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.
“Los Angeles Times”3 pages
'KëvinMichel Caps r ) p5' ere Is Dr. Men 1 One of the most bizarre manhunts of he 20th century is reaching a climax in the Parana River jungle on the border of Paraguay and Brazil. It is there that Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called "angel of death" of Auschwitz, the Nazi con- centration camp, reportedly resides in hiding. But there are strong indications that time is finally running out for Mengele, a fugitive for nearly 35 years. A host of pressures for Mengele's ex- tradition has been brought to bear dur- ing the past year on the government of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroess- ner, who has been giving refuge to Nazi war criminals since he came to power in 1954. Last month, the Stroessner regime announced that it would ask Its Su- preme Court tor.anntitizen- In a regime as authoritarian as The writer teaches economics and history at the John F. Kennedy School in Surrey, England. Stroessner's, such a request to the judi- ciary is tantamount to a fait accompli. Mengele has thus been declared per- • sone non grata in his homeland of 20 years. Stroessner's sudden change springs from the new Paraguayan desire for diplomatic respectability. One of the most hopeful trends in recent Latin American politics has been the efforts of dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, . Brazil—and now Paraguay—to present themselves to the world as less repres- sive societies. The international impo- tence of authoritarian' Brazil, for in- stance, contrasts sharply with the influ- ence of relatively democratic nations such as Venezuela and Mexico, and this has not gone unnoticed by Latin Ameri- can juntas. Though the apparatus of ' fascism is still intact in the Latin American dicta- torships, there has been a drop in the officially sanctioned kidnappings, tor- ture and arrest of political opponents. Latin American juntas now hope that the United States and Western Europe will be more easily persuaded to offer the technological aid desperately needed for economic development. From a strictly economic point of view, one of Paraguay's most desirable potential trading partners would be West Germany. (Stroessner, inciden- tally, is the son of a German immi- grant.) But a thorn in West German- Paraguayan relations continues, to be the German request for Mengele's ex- tradition, officially "pending" since 1962, with Paraguayan officials pre- . tending to know nothing of Mengeie's whereabouts. The latter is a rather du- bious claim, since the Nazi doctor ha, been seeu in P araguay by SCOrcS OL nesses and was tracked to a. remote hideout on the Paraguayan-Brazilian border last winter by a team of British Broadcasting Corporation reporters. As for Mengele himself, his fate is likely to become a bit precarious now that he has lost the patronage of his chief protector. Still, one should not underestimate the ability of Mengele's network of friends to find yet another Latin American dictator willing, to take in the former Auschwitz doctor. Find- ing Mengele a new haven will not be made easier by the fact that the doc, tor's.murderous career bears little re- semblance to the fictionalized account of Ira Levin's book, "The Boys From Brazil." The novel was subsequently transformed by Hollywood into a sci- ence-fiction fantasy, in which Mengele conceived ra plot to clone dozens of I young Adolf Hitlers and unleash them on an unsuspecting worlcL The trouble with such dramatizations is that, by sus- pending reality, they tend to distract the public from the real facts about . Mengele's grisly career. j As one of the chief physicians at Au- schwitz, Mengele became steadily more drawn to a Faustian fate of complicity in the murders of hundreds of thou- sands. It was Mengele who separated arriving inmates-by a flick of his finger —right was the path for the healthier men and women fit to work; left meant the beginning of the inexorable march to the gas chamber. But Mengele gained even greater no- toriety from his experiments on twins. One of his favorite techniques was to separate twins who arrived at the death camp, feed them relatively well, then perform various experiments on them. When they had served his purposes, Mengeie unceremoniously murdered them'and dissected their corpses. It was all done in the_ service of propagating the so-called Aryan race, a project much favored by Nazi theoreticians. Today .Mengele remains both the most sought-after and the most elusive of Nazi war criminals. But whether he will ever have to face legal tribunals in Europe remains an open question. Cer- tainly many in the Western world would like to deal with the "angel of death" in an extra-legal fashion. But whatever Mengele's ultimate fate, at least two hopeful signs can be detected from his loss of Paraguayan citizenship. The first Is that Paraguay's increasing desire for diplomatic respectability may lighten the load of oppression borne heretofore by its citizens. The second is that there will now be a new discomfort in the serenity of Mengele's Latin American retirement—the kind of discomfort the doctor so richly de- Serves. ,9,9,
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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.