MENGELE MAIL MAKES MOCKERY OF MANHUNT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100610008-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 28, 2011
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: June 24, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100610008-9
Y
WASHINGTON TIMES
24 June 1985
Mengele mail makes mockery
of manhunt
By Michael Bonafield
WASHINGTON TIMES FOREIGN SERVICE
MUNICH, West Germany - The hunt
for Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele
apparently has come to an end. But ques-
tions are beginning to be raised about
how Mengele, the most sought after Nazi
fugitive, could communicate with such
openness during the past four decades
with at least two people in Germany.
That fact, said one expert, has made a
mockery of the global manhunt mounted
for Mengele since the end of World War
II.
Norman Stone, 44, a Scottish professor
of history at Worcester College, Oxford,
spent a week here examining documents
obtained by Bunte, a mass-circulation
magazine.
The letters and notebooks Mr. Stone
pored over, and which Bunte obtained
from Mengele's 41-year-old son, Rolf,
reveal that Mengele simply used the
mails to write to both his son and Hans
Sedlmeier, an employee of the Mengele
family business in Gunzburg, southwest
of Munich.
"It shows," Mr. Stone said, "that when
you are running from the international
police, hide in the obvious place."
Mr. Stone told reporters he believes
Rolf Mengele, with whom he had a three-
hour conversation, had no links with his
father other than blood. Calling Josef
Mengele a "stupid, pedantic, humorless
old man living in Brazil," Mr. Stone
described Rolf Mengele, a lawyer in
Freiburg, as a "completely credible char-
acter who never identified with his
father."
If that were so, Mr. Stone was asked,
why didn't Rolf Mengele report his
father's whereabouts to authorities?
"That is something you will have to ask
him," Mr. Stone replied.
Rolf Mengele has declined so far to
answer questions or talk with reporters.
The Mengele family is said to be planning
a comprehensive news conference, but
no date has yet been set.
The idea of Josef Mengele - who was
called the "Angel of Death" because of
the gruesome experiments he conducted
at Auschwitz - conducting open corre-
spondence through the postal services of
various countries has shocked police offi-
cials.
"It is a matter of detective work, or
really the absence of good detective
work" that accounts for Mcngcle's suc-
cess, said a Munich police official.
"From what I have been able to learn
of the investigation," he said, "most of the
attention has focused on known methods
by which former Nazis communicated
with one another. The notion that Men-
gele merely put letters into a mailbox
seemed ridiculous."
Questions of a cover-up are being sug-
gested. How, asked one Munich newspa-
per last week in a banner headline, could
Mengele have written so openly when
officials from more than a dozen coun-
tries were searching for him?
"Cover-up is not a precise word;' said
the Munich police officer, who spoke on
condition that he not be identified.
"I think it is more a question of over-
looking the obvious in favor of some sort
of exotic conspiracy, like 'Der Spinner,
he said.
"Der Spinner," is the name given to an
elaborate network allegedly set up in the
closing weeks of World War 11 to assist
members of the Nazi SS to escape allied
war-crimes trials.
Mengele, who was noted for his mon-
strous operations on twins - surgeries
conducted without benefit of anesthetic
- was a physician in the SS. He originally
served in the Waffen SS, or armed SS, on
the eastern front before transferring to
Auschwitz.
Police in Sao Paulo, Brazil, have said
the bones now identified by forensic
experts as Mengele's will be put at the
disposal of the Mengele family, and if the
family does not want them, they will be
reburied in the grave from which they
were exhumed.
The Israeli Justice Ministry, however,
has said it would not accept the forensic
findings until it can examine them.
Former Israeli s y chief Isser H arel
whose ossa tnte t ence agency
trace enge a in South America. con-
tends that if Me_n_gele _had drowned in
1979, is family in West Germany would
have tried to prove it then.
"If he died six years ago, why did his
family and people who protected him
conceal this fact?" asked Miriam Tzeiger,
a twin who survived cruel "genetic"
experiments by Mengele. Mrs. Tzeiger
would like the Nazi doctor's bones scat-
tered over the ocean so that he, like his
victims, would have no grave. "I think it's
a story invented to stop the hunt after
Menaele;' she said.
But Israeli police officer Menachem
Russek, one of the experts aiding the
Brazilian investigation, said he now
accepts the results of the inquiry. "I
believe that with experts of the caliber
we have here, you have to accept the con-
clusion;' he said in Sao Paulo.
The policeman, himself a survivor of
Auschwitz, conceded: "Maybe I'm a little
disappointed that he was not brought to
trial"
This article is based in part on wire
service reports.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100610008-9