In Argentina, France, and Elsewhere in Europe, Attacks on Jews Are Judged by a Separate Yardstick

On June 5, 1959, after several years of patient work, the Nazi war-crimes investigators Simon Wiesenthal and Hermann Langbein finally persuaded West German authorities to issue an arrest warrant for Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor infamous for his bestial medical experiments on Jews and others incarcerated in the Auschwitz death camp. Mengele had fled to Argentina a decade earlier and was living openly under his own name in Buenos Aires. In the interim, Wiesenthal and Langbein assembled enough witness statements to provide a clear account of Mengele’s wartime atrocities, and the West Germans duly launched extradition proceedings to return him from Argentina for trial.

But by the time Argentina approved his extradition on June 30, Mengele, having received ample warning from the Argentine authorities, was safely ensconced on a farm over the border in Paraguay. For Wiesenthal, who would gain his international reputation later on, the Mengele fiasco was proof positive of the “Argentine government’s utter disregard for justice.”

As both Avi Weiss and Matthew Levitt make clear—in, respectively, Weiss’s revealing memoir of the 1994 AMIA bombing and its aftermath and, in responding, Levitt’s sobering examination of the Iranian suspects who remain at large—Wiesenthal would have little reason today to revise his view of Argentine justice. The 25th anniversary of the AMIA atrocity has come and gone, but not a single person has been tried or convicted for a crime hatched and executed by the Iranian regime and its Hizballah proxy.