Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  From Bolzano, Eichmann’s journey continued through Verona to Genoa, where he found refuge in a Franciscan monastery. We are still largely ignorant of which of his former comrades he met there. Eichmann mentioned only Pedro Geller, a former officer in a tank regiment whose real name was Herbert Kuhlmann. Eichmann claimed to have lent him money for the crossing. We can assume that Kuhlmann, alias Geller, was not the only person Eichmann met on his journey; he made contacts during this period for his new life overseas. Eichmann spent his last weeks in Europe in the monastery, passing the time by attending various appointments at the Red Cross offices and the outpost of the Argentine immigration authority in Genoa (DAIA) or playing chess and discussing worldviews with the “old monk Franciscus.” Rumors that Eichmann officially converted to Catholicism and was baptized at this point are not to be believed.71 Baptism would have been neither smart nor necessary, as his false papers from Termeno already said he was a Catholic. Eichmann would later consistently describe himself as gottgläubig and took up his host’s request for him to attend the morning service with his usual self-importance: “On the day before my departure the monk, Pater Franciscus, urged me to come to mass, as he wanted to bless me. ‘It can’t hurt,’ he said. I put my arm around his shoulders and called him ‘my good old Pharisee.’ ”72 The fake religion in his passport didn’t trouble his conscience, and he described his attitude with an astonishing lack of tact: “Without hesitation I called myself [not: I became!] a Catholic. In reality I belonged to no church, but the help bestowed on me by the Catholic priests remained deep in my memory, and so I decided to honor the Catholic Church by becoming an honorary member.”73 The men around Himmler had a slightly idiosyncratic idea of honor.

  Eichmann’s relief, as the Giovanna C finally left Genoa’s harbor with about fifteen refugees on board, could still be heard in his voice when he recalled the crossing in Israel.74 Reveling in the pathos of his salvation, he was struck by a particularly tasteless parallel between himself and earlier refugees: “Once it was the Jews, now it was—Eichmann!”75 This comparison is revealing as well as offensive: in 1960 Eichmann was trying to convince everyone that he had been a complete unknown, but here he was, using the name Eichmann with all its symbolic meaning. On a first reading, it sounds like an incredible liberty, a perpetrator trying to rank himself alongside his victims—but on second glance, it reveals Eichmann as exactly what he was: a man who stood in irreconcilable opposition to the Jews, and who knew that other people saw him that way too. They would immediately understand the juxtaposition of Jews with Eichmann, which rested on “the famous name Eichmann.” It was surely no coincidence that Eichmann remembered these feelings as he cast his mind back to the last leg of his escape. He felt that the power of his old name promised the opportunity to make a new start in his new homeland: “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann.”76 Friends who would help him precisely because of who he was. From the start, Ricardo Klement had been just a name on an identity document. The crossing to Argentina would give Eichmann back his freedom and his name.

  INTERLUDE

  A False Trail in the Middle East

  Eichmann (M) Adolf currently Damascus.

  —Heading of the West German intelligence

  service file on Eichmann, 1952

  “When the ship, the Giovanna C., left the harbor at Genoa,” Eichmann would write in Israel, “I felt like a hunted deer that has finally managed to shake off its pursuer. I was overcome by a wave of the sense of freedom.”1 If this really was how Eichmann felt on his Atlantic crossing in summer 1950, his hope was justified. He was being hunted, but none of his pursuers suspected he was on his way to Latin America. Eichmann had played such a canny game of hide-and-seek that, prior to his arrest ten years later, no one had hit upon his refuge in northern Germany. Speculations about his initial hideout all centered on the region most often associated with Eichmann: Austria. They could imagine him there, near his family and in close contact with his old comrades. After Eichmann’s actual escape route became known in 1960, people were quick to pour scorn on Simon Wiesenthal2 for his conviction that Eichmann was “in close contact with the underground movements ‘Edelweiss,’ ‘Sechsgestirn’ [Constellation of Six] and ‘Spinne’ [Spider].” He believed these secret Nazi cells were the pillars that supported ODESSA, because Spinne “had its headquarters in the Syrian embassy in Rome.”3 But Wiesenthal was by no means the only person to fall for this rumor. Even the CIC agents were familiar with it,4 and the same stories featured in confidential reports from the Upper Austrian Security Agency in Linz. A former SS man had given them a detailed story about Eichmann financing a transnational organization, but the story was so overblown, it would have made anyone suspicious. The informant claimed that SS general Paul Hausser was one of the underground’s ringleaders—a slight problem with this idea being that Hausser remained interned in a prisoner of war camp until 1949. Notes on these stories were entered into the files of the West German intelligence service5 and the CIA,6 but there was no hint of northern Germany as Eichmann’s hideout anywhere before 1960. Disguising himself as Otto Heninger on the Lüneberg Heath was an undeniable masterstroke by the fugitive Adolf Eichmann.

