Ep. 52- Mengele in South America with Betina Anton

Many Nazis including Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Klaus Barbie escaped Europe and fled to South America in an attempt to evade prosecution for their crimes.  We know quite a bit about their lives and crimes during the Holocaust but much less about the network of people that supported them in their new lives in South America.

I spoke with Betina Anton about her work researching the people who helped Josef Mengele and her personal connection to this case.

Note: You may want to listen to Ep. 26- Josef Mengele with David Marwell for a more in-depth biography of Mengele.

Betina Anton is a journalist and international news editor at Globo TV.

Anton, Betina.  Hiding Mengele: How a Nazi Network Harbored the Angel of Death (2025)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.073)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, wait, man born. And, this week we are talking about Mengele again, not out of a sort of voyeuristic obsession with him. We've already talked with David Marwell, in an earlier episode about sort of Mengele's life and times, particularly in his time in the Nazi party and, his time. And now switch, but on today's episode.

I have a really fascinating guest, Bettina Anton, to talk about Mengele after the Holocaust, his life on the run, particularly in South America and all the people who made that possible for him, which I think is one of the really fascinating things that comes out of her recent book on Mengele. so Bettina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Betina (00:56.174)
So hello, wait man. So thank you very much for having me here.

Waitman Beorn (01:00.807)
Can you just start by telling us, mean, I know that you do introduce in the book a little bit about this at very beginning, but how did you get interested in in Mengele of all people?

Betina (01:13.034)
All right, so first of all, I think I'll tell the name of the book. It's hiding Mengele in English. And in Portuguese, it's called Baviera Tropical, something like tropical Bavaria. And this is why I wanted to recreate a concept that I lived myself, which is I had like a, I lived in a German bubble here in Sao Paulo where I live. And I went to a German school.

all the people I met as a child who used to speak Portuguese and German. My father worked for a German company. We went to a German Lutheran church here in Sao Paulo. just to explain to you that we had this German bubble in the German community here in south of Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo is a huge city, but in the south of Sao Paulo, we have this big German community. So that's why...

The name in Portuguese is Baviera Tropical. And when I was six years old, I went to this German school and out of a sudden my teacher, Lizelotte Bossert, disappeared. And when you were small, know, have only, normally you have one teacher your whole day and you are very attached to this teacher, you know. And this is probably one of my first memories in life.

because this was a strong experience. And I remember all the audits saying that something very bad had happened, that was a big surprise that someone called Mengele was involved and so on. Of course, I didn't understand anything. And I only knew that something very bad had happened. And then came this TV crew, American TV crew to film us at school. I think it was NBC.

and a lot of reporters, journalists wanting to know what was going on. And then later I found out that my teacher, Lizy Lotebosset, she was the person who buried Mengele under a false name here in Sao Paulo in 1979. That means six years before that, because I was at school in 1985. All this story came up in 1985.

Betina (03:39.662)
Mengele was already dead for six years when all the world came to know that he lived here in Brazil for almost 20 years.

Waitman Beorn (03:52.773)
And so, mean, I'm just curious because, I want to hear a lot more about sort of the expatriate community in South America as well, but, you know, some time had passed, right? Between, obviously between the time that you were in primary school and the time that you wanted to go back and revisit this. So can you tell us like why, why you decided to go back and, and, focus on Mengele as a, as a sort of a professional job?

Betina (04:19.47)
Yes, sure. Yes, sure. I'm a journalist for more than 20 years and I also studied at LSE there in England and I loved it. I studied history and I always wanted to blend these two areas in my life, journalism and history, and because I love this, doing my reports and also

understanding the context, the historical context of the story. So as an international editor, I came across a lot of stories that were very, very interesting, but I could only deal with them in a very superficial way, because when you work with journalists, you have to be quick. Every day it's a new story. So I always wanted to write a book.

And then one day when we had a meeting discussing the news of that day, my boss came to me talking about the film he had seen that was very interesting about a Nazi who had fled Europe and so on. And he said the film was amazing and it was based on a book written by a journalist. And then in this moment I thought, my God, I have a...

I'm a journalist and I have a story of a Nazi that escaped Europe and I could tell this story or not, but then I have to go after the people that were living at the same time as Mengele lived here in Sao Paulo. And then I thought, of course, the first person I have to find is my former teacher, Lizalote Bossert. So that's how I started to have...

this idea and going after the story.

Waitman Beorn (06:16.553)
And we're going to get to that as we, as we move forward. can we, and again, for, our listeners, there's an earlier episode with, with David Marwell, who was, one of the members of the American government task with finding Mengele searching for him. so if you want sort of a, a longer biography of, of him and what he was all about, please listen to that one. Maybe even pause here, listen to that one and come back to this one.

Um, but if we can sort of start with, um, maybe Mengele leaving Auschwitz, so slightly before the end of World War II, um, when Auschwitz is evacuated, um, in, I guess, January of 1945, can we take a, pick up Mengele's story from there? Where is he, what does he do and where does he go in the next years or so?

Betina (07:12.366)
Yes, sure, because yes, the evacuation of Auschwitz was in January 1945. so people that worked with him, like the Hungarian pathologist Miklos Néizli, he was a doctor and a pathologist, and he worked very close to Mengele. And he didn't know where Mengele was. He writes about that, so I know because of that.

and Mengele disappears with all his writings and everything he did at the camp. I don't think everything, but many things that he wrote on the camp. And he disappears. And he went to other concentration camps, more to the west, because the Russians were coming, the Red Army was coming, and the Germans knew that, and they were very, very afraid.

to be met by this Red Army because they could imagine what would happen. So Mengele went to Grossosen first, that this was a concentration camp in the same complex as one very famous concentration camp because it was the concentration camp from where Schindler, from the Schindler List, also worked.

