The Nazi Hunters

by Neal Bascomb

  When the judge asked for Eichmann’s plea of guilty or not guilty, he answered with the same phrase for each count. “In the sense of the indictment, no.”

  Attorney General Gideon Hausner, a man of stout figure and hooded blue eyes, followed the indictment with his opening speech. Hausner knew he was speaking for history.

  When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: “I accuse.”

  For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman.

  The trial had begun. For the next fifty-six days, Hausner presented the case against Eichmann. It was as much about laying bare the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews as it was about prosecuting a single man. Throughout the prosecution, Eichmann remained composed and alert. Every time he entered his booth before a session, he wiped his desk and chair with a handkerchief, then arranged his papers about him as if he were preparing for a day at the office. Usually, he kept his eyes focused on the prosecutor.

  On May 28, Zeev Sapir walked to the witness stand. After the war, Zeev had returned to Hungary, but he soon realized that there was nothing left for him there. He went to Palestine and joined the fight for an independent Israeli state. Later, he married and started a family, working as a teacher.

  It was difficult for Zeev to speak of the past, but he had never forgotten it. On his way into the chamber, he felt a rush of pride and elation at seeing the enemy of his people sitting between two Israeli guards. After a judge swore Zeev in, the young assistant prosecutor Gabriel Bach began his questions. The first were simple: name, town of birth, date the Germans arrived. Then he was asked about the clearing of Dobradovo.

  “How many Jews were you in your village?” Bach asked.

  “One hundred and three souls, including children of all ages,” Zeev said.

  Bach then asked when Zeev had heard that an important SS officer was expected in Munkács. Zeev described the roll call and the man named Eichmann coming into the ghetto at the head of a party of German and Hungarian officers.

  “You see the accused here. Can you identify him as the man whom you saw then?”

  Again Zeev looked to Eichmann, who sat in his booth, eyes down at his desk, writing something in his notebook. The name was the same, but the man across from Zeev was missing the uniform, the weapon, and the aura of power. What was more, seventeen years had passed. “It is hard to compare,” Zeev said. “He’s different from what he was, but there is some resemblance that I can see in him.” He then told them about the horrors that had awaited him after Eichmann had left the camp. The memories were still raw.

  Zeev Sapir testifies against Adolf Eichmann.

  During the retelling, Zeev felt faint on the witness stand. A clerk brought him a chair. He sat down uneasily and held his bowed head in his hands. He did not touch the glass of water offered to him.

  The prosecutor said he didn’t need to continue, but Zeev wanted to tell his story. He had earned the right. He recounted the selection process at Auschwitz, the march from the coal mines, SS officer Lausmann and the pot, the indiscriminate shootings in the forest. When he had finished speaking, Zeev raised his sleeve and showed the courtroom his Auschwitz tattoo: A3800.

  It was impossible to know what role his testimony would play in the trial’s outcome, but the important thing for Zeev Sapir was that the facts of what he had experienced because of Adolf Eichmann were now known. Indeed, given the exhaustive coverage of the trial in the newspapers and on radio and television, Zeev’s story was broadcast across the globe.

  Several of the agents who captured Eichmann came to see him in his glass booth. Most didn’t bother with more than one session; they were busy with other operations. It was enough to know that they had succeeded in bringing Eichmann to justice.

  Once Hausner finished presenting his case, the defense took over, arguing that the Nazi state had been responsible for the crimes, not Eichmann. He claimed he had merely followed orders and that his role in the widespread atrocities was limited at best.

  Finally, Eichmann spoke in his own defense. Given his clipped, military tone, one might have expected straightforward answers, but instead he was long-winded and often contradicted himself. He was unmoved by Attorney General Hausner’s many attempts to force him into an admission of legal guilt. Still, he could not deny the weight of evidence against him.

  After closing statements on August 14, the judges adjourned the trial to weigh their decision. Four months later, they returned with their verdict. Eichmann was found guilty on all counts of the indictment, but he was acquitted on several individual charges within these counts. As he listened to the judgment, Eichmann’s face twitched, and he looked frantically from side to side. There was no avoiding the truth now.

  On December 15, 1961, Judge Landau asked Eichmann to rise, and delivered the sentence:

  For the dispatch of each train by the accused to Auschwitz, or to any other extermination site, carrying 1,000 human beings, meant that the accused was a direct accomplice in 1,000 premeditated acts of murder … Even if we had found that the accused acted out of blind obedience, as he argued, we would still have said that a man who took part in crimes of such magnitude as these over years must pay the maximum penalty known to the law … But we have found that the accused acted out of an inner identification with the orders that he was given and out of a fierce will to achieve the criminal objective … This Court sentences Adolf Eichmann to death.

  It was the first — and to this day only — sentence of death by an Israeli court.

  Eichmann stood absolutely still, his lips drawn together as if he were pressing a stone tightly between them. His throat and the collar of his shirt were soaked with sweat. Eight minutes after the session began, the bailiff called, “All rise!” and the judges left the courtroom. The trial was over.

