/specialCollection/nwcda6/154/MENGELE, JOSEF VOL. 2/MENGELE, JOSEF VOL. 2_0101.pdf

g the 'Angel of Dea
Jewish women and children wait or instructions at the Auschwitz station: Fates were sealed with a flick of the doctor's thumb
WORLD AFFAIRS
Forty years after the Holocaust, the search for Josef Mengele takes on new life.
The applicant walked into a police station
in Asuncian, Paraguay, on Oct. 24, 1959. He
presented an Argentine identity card, dated
1956. He formally declared that he had
opened an account at the Banco del Para-
guay and had deposited the required 5,000
guaranis ($41.50). He presented two Para-
guayan sponsors; he described himself as a
businessman and said he lived in a neighbor-
hood of Asuncian called Fernando de la
Mora. The presiding police official painstak-
ingly wrote down in longhand a description of
the man who stood • before him: dark skin,
cleanshaven, vertical forehead, light brown
eyes, "medium" mouth, straight nose. "nor-
'nal" eyebrows, prominent chin. Then (five-
year residency permit was issued—in the
name ofJOSe Mengele.
T he police document has since vanished
from government tiles. But in Asun-
ciOn recently, NEWSWEEK'S Theodore
Stanger got a look at a photostat of what was
purported to be the original paperwork Jo-
sef Mengele completed before applying for
Paraguayan citizenship 25 years ago. The
source who possessed the photostat refused
to say where it had come front or to allow it
to be photographed. Just such ephemera—
shadowy meetings, mysterious documents,
unconfirmed sightings—have a II been part
of the 40-year search for the fugitive "Angel
of Death," the Nazi doctor who sent hun-
dreds of thousands of victims to the gas
chambers at Auschwitz and performed gro-
tesque medical "experiments" on thou-
sands of others. In 1979, under mounting
pressure from abroad, Paraguay stripped
Mengele of his citizenship. Earlier this year,
President Alfredo Stroessner, who onceem-
ployed Mengele as his physician, ordered a
new public-relations campaign disavowing
any knowledge of the war criminal's where-
abouts. But Nazi hunters have reason to
believe that Mengele is still alive, at the age
of 74, and most of them are persuaded that
he is hiding out somewhere in Paraguay.
Four decades after the Holocaust the
In 1938 and 1959: 7 he most elusive Nazi
search for Josef Mengele is taking on new
life. Just last week Israel offered a $1 million
reward for his capture and formally asked
Interpol, the international police agency, to
help track him down. In Frankfurt, investi-
gators from West Germany, the United
States and Israel met to pool their informa-
tion and to plan a common strategy for
capturing Mengele. This week, one of
the world's best-known nongovernmental
Nazi hunters, Beate Klarsfeld of Paris, will
travel to Paraguay with a new kind of want-
ed poster: a brief film about Mengele that
she has been told she can show on local
television. "Mengele is in Paraguay under
the personal protection of President
Stroessner," charges Klarsfeld's husband,
Serge, a French lawyer. -Now public and
private pressure may at last force Mengele
out into the cold again.
Hit List: He has proved to be the most
elusive of the top Nazi fugitives, crisscross-
ing two hemispheres, always at least one
step ahead of his pursuers. In 1947 he appar-
ently slipped through the hands of U.S.
occupation forces in Germany. For years 0 c
lived in or near his hometown of Giinzburg,
West Germany, without detection. The
Mossad, Israel's fabled secret service,
counts Mengele as one of its more conspicu-
ous failures. The Israeli agents who kid
napped Adolf Eichrnann from Argentina in
NEWSW'EEK/MAY 20.