What immediately comes to mind when you hear the term “Nazi hunter”? Cloak and dagger operations? War criminals cowering in the jungles of South America? Perhaps the image of a secret agent tying up a culpable perpetrator of the Holocaust, stuffing a gag into their mouth, and delivering them before a court of justice?
I’m no mind reader, but I’d be willing to bet good money that any (or all) of those items listed just floated to the surface of your noggin.
That’s because our collective, and slightly romanticized, notion of tracking and capturing former members of the Third Reich in the years following World War II was born out of a single, history-defining event: Israel’s 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem.
Who was Adolf Eichmann?
Infamously known as the “Architect of the Final Solution,” Eichmann had been tasked with overseeing the deportation of Europe’s Jewish population to the industrialized murder awaiting them at Nazi death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. Six million men, women, and children were slaughtered — and the man responsible for helping bring about their deaths managed to slip away and start a new life in Argentina not long after Germany’s surrender in May 1945.
The surviving leaders of Hitler’s genocidal Nazi war machine were, of course, put on trial and executed at Nuremberg, but there was no disguising the fact that plenty of other guilty parties had avoided commensurate retribution.
When those trials concluded, the biggest players on the geopolitical stage hoped to wash their hands of the Nazi business as the conflict with the USSR began to take shape (as we know, the emergent world powers were more than happy to overlook war crimes of certain individuals if it meant winning the Cold War).
But Eichmann’s capture and trial — which captivated the world and mythologized the Mossad (the Israeli equivalent of the CIA) as a legend in the field of spy craft — sent shockwaves across the globe, forcing civilization to reckon with the permanent wounds of the Holocaust and confront the banality of evil.
Origins of Operation Finale
“There was this deep, deep well of trauma that existed in the country [Israel] that everybody was ignoring because they couldn’t face the things that had happened to them,” screenwriter Matthew Orton told me over Zoom ahead of the WGA strike. “The trial of Adolf Eichmann ended up being this huge moment of national catharsis.”
While there had already been several dramatized depictions of the Eichmann affair over the years — most notably 1961’s Operation Eichmann, 1979’s The House on Garibaldi Street (based on the account of the same name by former Mossad boss Isser Harrel), and 1996’s The Man Who Captured Eichmann (based on the memoir Eichmann in My Hands by one of the lead agents of the mission, Peter Malkin) — Orton saw an opportunity to place his own spin on the material.
“I started to think about this big, old story that could, in a nice little heist-y way, speak to some much bigger themes,” says the writer, who received a degree in history from Magdalen College. “It is this great moment of heroism and justice. Just a great moment in a country’s myth-making, in a country’s history.”
The end result was Operation Finale, which opened in theaters five years ago today. Orton wrote the script on spec, drawing from a number of firsthand accounts from those people who had directly taken part in the operation: Harrel, Malkin, Tzvi Aharoni (Operation Eichmann: The Truth about the Pursuit, Capture and Trial), and Rafi Eitan (he didn’t write a book, but gave plenty of interviews in the media).
“Four of the sources wildly contradict one another and sort of position themselves as the protagonist in this story,” Orton says, also citing citing Neal Bascomb’s Hunting Eichmann and Uki Goñi’s The Real Odessa as major sources of inspiration. “That’s incredibly helpful when you’re creating a piece of historical fiction, because you can kind of pick and choose without ever being deliberately disingenuous. You’re tapping into the spirit of it without, I hope, distorting facts too wildly.”
The struggling writer was nearly broke — “I think I had about 800 pounds left in my bank account,” Orton remembers — when MGM bought the screenplay, which frames the operation through the eyes of Malkin, who grabbed Eichmann after uttering those three iconic words: “Un momentito, señor.”
Who directed Operation Finale?
With a major studio onboard, production got underway, tapping Chris Weitz as director. Best-known for his work on films like About a Boy, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Weitz had something of a personal connection to the material. His father and grandparents fled Germany several years after Adolf Hitler rose to power and began restricting the basic human rights of German Jews.
“I think that was part of it. It was addressing some aspect of my past or my family’s past,” he explained over a separate Zoom call. “That and the the undercover nature of it. And that it was also a bit oblique. It wasn’t about Nazi Germany, it was about Argentina or any other place where fascism could take root.”
In addition, Weitz found himself attracted to the “extraordinary,” stranger-than-fiction elements of the case. There was the fact that Eichmann (going under the pseudonym “Ricard Klement”) was initially identified by a blind Holocaust survivor named Lothar Hermann, whose daughter was dating Eichmann’s son, Klaus, at the time. Then you had the nigh-impossible odds a fledgling nation like Israel faced in pulling off one of the most impressive operations in the history of espionage.
