Get Eichmann – Israel’s Hunt For A Nazi War Criminal - Part 1

==== INTRO =====

Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

When I was a teenager, roughly a 1000 years ago, I used to watch a lot of cable TV. And like all of us back then, I had certain channels that I liked to watch, certain shows I would always try and catch, but my absolutefavorite channel – and this will probably come as no surprise – was The History Channel. Now before your eyes roll right out of your skull, you have to understand that this was before the place was overrun with Ancient Aliens, Pawn Stars and American Pickers. Back in the day, the History Channel discussed actual history with actual historians.

But even back then, the History Channel had a bit of a problem. A fatal flaw. At least as I saw it. Despite being on the air 24 hours a day, it only ever seemed to talk about one kind of history. One particular era. And that era, of course, was World War II. Every single time I flipped over to the History Channel, I figured there was about an 90% chance that I’d find yet another documentary about Adolf Hitler, or Pearl Harbor, or Winston Churchill, or D-Day.

It’s no secret that in the realm of historical entertainment, World War II has an overwhelming gravitational pull. Walk into any bookstore, head back to the history section, and you will immediately notice that books about World War 2 dominate the shelves. Floor-to-ceiling swastikas and bomber planes and black-and-white battle photos.

And there’s a very good reason for that, of course, World War 2 is endlessly fascinating. It’s epic and horrifying and massive in scale – one of the most pivotal events in human history. And it only happened 80 years ago.

But because of that cultural ubiquity, I’ve always tried to keep World War II at arm’s length on Conflicted. It is, as they say, an oversaturated market. We’ve done a handful of topics from that era, of course; but part of me always felt that to justify dipping a toe into that crowded pond, it had to be the right story. Not necessarily an unknown story, but something that would challenge my own assumptions about the time period. Something that seemed so simple on the surface, but when you start to peel it back, it opens up into something that is incredibly complex and even thought-provoking.

And in my humble opinion, today’s topic ticks all of those boxes.

Today, we’re going to be talking about Nazis.

[AUDIO]

“Nazis. I hate these guys.”

But we’re not going to be talking about any Nazi. We’re going to be talking about the runner-up contestant for :Worst Adolf In History” / History’s Worst Adolf….the notorious SS officer, Adolf Eichmann.

For those of you who have not had the displeasure, Adolf Eichmann – that’s E-I-C-H-M-A-N-N – was a key architect and organizer of the Final Solution: Nazi Germany’s plan to systematically murder the Jewish population of Europe from about 1938 to 1945. The resulting genocide, which we now call the Holocaust – ultimately claimed the lives of 6 million Jews, roughly 1/3 of all Jewish people on Earth at the time. It must also be acknowledged that the Final Solution didn’t ONLY kill Jews, but also millions of Slavs, Poles, Romani, Homosexuals and the mentally disabled. But Jews were absolutely the focus of the effort.

The Final Solution was not Adolf Eichmann’s idea, but once he was given the order, he embraced it with vigor. He was, in the words of German historian Bettina Stangneth, “The organizational force behind the Holocaust”. What could have been a chaotic, haphazard program to machine-gun random pockets of Jews across Europe, Eichmann helped transform into an efficient, streamlined, industrial operation. Death on a factory scale.

By the end of 1942, a full 18 months before American and British armies landed at Normandy, 4 million Jews had already been murdered by the system Eichmann helped construct. In other words, his work was nearly complete two years before the Allies even hit the beach. But the Allies did hit the beach; they hit the beaches and bunkers and bridges and hedgerows– and by May of 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated.

Unable to face the music, Adolf Hitler and most of his inner circle committed suicide, but there were many high-ranking Nazi officers who attempted to run and hide and evade the justice of the victorious Allies. Most of them were unsuccessful. But there were more than a few who got away. And one of those lucky few was Adolf Eichmann.

After the war, he disappeared. Vanished into thin ar. For 15 long years, no one could find him. But then, through an unlikely chain of events, his trail was picked up by Israeli intelligence, the famously ruthless  and some would say unscrupulous Mossad. The Israelis, very anxious to bring such a prolific killer of Jews to justice, dispatched a covert operations team to find and capture Eichmann; to bring him back to Israel and stand trial for his crimes against the Jewish people. It would prove to be, in the words of one historian, “one of the most dramatic kidnapping stories of all time.”

And that, folks, is the story we’re about to embark upon today.

But this is not a story about World War II. It’s not a story about the Holocaust. It’s not a story about Nazi Germany, or the creation of Israel, or the Cold War; But it does contain pieces of all of those stories.

It’s part spy thriller, part political conspiracy, part character study, part courtroom drama. What one historian called “one of the 20th century's most dramatic manhunts.”

It is also surprisingly complicated. I’ve been doing Conflicted for almost 6 years now, and this is the first time I’ve had to put multi-colored sticky notes on a wall just to understand and visualize the full scope of events. All the different clues and characters and colliding interests.

Suffice to say, I had an absolute blast researching and writing this series, and I hope you enjoy the results. To quote the famous mid-century journalist Hannah Arendt – “it could be interesting – apart from being horrible.”

And so now, without further ado, let’s jump in and start the show.

Welcome to Get Eichmann – Israel’s Hunt For A Nazi War Criminal – Part 1

==== PROLOGUE =====

It’s October 15th, 1946.

18 months after the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich and the end of World War II in Europe.

We’re in the city of Nuremberg, Germany.

Or more accurately, we’re in what is left of the city of Nuremberg.

It had once been a beautiful city, true. Where sparrows flew above tapered Bavarian architecture, and drinking songs echoed from the benches of biergartens. In old photographs from the early 1900s, it looks like a fairy tale town, a medieval manuscript come to life.

But that was before Hitler. Before the war. Before the bombs started falling.

Now, Nuremberg looks more like a quarry than a city. It’s historically significant canals, cottages and courtyards have been flattened into historically significant rocks.

After being designated a prime target in the Allied bombing campaign, there wasn’t much left of Nuremberg to identify it as the cultural jewel of old Bavaria. But despite all the destruction, there is one building left standing in this urban wasteland. Rising above the rubble, is the Palace of Justice, a large courthouse that managed to escape the incessant rain of incendiary bombs.

And the Palace of Justice is no country courthouse; it is a huge complex, equipped with 20 courtrooms and a prison wing capable of holding 1200 inmates. It also has a small gymnasium.

And today, in that gymnasium, Master Sergeant John C. Woods of Wichita, Kansas is tying hemp rope into nooses.

11 nooses for 11 Nazis.

In the American army, there are many jobs, many different tasks that keep the war machine running. Engineers, mechanics, and radio operators. Medics, meatcutters, and quartermasters. But Sergeant Woods occupies a much more specific niche. He is the US Army’s official hangman. Its go-to executioner. And he is no amateur.

Since he arrived in France with the rest of the US Army in 1944, Sergeant Woods has hanged anywhere from 60 to 70 men, many of whom were American soldiers convicted of capital crimes like desertion, rape, or murder as the Army fought its way toward Germany.

After the Third Reich surrendered in May of 1945, the US Army sent Sergeant Woods all across Europe, serving as the hangman for Nazi war criminals. It was an odd career choice for a 35-year-old feed-store clerk from Kansas, but Woods took pride in his grim work. As he succinctly told TIME Magazine, “Somebody has to do it.”

And today, on a chilly October night in Nuremberg, Sergeant Woods is about to add 11 more notches to his belt. One by one, he carefully measures and cuts 11 lengths of hemp rope, three inches thick, 25 feet long. As he ties them into nooses, he double-checks his work. These nooses have to be extra good and extra tight. He cannot afford to botch tonight’s executions.

Because the world is watching. Hundreds of journalists have descended upon little Nuremberg, pencils sharpened and flashbulbs primed. The Associated Press, Reuters, the London Times – they’re all here. Even a few papers from Moscow, deep behind the Iron Curtain. Whether it’s an an editor or an executioner, everyone is facing down a deadline tonight.

The reason for the journalistic attention is obvious. Tonight, Sergeant Woods is not hanging petty thieves or common deserters. He is hanging 11 members of the Nazi high command – the curdled cream of the Fuhrer’s crop. Sergeant Woods may be a seasoned hangman, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel a little warm under the hot lights of history. Tonight is the long-awaited climax of the Nuremberg Judgements.

{AUDIO]

“At the Hall of Justice in Nuremberg, history’s greatest trial nears its fateful close. Under the most elaborate security precautions, only official cars pass the heavily guarded street barricades. Flags of the victorious allies, sitting in judgement on the Military Tribunal fly over the court building. […] For it is a grim atmosphere that 21 Nazis are to hear their fate.”

In May of 1945, after 6 years of war on as many continents, Nazi Germany was finally defeated by the Allied Powers – The United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. But that victory had come at a terrible cost. Across the world, between 70 and 85 million people were dead. Europe was, in the words of one historian, a “colossal cemetery”. Writer Paul Roland elaborates:

“Germany was in ruins. Its cities were flattened, its infrastructure and its industry had been decimated and its citizens had been bombed out of their homes. Many were now enduring the privations that had been experienced by the people of Warsaw, Belgrade, Leningrad and numerous other cities that had been gutted as the Nazi war machine rolled mercilessly over Europe and into Russia.”

As the Allies picked through the rubble of the old world, one thing was clear: Punishment was necessary. The people who had caused this global catastrophe needed to be held accountable and brought to justice. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill favored a more biblical form of retribution; at one point, he’d suggested that every single Nazi leader be lined up against the wall and shot. In his view, it was a better death than they deserved.

Ironically, many Nazis, unwilling to face the music, had the very same idea. Adolf Hitler, leader of Germany and instigator of this entire war, had already given himself a terminal lobotomy with a pistol in Berlin bunker. His propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and SS director Heinrich Himmler had followed their Fuhrer into oblivion by crunching down on cyanide capsules. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, had fled into the Eastern war zone and was presumed dead.

With Hitler and most of his closest advisors gone, who was left to punish? Many, many people in fact. The inner circle might’ve been dead, but the Nazi regime was rings within rings of concentric complicity. Tens of thousands of people, at every level of the German government, who had aided and abetted the most destructive war in human history.

As tempting as Churchill’s suggestion of summary executions might have been, the Allied leaders eventually decided that what the world needed was justice, not vengeance. This was an opportunity to make an example of the Nazis on the largest stage imaginable, to make sure something like this never ever happened again. So, they would do what the Nazis would never have done for their defeated enemies. They would indict them, try them, and legally convict them in a court of law. As one historian wrote:

“The scope of the war was so enormous that it required a trial of similar breadth to bring justice to the murdered victims of Nazi brutality.”

