Word: rajakowitsch
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Complicated Clients. The pursuit of other targets was always complicated by the expertness with which ODESSA-the Nazi escape apparatus set up and financed by the SS-slipped fugitives out of Europe after the war. One who did not go far was Erich Rajakowitsch, who in 1942 headed Eichmann's Section IV B4 ("death transports") in Holland: Wiesenthal finally found "Raja" in Italy, where he was heading a firm that traded profitably in oil pipelines and engines with the East bloc. Sentenced in Vienna to 2½ years, Raja was quietly released six months later...
Tired of Running. Soon afterward, Rajakowitsch dropped from sight, and many believed he had died on the Eastern front...
...after Eichmann told Israeli police that he had talked to his old friend in Buenos Aires after the war, the net started moving around him. Simon Wiesenthal, chief of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, who had helped track down Eichmann, traced Rajakowitsch to Milan. There, under the name Enrico Raja, he had built up a flourishing business importing metals and machinery from Communist Eastern Europe...
...Since Rajakowitsch was legally still an Austrian citizen, Wiesenthal asked Vienna cops to request his extradition. They refused; Italian police refused to expel him. Finally, about three weeks ago, Wiesenthal took the whole story to Milan's (and Italy's) biggest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, which printed it.*At that, Rajakowitsch fled to a Swiss villa he owned near Lake Lugano, but was quickly expelled as an "unwanted person" by the authorities. Tired of the chase, Rajakowitsch hopped a flight to Munich, then drove to Vienna where he gave himself up. He had expected to be freed...
...West Germany, news of the story came as an embarrassment to Rajakowitsch's wartime superior in The Netherlands, SS Brigadier General Wilhelm Harster. Harster had served eight years as a war criminal in Holland after the war, apparently no hindrance to his employment by the Bavarian Interior Ministry as a legal consultant. Last week Harster was dismissed from his post in Munich-with a pension, of course...