Nearly a decade ago, as part of the Jewish Film Festival, I viewed The Specialist, a documentary on the April 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel. I recall being rivetted and my wayward memory still harbours a few images of pasty-faced, didactic Eichmann defending himself (unsuccessfully, he was hanged a year later). What I didn’t quite understand from that movie was just how monstrous Eichmann was in the Nazi death machine and how ardently he was sought by the new state of Israel after the war. Both of those shortfalls in knowledge are quickly corrected in the recent history Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi by ex-journalist Neal Bascomb.
Hunting Eichmann kicks off with a crew of Mossad agents waiting for Eichmann’s regular bus to disgorge him in Buenos Aires, drops back into Austria in early 1944 to witness Eichmann preparing to supervise the killing of nearly three quarters of a million Jews in Hungary, and then rockets forward at a jet–propelled pace. This book is not a study of genocide or a psychological dissection of a monster, it is the hunt and that is all. Using many existing references, but also new interviews, Bascomb skilfully relates how Eichmann escaped after war’s end, how he was finally found, and how the Mossad team boldly nabbed him and spirited him to the land of his countless victims. The story is filled with tension and Bascomb wrings every ounce of it from his stylish plotting and writing.
Eichmann’s capture and trial, occurring as they did a decade and a half after one of the defining horrors of the twentieth century, were momentous events for the social psychology of both Israel and Germany. For the rest of us, too, Eichmann remains a cipher and genocide’s proof. Bascomb’s thrilling tale is, to my mind, a welcome addition to the historical record.