If you liked “Argo” – you’ll like “Operation Finale”

The 2013 Best Picture Oscar, as well as the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama of that same awards season, both went to Argo. That film recreated the dangerous 1979 covert extraction operation that spirited six Americans out of Tehran during the hostage crisis in Iran. We knew the outcome, but the film nevertheless had us feel the suspense and thrill of the daring.

With Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, we know the outcome. Nevertheless, the espionage and covert abduction-and-extraction (can they get away with him) mission recreated in Operation Finale delivers the same kind of suspense and thrills – along with an important history lesson.

Graphic evidence – the landscape of evil

My recollection is that, without picturing a body, the film’s opening credits are geographically demonstrable of the expanse of Nazi evil. On maps of Europe, there are lines drawn from cities to collection sites, to train yards, to networks of railroad tracks and train lines, all leading to death camps. The names of the camps are placed at each terminus.

Interspersed are pen-and-ink ledgers – columns and columns of numbers – that tell of the inconceivable numbers of men, women, and children who are destined for terminal travel along the lines that are shown on the maps. After more and more ledger pages are shown, the maps reappear, becoming more and more covered with transport routes and the names of still more death camps.

Then there are more ledgers still – more columns and the fearsome tallies at the bottom of each series of ledger pages – where Adolf Eichmann’s pen affixes his signature. His death warrants reach all across Europe.

Operation Finale’s opening visual moments speak volumes – serving an irrefutable indictment. If there is an award for opening credits, the film’s depictions of ledgers and transport networks would have to be the winner.

Eichmann in Argentina – lest we forget

Six million men, women, and children were eliminated – exterminated – simply because they happened to be of some Jewish heritage. The man who, to a great extent, organized and facilitated that heretofore unimaginable genocide was a Nazi SS lieutenant colonel, Otto Adolph Eichmann.

Through what can most charitably be called blind obedience, devotion and focus, this uncharismatic functionary managed to arrange for the trains that took millions to Nazi death camps, and their extinction.

By some accounts, Eichmann was an obsessive logistician; by many accounts, a coward. When the Allies made their way into Nazi territory, Eichmann discarded his uniform (of which he was so proud) and, hiding in the throngs of captured and undifferentiated Germans, he managed – through various “safe houses” in Europe – to slip through to Italy and then, undetected, made his way to Argentina.

Impelled by emotional needs for Nazi accountability – accompanied by demands for redress, and blessed with some luck – the national intelligence agency of Israel (Mossad) located Eichmann in a suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was living under an assumed name, and working in a Mercedes-Benz plant.

Location, Location, Location

Through contacts in Argentina who were committed to bringing to light the 1950s Nazi presence in that country (Germans hoping to resurrect their “beloved and holy patria”), the producers of Operation Finale were able to film much of the action, and most of the movie’s scenes, in and around Buenos Aires.

At a recent screening, film producer Fred Berger revealed that there were enough buildings and cobblestone streets still extant in Buenos Aires to provide the film with “a natural 1960 period vibe.” Eichmann’s unprepossessing stone house, its remote setting with the surrounding fields, and the bus and bus route he took home from work were recreated based on considerable firsthand sources.

Depicting authentic suspense and drama

There have certainly been other big-screen and made-for-TV iterations of the Eichmann capture and extraction, but Fred Berger gave special credit to the Operation Finale screenplay by Matthew Orton, who was a History scholar at Oxford’s Magdalen College. Orton’s penetrating research and interviews infused his screenplay with authentic recollection and recounting. Challenged to do justice to genuine justice-seeking, the filmmakers managed to explain on screen what needed to be explained about “the catch and extract” operation – and its worldwide consciousness-raising mission.