And then later after one month, think, he had to flee this camp. Also, he had to flee this camp. And he went to a camp in the Sudetenland, in the nowadays Czech Republic. On these days, it was Czechoslovakia. And there he...

already knew that he couldn't present himself as SS officer. So he took off his uniform. He took another uniform from the Wehrmacht, the regular army, and he presented himself with a false name. And so he spent, I think, six weeks in this camp in Czechoslovakia. But then the Red Army was coming again and he had to go to Germany. He had no...

Betina (09:39.564)
no way out. And on his way to Germany when he was already in Bavaria, he was caught two times by the Americans. And he was very lucky, actually, because he escaped prison. He was a prisoner of war, but he was released. I don't know if David told about this, they have when the war ended, the Americans had eight million Nazis.

in Germany. This is a number from Tony Jude, an English historian. So what do you do? You cannot like take everyone prisoner, you know. So they had this mechanism of automatic arrest. And one of the things that made you be arrested automatically was a tattoo from the SS. And Mengele was a member of the SS, but he didn't have the tattoo.

So he was very lucky and of course he didn't give his papers and so on. So he was released twice from two prisoners camp. And then he went back to close to his city. He is from Gunzburg in southern Germany in Bavaria, but he didn't go home because there was this denazification program in Bavaria.

the Americans were doing this and also his father was detained. So he went to a farm very close to his city and told a very dramatic story and gave a false name and he lived there for almost four years until 1949. And I think he was afraid of being there because he saw that many colleagues of his also even

Some doctor that worked for him in Auschwitz in the gypsy camp was extradited to Poland and was hanged in a trial in Auschwitz. So I think he knew he wasn't completely saved by them. know, his name appears in a lot of UN lists of wanted people, but in post-war Europe, there was, it was chaos. So...

Betina (12:06.99)
This was another, something very lucky for him, you know. But then in 1949, he decides to come here to South America and firstly to Argentina, to Buenos Aires. And it was easy to come here. First of all, because you had, in Argentina, the president was Juan Domingo Perón, and he was a sympathizer of the fascist regime.

and he read Mein Kampf, Hitler's book. And so he had a sympathy for fascists, first of all, and also for Nazis. There's something weird because many people here in Latin America have this vision that Perón was a left leader, but he also had this sympathy for the fascists. So there's something that is confusing for some people.

On the other hand, Perón also wanted to modernize Argentina and he had the interest to attract these minds to Argentina to help him modernize his government and everything. So he gave a lot of blank passports so many Nazi criminals and Nazis could go to Argentina.

This was not Mengele's case. Mengele came here to Buenos Aires with a passport from the Red Cross under the name of Helmut Greger. So first he arrived in Argentina. It was...

Waitman Beorn (13:46.205)
And sorry, just to go back, how does he get that passport? Because he clearly already knows at this point that his name is out there, so he has to travel under a false name. So how does he go about getting this passport?

Betina (14:00.822)
Yeah, his family, Mengele's family was very, very rich. So he managed to have people helping him to get from Bavaria to Italy. So until Genoa. Up to Genoa. And there, there were many, people with this red cross passport. So he had a fake red cross passport.

And people didn't ask too much because there were lots of people, millions of people that were refugees at the end of the war. he simply told them that, you know, I don't have my documents, but I lived here in northern Italy. I don't have a passport, but I need to travel. So he got this Red Cross passport. It was not something very weird at the time, you know.

But to get to Italy, he had the help of the family's money, because it was not so easy to, as a wanted criminal, to travel around Europe. It would be very risky for him. And then he came to Argentina. This was 1949. And he lived there very, had a...

pleasant life, I think, not at the beginning. He didn't present himself as a doctor. First, he worked with lot of things in Buenos Aires as a carpenter. Later, even, he got a company, pharmaceutical company that his fathers bought to him. But he was very afraid at the beginning.

But he managed to live in Argentina until 1959. And in Argentina, I went there. I went to Buenos Aires and also to Vicente Lopez, which is a small town very close to Buenos Aires, very close to northern Buenos Aires. And when you go there, it's very interesting, even for you who are British, because in this neighborhood, Florida, in Vicente Lopez, you...

Betina (16:22.156)
you see a lot of big houses, nice houses, and they were from the British and the German community in Buenos Aires, in Vicente Lopez. It is almost the same, it's very close. It's in greater Buenos Aires, let's say so. And the streets, there are lots of trees, the houses are big, the streets are very quiet, and this...

both communities lived together in Vicente Lopez, the British and the German. And in the German community, so the Nazi criminals could blend in very easily because there were lots of Germans there. It's not something that you arrive there, you know, I'm the only German here. No, it's not like that. So they could blend in very easily. And in Argentina in the 1950s,

you had a lot of Nazi criminals living there. So I went to the, I took all the addresses that Mengele lived in and I went to these addresses and I realized how the Nazis lived close to each other in this neighborhood. And there was this house, I took a picture in some of my book, where they had these meetings with all the Nazis, you you could...

I could imagine the scenes, know. There was Mengele, there was Eichmann, there was Willem Sasen, an SS official from the Netherlands. There was Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a pilot from the Luftwaffe, the most con-decorated pilot from the Luftwaffe.

There were so many Nazi criminals, know, and they were meeting there in Buenos Aires without being bothered. They even had a magazine, right wing magazine, the AVIC, that they edited there. And William Sassen, he worked for this magazine. He wrote many texts for this magazine. And William Sassen, this Dutch guy that I'm talking about, he was the one who recorded

Betina (18:41.258)
Eichmann tapes because Eichmann wanted to give testimony and so on. So William Sassen was the one who recorded all what he said, all his interviews, you know. So you had this Nazi atmosphere in Buenos Aires, very lively one. And they could meet, they could, you know, do many things. But one point is important to highlight.

that although Mengele knew Eichmann from Buenos Aires, they met a couple of times, maybe more, but they were not friends, Eichmann and Mengele. I have the impression that Mengele didn't like Eichmann very much because Mengele was from a rich family and so on and Eichmann had this, he was so defeated, I don't know, he had a very simple life at the end of his life.

