Geza Stammer

Geza Stammer is a Hungarian surveyor who becomes both host and adversary to Josef Mengele during Mengele’s years in South America. His household benefits materially from Mengele’s money, but Geza refuses to treat the Nazi’s financial leverage or authority as a reason for deference. Their uneasy arrangement makes Geza’s humour a form of resistance, while the eventual collapse of their shared life shows the limits—and the cost—of that resistance.

Identity and Household

Geza is portrayed as carefree and fond of drinking, smoking, and singing. His work takes him away from the farm, leaving Gitta Stammer, Geza’s wife, and their sons there with Mengele. The narrative describes Geza as lacking authority at home, a condition Mengele exploits by presenting himself as the person entitled to advise the family. Geza is not shown as a political organizer or a pursuer of war criminals; his opposition grows out of daily proximity to a man who intrudes into his home and presumes to govern it. That dependence is real. The Stammers’ living conditions improve through Mengele’s money: they move, acquire agricultural machines that raise the family’s income, and Gitta receives household goods and clothing that had previously been beyond her reach. Mengele also has an intimate relationship with Gitta and treats his financial contribution as grounds for possession and authority. This arrangement places Geza in a compromised position: he resents Mengele’s control, yet the household has benefited from the resources that make the fugitive’s presence possible.

Conflict and Resistance

Mengele’s contempt extends to Geza’s Hungarian identity. He considers Hungarians inferior and uses Geza as an occasion for lectures about Germany’s supposed moral and national superiority. At meals, he tries to dictate the family’s conduct: he objects to their speaking Hungarian, demands wholemeal bread, and criticizes the dishes Geza and the boys enjoy. He also reproaches Geza for smoking and drinking, invoking Nazi-era public-health measures while trying to impose discipline inside another family’s home. Geza rarely answers this authority with a direct confrontation. Instead, he provokes Mengele through humour and trickery, mocking his racial theories and German claims to superiority. He reminds Mengele that Germany, too, is occupied, and ridicules Adolf Hitler by imitating him with a colander on his head. The performance entertains Gitta and the children, but it also exposes the gulf between Mengele’s grandiose reverence for Hitler and the absurdity Geza sees in it. Mengele responds with fury, retreating from the room or taking refuge in his watchtower rather than winning the exchange. Geza’s teasing becomes more deliberate as his sons and the farm workers complain about Mengele. He tries to photograph him with a new Nikon, jokes that Israeli tourists may be watching, and makes fun of his moustache. He also brings home newspapers reporting Mengele’s crimes, the arrest of Nazis, war-crimes trials in West Germany, or victories by Simon Wiesenthal. These gestures bring the public pursuit of fugitives into the farm’s private space, where Mengele has imposed a ban on discussing Auschwitz. Gitta often acts as a buffer after the men’s quarrels; when the household cannot settle a flare-up, Gerhard is called in to restore calm.

The Assault and a Negotiated Stay

The conflict reaches a crisis on Easter Monday in 1964, after Mengele’s university degrees have been revoked and reports about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial Proceedings are being broadcast. Geza taunts him about facing justice and invokes Mengele’s own claim that he had merely performed his duty. Because discussion of Auschwitz is one of Mengele’s forbidden subjects in the household, this challenge provokes a physical attack. Gitta and the boys intervene, and Geza demands that Mengele leave. Mengele does not disclose his suspicions about Gitta during the confrontation, and he does not leave immediately: he argues that he has a stake in the farm and that the Stammers would have to go as well if he did. A move elsewhere is considered. With Hans Sedlmeier’s consent and Uli Rudel’s help, Gerhard discusses the possibility of transferring Mengele to Egypt, Syria, or Morocco. The plan comes to nothing: the process is too complicated, and Mengele’s reputation makes him an unwelcome burden even within Nazi circles. The Mengele family also has a financial and reputational interest in preventing an arrest from damaging its expanding business. To keep the Stammers hosting him, the family offers Geza a new car. Geza initially refuses, but eventually receives a luxury saloon, a chauffeur, and cash for its maintenance. The arrangement is preserved, not reconciled; after the crisis, the household continues much as before.

Separation and Narrative Significance

A later rupture follows when Mengele strikes Gitta during an argument. Geza responds decisively, contacts Wolfram Bossert, and insists that Mengele must leave. The Stammers will not be persuaded by an offer of $5,000. After thirteen years of living together, Geza treats separation as final, while the people who might otherwise shelter Mengele prove unwilling or unable to take him in. The household’s earlier accommodation has become untenable. By then the Stammers have sold their property in Caieiras and moved to a 1,000-square-metre villa in São Paulo. Mengele and his dog have two months to vacate the premises. Geza makes him pay rent for the bungalow Mengele bought with his share of the sale: a poor dwelling in Eldorado, an impoverished suburb of São Paulo. Mengele has no legal recourse against the demand. Geza’s final leverage is therefore practical rather than ideological. He cannot undo the years in which the family depended on Mengele’s money, but he can end their shared household and make the former benefactor pay for a place to live. Geza’s role is defined by this unresolved mixture of dependence, ridicule, and retaliation. His humour repeatedly punctures Mengele’s self-importance, but it does not dissolve Mengele’s control over the household or erase the material bargain that sustained it. The contrast between Geza’s irreverence and Mengele’s insistence on authority turns domestic life into a recurring contest. Its outcome is not a transformation of the fugitive or a public act of justice: it is his expulsion from the Stammer household and his descent from an influential guest into a tenant in a shabby bungalow.