Wolfgang Gerhard, 67, drowned off a beach in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979. His real name was Josef Mengele, a German physician known as the Angel of Death.

Mengele was a war criminal who conducted gruesome medical experiments on inmates in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and who funnelled thousands of civilians to oblivion. He carried out these atrocities from 1943 to 1944.

He was buried in a cemetery near Sao Paulo under his pseudonym, and six years would elapse before the news of his death surfaced. His burial was arranged by Lisolette Bossert and her husband, Wolfram, who had sheltered Mengele for ten years and remained faithful to him until his demise.

After escaping from Europe and evading justice, Mengele lived in Brazil and Paraguay for some 18 years, mostly under the protection of the Bosserts.

“What Mengele found in Brazil, especially in the state of São Paulo, was a network of loyal supporters, European immigrants who, in one way or another, had their lives intertwined with his,” writes Betina Anton in Hiding Mengele (Diversion Books), a thoroughly researched account about him. “In Brazil, Mengele created his ‘Tropical Bavaria,’ a place where he could speak German and maintain his customs, beliefs, friends, and his connection to his homeland.”

Anton, a Brazilian journalist of German extraction, knew Lisolette Bossert, who was her teacher at a German school in Sao Paulo. Even as generous rewards were offered for information leading to Mengele’s arrest, Bossert kept conspicuously silent.

However, she was not the first person who helped Mengele. Giza and Gitta Stammer, a Hungarian couple who lived in Austria after World War II and immigrated to Brazil in 1949, protected Mengele for thirteen years.

Anton, in her interesting book, traces Mengele’s life from Gunzburg, his birthplace in Bavaria, to Bertioga, where he drew his last breath.

The scion of a wealthy family in the agricultural machinery business, Mengele left his hometown when he was nineteen to study at the University of Munich, where he earned a........

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