You can't mossad the Mengele. Jews and their lies:
Why Did Israel Let Mengele Go?
TEL AVIV — For decades, Israel’s espionage agency, the Mossad, kept a file on Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor responsible for, among other atrocities, selecting which new inmates at Auschwitz would die immediately in the gas chambers and which would be put to work first or subjected to his horrible “medical” experiments.
The file is thousands of pages long and documents the Mossad’s efforts to capture or assassinate the war criminal: countless hours of labor, huge sums of money, scores of agents and sources, wiretaps, break-ins, secret photographs and just about every other ploy in the espionage tool kit, including recruiting Nazis and journalists.
It all amounted to nothing. Mengele never saw justice.
For the first time, it’s possible to say why the Mossad failed to apprehend the man who was perhaps the most wanted Nazi to survive World War II. Documents and interviews reveal that contrary to popular belief, for most of the time that Mengele was in hiding, the Mossad wasn’t looking for him at all — or placed finding him far down its to-do list. My new research sheds light on a time when realism and maturity shaped the agency’s priorities, rather than an understandable desire to spill Nazi blood.
Successive prime ministers of Israel, acting on the recommendations of successive Mossad directors, had the wise judgment to have the agency focus its efforts on more urgent matters and allot limited — if any — resources to the manhunt.
The capture, trial and execution in the early 1960s of Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic organizer of the Holocaust, led many people to believe that the Mossad would next want to get its hands on Mengele. Many in Israel and around the world figured that the Mossad would have no trouble doing so. But the truth was that for years, the leaders of the government and the agency were simply not all that interested.
Mengele fled Germany to Argentina in 1948, using false documents given to him by the Red Cross. (According to the Mossad’s file, the organization was aware that it was helping a Nazi criminal escape justice.) In Buenos Aires, he lived at first under an assumed name, but later reverted to his own name. He even had a nameplate on his door: Dr. Josef Mengele.
Though much about his wartime activities was known, the German government had not requested his extradition, and even supplied him with documents clearing him of a criminal record. The German ambassador in Buenos Aires is quoted in the Mossad file on Mengele as saying he received orders to treat Mengele as an ordinary citizen since there was no arrest warrant for him. When, finally, a warrant was issued in 1959, Mengele caught word. He went into hiding, first in Paraguay and then in Brazil.
The Mossad began pursuing Mengele in 1960 based on tips from Simon Wiesenthal, the celebrated Nazi hunter. In 1962, the agency recruited Wilhelm Sassen, a former Nazi and an acquaintance of Mengele’s, who provided information indicating that Mengele had found refuge among a group of Nazis and their sympathizers near São Paulo.
Soon after, a Mossad surveillance team saw a man matching Mengele’s description enter a pharmacy owned by a person who was known to be in touch with him. On July 23, 1962, the Mossad operative Zvi Aharoni (who had identified Eichmann two years earlier) was on a dirt road by the farm where Mengele was believed to be hiding when he encountered a group of men — including one who looked exactly like the fugitive.
The Mossad’s South American station chief cabled the headquarters in Israel: “Zvi saw on Gerhard’s farm a person who in form, height, age and dress looks like Mengele.” It later turned out that he was indeed Mengele. Speaking to me in 1999, Aharoni told me: “We were in an excellent mood. I was certain that in a little while we would be able to bring Mengele to Israel to be tried.”
But the head of the Mossad at the time, Isser Harel, ordered the matter dropped: On the same day, the agency had learned that Egypt was recruiting German scientists to build missiles; disposing of them was Harel’s top priority.
The Mossad was still a young agency, short of resources and manpower. Moreover, as Aharoni later put it in testimony for the Mossad’s history department, “When Isser began dealing with something, he dealt only with that.” In addition, the agency had been blindsided, knowing nothing about the German scientists and the missiles they were building for Israel’s biggest enemy. Harel mobilized the entire agency to deal with it.
