Mossad agents twice located the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele when he was in hiding in South America in the 1960s but chose not to arrest him and bring him to face justice, according to documents unsealed this week in Israel.
The Nazi's "angel of death" fled to Latin America at the end of the Second World War, attempting to escape inevitable prosecution for war crimes perpetrated predominently at Auschwitz. Mengele oversaw the gas chambers at the concentration camp and carried out a program of sadistic experiments on Jewish and Roma inmates, particularly children.
Despite his prominent role in the Holocaust, Mengele died a free man in Brazil in 1979. But he could have been captured for the first time in 1960 when officers in Israeli's national intelligence agency located him in Bueno Aires.
According to documents given by Mossad to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and reported in The Times, a senior agent decided to focus resources on apprehending Adolf Eichmann, a chief organiser of the Nazi genocide.
