In Tel Aviv, Israel, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,” is condemned to death by an Israeli war crimes tribunal.
Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1906. In November 1932, he joined the Nazi’s elite SS (Schutzstaffel) organization, whose members came to have broad responsibilities in Nazi Germany, including policing, intelligence, and the enforcement of Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Eichmann steadily rose in the SS hierarchy, and with the German annexation of Austria in 1938 he was sent to Vienna with the mission of ridding the city of Jews. He set up an efficient Jewish deportment center and in 1939 was sent to Prague on a similar mission. That year, Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish section of the SS central security office in Berlin.
In January 1942, Eichmann met with top Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin for the purpose of planning a “final solution of the Jewish question,” as Nazi leader Hermann Goering put it. The Nazis decided to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. Eichmann was appointed to coordinate the identification, assembly, and transportation of millions of Jews from occupied Europe to the Nazi death camps, where Jews were gassed or worked to death. He carried this duty out with horrifying efficiency, and between three to four million Jews perished in the extermination camps before the end of World War II. Close to two million were executed elsewhere.
Following the war, Eichmann was captured by U.S. troops, but he escaped a prison camp in 1946 before having to face the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal. Eichmann traveled under an assumed identity between Europe and the Middle East, and in 1950 he arrived in Argentina, which maintained lax immigration policies and was a safe haven for many Nazi war criminals. In 1957, a German prosecutor secretly informed Israel that Eichmann was living in Argentina. Agents from Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, were deployed to Argentina, and in early 1960 they located Eichmann living in the San Fernando section of Buenos Aires under the name of Ricardo Klement.
“Un momentito, Señor.”
They were the only three words Israeli intelligence Peter Malkin knew in Spanish, but they were about to change the course of history.
Malkin uttered the words to a balding Mercedes-Benz factory worker headed home from work on May 11, 1960. And when the man reluctantly acknowledged him, Malkin sprang into action. With the help of three other secret agents, he wrestled the man to the ground and into a car. As they sped away, they tied him down and covered him with a blanket in the back seat.
This wasn’t your average abduction. The man in the back seat was one of the world’s most notorious war criminals: Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who helped Germany carry out the mass murder of six million Jews during World War II. For years, he had evaded the authorities and lived in relative peace in Argentina. Now, he was in the custody of the Mossad, Israel’s secret service—and his once secret crimes were about to become public knowledge.
Eichmann’s capture, interrogation and trial were part of one of history’s most ambitious secret missions. “The logistics [of the capture] were incredible,” says Guy Walters, author of Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring them to Justice. “It’s like a movie plot that occurs in real life. And it woke the world up to the Holocaust.”
But that awakening—and Eichmann’s capture—was decades in the making.
When he first joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1932, few would have predicted that Adolf Eichmann had a future as a mass murderer. But Eichmann was both a skilled bureaucrat and a committed anti-Semite. He rose swiftly through the ranks of the party, and by 1935 he was already helping the party plan its answers to the so-called “Jewish question,” Nazi terminology for a debate over how European Jews should be treated.
Though he later claimed that he was just following orders, Eichmann helped the Nazis tackle the logistics of mass murder. He attended the Wannsee Conference, the meeting at which a group of high-ranking Nazi officials coordinated the details of what they called the “Final Solution.” Though he did not make decisions there, he took notes on the conference and prepared data which were used by higher-ranking officials to determine exactly how to murder Europe’s Jewish population. After the conference, Eichmann helped implement the genocide, coordinating the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in German-occupied areas.
But though many of the architects of the Holocaust were arrested, tried at Nuremberg and executed after the war, Eichmann escaped justice. After his capture by Americans as the war ended, he escaped, changing his identity multiple times as he traveled throughout postwar Europe. In Italy, he was given aid by Catholic priests and bishops with pro-Nazi sympathies, and reached Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1950.
Eichmann had a new identity—“Ricardo Klement,” laborer. His family joined him in Argentina soon after, living a relatively quiet life as Eichmann attempted to support himself at a variety of jobs. But he wasn’t the only Nazi in the South American country, and he didn’t make a secret of his past. Eichmann had social ties to other escaped Nazis, and even sat down for an extensive interview with a pro-Nazi journalist, to whom he complained that he had made a mistake by not murdering all of Europe’s Jews.
Rumors of Eichmann’s activities in Argentina made their way to the United States, Europe and Israel. But though both West German and American intelligence operations received tips on Eichmann, they didn’t follow up on the leads. “It wasn’t the job of the Americans to hunt Nazis,” says Walters.
But there was a new state that was very interested in arresting Eichmann: Israel. Thanks to Lothar Herrmann, a blind refugee who had fled to Argentina after being imprisoned in Dachau, they learned of his whereabouts and began planning one of history’s most ambitious captures. When Herrmann discovered Eichmann was in Argentina through his daughter Sylvia, who dated one of Eichmann’s sons, he wrote to Germany with the information.
A German-Jewish judge, Fritz Bauer, asked for more details, so with Sylvia’s help, Herrmann provided Eichmann’s address. Worried that Nazi sympathizers would alert Eichmann to any German investigation, Bauer covertly tipped off Mossad, the Israeli secret service, instead. Mossad assembled a “snatch team”—most of whom had seen their entire families wiped out during the Holocaust—to abduct Eichmann.
