At 0:00 on May 21, 1960, at the airport of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, an EL AL plane took off slowly.
And one of the plane's "passengers" will fly to Israel to face the trial it deserves, and that passenger is Adolf Eichmann, the top German Nazi war criminal in World War II.
Dropped out of high school to World War II Killer
Born in Rhineland, Germany, Adolf Eichmann in 1906 moved to Austria with his family as a child and dropped out of high school to study mechanical maintenance. At the age of 17, he joined a mining company and worked for a few years as a street agent for a vacuum oil filter company. Like the Germans of the same period, they lived an ordinary life, married and had children, and died of old age and illness.
The turning point came in 1932, when he joined the Austrian Nazi Party, then successfully joined the German SS using his superior skills, and after the outbreak of World War II, he was promoted to head of the Jewish Affairs Office after several trainings, and like most Nazi officers at the time, he worked to find ways to expel Jews from Germany.
But he did not do his job well, but instead escalated the content of his work to persecution and massacre. The early Nazi attitude toward the Jews was to deport the Jews to Palestine and send Eichmann to Haifa and Cairo to study the possibility of the plan. As a result, his research result was: Impossible!
In 1936 Eichmann questioned the Jewish policy of his superiors and submitted a report in which he made his point: a powerful Jewish Palestine would surely become an enemy of Germany! Yes, his implication was to exterminate him.
The "Eichmann List", which records the total number of Jews in various parts of Europe at that time
But this proposal was not adopted until the outbreak of World War II, and the Nazis' problem of dealing with tens of millions of Jews became very difficult. Eichmann was taken seriously by the leadership and began massing the capture of Jews in his own country and in the midwest of Europe, locked them in stuffy tank trucks, sent them to concentration camps day and night, and began his assembly-line massacre.
Eichmann oversaw the construction of eight concentration camps, including the world-shattering Auschwitz, where the daily nightmare of the slaughter of Jews was staged in Auschmann during World War II, all of which were carried out as efficiently as the production lines in the factory, thanks to Adolf Eichmann's invention of the poison gas killing method and the "final plan" for the Jewish people. (The "final solution" of the 1942 Wansai Conference proposed: the extermination of the Jews in the German-occupied areas.)
In World War II, 6 million Jews were brutally slaughtered by Nazi Germany, and Eichmann is considered one of the leading executioners.
Hunt down Eichmann
War criminals like Eichmann were not sent to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg for trial like his "colleagues." Instead, he took advantage of the chaos on the eve of Germany's defeat and cleverly escaped repeated pursuits. He is said to have disguised himself as a lumberjack and spent four years in hiding in a remote Village in Germany before fleeing to Italy. He fled to Argentina in South America in June 1950.
Eichmann's fake passport
Even if Eichmann could escape to the ends of the earth, the Jews did not forget the blood debt of the past. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish Provisional Government proclaimed the State of Israel, beginning the road to debt collection from Nazi war criminals.
So the intelligence organization Mossad (full name "Israel Intelligence and Special Missions") was established to carry out the pursuit plan, and one secret operation after another, the Nazis were arrested, but there was still no trace of Eichmann, and many people thought that he had died in the war.
It was not until 1957 that the Head of the Mossad, Issei Harrell, received a secret report: Eichmann was in Argentina. It turned out that Eichmann's "good" son Nick showed very extreme thoughts when he was dating his girlfriend, when Nick said: "The Jews are an inferior people, a burden to the world, and it is a pity that the Germans failed to kill all the Jews during World War II...".
What Nick didn't expect was that his girlfriend's father was a survivor of Auschwitz during World War II. After some investigation, the father successfully unearthed Nick's residence and Eichmann's presence. The news was revealed to the newspaper bounty officers and eventually sent to Issei Harrell.
After investigation, the Mossad clarified Eichmann's identity, and Harrell informed Congress of this information and proposed his own assassination plan, but Congress insisted that Eichmann be arrested and returned to China for trial.
This poses a conundrum for Harrell: kidnapping a person with citizenship (albeit fake) in a sovereign country, or Argentina, which we have a good relationship with? We have just established the country, what if we offend Argentina? How to send it back after being caught, and how to pass through the customs? How did the arresting team's entry into Argentina not arouse suspicion?
When Harrell was in his prime, Argentina celebrated its 150th anniversary and extended an invitation to Israeli leaders. So Harrell had a plan: anyway, he also offended people, simply offended a little more thoroughly, and started to celebrate the anniversary.
The Israeli delegation to the anniversary celebrations was picked up and dropped off by a special plane from home, and the 11 agents of the arrest team flew from all over the world to Argentina in disguise, captured Eichmann, and waited for him to fly back to Israel disguised as a crew member on the day of the celebration.
To prevent Eichmann from escaping again, the investigation team spent months of stepping on his network and blocking all escape routes near his hiding place. The arrest process also went smoothly, Eichmann did not resist, injected anesthetic disguised as an accidentally injured staff member, and was sent to the Israeli plane.
Two days later, in the afternoon, the President of Israel announced to the people of the world:
Israel's state security apparatus captured a very important Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. ...... Currently being held in Israeli prisons, they will soon be brought to trial in Israeli courts under the 1950 law against the Nazis and their collaborators...
Of course, the Israeli government has also been strongly condemned by the Argentine government for cross-border arrests without prior notice.
trial
The trial of Eichmann can be described as quite a rehearsal, first in the Holy Land of the Jews in Jerusalem, the scene of the trial provided German, English and other four languages of interpretation, to 37 countries live television Eichmann's crimes. The trial lasted seven months, and the indictment was so many that it took three court breaks to read it, and the verdict totaled 244 counts and 15 charges.
In response, Eichmann refused to plead guilty, giving defenses such as "I have no hatred for Jews myself", "I just follow orders", "I want to get rich for promotion", "I will have others do it if I don't do it", etc., but in the face of the identification of 90 survivors in Nazi concentration camps and thousands of undespoiled archival evidence, his defense did not impress the jury and judges in the slightest.
After the appeal was dismissed, Eichmann was sentenced to hanging, becoming the only person to have been executed since the establishment of the State of Israel. On May 31, 1962, Eichmann went to the gallows. The next day, his ashes were scattered by the Israeli navy into the vast sea, with no monuments or tombstones.