Original subtitles

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

After the Second World War,

some of the worst war criminals in history go to ground.

Hoping that, in the near future,

their fortunes will change

and they would be players again.

Many changed their names,

and the most-wanted flee to South America.

Others claim the Holocaust never happened,

or had nothing to do with them.

Told by historians and experts,

this is the story of the little-known people

searching for truth and justice.

Trying to confront this man who is the murderer of her entire family.

It's a hostile environment.

What kind of men are they? Are they mad?

They must be mad.

The hunt for Nazi war criminals

is without any parallel,

to my knowledge, either before or since.

It's a hunt taking place against the backdrop of a world

that wants to forget and move on.

Justice, for him, was everything.

I'm upset that he died without being in a cage.

In 1945, Allied troops swept across Germany,

bringing an end to 12 years of Nazi rule.

With Hitler dead and his country in ruins,

the surviving Nazi top brass were put on trial in Nuremberg,

and there, held to account for their crimes.

Men, women and children

murdered in cold blood.

What rights has any man to mercy

who has played a part, however indirectly,

in such a crime?

But many wanted Nazis are still on the run.

Among them, 39-year-old Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann led the notorious Jewish Affairs Department...

..working under SS Commander Heinrich Himmler,

the architect of the Final Solution.

Eichmann arranged the transportation

of millions of European Jews to death camps.

His role was so important,

he was repeatedly singled out at the Nuremberg trials.

Adolf Eichmann is one of the most terrifying Nazis.

Eichmann encapsulates the essence of Nazism -

a lethal cocktail between enormous personal ambition on the one hand,

and a murderous ideology on the other.

Eichmann organised, with meticulous bureaucratic coldness,

the murder of millions of Jews in Europe.

Eichmann may be a wanted man,

but he won't be easy to find.

Over seven million German prisoners of war have been taken.

This time, the Wehrmacht are really beaten.

The master race of men are stripped of their insignias,

de-loused, numbered.

The Allies face a monumental task

in distinguishing common soldiers from war criminals...

..and Eichmann takes full advantage.

All SS men have a tattoo,

so he burns that off because he wants to survive.

He is planning a future without his identity as an SS officer

because he knows that if caught, if put on trial,

he will almost certainly be executed.

When Eichmann is arrested and put in a POW camp,

he manages to hide his true identity.

Then, with the help of former SS colleagues,

he obtains false papers.

Now known as Otto Henninger,

a forestry worker,

he manages to escape...

..and goes into hiding in the woods in northern Germany.

Eichmann has a huge ego.

He genuinely believes that he is beyond reproach.

Eichmann even starts jotting down notes

about his work for the SS.

He starts collecting newspaper clippings about himself.

Eichmann is still a free man, living under the radar.

It's almost absurd.

Like so many other Nazi perpetrators,

he wants above all to avoid justice.

Eichmann is just one of thousands of wanted Nazis who remain at large...

..but the hunt is on to find them.

At the end of the war,

the Allied victors had divided Germany

into four separate administrative zones.

In the American-occupied zone,

the Counter Intelligence Corp - the CIC -

are tasked with finding Nazis on the run.

The primary directive of the CIC

is to root out any vestiges of the Nazis

and to bring those people to justice,

holding them accountable

for the crimes and atrocities they've committed,

making sure the Nazis don't rise again.

Former US infantryman Robert Taylor

has been transferred into the CIC

to help track down wanted war criminals.

Robert Taylor really has no background in intelligence.

He had done some small-town journalism work.

He's not really prepared for this pretty significant role.

In my experience,

there's all kinds of moral ambiguities,

psychologically and emotionally,

that are entailed in the world of espionage.

But Robert Taylor is kind of thrust into this situation

with very little training.

It's a lot.

In 1947,

the case of Nazi secret police chief Klaus Barbie

lands on Taylor's desk.

Posted with the Gestapo to southern France during the war,

Barbie became known as the Butcher of Lyon.

