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
Terre Haute, Ind. "But everyone Was in. scared ofHe decided how long - you lived." 1v 'One 12-year-old Jewish boy held a ▪ special . fascinationi Marc Berkowitz had blond hair, blue eyes and a twin ;;;• sister, 'Francesca. SS officers on the kokout for lab rats perked up when their mother. shoutedu"Kill me, but OI not my twinsr Immediately, they • wqre brought to Mengele, and the Berkowitz was ordered to disrobe 1....anti lie on a table. Fluid was drawn " froth his spine. "MY whole body was 7 burning, and the next thing I knew I was fighting hack fainting, recalls the 53-yeaeold retired New York furniture salesman, physically disa- bled from his days at Auschwitz.' He heard a whimper and reached out to comfort his sister. She lay on the next table- : t times, Mengele was alnine. gentle. He patted Berkowitz on the hend as a nurse mopped his brow. Sometimes, he even apologized. "Its sorry we have to do this, but the pain will go away," he said. Yet if his guinea pigs passed out. or fought bock, he eliminated them," ; says Berkowitz. who watched bloody bundles canned out of the tab. Ever 7 stoic. Berkowitz fought to detach ; himself from the pain, and did as he ',was told. Once, he stood on his head i llor hours -without passing out. He 7. was prodded, punctured and poked. ;:d4e was dunked in a steel vat of freer-, n ;ling water while Mengele lab techni- .. -Ciaris monitored his plummeting body ; -temperature. a ; -At last, when he was pulled out a _alive, Mengele strutted about the lab ' in ecstasy. He liked Berkowitz's at- ' i7titude. "You're the type of boy I've "'keen looking for," he said. "You're i'setting an example. The other chil- l; • Oren are behaving theniselves. We're 'getting good results." . -Berkowitz just tried to obey, intent ; on living from "moment to moment, i. 7second to second," So pleased was " the doctor with his star guinea pig that he made Berkowitz his "lauper," ;dor errand boy. He taught him Ger- "non songs, recited poetry. Mengele -loved classical music, and Berkowitz ; :hand-cranked his Victrola, shined his o 1;clots and harvested his brussels 'sprouts, - But Mengele'e moods changed like the weather. One day, Berkowitz watched hen shoot a boy, first in one ...knee, then in the other. The boy was Weeping as Mengele grabbed him by the hair and gave the coup cle grace with a bullet in the brain. His sin: he'd wandered away from his bar- racks. "You know he had no business over there," said Mengele. He asked Ber- kowitz if he'd done "something wrong" in shooting the boy, but didn't wait for an answer. "You have to re- spect the laws of the place," he said. All the time, the crematoriums were running. Twins who survived the experiments were spared, of Mengele .conjufed an errand so. Ber- kowitz could take a last walk with Helen Berkowitz. For Mengele,' it W25 just another experiment, the An- gel of Death testing the faith of a Jew. "So," asked Mengele later, "do you still believe in God?" "rye lost almost everything; re- plied Berkowitz, "but one thing I have not lost is God. You can take every- thing from me, but you . cannot take gengeie reached for his revolver. It was holstered in black leather, hanging over a chair. He unsnapped one button. He unsnapped the other. He stared long and hard at his gofer.. "You 'gave the right answer," he said. He nodded at his boots, "I Want a good shine today. I have very im- portant things to tend to." Berkowitz walked outside. Smoke was belching thick and black. He was thinking, "Freon/1i 12, but I'd better say Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for my mother. I don't know if I'll be around to say it tomorrow." On Christmas Eve 1944, With the Russians advancing on the eastern front, Mengel, found Berkowitz in the washroom. A light snow was fall- ing: Pausing at . the door, flanked by two SS guards, he wished him well. Mengele seemed almost wistful. "Adieu," he said. And that was the last time Berkowitz saw him. Everyone has an answer, a rumor, a theory, scold lead, an excuse. "I've /barely) missed him five times," says Wiesenthal. He has bagged 1,100 war criminals in his lifetime without ever getting as close to Mengele as the jeweler's wife. Christmas 1963. Wiesenthai got tipped off in a letter: Mengele, Hotel American, Milan. He flew there with a German prosecutor. Said the-man- ager, "Yesterday, he left." In Torre- molinosnSpain, he missed him by two days; at the Rome airport, by mere hours. Later, a group of Auschwitz aveng- ers called the "Committee of 12" tracked him to the Hotel Tyrol near the thriving German colony of Ho- henau in eastern Paraguay. They planned to spirit him to Frankfurt to stand trial. His alias that time: Dr. Fritz Fischer. They burst into room 26, but he was gone. Minutes before, Herr Fischer got a phone call, said the manager, raced down the stairs with his pajamas on under his suit, and vanished in the night: Intelligence tips put Illengele Chile 18 months ago; in Paraguay's German-speaking Mennonite villages on the Bolivian border as recenDy as last year; in Uruguay six months ago. South American governments, rubbed raw by complaints that they're sheltering the fled legions of the Nazis, deny it all. Says the Chilean Embassy press officer, "We had one Nazi war crim- inal;and that was plenty." That would have been the tare - after the war, he made little effort to hide his identity. But at least two U.S. Army vet- erans say they believe he was in U.S. custody at one time. A retired Cal- ifornia aerospace engineer, Walter Kempthorne, says soldiers put a red- faced prisoner through calesthenics —sand bil y 10. 