It was certainly Otto Adolf Eichmann who in 1960 was kidnapped by Israeli spooks in Argentina where he lived after the war with other German expatriates.
Obersturmbannführer Eichmann's Nazi role during the war was rather minor, but he came onto the radar of Simon Wiesenthal's Nazi hunters probably because Eichmann was at the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, which has come into the popular lore as the birthplace of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem."
The 2001 movie
Conspiracy about the Wannsee Conference with Kenneth Branagh as Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, could not have been more hyperbolized.
Both actors were also extremely miscast. I think that David Warner actually played the best Heydrich in the 1978 TV miniseries
Holocaust. I am not sure who would have played the best Eichmann, but Stanley Tucci wasn't it. Tucci tried to make Eichmann at Wannsee look like a big mafia lieutenant.
Conspiracy was interesting because it goes into graphic details about things such as homicidal gassings with carbon monoxide generated from gas-vans, and the corpulent attendees (e.g., Ian McNeice) are chuckling about how the deadly gassing process itself turns the dead bodies bright
Pink ─ like the Communist Reds that they were.
The only problem is that many of the "eye-witnesses" who claimed to have actually seen these homicidal gassings, like Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, are on record as describing the bodies as
Blue in color. OOPS!
The kidnapping and Show Trial of a Nazi War Criminal that nobody had previously heard of was a major coup for Israeli propaganda.
In the televised Jerusalem courtroom, Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth like a caged rat wearing headphones and looking a bit bureaucratic ─ sort of the "banality of evil" as (((Hannah Arendt))) famously put it.
Eichmann probably wondered why he was seen as so important all of a sudden as a Nazi War Criminal.
Although one needs only to read
Mein Kampf to disagree with those who think that Nazi Germany was pro-Zionist somehow, Eichmann was a logistics expert who could make the deportation trains run on time. He may have even thought of himself as helping the Jews leave Germany where they were not wanted, and to resettle them to Palestine ─ and that this philanthropic work merely got interrupted by the war. Eichmann even learned Hebrew if I remember correctly.
So obviously Eichmann was promised by the Israelis that if he cooperated with the charade, that they would go easy on him, and he probably wanted to believe it too.
Many smaller-fry Nazis such as corporals-with-chisels and sergeants-with-cyanide had indeed played ball in their trials and actually copped to horrible things to benefit the postwar narrative, and they had then gotten light sentences like five years. This kind of thing was more likely in a West German court, however.
Otto Adolf Eichmann should have realized that if the Israelis were pulling out the stops for a
Grand Guignol show-trial, then he would by definition be considered important enough that there is no way that he would be getting off the hook.
Plus, Eichmann was a lone customer and the dice was necessarily rigged. It had to be because all the show-trial's "eggs" were stored in one glass booth with a bespectacled balding man waiting inside.
However, with a gang of defendants like at the IMT, some of the subjects will likely be getting acquitted in order to foster the important global narrative that the process really was fair.
Of course, these
hombres who do get off Scot-free probably should never have been sent to face a War Crimes Tribunal in the first place ─ but then most people don't know a Joachim Ribbentrop from a Hjalmar Schacht anyway.
Therefore, like Hermann Göring at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, an Eichmann left with no sense of hope might have chosen strategically not to collaborate with his captors at all. The Truth still has power even when we are all doomed men.
Eichmann's Israeli jailers probably had him talking to endless psychiatrists keeping him on point and hopeful until they were done with him. Almost nothing that Eichmann actually said on the stand at Jerusalem should be considered true.
So after doing his best "show" to make his interlocutors proud, Eichmann was probably most incredulous in 1962 as they finally led him off to the gallows.
