Mengele May Still Live, Asserts Knesset Member

A Knesset member just returned from South America claimed Thursday to have “hard evidence” that human bones exhumed from a grave in Sao Paulo, Brazil on June 6, 1985 are not the remains of Auschwitz death camp doctor Josef Mengele.

The assertion by Dov Shilansky of Likud contradicts the findings of forensic and medical experts from several countries who examined the remains at the time and concluded “within a reasonable scientific certainty” that they were the skeletal remains of Mengele. The accused war criminal may thus still be alive.

Mengele, whose so-called medical experiments resulted in the death or maiming of countless Auschwitz inmates, had been the object of a world-wide manhunt since the end of World War II.

Rewards totalling $3.4 million were offered in 1985 for information on his whereabouts. Many Nazi-hunters believed he lived in Paraguay. But the search was called off when a German couple living in Brazil, Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, took police to the grave where they said Mengele was buried.

The couple said they had sheltered him for 10 years, during which time he used the name Wolfgang Gerhardt. Gerhardt drowned in 1979.

But Shilansky told reporters here that a dentist in Brazil, Dr. Helena Bueno Vieria de Castro, told him she treated Mengele under the alias of Pedro Miller long after Gerhardt’s drowning. According to Shilansky, she confirmed that Miller’s dental file was identical with Mengele’s SS dental file, a copy of which Shilansky gave her to examine.

However, dental records convinced American and Brazilian experts that Gerhardt was indeed Mengele. Dr. Lowell Levine, a consultant with the New York State Police, and Dr. Carlos Valerio, a specialist in forensic medicine, signed an affidavit in March 1986 attesting that the X-ray of the exhumed remains matched Mengele’s dental records.