Michael Maor

Michael Maor , maiden name Horst Michael Sternschein (born 1933 in Halberstadt ; † June 25, 2019 in Modi'in ) was a German - Israeli photographer and former Israeli secret service agent who photographed files for the Eichmann trial .

Life

Michael Sternschein's father fled to Spain as a Jew after the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, his mother was expelled from the German Reich in 1936. He grew up with his grandparents Moritz and Rosa Schubach in Beuel and in 1939 attended the first class of a school that was compulsorily set up for the Jews when his parents had him brought to Yugoslavia . The family was ghettoized by the anti-Semitic government of Yugoslavia in Derventa . After the German conquest of Yugoslavia in 1941, she went to the Italian-controlled part of Split and was imprisoned in the Italian concentration camp Kampor on the island of Rab . After the Italian surrender in 1943, she was able to escape to Topusko , where her parents perished in 1944 on the side of the Yugoslav partisans .

As an orphan , Sternschein ended up in a camp of the Jewish Brigade near Rome in 1945, which organized his crossing from Naples to Palestine in July 1945 . He was adopted in Kibbutz Mizra . Michael Maor became a soldier in the Israeli army , joined the paratroopers and was recruited by the Mossad . He was used in the Sinai War in 1956 . From 1958 Maor studied photography in Cologne . He also worked for the Israel Mission in Cologne. Its head Felix Schinnar kept in close contact with the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer in the search for Adolf Eichmann . So Maor came on two unusual missions, in which he broke into Bauer's office in Frankfurt with a duplicate key on behalf of Mossad in the spring of 1960 and there photographed Bauer's investigation files about Eichmann. These were needed for the legitimacy of Eichmann's kidnapping and the bringing of charges.

In order to be able to extend his agent activity in Germany, he worked for a photo agency in Cologne for another year after graduating. In 1962 he returned to Israel and worked again as an officer in the Israeli army and the Israeli border police, whose security he organized. He led commando companies and served in the Six Day War in 1967 and in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 . Maor represented Israel in the German-speaking section of the International Police Association .

In 1966 Maor accompanied former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as a press photographer on his trip through Israel and photographed the meeting with David Ben Gurion .

After his retirement, Maor was invited to Germany as a Holocaust survivor and contemporary witness .

literature

• Ronen Steinke : Fritz Bauer. Or Auschwitz in court. Biography with a foreword by Andreas Voßkuhle . Piper, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-492-05590-1 , pp. 13-21

Web links

• Michael Maor , at Yad Vashem
• Michael Maor. How the Mossad agent helped capture Adolf Eichmann , interview with: Deutschlandradio Kultur , October 31, 2016

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mossad agent and Holocaust survivor Maor has died. In: Israelnetz .de. June 26, 2019, accessed July 6, 2019 . 
2. ↑ See the detailed description of Edith Sternschein, geb. Schubach , at the Bonn history workshop
3. ↑ Hostile foreign countries . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1995 ( online - July 31, 1995 ).
4. ↑ Photo Ben Gurion and Adenauer , at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation
5. ↑ According to Kurt Nelhiebel ( Nothing is so delicately spun.. Or: Tell me how you copy it off, and I'll tell you who you are at the Fritz Bauer Archive) Steinke plagiarized the Spiegel report from 1995. In addition, however: Correction by the Tagesspiegel editorial team on December 15, 2014 as well as a reply by the contemporary witness and OLG judge a. D. Helmut Kramer A great role model, a person in Der Tagesspiegel , December 22, 2014.