Wiesenthal's Last Hunt

Tracking down the Angel of Death

"I have a compact with the dead. But if I could get this man, my soul would finally be at peace." So says Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter of Vienna. Since his liberation from Mauthausen death camp in 1945, Wiesenthal, now 68, has dedicated his life to avenging the victims of Hitler's Holocaust by tracking down more than 1,100 of their murderers. Yet the most sadistic Nazi war criminal of all has eluded his grasp.

For more than 20 years, Wiesenthal has been stalking Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS physician, known as the Angel of Death, who sent millions to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed thousands more in mad genetic experiments. Wiesenthal has long suspected--as have others--that Mengele was hiding in Paraguay. Despite firm denials from the Asuncion government, Wiesenthal believes that Mengele is now living in the village of San Antonio, in a remote area southeast of the Paraguayan capital. But the evil physician of Auschwitz, frustratingly, remains beyond his reach.

To 2.5 million or more Jews who perished at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, Mengele personified the insane, systematic brutality of Hitler's Third Reich.* As the shocked, uprooted prisoners arrived by rail at Auschwitz, Mengele, always impeccably turned out in a dress SS uniform, was the first person they saw. Placing himself between the rows of incoming prisoners, he decided their fate; a flick of a thin metal rod, held by a white-gloved hand, to the left meant immediate death in the gas ovens; to the right meant life--but what a life. Most of the prisoners would survive for only a few more weeks, doing hard labor on starvation rations or serving as guinea pigs in his ghoulish experiments. He tried, for example, to turn the eyes of children blue by painfully injecting them with dye.

As the Soviet armies neared Auschwitz in late 1944, Mengele disappeared. His crimes were prominently mentioned at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Meanwhile, Mengele was living comfortably--under his own name --in the Bavarian town of Guenzberg, where his family owned (and still owns) the town's only industry, a farm-equipment plant. In 1949 West German legal authorities were tipped about Mengele's whereabouts. He got away, using the secret escape routes established by ODESSA (an acronym in German for the Organization of Former Members of the SS).

Through his informer network--composed of former concentration camp inmates--Wiesenthal learned that Mengele had settled in Argentina and alerted the Israelis and West Germans. The West Germans requested Mengele's extradition, but the Argentines refused. Dispensing with legal niceties, the Israelis planned to kidnap him at the same time that they seized SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. But the doctor got away. Under questioning in Israel, Eichmann admitted that he had received money from Mengele, whose family is wealthy.

Although Paraguayan authorities deny it, Wiesenthal believes that Mengele entered Paraguay in May 1959. Thanks to German settlers there, Mengele was promptly granted citizenship and given naturalization card No. 809.

Wiesenthal claims to have pieced together new and fuller details about Mengele's life in Paraguay. The old doctor spends much of his time in a military zone that is off limits to all outsiders. Besides his villa in San Antonio, Mengele has a home in Puerto Stroessner, a town situated at the confluence of the Parana and Iguagu rivers.

Within the hinterland of Paraguay, which contains many large German-owned farms, Mengele moves about a great deal. No matter how safe their sanctuary may seem to be, old Nazis live in constant anxiety. Says Wiesenthal: "That is a part of their punishment." Mengele travels in a black Mercedes 2805L, escorted by four armed guards. Even before entering the home of a German acquaintance, two guards approach it first and make sure it is safe before signaling an all clear on their walkie-talkies to the guards who remain with Mengele.

In the past few months, Mengele has been seen at the German club in Asuncion. Risking discovery, Mengele sometimes drinks too much; one evening, he drunkenly pulled out a pistol and waved it about. Another time he chatted with a visiting West German professor. Each time someone entered the bar, Mengele, who wears sunglasses as a partial disguise on his Asuncion excursions, would quicky put them back on. Then, after he recognized the newcomer, he would take them off. Finally, he became so annoyed with putting on and taking off his glasses that he slammed them on the table, shattering a lens.

Mengele is an active member of a surviving network of former Nazi bigwigs known as Die Spinne (The Spider). In addition to being a mutual protection society, this organization specializes in extortion and smuggling in South America. Mengele is also working on a book that supposedly will justify his experiments as valid scientific undertakings.

The ugliest speculation about Mengele is that once again he may be involved in the destruction of a people--though on a much smaller scale. Despite Paraguayan denials, TIME's sources believe that he serves as an adviser to the Paraguayan police and frequently travels to the remote Chaco region where the Ache Indians are being hunted down or reduced to slave labor through techniques that are chillingly reminiscent of those of the German work camps. A high Paraguayan police official boasted to a visiting investigator that his government uses "German methods" in dealing with the Indians.

Seated in his book-lined office in Vienna, Wiesenthal, who is ailing with a heart condition, despairs of ever bringing his old quarry to justice. Two years ago, his Jewish Documentation Center suffered a severe setback; most of its funds were deposited in a Vienna bank that failed. His only real hope for bringing Mengele to justice would be Israeli intelligence, but the Israelis find the operation too risky. They have sent several teams to Paraguay to study a possible Mengele snatch. After losing at least one agent on a reconnaissance mission, they concluded that the potential losses involved in taking Mengele from his jungle hideaway were prohibitively high.

Wiesenthal's image in Austria has suffered because of a row with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky over former Nazis in Austrian politics. "Two old Jews fight, and the SS men laugh," says Wiesenthal sadly. He realizes that he may have to be content with what he calls "the biological solu-tion"--the hope that Mengele, who has circulatory ailments, will die soon. But that would not satisfy his outrage that a murderer has gone unpunished. And there is no guarantee that the hunter may not go before the hunted.

*Mengele has found his way into contemporary literature. In Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, he was the model for The Doctor who taunted God to punish him for his killings at Auschwitz. He is the inspiration for the drill-wielding Nazi named Szell in William Goldman's Marathon Man, and the mad doctor who sought to re-create a batch of little Hitlers in Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil.

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