Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Everyone repeated the legend that Eichmann was the black sheep of the family, which Eichmann himself put about among his comrades before the end of the war. The fact that Vera Eichmann received support from her husband’s family doesn’t seem to have raised any eyebrows.24 Nor did it occur to anyone that Karl Adolf Eichmann would never have fallen out with his son over the latter’s National Socialist worldview, because he himself was a committed Nazi. Eichmann’s father had joined the NSDAP at the end of the 1930s, which as Vera Eichmann later said caused him some difficulties in 1945. But it wasn’t simply “because he was a Nazi”: there were also items in his possession for which he had no proof of ownership, and the things that obviously didn’t belong to him were subsequently confiscated. David Cesarani is right to warn us not to underestimate the “dynamic interplay between father and son.”25

  In April 1947 Eichmann’s wife took the next step, attempting to have her husband declared dead in Bad Ischl. She claimed he had fallen in Prague in 1945. This may have been done in collaboration with Eichmann’s father, who had also discussed escape plans with his son early on. If it had been successful, Adolf Eichmann might really have managed to spend his life undiscovered in Europe, particularly given how adaptable we know he was. It would also have given his wife the right to a pension. At first glance, Vera Eichmann’s evidence looked convincing: she brought Lisa Kals, who was married to a man from Altaussee and was also resident there, with her as a witness. She was able to produce a letter from a Czech captain by the name of Karl Lukas, giving a report of Eichmann’s death. But Simon Wiesenthal immediately realized he had heard the name before: it belonged to Vera’s sister’s husband, who now lived with her mother near Linz. Alerted by Wiesenthal, the Altaussee police spotted a further inconsistency: Lisa Kals, the recipient of the letter from Vera’s brother-in-law, had been born Lisa Liebl.26 Vera Eichmann had tried to obtain a death certificate for her husband with the aid of her two sisters and her brother-in-law.27

  When Wiesenthal produced two sworn statements proving that Eichmann had been seen alive in Altaussee in May, Vera Eichmann withdrew the application, having achieved the exact opposite of what she had intended. It was now clear to everyone that Eichmann was still alive; otherwise this subterfuge on the part of his family would not have been necessary. The CIC made another search of the Eichmann family’s houses, and the house of one of his lovers. An Israeli spy even managed to secure a photo of Eichmann through Maria Mösenbacher, another of his female acquaintances.28 Wisliceny had put the investigator on to a man who claimed to have been Eichmann’s driver and could therefore provide him with a substantial list of these female acquaintances. In truth, this man was Josef Weiszl, the “Jews’ emperor of Doppl,” a notorious sadist whose dog whip had become his trademark; he was also Wilhelm Höttl’s brother-in-law.29 Weiszl appeared before a military court in Paris a short time later, where he told more tales on his boss; Weiszl, of course, had practiced sadism only under orders. Although the Eichmanns were probably unaware of the photo, Adolf Eichmann would surely have heard about the house searches from his father. During conversations with his associates in Argentina, it emerged that Eichmann even knew about the arrest warrant that had been issued in Vienna.30 All the members of the Eichmann family could see there was no alternative for Adolf Eichmann. He would have to resort to his emergency plan: escape from Germany. For Vera Eichmann, this would mean more years of waiting, doing nothing to alert suspicion. When she finally met her husband again in Buenos Aires, she had not seen him for seven years.

  Eichmann’s Hesitation

  We can make an educated guess at how Eichmann came to consider Argentina as a possible destination. He would later say he had read “that the former National Socialist Gauleiter of Carinthia was living in Argentina.”31 Eichmann was obviously referring to Siegfried Uiberreither, who, strictly speaking, had been the gauleiter of Styria. He had managed to escape from Dachau in May 1947, before he could be handed over to Yugoslavia along with the real gauleiter of Carinthia, Friedrich Rainer. The Austrian papers were full of this matter, and speculations soon surfaced that Uiberreither had fled to Argentina.32 By the end of the 1940s, a surprising number of people knew that former Nazi bigwigs were living in Argentina. Rumors were not the only things circulating; books and magazines from the Dürer publishing house were also making the rounds. Based in Buenos Aires, Dürer spread extreme National Socialist ideas, openly peddling authors with very familiar names. Germans with far-right leanings also eagerly read Der Weg—El Sendero, the most right-wing of all the postwar Nazi magazines, which was published by Dürer from 1947. It was as openly anti-Semitic, racist, and National Socialist as if the Third Reich had never collapsed.