“Everybody thinks about the Mossad in a certain way, which is of these incredibly able, dangerous super-men of that world,” Weitz says. “But at the time, it was such a shoestring and improvisational affair [and] you can tell that in the accounts.”
Of course, the “crazy sort of Hollywood way in which they intended — and managed — to get him out of the country” (disguising Eichmann as the drunken member of an El-Al flight crew in town for Argentina’s 150th independence celebration) made it perfect for the big screen treatment after several made-for-TV interpretations.
Who stars in Operation Finale?
Orton didn’t write the film with any actors in mind, though he probably couldn’t have dreamed of the ensemble it ended up featuring: Oscar Isaac (Peter Malkin), Sir Ben Kingsley (Adolf Eichmann), Mélanie Laurent (Hanna Elian), Nick Kroll (Rafi Eitan), and Lior Raz (Isser Harel) — among several others.
Much of the film’s dramatic impact resides within the various debates on morality, decency, and culpability between Malkin and Eichmann following the latter’s capture. “Now that we’ve [made the movie] I really can’t imagine anybody else playing the role,” Orton said of Isaac, who portrays Malkin as a man haunted by the ambiguity of what happened to his sister and her children during the Holocaust.
“Often, there’s just a line or a moment where you’re like, ‘That’s real. That was true.’ There is a moment between Oscar and Ben Kingsley, where he tells Eichmann about his sister and says, ‘We never knew what happened to her.’ Eichmann tries to explain, ‘I don’t know, either.’ And Malkin is like, ‘I wasn’t asking.’ It’s that lovely, awkward moment of misunderstanding.”
“Sir Ben Kingsley is the one living actor who has delved most deeply into this territory and remains fascinated with it,” Weitz said, alluding to Kingsley’s roles in Holocaust-related projects like Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989), Schindler’s List (1993), and Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001). “This kind of allowed him to supply another facet to the portrayals that he’s made of this time.”
How does Operation Finale differ from actual history?
By Weitz’s own admission, “we bent the truth quite a lot,” but that’s to be expected from a dramatized (or, if you prefer, Hollywood-ized) version of true events.
The biggest change he and Orton made to the source material was ramping up the danger posed to the Israeli team by exaggerating Eichmann as an influential figure, whose sudden disappearance kicks off a nail-biting manhunt conducted by Argentina’s ruthless fascist community (led by Pêpê Rapazote’s Carlos Fuldner).
“I think that Eichmann was going to have to represent something and be more of a symbolic figure,” Weitz explained. The Finale version of the Nazi fugitive, he said, embodies “the appeal of fascism and anti-Semitism” and serves to emphasize “that these ideas can take root anyplace and that they transfer along this narrative chain and remain dangerous, even when they seem like they’ve gone away for the moment.”
A similar instance of poetic license concerns Laurent’s Hanna Elian, the doctor tasked with keeping Eichmann sedated. The actual figure, Yonah Elian, was male, but Orton swapped the gender to “do away with a lot of the very casual sexism” found in the primary accounts, which “talk quite disparagingly of the female agent who was on the mission, and make jokes about how she couldn’t cook and was really ugly. It’s just gross. I didn’t want any of that in there.”
A third notable deviation from history revolves around the final escape with Eichmann from the Buenos Aires airfield. The film depicts the takeoff as a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat getaway that’s nearly foiled when, in reality, it wasn’t “as close an escape as was portrayed,” Weitz confessed.
For Orton, it’s one of the few scenes he’d change if given the chance. “The ending is so irritatingly close to Argo,” he said. “I think that’s my one gripe, is that we didn’t find a way of departing, and have it feel the same sort of satisfying.”
Operation Finale production and costume designers on recreating the late 1950s and early 1960s
All of principal photography took place in Argentina, with Weitz reuniting with his New Moon production designer David Brisbin, who has always “sought out intelligent period films,” Brisbin explained over the phone. “I’m really interested in narrative filmmaking as a way to dig into history — both to be able to scrutinize the past, but also just as a form of self-education.”
He characterized his job on Finale as “a strange kind of bifurcated situation” because of how certain reference materials only provided him with half the information he needed for “a lot of the key venues in the story.”
When it came to Eichmann’s house on Garibaldi Street, for instance, there is plenty of photographic evidence of the exterior, but no stills of the interior.
“Working from the historical photographs, we tried to get as close to the physical reality of that exterior,” Brisbin said. “Not just the house, but the whole area around it as we possibly could. But then the inside, we built onstage. I don’t want to say we made it up, but we made it up.”
The same ethos was applied to the safe house where Eichmann is kept before he can be smuggled out of the country. “We knew that it was a pretty big house,” Brisbin said of the vague “verbal descriptions” he was able to track down. So he relied on educated guesswork and input from Weitz, who wanted to evoke a certain frame of mind in “the room where Eichmann and Malkin have their major tete-a-tete.”