At that recent screening, Fred Berger apprised the audience of the challenges taken on in compressing into a well-paced film, a covert operation that was actually three years in the making. The operation had implications well beyond Argentina: Bonn and Washington knew where Eichmann was hiding, and didn’t want the publicity his capture would bring. If the operation failed, there would be major geo-political consequences. “The head of Mossad was directly involved, and on the ground in Argentina. Imagine if the head of the CIA was on the helicopter-gunship that landed at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”

As well as other cinematic iterations, and in some cases more explicitly and helpfully, we are given to understand how tips as to Eichmann’s possible whereabouts came about and how suspicions were followed up; how a photograph of Eichmann was obtained surreptitiously; how members of the Mossad team were assembled and how they arranged to get entry into Argentina; how reconnaissance was conducted; how Eichmann’s identity was confirmed; how the team members coped with the nine-day delay in getting their captive out of the country; how license plates played a role in the ruse; and how the escape was pulled off with ex-pat Nazis (and their Argentine allies) in hot pursuit through the streets of Buenos Aires and into the airport itself.

The putting together of action-adventure scenes with the recreations of Nazi-era atrocities might be noteworthy in the coming Winter’s awards season.

For awards consideration: There are map schematics that show the various (and indirect) air routes (and different airlines) that Mossad team members take to arrive in Buenos Aires and there are close-ups showing the skill with which assorted passports are forged. These, along with the opening credits, make for interesting and compelling storytelling. Perhaps special nods to the director and the film editor, and their graphics teams. The screenwriting is also a feat of storytelling – with its well-timed quips and comebacks, as well as its deft and cogent explications.

Cinematic Predecessors

The quite amazing story of Mossad’s detection, tracking down, abduction, and extraction of Eichmann has been presented previously: in The House on Garibaldi Street (1979) using a first-person recounting with date-lines; in The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996 – with Robert Duvall as Eichmann and as an executive producer); with a focus on the “final solution” in Conspiracy (2001); in Eichmann (2007) which drew significantly on the nine months of pre-trial interrogations of the defendant conducted by an Israeli police inspector; and in The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015) divulging the post-War efforts of the determined justice-seeking investigator-prosecutor who returned to Germany after having survived a Nazi death camp.

The events and the drama are now being exceedingly well-told in Operation Finale. The film’s title reminds us that the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” with its utterly perverse mania, gave rise to and impetus for monumental cruelties.

Operation Finale may not be the final word, the final depiction, but it is a depiction that is needed and should be seen – for its authenticity, its craft, and the many fine portrayals.

Oscar Isaac as Mossad operator Peter Malkin

If the producers of future James Bond movies are casting a wide racial-ethnic-nationality net for a new 007, they might well consider Oscar Isaac – he of a Guatemalan mother and a Cuban father.

He portrays the man who actually convinced Mossad higher-ups of the covert actions and abduction plan that worked. His character’s account, published as Eichmann in My Hands: A Compelling First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner informed several movie versions, along with Isser Harel’s The House on Garibaldi Street: The First Full Account of the Capture of Adolph Eichmann Told by the Former Head of Israel’s Secret Service.

The Art of the Deal – Psychological “warfare”

By many accounts, Peter Malkin’s patience and guile persuaded (tricked) Eichmann into signing the extradition paper that, under international law, gave the Mossad agents the justification to remove the accused to Israel – even as the Mossad team was violating Argentina’s national sovereignty.

Finding no fault with other portrayals, Oscar Isaac’s Peter Malkin has us grasp the restraint, the self-control, that had to be summoned in dealing with the creature who had likely authorized the execution of Malkin’s beloved sister and her children, among so many many others. The flashback scenes of his sister’s likely capture and doom are unnerving, upsetting – and properly so.

The flashbacks do not dwell on the firing squad (under the impassive Eichmann’s command) that took easy aim down at hundreds of utterly helpless women and children stuffed into pits and trenches; the riflemen under Eichmann’s command firing volley after volley to fully consummate the executions. The flashbacks do not dwell on the stacks of tumbled, intertwined, corpses to be removed from a mobile gas chamber. But these flashbacks are fully condemning and convicting.

Oscar Isaac’s Peter Malkin has to defeat these mental pictures in order to “befriend” the man who facilitated all those murders. By all accounts, Malkin figured out how to get to Eichmann’s ego, his pride, his need to vindicate himself. Could the SS-man-in-hiding be tempted by the opportunity to give his version to the world? There was his desire to have revenge on those who had blamed him for the outrages. In Eichmann’s uncomprehending mind, admissions by his fellow Nazis betrayed the Third Reich.

