Mengele Chronicled His Smooth Escape

July 07, 1985|By Alice Siegert, Chicago Tribune.

BONN — Though he was one of the most hated and sought after men at the end of World War II, the escape from Europe of the Nazi war criminal known as the

``Angel of Death`` was remarkably smooth, according to documents provided to a West German magazine.

The name of Dr. Josef Mengele appeared on a list of wanted war criminals issued by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, yet the SS

hauptsturmfuehrer (captain) who performed cruel pseudo-medical experiments on Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp apparently traveled with near impunity across the continent.

As in South America later, fellow SS members and other benefactors were at hand to help and protect him in critical situations, the documents said. His friends in South America kept the public from knowing until recently that Mengele had drowned while swimming at a Brazilian beach in 1979.

The notebooks, letters, photographs and other documents Mengele kept during his odyssey were turned over to Bunte, a Munich-based magazine, by Rolf Mengele, his son, after his father`s remains were found in a graveyard near Sao Paulo, Brazil, last month.

The diary, according to Bunte, is a detailed account of how Mengele made it from the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany to Austria to Genoa, Italy, where in 1949 he boarded a ship for a safe haven in South America.

During his years in hiding in West Germany immediately after the war, Mengele lived under the name of Fritz Hollmann, the name that appeared on his army discharge papers. His unit was taken to a prisoner of war camp where his papers even deceived U.S. Army investigators. He was released to the U.S. zone in the summer of 1945, according to Bunte.

As Fritz Hollmann, he worked on a farm in Bavaria and made clandestine trips to his hometown of Guenzberg to see his wife, the magazine said. In late 1948, when Europe began to get too dangerous for him, he decided to flee to Argentina as Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi leader, had done before.

Referring to himself by the code name ``Andreas,`` Mengele noted in his diary, according to Bunte, that he arrived on the Austrian side of the Brenner Pass on Easter Sunday, 1949, and spent the night at the Kerschbaum Inn, a quarter mile from the Italian border.

He had no passport, but lack of travel documents posed no problem, according to Bunte. At that time, sympathizers working as guides were ferrying ranking Nazis across the border cheaply.

In his diary, Mengele did not disclose the price he paid, the magazine said. However, almost poetically, he took time to note that a quarter moon was visible and that the first yellow primroses were blooming when he crossed the border.

Jakob Strickner, 70, a fellow SS member, told Bunte, ``I certainly know who led him across. I think I`m the only one who knows.``

But Strickner refused to divulge details except to tell Bunte that the border crossing took about an hour and that Mengele caught a train at 5:45 a.m. in Brennero for Sterzing, an Italian town where many Germans lived.

At the Goldenen Kreuz inn in Sterzing, he met an Italian called ``Nino.`` After Mengele mentioned the password ``rosemary,`` Nino procured a German identity card that had been issued in Brixen, Italy, and was valid until 1945 in an attempt to show he had spent the war as a citizen in Italy, according to Bunte.

At the inn, he also met ``Erwin,`` who brought greetings from his family in Germany as well as enough money to pay for his passage to South America. Rolf Mengele believes the man his father called Erwin was Hans Sedlmeier, a retired executive of the Mengele farm machinery plant in Guenzburg and a confidant of the Mengele family. Sedlmeier later made numerous trips to South America to visit the fugitive.

From Sterzing, Mengele was spirited by a chain of helpers via Bolzano to Genoa. He was issued an International Red Cross passport by a sympathetic woman at the Swiss consulate there, and a Croatian physician furnished him with a predated vaccination certificate, according to Bunte.

In Genoa, he ran into a serious hitch that could have been the end of his rush from discovery, the magazine said. He discovered that the police official who was to stamp an Italian exit visa into his Red Cross passport was away on a trip.

After he tried to bribe another official, he was incarcerated while authorities checked his papers.

However, Mengele`s luck continued when his police benefactor returned and called off the investigation. Mengele was released from jail with apologies and in time to board the Argentina-bound ship, North Queen. To make up for his inconvenience in jail, government officials allowed him to travel second class on a tourist-class ticket without extra charge, according to Bunte.

Rolf Mengele, a 41-year-old lawyer in Freiburg, Germany, traveled to Brazil in 1979 to pick up his father`s notebooks and other belongings from Wolfram Bossert, an Austrian who was a Nazi sympathizer and who sheltered the war criminal in Sao Paulo.

Rolf Mengele flew to Brazil under his own name, taking a Pan American World Airways plane to New York, where be boarded a connecting flight to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Asked by a Bunte reporter whether he felt grief when he visited his father`s grave, the son said he had not because he had barely known him. Rolf Mengele had met his father only twice, the second time during a 1977 visit to Brazil.

``I stood there for half an hour, thinking about him,`` he said. ``But the only thing that came to mind was, `There now lies the man who always wanted to be with tall, blond, blue-eyed people, buried beside a Japanese.`

And I wondered if this would please him. . . .``

When he picked up his father`s belongings, Rolf Mengele told the magazine, he had been filled with the thought that his father would have left a message for him and tried to explain the unexplainable. But there was no such message.