New Book ‘Hiding Mengele’ Brings Unique Brazilian POV To Real-World Nazi Conspiracy

Even at the age of six-years-old, Betina Anton knew something strange was going on when her teacher, a woman lovingly referred to as “Tante Liselotte,” abruptly left the school in the middle of the semester, never to be seen again.

“It’s one of my earliest memories,” the award-winning Brazilian author/journalist recalls over Zoom, speaking to me from her home in São Paulo. “I didn’t have the notion it was something with a global impact. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, but I knew that something very big happened. I could feel that.”

The year was 1985 and unbeknownst to the young Ms. Anton, authorities had just discovered that beloved “Aunt Liselotte” (real name: Liselotte Bossert) and her husband, Wolfram, had played a key role in hiding one of the most sought-after Nazi war criminals of all time; a man who skirted justice for over three decades.

His name? Josef Mengele.

Synonymous with the depravity of the Holocaust, Josef Mengele served as an SS doctor at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where he sent countless victims to the gas chambers and performed sadistic medical experiments on inmates — twins being his favorite test subjects. His methods were so cruel and callous, that Mengele earned himself the macabre nickname “Angel of Death.”

Having escaped Allied capture in the confusion of post-World War II Europe, the unrepentant and racist physician eventually relocated to South America, living there until he drowned off the coast of Brazil in early 1979. Even in death, however, the Nazi remained anonymous, deliberately buried under a false name by Liselotte, who never once imagined the scandal would ever see the light of day. That assumption proved to be unfounded six years later when the truth came to light and Mengele’s remains were exhumed for analysis by international experts.

But how, unlike Adolf Eichmann, was the man successful in evading ardent Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, Beate Klarsfeld, and the agents of Mossad?

That is the core focus of Anton’s Hiding Mengele (on sale from Diversion Books today), a tremendous work of non-fiction and, perhaps, the most significant book on the subject to ever come out of Brazil. While Mengele had already been the focus of numerous historical works, a bestselling thriller, and even a mock trial in Jerusalem (ironically held just a handful of months before the Nazi’s public exhumation), Anton had not seen an exploration rooted in the very place where the saga came to an end.

“I never read anything from someone in my community talking about this guy who lived very close to me. I wanted to know more,” explains the author, who grew up in a Lutheran enclave of São Paulo founded by German immigrants at the turn of the 19th century. “It’s my view as an insider who lives in Brazil, who knows the German community, who knows many of the places where Mengele used to go.”

The process of putting the book together took around six years of intense research and interviews all over the world, with Anton tracking down invaluable respondents like Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad operative who took part in the kidnap of Eichmann and was also tasked with finding Mengele (to no avail). “This is a 90-year-old guy who had lived five lives in one lifetime,” she says of the ex-spy, who died in 2019. “He was a Mossad commander, a businessman, a [government] minister, and he was still working. He had a wonderful memory and told me things that I’d never read before … It was very interesting to talk to someone who really lived history firsthand.”

The Israeli operation to find and bring the Angel of Death in front of a war crimes tribunal was continually stymied by budgetary and geopolitical factors. Despite the fact that he always feared the same fate as Eichmann, Mengele turned out to be one lucky fugitive. The SS doctor’s mythical, boogeyman-like status worked in his favor as the hunt intensified and led to many false leads, dead ends, and empty theories. “They had too many clues and most of them were false,” Anton says.

His spartan lifestyle, which stood in direct contrast to the public’s imagination of Nazis hiding out in South America, also played a factor in his ability to remain a ghost for so long. Where the version of the concentration camp doctor in Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, the actual Mengele “was poor, living in the periphery among humble people,” Anton explains.

Moreover, he was not aided and abetted by the apocryphal Odessa network, but kept afloat by his affluent family and a small chain of ex-Nazis and their sympathizers. Not exactly the far-reaching cabal of Third Reich fanatics often depicted in popular media, but that doesn’t mean the secrets and danger surrounding the conspiracy to hide Mengele were no less real. A year into her research, Anton managed to track down Liselotte Bossert (then in her early 90s) in the hopes of getting the full story. Instead, the veteran journalist received a cryptic warning. “She started saying things you don’t ever expect a former teacher to tell you: ‘This is a very, very dangerous subject. I think you should research something else.’ I was really scared.”

One can only guess why Bossert wanted her off the trail, but thankfully, Anton continued on, disregarding the old woman’s vague threats, as well as personal doubts over what the community might think. “Many people said, ‘We are of German descent. Everybody says we are Nazis. Why are you going to reinforce this image?’” she remembers. “But [in the end] most people liked it. I’m very relived.”

Hiding Mengele is now on sale from Diversion Books.