His job was to track down suspected communists

and members of the French Resistance.

Not every Nazi perpetrator

was a born sadist and torturer...

..but Klaus Barbie certainly was.

He was master of life and death.

You know, he could wave his hand

and decide if somebody was to live or was to die.

As head of the Gestapo in Lyon,

Klaus Barbie enjoyed torturing,

mistreating, causing pain.

He had a whole range of techniques -

electroshocks, boiling water, cutting people.

Even after 1945,

he does not show any remorse, he doesn't show any regret.

He still admires Hitler, the Nazi regime.

Despite Hitler's defeat,

Barbie is looking for a way to keep Nazism alive.

He's being helped by a group of wanted SS officers.

The CIC become aware, through their informants,

that Barbie has a network of former SS personnel,

and it's operating within the American Zone.

This is precisely what the Americans

and what the CIC have been afraid of.

Klaus Barbie and his group are on the run -

stealing, blackmailing,

but also procuring weapons.

They are plotting resistance against Allied occupation,

hoping that, in the near future,

their fortunes will change

and they would be players again.

Robert Taylor and the CIC know immediately

that they have to gather intelligence on this network

and they have to be able to quash it.

The CIC plan this highly-coordinated swoop

to flush out all these former Nazis and capture them.

They're going to unknown houses,

knocking on doors,

and they don't know what awaits them on the other side.

It's a dangerous situation,

and failure is not an option.

The Americans seize 70 Nazi suspects.

This network is crushed...

..but at the same time, a key leader escapes...

..and that leader is Klaus Barbie.

Klaus Barbie has just barely avoided arrest.

He's on his own, he has no place to go.

His greatest fear

is getting caught and being executed for his crimes,

and that is a real possibility.

Then, events in the wider world

take an ominous turn.

Since the end of the war,

relations between the Western Allies and Russia have deteriorated rapidly.

In Washington, President Truman tells Congress

that the world faces a new ideological battle.

"Communism", he says, "is now the greatest threat".

At the present moment,

nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority.

The second way of life relies upon terror and oppression,

and the suppression of personal freedom.

Joseph Stalin now controls much of Eastern Europe...

..and the Americans fear his vast armies

could take over the Western world.

Battle lines are drawn for what's being called the Cold War.

Now, in the early Cold War years, things are changing very quickly.

It's not so much arresting Nazis and bringing them to justice,

but fighting the communists.

By 1947, the geopolitical landscape has shifted quite a bit,

and so has the mandate and the mindset of the CIC.

Robert Taylor's thinking, "What is the threat on the horizon?"

Not, "What is yesterday's threat?

"What is today and tomorrow's threat?"

Incredibly, the Nazis are not

a top intelligence priority for the Americans at this time.

As the West's attention shifts to containing communism,

the CIC take their eye off wanted Nazis

like Klaus Barbie.

He's lucky.

He runs into a former comrade, Kurt Merk,

who was stationed with him in France.

They couldn't believe the coincidence to run into each other.

And then, of course, they talk about the good old times.

Merk is clearly doing well for himself,

he's well-dressed and looking good and is in good spirits,

and Klaus Barbie is not.

Former German intelligence officer Kurt Merk

tells Barbie he may be able to help him.

Merk arranges to meet an unlikely contact...

..the CIC's Robert Taylor.

Taylor has been paying Merk to track down suspected communists.

Now, Merk tells Taylor

he's found someone of even greater value -

an old friend from France, Klaus Barbie.

When you're an intelligence officer on the ground,

your mandate is to collect the best intelligence you can.

So, Robert Taylor's not looking at Klaus Barbie

as a former Nazi on our wanted list.

He's looking at Klaus Barbie as a potential asset.

Taylor could have Barbie arrested

and tried for his crimes...

..but instead, using Merk as an intermediary,

he invites the Butcher of Lyon to join them for lunch.

