MENGELE The Complete Story

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CHAPTER
9
The Man in the
Watchtower
Mengele's Brazilian savior, Wolfgang Gerhard, was as fanatical a
Nazi as they come. Each Christmas he adorned his tree with a
swastika. "You always have to rake good care of swastikas," he used
to say. He told friends he dreamed of "putting a steel cable to the
leg of Simon Wiesenthal [the Vienna-based Nazi-hunter} and dragging
him to death behind my car." His Brazilian-born wife, Ruth,
was just as unhinged. She once gave her landlady two bars of soap,
in their original 1943 wrappers, made from the corpses of Auschwitz
inmates.'
After his wartime service as a Hitler Youth leader in Graz,
Austria, Gerhard remained a Fascist for the rest of his life. He even
christened his son "Adolf." "Wolfgang made no bones about being
150 percent Nazi," a former workmate recalled. In Brazil he was
vague about what he did, having variously owned a small textile
printing plant and worked in a publicity agency and as a welder.
But what made Gerhard useful to Mengele was that he dabbled in
real estate.
As a small-time property owner, Gerhard knew people with
farms and estates that were far off the beaten track, ideal for a man
like Mengele, now desperately seeking a Brazilian sanctuary. Gerhard
had been introduced to Mengele in Paraguay, through Hans
Rudel, the Luftwaffe ace. Rudel asked Gerhard to help his friend
find a new refuge in Brazil and Gerhard jumped at the opportunity.
Too young to have played an important role during the war, Ger-
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