Senate Panel to Hold Mengele Hearing

A U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing into what happened to Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious Angel of Death of the Auschwitz concentration camp, will be held in Washington next week.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told reporters at the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies on Tuesday that the juvenile justice subcommittee, which he heads, will hold its first hearing on Mengele next Tuesday.

Specter, former district attorney of Philadelphia, also said the U.S. Department of the Army has agreed to release to his committee three Mengele documents withheld from the Wiesenthal Center under a recent Freedom of Information Act request. One of the documents reportedly involves Mengele’s possible attempt to enter Canada in the early 1960s.

“The most important question to answer is: Where is Dr. Mengele now? And, how can he be taken into custody and answer criminal prosecution?” Specter said.

The senator was in Los Angeles for hearings on career criminal legislation.

The Wiesenthal Center was successful in obtaining the release of two other documents indicating that U.S. authorities in Vienna may have arrested Mengele in 1947 and suggesting that the Nazi war criminal may have applied for a visa to enter Canada in 1962.

After disclosure of the documents, Atty. Gen. William French Smith ordered an investigation into Mengele’s whereabouts and into whether U.S. authorities had contact with him after World War II. The probe, which will be conducted by the Department of Justice’s office of special investigations, is expected to take several months.

Specter said Tuesday that the juvenile justice subcommittee hearing is independent of the efforts of the executive branch and is intended to focus public attention on the missing Mengele. One reason that the juvenile justice panel is conducting the hearings is because many of Mengele’s victims were children and twins, Specter said.

“I believe this is a matter of great public concern,” he said. “There are a great many questions to be answered as to why action has not been taken long ago in a matter of such enormous importance.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, joined in Tuesday’s news conference and will testify next week. He said in response to a reporter’s question, “There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever in the minds of all the experts involved in the Mengele case that Dr. Josef Mengele is alive today.”

Mengele would be 73. He is most often reported to be living in Paraguay, which granted him citizenship, then revoked it in 1979. He is accused of participating in the murder of at least 400,000 victims, mostly Jews, and conducting horrifying medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz in Poland.