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Nonetheless, the mystery was not entirely laid to rest. The body in Brazil was apparently Mengele's, and the papers in West Germany appeared to be authentic too. Yet questions continued to be asked about the motives of the Bosserts, who claimed to have sheltered the fugitive, and those of the Mengele family in West Germany, which apparently sent both funds and emissaries to the Nazi doctor, all the while concealing a trove of revealing photographs and documents. Because the fugitive apparently had left no recent dental records, forensic investigators admitted they could never declare with 100% certainty that the remains they had examined were those of Mengele.
The old Nazi's quiet demise was in keeping with the way he had spent his final years. Accompanied by photographs showing a distinguished-looki ng old man at once elegant and elegiac, the Bunte story presented the image of a melancholy but unrepentant old man living out his last days in near poverty. That impression was confirmed by his writings, in which the doctor grumpily denounced Communism and even went so far as to claim that the Nazi era would be regarded by history as one of the most splendid epochs since the time of Alexander the Great.
As Rolf Mengele told it in the Bunte story, the first time he met his father was on a skiing vacation in Switzerland in 1956, when the twelve-year-old boy stayed at a mountain hotel with an affable uncle called Helmut Gregor. Three years later, said Rolf, he discovered that "Uncle Helmut" was actually his father. As the two began to correspond, Rolf told Bunte, the fugitive showed himself to be paternal but far from penitent. "I can never hope that you will understand or sympathize with the course of my life," he wrote Rolf. "But I have not the slightest reason to justify, or apologize for, any of my decisions or actions." As their correspondence grew more contentious, Rolf resolved to meet his father again. In 1977 he flew to Sao Paulo.
He was met at the airport, the story continued, by Wolfram Bossert and driven in a rickety Volkswagen down a potholed dirt road into a virtual slum. "My father's house," Rolf remembered, "was nothing more than a wooden hut." Inside, it was meanly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs and a closet. As he entered the house, Rolf recalled, "my father trembled with excitement. I saw that he had tears in his eyes."
During his 14-day stay, said Rolf, he found a person very different from the dapper, even avuncular man-about-town he had seen in photographs. His father was intellectually alert and still on top of his Greek and Latin, Rolf recalled, "but he was a haunted creature," possessed by suicidal thoughts. At the same time, the doctor seemed to regret nothing. "There are no judges," Rolf recalled his father saying of his pursuers, "only avengers."