Searches "Absolutely No Doubt"

By Pico Iyer.

Carefully, cautiously, determined not to miss the smallest detail this time around, the Brazilian investigators retraced their steps. Under the watchful gaze of foreign observers, gravediggers in the small hillside town of Embu reopened the local cemetery's tomb 321, from which they had exhumed some mysterious remains two weeks earlier, and turned up four more teeth and several bone fragments. On the outskirts of nearby Sao Paulo, police descended once again on the dilapidated bungalow where the mystery man was said to have lived, and uncovered two bullets and a box of medical supplies. Then, returning to the home of Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, self-proclaimed friends of the dead man, policemen came upon a tape that featured martial music and a speech by Adolf Hitler at a rally. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together, and they suggested that the body found at Embu did indeed belong to the "Angel of Death" and the world's most hunted war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele.

Finally, shortly before noon last Friday, the suggestion became a conclusion. As reporters and television crewmen from around the world jostled for position, Federal Police Superintendent Romeu Tuma and the 16 forensic experts (six of them Americans) who had been examining the skeletal remains inched their way into the top-floor cafeteria of the 20-story Sao

Paulo federal police headquarters. A businesslike Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic specialist from the U.S. Justice Department, stepped forward and announced the experts' unanimous conclusion: "The skeleton is that of Josef Mengele within a reasonable scientific certainty." Later, the Americans reported that they had "absolutely no doubt" of their findings.

The bones, added Brazilian Forensic Anthropologist Daniel Munoz, conflicted in not a single respect with the medical records of the man who sent 400,000 people, mostly Jews, to their deaths at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during World War II. Earlier, experts had found that the handwriting on documents discovered in Brazil corresponded to Mengele's, and that photographs found in the Bossert home matched old pictures of the doctor. Most telling of all, an advanced method of matching the reconstructed skull against old photographs convinced the investigators that they had found their man. "I came here not knowing whether it was Mengele," said U.S. expert John Fitzpatrick. "I go home fully convinced that it was."

In West Germany, officials refused to comment on the Brazilian findings until German forensic experts had returned from Sao Paulo. But the week did bring to light a stream of photographs and documents that seemed to leave little doubt that the 25-year hunt for Mengele was over. The weekly magazine Bunte Illustrierte fleshed out details of the Nazi fugitive's sojourn of roughly 18 years in Brazil with an annotated collection of photographs, supplied by Mengele's 41-year-old son Rolf. In response, the rival weekly Stern ran six pages of photographs chronicling the same period of lonely exile. Gerald Posner, a New York lawyer who has pursued the Mengele story for four years and who had flown to West Germany from Sao Paulo to check the veracity of the Bunte documents, expressed no doubts whatsoever. "I'd be willing to bet anyone this material is authentic," he said.

Nonetheless, the mystery was not entirely laid to rest. The body in Brazil was apparently Mengele's, and the papers in West Germany appeared to be authentic too. Yet questions continued to be asked about the motives of the Bosserts, who claimed to have sheltered the fugitive, and those of the Mengele family in West Germany, which apparently sent both funds and emissaries to the Nazi doctor, all the while concealing a trove of revealing photographs and documents. Because the fugitive apparently had left no recent dental records, forensic investigators admitted they could never declare with 100% certainty that the remains they had examined were those of Mengele.

The old Nazi's quiet demise was in keeping with the way he had spent his final years. Accompanied by photographs showing a distinguished-looki ng old man at once elegant and elegiac, the Bunte story presented the image of a melancholy but unrepentant old man living out his last days in near poverty. That impression was confirmed by his writings, in which the doctor grumpily denounced Communism and even went so far as to claim that the Nazi era would be regarded by history as one of the most splendid epochs since the time of Alexander the Great.

As Rolf Mengele told it in the Bunte story, the first time he met his father was on a skiing vacation in Switzerland in 1956, when the twelve-year-old boy stayed at a mountain hotel with an affable uncle called Helmut Gregor. Three years later, said Rolf, he discovered that "Uncle Helmut" was actually his father. As the two began to correspond, Rolf told Bunte, the fugitive showed himself to be paternal but far from penitent. "I can never hope that you will understand or sympathize with the course of my life," he wrote Rolf. "But I have not the slightest reason to justify, or apologize for, any of my decisions or actions." As their correspondence grew more contentious, Rolf resolved to meet his father again. In 1977 he flew to Sao Paulo.

