THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, June 21, 1985 15 Author Posner traveled deep into the jungles of southern Paraguay in his quest for traces of Mengele. Here, he poses against a stand of bamboo. About The Author fraudulent. It is totally unlike any other field of historical research. Mengele had eluded justice since World War II. But traces of his flight have never been difficult to find. Since I began documenting his career as a fugitive, I have had trouble stemming the avalanche of informa- tion and sifting the real facts out of a veritable mountain of spurious data. Along the way, I have met a whole underworld of con men, tin horn tyrants, former SS troopers and people who buy and sell Nazis. When I began my study four years ago I was quite naive. I was aware that such respected news gathering organizations as Stern magazine, Newsweek and the Times of London had lost millions of dollars on such wild goose chases as the bogus Hitler diaries. but I knew nothing at all of the vast cottage industry that is based on the wholesale merchandis- ing of information and artifacts . emanating from the flotsam and jet- sam of the Third Reich. There are, for instance, merchants of myth who make a handsome living selling Bormann's bones and Men- gele's hacienda over and over again to gullible journalists or bounty hunters blinded by the prospect of reward money. And as I discovered in my encounter with the SS cor- poral, there are many people willing to manufacture documents, on of- ficial government letterheads, saying anything your heart desires. I have had to make many adjust- ments since I started my work in 1981. At that time, my law partner, Joseph Ferrara, and I were involved in pro bono research, trying to deter- mine whether a small band of surviv- ing Auschwitz experiment victims could file a lawsuit against Germany in an American court, seeking extra compensation for their injuries. The job was arduous and emo- tionally draining, but what had . started as a part-time, unpaid legal assignment eventually became an obsession. The plight of the death camp victims was too shocking, too morally damning to treat as an or- dinary legal case. And in the course of our research, one individual kept rising to the top of our list of cruel and evasive Nazi criminals: Josef Mengele. Our law firm decided to test the legal waters with a suit, filed on behalf of several Auschwitz victims, against both West and East Ger- many as well as the Mengele business interests in the United States, seek- ing compensation for the survivors' extraordinary medical expenses. After two years of work and the ex- penditure of more than $20,000 of our own money, we eventually decided to scrap the lawsuit. Although I wanted more desperately with every passing day to make those responsible for the death camp atrocities pay for their Continued on next page Gerald L. Posner, 31, is a part- ner in the law firm of Posner and Ferrara, with offices in midtown Manhattan. He was born and raised in San Francisco, received his bachelor's degree at the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley, where he made Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his law degree at the University of California's Hast- ings College. Posner married a British sub- ject, and was flying to London in 1981 when he met a Holocaust sur- vivor on the plane and decided to try and obtain extra compensation for those people who suffered lasting effects as a result of Nazi "scientific experiments." When Posner returned to New York, he and his law partner, Joseph Ferrara, decided to study the possibility of filing a suit in an American court against Germany on behalf of the surviving medical experiment victims. Within a short time, Posner's re- search had narrowed down to a hunt for information about the post World War II activities of Josef Mengele. He began devoting more and more time to the search. Four years and thousands of miles later, Posner has gathered what he believes to be the most volum- inous Mengele file in existence — some 25,000 pages — and is currently under contract with McGraw-Hill to write a book ten- tatively titled Josef Mengele: Life On The Run, scheduled for pub- lishing after January 1, 1986. Until the story of Mengele's death in Brazil broke last week, Posner had planned to fly to Ger. many again to interview relative-, friends and associates of the "Angel of Death." As we went to press, he was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, gathering information on the last six years of the infamous doctor's life.