Official dossier reveals how Dr Mengele - Auschwitz's Angel of Death - avoided Mossad's vengeance despite being in the Buenos Aires phonebook
By Guy Walters
Daily Mail
September 8, 2017
With the road from Brazil’s Sao Paulo to the southern city of Curitiba running for some 250 miles, the Israeli secret service Mossad agent prepared himself for a long drive. What would make the journey more challenging, however, was that he would be tailing the car in front.
That vehicle contained a 40-year-old man called Wolfgang Gerhard. The agent knew a lot about him, and there was a lot he didn’t like.
The former head of the Hitler Youth in Austria, Gerhard remained a fanatical Nazi long after the war, to the extent that he regarded many Brazilians as ‘half-monkeys’.
But the agent, Zvi Aharoni, had known worse Nazis. Just two years before, in 1960, he was part of the team that had sensationally kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from outside his modest home in Buenos Aires and spirited him back to Israel, where the man known as the ‘architect of the Holocaust’ was put on trial and hanged.
And now Aharoni was back in South America, on the trail of yet another notorious Nazi in hiding, and the man in front of him was hopefully going to lead him unwittingly right to his doorstep.
For Wolfgang Gerhard was none other than the link man between the outside world and a man whose name continues to chill even to this day — Dr Josef Mengele.
The Israelis had long wanted to capture this most evil of men, who, in his role as a ‘doctor’ at Auschwitz, had not only performed sadistic and murderous experiments on young twins, but had also overseen the selections of tens of thousands of Jews, in which Mengele had indicated with a mere flick of the wrist who was to live and who was to be immediately gassed.
Not for nothing was Dr Mengele known as the ‘angel of death’.
Zvi Aharoni was to be spared a long drive, for after a mere 25 miles, Gerhard turned right and headed up a rough track. The agent knew it would look suspicious to follow, and so he returned to the capital.
For the next few days, Aharoni and his team dreamed up ways to investigate who and what lay down that track. Eventually, they hit on the idea of a picnic, and so one Sunday, Aharoni and two other agents drove up the track, and somewhat brazenly started to eat some sandwiches near a small group of farm buildings.
Within minutes, three men emerged. Two were Brazilian, but one was clearly European. Could it have been Mengele?
Aharoni tried to grab his camera, but the men were too close to take a surreptitious shot. ‘I thought the man may well be Mengele,’ Aharoni later said. ‘In fact, I was sure of it. He had a moustache, he was the right height. There was a striking similarity with the photographs we had.’
Convinced that he had finally found his man, Aharoni flew to Paris in order to consult with the head of Mossad, Isser Harel.
The agent was certain that Mengele could be kidnapped, but to Aharoni’s dismay, his boss ordered him to drop it. ‘It was the end of the Mengele case,’ Aharoni would bitterly recall. ‘Having been a soldier I had learned to take orders, so I did what I was told.’
As a result of that fateful decision, Josef Mengele would get to live out his days in Brazil — in complete freedom. He would die from a stroke at the age of 67 while swimming in the sea in February 1979, unapologetic and unpunished for the most dreadful of crimes.
So why did the head of Mossad order the hunt for Mengele to be stopped? Until this week, it has never been possible to answer satisfactorily this most vexatious of questions.
Mengele was, after all, the worst of men, the very embodiment of the evil — not only of the Holocaust, but also of the perverted medical thinking that led a young doctor from a prosperous family in Bavaria to deem it acceptable to torture and kill children in the name of science.
Surely this was a scalp too valuable for the Israelis to give up on?
But this week, thanks to the release by Mossad of their bulging three-volume file on Mengele, we are finally able not only to learn the truth of why the hunt was abandoned in 1962, but also how the Israelis would later resume their search in the late Seventies.
The file reveals one of the most extraordinary clandestine manhunts ever undertaken, which stretched some 40 years until 1985, when Mengele — albeit his corpse of six years — was tracked down to an obscure graveyard in the Sao Paulo satellite town of Embu. But what makes the story of Mengele’s escape from both Mossad and justice especially frustrating is that for so many of those years this most wanted of men had, at times, been able to live openly under his real name.
