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For all that, Rolf's declaration was hardly momentous. In legalistic language, the son of the doctor announced, "I have no doubt that the corpse exhumed at the cemetery in Embu is the remains of my father. I am sure that the forensic tests will confirm this shortly . . . I have remained silent until now out of consideration for the people who were in contact with my father for the last 30 years."
Two days later, the Mengeles divulged a few more details. Dieter, the nephew of the Auschwitz doctor and one of the partners in the Mengele company, explained that the family had kept silent on the case for so many years in order to protect Josef's friends. The same day, Rolf handed over, free of charge, photographic and written material on Mengele, after his escape from Germany, to the weekly magazine Bunte Illustrierte. The magazine's current issue carries the first installment of an article in which Rolf explains that while he had ideological differences with his father, he sympathized with his plight.
To some degree, the revelations in West Germany complemented the stories provided by new witnesses in Brazil. In her attractive white house in the affluent hillside community of Petropolis Park, outside Sao Paulo, a nervous Gitta Stammer, who had earlier come forward to support and supplement the Bossert account, told her story to TIME's Jacqueline Reditt. Her face pale and worried, her hands trembling, the slight, 65-year-old Hungarian-born woman described how she and her family had kept a longtime lodger's secret for 22 anxious years.
In 1961, she said, she and her engineer husband Geza were living on a coffee and fruit farm in Nova Europa, 175 miles north of Sao Paulo, when they were introduced at a social function to Wolfgang Gerhard. Gerhard, an Austrian living in Brazil, asked the Stammers if they could take in a Swiss friend of his named Peter Hochbichlet. The friend, Gerhard said, would be able to help out around the farm. Agreeing to put up Peter, or "Pedro," in a separate house on their property, the family found him to be as good as Gerhard's word: the man paid the Stammers a nominal rent and "mended fences, vaccinated cows, picked fruit."
When, later that year, the Stammers moved to a farm in Serra Negra, 100 miles north of Sao Paulo, their lodger went along, taking a room in their new home. One day, about two years after Pedro joined the household, a visitor left a newspaper in the house that featured a picture of Dr. Josef Mengele as he looked at Auschwitz. Despite the 20-year interval, said Stammer, she recognized in the picture the gap between Pedro's top front teeth, and the bent head with which he gave his one-sided smile. Later that day, she said, she showed her lodger the photo. He turned white. That evening he admitted that he was indeed Mengele.