Hunt deepens for death camp doctor

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 12

Hunt deepens for death camp doctor

By

RALPH BLUMENTHAL,

of the “New York Times,”

The United States, West Germany, and Israel are mounting a new co-ordinated effort to track down and prosecute Josef Mengele, the elusive Nazi death camp doctor.

After two days of meeting in Frankfurt, law enforcement officials of the three countries have "resolved to open direct lines of communication at the prosecution and investigative levels” with the aim of bringing Mengele to trial for “crimes against humanity.”

West German arrest papers charge him with selecting victims for gassing and medical experiments at the Auschwitz extermination camp. The agreement, the most ambitious international effort since World War II to hunt down a former Nazi, comes 40 years after Mengele shed his S.S. uniform and boldly resettled in his hometown in the American sector of Germany. Later he disappeared, to resurface in South America under his own name, selling the Mengele family’s line of farm machinery, before going underground again. The new international co-opera-tion follows years of virtually no official interest and only fitful unofficial moves to find Mengele, now regarded as the world’s most wanted fugitive, with a price of nearly SNZB.B million on his head. Although Israel this week asked Interpol to join the search for Mengele, the multinational police agency has generally steered clear of Nazi cases.

Officials could recall no previous case in which the three Governments pledged such close cooperation on searching for a Nazi war criminal.

Why the case, after lying dormant for so many years, should now assume such extraordinary proportions is unclear, but some officials say it has to do with the 40th anniversary of Germany’s defeat and a long-delayed coming to grips with issues of the Holocaust.

Taking part in the meetings in Frankfurt this week were officials of the Justice Department’s Marshal’s Service and Office of Special Investigations, the West German Federal and State criminal police, and the Israeli Ministry of Justice and police.

The United States Justice Department said that because of the “sensitivity” of the investigation no further details could be provided. Investigators and other experts interviewed in recent months said they believed that Mengele was still alive, now aged 74, and hiding in his longtime refuge of Paraguay, making occasional visits to neighbouring countries and possibly some overseas trips. The Paraguayan leader, General Alfredo Stroessner, in a highly unusual television interview, re-

cently denied knowing Mengele and told America’s A.B.C. News: “I don’t know where he is, and we cannot find out where he is.” Accounts from admitted Mengele associates obtained by a New York lawyer place the former S.S. physician in Paraguay as recently as 1982 — three years after the Paraguayan Government, under growing pressure, revoked Mengele’s citizenship on grounds that he had been out of the country for at least five years. The investigations have also brought to light these disclosures, among others: • For about four years after fleeing Auschwitz, Mengele lived, by all accounts openly, in or around his hometown of Guenzburg, in Bavaria, a company town of the giant Mengele family farm-machinery factory that was in the American occupation zone and that the American authorities apparently never checked for his presence.

O At some point, Mengele may have been taken into custody by American forces, according to ambiguous notations in Army records and recollections by former American soldiers.

® In 1956, in Argentina, Mengele felt secure enough to abandon a longtime alias and resurface under his own name, in which he secured citizenship in Paraguay. 8 In Paraguay, in the 19605, officials of the Stroessner Government tipped off Mengele that Israeli agents were looking for him.

» While in Paraguay, Mengele travelled to German communities selling farm equipment for the Mengele company and keeping in touch with a company officer in Guenzburg. After Paraguay joined the United Nations Security Council in 1968, Israel took pains not to antagonise the Stroessner Government and did not press the Mengele case, according to a former ambassador. The world-wide interest in the Mengele case has produced a flood of misinformation and possibly deliberate disinformation and that has clouded the search with bogus sightings and photographs — including, apparently, even the pictures on widely circulated wanted, posters. “It’s the third largest industry in Paraguay, information on Josef Mengele,” said Allan Ryan, a former head of the Justice Department’s special investigations unit for war-crimes cases.

The following account is based on Nazi records and post-war German documents, statements by members of the Mengele family, company officials, and Auschwitz survivors, and interviews with investigators and private researchers. Mengele was born in Guenzburg

on March 16, 1911, the year his father Karl bought a farm machinery company that became the manufacturing concern, source of the family’s substantial wealth. He had an older brother, Karl Jr, and a younger brother, Alois. In 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power, Mengele joined the S.A., the extremist Nazi militia that was purged the following year, and in 1937, as a young doctor, he joined the Nazi Party, marrying two years later.

After research at an institute for “racial purity” in Frankfurt, he joined military units, serving in the General S.S. and the Waffen S.S. on the Russian front. After reaching the rank of major in the medical corps, he was assigned to duty at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in May, 1943.

