A shocking insight into the life of the feared Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele

Cheerful black-and-white photos from the 1970s show a radiant couple. Their two children play with a smiling older man with a huge mustache. Tio Pedro they called him Uncle Peter. He was a German who lived in South America under different names for thirty years, including eighteen years in Brazil. Here he led an undisturbed life, but Tio Pedro was in reality the feared camp doctor of Auschwitz, ‘the Angel of Death’: Josef Mengele.

Writer and investigative journalist Betina Anton (45) leafs through her book, which will be published this week in the Netherlands under the title The secret network that made Josef Mengele disappear, and compares one of the photos with the house in São Paulo she is now standing in front of. “The bush is still there, but this wooden fence is new.”

Her former schoolteacher, Liselotte Bossert, lived in this house with her husband Wolfram and their two children. The people in the photo. Betina Anton only discovered years later what role the family had played in the life of the infamous Nazi doctor. Their family friend Josef Mengele visited regularly. He ate with us, stayed there, went on trips with the family. During a swim in 1979 at their beach house in Bertioga, near São Paulo, he probably drowned as a result of a stroke.

Disappeared kindergarten teacher

As a young girl, Anton attended the German school in São Paulo where Bossert taught. In 1985, when Anton was six, her teacher was suddenly fired. Bossert and her husband turned out to have been confidants of Mengele for years, who carried out gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz, mainly on twins, and would later flee to South America. Miss Bossert belonged to the small circle who knew who he really was.

“The fact that she suddenly disappeared from school made an impression on me as a child. Only later did it become clear what her role was. Not only had she protected Mengele, but she and her husband were also the only ones who knew where he was buried when Mengele was discovered,” says Anton, who gets into her car for a tour of the German district in the São Paulo metropolis.

The event also had an impact on the German-Brazilian community here, where Anton grew up as a third-generation child of immigrants. Germans formed a substantial group of immigrants in Brazil as early as the nineteenth century. The community is close-knit, children go to the German school, buy school books at the German bookstore and on Sundays there is the German Lutheran Friedenskirche. “As I got older, I had more and more questions when I thought about the story of my teacher and Mengele. Was the school where I had such a wonderful childhood actually a Nazi stronghold? And what about the community where I grew up?”

Network of Nazis

Once an investigative journalist, Anton decided to delve into the story of Mengele in Brazil. For six years she conducted research in different countries: she spoke with victims who had survived Mengele’s medical experiments, with researchers, with former members of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and with agents of the Federal Police in Brazil. She studied more than eighty letters by Mengele, which she translated from German into Portuguese. And she read parts of his diaries and notes that he kept.

The book provides a shocking insight into Mengele’s life and personality. After his crimes during the war, he fled to South America in 1949 via the then well-functioning network of Nazi escape routes. Under the name Helmut Gregor, he settled in Argentina, where Juan Perón had come to power in 1946, and started a life as a carpenter. He receives support from other Nazis already living there, such as the Dutch SS man Willem Sassen, who introduces him to Adolf Eichmann and the German fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

Perón had sympathies for fascism and arranged jobs for ex-Nazis through large companies, making them feel protected in Argentina. Moreover, they did not stand out among the many millions of European migrants in Buenos Aires, Anton writes in her book. “But Mengele’s life does not look like the many mythical stories that circulate about him and that you often see in films in which he appears,” she believes. Like, for example, the opening scene of the classic The Boys from Brazil (1978), based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin. Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) steps out of a seaplane in a pristine white suit and walks to a huge villa. “As if he was living the life of a multi-millionaire here. In reality he lived simply, outside the big city. Once a week, Mengele arrived in the German district on a rickety city bus and visited the Bossert family, with whom he could speak German. Or he went to the German bookstore and then drank coffee and ate German delicacies, an apple strudel, or something,” Anton says based on Mengele’s letters.

Adolf Eichmann

Mengele went into hiding in Brazil when the Mossad managed to kidnap Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, from Argentina in 1960. Mengele himself had moved to Paraguay a short time earlier, after an arrest warrant was issued for him by Germany in 1959. “He knew this could happen to him too,” says Anton as she parks her car and crosses the street to the Alemão Bücherstube, as written on the outside of the business. According to the Federal Police, Mengele bought his German books here.

But no matter how close Mossad gets, the agency ultimately won’t get him. Only six years after Mengele’s death is his identity revealed, the Bosserts arrested and interrogated, and his grave broken up. DNA from his son Rolf, who still lives in Germany, confirms that it is Mengele.

Despite his violent past, Anton says Mengele’s letters and diaries show that he has a sensitive side. He writes poems, is passionate about Brazilian nature, and listens to Beethoven. But the ideas of the old Nazi doctor remain intact. There were hardly any Jews living in Mengele’s area, but there were black Brazilians. “Slavery should never have been abolished,” Mengele says in conversations with friends, to whom he often openly expresses racism when he is annoyed by “the many blacks” in the neighborhood.

For the old school teacher Liselotte Bossert, Mengele nevertheless remains the warm family friend of whom she did not know who he was at first, as she tells Anton in the last interview before her death. Once she knows that, she believes the bond is too strong to break. Moreover, the Bosserts believe Mengele when he says that the terrible stories about his role in Auschwitz were made up by the outside world to put him in a bad light.

Goethe and Nietzsche

The German bookstore contains teaching materials that are still used by German schools. On another pile of works by Goethe and philosophy books by Nietzsche. The German owner receives visitors in her office at the top of a steep staircase. Anton’s book has provoked many different reactions in the German-Brazilian community. The story is unknown to many people: Anton received many responses from readers who recognized family members in photos, such as someone who found a snapshot of her mother-in-law at a barbecue with Mengele. So many responses, in fact, that she could fill a second book with them, she jokes.

But there was also criticism: the book would fuel prejudices. The German owner of the bookstore immediately becomes defensive when she hears what the book is about. “We are always blamed while other peoples have also made big mistakes,” she says sharply. “Look at the Dutch, look at the English? They were guilty of slavery for hundreds of years, which is also very bad!”

Betina Anton herself was relieved that her school did not turn out to be a Nazi stronghold, as she found out from conversations with the former director. Yet in addition to Mengele, she discovered, four other refugee Nazis lived in her neighborhood. “Awareness is important. Also to fight Nazism and the extreme right, because this is increasing in Brazil, figures show. I hope the book contributes to that.”

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