Israeli secret service agent who first identified Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and helped to smuggle him back to Israel for trial
He lived quietly in a village near Exeter until his death, helping abandoned animals, keeping chickens and running the barbecue at local tennis club events. Blending into the background had always been one of Zvi Aharoni’s great skills. Few locals had any idea that this modest, amiable, German-accented man, living under the name of Hermann Arndt, had once been a key part of the Israeli team that carried out one of the most audacious and controversial missions of secret service history: the 1960 tracking down and kidnapping in Argentina of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann had held various key bureaucratic roles in the Nazi leadership’s planning for the expropriation of Jews and others and their deportation to the death camps. He had managed to evade capture at the end of the war and was believed by many to be dead but in fact had escaped to South America. One of the most famous “Nazi hunters”, Simon Wiesenthal, continued to research Eichmann’s whereabouts, and in the late 1950s the Israeli authorities were told by a Frankfurt prosecutor that he was living under an alias in Argentina. An earlier tip-off by a blind member of the Jewish community in Argentina had been initially disbelieved by the Israeli authorities, but provided valuable information when the search was begun in earnest.
Aharoni, working for a special Mossad unit pursuing Nazi war criminals, was sent to track Eichmann down and prepare for his capture. Armed with an old SS photograph of Eichmann he travelled in March 1960 to Buenos Aires, and located the house on Garibaldi Street where Eichmann was living as Ricardo Klement. Hidden under a tarpaulin in a truck outside the house Aharoni first spotted Eichmann “collecting the washing”, and shadowed him and his family’s movements for some time. Posing as a local he used a concealed camera to approach the family, and was able to take photographs so that Israeli specialists could confirm that this was Eichmann. He even sat behind him on a bus and, he recalled later, had to resist the temptation to take personal revenge on the man involved in the murder of so many of his fellow Jews, as he wanted Eichmann to have “a free and fair trial”.
Plans were now laid for a special Mossad team to kidnap its target. It was a tense affair, as the Israelis knew they were acting outside international law. On May 11, 1960, the team of seven lay in wait near the bus station where Eichmann used to return home from his work at a Mercedes-Benz factory. Aharoni confirmed Eichmann’s identity as he got off a bus; he was jumped on and bundled into a car driven by Aharoni, who warned him: “If you move, you will be shot.” Eichmann replied in German: “I accept my fate.” That, Aharoni said later, “was the moment I knew for sure we had the right man. I was elated”.
Eichmann was taken to a safe house where Aharoni, who had learnt fluent German in his childhood, led the initial interrogation. “Who’s going to look after my wife and children?” Eichmann is said to have asked Aharoni, who replied: “You worry so much about your wife and children, but how could you and your associates murder children in the tens and hundreds of thousands?”
“I did what everyone else was doing” was among Eichmann’s excuses, a foretaste of the defence at his trial which led the philosopher Hannah Arendt to write of “the banality of evil”.
“When I looked into his eyes,” Aharoni reflected later, “I am sure I should have felt revulsion, or anger, or even wonder at what he had done, but I have interrogated so many monsters that it had no effect on me.” He added that he respected the way that Eichmann “answered all my questions, he didn’t try to hide anything or mislead me”.
The Israeli team spirited Eichmann out of Argentina nine days later on an El Al plane after he had been drugged, dressed in an El Al uniform and passed off as a crew member who was ill. Eichmann then stood trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, and was hanged after being convicted of crimes against humanity.
Although Aharoni disapproved of the death penalty, seeing Eichmann brought to justice was some compensation for the persecution he had witnessed as a young Jew growing up in Germany. He had been born Hermann Aronheim in Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany in 1921. His family moved to Berlin in the mid-1930s, and had planned emigration to Palestine, but his father, a lawyer, was too ill to do so. After his father died the rest of the family finally left, shortly before the Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews in Germany hinted at the Holocaust to come. It was, he reflected later, a bitter irony that his father’s death had saved the family from the death camps. “If he had lived another year, I would have gone up the chimney at Auschwitz.”
In Palestine he changed to his Hebrew name, Zvi Aharoni, enlisted in the British Army to fight the Nazis, and was used as an intelligence officer interrogating German PoWs in Italy.
After the war he fought for the Zionist military organisation Haganah in battles over the creation of the state of Israel, and then worked for the domestic Israeli intelligence service, the Shin Bet, before joining Mossad and the hunt for Nazi war criminals. He was involved in the protracted and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find and prosecute Josef Mengele, who had conducted experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Aharoni was convinced that he had located Mengele, but the Israeli government decided not to continue the attempt to bring him to justice.
He retired from Mossad in the 1970s and worked for a time for a bank in Hong Kong where he met his second wife, Valerie Arndt (his first wife,Teulah, had died in 1973). He then worked in China for one of the first foreign enterprises to have permission to do business there. Afterwards he moved with Valerie — who had been born in Britain — to live in the UK, working initially as a security officer in a London hotel. Eventually they moved to Devon, where, Aharoni said, he could “escape the horrors I have known”. He lived quietly apart from a brief flurry of publicity in the 1990s when he published a book, Operation Eichmann, about his most significant operation.
He is survived by his second wife and by a son and daughter from his first marriage.
Zvi Aharoni, Israeli secret service agent, was born on February 6, 1921. He died on May 26, 2012, aged 91
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
