Mossad’s Nazi hunt revealed
THEY WENT after them with honeytraps, letter bombs, and some of the top intelligence agents in the world. But according to files released in Israel last week only one of eight topranking Nazis was ever captured in Mossad’s long, post-war hunt to bring them to justice.
Israel’s intelligence agency has offered the most vivid insight ever into its global operations to track down some of the Second World War’s most notorious fugitives, responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
A three-volume history, written originally for internal Mossad consumption, has been made public by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. It reveals that Israeli intelligence agents pursued eight high-ranking former Nazis for years, but failed to catch any, except Adolf Eichmann.
“There is no doubt that there was disappointment,” said Yossi Chen, the author of the Hebrew-language report, which is now available in full on Yad Vashem’s website. Mr Chen, a former Mossad agent who is now in his 80s, revealed in his research that the intelligence agency was prepared to assassinate former Nazis if it could not get them to trial.
in some cases, the agency planned to put out unsigned statements saying that “those who will never forget” were behind the act.
The report details several attempts to apprehend Josef Mengele, including in 1960 when Mossad’s Nazihunting was at its peak. “At the time when Eichmann was captured, before he was on the plane back to Israel, there were several days when they had chance to look for Mengele, but he wasn’t to be found,” Mr Chen said.
Isser Harel, who was then the head of Mossad, had hoped to fly both men from Argentina to Israel together, according to Mr Chen. But it turned out that Mengele had fled from Buenos Aires to Paraguay the previous year, fearing extradition proceedings closing in on him.
Spy chiefs in Jerusalem also tried using a female operative to honeytrap Mengele’s son Rolf but he turned
out to be a married family man who did not fall for her advances. It was a near miss: Rolf Mengele has since revealed that he was indeed in secret contact with his father during his years in hiding.
On another occasion an operative thought he had found Mengele but his superiors were not convinced it was the right man.
Mr Chen’s account clashes with oftrepeated claims, originating with Eichmann’s captor Rafi Eitan, that the Mossad knew precisely where Mengele was hiding but chose not to apprehend him, fearing a move for the Auschwitz doctor would jeopardise the operation to capture Eichmann.
Efforts went on long after Mengele’s death. In 1985, not knowing that he had died by drowning six years earlier, Israel offered $1 million for his capture. To Mr Chen, the only “comfort” for Jews is that “he lived like a dog — he was scared of his shadow”.
There are further surprising revelations in Mr Chen’s history, including the fact that one target was actually a one-time source for the Mossad’s precursor. Walter Rauff, who is believed to have directed the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in mobile gassing vans, dodged American arrest post-war and escaped to Syria. He worked in intelligence for the Syrian army and served as a source for Israeli intelligence in the years before the Mossad was founded.
Mr Chen said that the Israelis at this time “knew [Rauff] was German and that he had been a Nazi but were unaware of his acts against Jews”.
The files also revealed that one of the unsuccessful attempts to kill Eichmann’s assistant Alois Brunner, who is thought to have been responsible for 100,000 deaths, was foiled when somebody accidentally ripped an envelope holding a letter bomb.
The agency also sought, but failed to apprehend, Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and Nazi doctor Horst Schumann as well as Klaus Barbie and Franz Murer, the so-called “Butcher of Lyon” and “Butcher of Vilnius”, respectively.
Mr Chen is a Holocaust survivor, who escaped a ghetto in what is now Belarus when he was six. He said that Israel’s Nazi-hunting, even though mostly unsuccessful, is remembered as a kind of moral statement.
“It’s important that the Jewish people know the massive efforts that were made to chase after those who killed Jews,” he said.