatever nostalgia Mengele may have felt for the Hungary of his youth, he began to treat the Hungarian couple he lived with poorly, subjecting them to ugly outbursts. The Stammers came to dread and fear their erratic “house guest.”

Gitta’s husband was a sailor, frequently away at sea, and she was left alone for long periods with Mengele. She tried her best to create a pleasant atmosphere for him. An excellent cook, she would fix him his favorite dishes, chat with him, and even play the piano for his enjoyment. There were even rumors they were lovers. But instead of being grateful for her warmth and company, Mengele grew even more tyrannical, she later claimed in press interviews. He also became domineering and irascible toward the servants and other farm help.

On one level, Mengele’s mistreatment of the Stammers reflected his disdain for Slavs, a people the Nazis had considered only slightly superior to the Jews. But his rudeness wasn’t only a reflection of his sense of social superiority. He had treated his Aryan wife Irene much the same way, ordering her about and subjecting her to his jealous diatribes. The pent-up rage Mengele had probably always felt was manifesting itself in his relationship with the Stammers. Although he was both lonely and deeply dependent on them for protection, Mengele still wanted to feel in control. The fact that his family’s money had paid for the farm gave Mengele economic power over them, power that he used indiscriminately. He even gave the Stammers advice if not absolute commands-on how they should bring up their young children: He told them they should be far stricter with them, and discipline them more often.

Alienated from the Stammers, Mengele turned to his new friend, Wolfgang Gerhard, for friendship and support. Gerhard was Mengele’s only friend in his Brazilian retreat. Gerhard, who had lived in Brazil since the end of World War II, could advise Mengele on the country and its inhabitants. He was also as fanatic and dedicated a Nazi as Mengele.

This was their most important bond, since aside from a shared devotion to Hitlerian ideals, the two men had little in common.

The crude, lower-class Austrian was certainly not the type of person Mengele would have associated with back home. But in the wilderness of his South American exile, Mengele was glad for any friends he could get. Besides, the admiration verging on adoration that Gerhard lavished on him was salve for his battered ego.

While still a teenager, Gerhard already a passionate devotee of Hitler, signed up for the German Navy. He named his oldest son Adolf, and long after the war had ended and he had left his beloved Austria, he continued to lament the loss of the glorious Third Reich.

In his house were numerous souvenirs of the Hitler era, including medals and uniforms. Gerhard’s wife, Ruth, was almost as devout a Nazi as he. She once gave their Austrian landlady a gift: two bars of soap still in their original 1943 wrappers. They were

“Jew soaps,” she’d said-made from the fat of Jews killed in the concentration camps.

Another of the Gerhards’ prized possessions was the large swastika that topped their Christmas tree every year. “You always have to take good care of a swastika,” the old Austrian liked to say. Truly, Mengele could not have met a more ideal protector. For Gerhard, watching over Mengele was a labor of love.

Although Gerhard had introduced Mengele as Peter Hochbichler, Swiss exile, sometime in 1963 Gitta Stammer realized his true identity.

She stumbled on a newspaper containing a picture of someone with a striking resemblance to her house guest. Mrs. Stammer recalled that when she confronted him with the photographs,

“Hochbichler” turned white and quickly left the room. Later that day, he returned and admitted that he was the notorious Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz.

PETER SOMOGYL: When I first met my wife, she immediately noticed the number tattooed on my arm. “Were you in Auschwitz?” she asked me. I didn’t answer her. I didn’t want to talk about it.

Her father was also a camp survivor, and he had a number on his arm as well. She knew what it meant. I brushed her off, and we both decided we didn’t like each other very much, that first date.

But we went out again with another couple a few weeks later. It was to see the opera Don Giovanni. We realized we both liked classical music.

Even though she was ten years younger than I, she was very mature-perhaps because of what happened to her father.

Nevertheless, I continued to refuse to talk about the war with her.

Once, her father asked me about my experiences at Auschwitz, but I brushed him off as well.

It was a short courtship. We had met in August, we got engaged in December, we married the following June. I wanted to settle down.

I had moved around too much from place to place.

After our honeymoon, when we returned to our new apartment, my wife said to me,

“Now, will you tell me, please, about your past?

