Eichmann's only compensation consisted in talking endlessly with members of the large Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity. In 1955, this finally led to the interview with the Dutch journalist Willem S. Sassen, a former member of the Armed S.S. who had exchanged his Dutch nationality for a German passport during the war and had later been condemned to death in absentia in Belgium as a war criminal. Eichmann made copious notes for the interview, which was tape-recorded and then rewritten by Sassen, with considerable embellishments; the notes in Eichmann's own handwriting were discovered and they were admitted as evidence at his trial, though the statement as a whole was not. Sassen's version appeared in abbreviated form first in the German illustrated magazine Der Stern, in July, 1960, and then, in November and December, as a series of articles in Life. But Sassen, obviously with Eichmann's consent, had offered the story four years before to a Time-Life correspondent in Buenos Aires, and even if it is true that Eichmann's name was withheld, the content of the material could have left no doubt about the original source of the information. The truth of the matter is that Eichmann had made many efforts to break out of his anonymity, and it is rather strange that it took the Israeli Secret Services several years—until August, 1959—to learn that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement. Israel has never divulged the source of her information, and today at least half a dozen persons claim they found Eichmann, while “well-informed circles” in Europe insist that it was the Russian Intelligence service that spilled the news. However that may have been, the puzzle is not how it was possible to discover Eichmann's hideout but, rather, how it was possible not to discover it earlier—provided, of course, that the Israelis had indeed pursued this search through the years. Which, in view of the facts, seems doubtful.
No doubt, however, exists about the identity of the captors. All talk of private “avengers” was contradicted at the outset by Ben-Gurion himself, who on May 23, 1960, announced to Israel's wildly cheering Knesset that Eichmann had been “found by the Israeli Secret Service.” Dr. Servatius, who tried strenuously and unsuccessfully both before the District Court and before the Court of Appeal to call Zvi Tohar, chief pilot of the El-Al plane that flew Eichmann out of the country, and Yad Shimoni, an official of the air line in Argentina, as witnesses, mentioned Ben-Gurion's statement; the Attorney General countered by saying that the Prime Minister had “admitted no more than that Eichmann was found out by the Secret Service,” not that he also had been kidnaped by government agents. Well, in actual fact, it seems that it was the other way round: Secret Service men had not “found” him but only picked him up, after making a few preliminary tests to assure themselves that the information they had received was true. And even this was not done very expertly, for Eichmann had been well aware that he was being shadowed: “I told you that months ago, I believe, when I was asked if I had known that I was found out, and I could give you then precise reasons [that is, in the part of the police examination that was not released to the press]…. I learned that people in my neighborhood had made inquiries about real-estate purchases and so on and so forth for the establishment of a factory for sewing machines—a thing that was quite impossible, since there existed neither electricity nor water in that area. Furthermore, I was informed that these people were Jews from North America. I could easily have disappeared, but I did not do it, I just went on as usual, and let things catch up with me. I could have found employment without any difficulty, with my papers and references. But I did not want that.”
There was more proof than was revealed in Jerusalem of his willingness to go to Israel and stand trial. Counsel for the defense, of course, had to stress the fact that, after all, the accused had been kidnaped and “brought to Israel in conflict with international law,” because this enabled the defense to challenge the right of the court to prosecute him, and though neither the prosecution nor the judges ever admitted that the kidnaping had been an “act of state,” they did not deny it either. They argued that the breach of international law concerned only the states of Argentina and Israel, not the rights of the defendant, and that this breach was “cured” through the joint declaration of the two governments, on August 3, 1960, that they “resolved to view as settled the incident which was caused in the wake of the action of citizens of Israel which violated the basic rights of the State of Argentina.” The court decided that it did not matter whether these Israelis were government agents or private citizens. What neither the defense nor the court mentioned was that Argentina would not have waived her rights so obligingly had Eichmann been an Argentine citizen. He had lived there under an assumed name, thereby denying himself the right to government protection, at least as Ricardo Klement (born on May 23, 1913, at Bolzano—in Southern Tyrol—as his Argentine identity card stated), although he had declared himself of “German nationality.” And he had never invoked the dubious right of asylum, which would not have helped him anyhow, since Argentina, although she has in fact offered asylum to many known Nazi criminals, had signed an International Convention declaring that the perpetrators of crimes against humanity “will not be deemed to be political criminals.” All this did not make Eichmann stateless, it did not legally deprive him of his German nationality, but it gave the West German republic a welcome pretext for withholding the customary protection due its citizens abroad. In other words, and despite pages and pages of legal argument, based on so many precedents that one finally got the impression that kidnaping was among the most frequent modes of arrest, it was Eichmann's de facto statelessness, and nothing else, that enabled the Jerusalem court to sit in judgment on him. Eichmann, though no legal expert, should have been able to appreciate that, for he knew from his own career that one could do as one pleased only with stateless people; the Jews had had to lose their nationality before they could be exterminated. But he was in no mood to ponder such niceties, for if it was a fiction that he had come voluntarily to Israel to stand trial, it was true that he had made fewer difficulties than anybody had expected. In fact, he had made none.