Eichmann’s son meets father’s Israeli kidnapper
By Pamela Druckerman
JERUSALEM, June 22 (Reuter) – A former Israeli secret agent
who kidnapped Adolf Eichmann met the Nazi war criminal’s son for
lunch recently in a London hotel.
Zvi Aharoni described his meal last week with Ricardo
Eichmann, a 40-year-old archaeology professor, as both joyful
and embarrassing. The Israeli newspaper Maariv arranged the
meeting.
“It’s not easy to meet someone when you personally and
individually are responsible for the death of his father,”
Aharoni, a former Mossad agent, told Reuters in a telephone
interview from his home in western England on Thursday.
In 1960, Aharoni was part of a Mossad team that snatched
Eichmann from Argentina and whisked him back to Jerusalem —
drugged and dressed in an Israeli airline uniform — to stand
trial for war crimes.
Eichmann was a central architect of the Nazi Holocaust that
killed six million Jews in World War Two.
He was convicted and hanged in 1962, the only time Israel
has carried out the death penalty.
Aharoni said he was glad to see that Ricardo, a father of
two, had not been traumatised by the capture and execution of
his own father.
“I was a bit concerned that he would not grow up okay. I
was happy he became an educated person — a man,” Aharoni said.
Aharoni said Ricardo was glad to hear that in the days of
interrogation after the kidnapping, Eichmann expressed relief
that his years of dodging Nazi-hunters had finally ended.
“You have no idea the relief I, myself, feel,” Maariv
quoted Ricardo as telling the Israeli.
He first publically disclosed he was the son of the Nazi
killer earlier this year.
“I can promise you one thing — if the Nazis came to power
again in Germany, I would pack a small bag for each of the
children and we would get out of here,” he told Israel’s
Haaretz newspaper in June.
Ricardo was five years old when the kidnapping occurred and
said he did not remember the incident.
Aharoni said the younger Eichmann was happy to hear that he
did not look like his father.