  In 1950, with the exception of Eichmann’s family and the people who had provided him with direct help (most of whom claimed not to have known exactly whom they were helping), no one guessed that Eichmann was now bound for Argentina. His consistency and self-discipline, staying in the underground and trusting only the right people, helped him remain undiscovered; but the key to his success was the false trails he had started to lay at the end of 1944, as he bade farewell to his comrades. In 1946 he disappeared from a prisoner of war camp and vanished into thin air. When rumors that he was in Austria turned out to be false, everyone assumed he had put his plans into action and found refuge in the Middle East, with Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.

  Everything that people had heard about Eichmann up to this point seemed to point to this plan: his supposed gift for languages; the friendship he claimed to have with the grand mufti and the Arabs; the legend of his birth in the Templar colony of Sarona. There was also his fanatical hatred of Jews, and his oft-repeated willingness to fight “Jewry” to his last breath, using every means at his disposal. Eichmann made clever use of clichés, in the stories he told as well as in the image of himself he presented. The traveling murder expert had simply moved on, going where the work took him. The first attempts to track him down show just how convincingly Eichmann had promoted these fantasies.

  The first lengthy article appeared in Der Weg, the Berlin journal for Jewish questions, on August 16, 1946, headed “No Trace of Karl Eichmann.”7 The article, sections of which were subsequently reprinted in newspapers, not only contained that famous confusion of Eichmann’s forenames (Otto Adolf) with those of his father (Karl Adolf); it also gave a detailed history of the Adviser on Jewish Affairs. It mentioned Eichmann’s typical patterns of speech and his changing appearance. (The text was based on several different reports from his contemporaries.) He was suspected of being in a DP camp, where he could disguise himself as a victim; people even thought he could have had plastic surgery to alter his face. The article announced that it was the task of Jewish survivors to find Eichmann and bring him to trial.

  In January 1947 the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für die britische Zone (Jewish Community Paper for the British Zone) carried an equally detailed article under the programmatic headline “The Man We Are Looking For.”8 “Karl Eichmann,” it said, was a man of around thirty-five, “young, slim, tall, blonde, blue-eyed, studied theology.” He had been “the Nazis’ most capable tool in their persecution of the Jews.” The article repeated the legend of the perfect Hebraist: born in Sarona, he returned there in 1936 to establish contact among the mufti, Himmler, and Hitler. He had been seen for the last time in Theresienstadt. He was now suspected of “masquerading as
a Jew” in order to hide among them. “He may also have returned to Palestine to continue playing his games there as an illegal immigrant, perhaps as a Jewish terrorist?” After the end of the war, the fear was widespread that the murderer Eichmann might have found refuge among his victims. Even Simon Wiesenthal expressed that fear in his short book Großmufti—Großagent der Achse (Grand Mufti—Great Agent of the Axis Powers). Its lengthy chapter on Eichmann closed with the speculation: “Eichmann, the number-one enemy of the Jews, has still not been arrested. We cannot rule out the possibility that this greatest of all criminals used his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew to disguise himself as a Jew in a DP camp, or to flee to his Arab friends in the Middle East, posing as an illegal Zionist immigrant.”9 The illustrated volume also contained a photo that Wiesenthal mistakenly believed depicted Eichmann.

