Police Hold Man Pending Arrival of Fingerprints from West Germany

Colombian police are holding a 72-year-old German in voluntary custody today pending the arrival of fingerprints from West Germany which are expected to determine whether or not he is Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, who was last seen alive as Soviet forces took Berlin in 1945. The German, who identified himself as Johann Hartmann and claimed he has lived in Colombia since 1934, was found in a remote jungle region near the Ecuadorian border.

The possibility that he might be Bormann was raised by the weekly magazine, Cromos Siete Dias, which published snapshots of the man and noted physical features remarkably like those of Bormann including a scar below his left eye. If alive, Bormann would be 72. According to one report, however, Hartmann says he is a Jew, explains the scar as the result of wounds suffered during World War I and says he left Germany in 1926 and reached Colombia eight years later after wandering in remote areas of the Amazon jungle.

Colombian police found him living in a village near the Ecuadorian border with his 65-year-old Indian wife, their 20-year-old daughter and her four-year-old son. Conflicting reports surrounded the circumstances of his discovery. One report said he was picked up by police investigating a series of deaths in the region. Another said he was found by an engineer who wanted to buy his property.

WIESENTHAL DOUBTS HARTMANN IS BORMANN

(David Arthur, a ham radio operator in England said he picked up a broadcast from Colombia which reported that an Israeli investigator identified the man as Bormann.) The Israel Embassy in Bogota said it was watching developments in the case but denied it had imported agents to Colombia after Hartmann’s arrest. (In Johannesburg, South Africa, Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter who heads the war crimes documentation center in Vienna, expressed strong doubts that Hartmann was Bormann. According to Wiesenthal, wanted Nazis hiding out in South America “live under comfortable conditions” and “men like Bormann do not need to go into the Colombian jungle.”)

Hartmann, who is also identified in some reports as Ehrmann, is the 16th person to be arrested in South America since 1945 on suspicion of being the Nazi war criminal. The Venezuelan newspaper, Nacional, recalled yesterday that in 1965 it had reported the arrival in Caracas of a German citizen with a false passport who was believed to be Martin Bormann. The paper said the suspect eluded police by travelling into the mountainous region near the Colombian border.