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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.

ITA -- 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.

ASUNCION -- 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.

ASUNCION -- 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.