  Léon Poliakov published the first real photo in 1949, in his article “Adolf Eichmann ou le rêve de Caligula” (Adolf Eichmann or Caligula’s Dream).10 The French text was hardly discussed in Germany—which makes it all the more surprising that Eichmann was aware he had been compared to a Roman emperor who was a notorious madman and a rabid anti-Semite. Eichmann claimed to be either flattered or insulted by the comparison, depending who he was talking to. Poliakov refuted the Sarona legend and quoted witness statements and documents from the first Nuremberg trial, but the most important thing was the photo. For the first time, people were able to see what Eichmann looked like—or rather, what he looked like before he entered the SS. This image of a languorous youth, not wearing a uniform or striking an arrogant pose, fired speculation about what people saw as his typically Jewish appearance. When Willem Sassen later asked him about it, Eichmann insisted the picture had been retouched: he had never worn a tie like that, and the facial expression was not his either.11

  The suspicion that Eichmann’s escape route might have taken him south was given weight by a number of SS men who really did arrive in the Middle East, seeking not just refuge but a new assignment. In summer 1948 the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt published an article about an “SS general in Arab service” whose name was Hans Eichmann and who was born in Palestine.12 In addition to the transatlantic escape network, people were helping Nazis reach the Middle East.

  The Jewish survivors naturally felt far more threatened by the idea of Nazis in North Africa than in South America. The survivors still had vivid memories of the moment when Rommel, Hitler’s “Desert Fox,” had positioned his units outside Jerusalem, and they sensed danger in a German-Arab alliance. Simon Wiesenthal admitted that this fear had prompted him to make a knowingly false announcement to the world, about Eichmann’s phone call to his family from Cairo. Wiesenthal, and a friend who was a correspondent for the United Press news agency, decided the time had come “to give the Arabs a fitting accomplice.” The news was given to the Israeli press via Radio Austria, and from there it reached the rest of the world, serving as “propaganda for the Jewish side.”13 An article in the New York newspaper Aufbau on August 27, 1948, shows the impact of this move, but also what it owed to rumors that had been circulating for some time.

  EICHMANN IN CAIRO

  Even before the attacks [on Jews] began in Cairo, news came from Vienna that the notorious Gestapo agent Adolf Karl Eichmann had fled to Egypt and was living in Cairo under a false name, with false papers. Eichmann escaped from a camp in Regensburg and vanished without trace. One day Eichmann’s relatives, living in Linz (Upper Austria), received a message that made them suspect the wanted criminal must be in Cairo.

  According to reports from Wolfgang Bretholz, … several hundred Jews were killed during the days of terror in Cairo. The pogroms were planned, and there had clearly been lengthy preparations for them.

  It is possible that Eichmann had a hand in this. Eichmann, born in Sarona near Tel Aviv, speaks fluent Arabic and is familiar enough with Arab customs that he is able to pass himself off as an Arab without arousing suspicion. As you will recall, it was also Eichmann who brokered the first connection between the mufti and Hitler. The mufti lives in Cairo, and has arranged accommodation and employment for other former Gestapo people, as the report from Vienna also says. Cairo has become a haven for numerous wanted Nazi criminals.

  Eichmann, who also speaks Yiddish and Hebrew, is famed as a “specialist” in Jewish questions. He organized the deportation of Jews from Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, and is one of the principal people responsible for the murder of six million Jews in the death camps.

  This story reflects more than the usual paranoia of former victims, or pro-Israeli propaganda. The false trail that Eichmann laid was the route that some of his former subordinates, like Alois Brunner, really took. In spring 1952 the German press began discussing the role played by German National Socialists in Egypt—again, with reference to Eichmann.14 Although further research is needed, this role is now undeniable. Similar claims were made in reports by the German and American intelligence services, alleging that Eichmann, whom a local informant had confused with other Nazis on the run, had converted to Islam.15 The root of these suspicions lay in the fact that no one knew where Eichmann was or where he was heading. And this was unsettling, because people’s interest in seeing him arrested had not diminished. They were following every finger that was pointed, and Eichmann had seen to it that one of them pointed toward the Arab world. Without this deliberate misdirection, Wiesenthal’s Cairo story would not have had such an impact.

