Obituary: Tuviah Friedman

IN THE months before and after the end of the Second World War, Tuviah Friedman tirelessly hunted Nazis as part of a militia in liberated Poland, and revelled in his nickname, the Merciless One.

By his own account, he hunted, captured, tortured and sometimes killed Nazis as he roamed the Polish countryside, seeking to avenge the deaths of every member of his immediate family apart from his sister, Bella.

Sometimes he whipped his quarry, just as he had been whipped in the Nazi concentration camp from which he escaped in 1944 before he could be sent to the gas chambers.

He particularly sought Nazis who had killed Jews in and around his hometown, Radom, Poland - men such as Wilhelm Blum, an SS officer who sent tens of thousands of Jews to the Treblinka death camp and who was executed in 1947.

To find the SS operative Konrad Buchmayer in a prisoner of war camp in 1945, Friedman posed as a captured Nazi officer wearing a tattered SS jacket.

He went on to work with Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, in post-war Vienna. Together they helped capture as many as 250 former Nazis linked to war crimes.

Neither man caught the Nazi they most coveted, Adolf Eichmann, who had orchestrated the trains and gas chambers of the Holocaust and who was hanged in Israel in 1962 after an eight-month trial that transfixed the world. The Mossad, Israel's secret agency, claimed full credit for catching him, in Argentina.

But Wiesenthal and Friedman, working together in the immediate post-war years and separately later on, pursued clues, amassed evidence and rallied public attention as the interest and ability of governments in chasing war criminals waxed and waned.

In his 2010 book, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Tom Segev wrote that Friedman "ensured that Eichmann's name stayed in the headlines".

Tuviah Samuel Friedman was born in 1922, in Radom, where his father owned a printing business. After escaping from the labour camp through sewers, he joined the semi-official Polish militia in 1944. In Vienna he joined a secret Jewish group that was helping Israel come into being even as it strove to avenge the past. In 1946, his superior, Arthur Pier, who later changed his name to Asher Ben Natan and held posts in the Israeli government, instructed him on his top priority.

"Friedman, you must find Eichmann," he said, according to Friedman's 1961 memoir, The Hunter. "I will say it to you again: You must find Eichmann."

Moving to Israel in 1950, Friedman kept up his Nazi-hunting efforts while working for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance organisation, then started his own one-man initiative in Haifa, calling it the Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes in Haifa.As his profile grew, many Israelis grew bored with him; some greeting him with jeers of "Herr Eichmann!" In one news conference he held, in 1959, he made headlines by saying that Eichmann was in Kuwait. It was not true. He also offered a $10,000 reward for his capture, though he had no money to back it up.

At home, Friedman's wife, the former Anna Gutman, an eye surgeon, pleaded with him to give up his obsession. She blamed the emotional toll for a miscarriage and complained about having to support them alone on her salary. She told him people wanted to forget the Nazis. At one point during his hunt, Friedman received a letter from a man in Argentina saying he could pinpoint Eichmann's whereabouts. The man, writing anonymously, said he was interested in the $10,000 reward. More letters went back and forth.

Friedman maintained that his publicised reward offer and his correspondence with the informer, later identified as Lothar Hermann, a half-Jewish concentration camp survivor, helped lead to Eichmann's capture. Israeli officials disagreed, giving Friedman no credit. Mossad agents, they said, were already on Eichmann's trail and found him with Hermann's help.

But Friedman contended that after the arrest, Eichmann was heard telling the Israeli agents, "Where's Friedman?" Whether Friedman's promise of a reward, unauthorised by Israel, had truly motivated Hermann remains unknown. But Hermann felt he was entitled to the money, and he pressed the Israeli government to pay him. In 1971, prime minister Golda Meir agreed, and Hermann was paid $10,000.

To Friedman, this amounted to acknowledgment of his role in Eichmann's capture. "All these years, I was a beaten man," he said "but I had patience."

His wife and their son predeceased him.