Nazi Hunters

On the evening of 11 May 1960 a man named Ricardo Klement got off a city bus on Garibaldi Street, in the suburb of San Fernando outside Buenos Aires, and walked the last hundred yards toward his front door. He was wearing a grey suit and carrying a worn leather briefcase. He was fifty-four years old. He worked at the Mercedes-Benz plant six miles away as a foreman. He had lived in the same house for nine years. He had a wife, three sons, a small dog and a vegetable garden. The man waiting for him at the corner was thirty years old, an Israeli intelligence officer named Peter Malkin. Behind Malkin, in a black Chevrolet parked at the kerb, sat three more agents of a small Israeli operation that had been watching Klement for three weeks. Malkin stepped forward, took Klement by the arm and said in German, the first language Klement had ever heard but had not spoken openly for fifteen years, Einen Moment, bitte. Klement made a single attempt to free himself and was bundled into the back of the car within four seconds.

The men who arranged the journey to Garibaldi Street had been working for fifteen years. They had compiled the lists from the camps and the deportation manifests. They had cross-referenced family names with marriage certificates, parish records, postal addresses. They had followed half-brothers and old colleagues through three continents. They had paid informants, intercepted correspondence, persuaded reluctant witnesses to testify. They had been ignored by the agencies that should have done the work for them, and in some cases obstructed by the agencies that wanted some of the men they were chasing left in peace. They had small budgets and few staff and they did not give up. By the time Klement was identified as Adolf Eichmann and the Mossad sent in its operational team, the basic intelligence had already been compiled by a Holocaust survivor working out of a small office in Vienna with a single secretary and a card index.

The men and women on this page are the people who decided, after 1945, that the work of holding the perpetrators to account was not going to do itself. Some of them were survivors. Some were lawyers, journalists, intelligence officers, government employees. Their work was small in scale against the scale of the killing. The number of perpetrators they brought to court runs into the low hundreds; the killers numbered hundreds of thousands. They knew this. Their argument was not that they could deliver full justice. It was that the alternative, doing nothing, accepted the deal that the Cold War had made: that the murder of six million Jews would be set aside in the interests of getting on with other business. They refused the deal. They paid for the refusal with their adult lives.

Simon Wiesenthal in the office on Salztorgasse

The most famous of them weighed under seven stone and was three days from death when the United States Army’s 71st Infantry Division entered Mauthausen on 5 May 1945. Simon Wiesenthal was thirty-six. He had survived four years and eleven camps, the last at Mauthausen and the longest at Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald. His wife, who he believed had been killed at Warsaw, would be located alive in Poland later that year; eighty-nine of his and her relatives had not been. Within four weeks he had presented himself to the United States Office of Strategic Services and offered to work as an informant. They put him to work. By the autumn of 1945 he was running a documentation operation out of a borrowed room in Linz, interviewing displaced persons in the camps, taking down names of perpetrators they had seen, building card indexes.

The operation moved to Vienna in 1947 as the Jewish Documentation Centre, closed for lack of funds in 1954, and reopened in 1961 in a single small office on the Salztorgasse off the Danube Canal, where Wiesenthal would work for the next four decades. He had a secretary, a card index, a typewriter, an annual budget that would not have paid the rent on a comparable operation in any major American city, and a telephone that Israeli intelligence officers, German prosecutors, journalists, neighbours of suspected war criminals and the occasional cranks all used to call him.

The work he did from that office can be illustrated by what he did on Eichmann. From 1947 onwards Wiesenthal had collected information on Eichmann’s whereabouts from former colleagues, family members, intercepted correspondence and a chance encounter at a wedding photograph. The man who had organised the deportation of two-thirds of European Jewry was not, by the late 1940s, easy to find; he had vanished in May 1945, and his death had been falsely reported several times. Wiesenthal did not believe the reports. He continued asking questions. By 1953 he had established that Eichmann was alive in Argentina. He passed the information to Israel; the Israeli intelligence services at that time had other priorities and did not act. Wiesenthal continued. By 1959 the political situation in Israel had changed and the Mossad had taken up the case. The operational team that drove down Garibaldi Street in May 1960 had several sources. Wiesenthal’s was one of them, and he had been working on it for thirteen years.

The Eichmann case was the largest in scale but not the only one. Wiesenthal led the identification of Karl Silberbauer, the SD officer who had arrested Anne Frank and her family in the secret annex on the Prinsengracht in August 1944; Silberbauer was located in 1963 working as a Vienna policeman. Wiesenthal pursued Hermine Braunsteiner, the Mare of Majdanek who had supervised the killing of children at the gas chambers; she was found by his office to be living in Queens, New York, married to an American serviceman, and was extradited to West Germany. He worked for ten years on Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, who was located in São Paulo and extradited in 1967. He kept files on perhaps ninety thousand individuals at the height of the work.