For Klaus Barbie, it must be nerve-racking,

very, very stressful.

Ultimately, he's risking a lot.

But a life of this kind,

always on the run,

is not sustainable.

Taylor's there to make an assessment of Barbie, to figure out,

does this person have what we call placement and access?

Which is the placement and the ability to access information

that the US Government might want.

Barbie is a wanted war criminal,

so one would expect that this meeting

would have the form of an interrogation,

but it's actually not.

It's more of a conversation.

It always begins with rapport, and that might surprise people.

They don't just get down to business.

So some time would've been spent just making small talk,

maybe about Barbie's family or his kids,

and Taylor giving a little information about himself.

And that always happens before they get down to brass tacks.

Taylor makes the fervent Nazi an extraordinary offer...

..to work as a US agent,

hunting communists in return for his freedom.

Taylor writes his thoughts after the meeting,

and he was impressed by Barbie as, quote,

"An honest man, both intellectually and personally.

"Absolutely without nerves or fear.

"He is strongly anti-communist and a Nazi idealist

"who believes that he and his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power."

Hearing that seems quite shocking.

But, in the game of intelligence and espionage,

it's not unprecedented that the enemy's enemy becomes my friend.

So the CIC is probably not doing a lot of soul-searching.

These kind of cases happen all the time.

Once he gets the offer from the CIC,

it's pretty much a no-brainer for him.

This gives Barbie the opportunity

to have a normal life with his family again,

finally, after years of separation...

..constantly on the run and in hiding.

The Americans find Barbie a new home

and offer him a generous monthly salary.

Klaus Barbie's back in the game, he's fighting communists again.

Within two years of Barbie's recruitment,

Germany becomes a front line in the deepening Cold War.

In 1949,

the four Allied occupied zones

are reshaped into two new countries -

a democratic West Germany

and a Soviet-controlled East.

East zone Germans stage a so-called spontaneous demonstration.

On the Nazis' old stamping ground, Unter den Linden,

Berliners see a show that rivals Hitler's best.

In East Berlin,

the Russians mark the birth of a new nation

with a choreographed parade.

For Klaus Barbie,

the looming communist threat

means more guaranteed work.

But his fellow war criminal,

SS Officer Adolf Eichmann,

has no role to play in this new world.

His crimes are so well-known by now,

that no side will touch him.

Eichmann remains in hiding,

still living in the remote West German countryside

as Otto Henninger.

Eichmann experienced a huge fall from power.

He starts working on a chicken farm.

How pathetic does that sound,

one of the chief architects of the Holocaust

working on a chicken farm?

Eichmann's situation has become untenable for him.

So he starts planning a future outside of Germany.

Eichmann intends to cross the border into neighbouring Austria,

where he hopes to find help from Nazi sympathisers.

Before he leaves West Germany,

he burns all his papers and cuttings,

erasing his trail.

He's fed up with the idea that he has to live under the radar,

he wants to live under his real identity

and he wants to tell everyone in the world

what great achievements he has made during the Second World War.

He still believes that he has done nothing wrong.

But what Eichmann doesn't know

is there's one man who refuses to forget his crimes.

Lawyer Fritz Bauer is a German-born Jew.

He spent time in a concentration camp in the '30s,

before fleeing to neutral Sweden.

Now, in 1949,

Bauer's returning home on a very personal mission.

Fritz Bauer wants to confront German society with its past.

There was a fire burning in him.

The downfall of the Nazis was not a magic cure to anti-Semitism.

Being Jewish makes him an outsider.

He is likely to ask some uncomfortable questions...

..which nobody wants to hear.

Fritz Bauer wants former Nazis like Eichmann

to be held accountable for their crimes,

but he's going to have to act alone.

When he looks around him,

he sees that more than half of the judges he works alongside

were themselves members of the Nazi Party.

Fritz Bauer once said,

"As soon as I'm out of my office, I'm in enemy territory,"

and that literally referred to the building he was in.

