Told for the first time, the incredible story of how the British allowed mass murderer Adolf Eichmann to escape from under their noses...

AS THE Nazi bureaucrat responsible for sending at least two million Jews to their deaths, Adolf Eichmann was one of the most evil men in history.

    But newly-released documents yesterday revealed that British efforts to hunt for one of the chief architects of the Holocaust was called off in early 1947, less than two years after the end of the war. In a cruel twist, it later turned out that Eichmann had been living under the very noses of his hunters, hiding in the British-controlled zone of Germany, before smuggling himself out to South America.

    The files, newly declassified by the National Archives, show that in February 1947 a Major Comper wrote to a senior officer, informing him that 'an exhaustive search had been carried out, but the only indication of his fate was he may have committed suicide.'

    As a result, the case on Eichmann was closed, and the former Nazi remained free until he was spectacularly abducted by Israeli secret service agents from Argentina in May 1960. He was put on trial in Israel, and was hanged in June 1962.

    The news that the British stopped looking for Eichmann quite so soon is a huge embarrassment, but as a historian who is researching Hunting Evil, a major new book on the efforts to bring former Nazis to justice, it comes as no surprise to me.

    The truth is that the British had little stomach for chasing Nazis in the aftermath of war. During the course of my research, I have come across countless documents and spoken to many people who confirm that Britain lacked both the will and the wherewithal to hunt down the perpetrators of genocide, and were instead more interested in arresting Nazis who had murdered British PoWs.

    As one former officer in the War Crimes Investigation Unit recently told me, 'War crimes were not at the forefront of people's minds.'

    In fact, the unit was pathetically undermanned and under-equipped. The formation of what was originally called the War Crimes Investigation Team in April 1945 was an ad hoc affair, conceived only 'because of the numbers of war criminals being uncovered' wrote one officer. This seems an extraordinary admission, as the Allies had known about the scale of Nazi brutality for many years.

    To make matters worse, bureaucracy and military bungling held up the formation of the team, and by June of 1945, it was still not properly formed.

    'Until we get these teams completed with men who are up to the work,' an irate colonel wrote to his brigadier, 'we shall not be able to meet our responsibilities for War Crime Investigation. Meanwhile, the public, press and political interest in the matter is such that delay is likely to bring a storm down on us if we cannot produce results in the near future.'

    It was a prescient admission, and one that reached the ears of the Prime Minister himself, Clement Attlee. In November 1945, Attlee wrote to the Secretary of State for War, saying that he was 'concerned at the delays which have occurred with regard to the prosecution of war criminals…It is essential that…the persons on whom rests responsibility for the investigation of war crimes and the bringing to trial of the authors should be officers with drive and energy and that the high priority to be accorded to war crimes matters should be carefully understood.'

    Sadly, Attlee's words went unheeded. Although the officers and men assigned to investigating war crimes were of good quality, there was not nearly enough of them, and neither did they have any background in detective work.

    In fact, by Christmas 1945, the team could boast just eleven officers

searching for war criminals - a pathetic figure when one considers that the Allies' 'wanted list' would run to nearly 50,000 names.

    All this played into the hands of those Nazis on the run, and none more so than Adolf Eichmann.

    It is important to remember that it was not until early 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, that the full enormity and nature of Eichmann's crimes

were fully appreciated by the Allies.

    Nevertheless, they were certainly appreciated by Eichmann who, knowing that he faced certain execution if caught, had initially disguised himself as a Luftwaffe corporal to escape the encroaching Allied forces at the end of the war.

    After a few days on the run, he was detained by US troops near Ulm in southern Germany. In the confusion of victory, they had no inkling of his true identity, though they were able to identify him as a member of the SS by the distinctive tattoo on his arm.

    His first cover story exposed, Eichmann now decided to change his identity again, posing as an SS-Lieutenant named Otto Eckmann.

    This time, the Americans believed his story, and he remained in American captivity at a variety of camps. But because he was only considered of limited value as a prisoner, Eichmann was able to escape from a poorly-guarded detention centre in February 1946, and go into hiding once more, posing as a Bavarian businessman called 'Otto Henninger'.

    Eichmann then travelled across Germany, lodging with an informal network of SS sympathisers, before lying low as a forestry worker near Bremen, where he remained for two years.

    By all accounts, Eichmann was content, and none of his fellow workers, many of whom had been in the German army, had any inkling of who their fellow forester was.

    The forestry company eventually went bust, and so Eichmann tried his hand at chicken farming, at which he enjoyed a modicum of success - one neighbour recalled how the former bureaucrat was 'very good at helpin me fill in forms'.

    But estranged from his family, and haunted by the fear that his true identity would be uncovered, he fled to Buenos Aires by sea, where the sympathetic government of Juan Peron provided cover for former Nazis.

    The irony is that Eichmann had no reason to fear those who should have been him down. Throughout his time as a woodsman, the British War Crimes teams, instead of searching for men like him, had instead been concentrating on Nazis who had committed crimes against British servicemen.

    'We weren't really aware of the big fish,' a former investigator told me. 'Quite honestly, we had enough on our hands with the small fry.'

    The trouble was, hunting down 'the small fry' was a slow business. If the suspect was not already incarcerated in an Allied detention centre, then a full-scale manhunt had to be launched ­– not an easy task in the wreckage of a bombed-out Germany.

    Records had to be combed through, and thousands of miles had to be driven on atrocious roads in freezing conditions in order to follow up the

scantest of leads.

    Often, the investigators were given disinformation by Germans still sympathetic to the Nazis. One of the usual methods of throwing investigators off the track was to tell them that the suspect had killed himself, which may account for the supposition that this was the fate that had befallen Eichmann.

    The painfully slow pace of the investigators' work now looks infuriating. One of my interviewees told me that he had dealt with just twelve cases in the eight months he was attached to the unit. Of these, he had four successes – three men were hanged, and the other was already dead.

    Nevertheless, the officers did their best. 'We worked very hard,' he said. 'I don't think the enormity of the job ever hit us. We were still only in our early 20s, we were just lads.'

    Clearly, it would have been impossible for every Nazi war criminal to be brought to justice. But with the wisdom of hindsight, the limited resources and manpower should have been directed at searching for the big fish.

    When Major Cooper recommended that the hunt for Eichmann be stopped, he no doubt thought it was more sensible to hunt for those who could easily be found.

    In the end, it would be left to the people who had been most affected by Eichmann to hunt him down – the Jews.

    Tipped off by a former concentration camp inmate whose daughter had befriended one of Eichmann's sons, Mossad travelled to Argentina where, after several weeks of surveillance, they were able to confirm his identity. On May 11 1960, he was kidnapped by secret agents and smuggled out of the country ten days later.

    After years of giving the British Nazi hunters the slip, the man who sent millions to their death was finally held to account for his vile deeds.