The Vendetta For Adolf Eichmann | Nazi Hunters | Timeline

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incognito with his family near buenos aires the family have in fact moved to a street on the outskirts of buenos aires called garibaldi street but a blind jewish piano tuner whose daughter briefly dated eichmann's son has tipped off israel's secret service now the man branded the architect of the final solution is in the mossad's sites the information on the table was that he was in the argentine on the name of ricardo clemente that he lives in san fernando a suburb of buenos aires in an isolated house why were we so skeptic there was no electricity no water no nothing we asked ourselves why a man like eichmann goes to a dump like that the mossad agents thought there's no way that eichmann lieutenant colonel in the ss the murder of six million of our people lives in this very very modest little bungalow it's impossible we are sure that we got the wrong person it's not heichmann it's the young man mossad spies v aharoni is sent to argentina to investigate [Music] he enlists a local volunteer to help so averoni goes to rather extraordinary steps with one of his people going up to the house speaking to him about trying to buy land in the adjoining district we had a camera hidden in a case so you can't see it you would press certain buttons on the handle and it would click these photographs you can make pictures and the man doesn't know that you've been photographed and that's how we got these pictures he gets the pictures the man he thinks to be eichmann he looks at it compares it to all portraits of white men their left ears is like a fingerprint they photographed this man with his left ear and we had a photograph of eichmann in ss uniform with his left ear we were almost sure i can't say 100 percent that the man was ashamed [Music] aharoni returns to israel and presents the evidence to mossad chief israel harel takes it straight to the prime minister david ben-gurion ben-gurion recognizes an opportunity but he's fearful that the israeli youth will forget what happened to the jews and that the world will forget what happened ben gurion instructed israel to bring to israel the adulthood for a trial in israel the plan is simple but daring a team of secret agents will kidnap the war criminal and smuggle him nine thousand miles to jerusalem harel enlists the one man with the skills and the nerve to run such an operation mossad commander rafi atan i decided how many people i need okay and i started to choose the people rafi aitan puts together this team that is kind of the standard of what you see in spy movies or spy novels each individual on the team was picked for his or her expertise whether it was as a forger or as a master of disguise or whether it's someone who was excellent at logistics there are no james bonds debonair men and flashy suits they are ordinary individuals who you would never pick out in a crowd and that's what made them so good for the agents the mission is personal adolf eichmann is the man who made the nazis death trains run on time he's the man who helped to send millions of jews from all over occupied europe to the gas chambers eichmann has called the architect for the final solution and he was very good at his job a lot of these agents parents would have been killed essentially at this man's hands he was a very rabid intense fiercely efficient and virulent nazi towards the end of the war eichmann tells a fellow nazi that he will happily go to his grave knowing that he's killed six million jews his role was to isolate the jewish populations bring them to ghettos and ultimately ship them to extermination camps like auschwitz it was almost like he was operating this factory of this factory of death he was a specialist on jews and he he knew quite a lot about them he was a dust guy but he was also in the field he would go and see the techniques that they were using uh gas fans and just shooting jews he was out there seeing it he's an evil murdering nazi bastard there's no doubt about it this was an extremely significant operation for the mossad this operation if they're successful will put the mossad on the map it was an incredibly ballsy thing for the israelis to decide as to show the world that israel couldn't be messed with wherever you are in the world we will come and get you [Music] two weeks after adolf eichmann was photographed an advanced team of mossad agents arrives in argentina on separate flights on different days we all traveled on false passports on languages we didn't master in countries we didn't know and we had nobody to turn to the logistic people of the mossad made our timetable how to go to the argentine hotels to stay what identification to use [Music] their task confirmed the man in the photograph is still at the same address surveillance expert abraham bendor heads to garibaldi street i wanted to see the area and the surroundings she was driving i sat near him my chance we came when the bus came and suddenly i saw a man walking and i said to tree that's him in the photo it's ahmadizeman we got so excited that he slammed the brakes it was a lousy car and the brakes were screeching i said don't do that he might get suspicious when we hit the brakes i thought that he could never be in my team because he's so nervous eichmann he went on for 150 meters and he turned left and another 15 minutes he turned left into the house that was the only house anyway [Music] we watched the house of ashman for days they began finding out exactly what eichmann did what time he woke up when he left for work what bus he took how long he stayed at work when he came home what he did when he came home when the lights finally went out at night a single word is telexed back to mossad headquarters in israel garrett was the code word that tells you a lot of things one we found the man was in the picture that three brought back second the the situation in the field there is possible to make a kidnap operation third