Word: rajakowitsch
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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Tired of Running. Soon afterward, Rajakowitsch dropped from sight, and many believed he had died on the Eastern front...
...that, all right. Rajakowitsch traveled as Eichmann's deputy to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Berlin; then, in 1941 he was rushed to The Netherlands, where intermittent month-long protest riots had broken out in major cities after the Nazis' first raid on the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. Rajakowitsch soon got the roundups rolling smoothly. As boss of the dreaded Section IV-B-4 (Special Office for Jewish Affairs) in Holland, he was so thorough that when he was asked to spare a handful of Jews of Portuguese origin, he declared, "Jews are Jews...
...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...