Wolfgang Gerhard

Wolfgang Gerhard was an Austrian Nazi who helped conceal Josef Mengele in Brazil, first employing him in a confectionery shop and then arranging his refuge at an isolated farm. As a representative of Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Kameradenwerk in São Paulo, Gerhard served as organizer, driver, and intermediary: his commitment helped keep Mengele hidden, but it also brought intimidation into the household sheltering him. When Mossad followed the chain of contacts, Gerhard became the route by which the fugitive’s new hiding place was found.

Identity and Ideological Commitment

Gerhard had left Austria in 1949 and, by the time he became involved in Mengele’s escape, was struggling to establish himself. The account presents him not as a reluctant helper but as a fanatical Nazi who regarded protecting a wanted war criminal as an honour and a priceless commitment. His family in Günzburg doubted that he could be trusted with the task: they wondered whether a man with financial difficulties might charge heavily, and whether his fondness for alcohol and choir singing made him an unreliable choice. Hans-Ulrich Rudel reassured them that Gerhard would not demand a pfennig.

The details associated with Gerhard make his politics concrete. He printed propaganda and antisemitic scandal sheets that usually attracted little notice. His son was named Adolf, and a swastika crowned the family Christmas tree. Gerhard also dreamed of tying Simon Wiesenthal’s corpse to his car bumper and dragging it along the street like tin cans after a wedding. The grotesque image exposes the violence behind the loyalist persona: his service to Mengele belonged to an openly Nazi worldview, not merely to personal helpfulness or a discreet professional arrangement.

Organizing Mengele’s Refuge

When Gerhard first helped Mengele in Brazil, he employed him in his confectionery shop and comforted and encouraged him “like a son.” In Gerhard’s own sense of duty, devoting himself to the fugitive was comparable to saving Berlin from flames; the work was its own reward. During the year described, his business, wife, and two children had become secondary to his commitment. His attachment thus had a personal, almost familial form, but its object was the protection of a man implicated in Nazi crimes.

After Hans-Ulrich Rudel decided to exfiltrate Mengele to Brazil, Gerhard undertook the practical arrangements. He drove the fugitive from Itapecerica shortly before eight in the morning in a modest Ford Anglia, carrying two suitcases. Their destination was a remote farm near Nova Europa, about 300 kilometres from São Paulo, owned by the Hungarian couple Geza and Gitta Stammer. Gerhard had met them at a gathering of Central European expatriates several years earlier. He judged them humble and politically sound, and expected that they would not cause difficulty.

Gerhard presented Mengele to the Stammers under the invented identity Peter Hochbichler: a Swiss livestock-breeding specialist, fifty years old, recently unwell, newly in possession of an inheritance, and seeking both companionship and work. He explained that Geza’s surveying work kept him away for long periods, so Hochbichler could manage the farm. The Stammers were not well off and accepted the proposal. They would provide food and lodging and conceal their guest, though they would not pay him. The fabricated biography and practical offer made Gerhard’s operation depend not only on secrecy but on persuading an ordinary household to absorb the risks of sheltering a stranger.

Pressure on the Stammers

When a Brazilian newspaper reported that Mengele was among the world’s most wanted war criminals and that Israel might try to seize him in South America, Geza panicked. He feared an assault on the farm and danger to the couple’s young sons, and wanted their guest gone. Gerhard answered by insisting that the newspapers were unreliable, that nobody knew where Mengele was hiding, and that the family faced no danger. He urged the Stammers to take pride in hosting a leading scientist of the Third Reich and described their role as service to a cause that would ultimately triumph.

Reassurance gave way to coercion when Geza refused to continue. Gerhard agreed that Mengele would have to leave, but first demanded time to contact the fugitive’s family in Günzburg. Stroking the revolver in his pocket, he warned Geza against speaking out or making sudden moves, adding that the Nazis in Brazil were powerful and that a denunciation would cost him dearly. He then invoked the children’s future as an appeal. The episode reveals the force beneath Gerhard’s protective language: he could persuade hosts with promises and ideological appeals, but he was also prepared to threaten them when they tried to withdraw their cooperation.

Exposure Through the Escape Network

Gerhard’s devotion made him useful to Mengele, but also identifiable. By the spring of 1962, Mossad had narrowed its attention to the fugitive’s South American contacts, including Rudel and Mengele’s former friend Willem Sassen. Sassen, seeking money for his expensive lifestyle, supplied information that Mengele had fled to Brazil and identified Gerhard as his new protector and the fugitive’s only contact with the outside world. Mossad agents kept Gerhard under observation.

A morning journey in Gerhard’s Ford Anglia carried the agents toward the isolated farm. Zvi Aharoni later approached the area with two Brazilian Jewish agents and saw a medium-built European-looking man, moustached and wearing a hat pulled low, keeping apart while two companions spoke Portuguese. Aharoni suspected that the quiet man was Mengele, but withheld action and returned to Paris to begin planning a difficult operation. Gerhard’s arrangements had brought Mengele to shelter; the same arrangements had made the protector, his car, and his movements the trail by which that shelter could be approached.