The Vital Task of Holocaust Memory

Time and again, Martin Kramer has challenged one widely-embraced orthodoxy or another, both ideological and historical. And, using his incisive reasoning and his finely-honed skills as an expert and diligent historian, he has upended them.

In “The Truth of the Capture of Adolf Eichmann,” Kramer has done it again. He points out, rightly, that for most people the memory of historical events is formed less by what actually happened than by the narratives, often false, used to convey them. He argues that, in this case, what people think they know about Eichmann’s 1960 capture by Israelis in Argentina is based not on actual facts but on purported facts, invented by a person who wanted to be seen as a hero, and by Hollywood producers who based their film about Eichmann’s capture on that invention because it was cinematically useful. Worse still, the film conveys a false sense of the kind of man Eichmann was.

Kramer argues that the film—Operation Finale (2018)—was a misleading confection based on an account by one of the Israeli agents, Peter Malkin, and was almost surely exaggerated in order to make that agent appear to be a bold, brilliant, resourceful, kind, and tortured hero. It was also a fiction that, partly by casting as Eichmann the actor Ben Kingsley—widely beloved as a result of his roles in the films Gandhi and, more to the point, Schindler’s List—turned one of the monsters of history into a sympathetic human being. Kramer maintains that it was, in fact, a different agent, Zvi Aharoni, whose account of the operation was more reliable—and it was Aharoni, not Malkin, who got Eichmann to sign the agreement that he was going to go to Israel for a trial of his own free will.