Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  In summer 1952 several members of the Argentine camp traveled to West Germany. They formed close working relationships there, with positive outcomes for Fritsch’s network in particular. The SRP’s established network of members was integrated into Der Weg’s card index of subscribers, boosting circulation by three thousand. This also meant three thousand extra contact addresses for the “ring circle.” A political career had always been part of the plan. The war hero Hans-Ulrich Rudel was seen as a good potential election candidate, and he traveled to Germany several times, closely observed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).38 Press reports even claimed that Eberhard Fritsch (who was also on the BfV’s watch list) had secretly entered the country.39 There is evidence that one of Fritsch’s closest colleagues, Dieter Vollmer, moved back to Germany permanently, though he stayed in regular contact with the Dürer circle and had an intimate knowledge of their plans and projects.40 All these travelers knew that Adolf Eichmann was in Argentina, and men looking to impress like-minded friends are not usually reticent about their sensational contacts.

  Before the election, the SRP was found to be unconstitutional and was outlawed. Remer was also convicted of slandering the July 20 resistance group. The new Argentines then placed their hopes on the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) in Hanover, which was not a great deal more democratic. But this party had the added advantage of not objecting to a market economy—a stance that accommodated the approach of the economically active émigrés. Rudel’s new contact was Adolf von Thadden, who was a similar age to Eberhard Fritsch and one of the most active Nazis of the postwar period; he would later make a substantial contribution to the rise of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). By December 1952, Thadden had met Rudel, and he financed Rudel’s next trip in 1953, to support the DRP’s election campaign.41 Like Remer, Thadden expected the flying ace to exude the old National Socialist glamour. Rudel appointed Werner Naumann as his political adviser after only one meeting, a man whom the Frankfurter Rundschau called the “spider in the web of systematic infiltration.”42 He too joined the DRP. Thadden, however, seemed disillusioned by his Argentine reimport: “Personally he seems to be a very proper man. In terms of German domestic policy, he sometimes has completely incorrect ideas, which are evidently the result of him only associating with a certain type of former comrade.” Thadden, who had some fairly peculiar ideas about the future of Germany himself, was irritated by Rudel’s suggestion of “getting a real populist movement going.” He thought a more realistic option was to infiltrate the new democracy and use a political party to put some National Socialists in government—a goal that seemed “extremely modest” to the impatient Rudel. Thadden did, however, see the “allure of his name” and immediately recognized Rudel’s drive: “In any case, he has political ambition, and may play a role in Germany.”43 He was also impressed by the Dürer circle’s logistics.

  Adolf von Thadden’s later notes show that Rudel was anything but reserved in their meetings, chatting openly and without inhibitions. Long before Eichmann’s arrest, Thadden knew that the Adviser on Jewish Affairs was living in Argentina and had connections to the Dürer circle.44 The DRP fielded Rudel as a candidate, though nothing came of it. He didn’t even fulfill the formal criteria to become an election candidate, and his National Socialist speeches kept getting him banned from appearing in public. The files that the BfV compiled on Rudel and Eberhard Fritsch in the early 1950s are still under wraps (though parts of them, at least, will apparently be classified “archivable” in the future). The German Foreign Office was also keeping an eye on these new far-right machinations. Rudel and Fritsch had been traveling around South America since 1950, collecting for Kameradenwerk and advertising the coming revolution. The German diplomatic mission in Chile had sent back alarming reports, fearing for Germany’s reputation abroad in the face of so much open Nazi nostalgia. The Foreign Office was, however, reassured by the answer to its inquiry from the embassy in Buenos Aires: at the end of 1953, there were apparently only fifty to one hundred German emigrants there, and none of them were of any importance. They were therefore not worthy of being mentioned or properly counted.45 The CIA clearly thought otherwise. In the same year, its report on the activities of German nationalists and neo-Nazis in Argentina was fifty-eight pages long.46 We still don’t know the length of the report compiled by the West German intelligence services.

  In the early 1950s the many activities of National Socialists, and of fascists of whatever stripe, might look like a huge, worldwide conspiracy, but that is the one thing the postwar Nazis never achieved. On the face of it, the conditions for such an undertaking were not unfavorable. A few years after the war, West Germany was a long way from reaching the democratic consensus that the Allies had hoped to achieve with their “re-education” measures. Even so, the old faithful and their dreams of coups did not make it big in the postwar world. Taking a closer look at the pieces in this bizarre game, we can guess at the reasons. Quite apart from the fact that “an international alliance of National Socialists” was always a contradiction in terms, the men involved came from completely different worlds. As much as they wanted a conspiracy, they lacked something unifying to swear allegiance to and common aims that went beyond the purely negative. Their memories of old times were also wildly divergent. Ultimately, their conspiracy was based on an image of the past, and they had no practical ideas on how to bring about a coup in the present. And mourning the past did nothing to inspire faith in their abilities, either within their own ranks or with potential voters.

