Josef Mengele, the long-sought “selection doctor” at the Auschwitz murder camp, eluded capture by Israeli agents in Paraguay by only minutes recently, Der Spiegel, a leading newsweekly of Hamburg, reported in its current issue.
According to the weekly, 13 armed agents surrounded a hotel owned by a former Belgian SS man, but Mengele, warned by a German-born conspirator, jumped out of a window and escaped capture. The hotel is located between Encarnacion and Asuncion, the weekly said.
Der Spiegel said Mengele, who had the task of selecting victims for the Auschwitz gas chambers, arrived in Asuncion last month. As he was traveling to Asuncion, the weekly reported, “a member of the secret service team which had traced him was found dead, shot in the head, in the border area between Paraguay and Brazil.”
The Brazilian chief of Interpol, the international police agency, reported in Rio de Janeiro last September 9 that an Israeli who might have been searching for Mengele, had been murdered “a month ago” on the Peruvian side of the Brazil-Peru border. Edson Lasmar, the Interpol official, said he had asked his Peruvian counterpart to try to trace the killer. Neither Der Spiegel nor Lasmar gave the name of the murdered Israeli.
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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.
