Red Cross Link to Mengele Alleged : Given Travel Papers After WWII, Wiesenthal Center Says

The long-sought accused Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele apparently used travel documents issued by the International Red Cross in Geneva to escape from Europe after World War II, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles center, said the Committee of the International Red Cross in Geneva has provided U.S. authorities with information about a travel document issued to a Helmut Gregor, an alias used by Mengele.

Nothing more was immediately known about the Gregor document, but Cooper said he thinks that it should provide investigators with important leads on how Mengele escaped, who may have helped him and where he may be hiding today, if he still is alive.

Neal Sher, who is in charge of efforts by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations to find Mengele, confirmed that he has asked the International Red Cross for information about Mengele, but he declined to discuss the Gregor file.

Similar Request

The Wiesenthal Center made a similar request last month, but the International Red Cross, which provides travel documents for refugees, cited its policy of confidentiality and advised the center that details about the Gregor document had been given to the U.S. government.

According to Cooper, the name Helmut Gregor is one of several aliases used by Mengele in his 40-year flight from justice on charges that he directed the deaths of 400,000 inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp and conducted deadly pseudoscientific experiments on inmates there.

He said Mengele used the name Gregor as an alias as early as 1949, when some intelligence reports suggest that the death camp doctor traveled to Rome, secured travel papers and embarked from Genoa to Argentina.

Documents made public earlier this year by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reported that Mengele used the name Helmut Gregor-Gregori in 1954 when he practiced medicine in Argentina but identified himself as Jose H. Mengele when he obtained Paraguayan citizenship in 1959. He was known as Henrique (Enrique) Wollman when he purportedly practiced medicine in Encarnacion, Paraguay, in 1972.

1959 Arrest Warrant

Mengele would be 74 years old if he is still living, as is suspected by Hans-Eberhard Klein, the Frankfurt, West Germany, senior prosecutor charged with prosecuting Mengele for war crimes under a warrant issued for his arrest in 1959.

Klein recently told a radio interviewer, according to United Press International, that there is overwhelming evidence that Mengele is now living in Paraguay, despite statements by Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner that Mengele is no longer there. The prosecutor said dozens of West Germans have told his office of seeing Mengele in Paraguay.

Wherever Mengele may be, the Wiesenthal Center hopes to find him by reminding South American newspaper readers that rewards for his capture now total more than $2 million. The center, which has put up half of that reward, is planning a $40,000, monthlong advertising campaign in six South American countries.

The advertisement, prepared by a Miami agency, asks readers whether they have seen the man shown in a photograph, Mengele. The ad lists Mengele’s crimes and details the terms of the reward for his capture.