Adolf Eichmann had been one of the principal administrators of the Holocaust — the SS officer who managed the vast machinery of deportation that carried millions of Jews to the ghettos and the killing centres of Nazi-occupied Europe. When the Second World War ended, he slipped away, hid his identity, and eventually escaped along the clandestine routes that carried fugitive Nazis to South America. By the 1950s he was living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement, an unremarkable factory worker in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, his family around him, his past apparently buried. But he had not been forgotten. A chance tip, passed through a courageous West German prosecutor who did not trust his own country's institutions to act, reached the intelligence service of the young state of Israel. In 1960 a small team of Israeli operatives travelled secretly to Argentina, confirmed that the quiet Herr Klement was indeed Eichmann, and on the evening of 11 May seized him as he walked home from the bus near his house on Garibaldi Street. They held him in a safe house, secured his signature on a statement agreeing to be tried, and then — because Argentina would never have handed him over — smuggled him out of the country disguised as a member of an airline crew, aboard a flight that had brought an Israeli delegation to Buenos Aires. Days later, Israel's prime minister announced to a stunned parliament that Eichmann was in Israeli hands and would face justice. The trial that followed, in Jerusalem in 1961, became one of the defining events in the world's reckoning with the Holocaust. This is the story of how he was found, taken, and brought to account.
State & Intelligence Operations
1960
