Ten days after a covert Mossad team seized Eichmann off a Buenos Aires street, Ben-Gurion revealed the operation to the Knesset, stunning the world. Eichmann, architect of the Nazi deportation machinery that sent millions to death camps, had lived under a false identity in Argentina for years. His trial in Jerusalem the following year became a global reckoning with the Holocaust.
The operation itself, conducted by a small team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents, was a triumph of patient intelligence work. Eichmann, going by the alias Ricardo Klement, had settled quietly in a Buenos Aires suburb, working at a Mercedes-Benz plant, believing he had escaped justice entirely.
Agents snatched him near his home on May 11, 1960 as he walked from a bus stop, drugged him, and smuggled him out of Argentina disguised as a member of an El Al aircrew days later. Argentina protested the violation of its sovereignty, but Israel refused to relent.
Ben-Gurion's announcement to the Knesset was electric, a moment many Israelis, especially Holocaust survivors, had almost stopped believing could happen. Eichmann's subsequent trial, broadcast globally, introduced the world to Hannah Arendt's phrase 'the banality of evil' and forced a reckoning many nations had avoided for fifteen years.
Key people: David Ben-Gurion, Adolf Eichmann