The latest, and perhaps the last, chapter in what must rank as the most bizarre search of the century began two weeks ago in a small Bavarian town in West Germany. It quickly led to a Brazilian suburb where, amid a tangle of documents, false names and controversial clues, there emerged the strange tale of friendship between a quiet Austrian couple and the reclusive man who had lived under an assumed name in a modest bungalow. Last week, on a brilliant autumn afternoon, 200 people converged on a cemetery in the town of Embu, some 25 miles south of the Brazilian industrial center of Sao Paulo. They had come to see the exhumation of what Brazilian authorities believed were the remains of Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death," the notorious Nazi death-camp doctor who had escaped from justice at the end of World War II.
As the crowd surrounded a weed-covered tomb that had been marked until hours before with the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, who died in 1979, two gravediggers began loosening the solid red clay with pickaxes and then started shoveling. Almost an hour later, their tools struck against the light- colored wood of a coffin. The diggers broke open the casket and, as the crowd jockeyed for position, began handing the contents up to Jose Antonio de Mello, assistant director of the Sao Paulo police forensic team. There emerged some dentures and a few earth-stained bones, some still covered by a pair of rotting trousers. And as journalists scribbled and photographers clicked, De Mello, like some macabre Hamlet, held up a skull.
It was the head, according to Brazilian police, not of Wolfgang Gerhard but almost certainly of Mengele, the Nazi physician who sent some 400,000 victims to their deaths at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland and used thousands of others as guinea pigs for his gruesome genetics research. After the exhumation, Brazilian police seemed convinced that they had at last tracked down the mad doctor who carried a $3.4 million bounty on his head. "There is a 90% chance it is Mengele," said Sao Paulo Federal Police Superintendent Romeu Tuma. "On the basis of documents and photographs, I'm 100% convinced that it is Mengele. But I'd prefer to await the results of the medical examiners."