Not-quite-Disney Nazi hunters

Another recent movie viewing was Operation Eichmann, which aired a few weeks back on TCM and is another of the movies on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The movie opens up before the credits with a spotlight on Adolf Eichmann (Werner Klemperer) saying that the Jews are going to go down and the Nazis will rise again staged so as to imply he was on trial for his crimes against humanity during the Nazi era. In fact, the movie was released after Eichmann was captured but before the trial began, which also explains why it ends the way it does with his getting captured, and ending that feels incomplete.

Flash back to Nazi Germany, where Eichmann is a higher-up in the SS. The Nazis' plan of genocide against the Jews is going slowly, largely because mass murder is really not an easy thing to do. With the war on there's no way to just deport the Jews even if the Nazis had wanted to engage in ethnic cleansing instead of genocide, and all those Jews are in the Nazis' eyes a drain on resources. So the "Final Solution" is thought up, leading to the Nazis starting to gas the Jews to death a whole bunch at a time and then cremate them to destroy the evidence.

The first roughly half of the film focuses on Nazi Germany up to the end of the war, introducing a younger version of one of the important characters in the second half, David (adult David played by Donald Buka). David is a Jew who survived Auschwitz and amazingly survives the chaotic forced transports in the closing days of the war, when Eichmann ultimately flees (at least in the movie version of events). David makes his way to Israel and eventually becomes a Nazi hunter and the conscience of the Israelis, insisting that Eichmann be captured alive so he can be put on trial and the Nazi evil be shown to the world. Just discreetly killing him in his exile won't do.

In real life, Eichmann spent a couple of years in Germany before finally making his way to Argentina in 1950. The movie, however, has him going first to Madrid with his money-hungry girlfriend Anna (Ruta Lee). (In fact, Eichmann had a wife and three kids when they went to Argentina, with a fourth kid being born in Argentina.) The Israelis find Eichmann living under an assumed identity in Spain, but both the operation to capture him, allowing the movie Eichmann to make it to Kuwait, which seems illogical since it was a British protectorate at the time.

Meanwhile, the movie Eichmann having been responsible for the "Final Solution", he thinks he should be the head of the Nazi remnants. Other exiled Nazis, however, think Eichmann is a bit of a loose cannon who's going to get the whole organization in trouble, so they try to thwart his plans, even attempting at one point to kill him the way exiles in Notorious arrange for a "car accident" to do away with one of their number who can no longer be trusted. Eventually, of course, the Israelis find where Eichmann is in Argentina, and it's a race against time as to whether they or the Nazis will get Eichmann first.

Operation Eichmann is an OK movie, although it takes a lot of liberty with history. Klemperer is surprisingly good as Eichmann, since it's easy to think of him as Col. Klink, the buffoonish POW camp commandant in Hogan's Heroes. Adult David is good, although the juvenile David at Auschwitz is the weak part of the movie. The script makes his character into a mawkish plot device of convenience, to whom all sorts of magical coincidences happen from seeing his parents get gassed to seeing Eichmann to surviving at the end of the war. The finale is actually not badly handled.

I'd recommend Operation Eichmann as a curiosity if it ever shows up on TCM again.