He was met at the airport, the story continued, by Wolfram Bossert and driven in a rickety Volkswagen down a potholed dirt road into a virtual slum. "My father's house," Rolf remembered, "was nothing more than a wooden hut." Inside, it was meanly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs and a closet. As he entered the house, Rolf recalled, "my father trembled with excitement. I saw that he had tears in his eyes."

During his 14-day stay, said Rolf, he found a person very different from the dapper, even avuncular man-about-town he had seen in photographs. His father was intellectually alert and still on top of his Greek and Latin, Rolf recalled, "but he was a haunted creature," possessed by suicidal thoughts. At the same time, the doctor seemed to regret nothing. "There are no judges," Rolf recalled his father saying of his pursuers, "only avengers."

Throughout the years of exile, Rolf said, the Mengele family sent the doc- tor between $100 and $175 a month. The old man's diaries suggested that he might have supplemented those funds by arranging modest real estate deals. Yet his father's poverty, Rolf told Bunte, ironically may have provided his protection; after all, Mengele hunters "looked for him in a white villa on the sea, in the back of a Mercedes, behind bodyguards and guarded by German shepherds." They did not guess, ventured Rolf, that the runaway Nazi might be living in penury in a ramshackle hut. Thinking of that sorry plight, and of the jottings about children and poodles that constituted the lion's share of the released documents, Rolf said he deplored the methods and madness of the doctor, but could not condemn him. "I don't support my father," he said, "but I don't want to betray him either."

Rolf returned to Brazil in 1979, soon after Mengele drowned off a beach at Bertioga during an outing with the Bosserts. At that point, the younger Mengele reported, he collected from the Bosserts most of his father's effects; the rest, he thought, the couple had destroyed. Last week, however, Stern announced that it had bought from the Bosserts several hundred photographs of Mengele, along with three tapes of conversations, about a dozen notebooks and assorted letters.

The revelation raised the competition between the two rival magazines to new heights. Bunte announced that it would turn over all syndication fees from the Mengele story to Auschwitz survivors and to descendants of the camp's victims; Gunther Len Schonfeld, head of Stern's news department, told TIME that the generous-seeming gesture was "a show of hypocrisy." Privately, some editors at Bunte accused Stern of having stolen its cache of Mengele materials. Journalists at Stern complained that Bunte had violated copyright laws by running pictures owned by the Bosserts.

The feature common to both magazines, however, was their extreme caution in handling their respective scoops. Stung, perhaps, by the derision it drew after it fell for a hoax in publishing the so-called Hitler Diaries two years ago, Stern downplayed its pictures of the old man in Brazil. On its cover the magazine ran its standard topless beauty, and it held its press run to the usual 1.6 million copies.

Bunte was equally circumspect. In an introduction to Rolf's story, it recommended skepticism by readers "because this is an account of a man who for more than three decades knew how to escape or deceive his pursuers." The magazine promised four more installments describing how Mengele, immediately after the war, had worked for four years as a groom for a farmer near Munich; how he had been mistakenly arrested by Italian authorities in 1949 in Genoa, then released three weeks later with friendly apologies; and how he was assisted in South America by Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a Luftwaffe ace and unrepentant Nazi with connections to Paraguayan Dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Nonetheless, the magazine was hedging its bets until three special investigators it had hired had checked the authenticity of all the material at hand. Norbert Sakowski, Bunte's deputy editor in chief, said that he was convinced the documents were genuine, "but I can't rule out the possibility that it might be a Hitchcock plot."

Both magazines met with a lukewarm response when they tried to sell syndication rights to U.S. television networks for up to $600,000. After the news conference in Sao Paulo, moreover, Menachem Russek, the retired head of an Israeli police anti-Nazi unit, confessed that he was "not angry but disappointed" that Mengele had apparently died unregenerate and unpunished. Others were finding the Mengele myth equally difficult to abandon. "I admit to having hoped that Mengele would have been more intriguing than the other Nazi fugitives," acknowledged Archivist Posner. "A number of us had fantasies about a man living deep in a heavily guarded jungle compound surrounded by bodyguards and police dogs. Frankly, a lot of the material we have found is very dreary." Thus ended one of the most dramatic searches of the century, not in a blaze of justice but, quietly, in a pile of bones.

With reporting by William McWhirter/Bonn and Gavin Scott/ Sao Paulo