The scale and nature of Adolf Eichmann’s crimes placed them outside the reach of conventional legal frameworks. To hold him accountable, one court turned to a centuries-old doctrine designed to prosecute those who were considered enemies of all humanity.
At one point in history, not too long ago, a man who identified as a Nazi was told by a court of law that he was also a pirate.
It sounds… odd? These are not categories we expect to overlap. And yet, in 1961, in a courtroom in Jerusalem, that is more or less what happened.
Before the trial of Adolf Eichmann could properly begin, prosecutors faced a problem. How does an Israeli court try a German man, living under Argentine protection, for crimes committed across Europe against victims from multiple countries?
The usual legal pathways did not quite stretch that far. So, prosecutors reached for something older – a principle shaped in a time when criminals operated beyond borders, far from any single nation’s authority. It was a framework built for 17th century pirates. And now it was being used to deal with something far more modern.
A deadly cog in the machinery
Adolf Eichmann was not a public figure in the way some Nazi leaders were. He did not command armies or deliver speeches to crowds. His role sat deeper in the system, in the part that made everything run.
He joined the SS in 1932 and was eventually assigned to what the regime called “Jewish affairs”. Over time, he became one of the people responsible for organising deportations across Europe. His work was almost purely logistical: trains, routes, schedules, numbers. He did not design the camps himself, but he ensured that people arrived at them in vast numbers and with relentless efficiency.
When senior Nazi officials met at Wannsee in 1942 to formalise the “Final Solution”, Eichmann was there, recording the minutes. Genocide was being translated into paperwork, and he was part of the process that made it operational.
In 1944, he personally oversaw the deportation of roughly 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Around 75% of them were murdered shortly after arriving there. Across Europe, the scale of the transports he helped organise makes it difficult to put a precise number on the lives lost through his involvement.
When the war ended in 1945, Eichmann was captured by American forces. For a brief moment, it looked as though he might be held accountable for his actions. But then, he slipped through. Using forged documents, he concealed his identity and avoided detection. When it looked as though his true identity had been revealed, he escaped from a work detail and disappeared into the confusion of post-war Europe. His name surfaced repeatedly in the testimony of his fellow party members at the Nuremberg trials, but he himself did not.
In 1950, he made the disappearance permanent. With the help of covert networks that moved former Nazis out of Europe, he obtained Red Cross papers under the name Ricardo Klement and travelled to Argentina.
The man who almost got away
Argentina offered exactly the kind of distance Eichmann needed. There was no extradition treaty with Israel or Germany, and while the government appeared to be aware of the fact that their country was becoming somewhat of an open-air retirement home for war criminals, authorities showed little urgency when it came to pursuing Nazi fugitives. It created the ideal space for someone like Eichmann to settle in.
And he did exactly that. He worked a series of ordinary jobs before finding more stable employment at Mercedes-Benz, where he was eventually promoted to the position of department head. He brought his family over and built them a home. To the people around him, he was unremarkable, simply a family man with a routine, a job, a place in the neighbourhood.
Eichmann may have been moving on, but the people on his trail – predominantly Holocaust-survivor-turned-Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal – were not. As the years passed, suspicions about Ricardo Clement’s true identity began to surface and circulate, and those who were looking for him took notice. But figuring out where Eichmann was was only step one. What came next was the really tricky part.
Extradition was not a realistic option. Argentina had a history of refusing such requests, and even attempting one carried the risk of alerting Eichmann or those who would protect him. If he disappeared again, there was no guarantee he would be found a second time.
Foiled by a teenager
Lothar Hermann was a German Jew who had fled to Argentina before the war. In 1956, his teenage daughter Sylvia began dating a young man named Klaus. Klaus was charming, but he also had a habit of talking too much. At some point, he began boasting about his father’s past, dropping references to Nazi connections.
It was the sort of thing that might have been dismissed as bravado, except for one detail: his surname was Eichmann.