The man himself was contested in his own lifetime. Other Nazi hunters, particularly the Klarsfelds in Paris, found him publicity-hungry and wished he would acknowledge their work more often. The Israeli political establishment never quite trusted his independence. The far right hated him; his office was twice bombed and he received death threats almost weekly for fifty years. He was unembarrassed by the friction. I am not the Lord, he told an interviewer in the 1980s, and I am not Israel. I am one man. What I can do, I will do. He died at his desk in Vienna in September 2005 at the age of ninety-six. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, which was founded in his name in 1977 by the rabbi Marvin Hier and is not the same organisation as Wiesenthal’s own Vienna office, continues separate operations.

The Klarsfelds in Paris

If Wiesenthal worked alone at a desk, the Klarsfelds worked together on the streets. Beate Künzel was born in Berlin in 1939 to a Wehrmacht clerk who had been wounded on the Eastern Front and a housewife who lived through the postwar bombing without becoming particularly interested in what her husband had done in the army. She moved to Paris in 1960 to work as an au pair, met Serge Klarsfeld at a Paris Métro station in 1960 when she asked him for directions, married him in 1963, and for the rest of her life worked in partnership with him. Serge was the son of Arno Klarsfeld, who had been deported from Nice on convoy 61 to Auschwitz in November 1943 and had been killed there; Serge had been hidden as a child by a Parisian Catholic family and had survived. He had become a lawyer.

The Klarsfelds did three kinds of work. The first was political theatre. On 7 November 1968 Beate Klarsfeld walked onto the floor of the West German parliament during a Christian Democratic Union party congress in Berlin, walked up to Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had been a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and had spent the war working in the Foreign Office’s broadcasting section, and slapped him hard across the face. Nazi! Nazi! she shouted in the silence that followed. She was arrested, tried, sentenced to a year in prison, given a suspended sentence on appeal. The slap was the moment when the question of senior West German politicians’ Nazi pasts became a political issue that could no longer be deflected. Kiesinger lost the chancellorship the following year.

The second was the relentless tracking of named perpetrators. The Klarsfelds spent fourteen years on Klaus Barbie. They published a dossier of his crimes in 1972 that was distributed to French government departments, German prosecutors and journalists in five countries. They travelled to La Paz on three separate occasions, including once with Beate posing as a journalist, to confirm Barbie’s address and identity. They lobbied four French presidents. They ran a public campaign that was answered, in 1983, by the Bolivian decision to expel Barbie under the new civilian government of Hernán Siles Zuazo. He was tried in Lyon in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1991. The Klarsfelds were in court for the verdict. They had been working on the case for twenty-three years.

They also forced the trials of Maurice Papon, the Vichy official who had supervised the deportation of 1,690 Jews from Bordeaux including 223 children, by gathering and publishing the documents from his administrative archive that French successive governments had wished to keep buried; Papon was convicted in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight. They documented the role of Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn in the deportation of seventy-six thousand Jews from France. After successive German governments had refused to extradite the three to France, Beate Klarsfeld in 1971 attempted to abduct Lischka in Cologne and put him in the boot of a car for the drive across the border; the attempt was bungled, she was arrested by German police, and the resulting public scandal forced a German trial in 1979 in which all three men were finally convicted.

The third was the building of the archive. Serge Klarsfeld compiled the Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, a name-by-name record of the seventy-six thousand Jews deported from France between March 1942 and August 1944, naming the convoy, the date, the camp of destination and the place of birth of each. The book runs to two thousand pages. It is the foundational document of French Holocaust scholarship. Serge produced it on his own time over fifteen years using train manifests recovered from French and German archives, and personally arranged for its publication. He has continued the work into his ninth decade. Beate died in May 2024 at the age of eighty-five. Serge attended her funeral at the cemetery of Père Lachaise wearing the small Auschwitz convoy badge he had worn at every public appearance since 1965. He continues to work.

The Mossad in its operational decades

The Israeli intelligence services treated Nazi hunting as a state task in the years between the founding of the country in 1948 and the slow fading of operational priority in the 1990s. The Eichmann operation of 1960 is the famous case, but it was not the typical one. The Israelis did not repeat the public abduction model. They had taken Eichmann from Argentina without Argentine permission, had embarrassed the Argentine government to the point of UN Security Council action, and had set the diplomatic limits within which the country was prepared to operate. Subsequent operations were smaller, quieter and either successful in different ways or quietly unsuccessful.

