It should all seem a long time ago, because it was. And yet it lingers. I was 18 years old and about as wet behind the ears as can be. My hosts, in a rather chaotic way, were the Brazilian rock band Os Mutantes, who were huge in South America. A friend from a neighbouring village back home in the UK, Richard Court, aka Ritchie, was heading out to Brazil in pursuit of fame and fortune, which he found in the years that followed, and a couple of us tagged along for the ride. My memories of this time have a wonderful soundtrack, which includes hearing Rita Lee sing in her home and being on the edge of the stage at Santos Football Club (home to Pelé) for a live Mutantes show. Afterwards, I even signed autographs.
With hindsight, these were already strange days as my clueless adolescence crashed unprepared into the adult world. All of which was as nothing compared to what was about to happen. I was on course for a chance encounter so unsettling that the shiver it sent up my spine back then is still here now, lying low and waiting for moments like this when it surfaces with all its old vigour. It remains so disturbing because I have a near-complete recall of every second as it burned into my brain. Thankfully, it mostly lies dormant, although I’ve let it out to write this.
So, to set the scene: I was staying on the edge of São Paulo near, I think, Caeieras. Among my rock & roll social circle were a couple of Brazilian Germans (with hindsight, likely Austrians) who lived locally, a brother and sister of about my age. I think she was the older one. Both were distinctively blond and good company. By way of a little bit of insider trivia, while I was there the boy had a rabies scare after being bitten by a dog.
One day he and I went down to a nearby suburb for reasons I can no longer remember. On the way back he had a small chore to do for his family – to repair, I think, a boiler or some-such in the kitchen of a house they had some connection with. I cannot recall all the details, but they didn’t live there. I think he said a relative or parental friend of some sort might be staying there.
To get there, we walked along a short street and turned left downhill on a rutted and hard-baked dirt road with modest houses clustered on both sides. At the bottom we turned left again into a small, single-story home. It had a wall separating it from the road, and from there it was a few meters to the front door at the side of the house. And, in my mind, the main door is to the side under the canopy on the right of the building (below), perhaps behind a second gate.
Inside was a modest front room, approximately square in shape and with, on my left, an off-centre window facing the street. On the opposite side of the room was a door set at the left end of the wall, perhaps leading to the kitchen or utility area (the house was 2 rooms wide). A third door in the back wall, also set left of centre, probably accessed a bedroom. The furniture, as I remember it, was all dark, oak-like and old-fashioned/European in appearance. This was the only room I saw.
My friend walked to the door opposite and disappeared to sort out whatever it was that had brought him here. With time on my hands, I wandered across the room to inspect a bookcase atop a modest sideboard near the kitchen/utility door. This put me between the door my friend had left through and the door in the back wall. From this moment on, my recall is intense and vivid.
Books are usually a reassuring presence with a complementary story to tell about their owners. I am always drawn to them. Disappointingly, the titles in this one were in German, a language I don’t speak.
I scanned the shelves, coming to a jarring halt just below my eye line and in the middle of a middle shelf. In front of me was a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, complete with a green spine and faded gold lettering. This was a shock. I had never seen a copy before and doubt I’d ever been anywhere that would give it house-space, let alone flaunt it in prime position in a bookcase. I was still processing this when the door to my right opened and in walked a short, ageing man with a salt & pepper version of Stalin’s moustache. His hooded eyes were close-set, his hair receding, and there was quite a lot of forehead merging into his receding crown. The hair on the sides of his head was greying and combed back. And as I turned to face him, he stopped in his tracks. His demeanour changed dramatically.
He fixed me with an aggressive stare that mixed rage and utter contempt with a visible physical agitation, or just possibly fear. It’s possible he had briefly mistaken me for my equally blond & long-haired friend. His eyes locked onto mine, occasionally flicking from side to side, as though scanning for danger. It was an extraordinarily intense and adrenaline-charged moment in which the urges of fight and flight competed for ascendancy. Time slowed to a standstill. No grown-up had ever behaved towards me like this before. I was not meant to be there.
I think he was wearing a pale open-neck shirt, with perhaps an innocuous cardigan, dark trousers and bedroom slippers, but my eyes were locked on his face, so I’m not sure. He was dressed like somebody’s harmless grandpa, but the behaviour was off-the-scale alarming. Everything was all wrong and I was rooted to the spot with my mind in overdrive, desperately trying to make sense of what was happening. I had no idea who he was or how to react.
