Searches a Manhunt Leads to Bones

By Pico Iyer

The latest, and perhaps the last, chapter in what must rank as the most bizarre search of the century began two weeks ago in a small Bavarian town in West Germany. It quickly led to a Brazilian suburb where, amid a tangle of documents, false names and controversial clues, there emerged the strange tale of friendship between a quiet Austrian couple and the reclusive man who had lived under an assumed name in a modest bungalow. Last week, on a brilliant autumn afternoon, 200 people converged on a cemetery in the town of Embu, some 25 miles south of the Brazilian industrial center of Sao Paulo. They had come to see the exhumation of what Brazilian authorities believed were the remains of Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death," the notorious Nazi death-camp doctor who had escaped from justice at the end of World War II.

As the crowd surrounded a weed-covered tomb that had been marked until hours before with the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, who died in 1979, two gravediggers began loosening the solid red clay with pickaxes and then started shoveling. Almost an hour later, their tools struck against the light- colored wood of a coffin. The diggers broke open the casket and, as the crowd jockeyed for position, began handing the contents up to Jose Antonio de Mello, assistant director of the Sao Paulo police forensic team. There emerged some dentures and a few earth-stained bones, some still covered by a pair of rotting trousers. And as journalists scribbled and photographers clicked, De Mello, like some macabre Hamlet, held up a skull.

It was the head, according to Brazilian police, not of Wolfgang Gerhard but almost certainly of Mengele, the Nazi physician who sent some 400,000 victims to their deaths at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland and used thousands of others as guinea pigs for his gruesome genetics research. After the exhumation, Brazilian police seemed convinced that they had at last tracked down the mad doctor who carried a $3.4 million bounty on his head. "There is a 90% chance it is Mengele," said Sao Paulo Federal Police Superintendent Romeu Tuma. "On the basis of documents and photographs, I'm 100% convinced that it is Mengele. But I'd prefer to await the results of the medical examiners."

Until then, there is certain to be widespread skepticism over the discovery. The sudden uncovering of the bones struck many as either wishful thinking or ingenious misinformation by Mengele's Nazi sympathizers. Especially suspicious were those who had been on the Mengele trail for 40 years. "It's 99% certain that this is not the body of Mengele," said Simon Wiesenthal, the world's foremost Nazi hunter, during a visit to New York City. After learning more about the evidence, however, Wiesenthal professed to be less skeptical. Doubters asked why, if Mengele had really died six years ago, his relatives in Gunzburg, West Germany, had not said so and thus avoided the publicity that has accompanied the recent intense worldwide hunt for the Nazi fugitive. The U.S., German and Israeli governments last month agreed to pool their resources in the hunt for Mengele. This week a five-man Brazilian team will begin comparing the bones and seven teeth exhumed from the grave with medical and dental records of Mengele, dating back to 1938, that have been sent from West Germany. But, as Forensic Expert De Mello admitted, "we will never be able to make an absolutely certain, positive identification."

The latest curious twist in the search for Mengele began two weeks ago, when West German authorities descended upon the idyllic town of Gunzburg, whose biggest employer is the firm of Karl Mengele & Sons, manufacturers of agricultural equipment. There, acting on a tip from an unidentified university professor, for reasons still not clear, they raided a house that is believed to belong to Hans Sedlmeier, a onetime legal clerk for the Mengele firm. Sedlmeier was widely reported to have been a messenger between Mengele and his family when the fugitive was living in Asuncion, Paraguay. Inside a closet in the home, the investigators found seven or eight letters apparently mailed by Mengele from Brazil between 1972 and 1978. They also discovered two more recent letters from Wolfram and Lieselotte Bossert, an Austrian couple who had moved to Brazil in 1952. These letters implied that Mengele was dead.

