‘Mengele is not here’

Press, 28 May 1984, Page 10

‘Mengele is not here’

NZPA-AFP Asuncion A new arrest warrant issued last week against Dr Josef Mengele is considered in Paraguay as tantamount to an official Government denial of persistent rumours that the Nazi war criminal is still in the country. In 1979 the Justice Ministry stripped the former medical chief of the Auschwitz concentration camp of the Paraguayan nationality which he had been granted about 15 years earlier. Officials said that the issue of a fresh arrest warrant on Tuesday had been in response to repeated requests by the West German Government for Mengele’s extradition. “Mengele is not here. The arrest warrant is simply a token of the Government’s good faith,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Diplomats said that the move could also have something to do with the fact that Washington is under pressure from American Jews not to finalise certain accords with Paraguay be-

fore the question of Mengele is settled. Mengele, dubbed the “Angel of Death,” was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War. Now aged 73, he has headed the wanted list for the last 20 years. But so far neither Israel, nor Nazihunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld, nor the international press, have tracked him down to his presumed hiding place in South America. Asuncion, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo (Uruguay) have denied his presence since 1962, when the Federal German Justice Ministry began to call for his extradition. Mengele fled some 10 years earlier to Argentina as the facts began to emerge about his crimes and the experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps. Since then Mengele has been sighted many times in countries in southern Latin America. All efforts to find him so far have failed.