SEARCH FOR MENGELE FAULTED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000503900002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: February 10, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000503900002-6
WASHINGTON POST
10 February 1985
Search for Mengele Faulted
Ex-Investigator Says Nazi Avoids Paraguay
United Press International
BOSTON, Feb. 9-Josef Mengele is
traveling among three South American
countries, but Nazi hunters searching for
him in Paraguay are on the wrong track, a
former U.S. Justice Department Nazi inves-
tigator said today.
"The best information is, he's on the
move between Chile, Argentina and Uru-
guay," said John Loftus, who was a justice
Department prosecutor during the Carter
administration.
Loftus discounted arguments that the
Nazi doctor of Auschwitz must be dead, say-
ing that Mengele, at 73, is younger than
President Reagan. Now a private attorney
in Rockland, Mass., Loftus left government
work in 1981 to investigate the role of U.S.
intelligence agencies in smuggling Nazis to
the United States.
Mengele is not in Paraguay, Loftus said,
attributing his information to a U.S. attor-
ney investigating nationalism in South
America who just returned from Paraguay.
"He [the source] is impeccable, and has
ties with South American intelligence ser-
vices," he said, adding that Mengele lived in
Paraguay until 1979 but has been "on the
move" since then and returned to Paraguay
only briefly in 1982.
"All the Nazi hunters are looking in the
wrong country," Loftus said.
Mengele, a doctor-turned-torturer at the
Auschwitz, Poland, concentration camp who
is wanted for sending 400,000 people to
their deaths, was last seen in Paraguay in
1962. He slipped out of Germany at the end
of the war before he could be tried for his
crimes.
Loftus, said he believed that Mengele es-
caped to Argentina using a route like that of
Nazis smuggled out by British intelligence
agents working closely with U.S. State De-
partment officials. He said Mengele went
from Germany to Alt Ausse, Austria, and
then went to British-controlled Trieste,
Italy; from there he went to Genoa and on
to Argentina.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000503900002-6