In 1971, the Israeli government paid out a belated $10,000 reward to Lothar Hermann for his supposed role in finding Eichmann. This seems to be the first time there was any public mention of him.
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/14/arch ... hmann.html
https://www.jta.org/archive/argentinian ... f-eichmann
NYT: The decision ended a 12‐year fight for the money by Luther Herman, 70 years old, of Buenos Aires. He said he discovered Eichmann's identity in 1959 when his daughter was dating Eichmann's son, and told the Israelis of his suspicions.
The above is more or less the official story today, with details being added over time. Below is the Wikipedia version (the dates seem earlier than most sources).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_Hermann
In 1954, Hermann's daughter Silvia, then 12 years old, happened to meet Eichmann's eldest son Klaus, who was 17 years old at the time, in the York district cinema. There exist multiple versions of events that led Silvia and then Lothar Hermann to suspect that Klaus was the son of Adolf Eichmann.
As early as 1954, Hermann passed on his suspicions first to the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and then to the DAIA (Delegacion de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas), the Jewish political umbrella organization in Argentina, but they did not react. Hermann then passed on his information to Fritz Bauer and also to Tuviah Friedman, who was trying to investigate Nazi criminals from Israel but was massively hindered by the Israeli authorities in further contact with Hermann. Fritz Bauer, who at the time was working in Hesse, Germany, as General Prosecutor, in turn, passed this information on to the Israeli foreign secret service Mossad in 1957 by secret means.
Two fact-finding missions by Mossad in 1957 and 1958 led the secret service to doubt the information, citing that Lothar Hermann had moved outside of Buenos Aires and in the meantime had developed cataracts in his other eye and was almost blind.[2] It was only after more pressure by Fritz Bauer and an independent tip-off by Gerhard Klammer that the Israeli government decided to put Eichmann to trial.[3] Mossad agents shadowed Adolf Eichmann and finally abducted him to Israel in 1960, where he was put on trial in 1961 and executed after his conviction in 1962.
Immediately, there are a couple of odd things about this. First of all, Klaus Eichmann was evidently living openly under his real name in Argentina, which is very poor op-sec and very baffling. (Eichmann giving interviews to Sassen is also not really keeping a low profile). Second, the whole thing hinges on a romance Klaus supposedly had with a way-too-young crypto-Jewess. Third, it says Mossad checked up on the lead in 1957 and 1958 yet they inexplicably failed confirm the identity. That is amazing incompetence, especially given the total lack of circumspection on the part of the Eichmanns implied by the rest of the story. There is also some contradiction with the timeline given in the 1971 reports where Hermann supposedly first said he determined Eichmann's identity in 1959. The later versions have an earlier and more drawn out timeline. Either the 1971 media reports garbled things or the timeline of the story was ret-conned somewhat.
There is a book Hunting Eichmann (2009) by Neal Bascomb which contains an extended account of the story. It says the Hermann family had moved to Coronel Suarez, a town quite far from Buenos Aires, and that in April 1957, Sylvia, the daughter, read some article talking about the notorious war criminal Eichmann. They recalled her former beau Klaus/Nicolas Eichmann and that he had made comments to the effect that it's too bad the German hadn't finished the job on the Jews. Klaus is also said to have talked very loosely about his father's service during the war (not realizing he was talking to crypto-Jews). Supposedly this along with the Eichmann newspaper article led them to suspect that the father, whom they had not met, was Eichmann. They then took a ten hour train ride to Buenos Aires and then Sylvia tracked down the address by asking around. She went up to the house and knocked on the door to investigate. The Bascomb book is written in a very journalistic style but it does have source notes in the back. Here are the sources he lists for Sylvia's visit to the Eichmann house.
A. Hahn, AI; A. Kleinert, AI; Friedman, The Blind Man; Harel, pp. 18-19. To recount the scene of Sylvia Hermann's visit to the Eichmann house, I drew on these four primary sources, which contradict one another on various levels. What is beyond doubt is that Hermann found the address of Adolf Eichmann and presented herself at the house to see if Nick's father was indeed the Nazi war criminal, an act of tremendous courage.
"AI" refers to the author's interviews with Amelia Hahn and Anthony Kleinert. These seem to be very obscure people. Not much online about them. (One hit suggests Amelia might have been Lothar's wife but I'm not certain). Tuviah Friedman is a Wiesenthal-type "nazi hunter." Lastly, we have Isser Harel, a Mossad agent. Harel published a memoir in 1975, The House on Garibaldi Street. This might have been the first detailed publication of the story. It was made into a TV movie in 1979. Another Mossad agent, Peter Malkin, wrote a similar book in 1990, Eichmann In My Hands. I'm not seeing any first-hand accounts from Lothar or Sylvia.
For sake of brevity, I won't go into the Mossad investigations here in this post. But, again, the oddity there is that they took a surprisingly long time to confirm the lead.
“When we finally caught Eichmann in 1960, the chorus of famous and less famous Nazi-hunters who claimed the credit for having found him became louder and louder,” Zvi Aharoni, the Mossad agent who interrogated Eichmann, said in a book about the capture. “The sad truth is that Eichmann was discovered by a blind man and that Mossad needed more than two years to believe the blind man’s story.”
https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/ ... ets-wrong/
Like so many things related to this topic, we are told a story that is difficult to corroborate. If this is BS, that would probably mean that the Israelis had been well-aware of him for some time and there was not really any "discovery" of Eichmann. Rather, they simply decided in 1960 that it was time to string him up. If the story is legit, given that he was not particularly well-hidden, to me that means they couldn't have been looking for him very hard.
P.S. One of the articles linked in the Wikipedia article is an article to a Spanish-language site. It makes some interesting claims, for example, it says Lothar Hermann and Fritz Bauer knew each from Dachau in the 1930s and that is why he reached out to him with the info. This is tantalizing, but this doesn't appear to be true because I see nothing about Fritz Bauer ever being an inmate in Dachau and no other sources seem to suggest these two had known each other. So that article doesn't seem to be very reliable.
