Sixty years ago this week, May 1960, a team of Israeli Mossad agents quietly traveled to Argentina, where they found and captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who was instrumental in organizing the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.
A key member of that Israeli team was a young man named Peter Z. Malkin.
I met him in 1990, around the 30th anniversary of that famous episode. He had just published a book called “Eichmann In My Hands.”
And as he told me in that interview, the man he had been sent to capture had escaped from post-war Germany in the first place because of a mispronunciation of his name.
So here now, from 1990, Peter Z. Malkin:
Adolf Eichmann was brought back to Israel by Malkin and his team. Eichmann was tried and found guilty of war crimes, and was executed by hanging in 1962.
Peter Z. Malkin spent his final years in New York with his wife and children. He died in 2005 at age 77.