Officials of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith told a Senate subcommittee hearing yesterday that it has obtained information that can clearly establish that Nazi war criminal Walter Kutschmann has been living in Argentina under the alias Pedro Olmo since 1948.
The officials contend that Olmo can be identified as Kutschmann by scars on his upper thigh received when he was wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In addition, the ADL said Kutschmann has his blood type tatooed under his arm in accordance with SS practice.
Kutschmann, as an SS official, was involved in the mass murder of Polish Jews, including 20 university professors, together with their wives and children. He is allegedly responsible for the assassination of more than 1,500 Jews while chief of Gestapo in Bezazany, Poland during World War II.
The ADL officials — Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, director of the Latin American Affairs Department, and Elliot Welles, head of the ADL’s Nazi war criminals task force–testified before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on juvenile justice hearing testimony into the whereabouts of the Nazi war criminal, Josef Mengele.
Mengele, the former doctor at the Auschwitz death camp, is considered the most notorious war criminal still at large. He is believed to be in South America, with the last sighting of him reported in Paraguay. Para guay denies that Mengele is living there. He would now be 73 years old. The subcommittee was told yesterday that the Justice Department has enlisted five federal agencies in the search for the whereabouts of Mengele. The FBI, the State Department, the Army and the entire intelligence community are helping the Justice Department, according to Stephen Trott, assistant attorney for the criminal division.
“We also have the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals service assisting our Office of Special Investigations helping us find this man if indeed he is still living,” Trott told the subcommittee. The Justice Department began an investigation into Mengele’s whereabouts last month.
ARGENTINA GETS EVIDENCE ON NAZI WAR CRIMINAL
Rosenthal and Welles, meanwhile, said the ADL has presented Argentine authorities with evidence to support the allegation that Olmo is Kutschmann, and urging the authorities to apprehend the former Nazi so that West Germany can bring him to justice. A West German court in 1967 issued a warrant for the arrest of Kutschmann, accusing him of being a “murderer” and an “accessory to murder.”
Rosenthal and Welles claimed that Kutschmann — who has passed himself off as Olmo, a Spaniard — was detained by Argentine authorities in 1983 for an identity check. Despite the fact that the authorities had available to them extensive information on Olmo’s true identity, the ADL said an Argentine judge released him on the basis of his claim that he is actually Olmo, who was granted Argentine citizenship in 1950. The ADL officials said the hearing only lasted a matter of minutes, and no other evidence other than Olmo’s assertion was considered.
Argentine authorities should have been aware of the true identity of Olmo for years, Rosenthal and Welles said. In 1975, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal publicly identified Kutschmann as a Nazi war criminal and photos of him were published in Argentine newspapers and magazines. In a press conference in 1975, Kutschmann claimed that his German accent was due to the fact that he had lived in Germany as a child.
Further evidence of Kutschmann’s actual past, according to ADL records, comes from the West German Osram Electric Company, for which Kutschmann had been working in Argentina. A spokesman for the firm in Munich stated in 1975 that Kutschmann revealed his true identity to the firm.
The ADL said Kutschmann’s dossier indicates that he was born in Dresden on May 25, 1914, but lived most of his early life in Berlin. He was trained by the Luftwaffe prior to joining the Nazi Party in February, 1940, and the SS in December of the same year.
INVOLVED IN EXTERMINATING POLISH JEWS
As a 27-year-old SS lieutenant, Kutschmann was involved in the extermination of Polish Jewish university professors and members of their families. The Argentine weekly magazine Gente reported in 1983 that these executions were part of the Nazi plan to kill some 5,000 Jewish academicians in order “to diminish the intellectual potential of the country.”
Kutschmann was subsequently promoted to an SS post in the Galician town of Tarnopol, later becoming chief of the Gestapo in Bezazany, Poland, where he allegedly was responsible for the assassination of more than 1,500 Jews.
According to SS documents, Kutschmann was transferred to France during the closing days of the war but was listed as a deserter in 1945. He reportedly fled to Spain and finally to Argentina where he took on his new identity.
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.
