Sen. Jesse Helms (R. NC), acting on requests from Jewish leaders associated with tracing Nazi war criminals, has asked the Senate to help bring about the extradition of Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death, ” from Paraguay to West Germany to stand trial for the killing of more than 200,000 children.
Helms introduced a sense of the Senate resolution asking the government of Paraguay to apprehend and extradite Mengele. The resolution was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Helms is a member. It says that Mengele, while resident doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp “was responsible for the torture and death of more than 200,000 children” and “conducted cruel and inhuman surgery and experiments upon children to develop ways to manipulate the genetic structure of human beings. ” In addition, the Helms resolution said, Mengele “worked to develop new methods of sterilization to promote acts of genocide against Jews, Slavs and other European peoples.”
The fact that Josef Mengele should remain today in freedom, never having been brought to trial, “makes him a living symbol of the Holocaust we cannot continue to tolerate,” Helms said.
PARAGUAY DENIES MENGELE THERE
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the Paraguyan Embassy about Mengele and Minister Gilberto Caniza responded that Mengele “is not in Paraguay.” Caniza said that “We hear from time to time that he is in Paraguay” but he insisted he is not in that country.
“It would be very difficult for a person to hide in Paraguay,” he said, noting its small population. “If Mengele were in Paraguay,” he added, “his presence would be denounced not only by the Paraguayan people as a whole but by the Jewish community there,” He acknowledged that Mengele received Paraguayan citizenship along with other Germans who arrived there after 1945.
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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.
