Thread by @NLIsrael

Adolf Eichmann would perhaps never have been captured if it weren't for the man in this grainy photograph, a blind refugee named Lothar Hermann.
Hermann was born in Germany to a Jewish father and Christian mother & sent to Dachau in '35
for anti-Nazi activities.

He was violently beaten by the Gestapo and would later go blind as a result of his treatment there. He survived Dachau and was able to flee Germany following Kristallnacht, heading to Argentina.
In the 1950s, his daughter Sylvia began dating someone named Klaus Eichmann.

Though Adolf Eichmann, one of the most sought-after Nazi war criminals, was living in hiding under the alias "Ricardo Klement", his son – a raging anti-Semite who openly lamented that the Nazis hadn’t succeeded in murdering all of the Jews – used his father's actual last name.

Hermann alerted the Germans & wrote to Israeli Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman:
"As a private person and a Jew, I wish to let you know… There is absolutely no doubt that the person in quest whom I am finding for you really is Adolf Eichmann…"

Copies of Hermann's letters to Friedman are held in the National Library of Israel archives. Ultimately Hermann's tip got to the Mossad. A reconnaissance team was sent to Argentina to assess the situation, and Eichmann was captured on May 11, 1960.

A man literally blinded by the Nazis ultimately played a pivotal role in bringing one of their most infamous war criminals to justice.
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