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.
“The Advance”1 page
The-- Hunt for .Tosef Mengele "A 19.1-lltdc" rcePdc4";"ae l,'fivorite snow 1962 When Germiti?. i •tir* ex- - fixture • la-l•-•.••• , myStin. Ahem $fioessner, anclx Xepresentative for German firms. . trahideoditiuTcan'P41.beisfot arrivund, the4y His dealings alsti included substan- dispatch '4...Posse. "We have made tial payments to Stroessner's son,. . afull investigation and found no trace Says Paria,based Nazi hunter Beate of Mezigele in Paraguay," says the Klarsfekl,' whO, along With her hus, embas-sypress:artathe. "We believe 'hand, ltraelred 'Nan -: Ocellaere stiYinore."_ Klaus Altman Barbie to . Bolivia, where he Lee! npenty is•-•S govern- : • ,••- • sj sf. • . flssmt Serniity, doriseltant before Horrors lice the. Holocaust -make extradition to FranCe: !She clams . iriliTtiaenher, Ql•Teatiala Rudel's fnnatrcaal deetuneet.::;in her beget rifOre qnestanns If Meng.* is files, 'detail the deals; " , PeYer"9!0It!': ik'Cs ilie•#.45Tc's rr. "I humped into- kidei all oner the f n thieis; m tiliS,Xe -place.' says Benjamin Weiner ad esealile -listlee?••Or. if he is on Vaione, : 71, the former Israeli am- 6.4441 that mean finally tri- ' bassactor who made it a habit to be . fil • - • On Jan. 27, 1945, Berkowitz and :lf.r163d' di* 'like the'i!WC:re•s w'ife ' -sister,were liberated by the us-re RWhe had seenMengele He met Men- • gele's lawyer, • MENGELE, From Cl over the years, he became an Argen- tine citizen in 1954 and petformed. abortions, says Nazi hunter Simon WiesenthaL (At one point, he was 'detained" by police when a patient died,) His first wife divorced him that •year, and in 1958 he married his old- . er brother's widow. They were di- ..., Vorced three years later, and she left for Switzerland and Italy. After the •West German warrant was issued in 1959 be became a Paraguayan cit- ., isen; he is said to have attended his ' father's funeral in Germany that . year. He has lived his life. He has had friends, patients, family. Now bounty hunters, revenge seekers, glory hOunds and die-hard believers in -eaithly justice descend On South Anierica. in such numbers that they have fostered a trade in relics of this saint of Hell—photographs,' an ID 'card, whatever souvenir of evil you want, except the man himself. If alive, he would be 74 this month. Now America wants him. Its top • Nazi hunter, Neal Sher, a Justice De- - partrient lawyer who heads the Of- ; lice of Special Investigations, flew . to : Europe last week to seek leads from . Lerman prosecutors and Nazi track- ers like Wiesenthal, 76, who suspect Mengele is still in. Paraguay, pro- . tested by President Alfredo Stroess- ner; but after all these years, they still don't really know. • his application, he said he , -stOod 5 feet 9, with brown hair and , blue eyes. But others remember a shorter, darker-looking man in a. .. country that worshipped blue-eyed :.. 'blonde Mengele's hang-up was that he:looked bite a Gypsy,' says Wie- Senthal- . Indeed, he aimed to keep nature : from future mistakes, drafting human guinea pigs for macabre experiments he believed might make Hitler's dream Of an Aryan master race come ; trite. As the SS doctor at Auschwitz, he dispatched nearly half a million to ' the gas chambers and killed thou- '. Mods more with mad genetic quack- ' cry. He was obsessed with twins: if • German women could repopulate • after the war with multiple births, ' Military losses might be offset. He handpicked spedmens as they came off the trains at Auschwitz-Birkenau deep inside Poland. In his black SS •uniform, shiny stick in hand, he cut a •• striking figure to the bedraggled, - - frightened Jews, waving some to the ; "left, to die, others to the right, to live. . "He looked gorgeous," recalls twin -Eva Kor, 50, who sells real estate in -TJr-re Haute, Ind. "Buteveryone:was course, treated like prize pet rabbits.. But if one in a pair died, Mengele killed the other to compare autopsies. In other experiments, he snatched babies from mothers and tried to change the color of their eyes and hair, then killed them by -injection. "What's the difference if you make black eyes out of blue eyes?" he asked one mother, then tried it with her child. It died. Witnesses . have also told German • prosecutors: • He offered candy to two sets of twin girls, then shot them in the neck; castrated or sterilized "about 100 male prisoners," routinely tossed babies into ovens alive and wired in- mate's with electrodes to test, their threshold for electric shock. To boost his labor force, he or- dered pregnant women onto their backs, then stomped them until they aborted. Once, he promised a special milk. porridge for all expectant moth- ers who signed up, then gassed them all. He also gassed a barracks that in- cluded some of his former professors, all Jews. 