The Nazi Hunters (24 page)

As it turned out, Eichmann broke down much sooner than anyone expected, making that procedure unnecessary. When Aharoni asked for his name, he replied: “Ricardo Klement.” But when he asked him his height, shoe size, and clothing size, each of his answers matched those in his file. Then Aharoni asked him his Nazi Party membership number, and he provided the correct answer. The same thing happened when he asked him for his SS number. He also provided his correct date and place of birth—March 19, 1906, in Solingen, Germany.

“Under which name were you born?” Aharoni then asked.

“Adolf Eichmann,” he replied.

As Aharoni put it, “We had come out of the tunnel. . . . the tensions of a long and difficult operation dissolved.”

Just before midnight, Aharoni and Shalom drove to downtown Buenos Aires where Harel was waiting in a coffee shop for news. As Shalom recalled, the Mossad chief had been switching coffee shops periodically according to a schedule to avoid attracting attention. “I don’t know how many teas he had,” he said, laughing.

• • •

The special El Al flight, a turboprop Bristol Britannia carrying the Israeli delegation, landed in Buenos Aires just before 6 p.m. on May 19. The delegation was headed by Abba Eban, a minister without portfolio
who had already served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States and the United Nations; he would later become the country’s highly effective foreign minister. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had told him earlier that the flight’s real mission was to bring Eichmann back to Israel, and that information was shared with only a small number of the others on board. But the presence of three unfamiliar men in El Al uniforms who did not even pretend to be carrying out any flight duties tipped off most of the crew that something was afoot.

Back at the safe house, Aharoni and Malkin kept questioning Eichmann during the wait for the plane. Offering a preview of the kind of arguments that he would make at his trial, Eichmann claimed that he was never anti-Semitic. “
You must believe me, I had nothing against the Jews,” he insisted. But Hitler was “infallible,” and he had sworn an oath as an SS officer to him personally, which meant he had no choice but to follow orders. As Malkin summed up his message, “
There was a job to do and he did it.”

As a prisoner, Eichmann was more than obedient. “
He behaved like a scared, submissive slave whose one aim was to please his new masters,” Harel observed. Initially, the prisoner was terrified his captors would execute him or poison his food. And he seemed almost relieved to hear that the plan was to have him stand trial.
He tried to convince his captors that he should stand trial in Germany, Argentina, or Austria, but when Aharoni told him this was not going to happen, he even agreed to sign a statement declaring his willingness to go to Israel to be tried there.

During this whole period, the Israeli team kept monitoring the newspapers, fearful of any indications that the Argentine authorities had learned of Eichmann’s kidnapping.
But as Nicolas Eichmann indicated later, the family, while suspecting the Israelis were behind the father’s disappearance, were not about to make any public statements that could tip the Argentines off to his real identity.

The Israeli team’s main task was to prepare to get Eichmann on board the El Al flight.
Shalom had repeatedly driven to the airport to familiarize himself with the route and make himself known to the guards. When the plane was parked in the maintenance area, he could come in and out
without being stopped.
On May 20, the scheduled departure day, Shalom made a final inspection of the aircraft and sent a courier to Harel informing him that it was open and safe. Earlier in the day, another member of his team had told key crew members that the plane would be carrying a passenger wearing an El Al uniform who would appear to be sick. They were not told his identity, but the nature of the mission was now clear.

Back at the safe house, Eichmann was completely cooperative as he was bathed, shaved, and dressed in the airline’s uniform. When the team doctor brought out an injection to sedate him, the prisoner assured him this was not necessary since he would remain quiet. The Israelis were not about to take that risk. Seeing that they were determined to stick with the plan, Eichmann once again cooperated fully. By the time the agents were ready to take him out of the house, the drug was already beginning to work. But Eichmann was still alert enough to point out that they had left off his jacket, asking them to put it on so he would look exactly like the other crew members.