Their goal was not just to capture him, but to get him back to Israel where he could be tried publicly for his crimes. The plan was simple enough. As the team spied on Eichmann, they realized that his routine was extremely predictable. They decided to capture him as he walked back home after getting off of a city bus after work.
The hidden home of Adolf Eichmann in San Fernando, Argentina, circa 1960.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The carefully orchestrated plan to abduct Eichmann on May 11, 1960 was almost foiled when Eichmann didn’t get off the bus at the expected time. Half an hour later, though, Eichmann got off of a later bus. Malkin and his associates accosted him on a quiet, dark street. They took him to a “safe house” in Buenos Aires, where he was interrogated for days before he was drugged and put on a plane to Israel.
The trial that followed was among the first to be televised in its entirety. It gripped millions with its emotional testimony and its first-person views of the reality of the Holocaust. At the trial, Eichmann presented the same deceptively normal facade he had kept up in Argentina—an image of a meek bureaucrat who simply followed orders. That image caused political theorist Hannah Arendt to coin the term “the banality of evil,” arguing that Eichmann was not a psychopath, but a normal human.
“Actually, Eichmann was a rabid zealous key Nazi who was absolutely delighted to do his bit to try and kill as many Jews as possible,” says Walters. “He wasn’t just a functionary.” Though he insisted to the end that he wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was found guilty by a special tribunal. He was hanged on May 31, 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea.
When he first joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1932, few would have predicted that Adolf Eichmann had a future as a mass murderer. But Eichmann was both a skilled bureaucrat and a committed anti-Semite. He rose swiftly through the ranks of the party, and by 1935 he was already helping the party plan its answers to the so-called “Jewish question,” Nazi terminology for a debate over how European Jews should be treated.
Though he later claimed that he was just following orders, Eichmann helped the Nazis tackle the logistics of mass murder. He attended the Wannsee Conference, the meeting at which a group of high-ranking Nazi officials coordinated the details of what they called the “Final Solution.” Though he did not make decisions there, he took notes on the conference and prepared data which were used by higher-ranking officials to determine exactly how to murder Europe’s Jewish population. After the conference, Eichmann helped implement the genocide, coordinating the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in German-occupied areas.
But though many of the architects of the Holocaust were arrested, tried at Nuremberg and executed after the war, Eichmann escaped justice. After his capture by Americans as the war ended, he escaped, changing his identity multiple times as he traveled throughout postwar Europe. In Italy, he was given aid by Catholic priests and bishops with pro-Nazi sympathies, and reached Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1950.
Eichmann had a new identity—“Ricardo Klement,” laborer. His family joined him in Argentina soon after, living a relatively quiet life as Eichmann attempted to support himself at a variety of jobs. But he wasn’t the only Nazi in the South American country, and he didn’t make a secret of his past. Eichmann had social ties to other escaped Nazis, and even sat down for an extensive interview with a pro-Nazi journalist, to whom he complained that he had made a mistake by not murdering all of Europe’s Jews.
Rumors of Eichmann’s activities in Argentina made their way to the United States, Europe and Israel. But though both West German and American intelligence operations received tips on Eichmann, they didn’t follow up on the leads. “It wasn’t the job of the Americans to hunt Nazis,” says Walters.
But there was a new state that was very interested in arresting Eichmann: Israel. Thanks to Lothar Herrmann, a blind refugee who had fled to Argentina after being imprisoned in Dachau, they learned of his whereabouts and began planning one of history’s most ambitious captures. When Herrmann discovered Eichmann was in Argentina through his daughter Sylvia, who dated one of Eichmann’s sons, he wrote to Germany with the information.
A German-Jewish judge, Fritz Bauer, asked for more details, so with Sylvia’s help, Herrmann provided Eichmann’s address. Worried that Nazi sympathizers would alert Eichmann to any German investigation, Bauer covertly tipped off Mossad, the Israeli secret service, instead. Mossad assembled a “snatch team”—most of whom had seen their entire families wiped out during the Holocaust—to abduct Eichmann.
Their goal was not just to capture him, but to get him back to Israel where he could be tried publicly for his crimes. The plan was simple enough. As the team spied on Eichmann, they realized that his routine was extremely predictable. They decided to capture him as he walked back home after getting off of a city bus after work.
The hidden home of Adolf Eichmann in San Fernando, Argentina, circa 1960.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The carefully orchestrated plan to abduct Eichmann on May 11, 1960 was almost foiled when Eichmann didn’t get off the bus at the expected time. Half an hour later, though, Eichmann got off of a later bus. Malkin and his associates accosted him on a quiet, dark street. They took him to a “safe house” in Buenos Aires, where he was interrogated for days before he was drugged and put on a plane to Israel.
The trial that followed was among the first to be televised in its entirety. It gripped millions with its emotional testimony and its first-person views of the reality of the Holocaust. At the trial, Eichmann presented the same deceptively normal facade he had kept up in Argentina—an image of a meek bureaucrat who simply followed orders. That image caused political theorist Hannah Arendt to coin the term “the banality of evil,” arguing that Eichmann was not a psychopath, but a normal human.
“Actually, Eichmann was a rabid zealous key Nazi who was absolutely delighted to do his bit to try and kill as many Jews as possible,” says Walters. “He wasn’t just a functionary.” Though he insisted to the end that he wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was found guilty by a special tribunal. He was hanged on May 31, 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea.
כן יאבדו כל איוביך השם!!!