  Eichmann stands to hear the verdict read by Judge Moshe Landau.

  Eichmann appealed the judgment, but on May 29, 1962, it was denied. He flushed with anger when the five-judge panel restated the reason for the guilty verdict. His request for clemency to the Israeli President was also denied, and on May 30, the judges informed Eichmann that he would be hanged at midnight.

  In his cell, he asked for a bottle of white wine, cigarettes, and a paper and pen. He wrote a final letter to his wife and sons in Argentina. Then he shaved, dressed in brown slacks and a shirt, and brushed his teeth.

  There was no final-hour confession or plea for mercy from Eichmann.

  Two guards and Arye Nir, the prison commandant, entered the cell. Before they bound his hands behind his back, Eichmann requested a moment to pray. He retreated to a corner for a minute and then announced, “I am ready.”

  The guards escorted him down the prison corridor. The group entered the makeshift execution chamber through a hole that had been knocked in one of the concrete walls. A wooden platform had been built over another hole cut in the floor. A rope hung from an iron frame above it.

  Rafi Eitan stood in the room, ready to be one of the witnesses to the execution. Over the past few months, Eitan had interrogated Eichmann several times, gathering information about how the SS had been organized and operated. Eichmann stared at Eitan and said sharply, “I hope, very much, that it will be your turn soon after mine.”

  The guards placed Eichmann on a trapdoor on the platform and tied his legs together. A white hood was brought out, but Eichmann refused it. He looked at the four journalists selected to witness the execution as they scribbled on their pads. A coiled rope was placed over his head.

  “Long live Germany,” he declared. “Long live Argentina. Long live Austria … I had to obey the laws of wa
r and my flag. I am ready.”

  Two guards moved behind the curtain of blankets that shielded the trapdoor release mechanism from the prisoner. There were two buttons, only one of which was connected, so the guards would never know which of them had opened the trapdoor.

  Eichmann smiled thinly and called out, “Gentlemen, we shall meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I have believed in God all my life, and I die believing in God.”

  It was exactly midnight. The commandant yelled, “Ready!”

  Eichmann half closed his eyes, looking down at the trapdoor underneath his feet. His face was ashen.

  “Action!”

  The two guards hit their buttons, and the platform opened with a clang. Eichmann fell ten feet into the room below without a sound. The rope went straight, snapped, and then swayed back and forth. A doctor moved into the chamber, took Eichmann’s pulse, and declared the Nazi dead.

  Guards cut down the body from the noose. The face of the corpse was white, and the rope had cut into its neck. As one of the guards, Shlomo Nagar, lifted the body, he expelled some air from its lungs, producing a sound that almost made him faint, and that he would hear in his nightmares for years to come.

  The guards placed the body on a stretcher, covered it with a gray wool blanket, and carried it through the prison yard and out of the gates into a clearing in an orange grove. A mist hung in the air. A man who had once worked at an extermination-camp crematorium was already there, firing the furnace. As the guards placed the body into the smoldering oven, one of them lost his balance, and the corpse fell to the ground.

  Everyone froze.

  One of the witnesses, Michael Goldmann, who had been the Chief Inspector of the police unit that collected evidence for the trial, rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward to pick up the corpse and put it inside the furnace. In the fiery glow, the Auschwitz tattoo on his arm was clearly visible. Goldmann’s parents and his ten-year-old sister had been killed at the extermination camp.

  Two hours later, the ashes were scooped out of the furnace. They filled half of a small nickel canister. Goldmann considered how many Jews must have made up the mountains of ashes outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums. In the wintertime, the SS guards had forced him to spread those ashes on the paths so that they would not slip on the ice.

  Now Nir, Goldmann, and Rev. William Hull, a Canadian Protestant missionary who had also witnessed the execution, drove to the port of Jaffa with the canister. They arrived just before daybreak on June 1. Several other observers were waiting. They motored into the open sea in a police patrol boat. Six miles out, just beyond Israeli territorial waters, the captain shut off the engines. The boat drifted in the darkness, rising and falling in the swells. A sliver of red light appeared on the horizon.

  As Hull said a prayer to himself, Nir walked to the back of the boat and emptied the canister into the swirling waves. The ashes drifted up on the crest of a wave, then disappeared. By casting the ashes into the sea, the Israeli government had ensured there would be no place for any monument or shrine to Adolf Eichmann.

  The engines were restarted, and the captain steered back to the coast. They reached the shore just as the sun was rising in the sky.

  The Eichmann trial was almost more important in the field of education than in that of justice. David Ben-Gurion achieved his ambition: The trial educated the Israeli public, particularly the young, about the true nature of the Holocaust. And, after sixteen years of silence, it allowed survivors to openly share their experiences.

  Jews in Jerusalem listen to Eichmann’s trial on a portable radio.

  In the rest of the world, the intense media coverage and the wave of Eichmann biographies and fantastic accounts of his capture rooted the Holocaust in the collective cultural consciousness. The Shoah, as it was also known, was not to be forgotten, and an outpouring of survivor memoirs, scholarly works, plays, novels, documentaries, paintings, museum exhibits, and films followed in the wake of the trial and still continues today. This consciousness, in Israel and throughout the world, is the enduring legacy of the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann.

