The Austrian Jewish, Students Federation called on the West German government today to take immediate steps for the extradition of Nazi war criminal Walter Kutschmann who has been living in Argentina since 1947 under the alias of Pedro Ricardo Olmo. The request for action was contained in a note to the West German Embassy here, a Federation spokesman disclosed.
Kutschmann was arrested in Buenos Aires last Saturday after his identity was exposed by Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Nazi war crimes documentation center in Vienna. But he was released after six hours and, according to Wiesenthal, has gone underground. There was no explanation of why the Buenos Aires authorities released him. Wiesenthal provided documents indicating Kutschmann’s responsibility for the murder of 20 Jewish university professors and their families in Lwow, Poland, on July 4, 1941, a crime previously attributed to another former West German, Theodor Oberlaender.
The Federation of Austrian Resistance Fighters held Oberlaender responsible but the actual killings apparently were carried out by Kutschmann, who was, at the time, an SS officer and leader of a Gestapo unit. According to the Students Federation, Kutschmann was also directly responsible for the murder of 2000 other Jews in Lwow.
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.
