The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  BACK IN HUNGARY, more and more people were trying to escape across the border to Austria. But doing so was riskier than ever before. The Iron Curtain was now a deadly reality: minefields, barbed wire, armed guards ready to shoot on any pretext, and sniffer dogs now marked where East met West in Europe. Just months away from graduation, Alice and Erwin Koranyi were in a terrible bind. Should they leave while they still could, and not finish their medical degrees, or stay and wither away under Stalinism? “The choice was unfair and wicked,” recalled Erwin. “The decision was tearing us apart, but we could not live under a dictatorship again.”15 Once more, Erwin turned to his contacts in the underworld and discovered that it was possible to buy one’s way across the border. But it was expensive and very dangerous. The minimum punishment if caught was eight years in prison.

  Erwin could afford the smuggling fees for only one person. So he urged Alice to go ahead of him. He would never forget watching as she pulled out a small case and packed and unpacked it over and over, trying to fit in enough to last a lifetime. Two days after leaving with a smuggler in his car, Alice called. She could not say much, but she had made it safely to Austria.

  Now it was Erwin’s turn. But he had spent all his money trying to get Alice out, so he decided to risk being shot by crossing the border alone and on foot. He did not say goodbye to his parents. Instead, he told them he was going to a party. Nor did he pack anything, wanting to travel light. He put his most crucial medical papers in one pocket and a pharmacology book in another, and then took a bus to a village near the border. As the bus left Budapest, he looked out at the familiar city landmarks with “bitterness in [his] heart.” He would never see the city again.16

  That night, Erwin headed across country. Soon he was at the Ipoly River, swollen with snowmelt. He forged across, the water above his hips, and then through swamps on the other side. A day later, he crossed into Austria through a pine forest, “inhaling the resinous cold air,” and then made his way to Vienna, where he discovered to his shock that Alice had decided to go to Italy to finish her studies and had set out alone. But as she tried to get into Italy through the Brenner Pass, Italian guards had arrested her and sent her back to Austria. She was now in a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, “morally defeated.”17

  Erwin found Alice, and they went to Innsbruck, where a medical school had agreed to allow them to complete their degrees. They got a little money from the American Joint Distribution Committee and donated their blood for extra cash to buy food and textbooks. Among their fellow students was a young man called Laci Revesz, a Jewish émigré from Romania, who soon became Erwin’s roommate. Along with Laci, Alice and Erwin graduated a year after arriving, in June 1950.

  Meanwhile, Erwin had learned that his parents, his sister, Marta, and Pipez had been allowed out of Hungary and had gone to Israel, arriving with nothing but a sense of freedom. “I missed my family,” he recalled. “So when I finished the course, I decided to go to Israel.”18 Alice stayed behind with Laci Revesz in Germany and soon found a job at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne.

  In Israel, Erwin had a joyous reunion with his family in Haifa. He took a job in Eilat, a godforsaken desert town with just four hundred employees of a construction company, but soon decided that living in a hut in the middle of a desert was not good for his health or his finances. He returned to Europe, where he drifted aimlessly for several months. At some point, he discovered that Alice had meanwhile become engaged to Laci Revesz, who had managed to get to Sweden and was now trying his best to get the papers for Alice to join him there.

  It must have been painful to acknowledge that Alice had decided to live with another man. But any pangs of jealousy he felt were probably forgotten when Erwin found Alice in Cologne. She had lost a lot of weight, and had large, dark circles around her eyes. “I was shocked,” he remembered. “The shadow of death had taken over her face.” Erwin insisted on taking her to a nearby hospital. He found work and visited her every day. Thanks in part to Erwin supplying her with large doses of Vitamin E, Alice made a slow recovery. Then, one day, her immigration visa arrived from Sweden.

  Alice left for Sweden to be with Laci Revesz, and Erwin applied for an immigration visa to Canada. He arrived there in October 1952 and found work in a Montreal mental hospital. Soon, he was earning enough to put something aside each month for his parents in Israel, who were struggling in the nascent country to make ends meet. Then, in 1954, they sent shocking news. On his sixteenth birthday, Pipez had celebrated with friends on a kibbutz. “They danced and sang and drank orange juice,” recalled Erwin. “When the time came, the Kumitz ended. They took a truck to return home, but the truck sped away prematurely. Pipez fell off. He did not move. Soon it was clear that he had died instantly of head injuries.”19

  In his wallet, they found a picture of Alice.

