Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Heinrich Mast had been brought into the Gehlen Organization by a man with just as much ambition as he had—a man who, during this period, was one of his generation’s most successful retailers of Nazi history: Wilhelm Höttl, the same Wilhelm Höttl whom Adolf Eichmann once thought his friend. Mast employed Höttl in his publishing house. Höttl and Mast worked for Gehlen for a short period, and in 1951 they went over to the Heinz-Dienst (FDHD), the competitor organization to Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence service, founded by Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz in 1950 with direct backing from German chancellor Konrad Adenauer.5 Adenauer wanted his own source of information, independent from the Allied powers, particularly when it came to developments in East Germany, the former Soviet-occupied zone that had become the GDR. Of course, the FDHD was not completely independent of the Allies either. But the real problem in its Linz branch was actually posed by Mast and Höttl themselves, who called their little club “XG” and tended to act on their own authority. Höttl in particular was so adept at juggling his relationships and pulling off confidence tricks that at times he probably forgot exactly who he was working for. He cared more for money than for loyalty, and his ambition knew no bounds. In the year before the Wiesenthal episode, he had tried to establish an intelligence service base right in the middle of Franco’s Spain, partly to spy on North Africa but also to spy on political groups in Argentina.6 Höttl specialized in making big promises, and he considered Josef Adolf Urban one of his main competitors. One reason the CIA and the other services would eventually part company with this oracle was that more than a few pieces of “information” that he gave them turned out, on further investigation, to be entirely made up. This unenviable experience was repeated by numerous historians who approached Höttl in later years, sometimes with disastrous consequences for their work. Peter Black notes with annoyance: “In many cases, the surviving documentation does not support his speculations or reveals some of his anecdotes to be inaccurate.”7

  But too many people didn’t notice the problem, and Höttl continued to appear indispensable. Not long after Simon Wiesenthal reported Mast’s letter with the colorful stamps, Wilhelm Höttl was arrested8 on suspicion of being involved in the Ponger-Verber affair, working with two spies from the Soviet Union. The authorities clearly didn’t put much past him. During the interrogation, which was carried out in quite a conversational tone by the CIA, among others, Höttl said that Curt Ponger had contacted him on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee or “some other Jewish organization” and offered $100,000 for Eichmann’s capture. But Höttl didn’t want to work with Israeli secret agents.9 The CIA assumed that it was not Ponger but Wiesenthal who had offered the money, as it was known that Curt Ponger and Simon Wiesenthal were friends.10 Ponger was a Jew who had fled Austria and returned to conduct interrogations for the CIC after the war; Wiesenthal had obtained Wisliceny’s statement about Eichmann though him.11 Heinrich Mast, for his part, later wrote to Höttl that he had always thought Ponger was an Israeli spy.12 The German intelligence service received a warning about Höttl,13 and Heinz thought him “crude and characterless,” though he continued to rely on him at least some of the time. Then Heinz too finally dropped him.14 A month after Wiesenthal’s letter, Der Spiegel made an effort to publicly crucify Höttl and his friend Mast for all their intelligence service work, using material from the CIA.15 There was a general fear that Höttl could ultimately be spying for the Soviets, or for Israeli agents like Wiesenthal.

  If by this point you have lost sight of the bigger picture amid all these names and connections, you will have a very good idea of the confusion created by the myriad spies of the postwar years, particularly in Austria, which was now governed by four different powers. Everyone knew and mistrusted everyone else: two men couldn’t sit and have a cup of coffee together without a third man watching them and without a fourth having infiltrated all three—the whole thing was like a giant children’s party with added surveillance equipment. “Against the background of this fantastic and complex network of relationships,” says Tom Segev, “Mast may have had some reason to disclose to Wiesenthal that Eichmann was in Argentina.”16 Another piece of the jigsaw puzzle takes us closer to what this reason might have been: Wilhelm Höttl later claimed that he was the friend from Austria who had given Heinrich Mast the letter for Wiesenthal.17