In Buenos Aires he went to live in the suburbs and he had a very humble life, Eichmann, the opposite of Mengele at this time.

Waitman Beorn (19:54.206)
This is, mean, this is fascinating to me. This, period in Argentina where you have sort of a Nazi reunion of like all different, all different Nazis. mean, it, what changed with that? That, that, cause I guess Mengele felt safe or safer in this, in this group, but then he decides to move or he has to move.

Betina (20:21.994)
Yeah, the first thing he lived there, he even like at the end of this period, he even got his real name back. He had to, he married, so he had to take an Argentinian ID. So he gave his real name and I think he...

Waitman Beorn (20:43.773)
had to get divorced too, right? I mean, this is another thing where he used his real name as well.

Betina (20:46.476)
Yes, got divorced and then he got married, exactly. And then he got married to Marta, his second wife, so he gave his real name. So in these last days in Buenos Aires, he was living under his real name, at least on the document, you know.

Waitman Beorn (21:08.989)
Well, and presumably the German authorities knew as well, right? Because his wife in Germany, his first wife, right? Irene had decided she doesn't want to be married to a guy in hiding in South America anymore. And so she had to get him to sign the paperwork in his real name. So presumably some German, you know, mayor's office or legal court had a document signed by Joseph Mengele.

Betina (21:39.272)
Yes, they knew. Yes, they knew in the German consulate, you know. They knew and they didn't do anything because there were many Nazis in the German bureaucracy at this time, you know. At the Interpol as well. So they didn't have the interest to do anything. That's the truth. You know, the Germans at this time, you know. The Germans that wanted to do something to get Mengele caught.

Waitman Beorn (21:39.587)
divorcing him from his wife.

Betina (22:08.782)
were the victims and also the Jews. this is, we have Fritz Bauer, this very, very famous prosecutor that was someone that tried to bring Mengele to justice, you know, in the 1960s. So in 1959, you had the prison order.

to get Mengele caught, so he thought, my God, I have to go out of Argentina because they can extradite me to Germany and then I will have a problem. This was 1959. So he was living in, he had been living in Buenos Aires already for 10 years. So that's why he decided to go to Paraguay. And in Paraguay, there was also this German community there in an area called Hohenau.

And as I mentioned before, Mengele was friends with Hans Ulrich Hudel, the pilot. And Hudel was very well related. He knew a lot of people here in South America, not only in Argentina, but also in Paraguay. So he introduced some people to Mengele in Paraguay, and Mengele started selling machinery from the Mengele company in Gunzburg.

And he started doing business there in Paraguay. And so he thought, and he also managed to get Paraguayan ID, citizenship. So he thought, OK, I cannot be extradited to Germany because I'm a Paraguayan citizen. And he got this with the help of Nazi sympathizers that attested that he was living in Paraguay for five years because he only could have citizenship.

if you had been living there for at least five years. So he was living there months and he got the citizenship. So he thought he was safe and he also managed to go back to Buenos Aires from time to time to visit his second wife, Martha. So he thought he was safe. Nothing would happen to him. But then in 1960, this was the big turning point because

Betina (24:35.928)
This was the year when Eichmann, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires and was taken to Jerusalem where he stood trial. He was there for two years and then in 1962 he stood trial and was hanged. And this is a turning point for the Nazi community in Buenos Aires and also turning point for Mangalore story.

That's why in October 1960 he decides to come here to Brazil and he came here to São Paulo first and spent the next 18 years here in Brazil. And how he came here to São Paulo? Again, this very well-related friend, Rudel, the pilot, he knew

a guy here called Wolfgang Gerhardt, an Austrian expat who was living here and who could receive him and give him some shelter and some support at least at the beginning. So Mengele came here and he thought he was safe from the Mossad because I think they wouldn't imagine that he was up here in Sao Paulo. It's a three hour flight from Buenos Aires, so it's not close.

not exactly close. And that's how he begins his life here in Brazil.

Waitman Beorn (26:08.637)
And one of the things that's really interesting, and we'll start to jump around a little bit, but you know, this is not a case, because for example, I just finished this book on the Unovska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. for example, SS police general in Lviv was a guy named Fritz Katzmann. And Katzmann, after the war,

You know, he was very wanted because he had presided over the murder of 400 plus thousand Jews from Galicia. And so he disappears. He never goes home to his family. He never makes contact. He, he lives under a false name and literally until the day he dies. And then he tells a nun or whatever that he was who he was. But he, you know, he just completely abandoned his family and they had no idea. Which I think.

Other Nazis sort of did as well in attempts to disappear. But Mengele doesn't. Mengele's family seems very, very involved, knowledgeable about him. supportive, I think clearly of him. I mean, they're not, they're not, they're certainly not turning him in when they're certainly not cutting him off from family resource. Can you talk a little bit about.

what your take is on sort of the relationship between the Mengele family and and Dr. Mengele when he's living in South America.

Betina (27:46.606)
Sure, you know, there were more than 80 archives here in São Paulo with letters and so on, letters that Mengele received from his family and friends in Germany, and also letters that he wrote to them. And these letters covered the last years of his life, starting in 1969, if I'm not wrong, until...

his last letter, you know, saying I'm going to the beach, the beach where he drowned. So you have a very good insight into his personal life and into his personal feelings. And these letters, he receives letters from his nephew and from his son, Rolf.

And so you can see that's tense relationship because of course he's a burden for his family. But also on the other hand, they didn't abandon him. They sent over this employee called Hans Sedlemeyer who worked for the Mengele company and also went to school with Mengele.

and he came here to South America many times to bring Mengele money. Also, Hof brought Mengele money, but Hof came here to Brazil only once while he was still alive. It was in 1977. And also Rudolf came here to São Paulo to bring Mengele money. know, Mengele had the support of his family until his last days.

