The Mossad mission to capture architect of Holocaust

PARIS: On May 11, 1960, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was nabbed by a team of Israeli spies after years on the run in Argentina, ending a long manhunt. Ten days later, drugged and dressed as a crew member of Israeli flag carrier El Al, he was smuggled to Israel by Mossad agents and put on trial.

The architect of the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, under which six million European Jews were exterminated during World War II, Eichmann was tried and hanged in 1962, aged 56. Here is an account, based on AFP coverage from the time and since, of the top secret operation, details of which filtered out over the years.

‘War criminal arrested by Israelis’

“The security services found one of the great Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann,” prime minister David Ben Gurion announced on May 23, adding that he was under arrest in Israel and would face trial, in a masterstroke hailed by the Israeli press. Eichmann’s name and his role as architect of the Nazis’ killing machine had surfaced during the Nuremberg war crimes trials which took place from 1945-1946. He had been charged with organising and coordinating the deportation of Jews to death camps in Eastern Europe. The former chief of Section IV B.4 of the Gestapo, responsible for the so-called “Jewish question”, had vanished after the “Third Reich” collapsed in May 1945. Before fleeing he had destroyed documentary evidence of his activities and photos that could identify him.

The Argentinian lead

A manhunt was launched in 1945, led by prominent figures in the Jewish community, including famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who himself had escaped a concentration camp. The breakthrough came in 1957 when the prosecutor of the German state of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, tipped off the Israeli secret service that Eichmann was in hiding in Argentina, under the false name of Ricardo Klement.