The Eichmann Trial

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  This was the second time Eichmann had been captured. Immediately after the war, the Allies had apprehended and interned him in a POW camp. Using a pseudonym, he hid his identity. Then a number of Nuremberg defendants connected him to the Final Solution. They testified about his unrelenting quest to murder as many Jews as he could and his pivotal role in the annihilation process. Assuming that he was now on the Allies’ radar screen, Eichmann feared that they would soon uncover his true identity, or that another prisoner, in an attempt to curry favor with his captors, would expose him. With help from other former SS officers who were POWs, he escaped and headed to a remote area of Germany, where a lumber company provided work and shelter for many war criminals. When the company went bankrupt, he decided to leave for Argentina, where other Third Reich officials had found a warm welcome. Their wartime résumés did not impede their entry into the country. With the help of Catholic officials who had the imprimatur of high—if not the very highest—Vatican offices, Eichmann obtained a Red Cross passport and, using the pseudonym Ricardo Klement, made his way to Buenos Aires.3

  Eichmann’s escape was facilitated by the fact that at this time no one who had the requisite resources or legal authority was interested in finding him. After the Nuremberg tribunals, the Allies, worried about the Cold War, lost their ardor for hunting Nazis and alienating their new ally, West Germany. Israel, fearing annihilation by the Arabs, focused on protecting live Jews, not avenging dead ones. Germany’s chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, whose government was riddled with former Nazis, had declared the hunt for war criminals over.

  Eichmann’s whereabouts would probably have remained a mystery but for a combination of amateur sleuthing and dumb luck. Two of the names most prominently associated with locating him had little to do with the operation, whereas those who played a pivotal role have largely been forgotten. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and, to a lesser degree, Tuvia Friedman have claimed and been given credit over the years for finding Eichmann. In fact, though they may have been responsible for finding other murderers, they contributed relatively little to this capture. These two men were among a small group of survivors who believed that the Nazi war criminals had to be tracked down and punished. They devoted their lives to this effort, chasing down Nazis when most other agencies had lost interest. Wiesenthal has claimed that his information led to Eichmann’s “capture, conviction, and execution.”4 In his memoirs he described how he thwarted Vera Eichmann’s attempt in 1947 to have her husband declared dead, ostensibly so that she could be eligible for a widow’s pension. He claimed to have discovered that the person who supposedly witnessed Eichmann’s death was Vera’s brother-in-law and informed the occupation authorities of this fact. They immediately rejected her petition. Wiesenthal touted this as the most important step in the hunt, because a death declaration would have ended efforts to find him. (Who looks for a dead man?) Actually, it is highly unlikely that the Israelis who eventually apprehended Eichmann would have been waylaid by a death certificate obtained by his family. More important, however, Wiesenthal’s claims conflict with what he said at the time. In a January 1960 letter to the Israeli ambassador in Vienna regarding this incident, Wiesenthal explicitly stated that the petition was rejected “at the instigation of the authorities” and made no mention of his supposed role. In another letter to the ambassador, written around the same time, Wiesenthal noted: “Mrs. Eichmann has a sister in Prague, whose husband is a government official. Name to follow.” In other words, he did not seem to know the family’s name, yet he subsequently claimed to have exposed their efforts to have Eichmann declared dead.5

  In 1952, Vera and her sons disappeared overnight, leaving all their possessions behind. No one—neighbors, teachers, or officials—apparently knew they were leaving. Her relatives claimed she had left to remarry. This “dead of night” departure convinced Wiesenthal that Vera had reunited with Eichmann. He thought, however, that they were somewhere in northern Germany. Wiesenthal’s suspicions were aroused again when he saw a death notice for Eichmann’s mother listing Vera Eichmann as a mourner. Why would a remarried widow use the name of her former husband? All these were important indications that Eichmann was still alive, but they were not what led to his capture. One important lead did come into Wiesenthal’s hands early in the 1950s. Baron Mast, a fellow Austrian stamp-collector, told Wiesenthal that Eichmann was in Argentina. Six months later, Wiesenthal passed the information on to the World Jewish Congress, who gave it to the CIA. No one followed up. The Israelis, whom Wiesenthal also informed, failed to follow up.6 Had any of these groups acted, Eichmann might have been found and Wiesenthal would have deserved the credit. Wiesenthal’s claim to have found Eichmann is further weakened by his letter to the Israeli ambassador to Austria written on September 23, 1959, about six months before Eichmann’s capture. In it he suggested that Eichmann could be found in northern Germany. The lesser-known but no less indefatigable sleuth Tuvia Friedman also spent great energy and resources in trying to track down Eichmann. After the capture, he claimed to have provided the Israeli government with the crucial information on his whereabouts. He did give them Eichmann’s address in Argentina, but by the time he did so, Israeli officials already knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts and were making plans for his capture.7

