U.S. Experts Fly to Brazil to Check Mengele Death Report : Police Open Grave and Take Bones

As U.S. investigators flew to the scene, workmen today opened a weed-covered grave and smashed open a coffin that federal police are “90% convinced” is that of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death,” who they say may have drowned near here in 1979.

With hundreds of police and reporters looking on, three gravediggers with picks and shovels opened the grave in the small cemetery of this Portuguese colonial town, 17 miles from Sao Paulo.

The workers were unable to remove the coffin, which stuck in the 47-inch-deep grave. Police ordered them to smash it open with picks.

When the coffin was opened, bones and shreds of clothing were removed by hand and placed on a long metal tray, which was taken to a city morgue truck for removal to Sao Paulo.

Skull Displayed

Morgue Director Jose Antonio de Mello picked up the skull and held it high for onlookers to see. He said the disarray of the bones would make identification difficult and it could take as long as 15 days.

In Washington, the Justice Department said a team of U.S. investigators left for Brazil to check on the report that Mengele’s body had been found. The department said the team, including a representative of the U.S. Marshals Service, will be joined by counterparts from West Germany and Israel.

Earlier, Brazilian Federal Police Chief Romeo Tuma told reporters that police seized “documents and a diary belonging to Mengele” at the home of a German couple in Brazil, where Mengele had apparently been living.

Rewards Offered

Mengele, one of the last major war criminals, has been sought since the end of World War II. Several rewards, totaling $3.5 million, have been offered for information leading to his capture.

In Paris, lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, who with his wife, Beate, is one of the world’s best-known Nazi hunters, said he views reports of Mengele’s death “with the greatest skepticism.”

“If Mengele were dead, his family would be in a hurry to make it known,” he said.

Tuma said the man police believe is Mengele drowned in 1979 while swimming in the ocean at the beach resort of Bertioga.

Heinz Haueisen, the public prosecutor in Frankfurt, West Germany, said today that documents recently seized at the home of Mengele’s relatives in Bavaria had led authorities to conclude that the hunted Nazi may have died in Brazil.

Identification Difficult

“The identification will be very difficult. We don’t know yet how we are going to do it,” Haueisen said.

“We don’t have dental records of Mengele. We don’t have bone structure records either,” he added. Tuma was reported by United Press International as saying he had been told dental records were available in West Germany and were being dispatched.

Tuma said Mengele had lived for “some time” with a couple in Santo Amaro, a middle-class neighborhood in Sao Paulo. He could not say when the Nazi doctor arrived in Brazil.

Brazil’s neighbor, Paraguay, had granted Mengele citizenship in 1959 but revoked it 20 years later and denies that he is still in the country.

Diary Surrendered

“There was no doubt that Mengele lived at their house,” Tuma said of the Santo Amaro couple.

He said the couple, “in their 60s,” underwent several hours of interrogation before surrendering a diary and other documents that led to the conclusion the man probably was Mengele.

“They told us: ‘Yes, he was Mengele, here are the documents,’ ” Tuma said.

Mengele, who would be 74 if he were alive, carried out sadistic medical experiments and ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews at the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp.