NY Times-"Secret Papers Detail U.S. Aid for Ex-Nazis" (Operation Paperclip)

[Jan Klimkowski]

It's full of redactions and omissions, and sounds like a textbook definition of "limited hangout".

A classic example is the supposed material on Mengele.

The "Mengele's scalp" tidbit is akin to the "drug to make Castro's beard fall out" or the "exploding cigar" destined for the Cuban leader. It's trivial colour designed to distract from the important matters.

Such as the crucial 1945-1980 years when it is likely that Mengele was on the both the Odessa and western payroll.

So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.

The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.’s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.

It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.

After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengele’s scalp on privacy grounds.

Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.