Against Forgetting: The Nazi Hunters

By the late 1950s, it appeared that the Holocaust was fading from the memories of all but those who had experienced it personally. The United States and other Western nations were more concerned about the Soviet threat, and neo-Nazi groups in West Germany had emerged to attack the country’s few remaining Jews, their homes, and synagogues. The trail of escaped Nazi war criminals Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele had gone cold, and lower-ranking former Nazis had been “rehabilitated” and enlisted in the fight against Communism.

Despite these circumstances, a few people in Israel, West Germany, the United States, and Argentina refused to forget. Since his escape from Germany in 1950, Adolf Eichmann—the commander of logistics for the extermination of Jews during the Second World War—had been sighted in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi (Scholastic, 2013) narrates the 15-year effort to find Eichmann, catch him, and bring him to justice in Israel, where he was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to death.

The Nazi Hunters uses material from Neil Bascomb’s bestselling account of Eichmann’s capture for general adult readers, Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi (Mariner, 2010). The research is extensive and thorough and includes one-of-a-kind interviews with dozens of people involved in the hunt over two decades. Well-chosen photographs help to bring the narrative to life. Though a map of metropolitan Buenos Aires, including the Ezeiza international airport ten miles southwest of the Buenos Aires city limits, would have been helpful in following the taut account of Eichmann’s surveillance and capture by Israeli agents, this may be a good project for students at the middle or high school level.

The Nazi Hunters is a gripping adventure story, full of heroes and villains, close calls and daring escapes. Bascomb, however, goes deeper to explore the reasons why Eichmann got away for so long, why the Israelis wanted to capture him alive, and the significance of the capture and public trial, not only for the Holocaust survivors but for everyone at the time who may have forgotten in the midst of the Cold War.