  Still, the connections between the Nazis who had fled to Argentina and those in Germany and Austria were multifaceted and went far beyond sending airmail letters with colorful stamps. Even without a secret-monger like Höttl, with his multiple intelligence service contacts, in 1953 plenty of people knew about Eichmann’s hiding place and Perón’s power plant project. If the Gehlen Organization had followed up on the clue it received in June 1952, its agents could have discovered where Eichmann was working, a fact not mentioned in the original message. The nervousness with which the West German institutions reacted to Fritsch and Rudel’s ambitions shows that they had at least some idea of who else was in Argentina. They would not have needed to pay Mast and Höttl a small fortune to obtain this information.

  Eichmann on a Silver Platter

  However Höttl and Mast got wind of of Eichmann’s whereabouts, their decision to pass this information to Simon Wiesenthal, of all people, is worth examining more closely. At the start of 1953, anyone with a connection to the intelligence services knew what Höttl did with information, but they also knew exactly who the philatelist Simon Wiesenthal was. He had always been a loud and enthusiastic voice in the hunt for Nazis, founding the Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz in 1947 and making his own contacts with the American and Israeli intelligence services. Höttl and Mast must have been well aware of what they were doing: they were turning Adolf Eichmann in. The power plant clue was so precise that a few inquiries in Buenos Aires would have led straight to CAPRI, a company working on one of the Argentine government’s largest projects. The only reason they failed to expose Eichmann was because, in classic Nazi fashion, they overestimated Simon Wiesenthal’s influence. Their belief in a Jewish world conspiracy made them think of “the Jews” as a single entity.47 National Socialist thought ascribed more influence to any little Jewish corner-store owner than even large Jewish organizations had in reality. “The Jews” were entirely focused on world domination and revenge. Outwardly, sending this letter looked like handing “the Jews” their enemy Adolf Eichmann on a silver platter. This fact forces us to ask the difficult question: who had a vested interest in this development in 1953?

  When one person wants to damage another, he or she may well be acting from a personal motive like fear or revenge or from some other desire to see them suffer. Höttl doubtless knew that Eichmann had sworn to kill him for revealing his confession about the six million. But Eichmann was far away,
and Höttl was no stranger to this kind of threat, having made plenty of other enemies through his work for the Allies. Dr. Langer, a member of the Sassen group, told people in Argentina that by May 1945, threats were being made against Höttl all over Vienna: “Everyone had a great hatred for Höttl. So I heard ‘if I catch that fellow, I’m going to kill him’ etc. not from one person, but from several of these people.”48 Wilhelm Höttl clearly took great pleasure in painting Eichmann in the worst possible light, and he seemed to envy Eichmann’s fame even after he had been hanged—but it is difficult to believe that malice alone would have driven him to such lengths. If it had been Höttl’s intention (or the intention of whoever made him take this step) simply to reveal where Eichmann was, he could have made copies of the letter and distributed them to the international press. But as far as we know, Höttl and Mast didn’t show the letter to anyone apart from Wiesenthal in 1953. As the Germany security services’ archives remain firmly closed, we can only speculate on whether Höttl and Mast could have made this move without the Gehlen Organization, the Heinz-Dienst, or the BfV knowing about it, being involved in it, or at least being informed of it after the fact.

  For men of boundless ambition, one possible motive could have been the desire to raise their profile in the intelligence business. But if they had wanted to score points by tracking down a war criminal, they would surely have made their own intelligence services the first recipients of the news. But then Höttl’s reputation with the American and German services was by then so terrible that an indirect approach might have seemed best. In November 1952 Höttl had become a candidate for blacklisting by the BfV. All the German and American services treated him as unreliable, for having invented one piece of intelligence after another.49 An indirect approach via a suspected Israeli spy would, however, have been a very complex plan. Greed was not the motive, either: the letter was never sold, and Wiesenthal certainly didn’t pay them $100,000, if only because he never had access to that kind of money. Even if another party had paid Mast and Höttl a princely sum for their action, the question remains why anyone would have had an interest in publicizing Eichmann’s address.

  What might have been accomplished if this action had done something beyond just causing Wiesenthal’s heart to skip a beat and had actually succeeded in telling “the Jews” where Eichmann was? What reaction might Mast and Höttl, or their paymaster, have been expecting from Nahum Goldmann, the man whom the crazed Jewish-conspiracy theorists believed to be the supreme head of world Jewry? What could “the Jews” have done? From today’s perspective, there are two possible scenarios. One of the vengeance squads that were still active could have quietly murdered Eichmann or he could have been brought to trial (as he was, later on)—provided he didn’t hear that his cover had been blown and manage to find another hiding place in time. But apart from his victims, the Jews, who would have had an interest in pursuing either of these possibilities?

