Germany sent a spy to Israel in an attempt to influence the trial of Adolf Eichmann because they feared it would implicate former Nazis who had senior roles in the government of post-war Germany.

Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor, personally dispatched the spy as part of a secret campaign to stop embarrassing information leaking out during the 1961 trial.

Such was the desire to keep names under wraps, that the defence ministry threatened to end arms deals with Israel if the trial reflected badly on Germany.

The disclosures, based on newly declassified documents from the German intelligence services, provide fresh information about the capture and trial 50 years ago of one of the worst Nazi criminals. Eichmann had organized the transport logistics of the Holocaust before fleeing to Argentina following Germany's defeat in the Second World War.

He was kidnapped by Mossad agents in 1960 and taken to Israel where his trial, which began on April 11, 1961, made headlines around the world.

Given the considerable sum of 2,000 Deutschmarks a month and free accommodation, Rolf Vogel, a German spy, pretended to be a journalist as he established ties with prosecution figures in an attempt to keep the names of certain former Nazis out of court. Of particular concern was Hans Globke, the director of the federal chancellery and one of Adenauer's closest aides. Once an official in Hitler's interior ministry, Globke had contributed to the Nuremberg Laws that targeted Germany's Jews.

According to the documents, a German foreign ministry official said he wanted to prevent "leading public figures in the federal republic" from being incriminated in the trial. He added that Germany had to demonstrate that only a "small group of individuals" had implemented the Holocaust and that those who "were not directly involved could not have had any knowledge of it."

The documents also revealed that in July 1961 an aide to a "co-ordination meeting at the federal chancellery" noted the government wanted to make it clear "that Eichmann had worked as a henchman of the Himmler-SS machine and not as an agent of the then German Reich". This, the aide argued, would make it impossible to link West German officials "to Eichmann's misdeeds". The Bonn government was also concerned that stories of former Nazis holding high-ranking posts could provide communist East Germany with a propaganda coup, and damage the credibility of the West German state in the eyes of its allies. The Eichmann trial, wrote Heinrich von Brentano, Germany's then foreign minister, could "boost all those forces abroad that view Germany and the Federal Republic with suspicion and resentment".

Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said the documents showed the "total lack of will the German government had to bring Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Final Solution, to justice".

"It's terrible. On the one hand the German government was trying to be a modern democratic state but on the other it had no interest in bringing this man to justice," he said.

The three-month Eichmann trial brought scores of witness accounts of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people into the public domain. From the first day, when the Attorney General of the Jerusalem district court told the judges that with him "stood six million accusers", the emotional testimony provided the world with a graphic illustration of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Eichmann was sentenced to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity and was hanged in 1962.

Read it on Global News: Germany sent spy to silence prosecutors in the Eichmann trial

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