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- But the success of the Mengele investigation will ultimately depend on the availability and quality of old documents, dental charts, X rays and medical records. "This is the decisive point and, I think, the weak point in the Mengele case," observes Rainer Knussmann, an anthropologist at the University of Hamburg. Mengele's 1938 dental records (a written description of the teeth, not including X rays), received last week from West Germany, proved to be "imprecise" and "incomplete," according to Ayrton Martini, director of the Sao Paulo state police scientific department. Also, there is scant information on a pelvic fracture Mengele is said to have suffered in a wartime motorcycle accident. The injury seems to accord with hip abnormalities found on the skeleton, but unless old X rays of Mengele's pelvis turn up, it may be impossible to prove a correlation.
Forensic scientists ultimately come to a verdict much as a jury does, judging from the preponderance of carefully examined evidence. "We deal with the law of probabilities," says Dr. Marcos Segre of the University of Sao Paulo. "We are scientists and not magicians."