I want to know what happened.”

And so I told her in a nutshell about my experiences as a Mengele twin at Auschwitz. But only in a nutshell.

We had been married two weeks. We were starting our new life together.

I said to my wife,

“I have told you now what happened to me. Please don’t ask me about that ever again. I never want to discuss it again.”

Afterward, Mengele refused to talk about his past with the Stammers.

According to Gitta, he didn’t even like to mention the Second World War. Intensely paranoid after his secret was out, Mengele viewed any unknown visitors to the farm with suspicion. He was always asking her about the guests, who they were and what they wanted.

Ironically, visitors to the Stammer farm who met

“Senor Pedro” tended to be charmed by him. Mengele was exceedingly polite to strangers, and, when he felt he could trust a person, friendly and expansive.

Gitta, who endured his constant harping in private, was mystified. It seemed to her that Josef Mengele had two sides, “one for strangers, and the other when he did not need to dissimulate.”

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: We are like actresses. Both of us hide our true feelings. On the outside, we are laughing and smiling, but inside, everything is rotten and dark, and will remain so until the end of our lives.

To new acquaintances, Mengele was the lovable Beppo, a sunny boy grown into a delightful if somewhat eccentric old man. Once the guests were gone, he behaved like a tyrant, given to cursing fits and temper tantrums. He was furious if he didn’t get his way. Gitta perceived the fundamental split in Mengele’s personality. She saw very clearly the duality, and it frightened and puzzled her. She was unable to fit the “twin” sides of Josef Mengele together. What she didn’t know was that Mengele had always been like this. At Auschwitz, he would smile and act kindly, then fly into a rage at the slightest provocation.

And here in Brazil, he had lost all of his power and none of his madness.

Yet, because Mengele made such a good impression on visitors, the Stammers had a hard time convincing their friends how irrational their dapper house guest really was. Later, they would recall how they would agonize over the behavior of this strange old man, who seemed both to yearn for their friendship and to go out of his way to torment, insult, and abuse them.

The Stammers were coming to realize that they were stuck with their very difficult house guest. They couldn’t get rid of Mengele, nor could they persuade him to behave in a more cooperative manner.

Whenever the Stammers complained and suggested a parting of the ways, Gerhard would arrive to deliver a stern lecture on what an “honor” it was to lodge the famed SS doctor. When that approach ceased to work, Gerhard resorted to threats. He suggested harm might befall them and their children if they dared to throw Mengele out of their home.

Eventually, even threats stopped working, and sometime in 1962 the Mengele family learned of the Stammers’ unhappiness with their living situation. They quickly dispatched their best factotum, Hans Sedlmeier, who still enjoyed a top position in the firm, to smooth matters over. Clearly, the family wanted to continue the current arrangement. It was inexpensive, and they didn’t have to worry about Josefs safety.

In Brazil, Sedlmeier listened sympathetically to the Stammers’ complaints. Then, believing there was only one way to handle the distraught Hungarians, he offered them more money. Sure enough, the relationship was salvaged, at least for the time being. After Sedlmeier’s visit, life settled down on the farm. Mengele continued to work on his memoirs. Progress was slow, perhaps because Mengele, sensing his future was bleak, preferred to linger over the past: He devoted scores of pages to describing his birth.

But even as Mengele quibbled with Gitta Stammer over the servants, or agonized about what word to use in his “memoirs,” a storm was brewing in Germany. During the three years spent preparing for the Frankfurt trials that got under way in 1964, prosecutors had become convinced of the enormity of Mengele’s crimes. The German government was prompted to intensify its search for him. Perhaps the most dramatic example of Germany’s dedication to the hunt was their decision to have their ambassador to Paraguay intercede. In February 1964, Ambassador Eckart Briest requested an audience with President Stroessner. In a rare display of diplomatic passion, he demanded that Paraguay turn over the infamous death-camp doctor. Stroessner was so infuriated, he threw the ambassador out of the country, creating a minor diplomatic crisis.

Because of his close ties to Nazis such as Rudel and Von Eckstein, the Paraguayan strongman was in a position to know-or find out-Mengele’s whereabouts. And because foreign citizens were watched very closely, Stroessner must have had available precise knowledge of Mengele’s trips in and out of Paraguay. But Stroessner was unwilling to betray a Nazi.

