WORLD'S MOST WANTED MURDERER
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from December 1984.
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"Do you recognize this man?" reads the full-page advertisement. "He is the world's most wanted murderer.
"He is responsible for the murder of 40,000 Jews in gas chambers during World War II," and for "having practiced countless experiments on human beings, submitting them to horrible physical torture."
Anyone having information is urged to contact a Paris address and is offered a reward of 10 million guaranies (26,500 dollars), equivalent to 22 years of labour at Paraguay's current minimum wage, if the contribution leads to an arrest.
The photo is allegedly that of Josef or "Jose" Mengele, the "Angel of Death," sought by West Germany since 1962 for crimes committed at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
A physician, Mengele, who would now be 73 years old, fled Germany to South America in the 1950s and, after living under his own name in Argentina, came to Paraguay, where he was granted citizenship in 1959. Under pressure, the government revoked his papers in 1979, saying he left the country in 1964 or 1965 and had not returned.
The ad was placed in the newspaper El Diario on Dec. 10 by Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld, who visited Paraguay in February and November to meet officials, setting off a new round of denials of Mengele's presence and fanning new speculation about his whereabouts.
Mrs. Klarsfeld, a West German who with her French husband operates a Paris-based organization searching for hidden war criminals, maintained there still are strong reasons to believe Mengele is living, under protection, in Paraguay and receives money from a family-owned firm in Germany.
Interior Minister Sabino Montanaro, one of the most vehement spokesmen for the 30-year-old right-wing regime of President Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, questioned Mrs. Klarsfeld's motives, suggesting her efforts were part of an "international communist conspiracy" to damage Paraguayan prestige.
Patria, the newspaper of Stroessner's ruling Colorado Party, suggested that the reward should apply not just to Paraguay, but to "wherever Mengele may be, in Brazil, Bolivia, Tibet, Abyssinia or six feet underground in some forgotten graveyard."
Still others suggested that Mrs. Klarsfeld was merely seeking publicity for fundraising purposes.
"The desire of the Paraguayan Government is to find this man and bring him to justice," said Criminal Court Judge Anselmo Aveiro, now in charge of the case, in an interview at his office in Asuncion's white marble Justice Palace.
"An order for his arrest has existed for years and I renew it regularly, but the police have not found him and no one else has told me where he is," the 38-year-old judge said. "No one has come forward from the Jewish community or from the West German Embassy.
Mrs. Klarsfeld, he said, "did not speak with me, nor, as far as i know, did she offer any new facts to the justice or interior ministries. Those who say Mengele is being and Jung is believed dead. "I think it is possible that Mengele is still here, if he is still alive, moving back and forth across the border between Paraguay and Bolivia," the judge said in an interview.
Mengele rumors, most of them unverifiable, continue to circulate from time to time. protected fail to say who is the protector or where the wanted man is hidden."
Judge Jimenez, who left the court in 1964, said Mengele's application claimed he had lived the required five years in Paraguay and was signed by two witnesses, Army Lt. Col. Alejandro von Eckstein, a white Russian of German extraction who won citizenship by fighting in the bloody 1932-35 Chaco war between Paraguay and Bolivia, and a man named Werner Jung, also a German-born naturalized citizen.
Von Eckstein, now a general still on active duty, refuses to speak about Mengele.
