The Nazi Hunters

by Neal Bascomb

  In the Britannia cockpit, red lights blinked furiously as the plane descended over the Atlantic toward Dakar. They had flown for close to thirteen hours and far beyond the 4,650 miles projected. Shaul had altered their flight path and altitude a number of times during their ocean crossing to find more favorable winds. Once, Tohar jokingly went through the cabin asking if anybody had a cigarette lighter because they needed all the fuel they could get.

  Now the time for jokes had passed. The gauges flashed that the plane was dangerously low on fuel. If there was a problem in Dakar, if the runways were shut down for any reason, they would not have enough gas to fly around the airport while waiting for permission to land or to divert elsewhere. The cockpit was silent, everyone focused on the task at hand. Tohar stared out the window, focused on the horizon.

  Finally, he saw Dakar through the window. He lowered the landing wheels and decreased their altitude. A final few breathless moments passed before they made a smooth landing on the runway, thirteen hours and ten minutes after leaving Buenos Aires. Tohar shut down two of the engines as soon as he slowed the plane, unsure whether there was sufficient fuel even to taxi to the terminal.

  The navigator’s logbook for the El Al flight.

  Isser Harel congratulated the cockpit crew, but he was worried that the Argentine authorities might have contacted Dakar during their flight, warning them that they might be carrying a suspicious passenger. If this was the case, a thorough search of the plane could be expected. Elian injected Eichmann with more sedative, and Gat sat down next to him. A steward drew the curtain across the first-class cabin and turned off the lights.

  While an airport services crew refueled the plane, two Senegalese health inspectors came on board. Gat heard someone speaking in French. He placed Eichmann’s head on his shoulder and pretended to be asleep. The inspectors barely gave the cabin a second look.

  The rest of the stopover went smoothly. The crew loaded more food, and Shaul and Hassin filed a flight plan to Rome, even though they were going straight to Tel Aviv. They had already plotted out a 4,500-mile, eleven-hour route. They knew that the tailwinds over the Mediterranean were much stronger than those in the South Atlantic, meaning that the journey would not test the plane’s limits in quite the same way as the journey to Dakar had done.

  One hour and twenty minutes after landing, they left Senegal. The plane flew up the west coast of Africa, then northeast to Spain, gathering speed from the tailwinds as it turned almost due east toward Italy.

  The flight deck told air-traffic control in Rome that they would be heading on to Athens. They then flew southeast across the Mediterranean before announcing to the Athens air-traffic controllers that they would go straight to Tel Aviv. They crossed southern Greece, skirting Turkey, then shifted toward Israel.

  When the plane was making its final approach toward Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, Harel washed his face, shaved, and put on clean clothes, preparing himself for the rush of activity that would greet his arrival. He informed his men of their duties on landing, then stared out the window, eager to see the Israeli coastline appear out of the early morning sky.

  Early on Sunday, May 22, Zvi Tohar lowered the landing gear on the plane. Fifteen minutes later, the wheels touched Israeli ground. There was no celebration as there had been when leaving Buenos Aires. The crew had been flying for almost twenty-four hours straight, and the agents watching Eichmann had not rested either. The mood in the aircraft was one of simple relief.

  Tohar taxied to the terminal, where most of the crew disembarked. Harel made sure to shake everyone’s hand as they left the plane. The captain also warmly thanked each of them as they stepped out. Then the doors were closed again, and Tohar taxied to the El Al service hangars, far from the terminal.

  The moment they arrived, Harel left the plane and strode into one of the hangars, where he found a grease-smudged phone to ring Shin Bet headquarters. “The monster is in shackles,” he told one of his lieutenants, then he ordered a vehicle. A short while later, a windowless black van appeared alongside the plane.

  Tabor and Gat escorted a trembling, blindfolded Eichmann down the steps and into the back of the van. Harel explained to Gat that he was to take Eichmann to the secret Shin Bet detention center, which was located in an old Arab house on the edge of Jaffa. He then hurried toward Jerusalem, hoping to see David Ben-Gurion before his 10 A.M. cabinet meeting.

