Eichmann Case Role Defended by Wiesenthal
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal on Friday dismissed charges by the founder of Israel’s secret service that Wiesenthal had played no part in the capture of Adolf Eichmann.
Wiesenthal was commenting on a statement by Isser Harel, that Wiesenthal’s role in tracking Eichmann to Buenos Aires in the late 1950s was “absolutely nothing.”
“There is no cure for envy,” Wiesenthal said, adding that he had a letter from the Israeli ambassador to Vienna in 1959 thanking him for his help in tracking Eichmann.
But Harel stood by his claims.
Most accounts of Wiesenthal’s life credit him with locating Eichmann’s hide-out. Eichmann organized the transportation of 6 million Jews to death camps.
He was captured in 1960 in Buenos Aires, secretly flown to Israel, tried and executed in 1962.
Wiesenthal, who runs the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, also denied that he had indirectly spoiled a bid to capture Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz concentration camp doctor known as “the Angel of Death,” by mentioning in a speech that he was in Argentina.
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