The Nazi Hunters (45 page)

While solving the riddle of his fate, the discovery still left unanswered the question how the most hunted man since Eichmann had succeeded in doing so. His name had surfaced during the International Military Tribunal’s case against the top Nazis at Nuremberg. Testifying as a witness, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss specifically mentioned “
experiments on twins by SS medical officer Dr. Mengele.”

Auschwitz survivors later offered detailed accounts of his outsized role in the death and torment of the prisoners in the camp. Eagerly meeting the incoming trains, he participated regularly in the selection process,
sending thousands to their deaths in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. He often spared twins at first, so that he could obsessively conduct experiments on them. He injected dyes into the eyes of babies and children to change their color, and performed multiple blood transfusions and spinal cord taps. He tested the endurance of other prisoners by, in the case of Polish nuns, exposing them to massive X-ray doses that burned them. He also operated on sexual organs, transferred typhus and other diseases to healthy prisoners, and extracted bone marrow. In a report, a superior officer praised him for his “valuable contribution in the field of anthropology by using the scientific materials at his disposal.” Mengele personally executed numerous prisoners who managed to survive his experiments, thus disposing of the leftover “scientific materials.”

According to Robert Kempner, the German Jewish lawyer who left his homeland in 1935 and returned as a member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, Mengele’s name came up in relation to the “Doctors Trial” in 1947, the first of the follow-on trials after the International Military Tribunal. “We started the search for Mengele in Nuremberg,” he told me in 1985. “They tried to get him but they couldn’t find him in Germany. He was already underground somewhere.” He added that Mengele had, in fact, been in U.S. custody immediately after the war, but his jailers did not know who he was.
The prisoner, who was incredibly vain, had managed to convince the SS that he did not need the standard SS tattoo since he did not want to mar his appearance; as a result, the Americans did not spot him for what he was.

Although Mengele was already on war criminal lists, Kempner was not surprised that someone who had been part of the huge roundups by U.S. troops quickly slipped free during that chaotic period. “These fellows just disappeared,” he said. “It was not too difficult. The real criminals were just smarter than our boys.” Kempner was convinced that, unlike Klaus Barbie, Mengele cut no deals with the Americans to do so. “He was an independent fellow,” he said. “In contrast to many others, he was a man of means.”

Because of the Barbie case, the U.S. Justice Department was particularly eager to examine the record on that score once Mengele’s remains
were found. The Office of Special Investigations conducted another exhaustive study, which was finally published in 1992. While it noted that Mengele had lived under an alias as a farmhand in the U.S. occupation zone until he made his way to South America in 1949, it concluded: “
Mengele fled Europe without U.S. assistance or knowledge. There is no evidence that he ever had a relationship with U.S. intelligence.”

Mengele initially lived in Buenos Aires, at one point in Olivos, the same suburb where Eichmann resided. When the Israelis began their operation to kidnap Eichmann, Isser Harel, the Mossad chief, had heard that Mengele might be there, although he stressed that the information was unconfirmed. His feelings about the Auschwitz doctor were clear. “
Of all the evil figures who played principal parts in the macabre attempt to wipe out the Jewish people, he was conspicuous for his abominable enjoyment of his role as death’s messenger,” he noted. When a question came up about the cost of the Eichmann operation, he told one member of his team: “To make the investment more worthwhile, we’ll try to bring Mengele with us as well.”

While Harel was eager to find Mengele, he did not want to do anything “that might endanger our primary objective, Operation Eichmann,” as he put it. His team in Buenos Aires was fully occupied shadowing their quarry, arranging safe houses and transportation, and planning both the kidnapping and its aftermath. They were aware that Mengele could become a target as well, but they agreed with the decision to focus on their main target first. “
None of us showed any enthusiasm for the Mengele operation,” recalled Zvi Aharoni, a key member of the Eichmann team who was slated to be his interrogator after the kidnapping. “This certainly had nothing to do with a lack of courage. We only feared that such a questionable double-Rambo action would endanger the success of ‘Operation Eichmann.’ ” According to him, Harel was the most anxious to get Mengele, and it was Rafi Eitan, the field leader of the operation, who initially talked him out of taking any steps in that direction, invoking the Hebrew saying: “Try to catch a lot—and you will catch nothing.”