  A secretary led him into the Prime Minister’s office.

  “I brought you a present,” Harel said.

  Ben-Gurion looked up from his paper-strewn desk, surprised to see him.

  “I have brought Adolf Eichmann with me. For two hours now he has been on Israeli soil, and, if you authorize it, he will be handed over to the Israeli police.”

  Ben-Gurion remained silent for a few moments. “Are you positive it is Eichmann?”

  It was not the response Harel expected, and he was slightly taken aback. “Of course I am positive. He even admitted it himself.”

  “Did anyone who met him in the past identify him?”

  “No,” Harel said.

  “If that’s the case, you have to find someone who knew him to go and inspect Eichmann in jail. Only after he has been officially identified will I be satisfied that this is the man.”

  Harel understood Ben-Gurion’s caution, knowing the implications of any announcement he made. Even so, there was not a shred of doubt in his own mind that they had their man.

  A few hours later, Moshe Agami, who had been a Jewish Agency representative during the war, was brought to Eichmann’s cell. Agami had met Eichmann at the Palais Rothschild in Vienna in 1938, when the Nazi had made him stand to attention in his office while he pleaded for permission for the Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Agami confirmed Eichmann’s identity. After he left, Benno Cohen, the former chairman of a Zionist organization in Germany in the mid-1930s, also identified the prisoner as Eichmann.

  Harel phoned the Prime Minister and delivered the news. At last Ben-Gurion allowed himself to relish the operation’s success. He wanted to announce the capture the next day. Harel asked him to wait — some of his agents were still in South America.

  “How many people know Eichmann is in Israel?” Ben-Gurion asked.

  Already more than fifty, Harel admitted.

  “In that case, no waiting. We’re going to announce!”

  Early the next morning, May 23 — a blisteringly hot, cloudless Israeli day — Adolf Eichmann was brought in front of Judge Emanuel Halevi in Jaffa. When asked for his identity, he answered without hesitation, “I am Adolf Eichmann.”

  His voice cracking, Halevi charged him with the crime of genocide and issued his official arrest warrant.

  Eichmann’s detention warrant.

  In a restaurant in the center of Cologne, Fritz Bauer was waiting for an Israeli associate of Harel’s, who had called an urgent meeting but who was now late. Bauer suspected something had gone terribly wrong with the Eichmann mission.

  Harel’s associate came into the restaurant and crossed quickly to the table. When Bauer heard the news of the capture, he leapt from his seat, tears welling in his eyes, and kissed the Israeli on both cheeks. Isser Harel had thought that the Hesse attorney general deserved to be told of the mission’s success before it hit the headlines.

  Now it was time for the rest of the world to know. At 4:00 P.M., David Ben-Gurion strode into the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Some had heard he had a special announcement, but no one had any idea what it might be. He stood at the podium, and the chamber hushed. In a solemn, strong voice he said, “I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann — who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ that is, the extermination of six million of the Jews of Europe — was discovered by the Israeli security services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the l
aw for the trial of Nazis and their helpers.”

  For a moment, everybody was rooted to their seats, unsure whether they had heard the Prime Minister correctly or that what he said was true. Slowly, they realized the enormity of his statement, and it was as if the air had been knocked from their chests.

  “When they had recovered from the staggering blow,” an Israeli journalist later reported, “a wave of agitation engulfed the hearers, agitation so deep that its likes had never before been known in the Knesset.” Many went pale. One woman sobbed. Others jumped from their seats, needing to repeat aloud that Eichmann was in Israel in order to come to terms with the news. The parliamentary reporters ran to their booths.

  Ben-Gurion stepped down and left the hall. Nobody was quite sure what to do as the chamber buzzed with the news. Eichmann. Captured. That was all anyone heard. Within hours, all of Israel and the rest of the world would be equally astonished by the historic announcement.