Half a year later, Harel was replaced by Meir Amit, who ordered the Mossad to “stop chasing after ghosts from the past and devote all our manpower and resources to threats against the security of the state.” He mandated that the agency deal with Nazis “only to the extent it is able to do so, in addition to its principal missions” and as long as “it doesn’t impinge on the other operations.”
With the backing of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Amit focused on the Egyptian missile program until that threat was resolved (with the help of a former high-ranking Nazi), and then on gathering intelligence on the Arab states that proved critical to Israel’s victory in the 1967 war.
Amit withstood pressure from many members of his staff who were Holocaust survivors or relatives of victims. But others thought he was right. Rafi Eitan, an Israel-born Mossad operative who led the team that caught Eichmann, told me: “Because of the need for foreign-language speakers, many of the Mossad’s recruits were from Europe, and therefore had gone through the Holocaust or lost their families in it. One can definitely understand their need for vengeance. However, there was huge pressure to deal with current requirements, and with the resources being as meager as they were, in no way would it have been right to give the Nazi matter priority.”
In 1968, the Mossad received fresh confirmation that Mengele was living on the farm near São Paulo, sheltered by the same people who had been under surveillance six years earlier. “We have never been so close to Meltzer,” a Mossad operative wrote to Amit, using Mengele’s code name. The operative asked permission to nab one of those people and torture him to find Mengele. But his superiors were worried by his eagerness, ordered him back to Israel and replaced him.
By then, Palestinian terrorism had become Israel’s main security challenge, and the Mossad devoted most of its efforts to that threat. For the next 10 years, backed by Eshkol and his successors as prime minister, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, almost nothing was done about Mengele. The surge in terrorism, the surprise Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the Syrian military buildup with Soviet assistance took precedence.
When Menachem Begin came to power in 1977, he wanted a change. He made that clear in an early meeting with Yitzhak Hofi, who was then the director of the Mossad. “When Begin came in, he thought that not enough was being done and that there was a need to go on hunting Nazis,” Hofi later said in a classified interview with the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. “I told him, ‘Prime minister, today the Mossad has other missions that concern the national security of the people of Israel today and tomorrow, and I give preference to today and tomorrow over yesterday.’ ” Begin didn’t appreciate that response. “In the end we decided that we would focus on one more target, Mengele, but Begin, who was a very emotional man, was disappointed,” Hofi said.
For Begin, getting to Mengele was not just a matter of the past. He equated Yasir Arafat with Hitler. “Unlike other Israelis, who saw the Holocaust as a one-time historical catastrophe,” said Shlomo Nakdimon, a prominent Israeli journalist who was close to Begin, “Begin believed with all his heart that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people must protect themselves in their own country in order to prevent a renewed threat to their existence.”
Begin thought settling the score with Mengele would show Palestinian leaders (and the Israeli public) that they would have to pay a price for harming Israelis. His attitude was reflected in a message he sent to President Ronald Reagan when he sent the Israeli Army into Lebanon in 1982, saying that he felt as if “I have sent an army to Berlin to wipe out Hitler in the bunker.”
The prime minister wasn’t satisfied with Hofi’s verbal agreement to find Mengele. In July 1977, the cabinet’s security committee secretly approved a proposal from Begin “to instruct the Mossad to renew its search for Nazi war criminals, in particular Josef Mengele. If it is not possible to bring them to trial, to kill them.”
The pursuit resumed with a vengeance. In 1982, the agency even considered abducting a 12-year-old boy and threatening to take his life unless his father, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a devoted Nazi and a childhood friend of Mengele’s, gave them the information that could lead to his capture. (In the end, Rudel died before the Mossad decided whether to go through with the operation.)
The same year, the Mossad hoped to tap phone conversations between Mengele and his son, Rolf, who was living in West Berlin. The two were born on the same day, and the Israelis hoped they would call each other to say happy birthday. Cold War Berlin was inundated with spies, and the Mossad preferred when possible not to work there. But they calculated that “this may be the last opportunity” to hear from Mengele. Israeli operatives installed listening devices in Rolf’s home and office, and in his phones.
