Tuviah Friedman, Nazi hunter, dies at 88

Tuviah Friedman survived years in a series of concentration camps during World War II. His parents and two siblings perished, and he had seen Nazis kill dozens of others.

So Friedman made it his life's work to bring his captors to justice. As a Nazi hunter after the war, he was credited with helping to find Adolf Eichmann, the German officer considered a major architect of the Holocaust.

Friedman died Jan. 13 at 88 in Haifa, Israel.

Born to a Jewish family in Poland, Friedman "was an indefatigable and sometimes brash or even intemperate voice for justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity," said Eli Rosenbaum, a prosecutor with the Justice Department who has investigated Nazi war crimes cases.

After the war ended in Europe, Friedman worked with Soviet and Polish authorities who were seeking evidence of German atrocities. In the spring of 1945, they sent him to inspect an abandoned Nazi facility on the outskirts of what was then Danzig (now Gdansk), Poland.

"One room was filled with naked corpses," Friedman wrote in his 1961 memoir, "The Hunter." "Another room was filled with boards on which were stretched human skins. Nearby was a smaller building, with a heavy padlock. We broke in and found an oven in which the Germans had experimented in the manufacture of soap, using human fat as raw material."

Friedman was often described as working in the shadow of Simon Wiesenthal, a renowned Nazi hunter who died in 2005. But unlike Wiesenthal, a self-promoter, Friedman toiled in obscurity for most of his career.

In the postwar period, Friedman worked in Vienna with the support of the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary group. He and a small team chased down leads all over Europe.

Friedman pursued Eichmann with a maniacal passion. He scoured thousands of documents and interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors for hints of the Nazi officer's whereabouts.

Eichmann had disappeared from Germany after the war and was the subject of an international manhunt. To get background on Eichmann's family, Friedman visited Linz, Austria, where Eichmann's father owned an electrical goods store, and bought a lightbulb.

"I felt, after looking at the old man, that I had seen Satan's father," Friedman wrote in his book. Once Friedman left the store, he smashed the bulb in the street and spit on the shards.

The Eichmann trail soon ran cold. Friedman's team was disbanded, and in 1952 he moved to Israel. In Haifa, Friedman's life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice became a lonely obsession.

He bought classified ads in newspapers, asking for tipsters to contact his one-man foundation: the Institute of Documentation for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes.

As years passed, Friedman found that interest in finding Eichmann waned. In the late 1950s, Friedman lobbied the World Jewish Congress and the Israeli government to offer a reward for information leading to Eichmann's arrest.

Friedman's activism paid off Oct. 18, 1959, when a letter originating from Argentina came to his address. The sender was a partially blind survivor of the Dachau camp. He wrote that Eichmann was alive and living near Buenos Aires under an assumed name.

Overjoyed with the fresh tip, Friedman alerted Israeli authorities. Unbeknownst to Friedman, the Israelis were already working on a plan to capture Eichmann. He was kidnapped by Israeli commandos in May 1960 and smuggled to Israel.

Planning for Eichmann's trial, Israeli police sought the help of Friedman, who provided investigators with hundreds of documents related to the Nazi's war crimes. Eichmann, convicted of crimes against humanity, was hanged in 1962.

Wiesenthal and others said Friedman's role in Eichmann's capture or prosecution was overblown. But Rosenbaum, the Justice Department official, said that finding Eichmann was a combined effort.

"It's fair to say that but for the constant agitation of Wiesenthal and Friedman, it would have been very unlikely that Israel would have launched the operation that resulted in Adolf Eichmann's apprehension and trial," Rosenbaum said in an interview.

Toward the end of his 1961 book, Friedman wrote that he had hope that future governments would "look about them and remove from their midst the residue of Nazi murderers who still live."

"Sadly," Rosenbaum said, "that hope was not realized, because the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators have evaded justice."