The hide-out of an Austrian businessman, Erich Rajakovic, said to have been a key wartime aide to Adolf Eichmann, was reported today to have been found in Lugano at the same time that he left his home here on Friday night with his wife. The hideout was found abandoned.
(A report from The Hague today said that the Dutch Government, responding to reports that Rajakovic had fled to Switzerland from Italy, was considering asking the Swiss to extradite him, The extradition would be based on Rajakovic’s reported connection with the transport of 110,000 Jews from Holland to the Mauthausen, Auschwitz and Treblinka murder camps.)
Rajakovic’s departure preceded the appearance of reports in Milan’s “Corriere della Sera,” identifying him as an assistant to the Gestapo colonel who was tried in Jerusalem, found guilty and hanged last May. Press reports quoted his son as saying on Friday night that a “defamatory campaign” was being waged against his father. The son also disappeared a few hours later. Neither the son nor the father left any traces, according to Italian journalists.
The Milan newspaper said that Rajakovic, who had lived in Milan since 1957, had been identified by the Jewish Documentation Center in Haifa as a top Nazi who had been in charge of a Nazi concentration camp at Nisko, in Galicia, where 6,000 Jews perished. Later, it was established, he went to Prague and then became director of the Nazi “Special Office for Jews” in Holland and Belgium. After the war, he fled to Argentina, leaving when Peron fell from power. He had not been heard from since, until his whereabouts in Italy were disclosed.
The Rome daily, “Messagero,” asserted that the Austrian consulate in Milan probably knew more about Rajakovic’s whereabouts than it was willing to reveal.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