  Speculations about Eichmann’s supposed escape to the Middle East were so persistent that they can be found even in early books written about Eichmann after 1960. Alternative escape stories have continued to surface, according to which Eichmann left Germany in 1948 and went either to Spain or to the Middle East before finally fleeing to Argentina. In 1959 the German journalist Hans Weibel-Altmeyer was offered the mass murderers Alois Brunner and Adolf Eichmann “for sale.” The reporter, who had his photo taken with Amin al-Husseini, said that the former grand mufti had claimed to know exactly where both these gentlemen were.16 After Eichmann was kidnapped, Quentin Reynolds reported that he had initially gone to Syria under the name Karl Brinkmann, stayed with Alois Brunner and Walter Rauff, and then traveled through Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, North Africa, and Saudi Arabia, where he had used the names Eckmann and Hirth. Only then had he fled to Buenos Aires, via Spain and Genoa.17 As clearly false as these stories were, they demonstrate that traumatized victims of the Nazi regime were not the only people who believed them.18

  If something positive can be taken from the many pages of erroneous escape stories, it is that in the end, even these false trails contributed to Eichmann’s downfall. In late 1959, when the right people had finally discovered Eichmann’s whereabouts and were plotting his abduction from Argentina, it was vital that Eichmann and his friends believed they were safe. With the help of his Israeli allies, Fritz Bauer, the attorney general from Frankfurt who had tracked Eichmann down, reignited the old rumors: new articles about Eichmann appeared in the press, now claiming he was in Kuwait. Eichmann was ultimately caught out using one of his own lies.

  Nevertheless, during those first five years after the war, no trace of Eichmann could be found anywhere. Not that people weren’t following up every lead—the need for revenge was too great. Vengeance squads were busy compiling hit lists and going in search of the people who had tortured them. “The method of those seeking revenge was simple,” Tom Segev observed, having spoken to former members of these hit squads. “They disguised themselves as British military policemen and appeared at their victims’ houses in a military pickup truck, its license plates obscured with mud. They would knock on the door, ascertain the identity of the man, and ask him to come with them for some sort of routine procedure. In general, there were no problems. They would take their victim to a predesignated location, identify themselves, and shoot him.”19

  Naturally, Eichmann was also on a hit list. In 1966 Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli author who had excellent relationships with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Daya
n, managed to speak to the leader of the unit that had hunted Eichmann. As they were carrying out surveillance on Vera Eichmann, the men noticed that she and her brother-in-law often went to a secluded villa. They followed her and Eichmann’s brother to this house, in which four men were living a decidedly secretive life. The four men left the premises only at night and received provisions covertly. One evening the team accosted the man they took to be Eichmann as he was taking a walk, and said they were from Palestine. He replied arrogantly, “You can’t do anything to me,” whereupon he was shot and fatally wounded.20 Many years later Tom Segev spoke to Shimon Avidan, who had been part of that team. Avidan told him that everyone was convinced they had caught the Adviser on Jewish Affairs, but Avidan had been less sure.21 Eichmann, who read about the incident later in a magazine sent from Austria, always spoke of this execution with a strange pride.

  Argentina afforded Eichmann temporary protection. The reason he had avoided detection thus far was not only his clever choice of hiding places but also the fact that no one thought him capable of living in the shadows for long. The agile, grandiloquent, and ambitious image maker that Eichmann’s colleagues and victims had encountered during his glory days was sure to seek out a new “task.” He was entirely unsuited to a sedate, anonymous existence. The vehemence with which he had always propounded his National Socialist ideology made it seem highly implausible that he could just resign himself to the new era and its legal norms. Eichmann’s need for action and admiration was imprinted so clearly on people’s memories that from 1946 on, rumors circulated of him having plastic surgery on his face, so that he could take up a prominent position once again without being recognized by his surviving victims.22 People kept a particular lookout for an identifying scar above his left eye,23 the result of a motorcycle accident in his youth.24 It seemed unlikely that Eichmann would want to remain in the underground. How could someone who had been a member of the master race, overstepping the boundaries of human nature to such a degree, be satisfied with a nameless existence in some little town somewhere? Could Adolf Eichmann ever really stop fighting for his insane ideals? However far Eichmann’s pursuers were from discovering him in those first years, this estimation of his character was ultimately proved correct. Sitting in an Israeli cell in 1961, pondering what had caused him the most suffering after 1945, his answer was clear: “the mental burden resulting from the anonymity of my person.”25