FIRST PERSON

V DRIVING SOUTH on the autobahn in the spring of 1978, a large transporter on the opposite carriageway trundled into my view.

On its trailer were several agricultural machines and stamped in large letters on their sides was the name “MENGELE”.

The merchandise was being delivered from a factory in Gunzburg, Bavaria, founded a century earlier by Karl Mengele, whose son Josef was then one of the world’s most notorious Second World War fugitives.

Josef Mengele had served as an SS doctor at the Auschwitz extermination camp from May 1943 to January 1945.

His family home in Gunzburg was also where I was heading on what in hindsight was probably the most preposterously ambitious venture of my journalistic career: to succeed where both the West German and Israeli authorities had failed — finding Mengele, reported to be hiding in Paraguay under the protection of its President, Alfredo Stroessner, who ran one of South America’s most oppressive dictatorships.

I’d just joined the ITV investigative documentary programme

In Action. In those days, TV budgets were many times bigger than today, so ambition was as high as the sky. We hired a team which included an attractive, blond, blue-eyed female German doctor whose task was to use her feminine charms to penetrate the German settler community in Paraguay which is where Mengele was rumoured to be hiding.

Needless to say, we failed to find Dr Mengele. After six weeks of stakeouts and dead ends, we were rumbled. My colleague was arrested, thrown into a cell in the capital Asuncion and deported, whilst I managed to escape across the Paraguayan border into Brazil with some of our film and documents.

But although we never set eyes on Mengele (who, we later learned, had moved to Brazil), our resourceful German doctor did penetrate the circle in which he had moved in recent years, allowing us to covertly record several Nazi sympathisers who had helped him, including one man who admitted to still being in touch with Mengele. When the doctor asked him if he knew where Mengele was getting money from, he replied menacingly: “Do you have to ask such stupid questions? Leave Mengele alone. Now you’re beginning to sound dangerous to me. Now we’ll have to find out what you’re really up to.”

The programme, called The Hunt for Dr Mengele, was also broadcast on the American TV network CBS to 20 million viewers and spurred on a congressional campaign to establish a special Nazi-hunting unit within the US Justice Department unit called the Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

The OSI targeted mainly Nazi war criminals who had sought refuge in America, amongst them the Sobibor (and probably Treblinka) concentration camp guard, John Demjanjuk, so savagely violent he was known as “Ivan

We recorded several Nazi sympathisers who had helped him