  If this is true—and some things certainly speak for this version of events—it means that the crucial information came from a man who purported to have been friends with Eichmann.18 Eichmann and Höttl’s relationship was multifaceted, and an understanding of it is vital if we want to comprehend not just these events but the historiography of the Holocaust. Höttl was one of the principal witnesses who condemned Eichmann in absentia at Nuremberg, and he was therefore also one of the leading witnesses to the scale of the genocide. It was he who had mentioned the notorious conversation with Eichmann in Hungary, in which the latter allegedly cited the figure of six million Jews. This testimony had made Höttl famous overnight. Höttl welcomed his fame, bolstering it at every opportunity, though he always posed as simply the man fate had chosen to bear this knowledge. A short time after Mast handed Wiesenthal his letter denouncing Eichmann, Höttl was arrested by the CIC in Salzburg, and he took the opportunity to point out his special role as witness once again. Der Spiegel commented on the interview: “This explanation [Eichmann to Höttl] is still the only authentic source for the figure of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.”19 That wasn’t true, as Eichmann had mentioned the number to more people than just Höttl, but it chimed well with Höttl’s grandstanding. In the postwar period, Eichmann and Höttl seemed like inseparable antipodes: Höttl’s unique insider knowledge made Eichmann a wanted criminal; Eichmann’s story made Höttl an authority. Their personal relationship, however, had certainly not been formed by opposition.20

  Eichmann first met Höttl, who was nine years his junior, in Vienna, when he arrived there in 1938 to organize the expulsion of the Jews. The two men worked closely from the beginning, as Höttl headed up the part of the Jewish Office responsible for Vienna. When Eichmann needed the keys to Jewish institutions that had been sealed off, he turned to Höttl, who had custody of them. During this period, they had regular contact both in and out of the office, and Eichmann had fond memories of his conversations with Höttl, whom he admired for his education. Thereafter their contact was limited, as Höttl remained in Vienna, returning to Department IV of the RSHA once a month to give progress reports. After being transferred to the RSHA in 1943, Höttl did not stay long in Berlin and pushed ahead with the relocation of his office back to Vienna. Eichmann and Höttl became close again only in March 1944, when both men were deployed to Hungary, with different assignments: Eichmann was to deport hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths, while Höttl was sent there by the Foreign Secret Service. He acted as an adviser to the Reich plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer, who relayed the murder figures back to Berlin. Both Eichmann and RSHA head Kaltenbrunner later said that no one was better informed on the situation in Hungary than Wilhelm Höttl.21 At the end of 1944, Eichmann went back to Berlin and met Höttl again in April 1945, in Altaussee. Once the war was over, however, there was only one thing on which the two men were agreed: they really had been friends. They even had the same birthday. Höttl’s brother-in-law was none other than Josef Weiszl, one of Eichmann’s closest colleagues in Austria, otherwise known as the “Jews’ emperor of Doppl.” He was the whip-wielding commandant of the first camp personally initiated by Eichmann, and he later excelled as a deportation expert in France, though afterward he claimed to have been Eichmann’s “driver.” Weiszl, who liked to brag, could have informed his brother-in-law about Eichmann’s activities at any time. But Höttl managed to make all this disappear from view by promoting himself as the key witness to Eichmann’s crimes. The success of his disinformation campaign means it is still almost impossible to get a clear picture of Höttl’s own activities in Vienna from 1938 and later in Hungary. He b
egan to style himself as a resistance fighter. Meanwhile he created an image of Eichmann using dates and details that he could not possibly have known and that bore no resemblance to the truth. Using what he already knew about the extermination of the Jews, and what other people had told him about Eichmann’s escape, he established his reputation as an authority on both.22 The year 1953 was not the first time Höttl betrayed Eichmann’s escape plans, even if the clues he initially gave about the Middle East proved false.

  Höttl was not driven by an unusual love of truth or even a desire for justice. When it came to his close associates, like Walter Schellenberg and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, he could be extremely cagey and tended to tell lies. One of his principal strategies for protecting himself and his friends was to incriminate a small group of former colleagues. Eichmann was at the very top of this list, and with extraordinary dedication, Höttl spent the rest of his life doing all he could to flesh out and publicize his own image of Eichmann. He was deeply cunning in what he told the intelligence services, and his manipulation of historians, journalists, and filmmakers was masterly. Shots of a jovial man in a traditional Austrian jacket against an Alpine backdrop, telling Eichmann anecdotes and revealing indiscretions with a wry smile, have become part of the stock in trade of war documentaries. Tellingly, a wartime friend of his termed the media’s fondness for this professional witness “Höttelhörig” (under Höttl’s spell).23