As soon as the Israelis had seized Eichmann, though, Harel pressed Aharoni to question him about Mengele. At first, the captive refused to
reveal anything, but then he admitted that he had met Mengele once in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, claiming it was a chance encounter. He did not know Mengele’s address, he said, but indicated that he had mentioned a guesthouse in Olivos owned by a German woman. Aharoni believed him, but, as he recalled, Harel did not. “He is lying to you!” Harel said. “He knows where Mengele is!” As Aharoni saw it, the Mossad chief “seemed possessed.”

In fact, Mengele had left Argentina for Paraguay the previous year after West Germany issued a warrant for his arrest. If he had any doubts that he should retreat to a country that was even more likely to offer protection to Nazi war criminals than Argentina, Eichmann’s kidnapping would have dispelled them completely. But Paraguay did not feel safe either. After the successful kidnapping of Eichmann, Harel dispatched Aharoni and other agents to look for him in several Latin American countries. With the help of other former Nazis who had settled in the area, Mengele had moved to a farm near São Paulo, working as a farmhand again but feeling mawkishly sorry for himself—especially when he learned that West German newspapers were reminding readers of his ghoulish record at Auschwitz.

“
As you can see, my present mood is pretty bad, especially since I have had to deal these last weeks with this nonsense about attempting to strip bodies in B [Auschwitz-Birkenau],” he wrote in his diary. “In this mood one finds no joy in a radiant sunny sky. One is reduced to being a miserable creature without love for life or substance.”

Aharoni claimed that in 1962, thanks to payoffs to one of Mengele’s contacts in South America, he was pointed in the direction of Wolfgang Gerhard, a Nazi living near São Paulo who had provided shelter for Mengele. “
We did not know at the time how close we already were to our target,” he wrote. He began scouting the area, and in retrospect believed he may have caught a glimpse of Mengele with two other men on a jungle path. But to the surprise of Aharoni and the other agents assigned to the case, Harel abruptly recalled them to deal with a new high-priority project: to search for an eight-year-old boy who had been smuggled out of Israel by religious extremists in defiance of a court order. The agents
found the boy in New York and brought him back to his mother. Afterward, they were not sent back to South America.

A shift in leadership of the Mossad accounted for the dwindling interest in the search for Mengele. When Harel stepped down in March 1963, he was replaced by Meir Amit. The new chief was soon preoccupied with preparations for the next looming conflict with Israel’s Arab neighbors, the 1967 Six Day War. “
We gave little weight to finding Mengele so we didn’t find Mengele,” explained Eitan, who had led the Eichmann operation and continued to work for the Mossad after the change at the top. Once again, Nazi hunting was no longer a priority.

When Mengele’s body was discovered in 1985, his son Rolf offered an explanation for why his father was never caught. “
His house was small and extremely poor . . . so small that no one suspected him,” he told the West German magazine
Bunte.
Because he came from a wealthy family, the people on his trail “were looking for a man who lived in a white villa by the sea, with a Mercedes, protected by bodyguards and Alsatian dogs,” he added. The implication: it was almost as if they imagined they would encounter the Mengele portrayed by Gregory Peck in
The Boys from Brazil
.

Rolf offered no apology for his long silence, even after he knew his father had died. “
I have remained silent until now out of consideration for the people who were in contact with my father for 30 years,” he declared. His father had been equally unrepentant about his crimes. In a letter to Rolf, he wrote: “
I do not have the slightest reason to try to justify or excuse whatever decisions, actions or behavior of mine.”

The fact that, as Rolf finally admitted, the family and so many others had helped Mengele elude justice for all those years also raised questions about the West German investigation led by Frankfurt prosecutor Klein. No search warrants had been issued for the homes or businesses of Mengele family members, and there appeared to have been little effort to question them. According to Dieter Mengele, a nephew of the fugitive, he was never approached by the prosecutor. Klein asserted that the family had been “only” partly placed under surveillance, whatever that meant.