And so financially he was okay. He didn't have a very rich life here in Sao Paulo as many people thought. You had this big movie called Boys from Brazil. I don't know if you watched it. It was very famous and it came out in the late seventies. And on this film Mengele appears like a very, let's say,

Waitman Beorn (29:53.447)
Mm-hmm.

Betina (30:06.958)
Posh, former SS former, he wears a white suit and he arrives by plane in Paraguay and he visits a mansion and so on. And you know, when Rolf came to visit him in 1977, he said that the best disguise was the way he was living here in Sao Paulo because he used to live in a very humble neighborhood, you know.

It had nothing to do with what the imagination of all the people were thinking of, you know, the movies and books and so on. And it's very funny because when this film came out, Mengele was still alive. So probably he saw this movie, you know, and he thought, my God, he must have thought, my God, in the movies I have a very, very...

Posh life and my reality is not the same as in the movies. But it was a good disguise, know, no one thought that this humble old man was such a big war criminal living here in the outskirts of São Paulo.

Waitman Beorn (31:21.909)
Did you, did you try to talk to his family for the book, to see what, or his descendants or anything to sort of see how they, how they come to terms with the fact that essentially their family knew that this really awful work and what all was around and, concealed it and aided him in never coming to justice.

Betina (31:45.23)
I read the letters that they wrote to him and so this gave me a very good insight and also interviews that Rolf gave me but I didn't talk to them, it was not my focus but it was very curious how they... one letter for example was saying that they were very careful

when Mengele wanted to move his house, you know, when they wanted to move because they had this thought that maybe he could meet another neighbor that could recognize him and so on. So they were discussing Mengele's move. And this struck me, you know, because I thought, my God, he had like, I don't know, they were so protective.

You know, even after so many years, they really cared about him because his two brothers, younger brothers, were already dead. So he was the only one from this generation still alive. So the nephew and the son, they cared about him. You know, I have this feeling.

Waitman Beorn (33:03.165)
And, and, and certainly, I guess at a minimum, they, at a certain point, they also didn't want to be found out. Cause if he gets captured, if he gets caught, then it all comes out that they were supporting him. And that's probably not, you know, not good for business, I suppose. I mean, it's not great to have the Mengele family name as your, you know, farm equipment company, but it's probably worse if that comes out that you actually knew where he was the whole time and never told anybody.

Betina (33:31.63)
Yes, sure. And they denied that they knew anything about Mengele. They denied this in public. You have interviews, TV interviews in the United States. For example, I mentioned this on the book. But something that Rolf told Bunze magazine was that he didn't know because, you know, they had a decision to make in 1979 when Mengele died. They could simply say that he died, you know, but

They didn't. So the world kept looking for Mengele for six years, all his victims and so on. They were still thinking that he was still alive, but he wasn't. He was already dead. So, and they thought the story would go on forever. They would never find out what really happened to him. And I have a theory why they found out, but I'll you later. So, but at this time in 1985,

Holf Mengele told Bunta Magazine, a German magazine, that he didn't say anything six years earlier because he didn't want to betray his friends here in Brazil. Liselotte Bossert, my teacher, her husband, Wolfram Bossert, and also the other families that helped Mengele out here in Brazil. So he didn't want to do something that could be criminal for them, and it was.

Here in Brazil it was criminal, it was a crime to help out a Nazi criminal. But in Germany, no. If you were related to someone and you helped them, it was not a crime. So Rolf, in Germany, this wouldn't be a crime for Rolf, you know. But it would be a crime, for example, for Hans Sadler-Meier, because they were not from the same family.

Waitman Beorn (35:26.957)
right. OK. Yeah. So we think about some of these people that you talked about in the book in South America, these these families that he sort of.

gets placed with, you know, can you talk a little about that and sort of his his relationships with these these these families that he sort of moves between because he's never as I understand it, he's never sort of necessarily just living by himself in a house. He's he's always kind of with other people.

Betina (36:01.974)
Yeah, sure. So let's start from the beginning. So how Mengele got this contact here in Brazil was through Rudolf again, the pilot that they mentioned many times before, because he's a central figure here and just out of curiosity. I did a talk here in Brazil last year with an Austrian author. She wrote a book called Surazo. And this book explores the relationship

in between Germany, the Nazi past and Bolivia. Klaus Barbie and so on. And also the left wing guerrilla there with Che Guevara and so on. So they all have a relation there. And know, Rudo appears in her book as well. So I thought, my God, I didn't know that Rudo also had relations to Bolivia. So you know, he was really well related here in South America.

Waitman Beorn (37:00.061)
Well, and it's also a great point, you know, for those of our listeners know that I'm, know, my first book was on sort of another nail in the coffin of the clean Wehrmacht, right? The idea that the Wehrmacht was sort of aloof and from Nazi war crimes. And Rudel is a great example of that because there are so many people.

Betina (37:00.844)
Many conflicts.

Waitman Beorn (37:24.067)
out there who are just kind of like fans of Rudol because he was this amazing, you know, pilot and very decorated and he had all of these kills, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and they try to sort of to enjoy that, that fandom in isolation. But here you have a guy who is literally after the war going out of his way to help the worst.

Nazi war criminals, you know, escape justice. And I think it just bears, it just bears repeating that, you know, if you didn't know already that, you know, these people are bad people, you know, I mean, regardless of how good a pilot he might've been, he's a horrible human being.