Eichmann dozed as he was driven in a three-car convoy to the airport. Seeing that all the passengers of the first car were in El Al uniforms, the guard opened the gate and allowed everyone through. Once they reached the plane, the agents kept Eichmann surrounded tightly and supported him as he was maneuvered up the steps. Deposited in the first-class cabin, he was near other “crew” members who also pretended to sleep. The cover story was that they were all part of the relief crew that needed to rest up before they would take over later. Just after midnight, which meant the date was officially May 21, the plane took off.
When the plane left Argentine airspace, the “crew” in the first class cabin got up to embrace each other and celebrate their success. The rest of the real crew finally learned the identity of their mystery passenger.

Harel was on board, but most of the other agents who had carried out the operation—including Eitan, Shalom, and Malkin—were not on the flight. They would have to make their way out of Argentina separately, arriving back in Israel days later. While their deed soon became public knowledge, their roles in it remained secret for years to come.

That fact contributed to the bitter skirmishes later about who really
deserved credit for Eichmann’s capture. The private Nazi hunters like Tuvia Friedman and Simon Wiesenthal were free to tell their versions of events—and they were more than willing to do so. Friedman quickly published a memoir where he dramatized his own efforts. According to his account, Eichmann fainted when he learned that his captors were Jews who had been after him for a long time. When he came to, Friedman continued, he reportedly asked: “
Which one of you is Friedman?”

Friedman did add: “The story was given me second-hand so I will not swear to its accuracy.” Eitan, the field commander of the kidnapping who had helped drag Eichmann into the car, stated flatly that nothing of the sort ever happened.

Wiesenthal also published his first account of his role in his 1961 book
Ich jagte Eichmann
(I Hunted Eichmann). The title alone suggested that he was claiming a major part of the credit, although his assertions in this and subsequent public statements and writings were often more measured. He was happy to report that Yad Vashem sent him a cable on May 23, 1960, after Ben-Gurion had announced Eichmann’s capture and arrival. “
HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENT,” it read.

But speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem later, Wiesenthal chose his words carefully: “
Eichmann’s seizure was in no way a single person’s achievement. It was a collaboration in the best sense of the word. It was a mosaic, especially during the last decisive phase, when many people, who for the most part did not even know each other, all contributed small pieces. I can only talk about my own contribution, and I do not even know if it was particularly valuable.”

In his 1989 memoir,
Justice Not Vengeance,
he wrote: “
I was a dogged pursuer, but I was no marksman.” To his daughter, Paulinka, and her husband, Gerard Kreisberg, he never claimed all the credit. Speaking of the Israelis, he said: “
I could never have done what they could. How can I compare myself to a country like Israel?”

Until his death in 1968, Bauer, Hesse’s attorney general who had provided the key information that led the Israelis to Eichmann, did not seek any public recognition for his role.
As soon as he had returned to Israel
with Eichmann, Harel had sent a message to one of his men in Germany. The Israeli met with Bauer in a restaurant a few hours before Ben-Gurion made the announcement about Eichmann’s capture. When he told him the news, Bauer embraced him and his eyes filled with tears. He was elated.

While he was circumspect about his own role, Bauer could not help but notice the media’s focus on Wiesenthal as the key Eichmann hunter. “
He can call himself that, even though he didn’t catch him,” Bauer said privately to a friend. “Hunted, yes.”

But Bauer and Wiesenthal were in occasional touch with each other, and Bauer never betrayed any resentment for the fact that the other man was more in the spotlight than he was.

Harel was another story, however. Since he could not publicly claim the credit while he was still running the Mossad, he fumed from the very beginning at the growing impression that Wiesenthal had played the central role in Eichmann’s capture—and at Wiesenthal’s willingness to play along with that perception.

In 1975, Harel was finally free to publish
The House on Garibaldi Street,
his account of the Eichmann operation. He pointedly omitted any mention of Wiesenthal. Later, in an unpublished manuscript, “Simon Wiesenthal and the Capture of Eichmann,” Harel wrote that Wiesenthal had played “
no part” in Eichmann’s capture and “could not countenance the truth.”

