Thirty-five years after Israeli agents kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, one of his sons has broken his silence about his father.
Ricardo Eichmann, 40, a professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Tubingen in southwest Germany, spoke for the first time about his father to Israeli and German newspapers.As chief of the Gestapo's Jewish section, Adolf Eichmann oversaw the abuse, deportation and murder of millions in Jews in World War II. He promoted the use of gas chambers in concentration camps.
After the war he escaped to South America but was kidnapped by Israeli agents in 1960 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was living under an assumed name. He was tried and convicted in Israel of crimes against humanity, and in 1962 he was hanged.
"I am happy that the trial and the sentence took place then, and that as an adult I have no connection with him," Ricardo Eichmann told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in an article published Monday.
"For years I have been unable to get the matter off my mind," he said. "I do not need ceremonies commemorating the end of the war to live with the subject. I tried to grapple with it in conversations with my friends, but I . . . couldn't find answers, and I doubt if I ever will."
He told Haaretz he would like to visit Israel but realizes this would be difficult due to the hatred of Israelis for his father.
Ricardo Eichmann was 5 years old at the time of his father's abduction. He said his mother never talked about what had happened. Only later, at school, did he learn the truth, he told the German news-paper Suddeutscher Zeitung.
Eichmann said he decided against changing his name "because it would have been running away."
He had not told his students that he was Adolf Eichmann's son because he feared they would be "more preoccupied with who I am than with their studies," he said.
But Eichmann said he decided to disclose his parentage after he started his new job at the University of Tubingen on April 1.