we are going to continue the surveillance of the house in jerusalem the mossad boss gives the green light to operation eichmann capture the man who organized the genocide of europe's jews and bring him to israel to stand trial for his crimes i was 14 when i left czechoslovakia we went to hungary and in 1944 we were taken to auschwitz [Music] all of us my mother my sister my father my grandfather my aunt and me together on the train we were frightened we're hungry we were cold we were humiliated we were strictly brought to auschwitz to be exterminated after decimating poland's jewish population in 1944 eichmann set about sending hungary's 700 000 jews to their death ultimately anybody who is a hungarian jew or has their roots in hungary and is jewish will have a relative an ancestor who was ultimately killed by adolf eichmann the doors openness and the first thing before even seeing we heard the german shepherd barking and couldn't believe it that here we were in this horrible horrible place the mossad chief knows that an extradition request for adolf eichmann to argentina will likely fail it would also send the nazi into hiding the kidnap team arrives but they've got lots of things to be getting on with i mean it's not just a case of just like hitting him over the head for him in a car being an airplane let's go home job done you've got to work out if we hold him where are we going to hold him so they've got to rent a house now renting a house 1960 in argentina is not the easiest thing to just go around doing there's a lot of things like that which one doesn't think about they had to try and achieve that task is given to master of disguise yitzhak nasher posing as a tenant he finds a villa an hour's drive from buenos aires they picked this house because the neighbors were not too close it had an enclosed backyard it had several rooms big enough to keep all these agents it was a normal house in a quiet neighborhood in buenos aires so that was the first factor the second was they needed to get eichmann out of the country it was harold who came up the idea that maybe they were to fly eichmann out with an ll jet but israel's national airline does not fly to buenos aires with one extraordinary exception luckily there's one of those bits of coincidence there's the uh anniversary of argentina's founding and israelis say we want to send a delegation of dignitaries out to come and help celebrate and argentina says yes well of course you must send this special flight and it's this special flight that's going to take iceman out of the country so the schedule of when the operation proceeded was based on when that plane was arriving and could take off from buenos aires the plane is set to arrive on may 12 and depart the next day this means they have a week to kidnap the war criminal the clock is ticking we saw him every day every day the same time except sunday [Music] same bus same hour and everything the same [Music] likeman is a character of habit he likes to get off the bus the 202 bus at the same time every day back from this big car factory where he's working the road near the house wasn't really busy there were no people walking with it and very few driving on it garibaldi street in 1960 was the worst street in the whole of the southern hemisphere to conduct a kidnap it was completely exposed the eichmann house is just his concrete block it's it's like putting a dice on a pool table it's just there and there's not much else around so if you're walking along and you look different you're going to be noticed straight away it was a strange place to conduct a kidnap but where else were they going to do it so we thought that's it after watching him and his way of doing things we were convinced that the easiest and the best way to get him was just when he gets out of the bus walking home now orchestrating that to come off flawlessly is an entirely different game the basics of the plan were eichmann gets off the bus on his way back from work at night as soon as he turns the corner onto the smaller road leading to his house they would grab him the plan was three mulching to walk between the house and the bus the iceman walked between the bus and the house and they should meet somewhere in two-thirds of the of the way it's imagine i had to tell him a moment testosterone yo i would like to ask you a question the that was the plan from the beginning to get the mechanism and the tactics together we did it about three four hundred times they practiced throwing eichmann into the car putting him down on the floorboard and driving off in 20 seconds we wanted to do that they practiced the route that they would escape from numerous times in case the police were chasing them we didn't carry weapons because it wasn't incriminating why do we need the weapons for we we don't want to shoot anybody we knew that the only enemy that we could face were the argentine police or the argentine military so we said we don't need any weapons and that's a risk we took the mossad agents are running a terrible personal risk in going on this operation if you were caught in argentina in 1960 as a known foreign spy you wouldn't be executed but you would have been prison for ages and ages and of course your mission probably would have been denied back home as is the great tradition of most spy stories so yes it was a terrible risk since the war argentina has offered a safe haven to high-ranking nazis like eichmann there was a network that juan peron the president of argentina put together to bring nazis to argentina it was widely known within the network of underground former nazis that if they found a way to argentina that the argentinian government would help support them the allies victory in 1945 eichmann became a wanted man and went on the run he makes his way up to hamburg and then ends up in a little town called everson where he works as a forester then forestry uh business goes bankrupt and he finds his whole nazi guide to manage a chicken farm and ends up running what