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Over the years, his activities began to form a patchwork quilt of legend and rumor. He was reported to have masterminded a heroin-trafficking ring in Paraguay; he was said to have been Stroessner's personal physician, as well as the dictator's special adviser in a genocidal campaign against Paraguay's Ache Indians. Like some dark spirit, he seemed to be everywhere at once, often hidden behind sunglasses; he was sighted in Bolivia, Uruguay and Chile, and in the jungles of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
The U.S. Justice Department followed up one report that placed the doctor on a hacienda in Texas, another that had him arriving on a Miami-bound plane. He was said to have taken vacations in Egypt, Italy and Greece, and by one account, to have spent time in Mount Kisco, N.Y. Often he was said to be living in a heavily fortified villa in the Paraguayan hinterland, complete with a Mercedes-Benz 280SL and four armed guards. According to Simon Wiesenthal, the doctor was most recently spotted last summer in a Mennonite village in Paraguay called Valendam. One year earlier, in fact, Wiesenthal had observed that the 10,000 members of that close-knit community would provide the perfect cover for the fugitive. "To the people living there," said Wiesenthal, "he is a refugee, and they are not in a hurry to deliver him to the police. The Mennonites believe in justice after death."
Among all the rumors, inevitably, there were some that insisted that the Angel of Death had all along been dead. In 1948 Telford Taylor, who had served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, announced that "Dr. Mengele is dead as of October 1946." In 1970, according to another story, Mengele was buried in Asuncion under the name Flores. Three years later, Brazilian newspapers reported that the doctor had been killed by Israeli agents in a hideout along the Brazil-Paraguay border. "This is the fourth reported incidence of Mengele's death," was the verdict last week of John Loftus, 35, a Nazi hunter who used to work for the Justice Department's office of special investigations. "That's a lot of funerals for one guy."
Whatever the details of Mengele's life on the run, much of the time he has clearly been hiding in the clannish fold of South America's German immigrant communities. Brazil is home to more than 3.6 million ethnic Germans; in many areas, the German language is still more prevalent than Portuguese, and towns bear names such as Blumenau, Frederico Westphalen and Novo Hamburgo. Near the Chilean city of Parral, 300 Germans have set up a closed community called Colonia Dignidad. Protected by a high fence, the colony observes its own laws and has been reported to shelter at least two former ranking Nazis.