  THE HERMANS EVENTUALLY SUCCEEDED in establishing new lives in America. But it was a difficult transition. Emil had to begin almost from scratch. “He rode ambulances in Harlem for a pittance and served as house physician in old peoples’ homes for meals and a couple of dollars,” recalled Vera, “studying late into the night for all his tests. But he never uttered a word of regret or even nostalgia. He made a decision in favor of democracy and never looked back.”20

  At age fifty, Emil qualified as a doctor in the United States and then worked as a psychiatrist for twenty years. In 1972, his health rapidly declined. He collapsed one day and was able to recover sufficiently, recalled Vera, to “consume his last dinner with gusto, praising my mother’s cooking, as well as her looks, and inviting her for a walk around the block, where they were seen smiling, holding hands. Then his time ran out.”21

  Margit, widowed at sixty-eight, tried to build another new life for herself. In 1973, she began to volunteer at the Helene Fund Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, and worked for the next twenty-three years in its gift shop. Before she died in 1995, her only child, Vera, whose life she had saved through her immense courage and determination, was able to spend a great deal of time with her. Margit’s beauty was “unaltered by ninety-two years of living,” Vera recalled, “including [her] Holocaust experiences and the stresses of twenty-three years of widowhood.”22

  Gradually, but faster than her parents, Vera had also adapted to her new home in the United States. She excelled academically, eventually gaining a master’s degree from New York University, where she met her husband, a postgraduate chemist named Jerry Goodkin. They have been together ever since. Their first daughter, Kathleen, was born in 1958, and was joined by Deborah in 1960. Vera then devoted herself to her family and teaching, gaining a doctorate in 1982 and eventually becoming a professor of French and English at Mercer County College in New Jersey, where she would retire in 1997, a much-loved teacher and mentor.23

  19

  Going After the “Master”

  LIKE WALLENBERG, Adolf Eichmann also disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the war. Captured in 1945 by the U.S. Army, for two years he used a false name as he was shuttled from one vast POW camp to another. In 1947, he escaped American custody and worked as a laborer under various guises. Then in 1950, with the help of Italian archbishop Alois Hudal, who ran a ratline for Nazi war criminals, he obtained a false passport and made his way to Argentina. He was but one of many wanted Nazi killers who successfully found refuge in the 1950s under the fascist regime of Juan Peron. Eichmann began a new working-class life in the Buenos Aires suburbs, finding jobs in various factories, and then lived for a period on a remote ranch, where he was a rabbit farmer.

  Back in Europe, dedicated Nazi hunters, notably Simon Wiesenthal, were convinced that Eichmann was still alive, although his trail had gone cold, and were determined to bring him to justice. But what did their quarry look like? One of the biggest problems facing Wiesenthal and others seeking to find Eichmann was how to obtain a photograph of their wanted man. Without a decent likeness, if not a photograph of Eichmann, it would be impossible to identify him, let alone arrest him and
bring him to trial. To complicate matters, Eichmann had been careful to destroy any photographs, going so far as to seize negatives in which he appeared. “He consciously wanted to remain ‘the man in the shadows,’” recalled his closest associate, Dieter Wisliceny. “Whenever he needed photographs for identification papers, he had them taken by the Gestapo Photographic Laboratory. I myself took two pictures of Eichmann.”1 Eichmann had told him to hand over the negatives.

  The best way to get to the “Master,” reasoned Nazi hunters such as Wiesenthal, would be through the many women in his life, starting with his wife.2 In early 1946, a handsome, charming Holocaust survivor, Manus Diamant, went to Bad Aussee, near Linz, where Vera Eichmann was still living with her and Eichmann’s sons. He spent a month there and then returned to Vienna, having befriended Eichmann’s three sons but having failed to confirm that Eichmann was still alive.