  As for the Eichmann family, Vera and her youngest son, Ricardo, moved back and forth between Buenos Aires and West Germany for several years before settling in Osterburken, forty miles west of Heidelberg, in West Germany. Vera never accepted that her husband was guilty of his crimes, nor did she get over his execution. Ricardo scarcely remembers his father, and the Eichmann name is a weight that he continues to carry. Now a professor of archaeology in Germany, he recognizes the terrible deeds of Adolf Eichmann and is reluctant to speak about him. Of the three older sons, Horst continues to live in Buenos Aires and is reportedly a neo-Nazi leader. Dieter and Nick moved back to Germany, to Lake Constance, on the Rhine. They remain convinced that their father just obeyed orders and that most of what was said against him at the trial was false. Beyond that, they do not wish to discuss him.

  Fritz Bauer, whose involvement remained a secret for two decades, moved quickly on the cases of other war criminals already under investigation. In the weeks after Ben-Gurion’s announcement, Bauer and his fellow West German prosecutors arrested a host of former Nazis implicated in the atrocities, including several of Eichmann’s deputies. Right up to his death in 1968, the Hesse Attorney General cracked down on German fascist groups and campaigned vigorously to unseat former Nazis from power.

  Simon Wiesenthal won a tremendous amount of attention for his contribution to the hunt for Adolf Eichmann. Encouraged by the renewed public interest in war crimes, he returned to hunting Nazis and spent forty-five years promoting “justice, not vengeance.”

  Before the operation to catch Eichmann unfolded, Sylvia Hermann left Argentina for the United States, where she still lives today. In 1971, Lothar Hermann received a reward from Israel for information leading to the arrest of Eichmann. Until then, his and his daughter’s role in the capture had been kept a secret.

  For the Mossad agents whose families had been devastated by the Nazis, their participation carried an even greater personal satisfaction. In 1967, while on a job in Athens, Malkin received a call from Avraham Shalom, who told him that Malkin’s mother had been rushed to the hospital. Malkin returned to Tel Aviv on the first flight out and went straight to her bedside. Her eyes were closed, her face ashen. He tried to speak to her, but it didn’t seem like she heard him.

  “She can’t talk,” said the old woman in the neighboring bed.

  “Mama,” Malkin whispered in her ear, “I want to tell you something. What I promised, I have done. I got Eichmann.”

  His mother did not open her eyes, nor did she turn her head. It had been seven years since Malkin had grabbed Eichmann on Garibaldi Street. He had kept the secret from her because of the oath he had sworn, but now he could not bear for her to die without knowing what he had accomplished.

  “Mama, Fruma was avenged. It was her own brother who captured Adolf Eichmann.”

  “She can’t hear you,” said the old woman, growing impatient with his visit.

  Just as he was losing hope, Malkin felt a hand cover his, and then his mother grasped his hand tightly.

  “Do you understand?” Malkin asked her.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

  My Sister Fruma, a painting Peter Malkin completed while guarding Eichmann.

  Two decades ago, while studying abroad in college, I first heard of Adolf Eichmann. In Luxembourg, a Holocaust survivor explained that she was never able to speak of her terrible experiences during the war until after the famous Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In a way, she felt the testimonies by many survivors at the trial gave her permission to speak of her own suffering. Yes, the story of the Eichmann capture is a great spy tale, with lots of twists and turns, but in the scheme of history — and in so many personal lives — it is important as well. That’s why I wrote this book.

  Researching the story was an incredible journey, one that found me on four continents, interviewi
ng Mossad spies in Tel Aviv, Israel; tracking down former Nazis in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and unearthing rarely seen archives in Germany and elsewhere. Along the way, a crack team of researchers and translators helped me. With one-on-one talks with many of the key individuals in the operation, some of whom had never before been interviewed, I was able to put together what I hope is the most accurate account of these dramatic events. Over the course of the research, I also discovered some important documents, including the passport Eichmann used to escape Europe after the war.

  Now, despite my best efforts, my reconstruction of these events is no doubt imperfect. First of all, this is a spy story, and some elements of what exactly happened remain secret — and/or clouded in half-truths. Second, my interview subjects often contradicted one another on specific versions of events. I’ve tried my best to reconcile conflicting accounts, and in the Notes section of the book, I pinpoint a few of these instances. Every writer of history wishes he could work with perfect, complete information, but in the end, we simply have to unearth as much as we can and then make do with that.

  I made do with a great deal thanks to the efforts of many people who assisted me. A special shout-out in particular to my researchers Valeria Galvan, Nava Mizrahi, and Franziska Ramson. Many individuals spoke to me in the course of my interviews, but special acknowledgments to Avraham Shalom and Shaul Shaul, who suffered my barrage of questions the longest. Finally, thanks to Liz O’Donnell, who walks through fire with me on every book, and to Cheryl Klein, my sharp-penned, incredibly talented editor at Scholastic.