Adolf Eichmann

In 1961, in Jerusalem, there was one of the most important trials in the history of the Jewish people: the trial of Adolf Eichmann. This German criminal, who had thousands upon thousands of Jews killed, could never have imagined that 16 years after the end of the Second World War he would find himself in the Jewish state and be tried there. The role of this man in the Shoah was already known from the Nuremberg trial, where the Nazi leaders were judged. It was known that from 1941 he ran the accursed office IV B4, which was in charge of the Jews. It was known that he was the secretary of the Wannsee conference, where 15 leaders of the German state and the Gestapo decided the fate of the Jews. It was known that he himself organized the killings at Auschwitz. But in 1945 he managed to escape American control, hide for 5 years in Germany under the name Ricardo Klement, and go to Argentina by way of Austria and Italy. He took many jobs, ran a laundry in Buenos Aires, and finally became a mechanic at the Mercedes-Benz factory outside Buenos Aires.

In those years spent in Argentina he never regretted being in contact with the hidden Nazis, including the terrible Dr Josef Mengele, though he did not see him much; but he always regretted that he had not been able to finish his work of killing. Of course it was an obsession for Israel's secret services, the Mossad, to be able to seize the criminal Eichmann and try him in Israel. In the end it was a German named Lothar Hermann, who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938 after being imprisoned in the Dachau camp near Munich, who discovered that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement. Lothar's daughter was a friend of Eichmann's son. Talking intimately together, the son had told Lothar's daughter who his father was. Lothar sent this news to Fritz Bauer, attorney general in Germany, and Bauer thought it better to alert the Government of Israel.

When David Ben-Gurion, then prime minister, learned that Eichmann's whereabouts were known, he launched the operation 'Attila', which consisted of seizing him. As planned, one day as he left his house he was seized and put in the basement of a house rented by the Mossad until an El Al plane came to take him to Israel. To get through customs without the customs officers noticing, they sedated him and dressed him as an El Al officer who was very ill, almost unconscious. Isser Harel, the head of the secret services, said: 'The hardest thing for us was knowing that we had to look after his health, feed him, shave him, cut his hair — in short, serve this man who had so many thousands of Jews killed — in order to bring him safe and sound to Israel and try him there.'

On 23 May 1960 Ben-Gurion told the Knesset and the whole world that the great criminal of the 'Shoah', Adolf Eichmann, was now in a prison in Israel. His trial made a great noise, but in the end he was hanged, his body burned and the ashes thrown into the sea outside the borders of Israel, in 1962.