Argentine Jewish Leader Urges Government to Arrest Ex-nazis

The president of the Argentine Jewish umbrella group DAIA has called on the government to step up efforts to identify and arrest Nazi officials still at large in Argentina.

Ruben Beraja said DAIA approached the Argentine government with the idea of creating an institute to hunt Nazis after U.S. journalists in 1994 found former SS Capt. Erich Priebke, now on trial in Italy on war crimes charges, living in the city of Bariloche.

Last year, the Argentine Congress passed a law mandating the creation of an institute to research the presence of Nazi refugees here.

But the law has yet to be implemented.

“The world sees Argentina as a passive country, ready to be a haven for Nazis,” Beraja said in an interview. “We look like a country stirred only by press exposes, a country that would act only when journalists find Nazis like Erich Priebke.”

Beraja added that Argentina should investigate the presence of Nazi officials “not only for the sake of those already dead, but to determine if there are still Nazis still at large in our country.”

“Our land should not be a refuge for those repudiated by mankind, for those whose crimes are horrid,” he said.

After World War II, Argentina became one of the world’s principal sanctuaries for Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann.

Earlier this month, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Europe and Latin America said up to 17 wanted war criminals may still be alive and at large in Argentina.

In a recent interview with an Argentine newspaper, Director Shimon Samuels said he had surrendered “again and again” a list of Nazi officials living here to “three interior ministers of the Carlos Menem administration.”

Argentine officials have taken no action to find and extradite those on the list.

Beraja also said the creation of the institute was important in the wake of reports that a Uruguayan passport belonging to German Nazi official Martin Bormann surfaced in Bariloche. The passport, bearing the name of a Richard Bauer, widely believed to be an alias used by Bormann, indicated that he might have died in Argentina in 1975.

The reports have kindled interest in the whereabouts of German Nazis living in South America.

In a related development, a Bariloche newspaper published last Friday the story of Maria Elena Keller-Keller, a Chilean woman who says she is Bormann’s adopted daughter.

Researchers have said Juan Keller-Keller was one of the names Bormann used in South America.

According to the woman, who is 49 years old, the man who adopted her vanished in 1960.

Researchers here continue to try to make sense of all the information that has appeared as of late.

“We are confused because every lead and allegation has a nugget of truth of some material evidence,” one researcher said. “But we cannot assume that Bormann was everywhere at the same time. We are beginning to think that people are confusing other Nazi officials with Bormann. It might very well be that all these Germans identified as Bormann are other war criminals.”

Meanwhile, a former Nazi intelligence agent who denounced the presence of Priebke in Argentina revealed that a “pro-Priebke group” is threatening his life.

In 1994, Reinhardt Koops, who uses the alias Juan Maler, told an ABC television crew that Priebke was alive and living in Bariloche.

“The Americans asked me if I was an SS member,” Koops said. “I answered, `You want to meet a real SS? Go see Priebke.'”

After ABC aired an interview with Priebke in which he recounted his role in the 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre outside Rome, Italy asked for his extradition from Argentina. In late 1995, Priebke was sent to Rome to be tried for his part in the massacre, in which 335 Italian civilians, some 75 of them Jews, were killed.

After the extradition, Koops, 82, kept a low profile, hiding at his daughter’s hotel in Bariloche and at a small rural property he owns in southern Chile.

But he said he began to receive threatening letters in German that were signed by “Canaris’ people.”

Adm. Wilhelm Canaris was the Third Reich’s military intelligence director and a participant in the June 1944 conspiracy to kill Hitler. Koops reportedly was one of his subordinates.

Koops was called “a gypsy traitor” in the letters, which also threatened to “liquidate” him if “Priebke has to spend the rest of his days in an Italian prison.”

The fourth and last letter said Koops would be “thrown to the cold waters of the Azul River” so that he could “swim all the way to Chile.”

Koops said he is “scared, but not too much, because I am old and have cancer.”

Koops told local journalists that he had met Priebke only after arriving in Bariloche in 1951.

The former intelligence agent also said he had left Germany in 1948 via Austria with a “perfectly legitimate German passport.”

“I am not wanted in any country, and I only changed my name from Koops to Maler because Argentina had declared war on Germany and diplomatic relations had not been restored yet,” he also said.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Koops’ record is not so clean.

After the war, Koops worked as an aide to Bishop Alois Hudal, who organized the escape of war criminals from Allied-controlled territories to South America, said Sergio Widder, the Wiesenthal Center representative in Argentina.

“Koops was in charge of issuing passports,” said Widder, who described Hudal’s operation as part of the “ratline,” the organization that smuggled hundreds of Nazi officials out of Europe.

And according to a 1994 report by the center, Koops still raises funds for neo- Nazi groups.

In 1992 and 1993, the center successfully had a researcher infiltrate several German neo-Nazi organizations.

Posing as the editor of The Right Way, a non-existent Nazi magazine, Israeli researcher Yaron Svoray met with several neo-Nazi organizers in Europe.

They eventually directed him to travel to Bariloche to meet Koops, who, thinking he was talking to a comrade, revealed that during the war he had been active in “cleaning” Albania of Jews and other minorities.