In the autumn of 1945 a twenty-three-year-old man named Tuviah Friedman walked into the Jewish Documentation Centre at Linz, where Simon Wiesenthal was beginning his postwar work, and offered himself for any task that needed doing. He had liberated himself from a labour camp at Radom in Poland in January 1945 by escaping during the chaos of the German evacuation. He had then joined the Polish security services as a junior officer attached to the unit hunting German fugitives in the Kraków region, working under the direct supervision of the Soviet NKVD officers who were running the postwar Polish security apparatus. He had personally arrested approximately two hundred Germans in the eighteen months he had served. He had returned home one evening in mid-1946 to find a former colleague waiting outside his Kraków apartment with the warning that the NKVD had decided his usefulness was at an end and that he should leave Poland that night. He had crossed into Czechoslovakia the following morning with twenty United States dollars sewn into the lining of his coat. He had reached Vienna by the end of the week. Within a year he had been working with Wiesenthal on the Documentation Centre files. By 1952 he had moved to the new state of Israel, set up his own institute in Haifa, and continued the work for the next fifty-eight years.
Friedman was the most direct of the early Nazi-hunting figures. Where Wiesenthal had built a methodology of card indexes and cross-referencing, Friedman had built one of advertisements, public appeals, and direct confrontation. He was less subtle than Wiesenthal. He produced fewer cases. He kept the question of Nazi prosecution in the public press in Israel and in West Germany at a time when neither government’s interest in pursuing it was strong. He outlived Wiesenthal by six years. He died in Haifa in January 2011 at the age of eighty-eight, having continued to operate his single-room institute at Yiftah Street near the Haifa central bus station almost to the end.
The Eichmann advertisements
Friedman’s most consequential contribution to the Eichmann case was a series of advertisements he placed in West German and Austrian newspapers in November and December 1959. The advertisements offered a reward of ten thousand Israeli pounds, approximately three thousand dollars at the prevailing exchange rate, for information leading to the arrest of Adolf Eichmann. Friedman had drawn the funding from a Haifa-based fundraising committee and from American Jewish federations. The advertisements ran in Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Hamburger Abendblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the Vienna Kronen Zeitung over a three-week period.
The advertisements produced few useful tips. Most of the responses were cranks. Some were anti-Semitic abuse. A small number purported to identify Eichmann as living in Damascus, in Cairo, in Asunción, or in various other locations that did not match the Mossad’s existing intelligence. None of them came from the Argentine source that mattered. The Mossad operation that seized Eichmann in May 1960 was already in the planning stage at the time of the advertisements; the operational team had been compiled and was preparing for deployment.
The advertisements’ contribution was therefore not the production of new intelligence but the maintenance of public pressure. The Mossad operation depended on political cover from the Israeli government, which had multiple reasons to prefer not to mount such an operation in the absence of public demand. Friedman’s advertisements, taken together with Wiesenthal’s continued public profile in Vienna and Bauer’s confidential pressure in Frankfurt, ensured that the political cost of inaction continued to rise. The Israeli political class could not, by late 1959, easily justify continued passivity. The operation was launched. Friedman’s advertisements had played a part. He was not a member of the operational team. He claimed in his subsequent writings, with some exaggeration, that the advertisements had been the trigger for the operation; the historical record has set his contribution lower but real.
The Haifa Institute
The Tuviah Friedman Documentation Centre operated from a single room at 27 Yiftah Street in Haifa from 1952 until shortly before Friedman’s death in 2011. The room contained a desk, a typewriter, two filing cabinets, a small library of German-language reference works, and a collection of approximately 7,000 individual case files compiled over Friedman’s working life. Friedman maintained the files himself. He had no permanent staff. He was occasionally assisted by volunteers, including students from the University of Haifa and visiting researchers from the United States and from Yad Vashem. The institute’s annual budget never exceeded a few thousand dollars.
The cases Friedman worked on included the identification of Franz Stangl in São Paulo (which he pursued in parallel with Wiesenthal in the 1960s, the two men competing rather than cooperating); the location of Franz Murer, the Butcher of Vilna, who was tried and acquitted in Graz in 1963 in a verdict that Friedman publicly criticised; the identification of Erich Rajakowitsch, who had supervised the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Netherlands and whom Friedman traced to Milan in the early 1960s; and the location of various smaller figures, mostly in Germany, Austria, and South America. Friedman produced approximately ten books over his career, all in Hebrew, on his work and on related Holocaust topics.
The relationship with Wiesenthal
Friedman and Wiesenthal had known each other since 1945. They had collaborated in Linz in the 1946 to 1948 period and had developed at that time a close working relationship. The relationship deteriorated after Friedman’s move to Israel in 1952. The two men were temperamentally different, Wiesenthal the patient documentary researcher, Friedman the public agitator, and they came to disagree on tactics and on credit-taking. They duplicated each other’s work on several cases including Stangl. They occasionally briefed against each other to journalists. Wiesenthal’s autobiographical writings give Friedman a small role in the postwar Nazi-hunting work; Friedman’s give himself a larger one than the documentary record supports.
The two men reconciled in their later years. Friedman attended Wiesenthal’s seventieth birthday celebration in Vienna in 1978. Wiesenthal sent a message of congratulation on Friedman’s eightieth in 2002. The reconciliation was personal rather than professional. Their methodologies remained different. The wider Nazi-hunting community had room for both.
What Friedman achieved
The number of perpetrators identified or located through Friedman’s specific work, by careful counting from the institute’s case files, is in the low hundreds. Most were minor figures. Some were never prosecuted. The institute’s contribution to Holocaust historiography has been smaller than Wiesenthal’s Vienna office and substantially smaller than the Klarsfelds’ Paris archive. The historical assessment of Friedman’s specific contribution is therefore that he was a real but secondary figure in the postwar Nazi-hunting enterprise.
The wider contribution Friedman made was different in character. He was, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the most public Israeli voice on Nazi-hunting. He published in the Israeli press, gave lectures at Israeli universities, and maintained a continuous public presence on the question at a time when Israeli public discourse on the Holocaust was substantially less developed than it would become after the Eichmann trial. His public agitation for the prosecution of perpetrators was part of the cultural foundation on which the Eichmann trial built. He was not the most consequential of the early figures. He was one of the more visible.
The institute Friedman built and operated for fifty-eight years has been preserved by his family. Its case files have been transferred to Yad Vashem. The single room at Yiftah Street has been preserved as a memorial. Friedman himself was buried in Haifa with a private ceremony attended by his immediate family and a small number of professional colleagues. His son David Friedman, an Israeli academic, has continued some of the work in the form of historical research.
See also
- Simon Wiesenthal
- Adolf Eichmann
- Franz Stangl
- The Netherlands
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- The Eichmann Trial 1961
Sources
- Tuviah Friedman, The Hunter, Doubleday, 1961
- Tuviah Friedman, Hatred against Jews and Israel: Selected Essays and Articles 1958 to 2008, Tuviah Friedman Documentation Centre, 2008
- Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, Continuum, 2002
- Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Doubleday, 2010
- Tuviah Friedman Documentation Centre archive, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
- Andrew Nagorski, The Nazi Hunters, Simon and Schuster, 2016