"Government doesn't do these dark things." � Senator John Danforth July 22 2000 Times of London US failed to arrest Eichmann for four years FROM IAN BRODIE IN WASHINGTON THE United States ignored a request to arrest Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi in charge of the "Final Solution" to exterminate European Jews, while he lived in the US-controlled zone of Germany after the Second World War - allowing him to slip away, historians claimed yesterday. Documents unearthed by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles show that the Hungarian Government told US occupation forces that Eichmann was living in their zone in 1947, but their request went unanswered for four years. A year before, Eichmann had escaped from a US prison camp and, with the help of former Nazis, eventually surfaced in 1958 in Argentina where Israeli intelligence agents seized him two years later. The letter from Hungary's minister of justice in April 1947 asked for Eichmann to be extradited from the US Zone to stand trial for his murder of Hungarian Jews. Not until May 1951 was the request denied in a letter from the president of the US extradition board responsible for sending war criminals to other countries for trial. The request was turned down because a "definite address" was not provided and, astoundingly, more details of Eichmann's alleged crimes were needed. "The material submitted in this case does not meet the technical requirements required," the letter said. The letter showed a "callous disinterest" because Hungary was by then a Communist country, said Rabbi Marvin Heir, a founder of the Wiesenthal Centre. Rabbi Meir believed that if the Americans had taken the request seriously, Eichmann might have been found much earlier. But by then they were more worried about the Soviet Union and "wanted to get out of the war crimes business". "They made it easier for Eichmann to live in anonymity and not to worry because no one was looking for him," Rabbi Meir said. However, another historian disagreed with the centre's assessment, saying the American effort to find Eichmann was concentrated in Austria, his last known whereabouts. Other countries, including France and Greece, had been seeking his extradition and Hungary was not high on the list, said Hans Safrian, author of a book about Eichmann. He noted that other Nazi criminals were extradited to Communist countries and executed. "It was a common practice," Safrian said, but admitted that the West was sometimes reluctant, knowing the treatment likely to be meted out to the war criminals on their return. "The perpetrators didn't like that, because they knew they would get harsher treatment in the East," Mr Safrian said. Eichmann was tried by Israel and hanged in 1962. He was commander of the Gestapo's Department for Jewish Affairs, which oversaw the rounding up and killing of six million Jews in concentration camps. He personally organized the transport of Jews in cattle cars to the death camps and devised ways of expediting the mass murders. Before his death, he acknowledged the Holocaust as "the most enormous crime in the history of mankind" and in his prison diaries, released in February by the Israeli Government, described having to brush the brains of a dead child from his leather coat after a visit to a death camp. "I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork," he wrote. "It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all time." More than 400,000 of his victims had been from Hungary.
