Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi By Neal Bascomb Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009, $26, pp. 400

Manhunt of The Century

I was nearing my ninth birthday in the spring of 1961, when the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Israel. I can readily recall the image of a decidedly unthreatening old man flickering from my family’s black-and-white television, protesting his innocence. Why, I wondered, were my parents transfixed by the sight of this man peering through thick eyeglasses from his Plexiglas cage in the Jerusalem courtroom? Could he possibly be what they said, one of the most evil men who ever lived, the logistical engineer of the Holocaust? How could evil appear in such a pathetic figure?

These child’s questions were, of course, precisely the ones that preoccupied the world at the time, encapsulated in the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s book on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Was Eichmann a virulent anti-Semite? More chilling, perhaps, was he a careerist technocrat, just following orders, as he repeated over and over?

Those questions have been re-hashed again and again through the years, with the preponderance of opinion rejecting Arendt’s thesis as well as Eichmann’s own protestations (“I love Jews,” he told one of his Israeli captors in Argentina). It is a tired argument after all these years, and somewhat beside the point—we know that he was directly responsible for the deaths of more than 700,000 Hungarian Jews, though he did not personally herd them into the gas chambers and open the valves.

Gratefully, it is not Neal Bascomb’s purpose to replay this old debate in Hunting Eichmann. Instead, as the title of his highly readable new book suggests, he aims to describe how this altogether unimpressive man—who could not even manage to graduate from vocational school—was tracked down and brought to justice.

Drawing on considerable new material, interviews with surviving veterans of the chase and recently opened archives, Bascomb reconstructs, in often fascinating detail, Eichmann’s flight from the ruins of the Third Reich in 1945, through two allied prisoner-of-war camps, to Italy and finally, with the aid of a forged Red Cross passport, to Argentina. There he lived in a miserable brick house without electricity or running water in a small town outside Buenos Aires.

In telling the tale, Bascomb faced a problem with the narrative: The hunt for Eichmann itself was not all that interesting.

One December afternoon in 1956, a young Argentine lady by the name of Sylvia Hermann brought home a new boyfriend, one Nick Eichmann, who proceeded to tell the family that his father had been a high-ranking officer in the Wehrmacht, adding that Germany would have been better off if it had finished the job of exterminating the Jews.

Months later, Sylvia noticed an article mentioning that German prosecutors were still looking for a war criminal named Adolf Eichmann. She told her father, Lothar, a half-Jewish lawyer who had spent some time in Dachau in 1936 for socialist activities before emigrating to Argentina. He promptly wrote the chief prosecutor mentioned in the piece, Fritz Bauer, saying he knew Eichmann’s whereabouts, and Bauer alerted the Israelis. They confirmed Eichmann’s identity and hatched a plan to snatch him.

No complex intrigue there, but the most interesting elements lie outside the basic narrative. Bascomb uses the story to draw readers inside the chaotic atmosphere of postwar Europe, where even as prominent a figure as Eichmann could blend in for a couple of years. He escaped Europe with the aid of a network of former Nazis and Catholic priests, finding his way to a welcoming reception in a post-Peronist Argentina where Nazism had never fallen completely out of fashion.

Neither Lothar Hermann nor Fritz Bauer trusted their own governments, which were still staffed with former Nazis and plenty of sympathizers who might tip off Eichmann. Hermann went straight to Bauer, who, risking charges of treason, took Hermann’s information to the Israelis.

From there, the story—alternatingly fascinating and tedious—focuses on the plan to capture Eichmann, hold him for nearly 10 days in a safe house, and finally get him out of Argentina to Israel. Along the way, his captors speak of the “soul-hollowing” effects of looking after the man who efficiently organized the annihilation of the Jews and wondering along with the rest of us just how this seemingly pathetic creature could have committed such crimes.

Curious enthusiasts of the darker arts will no doubt find this spellbinding, and in part it is. Others will be tempted to skip Bascomb’s intricate reconstruction of the Mossad’s involved preparations to get to the final, harrowing moments.

Bascomb’s energetic narrative technique —which served him well in Red Mutiny, about a rebellion on the battleship Potemkin during the 1905 uprising in Russia— wears thin at times. His refusal to weigh down the text with either footnotes or attribution of any sort hurts his case more than it helps. You can’t help but wonder, at various critical junctures, where this or that fact originated and whether it carries any authority. But that having been said, for those with the urge to revisit the episode, Hunting for Eichmann provides a valuable window into not only the manhunt, but the era in which it unfolded.

Kyle Crichton is regional editor for Europe and the Middle East on the foreign desk of The New York Times.