Letters show Mengele never regretted crimes

The Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele never regretted his crimes and died convinced of the superiority of the Aryan race, documents obtained by a local newspaper in Brazil, where he lived for years in hiding, show.

The Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele never regretted his crimes and died convinced of the superiority of the Aryan race, documents obtained by a local newspaper in Brazil, where he lived for years in hiding, show.

The daily Folha de S. Paulo obtained 85 documents, some in Mengele's handwriting, from the files of Brazil's federal police, which investigated Mengele after his death in 1979. They would not comment on the papers.

They reflect the racist convictions of the infamous "Death Angel" of the Auschwitz extermination camp. In a November 1972 letter, Mengele says he hopes that racial mixing in Europe is confined to "neighbouring countries" and that the population of northern European nations "does not decrease".

Mengele also praises the apartheid regime that governed South Africa until 1994. "Apartheid is an effective and unique way to prevent racial mixing," he says.

Mengele fled to Argentina in 1949. Ten years later he moved to Paraguay, and then to the interior of Brazil's Sao Paulo state in 1960. He drowned, aged 66, in the coastal town of Bertioga. DNA tests in 1992 proved his identity.