MENGELE The Complete Story

306 MENGELE
panel chaired by Gideon Hausner, Israel's chief prosecutor at the
Adolf Eichmann trial, Telford Taylor, chief American prosecutor
at Nuremberg, and Simon Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal and some Israeli colleagues had resorted to this wellpublicized
"trial" in a last desperate attempt to highlight the failure
of governments to run Mengele to ground. There had been some
last-minute in-fighting between Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds, who
had wanted to be there. According to Serge Klarsfeld, Wiesenthal
wanted the Nazi-hunting stage to himself. "He's an egomaniac,"
said a slighted Klarsfeld.'
The event was an enormous success. For four consecutive nights,
TV screens showed victims—midgets, Jewish women, twins—telling
the most gruesome tales, all testifying to Mengele's unspeakable
crimes. Altogether 106 known survivors of his grotesque research
were ready to take the stand.
The groundwork for this new and final push had been laid the
previous month when the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal
Center, in a fanfare of publicity, released declassified American
army intelligence documents showing that Mengele may have been
in U.S. hands in April 1947.* In fact, the documents had been
declassified eighteen months before, but the timing of the release,
the pilgrimage to Auschwitz, and the mock trial at Jerusalem was
a masterly stroke of public relations planning, especially coming
after the buildup of speculative stories the previous summer suggesting
that Mengele might have tried to enter the U.S. and indicating
the extent of Dieter Mengele's business interests there. Pressure
on the U.S. government to act became irresistible.
On February 6, 1985, the day the Jerusalem "trial" drew to a
close, U.S. attorney general William French Smith directed the
justice department to examine every aspect of the Mengele case—
and to find him. As Smith told reporters that day:
The allegations have been such, and the public interest has
been such, and the notoriety of the individual has been such, that
it seemed appropriate to open the investigation. We intend to be
thorough. We also intend to be speedy.'
• Inquiries showed that Mengele was not in U.S. custody in April 1947. But he
was in American hands, under his own name, during the summer of 1945. See Chapter
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