“He wanted to get inside of a sort of psychological destabilization in that place — literally to the point of wanting wallpaper that would sort of feel like it was closing in. Almost like an organic, seething plant world that could insert the audience into the mind of these two characters who are, in that moment of the story, getting into the densest, personal, psychological, political space in the entire movie.”
On a macro level, the largest obstacle for the production designer was the simple fact that Buenos Aires no longer looks like it did back in 1960: “There’s an enormous gap to close. You just research the hell out of it and try to find things that either can substitute for or approximate the original history, and capitalize on those.”
Due to budgetary restrictions, the movie was unable to shoot a number of scenes in Israel, though Brisbin caught a serious break upon realizing that there had actually been a construction boom, “that corresponded style-wise and period-wise,” between the two countries in the 1950s and ‘60s.
“Weirdly, there was a parallel available in Buenos Aires to shoot in that I wouldn’t have necessarily predicted until we started looking around there and realized, ‘Well, actually, there is an architectural parallel between what you can find at Buenos Aires and the research that we had had on Israel.’”
“We had to squeeze as many Middle Eastern-looking, period-looking places as possible out of Buenos Aires,” echoes Weitz.
Costume designer and native Argentinian Connie Balduzzi (Night Sky) wasn’t so lucky, given that the fashions between the two nations were “completely different” at the time, she said, adding that Argentina was about a decade behind on the vogue front in general. “So when we do the ‘60s, we are really doing the ‘50s.”
Because most of the story (and filming) took place in Argentina, Weitz wanted to bring on at least one local head of department. “He really fought for me to be in this job,” Balduzzi said. The director’s insistence paid off: the designer’s connections with nearby vintage shops (such as La Percalina), as well as tailors and seamstresses, proved invaluable.
“We produced a lot of things in Argentina,” she explained. And whatever Balduzzi couldn’t get locally, she sourced from the Peris Costumes rental house based out of Madrid, Spain. The biggest items to come from Peris were Nazi uniforms (seen in flashbacks to WWII) and the El-Al flight crew outfits.
The latter sparked brief friction between Balduzzi and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. Since she could not travel to Europe, the costume designer relied on the Spanish director of photography to help choose the right shade of blue.
“When we did the camera test and he saw the complete costume, he told me, ‘Connie, this is not the blue that we chose.’ And I said, ‘Yes, this is the blue that we chose.’ I think he hated me for one day and afterwards he did [some] beautiful lighting and the costumes really looked amazing.”
Speaking of color, Balduzzi chose “warm colors [for] characters that were coming from Israel and all the cold colors [for] all the people that were part of Eichmann’s group.” In other words, “The bad ones were cold and the good ones were warm.”
For the third act stretch involving Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial, Brisbin pored over archival footage and images of the event to nail down the look of the courtroom, which had been housed within a recently-opened center for the performing arts known as Beit Ha’Am. His research yielded a rather intriguing and “meta” discovery about the story behind the setting for one of the most important tribunals in history.
“On a rushed schedule — it was almost like throwing together a set for a movie with not enough time not enough and money — they literally built the courtroom almost as a stage set in front of that theater.”
When did Operation Finale come out?
Operation Finale opened in North American theaters on Aug. 29, 2018 to very little fanfare. After all, this was a summer chock full of heavy blockbuster hitters like Deadpool 2, Incredibles 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, The Meg, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Weitz’s modest drama sadly fell by the wayside at the tail end of the season, obscured by those massive studio tentpoles. And, as a result, it failed to recoup its $24 million budget with a final box office haul of just $17 million.
There were no international ticket sales, owing to the fact that Netflix
NFLX
“It’s a really fun historical thriller … that sort of unpacks an unpleasant, complicated man, and shows this incredible moment of heroism from a bunch of people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing — for both their country and for history,” Orton concluded when I ask why he thinks audiences should revisit Finale (or perhaps discover it for the very first time).
“I think we’re in a stage where people are tempted … to gloss over history and forget history … it doesn’t work because it’ll come back and bite you,” Brisbin added, recalling those famous words by George Santayana. “You can pretend that history’s not there. But it also does have the capability of coming back to ensnare you at times when there’s a justice that needs to be meted out.”
Weitz echoed that sentiment, describing the film as “perennial.”
He finished: “Charlottesville happened while we were shooting,” he recalls. “I think that it is worth the occasional reminder that these kinds of things can happen in countries that you think have nothing to do with the Second World War or anti-Semitism or Nazism. That nobody’s quite immune.”
Operation Finale is now streaming on Netflix.
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