Alerted by the West German consulate, Sao Paulo Police Chief Tuma posted his men around the Bossert home in the middle-class suburb of Brooklin Novo. After three days of surveillance, the police raided the house and took in for questioning Bossert, 59, an unemployed paper-company technician, and his wife, 57. Inside the modest wood-and-concrete house, they reportedly found several photographs, apparently of Mengele. One picture was of his son Rolf. Also found was a book entitled Evolution of the Organism that included 15 pages of notes in what is believed to be Mengele's handwriting. At the police station, the Bosserts gave two depositions in which they told the story of how they had befriended the death-camp doctor.

They had, they said, first been introduced to Mengele in 1970 through an Austrian engineer, Wolfgang Gerhard. Five years later, Gerhard left Brazil, giving Mengele his Brazilian identity card. Mengele put his own photographs on the document and assumed Gerhard's identity. The real Gerhard died in 1978, according to West German legal authorities.

Although the Bosserts had known of Mengele's true identity since 1972, they accepted the man they say was the aging Nazi almost as a member of their family. In 1977 he moved into a dilapidated, two-bedroom house owned by the couple in the Sao Paulo district of Eldorado Paulista. Wolfram Bossert described Mengele as living a lonely life, supported by his family in West Germany.

In February 1979, according to the statements, the couple invited their friend for a holiday at Bertioga, a coastal resort 70 miles east of Sao Paulo. While swimming in the sea, the depositions assert, Mengele, who by then was 67, drowned after suffering a stroke. The Bosserts said that they decided to bury him at the Embu cemetery in a family plot owned by the real Gerhard, who had buried his mother there in 1961. That same year, Wolfram Bossert told the police, "Rolf Mengele came to talk to me, and I handed over (his father's) diaries, documents and personal belongings."

A few stray pieces of evidence seemed to support the Bosserts' story. Brazilian police did indeed record a drowning at Bertioga on the day in question, and a few months later the Paraguayan government, which had granted Mengele citizenship in 1959, inexplicably canceled it. Also, the exhumed body did not have its arms crossed, as is usual in Brazil, but was placed with the arms extended by the side. In the letters found in Gunzburg, Mengele had stipulated that he be buried in such a position. And last month an elderly farmer in eastern Paraguay told a film crew from the CBS program Sixty Minutes that he had been told that Mengele had died in a swimming accident in Brazil some years earlier.

Late last week Brazilian police unveiled more evidence, in the form of a deposition from a Hungarian-born woman who has lived in Brazil since 1948, to support the Bosserts' account. Gitta Stammer, 65, who with her husband Geza owned a small farm in southern Sao Paulo state, claimed that Mengele had lived with the couple for 13 years. According to her statement, in 1961 the Stammers were introduced by Wolfgang Gerhard to a man who called himself Peter Hochbichlet and who said he was Swiss. They gave him a job helping to administer their farm, and the man moved in with them. A year later, the woman said, Hochbichlet confessed that he was really Mengele. Even so, he continued to live with the couple until they sold their farm in 1974. In February 1979, she claimed, she heard that Mengele had drowned.

Certainly, Mengele had long displayed a gift for evasion. By the time Allied forces liberated Auschwitz in 1945, he had disappeared. In 1947 he was reportedly arrested by U.S. counterintelligence agents in Vienna, only to slip through their hands. Two years later, apparently after living quietly in Gunzburg, he made his way to Buenos Aires and thence to Paraguay. In 1960 he narrowly eluded Israeli agents. Since then, a number of sightings of him have been reported.

The determination of so many people to find the "Angel of Death," a title he won for his power to pick who would live and die in Auschwitz by the wave of his hand, may have borne fruit in last week's exhumation. The recently stepped-up hunt might have prompted Mengele to set another ingenious false trail. At week's end skeptics remained convinced that the doctor had vanished once again. But there was also a possibility that Mengele's body had indeed been found and that all kinds of unquiet ghosts could at last be laid to rest.

With reporting by Gavin Scott/ Sao Paulo, with other bureaus