With this unprecedented trial, the Allies would prove for all posterity that the Third Reich was a criminal regime, never to be emulated or revived, and they would do it by the book. As the Chief US Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, later put it:

[AUDIO] “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

The prosecuting body, the International Military Tribunal, was formed in August 1945 and consisted of representatives from all victor nations.

By October of 1945, they’d handed down indictments to 24 key officials of the Third Reich. As British journalist Jack Fairweather describes:

Twenty-four Nazi leaders, including Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring, military commanders, senior SS officers, youth and labor leaders, and members of the conservative elite who had facilitated the Nazi rise to power were to be tried for waging a war of aggression and committing war crimes. […]

“The defendants,” wrote German journalist Ronen Steinke, “represented a cross section of the Nazi regime’s elite, and so, from the prosecutors’ point of view, they stood for the forces that had plunged Europe into the abyss.”

The Trial of Major War Criminals, as it was called, commenced on November 20^th, 1945. The city of Nuremberg was chosen as the venue for its symbolic significance. Nuremberg had been the site of some of Nazi Germany’s largest rallies, and it seemed a fitting location for reckoning. That type of justice that is so very rare, poetic justice.

Four main charges were brought against the defendants.

Count One: Conspiracy to wage aggressive wars.

Count Two: Waging an aggressive war or crimes against peace,

Count Three: War crimes, which was concerned with, according to one historian “the killing and mistreatment of prisoners of war, the use of slave labor, bombing of civilian populations, retaliatory killings, violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the use of outlawed weapons.”

And finally, Count Four: Crimes against humanity; This last count concerned the systematic genocide – a new word, recently coined – that the Nazis had perpetrated against European Jews, as well as other ethnic and social minorities.

All 24 defendants pleaded “Not Guilty” to the charges, lending some credence to the old maxim that in prison, everyone is innocent.

The major Nuremberg Trials would last for nearly a year, eventually concluding in October of 1946. Now obviously that seems like a very long time to reach a verdict, but there was so very much to discuss. The evidence of the Nazi’s crimes was mountainous. 3,000 tons of documents – that’s more than 6 million pounds of PAPER - were submitted by the prosecution. There was also, according to one historian: “19 miles of film, and 25,000 photographs” As Paul Roland writes:

Fortunately for the prosecution the German reputation for thoroughness and order was taken to an extreme by the Nazi administration. Detailed records of every order, and memos of every meeting, had been kept and dutifully filed. Requisitions for everything from stationery supplies to canisters of Zyklon B gas (used to murder the inmates of the death camps) had been countersigned by those responsible for the implementation of Nazi policy. Many of these documents had been burned in haste as the Allies closed in, but mountains of paperwork survived to be presented in evidence at the tribunal and at subsequent trials. All of this was augmented by excerpts from official decrees, the transcripts of key speeches and correspondence between departmental heads. 

One US prosecutor commented:

‘I did not think men would ever be so foolish as to put in writing some of the things the Germans did… The stupidity and the brutality of it would simply appall you.’

Another staff member remarked:

“The documentary evidence . . . is just unbelievable. Their own reports illustrated with pictures are far better than any of the studies we have compiled on the persecution of Jews, crimes against humanity, etc. The Germans certainly believed in putting everything in writing.”

The paper trail of incriminating evidence was damning enough, but a key turning point in the trial came when the prosecution dimmed the lights and wheeled in a film projector. “The assembled audience was totally unprepared,” writes Paul Roland; the footage shown elicited “a sharp, spontaneous intake of breath from the onlookers.”

For several hours, the prosecution played footage from the vast network of concentration camps that the Nazis had used to murder Jews and other minorities on an industrial scale. In the modern day of course, we are very familiar, even a bit numb, to these kinds of images – the emaciated bodies, the crematoriums and the train cars, the corpses of women and children stacked like firewood. You can find them in any serious history textbook. But in the winter of 1945, the public had not seen any of these images before. The footage was so vile, so stark and shocking in its cruelty, that even the Nazi defendants were visibly affected. As legendary newsman Walter Cronkite recalled:

‘As soon as the defendants saw the pictures, the film of the concentration camps, they began to wither. As a matter of fact several of them cried. They weren’t crying, I don’t think, for the Jewish people that were lost. They were crying because they knew that when those pictures were seen in the world they had no way to escape execution.’

Yes, for many observers, these fine specimens of the master race were a bit underwhelming. Stripped of their power, they were just goose-stepping, pill-popping vulgarians.

“They are like burnt-out embers,” noted a correspondent from the New York Times, “so empty when power is squeezed out of them that it is incredible that they lit a fire that scorched the world.”

After establishing the existence, methodology, and sheer brutality of the camps, the prosecution set about unraveling and mapping the logistical network that had made it all possible. Day after day, witness after witness, photograph after photograph, the full scale of the Holocaust began to come into focus. In less than a decade, 6 million Jews, or about a 3^rd of all Jews in the world, had been systematically murdered by the Nazis. It should also be said that millions of other ethnic, social and sexual minorities were killed in the camps as well.

Armed with this horrific evidence, the prosecution applied guilt with a broad brush. Nearly all of the Nuremberg defendants had some direct or indirect role in the mass disenfranchisement, deportation and extermination of European Jews, but as the months dragged on, and the testimony stacked up, it became clear that someone very important was missing from the indictments. In cross-examinations, one particular name started popping up over and over again.

[AUDIO]

[…….EICHMANN….]

That’s the voice of Dieter Wisliceny (Viss-litz-eeny), a Gestapo officer and SS Captain who was brought before the court in January 1946 to testify about the Nazi death camps. As he unburdened his conscience to the court, Wisliceny’s testimony began to implicate someone who was not at Nuremberg at all. Someone who seemed to have escaped the attention of the Allied dragnet.

A certain SS Obersturmbannfuhrer – A Lieutenant Colonel – named “Eichmann”

Adolf Eichmann.

Wisliceny and other witnesses went on to explain that Adolf Eichmann was known within the Third Reich as a sort of Jewish deportation specialist. An SS Section Chief and self-styled expert on the Hebrews. It was he, they said, who’d been a major logistical organizer of the transportation of Jews to the death camps. His signature could be found on hundreds of documents consigning millions of innocent men, women and children to their deaths.

Naturally, the prosecution was intrigued.

[AUDIO “How well did you know Eichmann? Personally?

The witnesses were reasonably forthcoming and cooperative, but information on Eichmann seemed scant and incomplete. The Prosecution peppered them with more questions. Who is this Eichmann you all keep talking about? If this little Obersturmbannfuhrer is so important, why haven’t we heard about him before? What, specifically, was his role, what was his mandate, when and where did he operate? Who did he report to, who were his associates? And more importantly, where the hell is he?

[AUDIO

1. COL. BROOKHART: When did you last see Eichmann?

WISLICENY: I last saw Eichmann towards the end of February 1945 in Berlin. At that time he said that if the war were lost he would commit suicide.

1. COL. BROOKHART: Did he say anything at that time as to the number of Jews that had been killed?

Wisliceny’s answer to this last question became one of the most infamous and unnerving pieces of testimony of the Nuremberg trials.

WISLICENY: Yes, he expressed this in a particularly cynical manner. He said he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.

With that, Wisliceny was dismissed, and the Prosecution moved on to the examination of other witnesses. Well, a few months later, Adolf Eichmann’s name came up again, this time during the testimony of Rudolf Hoss {Hearse], commandant of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, in which about 1.1 million prisoners were murdered. Hoss testified that Eichmann “came repeatedly to Auschwitz and was intimately acquainted with the proceedings.”

When the Prosecution asked if this Adolf Eichmann had kept notes and records about the number of people killed in Auschwitz, and if he was the man with “the task of organizing and assembling those people”, Hoss replied in the affirmative. “Yes”.

By this point, it became clear to the prosecution that their rotten basket was missing a very big egg. A warrant was immediately issued for Adolf Eichmann’s arrest, POW camps were searched and scoured, but the elusive SS officer seemed to have vanished like a wisp of smoke. All across occupied Germany, military police combed the countryside and border towns, looking for the man who witnesses at Nuremberg had identified as a key figure in the Nazi death machine. But time and time again, their searches came up empty. No one seemed to know where Eichmann was, or how to find him. For all intents and purposes, the man was little more than a name and rank - a ghost story with a rapidly disintegrating paper trail. They had a physical description, yes, but not a current photograph of him. Eichmann, associates said, did not like to be photographed.

Nonetheless, the Nuremberg Tribunal plowed forward with its grim work. Their nets were full of fish already, and they could not afford to chase ghosts, not when they had so many high-ranking Nazi officials here in the flesh. Besides, for all the prosecution knew, Eichmann was just a patsy, a scapegoat, a fictitious name that captured Nazis could pin their crimes to in the hopes of a lighter sentence. “You think I’m bad? Wait til you get a load of Eichmann! He’s the real mastermind.”

Whatever the truth of the matter, Adolf Eichmann – whoever he was - would have to wait. The Holocaust, horrifying as it was, was not the primary focus of Nuremberg. The Tribunal’s main aim was to set a clear precedent in international law. To “establish a global rules-based order to deter future warmongers” according to journalist Jack Fairweather. What one US prosecutor called ‘ the secular equivalent of redrafting the Ten Commandments’.  

Well, on October 1^st, 1946, after almost 11 months of tireless work, the International Military tribunal reached an official verdict.

[AUDIO} Nuremberg Sentences “Death By Hanging”

And on and on it went. As Fairweather continues: “The Nuremberg verdict saw twelve of the defendants sentenced to death and all but three of the others given long prison sentences.”

Two weeks later, on the night of October 15^th, 1946, the condemned men are led out one-by-one to the prison gymnasium, where Master Sergeant John C. Woods of Wichita, Kansas is waiting. While the fancy folk have been inside, hemming and hawing on their translation headsets, Sergeant Woods has been hard at work constructing the last stage these Nazis will ever strut across.

In preparation for the execution, Sergeant Woods and his assistants have assembled three large gallows platforms. Two to be used in alternation, and a spare, just in case one breaks down. In accordance with common Army practice, Woods will be employing the ‘standard drop’ method tonight. After all, anyone can just haul a man up by his neck and watch him strangle to death. Hell, Woods knew, they do that all the time in Mississippi. But a real hangman, a real professional, uses the ‘drop’ method.