1945. "This here's the bastard who ster- ilized 3,000 women at Auschwitz," Said one, as a man fitting IvIengele's description huffed and puffed. Kemp- thorne Was 19, a private at the Ida!, Oberstein detention camp in occupied Germany, where Nazis were inter- rogated after the war. Guards sometimes trotted them outside lotion and games, including a charade called "Luftwaffe": Prisoners were ordered loran around in circles "spitting like a plane," says Richard Schwarz, 59. a retired government labor lawyer in Washington, D.C. As a young private, he put a Nazi broom believes was Merigele through the drill, "pats on the fannY" and all. "Presumably, it was Mengele," recalls Schwarz, who never heard the man's name, but has war correspond- ence indicating he wrote friends about just such a doctor. And the Si- mon Wiesenthal Center in Los An- geles, which horns data on Nazi war criminals and supports Holocaust studies, turned up the two. soldiers, along with a U.S. Army dispatch from an intelligence officer who refers to an 'account of Mengele's arrest in 1947. "We're searching our records et that camp," says Lt. Col, Craig McNala, an Army spokesman. "You've got to understand, Mengele wasn't on top of anyone's list back then. In 1945, he was a doctor way off in the wilds of Poland.".. And by the 1950s, he was long gone. In Smith America, the chase began, a slow and frustrating pursuit. Diplomatic channels yielded nothing. Everything grew vagee. loser Harel. Israel's secret Service chief who pulled off the daring snatch of Eichmann from Buenos Aires in 1960, eyed Mengele, too, but didn't want to risk losing Eichmann, he once wrote. Aftersards. Israeli agents tracked down his house in a middle-class suburb of Buenos Aires, but he was gone. They traced him to Paraguay. There, it was believed, he was protected by President Alfredo Stroessner, the right-wing strong man who took power in 1954, son of an immigrant German cavalry officer. It was easy to hide in a remote Cal- ifornia-size country with only two million people and a gossipy capital where word travels fast when out- siders come sniffing around. There wns also plenty of camou- flage from German colonies to the east, where lush, rolling hills be- tween the Paraguay and Parana riv- ers lured refugees Ikn n • • idea besides: "Hunting Nazi • war 'criminals wasn't our big preoecupa- . In those days. Mengele lived open- ly, sunning at a villa a half-mile-fort the embassy and scouting for', land in Alta Parana, just . sera.. the Argen- tine border, reportedly working as an auto mechanic northeast of Asuncien near the Brazilian border. "Recurring rumors" said that Mengele was at a "well-guarded ranch, either near En- carnacien, in eastern Paraguay, or in Chaim, and that he is protected by Strosner," said a 1972 CIA report. , Veterans of the AsunciOn diplo- matic corps say Mengele socialized. with late Nazi Luftwaffe ace Hans Ul- rich-Ruda reputed mastermind of Odessa, the secret underground that resettled fleeing Nazis in South no our imager he was, often asked. "A good place to start would be to cancel Mengele's citizenship," he re- plied. Then, one day, out of the blue, the foreign minister said, "Bob, that's a wonderful idea, ria bring it up with the president." And, in 1979, Men- gele was stripped of his citizenship for being "out of the country for more than two years." "We knew he was in Paraguay, but it's not something we pursued," says Alan Ryan, the top Nazi hunter for the Justice Department until 1983. There was no jurisdiction, and Ryan was too busy chasing Nazi war crim- inals hiding in America to go "smoke him out of the jungle." These tales, of course, contradict Paraguay's official shrug that his ougza craze. "There are people out there willing In sell you Bormann's bones and Mengele's hacienda," says New York lawyer Gerald Posner, whose re- search relays draw Nazi brokers like flies. 'The minute they hear an American is hunting Nazis, their ears perk up and their wallets get itchy." He's spurned diaries, rings and memorabilia. How about Menge/e's original fingerprint card? asked a Brazilian cop. Only $500. Or. recent photos, whispered an ex-Nazi officer over mint tea at the Hotel Mansour in Casablanca—after plastic surgery. A mere five grand. Or, maybe you like Meugele's SS ring, very cheap: $1,000, said the Argentine lawyer, The flea market sells such rings by the trayful, swastika and an. $3 apiece.
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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.