The Hunt for Adolf Eichmann: Case Closed (from History's Greatest Mysteries)

Today, the global man-hunt for a Nazi war criminal who vanished after the Holocaust

“and the stunning operation that finally brought him to justice.”

Adolf Aykman was the architect of the Nazi Holocaust. He murdered millions of Jews, yet the allies.

Never even knew his name.

He takes this idea of the final solution and turns it into almost an assembly line process. At the end of World War II, Aykman hides in plain sight. There's so much chaos that the allies don't even realize that they have Aykman and custody, and by the time they realize it, he's vanished. Nazi hunters are convinced that Aykman is still alive, but a decade passes and no one knows

where he could possibly be.

“Now we explore the top theories surrounding Adolf Aykman's whereabouts leading up to his dramatic”

capture. These Nazis and Germany end up with a really surprising ally, the Catholic Church. And Israeli investigator receives a tip off that Adolf Aykman has been recently spotted in Kuwait. There was only one existing photograph of Aykman. It's really like hunting a ghost. What really happened to Adolf Aykman? Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by

rewind studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history. Backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject, this week is a special case closed investigation where our hunt for answers ends with a solution. And today, we're diving into the hunt for Adolf Aykman. Today, I'm Justin Wolfers, host of the Platypus Economics podcast.

“If there's one thing I've learned from a career teaching economics, it's that your life is shaped”

by economic currents you'll never see. A single price tag can explain things a thousand experts

can't. People who understand economics, they make better decisions in their careers, their finances, their relationships, and their communities, and I want that for you. Listen to and follow Platypus Economics, available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's January 1942, and in a lakeside mansion near Berlin, 15 senior Nazi officials are meeting. The topic, the systematic annihilation of Europe's Jews, what the Nazis refer to as

the final solution. Well, along with these high officials, there's one Lieutenant Colonel, very quiet, very unassuming taking notes, but he's also providing information like the amount of Jews in different countries. This is Adolf Aykman. Aykman is not really well known as a frontman of the Nazis. He's more of a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat, and he really views the killing of millions of Jews as sort of this logistical problem that he's in charge of solving.

Aykman grows up in Austria, the son of an accountant. He joins the Nazi party in 1932 at age 26. Aykman had joined the SD, the SS's Intelligence Agency in 1934. In 1936, he's recruited by a member of the SD to join the so-called Jewish Affairs Division, and eventually he comes to take over this division. He makes it named for himself

after the annexation of Austria, where he works at a system for basically speeding up the

immigration of Jewish populations outside of Germany. He figures out how to conduct these mass deportations as fast as possible. He devises a system to give deportation papers to Jewish people on the spot, while also stripping them of the possession stripping them of the wealth and getting them essentially out of the country within less than an hours time. Once World War II starts, Aykman becomes more and more fanatical.

And once the final solution is decided upon, he becomes the central operational figure behind the Holocaust. Hitler is the one who's ordering these atrocities, but Aykman is the bureaucrat in charge of actually carrying them out. There are a lot of pieces of information that come out of Nazi Germany during World War II, and it's just so hard for Westerners to comprehend this scale of tragedy that it's not

until we start to overrun some of the outlying murder camps that we can't deny what's going on anymore. In January of 1945, Hitler retreats to his bunker. By April of that year, he's dead,

Despite the fact that many high-ranking Nazis have been captured, Aykman is never found.

“And on top of that, most of the world has never even heard his name.”

Six months go by before the public finally learns about aid-off Aykman and his role in the Holocaust. In November of 1945, all eyes are on Normburg, Germany where 24 Nazi officials are put on trial for their atrocities during World War II, and it's here that Aykman's name first comes up. Prosecutors quote this Hungarian Jewish leader who tells the story of a mass deportation of Hungarian Jews from Budapest. So there's a special unit that is running operations there,

and Aykman is in charge of that unit. He is the one who's going to decide who's going to

the gas chambers, and who will live. A few weeks later, on January 3rd, 1946, an SS captain with

ties to Aykman is called to testify. He had joined the Nazis' intelligence service and then had become one of Aykman's men in the so-called Jewish affairs division of the Gestapo. He claims that he pushed back against his planned to kill millions of Jews, but Aykman simply told him you're being too sentimental about it. The Nuremberg testimony gives Aykman worldwide notoriety, but his whereabouts are still unknown. Finding Aykman won't be easy, but after the revelations

“at Nuremberg, it's a priority. The question is, where could he be?”

