Patrick Sauer at
Smithsonian.com offers a piece on the new film about the capture of Nazi war
criminal Adolf Eichman.
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.
The daring
mission to smuggle Eichmann out of Argentina is told in Operation Finale, a new film directed by Chris Weitz, which opens on August 29. The
movie covers the entire operation, from locating Klement and confirming his
true identity, through his capture, 11-day interrogation, return flight to
Israel, and the opening of the trial. On the whole, Operation Finale is a
straightforward, old-fashioned spy caper, steeped in the nuts-and-bolts of
bringing one man home alive to answer for the crimes of the Third Reich. But
it’s the scenes between Eichmann and Peter Malkin, a cunning-yet-humane Mossad
agent, that really crackle. To stand trial in Israel, the court required
Eichmann’s consent signature, and Malkin took it upon himself to get it through
means beyond intimidation or torture. It’s Malkin’s attempt to understand
Eichmann as more than a monster, even though the Nazis killed his beloved
sister and her children, that gives Operational Finale its emotional and
psychological heft.
You can read the
rest of the piece via the below link:
1360154066&spReportId=MTM2MDE1NDA2NgS2
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