A doctor’s secret hunt for Nazi ‘Angel of Death’
Winnipeg doctor reveals role in trying to bring Nazi to justice
Today, Dr. Ethan Rubinstein is the head of adult infectious disease at the University of Manitoba, but in 1984 he was part of a secret mission to pluck fugitive Nazi doctor Josef Mengele from his South American hideout and bring him to justice. “I was fully prepared to go to the grave without ever mentioning it,” Rubinstein told the Post’s Joe O’Connor.
Dr. Ethan Rubinstein is a professor of medicine and the head of adult infectious disease at the University of Manitoba. He is a thoughtful, serious man, an Israeli who moved to Winnipeg about a decade ago because, as he told me in a less serious moment, he loved the “weather.”
During his time in Winnipeg the medical specialist has published an alphabet soup of research papers: on influenza, chronic pulmonary disease, septic arthritis and staph infections. During flu season his is a trusted voice, nudging the public to roll up its sleeves and get a flu shot — an esteemed expert who presents as wise and old and content in his ways.
Of course, everyone has a past. Most are unremarkable, however happily so, and some stretch the imagination. They sound, well, made up, like something from a James Bond movie, because how many among us are there in this world — and in Winnipeg — who can say what Dr. Rubinstein did to me during a lengthy phone conversation this week?
That, in another lifetime, he was a Nazi hunter, involved in a brazen operation to kidnap Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp doctor known to history as the “Angel of Death,” from his South American hideaway and spirit him to Israel to stand trial and answer for his crimes.
“I am a physician,” Dr. Rubinstein says. “I speak German, and my German was very good and an offer was made to me to be a part of the mission. I was made aware of the target. I knew who it was, and where he was hiding and what I was supposed to do.
“My job, as the physician, and a German speaker, would have been to interrogate Mengele, if he would let me, on the flight home to Israel, because I would know the right questions to ask and the feeling was he wouldn’t say a word once a trial started.
“And I think I knew what to expect from him, as well, because I think he was a man with zero morals and zero ethics. The only ethics he had were the Nazi ethics. He saw himself as serving his nation without price, without ever considering that what he had done was bad.”
Dr. Rubinstein never spoke of the Mengele operation — to anyone — until Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist and the co-author of Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, called him up six weeks ago to ask him about it.
“I was fully prepared to go to the grave without ever mentioning it,” says the 73-year-old Dr. Rubinstein. “The team never talked about it afterwards because our story had an end — we failed.”
They were not the first: Mengele had eluded justice for decades. Peter Malkin, a friend and former Mossad super-spy and key figure in the operation that plucked Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust, from Argentina and brought him to trial in Jerusalem in 1961, asked Dr. Rubinstein if he was interested in going after the Angel of Death.
It was 1984. A five-man team was assembled consisting of ex-spies, a pilot, a soldier and the doctor. Mr. Malkin was the chief planner. A wealthy Jewish backer was bankrolling everything, right down to outfitting the men with special belts and holsters and cameras and guns and a Boeing jet with a hidden cell — to lock up Mengele for transport to Israel.
“Carlos,” a Paraguayan lawyer and confidant of the Paraguayan regime, was their local intelligence source. He claimed to know the exact location of Mengele’s cabin in the woods near the Brazilian border. The team had a timetable as to his daily rituals. They had a plan to kidnap the notorious Nazi when he went to bathe in a spring.
“If Mengele had violently resisted, he would have been shot,” Dr. Rubinstein says. “But the whole idea was to bring him to trial, to prove everything he had done in Auschwitz.”
The team arrived in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They met, planned, revised their plans, met some more and kept to the city’s shadows, waiting. There were several meetings with Carlos.
“Peter Malkin had these special talents,” Dr. Rubinstein says. “And something in what Carlos was saying sounded wrong to him. He couldn’t exactly say what it was. But he suspected a trap, that Carlos wasn’t tell-
I think he was a man with zero morals and zero ethics
ing the truth because Carlos was to be paid quite handsomely after we got Mengele.”
Mr. Malkin broke into Carlos’ room during a subsequent meeting, discovered some papers that confirmed his hunch — that the Israelis would be walking into a trap, that they were to be killed — and so the team voted to scrub the mission, disbanding thereafter, never again mentioning what might have been.
“There was a great sense of disappointment,” Dr. Rubinstein says. “Now, it would turn out that Mengele was already dead — he had drowned in the late 1970s in Brazil. But no one knew that then. He was still very much alive to all of us.”
And what about now, 30 years after the Israeli doctor’s, ahem, trip to Brazil? Is the infectious disease specialist at U of M all that he seems? Are his days as a Nazi hunter truly behind him?
“I am too old for all that now,” Dr. Rubinstein says, chuckling. “For me, my present professional life is satisfying. But the past was, too — more adrenalin and less mental work.
“I guess it is all a matter of growing older, don’t you think?”