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“Polit­i­cal language…is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to pure wind.”

— George Orwell, 1946

COMMENT: Some of our dis­cus­sion con­cern­ing “The Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy” might seem to some lis­ten­ers to be “a long way from home,” so to speak.

In a pre­vi­ous post, we not­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion between Josef Men­gele–the infa­mous “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz–and the U.S. gov­ern­ment, via Paraguayan dic­ta­tor Alfre­do Stroess­ner. 

In FTR#1147, we not­ed that ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence appear to have pro­tect­ed Men­gele, as part of their clan­des­tine spon­sor­ship of the post­war Nazi dias­po­ra.

We high­light this because Men­gele was not an iso­lat­ed exam­ple, but rather char­ac­ter­is­tic of a much larg­er and broad-based phe­nom­e­non. 

Below, we excerpt the infor­ma­tion about Men­gele’s post­war col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. intel­li­gence.

It should be not­ed that Men­gele’s deep polit­i­cal Amer­i­can ties are pro­found:

1. In FTR#664, we not­ed tes­ti­mo­ny at the Nurem­berg tri­als to the effect that Men­gele filled out paper­work  before his infa­mous exper­i­ments on twins, a copy of which went to the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute, which received a great deal of fund­ing from the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion.
2. Men­gele’s post­ing at Auschwitz was due to a superior/colleague at the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute, who sug­gest­ed that it would be a good career move, as high­light­ed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR#908.

“How Allen Dulles and the SS Pre­served Each Oth­er” by Peter Dale Scott; Covert Action Quar­ter­ly; Num­ber 25: Win­ter 1986.

. . . . By July 1945 Josef Men­gele had been cap­tured and iden­ti­fied at an allied pris­on­er-of-war camp. Forty years lat­er an eye­wit­ness told a con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee how guards knew Men­gele’s name, and also the gen­er­al nature of his crimes as doc­tor, exper­i­menter, and exe­cu­tion­er at Auschwitz.’ Also in 1985, the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter in Los Ange­les released doc­u­ments obtained from the U.S. Army under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, accord­ing to which Men­gele “may have been arrest­ed by U.S. author­i­ties in Aus­tria in 1947 and sub­se­quent­ly released. ’ Yet like so many of his fel­low mem­bers of the SS, the bureau­crats of death in the Nazi behe­moth, Men­gele was some­how allowed to dis­ap­pear, to reemerge ten years lat­er in Latin Amer­i­ca. . . .

. . . . Could Mengele—not even a polit­i­cal police­man (like Rauff and Bar­bie), but a doc­tor with a pen­chant for lethal exper­i­ments on human guinea pigs—could even Men­gele have been saved as a result of a secret deal between Dulles and the SS? Such a hypoth­e­sis would once have been almost unthink­able. But we have since been told that his col­league in the Auschwitz human exper­i­ments, Wal­ter Schreiber, was shield­ed by the Amer­i­cans from a Pol­ish con­vic­tion in absen­tia, so that he could help guide the post­war research­es of the U.S. Air Force in bac­te­ri­o­log­i­cal war­fare. In 1952, Schreiber was helped by Amer­i­can offi­cials to reestab­lish him­self, via Argenti­na, in Paraguay.’ That is the year that Men­gele him­self appeared in Argenti­na, mov­ing to Paraguay two years lat­er. . . .

. . . . Men­gele and the Kam­er­aden­werk

Despite the books, arti­cles, and TV pro­grams about Men­gele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, less is known for cer­tain about his post­war activ­i­ties than those of any com­pa­ra­ble war crim­i­nal.” Apart from his extend­ed res­i­dence in Paraguay, where he gained cit­i­zen­ship in 1957 and was stripped of it in 1979, lit­tle has been doc­u­ment­ed. But in one of the best books to appear about the post­war net­work of Rauff, Schwend, and Men­gele, the so-called Kam­er­aden­werk, the career of Men­gele is close­ly impli­cat­ed.

The book is The Bor­mann Broth­er­hood by William Steven­son, him­self a wartime intel­li­gence oper­a­tive with access to intel­li­gence sources, includ­ing the records of Dono­van and their mutu­al friend, Sir William Stephen­son of the British SOE. Accord­ing to Steven­son, Men­gele had worked in a restrict­ed mil­i­tary zone of Paraguay with the wartime Croa­t­ian dic­ta­tor Ante Pavel­ic, whose Croa­t­ian Catholic con­nec­tions undoubt­ed­ly (as we shall see) played cen­tral roles in the escapes of Rauff, Schwend, and Barbie.15 Pavel­ic had ini­tial­ly made con­tact with the Latin Amer­i­can Nazi Kam­er­aden­werk through Rauff.16

With respect to Men­gele’s finances, Steven­son men­tions the Kam­er­aden­werk rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Ecuador, “Alfons Sassen, the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Broth­er­hood [Kam­er­aden­werk] busi­ness enter­prise known as ‘Estrel­la.’ It is said, too, that Sassen is financed by Dr. Josef Men­gele, who con­trols now such funds as remain liq­uid from the sale of Euro­pean loot.” 7

Steven­son else­where names this Estrel­la com­pa­ny as the sub­sidiary of a finan­cial con­sor­tium con­trolled from Bolivia by Schwend’s busi­ness part­ner Klaus Bar­bie.” In the ear­ly 1960s Bar­bie did in fact set up a com­pa­ny called Estrel­la, osten­si­bly deal­ing in quin­quina bark. Although no records exist in the pub­lic reg­istry in La Paz, at least one Boli­vian arms deal­er still remem­bers it as a weapons trad­ing com­pa­ny.’

It appears that Bar­bie and Estrel­la did export quin­quina bark as agents for the Ger­man drug firm Boehringer, which grew rich on qui­nine con­tracts to the U.S. Army dur­ing the Viet­nam war. 22 But the pri­ma­ry busi­ness of Bar­bie and Schwend was arms traf­fick­ing, “car­ried on through two Ger­man-based firms, Merex and Geme­tex. The two Nazis act­ed as agents, nego­ti­at­ing pur­chas­es not only on behalf of the Boli­vian and Peru­vian gov­ern­ments but, through their friend­ship with the Nazi Hans Rudel, sales to Paraguay and Chile and, through Otto Sko­rzeny in Spain, fur­ther deals in Madrid.”

Merex AG, itself set up in 1963, was an arms com­pa­ny owned and con­trolled by the Gehlen BND, while Sko­rzeny was one of the top go-betweens in the post­war deals between Gehlen, the SS, and the CIA. . . . .