A majority of the town council in Muehldorf in Upper Bavaria has voted to refuse Martin Bormann Jr., son of Hitler’s deputy, the job of religious teacher in a local vocational school for which he had been recommended by the Catholic Archdiocese in Munich. Bormann is a Catholic priest. The town council cited no reason for its decision which followed widespread newspaper reports that the elder Bormann is alive in South America.
The reports are based on documents that a Hungarian-born author, Ladislas Farago, says he collected in Argentina and elsewhere which claim that Bormann has been living in Argentina since 1948 under a variety of aliases. Last week, the Frankfurt public prosecutor, Wilhelm Metzner, said he was highly skeptical of the claims.
But Metzner said yesterday that he would consider reopening war crimes proceedings against Bormann as a means of obtaining his extradition should Farago’s reports prove true. Metzner said the documents Farago showed him “made a credible impression.” He said the writer promised to supply him with a complete set next month and that he would have them analyzed with a view to getting the man identified as Bormann extradited to West Germany.
Farago claimed that he also showed the documents to Dr. Robert M.W. Kempner, former deputy chief counsel for the U.S. at the Nuremburg war crimes trials who was quoted as saying he thought they were authentic and would ask the U.S. and its wartime allies to reopen the Bormann case within the framework of the international Military Tribunal.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
