(3 of 4)
Although the Bosserts had known of Mengele's true identity since 1972, they accepted the man they say was the aging Nazi almost as a member of their family. In 1977 he moved into a dilapidated, two-bedroom house owned by the couple in the Sao Paulo district of Eldorado Paulista. Wolfram Bossert described Mengele as living a lonely life, supported by his family in West Germany.
In February 1979, according to the statements, the couple invited their friend for a holiday at Bertioga, a coastal resort 70 miles east of Sao Paulo. While swimming in the sea, the depositions assert, Mengele, who by then was 67, drowned after suffering a stroke. The Bosserts said that they decided to bury him at the Embu cemetery in a family plot owned by the real Gerhard, who had buried his mother there in 1961. That same year, Wolfram Bossert told the police, "Rolf Mengele came to talk to me, and I handed over (his father's) diaries, documents and personal belongings."
A few stray pieces of evidence seemed to support the Bosserts' story. Brazilian police did indeed record a drowning at Bertioga on the day in question, and a few months later the Paraguayan government, which had granted Mengele citizenship in 1959, inexplicably canceled it. Also, the exhumed body did not have its arms crossed, as is usual in Brazil, but was placed with the arms extended by the side. In the letters found in Gunzburg, Mengele had stipulated that he be buried in such a position. And last month an elderly farmer in eastern Paraguay told a film crew from the CBS program Sixty Minutes that he had been told that Mengele had died in a swimming accident in Brazil some years earlier.
Late last week Brazilian police unveiled more evidence, in the form of a deposition from a Hungarian-born woman who has lived in Brazil since 1948, to support the Bosserts' account. Gitta Stammer, 65, who with her husband Geza owned a small farm in southern Sao Paulo state, claimed that Mengele had lived with the couple for 13 years. According to her statement, in 1961 the Stammers were introduced by Wolfgang Gerhard to a man who called himself Peter Hochbichlet and who said he was Swiss. They gave him a job helping to administer their farm, and the man moved in with them. A year later, the woman said, Hochbichlet confessed that he was really Mengele. Even so, he continued to live with the couple until they sold their farm in 1974. In February 1979, she claimed, she heard that Mengele had drowned.
Certainly, Mengele had long displayed a gift for evasion. By the time Allied forces liberated Auschwitz in 1945, he had disappeared. In 1947 he was reportedly arrested by U.S. counterintelligence agents in Vienna, only to slip through their hands. Two years later, apparently after living quietly in Gunzburg, he made his way to Buenos Aires and thence to Paraguay. In 1960 he narrowly eluded Israeli agents. Since then, a number of sightings of him have been reported.