Erich Rajakovic, the former SS officer under arrest and being investigated in Vienna on charges of having been the key man in the wartime deportation of 110,000 Jews from Holland to the Nazi gas chambers, is now suspected of espionage in Italy on behalf of some Iron Curtain countries, the Italian federal police announced today, If the charges prove correct, authorities said, Italy would demand Rajakovic’s extradition from Austria.
Rajakovic, a wartime aide to the late Adolf Eichmann, conducted a highly profitable import-export business with headquarters in Milan. He fled Milan Just before one of a leading newspaper in Milan exposed him as an Eichmann henchman. It was known that his firm had many commercial dealings with Soviet satellites.
A search of his main office in Milan, police said, has led to further scrutiny of his branch offices in this city, Venice and Trieste. Italian security officers have found in the Rajakovic files some documents which seem to be semi-secret communications between the ex-Nazi and certain Communist countries.
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