The True Story of “Operation Finaleâ€
By Patrick Sauer
August 28, 2018
It was late fall in Buenos Aires and Ricardo Klement was an ordinary man living an ordinary life. Every morning, he took the bus to his job as a foreman at a Mercedes-Benz factory, and every evening, he returned to his wife and two children in their suburban home. The mirage that was his very existence shattered on May 11, 1960, when he was thrown to the ground, shoved into the backseat of a car, tied up, gagged and blindfolded, threatened with death, and driven to a safe house for interrogation. His captors pulled off the mission in under ten minutes, but it had been meticulously planned out for months, escalating in late March, when Klement’s true identity as Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was confirmed.
The bold undertaking was carried out by Israeli intelligence operatives acting on behalf of the Israeli government. Afraid they would be thwarted by a sympathetic fascistic regime, they never told Argentinian authorities about their mission. Eichmann, the “Architect of the Holocaust,†would be brought to Israel to stand trial on 15 counts of war crimes perpetrated against the Jewish people and against humanity. A year later, his televised trial would be the first time the breadth and depravity of Nazi atrocities were exposed to the world at-large.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-operation-finale-180970153/
