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Throughout the years of exile, Rolf said, the Mengele family sent the doc- tor between $100 and $175 a month. The old man's diaries suggested that he might have supplemented those funds by arranging modest real estate deals. Yet his father's poverty, Rolf told Bunte, ironically may have provided his protection; after all, Mengele hunters "looked for him in a white villa on the sea, in the back of a Mercedes, behind bodyguards and guarded by German shepherds." They did not guess, ventured Rolf, that the runaway Nazi might be living in penury in a ramshackle hut. Thinking of that sorry plight, and of the jottings about children and poodles that constituted the lion's share of the released documents, Rolf said he deplored the methods and madness of the doctor, but could not condemn him. "I don't support my father," he said, "but I don't want to betray him either."
Rolf returned to Brazil in 1979, soon after Mengele drowned off a beach at Bertioga during an outing with the Bosserts. At that point, the younger Mengele reported, he collected from the Bosserts most of his father's effects; the rest, he thought, the couple had destroyed. Last week, however, Stern announced that it had bought from the Bosserts several hundred photographs of Mengele, along with three tapes of conversations, about a dozen notebooks and assorted letters.
The revelation raised the competition between the two rival magazines to new heights. Bunte announced that it would turn over all syndication fees from the Mengele story to Auschwitz survivors and to descendants of the camp's victims; Gunther Len Schonfeld, head of Stern's news department, told TIME that the generous-seeming gesture was "a show of hypocrisy." Privately, some editors at Bunte accused Stern of having stolen its cache of Mengele materials. Journalists at Stern complained that Bunte had violated copyright laws by running pictures owned by the Bosserts.
The feature common to both magazines, however, was their extreme caution in handling their respective scoops. Stung, perhaps, by the derision it drew after it fell for a hoax in publishing the so-called Hitler Diaries two years ago, Stern downplayed its pictures of the old man in Brazil. On its cover the magazine ran its standard topless beauty, and it held its press run to the usual 1.6 million copies.
Bunte was equally circumspect. In an introduction to Rolf's story, it recommended skepticism by readers "because this is an account of a man who for more than three decades knew how to escape or deceive his pursuers." The magazine promised four more installments describing how Mengele, immediately after the war, had worked for four years as a groom for a farmer near Munich; how he had been mistakenly arrested by Italian authorities in 1949 in Genoa, then released three weeks later with friendly apologies; and how he was assisted in South America by Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a Luftwaffe ace and unrepentant Nazi with connections to Paraguayan Dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Nonetheless, the magazine was hedging its bets until three special investigators it had hired had checked the authenticity of all the material at hand. Norbert Sakowski, Bunte's deputy editor in chief, said that he was convinced the documents were genuine, "but I can't rule out the possibility that it might be a Hitchcock plot."