The Road to Jerusalem

On 22nd May 1960, an El Al flight from Buenos Aires, via Senegal, arrived in Israel. One of the flight attendants had to be carried off the flight by his fellow passengers. Not because he was drunk, but because he was drugged. He had been kidnapped.

Ten years earlier, he had arrived in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. He had a Red Cross passport. The name on the passport was Ricardo Klement, and it said he was from the Italian Tyrol. There was nothing suspicious about this. Since the end of the Second World War, many from the former Axis powers had migrated to South America. Argentina in particular had a large expat community, and so was an obvious location for those wanting to start a new life.

 Red Cross passport of Ricardo Klement

And yet, not all was as it seemed. The passport had been issued under the authority of an Austrian Catholic Bishop, Alois Hudal. Once a rising man in the Vatican, he had been a prominent supporter of National Socialism, and with the Nazi experiment now in ruins, Hudal was very much out of favour. He had turned to providing “a charity to people in dire need.” What he was actually doing was helping Nazis and their fellow travellers to escape. Across Europe, the Allies, and the new states born out of the ashes of a defeated Europe, were engaged in denazification, and trying to bring those responsible for war crimes to some sort of justice. Thanks to Hudal, and those like him, around 9000 former Nazis made it out of Europe and across to South America, the bulk of them to Argentina. These were known as the ratlines.

Hudal, lecturing on Nietzsche in 1937. Pretty much the most Nazi thing imaginable

Further mystery surrounded the man who stepped off the boat in Buenos Aires that July morning in 1950. His passport gave his name as Ricardo Klement, and that he came from a German speaking part of Italy. Yet when he had approached Hudal’s organisation for his papers, his name had been Otto Heninger, and he had been living in northern Germany, working in the forestry industry. Before that, he had been a prisoner of war, and before his escape from an American prison camp he had gone by the name of Otto Eckmann. Travelling to South America on a forged passport, issued by a Nazi sympathiser, and with a string of false identities behind him, Ricardo Klement was clearly a man with a past.

Klement’s family came to join him in 1952, and after several years of working low paid, menial jobs, he eventually got a job with that most German of companies, Mercedes-Benz, working his way up to be a department head. Here the story could have ended. But it didn’t.

On 11th May, Klement got off the bus on his way home from work. He was approached by a man who asked him, in Spanish, if he had a moment. Klement, nervous, tried to walk away. Suddenly, two other man appeared. There was a struggle, but eventually Klement was overpowered and shoved into the back seat of a nearby car.

All because a young man had got himself a girlfriend.

Klaus loved to boast to Sylvia that his father had been a great war hero, helping Germany to accomplish great deeds. Yet no one knew where his father was, he told her. That was why he lived with his uncle, Ricardo Klement.

What Klaus was not to know was that Sylvia’s family was German-Jewish; her father, Lothar Hermann, had been imprisoned in Dachau, and upon release in 1938 had fled to Argentina. Lothar alerted a West German prosecutor that he believed his daughter had found a relative of a senior Nazi holed up in Argentina. Lothar than persuaded Sylvia to undertake an act of monumental bravery. She was to visit Klaus at home, and try to meet his uncle. This she did, but when she called at the house, Klaus was not home yet. Instead, she was invited in by Ricardo Klement. When Klaus returned, not knowing that Sylvia was there, he addressed Klement as father.

Lothar Hermann was stunned. For if Ricardo Klement was Klaus’ father, that meant they would share a surname. Eichmann. This meant Ricardo Klement was one of the most wanted men in the world.

The true past of Ricardo Klement

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies had put the most senior Nazis on trial. But during their testimony, they realised they were missing other monsters. One such monster was Adolf Eichmann. Before the war, he had been involved in Nazi efforts to expel Jews from Germany. When it became obvious that this plan would not work, the Nazi regime embarked upon the Final Solution; the mass murder of European Jewry. The plan which emerged from the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 was to build a network of camps, purely for the purpose of murdering Jews and other untermenschen (sub humans). These camps are now infamous reminders of the horror of horrors. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Treblinka. Belzec. Sobibor. The enormous administrative task of identifying people and transporting them to these camps was to be organised and co-ordinated by Eichmann.

