Literatureטוביה פרידמן

Tuviah Friedman

Tuviah Friedman was a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who founded and directed the Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes in Haifa.

1922 to 2011Hunting Nazi war criminalsFounding the Haifa documentation instituteRole in Adolf Eichmann's captureAutobiography The Hunter

Born: 23 January 1922, Radom
Died: 13 January 2011, Haifa
Occupation: Nazis hunter, writer, journalist, historian
Founded: Institute of documentation in Israel for the investigation of nazi war crimes (1958)

Tuviah Friedman was born in 1922 in Radom

Friedman was born in 1922 in Radom, Poland, the second of four children in a traditional family. His father owned a printing shop and his mother ran a sewing workshop. The German army took Radom in 1939, and the family was later moved into the Radom ghetto, where his father died of malnutrition.

In 1942 his mother and younger sister were sent to Treblinka, and his younger brother disappeared. Friedman was held in labor camps and escaped through a sewer in June 1944. In November 1944 he was caught by the Germans, killed his guard and fled.

In 1945 he joined the Polish police under a non-Jewish name. He then served in Gdańsk as an interrogation officer, where he arrested and questioned hundreds of Nazis. In 1946 he left Poland and reached Vienna with the help of the Bricha movement.

From 1946 to 1952 he headed the staff of the Documentation Center in Vienna, which tracked down Nazis. In Israel he founded the documentation institute in Haifa in 1958 and played a role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. His autobiography is called The Hunter, and his files on Nazis are kept at Yad Vashem.