Eichmann in My Hands

A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner

Peter Z. Malkin, Harry Stein

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504055499
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

The true story behind "one of history's great manhunts" and the film Operation Finale by the Mossad legend who caught the most wanted Nazi in the world ( The New York Times ). 1n 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial. The result is a portrait of two men. One, a freedom fighter, intellectually curious and driven to do right. The other, the dutiful Good German who, through his chillingly intimate conversations with Malkin, reveals himself as the embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." Singular, riveting, troubling, and gratifying, Eichmann in My Hands "remind[s] of what is at stake: not only justice but our own humanity" ( New York Newsday ). Now Malkin's story comes to life on the screen with Oscar Isaac playing the heroic Mossad agent and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley playing Eichmann in Operation Finale.

INDEX

Adenauer, Konrad, 84, 267

Amadeo, Mario, 266

Anschluss, 32

Anti-Semitism, 18, 229–30, 267

Arabs, 22, 27

British attitude toward, 35–37

disorganization, 62

hostilities after 1948 partition, 60–65

Nazis working for, 83–86

Argentina

Eichmann arrival in, 80–82

Eichmann discovered in, 122–25

Eichmann’s Garibaldi Street hideout, 163–66

Eichmann’s surveillance in, 167–72

first suspicions of Eichmann in, 111–12

government policies, 208, 265–66

logistics of Eichmann’s capture in, 152, 186–90

materials for Eichmann’s capture in, 134

safe house in, 173

Shin Beth team in, 129–30, 151–66

Auschwitz (camp), 41, 50, 136, 171, 275

Austria

Eichmann’s initiation of Final Solution in, 32–34

postwar government dissassociation from Eichmann, 267

see also Anschluss

Balfour Declaration (1917), 36

See also British Mandate

Barbie, Klaus, 109

Barth, Adolf (Eichmann alias), 79

Bauer, Fritz, 112, 122, 199

Beit Hamm (the House of the People), 1–2

Belzec (camp), 47

Ben-Gurion, David, 60, 84, 261, 265, 266

Bergen-Belsen (camp), 49

Boldt, Gerhard, 81

Bormann, Martin, 109, 206

Brandner, Ferdinand, 83

British Mandate, 35–41, 57–58

Buchenwald (camp), 33

Bue...