List from the Wannsee Conference, setting out the Jewish population of Europe

His full role was not really identified till after the war, when his name came up again and again at various war crime trials. But by then, it was too late. Eichmann had slipped through the net, and made it to Argentina.

Lothar Hermann passed the information on to the West German prosecutors. But they were afraid; if they launched a formal investigation, Nazi sympathisers in the office might tip Eichmann off and allow him to melt away again. So they passed the information to a group of people who were very interested in getting their hands on Eichmann.

The revulsion and disbelief at the horrors of the Holocaust had been largely responsible for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. It was the defining experience of Judaism in the modern era. When the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, was tipped off that the man who had orchestrated the practicalities of mass genocide was living quietly in Buenos Aires, they swung into action.

A few weeks of surveillance in early 1960 confirmed that they had the right man. But they also had a problem. Argentina had routinely turned down extradition requests for Nazi war criminals. If Israel unveiled Eichmann’s existence to the world, Argentina would drag its heels, and again the world’s most wanted man would slip away. Eventually David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, authorised the only option open to Israel; Eichmann was to be kidnapped. The director of the Mossad flew to Buenos Aires himself to lead the mission.

After he was snatched from the streets, Eichmann was questioned in a Mossad safe house. They were confident they had the right man. The Mossad team also learnt that Eichmann knew the location of Joseph Mengele, the so called ‘Angel of Death’ who had carried out human medical experiments in the death camps. They paused to watch this new location for a few days. But Mengele had recently moved out of this boarding house, and no one knew where he was. Deprived of a double capture, the team now needed to get Eichmann out. His family had searched the hospitals of Buenos Aires, but had not yet informed the police of his disappearance. But the Mossad team could not afford to wait much longer.

Argentina was celebrating 150 years of independence from Spain. A large team of Israeli diplomats and politicians had flown in to mark the occasion. When they flew back out again, to Senegal to refuel and then on to Israel, the team was slightly larger. And one of the flight attendants looked very much worse for wear.

On 23rd May 1960, David Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that Israel had acquired Adolf Eichmann. The reaction of the members, often at loggerheads with each other, was estatic. The Argentines, on the other hand, were livid at the infringement of their sovereignty. The West Germans and Americans panicked, worried that Eichmann might implicate senior Nazis who had survived denazification, and were currently working for them. For Eichmann himself, his biggest moment was yet to come, when he would face trial in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem. A tale for another time

Why what you know about VE Day is (probably) wrong

This year marks 75 years since VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. As with most historical events, everyone 'knows' what happened. As with most historical memory, what you think you know isn't the full picture...

Celebrations

We've all seen the pictures. People celebrating, dancing in the streets, crowding central London to hear Churchill and the King speak and appear on the balcony of Downing Street. And with good reason. After six years of hardship, and having been expected imminently over a week, the Second World War in Europe was at last at an end.

And yet...

All of this did happen, that is beyond dispute. But away from most city centres, VE Day was a quiet day. "Usually, crowds were too few and too thin to inspire much feeling," reported Mass Observation. In the afternoon and evening, between 33% and 40% of the adult population was inside, tuned to BBC Radio, listening to coverage of various speeches, church services, and what we would now call vox-pops. In L.S. Lowry's VE Day, the side streets are deserted.

Many people found the whole atmosphere a bit artificial, a bit forced. The author Vera Brittain reflected that it was not as spontaneous as the end of the First World War 27 years previously. This makes sense. For many people, the war had become normality. VE Day marked the first jarring step into the unknown.

In popular memory, it was the hero of the hour, that icon of Britain at war Winston Churchill, that people were keenest to hear from. And yet, Mass Observation recorded some people treating his speech about the future with derision. "It was just like this after the last war and twelve months later we was standing in dole queues" a middle-aged man was heard to say when Churchill made positive noises about rebuilding the country. And although he was hushed by those listening to Churchill's speech ("He's done a grand job of work for a man his age - never sparing himself"), Churchill was living on borrowed time. Within weeks he would prove he was not the man to lead Britain into the brave new world. Forced into an election campaign, he said that his war cabinet colleagues would need a Gestapo to make their planned welfare state work. Churchill led the Conservative party to a crashing defeat, and was replaced by Labour's Clement Attlee. With this piece of knowledge, maybe it makes sense that the popular, unpolitical King George VI was the person people wanted to hear from the most on VE Day.