There are millions of Germans packed into POW camps all over Europe. The Americans alone have two million in captivity, but these camps are cramped. They're not well-organized. They don't have the names of everybody in them, but the obvious place to look for, Aykman is in POW camps around Europe. Which brings us to theory number one. He was hiding in a POW camp under a false name.

Despite the fact that most of the world has never heard the name,

it of Aykman, the US counterintelligence corps has actually been compiling a dossier on him for months. Investigators go and track down Aykman's wife, Vera. They find her in Austria. She claims that she hasn't seen her husband in months, and she doesn't even have a photograph of him. It's clear that he was really planning ahead here. He was making sure that there were no pictures of him left over. SS officers tell allied officials that Aykman was still alive at the end of the war,

and he probably still is. They don't think that Aykman would have taken his own life the way that other Nazi officials did at this time. With all of the chaos in the disorganization and the disarray of these POW camps, it becomes very, very likely that Aykman is using these POW camps to hide out. The Allies also assume that he's using an alias. CIC distributes notices to their regional offices and they call Aykman, quote, "of the highest importance among war criminals." As it turns out,

the Americans already have Aykman in custody, they just don't know it. At the end of the war, Aykman actually goes down into Austria to hide out and there are tons of Nazis all over the plate hiding from the Allies. He meets with his wife and gives her instructions on how to deal with allied investigators, which he knows are coming. His plan is to head north west to Germany with his assistant, staying in homes of people who are sympathetic to former Nazis. A little later

in May, however, Aykman and his assistant are picked up by US Army Patrol, and they're taken to a US POW camp in Biden. Aykman gives a false name, a false identity, by the name of Adolf Barth. In the camp, Aykman plots how to keep from being discovered and how to escape. Aykman is going to be identified sooner or later because every SS officer like Aykman has a unique identifier that's not common in the rest of the German very much. Every SS soldier has his blood type

tattooed inside his armpit, and that means if you make all of the captives take off their shirts and hold their hands up in the air, you can quickly pick out a fanatical Nazis. He tries to burn that tattoo with cigarettes, but it doesn't work, so he's not going to nail the claim he's not

“to remember the SS, but there are plenty of SS men who are POWs at the end of the war.”

So what he tells the Allied officials is that his name is actually Otto Eckman, and that he's a lieutenant, Colonel, in the SS. Aykman makes the switch thinking Eckman is close enough to his real surname. If an old acquaintance were to suddenly blurred out his real name, Eckman in the camp, it would be less likely to route suspicion.

Aykman knows that he can't play this game forever. He's gotten through a couple of interrogations undetected, but he knows it's only a matter of time before he's found out to be who he really is.

papers that pass him off as a hunter in the area, and the SS officers in the camp also get

“him some civilian clothes. And one night, Eckman is able to climb over a section of barbed wire”

fence that isn't viewed by any camp guards, and he's able to make his escape into the surrounding woods, and there he vanishes. Authorities learned that an SS officer named Otto Eckman has escaped, and so they interrogate all the other former SS officers that are in the camp. And those people confirm that Otto Eckman actually is, Adolf Eckman. It really shows how disorganized the situation in Europe

is at the end of 45 and beginning of 46. The Allies wind up realizing that they've been looking for Eckman for months, when in reality he was hiding right underneath their nose inside one of their own compounds. And so it's a little embarrassing, it's a little frustrating, but it also means that they're pretty hot on his tail. It's not just allied officials who are searching for Eckman.