The former Mossad chief did not claim that Wiesenthal “
had not exerted himself over the years in the pursuit of Eichmann, nor that he had declined to lend assistance when asked.” But he was incensed by what he saw as Wiesenthal’s efforts to take advantage of Israel’s official silence on how the operation was pulled off. “At first he proceeded with some prudence but, taking Israel’s silence for consent, he became progressively bolder, to the point of arrogating to himself full credit as the brain behind the capture of Adolf Eichmann,” he wrote. The choppy manuscript, which includes a collection of documents, is an emotional assault on Wiesenthal’s character. Above all, it contains an implicit plea to acknowledge the author’s own primary role.

Some members of Harel’s team were far more inclined to give Wiesenthal credit for both keeping the hunt for Eichmann alive and providing useful leads. But the Harel-Wiesenthal feud was as much a clash of two forceful personalities as it was a debate about specific interpretations of events. Shalom, the deputy of the operational team in Buenos Aires, recognized what really was at stake. “
They were competing for the prize,” he said. “The prize for being famous for catching Eichmann.”

In the small community of Nazi hunters, this dispute would continue unabated even after the death of both antagonists (Harel died in 2003; Wiesenthal in 2005). But for the broader public, the infighting rarely registered. Far more interesting for them was a question that Harel asked himself when he had gone to see his famed captive at the safe house in Buenos Aires.

“
When I actually saw Eichmann for the first time, I was amazed at my reaction,” he recalled. Instead of feeling hatred, his first thought was: “Well now, doesn’t he look just like any other man!” He wasn’t sure what he had expected Eichmann to look like, but he said to himself: “If I met him in the street I would see no difference between him and the thousands of other men passing by.” Then he asked himself: “What makes such a creature, created in the likeness of man, into a monster?”

This would be the question on everyone’s mind when Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem.

“
That many (including me) experienced ‘shame,’ that is, a feeling of guilt during the imprisonment and afterward, is an ascertained fact confirmed by numerous testimonies. It may seem absurd, but it is a fact.”

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist and writer, in
The Drowned and the Saved
, his final book about the Holocaust. He committed suicide in 1987.

T
he special flight carrying Eichmann landed at Tel Aviv’s Lydda Airport, which would later be named Ben Gurion Airport, on the morning of May 22, 1960. The next day Ben-Gurion told his cabinet: “
Our security services have long been looking for Adolf Eichmann, and in the end they found him. He’s in Israel and will stand trial here.” He would announce this news to the Knesset later that day, the prime minister added, making the point that Eichmann would be tried for crimes that still carried the death penalty in Israel.

According to the top secret transcript of the cabinet meeting that was only released in 2013, Ben-Gurion was immediately peppered with questions by his astonished team. “How, in what way, where? How does one do that?” asked Transportation Minister Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. The prime
minister replied: “That is why we have a security service.” Others offered their congratulations, and Finance Minister Levi Eshkol suggested that Ben-Gurion express in his speech to the Knesset “special appreciation for this action, maybe with some kind of token.”

“What kind of token?” the prime minister asked.

When Eshkol pointed out that Israel did not have medals to give out, Ben-Gurion responded: “The reward for a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself.” In Hebrew,
mitzvah
literally means commandment, but it is generally used as shorthand for any good deed.

The cabinet members were desperately curious about where and how Eichmann had been caught, but Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen recommended that “no details” be given out.

During a brief discussion about who might serve as Eichmann’s lawyer, Rosen explained that they would give him “any attorney he wants.” But Foreign Minister Golda Meir interjected: “On the condition he wasn’t a Nazi.”

When Agriculture Minister Moshe Dayan asked what if the lawyer was an Arab, Ben-Gurion declared: “I am certain that an Arab will not agree to defend him.”

Mossad chief Harel, who was also at the meeting, responded to a question about how Eichmann was behaving in prison. “He doesn’t understand our behavior, he thought that we would beat him and treat him cruelly,” he said. “We are treating him in keeping with the laws of the State of Israel.”