A lawsuit filed in Washington yesterday seeks to compel the United States government to release four pages of classified Army intelligence documents that may provide key information regarding the reported efforts by Joseph Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor, to gain entry into Canada in 1962.
The suit, filed by Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R.N.Y.) and Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, follows last week’s release by the Center of intelligence documents indicating that, besides attempting to obtain a visa into Canada, Mengele may also have been captured and released in an American occupation zone soon after World War II.
The documents previously released by the government mention that Mengele, considered the most wanted war criminal still at large, may have sought a visa at the Canadian Consulate in Buenos Aires under the alias of “Joseph Menke.” There is no knowledge that he ever entered Canada. The documents were obtained under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
REASON FOR WITHHOLDING DOCUMENTS
American intelligence was informed of the visa application made in the name of “Joseph Menke” and replied to the Canadians with information about Mengele, but subsequent follow up, if any, has not been revealed. U.S. intelligence has established that Menke was an alias used by Mengele.
The four pages of documents, three of which reportedly are Canadian records held by Army intelligence, were withheld because they “reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security” or involve foreign government information, according to Army Intelligence and Security Command, which released the other records to the Wiesenthal Center.
Canadian Solicitor General Elmer Mackay told Parliament this week that all restrictions on the publication of incriminating documents now in the possession of the U.S. State Department will be lifted for the Canadian government so that a thorough investigation can be conducted.
D’Amato told reporters outside the U.S. District Court in Washington that the release of the four pages of documents may “provide us with new information explaining how Dr. Mengele has escaped apprehension since the end of World War II. We need new leads.” Cooper and Hier were not in Washington when the suit was filed.
Mengele, known as the “angel of death” for his inhuman experiments on inmates at the Auschwitz death camp, was last reported seen in the 1970’s in Paraguay. His present whereabouts are unknown. The government of President Alfredo Stroessner maintains that he has since left the country. He would now be 73 years old.
FACTOR OF MENGELE’S AGE
Mengele’s age is a central factor serving as a catalyst in the renewed public efforts to locate the former Nazi. “We must find Dr. Mengele and make him account for the lives of the four million who were murdered at Auschwitz,” D’Amato said. “It would be a crime of mammoth proportions if Mengele were to die without ever having been brought to justice and held accountable for these horrible crimes.”
The New York Senator also requested that William Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, conduct an investigation in search of postwar intelligence files for information relating, directly or indirectly, to Mengele. D’Amato made the request at a meeting with CIA General Counsel Stanley Sporkin.
A KEY DOCUMENT RELEASED
A key document released by the Wiesenthal Center last week contained a letter written by former Army intelligence officer Ben J.M. Gorby to the commanding officer of the 430 Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) unit in Vienna, which said his office had information from an informer that Mengele had been arrested in Vienna in 1947.
Gorby was located last weekend by the Wiesenthal Center. Now living in Israel, Gorby, in a statement released by the Center, asserted that he stands by the information he filed with the CIC unit. But he said he had never followed up on the report and did not remember its existence until it was recently uncovered in American archives.
The Pentagon, in response to the Center’s documents, said, it did not believe Mengele had been arrested and later released as Gorby contended in his letter. “None of the documents indicate any American units had any contact or captured the doctor after the war,” Pentagon spokesman Michael Burch said last week. He said, however, Defense Department officials were conducting a review of pertinent documents.
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