“We also have the Hagenath, the Jewish intelligence services that ultimately became the IDF once”

the Israeli state was established. The Hagenath tried to find Eckman by assembling this team of five operatives that are going to track his family. They launched this much more elaborate investigation than the Allied forces had. The team travels to Austria, and after months of searching, locates the current homes of Eckman's wife and brother Otto. As the members of Hagenath start tracking Vera and her brother-in-law, what they discover is, the two of them regularly take

train trips out to the Austrian countryside, basically between Lins and Salzburg. They always travel

separately, but arrive at the same time, and they then walk into the forest essentially to a two-story house that's kind of camouflaged from casual observation. The team investigates the house, and what they find is there's four men living in it, and they never come out, but every night an individual comes to the door and brings them food. The five-man team from a distance sees one of these figures that they think looks like Eckman, but they really can't tell. They theorize that

this is why Vera and his brother are coming and staying and visiting for a while. Since they may have found their man, the operative stage arrayed on the Shalei. One night while the men are having dinner inside this house, five members of Hagenath approach. Two of them kick in the door while the other ones pull guns on the men inside this secluded home. They single out the individual that they think might be eight off Eckman and they remove him from the house. The operatives are shouting questions

at the man that their convinces Adolf Eckman, but the man is telling them I'm not Adolf Eckman, my name is Wolfgang Bauer, but after a bit of time, Bauer reveals that he actually was an SS officer, but he's still not the man that they're looking for. He's not Eckman, but he knows Eckman, he served with Eckman, and he was actually part of the Einstein scriptman that Eckman over saw. This was this mobile death squad that came in and exterminated Jews usually by shooting them.

They killed millions of people. Still convinced the man is Eckman himself, the operatives drag him out into a waiting car and drive him deeper into the woods. They say if you're not Eckman, why are Eckman's wife and brother continually visiting you? And his only answer is that they were friends with the owner of the Shalay where they were staying. They continued peppering him with questions, one of the operatives is pointing it gun directly at his chest and Bauer,

basically just laughs at the operatives and he tells them all you can do is kill me.

“So that's what the operatives do. They pump bullets into his chest and they bury him in a shallow”

grave and then later the Hagenaggo back to their superiors and they tell them that they have successfully killed Adolf Eckman. So that's theory number two, he was shot in Austria. Nobody's quite sure what to think about the Eckman situation. There are some that are convinced that Hagenaggo had gotten the wrong man that in fact the individual they shot really was Wolfgang Bauer and he was telling the truth. He wasn't Eckman.

Others on the other hand are convinced that Adolf Eckman is killed by the Hagenag and it's officially overcase closed. As for the Allied forces they're not as worried anymore about looking for Nazi war criminals considering that by 1947 the Allied forces are dealing with in their minds a much bigger deal which is the burgeoning cold war. One man still in pursuit is an Austrian Holocaust survivor named Simon Weason Paul who's dedicated his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals.

someone else who might have been connected to him. In fact Vezin Paul is fairly frustrated that

“they shot the individual rather than bringing him in for deeper interrogation because he might have”

been able to offer some clues as to Eckman's actual whereabouts. But he has to work with the materials that are available to him. So he begins at the beginning and he starts looking at the individuals that were closest to Eckman. Working with other investigators, Weason Paul is able to

source a photo of Eckman finally putting a face to the notorious Nazi criminal. In December

of 1947 Vezin Paul is called to Austria to the USC IC headquarters for an urgent meeting. He's told there that Eckman's wife Vera has just put in an application to have her husband legally declared dead. Now she says she does this in the interest of their children. But if he is in fact declared dead, the warrants that are out on Eckman will disappear. The search for him will officially be over.

“And the proof of the death is that there is a report coming from a government officer in”

Czechoslovakia named Lucas that he witnessed Eckman being killed by a Soviet firing squad at the end of World War II. Leading to theory number three, he was killed by the Soviets. Paul Lucas, swears in an affidavit that Eckman, along with other Nazis, were apprehended by the Red Army, they were lined up shoulder to shoulder and executed on April 30, 1945 by members of the Soviet Army. Vezin Paul is not buying it. He has interviewed people in the POW camps who said that they saw

Eckman after April of 1945. And he starts thinking, Vera has probably submitted this application as an attempt to end the hunt for her husband. Vezin Paul petitions the court to essentially postpone the decision about whether Eckman was alive or dead. Vezin Paul thinks that given a little bit of time, he can actually prove that Eckman is still alive. He sends investigators to

Prague to both find out more evidence on Eckman and also to basically check the background on Lucas.

