The Nazi Hunter Who Wouldn’t Back Down: Tuviah Friedman’s Mission

Unterscharführer Konrad Buchmaier was on a rampage. That morning he announced that exactly 6,000 Jews from the Radom Ghetto in Poland would board the train, but in practice the Jewish police managed to produce only 5,997. Such "insolence." Buchmaier stalked between the barbed wire fences, lashing his whip left and right at men, women, and children. His soldiers shot and looted, spreading terror and horror. To him it was unthinkable that a German would command and a Jew would not comply.

It was 1942. The Germans were in the midst of liquidating the Jews of Radom. Nearly six thousand Jews were loaded onto a cattle train of sixty cars, one hundred per car. When the roundup ended, four hundred Jewish bodies lay across the ghetto. A special group of Jews buried them and was then itself shot.

People hiding in attics and basements witnessed everything. One of those witnesses was nineteen year old Tuviah Friedman. The malicious Unterscharführer Konrad Buchmaier could not have imagined that four years later Tuviah Friedman would track him down in the streets of Vienna and turn him over to the authorities. Thanks to Friedman’s testimony, that evildoer spent the rest of his life in prison.

Hunting the Killers of Radom

But Buchmaier was not the only one. Before him, alongside him, and after him, Tuviah Friedman tracked down more than a thousand Nazi criminals, several of them responsible for murdering his own family and the Jews of his hometown of Radom.

Richard Scheigel, an SS officer responsible for deportations from Radom to Treblinka, had been arrested by the Allies but released for lack of evidence. He claimed he handled only administrative matters and that no one could prove otherwise.

Two months later Tuviah Friedman appeared. He located and identified the criminal and found witnesses who had seen him cram Jews into cattle cars while committing sadistic abuse and murder. Scheigel too ended his life behind bars.

Escape and Survival

After the Nazi invasion in 1939, sixteen year old Tuviah Friedman was taken for brutal forced labor in Czshanov, where he dug anti tank trenches by hand. He managed to escape and return to Radom, which soon became the Radom Ghetto.

His parents died there of hunger and disease. It was there that he first encountered the Nazi Richard Scheigel. Scheigel promised the Jews a prisoner exchange with the British and under that pretext loaded sixty Jews onto a bus. He drove them toward the cemetery in order to shoot them for his own amusement. At the last moment another officer removed Tuviah Friedman and his sister Bela from that final journey.

In October 1943 Friedman and his sister were sent to the Shkolna camp. As Germany’s defeat drew near and the camp was about to be liquidated, Friedman escaped with several prisoners through a sewer and hid in the cemetery for several weeks.

Eventually they had to leave their hiding place to look for food and were caught by the Germans. By a special miracle the Germans did not recognize them as Jews. They were taken as suspected partisans and sentenced to execution the next morning.

Friedman did not wait. During the night he attacked the guard, killed him, and escaped again. This time he remained free until the end of the war.

A Lifetime Mission

When the war ended he reported to the Radom police and volunteered to track down Nazi criminals. From that moment he began a pursuit that continued until his passing in 2011 at a ripe old age.

After locating Radom’s perpetrators Buchmaier and Scheigel, he tracked down the SS chief and police commander in Radom, Herbert Boettcher, and his deputy Wilhelm Blum. He located them in Neumünster and thanks to his efforts the criminals were hanged in the very city where their crimes had been committed, Radom.

Refusing to Give Up

In the early 1950s the Allies stopped cooperating in the pursuit of Nazi criminals. They were satisfied with what had been done and did not want to reopen old wounds.

Friedman could not accept this. Knowing that thousands of Nazi criminals were still alive, he continued his efforts. Later he immigrated to Israel and became an active partner at Yad Vashem, but eventually he resigned. He was not willing to settle for testimonies alone. He demanded justice.

Then he faced a serious obstacle: money. He had no support and no funding. Without resources he could not travel abroad, pay investigators, or obtain information. With great regret he considered ending his work.

Before making that decision he went to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe told him:

"You must not quit. You owe this to the Jewish people. Write a book about your work and sell it at your lectures."

The advice succeeded beyond all expectations. Thanks to the sales of his book, Friedman continued his work for another forty years. Hundreds more Nazi criminals were brought to justice through his efforts.

Bringing Eichmann to Justice

Friedman established international centers to locate Nazi criminals and to file civil claims against Germany and its collaborators.

He uncovered one of the first clues that led to the arch criminal Adolf Eichmann when he found the address of a woman who had been Eichmann’s acquaintance in Linz, Austria. For fifteen years he gathered extensive material on Eichmann, material that ultimately helped lead to Eichmann’s capture and trial in Israel.

Tuviah Friedman devoted his entire life to pursuing justice for the victims of the Holocaust and ensuring that their murderers would not escape punishment.