São Paulo

São Paulo is both a practical refuge and an exposed point in Josef Mengele’s Brazilian life. From a confectionery shop and a rented studio to a hospital bed and the city’s forensic institutions, it links the arrangements that kept him hidden with the evidence that ultimately confirmed who he was. The isolated farm where he spent much of this period lay far beyond the city, but São Paulo remained central to the network supporting him and to the investigation that closed in around him.

An urban base for concealment

When Josef Mengele first arrived in Brazil, Wolfgang Gerhard employed him in his confectionery shop and tried to reassure and encourage him. Gerhard was connected to Uli Rudel’s Kameradenwerk and became a key intermediary in the fugitive’s protection. The Günzburg family questioned whether Gerhard could be trusted and worried he might charge too much, but Rudel assured them that Gerhard would not ask for payment. In Gerhard’s view, protecting a wanted Nazi criminal was a duty in itself; his own business and family had taken second place to the effort.

The São Paulo connection was not limited to an initial job. When Gerhard decided to move Josef Mengele to a more secluded refuge, he arranged a false identity and a place on a farm near Nova Europa, about 300 kilometres from São Paulo. The city was therefore a point of origin and connection rather than the location of the principal hideout. Gerhard presented Josef Mengele to the Hungarian owners, Geza and Gitta Stammer, as Peter Hochbichler, a Swiss livestock-breeding specialist seeking work and companionship. The agreed arrangement was that Hochbichler would receive food and lodging and remain concealed, without being paid for managing the farm.

Even while the farm offered distance from the city, São Paulo supplied links to money and ordinary urban life. With his family’s help, Josef Mengele bought a studio there that could provide rental income. The property title was put in another name, preserving the division between the asset and the fugitive who benefited from it. Later, with Gerhard and Wolfram Bossert protecting him, he ventured out more often. He sometimes went into the city without his hat and raincoat, and Bossert’s children accompanied him on buses to a supermarket and a cinema. These excursions marked a limited loosening of his self-imposed isolation, not an end to his fear of recognition.

A city under observation

São Paulo also became relevant to the pursuit. In the spring of 1962, Willem Sassen, seeking money, supplied Mossad with information about Josef Mengele’s move to Brazil and identified Wolfgang Gerhard as his protector and principal link with the outside world. Mossad agents kept Gerhard under observation. After tracking him to the vicinity of the isolated farm, Zvi Aharoni saw a man in a hat who he believed was Josef Mengele, but held back from acting until further photographs could confirm the identification. The surveillance around São Paulo thus fed into a patient operation whose target remained hidden beyond the city.

The city’s importance to the fugitive depended on managing names as carefully as movements. When Gerhard prepared to leave Brazil, he offered Josef Mengele his own identity card, which could be adapted by replacing the photograph and laminating the document. A false card in the name of Hochbichler was considered poorly made and potentially troublesome. Later, in 1976, Gerhard returned to São Paulo and helped with another change of documents, although Josef Mengele’s aged appearance made the new identification less convincing. Before returning to Europe, Gerhard asked Bossert to give their friend more attention or find a family willing to visit him. He also introduced Ernesto Glawe to Josef Mengele under a cover story that concealed Gerhard’s own identity and described Josef Mengele as a former military doctor.

Hospital and exposure

Josef Mengele’s dependence on the city became unmistakable when he fell seriously ill. After months of recurring abdominal pain, his condition worsened into vomiting, constipation, fever, swelling, and a palpable lump. He suspected either a tumour or poisoning, yet resisted seeing a doctor because he feared that a hospital visit would expose him. Bossert and Geza Stammer also hesitated over the risks and doubted the seriousness of the complaint. When it became clear that the illness was an emergency, Bossert drove him to a hospital in São Paulo.

At admission, Bossert supplied papers identifying the patient as Wolfgang Gerhard. A doctor, puzzled by how badly the patient’s body had deteriorated for someone supposedly only forty-six or forty-seven, examined the record and ordered X-rays. Bossert realized that the stated birth year, 1925, did not fit Josef Mengele, born in 1911, and tried to explain the discrepancy as an administrative error. The X-rays revealed an intestinal obstruction. During surgery, doctors removed a compact hairball that had formed after years of nervous moustache-chewing and blocked his gut. Bossert paid the hospital bill in cash, and the man admitted as Wolfgang Gerhard disappeared from the institution without his identity being exposed there.

Forensic confirmation and aftermath

Years later, São Paulo became the center of official efforts to establish what had happened to Josef Mengele. In June 1985, after German police searches led investigators to Brazil, São Paulo police watched the Bossert and Stammer families and then raided the Bossert home. Photographs and other possessions connected the household to the old man. Bossert disclosed that Josef Mengele was dead and buried in a grave at Embu das Artes under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. The city’s police and forensic institutions now stood at the end of a trail that had once relied on false papers and guarded contacts.

On 21 June 1985, at police headquarters in São Paulo, forensic pathologists announced that they had established to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that the skeleton recovered from the grave was Josef Mengele’s. The identification process had compared physical and documentary evidence, including dental spacing, the prominent forehead, measurements of bones, and a recorded pelvic fracture. In 1992, DNA tests confirmed the experts’ conclusion. That year Germany, Israel, and the United States closed the case; the remains were kept in a cupboard at São Paulo’s Legal Medical Institute, and the family did not claim them. The city’s role had reversed: first it offered work, income, contacts, and medical care within a protective network; finally, its forensic institutions helped turn a fugitive’s concealed identity into a documented fact.