Operation Finale to Be Released Next Week

The kidnapping of Eichmann on May 11, 1960 spawned numerous books and movies but, it was really well short of spectacular. Over 30 Mossad agents were involved with three agents accosting and overpowering the 54-year-old Eichmann as he came home one night late from work. Eichmann had made it easy for the kidnappers. He followed a consistent pattern of taking the same public bus home and was unarmed.

Finding Eichmann

There have been many self-serving inaccurate claims regarding the discovery of Adolf Eichmann. In fact, Eichmann was giving interviews to people in the 1950s, specifically to Willem Sassen. Eichmann also drafted and purportedly sent a letter to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, proposing that he (Eichmann) return to Germany to stand trial. Finally, he frequently visited with his sons Klaus and Nicholas, who both kept Eichmann as a last name. This is what led to the kidnapping.

During 1956 Klaus Eichmann was in a relationship with a young woman Sylvia Hermann. Her father Lothar Hermann, had immigrated to Argentina after leaving Germany in 1938. Lothar had met and conversed with Klaus Eichmann. When Lothar spotted a newspaper article about an impending war-crimes trial in Frankfurt which mentioned Adolf Eichmann, he surmised that Klaus was the son of Adolf Eichmann.

For whatever reason, Lothar wrote to the judicial authorities in Frankfurt, who passed on the letter to Fritz Bauer, the Attorney General of Hesse.  Bauer was a former a concentration-camp prisoner, who had fled first to Denmark, and then Sweden after the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940.

Bauer, in turn, sent all the information he had, including the home address of Eichmann, to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Walter Eytan, the Director General of the Foreign Ministry, who, in turn, arranged a meeting with Isser Harel, the Director of the Israeli Secret Service. Thus, the Germans handed Eichmann to the Israelis on a plate. The appearance of various Eichmann family members at public events stimulated pressure for the Israelis to act.

Charges

After being grabbed, Eichmann confirmed his true identity, and after a few days Eichmann agreed to stand trial in Israel. On May 20, 1960 Eichmann was flown on an El-Al plane to Israel to face 15 charges. He was found guilty on all charges and hanged. Interestingly, the indictment  included:

§ Charge 9: He deported a half-million Poles.

§ Charge 10: He deported 14,000 Slovenes. 

§ Charge 11: He deported tens of thousands of gypsies and 

§ Charge 12: He deported and murdered 100 Czech children from the village of Lidice.  

The charges relating to Jewish victims arose under Section 1(a)(1) of the Nazis and Nazi-Collaborator Law 5710 passed in 1950. 

The prosecution also claimed that the extermination plan was in effect "Immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Books and Movies

Just about everyone who had anything to do with the Kidnapping has produced  a book or movie.

The earliest movie was Operation Eichmann, a 1961 American film directed by R.G. Springsteen, starring Werner Klemperer in the title role. Klemperer continued his career depicting German villians as Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes.

The movie Eichmann (2007) was based on manuscripts of the hundreds of hours of interrogations of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli Officer Avner Less:

"who [was] faced with the immense task of tricking the skilled manipulator into self-incrimination. While the world waits, Less's countrymen call for immediate execution, forcing him and Eichmann to confront each other in a battle of wills. “ 

The first Eichmann movie has a reported domestic gross of $2,706.

There was The Eichmann Show, released in 2015, produced by Laurence Bowen and Ken Marshall for Feelgood Fiction and sold to BBC.  Most memorable line, "Coming over was my first time on a plane. Puked so much they locked me in a toilet till we touched down."

 The personality of Adolf Eichmann

Like medieval scholars debating over how many angels can dance on a head of a pin, the books and movies argue about Eichmann's personality.  The original presentation was by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Her movie is Hannah Arendt [2012]).  Broadly, Arendt sees Eichmann as a man who displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job" ("He did his duty…; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law."

That characterization riles many Holocaust Believers who want to present Eichmann as a Satanically evil deceiver: As the Operation Finale trailer puts it, “This guy convinced rabbis to load the trains themselves. And not by force.”

The presentation of Adolf Eichmann in the trailer is a classic caricature of a German.

A leader of this faction is Professor Mark Lilla, a Holocaust fanatic and proponent of "The New Truth," a theory that "Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism." 

New York Review of Books article, "Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth."

Professor Lilla even claims, "Arendt was not alone in being taken in by Eichmann and his many masks."  In short, Eichmann must be shown as deranged and absolutely evil in a demonic sense.  Professor Lilla has his movie with Operation Finale.