Lothar sensed what was happening. To be sure of the facts, he asked Sylvia to go to the family home and see who answered the door. When she arrived, it wasn’t Klaus who greeted her, but an older man who introduced himself as Klaus’ uncle. He seemed cautious and measured. Then, a short while later, Klaus appeared and addressed him plainly as “Father”.
Lothar alerted Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany, who in turn made the decision to approach Israeli authorities directly. From there, the slow machinery of investigation began to move with more purpose. By the end of the 1950s, Israeli authorities had enough to justify closer scrutiny. Mossad agents were sent to Buenos Aires, where they began observing Eichmann’s daily movements. They watched his movements, noted his habits, and compared what they saw with what they knew.
He took the bus home at roughly the same time each day, and he followed the same route on foot. There was a predictability to his life that made surveillance possible and, eventually, a plan feasible. On the evening of 11 May 1960, Eichmann was intercepted by a team of agents while walking home. He was overpowered and forced into a waiting car. Several days later, he was sedated and snuck onto a plane to Israel.
The legal problem
Argentina’s response was immediate. From its perspective, its sovereignty had been violated. Foreign agents had entered the country, abducted a resident, and removed him without permission. The dispute was taken to the United Nations.
Israel acknowledged the breach, but did not return Eichmann. Instead, it moved forward with the trial. That decision brought the central legal issue into focus. Eichmann’s crimes had taken place in Europe. He was a German national who had been living in Argentina. The state preparing to try him had not existed when those crimes were committed. The usual rules about jurisdiction did not provide a clear answer.
To proceed, the court needed a principle that could stretch across borders and still hold. And that principle came from an unexpected place.
Between the 1600s and 1700s, rampant piracy forced legal systems to confront a similar problem. Pirates operated beyond the reach of any single nation, attacking ships in international waters and constantly moving between jurisdictions. Since traditional rules struggled to contain them, the response was the concept of universal jurisdiction. Since pirates were considered hostis humani generis – or enemies of all humanity – the decision was made that any state was allowed to prosecute them, regardless of where their crimes took place or where they themselves were from.
By the 20th century, this idea was well-established in relation to piracy. What had not yet been fully resolved was whether it could apply to crimes committed on land, within the borders of states, against civilian populations.
The Holocaust forced that question into the open. In Eichmann’s case, the court framed his actions as crimes against humanity, extending beyond any one country or legal system. That framing made it possible to apply a form of universal jurisdiction. For the purposes of the trial, Eichmann was condemned as both a Nazi and a pirate.
Eichmann’s end
The trial began in Jerusalem in April 1961 and unfolded over several months. The prosecution presented documents, records, and testimony from survivors who described, in detail, the systems that had shaped their trauma. Eichmann’s defence remained consistent throughout. He argued that he had been following orders, that he was part of a larger machine, that responsibility lay elsewhere. His denial of personal responsibility would later inspire a researcher at Yale University to design the Milgram experiment in order to test the limits of human obedience (in case you missed it, I covered that experiment and its findings in an article here).
The court rejected Eichmann’s argument. It found him guilty on multiple counts, including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. In December 1961, he was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by hanging the following year.
A strange alignment
Dubbing Eichmann hostis humani generis wasn’t an attempt to be poetic. It was a way of saying that what he (and he fellow Nazi party members) had done could not be contained within nationality or geography. The scale of the crime demanded a broader claim and a different kind of accountability.
The comparison to piracy feels mismatched, almost absurd at first glance. But that discomfort is part of the point. It reveals the limits of the systems we build, and the strange places we have to go when those systems fall short. Because in the end, the alternative was far stranger: a world in which someone could help orchestrate the machinery of genocide, cross a border, change a name, and simply carry on.
About the author: Dominique Olivier
Dominique Olivier is the founder of human.writer, where she uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.
Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.
She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.
Dominique can be reached on LinkedIn here.