Betina (38:07.988)
Yeah, you know, there's this myth of Odessa. I think you've heard about it. There was this organization that helped out as officer after the world war and so on. This big organization didn't exist, as they put it. You know, there was also a book very famous in the 70s talking about Odessa and so on. This is a myth, you know, it's very

Glamorous myth. Again, very glamorous. But in the real life, there was some kind of organization between them, among them. But it was not this glamorous organization. It was a small network, as they call it in German. They had this Kameradenwerk. It's like you have your buddies, you know each other, so I make contact.

with this guy, with this another guy, please help out my friend, he's going to Brazil and so on. And that's exactly what Rudolf did with Mengele. He contacted his friend, Wolfgang Gerhard, this Austrian guy, Nazi sympathizer that lived here in Sao Paulo. And he said, please help him out. And that's what he did. So Wolfgang Gerhard was the first contact for Mengele here in Sao Paulo.

and he lived in the outskirts of the city, a place that was very remote back then, at this time. Not even the bus arrived there, you know, they didn't have light and so on, so you can imagine how simple life must have been back then. And although Wolfgang Gerhardt was a very, very fan of Nazism,

His first son was called Adolf, so you can imagine. He couldn't keep Mengele with him, you know. He didn't have resources. He had four kids. He had a very small company, so he couldn't have him living at the same house as him. So, Wolfgang Gerhard used to go to this...

Betina (40:32.046)
parties, this Austro-Hungarian parties that we had here in São Paulo back in the 50s, and he met this Hungarian family called Stammer, and they just arrived here in Brazil from Hungary because they were fleeing communism in Europe. They were not Nazis, but they were here for another reason.

So, and then Wolfgang Gerhardt told them, you know, I have this Swiss friend of mine who is looking for a job. He wants to work and so on. He's alone. Could you keep him? And then they thought, all right, let's keep him because they were going to move to a farm and the husband, Gesa Stammer, had to travel a lot. So his wife, Gita Stammer, was going to be alone a lot. So it was good to have someone there with her.

like managing also the small farm and so on. So Mengele went to the countryside of the São Paulo province. São Paulo is a state, a city, and also a province here in Brazil, very big province. Probably the size of United Kingdom, you know? It's very big. So this first farm that he went to live, it was in a region that's very, very hot.

and Gita Stammer coming from Hungary didn't manage to live there, so they decided to go to another spot called Serra Negra, also here in the state of São Paulo, the province. And Serra Negra has a mild climate, much better and so on. And reading Mengele's letters, the letters that they mentioned before, you could see that they started having a financial relationship as well.

Because Mengele says in these letters that he helped to buy this small farm in Serra Negra, that he gave some money to buy this farm. So you see that they had not just a personal relationship, but also financial relationship. And the Stammers, they said that they didn't know that Mengele was Mengele from the beginning. But after one year that he was living with them,

Betina (42:57.102)
Gita Stammer found it out because she saw something, a picture on the newspaper talking about the atrocities that Mengele did in Auschwitz and she thought, my God, this guy looks exactly like you. Please tell me who you are. I think I deserve to know this. And then he reveals it that, all right, it's me. You have the right to know. And then later to the federal police here in Brazil, she...

She says that she didn't call the authorities, didn't say anything, because she started to be threatened by Wolfgang Gerhard. That she shouldn't say anything and she was very afraid. And so that's why she didn't tell anything to the authorities, because he was already someone being looked after by authorities.

That's how he escaped justice here in Brazil for the first time. There were many other times, but this was the first time. And then Mengele lived with this Stammer family for 13 years. later after Serra Negra, they went to Cairas, another small town where he gets to know the Bosserts, this family from my teacher. And then in his last years,

here in Brazil the four years I think Mengele came here to São Paulo the city the capital of the state and he lives on his own in a small house in front of reservoir and with a very humble neighborhood.

Waitman Beorn (44:39.483)
And one of the things that I found fascinating and I certainly didn't know about before I was reading the book is the, the really sort of uneven stop and go attempts by the Masaad to, to go after him and how close they were at certain points when they just decided for various reasons to kind of give up or go in different direction. Can you talk a little bit about, about some of these

these attempts by the Mossad to track him down, of course is coming both concurrently with and then shortly after the operation to take down Eichmann as well.

Betina (45:20.382)
Yeah, sure. When I started to research this book, I went to Israel for three weeks as a journalist. And I was determined to hear someone from the Mossad about Mengele's case, you know. And I tried so hard and even I talked to everyone, also the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Israel. And when you said the name Mossad, people...

They didn't say anything about it. They didn't want to say anything about it. And then when I was on my last day there in Israel, in Tel Aviv, I managed to arrange an interview with Hafey Eitan. Hafey Eitan was simply the operation commander of Aichmann's kidnapping, and he was also operational commander.

of Mengele's kidnapping. This is a story that people don't know because a story that not well succeeded. So that's why Eichmann became a film, his kidnapping became a film and Mengele's kidnapping didn't go anywhere because it didn't happen. So at this time when I met Raffi Eitan, he was 90.

And he was very lucid, he remembered everything and he could talk a lot and he had many details also in his head. I was quite impressed, you know. And then he told me some very interesting things. From the start, he said that Eichmann was caught. I asked him, why was Eichmann caught? Why not another Nazi?

because Ben Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, gave this order to the Mossad chief, Yisrael Harel, that he had to bring a Nazi criminal to Israel, so to be judged, so the new generations would know from this trial what the Nazis did to the Jews, because he was afraid that the youngest generation was losing it, didn't know about this story.

Betina (47:31.38)
So that's an, and Raffi Eitan, one of the things that he told me was that they got Eichmann because he found him first, but it was not the idea like, let's go to Eichmann first and then to Mengele, then no, it wasn't like that. And at the same time, at the same period that they kidnapped Eichmann, they wanted to kidnap Mengele as well. Because as I told you before,

Mengele was living in Paraguay at this time after the kidnapping, but he came back to Buenos Aires sometimes to visit Martha and so on. And Rafael told me that there was also an internal fight in the Mossad because some people wanted to wait for Mengele and bring him to Jerusalem with Eichmann and other part of the group thought no.