Rather than kicking the prisoner’s legs from underneath a stout log, the standard drop method uses a trap door to maximize the length of the fall. With a long enough rope, and a long enough drop, the prisoner’s neck will snap instantly, resulting in a death that was, in Woods words, “clean, painless, and traditional.” It was, Woods told a friend, “a damn good way to die.”

The British, Woods knows, like to use something called the ‘long drop’ method, which almost double the length of the fall and raises the likelihood of a snapped neck and instant death. Sergeant Woods feels that the long drop is overkill. You’re as likely to tear the prisoner’s head off with a long drop. The placement of the knot is what matters, right between the ears and spinal column. You get that right, and the rest is gravy. Yes, the standard drop will do just fine.

As he peers up at the 15-foot gallows platform, Sergeant Woods is confident that these executions will go off with a hitch. Rack ‘em, crack ‘em and stack ‘em. He looks down at his watch. It’s almost time now. His first customer will be arriving shortly -  at 1:10 AM sharp.

At some point, a military police officer jogs up and informs Sergeant Woods that he will only be hanging 10 men tonight, not 11. Two hours earlier, the highest-ranking Nazi prisoner, Herman Goering, managed to get a hold of a cyanide pill and killed himself in his cell. If the waxy, eternally contorted expression on Goering’s face is any indication, it was not a pleasant death. But Sergeant Woods is not too disappointed. In fishing, as in hanging, sometimes the big ones get away. Goering might have cheated the hangman, but the 10 remaining war criminals will not escape their sentences. They will all swing like church bells before the sun is up.

At 1:11 AM, the first prisoner arrives in the gymnasium, Joachim [Yo-Ah-Him] von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. A reporter from TIME Magazine described what happened next:

“When he entered the gymnasium, all officers, official witnesses and correspondents rose to attention. Ribbentrop’s manacles were removed and he mounted the steps (there were 13) to the gallows. With the noose around his neck, he said: “My last wish . . . is an understanding between East and West . . .” All present removed their hats. The executioner tightened the noose. A chaplain standing beside him prayed. The assistant executioner pulled the lever, the trap dropped open with a rumbling noise, and Ribbentrop’s hooded figure disappeared. The rope was suddenly taut, and swung back & forth creaking audibly.”

One by one, the condemned Nazis were led to the gymnasium and hanged. By 2:57 AM, the grisly task was done. Sergeant Woods congratulated his assistants: “Ten men in 103 minutes. That’s fast work.”

In later years, there were some who accused Sergeant Woods of botching the Nuremberg executions; They suggested that some of the Nazis hanged did not die right away, but slowly suffered and strangled to death for up to 15 minutes after they fell through the trap doors. Woods brushed these criticisms off: “The only people who spread reports like that are people who don’t know anything about hangings.”

No, Woods went to sleep that night and every night afterwards with a clean, clear conscience. After all, who were they to question his methods? Folks would sneer at him, judge him, write nasty articles about him, sure; but then, that’s the hangman’s burden. At the end of the day, he reminded himself, I just hang who they tell me to hang.

They forget, I’m only following orders.

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

It’s September/Fall 1957.

11 years after the Nuremberg Judgements.

We’re in the city of Frankfurt, the financial capital of West Germany.

In 1957, a single unified Germany no longer exists. After the fall of the Third Reich, the country has been cleaved in two, split like a cake between the two emerging superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. As tensions rise between the former allies, the frost of a Cold War has settled over Europe.

And zipping through the rainy streets of downtown Frankfurt, peddling hard and avoiding the angry beeps of automobiles, is a bicycle courier. As he whips and weaves through the traffic, the courier glances at his watch. He has many deliveries to make today, but this one is arguably the most important. It’s a letter – sealed, postmarked, and addressed to a very important recipient.

Eventually, the bicycle screeches to a halt in front of a large government building on Gerichtsstrasse (Court Street). Shaking off the rain like a wet dog, the courier bounds up the steps and proceeds to the second floor. “Urgent Delivery for Attorney General Fritz Bauer”, he tells the pretty secretary with the beehive hairdo. She offers him a reheated/warmed-over smile and signs for the delivery. “I’ll take it to him right away.” Then she stands up, smooths her dress, and knocks on the heavy oaken door behind her. A voice that is more bark than human speech tells her to come in.

Entering the office, the secretary is hit with a wave of cigar smoke. Thick cirrus clouds of tobacco hang in the air, covering every surface with a sticky, resinous stench. The secretary knows that she will, yet again, have to wash her hair twice just to get the smell out. 

In the center of this aromatic room is a large desk; and behind it, the red cherry of a cigar glows like a runway light. As if to say / You may approach, it says.

The secretary chirps that she has a letter here, sir - all the way from…Argentina. A gnarled hand reaches out from the cloud of smoke / behind the desk and takes the letter. With a flick, the hand waves her away. That’ll be all, thanks. The secretary flees from the office like a deer from the sound/snap of a broken twig. When the heavy oaken door creaks shut, Fritz Bauer, Attorney General for the West German state of Hesse, leans back in his leather chair. Who the hell, he wonders, do I know in Argentina?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time to meet a very pivotal figure in our story. His name, as previously mentioned, is Fritz Bauer. That’s F-R-I-T-Z (Fritz), B-A-U-E-R (Bauer).

Adjusting his thick black glasses, Bauer looks around his desk for a letter opener. Among the clutter of files and folders, it’s difficult to find anything at all. As the top government prosecutor in West Germany’s most prosperous district, with over 200 lawyers under his supervision, Bauer’s desk is always cluttered with something. Witness statements, police reports, the occasional death threat. With a wordless growl, Bauer suspends the search for the letter opener, stubs out his cigar, and peers out the 2^nd story window. In the pane-glass reflection, he sees a balding 54-year-old man with bristly grey hair and a mouth folded/creased into a perpetual scowl/frown.

Despite appearances, Bauer is not only a key character in this drama, he is also, arguably one of its heroes.

In real life, heroes rarely look the part. Most of the time, they don’t look like Clark Kent or Indiana Jones - they look like the assistant manager of a tire shop. And Fritz Bauer is just such a case. At first glance, he is a small, unremarkable man – but as we will discover over the course of this series, appearances can be deceiving. Among friends and foes alike, Bauer is known for his “courage, argumentative brilliance, and an unflagging work ethic.”, according to Ronen Steinke. He is, writes journalist Neil Bascomb, “the bulldog of the West German court system.”

But in the Fall of 1957, Bauer doesn’t feel much like a bulldog at all. Much less a hero.  Truth be told he just feels tired, stretched thin, burdened with the lonely and unenviable task of cleansing West Germany of its ghosts. 12 years after the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, the nation’s Nazi past has proven difficult to exorcise. / shake off.

For most of the international community, the judgements at Nuremberg had represented a clean break with the Nazi era – a satisfying closing of the book. With a sigh of relief, the world said: now we can finally move on. It’s over. Those goose-stepping bastards are dead and gone. But in Germany, redemption/closure was not as simple as swapping out the flags on the front porch. Nuremberg had been a monumental judicial accomplishment, but in practical terms, the trials convicted “only a handful of Nazis for a crime that had required the acquiescence of a nation,” according to Jack Fairweather.

“Eight and a half million Germans had joined the Nazi Party,” Fairweather continues, “More than 250,000 had served in the SS, which had operated the death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Bełżec, Chełmno, and Sobibór and staffed special murder squads known as Einsatzgruppen. Tens of thousands of soldiers had committed atrocities on the front lines. Countless civil servants had participated in the vast bureaucratic machinery of industrialized murder. And yet most of these people had simply slipped back into German society and resumed their lives as if nothing had happened.”

“Thousands of murderers slotted back into German society after the war,” adds Ronen Steinke, “going on to lead apparently unobjectionable lives as pharmacists, postal workers, and the like.”

For men like Fritz Bauer, this was unacceptable.

He had been fighting Nazis all of his life. As a young lawyer in the early 1930s, he’d marched in the streets against Hitler’s brownshirts. When the Nazis seized power in ‘33, Bauer had bravely spoken out against them. When that resistance earned him an 8-month stretch in a work camp, he endured daily beatings, starvation and abuse. And when he escaped to Scandinavia just before the war, Bauer continued his resistance in the form of pamphlets and articles to rally people to the Allied cause.

But Bauer was not only motivated by a political aversion to fascism; He had a personal stake in the fight against Hitler’s legions. Fritz Bauer was a Jew, and like most European Jews, his family had not escaped the groping fingers of the Final Solution. In December of 1941, Bauer learned that his Aunt Paula and her son Eric had been arrested in Stuttgart, put on a train with 1000 other Jews to Riga, and shot. The rest of his family barely managed to escape with their lives.

“Once the war ended,” writes journalist Neil Bascomb, “Bauer hesitated to return to his homeland. He disliked the thought of living in a country that had supported a man such as Hitler. But after the establishment of West Germany’s constitution, he felt that it was his duty to help foster the democracy and to resist any future rise of totalitarianism. He also believed that coming to terms with the past was essential to achieving this end.”

So when Bauer returned to Germany in 1949 to help rebuild his broken country by serving in the West German judiciary, he was determined to tear out any remnants of the Nazi ideology boot and stem – to find the criminals that Nuremberg had overlooked, drag them into the light and bring them to justice.

Unfortunately, that was much easier said than done.

Most West Germans had no interest in dredging up the recent past. They wanted to move on, rebuild their lives, and bury the nation’s shame in the deepest hole possible. As Paul Roland observed: “Accepting complicity in a crime in which you did not actively participate takes extraordinary courage, which few possess or are even willing to consider.”

After so much death, destruction and pain, there wasn’t much of an appetite to continue pursuing Nazi war criminals. Why, some asked, should we keep picking at that scab? As early as 1949, the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was declaring that it was time to “let bygones be bygones.”

Token attempts to cleanse German society of former Nazis had proven half-hearted and ineffective. Like a piece of Tupperware that once held spaghetti sauce, the stain just would not come out. “The Americans and British had established denazification panels that theoretically had sweeping powers to bar Germans from work and refer them for prosecution depending on where they fit on a scale of complicity,” writes Jack Fairweather, “The trouble was that the panels relied on Germans to self-report Nazi affiliations, allowing the guilty to reassimilate with ease.”