  Eberhard Fritsch, Dürer’s young publisher, relied on the huge publicity he received in Germany. He was so aggressive and self-confident that the ever-increasing circulation of this fascist propaganda sheet from abroad unleashed a wave of warnings and exposés in the German media. People wrote of “Nazi resistance cells” in Argentina and “the Hitlers of South America”; they warned readers about “the Weg that leads into the abyss.” Munich’s Neue Zeitung called Fritsch the “up-and-coming man of the Fourth Reich.”33 The Hamburg-based Der Spiegel also claimed that prominent Nazis had been ordered to flee to Argentina by the Wehrmacht’s high command.34 Der Weg also ran ads for travel agencies and for a trustworthy-sounding club called Kameradenwerk (Comrade Work). For a devoted National Socialist like Eichmann, these must have sounded like messages from the Promised Land.

  Wilfred von Oven, a former subordinate of Goebbels’s and an unrepentant National Socialist, also ended up in northern Germany after the war. He made no secret of the fact that it was the Dürer publications that had first made him curious about Argentina. Eberhard Fritsch published Oven’s book on Goebbels while he was still living in Schleswig-Holstein, using communication networks between Germany and Buenos Aires that were clearly already fully functioning.35 In Argentina, Eichmann would come to value this network.

  Argentina didn’t just sound good; it was a realistic destination for Nazi fugitives. Thanks to groundbreaking source studies by the Argentine author Uki Goñi, we now know a great deal about the networks that made escape possible for those who were keen to emigrate. For someone with a biography like Eichmann’s, improvisation in this area was not advisable. At first, the established escape route went via harbors in Sweden, which from northern Germany were practically on Eichmann’s doorstep. But after this route was exposed in 1948, people had to rely on the southern alternative. A chain of German helpers, Argentine public officials, Austrian border guards, Italian records offices, the Red Cross, men from Vatican circles, and influential shipping magnates allowed people to escape. In order to start down this route, it was imperative to have two documents. The first was a short-term visa for Argentina, provided by Horst Carlos Fuldner, a people smuggler who had the blessing of the Argentine caudillo Juan Perón. The second was identity papers in the same name, which in Eichmann’s case were issued by the commune of Termeno, in South Tyrol. Eichmann, the concentration camp “doctor” Josef Mengele, and Himmler’s chief adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben (all particularly problematic cases), were issued papers there at the same time in 1948. Eichmann’s paper was dated June 11, numbered 131, and made out in the name of Riccardo Klement.36 Bishop Alois Hudal, the self-appointed protector of persecuted and tortured persons—by which he meant Nazis—would later become famous for having arranged papers from Rome for this particular fugitive.37

  Almost two years elapsed between these papers being issued and Eichmann’s actual escape. He made use of the visa only at the last minute, just before it expired. What could have made him hesitate? One possible answer is the political upheaval in Germany between 1947 and 1950. At the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in December 1947, it became obvious that differences with the Soviet Union were continuing to grow, and a split between the Allies was no longer to be avoided. A lot of Nazis had speculated about this east-we
st conflict before the end of the war. They hoped that the Western powers’ anti-Bolshevism would ultimately prove stronger than their desire to bring down Hitler’s Germany. Germany could then reemerge as a sovereign state. “Eichmann firmly believed in the dispute between the Western powers and Russia, and saw it as his last chance,” one of his close colleagues later reported.38 Göring also expressed this belief several times in Nuremberg, hoping that it might even return him to power.39

