Adolf Eichmann - Capture in Argentina

Capture in Argentina

Israel's official intelligence agency, Mossad, had as one of its principal assigned tasks the pursuit and capture of accused Nazi war criminals. Throughout the 1950s, many Jews and other victims of the Holocaust also dedicated themselves to finding Eichmann and other notorious Nazis. Among them was the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In 1954, Wiesenthal saw a letter received by an Austrian Baron from an associate living in Buenos Aires, saying Eichmann was in Argentina. The message read in part:

Ich sah jenes schmutzige Schwein Eichmann. ("I saw that filthy pig Eichmann.") Er wohnt in der Nähe von Buenos Aires und arbeitet für ein Wassergeschäft. ("He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.")

With this and other information collected by Wiesenthal, Israel had solid leads about Eichmann's whereabouts. However, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, later claimed that Wiesenthal played no role in Eichmann's apprehension.

Eichmann changed his name but not those of his wife and sons. It was this that led to his capture.

Also instrumental in exposing Eichmann's identity was Lothar Hermann (de), a German half-Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938 after spending time in a concentration camp for underground socialist activity. When Hermann's daughter Sylvia began dating a man named Klaus Eichmann who boasted about his father's Nazi exploits, Hermann alerted Fritz Bauer, the Hessen district attorney, who passed on the information to a Mossad operative, Shlomo Cohen Abarbanel. In her book about the Eichmann Trial, historian Deborah Lipstadt describes how Sylvia, sent on a fact-finding mission, was met at the door by Eichmann himself who said he was Klaus' uncle. Informed that Klaus was not home, she sat down to wait and made small talk with the man. When Klaus returned, he addressed Eichmann as 'Father.'

In 1959, the Mossad was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and then began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts. When surveillance affirmed that Ricardo Klement was Eichmann, the Israeli government approved a covert operation to bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. It was to be a joint operation, carried out by the Mossad and Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency. The Israelis continued their surveillance of Eichmann in 1960 until it was judged safe to take him. A key figure was Yitzhak Elron, the IDF attache in Argentina, who trailed Eichmann with his wife, Sarah, before the abduction.

Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in San Fernando, Buenos Aires, an industrial community 20 km north of the center of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. The Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing the suspect's routine for many days, they determined that he usually arrived home by bus from his work as foreman at a Mercedes-Benz factory around the same time every evening and planned to seize him when he was walking beside an open field from the bus stop to his house at 14 Garibaldi St (now 4261 Garibaldi Street). The plan was almost abandoned when Eichmann on the designated day was not present on the bus he usually took home. Tension rose when a passerby offered to assist the agents who pretended to be fixing the broken-down Mossad vehicle; the agents declined the offer. Finally, almost a half hour later, Eichmann got off a bus. A Mossad agent engaged him, asking him in Spanish ("un momentito, señor") if he had a moment. Eichmann was frightened and attempted to leave, but while blinded by Mossad headlights two Mossad men seized him and wrestled him to the ground. After a struggle, he was brought to the car and hidden down on the floor. Eichmann told his captors later that as soon as they told him to keep quiet or they would shoot him, he knew he had been captured by Israelis. The Mossad agents ran into a police checkpoint, but managed to pass a license-plate check.

Eichmann was brought to a Mossad safe house, Tira, where he was kept for nine days, during which time his identity was double checked and confirmed.

Eichmann was drugged to appear drunk by an Israeli doctor included in the Mossad team and dressed as a flight attendant. He was smuggled out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia plane which a few days before had transported an Israeli delegation to the 150th anniversary celebration of Argentina's independence from Spain. After some tense delay at the airport over getting its flight plan approved, the plane took off from Buenos Aires to Dakar, Senegal and then to Israel on May 21, 1960. He arrived heavily sedated, and like the agents, disguised in the uniform of the El Al crew.

There had been a backup plan in case the apprehension did not go as planned. If the police happened to intervene, one of the agents was to handcuff himself to Eichmann and make full explanations and disclosure.

For some time the Israeli government denied involvement in Eichmann's capture, claiming that he had been taken by Jewish volunteers who eagerly turned him over to Israeli authorities. Negotiations followed between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Argentine president Arturo Frondizi, while the abduction was met from radical right sectors in Argentina with a violent wave of antisemitism, carried out on the streets by the Tacuara Nationalist Movement—including assaults, torture and bombings.

Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann's capture to the Knesset—Israel's parliament—on May 23, receiving a standing ovation in return. Isser Harel, head of the Mossad at the time of the operation, wrote the book The House on Garibaldi Street about Eichmann's capture, which was made into the 1979 American television movie of the same name.

When Eichmann was brought to Israel for trial, the Israeli police officer Avner Less was Eichmann's interrogator. Extracts from Less's interrogation of Eichmann have been published in the 1983 book Eichmann Interrogated.

Heavily edited parts of the interrogation, now available freely and in full from the Israeli archives, were incorporated in the 2007 film Eichmann, dramatizing Eichmann's interrogation. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the movie downplays his role in the Holocaust, including his admission of planning the task and his determination to complete it.

Some years later, Peter Malkin, the member of the kidnapping team actually assigned to seize the suspect, wrote Eichmann in My Hands, which describes the preparation for and details of the capture, while exploring Eichmann's character and motivations.