He was not the chief doctor at Auschwitz, the Germans’ largest death camp, where an estimated four million people, most of them Jews, were gassed and cremated. Accounts of survivors — many of whom recall his hypnotic dark eyes and the distinctive triangularshaped gap between his front teeth

— place him constantly at the arrival ramp selecting those to be killed immediately and those to be put to work or to be used as human guinea pigs for medical experiments. His obsession was twins, and, the charges say, he killed and dissected many twin children in hopes of finding the secret to more quickly producing a “master race” of blue-eyed Aryans. One of the counts later filed by the West German charges: “At the end of 1944, he supposedly conducted experiments on a newborn baby of witness J., after which the eyes were not recognisable any more, but just formed a single red clump.” The baby later died. By the time the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Mengele had disappeared. A survivor, Marc Berkowitz, recalls him bidding him a strangely sentimental farewell at Christmas of 1944. The doctor’s movements over the next several months have not been traced, but Justice Department investigators are studying Army records that suggest that he may have been apprehended by American troops, a recollection shared by several former soldiers. If he had been arrested, he may have escaped or been released, because the summer of 1945 found Mengele back in Guenzburg. Gerald Posner, a New York lawyer who has documented much of Mengele’s life on the run for a book he is writing, said a friend of the doctor’s had recounted meeting him in Guenzburg during this time.

The friend, Julius Diesbach, who has since died, said Mengele was using his own name and working for the Mengele company, according to Mr Posner. Similar accounts were given to

another writer, Flora Rheta Schreiber, who visited Guenzberg for an investigative series of articles on Mengele in 1975. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Los Angeles Holocaust study institute named for the Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, also recently obtained declassified Army intelligence records indicating that Mengele was known to be residing with his family after the war in Autenreid, a village near Guenzburg. By 1947, Mengele had already been publicly identified by the Auschwitz camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, as responsible for some of the medical atrocities.

In 1949, as the American occupation forces yielded sovereignty to a new West German Government, Mengele fled the Guenzburg area. With a Red Cross passport bearing a picture of his brother, Alois, and issued in the name of Helmuth Gregor, he reached Buenos Aires. Seven years later, with no indication that anyone was interested in finding him, Mengele resurfaced.

On September 11, 1956, he visited the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires, announced that he was really “Jose” Mengele and obtained a certificate that then enabled him to get a new Argentine identity card in his real name. There is nothing to show that the West Germans questioned his action or checked on the reason behind it.

By 1958, however, a West German prosecutor, Hermann Langbein, persuaded reluctant officials to authorise charges against Mengele and happened to discover his presence in Argentina, clearing the way for a 1959 West German order for his arrest and extradition.

In response, Mengele crossed the border to Paraguay, where a Paraguayan Government intelligence official, Colonel Alejandro Von Eckstein, and a former Nazi youth leader, Werner Jung, eased his way to citizenship by attesting that he had been a resident in Paraguay for five years.

Mr Posner, who interviewed Von Eckstein recently in Paraguay, said the official defended his action as proper because he had known Mengele for five years. Jung died in the meantime in Spain. It was during this time as well that Mengele narrowly escaped capture by the same Israeli team that seized Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. In a widely reported incident shortly before the Eichmann kidnapping, a woman rumoured to have been an Israeli agent was found dead of a fall after befriending Mengele at the Argentine resort of San Carlos de Bariloche.

The story is told in Argentine police files but research indicates the woman, Nourit Aldot, was not an Auschwitz survivor, as commonly reported, but had emigrated

to Palestine, before World War 11. Israeli officials recently maintained that none of their agents ever died in the search for Mengele. In addition, Mr Posner said that Von Eckstein showed him a hideway. the Hotel del Tirol, near Encarnacion, where unidentified Nazi hunters nearly trapped Mengele in 1965. John Martin, an A.B.C. News correspondent recently in Paraguay, obtained unusual on-camera admission by Von Eckstein that the Stroessner Government had warned Mengele about Israeli agents searching for him. “Yes, the chief of investigations told him, yes,” the colonel said. Mr Posner said he was also told that, during the 19605, Mengele took over a farm machinery business in Paraguay and sold Mengele equipment to the German Mennonite communities.

Dieter Mengele, the son of Josefs late brother, Alois, and a director of the Mengele company today, has denied that his uncle ever worked for the company or received money from it. However, a former general manager of the Mengele company in Guenzburg, given by Mrs Schreiber in her articles as Hans Sadelmeyer, is quoted as saying he was in constant touch with Mengele in Paraguay.

On at least one occasion in 1974, West German prosecutors were reported to have monitored the telephones of members of the Mengele family in hopes of tracing calls from the doctor but the efforts were described as fruitless.

Relations of Mengele have also been subject to periodic surveillance by private as well as official investigators.

Mengele’s divorced wife, Irene, is living in Freiburg, as is their son, Rolf, a lawyer. Mengele subsequently married Martha Mengele, the widow of his brother, Karl. Her son, Karl Heinz, also living in West Germany, became Mengele’s stepson. Mrs Mengele now lives in Merano, Italy.

Mr Posner said he was told directly by members of a German family in Hohenau, in southern Paraguay, in December that Mengele had stayed with them for several days in 1982. The family, Oscar Krugg and the widow of Alban Krugg, were also reported to have put up Mengele on earlier occasions. Mr Posner said he also found reports in police files in Brazil and Chile that Mengele has been spotted in places there in 1983. Complicating the search is the fact that many of the photographs purporting to be of Mengele since 1959 are viewed by experts as fakes. This includes the common picture of an older man with a drawn face and drooping moustache looking over his shoulder.