It was too late. Mengele had died a free man in 1979 while swimming off one of São Paulo’s beaches.
Looking back, some former Mossad officers expressed regrets. Mike Harari, the chief of the agency’s special operations unit, Caesarea, in the 1970s, told me shortly before he died in 2014 that he wished they had pursued him: “As long as there’s still a Nazi breathing in any corner of the world, we should have helped him stop breathing.”
I am not sure I agree. I’m the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child I heard from one of my parents’ best friends about living through Mengele’s infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares. So, of course, I feel angry at the German government’s lack of action in the early years after World War II and frustration at the Mossad’s failure to bring him to justice. Still, I believe that the decision not to prioritize capturing him was the right one. Every intelligence operation carries risks. The Mossad’s approach to Mengele shows prudence and pragmatism on the part of the agency’s leaders — in contrast with Begin’s emotionalism.
The capture and trial of Eichmann — and his execution — were enough to teach the world about the Holocaust and to convey the message that Jewish blood cannot be spilled with impunity. From that point on, it would have been better if the Mossad had let the past go. Nazis no longer posed a threat. And there is no lack of present-day enemies who did and apparently always will."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/sunday-review/israel-mengele-auschwitz-holocaust.html
for most of the time that Mengele was in hiding, the Mossad wasn’t looking for him at all — or placed finding him far down its to-do list. My new research sheds light on a time when realism and maturity shaped the agency’s priorities, rather than an understandable desire to spill Nazi blood.
This is bullshit. Mengele was the most notorious nazi war criminal who got away with what he did in the end. Even back when Eichmann wasn't captured by the jews, Eichmann was the most wanted nazi, followed by Mengele who was #2 at that time.
If the jews could've captured Mengele, they would've. They simply failed to and tried to save face of their incompetence.
Cawk said:TEL AVIV — For decades, Israel’s espionage agency, the Mossad, kept a file on Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor responsible for, among other atrocities, selecting which new inmates at Auschwitz would die immediately in the gas chambers and which would be put to work first or subjected to his horrible “medical” experiments.
What? I thought the Holocaust never happened. ~
Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor and forgiveness advocate
Answered Dec 10, 2014
Although I survived his experiments, I never had any in-depth discussions with him. The relationship between Mengele and us, the twins, was a unique and unusual relationship. We knew that we were alive because he used us as guinea pigs. I couldn't be grateful to him that I was his little puppet and he could do whatever he wanted to me - I did not like that position. Yet I knew I was alive because he wanted to use me as a guinea pig.
Second, we knew within a very short time in Auschwitz that he was probably responsible for selecting most of our family members for death and sending them to the gas chambers. But that was not something that I was able to deal with in Auschwitz. The issues at hand were very pressing - getting more food, not getting sick, and staying alive. I understood that I was only alive as long as Josef Mengele wanted me alive.
Ultimately, most of us would be murdered. Twins started disappearing from our barrack. First one twin, who was kind of sick, then the other would disappear. That was the way the rumor got started that if a twin got sick, they never survived. That was the pattern. There was no clear information from anybody except what we observed and heard from rumors.
I can say that Mengele did bring in cookies and chocolate to some of the younger children. I never received any, and it's my understanding that he did not like me and I definitely did not like him. I was very defiant and angry. My close interaction with him was after I was injected with a deadly germ. Mengele did not do the injection. However, he was standing by as one of the nurses injected me with all kinds of things in my right arm. That night I became very ill. I explained this part of my experience in more detail here: What gives you hope during tough times?
Mengele was always dressed immaculately. He was very proper. I never personally witnessed him kill another person, but that does not mean that he didn't. What I have also learned about him from other people is that he would give chocolate, candy, and goodies to the little gypsy twins (I heard this in a testimony in Jerusalem from one of the nurses who took care of the gypsy twins). He was so fanatic about the little girls being dressed perfectly. He would give them stocking-type leggings with a seam in the back. If the seam wasn't perfectly lined up, he would yell at the nurses. They had to be picture perfect. He would bring silk pantaloons for the little boys, and he liked to play word games with them, observe them, and ask them questions. By October 1944, all the gypsies in the camp were murdered and all the gypsy twins were gassed to death with their parents. I never saw the gypsy twins because they were in a different barrack - we were not intermingled.
