Ambros, Convicted Nazi War Criminal, Abandons Plans to Visit U.S.

Otto Ambros, the convicted Nazi war criminal who managed a rubber factory at the Auschwitz death camp during World War II, has abandoned plans for a third visit to the United States, a State Department spokesman reported. The 70-year-old German scientist had requested a special visa from the American consulate at Stuttgart to attend a seminar of the Dow Chemical Co. at Midland, Mich. on May 12. News of his request touched off numerous protests among Jewish leaders. The spokesman, Fred Scott of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, said the Stuttgart consulate had reported that Ambros “has other commitments” and would not come to the United States. Scott also disclosed on Friday that an investigation showed Ambros had been in the United States twice previously on special authorization, required because he had been sentenced by a war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg in 1948 to serve eight years in prison for “misusing slave labor” as a manager of the I.G. Farben plant at Auschwitz. Slave laborers culled from Jewish and other inmates at the death camp lasted about three months at the rubber plant and about 25,000 of them employed by Farben died. Sixty percent of those brought to Auschwitz were gassed at the death camp.

Scott said Ambros came to the United States in 1967 after the State Department recommended to the Justice Department a waiver on his eligibility which was granted. In 1969, the former Nazi received a second visa, but this time the United States consulate gave him the visa by local decision apparently on the ground that the waiver granted in 1967 was sufficient for a second waiver. Scott told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Stuttgart consulate granted Ambros a visa early in April with out referring the request to Washington because the previous visas allowed him. The spokesman said he had no records to indicate whom Ambros visited during his previous stays in the United States. On the third bid, the Dow firm supported his application and a Dow spokesman was quoted as describing Ambros as a “well-informed authority on the German chemical industry.” The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish War Veterans and the Jewish Defense League had demanded that Ambros be barred from entry. The American Jewish Committee representative here said that if Ambros had legitimate business in the United States, “he has the right to be here, just as others have the right to comment on what they think of him.”