Nazi-hunter who doggedly pursued those in hiding after the war, including Adolf Eichmann in Argentina
One of the myths of the Second World War exposed to daylight in recent years is that of the diligence with which the Allies pursued former Nazis. The trials at Nuremberg dealt with those rounded up in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. Yet by the late 1940s the hunt for those who had escaped had been called off by governments now preoccupied with the chill in relations between East and West, and keen to make use of the expertise of their erstwhile enemies. Even the new state of Israel had more pressing concerns. The task of tracking down such infamous figures as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele was left to a handful of individuals driven by a sense of mission, among them Tuvia Friedman.
In common with his better-known colleague Simon Wiesenthal, Friedman was motivated by his own experience of the Holocaust. One of four children, he was born in 1922 in Radom, south of Warsaw. His father owned a printing business and his mother kept a dress shop. The family managed to escape the initial purges that followed the German invasion in 1939, but once their ghetto was liquidated in 1942 only Tuvia and his sister Bella survived.
Her Aryan looks — both of them were blond — saved the pair the next year when an SS officer spared them from execution, perhaps moved by Bella’s beauty. In June 1944 Tuvia escaped from the Szkolna Street camp in Radom through its sewers, and hid in the woods, living on raw potatoes. When he was captured by German soldiers, he got away by killing his guard with his own bayonet as he slept.
After the Soviet forces arrived in 1945 Friedman joined the Polish security service and, moving to Danzig (Gdansk), began to ferret out those in the German regime who had gone underground. By his own account, he was both brutal and vengeful in his methods but succeeded in arresting several hundred suspects, among them the collaborationist cardinal, Carl Maria Splett.
Friedman still found much hostility to Jews in Poland, and in 1946 he set out for Palestine. On getting to Vienna, however, he learnt the whereabouts of a member of the SS who had run camps in Radom, and denounced him. He was then given the task by Asher BenNatan, who was running Israel’s intelligence service in Europe, of finding Eichmann.
Friedman had never heard of him, although he had been the chief administrator of the Final Solution. One of his priorities was to acquire a photograph of his quarry, but Eichmann had destroyed even family keepsakes. Eventually, Ben-Natan and Friedman discovered the address of one of Eichmann’s many mistresses, and dispatched a handsome Hungarian Jew, Henyek Diamant, to make her acquaintance. Posing as a Dutch member of the SS, he found a photograph of Eichmann in an album of hers, and Friedman had it copied.
He remained in Vienna until 1952, helping to smuggle arms to Israel and organising the transport to Jerusalem of the remains of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. Friedman then settled in Haifa and married Anna Gutman, an eye surgeon.
But his failure to prosper rather embittered him, and he was disappointed by the Government’s seeming disinclination to go after Eichmann. At his own expense, he set up an archive of documents relating to the Holocaust, and, although it made him unpopular in official circles, continued to agitate in the press for the resumption of the hunt for the remaining Nazis.
It was Friedman’s high profile — as well as a $10,000 reward that he had offered — that in late 1959 prompted Lothar Hermann to write to him from his home in Argentina. Hermann had been a political prisoner in Dachau in the 1930s, and had correctly divined that the father of his daughter’s new boyfriend was the vanished Eichmann. Friedman passed on the address given him by Hermann to the Israeli authorities, and when Eichmann was snatched in Buenos Aires six months later by a team of agents and brought to Jerusalem for trial, Friedman believed that much of the credit was due to him.
In fact, Hermann had previously sent Eichmann’s address to a German prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, who had also alerted the Israelis, and a plan to seize Eichmann had been hatching for some time. Yet the reluctance of the BenGurion Government to disclose the part played in the kidnap by its secret service left a vacuum that the press first filled with Friedman and then, to Friedman’s growing irritation, with Wiesenthal, the abler self-publicist.
In the years afterwards Friedman continued to keep the search for the perpetrators of the Holocaust in the public eye. In fact, few of his claims proved to have much substance. He had originally thought, for instance, that Eichmann had been hiding in Kuwait, and when the skeletons of Mengele and Martin Bormann were found, denied that either was dead. None the less, as with Wiesenthal, perhaps his true service was his refusal to let matters drop, eventually embarrassing governments into action. The documents that he had collected were also used in Eichmann’s trial, leading to his execution in 1962.
Tuvia Friedman published a memoir, The Hunter, in 1961. His later years were blighted by the death of his son, a commando in the Israel Defence Forces, in a scuba-diving accident. His wife, Anna, also predeceased him.
Tuvia Friedman, Nazi-hunter, was born on January 23, 1922. He died on January 13, 2011, aged 88
