Nurit Eldad |
The members of the team who went to Bariloche |
On March 23, 1961, the Israeli press published a report that looked like it had been taken from an overly imaginative Hollywood movie.
"She followed Mengele in Argentina - and was murdered," the headlines screamed. "The mysterious secretary of the Israeli delegation in Cologne was apparently 'executed' by Nazi agents, who had found out that she was one of the Israeli commandos hunting Nazi war criminals who found refuge in Argentina," the reports claimed.
The name of the mysterious Israeli woman was Nurit Eldad, but she was also known as Eldod, Eldot, and Eldok - and the news report was the first clue to the extraordinary story of her life and death.
The day after the sensational report, the claims that Nurit had been killed while carrying out a spying mission on senior Nazi officials were vehemently denied. "Nurit Eldod – a victim of an accident in the mountains of Argentina – was not murdered by Nazis," wrote the Davar newspaper, which stated that she "perished while hiking in the mountains of southern Argentina - something that was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt already a year ago."
The vigorous denials were effective. The story of Nurit's death and the jaw-dropping news that she was murdered by Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, who selected who would be sent to the gas chambers, who to experiments, and who to hard labor, were dismissed as an urban legend. However, a close examination of the denials raises questions. An article from the Davar newspaper, which is not signed by any reporter but by Davar Staff, states that "according to the report that arrived in Israel about a year ago, Nurit slipped and fell into a deep crevice and there was no possibility to help her or to retrieve her body."
However, we can now reveal for the first time the testimonies of several people who were with Nurit on the trip where she died. These reveal that no one saw her fall to her death. Moreover, her body was found only after a four-day search by a rescue mission, and the testimony of the rescue personnel indicates that she was found with her backpack and belongings lying neatly next to her – a far cry from the reports that denied foul play.
This did not prevent former Mossad director Isser Harel from publishing a report in the Maariv newspaper in June 1985 that categorically denied the details of the case. "This story has been circulating in various versions for years in the world media," Harel said. "But whenever I was asked about it, including recently, I denied it outright. There never was an 'Israeli agent' who was infiltrated by the Mossad into Mengele's vicinity and murdered by him."
In the years since not a single historian specializing in the study of Mossad operations has found out the riveting details of the story of Nurit's death. In 2007, the Mossad's history department published a large volume detailing the organization's extensive efforts to get its hands on Mengele. The volume contains not a single word about Nurit and the story of her and she remains an enigma shrouded in mystery.
Who was Nurit Eldot