It's not safe, know, the operation is going very well until now. We have Eichmann, everything is right. Now if we wait for Mengele, maybe it's not going to be right. So they decided to go back to Jerusalem with Eichmann and Hafi Eitan stayed in Buenos Aires with another two operatives from the Mossad and they were searching for Mengele. And they got very close because

people, they got to know people that knew him, but they didn't manage to catch him in Buenos Aires. So after, and then Haffington also went to Paraguay, to Hohenau, and so on. And after some time, after two years, Mossad had a new clue on Mengele, bringing directly here to Sao Paulo. And how they got this clue? Following Ruedo.

So they knew Rudolf met with Wolfgang Gerhardt here in São Paulo and they started following Wolfgang Gerhardt and then that's how they came to a very small farm in Itapesirica da Serra which is 40 kilometers from São Paulo and Rafaetan told me that he came face to face to Mengele at this time.

Betina (49:51.886)
And he also told me that Mossad had a modus operandi, and they must still have another modus operandi, think, that they just not got like, you know, you see the target and you just kidnap the person and so on. It's not like that. Mossad is very, you know, it's one of the best intelligence service in the world, maybe second to CIA or maybe best, I don't know.

They are smaller for sure. And then, Rafael told me that they had like four stages before they kidnapped someone. And the first stage was of course finding this target. And the second stage was like looking around, seeing like the habits of the person, seeing what they did every day and so on until they come to the kidnapping. When they were on the first stage, they got a call from Israel telling them,

the three agents, Mossad agents that were here in Sao Paulo, that they had to go back to Israel because Egypt was producing missiles with the help of German scientists and these missiles were able to reach any point on the Israeli territory. So this was very urgent and they had to go back and the Mossad didn't have

many resources so they had to go back to Israel. So that's how Mengele was very lucky because probably he could have been kidnapped at this point. And then in 2019 or 2017, I'm not sure, on my book there's the real date, I don't know it by heart, but the Mossad opened its archives on the Mengele hunt.

And from these archives, you got to know that they came back to Brazil other times and that they had very strong clues on Mengele. And in my opinion, I don't know, I think if they saw their archives from the previous years, what the previous agents had done before, they would have caught Mengele.

Betina (52:18.806)
The feeling that I have is that the information was disconnected. And this is something very common in intelligence services. you see this happened in Israel right now with the Hamas massacre. They said that the intelligence was disconnected and so on. And in Mengele's case, I think this was the problem because Mossad already knew about Wolfgang Gerhardt here in Brazil.

in the 1960s and the German police would arrive to to Wolfgang Gerhardt only in 1985. You see more than 25 years later you know it's a lot.

Waitman Beorn (53:02.471)
Well, it's one of the things that you mentioned in your first conversation with Liza Lott. So Liza Lott, one of the people that Mengele lived with, the last group, I guess, that he knew, they were friends with. And she sort of, when you tried to talk to her in the beginning, she sort of suggested that there was this shadowy...

some kind of threatening organization out there, that was either threatening her or paying her to be quiet. I mean, did you, do you get a sense that there are still people in, in Sao Paulo or elsewhere in South America that are sort of still holding on to secrets like this that they don't want to come out? Or is that, or was that sort of a

a boogeyman that, that she made up to kind of excuse her talking to you or excuse her actions.

Betina (54:02.618)
No, of course there are many people that knew these war criminals and they are still alive and they don't want to talk about it. I know it from my experience because I knew this boy who grew up with me. I was a Girl Scout, let's say so, and he was Boy Scout. And we grew together, he's my age. And then I met, I was trying to get an interview from his uncle.

And his uncle is from another family that was friends with Mengele, the Glavi family. I mentioned this family in the book. And you have to keep in mind that I know this guy since I was a child. And then I came to him and I said, you know, your uncle, does he want to give an interview to me? I'm writing this book and so on. And I had already asked once.

And then he told me he got very angry with me and he said in a very frightening way, he said, you know, he doesn't want to appear in your book. If his name is on your book, I'm going to sue you and my uncle is going to sue you. Of course, all his friends knew who Mengele was. They talked to him and so on, but they don't want to say anything.

So it was very creepy coming from someone that I knew since I was a child. I wasn't expecting this behavior nowadays. And on my book, there is a photo of a barbecue here in Sao Paulo where Mengele appears with a lot of young people. And then when the book was released, two people came to me and said, you know, my brother is on this picture.

Another woman came to me, you know, my mother is in-laws on this picture. So of course, there are people that Mengele knew that were younger than him, of course, because nowadays he would be 110, I think, I don't know how old. But yes, many young people that knew Mengele here in Sao Paulo, they are still alive. They are old now, of course, but they don't want to talk and they don't want to appear.

Waitman Beorn (56:23.773)
That's really interesting. mean, it's one of the things I'm always fascinated by historically is kind of like family memories, family, family reactions to either having a Nazi in the family or in this case, I suppose, having sheltered them. And it's interesting that even in, in Brazil, you sort of have this cone of silence around the families. Um, and I suspect that, you know, they're

There probably are other Nazi war criminals who we don't know about who ended up in, in Sao Paulo or in other places in South America too. And so it's, kind of like unraveling a thread that, that might lead to places that other people don't want you to go.

Betina (57:11.028)
Yeah, I think we should study a bit more about like Nazi criminals here in Sao Paulo, I think, and also in other countries here in South America. I think we have many books, history books on the Second World War in Europe and so on, but we don't have much research here in South America. I think we have a lot of things we could find out digging deeper. And I know that here in Sao Paulo, other...

important Nazi criminals lived here, for example, Franz Stangel, who was the commander of Treblinka and Sobibor. Gustav Wagner, who was the commander of Sobibor. These were extermination camps. And also, Herbert Sukurs, who was an SS officer from Latvia, and he was responsible for a massacre of Jews.

Waitman Beorn (57:45.245)
Mm-hmm.

Betina (58:10.252)
I think this, I'm sure this other tree lived here in Sao Paulo and they lived at the same time that Mengele was living here.

