Operazione Eichmann

Werner Klemperer plays Adolf Eichman in an Allied Artists production covering his implementation of the "Final Solution", his escape from Allied forces, through his capture by Israeli in Argentina.

Werner Klemperer gives a fine performance in the title role. Someone like me, used to his comic performance in HOGAN'S HEROES -- John Banner, who played "Sergeant Schultz" in that show, plays Rudof Hess -- will be surprised at his performance: fanatic, intelligent, assured of his position and approaching each problem, whether it's how to kill more Jews or how to get to safety, as an intellectual puzzle to be solved: in a word, chilling. It's a portrait of a real-life villain that at first seems too stereotyped to be interesting. Yet Klemperer plays the role with such intelligence that he is fascinating in his portrayal.

Director R.G Springsteen spent most of his career as a solid director of B Westerns. Given a solid cast and a tough subject, he handles the subject well. He is brilliantly aided by the camera of Joseph Biroc, who lights the scenes set in Nazi Germany with a flat, low light that reduces everything to grey. There are no whites or black in Germany, just a greyness that reduces all morality to nullity. Only the later sequences show any light. Yet every scene is shot with a clarity that becomes frightening.

It's a tough movie to watch for an American Jew who grew up in the Post-War era, in a millieu of older relatives and and their friends who had blue numbers tattooed on their arms. It must have been a tough movie to convince the producers to make and to cast; Joseph Schildkraut reportedly turned down $300,000 to take the lead. It's clearly a movie that everyone involved thought had to be made, and made as well as they could.

They succeeded. I don't need to see it again.

Low budget drama about the capture and covert extradition of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel by a team of Mossad operatives. The 1961 film was released less than a year after the operation (May 1960) and about a year before Eichmann's execution for war crimes (June 1962). The story largely follows an increasingly paranoid Eichmann as he tries to keep one step ahead of the Nazi hunters and to maintain his standing amongst expatriate Nazis (perhaps ODESSA, if such an organisation really existed) and probably would have been more interesting if the focus had been on the searchers. The film may now be best known for its casting: Eichmann, one of the most sought after Nazi war criminals and 'architect of the Holocaust' is played Werner Klemperer, who four years later became famous as the bumbling Col. Klink, commandant of a German POW camp in the improbable hit comedy "Hogan's Heroes", and Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz (not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer who died in Spandau Prison in 1987), is portrayed by John Banner, who subsequently played Klink's jolly but incompetent subordinate Sgt. Schultz. Ironically, both Klemperer and Banner were from Jewish families. There are a number of films/documentaries about the hunt for Eichmann that came out after the trial which may be more accurate and complete (e.g. The House on Garibaldi Street (1979), The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996), The Hunt for Adolf Eichmann (1994), Operation Finale (2018)).

Released in early 1961 to capitalize on the capture and later trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann the movie "Operation Eichmann" obviously has a lot of inaccuracies about Eichmann's flight from the law; A flight from justice that lasted some fifteen years, from 1945-60. But Eichmann's crimes are fully documented, not fictionalized, in the movie as the head and executioner of infamous "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem".

We get to see Adolf Eichmann, Werner Klemperer, at the beginning of the film standing trial and arrogantly saying how the new Nazi Movement will rise again and sweep away and destroy all those who stand opposed to it. This is something that Eichmann never said when he was on trial for his life in a Jerusalem courtroom. Still it, Eichmann's opening and bombastic statement, had a chilling effect on the audience throughout the movie.

Eichmann during those fifteen years as a fugitive from justice was not only on the run from the Israeli Mossad, among other law enforcement agencies, but obsessed with rekindling the Nazi Movement all over Europe as well as South America where he was in hiding.

Eichmann checking out of his beloved Germany as it's military collapsed in the spring of 1945 is on the run with so many different identities that even he at times has trouble knowing just what his name is. Always a step ahead of the law in countries like Spain Italy and the Kingdom of Kuwait gave Eichmann the feeling of invincibility and power over those who were perusing him. Eichmann is also given a beautiful Fraulein Anna Kemp, Ruta Lee, by the movie-makers as his love interest in he movie. What Anna saw in that egotistical and arrogant swine only she and the movie-makers of "Operation Eichmann" could possibly have known.

We see early in the movie Eichmann's climb to power in Nazi Germany and his association with other top Nazi war criminals like the Commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp Rudolf Hoss, John Banner, as well as SS commander the soft-spoken but blood-curdling Heinrich Hmmler, Louis Van Rooten. It's also ironic that both Werner Klemperer and John Banner would be reunited four years later in the wartime TV comedy "Hogan's Heroes" as Nazi's, the commandant and guard, in a WWII German POW camp.

Eichmann is such a loose cannon in the movie that even his fellow undercover Nazis are more then happy to set him up to get knocked off. This just to keep his big mouth shut which was jeopardizing their own safety. It was the Israeli Mossad that in the end did Eichmann in by capturing the wanted Nazi war criminal and not killing him. That was left for a court of law where he was eventually convicted of war crimes and later executed in the early morning hours of May 31, 1962 in Tel Aviv's Ramie Prison. Eichmann's last words on earth before he was dispatched for good,via the gallows, were "I Am Ready!".

In the end opting to capture Adolf Eichmann alive instead of killing him which caused Holocaust survivor and Mossad agent David, Donald Buka, a lot of criticism form his fellow Israelis turned out to be the best and right thing to do. Like David said: if we kill him here and now Adolf Eichmann will just be a small article in a Buenos Aires newspaper but if he's captured and put on trial the whole world will see and remember the crimes that he committed.

This is a brutal, compelling, fascinating study of Nazi Adolf Eichmann (played brilliantly by Werner Klemperer) who had the reprehensible idea of killing Jews in gas chambers and later burning them in ovens. It's done so matter-of-factly that it's more horrifying than if the emotions had been punched home (as most filmmakers would do). Some scenes do pack a wallop: like the Jewish singing over the newsreel footage of the camps being liberated. I like this a heck of a lot more than some of the famous anti-Nazi movies out there. What makes it even more interesting is that they don't feel the need (till the end) to put in a 'nice' character to offset Eichmann's (and the other Nazi's) evil. That makes it more powerful than ever. Sure, there are a few flubs (actors blow lines, etc.) but who cares? It's a great film and deserves to be on DVD.

The most chilling scene is to see the SS characters of Werner Klemperer and John Banner (Four years before "Hogan's Heroes") matter of factly greeting the Jewish arrivals to the death camp. The contrast between the high comedy of their work together later on belied how easy a shift of perspective of the Third Reich could be achieved. I recommend this film just for this extremely chilling scene alone.