The Nazi Hunter Who Wouldn’t Back Down: Tuviah Friedman’s Relentless Quest for Justice

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. Unthinkable to him: a German commands, and a Jew does not comply?

It was 1942. The Germans were in the midst of liquidating the Jews of Radom. The nearly last six thousand Jews were loaded onto a cattle train of 60 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 it all. One of those witnesses was 19-year-old Tuviah Friedman. The malicious Unterscharführer Konrad Buchmaier could not have imagined that four years later, Tuviah Friedman would be on his heels 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.

But Buchmaier wasn’t 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, 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 administration—who 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 miserable life behind bars.

After the Nazi invasion in 1939, 16-year-old Tuviah Friedman was taken for brutal forced labor in Czshanov, where he had to dig anti-tank trenches by hand. He managed to escape back to his hometown of Radom, which soon became the Radom Ghetto. His parents died of hunger and disease there. That’s where he first encountered the Nazi Richard Scheigel. He promised the Jews a prisoner exchange with the British and, under that pretext, loaded 60 Jews onto a bus, supposedly for the swap. He drove them toward the cemetery to shoot them there for his own amusement. At the last moment, another officer rescued 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, it seemed the camp was about to be liquidated, so Friedman escaped with several prisoners through a sewer and hid in the cemetery for several weeks. Eventually they had to leave to look for food and were caught by the Germans. By a special miracle, the Germans did not think they were Jews—otherwise they would have killed them on the spot. They were taken as partisans, with execution set for morning. But Friedman didn’t wait. During the night he attacked the guard, killed him, and slipped to freedom again—this time until the end of the war.

When the war ended, he reported to the Radom police and volunteered to track down Nazi criminals. From that moment he began a pursuit he would finish only in 2011, when he passed away at a ripe old age. After tracking down Radom’s perpetrators, Buchmaier and Scheigel, he turned to hunt the SS chief and police commander in Radom, Herbert Boettcher, and his deputy, Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Blum. He located the two in Neumünster, England, and thanks to his vigorous efforts the criminals were hanged in the city where the crime was committed—Radom.

In the early 1950s, the Allies stopped cooperating in the pursuit of Nazis. They were satisfied with what had been done and didn’t want to rouse sleeping bears. Friedman couldn’t accept that. He knew thousands of Nazi criminals were still alive, so he moved to the communist side, where war criminals were still being prosecuted. Later he immigrated to Israel and was an active partner at Yad Vashem, but eventually he resigned. He wasn’t willing to settle for testimonies; he demanded justice and revenge. Then he hit a major obstacle: money. He had no support—not even a single lira. He lacked the means to travel abroad, pay private investigators, pay for information, or take any other necessary action. He decided, with great regret, to retire from the work. Before doing so, he went to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe instructed him: \"You must not quit; you owe this to the Jewish people. As for the money: my advice is that you write a book describing your activities, and sell it everywhere you lecture.\" The Rebbe’s advice succeeded beyond all expectations, and thanks to book sales his work continued for another forty years. Hundreds more Nazi criminals were brought to justice thanks to his efforts.

He established international centers to locate Nazi criminals and to file civil claims against Germany and its collaborators. He uncovered the first thread that led to the mega-criminal and arch-terrorist Adolf Eichmann, after he found the address of a woman who had been Eichmann’s friend in Linz, Austria. For fifteen years he gathered extensive material on Eichmann, which ultimately aided in the capture and trial that ended with his hanging in Israel in 1960.