The spirit of the Nazis was still very present.

Nobody cares to talk about the things they did,

and he's angry, he's angry that many people

don't seem to want to learn any lessons from the past.

What message are you sending to the survivors,

the few survivors that are coming back to Germany,

like Fritz Bauer?

The message to them is, "You still don't count,

"we still don't care for you."

Fritz Bauer's crusade to hunt Nazis

earns him few friends.

He receives a huge amount of mail,

full of hate, full of outrage.

People saying, "Go back to where you belong."

To some degree, it emboldens him,

it shows him he's going in the right direction

and he is hitting on the right notes.

And on the other hand, it means he has to be very careful.

While Fritz Bauer begins his campaign for justice,

US agent Klaus Barbie is feeling untouchable.

The Cold War is heating up,

and so, in a very short period of time,

he had a large number of sources

informing Americans about communist activities.

He gives them names and addresses and contact information,

so his American handlers are happy with him.

But then, Barbie's reputation as the Butcher of Lyon

catches up with him.

The French want to question him about the torture and murder in 1943

of their wartime Resistance hero, Jean Moulin.

Everybody talks about Jean Moulin

as a national hero in France, as an icon.

Every child knows about him,

and Klaus Barbie is one of the people

who murdered their national hero.

When the French authorities demand to interrogate Barbie,

the Americans have no choice but to give him up for questioning.

But the CIC do so on their own terms.

Barbie sees that the American officer clearly has his back

and is shielding him.

He was kind of looking down on the French

and belittling them almost, like, "What do you want?

"I work for the Americans, right, you cannot touch me."

With the CIC's help,

Barbie is off the hook - again.

One of the reasons I got out of intelligence is because

I think it's very easy

to lose sight of your own moral parameters

and for your moral compass to go quite askew,

without you even realising it, before it's too late.

And I think in this case,

what is appalling is that the CIC is putting the interests

and safety of Klaus Barbie

above any kind of measure of retribution or justice

for Barbie's victims.

The list of crimes of Klaus Barbie is very long.

He's probably most notorious for the deportation of 44 Jewish children

from an orphanage near Lyon.

The youngest child was four years old and the oldest 17.

Those children were arrested on his order

and then murdered in Auschwitz.

When a French newspaper breaks a story

about Barbie's criminal past...

..the Americans are forced to act.

This puts the CIC in an extremely uncomfortable position,

because all of a sudden, they're realising

that their star source is in fact a monster.

It's at this point where I think we can safely say

that the CIC is operating way outside of its moral parameters.

They decide that

the best thing to do is to make Barbie disappear.

In March 1951,

CIC agents accompany Barbie and his young family

onto a train heading to Italy.

It's not an option just to kill him off,

and if we go killing our foreign agents

or turning them over to the authorities,

nobody's ever going to come work for us in the future.

Armed with false papers,

Klaus Barbie and his family

travel along a secret escape route - the Ratline -

used to smuggle wanted Nazis out of danger.

Using the Ratline,

they travel out of Germany,

through the Austrian Alps

to the Mediterranean port of Genoa.

In Genoa, the CIC put Barbie in touch

with a Vatican priest called Father Draganovic.

They pay him to secure a safe passage for Barbie

out of Europe altogether.

Draganovic is a hard-core fascist and anti-communist.

In his headquarters, he has war criminals who are hiding as priests.

They're using code names,

they're using secret hideouts.

It all sounds very much like a James Bond movie,

but it was real.

Draganovic tells Barbie he's already helped many wanted war criminals

flee to South America...

..in the hope that the Nazis may one day return and rise again.

Draganovic is not an exception.

There are many Catholic priests like him helping a whole wave of Nazis

to leave the continent and start a new life overseas.

Three weeks later,

Barbie and his family arrive safely at the end of the Ratline,

7,000 miles away

in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires.

In South America,

even the most notorious Nazis can find refuge,

as sympathetic right-wing dictators turn a blind eye to their crimes.