Towards the end of the war, Mengele did indeed go into hiding. Calling himself ‘Joseph Memling’, he fled, taking his ‘medical’ notes, from Auschwitz as the Red Army approached the camp in January 1945.
For the best part of four years, Mengele lived and worked as a farm worker in Bavaria.
The comedown from exercising the power of life and death over thousands of people to hoeing potato fields was a huge one, and Mengele became increasingly embittered. He was also enraged by what he felt were the ‘lies’ being spread about him, and until the end of his life he was adamant that he had not only saved lives, but had also carried out work that would improve the racial ‘purity’ of mankind.
It was during this period that Mengele would occasionally see his wife Irene at a lake some eight miles from the farm, though he would only very rarely see his son Rolf who had been born in 1944.
Immediately after the war, Mengele may have fretted about being discovered, but he need not have done.
Despite his name appearing on the official list of war criminals, the Allies were not still entirely sure whether he was called Mendelei, Margde, or indeed Mengele, and few, if any, attempts were made to track him down.
Nevertheless, an increasingly anxious Mengele decided that he wanted to create a new life.
In 1949, travelling under the name ‘Helmut Gregor’, and assisted by his family’s wealth derived from a successful farm machinery business, Mengele escaped over the Brenner Pass and through northern Italy to Genoa, from where he boarded a ship to Argentina — the most popular ‘retirement home’ for Nazis on the run.
When Mengele arrived in Latin America clutching little more than his ‘biological notes’, he lacked friends, but there was a network of sympathisers who were eager to help him.
References made to Mengele in various post-war trials had started to make the ‘angel of death’ something of a celebrity in fascist circles, and after several weeks of enduring none-too-salubrious lodgings, Mengele soon found himself housed in the grand suburban villa of a Nazi sympathiser.
For the next few years, Mengele was to forge a successful bourgeois life, setting up businesses, and even — remarkably — acting as a representative for the Mengele family firm. By the mid-Fifties, Mengele, then in his mid-40s and divorced from Irene, became a man-about-town in Buenos Aires, and would eat out regularly.
He was also making plans to marry Martha Mengele, the widow of his late brother.
In April 1955, after obtaining a passport in the name of ‘Helmut Gregor’, he travelled to Europe to meet Martha. The marriage was born more out of convenience than love, in order to ensure that Martha did not subsequently marry someone who would prove to be troublesome on the board of the Mengele firm.
While he was in Europe, Mengele also met his son, Rolf, although the boy was only told that the visitor was ‘Uncle Fritz’.
After the success of the trip, an emboldened Mengele returned to Buenos Aires and — astonishingly — registered himself at the West German embassy under his real name, and actual place and date of birth. He was even issued with a German passport. In 1958, Martha and her son joined Mengele, and the couple married — and were even listed in the Buenos Aires phonebook under the name Mengele.
The very notion, then, that Mengele was in hiding or feared for his life was clearly farcical.
For a short while, all was well. However, in September of that year, a German called Hermann Langbein, who had been compiling a dossier on Mengele for many years, presented a state prosecutor in Bonn with evidence that Mengele was in Buenos Aires, and that the authorities should act.
With a West German legal apparatus riddled with former Nazis, it appears that Mengele may well have been tipped off, and in March 1959, he moved to Paraguay on his own, citing ‘political reasons’.
Mengele’s 15 months in Paraguay would prove to be among his most unhappy. He hid in a two-bit town called Hohenau in the southeast of the country, living among poor farmers of German ancestry whom Mengele openly regarded as hicks.
Though he would quickly gain Paraguayan naturalisation that made him immune from extradition, Mengele was made even more nervous by the dramatic events of May 1960, when Adolf Eichmann — whom he occasionally met at a German cafe in Buenos Aires — was kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel by jet.