  Höttl used his knowledge (both genuine and assumed) to establish his reputation as an important witness to the war years, and he did a brisk trade in this knowledge with various intelligence services. But from the very beginning, he also used it to write books. Under the pen name Walter Hagen, he wrote The Secret Front: The Inside Story of Nazi Political Espionage,24 an imaginative sex-and-crime version of events, told from the viewpoint of the German intelligence services. It was translated into several languages and quickly caused a furor. In Argentina, it gave rise to both criticism and anxiety. The identity of the man behind the pen name was no secret, and Höttl’s gossip formed the basis for hours of discussion. There was even a long guest lecture on him in the Sassen circle. After Wiesenthal’s pamphlet about the grand mufti of Jerusalem, this was the first book to contain a chapter on Eichmann’s superiors Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, and the “Jewish question.” Eichmann read that he had belonged to a tiny group that was secretly guided by “Heydrich’s boundless malevolence and misanthropy.” Under Heydrich’s direction, this group had almost single-handedly carried out “ ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’—that most devilish masterpiece.”25 Above all, Eichmann discovered that Höttl was peddling insider stories in public: the tittle-tattle that Eichmann had passed on to him in Vienna, Berlin, and Hungary.26 While Höttl was becoming a best-selling author at others’ expense, Eichmann had been fleeing across half of Europe, all the way to Argentina. This was no way to behave toward an old friend and comrade.

  The letter to Höttl about Eichmann’s location, which Wiesenthal supposedly saw in summer 1953, has never been found.27 Neither Höttl nor Mast seems to have handed it over, or even given out copies of it, although such a letter would have fetched a considerable price even after 1960. If we choose not to assume that the letter was simply a forgery that they both feared would be discovered, the reason for their secrecy must lie with the parts of the letter that undoubtedly contained other names from Argentina—even if only that of the sender. In contrast to Mast, Höttl was respected and famous enough to have received such a letter. He was constantly swamped with inquiries from people, asking for information on the whereabouts of all manner of old comrades. In 1953 he was planning to start a business that would operate between Switzerland and South America, in partnership with Friedrich Schwend, a counterfeiter and one of his associates from the old days, who had escaped to Peru.28 Whoever wrote the letter to Höttl in 1953 knew precisely whom he was entrusting with this explosive information: a man who earned his living by selling this sort of intelligence and was therefore unlikely to keep it to himself. Even before his first book appeared, Höttl was seen as a security risk in Nazi circles. Everyone knew he was building his postwar career on betrayal, and his old comrades believed he had sold himself to the Allies. Some people, like Otto Skorzeny, went so far as to attribute the “invention of the six million” to Höttl, who was acting out of pure opportunism.29 After Höttl’s book and newspaper articles came out, people didn’t need intelligence service experience to realize that passing secret information to Höttl had a similar effect to putting it on a billboard. Whoever told Höttl where Eichmann was living must have known he was effectively turning him in.

  The source of the information could have been any one of a great number of people. But from the start, Adolf Eichmann’s family believed one man in particular had betrayed their father (without even knowing about this letter). This was Herbert Kuhlmann, who had made the journey from Europe with him. “My father paid for his passage,” Klaus Eichmann said in 1966. “He betrayed my father. He put it about: ‘Be careful around that Clement. He’s really Eichmann. Eichmann is a swine.’ ”30 The similarity of the phrasing here is hard to ignore. Still, Kuhlmann was not the only person with a penchant for colorful language who might have given Eichmann away. Even in 1953, there were plenty of ways a person could have got hold of the information: not only was Adolf Eichmann becoming increasingly careless, his acquaintances had started traveling back to Germany for business or pleasure, carrying their knowledge with them.