is quite a lucrative chicken business but in 1950 fearing capture nazi sympathizers in the catholic church helped to organize eichmann's passage to south america from the port of genoa under the name ricardo clemente the route he's been using is a very well trodden escape route some people call it a rat line lightning's given um all the paperwork he needs such as landing permits for argentina exit permits from uh italy and so on so forth and eventually eichmann set sail a third class ticket to go to a new life in argentina itunes was certainly not the only senior nazi to end up going to argentina there was almost a great tradition of nazis going there some of them brought some money some of them brought some technical expertise and so on so forth the former ss officer has a string of jobs from running a laundry to raising rabbits none are a success he finally finds steady employment in a mercedes-benz car plant [Music] while argentina's military dictatorship welcomed nazis like eichmann it would not take so kindly to a team of israeli spies on its soil to outwit the authorities the agents forge several different license plates for their getaway vehicles we had three number plates and we didn't have these revolving things that they have in james bond films we had to put one number plate upon the other so we didn't lose time in taking off the previous one that was really better than in movies much quicker for each license plate we had different documents just in case [Music] in argentina in the 50s the cars you hired weren't the nice sedans we get today they were pretty ramshackle there's always a danger these cars would break down [Music] the cars were in a terrible condition all of them once we had to push them [Music] of course anything would happen [Music] operation eichmann moves into high gear [Music] from the second eichmann went underground after the war he was constantly worried about being found he was constantly worried about every footstep behind him with someone coming after him they're constantly fearful that if they let the operation go just one more day that that day was the one that eichmann would figure out he was being fouled and he would vanish there was a danger that he would try to escape and get away from us of course was a danger one way or the other struggle or not this was the moment to go we don't have any communication not communication not weapons you could say it was a primitive operation okay but sometimes primitive operation works better than others may 11 1960 the kidnap of adolf eichmann is in play the massage agents arrived in the dark about 30 minutes before eichmann was to return home from work to get their cars in place they have two cars one to capture them the other to act not only as a backup car but as an interference car in case they were being pursued by the police there are four agents in the front and they're the snatch squad they're gonna grab him they get out the car and they have the hood up and they're tinkering this the classic tactic isn't it of keeping cover is playing with your broken car and they're waiting bus arrives and they wait for eichmann to come off the bus and he's not there and they just can't believe it the only night that he didn't arrive on the seven o'clock bus was the night we intended to catch him people were how could they say quite tense [Music] [Music] every night eichmann has been on the same bus and the night of the kidnap he's not and they wait and they wait and there's no eichmann and after 20 minutes to half an hour the group are getting very nervous some bicycles went by and asked questions and some men came by and asked questions so the people became tensed triani asked me what do you decide maybe we go i say no we stay and you can remember garibaldi street this desolate empty place they're looking very very obvious and then suddenly another bus comes and out of it is the unmistakable little five foot seven figure of the little man walking along adolf eichmann there could be no doubt about it we saw iceman coming and then the operation started when he comes with his flashlight i blind him with my headlights so he doesn't see the other car [Music] and he's walking towards them and uh one of the agents malkin the only spanish he knows is the spanish for a moment or a little moment a moment in your i would like to ask you a question you know trying to get aikman over to come and see him and he says this to eichmann but eichmann was frightened and eichmann reaches into his pocket and they think he's got a gun and then malchim jumped on him and took him by his neck instead of his mouth he tried to hold his hand in his pocket and therefore eichmann was free to shout he started screaming and i made a lot of noise with the engine to overshadow this noise and at that point malcolm grabs eichmann and they wrestle their way into this ditch we jumped on him legs belly head we put him into the car they tend to shut up and this is the first order that eichmann has ever been given by a jew jose tavor immediately went to the front only was already inside the car with the engine running and iron myself was in the back his head on my knees and we covered him with blanket and then ciao only told him in german if your life dear to you be quiet and then he said you should cooperate with our people otherwise we're going to kill you he said he have a mission that means i have surrendered to my fate when is in the car i had to lead the way to the safe house no one said a word my hand was on his mouth he was completely quiet after one mile we stopped and we changed the plates of the car there were argentinian number plates we changed them to other argentinian number plates which were forged so there was no suspicion on the cars and we had to change all that in seconds garibaldi street is a long way from the safe house and don't forget they're in a really really bad argentine 1960 hire car that can break down at any time and if it's broken down and a policeman comes to help it's