Friday 22 July 2022 10:54 PM Mossad agent reveals he seized Hitler's Holocaust mastermind by identifying him ... trends now
As the man who’d just got off the bus approached, my fellow agent, who’d been pretending to tinker under the bonnet of a parked car, stood up. ‘Momentino, senor (Just a moment, sir),’ he said, and then grabbed him.
They rolled into a ditch in the struggle, where two more of us leapt in to complete the capture. Our prey tried to shout out, his voice strangled, like the growl of a wounded animal.
We dragged him to the back seat, my hand over his mouth. He was told, in German: ‘If you keep quiet, nothing bad will happen to you.’
‘Jawohl,’ came the answer. When I heard this, any remaining doubts dissipated. ‘Jawohl’ is not just ‘yes’, but ‘yes’ said to a commander; to someone with a higher rank than yours.
Even now, Adolf Eichmann remained an obedient German.
The date was May 11, 1960, 15 years since the full scale of Hitler’s Final Solution had been exposed — the attempted extermination of the Jewish race from Europe.
And I knew that on a quiet residential street in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires, my colleagues and I — from the Israeli secret intelligence agency, Mossad — had just captured the Nazi mastermind behind it, in order to bring him to Israel to stand trial.
Adolf Eichmann (pictured centre with outstretched arm) was captured while living in Argentina in 1960
Mossad agents surveyed Eichmann (pictured in 1961) while he was living and working Buenos Aires under a false identity
Once back at our safe house, we stripped Eichmann, examined the scars on his body and found, tattooed under his armpit, his blood type, as was customary for all SS members.
‘What is your name?’ we asked him. ‘Otto Heninger’ was his first reply, one of two fictitious names Eichmann used after the war, when he escaped from an American PoW camp in Germany. ‘Your real name,’ we insisted.
This time he said: ‘Ricardo Klement,’ the name of the family man under which he had been posing in Argentina. Only when we persisted for a third time did he give his real name and his SS number.
It was at this stage that we discovered where he worked — at the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Buenos Aires, which employed him in their spare parts warehouse.
This then was the life of one of the main people responsible for the murder of six million Jews: getting up early in the morning, going to work on the bus, arranging cardboard boxes on shelves, taking out parts according to instructions and returning in the evening by bus.
In the first decade after the establishment of Israel in 1948, pursuing justice against the perpetrators of the Holocaust was not a central priority. The new state had more than a million immigrants to house, feed and find work for.
It was the head of the Israeli security service, Amos Manor, who wanted to hunt those Nazis who had escaped justice. Manor was the only member of his family to survive Auschwitz.
He identified four Most Wanted targets: Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy; Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo; Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s infamous Angel of Death doctor who had performed horrific experiments on inmates; and Eichmann, the man charged with deporting Jews to such death camps.
Eichmann facilitated and managed the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews
Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe
The task was handed to the security service’s foreign intelligence arm, Mossad, where I worked in a special operations unit.
The first information that Eichmann had fled to Argentina was provided by the celebrated Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. But the trail went cold until information was relayed to Mossad from a blind half-Jewish emigre of German descent living in the country.
His name was Luther Herman. His daughter was being courted by a 20-year-old who called himself Nick Eichmann and who, during visits to their home, expressed anti-semitic views without knowing of the family’s origins. The girl’s father found that the war criminal sharing that surname had three sons — the eldest of whom was called Nicholas — and then turned private detective to trace Nick’s address.
The Mossad agents sent there were told by neighbours that a family called Klement had recently moved from the same street —though they didn’t know where — and that another family member worked at a nearby garage.
This turned out to be a Dieter Klement (in reality Eichmann’s youngest son), who was placed under surveillance and followed to an address in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando.
An investigation found that a man called Ricardo Klement lived there. He hadn’t been there for a few days, but the house was registered in the name of a Vera Liebel — the maiden name of Eichmann’s wife Veronica. One weekend the man reappeared and a photo of him was obtained. As soon as the photos reached us, I took them to the Israeli police forensics department and asked for a comparison with the ones in Eichmann’s SS file. It was inconclusive.
Then one of the surveillance team got a profile photo that included Klement’s left ear.
Eichmann was living under the name of Ricardo Klement in Argentina (documents showing fake identity shown)
A person’s ear is like a fingerprint: no two are identical. This time the verdict was unequivocal: we had found Eichmann. I was instructed to prepare an operation — to be called Finale — to capture him and bring him back to Israel.
The son of Russian refugees, I had joined Mossad in my mid-20s and came to head the special operations unit within it, Division 10. Although I was only 33 and had not gone through the horrors of the Holocaust, I was well aware of the responsibility on me and of the moral and historical significance of capturing Eichmann. I bought every book in which Eichmann was mentioned. I also met and talked to Holocaust survivors who had had contact with him.
What did I learn? That Eichmann, 54 by the time of our operation, was the German-born son of a book-keeper in Austria and attended the same high school as Hitler had 17 years previously.
A failure academically, he eventually became a travelling salesman. In 1932, he joined the Nazi Party and then its paramilitary wing, the SS. Eichmann won his superiors’ attention once war broke out by orchestrating the creation of the cramped and disease-ridden European ghettoes into which Jews were rounded up.
Their ultimate fate was decided at a lakeside villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. A conference of 15 leading Nazi adminstrators was called there on January 20, 1942, by Eichmann’s SS boss, the chilling Reinhard Heydrich.
The meeting, efficiently concluded in 90 minutes, devised the systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jewish population. It was Eichmann to whom Heydrich entrusted the task of drawing up the conference minutes, with the strict instructions that they were to be neither verbatim nor too explicit.
Eichmann was far from squeamish about carrying
