Bogota Investigates Bormann Suspect

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 17 (Reuters)—Secret police agents brought a German‐born recluse out of the remote Amazon jungles of southern Colombia today for an investigation of whether he is Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy.

Police sources here said that the recluse, who identified himself as Johann Ehrmann and gave his age as 72, would have his fingerprints taken for comparison with Bormann's prints, being sent here by air from West Germany. Bormann, who fled from Hitler's bunker in Berlin as Soviet troops approached in April, 1945, would be 71 old.

[In Johannesburg, Reuters reported, Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna and a hunter of Nazi war criminals, expressed doubt that Mr. Ehrmann is Bormann. Noting that the recluse was the 16th person to be arrested in South America since 1945 on suspicion of being the Nazi war criminal, Mr. Wiesenthal said he had found that runaway Nazis “live under comfortable conditions” and that ‘!.men like Bormann do not need to go into the jungle]

A Colombian Government official said that Mr. Ehrmann “might be just what he says he is, although there are a lot of coincidences.”

Mr. Ehrmann was taken into custody last night after a report in the Colombian news magazine Siete Dias that there was abundant proof that he Bormann. He was found living with his Indian wife, their 20‐year‐old daughter and a 4‐year‐old grandson in a house built on stilts near the Ecuadorian border.

The magazine said that photographs taken of Mr. Ehrmann showed a strong likeness to pictures of Bormann. Among the similarities, it listed a squint caused by a scar below the left eye, a drooping mouth, large earlobes, medium height and narrow shoulders.

When arrested, Mr. Ehrmann was described as thin and barefooted and dressed in peasant's clothing. A police jeep with the stubbly‐bearded suspect aboard reached the city of Pasto today, 300 miles southwest of here.

The magazine conceded that Bormann, unlike Mr. Ehrmann, was a stocky, heavyset man, but it asked, “Would not more than 13 years of living in the jungle have changed him, and would not Bormann himself have tried to keep thin order not to be recognized?”