So this investigation is three years after this alleged shooting. So there's really no evidence to be found there, but what Vezin Paul's researchers do find its rather fascinating is that Lucas is married to Vera's sister. When Vezin Paul approaches the judge and points out that the star witness suggesting that Eckman was dead is actually married to his wife's sister of the judge's mortified because that's something that the witness should have revealed

at the very beginning of the discussion. Ultimately the judge throws the case out. He can't rule Eckman dead on the basis of individuals testifying who had a vested interest in an outcome.

So to Vezin Paul, this pretty much confirms his suspicion. Eckman is still alive

and doing whatever he can to allude the long arm of justice. So Eckman could presumably be anywhere. Coming up, the hunt for Eckman continues far away from Europe. By 1950, with the Cold War heating up, the Allied powers are less focused on hunting Nazi war criminals, but it remains risky for Nazi fugitives, even those with fake identities to pass

through border checkpoints in escape Europe. Nazi hunters, like Simon Weisenthall, have no idea if Eckman is still in Germany or could have escaped thousands of miles away. In a major surprise to Western powers, some of the former Nazis are actually gaining assistance escaping Europe thanks to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church sees the Nazis as one of the great ways to fight against the evils of communism. There are still plenty of fascist sympathizers

“after World War II and they start creating these secret routes via safe houses that are called”

ratlines as a way to help Nazis escape to safer areas. And the Catholic Church plays a role in this because some of these ratlines, some of these safe houses, are monasteries that exist in places like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. You have a number of cardinals and a number of upper-level Catholic administrators who are sympathetic to the Nazis, not because of their anti-Jewish stance, but because they

saw them as an ally in the fight against communism, which they saw is much worse than even Naziism. Italy is vital to all this because in Rome there's a Catholic bishop named Alois Hudall,

out of Europe. These papers are accepted by the Red Cross. No questions asked. The Red Cross is

“really overseeing the flow of refugees. And so these former Nazis and SS officers are basically”

able to just blend in with other refugees and being able to get out of the country. By the early 1950s, investigators believe it's possible, Eichmann has taken advantage of the ratlines. About 90% of these Nazis escaped Europe through Italy or Spain and they were on their way, most of them to South America. Argentina is a safe haven for these Germans. President Juan Perone was a close ally of Hitler's during the war.

So Hudall knew exactly who he was helping here. He writes to Perone actually in 1948 and asks for 5,000 visas to help Nazis escape. So Argentina seems like a good place to try to start looking for Eichmann. Giving us theory number four, he fled to Argentina.

“There are rumors that start to circulate that by the 1950s, Eichmann has fled to Argentina”

and has started life there. Now, for the most part, the newly formed West German government largely ignores a lot of these rumors, but there's one prosecutor that just will not let this information go. He's a German Jewish prosecutor by the name of Fritz Nauer. He and his family had fled from German persecution early on in the Eichler Reich. So he escaped some of the worst evils of the Holocaust. But when he returns to Germany in the postwar era,

he's determined to set some of the wrongs right. Vauer can't be too open with what he's up to, because he doesn't know who in the German hierarchy it might be sympathetic to those individuals and might tip them off to the possibility of their discovery.

“In September 1957, Vauer receives a letter from Lothar Hermann, a blind attorney living in Argentina.”

Hermann is one of the German expats living in Argentina. He's Jewish and part of a rather large Jewish population, even though Paron is really anti-Semitic, there's a population about 400,000 Jews living in Argentina. Hermann is a survivor of one of the most notorious concentration camps of World War II, DACA out. In fact, he endured such vicious beatings during his time at the camp that he actually lost his eyesight. The immigrants Argentina in 1938 with his wife in his daughter,

in 1956 he's living in a suburb of Buenos Aires with his family. And his daughter Sylvia is dating this young German expat named Nick. So one night while having dinner over at the Hermann's house, young Nick says that his dad was a high official in the vermarked the German army. Nick has no idea that he's talking to a Jewish family. The Hermanns do not publicize the fact that they're Jewish,

so he just keeps talking and talking and eventually says it's a shame that Nazis were never able

to complete their mission of extermination. The Hermann family just sits quietly. The father doesn't say anything. He's used to hearing anti-Semitic comments. He knows that this is just how it goes sometimes. He's disappointed that his daughter is dating him. I'm sure, but he just lets it go. A few months later, the Hermann family moved a couple of hundred miles away to another town. And the boyfriend is forgotten. One day, in April of 1957, Sylvia is reading an article in the

newspaper for her father, about Nazi war criminals, and she mentions the name Adolf Eichmann. When she says her boyfriend, Nick said that his last name is Eichmann. Lothar Hermann instantly remembers the boy's hateful comments at the dinner table.