  The year 1948 saw the gradual realization of this split. With it came the hope of a new beginning for Germany and, more important, of a general amnesty. Another development came as a more unpleasant surprise to Eichmann: on June 20, 1948, the currency reform came into effect. It meant the loss of his job, as the company he worked for after Burmann & Co. promptly went bankrupt. The currency reform also threatened the money that Eichmann had been carefully putting aside. For someone living illegally, the introduction of the Deutschmark posed a serious problem. Avoiding all contact with officials meant receiving neither the so-called bounty allowance of forty Deutschmarks nor the new currency. It would also be impossible for him to exchange his old Reichsmarks without help: for this exchange you needed a bank account and the correct documentation for the Finance Office’s checks. Eichmann had neither. Although he had a legitimate resident’s permit and valid papers, he had carefully avoided any contact with officials. People living illegally would now have to rely on money launderers, which didn’t make the exchange rate particularly favorable. He would also have no protection against any misappropriation of funds. Someone like Eichmann, who had used unfair exchange rates in Vienna to generate millions for the Reich, knew this only too well.

  When he wasn’t “quartered” in confiscated villas with well-stocked wine cellars, Eichmann had always made a conscious effort to live frugally, and the currency reform was a setback to his plans to find a new life overseas. Even old comrades wouldn’t provide help for free. His investment in the chicken farm should possibly be seen in this light. In the 1930s, when Jews were routinely robbed of everything they owned before being allowed to leave the country, Eichmann had learned that if you wanted to safeguard your funds, you had to invest in material assets—as long as a criminal state didn’t set out laws prohibiting the purchase of material assets for this very reason.

  No one prevented Eichmann from investing in chickens, and no one would have stopped him from exchanging his poultry for the new currency a few weeks later. However, once this new, stable currency had been introduced, the earning potential of his investment became apparent. As the children of the village remembered, Eichmann kept more than one hundred chickens and charged a steep twenty pfennigs for an egg. For comparison, his monthly rent was ten Deutschmarks.40 And so he was able to put some money aside, and wait a little while, hoping that the milestone of five years after the end of the war might lead to an amnesty after all. But another event might also have played a role in Eichmann’s hesitation: a failed attempt by the police, Israeli “guests,” and a Nazi hunter to arrest him in Austria, in the winter of 1948.

  A Family Visit?

  During a press conference in 1960, Simon Wiesenthal explained to an astonished audience that he had tried to catch Adolf Eichmann on his planned Christmas visit to Altaussee in 1949: “The house was surrounded, but Eichmann didn’t come. He was warned off, or became suspicious, and disappeared again.”41 This was not just one of Wiesenthal’s dramatic stories but a genuine operation, even if his dates were not entirely accurate.

  In the fall of 1948, there were clues that Eichmann was going to try to visit his family between Christmas and the New Year. Reports on the operation that followed have been written by several of the people involved; their details don’t always tally, but they can be reduced to a common core and a set of dates.42 In December 1948, representatives of the Austrian police force from Linz (including Leo Frank-Maier43), together with Israeli agents (including Michael Bloch44)and Simon Wiesenthal, were lying in wait in Altaussee. The plan was to arrest Eichmann and hand him over to the Israelis, for which the chief of police in Linz would receive five thousand dollars in addition to the operation’s costs. And so they attempted to distribute themselves as unobtrusively as possible through the sparsely populated area—in the middle of a cold winter, when nighttime temperatures fell to -4 degrees F. The team all spoke of interruptions in their surveillance but couldn’t agree on who was ultimately to blame for Eichmann being warned off. The most likely explanation is that in a place as small as Altaussee, it simply wasn’t possible to conduct an operation on this scale without being discovered. The reports even mention rumors circulating in the town that Israelis were there, or the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who was not unknown in Austria.

  Did Eichmann really attempt to visit his family in the period between Christmas and New Year 1948? Did he run the costly risk of traveling across Germany and crossing the border under a false name? We know from later years that despite being gottgläubig (adhering to a racially based Nazi religion), Eichmann associated Christmas with a strong sense of family. And his papers were waiting for him in Italy, so the visit to his family could have been a stopping point along an escape route that he actually took later. But in that case, Eichmann would have disappeared from Altensalzkoth without selling his property there, incurring a huge financial loss. Neither Vera Eichmann nor the children would speak of such a plan in later years; nor did Eichmann’s observant neighbors in Altensalzkoth notice any long absence. Eichmann later indicated that the possibility had crossed his mind, though he was talking about 1950, when his escape route took him within a few miles of his wife and children as he traveled across Austria. He briefly considered whether to run the risk of meeting his family but, with great self-discipline, decided against it.45 It is unlikely that Eichmann was less disciplined in 1948. In any case, he thought too much like an investigator to make the error of arriving on such a significant date, especially after Vera Eichmann’s failed attempt to have him declared dead.