I am lightly built and was about 5’ 10” (1.78m) back then. But I was maybe 40 years his junior and a bit taller than him, and so shouldn’t have been physically intimidated. And yet I remained frozen. We were locked in this face-off for what seemed an eternity, but was probably at most 20 seconds or so. Only decades later did I realise that he was probably within a meter or two of a gun.
He broke the spell by abruptly turning on his heel and leaving through the same door, banging it shut behind him. As suddenly as he had arrived, he was gone and time inhaled.
And as that door slams, so my memory stops. My friend must have returned, summoned no doubt by the noise, and we must have left soon afterwards. I must surely have asked him what had just happened, but I can’t remember either my question or the answer.
Looking back all these years later, my recollection of that encounter does not fade. The face remains in sharp focus: glaring, eyes slightly widened, and all slathered with contempt. And so does the memory of the intense anxiety that gripped me.
Time passed, and in 1979 Mengele died by drowning off a Brazilian beach. The death was covered up and he was buried with a false identity. Then, in 1985 and following a tip-off, the body was exhumed and formally identified, creating global headlines. Josef Mengele was officially dead.
The reporting revealed he had been living in Caieiras whilst I was there. So I started to wonder. There were also plenty of published pictures that looked a lot like the man I had met. But so did Stalin. So, well … so what?
This was before the internet unlocked the past, and I did nothing about it. I filed it in the back of my mind as a maybe. As in ‘maybe I met Mengele but don’t be silly’. What were the chances of that happening? Zilch.
Then, sometime later, a magazine published a picture of his home in Caieiras, and there it was: The little house I’d been to. It was an exterior shot of the place where I had shared a room with Mein Kampf and a man who looked exactly like Josef Mengele.
Then the internet arrived and, bit by bit, curiosity got the better of me, and it was true: I had been in the house where he lived, perhaps before he moved in full-time, and almost certainly with a member of a family that harboured him. The inescapable conclusion was that I had met Mengele, the Angel of Death. A monster guilty of unspeakable cruelty and mass murder.
With hindsight, I now know that he was closely associated with 2 German/Austrian families who protected him. The Bosserts were low-ranking Nazis who had fled to South America after the War. I don’t think they were war criminals. In the early ‘70s they took over from the Stammers, who had sheltered him for more than a decade, and then had a falling out. People sheltered fugitive Nazis for many reasons: Some were coerced, some wanted the money and some were ideologically aligned. And some were all three.
In ’73 the Stammers owned the little house, while the Bosserts were becoming his principal minders. So was my friend related to one of these families? It seems likely, although I think the Bossert kids were too young. According to the internet, the Stammers had a son 2 years older than me.
Finally, it is not possible to evoke the name Mengele without remembering Auschwitz, and where can I begin with that? I’m struggling to corral the words needed to tell my little story. By comparison, the camps and the sadism, gas chambers, barbarism, industrialised slaughter and all the rest of it are beyond any language I can summon up. It’s overwhelming, and there’s no closure in it. And nor should there be.
Ends
Post Script: I have written this because it’s been intermittently rattling around at the back of my brain for most of my adult life, and I can’t quite put it away so that it stays away. I have no big moral conclusion to draw, no lesson in life to share. Nor can I say it somehow changed my life for the better or worse (it didn’t). And as a jobbing hack, I am not the writer to tell the horror story that was Mengele. So it’s just me and a weird, weird memory that occasionally rises to the surface and gives me a shake, but that mostly lies silent and unseen. Now that it is laid out before me, in print for the first time, I can see it as a tiny moment in time, a fleeting incident. The appropriate conclusion to the words “a fleeting incident” should be “of no consequence”, but they refuse to attach.
Time passes, dates get muddled and recollections vary. Some of the contemporary reporting is contradictory, making these muddied waters to dive into. And, apart from the absolute clarity that starts just before Mein Kampf and ends with the slamming door, I have as many questions as answers. There are too many rabbit holes beckoning, and from now on I’m staying out of them. Fini.
I hope you – the reader – will not think I’m over-sharing. More than 50 years on, I just want to unload. So thank you for reading.
That’s it. Story told. Hopefully, he will now slip back into some dark, forgetful corner of my mind.
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