And in 1949, any semblance of accountability had evaporated completely with the passing of a bill that, according to Fairweather, “ushered through a general amnesty for offenses committed during the war and in the immediate postwar period. There was some debate as to where to draw the line of forgiveness, but the final bill stated that anyone with a sentence of a year or less—some 792,176 people—would be pardoned. This figure included 30,000 war criminals who had already benefited from light sentences. The amnesty bill passed in December 1949 with a large majority. The government pressed ahead with plans to reverse denazification entirely by offering to reinstate the 265,000 former members of Hitler’s regime who had lost their jobs and pension rights and who referred to themselves as ‘those damaged by denazification.” Further proposals included a quota for the compulsory employment of former Nazis in each ministry.”

In other words, most former Nazis in West Germany had not only been let off the hook, they had been fully, cleanly absorbed back into society, with the ability to influence policy and pass laws in the new West German government. Six million dead Jews was just ash under the bridge. No harm, no foul. As the legendary spy novelist John Le Carre reflected on his time in the British Foreign Service in Germany during this era:

“Sometimes the very streets felt like a perilously thin surface laid hastily upon the recent dreadful past, like one of those nicely mown grass mounds at Belsen concentration camp, covering the mute agony of the innocent dead.”

Most disturbing of all, West Germans seemed to already be forgetting, hiding, or even questioning the horrors of the Nazi era. Unwilling to look in the mirror, they simply smashed the glass and turned away from it. “Even the country’s schoolteachers were found to be incorrectly instructing their students on the nature of Hitler’s regime,” notes Neil Bascomb, “A ninth-grade textbook devoted only a single paragraph to the “Jewish question” during World War II. Extermination camps were not mentioned once”.

In his Frankfurt office, on a rainy day in 1957, Fritz Bauer stares out the window and clenches his fists. Despite the cowardice and complicity of his countrymen, he will not forget. He can never, ever forget. Tired of looking out at the soggy streets of this ugly little city, Bauer returns to his desk and finally locates the elusive letter opener.

Like a weary fisherman gutting his thousandth fish, Bauer slices the envelope open, and unfolds the paper inside. As his eyes flit back and forth across the paragraphs of cursive lettering, Bauer’s grip on his cigar begins to loosen. Now this is interesting. Very, very interesting.

The author of the letter introduced himself as a Mr. Lothar Hermann, a German immigrant writing from Coronel Suárez, Argentina. To whom it may concern, Mr. Hermann explained that he had “reliable information” regarding the whereabouts of a former SS officer. A certain Obersturmbannfuhrer. Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, the letter said, was hiding in Buenos Aires, Argentina – living under an alias.

Bauer takes a long drag on his cigar, sending ash tumbling down onto the desk. “Eichmann”. It was a name the Attorney General was already very, very familiar with.

Having first come to the world’s attention in testimony at Nuremberg, Eichmann’s notoriety had only continued to grow in the intervening 11 years. At its height, the Allied list of war criminals, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, contained over 60,000 names. And over the years, like a pop song climbing the charts, Adolf Eichmann’s name had rocketed right to the top of it. The body of evidence implicating him as a major facilitator of the Holocaust was overwhelming and undeniable. In 1957, he was one of the most wanted war criminals on earth.

The problem was, Eichmann was gone.

He had disappeared 11 years ago into the post-war chaos. Governments, security services, independent Nazi hunters - no one had been able to find him. No one could even say for sure that he was still alive. Apart from a few obsessed hobbyists, no one was actively or successfully pursuing Eichmann.

But now, Bauer blows a smoke ring into the air, this Lothar Hermann is saying he knows where Eichmann is. Well, Mr. Hermann, you would not be the first hot tip to land on my desk. Every week, there seemed to be a new rumor, lead or headline regarding Eichmann’s whereabouts, each one more far-fetched and fanciful than the last.

Eichmann was in Egypt, some people said, advising the Anti-Semitic leaders there. No no, other sources said, he’s actually in Tel Aviv, hiding right under the nose of the Israelis. Impossible, others said, there’s strong evidence he operates an import/export business under a false name in Damascus. And on and on and on it went. Like trying to find a clear radio station in an ocean of static, separating fact from fiction on Eichmann was a infuriating exercise.  

Besides, Fritz Bauer thinks, if I want to find a Nazi, all I have to do is walk across the hall. This country, this state, this city, this building is full of old Nazis. I can’t even get them out of my department meetings, much less bring one to trial. As Ronan Steinke writes:

“In the early days of the West German republic, the Allies and German democrats had hoped for a cleanup of state institutions. Since then, however, civil servant unions had successfully fought for the rights of almost all former Nazi officials to be reemployed. As a result, former Nazis were working in government ministries, holding positions up to the level of undersecretary. During the 1950s, virtually all former Nazi Party members were able to reassume positions within the West German judicial and administrative systems.”

“In the west German police, the judiciary, the intelligence fraternity, and the armed services, in the industry and science and teaching professions and, most particularly, the bureaucracy, old Nazis abounded,” reflected John le Carre, “either because they have done nothing for which they could be purged, or because they had been deemed indispensable to West Germany’s reconstruction. But most often because their cases had laid gathering dust in someone’s drawer, filed and forgotten as part of a tacit agreement between NATO partners to put the past behind us.”

When faced with accusations that the West German government was simply laundering Nazi officials through a new, more legitimate regime, Chancellor Konrad Aldenauer is said to have wearily replied: “You don’t throw away dirty water until you have clean water.”

As you can imagine, the ubiquity of old Nazis in the new government made bringing charges against war criminals extremely difficult for prosecutors like Fritz Bauer. Time and time again, he had seen his efforts to prosecute formers Nazis obstructed and sabotaged by this shadow bureaucracy. So many wolves, pretending to be golden retrievers. Yes, the West German judiciary had more leaks than busted U-Boat. According to Ronen Steinke:

“When pursuing Reinhold Vorberg, the most active contributor to the Nazi regime’s policy of euthanizing people with disabilities, Bauer’s team filed a request with a court in Bonn for permission to launch secret investigations. The judge personally passed this confidential information on to a local lawyer, and Vorberg promptly fled to Spain.”

In his office, Fritz Bauer blows another noose-shaped smoke ring. West Germany was compromised. That was clear. How many times can I roll the boulder up the hill, and watch it tumble back down again? How much longer can I keep doing this? After a moment of quiet contemplation, Bauer opens a large file cabinet and rifles through a stack of manila folders with tobacco-stained fingers. A, B, C, D, E….there it is. He pulls a very thin file from the cabinet and slaps it on his desk.

When he opens the folder, a face stares back at him. The black and white photograph shows a thin man in an SS uniform. Green-grey coat. Stiff black collar. Officer’s cap with a death’s head insignia. The man has a sharp chin, thin lips, an aquiline nose, and wears a sort-of pinched expression, as if having his picture taken causes him physical pain. Fritz Bauer lifts up the photograph in the afternoon light. Hello, Adolf. Taken in 1942, this official SS headshot is one of the only existing photographs of Eichmann, unearthed from a dusty office box in Nazi archives. When the picture was taken, he was about 35 years old – a young man in his prime and at the height of his power. Now, in 1957, he’d be…what? 50, 51 years old. Who knows what time has done to the face of the master race.

Suddenly, two other faces pop into his Bauer’s head. The faces of Aunt Paula and little Eric, shot at Riga and dumped in a ditch. Bauer swivels his chair and reads the letter from Lothar Hermann again.

If this tip is legit, and this Hermann person actually knows where Eichmann is hiding in Argentina, it represents a huge opportunity. If Bauer can find and successfully prosecute a key architect of the Holocaust, it will force West Germany to look itself in the eye. It will open a doorway to taking down other ex-Nazis in the government. After all, who knows how much incriminating evidence is rattling around in Eichmann’s head. As Jack Fairweather writes:

“Here, at last, was a war criminal whose prosecution might reawaken Germans to the scope of the genocide and give lie to the belief that guilt was limited to Hitler and his inner circle.”

But even if this lead was real, even if Bauer learned exactly where Eichmann was hiding, how could he possibly get to him? Argentina would never extradite – they were practically Nazis themselves. And if Bauer told anyone in the judiciary about the letter, the spiderweb of information networks would instantly tip off Eichmann and he would vanish yet again.

Official channels were not an option.

But there had to be another way.

With a bulldog bark, Fritz Bauer yells through the door for his secretary. The hinges squeak and a beehive hairdo pops through crack. Yes sir?, it says. Bauer tells her that he needs to arrange a meeting with Mr. Shinnar as soon as possible. The brain buzzes within the beehive, then a lightbulb goes off. She asks if he means Felix Shinnar, the State of Israel’s representative in West Germany?

Bauer replies, that yes that’s exactly who he means.

I’ve got somethin’ for him.

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s December of 1956.  

About 9 months before Fritz Bauer received the intriguing letter from Mr. Lothar Hermann.

Today, we are very far away from the rainy streets of Frankfurt. In fact, we’re in another hemisphere entirely. We are in Buenos Aires, the capitol of Argentina.

[AUDIO

“After another delightful flight over the Andes, we behold beautiful Buenos Aires, capitol of Argentina. The largest city in South America and 9^th largest in the world. Over 4 million people live, work and play. All seeking to shape a successful destiny for their country. […] Practically every kind of architecture is represented in this cosmopolitan city, which is growing day by day in size and importance.”

If you were to take someone in 1950s Europe, blindfold them, put them on a plane, fly them to Buenos Aires and remove the blindfold, they might not even realize they were on a different continent.

With its wide boulevards, towering architecture, and chic cafés, the Argentinian capitol routinely draws comparisons to cities like Paris or Madrid. Fed by a steady stream of European immigration since the late-1800s, the rose of old-world prosperity has flowered in the black soil of South America. In some ways, Buenos Aires is like the European continent condensed into miniature – 70 square miles of cold German beer, lively Spanish music, and Italian fashion. Naturally, this has made Buenos Aires a very attractive destination for European ex-pats, looking to leave the post-war rubble behind. 400 years after Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas, Europeans are still discovering a fresh start in the New World.

But Buenos Aires is not only a beautiful city, it is a practical one, equipped with a sprawling public transit system of subways and city buses. And if you were to step aboard one of those buses, take a seat, and let the gentle movement rock you to sleep, you just might find yourself on a route leading out of the downtown clamor and into the quiet suburbs of the city. After an hour or two, the bus might roll to a halt, open its doors with a gentle hiss and deposit you on a quiet calle named Chacabuco Street.