all over we cross checkpoint by military and police the police stopped me and he said nothing and i said nothing they saw the foreign plates of the cow and they said go it's a nervous drive but they make it back and they get into the safe house and there they've got him we put covered glasses on his face so he couldn't see anyone and couldn't remember anyone we didn't speak one syllable nothing we didn't talk to him he didn't talk to us we took off his clothes to make sure that he doesn't got any weapon or razor blade to kill himself he's given a medical by a doctor who was part of the team to confirm that his heart's okay it's a very stressful thing to be kidnapped one thing they have to do they're 90 sure they've got eichmann but they're not 100 sure they've got to make sure they're not kidnapping the wrong guy before we went to the argentine we studied the ss file that we had in our archive and we knew iceman his measurements his facial scars things like that and all these helped us to identify him before we talked with him one of the agents of aharoni was given the job of interrogating eichmann to in order to establish exactly who he was what he'd been up to and so on so forth i asked him what's your name and he said and he said your real true name and he refused to answer them [Music] true is a very methodical interrogator he can drive a person out of his mind when he asks you slowly the same question again and again they kind of claim and what's that always your name what was your name before he said that was the name that he used in germany after the war the agents know eichmann's ss identification number they find the scar where his telltale ss tattoo should be but eichmann began to burn that off directly after the war ended because he knew that it was the chief identifier sweden asked him did you serve in the ss she said yeah and what was your asses number he said the correct number of frenchman so you cannot say your otto henninger when you know the correct number of our other regiment he's not a genius he made a mistake and eichmann then knows that the game is up within the space of 10 or 15 minutes eichmann admitted that he was adolf heinken we were very happy of course that we got the right man because until that moment we were not really sure i asked him if he had any role in the holocaust how was he involved in it and he denied of course everything denied everything you would have thought a monster like eichmann would have a much more impressive physical presence but it's just this sort of pathetic little man yeah he was the one who had organized this enormous murder i hate trains then when i hear that sound i'm immediately transported back to 1944 and the trip to auschwitz we had to jump off the train and then we saw the soldier there and we saw the people standing online and one went to the left one went to the right we went to the right and the elderly they went immediately the gas chambers i didn't see my grandmother anymore i never saw her actually leaving mercifully and they purposely always separated families my aunt and me on one side my sister and mother on the other and it's the last time that i had seen them the mission has gone like clockwork until now argentine officials delay the special israeli plane that will take eichmann out of the country the team have a real problem now they're stuck in this house with this figure of evil thousands of miles away from home with some very hot property and that is not a good situation to be in the mossad agents holding adolf eichmann have hit a serious problem they thought they were going to be dead in the safehouse for two or three days in fact the special el al flight was going to be delayed by up to a week we knew that the flight would come to the argentine something between 20 and 21st of may and there's not much they can do until their means of escape this ll jet will be able to take them back across the atlantic they're stuck in the safe house and like any people living close together under times of great stress a lot of members of the team are you know having a ghost at each other they were constantly worried in the safehouse about people coming after them whether the police or eichmann's friends and most importantly his family his family are running around trying to find him with various friends of theirs sympathetic to the nazis the risks were definitely the german community of buenos aires the less happens the more you get worried [Music] rafi was in charge and the most of the burden on him he thought that it's impossible that the nazis don't look for him with the family he was really really really worried they've got this very tense time and what's not helped is they don't want to let eichmann out of their sight or he might commit suicide to try and escape these agents and this is what's really unpleasant they even have to help him go to lavatory and i mean help him do everything it's quite something to clean someone off when you know that that man has murdered six million of your people it would have been much simpler to just kill eichmann but they needed to bring him back to trial all the people in the house though some of them were holocaust survivors all of them knew the importance of bringing heichman alive to israel all of them they knew it they understood it and they fully agreed with it the agents insist eichmann sign a statement that he is returning to israel of his own free will if caught by argentinian authorities it might be the only thing that can save them eichmann tried to get them saying i'm a german citizen i should be tried in germany but they told him you're coming to israel and ultimately they got him to sign he gave me a letter signed by himself i have the letter here he said i adopted eichmann the one who has signed this letter i here will stay clear ready to go to israel in order to clear my conscience he said he understood what his faith will be and he was facing his faith eight days after eichmann was kidnapped the specially chartered