The two sides of Winston Churchill in 1945: heroic war leader to bungling party politician within a month

We won

I mean, on the face of it, yes. Britain was on the winning side. And what we had helped to defeat was the epitome of political depravity and evil. The evidence for that was evident, from the death camps of the Final Solution that were liberated as the war drew to a close.

But victory had come at a price. In 1815, relaying news of his victory at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington had said:

My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

This is a pretty good summary of the place the United Kingdom found itself in in 1945. Yes, it had won. But at great cost. Around 384,000 British servicemen and women had been killed, and another 376,000 injured. 67,000 civilians had been killed, mainly in the bombing of British cities between 1940 and 1941. The country had bankrupted itself in this fight to the death with Nazi Germany, and was reliant on cheap loans and handouts from other countries, particularly the USA. It would now have to rebuild Britain, and pay its share of rebuilding Germany, with empty pockets.

The psychological damage to Britain's place in the world was also profound. For the Britain of 1945 was not just the United Kingdom we know today. It encompassed a quarter of the world's land mass, and one in five of every person alive in 1945 was a part of the British Empire. But Britain's position as the pole imperial power was badly shaken. It had been the colonies and Dominions of the Empire which had rescued us just as often as the other way round. The speed with which France had fallen, and the British withdrawal from it, the ease with which the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales had been sunk, the falls of Singapore and Hong Kong to the Japanese, the fact that the Channel Islands had been occupied and not freed until after the war was over, all had shattered the image of British imperial might. Britain's treatment of the empire's brightest prize did not bear close scrutiny. The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 was made worse by the focus of the British Indian government on fighting the Japanese, and there was a crackdown on the Indian National Congress by the authorities. Within a decade and a half, the British Empire would be no more. It is telling that the contribution of the colonies in saving Britain from Nazi Germany has virtually not featured in our telling of the story of the Second World War. It is too painful, too unlike the story we tell ourselves.

Soldiers of the British Indian Army, 1944. They are often omitted from our story of the Second World War

It is often said now that the USA contributed the most money and industrial money to the war effort (the US economy only emerged from the depths of the Great Depression thanks to the Second World War), the USSR the most manpower (somewhere between 20 and 30 million Soviets died in the war), and Britain provided the most brains and innovation. A simple glance at the shelves in any bookshop, with titles like Churchill's Boffins, or recent films and TV shows about Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, will show this approach. And it is true that some technological advances were designed with the help of British scientists, notably the atomic bomb. But it does offer a telling glimpse of the reality of the postwar world. The future belonged to those two superpowers who had dominated the war effort. Britain was now very much going to play third fiddle on the world stage.

 

Part of the myth that we tell ourselves is that our brainpower helped win the Second World War

Britain did emerge from the war with immense moral authority. After all, it had stood alone in 1940 and 1941, carrying the flame of resistance and hosting the governments in exile, as country after country was plunged into Nazi occupation. Even this is contentious history, as many politicians in 1940 were prepared to talk peace with Hitler (it has to be said, amusingly given the regularity with which they reach for the imagery of the war, many senior Conservatives, often the ones who had resisted Churchill's ascent to the premiership), the USA was already bankrolling Britain by that stage, and it ignores the support of Greece and Yugoslavia, countries we notably failed to save from Nazism in the spring of 1941. But rightly or wrongly, Britain did get moral credit. It was to waste much of that in 1956, during the humiliation of the Suez Crisis. Some victory indeed.

War's over

VE Day is often held up as the end of the Second World War. It really wasn't. In the Far East, Imperial Japan still controlled vast swathes of Indonesia, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, and China. Japanese attitudes to surrender were that it was a huge dishonour. Already, even turning the tide against Japan had been far bloodier than much of the fighting in Europe. The Americans were closing in on the Japanese home islands, but the war was far from over.