Waitman Beorn (58:19.185)
Do you think they knew each other?

Betina (58:21.698)
I know that Mengele, I know this from the police investigation, that Wolfgang Gerhardt wanted to help Franz Stangel, you know, because you know, was this Nazi sympathizer, he wanted to help all the Nazis friends. And then he told Mengele that he wanted to go to the prison where Franz Stangel was and wanted to kidnap him. He had like a bad plan, a very...

crazy plan to help Stanghel and Mengele said, no, no way. I'm not going to help Stanghel because people will find it out and then they will find me. So on the newspapers at this time, it's very, very funny because the main newspaper in Brazil at the time says, so, you know, police arrested Stanghel and so on. And it appears that Mengele used to live here in Brazil.

You know, they had a clue, but they didn't go after this clue because they didn't know for sure. But you could read this like back in the end of the 70s.

Waitman Beorn (59:34.813)
It's amazing. mean, and so just to kind of, I suppose, wrap up a little bit, right? So he is, is, I guess, not living with the the Balserts, but he's very close to them and he goes with them on vacation. And that's when he dies, right? Has a heart attack or whatever while swimming. And

And his body is then buried in, was it Gerhard's family grave? And so he's buried under a false name in Sao Paulo. So then how does the world, which doesn't know he's dead and his family aren't telling, and obviously the people that are helping him are telling, how does the world find out that he is dead? This is your theory.

Betina (01:00:10.21)
Yes, Wolfgang Gert's name.

Betina (01:00:29.43)
Okay, that's what I wanted to, this is my theory that I wanted to tell you before. My theory is that the victims didn't let the story die. And this is very important, I think this is a good example for today as well, that we see a lot of war criminals going around the world, Vladimir Putin for example. And you had this twin,

called Eva Moses Kaur, this American twin. And she went to Auschwitz when she was 10 years old with her sister Irene. And Irene had a very bad kidney problem and she was almost dying because of her kidney problem. And the doctors told her, you know, you have to tell us.

what happened to you in Auschwitz, what did Mengele do to you so we can help you out because you have a kidney of a 10 year old girl. That's why it's so bad. And then she said, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what happened to me in Auschwitz. I was just subject of experiment. I don't know what they did to me. So Eva thought, you know, if I find the other twins, maybe together we can find out what happened to us.

I could get more information and so on. And with this idea in mind, in 1984, she went after all the twins that were still alive and she did an amazing work. She and Irene, sorry, her sister was not Irene, was Miriam, sorry, Eva and Miriam. And they...

they found more than 100 twins in many different countries. This was amazing. Apparently you didn't have internet, know. I don't know how they managed to do this, but it was a fantastic work. And then in February 1985, they organized in Jerusalem with the help of other victims, a mock trial for Mengele because no one knew where he was, so he couldn't go to trial, the proper trial.

Betina (01:02:43.542)
So they organized a mock trial. so during three days, many victims and also witnesses gave their testimonies to this trial. And they told their experiences. were horrible, creepy experiences. And all this was broadcast. You could see this on television all over the world, even here in Brazil.

I saw some parts of this mock trial that we have in our archives, I work for television, and we showed this back then. Probably the Bossard family saw this as well on television, maybe. And so this got very emotional, and then three governments decided that it was about time to catch Mengele, the government of...

Germany, Israel and of the United States. So they came together, they helped each other and after three months they got a clue here to Brazil to the door of my teacher's house here very close to where I live because of the letters exchanged by Mengele and his families and friends. So, but at that time they didn't know that Mengele was dead.

They presumed that he was dead because of some information, but they were not sure. And then the German police gave this investigation job, let's say, to the Brazilian police. And from there, the Brazilian police took over. And then they got to Lizelotte Bossert, and she told the story, know, Mengele, of course, you're right. He lived here in Brazil for...

for many years, but he's already dead for six years. I buried him under a false name at the cemetery, close to Sao Paulo and so on. And so the police said, all right, so let's go there. And then the next day they started the exhumation of the body. And this was a big event. All journalists from all over the world came here. The coverage was bigger.

Betina (01:05:05.73)
than when the Brazilian president died three months earlier. The first civil Brazilian president after our dictatorship. He died, the coverage of Mengele's skeleton was bigger than that. So you have a sense of how huge this fact was back then.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:11.655)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:31.077)
And so, you know, there's, there's then this sort of, and you go into it in great detail in the book and I don't want to sort of spoil it, I suppose. but there's a, you know, there's a forensic, investigation that, ultimately concludes that this is in fact him. even though some people still think, still thought that he was alive and that this was yet another sort of.

know, trick of the trade, sort of get him out of it, but it turns out that that's actually him,

Betina (01:06:08.14)
Yes, exactly. know, conspiracy theories make me tired. I hate them, sorry. But you know, the way the exhumation was done gave some space for conspiracy, you know, because when I saw the archives and saw the images, I was laughing, you know, because...

The authorities here in Brazil, they took the bones without wearing gloves. They were stepping on the skeleton on earth and everything. They didn't have, they weren't careful. You must not be from the police to know that this was not right. So all the foreign experts, the Germans, the Americans, they were like...

They didn't trust so much the Brazilian authorities, I think, because of this. At some point, the Brazilian guy just came with a mangled screw on his hand, holding it like a Shakespearean moment. This was not very professional. But then, OK, this was a big circus because of the press that was there. I don't know. This was the 80s. This was something very different from

what we have nowadays. But then later on, the doctors, the Brazilian doctors did a very nice work here in Brazil. And you have to remember at this time, we didn't have the DNA, like, so you could sort it out very easily and very quickly. So they did a very good job. But I think the beginning was a little bit alarming. And also you had the fact that many people had this theory.

that Mengele was not dead, that he was pretending that he was dead so he could escape and live his life without being persecuted and so on. And of course, this was just a theory, but because later in 1992, when we had access to the DNA test, they did this test and then they discovered that was 99,9.

