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If Mengele is indeed dead, the discovery will, in a way, bring an end to an era -- even though the troubling ghosts of World War II still arouse violent feelings, as evidenced most recently by the controversy over President Reagan's visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. For many Germans, Mengele, a top physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, embodies a dark past they are hoping at last to exorcise and bury. By the same token, the Mengele hunters and the survivors of the Holocaust, in which some 10 million people were killed, have mixed feelings about the possibility that Mengele has been finally laid to rest. That prospect, says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, brings "a sad sense of relief." If Mengele is gone, he will never be brought to justice; his crimes will be buried like his victims.
No matter how far the current investigation goes, moreover, the almost seamless skein of evidence collected so far has been greeted with skepticism. For years, Mengele had displayed an uncanny adeptness for eluding his pursuers. Suddenly, not long after the search intensified once again earlier this year, the body was found and tidy explanations appeared. "The whole matter looks like a play with a perfect script," said Simon Wiesenthal, who has tracked down more than 1,100 Nazis in a 38-year campaign. "Mengele lives and breathes," said Menachem Rusek, director of Israel's police unit investigating Nazi crimes, before flying to Sao Paulo last week. "He and his relatives have already managed to play every sophisticated trick in the book to conceal his identity."
The doubters initially focused their attention on the circumstances under which the latest trail opened up on May 31. Following a tip from an unidentified informant, West German police raided the house in Gunzburg, West Germany, of Hans Sedlmeier, a former employee of the Mengele family firm who was said to have been in touch with Josef in South America. Inside, the agents discovered photographs and letters from Brazil that pointed to an elderly Austrian couple, Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, who lived near Sao Paulo. Searching their home, Brazilian police discovered other documents apparently belonging to Mengele. The Bosserts said that they had first been introduced to Mengele in 1970 by an Austrian, Wolfgang Gerhard; that the doctor of Auschwitz eventually took the name and identity papers of Gerhard; and that after Mengele drowned at the beach resort of Bertioga in 1979, they buried him at Embu, 20 miles south of Sao Paulo. After the body was exhumed, Superintendent Tuma declared that his men had almost certainly located the world's most wanted man.