And as a blood orange sun spills pink and purple into the dusk, a man named Ricardo Klement is just getting home from work. Ricardo {R-I-C-A-R-D-O] Klement [K-L-E-M-E-N-T]

Ricardo is a blue-collar guy. He works long hours for little pay, and at the age of 51, the 9-to-5 grind isn’t getting any easier. But Ricardo does not measure wealth in silver and gold; he is rich in other things. Because at the end of every day, after a long bus ride, he gets to come home to his wife, his son, and their one-story house at 4621 Chacabuco Street. It’s not a big house, just a rented casita with a low fence and a terra cotta roof, but it’s home.

Pulling off his denim work jacket as the screen door bangs shut behind him, Ricardo is greeted by his wife Vera, cradling their 2-year-old son, Ricardo Junior, on her hip. Ricardo Senior has three older sons as well, but they’re all teenagers or young men now, too old to greet their Dad when he comes home from work.

Grateful for the attention, the elder Ricardo pecks Vera on the cheek, tussles Junior’s hair and retires to the bedroom for a well-earned shower before dinner. As he peels off his work clothes, in front of a mirror, the reflection reveals a body crisscrossed with scars. Gashes on his elbows, and tears on his knees. Old injuries, made long ago. But Ricardo’s most noticeable mark is a small mass of scar tissue just below his right arm, above the ribs and below the armpit. When they were younger and curious, his boys probably asked him about it. It’s from an accident, he might’ve responded. Daddy got in an accident a long time ago. But what Ricardo does not tell them is that he did it to himself. The burn scar conceals an old tattoo.

He'd gotten the ink when he was 26-years-old. Nothing fancy, just ¼ inch line of black gothic lettering, spelling out his blood type. In those days, all new recruits to the Schutzstaffel, the SS, were given the blood group tattoo. It was, after all, a violent job. And if harm befell them, the tattoo was to make blood transfusions quicker and easier. Ricardo scratches at the old scar. It’s been a long time since that ink was fresh. It’s been a long time since he’s gone by his real name:

Adolf Eichmann.

WANNSEE

Unbidden, a flash of memory lights up old corners of his mind like twin thunderbolts. For a brief moment, he is no longer in his house. He is no longer in Buenos Aires. He is no longer Ricardo Klement. He’s 7,000 miles away, in another time and another life.

[MUSIC

Mozart]

It’s 15 years earlier.

January 20^th, 1942.

We’re in the city of Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. A thin layer of snow clings to the street like delicate lace, catching the light of the low winter sun. This picture of tranquility is suddenly upended by the wheels of a black Mercedes-Benz, churning the snow into slush. On the hood of the car, twin swastikas flutter, heralding its presence and general immunity from traffic laws. After a brief ride through city suburbs, the car turns onto a private road and passes through an iron gate. As it glides up the gravel promenade, a large villa is reflected upside down on the waxed hood of the car. Manicured hedgerows warp and contort in its polished reflection.  

This is 58 Großen Street [guhrossen], a sprawling mansion on the shores of Lake Wannsee (Vahn-Zsee). In the present day, it is a museum; but it in 1942, it’s an operations and administrative center for the SS Security Forces. Lavishly furnished, heavily guarded, and most important of all – private. As the car turns into the circular roundabout, the chauffeur sees that 14 other Mercedes-Benz’ are parked outside. That means that everyone is here. All the VIPs have arrived.

Inside, fresh flowers stand at attention in ornate vases, while an impressive spread of charcuterie meats and cheeses begin to perspire in the central heating. In a conference room on the first floor, around a shiny wooden table, 15 high-ranking administrators of the Nazi regime have gathered. Representatives from the all the key organizations are here, with their uniforms of various cut and color. The SS men in their black and grey and green. The browns and beiges and navy blue suits of the Ministry men and civilian officials. Every precious shade of the Reich’s rainbow.

Most of these men’s names, you would not recognize. The celebrities - Hitler and Goering and Bormann and Goebbels - are not here. Those men are the delegators. These men are the doers. The middle managers. The ones tasked with turning the Thousand Year Reich into a Thousand Year Reality. With a brisk sense of Prussian efficiency, the meeting is called to order. Packets are distributed, pens are uncapped, stationary is set, and the doors creak shut.

The 15 men at this table are gathered here today to - in modern corporate parlance - “align”. To collaborate and communicate and get all their ducks goose-stepping in the same direction. In short, they are here to solve a very pressing problem for Hitler’s Germany. Many of the people in this room would say it is THE most pressing problem, more dangerous than any Soviet army or English Navy - an existential threat to the Master Race.

This problem is known, euphemistically, as the “Jewish Question.”

“Right from the start, the ‘removal of the Jews’ from Germany had been one of Hitler’s and the Nazi movement’s central aims,” writes German historian Peter Longerich, “On assuming power in 1933 the National Socialists found they had an opportunity to turn this aim, hitherto formulated only in vague terms, into reality. Indeed one of the most dynamic areas of Nazi policy in the 1930s consisted in discrimination against the Jews, forcing them out of public life, relentlessly harassing and intimidating them, exploiting them economically, and ultimately expelling them from Germany. The most important stages in this process were the boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, and the pogrom of November 1938.”

From the Nazis’ perspective, European Jewry was a pebble in Germany’s jackboot, one that needed to be removed and flung as far away as possible. Before the war, this primarily took the form of, shall we say, “incentivized emigration.” The Nazis said: We are going to make it so painful and difficult and humiliating for Jews to live in this society, that they will have no practical alternative but to leave. Like the leeching of pus from a boil, discrimination and disenfranchisement would be the lance that drained the Jews from Germany. Why would you want to live under these conditions?, the Nazis said. For your own good – and ours - get out of our country.

Yes, only the Nazis could look at a stick and call it a carrot.

The problem was, many Jews did not want to leave, or were too poor to leave, or were turned away from countries they tried to immigrate to. This put the Nazis in a very frustrating position. Here they had all these Jews they didn’t want, but no place to put them. The headache was turning into a migraine.

But with Germany’s aggressive annexation of countries like Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in ‘39, the thinking around the Jewish Question began to accelerate. As historian Deborah Lipstadt writes:

“With the start of [World War 2] in 1939, the number of Jews under German control increased exponentially. It did not take long for German officials to recognize that emigration was no longer a viable solution. Rather than push the Jews out of the Reich, their goal became finding some Reich controlled territory appropriate for resettling Jews.”

The German writer Bettina Stangneth elaborates:

“The much-cited Lebensraum (or living space) to the east would contribute more than three million Polish Jews to the “Jewish question” and open up new possibilities for the Nazis’ resettlement plans: now the Jews could not only be blackmailed, robbed, and hounded out—they could also be transported from the margins of society to the still more inhospitable margins of the newly enlarged Reich.”

During this time period, there were many proposed solutions to the “Jewish Question.”

One particularly insane scheme involved deporting millions of Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the African coast, and keeping them imprisoned there in a sort-of colonial police state. There, the exiled Jews of Europe would serve as, in the words of one historian, a “bargaining chip” and leverage against the Allied Powers. Hostages, essentially. The only problem with this plan was that Madagascar was 5,000 miles away, and any attempt to resettle the Jews there would face heavy resistance from the British Navy, which had obstinately failed to surrender as expected. The Madagascar plan was scrapped in ’41.

As their brainstorm whiteboard became increasingly covered in eraser marks, Nazi administrators realized they needed a better solution. A more radical solution. A “Final Solution.”, if you will. The Nazi mind, all hard corners and right angles, arrived at a very simple conclusion. There is nothing more ‘final’ than death. As Peter Longerich writes:

“The Holocaust was the result of a decision-making process in which Hitler, the key source of authority in the ‘Third Reich’, acting in close co-operation with other parts of the power structure, gradually developed what had previously been only a vague intention to destroy the Jews into a concrete programme to murder them.”

And so, in January of 1942, fifteen middle managers gathered at a lakeside mansion in Wannsee, just outside of Berlin, to discuss the when, where, and how. The ‘why’, of course, was not in dispute. As the American historian Hannah Arendt wrote:

“The meeting had become necessary because the Final Solution, if it was to be applied to the whole of Europe, clearly required more than tacit acceptance from the Reich’s State apparatus; it needed the active cooperation of all Ministries and of the whole Civil Service.”

“The century’s most appalling crime,” adds Peter Longerich, “was to be not just the work of the SS, Security Police, and Security Service; rather, the Reich Chancellery, Ministry of Justice, Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, civil occupation authorities, Four-Year Plan (the highest authority in the armaments sector), and Nazi Party. [They] were all actively involved and jointly responsible.”

But of course, saying you’re going to murder 6 million people and actually doing it are very different things. Logistically, it would be an absolute nightmare. There were a thousand thousand factors to consider – transport, application, disposal, allocation of roles and responsibilities. Not to mention keeping it relatively quiet. When 6 million people disappear, it’s bound to be noticeable.  

Thankfully, of the 15 men at this conference table, one in particular has proven himself not only capable of handling Jews and all their itinerant problems; he has shown himself to be a true savant, a specialist, a rising star. A recently promoted Obersturmbannfuhrer, 35-year-old Adolf Eichmann.

->

On this crisp January morning, Eichmann is one of the lowest-ranking members at the Wannsee conference, a mere Lieutenant Colonel amongst Bureau Chiefs, Major Generals, and Ministry Undersecretaries. But he has been invited to this meeting because he has demonstrated, in a remarkably short amount of time, a singular talent for getting Jews out of places they are not supposed to be.

“He had a talent for organization, and for making possible things that had never been done before,”writes Bettina Stangneth, “When others were at a loss, he was the man they called on. [he specialized in] “unconventional solutions and would not get caught up in the usual bureaucratic formalities.”

As it turned out, the “Jewish question” had an answer. And its name was Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann had first joined the Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary arm of the Nazi party, in 1932, at the tender age of 26.  In those days, the SS was still a glorified protection detail for Adolf Hitler. But despite its embryonic status, the SS took itself deadly seriously, subjecting new recruits to a brutal training regimen that included crawling over barbed wire. That’s where Eichmann got the distinctive scars on his knees and elbows, still visible 15 years later in Argentina. Once young Eichmann had earned his lightning bolts and been inked with the traditional blood group tattoo, he surrendered himself completely to the petty hatreds and racial grievances of his newfound family.

