Today in History—May 11: The Day Adolf Eichmann Was Captured
Imagine your daughter brings home a young man.
She seems happy, but there’s a problem: His father is one of the architects of the Holocaust, one of the men responsible for your time in Dachau concentration camp, where Gestapo officers beat you so brutally that you went blind.
This is the story of how a blind Holocaust survivor and his teenage daughter helped capture one of the world’s most wanted war criminals: Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi lieutenant who helped oversee the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps.
After his release from Dachau, Lothar Hermann settled in Argentina with his wife and daughter, Silvia. He rarely spoke of his Jewish heritage or what he’d endured.
Then teenage Silvia started dating Klaus, the eldest son in the Eichmann family. Both families had traded Germany for Argentina after World War II. Lothar’s hackles were raised when Silvia’s beau made antisemitic remarks—and mentioned that his father, Ricardo Klement, had served under Adolf Hitler. (Only Adolf Eichmann changed his surname in Argentina.)
But the Hermanns moved away, and Lothar’s suspicions faded with the distance.
Then, in 1957, Lothar read of Nazi trials in Frankfurt that mentioned Adolf Eichmann. He wrote to prosecutors in Germany with his hunch.
The chief prosecutor wrote back: Can you confirm it?
So, Silvia and her dad traveled hundreds of miles to the Eichmanns’ home. She pretended to look for Klaus, and she glimpsed Adolf inside.
It was enough. The prosecutor quietly alerted Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, fearing Nazi sympathizers on the German force might warn Eichmann.
And then—nothing happened.
The first tip about Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts was dismissed because agents thought he would never live in a middle-class suburb.
Eichmann had already escaped an American detention center and fled through Italy to Argentina, then a haven for former Nazis. But Mossad agents dismissed the claim. Lothar’s reports and the prosecutor’s alerts went nowhere for nearly three years.
In March 1960 Lothar accused the Israeli agency offering a reward for Eichmann’s capture of ignoring him to avoid paying.
Finally, another Mossad team traveled to Argentina. They seized Eichmann on his way home on May 11, 1960, and smuggled him to Israel to stand trial. He was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed in 1962.
Lothar spent the next decade fighting for the reward money, receiving it only after appealing directly to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
- $130: Initial amount given by Mossad to Lothar to cover his expenses and information
- ~71: Lothar’s age when he finally received the reward for Eichmann’s capture
- $10,000: Amount of the reward for Eichmann’s capture
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