When the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations issued
its report on Mengele in 1992, it conceded the obvious. “
That Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ was allowed to perpetrate his crimes and to die an old man’s death in Brazil is evidence of failure,” it concluded. But it also pointed out that West Germany, Israel, and the United States belatedly had mounted “an unprecedented worldwide search,” indicating that they were not content with that failure. More significantly, “the many years he consequently spent hiding in near squalor in Brazil, tortured by his fear that Israeli agents were on the verge of capturing him, arguably provided a kind of rough, albeit inadequate, ‘justice.’ ” He paid the price, the report added, in the sense that he was “transformed into a prisoner of his own nightmare of capture.”

Mengele had escaped the Nazi hunters, but he had not escaped their lengthening shadows.

“
Survival is a privilege that entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.”

Simon Wiesenthal

I
n April 1994, an ABC News camera crew carefully staked out their man. They had located Erich Priebke in San Carlos de Bariloche, an Argentine resort city in the foothills of the Andes where nineteenth-century German immigrants had constructed Alpine houses. Like many Nazis implicated in mass killings, the former SS captain had fled Europe after the war and led a seemingly normal existence ever since. He ran a delicatessen and even traveled back to Europe on occasion, never bothering to change his name. His past looked to be well behind him—until the day he was confronted by ABC’s pugnacious reporter Sam Donaldson as the camera rolled.

Priebke’s claim to infamy was his role in organizing the execution of 335 men and boys, including seventy-five Jews, in the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome on March 24, 1944. Italian partisans had killed thirty-three Germans earlier, and Herbert Kappler, the Rome Gestapo chief, ordered the massacre on the principle that ten Italians should die for every dead German. Unlike Priebke, Kappler did not get out of Italy
in time, and he was given a life sentence; but in 1977 he was sprung from a military hospital and lived as a free man for a year before his death. There were also reports that Priebke had participated in the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz.

“
Mr. Priebke, Sam Donaldson of American television,” the reporter called out, approaching Priebke on the street as he was about to get into his car. “You were in the Gestapo in Rome in 1944, were you not?”

Priebke did not appear unduly rattled at first—and he made no effort to pretend he was not involved in the executions. “Yes, in Rome, yes,” he said, speaking accented but good English. “You know the communists blew up a group of our German soldiers. For every German soldier ten Italians had to die.”

Wearing a polo shirt, windbreaker, and a Bavarian hat, Priebke looked like just another German who had decided to make his home in the picturesque town.

“Civilians?” Donaldson asked.

Maintaining his level tone but beginning to show some discomfort, Priebke responded that they were “mostly terrorists.”

“But children were killed,” the reporter pressed on.

“No,” Priebke insisted. When Donaldson pointed out that fourteen-year-old boys were killed, he shook his head and repeated, “No.”

“But why did you shoot them? They had done nothing.”

“You know that was our order. You know that in the war that kind of thing happens.” By this time, Priebke looked eager to cut things off.

“You were just following orders?”

“Yes, of course, but I didn’t shoot anybody.”

Donaldson said again that he had killed civilians in the cave, and again Priebke protested: “No, no, no.”

After another round on the issue of orders, Donaldson declared: “But orders are not an excuse.”

Priebke was visibly indignant at the American reporter’s seeming inability to understand how things worked. He had had to carry out orders, he reiterated. “At that time an order was an order.”

“And civilians died,” Donaldson followed up.

“And civilians died,” Priebke conceded. “Many civilians died on all parts of the world [
sic
] and still they are dying.” With a nervous smile and flicking his head back and forth, he added: “You live in this time, but we lived in 1933,” referring to the year Hitler took power. “Can you understand that? Whole Germany was . . . Nazi. We didn’t commit a crime. We did what they ordered us. That was not a crime.”

Donaldson just kept coming at him, asking if he had deported Jews to concentration camps.