Illegal Justice - May 11, 1960

On May 11, 1960, Israeli Mossad agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from a Buenos Aires street  an act that was heroic, criminal, and diplomatically explosive all at once. Today's episode examines the full weight of that night: the moral logic that drove Israel's decision, the Argentine Jews who absorbed the backlash, the German Jewish prosecutor who secretly tipped off the Mossad because he didn't trust his own government, and Hannah Arendt's shattering argument about the nature of evil that the trial unleashed on the world. Justice was served. Everything about the way it happened was illegal. Both of those things are true.