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, the doctor 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.
Read the full article by Richard Spencer at The Australian (subscription only).