Israel’s spy agency found Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele in 1960 but let him get away.
Rafi Eitan, the Israeli spymaster who now serves as a Cabinet minister, said Tuesday that he and other Mossad operatives discovered Mengele with his wife in a Buenos Aires apartment, but decided not to capture him fearing it would compromise the capture of Adolf Eichmann.
A Mossad team returned to the area several weeks later, but Mengele had disappeared.
Mengele, who performed experiments on camp inmates, especially twins, and supervised selections for the gas chambers, suffered a stroke and drowned in Brazil in 1979 at the age of 68.
“I would have done the same thing again today,” Eitan told the Jerusalem Post. “I think that had we gone for them both at the same time, we would have lost them both.”
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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.