Klaus Barbie is not the only one.

Thousands of Nazi perpetrators were able to escape through the Ratline.

There is something really wrong here,

that justice was denied,

and the victims deserve justice.

As Barbie makes his escape,

in the German town of Landsberg,

thousands of protesters demand clemency

for Nazi war criminals held in the local prison.

21 death sentences are overturned

and many other Nazi prisoners are released early,

including members of an SS extermination squad.

Convicted at Nuremberg, they now walk out free men,

granted a reprieve.

They are greeted like heroes.

The war has only been over for six years,

but already, attitudes to Nazi crimes are relaxing.

In the 1950s,

Germany is a country that is starting to prosper.

People are very happy to look to the future,

and they don't really feel a need to look in the past.

People are willing to forget and to forgive themselves.

Lawyer Fritz Bauer pushes back against this collective amnesia.

He's still determined to bring Nazi Adolf Eichmann to justice.

In 1957,

he receives a letter from the Nazi safe haven of Argentina.

But this letter isn't full of the usual violent threats.

Fritz Bauer had, for a number of years,

been trying to find out where Adolf Eichmann had escaped to

and where he was living.

But when he opens the letter,

he's surprised to find a message

from a German Jew living in Argentina,

called Lothar Hermann,

who tells him that Adolf Eichmann

is living under a false name in Argentina

with his wife and his children.

To Fritz Bauer,

this was incredibly valuable information.

And it's served to him on a platter.

Bauer is reluctant to share his tip-off with his colleagues.

He still can't trust anyone working around him.

Fritz Bauer realises

there are too many people in the police, in the prosecution,

who would want to tip off Eichmann and to allow him to escape.

Who could he turn to?

So, it's only Fritz Bauer

who is interested in catching Adolf Eichmann

and putting him on trial.

In this situation, he takes matters into his own hands

to seek contact with the Israelis.

Zo Ahava by A Uzan & Philippe Guez

In 1959,

Bauer travels to the newly created state of Israel.

There, he makes contact with Isser Harel,

the chief of Mossad,

the Israeli intelligence agency.

Catching a Nazi, it's not a priority in the Mossad.

The priority for the Mossad

is to find information

about the Arab states that surround Israel

and that want to destroy the young country.

Fritz Bauer's very disappointed with Mossad.

It turns out they're very hesitant and very careful.

It's kind of reverse of what one would expect -

this elderly German man with a tie and suit

and these young Israeli secret agents,

and he's the one who's telling them to be more aggressive.

To persuade Mossad to take on the case,

Bauer gives Harel an ultimatum -

if Mossad doesn't act,

he'll go to the press,

and then their chance to catch Eichmann by surprise will be lost.

His gamble is successful.

The head of Mossad promises to give it a shot,

and to see whether they can catch Eichmann.

With his government's backing,

Harel agrees to bring Eichmann back to Israel to stand trial.

But he knows the scale of the challenge.

There is no extradition treaty between Israel and Argentina,

so Eichmann must be kidnapped and secretly smuggled back alive,

without the Argentinian authorities finding out.

This is a very rare and very important operation.

To smuggle him alive to Israel is very, very complicated.

Isser Harel needs to think about all the small details.

There is plan A, there is plan B, there is plan C.

There is no place for failure here.

24/7, he's dreaming about it.

But the big failure can be that this is the wrong guy.

Isser Harel sends Mossad agents to Buenos Aires.

They confirm Eichmann is living there,

under the pseudonym Riccardo Klement,

and he's working in a Mercedes car factory.

The Mossad agents start observing Eichmann,

they start following him to and from work,

and his family home.

Eichmann is living with impunity.

He is not afraid of anything.

He even allows people to take his photograph.

He really feels safe from Allied prosecution.

Wednesday evening, 7:30.

Adolf Eichmann is on his way home by bus.