  Then came a breakthrough. In February 1947, fellow Nazi hunter Tuvia Friedman learned that Joseph Weisl, Eichmann’s long-standing driver, was in prison in Vienna. During a subsequent interrogation, Weisl told Friedman about one of Eichmann’s mistresses, a Frau Missenbach: “She was quite a woman, and he spent a lot of time in Doppel because of her. He probably gave her several hundred thousand marks, which was taken from Jews.”

  “Where does Frau Missenbach live now?” asked Friedman.

  Weisl picked up a pen and drew a map of the area near Linz where she was now living.

  “She must have a photo of Eichmann,” said Weisl. “I saw one there myself once. She was very proud of him. She knew him from the time he was an ordinary SS enlisted man, and she grew prouder as he kept on getting higher ranks all the time, until he became a lieutenant colonel.”

  “How many times did you ever take a picture with Eichmann?”

  “Never,” said Weisl. “He didn’t take pictures with me. I was just a driver.”

  A guard took Weisl back to his cell, and Friedman returned to his Vienna office. The next day, Friedman sent Manus Diamant to Linz to meet with Wiesenthal, who encouraged Diamant to try to seduce Missenbach. “When you think it’s the right time, you’ll contact me,” Wiesenthal told him. “I’ll get the Austrian police to search her house for illegal ration coupons. She won’t even miss the photo—if she’s still got it.” WITHIN WEEKS, Diamant was getting on famously with Missenbach. One day, she showed him a photo album. He smiled as he looked at pictures of her as a baby, and then flicked through the album and stopped at a picture of a man in civilian clothing.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “Oh, a friend. He died, in the war.”

  Missenbach quickly turned the page.

  At the earliest chance, Diamant phoned Wiesenthal.

  “Bring your people.”

  The police made a thorough search and took the photograph. Prints were made and soon distributed around the world. “The photograph of Eichmann was taken in 1939, and he would certainly have changed by 1947,” remembered Friedman. “But it was a clear, sharp reproduction. We were all very grateful that the blackness surrounding Eichmann had lifted. Now, at last, we would see the face of our quarry.”3

  Several years would pass, however, before the next break in the hunt for Eichmann. This time it would be Simon Wiesenthal, operating out of an office in Eichmann’s hometown of Linz, who would make a crucial discovery, thanks to a passion for collecting stamps. Late in 1953, he met with an Austrian aristocrat in the Tyrol. They drank wine and talked stamps. Wiesenthal told him about his attempts to track down Nazi criminals. The Austrian baron told Wiesenthal that several Nazis in the Tyrol had returned to political power “as though nothing had changed.”

  The baron then told Wiesenthal about a friend of his, a German lieutenant colonel. In 1952, the German officer in question had gone to Argentina, where he now worked in Juan Peron’s army as an instructor, as did many other brutal ex-SS men. “He just sent me a letter,” the baron told Wiesenthal, and then handed over the letter. “I asked him whether he met any of our old comrades down there. Here is what he writes: ‘There are some people here who we both used to know . . . Imagine whom else I saw and even had to talk to twice: dieses elende Schwein Eichmann, der die Juden kommandierte [this awful swine Eichmann who commanded the Jews]. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.’”4

  “How do you like that?” added the baron. “Some of the worst criminals got away.”

  Wiesenthal did not respond, worried that the baron might become suspicious. “This was no Altaussee rumor,” recalled Wiesenthal, “this was fact.”5

  It was the first time that there had been definite confirmation that Eichmann was alive. But the trail soon went cold. Several more years would pass before Eichmann would be finally run to ground.

  THE TAPE RECORDER’S SPOOLS TURNED, sometimes into the early hours, week after week, as Adolf Eichmann explained his role in history’s greatest genocide. Eichmann’s confessor was an ex-SS officer, Wilhelm Sassen, who had agreed to help Eichmann publish his memoirs anonymously. Sassen was half-Dutch, half-German and had served in the Waffen-SS during the war.6

  The pair talked at Sassen’s home over a five-month period during 1956 and eventually recorded sixty-seven tape reels, which produced a script of 695 pages, covering the Final Solution and Eichmann’s role in it. Eichmann had been introduced to Sassen by none other than Otto Skorzeny, with whom Eichmann had become reacquainted in Argentina. Skorzeny had served three years in prison before being acquitted of war crimes. The man who had been instrumental in the Arrow Cross putsch of October 15, 1944, was now a close adviser to Juan Peron, and was even rumored to have slept with Eva, Peron’s legendary wife.

