‘Angel of death’ spared as Israel had Eichmann
ISRAEL: Mossad has admitted that it turned down an opportunity to kidnap Josef Mengele, the Nazi ‘‘angel of death’’, when the Israeli spy agency found him living in Argentina in 1960.
Mengele, who oversaw Auschwitz’s gas chambers and became notorious for his gruesome and frequently lethal experiments on the concentration camp’s inmates, was discovered by a Mossad team living in Buenos Aires.
He was under Mossad surveillance when its agents seized the best-known of the wanted war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. The agency released official papers on Mengele to the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem this week, confirming that the team it sent to bring Eichmann to Israel knew where Mengele was too. Isser Harel, who was then the Mossad director, was persuaded not to try capturing both men by the team leader on the ground, Rafi Eitan.
Eitan, who is now 90 and one of the country’s most famous agents, told Israeli public radio that he had argued for a ‘‘one at a time’’ approach. ’’At the same time as we caught Eichmann, Mengele was living in Buenos Aires. We found his apartment and kept it under observation,’’ he told Israeli public radio. ‘‘I didn’t want to carry out two operations at the same time because we had one successful operation in the bag, and in my experience if you try to carry out another one you put them both at risk,’’ he said.
He stayed on after Eichmann was smuggled on board an El Al passenger plane to Israel, but Mengele realised what had happened and gave his pursuers the slip.
‘‘Mengele wasn’t at home and the neighbours said he would be back in a week,’’ Eitan said. ‘‘We waited a week but in the meantime [Eichmann’s] capture was announced to the world and Mengele never returned to his apartment in Buenos Aires.’’
Instead he fled to Brazil, while Eichmann was put on trial in Israel and hanged.
Mengele’s experiments on Jewish and Roma children in Auschwitz were marked by a high degree of sadism, according to accounts by survivors. He was particularly interested in twins, on whom he experimented in an attempt to prove Nazi theories of hereditary racial superiority. Those who survived the experiments were usually sent to the gas chambers.
He escaped the camp before the Russians arrived to liberate it, and made his way to South America with the assistance of Nazi sympathisers in 1949.
The Mossad files, to be made public tomorrow, reveal the agency’s extraordinary efforts to trace Mengele - as well as the confidence with which he scotched them. Details have been released by news organisations given early access.
Mossad tracked Mengele down again in 1962, by which time he was living in Brazil. ‘‘At the end of 1962 Mengele was positively identified at a farm near Sao Paulo,’’ Eitan said.
Harel resigned as Mossad chief early the following year and his successors did not approve an operation against Mengele as they had other priorities around the world, Eitan said. Mengele went underground again, and for a while Mossad sought him in the wrong country - Paraguay.
The Nazi often hid in plain sight, even visiting family in West Germany, and remained in contact with his son, Rolf. At one stage, Mossad tried to use a honey-trap, sending an attractive female agent to get close to Rolf in the hope that he would reveal where his father was, but to no avail.
On another occasion, an agent contacted Rolf, pretending to be a family friend, saying that his father was ill and had asked to see him. But by then Mengele was already dead. He had suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming in Brazil in 1979. - The Times