Searches the Mengele Mystery

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As Isser Harel, the head of MOSSAD at the time, recalls in his memoir, The House on Garibaldi Street, his men were convinced on at least three other occasions that they had cornered Mengele: in 1961 on a farm near the sleepy Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, in 1962 on a farm near Sao Paulo, and a few months later along the Paraguayan-Brazilian border. Each time they came away emptyhanded.

In 1964 a woman named Nora Eldoc, operating under a West German cover, apparently managed to get close to Mengele; she was subsequently found dead. Five years later, a former Paraguayan policeman working for the Israelis expressed confidence that he had tracked down the Nazi runaway; he disappeared, never to be seen again.

In his effort to stay several steps ahead of his pursuers, Mengele was apparently helped by Paraguayan Dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the grandson of a Bavarian cavalry captain and a man of pronounced right-wing views. When, in July 1962, Bonn began agitating for Mengele's extradition from Paraguay, Stroessner responded that he could be of no assistance since Mengele was a Paraguayan citizen and was thus protected. Two years later, the West German Ambassador in Asuncion approached Stroessner again with the request for Mengele, only to be told that it would be best to drop the matter.

The Paraguayan government has consistently tried since then to brush the Mengele issue aside, usually by insisting that he had left the country in the early 1960s. In 1979 Paraguay's supreme court canceled Mengele's citizenship. The official explanation for the revocation was that he had been absent from the country for more than two years. The real reason, according to other assessments, was that Asuncion was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the unpleasant publicity generated by the Mengele association. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, the doctor had by then been the inspiration for two novels, Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil and William Goldman's The Marathon Man, that had been turned into popular movies.)

"I deny categorically that Mengele is in Paraguay," Paraguayan Under Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Bestrad said two months before the supreme court ruling. Stroessner himself told an interviewer last March, "I don't know where Mengele is. The Mengele question is a repeat question, like a long-playing record."

That is in large part because answers have been so hard to come by. During the past 15 years, Mengele has vanished behind a curtain of supposition and speculation, becoming an almost mythic figure whom many have claimed to have seen just about everywhere. The ubiquity is partly explained by the thesaurus of aliases under which he operated. At one point, Mengele called himself "Fausto Ridon," at another "Friederich Elder von Breitenbach." He also passed himself off as "Gregorio Gregori," "Jose Alvarez Aspiazu" and "Pedro Caballero."