  Wiesenthal’s aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims—even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal’s five million? In fact, this figure is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations. Among those specifically targeted to be killed by the Nazis on racial or ideological grounds were Germans with mental and physical disabilities, some of the Roma (also known as Gypsies), Soviet and Polish educated and leadership elites, and Soviet civilians of certain ethnic groups. Many others, including domestic political opponents, members of national resistance movements in occupied territories, German homosexual men, and Germans labeled as “asocial” were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Countless died as a result of the atrocious treatment to which they were subjected. They were not, however, targeted for complete annihilation. Some historians speculate that, had the Germans won the war, the remainder of the Roma and other groups, including those of mixed, “Aryan” and Jewish, heritage, would have been eventually been totally annihilated. The Germans would probably have also liquidated millions of civilians of certain ethnic groups (Russians, Belorussians, and “Asiatics” of the Soviet Union). Ultimately, had the Germans had a free hand to carry out these genocides, the number of victims would have dwarfed that of the Jews. The motivation for this intended mass murder was clearly racial. However, while the Germans wanted to eliminate these groups, it was the Jew that they considered the most immediate and dangerous enemy. In the Nazi mind it was Jews alone who had the nefarious capacity to organize other subhuman racial groups into opposing Germany. Killing all Jews—irrespective of age, location, education, profession, religious orientation, political outlook, or ethnic self-identification—was the priority in the race war that Nazi Germany conducted. This, rather than the numbers, the means, and the racial motivation, is what was unique about Nazi policy toward the Jews. Wiesenthal admitted to Bauer that he had invented a historical fantasy in order to give the Holocaust a more universal cast and to find a number which was almost as large as the Jewish death toll but not quite equal to it. When Elie Wiesel challenged Wiesenthal to provide some historical proof that five million civilian non-Jews were murdered in the camps, Wiesenthal, rather than admit that he invented the five million number, accused
Wiesel of “Judeocentrism,” being concerned only about Jews.8

  Wiesenthal’s historical invention obscures, if not denies, the true nature of the Holocaust. Wiesenthal’s invented equivalencies ride roughshod over the history of Nazi policy during 1941–44. Unfortunately, in many circles it has become accepted wisdom. At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the “eleven million victims.” Carter also used Wiesenthal’s figures of “six million Jews and five million others” in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism. However well meaning, this fraudulent effort on Wiesenthal’s part will have far more lasting deleterious implications than his confusing stories regarding his Nazi hunting.9

  Who, then, did find Eichmann? Actually, the decisive information came from three unlikely characters. Lothar Hermann, a nearly blind German half-Jew, had fled to Argentina in 1939, after spending some time in a concentration camp. Fearful of the numerous Nazi sympathizers in Argentina, he hid his Jewish identity. He was so successful at this subterfuge that the second character in this episode, his teenage daughter Sylvia, who apparently knew nothing of her Jewish heritage, was comfortable dating the son of a former Nazi officer. The third critical player was Fritz Bauer, a Jewish lawyer from Stuttgart who had been incarcerated in concentration camps but was able to flee Germany during the 1930s. He stayed in Denmark until the Germans invaded it, and then spent the rest of the war in Sweden. After the war, though well aware that “former” Nazis filled many important posts in Adenauer’s government, he did something many people—Jews in particular—found incomprehensible, if not reprehensible. He not only returned to Germany but accepted a governmental appointment as attorney general of Hesse. His colleagues were Germans who had loyally served the Third Reich and had then seamlessly shifted their loyalty to the Federal Republic. (Showing amazing adaptability, some of these judges and attorneys had preceded their service to the Third Reich with service to the Weimar Republic.) Bauer tolerated this because he wanted to help rebuild a legitimate judicial system in Germany and bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

  One day in the late 1950s, Sylvia Hermann introduced her new boyfriend, Klaus Eichmann, to her family. Though Adolf Eichmann had established a false identity, the children had kept his name. Klaus boasted to Sylvia’s family that his father had been a high-ranking Waffen-SS officer and declared that the Germans should have finished the job of exterminating the Jews. Though Lothar was appalled, he was intent on not revealing his Jewish identity and therefore maintained his silence. But for an article that subsequently appeared in Argentinisches Tageblatt, the story might have ended there. Describing Germany’s preparations for its first major war-crimes trial, the German-language Argentinian newspaper mentioned Eichmann as one of the criminals still at large. When Lothar was read the article, he recalled the remarks made by Sylvia’s boyfriend and suspected that the young man was Adolf’s son. His suspicions were further aroused by the fact that Klaus had been vague about his father’s fate and had refused to give Sylvia his address, forcing her to correspond with him through a mutual friend. Aware that the German Embassy in Buenos Aries was staffed by former Nazis, Lothar chose not to share his suspicions with them. In fact, these German officials may well have known that Eichmann was present in Argentina, given that his sons and wife were there on German passports. Instead of turning to the embassy, Lothar wrote to the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, which was handling the case. His letter landed on Fritz Bauer’s desk. Intrigued, Bauer asked Hermann to ascertain Eichmann’s address. The Hermanns devised a scheme. Sylvia went to the run-down neighborhood where Klaus lived and asked around until she located the Eichmann home. At this rather ramshackle house she was greeted by a middle-aged man who identified himself as Klaus’s uncle and invited her to wait for Klaus to return. She chatted with him about her schoolwork, love of languages, and future plans. Upon his return, Klaus immediately suggested he take her to the bus. As they were leaving, he bade the man farewell, addressing him as “Father.” The young couple parted at the bus stop. Had Klaus discovered her intentions, she could easily have been harmed by the local neo-Nazi and right-wing groups with which the Eichmann boys were associated.10

