Swiss police today told Erich Rajakovic, a one-time key aide of Adolf Eichmann, that he must leave Switzerland immediately or be expelled as an undesirable alien.
The police said that Rajakovic arrived in Switzerland yesterday, after fleeing from Italy, and spent the night in a Bern Hotel. Police went to his hotel and told him to leave. However, there was a possibility that Rajakovic might lodge an appeal against the police order.
The Dutch Government had been reported considering a request to Switzerland for extradition of Rajakovic as the Nazi official who deported 110,000 Jews from Holland to the Mauthausen, Auschwitz and Treblinka murder camps. One of those he was alleged to have sent to their deaths was Anne Frank, whose diary of her suffering during the Nazi occupation has become a world classic.
However, late today, Dr. Anton Beerman, the Dutch Justice Minister, announced that the Dutch would not ask for extradition because Dutch files did not contain enough Juridical material for a trial in Holland. He added that the Government would cooperate with any trial of Rajakovic held elsewhere by making available material from the State Office for World War II Documentation at Amsterdam.
The former Nazi and his wife disappeared from their home in Italy last Friday a few hours before the Milan newspaper, “Corriere della Sera,” identified Rajakovic as a former assistant to Eichmann, who was tried, sentenced and hanged in Israel last year for his role in the wartime slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jews.
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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.