CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela has always prided itself on being unsullied by South America's reputation as a haven for fugitive Nazis, so a claim that it is harboring 18 Nazi collaborators has shocked the nation.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Nazi-hunting organization, has asked the Venezuelan government to help track down the 18 alleged collaborators. It says they include a prominent retired businessman from Estonia.
"Many Jews saved their lives coming here. We are profoundly grateful to this land that has offered us refuge," said Isabel Cohen, 61, a Spanish Jew who fled to Venezuela in 1942. "That's why we are very upset by this news. We are shaken by the very thought that this oasis of peace could be stained by the presence of war criminals."
South America was a popular destination for Nazis fleeing arrest after World War II. Prominent among them were Adolf Eichmann, a senior officer in the Nazi extermination system who lived in Argentina until Israel abducted him in 1960; Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo chief deported to France in 1987 from Bolivia; and Josef Mengele, the murderous Auschwitz camp doctor who died in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1979.
The Wiesenthal Center doesn't know exactly how many former Nazis and collaborators are living in South America today but says it fears many have already died in freedom.
"Time is against us. Time is working to allow these assassins to die in liberty," said Sergio Widder of the center's Buenos Aires branch.
Among the alleged fugitives the Wiesenthal Center says are in Venezuela is businessman Harry Mannil. It claims that as a political police officer during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Estonia, Mannil participated in the massacre of at least 100 civilians. Mannil, now 81, has strongly denied it.
The others are from Lithuania and Latvia but won't be identified until it can be confirmed that they are alive and living in Venezuela, the Wiesenthal Center says.
The Venezuelan government has said it will cooperate in the search.
"I don't even want to think that these type of people sought refuge in Venezuela," Foreign Minister Luis Alfonso Davila told The Associated Press. "We are proud of being a country that welcomed with open arms those who fled the barbarity of the European wars."
Although Nazi-hunters have largely focused their search outside Venezuela, the news didn't surprise Elieser Rotkopf, of the Confederation of Israeli Associations of Venezuela. Rotkopf points out that in 1943, the United States made a list of Venezuelan government officials who allegedly had ties to Nazis and could have subsequently helped them enter the country.
The Wiesenthal Center also provided Argentina with the names of 20 alleged Nazi collaborators suspected of living there.
Mannil, a former importer and art collector who has donated works to Estonian museums, insists he only worked for Estonia's political police for four months and fled in 1943 rather than cooperate with the Nazis.
"This is absurd and completely unfounded," he was quoted as saying in an Estonian newspaper.
His son, Mihkel, repeated the denial.
"My father was forced to flee Estonia for refusing to work with the Nazis. He escaped when they were about to arrest him," Mihkel told the AP. "Those who accuse him are lying and they have no proof."
At least 5,000 Jews died in Estonia during the Nazi occupation of the Baltic country, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
Estonian investigators say they combed their files in 1995 for evidence implicating Mannil but found none. Last week, an Estonian presidential commission announced that a search of archives there and in Germany found no mention of Mannil. The country's security police said they would seek access to any documents on Mannil in U.S. archives
Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center said in a recent letter to Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar that he believes the United States has documents pointing to Mannil's guilt. He said Estonia should try Mannil if new evidence is uncovered.
Eli Rosenbaum, who heads the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations on Nazis, said he couldn't comment about Mannil. But Justice Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mannil is barred from entering the United States because of the allegations. They declined to elaborate.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's former foreign minister, said the Venezuelan case shows that Latin governments shouldn't give up the search, even if more than 56 years have passed since the war ended.
"I am confident that (Venezuelan and Estonian) authorities will punish those responsible," Ben-Ami told the AP.
On The Web: Simon Wiesenthal Center: www.wiesenthal.com