Mengele was sure that the Israelis would also look for him — and his fears were well grounded, for it later emerged that the Eichmann kidnap team did indeed scour Buenos Aires looking for him.
And the following month, the Germans started half-hearted extradition proceedings against Mengele in Argentina, though by then, he was in Paraguay. But for Mengele, all this was too close, and in late 1960, with the help of the former Hitler Youth leader Wolfgang Gerhard, he moved to Brazil.
Unbeknown to Mengele, Mossad was not giving up. Its agent Zvi Aharoni had persuaded a Dutch former SS officer called Willem Sassen to work for it, and by early 1962, Sassen had uncovered the association between Wolfgang Gerhard and Mengele.
But despite all these efforts, in July that year, the operation — so tantalisingly close to snaring Mengele — was halted.
The question remains — why? For many years, it has long been suspected that the spy agency had decided to devote its resources either towards the hunt for an eight-year-old boy who had been abducted out of Israel, or against the German scientists developing rockets in Egypt that could be used against the Jewish state.
The newly released Mengele file reveals that, according to Yosef Chen — a historian and former Mossad agent who has written an accompanying study of the documents — the reason is because, despite Aharoni’s seeming certainty, Mossad was simply not sure it had its man. ‘There was somebody who was more certain it was him and someone else who was less certain and it was not entirely clear if it was him,’ said Mr Chen this week.
‘In any case, you can’t do anything upon first sighting. You have to gather all the information and to check all possibilities and then decide what to do.’
For the next few years, the hunt went into abeyance, during which time the Israelis would indeed concentrate on contemporary enemies rather than ‘chase ghosts’.
However, with the election of Menachem Begin as Israeli PM in 1977, that policy was to change. The hitherto secret minutes of a cabinet meeting held that year conclude with the ominous words: ‘We decided to instruct Mossad to renew the search for Nazi war criminals, especially Josef Mengele, with a view to bring them to trial in Israel. If they cannot be brought to trial — kill them.’
Mossad tried every trick in the spy’s handbook to find Mengele, who was, by then, living in a bungalow in an anonymous suburb of Sao Paulo.
One potential weak link was Mengele’s son Rolf, who lived — and continues to live — in Germany, and who shared a birthday with his father. The Israelis tapped Rolf’s phone, hoping to record a conversation between the two men on their birthday, March 16. But when the day came, they had no joy.
The reason — unknown to the spies — was because by the time of that call, in 1983, Mengele had been dead for four years. Nevertheless, the mission continued. Rolf’s mail was intercepted, his home broken into, his documents photographed. All yielded nothing.
The Israelis then tried perhaps the oldest method available — the honeytrap. A female agent was employed to get close to Rolf, with a brief to be ‘attractive, intelligent and able to fill the role of a private secretary’. But that ploy did not work, either.
In the end, it was not the Israelis who found Mengele. As the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approached in 1985, the outrage that Mengele was still seemingly free gathered a head of steam, and the U.S. and German authorities mounted a concerted hunt for the Angel of Death.
A search was made of the home of a fixer who worked for the family firm, which revealed correspondence indicating that Mengele had died in 1979.
Mengele’s skull and bones were soon unearthed from the Embu graveyard under the gaze of the world’s media. Though many were cynical, and believed the near-legendary Mengele had faked his own death, dental and X-ray records confirmed that the skull belonged to the ‘doctor’.
This was confirmed by a DNA test by the pioneering British geneticist Alec Jeffreys in 1992 — ironically, using the very field of genetics that had been so corrupted by the evil doctor.
Ultimately, the hunt for Mengele was a failure. ‘A lot of years and time and many attempts went into trying to trap Mengele and it’s a shame they didn’t reach the desired goal,’ Yosef Chen said this week.
For Mengele’s victims, that this most evil of men escaped justice still represents something more than just a shame.
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Guy Walters is the author of Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped And The Hunt To Bring Them To Justice (Bantam).
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