A Negotiation – a Psychological chess match

Malkin was the man who physically captured Eichmann. (The movie has us understand why Malkin wore gloves. Those coverings were enshrined in a bronze casting which has been on display in a Tel Aviv museum).

Malkin was the captor; he was not the team’s professional interrogator. Yet, his manner and approach, his appeal – questionable in some respects – was effective in getting Eichmann to imagine a way to redeem himself by agreeing to extradition.

Maintaining his composure, Malkin asks Eichmann, “I want to know what really happened – the real story.” He suckered him in, but kept his word and the bargain he had offered in exchange for the signature.

Yes, Malkin worked on Eichmann’s vanity and need for self-justification. We wonder if Malkin was also curious as to how Eichmann’s mind worked – how he was going to try to justify and absolve himself.

Sir Ben Kingsley, from Gandhi to Eichmann

The actor who received such wide wholly-warranted acclaim for his portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, again transforms himself. For this role – again with makeup wizardry – he has an unsettling resemblance to the Eichmann we can see in archival photos and film footage of his 1961 trial. In the December 2018 – February 2019 awards season, might the make-up artistry that transformed Sir Ben Kingsley into Adolph Eichmann be accorded a nomination? along with Kingsley’s portrayal?

Kingsley’s incarnation of the seemingly un-villainous villain can be maddening. We know what he did, we know he was responsible for expunging so many many families – yet, Kingsley’s Eichmann repeatedly asks (as Duvall’s did, and as the real Eichmann apparently did) for assurance that his wife and family were safe.

If pressured to make his case, Eichmann would only consider a forum in Germany where he would have the opportunity to refute and correct “the lies of the swine” who spoke against him in the Nuremberg trials. Calm and uncooperative, he insists that he is not going to be made a scapegoat.

Truth and Consequences

In his trial testimony, Adolph Eichmann – who was credited as “the architect of the Final Solution” – tried to minimize his role in the exterminations. The once proud functionary weaseled about his involvements and responsibilities – about his knowledge of what transpired at the end of the railroad lines and in the mobile gas chambers that were unequivocally in his very purview. As the Nazi transportation czar, he managed the Final Solution's supply chain. He may never have actually pulled a trigger or a switch, but there could be no denying that he certainly provided the millions of bodies that would soon become corpses.

A determined approval-and-status-seeking climber, Eichmann became head of the SS Office of Jewish Affairs, arming himself with ledgers, maps, fleets of vans, and railroad timetables. By position, power, and authority, he was the eradicator-in-chief of European Jewry.

It is bizarre and contemptible that semi-celebrated philosopher and intellectual “historian” Hannah Arendt – who experienced antisemitism in Germany in 1933, and was able to flee the fatherland – wrote a report about the 1961 trial of Eichmann that many knowledgeable readers found to be sympathetic to, even exonerating of, the accused.

Those actually and truly familiar with the trial faulted her “Report” of the proceedings for its glaring omissions and misrepresentations of evidence and testimony – all calibrated to fit her tortured view of Eichman as innocent of intent. She claimed he didn’t realize what he was doing – that he was mindlessly following the wisdom of superiors; that he was simply “thoughtless.”

Moral Mistold

Hannah Arendt, the celebrity intellectual, “was shoddy as a historian, and could be overbearing as a moral philosopher.” This assessment, shared by many, was well articulated by History professor George Cotkin. He went on to explain, “Unlike the historian, Arendt was not sufficiently careful to moderate her interpretative needs to the resistances of facts” – especially those facts that undermined or even refuted her appraisals.