Sylvia is still in touch with Nick, but he's never given her his home address. He gives her

a different address to write to to get to him. And oddly enough, while Sylvia and Nick were dating, he never invited her over to his house. So Lothar immediately suspects that this might be Adolf Eichmann's son. They want to tell that German authorities or the Argentinian authorities, but they really can't, because Nazi sympathizers are everywhere at this point. So instead, they write a letter to the prosecutors in Frankfurt, West Germany, and that's the letter

that makes its way to Fritz Bauer. So Bauer is intrigued. He knows that Eichmann's son is named Klaus, but in German, Klaus is actually short for Nicholas. So this seems promising, but he needs

back to the suburb of Olivos, and they pretty much spend the day just walking around the town

“until Sylvia runs into a mutual friend of hers and Nick's that tells her where Nick's house is.”

She gives her the address. Sylvia goes to the house. The door is answered by a woman who reluctantly lets her in. There is a middle-aged man in glasses, and she thinks that he looks like the guy in the picture that Fritz Bauer had sent to her of Adolf Eichmann, but she's not totally sure. So she asks him. She says, "Are you Mr Eichmann? Are you Nick's father?" And he sort of touristly responds, "No, I'm his uncle." So she sits down and just strikes up

a pleasant conversation with him. Nick comes home shortly thereafter and sees Sylvia says, "What are

you doing here?" So, "Oh, I just stopped to say hi. I have to go. I have to go." The middle-aged man

wearing glasses, who has claimed to be the uncle, stands up to walk her to the door and Nick says,

“"No, Father. I can walk her to the door myself." So it would seem that the hermons have stumbled”

on something pretty suspicious. The fact that it took all this time to figure out Nick's address, why was he being so cagey about where he lives, and then when Sylvia arrives to the house, the woman that answers the door reluctantly lets her in. The man claims to be Nick's uncle, but then Nick refers to him as father, and something just is not adding up in the situation. Although Fritz Bauer is intrigued, he's got a problem. He can't really rely on German or

Argentinian authorities to follow up on this information. There's just too many Nazi sympathizers

within both of those populations. So instead, he turns to the new Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. The Mossad go to the house that hermons had told them about, but when they get there, they don't think it's the right address. It is Fram Chekkel, it's worn out, and I just can't believe that an SS officer of the rank and fortune of Ikeman would be living there. As they watch the house, they just don't see anybody coming and going that matches Ikeman's description. So they're

pretty certain this is a case of mistake and identity. The Mossad let the tip go. The hermons, though, they don't want to let this go. So in April of 1958, they're going through public records, and they find out that the home is owned by a guy named Fransisco Schmidt. And they think that this is just the latest alias of Aetolf Ikeman. And so they go back to the Mossad, and they say, look into Fransisco Schmidt, and they do, and they say, there's no way that Fransisco Schmidt

is actually Aetolf Ikeman. So at this point, they pause their contact with the hermons, because they just think that they're full of unreliable information. A year later in August of 1959, an independent Nazi investigator, Tuvia Freeman, said that he's been in contact with some high government officials in Germany, and they've told him that Aetolfman is not an Argentina, he's been Kuwait. And that's theory number five, he was living in Kuwait.

