Hunting Eichmann

A blind man's efforts, and a criminal caught.

Lothar Hermann was born in 1901 in Quirnbach, a small town in the Westerwald region of Germany. He grew up, trained as a merchant, worked in finance, and in the 1930s began quietly smuggling currency across the border into France to support Jews trying to reach Palestine.

In 1935 the Gestapo caught him. They sent him to Dachau, where the beatings were severe enough that he lost the sight in one eye, and eventually the other.

When he was released, he emigrated to Argentina with his wife and his daughter Sylvia.

Years later, when Sylvia was a teenager when she met a German boy at a club in Buenos Aires named Klaus. They began seeing each other. One evening Klaus came to dinner and said, in front of Lothar, that it would have been better if the Germans had finished the job of extermination.

Lothar said nothing, but he remembered the name. Klaus Eichmann.

In 1957, when Sylvia was reading the newspaper aloud to her father — he was by then entirely blind — and came across a detailed account of Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.

The story described in detail the role of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, last seen alive after the war, believed to be in hiding somewhere in South America.

Lothar did not think it was a coincidence. He wrote letters — too the Jewish community in Buenos Aires — no response.

To a prominent Nazi hunter — no meaningful follow-up.

To Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor-general of the German state of Hesse, a Jewish man himself who had survived the Nazi years and who did not trust his own colleagues not to tip Eichmann off if official channels were used.

Bauer took the letter seriously and passed it on to Israeli intelligence.

Mossad sent an operative to look at the house where Klaus and his father lived, but he came back skeptical. The house was too modest, too wretched — a small structure without running water or electricity on the outskirts of San Fernando, a working-class suburb north of Buenos Aires.

A man like Eichmann, who had organized the deportation of millions with the administrative power of the entire Nazi state behind him, wouldn’t be living like this. The case was effectively closed.

Bauer pushed again; Mossad sent an operative back — this time to meet Lothar and Sylvia in person. He believed them—but without proof, nothing happened.

Mossad asked the Hermanns to investigate further themselves, without support, without protection.

So Lothar and Sylvia boarded a train to Buenos Aires and started asking around for Klaus Eichmann’s address. Sylvia went to the door alone. Eichmann answered, saying he was Klaus’s uncle. Then Klaus came home and called him father.

Sylvia returned and told her father what she had seen. They were certain. But Mossad was still not convinced.

Then a second independent tip arrived — a German geologist named Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann at a construction company, provided a photograph and an address, corroborating everything the Hermanns had said.

By early 1960, Mossad director Isser Harel had seen enough. He flew to Buenos Aires himself to oversee the operation.

The man living on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando had spent fifteen years becoming invisible. He was working on the assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory. He called himself Ricardo Klement.

He rode the same bus home every evening at roughly the same time. For weeks, Mossad agents watched him — noting his schedule, renting safe houses, building a cell in one of them where he would be held.

They photographed him from a distance with a camera hidden in a briefcase, and compared the shape of his ears to photographs in his SS file.

It was a match.

On the evening of May 11, 1960, seven agents waited for two hours near the bus stop on Garibaldi Street. When Eichmann finally stepped off the bus and began walking toward his house, agent Peter Malkin stepped forward.

“Momentito, señor.”

Eichmann panicked; Malkin grabbed him and forced him into the car. An agent told Eichmann: “If you move, you will be shot in the head.”

They held him in the safe house for nine days, and he offered aliases twice before admitting who he was. They flew him to Israel on an El Al plane, drugged, dressed in an El Al crew uniform, and boarded as a sick flight attendant.

The code word sent to Israel confirming the capture was: “The typewriter is okay.”

On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and announced that Adolf Eichmann was in custody and would stand trial.

It was the first trial in history to be televised. More than 100 witnesses testified — Holocaust survivors, most of whom had never spoken publicly about what they had experienced.

Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass and did not deny his role. He said he had been following orders.

He was found guilty on all 15 counts. On June 1, 1962, he was hanged — the only time Israel has ever carried out a death sentence. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, so there would be no grave, no marker, no place for anyone to come.

Lothar Hermann, the blind man whose letter started all of it, died in 1974, largely unrecognized.

(The video above is from a somewhat fictionalized account of the capture: Operation Finale. But it’s worth a watch.)

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 10: “Done.” — The single word tapped in Morse code by the Western Union telegrapher at Promontory Summit, Utah, at 12:47 p.m. on this day in 1869, announcing to the nation that the Golden Spike had been driven and the first transcontinental railroad was complete.

• May 11: “The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere we could use all the material that everybody else had said was too silly.” — Terry Jones, recalling the evening of this day in 1969 when all six members of Monty Python met for the first time together at a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, London.

• May 12: “Strategically unimportant.” — The German government’s official verdict on the world’s first programmable, fully automatic digital computer, presented by engineer Konrad Zuse to a small audience of scientists at the German Laboratory for Aviation in Berlin on this day in 1941. The original Z3 was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943. Zuse rebuilt it from memory.

• May 13: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” — Winston Churchill, from his first speech as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered in the House of Commons on this day in 1940, three days after he had been called to replace Neville Chamberlain.

• May 14: “I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation.” — Edward Jenner, from his own account of the experiment he conducted on this day in 1796 in Berkeley, England — scraping cowpox matter from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and introducing it into two small cuts on the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps. The experiment launched the science of vaccination.

• May 15: “The effect was electric.” — A contemporary account of the moment nylon stockings went on sale for the first time across the United States on this day in 1940; stores in New York sold out within hours.

• May 16: “I will never forget that moment. I had never heard anything like it.” — Jack Mullin, recalling when he first encountered a German Magnetophon — a broadcast-quality tape recorder in the waning days of World War II. Mullin, an Army Signal Corps engineer, dismantled two machines, shipped them home, and demonstrated them on this day in 1946 at an Institute of Radio Engineers show in San Francisco. Bing Crosby, who hated performing live, wrote a check for $50,000 on the spot.