He was, he explained years later, “an idealist.”

As the Nazi party swelled in power and proportion, so too did Eichmann’s career. “In those early, heady, chaotic days of the Third Reich,” writes journalist Harry Stein, “anything was possible for an ambitious young man unburdened by conscience.”

But Eichmann didn’t really find his true calling - his niche, you might say – until 1935, when he was appointed the director of a small division responsible for collecting data on Jews. Tasked by with learning about their culture, their language, their history and rituals, Eichmann was given what many Nazis might have considered a distasteful, tedious assignment. What proud Aryan, after all, would want to spend time immersing himself in Jewish customs? But Eichmann was absolutely fascinated – transfixed by this strange and revolting enemy. Like a child sociopath dissecting his first cat, Eichmann became borderline obsessed with the study of the Hebrews; He took lessons in Yiddish, read volumes on Zionism, and even took a brief trip to Palestine.

“In astonishingly short order,” writes Harry Stein, “he was known in high Nazi circles as an expert on the Jews.”

And as the Jewish Question began to ring louder in the Fuhrer’s ears, SS men like Eichmann were called upon to apply their theoretical knowledge in practical scenarios.

In March of 1938, Eichmann was given the difficult assignment of somehow removing every single Jew from the newly-annexed city of Vienna, Austria. The “overwhelming success” of his efforts there, shocked even his superiors. In Vienna, Eichmann developed a system – a methodology that would become not only his personal trademark, but a logistical model for the Final Solution itself.

“There were two things Eichmann could do well, better than others:” Hannah Arendt observed, “He could organize and he could negotiate.”

As Harry Stein elaborates:

“Eichmann began meeting regularly with highly placed Jewish officials, setting up a system that accomplished several Nazi ends simultaneously. Still more than a year before the outbreak of war, the Nazi aim in Austria was not annihilation but expulsion. Granted limited administrative control over their own affairs, but with all funds in the community frozen and the SS otherwise overseeing financial matters, the desperate Jews were thus made to cooperate in their own undoing. The final stage of Eichmann’s process ensured that no one escaped before being robbed, not just of his property, but of his self-respect. [Now Stein quotes an Israeli lawyer)

“A Jew would enter the [emigration] office,” as prosecutor Hausner would later describe it, “and he was still somebody, having a job or a shop, an apartment to live in, some property or cash in the bank, his child still registered at school. As he proceeded from window to window he was stripped of these things one by one. When he finally left the building he was jobless, his property had been requisitioned, his child crossed off the school roll, and his passport taken away. All he had now was a passport with the letter ‘J,’ valid for two weeks. It was his task to find a foreign visa. He was expressly told that if he were found in Austria after the passport expired, it would be valid, but only for a single, one-way journey: to a concentration camp!”) During Eichmann’s tenure in Austria, a new camp had to be built in Mauthausen. Dachau and Buchenwald were full.”

Eichmann’s superiors were so impressed by his effectiveness in Vienna that he was given a promotion shortly afterwards. Now here was a man, they said, who had practical answers to the Jewish Question. Later in the war, the Director of the SS himself, Heinrich Himmler, was known to occasionally refer to Eichmann as “the master” in correspondence with other officials. As in, oh you’re having a problem getting Jews out of your area? Don’t worry – we’ll send a master practitioner to sort them all out for you.

By the time of the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, Eichmann had been admitted into the inner echelon of complicity. Not only was he one of the favored fifteen tasked with the Final Solution, he was a driving force in its implementation. Eichmann helped plan the Wannsee meeting, arranged the agenda of the discussion, and personally drafted the minutes afterwards.

Those minutes, of which one surviving copy remains today, are a brisk, but chilling read. And not exactly for the reasons you might think. When discussing a government-wide conspiracy to systematically murder millions of people, the Nazis rarely used direct language. They liked to camouflage their intentions in a paper trail of benign jargon and ghoulish euphemisms. Jews were never “killed”, you see, they were “evacuated”. They were never shot or gassed or burned; they were given “special treatment”. They were not carted off to concentration camps and worked to death, they were simply “resettled” for “labor in the east”.

The Wannsee Conference of January 1942, in which Eichmann played such a pivotal role, was not the moment when Nazi Germany decided to murder Europe’s Jews. That was already a foregone conclusion. But Wannsee was the meeting in which they decided HOW to do it. And given the gravity of such a meeting, the enormity of such a task, you might expect that these 15 men were in that conference room all day and all night. pounding the table and mainlining coffee.

In reality, the meeting only took about 90 minutes. 

Entire teams of employees in modern-day corporate America cannot reach approval on a logo design or a quarterly budget or a project timeline in a 90-minute ZOOM call. And yet the Nazis aligned on the Final Solution and adjourned their conference in the time it takes to watch a couple episodes of Netflix.

As the convoy of black Mercedes-Benz departs the Wannsee villa, Eichmann and his SS superiors retire to a drawing room, lit by a crackling fire. Sinking into the soft leather chairs, a bottle of cognac is opened, and crystal snifters are filled with generous pours. If not for the uniforms, they could’ve been businessmen toasting a successful merger, allowing themselves the restrained levity of a job well done. As the snow falls outside, they watch the fire logs sputter and spit and disintegrate into piles of ash. Years later, Eichmann recalled that a sort of calm determination settled over him in the aftermath of the conference:

“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt. Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?”

In other words, he had his orders. All that was left to do, was carry them out.

15 years later, far away in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ricardo Klement allows himself a small, private smile. The Third Reich may be gone, Hitler may be dead, and the Allies may have won – but six million Jews are never coming back. Nothing can ever, ever change that. Adolf Eichmann, the master practitioner, the specialist, had performed his role very well. He had fulfilled the Final Solution to the best of his ability.  And despite all that he had done, despite all the vain fury of the Allies…he was still alive. He had slipped away and escaped.

He was hidden and protected and perfectly safe.

And no one would ever find him.

From the kitchen, Ricardo hears his wife calling and his toddler cooing in the highchair. Dinner is ready, she says. Ricardo pulls on an evening shirt, covering his old SS tattoo scar. Perhaps later, he’ll play his violin.

Be right there, my love; meine liebe. What are we having tonight?

--- MUSIC BREAK ---

THE SPY

It’s December 3^rd, 1959.

17 years after the notorious Wannsee Conference, and 2 years after Fritz Bauer first received the letter from Argentina.

We’re in Tel Aviv, the largest city in the nation of Israel.

Established by a United Nations resolution in 1948 as an official homeland for the Jewish people, Israel was – and remains - a bit of a paradox: A very young country, created in the name of a 4,000-year-old-religion. And in 1959, at just 11 years old, Israel doesn’t even quality for a bar mitzvah yet.

But despite its relative youth in the family of nations, Israel has already faced some immense – and existential – challenges. Surrounded on all sides by hostile Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, the Israelis learned very quickly that the difference between winning and losing is being well-armed, well-connected - and above all – well-informed.

In this new Cold War reality, where the slightest geopolitical misunderstanding has the potential to bloom into a nuclear exchange, information is the new currency, and intelligence is king. It’s no longer enough to simply have bigger guns or more soldiers than the other guy. You have to know where the other guy’s guns are made, who paid for them, and why. You need to know the names of the soldiers who press the button, the names of their wives, children, their favorite dinner spots. Because just one of these seemingly inconsequential details can tip the scales and save lives. Big guns, after all, can be undone by little secrets..

At this time, in the late 1950s, we are entering the golden age of intelligence, counterintelligence, and espionage. Surveillance, disinformation, and defection. In other words, this is the golden age of spies. Each major nation has its own clandestine service. The United States has the CIA and its unsung cousin, the NSA. The Russians have the KGB and the GRU. The British have MI5 and MI6. These are large, well-funded organizations with access to state-of-the-art equipment, closely guarded technical expertise, and robust operational budgets.

The Israelis, by contrast, have a little house in Tel Aviv, with a red-tile roof and old stone walls. It bears no resemblance to the gleaming office building in Langley, or the imposing citadels in Moscow. This little house in Tel Aviv, which looks more like a place you’d go to have soup with your grandmother, is the home of Israel’s fledgling intelligence agency:

The Institute for Intelligence and Operations.

Although you may know it by its abbreviated and more commonly used Hebrew moniker:

Mossad. That’s M-O-S-S-A-D.

And right about now, on this damp December afternoon in Tel Aviv, a chauffeured Sedan is pulling up to the old stone house. A few minutes later, the front door swings open, and a man in sunglasses walks out.  His name is Isser Harel. That’s I-S-S-E-R (Isser), H-A-R-E-L (Harel).

Isser Harel is a spy. To be more specific, he is Israel’s top spy -  he director and chief of the Mossad intelligence agency. Now when we think of spies, we typically think of this:

[AUDIO] “I admire your luck, Mr…” “Bond. James Bond.”

In the pop cultural imagination, spies are dashing figures – sheathed in fitted suits, armed with a silenced pistol and cursed with a weakness for strong martinis and/or pretty girls. But Isser Harel, chief of Mossad, is about as close to James Bond as Tel Aviv is to Scotland. He looks less like Sean Connery, and more like Danny Devito. As Neil Bascomb describes:

“At five feet two, with a balding pate, jug ears, and small, piercing gray-blue eyes, he sometimes wore the neat, inexpensive suit of a bank teller and other times wore street clothes, his shirt opened to his barrel chest. He walked with a lively step and a straight back, seeming always to have a place to go, but this was not unusual. Israel was a young country populated by many people with a strong sense of purpose. If anyone overheard him speaking, which would occur only if he wanted to be heard or if his subject was not secret, he or she would hear Hebrew spoken with a slight eastern European accent in short, sharp bursts, much like a Kalashnikov.”

But despite his vertical challenges, you would not want to get into a fist fight with Isser Harel. Raised in the harsh villages of Latvia, near Russia, Harel learned quickly how to defend himself from bigots and antisemites. High pain tolerance and a low center of gravity – the ultimate combination. Yes, in a fair fight, Isser Harel would be picking James Bond’s perfect teeth out of his knuckles.

But these days, at 47-years old, Harel doesn’t have to fight anyone anymore. He has people for that. As the Director of Mossad, Harel oversees an intelligence service with networks that extend from Cairo to London, Syria to Sweden. “He had spies in place in every Arab capital,” writes British journalist Gordon Thomas, “providing a steady stream of priceless information.”

Suffice to say, Isser Harel is very busy man.