'We called hirn the 'death doc- tor,' " says survivor Ernest Michel, 61, of New York City, who once es- corted eight Jewish women to Men- gele's lab as an orderly. When he hauled them away, two were dead, two were in a coma, another had to be disconnected from an electroshock machine. Spared for his elegant penmanship, Michel was ordered to rewrite med- ical history. "Heart attack,' he wrote day after day to cover up the true cause of death. "Our biggest fear was that some would be left alive to tell what really happened," he says. As one of Mengele's pets, Ber- kowitz WAS there in 1944 when his keeper exploded over a report of lice among the Gypsies. "I'm sick and tired of these filthy, diseased pigs," Mengele ranted. "I've been trying to keep this camp dean, and I'm fight- ing a losing battle!" His solution: send the whole bar- racks to the gas chambers. And 700 Gypsies were marched off to be "dis- infected" forever. One German offi- cer nodded At Berkowitz, a witness to his rage. Said Mengele, "Don't wor- ry, he's one of us. If we had more boys like him, we would have won the war." Mengele liked to test Berkowitz, probing for the secret of his endur- ance. Once, he ordered Berkowitz to swim with the SS men who nearly drowned him for sport. To retest his courage, it was back to the pool. When his Mother's barracks was marched off to the gas chamber, Mengele conjured as errand so Ber- kowitz could take a last walk with SS general who conceived and mom,' ated mobile gas chambers used to exterminate Jews. He recently died in .his sleep after running a fishing boat for years, under his own name, out of 'Puerto Proyenir. Chile's su- preme court denied his extradition request on a technicality. Another extradition request was denied in 1959 by Argentina, on grounds that.. • it was written in German, not ish. And not till 1970 'did Parigna)t concede Mengele had been natural" ized years loefore "The last photograph is 1963 is AsunciOn," says Wiesenthal by phOne from Vienna. "We. don't know his [new] alias." What of rumors -he may have und- ergone plastic surgery? Wiesenthal doubts it; no Nazi war criminal he caught ever went under the knife What about the report of postcards sent to friends from Portugal? Does Wiesenthal say this is a Nazi disin- formation trick to blur the trail? Or CIA tiles portraying Mengele as a cocaine warlord, dealing under the name Dr. Henrique Wollman? "A stu- pid story," Wiesenthal scoffs. "He doesn't need the money." . . It would certainly seem that way, if he can rely on rich Nazi friends and the family conglomerate, Karl Me:n- gele & Sons, with offices in Para- guay, Argentina and the United States. A Si million bounty was offered last week by unnamed donors in Lcs Angeles after lesser amounts did no good. He remains at bay, a fugitive with all the glamor of an emissary from hell, merely yapped at by the hounds of justice, and mythologized by Hol- lywood in two movies, "Marathon Man" and "The Boys-From Brazil.' 7.• '="" Mengele was born March 16, 1911, in Guenzburg, Germany, the third son of a wealthy farm machin- ery manufacturer. At 24, he joined Hitler's 'Brown Shirts," the Nazi Par- ty three -years later. . He studied anthropology and zo- ology M Mnnich, hatching a fascina- tion for genetics, which was further fueled at the Institute for Genetic Purification in Frankfurt. In 1938, he graduated from medical school, mar- ried Irene Maria Schoenbein, joined the Waffen SS and became the Auschwitz canm physician. Their son Rolf was born at Ausch- witz in 1944. Like other Nazis in the early days after the war, he made little effort to. hide his identity_ But at least two TI S Army vet- fannirig :inljake . "They 'would Call me to express the to understand: iNith Eva Kor, he ..iii.siile:asure of their president; says Started a Support group for Ansch- ildialS called Varme carpet. pain of a crumbling spine and fought th 0,41 * Natu=a4,140nc -4' mar mock trial for Mengele JeCusalem iEnieblie;';' and Israel' CoirldO'f.