Now, Kuwait at this time is this sort of obscure British territory. There's only about 300,000 people living there. North Africa and the Middle Eastern are actually very popular destinations for ex-Nazis. Friedman immediately contacts the Israeli Defense Ministry, and he says that Aetolfman

“is in Kuwait. You should send some agents over there to go pick them up, but the ministry”

pretty much ignores Friedman entirely. Israel is a brand new country and has a long list of security priorities. And Friedman realizes that Aetolfman is not really the top of the list or maybe even the middle of it, but he's not going to give up. So Friedman contacts in Israeli newspaper men and says, "Have I got a scoop for you? Aetolf Aetman, the former Nazi, is living in Kuwait." Friedman suddenly becomes an international celebrity, and he uses his fame to draw attention

to the fact that Aetman has not been located. Other Nazi hunters are not happy. They believe it's going to do nothing but drive Aetman either underground or out of Kuwait. No solid evidence of Aetman turns up in Kuwait, and the trail, once again, seems to run cold. Nevertheless, Friedman is pleased with what he did because now he's put Aetolf Aetolf Aetman's name in newspapers all over the world, and this becomes a way to potentially inspire,

not only Nazi hunters, but actual governments to locate this Nazi war criminal and bring him to justice.

intel.

In late 1959, there's a rash of anti-Semitic activity throughout West Germany.

Reportedly, swastikas are painted on nearly 700 Jewish sites across the country, along with graffiti reading Jews out. It's a painful time, but the attacks do help galvanize all the parties that are or should be hunting down Nazi war criminals.

“It is important to acknowledge that there were still Nazi sympathies,”

even though they had been defeated in World War II. That didn't mean that pro-Nazi sentiment completely disappeared. This can explain why it took West Germany so long to take the hunt for Aetman seriously. Up to this point, there has been a lot of foot dragging. West German intelligence has been sitting on a lot of evidence that Aetolf Aetman is alive in Argentina and living

under an assumed name. After years of pursuing Aetman, West German prosecutor Fritz Bauer receives new intel, pointing him to Aetman's alleged alias. Bauer gets a tip from a man named Gerhard Klammer, and Klammer used to work

“for a construction company in Northern Argentina with a guy named Ricardo Klement.”

He's never forgotten the man's face, and he's seen it in news coverage as the years have gone by,

and he is thoroughly convinced that Ricardo Klement is actually Aetolf Aetman. Now, he was German, but he wasn't a Nazi. He was anti-Nazi as so many Germans were, and so he spends the 1950s trying multiple times to notify the German government that Ricardo Klement is there in Argentina, and that he is Aetolf Aetman. Bringing us back to theory number six, he was living in Buenos Aires with an assumed name.

In an amazing coincidence, Klammer is in Buenos Aires, and he sees a man get off the bus that he recognizes as his old coworker Ricardo Klement. He follows the man and writes down the address

“where the man goes home. Finally, in December of 1959, we might have definitive evidence”

of where Aetolf Aetman is hiding. Klammer's findings make their way to Fritz Bauer,

and this is when Bauer starts to slowly put together the pieces of this puzzle. He knows the name Ricardo Klement, because that information was provided to him by the hermons when Sylvia found that name registered on the electric meter of the house that he's living in. On top of that, Klammer also has a photograph of him and Ricardo Klement standing together, and when Bauer takes this photograph and puts it by the photo that they have

of Aetolf Aetman, the resemblance is incredibly striking. A few months later, Bauer reaches out to the Masad. He knows where Aetman is hiding. He just hopes it's not too late. The Masad recognizes that they might have made a mistake about whether or not Aetman is still alive and well in Argentina. In March of 1960, a new Masad agent is sent to Argentina, and he starts to investigate. The agent who was assigned this case is Sviharoni. He was known as being very

methodical, very unflappable. He could do just about any job that needed to be done. While he and his mother had escaped the Holocaust and gotten to Palestine by 1938, the entire rest of his family was killed. So the idea that he could capture Aetman was personal. Svih goes to the neighborhood and checks out the house in Buenos Aires. Only to find that Ricardo Clement has just recently moved out. There's a team of painters painting the house. Sviharoni finds an ally in this young Argentinian

kid in the neighborhood who goes up to the painters and is trying to get the address of where Ricardo Clement moved. He claims to be determined to deliver a package to the family that had previously inhabited the home and it turns out one of the workers is actually friends with one of the Clement's family sons and after a little more discussion he's persuaded to provide the new address where the Clement's family resides. This new property was purchased by Ikeman's wife

using her maiden name and they've moved to San Fernando, which is just outside of Buenos Aires. The address is 14 Garibaldi Street. Using caution, Aherone surveils the address and during his surveillance, he notices a middle-aged man that bears a pretty striking resemblance to Aetalf Ikeman and with this

that basically tells the Mossad that Ikeman has been found.