  Upon receiving the address from the Hermanns, Bauer felt further investigation was warranted. He was reluctant to turn to the German security services, or to his colleagues in the judicial system, because he suspected that they harbored Nazi sympathies and might warn Eichmann. He decided that, even though he was a member of the West German judicial system, he would give this information to Israel and allow its security services to investigate. Bauer had the support of the minister-president of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, whom he informed about his efforts. Bauer’s decision may have been based, in great measure, on Argentina’s dismal record regarding Nazi war criminals. A few months earlier, German authorities had told the Argentines that there was good reason to believe that Dr. Josef Mengele was in their country and that they wanted to extradite him. Argentinian authorities claimed—probably falsely—that they did not know where he was. Moreover, they told the Germans, since his crimes had been political, he was ineligible for extradition. In the interim, Mengele disappeared.11

  The information about Eichmann reached Isser Harel, the head of Israel’s security services (Mossad). Preoccupied with other security issues, he did not consider this a matter of utmost urgency. After a lapse of four months, Harel asked an Israeli operative who happened to be in Argentina to check the address. The agent walked through the neighborhood and decided that, given its dilapidated state, this could not be home to a high-ranking Nazi official who had once had access to Jews’ possessions. When Bauer learned of this lackadaisical approach, he insisted that Harel send agents posing as German officials to meet Hermann personally. They could then assess the quality of his information.

  Harel again let a few months pass, then asked an agent who was going to be in Argentina on other business to visit Hermann. The officer went to the Hermanns’ home and was nonplussed to discover that their informant was blind. He was inclined to dismiss the entire matter until he spoke with Sylvia, whose detailed description of her encounter with Klaus’s “uncle” intrigued him, and he asked them to continue sleuthing. The Hermanns checked the property records for Eichmann’s address and discovered that the land was owned by an Austrian named Schmidt, but that the utility bill went to a Ricardo Klement. Hermann concluded that Schmidt was Eichmann and proposed an outlandish theory about Eichmann’s having had plastic surgery to disguise his appearance. The Israelis easily discovered that Hermann’s theory was wrong and dropped the case. The issue might have died here but for Bauer, who in the interim had learned from another source that Eichmann, now known as Klement, was in fact living in Argentina.12

  At this point, Tuvia Friedman, who had devoted his life to finding Nazis, inadvertently almost sabotaged the effort. In 1959, having heard that Eichmann was in Kuwait, he released the information to the press. It generated headlines worldwide. Bauer and the Israeli agents feared it might alert Eichmann that he was being sought and cause him to flee or adopt a new identity.13

  In December 1959, Bauer was scheduled to visit Israel. Furious at Harel’s lack of resolve, he complained to Attorney General Haim Cohen, who summoned Harel to a meeting. After lambasting Israel’s efforts and declaring that a second-rate German policeman could have done better, Bauer informed Harel that yet another informant had linked Eichmann to Klement. Given that the same information had come from two separate sources, Harel’s attitude changed immediately. Shortly thereafter, he dispatched the Mossad’s chief interrogator, Zvi Aharoni, to
Argentina to confirm Eichmann’s identity.

  Aharoni obtained pictures of Eichmann and confirmed that he and Ricardo Klement were one and the same. When Ben-Gurion learned of this, he immediately decided that Eichmann should be apprehended and brought to Israel to stand trial. Having received a green light from Ben-Gurion, Harel assembled a group of “volunteers,” almost all of whom just happened to be members of or closely connected to the Israeli security services. Using false papers, they entered Argentina, leased houses, rented cars, tracked Eichmann, and devised a plan. They quickly discovered that the Eichmann family had moved to an even more modest abode. This cinder-block house, which they had built themselves and which had no electricity or running water, was situated on a secluded bluff on Garibaldi Street. Eichmann may have chosen the spot because anyone who approached could easily be seen. Yet, even though the seclusion allowed for privacy, it also eliminated the possibility of neighbors’ giving the Eichmanns warning.

  Each night, Eichmann took the bus home from his job at a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant. He alighted at a stop a couple of hundred meters from his home. On May 11, 1960, the Israelis parked two cars midway between the bus stop and his home. One had its hood up. The men assigned to grab him huddled over the engine as if they were checking a mechanical failure. The second car parked down the road, facing the first car. When Eichmann neared the “disabled” car, the driver of the second car switched on the headlights, effectively blinding him. Peter Malkin, a hand-combat specialist and one of the agents near the “disabled” car, jumped him. While they struggled, Eichmann emitted what Malkin described as “the primal cry of a cornered animal.”14 Eichmann was bundled into one of the cars and taken to a “safe house.” Other members of the team had remodeled the house in order to create an internal room to hold the prisoner. Harel, who was in Buenos Aires supervising the operation, was informed that all had gone off without a hitch. Using a code, he cabled Ben-Gurion that Eichmann was in their hands.