The Hannah Arendt Defense of “Normalcy” and “Thoughtlessness”

It could happen. A gang-banger shoots and kills with rank callousness and uncomplicated intent. It’s his initiation and rite-of-passage into his gang’s higher echelons. By reports, we can think of MS-13. Or, a terrorist rams or detonates, and is captured and charged. The defense lawyers for these murderers read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Light-bulb: The lawyers defending the gang-banger and the terrorist argue for exoneration by invoking the explanation that Eichmann himself put forward, and which Arendt adopted as convincing. On Arendt’s authority, the defense lawyers raise the psychological explanation – the sociological exculpation of “normalcy”– which she bestowed on Eichmann’s conduct in uniform and to his testimony from the bullet-proof chamber which housed him during the trial.

1. The defendant – without evil intent – was just doing his job, following the dictates from his higher-ups.

2. The defendant suffered from – and was a victim of – his fidelity to the expectations of his higher-ups.

The gang-banger’s and the terrorist’s defense lawyers argue that there is a compelling human need for acceptance and approval. That widely-shared psychological need had these clients proceed, obediently, without giving any thought to moral issues, assuming the gang-banger or the terrorist had any sense of morality and immorality or amorality.

Pure and simple, like Eichmann, the gang-banger and the terrorist cold-heartedly murdered, or arranged for kills, to advance their belonging and status. So, like Eichmann, they were merely being “thoughtless.”

Indulging insensitivity, irresponsibility, and inaccuracy

William Shaw, the venerated editor of the prestigious The New Yorker magazine, had a tendency to indulge writers, especially females who projected brilliance. The indulgence, his vulnerability, in publishing what was presented as profound, made him susceptible to being fooled. Perhaps momentousness made him less vigilant and suspicious of a few particular writers’ accusations and grandiloquence, their certainty and their disdain.

A member of the highly- (and rightly well-) regarded fact checking department was (it seems) given limited opportunity to vet what became Arendt’s five-part Reporter At Large article. Arendt (who was not an experienced court reporter, let alone expert as to any criminal law proceedings) complained about the young man’s efforts to flag her contradictions, inaccuracies, misstatements – his efforts to correct her “facts.”

That checker, who went on to do significant editorial and journalistic work at major publications, may have discovered that Arendt failed to disclose that she had not attended all sessions of the trial. Indeed, she was absent when especially damning evidence was introduced and especially damning testimony was given.

That 1963 New Yorker publication predated my arrival as editorial counsel for the magazine, and I was never able to get a better read on what did or did not take place between Arendt’s submission of the manuscript and its serial publication.

But immediately following publication there were resounding rebukes and rebuttals: ample evidence of Arendt’s contempt and disdain for the Jerusalem judges, the prosecutor, some of the witnesses even, and authorities on the law who critiqued her views of the evidence and testimony.

The book publisher (Viking Press) would have relied on the magazine’s presumed scrutiny.

An exculpatory take, rightly denounced, condemned, decried, reviled, discredited

Hannah Arendt’s philosophical tangles, omissions, misstatements and distortions were dismissed, or conveniently ignored, by her and her intellectually-pretentious defenders. Together, they removed themselves from the stark and unprecedented inhumanity of the Nazis.

Book sales are promoted by endorsements that are carried in publicity press releases, and often on the introductory pages and the back cover of books.

An opinion: Excerpts and distillations from just a few of the highly-reputable reviewers and commentators who found Hannah Arendt’s “Report” dishonest, malicious, and repugnant should accompany any reprint of her book. Here’s a distillation:

“a prime example of uncomprehending arrogance and intellectual irresponsibility”

“surging contempt for everyone and everything connected with the trial”

“the overwhelming effect is of blinding animus and vast ignorance”

“the author manipulates evidence and testimony with high-handed assurance”

“heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious”

“as deceitful and cunning as the accused she excuses”

“untenable, if not preposterous”

“deranged, and desecrating”

“pernicious”

“downright perverse”

One of the most authoritative and incisive condemnations came from an exceedingly well-informed critic – Justice Michael A. Musmanno, a World War II European Theater of Operations Veteran. From 1946 to 1948, he served as the presiding judge at the Nuremberg Trial that focused on the mobile killing units that murdered more than a million civilians behind the front lines. He was a witness for the prosecution at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.

In The New York Times Book Review, he wrote, “The disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work.”

In further condemnation, he incredulously noted that Arendt maintained that the court had failed to articulate “a valid definition of a crime against humanity.”

