The Nazi Hunters (50 page)

(12)

From the bulletproof glass booth constructed for his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust, heard the court sentence him to death on December 15, 1961. After Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires and smuggled him on a special flight to Israel, his case triggered new debates about the Holocaust and “the banality of evil.”

(13)

Eichmann pacing the yard of his Israeli prison cell.

(14)

A Social Democrat from a secular Jewish family, the German judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer spent most of the Nazi era in exile. Returning to West Germany after the war, he played a critical secret role in the capture of Eichmann. In the 1960s, he orchestrated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that forced many Germans to confront their past.

(15)

Among the defendants in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, SS Staff Sergeant Wilhelm Boger stood out because of his particularly sadistic interrogations. The descriptions of his elaborate torture devices produced mesmerizing—and repelling—testimony.

(16)

By the 1970s, bestselling novels and hit movies provided highly entertaining but misleading tales of Nazi hunters. In
The Boys from Brazil,
Gregory Peck played Josef Mengele, who is pursued by a Simon Wiesenthal–like character.

(17)

In
Marathon Man,
the evil Nazi is a fugitive concentration camp dentist played by Laurence Olivier (above), who tortures Babe Levy, his young American pursuer played by Dustin Hoffman.

(18)

In May 1941, this group of foreign Jews in France was arrested and dispatched from the Austerlitz station in Paris to internment camps. Later, French Jews were also rounded up both by the German occupiers and their French collaborators, and thousands were sent to death camps.

(19)

Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld at a press conference in Bonn in 1979, presenting evidence against former SS officer Kurt Lischka about his role in the deportation of French Jews. Serge’s father died in Auschwitz, giving the French-German couple a powerful motive to pursue such cases.

(20)

One of the Klarsfelds’ most famous feats was to track down Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” in Bolivia. (Above) Barbie entering the Lyon court in 1987, where he was given a life sentence.

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The children’s home in the French village of Izieu served as a refuge for Jews until Barbie’s Gestapo arrested all forty-four children and seven guardians there on April 6, 1944. Except for one guardian, they all perished in Auschwitz.

(22)

As the longest-serving director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Eli Rosenbaum led the government’s efforts to identify and strip Nazi war criminals living in the United States of their citizenship.

(23)

In an early case, Rosenbaum targeted Arthur Rudolph, one of the German rocket scientists brought to the United States. Rudolph developed the Saturn V rocket that sent the first astronauts to the moon, but he had also worked thousands of prisoners to death while producing V-2 rockets during the war. Rudolph’s wartime identification card with an added postwar British stamp on it.