There were three alternatives open to the Allies. One was to starve Japan into submission, by using their navies to sink ships transporting food between the four main islands. 67 of Japan's cities had already been subject to firebombing; this would be intensified. The second option was to invade Japan itself. Given the ferocity of the fighting so far, the casualty estimates sometimes ran into the tens of millions, when taking in Allied servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians. Also, there was no guarantee that the Japanese wouldn't just move the Emperor elsewhere and carry on the war. For soldiers in Europe, being held to prepare to transfer to Japan ahead of the planned invasion, there was genuine fear. Certainly, many people looked grimly at the Far East and expected several more years of carnage.

So the third option was taken. On August 6th 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was obliterated in a blinding flash of light. Three days later, Nagasaki was also destroyed. Japan, facing the full horror of warfare in the new atomic age, decided to surrender. There were more celebrations around the world for VJ Day. At last, the war was truly over.

The true end of the Second World War(?)

Even this isn't so simple. The Second World War may have been over. But the one thread which held the Allies together was defeating Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. With these enemies vanquished, it became rapidly apparent that the USA and USSR would not get along. For another 45 years, the spectre of a war between these two would haunt the world. And many people would die in the conflicts fought by their proxies. In the celebrations of VE Day, it is possible to see the Cold War which would dominate the world until 1990.

The signing of the final German peace treaty, in September 1990, at the end of the Cold War

The army which fought the war in the Far East for Britain is often called the Forgotten Army. The army which fought in Burma and Malaya does not attract the same attention as the fighting which took place in Europe and North Africa. The focus on VE Day shows this. But this was not the end of the Second World War, and we would continue to live, and fight, in the world it created for a long time to come.

Commemoration

All of these confused memories aside, we have decided to commemorate VE Day. This is fairly novel. We did not make this a big deal of the anniversary in 2015, or 2005. The Bank Holiday was moved for the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995. This 1995 event is important, for it marks the start of the resurgence of war commemorations in Britain. Until the mid-1990s, attendance at Remembrance Sunday events was continuing to fall, Remembrance Sunday itself was the day marked, over Armistice Day. Major anniversaries, of battles and events, were marked, but not to anywhere near the same extent as they are today.

VE Day's 50th anniversary in 1995- the start of Britain's rememberance mania

Whereas now, we are in a very different landscape. Remembrance Sunday has become a major event on the calendar, and more attention has turned to Armistice Day, to the extent that both are now marked in the same week with silences and ceremonies. The recent passage of the centenary of the First World War saw a wide range of events, and the Second World War does too. It has become heresy to suggest that these events cannot be commemorated, celebrated even, on a large scale.

Our commemoration has increased at the same time as the number of people who were there has gone down. To take the Second World War, these events were barely marked through until the 1990s. But there were millions of Britons in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s who had direct memories of the Second World War, indeed who had fought in the war, yet they chose not to mark these events. It is only with the increasing passing of this generation that our commemoration has gone up several gears.

Part of this makes sense. As there are fewer links to that past, there is more of a drive to connect to it, partly because it is harder for us to associate with it. But this also means the opportunities for mis-remembering are rife. We retreat into a safe, warm, memory, but one which may not really have happened. The current VE Day setup is borderline a festival (albeit one being conducted at a 2m distance). That is not fair to the sacrifices of millions in the Second World War. I often think 'Is this what they would have wanted us to be doing?' Look at the tea boxes full of food they definitely would not have had, the national sing along, containing none of the songs that the radio played on the day, the idea that Churchill was lauded as the nation's saviour when he was weeks away from being ejected from Downing Street in a landslide.

I have really conflicted views on this. I obviously believe the defeat of Nazism was a good thing, and it is important to mark it, and the contribution of those who did it. To borrow the words of the Kohima Memorial, those who gave their tomorrows for our todays. But I am also a history expert, who spent five years studying it at university, and five years teaching it to people. Much of the way we mark these events is what we want to remember, not what really happened. This is bad history. Bad history leads to a bad misunderstanding of the present. And bad history is something the people of 1945 had just spent six years pitted against.

 

US combat engineers passing out champagne on VE Day, May 1945