Funeral services were held here today for Ladislas Farago, the writer who claimed in 1972 that Martin Bormann, the high-ranking Nazi official, was living in Argentina. Farago died last Wednesday at the age of 74 after a brief illness.
A Hungarian-born former journalist, Farago was the author of more than a dozen books on world affairs, but he become world-famous through his contention that Bormann, who was Hitler’s deputy and the one regarded as responsible for the mass murder of Jews and Pales during the Nazi era, was alive in Argentina and did not die, assumed, at the end of the war in 1945.
Farago made his contention concerning Bormann in a series of articles in The London Daily Express in November 1972. In those articles he said that Bormann was one of a number of high-ranking Nazis who had escaped to South America and that Bormann was then a prosperous, 72-year-old businessman.
But in 1973 West German officials announced that a skeleton uncovered during construction work in West Berlin was all that remained of Bormann. Farago, however, stuck with his contention and expanded on it later in a 1974 book called “Aftermath.
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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.