Since he took over Mossad in 1952, Harel has transformed the Israeli secret service into one of the most formidable, non-superpower intelligence agencies in the world. Under his direction, Mossad has engineered disinformation campaigns in Egypt, smuggled persecuted Jews out of Morocco, and even secured a highly-sensitive (and embarrassing) transcript of Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev shit-talking his old boss Joseph Stalin –a copy of which Harel personally delivered to the American CIA as a gesture of good will.

In some ways, Isser Harel is a perfect encapsulation of the state of Israel itself. He is small, scrappy, and very comfortable with violence in the service of survival.

But even the Chief of Mossad has to report to someone. Today, Harel is being summoned to the Israeli capital of West Jerusalem to discuss a new and pressing assignment. An operational opportunity. Apparently, a West German district attorney by the name of Fritz Bauer believes he has located the most infamous and high-ranking Nazi alive. The so-called architect of the Final Solution.

Adolf Eichmann.

Isser Harel, always vigilant against false leads and dubious intelligence, is more than a little skeptical. After all -  a good spy knows the difference between fool’s gold and the real thing.

As the chauffeured Sedan screeches to a halt in front of the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem, Harel hops out and sweeps through the entrance way, his dress shoes clicking on the tile like a metronome. A short elevator ride later, he is stepping into a conference room. At the head of the table, glowering in a pair of glasses and chomping on a thick cigar, is West Germany’s bulldog Attorney General, Fritz Bauer.

Isser Harel musters a skin-thin veneer of professional cordiality, and musters up a polite smile. But inside, he is not happy to see Bauer.  Another crusader in the Holy Land, Harel thinks, chasing a lost cause. Another German Jew, a yekke, still clinging to a home that hates him.

As Harel enters the room, Fritz Bauer does not rise from his chair. You’re late, he observes with a puff of smoke. In fact, Bauer thinks to himself, Director Harel is late in more ways than one. It has been two years – two long, lazy, fruitless years - since Bauer risked his reputation and his job to pass along the lead about Adolf Eichmann’s possible whereabouts. And yet, Harel and his Mossad spooks have done, in Bauer’s view, absolutely nothing. They have let the opportunity grow stale on the shelf like a forgotten pastry.

Back in the fall of 1957, when Bauer first received the letter from a Mr. Lothar Hermann of Buenos Aires, who claimed to have information about Eichmann’s whereabouts, the Attorney General immediately sprang into action. He knew that disseminating such valuable information through the West German judicial system would mean alerting the former Nazis inside it. If the lead was genuine, those same Nazis would likely warn Eichmann through their underground networks, and the elusive Obersturmbannfuhrer would vanish yet again.

Nor could Bauer turn to the Americans or the British for help. Although it might seem like the Allies would be keen to hunt down an infamous Nazi, that was not the case.

“The start of the cold war drained the will and resources of the Allies away from pursuing war criminals,” writes Neil Bascomb, “The convictions at Nuremberg had satisfied many political leaders that adequate punishment had been meted out for the Nazi atrocities..”

As the American CIA put it bluntly:

“We are not in the business of apprehending war criminals.”

So, Bauer contacted the one nation on earth who he knew would absolutely be interested in tracking down a Nazi war criminal:

Israel.

Doing so was extremely risky, of course. “By providing intelligence to a foreign country Bauer was aware that he was committing treason,” writes Neil Bascomb, “but he felt that he had no other choice if Eichmann was to be brought to justice.”

On September 19^th, 1957, Bauer drove to a little motel outside of Frankfurt and met with Felix Shinnar, Israel’s diplomatic representative in West Germany. “Eichmann has been found,” Bauer told a shocked Shinnar, “He’s in Argentina.” And there, in that motel, far away from prying eyes, Bauer explained the contents of the letter he had received.

LOTHAR

The letter had come from a Mr. Lothar Hermann, a German half-Jew who had immigrated to Buenos Aires in the late-1930s. Like many European Jews, half-blood or otherwise, Hermann fell prey to Nazi policies, and was imprisoned in a work camp in 1935. During that time, he was beaten so badly by the guards that he later lost his sight in both eyes as a result of his injuries. Well, after he was released in ’36, Hermann fled as far away from Germany as he could physically get. And in those days, that meant Argentina, 7,000 miles across the ocean.

Years passed, and in Buenos Aires, Lothar Hermann forged a new life and raised a family, hoping to put his troubled heritage behind him. His teenage daughter, Sylvia, did not even know that she was part Jewish.

Well one day, in 1956 or 1957, Sylvia came home with a boy. A nice young man from school, about 17 or 18-years-old, who introduced himself as Nick Eichmann. During his visit, Nick proceeded to express viciously antisemitic views, saying it was a tragedy that Hitler had lost the war and Nazi Germany had failed to fully exterminate European Jewry. You know, the kinds of things you talk about when meeting a friend’s parents.  “Although such a view,” writes Harry Stein, “was anything but uncommon in Argentina’s large and flourishing German population.”

But still, there was something odd about the boy.

“Lothar Hermann’s wife, Martha, wondered at the young Eichmann’s accent, which had no regional inflection,”writes Jack Fairweather, “Nick explained that his father had been a high-ranking military officer and that the family had followed him around Europe. His father had “done his duty for his fatherland,” he declared.”

Lothar Hermann bit his tongue, changed the subject, and sent him home. But as the days and weeks went by, the boy’s name lodged like a splinter in the folds of his brain. Where had he heard that name before? Eichmann. It sounded so familiar, somehow important. Then one day, while listening to Sylvia read him the newspaper, a realization him like a lightning bolt.// sledgehammer The article reported the arrest of a former Nazi in Europe, a close associate of the notorious and still-missing war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

When he heard the name. Hermann felt his stomach drop through the floor. THAT Eichmann. THE Eichmann. And that boy, Nick, who had so casually bemoaned the fall of Hitler and the failure of the Holocaust….no, it couldn’t be true. It was too much of a coincidence. Surely there were other Eichmanns in the world. Surely other Eichmanns had served in the German military. Hermann had traveled halfway across the globe to escape the Nazis. The possibility that one of the worst Nazis of all was not only living in the same city, but had a son who was friends with his daughter, was too fantastical to be true.

But something in Hermann told him, that no, this was real. That boy was Eichmann’s son. The antisemitic bile Nick had spouted to a stranger was his wretched inheritance. In that moment, an implacable anger boiled up in Lothar Hermann’s mind. The Nazis had blinded him, imprisoned him, and hounded him out of his home. The idea that a man like Eichmann had eluded justice was not only infuriating; it was intolerable. So, unable to quiet his suspicions, Hermann mailed a letter to the West German district attorney’s office, detailing all of the information he had. 

A few weeks later, it landed on the desk of Fritz Bauer.

Intrigued, Bauer urged Hermann to continue his excavation of the truth, however he could; the lawyer even provided a photograph and physical description of Adolf Eichmann to aid in the identification. Lothar Hermann, emboldened by Bauer’s response, decided to press forward with his amateur investigation. To do so, he enlisted the help of his daughter Sylvia. The teenage girl didn’t know she was a quarter Jewish, but she did know the Nazis had committed unspeakable crimes, and she was eager to help her Dad confirm whether or not Nick’s father was a war criminal in hiding.

Sylvia, embracing her role as a teenage sleuth, obtained Nick’s family address, a little one-story house at 4621 Chacabuco Street. Soon after, she paid them a visit. As Harry Stein writes:

She [Sylvia] knocked at the door and it was answered by a middle-aged woman. Almost immediately a balding middle-aged man in dark-rimmed glasses appeared behind her. When she asked to see Nicolas, the man answered that he was still at work. “Are you Herr Eichmann?” she asked. He looked uncomfortable and made no reply.”

The middle-aged man explained that he was Nick’s uncle. Uncle Ricardo. Out of politeness, Sylvia was invited inside for refreshments and conversation. The girl was terrified, of course, but she did her best to appear calm. A short while later, Nick returned from work. He was flustered that Sylvia had sniffed out his address, and asked her to leave. But as they were walking to the door, Nick made a mistake.

When Uncle Ricardo held the door for him, Nick responded, “Thank you father.”

Sylvia kept quiet, took the bus home, and told her dad everything that had happened. Hermann immediately wrote back to Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt. As the Attorney General read Lothar’s report, he felt confident that this was not a false lead. Finally - he had actionable information that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires under the alias Ricardo Klement at 4621 Chacabuco Street.

It was time to contact the Israelis.

On September 19^th, 1957, at the quiet motel outside of Frankfurt, Bauer finished his story and folded his hands. Felix Shinnar, the Israeli representative, was floored – too surprised or engaged to wave the cigar smoke out of his face. He asked Bauer, “What do you intend to do?” The District Attorney leaned close and lowered his voice:

“I’ll be perfectly frank with you. I can’t rely on the German Foreign Office. I can’t rely on the German embassies in South America. I can’t even rely on my own staff. I see no other way but to turn to you. Nobody could be more interested than you in the capture of Eichmann. Obviously, I wish to maintain contact with you in connection with the matter, but only if provided the strictest of secrecy.”

Shinnar responded:

“Thank you for the great faith you’ve shown us. Israel will never forget what you have done.”

But before they parted, Bauer had one last condition. His source, Lothar Hermann, must remain anonymous for his own protection. Need-to-know basis only, Felix – and Mossad doesn’t need to know. You know how they are. Shinnar assented to this solitary condition, and the next day, he passed the information to the Israeli Foreign Minister, who then passed that information to Mossad and its diminutive director, Isser Harel.

Initially, Harel was skeptical. Extremely so. People had been claiming to have information about Eichmann’s whereabouts for almost 15 years now. And in all that time, not one single tip had borne fruit. According to the rumors, Eichmann was the most well-traveled war criminal in the world. One year he was in Kuwait, then Syria the next. He was, in defiance of all the laws of physics, in New Zealand, Egypt, and Argentina – simultaneously. But if Harel was a gambling man – and he most certainly was not - Eichmann was probably dead in a ditch somewhere, reduced to yellow bones in a worm-eaten, bullet-torn SS uniform.

But still, Harel acknowledged, a lead is a lead.

And a missing Nazi is a poor substitute for a dead one.

Like a stern father handing over the keys to the family car, the Mossad chief grudgingly dispatched an agent to Buenos Aires to ascertain the veracity of Fritz Bauer’s anonymous tip. And what the agent found at 4621 Chacabuco Street was not encouraging.

