JERUSALEM — Israeli agents who kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 found the notorious death-camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday.
Mengele was one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, a doctor who conducted cruel experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Rafi Eitan, now an 81-year-old Israeli Cabinet minister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he and other Mossad agents located Mengele living in a Buenos Aires apartment with his wife at the time of Eichmann’s capture in 1960. But they decided that trying to nab him would risk sabotaging the capture of Eichmann, who was deemed a more important target.
“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.
Eichmann was responsible for implementing Hitler’s plan that exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. After his capture, he was spirited to Israel, tried and executed.
Mengele was infamous for his sadistic experiments in the death camps. He injected dye into the eyes of twins to change their color and sewed them together to try to create artificially conjoined twins. He ordered twins killed simultaneously and then dissected for examination of their organs. His horrors earned him the title “Angel of Death.”
After the war, Mengele fled Germany under an assumed name and ended up in Argentina. 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 was believed to be a temporary absence.
At the time, the Israelis had already snatched Eichmann and were waiting to whisk him out of the country. They feared that if they waited for Mengele to come back, the Eichmann operation would be discovered.
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 of Mengele.
After missing him in Argentina, the Mossad had another shot at catching Mengele in São Paolo, Brazil, two years later, Eitan said.
But the organization had other “operational priorities,” and Mengele got away again.
Having eluded capture for 34 years, Mengele drowned in Brazil in early 1979 and experts identified the body as his six years later.
