Bertioga

Bertioga, a coastal retreat in Brazil, becomes the setting for the final episode of Josef Mengele’s fugitive life. A visit intended to offer relief from the heat ends on the beach below Bossert’s holiday home, where Mengele drowns in the sea without ever facing justice for his crimes.

Setting and Arrival

During a January heat wave across the state of São Paulo, Bossert proposes that Mengele leave his stifling home and come to the family’s holiday house in Bertioga to cool off by the ocean. The children, Bossert says, will be glad to see their uncle. On the morning of 7 February 1979, Mengele boards a bus bound for the port of Santos. At the bus station, Musikus collects the listless, bad-tempered old man.

Mengele arrives exhausted and does not eat lunch. He shuts himself in his room for a nap and dreams: a misty forest and crowds of naked people converge on a grisly ritual, while members of his family and figures from his past are made to push blocks of granite. A great fire is being prepared. He wakes drenched in sweat, trembling and spent, with a sense that his journey is nearing its end.

The Walk to the Water

Despite backache, Mengele puts on his bathing trunks and goes down to the beach without eating or drinking. Bossert greets him and offers shade beneath a parasol, lemonade, and a salted cod fritter. Mengele declines the food and drink and proposes a walk along the shoreline instead. Bare-headed in the glaring sun, he moves in a daze, disregarding Bossert’s small talk.

His breath grows short and his head spins, forcing him to sit on a rock. In the pause, the children’s voices, birds, surf, and sea wind seem to fall silent around him. Staring toward the horizon, he babbles about ruins, his parents, and Günzburg, and says he dreams of going home to end his days. He complains that he is dying of thirst and heat, even as the ocean lies beside him.

Drowning and Aftermath

Mengele then goes alone into the turquoise water, driven, the account says, by a mysterious force. The current carries him toward the open sea. His neck stiffens, his jaws tighten, and his limbs freeze; he groans as seabirds pass overhead. Bossert fights through the waves to bring him back. Mengele is still breathing when Bossert reaches him, but the body he drags ashore is a corpse.

The contrast defines Bertioga’s place in the account: the ocean that was meant to provide respite becomes the means of Mengele’s death, while the justice he had evaded remains unmet. He is buried the following day in Embu das Artes under the false identity Wolfgang Gerhard. Bossert is in hospital and misses the funeral; only Bossert’s wife, the funeral director, and a crematorium assistant witness the burial.