The Israeli agents who kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 knowingly let the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele get away, one of the operatives said on Tuesday.
Rafi Eitan, now an 81-year-old Israeli Cabinet minister, said he and the other Mossad men located Mengele — infamous for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates — living in Buenos Aires. But they decided that trying to nab him would risk sabotaging the capture of Eichmann, whom they deemed more important.
It was known that Mengele was living in Buenos Aires around the time of the Eichmann capture. But Eitan’s comments indicated that the Israelis were closer to him that has been thought — and shed light on why they decided to abandon an attempt to catch him.
“When you have one operation, you’re taking a certain level of risk. If you’re doing a second operation at the same time, you double the risk ... not only for the second operation but for the first one as well,” Eitan said on Tuesday.
US documents throw some doubt on Eitan’s claims. They say Mengele arrived in Argentina in 1949 but left in 1959 and became a naturalized citizen of Paraguay. After Eichmann was captured in May 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil, according to the documents, published by the US Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations.
Mengele was never caught and died in 1979. Eichmann, responsible for implementing Hitler’s “final solution” that resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews, was spirited to Israel, tried and executed.
At the Auschwitz death camp, Mengele carried out cruel medical experiments on children, twins and dwarves.
“He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him ‘uncle,’ ‘uncle Mengele’ and sometimes give them a sweet — and in the same tone of voice that he said ‘I’m uncle Mengele,’ he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection,” Martha Weiss, a Holocaust survivor said in 2005.
After the war Mengele fled Germany and ended up in Argentina.
Informers working with the Mossad had seen Mengele while the agents were in Buenos Aires, Eitan said. The Mossad men located Mengele’s apartment, and on one specific day even knew he was at home, Eitan said. But the next day Mengele left with his wife for what the agents believed was to be a temporary absence.
At the time, the Israelis had already snatched Eichmann and were holding him in a safe house while they waited to whisk him out of the country.
Fearing that if they waited for Mengele to return, the Eichmann operation would be discovered, Eitan decided it was not worth the risk and by the time the Mossad sent a team back to Buenos Aires a few weeks later, it was too late.
“After Eichmann’s capture was made public, he disappeared entirely,” Eitan said.
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