“With this information, the Prime Minister of Israel Ben Gurion decides to send an 11-man”

team of Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to capture Ikeman and bring him back to Israel. It's called Operation Finale. The Mossad agents run surveillance on Ikeman for two months and they track all of his movements because the better they know where he goes, where he stops, what he does during the day, it'll be much easier to figure out when's the best time to strike and they figure out he gets off the same bus every single day and makes this short walk to his house and that's

when they'll strike. On the evening of May 11, 1960, the Operation unfolds like a scene from a spine novel. Aetalf Ikeman has become very set in his daily patterns. Every day he climbs off of a city bus at 740 p.m. and he follows the same path to his house just 110 yards away.

“But on this night, 740 passes and Ikeman's bus has yet to arrive.”

Mossad operators are waiting for him near the bus stop. They have a limousine full of agents. They even have a couple of guys outside of the car who are sort of pretending to work under the hood. There's another guy in a backup car behind them. 740 comes and goes. The bus doesn't come so now they're confused. This is not how they were expecting things to go down. It's getting later and later and they realize really the longer that they sit there. The more likely it is

that they're going to get noticed by someone. So finally, a bus arrives. The agent's

blood pressure arises. They know that this is the moment, but the bus doesn't stop. It just whizzes by. The Mossad agents probably starting to get a little bit nervous. What if somebody tapped off Ikeman? So we should abort for tonight. Maybe we'll try again later with the hopes that this operation will work. But then, five minutes later at 805 p.m. Another bus pulls up to the bus stop. 25 minutes late. Their suspect steps off the bus. These starts making the walk

to his street. They're going to let him get to his street. And it's there. An agent named Peter Malcolm goes up to him and says, "Woon momentito senyor." And he must know something's up because he takes off running. Malcolm has to go and really tackle him to the ground. After struggle, they drag him into the limousine. And while they're in the car, he's strangely silent. And then suddenly, in perfect German, he says to them, "I am resigned to my feet." Now, before this,

the Mossad agents were 99% sure this was Ikeman. After he says this, they know 100% they've got their man. So for this mystery, it's case closed. Riccardo Clement is Adolf Ikeman. For nine 10 states, the Mossad agents keep Ikeman sequestered in a safe house while trying to figure

“out the details of his extraction. Because you have to understand, these Mossad agents are in”

a sovereign nation. They have just apprehended a citizen of that nation. And now they're going to try to extradite this person out of the country without the Argentinian government, no. So they have to be very, very careful about every step that they take because if something goes wrong, Ikeman could be allowed to stay in Argentina and not be extradited back to Israel. What they end up doing could be a part of a movie. They drug him, put him in a flight crew uniform,

and take him to the airport. They drag him along as if he's just some drunk pilot that they're going to put on the plane. They're very nonchalant laughing about this. Here's this drunk pilot, no big deal. This isn't Adolf Ikeman, the architect of the Holocaust. This isn't a prisoner who we've drugged. This is just some drunk flight crew member who we're going to take home before he gets in trouble.

They finally get to Israel. Ikeman is caught. He knows that he is, and he's resigned to his fate.

Now, at long last, one of the primary engineers of the Holocaust will stand trial for his crimes. Ikeman's trial commences in 1961, and his defense essentially suggests that he's a low-ranking bureaucrat who was merely following orders in doing his job. However, as the trial develops, the evidence makes it clear that Ikeman was absolutely central to the propagation of the Holocaust. Ikeman is ultimately found guilty of war crimes against humanity,

Government authorities eventually took down Ikeman, but the details of his capture remind us of

“the role played by ordinary people, the haremons, a blind lawyer, and his teenage daughter with”

no training were the first to truly expose Ikeman's new life in Argentina, and they never gave

up seeking justice. Thanks so much for listening to history's greatest mysteries,

“a history channel original podcast presented by rewind studios. Join us next time for a”

deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.