Some other thoughts about Mengele: Realizing that this guy had the power of our life and death in his hands, I couldn't possibly admire him. I didn't like what he was doing to me, yet I was at his mercy. I don't think I have ever had such a complicated relationship with anybody. In a strange way he was our protector and our tormenter, because as long as he wanted us alive, we stayed alive. Every single one of us knew that within a few weeks of being in Auschwitz.
I talked to another former Nazi doctor, Hans Munch, who knew Mengele in Auschwitz. I asked him how he became friends with Mengele. He said, "Eva, it was the only way to stay alive. He was the only other Nazi in Auschwitz who didn't get drunk. After coming back at night from the miseries of the camp, at least I could have a conversation with someone." During those conversations, Mengele would justify it to him by saying, "I am saving those twins. If it weren't for my experiments, they would all be dead." So he was rationalizing the fact that he was using us as guinea pigs.
I saw Mengele probably for the last time at the end of November, 1944. He seemed very preoccupied and nervous. When he got nervous, he would yell an awful yell. There were a couple of twins who died in the barrack, and he screamed about that. Sometime after November, the experiments stopped. There was so much bombing and artillery around, and we could sense this war was coming to an end. According to Munch, Mengele took all his files on January 18 and loaded them in his car as he escaped Auschwitz. The only things that have been found at the Auschwitz Museum are isolated pages. I have copies of three that fell out of the file as he was in a hurry, grabbing his files and taking them with him.
If I saw Mengele today, I would go up to him, look him straight in the eyes, and number one ask him, "What did you inject into us?" Number two, I would say, "I forgive you. - not because you deserve it, but because I and every human being who has ever been victimized deserves to be free. And I deserve to be free from what you imposed upon me in 1944."
Nazi Mengele died sad, poor and in pain
Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz concentration camp, spent his last years in his Brazilian hideaway lonely, depressed and short of money, according to 86 letters, notes and diaries discovered filed away in a Sao Paulo police archive.
One of the most wanted Nazi war criminals - because of the experiments he conducted on children and other inmates - Mengele apparently lived his last years suffering intense abdominal pains.
Fear of being discovered made him chew the ends of his moustache, resulting in a ball of hair blocking his intestines.
The typewritten letters and handwritten notes were found when police files were being reorganised, and excerpts were translated and published by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
They had been seized at the home of an Austrian couple, Liselotte and Wolfram Bossert, now dead, who befriended Mengele, and at the small house in the seaside resort of Bertioga, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, where he lived until he died from a heart attack in 1979.
Most of the letters were addressed to Wolfgang Gerhard, an Austrian Nazi Mengele befriended in Brazil.
Mengele's diary reveals a man who was unrepentant about Nazi actions during the Second World War.
In January 1976 an entry reveals that Mengele was reading the memoirs of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister. He commented: "He diminishes himself, showing repentance, that is lamentable."
At the same time he was depressed and resentful about his lonely, hard-up life in exile.
In 1976 Mengele wrote in his diary, after complaining that he would not be able to make a trip to Rio because neither he nor his friends could afford the petrol: "What's going to happen? Now I feel lonely, or rather abandoned, more painfully than ever."
In another entry, apparently referring to having to buy the silence of friends, he wrote "everything in life has a price".
Mengele came from a well-to-do family, and during his first years in exile, in Argentina, he lived well.
But by the time he reached Brazil in 1960, after 10 years of hiding in Paraguay, his funds had dwindled.
In 1974 Wolfgang Gerhard, writing from Austria, suggested that he should return to Europe for medical treatment, saying he should go before he got too old to travel - he was 63 - and that it would not be as difficult as he imagined. But Mengele, forced to sell the small flat he had bought in Sao Paulo, did not have the money.
The letters also show that Mengele had not changed his racist views.