Mossad operatives ambushed Adolf Eichmann as he walked home from a bus stop in a Buenos Aires suburb, drugging and smuggling him out of Argentina days later on an El Al flight to Israel. Eichmann had organized the logistics of deporting millions of Jews to death camps. His 1961 trial in Jerusalem, televised worldwide, became a landmark public reckoning with the Holocaust and inspired Hannah Arendt's study of the "banality of evil."
For fifteen years Adolf Eichmann had lived as Ricardo Klement, an unremarkable Mercedes-Benz factory worker in a modest Buenos Aires suburb, his true identity known only to a handful of fellow former Nazis and, eventually, to his own increasingly unwitting son. Israeli intelligence had tracked leads for years before a tip from a German prosecutor and a chance romantic relationship between Eichmann's son and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor cracked the case open.
On the evening of May 11, 1960, a Mossad team led by Rafi Eitan grabbed Eichmann as he stepped off a bus, forced him into a car, and held him in a safe house while confirming his identity through a scar and other physical markers. Nine days later, disguised as a sedated El Al crew member, he was flown to Israel in violation of Argentine sovereignty, triggering a diplomatic protest at the United Nations.
Eichmann's trial the following year, conducted in a Jerusalem auditorium and broadcast globally, forced a reckoning with the machinery of genocide through the mundane testimony of a bureaucrat who insisted he was merely following orders. He was hanged in 1962, the only civil execution Israel has ever carried out.