The little house was a glorified shack, with chickens in the yard and a barefoot toddler on the porch. A tired, overweight woman was hanging clothes on the line. Hardly a likely hiding spot for someone as well-connected as Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. The agent snapped a few token pictures and reported back that there was very little chance Eichmann was living there, in what he called a “wretched little house.”

When Fritz Bauer found out about the superficiality of the search, he was furious. They’d barely looked, he protested. How could they know for sure that Eichmann was not there? I mean, they didn’t even knock on the door! The fearsome Mossad, which foils Arab plots before breakfast and steals Soviet secrets like candy, afraid to face a middle-aged housewife.

Through an intermediary, an irritated Harel responded:  Fine, we’ll look into it a little more - but only if you give us the name and address of your mysterious source. How do we know this information is even credible? How do we know this isn’t the paranoid fantasy of some bored Argentinian abuela?

Bauer, hands tied and faced with the prospect of watching the Eichmann lead turn cold, reluctantly agreed, and provided Mossad with Lothar Hermann’s name and address. Director Harel promptly dispatched yet another field agent to Argentina, and when he knocked on the door of the Hermann home, he was greeted by a blind man with milky, crooked eyes. So, the agent thought, this was Bauer’s “credible” source. As Neil Bascomb writes, he had been sent “to investigate a sighting of Adolf Eichmann by a man who could not see.”

To make matters worse, the daughter, Sylvia, looked as if she had only just recently mastered the mysteries of the tampon. A little girl, playing at being a spy.

This time, it was Isser Harel’s turn to be furious.

In his view, Fritz Bauer had done nothing but waste their precious time.

Are you out of your mind?, Harel might’ve thought. You have us chasing whispers halfway across the world, on the word of a blind retiree and a teenage girl? Is the air especially thin up there in Frankfurt, or have those cigars turned your brain to ash? Do you think I don’t have anything better to do? In case you hadn’t noticed, Mr Bauer, I am in charge of protecting the most threatened nation on the planet. Israel is a life raft, ringed/circled by sharks. Our resources are as thin as fly paper, and our budget reviews are measured in weeks, not hours. And knowing all of that, you want us to dedicate valuable time, manpower and money to a wild goose chase in Conquistador country. Please, Mr Bauer, do not waste my time. In Israel, where real Jews choose to live, we are trying to look forward, not back.

As Neil Bascomb writes;

“Harel had made his way to the top of Israeli intelligence by assembling as much information as he could and then putting himself in his enemies’ shoes to understand their motivations and to play out their possible next moves. His agents remarked among themselves that “if you showed Isser Harel one side of a match folder, he could tell you without looking what’s printed on the other side.” He trusted his intuition, and regarding the Eichmann case, instinct told him not only that [his agent] was right that the Nazi fugitive could not be living in such squalor but also that the information Lothar Hermann had sent in his report was suspect at best and perhaps wholly fashioned imagination at worst.”

And so with that, the Eichmann lead was shelved, dismissed as a yet another false alarm/trail.

In Mossad’s view, Bauer was just another boy who cried Nazi.

->

THE ULTIMATUM

Months passed, 1958 became 1959, and Fritz Bauer began to abandon all hope that Mossad would ever seriously investigate the Eichmann lead; But then, in November of 1959, more than two years after he’d first passed the information to Harel – a new breakthrough occurred.

A second source, completely independent from Lothar Hermann, came forward with information that matched the blind man’s account almost exactly / to the letter. A geologist named Gerhard Klammer, who had spent some time working in Argentina in the mid-1950s, had labored alongside a surveyor who went by the name “Ricardo Klement”. “But,” writes Jack Fairweather, ”everyone on the team knew his real name: Adolf Eichmann.” When Klammer tried to alert the Argentinian authorities, he was rebuffed, but he did still have a picture that someone had taken of the team.

When Fritz Bauer looked at the black-and-white photograph, he saw a team of 9 people, posing in front of a pair of cars in the South American jungle. They wore tired smiles and sharp khaki – just a quick, casual shot. But there in the background, inching towards the edges, was a man with a tapered chin, an aquiline nose, and a pinched expression. He clearly did not like being photographed.

Fritz Bauer compared the Argentinian photograph with the SS headshot in his file. It was him. A little older, a little balder, a little worse for wear – but no doubt about it – that was Adolf Eichmann.

Wasting no time, Bauer immediately booked a flight to Tel Aviv. But this time, he would not be going through that dwarf of a director and his slipshod, cowboy operation. He would present his evidence right to the top of the Israeli government, to its own Attorney General, a man named Haim Cohen. Let Isser Harel try to ignore the evidence then, laid bare in front of his betters,

And that brings us back to December 3^rd, 1959 - to the meeting room in West Jerusalem, where Fritz Bauer is seated, and Isser Harel has just walked in. You’re late, Bauer observes with a puff of smoke. Also at the table is Haim Cohen. Two lawyers and a spy – gathered to discuss the prospect of apprehending a missing war criminal.

Holding nothing back, Fritz Bauer slapped his dossier on Eichmann down on the table; A couple years earlier, the file wouldn’t have been thick enough to steady a table, but now it was bursting with evidence, replete with photographs and detailed reports from two different sources.

“After a brief introduction,” writes Neil Bascomb, “Bauer launched straight into the new intelligence he had received confirming the Klement alias. His bushy gray eyebrows flared while he spoke. He was obviously incensed that the first Israeli investigation had dismissed the Hermanns’ reports. A precious eighteen months had passed without action, and Bauer feared that Eichmann had long since moved or switched his name again.”

Isser Harel remained impassive. A short man with a long fuse. After Bauer’s lecture had ended, the spy paused and responded.  Have you considered that your sources might be working together? Collaborating in pursuit of a fee or reward money?

Bauer’s cigar almost dropped out of his mouth. He could hardly believe the condescension. His anger exploded with the sudden force a car bomb:

“This is simply unbelievable! “Here we have the name Klement: Two completely independent sources, who are strangers to each other, mention this name. Any second-class policeman would be able to follow such a lead! Just go and ask the nearest butcher or greengrocer and you will learn all there is to know about him!”

Bauer was understandably enraged. Harel and Israelis like him might want to run away from the past, to bury their heads in the Negev sand and shift their hatred onto new, more convenient Arab enemies, but Bauer could not forget. After the war, he had stayed in Europe to fight the good fight, battling ex-Nazis in the West German government, trying to hold people accountable. He did not have the luxury of the inclination to run away to Israel.  To tell it true, Bauer didn’t think much of the Zionist project. He had no love for these pioneer Hebrews who wanted to played James Bond in the desert. No, Fritz Bauer thought of himself as German first, and a Jew second. It was his heritage, yes, but it was not his identity. Truth be told, he didn’t even pray anymore. That dial tone was long-dead.

What’s more, Israelis like Isser Harel simply did not understand or appreciate what was at stake on the continent.

Back in West Germany, people were already forgetting what the Nazis had done to their people. In 1959 alone, there had been 685 swastikas found painted on Jewish businesses and synagogues throughout West Germany. Like some kind of chronic ailment or chemical dependency, antisemitism was on the rise in Germany yet again. The Auschwitz ovens barely stopped smoldering, and already Germans were grumbling about Jews.

“In a 1956 poll,” writes Jack Fairweather, “a quarter of respondents said Germany would be better off without Jews; half the country was undecided on the matter.”

 “The German Reich Party, a right-wing group with Nazi sympathies, had made gains in the recent election,”adds Neil Bascomb, “Membership in militant and nationalistic organizations was increasing, as was the number of newsletters and daily papers, book clubs, and discussion groups whose readers and members hated the [new] “Bonn democracy” and aimed to “correct the accepted facts” about Hitler and German war guilt.”

The world was forgetting, and the snakes were coiling underfoot. That’s why getting Adolf Eichmann was so important. He wasn’t just a washed-up war criminal – he was an opportunity to remind people of what had happened during the Holocaust, to shock their sensibilities and open the door to finding and prosecuting other men and women who had escaped Nuremberg’s justice.

Exasperated, angry, and out of options, Fritz Bauer decided to issue an ultimatum to Isser Harel and the Israeli government. As Bascomb writes: “Baur declared that he would have no choice other than to begin extradition proceedings through official German channels if the Israelis did not act immediately.”

Isser Harel folded his arms and smirked. Bauer was bluffing. Going through official channels was tantamount to sending Eichmann a postcard that said, “Hey just a heads up, we’re coming after you. So go ahead and start working on an escape plan.” The ex-Nazis in the West German government would certainly alert Eichmann and he’d never be seen or heard from again. We might as well pack his bags ourselves.

But although Bauer – self-made martyr of the Diaspora - might be bluffing, Harel could not ignore the compelling evidence. One name and two independent sources. Perhaps Adolf Eichmann was in Buenos Aires after all. And if Mossad managed to track him down… it would win untold glory and prestige for Harel and his fledgling agency. Then, the government purse strings would loosen; he could mount operations anywhere and everywhere he wanted. Turn the Arab world upside down.

Yes, Get Eichmann, and Mossad could protect Israel that much more effectively. Maybe the past and future were a little more connected than he realized.

The Mossad Chief, suddenly conciliatory and accommodating, assured Bauer that no extradition proceedings would be necessary. Armed with this new corroborating evidence, Mossad would go back to Buenos Aires, locate “Ricardo Klement”, confirm that he and Adolf Eichmann were the same man, and bring him to justice.

Fritz Bauer leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through his bristly hair and reignited the end of his cigar with the clink of a lighter.

It’s about goddamn time.

--- OUTRO -----

Well guys, that’s all the time we have for today. 

Next time, in Part 2 of Get Eichmann, we’ll proceed to the business of, well, Getting Eichman. 

Isser Harel and his Mossad team will take center stage, as they attempt to infiltrate Argentina and hatch a daring operation to capture one of the most infamous Nazis in history. Things will go right, things will go wrong, and as they say – there will be blood. 

Intercut with that spy thriller narrative, we’ll also be taking some time to learn how Eichmann escaped from Europe in the first place. How he acquired his fake identity, evaded Allied pursuers, and fled to Argentina through an underground network of smugglers, fascists and even a few Catholic priests. 

Suffice to say – we have lots more story to tell, and I can’t wait to share it with you. 

So as always, thanks for listening, and I hope you have an awesome day. 

This has been Conflicted. 

I’ll see you next time. 

--- END -----