German court blocks full release of Nazi Eichmann files Published duration 28 June 2013

image caption Eichmann went on trial in a blaze of publicity after a dramatic kidnap

A German court has rejected a journalist's request to see all German secret service files on a top Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

The foreign intelligence agency (BND) had given the Bild newspaper journalist documents on Eichmann with some passages blacked out.

Eichmann organised deportations of Jews to Nazi death camps in World War II.

He fled to Argentina after the war, but was kidnapped by Israeli agents and hanged after a trial in Israel in 1962.

Germany's Federal Administrative Court ruled that the BND had the right to keep parts of its Eichmann records secret.

Bild has been trying to establish how much the BND may have known about Eichmann's hiding place after the war.

Agents from the Israeli spy agency Mossad tracked him down in Buenos Aires in 1960.

A senior SS officer, Eichmann had been in charge of managing the logistics of the Holocaust.

He personally directed the plunder, ghettoisation and deportation of more than 437,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944.

Most of those deported were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.