Israeli officials and Jewish groups have expressed satisfaction with test results announced in Germany this week that prove conclusively that a skeleton unearthed in Brazil seven years ago was that of Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor at Auschwitz who was known as the “Angel of Death.”
“For us, Mengele is dead,” German prosecutor Hans-Eberhard Klein told a news conference Wednesday in Frankfurt.
Klein announced that DNA samples taken from the remains match blood samples taken from Mengele’s son, Rolf, and his wife, Irene Hackenjos.
The sophisticated genetic testing, performed in Britain by Leicester University geneticist Alec Jeffreys, had long been requested by the German government.
But it was only recently that Rolf, who has adopted his wife’s maiden name, Jenkel, to avoid publicity, agreed to provide the blood sample.
According to a German government source, he did so only after justice authorities in that country threatened to exhume bodies of other members of the Mengele family.
The skeleton was unearthed in 1985 after it was reported that a man identified as Mengele had died of a stroke while swimming off Sao Paulo in 1979. He was buried at the time under the name Wolfgang Gerhard.
Professor Jeffreys wrote that after comparing DNA from the skeleton to DNA from Jenkel’s and Hackenjos’ blood samples, he was able to “conclude that, beyond reasonable doubt, the skeletal remains are those of the father of Rolf Jenkel, namely Josef Mengele.”
In Israel, the Justice Ministry issued a statement accepting the German findings.
Over the years, a number of individuals have refused to accept the fact that the body exhumed in Brazil was Mengele’s.
“The results of this test should put an end to the rumor-mongering of pseudo-Nazi-hunters who continue to mislead the general public and the Jewish community,” said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, in New York.
MENGELE HAD NO REGRETS
Still, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles has asked for the U.S. Justice Department to end what it called a “seven-year delay’ in releasing its own report on the Auschwitz death doctor, which contains not only forensic results but Mengele’s whereabouts after the war.
That would include information on the potentially embarrassing question of whether Mengele was held and released by the U.S. Army following the end of World War II, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center.
“With the last doubts removed, there is no further excuse to delay release of the long-awaited report,” said Cooper.
In Washington, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman, Doug Tillett, said in response, “My information is that the report is still incomplete and that no decision has been made as to its issue.”
Tillet said the department had “asked the Germans for a copy of their report, and I’m sure we will study it.”
The Wiesenthal Center, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and the Brazilian government in 1985 jointly engaged investigators, including an anthropologist and forensic pathologist, to study the remains found in the cemetery near Sao Paulo. Those results showed that the body was indeed Mengele’s.
Still, separate from the Wiesenthal Center, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who is based in Vienna, said several times that it was not definite that Mengele was in fact dead.
Mengele, held responsible for the murder of some 400,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death complex, was known for his sadistic brutality and the cruel, pseudoscientific experiments he carried out on living persons that resulted in the mutilation and sterilization of many Jews.
Mengele’s son made available letters he had received from his father in the 1960s and 1970s that showed he did not regret what he had done.
In one letter, he wrote, “I do not have the slightest reason to try to justify or excuse whatever decisions, actions or behaviors of mine.”
(Contributing to this report were JTA correspondents Tom Tugend in Los Angeles and David Landau in Jerusalem.)
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.
