The capture by Israeli security forces of Adolf Eichmann, his detention in Israel, and his forthcoming trial by an Israeli court, were announced by Mr. Ben-Gurion to the Knesset on May 23 in the statement recorded below.
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"I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the greatest of the Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called' the final solution of the Jewish question'--that is, the extermination of 6,000,000 of the Jews of Europe--was found by the Israeli security Services. Eichmann is under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the law for the trial of Nazis and their collaborators."
Mr. Ben-Gurion did not say where and how Eichmann had been found and captured, but the Minister of Justice (Mr. Pinhas Rosen) told the Press that Eichmann had acknowledged his identity.
A statement issued on May 26 by the Israel Government Press Office said that Eichmann had volunteered to collaborate in shedding light on the events in which he played a part, and had told his captors that his arrest after 15 years was a relief. He was quoted as saying: "I have been living all the time under horrible tension; now I am reconciled to my fate."
The statement also gave details of Eichmann's movements after his disappearance at the end of the war and his capture by the Israeli security service.
Eichmann was said to have been captured by the U.S. forces in Austria on May 8, 1945, but to have immediately discarded his S.S. uniform and personal documents and taken the uniform of a Luftwaffe private. Later he had been transferred to another camp where he had again changed his identity; in view of the S.S. tattoo mark on his hand (which had earlier escaped notice), he had called himself a lieutenant of the Waffen S.S. After 1 1/2 years' detention he had escaped from the American camp and became a forest warden in northern Germany, working as a woodcutter and living in a hut. In 1950 he was said to have left Germany with false papers, and to have secretly contacted his wife and three children who were living in Austria but had not heard from him before; she and the children later joined him abroad.
Reports that Eichmann had been traced in Argentina by Israeli agents, and had been secretly taken out of that country to Israel, were confirmed in an Israeli Note handed to the Argentine Foreign Ministry on June 6, in reply to an Argentine complaint that Eichmann had been kidnapped on Argentine territory for delivery to an Israeli court.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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