Tuvia Friedman, founder and head of the war crimes documentation center in Haifa for the past 20 years, announced yesterday that he is “giving up the hunt.”
Friedman, 63, a Holocaust survivor, said he was retiring after 40 years devoted to tracking down Nazi war criminals because the last major criminal on his “wanted list” is presumed dead. He said he accepted the findings of forensic experts last month that the remains exhumed from a cemetery near Sao Paulo, Brazil in June are those of Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz death camp doctor.
“If other people wish to continue tracking down less well-known Nazis, I wish them luck. But I am giving up the hunt,” Friedman said. He said he would donate his extensive archives to the Center for Holocaust Studies at Haifa University.
Friedman, a former concentration camp inmate, is credited with helping bring to trial nearly 2,000 Nazi war criminals after World War II. He was instrumental in tracing Adolf Eichmann to Buenos Aires, Argentina where he was kidnapped by Israeli secret service agents and brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
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.