•;:affoid for mercenaries" Thtc/-46143,6ts last month. - .'surfaced Of assOrted. aveeEers on the, Later, in 1978, tie 11 is. hanicmiv i! Wouid prefer a trial. He doesn't hate aith the (lector.' ,t tin's. many yearaentrunals tan into ny',saettvoy .irt ll9ra5 that 146 eie'r.of, ye, Witfiess. HOW can you punish grainer but We Lebow dc:41* pf:499;9*'P.e-6-, ',13!enf he is i'afighilana gets life: he'll hired a Nazi boasting of pfayipg .caidq Af" Especially when the citizenship So, why -wasn'i -he arrested —or Ilw-ser°11P • •• • • !' papers are signed by old Stroessner friends like Alejandro von Eckstein, a Russian emigre who fought alongside Stroessner in the Chaco War with Bolivia, and who still - advises Paraguayan intelligence services. At the American Embassy at AsunciOn, there were frequent ru- mors of Martin Bormann alive and well, but never Mengele, recalls A. Dane Bowen, political officer until 1964. Besides: "Hunting Nair war criminals wasn't our big preocc-upa- ton." In those da ys_ Menvele lived ores- s' , -after S j .ving a death marchdutifully ing Such re- zingin thefree colcLAndthreeyears ":'1 4, 0'',:-'1!''. !".-... 0 . pthis la Tel Aviv. He got no reply. , later, after ,stinfs in refugee camps. l'i:Soiriti.;ii.Li• -.6)--orici'Sizid-r-Sil-f..i,l;Cda- 1:`rael dc'ein't e'llsect ltS °lib's" ' they wound up in America • sole sur- trenimiliaiiilland --il.>11, :.:::::::;/,..,,,,:::, ,Nazi. • . 'mom& a family of mne. .. l. fi,3,2a.i-tliere:Merigeje,..aj!otidBut whenever Nazi hunters , back Berkowitz washed dishes in New Il.'iii:ihe '60s; friorn Pedro juantCa- hal- .,b9Ine 'raised a fuss . Paraguafall a', Yorlo, sold furniture, shrugged off the [fa likleartin .. the retired diplomat turned Writer, wits twins nialinti candle, .sti far, home il.garbi".in the eatly,t,cki:;.&it Who liveS in Brookline, liras's. 'But abeut 120have come forward, 20 a;conunando;taid.;;There : they never denied he was there." • from the StateS. Many testified at a !arirchillomatie the doe-tor. His sfandaidiline:".'00" if4ingoe. ia,0**,arresteduSet- ',mann :affair had ;elided ...Via' 4;cioei- across the street. The Germans have ` ipswilieveorits Oa-ask-him some goes- mScin- 1 : warrant fur his arrest." His job was to askhin) exactly to keep Paraguay's crucial U.N. Se- 'what he did to his guinea pigs, some Amino:Sad and thd'iiieSiiirtlierf idst entity Council vote in Israel's Corner can get medical help," he says, "We Mesigeld!actrois -fhe hozdermmBrazl1,He charmed, he cajoled, he got it, are hire a puzzle We have to be put l:acconling to heavily edited CIA files .even as Meugele was Semi .aromid . backtogether pieie by piece.' ''..reteitsed last week:',ACc0.66.Fgs6 town.j •: Anibivalent abent' revenge, , he looSe.:, and soineone aPparaftlyitnis' • heard he feeie•ented :the Eaballo Mengele; And lie reflects that, he is -to* .-a . man' for Mengele. 'Ile ' Was .Biagoo, or white flerse:a. f.;:riorite .'ttnt Iris errand boy: "You see, he fiev.,. Jotmd be.afen 41e4th-• : German rejstaurant cloy/ma...in. And a disnifisseci Me; : j • ••• ; 'outtobeanez-Nazisoldner. .• • •. • BBc , a! hidzkii! lace".Loolo, the lifeof • • trobablY- servejagy_a. few:years ...be- • • r:Ps-At'all'Ociiaglt*' TP.Iiict- 'wiwnenerllnsbasuadecRohertWhite. fore he diesAlialiviill end uP..to.he :.the 5. tni :(qught •.F tie . if...gene:le:is something? 13ecause he wasn't - stn-viv hOuld -jt - wanted all that much," says White, . . . . • who filed his' Mengele tales with the State Department and got no reply. ! . "We :did report on it, but there was Now Mengele is hot, everyone'snever much interest expressed by favorite villain. It's only taken 40Washington in any way." years. In South America, there are Still, such accounts irritated M- , ose who can look on it as a trend, riotsthe remote haven for right- not unlike other trends, a sort of nos- wing refugees. "Bob, how can we pal- talvia craze. ish up our image?" he was. often -"There are people out there willing asked. to sell you Bormann's bones and "A good place to start would be to Mengele's hacienda," says New York cancel Mengele's citizenship," he re- lawyer Gerald, Posner whose ye-- 7.. . _
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.