  Höttl made a very good living from being the only person able to offer a firsthand account of what Eichmann had said. For him, having this man killed on the quiet would have one benefit: Eichmann’s knowledge about the Holocaust would vanish along with him. There was one problem with the theory that Höttl and Mast were hoping the Jews would get rid of Eichmann (do the dirty work, so to speak), so that the real key witness would no longer be able to testify to the figures: it would mean they had to accept that the numbers Eichmann had quoted corresponded to the truth. Silencing someone makes sense only if you think they have something unpleasant to reveal. In 1953 few people in Germany and Austria, not even Wilhelm Höttl, believed that of Eichmann.50

  Today it’s difficult to imagine what people in the early 1950s knew or wanted to know about the National Socialists’ crimes—namely, almost nothing. Most of the information to be had on the Holocaust in Germany and Austria (for those who weren’t too busy making a new start to find out) came from press coverage of the war crimes trials. In a recently defeated country, these trials didn’t have a particularly good reputation. Terms like “victors’ justice,” “propaganda statements,” “atrocity stories,” “collective guilt,” and “vengeance verdicts” were widespread, and the number of six million seemed so extraordinary that people needed more evidence and explanations to make it even remotely comprehensible. These were not yet available in 1953. Although the first books about Hitler and National Socialism had begun to appear, there was as yet no published account of the Holocaust. Eight years after the end of the war, the only way to get an impression of this mass extermination was to study the trial documents, and very few people had access to them. Under the circumstances, the easiest reaction was to disbelieve and repress the facts. Holocaust deniers had an easy ride, when even the perpetrators could reassure themselves that “nobody knows the details.”

  Today we have the testimonies of the concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höß, the Wannsee Conference transcript, reports from the Einsatzgruppen commandos, descriptions of concentration camps, murder statistics, and of course Eichmann’s testimonies, not to mention brilliantly edited collections of documents—enough secondary literature to fill a library, and more images than we can bear. In 1953 there was not a single book, aside from the Nuremberg judgment. The perpetrators and the people in the know relativized and denied everything, and the survivors had barely started finding their voices again. Even statements from the representatives of the new West Germany often sounded like stock phrases and political correctness: things people knew they had to say, without really acknowledging what they meant.51 Aside from the people who knew exactly what had happened because they had been directly involved in the crimes, most of the population couldn’t imagine that Eichmann might have anything worse to reveal. It would just be another incomprehensible witness statement that nobody wanted to hear. So why spare a thought as to why someone might want to keep this statement quiet? You would have to have been in the know to want Eichmann silenced before he started naming names. But betraying Eichmann, rather than leaving him to ride through the mountains of Tucumán in peace, was a risky business.

  Things looked rather different from the perspective of vehement Holocaust deniers—people who were stubbornly clinging to a different truth. The writers associated with Der Weg, ex-general Otto Ernst Remer, and a frightening number of unreformed anti-Semites had such an intense hatred of Jews that they favored the idea of extermination. But they also either believed the millions of murders to be a lie, or tried to relativize those murders as far as possible. From this point of view, the figure of Adolf Eichmann, the man who knew the truth better than anyone, took on a different significance. In the deniers’ world, the only truth Eichmann had to tell was theirs: he would say it wasn’t at all like people had claimed in Nuremberg, and that “the Jews” had lied about the scale of the killing. His statement would lift the burden of blame from the Germans and reveal that—as usual—the Jews had abused the truth, to gain the upper hand. One of Der Weg’s most successful articles was entitled “The Lie of the Six Million.”52 Written under the pseudonym Guido Heimann, this text claimed that there had only been 365,000 deaths among the National Socialists’ opponents, with no systematic mass murder, gas vans, or gas chambers. All claims to the contrary were a gigantic falsification of history. A key witness was needed to refute this “lie,” and even in this crude vision of history, that was Adolf Eichmann.

  In the middle of the election campaign in West Germany, this alleged “lie” had gained a political dimension that would change the country. Konrad Adenauer finally brought himself to publicly acknowledge the German people’s guilt and responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. He spoke of every German’s duty to Israel and to the Jewish people.53 Pressure from the Western Allies on the issue of reparations had made it impossible to remain silent any longer. West Germany had to acknowledge the past; otherwise it would be impossible to rejoin the international community. There were protracted negotiations between the federal government and the representatives of the Jewis
h Claims Conference. In 1952 the government signed the Luxembourg reparations agreement, promising Israel payments, goods, and services totaling 3.45 billion Deutschmarks over twelve years, and in many people’s eyes, this agreement was a scandal. For the Bundestag to ratify it, Adenauer needed the Social Democrats’ (SPD) votes, as too many members of his own coalition had withheld their consent. The debate over the contract with the Jewish Claims Conference led to a huge crisis within the Christian-Liberal coalition government, and Adenauer seemed stricken. Far-right voices were not the only ones arguing against any kind of payments. Opinion polls showed that only 11 percent of Germans were in favor of the Luxembourg Agreement.54 If the conspiracy theorists’ version of Adolf Eichmann could step into this situation—a man who could produce detailed calculations showing that the Nazis’ crimes had not been committed, or at least not by Germans—the consequences would be tremendous. Adenauer would be discredited, the rug would be pulled from under the whole agreement, the Jews would lose all respect on the world stage because of their “deception,” and—most important—the Germans would be freed from guilt. The truth would finally come out: “the Jews” had staged the whole thing themselves, just so they could get their hands on Palestine and reap the financial rewards.