  But something else speaks against Eichmann having been close to his family at this time: at the end of September 1948, an interview in Linz gave rise to a series of newspaper articles. “Eichmann’s parents,” the Vienna Welt am Abend reported, “have heard nothing from their son since the end of the war.” Investigations in the area had, however, brought to light the rumor that Adolf Eichmann had been an American prisoner of war until 1946. He had taken the name Eckermann and was now said to be in the Middle East, “as an adviser to the grand mufti of Jerusalem, El Husseini, helping him to rid Palestine of its Jewish problem.” The stories, with headlines like “The Reich Commissar for the Jews” and “A Member of the Arab Legion,” persisted stubbornly in the press throughout October 1948.46 Curt Riess, who had just finished his biography of Goebbels, went to Altaussee as a “special correspondent” to try to track Eichmann down. This trip resulted in nothing more than a somewhat labored and sensationalistic series of articles on “the merry wives of Altaussee,” which also managed to tap into legends of hidden Nazi gold. Die Neue Welt did at least provide a revealing document on Eichmann: his two-page, handwritten CV from 1937, taken from his service record, which pinpointed exactly when and where he was born, and how he began his murderous career. Riess also described exactly where Eichmann’s family now lived. One piece of information in particular came up again and again in the articles and must have caused the Eichmann family grave concern: “Eichmann is first on all the lists of war criminals.” Whatever travel plans Eichmann might have made, the end of 1948 was not a good time to put them into action. Clearly the man who had dreamed of becoming the “Reich Commissar for the Jews” was still on everyone’s mind.

  A few years later the Gehlen Organization (the predecessor of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND) discovered that in 1949, a year after the failed Christmas operation, the Israeli consul in Vienna had set aside fifty thousand schillings for a campaign to find and arrest Eichmann.47 There was even talk of a vast bounty of a million schil
lings on his head. Gehlen’s informant said that an Israeli unit had taken up residence in Austria, to kidnap Eichmann when he visited his family at Christmas. It had even chartered a plane from Salzburg airport. Was there another attempt to catch Eichmann, a year later?

  Gehlen’s informant, according to the files, was Josef Adolf Urban. He was a man of many talents, born in 1920, and had been arrested in 1948 in a Linz coffeehouse that served as a trading center for fake passports. He had a bag full of counterfeit documents on him, which was enough for the Linz police to take him into custody. Leo Frank-Maier, one of the police officers involved, reported on Urban’s interrogation. He had allowed Simon Wiesenthal to listen in, because the man they had apprehended was clearly helping war criminals escape. In spite of the hard evidence, they were forced to release Josef Adolf Urban after two days. According to Frank-Maier, two American CIC agents turned up and demanded that the suspect be released: Urban was a vital coordinator in a spy network being deployed against the Soviet Union. Frank-Maier quickly discovered that in reality, Urban was feeding the U.S. agency made-up “information” from his also largely made-up “field agents.” He had even invented a number of weapons factories in the East.48

  What Frank-Maier could not know was that the Americans weren’t the only ones keen to avoid Urban being put on trial. The intelligence fabricator was also an informant for the national security division of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, and this fact would inevitably have come to light if he were put on trial.49 Urban actually supplied pretty much every agency going, from the Deuxième Bureau to the Israeli intelligence service and of course the Gehlen Organization.50 He was, as the authors of a comprehensive study on the BND put it, a “roving secret-service mercenary.”51 Reinhard Gehlen commissioned Urban, who he thought was well connected, together with Bruno Kauschen, to expand the Austrian branch of the German secret service.52 It is not known whether Gehlen was aware of how Urban sometimes came up with his explosive information and where he had learned to do so.