THE past finally caught up with the man calling himself Ricardo Klement as he stepped off a bus in a nondescript suburb of Buenos Aires.
Adolf Eichmann on trial in 1961
His protests that he was a foreman at a nearby Mercedes-Benz factory were ignored by the Mossad agents who had spent 15 years following a trail from the ruins of Nazi Germany. Eventually Klement admitted his real name was Adolf Eichmann.
The hunt for one of the masterminds of the Final Solution – Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people – was over.
Eichmann had slipped away in the chaos at the end of the Second World War, hiding in Austria under a series of aliases before escaping with his family to Argentina.
Here Eichmann assumed he was safe but did not count on the determination of Israel’s intelligence service and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.
Sedated and disguised as a flight attendant, Eichmann was smuggled to Israel. On May 23, 1960, prime minister David Ben-Gurion announced his arrest to the world.
The prosecution of Eichmann for genocide and other crimes the following year in Jerusalem was described as “the trial of the century”.
It was broadcast worldwide, including to the UK and Germany, becoming the first global TV event.
The gripping trial gave Holocaust survivors a voice and opened the eyes of the world to the horrors of concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
At the time many people still did not believe the extent of Nazi crimes or thought first-hand accounts exaggerated.
The remarkable story is told next week in a BBC drama documentary that uses original footage from the period, including Eichmann behind a bullet-proof glass screen.
The trial began on April 11, 1961, with the haunting words of chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner.
He said: “Here with me at this moment stand six million prosecutors but alas they cannot rise to level the finger of accusation in the direction of the glass dock and cry out ‘j’accuse’ against the man who sits there, because their ashes have been piled up in the mounds of Auschwitz. Their blood cries to heaven but their voices cannot be heard.”
Eichmann in his days as an SS officer
Balding and bespectacled, Eichmann revealed no emotion as his crimes were outlined. “Not guilty,” he replied to every indictment.
Behind the broadcasts were US producer Milton Fruchtman and veteran director Leo Hurwitz, played by Martin Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia.
Each day reels of highlights were rushed to Jerusalem airport and dispatched to 37 countries for transmission.
The pair wanted to shed light on how an ordinary man such as Eichmann, who left school with no qualifications and sold petrol before the war, could order such monstrous acts.
In 1944 after Germany invaded Hungary he travelled to Budapest with a special task force and personally directed the deportation of more than 425,000 Jewish people in the space of eight weeks, most of whom were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz.
However with its three-day opening address the trial got off to a slow start and the filming team worried it would be overshadowed on TV by the unfolding story of the US’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space.
Audiences had dwindled after the novelty wore off of seeing Eichmann, who had gradually risen through the ranks of the Nazi party after joining in 1932, in the dock.
All that changed when the 112 witnesses began to give evidence. One described how he was forced to dig graves for the victims of gas chambers. He heard the screams of the dying, followed by silence.
Later the dead were laid out beside trenches. One day he recognised people from his own town, including the bodies of his family.
“I lay near my wife and two children and I wanted to be shot,” he said.
A female witness told how she watched her father beaten and shot dead. Then her child was taken from her arms and killed.