Word: rolf
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...that seemed to leave little doubt that the 25-year hunt for Mengele was over. The weekly magazine Bunte Illustrierte fleshed out details of the Nazi fugitive's sojourn of roughly 18 years in Brazil with an annotated collection of photographs, supplied by Mengele's 41-year-old son Rolf. In response, the rival weekly Stern ran six pages of photographs chronicling the same period of lonely exile. Gerald Posner, a New York lawyer who has pursued the Mengele story for four years and who had flown to West Germany from Sao Paulo to check the veracity of the Bunte...
...Rolf Mengele told it in the Bunte story, the first time he met his father was on a skiing vacation in Switzerland in 1956, when the twelve-year-old boy stayed at a mountain hotel with an affable uncle called Helmut Gregor. Three years later, said Rolf, he discovered that "Uncle Helmut" was actually his father. As the two began to correspond, Rolf told Bunte, the fugitive showed himself to be paternal but far from penitent. "I can never hope that you will understand or sympathize with the course of my life," he wrote Rolf. "But I have...
...airport, the story continued, by Wolfram Bossert and driven in a rickety Volkswagen down a potholed dirt road into a virtual slum. "My father's house," Rolf remembered, "was nothing more than a wooden hut." Inside, it was meanly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs and a closet. As he entered the house, Rolf recalled, "my father trembled with excitement. I saw that he had tears in his eyes...
During his 14-day stay, said Rolf, he found a person very different from the dapper, even avuncular man-about-town he had seen in photographs. His father was intellectually alert and still on top of his Greek and Latin, Rolf recalled, "but he was a haunted creature," possessed by suicidal thoughts. At the same time, the doctor seemed to regret nothing. "There are no judges," Rolf recalled his father saying of his pursuers, "only avengers...
Throughout the years of exile, Rolf said, the Mengele family sent the doc- tor between $100 and $175 a month. The old man's diaries suggested that he might have supplemented those funds by arranging modest real estate deals. Yet his father's poverty, Rolf told Bunte, ironically may have provided his protection; after all, Mengele hunters "looked for him in a white villa on the sea, in the back of a Mercedes, behind bodyguards and guarded by German shepherds." They did not guess, ventured Rolf, that the runaway Nazi might be living in penury in a ramshackle hut. Thinking...