The Germans were determined that he be brought to book. But even without Mengele at the stand, this trial yielded ample testimony about his conduct at Auschwitz. The revelations by former inmates who had worked with Mengele elicited headlines-the first time since the end of the war that Mengele had received so much notice in his own country.

Even in his own Deutschland, Mengele was now vilified, an object of loathing.

At the trial, an Israeli doctor named Mauritius Brenner told the German court how his twin children had been put to death by Mengele because they were not identical. His story was confirmed by the Auschwitz pharmacist, Viktor Capesius. Before a horrified court, Capesius recalled bringing the Brenner twins to Mengele, who was in an irritable mood. On that day, Mengele didn’t want to be bothered with any fraternal genetic specimens. “I have no time now,” said the Angel of Death, after throwing a glance at the bewildered children. They were promptly taken away to be gassed. Other witnesses described Mengele’s selections, his affinity for experimenting on cripples, dwarfs, and, above all, twins.

Germany persisted in its efforts to find the fugitive, and offered a small reward for Mengele’s capture. Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor who had helped Israel find Eichmann, made headlines when he alleged that Mengele had been spotted in Asuncion in the company of Martin Bormann.

Bauer insisted that Bormann, who was supposed to have died in Hitler’s bunker in 1945, was in fact alive and well in South America. Bauer alleged that Hitler’s most trusted assistant was good friends with the Auschwitz doctor.

But as German authorities searched far and wide for clues that might lead them to Mengele, they seem to have overlooked connections much closer to home: Hermann Langbein, who had forced Germany to reopen its Mengele investigation in the late 1950s, was involved in a new battle.

Langbein hoped to persuade the University of Munich as well as the University of Frankfurt to revoke the degrees and doctor’s license they had once bestowed on Mengele.

In the spirit of the Frankfurt trials, both institutions seemed receptive to Langbein’s demands. The man who had killed hundreds of thousands of people certainly did not deserve the title of “doctor.”

The University of Frankfurt, embarrassed about its past as a Nazi academic haven, promptly agreed. The University of Munich said it would follow Frankfurt’s cue.

But even as Frankfurt prepared to revoke Mengele’s degree, Martha-still legally his wife, even though they were separated launched a formal protest. The battle pitted the universities against a barrage of tough, highly paid Mengele family lawyers. In retrospect, it seems probable that the family was being egged on by Mengele himself, that Martha’s prominent role was due to pressure from her estranged husband.

Incredibly, however, German authorities never thought to investigate Martha or the rest of the family at this time, and to demand to know Mengele’s whereabouts.

Indeed, although the Mengele family adopted the party line after the war that Josef was missing or dead, they came to realize there was no need to continue the pretense. Until the Frankfurt trials in the early 1 960s, postwar Germany had not the slightest interest in finding, let alone trying, the Auschwitz doctor for war crimes. In a way, the mysterious Dr. Mengele was not so elusive after all, at least, not for many years. The townspeople of Gunzburg knew that their Beppo was alive and well and living in South America. They knew of his divorce from Irene, and his bizarre marriage to Martha, and they delighted in gossiping about that union when it, too, failed. But no one was especially troubled by the knowledge that the infamous war criminal was still at large. None felt a need to come forward and tell all. More important, no government authorities-not the Germans, not the Israelis, not even the Americans-had ever bothered to question them closely until the mid-1980s, and by then it was too late.

Gently sidestepping the question of whether the aggrieved party was dead or alive, Martha and the family lawyers kept doggedly appealing the Case of the Diplomas. They argued Mengele’s degrees couldn’t be repealed because they had been granted before the wa rand hence, before Mengele had committed his alleged crimes. But the University of Frankfurt refused to budge, and ultimately it prevailed.

The loss of his credentials must have been unbearable to the exiled Nazi. He could no longer harbor any illusions about returning to his homeland and his former life. Never again could he mention his prized doctorate, never could he try to assume a position in academia, his lifelong dream. Mengele’s degrees were the last remaining testament of his former greatness, a reminder of his life before all went awry.