  A Holocaust survivor displays her Auschwitz tattoo as news of Eichmann’s arrest breaks. The capture and trial would be a transformative moment for survivors to speak of what they experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

  On May 25, Avraham Shalom was on a bus back to his hotel in Santiago, Chile. He had only just been able to send a cable to Mossad headquarters, notifying Isser Harel that he, Eitan, and Malkin were safe. They had arrived in the country three days earlier, after a breathtakingly beautiful journey by steam train from Mendoza through the Andes. On the day of their arrival, southern Chile had suffered a devastating earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in the world, which had killed thousands and sent tsunamis surging across the Pacific.

  Shalom looked idly over the shoulder of a passenger ahead of him, who was thumbing through a newspaper. There, in bold letters, he saw the word EICHMANN. Stunned, he stumbled off the bus at the next stop. At a corner stand, he bought a whole bundle of papers, most carrying the headline BEN-GURION ANNOUNCES THE CAPTURE OF ADOLF EICHMANN.

  Shalom was livid. Nobody was supposed to know about the operation until they were all back in Israel. When he showed Eitan and Malkin the newspapers, they were equally angry, but there was nothing they could do about it. A few days later, they secured flights out of Chile. By chance, Shalom and Malkin were both routed through Buenos Aires, and they spent a worried hour on the tarmac at Ezeiza before takeoff.

  At last they arrived home. Shalom discovered that his wife already knew he had been on the mission. Yaakov Gat had visited several days before to assure her that her husband was all right and would soon be home. Shalom knew that she would never utter a word about his involvement.

  The others had similar experiences. On the evening of Ben-Gurion’s announcement, Moshe Tabor was at the cinema with his wife when the film was interrupted by the news. Turning to him, she said, “You were in India, I thought?” Tabor tried to distract her, but she told him that she had noticed the toy pistol he brought home for their son was stamped MADE IN ARGENTINA.

  At Peter Malkin’s first family Sabbath dinner after his return, his brother talked of nothing else, wanting to know what had happened while Peter was in “Paris” for the past month. Malkin pleaded ignorance. His mother pushed him to say where he had really been.

  “Look, didn’t you get my letters?” he asked.

  “They were like all your letters. They could have been written last year or tomorrow…. Were you involved with this?”

  Malkin desperately wanted to tell her that he had been involved and that he had avenged his sister Fruma’s death. “Please, Mama … Enough. I was in Paris.”

  Zvi Aharoni made the same excuse when his brother called him unexpectedly, wanting to know when he had returned to Israel. “I’m not naive,” his brother said. “I know you were away for over two months, and I heard Ben-Gurion on the radio. I can add two and two together. Or can I? Well done!”

  A Shin Bet secretary, who had also tied Aharoni’s absence to the news, threw her arms around him on his first day back in the office. No words were needed.

  Outside Haifa, at a fortified police station code-named Camp Iyar, Adolf Eichmann sat in a ten-by-thirteen-foot cell. The lights overhead were never switched off, and a guard stayed with him at all times. Another guard kept watch through an opening in the reinforced door to make sure there was no contact between the guard inside and the prisoner.

  The prison commandant feared not only that Eichmann might commit suicide but also that there might be an attempt on his life. His food was always tasted before serving, and his guards were carefully selected so that none of them had lost a family member in the Holocaust.

  In Israel, the shock over the capture developed rapidly from pride in the mission’s success to demands for swift revenge to a more settled view that justice could be delivered only in terms of the letter of the law. Ben-Gurion never wavered from his intentions. “The Jewish state is the heir of the six million murdered, the only heir.” In his view, the trial should be held in Israel to fulfill that country’s “historic duty” to those who were killed. As for the half million Israelis who were Holocaust survivors, the majority agreed with their leader.

  The capture also had international implications. The Argentine government was outraged as soon as press reports revealed that “Israeli agents” had made the capture on Argentine soil. On June 1, the Argentine Foreign Minister, Diógenes Taboada, summoned Israeli Ambassador Arieh Levavi to demand an official explanation and the return of Eichmann.