Parked near his usual stop

are four Mossad agents,

pretending their car has broken down.

Their chief, Isser Harel,

waits in a nearby cafe.

He don't have any connection with them -

no telephone, nothing.

He just need to wait and pray.

Even if you are not religious, you need to pray sometimes.

One of the agents approaches him and say, "Momentito, senor."

It means, "Excuse me."

This is a very dangerous moment in the operation

because his wife and kids at home,

and it was isolated area, very quiet,

so if you scream, they can hear you.

Surprisingly, Eichmann doesn't try to fight back.

He is resigned to his fate.

He is now a prisoner of the Israeli Government.

Eichmann knows that his options have run out.

Isser Harel was shocked when he saw Adolf Eichmann.

He ask himself, "This is Adolf Eichmann,

"the Nazi, the head of the Jewish Department,

"the one that was the architect of the killing machine?"

This short guy,

this grey man,

this miserable runt.

As Mossad secretly fly Eichmann back to Israel to stand trial,

lawyer Fritz Bauer meets an Israeli diplomat in Frankfurt.

The first thing that the contact says is, "We've got him."

Fritz Bauer finds out before the world finds out.

He has this sweet moment of triumph.

But Bauer's part in the operation can never be known.

By aiding and abetting the Israelis to kidnap a German national...

..Bauer's broken the law.

Fritz Bauer had the courage to put his career at risk,

maybe even his personal freedom.

He had the courage to say no,

courage not to go along with everybody else,

not to choose the comfortable road.

But he has to take this secret into his grave.

He will never be able to receive applause openly,

and others will take the credit.

Here in Israel, Adolf Eichmann faces

probably the most appalling list of charges

ever to be levelled against a single human being.

The Israelis are trying to place before the conscience of the world

the full facts of how the Nazis tried literally to exterminate

millions of the Jewish people in Europe.

The Eichmann trial is televised across the globe.

This is the first time a major Nazi war criminal

is put on trial by the state of Israel.

That is a huge moment.

Eichmann knows he will face justice.

The accused, together with others,

during the period 1939 to 1945,

caused the killing of millions of Jews

in his capacity as the person responsible

for the execution of the Nazi plan

for the physical extermination of the Jews,

known as the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

The list of charges against Eichmann is so long,

it takes the judges over an hour to read them out.

Eichmann claims that he is innocent.

He presents himself as a bureaucrat

who simply followed orders.

But over and over again,

he cannot hide his real identity.

Israel, at the time,

is suffering from an inability

to speak about the unspeakable crimes.

And when finally Eichmann is put on trial in Jerusalem,

the victims have their voices heard,

people see that they're not alone,

see that they can get respect and understanding and empathy

for what they went through.

There's a great value in having a trial as a therapeutic moment,

as a cathartic moment.

Two months into the trial,

the court is shown footage of the Holocaust...

..including the silent images shot by the Nazis themselves

in the Netherlands in 1944,

of trains taking men, women and children

to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

A system of genocide

overseen by Eichmann himself.

This is Patrick Smith

calling Radio Newsreel from Jerusalem.

Eight months after he first entered the court,

Eichmann prepares for judgment.

Eichmann heard his verdict, standing stiffly to attention.

"The court convicts you of crimes against the Jewish people,

"crimes against humanity and of war crimes."

Eichmann is found guilty on all counts.

He's sentenced to death.

Before his execution,

the Israeli authorities give Eichmann

the chance to meet a priest.

The priest asks Eichmann whether he repents.

Eichmann says, "No."

And then he is led to the gallows.

Eichmann was brought to justice and sentenced and executed

by survivors of the very people he sought to exterminate.

"He saw the backs of our dead," writes one paper.

"He met us face-to-face."

His father isn't dead.

He was accused of these terrible crimes.

This destroys her world, the way she has seen it until that moment.

For Klaus Barbie,

one of his worst fears is now coming true.

Speer wants to dominate the interpretation of the Third Reich.