I'm thinking if they had located a former Nazi in East Berlin, wouldnt the Russians have been glad? Didnt the russians control East Berlin in 1955? Therefore, wouldnt it be easy to get a former Nazi out for trial? Am I missing something?
shareI have to start by saying the East Berlin section of the film was actually set in 65 not 55, the wall didn't actually go up until 1961.
Vogel's crimes were against Jews, therefore the Israeli's would have wanted to have been the ones to bring him to trial.
The other important thing to remember is the political situation at the time. It was the height of the cold war. Israel was (and still is) backed by the USA, this is mentioned in the film. At the time the Soviet Union backed and was arming Israel's Arab neighbors. War was already brewing in the region and 2 years later the Arabs and Israeli's fought the 6 day war which was effectively a proxy war between the US and Soviets.
I think it would have been more likely that once the kidnap attempt went wrong the team would have received orders to execute Vogel, get rid of the body and try to make their own way out of East Berlin.
Mossad were certainly not against such actions. Herberts Cukurs was a Latvian war criminal assassinated by Mossad agents in Uruguay in 1965. Originally they had planned to Kidnap him and put him on trial but decided it would be too difficult to get him out of the country after the kidnapping of Adolf Eichman a few years earlier.