The case of Herberts Cukurs is one of the harder ones. Cukurs had been a Latvian aviator who had become a famous figure in interwar Riga as the first man to fly solo from Latvia to The Gambia. During the German occupation he had served as the deputy commander of the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian auxiliary unit responsible for the killing of perhaps thirty thousand Jews in Latvia. He had personally participated in the killings at the Rumbula Forest in November and December 1941. He had escaped at the end of the war to Brazil and then settled in São Paulo as a small-business owner. The Mossad investigated him for years. In February 1965 a team led by Yaakov Meidad lured Cukurs to a rented house in Montevideo on the pretext of a business proposition, killed him, and left a typed statement on his body identifying him as a war criminal. The operation was on the edge of what the Israeli political establishment would tolerate and was followed by a tightening of the operational rules. There were no further extra-judicial executions of named perpetrators by the Mossad. Letter bombs were sent to Alois Brunner in Damascus in 1961 and 1980; one took an eye, another took fingers; neither killed him. The Mossad continued to search for Mengele in São Paulo for two decades and got close on at least two occasions; the operation was suspended in the 1960s when Egyptian intelligence kidnapped an Israeli engineer working on the rocket programme and the resources had to be redirected. Mengele drowned in 1979 unaware that he had been the most wanted Nazi in the world.

Tuviah Friedman in Haifa

One of the smallest operations was run from a one-room office in Haifa by a man who had survived the Radom labour camp at the age of twenty-one and who had then, after liberation in 1945, joined the Polish militia and spent eighteen months personally hunting Germans in the Kraków region. Tuviah Friedman moved to Vienna in 1946 to work with Wiesenthal, then to Israel in 1952 to set up his own institute. His funding was tiny. His persistence was remarkable.

In December 1959 he placed advertisements in newspapers in West Germany and Austria offering ten thousand Israeli pounds for information on Eichmann’s whereabouts. The advertisements produced few useful tips but they generated press coverage that, taken together with the work of Wiesenthal in Vienna and the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt, kept the case in front of the public at the precise moment when the Mossad was deciding whether to mount the operation. Friedman could not have brought Eichmann in himself. He could ensure that nobody in any of the relevant offices was able to forget who Eichmann was. He continued the work for fifty years; he died in Haifa in January 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.

Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt

The single figure who has been most overlooked in the popular history of Nazi hunting was a German Jewish public prosecutor who in May 1957 received from a German emigrant in Argentina, a partly blind ex-judge named Lothar Hermann, the address at which Adolf Eichmann was living. Fritz Bauer had himself been imprisoned at Heuberg concentration camp in 1933 for his work as a young Social Democratic prosecutor, had escaped to Denmark and then Sweden, and had returned to Germany in 1949. By 1956 he was the chief public prosecutor of the State of Hesse, headquartered in Frankfurt. He could not trust the West German federal authorities. He could not trust the Federal Intelligence Service, which was full of former Wehrmacht and SS officers under Reinhard Gehlen. So he passed the Eichmann tip directly to the Israeli ambassador to West Germany.

It took the Mossad three more years and several rounds of additional verification to act, but the chain of intelligence on which the operation was eventually built started with Bauer’s confidential briefing to the Israelis in November 1957. Bauer subsequently brought the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965, in which twenty-two former Auschwitz personnel were tried in West Germany itself, the first sustained domestic prosecution of camp officers by a West German court and a turning point in the German public’s confrontation with what their parents and neighbours had done. Bauer was sixty-four when he died of unexplained causes in his bath in his Frankfurt apartment in July 1968. The German press at the time reported the death as natural. His staff and many subsequent biographers have not been so sure.

Efraim Zuroff and the late prosecutions

By the 1980s the original generation of hunters was either dead, retiring or running out of energy, and the remaining perpetrators were running out of time. The next generation of work was different in character. Most of the senior leadership had been tried, killed or had died. What remained was the much larger pool of camp guards, policemen, local auxiliaries and lower-ranking officers who had taken part in the killing in numbers that historians have estimated at approximately a quarter of a million. Many were living quiet retirements in the Baltic states, in Croatia, in Hungary, in Romania, in Lithuania, where postwar Communist regimes had either prosecuted incompletely or had used the prosecutions for political theatre and let many men go. Most were old men. Most were not famous. The political appetite for prosecuting them was weak.

The American-born Israeli historian Efraim Zuroff, who had joined the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in 1980 and had directed its Jerusalem office from 1986, took on the work. From 2002 he ran what he called Operation Last Chance, offering rewards of up to twenty-five thousand euros for information leading to the identification and prosecution of any surviving Nazi war criminal. The operation produced leads in dozens of cases. Zuroff personally tracked Aribert Heim, the Butcher of Mauthausen, to Cairo, where he had lived undisturbed under an assumed name as a converted Muslim and had died of cancer in 1992. Zuroff worked on Sándor Képíró, a Hungarian gendarmerie officer responsible for the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942 in Yugoslavia; Képíró was tried in Budapest in 2011 and acquitted under controversial circumstances at the age of ninety-seven, four weeks before his death.

