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HOHENAU -- Paraguay's national addiction is yerba mate, a holly bush that when ground to a coarse powder and steeped in scalding water creates a bitter, astringent tea. It would be mildest exaggeration to say that by noon every day, most Paraguayans have drunk more yerba mate by volume than most Americans drink of coffee in a week. The slavish devotion to the drink extends to all classes and ethnicities, including Europeans. Indeed, I have heard of only two Paraguayans who scorned the stuff. One was Bernhard Foerster, the Jew-mauling founder of New Germany, and the other was Josef Mengele.
Read MoreITA -- Paraguayan soil is a dark, rich red, the same ferrous color that stained my white socks when I visited Mississippi as a boy. Since I have never dug up a human body here before -- much less one belonging to a fugitive Nazi -- I can only guess how red a corpse's bones should be. According to Hugh Thomas, one of the most serious proponents of the theory that Reichsleiter Martin Bormann died in Paraguay in 1959 and was secretly disinterred and brought to Berlin, the Bormann bones found in Berlin in 1972 had a distinct red sheen, the telltale tattoo of their brief stay here in the municipal cemetery of Ita.
Read MoreASUNCION -- In his last day in the Bunker, to ensure that his beloved Alsatian Blondi would never walk at the end of a Soviet leash, Hitler ordered her poisoned. About the fates of his closest human companions the Fuehrer was not so careful. Many (Goebbels, Eva Braun) killed themselves, but in the chaos of the last days, at least one emerged and made a run for safety. Whether that run ended in Paraguay is the subject of the second document I examined at the terror archive in Asuncion.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Mengele grew up in Guenzburg, Bavaria. Guenzburg is the present-day site of Legoland Deutschland and is just a couple hundred miles from the ancestral hometown of Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner, a year younger than Mengele, was born to a Bavarian immigrant father in Paraguay, and by the time Mengele arrived to settle in Paraguay permanent, he had ruled the country for nearly five years. Mengele thought a fellow fascist Teuton might see his flight from justice sympathetically. He was right.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Like many before them, the Nazis came to Paraguay as a last resort. In those years, crossing the equator for an unknown southern land meant forsaking not only the comforting clockwise flush of the toilet, but also a way of life. It was an epic and arduous journey, and indeed in the case of Australia's convicts nothing short of the gallows convinced them to undertake it. Paraguay was, in a way, an anti-Australia: if Australia's magic was to take bonded criminal dross and transmute it into civilization, Paraguay's was to take freely-settled cultural and religious aristocrats and reduce them to beggary and ruin. It is where pretenses to civilization came to die.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death, first traveled to Paraguay in 1951, at the age of 40. He represented his father's Bavarian ironworks in its South American affairs, and he thought he could sell the company's new manure-spreader to the German and German-descended farmers in the Paraguayan hinterlands. Many of those Germans sympathized with the defeated Reich, so Mengele found refuge and immigrated to Paraguay permanently in 1959. Across the next week of posts I will visit where he and other Nazis are known to have lived, and where some say the most wanted of them, Martin Bormann, was buried secretly in 1959.
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