Betina (01:08:29.87)
percent sure that these bones were from Mengele, so there's no doubt.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:36.478)
And what happened to the skeleton now? It's kind of an interesting story,

Betina (01:08:41.62)
Yes, this is a very ironic part because, you know, I interviewed for six hours the doctor that worked on Mengele's skeleton and they got this skeleton from the police and so on. And after the job was done, the skeleton was forgotten for many, many years. And then this doctor who happens to be also a professor at

at the university thought, my God, I will teach my students like with a real skeleton and I will teach them pathology and so on with Mengele's skeleton. So Mengele became, let's say, so like an object of study. So he wanted to be someone famous and important in the university and he became that, just not the way he

Waitman Beorn (01:09:38.301)
you

Betina (01:09:39.81)
He fought.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:42.077)
And guess the other, the other piece that, that, is outstanding is because you mentioned this in the book and I think it's fascinating that one of things he may have been Mengele may have been very interested in covering his tracks and just about everything and paranoid about being caught. But when he leaves Europe, he brings with him all of his medical notes and documents.

et cetera, which are, you know, an absolute smoking gun. If anybody ever found them, right. That, mean, like when he's, when he's traveling, you know, he has these documents that he's written and that are directly implicating him and have Al Schwitz written all over them, et cetera, presumably. but I'm guessing that these have never surfaced and we don't know what, whatever happened to them.

Betina (01:10:33.77)
Yeah, no, and you know something very strange happened after I released the book here in Brazil because the director of the Auschwitz Museum got in contact with me through LinkedIn and he asked me, do you know that something very big about Mengele is about to come out in Brazil? I don't know what and so on. Could you help me with that?

And then I was thinking, my God, what is coming out? And I thought of this, know, it must be his records. Maybe, yes, maybe it's still possible that they can come out. I think there are things that we still don't know about Mengele here in Brazil, because research here in Brazil is not like in England. When I studied in England, I went to the Kew Gardens archive. It was everything so organized and so on.

Here in Brazil it's very different. For me to have access to the police investigation, I got to know someone who had this investigation and gave me this investigation and so on. And then I went to the federal police to have access to the letters. The letters were forgotten in a cupboard. They were there, like, behind something. do you want this? Is this that you're looking for? said, yes. It's not so organized. So maybe.

we can find somewhere in a dusty cupboard something very interesting, still very interesting.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:05.841)
Well, and you found already some, mean, like the fact that he kept a diary for a while. And I guess that's available in an archive someplace as are, as is his sort of autobiography, which is like very thinly disguised as a novel. mean, these, there are lots of actual writings that he did while he was in hiding that sort of, that still exist.

Betina (01:12:25.228)
Yes.

Betina (01:12:30.806)
Yeah, you know, these diaries are very interesting because many of them were here in his last house in São Paulo, this house in front of this reservoir that I mentioned before. you know, the Bosset family told the Stammer family, you can take this, you know, they didn't keep his diaries.

And then later, I don't know who and how, someone sold these diaries and they got like almost $200,000 for these diaries. And the house was worth $50,000. So it was much better to have the diaries than the house, you know? And the financial perspective, it was better. But from what I know,

There was this guy, an ultra-orthodox Jew, who bought this diary. His name was not disclosed. And he kept these diaries because he didn't want people to read about his personal life and so on, or to misuse them and so on. Because this is one important part. You know, in my book, I tell a lot about outfits and how Mengele became Mengele and so on, and how he did his experiments and interview.

a lot of survivors. Because if you take Mengele out of his context, you can have a wrong picture of him. If you take him out of Auschwitz and you don't mention it, he can appear to be a nice guy who likes going for walks with his dogs, eating berries, going to waterfalls.

talking to his friends in German, discussing literature, discussing astrology, drinking wine, going to the beach, you know, seems a very regular guy. He even liked the Brazilian soap operas. He says in his letters that he didn't miss one because we had soap operas. In Brazil, people used to love soap operas like in England. He says...

Betina (01:14:50.37)
He said that he watched the six, seven, and eight o'clock soap operas. He didn't miss one, you know? So he was a very regular guy here in Brazil. And if you don't say what he did in Auschwitz, you could have the wrong image.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:06.17)
I mean, it's a great point. I will highlight that. really should, the listeners, I the book Hiding Mengele, it's really good. It's really detailed. And it does provide all of that important context of what Mengele did to human beings and the very real sort of suffering that he caused. That's all in the book. It's not just a book sort of focused on

on Mengele as a biography. It's really much more about, you know, all of his sort of life after the war, but also including, you know, plenty of context of what he did at Auschwitz. And again, I can't, I can't recommend it enough, but we've taken up a ton of your time already. And before we go, I just want to ask our question.

which I normally ask everyone, which is what is it? What is a book that you would recommend about the Holocaust that's been meaningful to you or important or that you would recommend that our listeners check out?

Betina (01:16:06.84)
Well, I read many, many books on Holocaust. I could recommend a lot of them with testimonies and so on. They're very touching books. But I think there's one Holocaust book that is fundamental for someone who wants to know what really happened. And it's called The Holocaust by Lawrence Reese. And it's very complete.

And I think it's where anyone should start when you want to have the whole picture of this horrible system, of this killing machine that was Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:48.525)
Excellent. And we'll put that on the on the reading list. And obviously we'll have links to your book at the bottom of the podcast on all the various sites. Thank you so much for coming on and to our listeners again. Thank you so much. We are.

vastly, vastly approaching 50 episodes, which is kind of crazy. and I really appreciate all of you listening. And, also if you have a moment to sort of give us a rating or a comment as always, that'll be amazing. again, Bettina, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your work.

Betina (01:17:28.738)
Thank you so much, Waitman, for inviting me. It was a pleasure.