A German prosecutor said Wednesday that sophisticated genetic testing has confirmed that Josef Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death," died in Brazil in 1979.
Doctors matched the genetic makeup of Mengele's remains with a blood sample of his son, who is said to have complied only after German officials threatened to raid a relative's grave to obtain a DNA genetic sample."We conclude beyond every reasonable doubt that it is Mengele," prosecutor Hans-Eberhard Klein, head of the investigation, said at a news conference.
The genetic testing proved that bones discovered in Brazil in 1985 were those of Mengele, the Nazi doctor who is said to have sent about 400,000 people to the gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Reports of sightings of Mengele kept cropping up, and the controversy refused to die about whether the remains belonged to Mengele. Friends had said he lived in Brazil for 18 years and drowned in a swimming accident near Sao Paulo at age 68.
In Jerusalem, Israel said Wednesday it accepted the results of the genetic tests.
A Justice Ministry statement said investigators from Germany, the United States, Brazil and Israel agreed with near-certainty three years ago that the remains were Mengele's.
"But at the request of Israel, to remove even the slightest doubt, the announcement was delayed until it was possible to carry out the decisive check of the genetic profile," the ministry statement said.
Following the tests, "all reasonable doubt was removed, and it is possible to determine that Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor from the death camp of Auschwitz, died in 1979," the statement added.
Mengele performed experiments on inmates, particularly twins, to explore Nazi theories on Aryan superiority. Most of his victims were Jews.
Israel became the refuge for thousands of those Holocaust survivors, including Jews maimed in Mengele's experiments.
Klein was joined at the news conference by Alec Jeffreys, a British genetics scientist from Leicester University in Britain who carried out the testing.
Jeffreys extracted genetic material from one of the bones exhumed in Brazil. That material was compared with blood from Mengele's son, Rolf, and genetic material from his mother, Jeffreys said.
The DNA tests use unique patterns in each person's genetic material. DNA from body parts can be matched to other body parts or to residue from material known to have been handled by the person.
The tests showed DNA "fully consistent with that of Josef Mengele," Jeffreys said. "In other words we conclude with a high degree of certainty that the remains are those of Josef Mengele," he added.
Mengele's son, Rolf Jenckel, gave a blood sample in January.
Jenckel, who changed his family name, had refused for more than a year to provide the sample.
Klein was asked about reports that he had threatened to exhume the bodies of other Mengele relatives to force Rolf to give a blood sample.
He replied that no pressure was put on the son but said it was known he was considering obtaining genetic material from Mengele's parents.
Mengele slipped through the Allies' hands at the end of World War II and went into hiding in South America.
Newly released files in Argentina on Nazis who fled there after World War II show that Mengele arrived in 1949 on an International Red Cross passport under the name Gregor Helmut of Italy.
In June 1985, Mengele's remains were exhumed near Sao Paulo, Brazil, from a grave marked "Wolfgang Gerhard."