Ex-Soldier Tells of Prisoner Said to Be Mengele

A former Army private told Thursday of seeing a man identified as Dr. Josef Mengele, the elusive Angel of Death of the Auschwitz concentration camp, while assigned to guard duty at a camp for German prisoners in July, 1945.

Walter Kempthorne, a 59-year-old retired engineer from Riverside, told reporters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies that the encounter occurred while he was serving as a guard at a Counter Intelligence Corps prison for war criminals in the Rhineland.

Kempthorne recalled entering a building at the Idar-Oberstein prison camp with a fellow enlisted man named Hall and seeing a red-faced male prisoner, breathing hard and perspiring from exercise, standing at rigid attention before two guards.

‘This Here Is Mengele’

Although he does not now remember the exact words used, Kempthorne said he asked the guards what was going on, and one of them replied, “We’re getting him in shape to get hung. This here is Mengele, the bastard that sterilized 3,000 women at Auschwitz.”

As a 19-year-old private first-class assigned to tower and perimeter guard duty, Kempthorne said, neither Mengele’s name nor Auschwitz meant anything to him at the time. Later, he said, he learned about Mengele’s activities, but it was not a primary interest until he read a recent story about Mengele in The Times and contacted the Wiesenthal Center.

If true, Kempthorne’s recollection would represent the strongest evidence to date that Mengele was in U.S. custody after the war.

Mengele, who would be 73 if still alive, is most often thought to be living in South America where he fled after being charged by West Germany in the deaths of at least 400,000 prisoners at Auschwitz, some of whom were subjected to gruesome medical experiments.

Kempthorne could not verify that the man identified as Mengele was in fact the war criminal. But, in a letter to the Wiesenthal Center, he wrote:

“If you can locate U.S. Army files for that unit at Idar-Oberstein, it might give you names of the administrative personnel and/or the CIC officers assigned to the camp. At least it’s a lead.”

Kempthorne’s decision to contact the Wiesenthal Center about his experience was praised by U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), both of whom attended Thursday’s press conference in the center’s Holocaust Museum on West Pico Boulevard.

Panel to Investigate

Specter reiterated that a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee, which he chairs, will begin inquiries in Washington on Tuesday “to ask why Mengele was not brought to justice.” The big question, he said, is “Why was Mengele allowed to get away?”

D’Amato, who recently joined in a lawsuit with the Wiesenthal Center to force the federal government to declassify documents about Mengele, stated unequivocally that he thinks Mengele is alive.

He called on the federal government to release all documents concerning Mengele, including one withheld by the Department of the Army on the grounds that its release “could cause serious damage to U.S. security.” D’Amato described the designation as “absolutely absurd.”

If U.S. authorities had Mengele in custody and helped him escape prosecution, D’Amato said, the nation should be in the forefront in identifying where Mengele is now. He said he considers Kempthorne’s story about Mengele in 1945 to be supportive of another report that Mengele may have been arrested by American authorities in Vienna.

Counterintelligence Report

That report was described in an Army document obtained by the Wiesenthal Center under the federal Freedom of Information Act and made public last month. In it, Benjamim J.M. Gorby, a U.S. counterintelligence officer in Germany, reported receiving information that Mengele had been arrested by counterintelligence authorities in Vienna.

No follow-up documents to Gorby’s report have yet been made public.

In the wake of the controversy over whether Mengele might have been in U.S. custody and then allowed to go free, Atty. Gen. William French Smith recently ordered an investigation into Mengele’s whereabouts. The probe is to be conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said Thursday that the center had “gone public” with Kempthorne’s report in hopes that other members of the CIC unit that ran the Idar-Oberstein camp will come forward with information.

According to the Pentagon, Kempthorne was inducted into the Army in January, 1944, assigned to the 1280th Engineering Battalion, trained as a demolition expert and served in Europe from December, 1944 to September, 1945.