When Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann escaped from the Allied forces that had captured him after World War II, he disappeared and was presumed dead by some — but Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion swore he would be made to account for his crimes, as other Nazis had at the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s.
The story of how Eichmann was apprehended in Argentina in May of 1960 is the subject of the new movie Operation Finale. But the capture was, in many ways, only one part of the historical importance of that story. What happened next, though largely outside the scope of the film, would raise new questions about the very meaning of concepts such as justice, evil and guilt.
As TIME reported immediately after the capture, the idea that Eichmann would stand trial in Israel was controversial, as “diplomats and editorialists around the world asked about the legality of kidnapping a man from one country to stand trial in a second for crimes committed in a third,” and Argentina dealt with a situation under which its “sovereignty was infringed and [its] laws against abduction were flouted.”
