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.
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r gu go where I had some protection such as citizenship." [Resolutions have been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate calling for an official request to Paraguay to facilitate extradition of Mengele if he is in Paraguay.] Mengele clearly has been protected in Paraguay. His pursuers believe that one of the .reasons he has been pro- tected is • that President Alfredo Stroessiter, the country's strongman ruler since 1954, is the son of an immi- grant German cavalry officer. The nature and geography of the country also conspire to furnish pro- tection. Its population of just 2 mil- lion is scattered over a !and area al- most as large as California. Even in the capital of Asuncion, with 400,000 population, a stranger making inquir- ies comes quickly to the attention of 'the neighbors—and the authorities. The eastern third of the country be- tween the Paraguay and Parana rivers is an area of green, rolling hills and some of the world's most fertile land for subtropical farming. It is the • home of a majority of the 30,000 Ger- man nationals who live in Paraguay. Mengele has been reported "posi- tively sighted" in a village named Ho- - henau in the southeastern extreme of S' that region, and in the Coffee-growing center of Pedro Juan Caballero, near its most northeasterly point. Israeli sources here concede they do not know the exact location of his present refuge, but they believe it is somewhere between Hohenau and Pe- dro Juan Caballero, probably along the Parana River that forms parts of Paraguay's boundary with Brazil and Argentina and affords quick access. into either of those countries. Unlike many Nazi fugitives, Men- '' gele made little effort to hide his 'identity during the early- Years after tC'-the war. . He lived openly in Bavaria until the Fearly 1950s when he traveled to Ar- gentina where the late Gen. Juan D. 1;■Peron had offered asylum to a host of V1 Nazis on the run. Mengele continued to live under his own name here until the mid-1960s, • representing Karl Mengele & Sons, a Bavarian farm machinery firm man- ; aged by his brother. But he took the --precaution of acquiring Paraguayan citizenship after a West German court issued a warrant for his arrest in July 1959. Acting on the warrant, West Ger- many asked Argentina for his extradi- tion, but the petition was returned without action in August 1959 on the technical ground that it should have been drafted in Spanish rather than German. Official records in Paraguay _show that "Jose Mengele" received an. iden- tity document from that country's au- thorities in October 1959. A month later, he received Paraguayan citizen- ship by order of the Supreme Court. He continued to live in Argentina, however, until the spectacular 1960 abduction here of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli secret agents, who spirited Eichmann to Israel for trial and later execution for his key role in the Holo- caust. •Israeli secret service chief Isser Hare!, who personally directed the pursuit and capture of Eichmann in Argentina, wanted to seize .Mengcle, too, but was unable to divert the time and resources away from his principal mission. In "The House on Garibaldi Street," his book on the Eichmann operation, Harel describes the home in Vicente Lopez, a middle-class suburb of Bue- nos Aires, where Mengele lived until just before the Elchmann capture. "Of all the evil figures who played principal parts in the macabre drama of the attempt to wipe out the Jew- ish people," Hard). wrote of Mengele, "he was conspicuous for his abomina- ble enjoyment of his role as death's messenger." * After news of the Eichrnann capture was made public, Argentina's press clamored for Mengele's arrest, and in July 1960, authorities ordered police to pick him up. But it was already far too late. Israeli agents traced him to a hotel in Asuncion and from there to Hohenau. Mengele, 49 when he fled Argen- tina, is 68 today. In the years between, he is assumed to have changed his ap- pearance, which once included blond , hair and moustache. He is known to have used 11 false names in that time, with false documents to match.
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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.