ll plane finally lands in buenos aires 24 hours later the final and most dangerous phase of the mission begins the way of getting eichmann out of the country on this ll plane is spectacularly brilliant they decide they're going to disguise eichmann as a flight attendant we had a doctor with us who looked after him and he gave him an uh injection and they're gonna make our lead drum they leave the safe house they eventually arrive at the airport they drive through the special area where the crew allowed to go and there is this slightly comatose eichmann they took him out and carried him on the stairs into the plane in uniform and we waited to keep the all clear for takeoff the diplomatic crew that had come to argentina had disembarked the only passenger going back to israel besides the crew and the assad was adolf hike they told the crew an hour before they were about to take off they were escorting adolf eichmann out of the country the agents travel under the guise of israeli diplomats and off-duty ll crew even when they got eichmann onto the plane and they sit him in a first-class seat they still weren't home and dry argentine immigration authorities turn up onto the plane as they're entitled to do they want to check passports and they walk up and down the plane checking passports and there's a passport for eichmann in a fake name clearly what's wrong with him no he's drunk too much partying you know it's like buenos aires you know too much of kind of dances and girls and of course the argentine guy just thinks that's perfectly normal this won't be the first drunken flight attendant he's seen they get off the steps are taken away from the plane they're prepared to take off they're taxing to the runway when suddenly air traffic control says stop you can't go anywhere now you can imagine this moment where they have eichmann they're ready to go and now what's wrong moments before takeoff the plane carrying adolf eichmann to israel is grounded they said five minutes and then 10 minutes and 20 minutes but we were suspicious of everything we were also tense have the authority's been alerted that eichmann is on board is this operation about to unravel israel wants to take off and risk the prowess of the argentinian air force an individual named shaol shaol who is the navigator of the plane it says i will go i will check out and see what's wrong so this normal navigator is told by israel if you're not back in 10 minutes we're taking off without you [Music] and he steps off the plane his heart sinking into his shoes thinking i may never come back it turns out that they had not filed something in the flight plan the navigator gets back on the plane and they take off well of course it was a great relief and satisfaction then we finally took off and went up in the air with eichmann and the plane the pilot announces that the plane has left argentinian airspace it was actually almost a celebration that they had accomplished this but they still weren't home and dry [Music] normally in those days you would fly north up to brazil from buenos aires refuel at recife make your way across the atlantic to dakar in africa where you would then refuel and head on to israel now of course the israelis did not want to stay in south america at all in case someone was onto them so they had to try and get this plane across the atlantic all the way to dakar on a single tank of fuel and it was touch and go they're almost flying on on vapor when they land [Music] when it was announced that adolf eichmann had been captured the world was absolutely stunned for the israeli secret services to capture an individual 9 000 miles away and do it all secretly and quietly was extraordinary [Music] the eichmann trial was in many ways more than iconic it in fact put the holocaust on the cultural map it reminded the world of what had happened in the holocaust and launched this whole investigation of the jewish experience during the war without the trial people may have swept the holocaust under the rub a lot of very very powerful testimony was made during the trial of those who had either met eichmann or survived the camps and the extent and the savagery of what had happened was incredibly heart-rending eichmann's defense was the tired time-stained boring i was following orders defense eichmann's found guilty which will come as no surprise and he's uh he's going to be executed [Music] when i heard that adaf ackman was finally captured and being brought to justice i was of course very glad that finally he gets repaid for what he has done it was difficult to understand how such a man who doesn't look like a big personality was responsible for to test of national people i don't know the answer [Music] the night before he's to be hanged he writes letters to his family and he declares how much he loves germany and everything i did i just did for my fatherland and he's then taken out of his cell and he's hanged quickly efficiently he's then cremated straight away and his ashes are put in a bucket and the bucket is put on a boat and the boat sails off the israeli coast out of israeli waters they don't want to be touched by the ashes of this man and they tip the ashes into the water and a few ashes left in the bucket and they rinse them out they want to get every last grain of ice man out and they'd rinse out the bucket and they go back [Music] the end was just [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 304,548

Keywords: Buenos Aires, Concentration camps, Eichmann capture, Eichmann documentary, Eichmann trial, Eichmann's disappearance, Eichmann's war crimes legacy, Eichmann's war crimes trial, Final solution, Mossad, Nazi atrocities, Nazi escape, Nazi persecution of Jews, Nazi regime, Nazi war crime investigations, Nazi war criminal hiding, Nazi war criminals captured, Nazi war criminals on the run, SS officer, The hunt for Eichmann, Timeline - World History Documentaries

Id: x8irdD1Hqi8

Length: 41min 58sec (2518 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021