Zuroff’s most consequential intervention was on the German legal test for camp guards. For decades German courts had required prosecutors to prove a specific act of murder by an individual defendant, a test that excused most camp personnel because they had not personally pulled triggers. Zuroff and others argued for years that service as a guard at a death camp was itself participation in the crime of mass murder. The argument prevailed in May 2011, when a Munich court convicted John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who had served as a Trawniki-trained guard at Sobibór, on the principle that the work of any guard at a killing centre was the work of an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk was eighty-eight, in a wheelchair, and died before his appeal was decided. The principle survived him.

The Demjanjuk decision opened the door to the late prosecutions of Oskar Gröning, the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, who was convicted in 2015 at the age of ninety-four and died before he could begin his sentence; Reinhold Hanning, also ninety-four, convicted in 2016 and died in 2017; Bruno Dey, a Stutthof guard convicted in 2020 at the age of ninety-three; and Irmgard Furchner, who had worked as a typist in the Stutthof commandant’s office and was convicted in 2022 at the age of ninety-seven, the last of these prosecutions and almost certainly the last that will ever happen. Zuroff was in court for several of these verdicts. He has been quoted as saying that the small numbers and great age of the defendants are not the point. The point is that as long as a single perpetrator is alive, the obligation to bring him to justice is not extinguished. He continues, in his late sixties, to pursue the remaining leads.

Eli Rosenbaum and the Office of Special Investigations

The United States had let in several thousand former Nazi collaborators after the war, often as displaced persons whose records were not checked. Some had been actively recruited by American intelligence agencies. From 1979 the Office of Special Investigations in the Department of Justice, established by Congress under the Holtzman Amendment, took on the work of identifying, denaturalising and deporting them. The unit was small, never more than thirty lawyers and historians, and its remit was civil immigration law rather than criminal prosecution; it could strip naturalised American citizens of their citizenship and have them deported, but it could not put them on trial. Within those limits it was effective. Under the long directorship of Eli Rosenbaum, who joined the unit in 1980 and led it from 1995 to 2010, the OSI brought 137 cases, denaturalised 107 individuals, and deported many of them.

The targets included John Demjanjuk; Vilis Hāzners, a former Latvian SS commander; Bohdan Koziy, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who had killed Jewish children in Lysets; Jakob Reimer, a Trawniki guard who had served at Sobibór; Aleksandras Lileikis, the Lithuanian security police chief in Vilnius; and dozens more. The unit was renamed the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section in 2010 and continues its work on more recent cases of crimes against humanity from later conflicts. Rosenbaum was succeeded by other directors who have kept the work going. The unit has had no political profile and has done its work in obscurity. It has, between 1979 and the present, removed from the United States a substantial proportion of the surviving Nazi collaborators who had taken refuge there in the years after the war.

What the hunters changed

The number of perpetrators brought to court by the hunters’ work is small against the scale of the killing. Hundreds of thousands took part in the genocide; a few hundred faced courts. The hunters knew this. Their argument was not that they could deliver full justice. It was that the alternative, doing nothing, accepted the deal that the Cold War had made: that the murder of six million Jews would be set aside in the interests of getting on with other business.

What they changed was three things. The first was the public archive of perpetrator identities. Wiesenthal’s card index, the Klarsfelds’ dossier, Bauer’s prosecutor’s files, the OSI’s case histories, Zuroff’s leads, are now part of the documentary record from which historians work. The killers have names. The names are findable. The system that produced them is anatomised. That archive did not exist in 1945. It exists now because these people built it.

The second was the political pressure that forced governments to act when they would have preferred to let things lie. The Bolivian extradition of Barbie in 1983, the German trial of Lischka in 1979, the West German trial of the Auschwitz personnel at Frankfurt in 1963 to 1965, the late prosecutions of camp guards in the 2010s and 2020s, did not happen because the governments concerned woke up one morning and decided to do the right thing. They happened because somebody had spent decades making it impossible for them to keep refusing.

The third was the doctrine. The work the hunters did, slow, expensive, often legally innovative, established that the obligation to prosecute the men who had built the camps and the killing units was not extinguished by the passage of time, by the political inconvenience of doing so, or by the age of the defendant. That principle, that there is no statute of limitations on participation in genocide, is now embedded in the laws and the practice of every state that takes international criminal law seriously. It is one of the things that did not exist before 1945 and does exist now. It exists because the people on this page made it exist.

See also

Sources

  • Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Doubleday, 2010
  • Hella Pick, Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996
  • Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Piatkus, 2018
  • Serge Klarsfeld, Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Klarsfeld, 1978, revised editions to 2012
  • Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009
  • Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street, Viking, 1975
  • Ronen Steinke, Fritz Bauer: The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial, Indiana University Press, 2020
  • Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963 to 1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law, Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Efraim Zuroff, Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
  • Andrew Nagorski, The Nazi Hunters, Simon and Schuster, 2016
  • Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009