Senator Sues to Get Army’s Mengele Papers

Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) went to court Tuesday to force the Army to produce documents relating to Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele that it has retained on grounds of foreign government confidentiality.

The Army said later that it has asked the foreign governments to release the documents and that they would be made available shortly, possibly in one or two weeks.

D’Amato’s suit was filed in conjunction with the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies of Los Angeles, which released declassified Army documents last week indicating that Mengele may have been arrested and released by U.S. military intelligence officials in Vienna in 1947.

‘Rules of the Game’

While declining to comment on the D’Amato suit, an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Craig MacNab, said: “There’s no desire not to release the documents. There’s nothing to hide, but they originated with other governments, and the rules of the game require this. . . . No one is saying 40-year-old documents would damage our national security.”

At a news conference on the steps of the federal district court building after filing the papers, D’Amato said that release of the documents “would not in any way jeopardize the security of this nation or any other nation.”

He said that the Army, in its Jan. 5 letter denying the Wiesenthal center’s Freedom of Information Act request for the additional documents, had not stated that it had requested release of all the documents.

Informed later of the Army’s response, Ed Martin, a D’Amato spokesman, said: “That’s good news. The bottom line is to get the documents made public.”

D’Amato also met with Stanley Sporkin, counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency, and Martin said that Sporkin had agreed to have the agency review its postwar intelligence files so that documents “that don’t constitute a security problem” could be released.

Mengele, who is 73 if he is still alive, is believed by some to be living in Paraguay, although the government there denies it. He performed medical experiments on hundreds of prisoners at the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where 4 million people, most of them Jews, died before the camp’s liberation on Jan. 27, 1945.