  “I don’t think this is possible,” Levavi said.

  Two days later, Israeli diplomats sent a communiqué to the Argentines explaining that a group of “Jewish volunteers, including some Israelis,” had captured Eichmann. These volunteers had “made contact” with the Nazi in Buenos Aires and had received his written permission to take him to Israel, where they had handed him over to the Israeli security services. The letter stated that Israel regretted if these volunteers had violated Argentine law but also asked that the “special significance of bringing to trial the man responsible for the murder of millions of persons belonging to the Jewish people be taken into account.”

  Some in Argentina were eager to punish the Israelis. Unable to strike against them directly, right-wing groups took their revenge on the local Jewish community. Tacuara carried out the worst of these attacks, beating up several Jewish students at the University of Buenos Aires and chanting, “Long live Eichmann. Death to Jews.” One student was shot, and later, in a vicious assault, Tacuara radicals branded a swastika onto the chest of a teenage girl whose father was suspected of having helped the Israelis. Nick and Dieter Eichmann hung a swastika flag in front of their Garibaldi Street house and talked tough.

  Vera Eichmann called upon the Argentine courts to instigate proceedings against those involved in her husband’s kidnapping. On July 12, a judge approved the case and launched an investigation, aided by the Argentine security services.

  By the fall, relations between Argentina and Israel had improved, and Vera Eichmann’s case faltered. The inquiry met with resistance, no doubt because of the embarrassment of the Argentine police and security forces over having been outwitted. Investigators had failed to find out even the names of those who had returned on the El Al flight. The Mossad had covered its tracks well.

  In the valley below the Old City of Jerusalem stands Beit Ha’am, the House of the People, a four-story white stone and marble auditorium in the heart of the modern, chaotic metropolis. On the morning of April 11, 1961, one hundred police and military guards with automatic weapons surrounded the building. At 8:55 A.M., Adolf Eichmann, dressed in a dark-blue suit and tie and wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, was brought into the courtroom and placed in a bulletproof glass booth. He sat facing the empty witness stand. Two guards stood directly behind him.

  The 750 spectators, who were already seated, gazed at Eichmann with unblinking eyes. In front of them, on the first level of a three-stepped dais, were the five prosecutors and two defense attorneys in their black gowns, seated a
t tables, side by side. Above them were the court stenographers and clerks. Cameras and microphones recorded every moment for the world to see and hear.

  For five minutes, there was little movement in the hall. Eichmann sat like a statue, looking down at his shoes. There was muffled conversation as people attempted to understand how this man, with his ordinary face and measured demeanor, could be responsible for so much suffering.

  When instructed by the judges in Hebrew, Eichmann turned toward them, his jaw cocked, his face fixed in a slight scowl.

  “Adolf Eichmann, rise!”

  Eichmann snapped to his feet the instant the judge’s words were translated through his headset.

  The defendant, Adolf Eichmann, standing in a bulletproof dock.

  “Are you Adolf Eichmann, son of Adolf Karl Eichmann?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  The presiding judge, Moshe Landau, began reading the indictment, head down, hands together as if in prayer.

  “First count. Nature of Offense: Crime against the Jewish People. Particulars of the Offense: (a) The Accused, during the period from 1939 to 1945, together with others, caused the deaths of millions of Jews as the persons who were responsible for the implementation of the plan of the Nazis for the physical extermination of the Jews, a plan known by its title ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’”

  Landau’s indictment went on for an hour: fifteen counts, numerous charges within each. Eichmann had uprooted whole populations. He had assembled Jews in ghettos and deported them en masse. He had committed mass murder at the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek. He had enslaved Jews in forced labor camps and had denied their rights as human beings. He had inflicted inhuman torture and suffering. He had plundered the property of Jews through robbery, terror, and torture. He had operated across Europe as well as in the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — always, always, with the intention of “destroying the Jewish People.”