He later added, “She says that Eichmann was misjudged, misrepresented, misunderstood, that he was ‘the victim of hard luck.’” Is that not sympathizing?”

The Conscience of a Criminal

In that same May 1963 review – “Man with an Unspotted Conscience” – Musmanno wrote, “Miss Arendt devotes considerable space to Eichmann’s conscience and informs us that one of Eichmann’s points in his own defense was that 'there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience.'" In well-considered outrage, the jurist proclaimed, “How abysmally asleep is a conscience when it must be aroused to be told there is something morally wrong about pressing candy upon a little boy to induce him to enter a gas chamber of death?”

And what about Arendt’s conscience: There was ample, undeniable irrefutable evidence that Eichmann knew where he was dispatching his herds, and ample, undeniable irrefutable evidence that he knew full well of their fate. Yet she defended Eichmann against his own admissions.

Justice Musmanno observed that her championing the SS-man’s proclaimed unawareness “is like saying that one repeatedly sojourned at Niagara Falls but never noticed the falling water.”

In the September 1, 1963 issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, wrote that the book with “its scholarly pretentions parades as history.” He continued,

“The book is in no sense a work of objective historical research aimed at determining ‘the way things really were’…. Arendt’s manipulation of evidence is at all times visibly tendentious…. Her cavalier treatment of evidence created distortions of perspective…. Her banalities stand as a shocking disservice to scholarship….”

The Legacy of Judgment at Nuremberg

In 1945 and 1946, the Allies empaneled military tribunals to apply international law in the prosecution of Nazis who planned, promoted, and facilitated The Holocaust. The trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany. That city’s Palace of Justice was relatively undamaged and included a sizable prison facility. Symbolically, just a few years before, that city had been the site of Nazi propaganda rallies.

The world public gained a vivid and emotional understanding of those heinous crimes with the distribution of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, which incorporated actual footage of Nazi Holocaust abominations. The film, which focused on the complicity of the Nazi judiciary, won two Oscars and two Golden Globes (including Best Picture) – and was favored with twelve other nominations by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Golden Globes. The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress designated the film for preservation citing its “cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance.”

At a recent screening of Operation Finale, Katharine (Kat) Kramer, filmmaker Stanley Kramer’s daughter, explained what Judgment at Nuremberg bequeathed to subsequent filmmakers. “Steven Spielberg credits the film, and my father, with having the courage and diligence to tell a story about vile, inhuman conduct in a way that promotes keen awareness. Those lessons, so well conveyed in film, must not be lost on succeeding generations. Steven has often said that he couldn’t have made Schindler’s List had it not been for Judgment at Nuremberg.

“I think that Operation Finale follows and adds to the tradition of bringing painful truth to wide audiences who might never be apprised of truth. I am speaking of the kind of truth that clearly refutes dissembling, egregious evasions and lies. The vile perpetrators of crimes against humanity tried to shield themselves in their own perverse amoral myths of truth and justification.”

Producer Fred Berger concurred with Ms. Kramer’s view in emphasizing that “truth-telling films show how justice can be pursued – not to satisfy blood-thirst revenge – but to expose the very worst inhumanity."

She echoed his elaboration on the artistic mission and responsibility: “The horror is there – but it’s not gratuitous. The moral is that justice can be rightly and justly pursued – not in a primal way – but by doing better than the criminals.”

Operation Education – telling it like it was, so more understand what is still with us

One is put to wonder if, back in 1963, an editor at The New Yorker or an editor at Viking Press – or any of Arendt’s defenders – consulted a thesaurus to discover that popular synonyms for “banal” include words such trite, hackneyed, vapid, commonplace, ordinary, conventional, timeworn, tired, unimaginative, humdrum, ho-hum, unoriginal…. trivial.

The Holocaust was anything but trivial. Films such as Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Schindler’s List (1994), along with documentaries such as Shoah (1985), serve to educate those who don’t know enough history to forget its horrifying lessons.

Operation Finale takes a rightful place in making sure current and future generations learn history that must never be forgotten.