Documents / FOIA release
This is a Central Intelligence Agency cable dated 14 August 1985 and sent to Washington. It forwards news clippings and magazine articles on Josef Mengele, released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The attachments include an Argentine magazine report on claims that Mengele lived in La Banda, Santiago del Estero, as Adolfo Gualterio Ascher, along with an interview with the judge investigating those claims. They also include a newspaper article on Mengele's protection in Paraguay and on past efforts to extradite him. The file has no UFO content.
Wiesenthal in his Vienna office: Is the fugitive alive? TRAIL OF A MASS MURDERER' 1944- Mengele leaves Auschwitz with false pa- pers, allegedly obtained for him by his Jewish mistress, whom he saved from the gas chamber. 1947 - Arrest • • then is released or ince. ides out in Germa -49 - Resides briefly in hometown of Gu burg, then flees through Italy to Argentina with Red Cross passport in the name of Helmut Gre gor. Under protection of dictator Juan PerOn, sets up medical practice without work permit. 1951 - Enters Paraguay and lives part-tim I I 1954- Obtains German divo is first wife. N 058- Resettles in Argentina, where he acquir Argentine passport in name of Jose) Men uguay. 1959 - Reportedly attends his father's funeral in Giinzburg, then returns to Argentina. West Ger- man prosecutor in Freiburg issues first arrest warrant: Mengele, fearingxlraditiort„ flees to Paraguay, whe _he_obtalris Paraguayan citizen- shi • • later. 060 - Israeli agents kidnap Adolf Eichmann Buenos Aires and learn Mengele's address • nly to find he fled to Argentina earlier. gedly spend time in Brazil, Switzerland,. Egypt. and at a monastery on Greek island of Kythnos, where Greek police arrive just days after he leaves. Mengiele's wife and stepson leave him and return to Europe. 1962-West Germany requests Mengele's extra- dition from Paraguay; Stroessner government is uncooperative. 1965 - Allegedly moves to his brother's farm in Iguacu area 1979- Under pressure from abroad, Paraguayan Supreme Court strips him of his citizenship ; Ac- cording to one report, he flies from Asuncion to Miami. 1981-1985 - Checks on his whereabouts in Mi- ami, West Germany, as well as Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Australia and other countries, yield no results. 0 tri 1960 were too slow to bag Mengele; later, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin put Menge/e on a hit list, the Mossad couldn't get close enough to kill him, much less arrest him. The search for Mengele now is a race against time—one last effort to find the Nazi doctor before death by natural causes en- ables him to cheat the hangman forever. "Mengele was a very handsome, smartly- dressed man in his 30s, with a boyish. sharp- featured face, who spoke the cultured Ger- man of an intellectual," Ella Linger's, an A uschwitz survivor, wrote after the war. "He stood, day in and day out, on the station ramp, sometimes whistling an opera„survey- ing the arriving prisoners and jabbing his thumb either to the right or to the left. The prisoners he sent to one side could proceed to the camp; the other column was marched to the gas chambers." Of the 4 million Jews, gypsies and other prisoners hauled into Auschwitz during World War II, only 405,000 were considered sufficiently fit for work to be registered as inmates. Mengele took part in at least 74 of these mass selections between May 24, 1943, when he arrived in Auschwitz, and Christmas Eve of 1944, when he disappeared from the camp as the Red Army closed in. He personally sent perhaps 400,000 people to their deaths: the old, the infirm and nearly all of the children who passed before him. "Mengele was utterly convinced that the Jews had to be destroyed," another Auschwitz doctor, Hans Munch, told a German prosecutor after the war. "[But] he believed ii was OK jar those Jews who were capable of work to be kept alive for the time being." How can anyone be sure that Mengele still alive? Partly because of what hasn't happened yet: his family has not announced NEwSWEEK/MAY 20, 1985 his death. Mengele has a son named Rolf and a stepson named Karl-Heinz back in West Germany. The family's agricultur- al-machinery company, Karl Mengele & Sons, still operates in Giinzburg. Family members refuse to talk about Josef Men- gele. -When they can say the man is dead, the embarrassment will be finished," notes Simon Wiesenthal, the veteran Nazi hunter based in Vienna. "But they always say, 'No comment'." Keeping in Touch: Josef Mengcle still has a lawyer in Frankfurt, named Fritz Steinacker, and recently the attorney went beyond "No comment." "Yes, I have rep- resented Mengele," he told NEWSWEEK, "and I still do represent him." Hans-Eber- hard Klein, the Frankfurt prosecutor who heads West Germany's search for Men- gele, says he has "no ,evi- dence" to link the family and its company to the fugitive SS doctor. But there are rumors that Mengele keeps in touch with his roots. Wiesenthal Charges that the Mengele clan "knew all the time where he was," and still does, "even today." In Frankfurt last week, prosecutor Klein met with Israeli investigators and a team of Americans headed by Mark Richard, a U.S. deputy assistant attorney general. After- ward, the officials issued a statement prom- ising that their governments would "work intensively together" to catch Mengelc. The coordinated hunt began in earnest only a few mont hs ago. On Feb. 6, William French Smith, who was attorney gentral then, as- signed the task to t he Just ice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which was set up five years ago to trace Nazi war criminals in the United States, but has not, until now, pursued a case overseas. The reward offered by Israel last week brings to 53.4 million the amount of money potentially available to whoever captures Mengele.* Surprisingly, Israel's pursuit of the Auschwitz doctor has been an on-and- off affair. Isser Hard, the Mossad chief who captured Eichrnann, pursued Menge.. le relentlessly, in hopes of subjecting him to a show trial like the one staged for his fellow Nazi. Later, however, the Israelis developed a strange-bedfellows relation- ship with St roessner's right-wing, German- __ 'Anonymous contributors have offered St million through the Simon Wiesent hal Center in Los Angeles. Other rewards have been put up by Wieiienthal himself' (S50,00(.0, Beate Klarsield (525,1100) and the Wes( German gm eminent I S'320.1X.K.U. An addition& $ I million has beun (4i:red by Thii Washington Times, the newspaper that linked to the Res . .Suri Myung Moon's Unification Church. 9
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 81 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.