Zvi Aharoni

Zvi Aharoni was born in 1921 in Frankfurt (Oder)

Zvi Aharoni was born Hermann Aronheim in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany. His father Heinrich was a lawyer and a leader of the local Jewish community, and the family later moved to Berlin. In 1938 he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with his mother and brother, joined Kibbutz Alonim and later served as a guard in the Jezreel Valley.

In 1942 he married Geula and left the kibbutz to join the British Army, where he was trained as a prisoner of war interrogator and served in North Africa and Italy. After his discharge in 1946 he began studying architecture at the Technion. He stopped when Israel's War of Independence broke out and fought as an officer in the Carmeli Brigade.

He then joined the Shin Bet and became head of its investigations division. In 1960 he was sent to Argentina, located Eichmann and photographed him with a hidden camera. During the capture he drove the car and was the only one allowed to question Eichmann.

For the Mossad he was posted to Paris and searched for other Nazi criminals, including Josef Mengele. In 1964 he returned to Israel and headed the Mossad operations division until he left state service in 1970.

He worked in Hong Kong, remarried after his first wife died, and on his return founded a polygraph institute. He sold it in 1980 and worked with Shaul Eisenberg in China, then retired in 1985 and moved to England. He died there in 2012.