Suspected Nazi war criminal Josef Schwammberger, being held in an Argentine prison pending extradition to West Germany, has been hospitalized in serious condition, following what may have been an attempt to take his own life.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles reported Friday that Schwammberger, 77, was comatose. The center, whose publicity about the case led to Schwammberger’s arrest two years ago, called for an “immediate and full investigation” into the circumstances of what it described as an apparent suicide attempt.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, said Sunday he had learned from a Reuters reporter in Buenos Aires that Schwammberger went into a coma last Thursday, “just days after the attorney general submitted a 19-page document to the Supreme Court which favored the accused mass murderer’s extradition to West Germany.”
The federal judge ruling on his extradition told Cooper he “had not seen the medical tests, but could not rule out suicide,” Cooper told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
However, Argentine sources told Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, director of the Latin American affairs for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, only that Schwammberger had been admitted to a hospital in La Plata, Argentina, last week, in serious condition. The sources made no mention of suicide or coma.
ATTORNEY GENERAL FAVORS EXTRADITION
One of those sources was David Goldberg, president of the DAIA, the umbrella body of Argentine Jewry, with whom Rosenthal spoke on Sunday.
The DAIA, Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have been in communication with the Argentine attorney general, Oscar Roger, concerning the extradition proceedings against Schwammberger, who exhausted two appeals to stay his extradition.
Schwammberger lost on both appeals, and it was expected he would not win an appeal to the Supreme Court, said Rosenthal. The DAIA met several weeks ago with Roger “and received his assurances that the legal proceedings would take place without delay. And that was publicly announced in the papers,” said Rosenthal.
Roger was recently appointed as attorney general by Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem. “We were relieved that the new attorney general had come down on the side of extradition,” said Cooper.
Schwammberger is accused of the mass murders of Jews in several Polish towns, concentration camps and labor camps.
The Wiesenthal Center, which reported his presence in Argentina in 1966, placed Schwammberger as No. 5 on their “10 Most Wanted” Nazis list, which they announced at a news conference in Jerusalem in October 1987.
Less than a month later, on Nov. 13, 1987, Schwammberger was arrested in the province of Cordoba, in northern Argentina.
Schwammberger was arrested in Austria following World War II, but it is believed he escaped and got to Argentina in 1949 with the help of the Nazi network Odessa.
On Sunday, Rosenthal mused on the possibility that a Nazi conspiracy was still operating to cheat the arm of justice.
“The question in my mind is whether it is a suicide” attempt, said Rosenthal. “Without proof, I see a pattern. Whenever one of these Nazis are about to be brought to trial, they die.”
He cited Walter Kutschmann, who was arrested in Argentina in November 1985, on a special extradition request by West Germany. Kutschmann was an SS officer and Gestapo official in the Ukraine. He died in September 1986, during protracted extradition proceedings in Argentina.
Rosenthal also mentioned Walter Rauff, the Nazi SS colonel who died in captivity in Chile in May 1984, after a long campaign by Nazi-hunters, Israel and West Germany to ferret out the man responsible for mobile killing vans.
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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.