  Eichmann rambled for hour after hour, at one point telling Sassen that Hungary “was the only country where we could not work fast enough, where I was under pressure all the time trying to mobilize transportation and assembly centers for the deportees. Such was the tempo forced upon us by the Hungarian government. In Denmark, our experience was the exact opposite . . . Both were extreme exceptions to the rule generally encountered in the other countries of Europe.”7

  Eichmann finally grew disillusioned with Sassen when he read what he claimed were doctored transcripts of their conversations, and the joint venture fell apart. Then in 1958, two years after parting ways with Sassen, Eichmann decided to put down roots in Argentina and bought a small plot of waterlogged land in the poverty-stricken, desolate Bancalari district of Buenos Aires. With his three teenage sons, Eichmann built a house at 14 Garibaldi Street.

  During 1956, his eldest son, Klaus Eichmann, had befriended an attractive young woman named Sylvia Hermann. Sylvia’s father, Lothar, had fled Nazi Germany in 1938 after spending time in a concentration camp. Lothar Hermann often spoke with Klaus Eichmann when he came to visit his daughter. One day, he read an article about a war crimes trial in Frankfurt. Eichmann’s name was mentioned in the article. Guessing that Klaus was none other than the son of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Lothar wrote to the authorities in Frankfurt, who in turn passed on his letter to Fritz Bauer, the attorney general of Hesse.

  Bauer was a former concentration camp prisoner who had fled first to Denmark and then Sweden, before returning to Germany after the war. He passed on Lothar Hermann’s letter to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Walter Eytan, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, then arranged a meeting with Isser Harel, who headed Mossad, the skilled and much-feared intelligence service set up to track down and kill enemies of Israel such as Eichmann. It was eventually decided that Eichmann should not be assassinated but brought back to Israel to stand trial.

  In early 1960, Mossad contacted Hermann and Operation Eichmann began in earnest. It was imperative that Mossad agents sent to Buenos Aires knew for certain that they had found their man. Simon Wiesenthal was painfully aware that the photographs Mossad had of Eichmann, thanks to Manus Diamant, were now twenty-four-years old. New ones were needed if the Israelis were to positively identify the right man. Wiesenthal came up with
an ingenious solution: Recent photographs of Eichmann’s brothers would give Mossad an idea of what Eichmann now looked like.8

  Wiesenthal duly arranged for photographers to take pictures of Eichmann’s brothers at a funeral. Mossad could then compare their faces with that of Eichmann. “They did a fine job,” recalled Wiesenthal. “Hiding behind a large tombstone at a distance of about two hundred yards, they made sharp pictures of the members of the funeral procession, although the light was far from perfect. That night, I had before me enlarged photographs of Adolf Eichmann’s four brothers: Emil Rudolf, Otto, Friedrich, and Robert.”9

  Wiesenthal then sent the photos to Mossad. In April 1960, Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni arrived in Buenos Aires and staked out the house at 14 Garibaldi Street. He soon saw a man who fitted Mossad’s profile of Eichmann. When he then tried to find out who owned the house, he discovered that it belonged to a certain “Veronica Catarina Leibel de Fichmann.” The last name’s similarity to Eichmann gave him away. “When I saw that,” Aharoni recalled, “I knew I’d cracked it.”

  For several days, Aharoni and his agents monitored Eichmann’s comings and goings and soon discovered that he was a creature of habit. Each evening, around 7:45 p.m., he would get off a bus and walk to his home. It was decided that the Mossad agents would seize Eichmann as he did so. The date was set for May 11, 1960, Eichmann’s wedding anniversary.

  At 7:40 that evening, Aharoni was in place in a car on the street where Eichmann’s bus stopped. The bus arrived on time, but there was no sign of Eichmann. Had their cover been blown? The agents waited for a quarter of an hour, growing increasingly nervous. Then another bus stopped and Eichmann got off.