Searches the Mengele Mystery

Flashbulbs popped, klieg lights blazed. On the 17th floor of federal police headquarters in Sao Paulo last week, Romeu Tuma, the mustachioed federal police superintendent who is Brazil's best-known detective, stood amid a gaggle of reporters and television crewmen assembled for a regular briefing. Without delay, Tuma came to the point. The evidence, he said firmly, was steadily mounting that the body, which had been exhumed from a graveyard in the little town of Embu a few days earlier, was that of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who sent some 400,000 concentration-camp prisoners to their deaths during World War II and cruelly experimented on thousands of others in his genetics research. What, cried a reporter, about the news just in from West Germany that Mengele's son Rolf was certain the body was his father's? That, said Tuma evenly, would support his own theory but not affect his investigation.

So it went virtually every day last week. As a team of Brazilian forensic experts examined the Embu bones at Sao Paulo's Instituto Medico Legal to determine whether they were Mengele's or not, Tuma -- and others -- provided bits and pieces of fresh evidence in what could be the final act of a dramatic and drawn-out manhunt, a bitter trail of false identities, narrow escapes and never-ending questions. For more than a quarter-century, Nazi hunters from Israel and other countries had crisscrossed Europe and much of South America trying to track down the elusive "Angel of Death." Was the hunt finally about to end? Or would the searchers discover that they had been duped in a giant hoax, lured into an ingeniously woven web of disinformation, implying that Mengele, a man with a $3.4 million reward on his head, might still be at large?

As the story unfolded and the evidence grew, no final answers were available. For the moment at least, even if the possibility of Mengele's death assumed greater plausibility, the great mystery remained unsolved. In Sao Paulo, new witnesses came forward, telling the police or the press that they had known the man alleged to be Mengele, fleshing out earlier claims that he had lived reclusively in Brazil between 1961 and 1979. In West Germany, Rolf Mengele broke the family's long silence not only to announce that he had "no doubt" that the Embu bones were the remains of his father but to turn over to a West German magazine photographs, letters and documents purportedly relevant to the Mengele story. Late last week, moreover, U.S. handwriting analysts confirmed that the script on documents found in Brazil corresponded with that on other Mengele papers.

Gerald Posner, an American lawyer who has assembled 25,000 pages of documents and interviewed 200 witnesses in South America during a four-year search for the doctor of death, explained that when he first heard of the find at Embu, he thought the story a hoax. After flying from New York City to Sao Paulo, however, Posner said, "We have to await the forensic investigation, but I'm starting to think he may be dead."