On June 6, 1985, in Our Lady of the Rosary cemetery in Embu, Brazil, the grave of Wolfgang Gerhard was opened and the skeletal remains were clumsily removed. The Brazilian police, acting on information received from German authorities, believed they were digging up the final hideout of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
In 1984, 40 years after their arrival in Auschwitz and a year before the discovery of the body in Brazil, the two sisters set out to locate and organize the twins who had survived the camp. They formed a group named CANDLES (an acronym for Children Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors), which now has 120 members in ten countries on four continents. On January 27, 1985, five months before the exhumation in Embu, the twins organization visited Auschwitz to mark the 40th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. They went on from Auschwitz to Jerusalem, where they held a mock trial of Mengele at which 106 survivors of his research lined up to testify. Television stations all over the world carried reports of the event, and in its wake the United States, Israel, and Germany agreed to join forces in their search for the old Nazi. Soon more than $3.5 million in reward money had been posted by governments, organizations, and individuals, and newspaper, magazine, and television reporters all wanted to talk to Eva Kor.
Mengele escaped prosecution immediately after World War II for several reasons. Despite the number and severity of the crimes he had committed, there were other fugitives who were considered far worse and who were higher on the list of those sought by the Allied forces. Mengele also had no SS tattoo, so he was not picked out of the ranks of POWs as other SS men were. In the chaos of postwar Europe, American prosecutors came to believe first that he was dead–his wife Irene had arranged for a memorial Mass to be said for him, although she knew he was alive–and later that he had already been put on trial by the Polish government.
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After finding the letter the West German police contacted Brazilian authorities, and the Brazilians interrogated the Bosserts. The Bosserts said that Mengele was indeed the “Uncle” of the letter and that he was buried in the Embu cemetery under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard. The Brazilians then did their exhumation, and forensic specialists and Mengele investigators from Germany, Israel, and the United States boarded planes to Sao Paulo.
While the Brazilian police were going about trying to find X rays, the forensic teams were working over the skeleton. In their account of the investigation in the book Witnesses From the Grave (Little, Brown, 1991), Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover described the tasks taken on by each set of specialists. The three anthropologists–Americans Clyde Snow and Ellis Kerley and Brazilian Daniel Munoz–measured the dimensions of the skull and thereby established that the skeleton belonged to a Caucasian. The large brow ridge and the characteristics of the hip bones indicated that the skeleton was not female. Using a formula applied to measurements of the femur (the thigh bone) and the tibia (the shin bone), the three scientists determined that the dead man had been 173.5 centimeters tall, and by comparing the right humerus (the long bone of the upper arm) and femur with those on the left they learned that the Embu man had been right-handed. Kerley took a thin cross section of the femur, put it under a microscope, and counted the blood-carrying canals; the canals increase as a person ages. From that count, Kerley determined that the man had most likely been 68 or 69 years old when he died.
