Frankfurt serves as both a public forum for testimony about Auschwitz and a working center of the postwar pursuit of Josef Mengele. The city’s significance lies less in any direct encounter with the fugitive than in the contrast between survivors’ accounts of his crimes and the slow, often obstructed legal efforts to hold him accountable.

The Auschwitz trials and public testimony

In 1964, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt become an increasingly prominent part of the story. Reports from the proceedings reach the Stammer household by radio, where Mengele’s name is repeatedly heard alongside survivors’ testimony about his conduct. The news turns a distant court case into a direct challenge to the fugitive’s imposed rule that Auschwitz must not be discussed. On Easter Monday, Geza Stammer taunts him about facing justice; the confrontation escalates into a physical struggle before the family intervenes. Frankfurt’s trials thus exert an effect beyond the courtroom: their public record of testimony unsettles the concealment on which Mengele’s life in hiding depends.

The trials also belong to a wider postwar reckoning. Survivors’ accounts make the crimes a matter of public and legal record, while Mengele continues to describe his actions in the language of duty and racial policy. The book places these opposing forms of testimony in sharp contrast: a perpetrator’s self-justification cannot erase the accounts brought before the courts.

Bauer’s investigation and the limits of pursuit

Frankfurt is also associated with Fritz Bauer’s investigation of the network maintaining contact with Mengele. In 1964, Bauer, the prosecutor, issues a search warrant for Hans Sedlmeier’s home, convinced that Sedlmeier is acting as an intermediary between Mengele and his family. The search yields no letters or other compromising material; Sedlmeier has been warned in time by a police contact. The failed search reveals how information and personal connections could frustrate a formal judicial inquiry even when investigators had identified a suspected channel of communication.

The pursuit is marked by institutional restraint as well as obstruction. West German authorities rely heavily on procedure and devote no special agents or spies to finding Mengele. Their attention is directed toward Paraguay after evidence emerges that he has obtained citizenship there, while the Paraguayan government refuses to cooperate with extradition efforts. Frankfurt’s investigations therefore form part of a cross-border pursuit whose legal instruments repeatedly meet political resistance and advance only fitfully.

Renewed coordination in 1985

The connection to Frankfurt becomes explicit again in 1985. After Sedlmeier lets slip that he has continued sending money to Mengele, the information reaches the police and prompts a new investigative mandate. On 10 May, a German prosecutor in Frankfurt informs American and Israeli partners that a search of Sedlmeier’s residence is pending. This time the local police do not warn the people under investigation. The subsequent search uncovers coded telephone numbers and copied correspondence linking Mengele with Sedlmeier, Wolfram Bossert, and the Stammers; a letter from Bossert reports Mengele’s death.

Those discoveries redirect investigators toward Brazil, where surveillance and searches lead to the identification of Mengele’s grave under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. Frankfurt’s role is therefore part of the evidentiary chain that turns an old, repeatedly frustrated pursuit into a coordinated international investigation. The city links the public proceedings of the 1960s with the renewed police work that, in 1985, helps expose the people and communications surrounding the fugitive.