Hohenau is a German-settler town in southern Paraguay whose village routines briefly frame Josef Mengele’s life in hiding. Near the Argentine border, the surrounding countryside offers a place to disappear, but not the secure domestic refuge he wants: amid its farms and festivals, Mengele remains anxious about capture, dissatisfied with his host, and increasingly at odds with his family’s needs.

Setting and Village Life

The town’s buildings spread around a church square, while red-earth streets lead toward the Paraná River. The book depicts a mixed local landscape: Guarani residents pass time near the square; cattle and pigs move through the streets; stalls sell sausages and snakeskins; and children drive ox carts toward the river. European settlers work in fields of corn and watermelons under the heat. These details place Hohenau at a remove from the urban networks and comforts Mengele had left behind, in a community organized around farming and village routine.

Seasonal gatherings interrupt that routine. The autumn beer festival offers a diversion, and a banquet welcomes the southern spring. Rural laborers dance in lines and circles as the festivities grow lively; Mengele watches nervously. The scene sets communal celebration against his guarded, unsettled presence. He is physically among the settlers, but the narration presents him as an observer who cannot share their ease.

Refuge with Alban Krug

Mengele reaches this rural refuge after receiving word that an arrest warrant has been issued in West Germany and that Argentina may be asked to extradite him. With little confidence that he can remain safely in Buenos Aires, he turns to Uli Rudel for help finding a hiding place in a German community. Rudel approaches Alban Krug, a Nazi who owns a farm in the Nueva Bavaria enclave, a few kilometres from the Argentine border. The farm and the surrounding settlement offer distance from the city and proximity to a community where German language and connections can help a fugitive blend in.

Krug is an imperfect protector in Mengele’s eyes. Though loosely responsible for a farm cooperative, he appears more interested in beer, his wife’s cooking, and hunting and fishing with his children than in the farm’s accounts. He brushes aside the modern management methods Mengele tries to teach him. The contrast is practical as well as personal: Mengele wants to impose order and improve the enterprise, while Krug does not share his priorities. The book compares Krug’s loyalty and lack of learning, as Mengele perceives them, to those of his dog, Heinrich Lyons. Shelter does not become companionship; the host’s presence itself becomes another source of irritation.

Work, Anxiety, and Family Strain

Mengele continues to work as a traveling salesman, carrying a catalogue of agricultural machinery as he travels around Paraguay. The work gives him a role and a reason to move, but it does not settle him. He broods over the loss of his former life in Argentina, fears capture, and resents the prospect of remaining indefinitely at Krug’s farm. Anxiety sometimes gives way to tentative optimism: he imagines that Paraguayan citizenship could let him buy land and build a life with Martha Mengele and Karl-Heinz. Hohenau is therefore both a hiding place and a provisional starting point for a future he has not secured.

That future is contested at home. Martha finds the Paraguayan countryside difficult: she objects to the heat, power cuts, and red dust, and she is unsettled by travel and her husband’s absences. After being bitten by a spider on her first night, she collapses in tears. Mengele blames himself for having accustomed her to a more comfortable life, but also resents her reluctance to accept the conditions of his flight. Her acquaintances in Buenos Aires ask for news, and she does not know what to tell them; Karl-Heinz, meanwhile, has been unsettled since his father’s departure. She worries that a move into the jungle would jeopardize his education, and argues that the family could return to Buenos Aires because she sees no real danger there. Their disagreement exposes the limits of Mengele’s imagined refuge: a place that might protect him cannot automatically provide a tolerable home for his wife and son.

Exile and the Limits of Protection

The book connects Hohenau’s rural refuge to a wider contest over borders, documents, and extradition. Mengele’s flight from Argentina is not simply a retreat into the countryside: Rudel helps him seek Paraguayan citizenship, which could place him beyond the reach of extradition demands. The application is granted in November 1959 despite the stated five-year residency requirement. That legal protection makes life in Paraguay seem more sustainable, but it does not erase the danger or his dependence on influential friends.

Later, West German authorities focus their pursuit on Paraguay after learning that Mengele has obtained citizenship, while the Paraguayan government resists cooperation and invokes its sovereignty. The book also depicts continued uncertainty about where he is living. Hohenau’s significance lies in the contrast between the small-scale, apparently ordinary rhythms of a German-settler town and the international machinery of pursuit surrounding its fugitive guest. The countryside offers concealment, not release: Mengele can travel, sell machinery, and imagine buying land, yet his life there remains structured by fear, dependence, and unresolved family separation.