  German-Argentine Relations

  By the early 1950s, the men of the Dürer circle were following events in West Germany for more than just sentimental reasons. Their overtly political ambitions were expressed in Der Weg, in increasingly direct comments on the new democracy. The people behind this magazine didn’t hide the fact that they had no interest in any other country, not even in a special German community in Argentina: they wanted the return of a different Germany. They started trying to intervene in German politics and increasingly wrote for a German audience. Even if this idea sounds as naïve today as it did in the early 1950s, Sassen, Rudel, Fritsch, and the other authors were trying to foment a revolution in Germany. Their National Socialist stance was primarily defined by what they opposed: the Western integration of the Federal Republic; rearmament; the United States; and Konrad Adenauer, the man who stood for it all. They wanted to do more than just produce the Monatsschrift für Freiheit und Ordnung (Monthly Magazine for Freedom and Order—Der Weg’s new subtitle). They wanted a strange kind of freedom and a palpable new order. They wanted the “building of a new Germany.” For a while, there was even talk of forming a German government in exile.31

  The behavior of these men, who were now nicely established in Argentina, cannot be explained rationally—though closer inspection reveals the principal motivation for their political ambitions. Anyone who has labored under the delusion that he belongs to the world’s new elite, and who helped shape the politics of the German Reich that shook the world for twelve years, would be incapable of resigning himself to a normal life. Hans-Ulrich Rudel phrased it memorably, with help from Sassen:

  We live on, and we certainly live better from a material point of view than many millions of our defeated countrymen. But can one really narrow one’s field of vision like this, down to the most limited circle, in the space of a few years? I often … think back over this short time, to my last conversation with Hitler, and the idea that always got us back on our feet and kept us doing our duty during those last months of war, the great goal that had ruled my entire life until this point: the prosperity and happiness of the Fatherland. And then my present existence seems so pitiful, so small and meaningless! Is it possible suddenly to change so much, to think only of yourself and the smallest circle of your family and comrades?32

  The end of the war, and their escape from the Allies, had thrown these men back into an everyday reality that had never really been the norm for them and that must now have seemed trivial.
It was difficult to dream of world domination from the sobering context of exile in Buenos Aires. And the change hit them all the harder because they were still relatively young. The end of the war had pulled them up abruptly in the middle of their careers. Rudel was born in 1916, Sassen in 1918, and Fritsch in 1921; Eichmann, in his mid-forties, was among the oldest. But back in West Germany, people were electing a chancellor of over seventy. All this reminded the exiles of the Weimar Republic, where “the youth” had succeeded in seizing power from the old Reich president, Hindenburg, and getting rid of the hated democracy. They wanted to try the same thing again. For them, National Socialism was a mission that had not yet ended.33

  It was not only in Argentina that people were dreaming of a second coup d’état. In the early 1950s, all the influential far-right groups were attempting to organize themselves in greater numbers. The most famous example is the group led by Werner Naumann, the former state secretary to Joseph Goebbels. He attempted to infiltrate the North Rhine–Westphalia Free Democratic Party, pursuing opaque political ambitions in West Germany—and by 1952 he had also started making contact with fascists from other European countries. The most important names here were also to be found on Eberhard Fritsch’s list of authors and correspondents: the Englishman Oswald Mosley, and the Frenchman Maurice Bardèche. At the same time, the Dürer circle was attempting to build its political influence in Germany. The first step was an association with the Sozialistischen Reichspartei (SRP), a National Socialist party led by Otto Ernst Remer and the völkisch author Fritz Dorls. Both men were radical anti-Semites, who could potentially be very useful to anyone in the business of falsifying history.34 The “solution of the Jewish question” was an overt part of their manifesto, though they took pains to be at least a little critical of Hitler’s methods. The immediate aim was to win a large number of votes in the upcoming federal election of 1953, preventing Adenauer’s victory and thereby becoming an influential voice in the conservative camp. Like Remer and his party, the men of the Dürer circle firmly believed that the majority of the population was secretly right-leaning and on their side. The SRP’s first electoral victories at a national level fueled their hopes.35 In 1951 there was clear cooperation between the far-right Der Weg and the equally unambiguous magazine Nation Europa, which had been founded that year. Willem Sassen wrote a caustic polemic against the United States and rearmament for Nation Europa, raising the circulation figures in Germany so significantly that the rest of the press, including Der Spiegel, began to take note of the publication.36 There is also evidence of contact between Argentina and the Plesse publishing house in Göttingen, in which Werner Naumann was involved.37 And perhaps Fritsch really did travel to Germany, as he claimed in letters to his authors, for a personal discussion on how similar waves could be made in the future with the newspaper cofounder Karl-Heinz Priester.