Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  The fall of 1957 brought with it a significant change for postwar Nazis the world over. Konrad Adenauer won the election in West Germany with an absolute majority. The far-right movement in both Germany and Buenos Aires had dreamed of preventing this election victory and of effecting a turning point in German postwar politics—a dream that was far removed from reality even in the 1950s. It had come to nothing, along with the prospect of using this route back to a seat at Germany’s top table. The German population, as Adenauer had realized, was no longer keen on experiments.307 Everyone had now come to appreciate that there was no way back, and they would have to adapt to the new world as it was. Eberhard Fritsch, Ludolf von Alvensleben, Willem Sassen, and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, as their biographies show, were slowly beginning to grasp that Hitler had been dead a long time: the Third Reich was past and would never return. Even the most sentimental of dreams, in the isolation of exile, had a limit, when the rest of the world was moving on—and the world had moved on significantly, even in Argentina. In 1957 the country was a long way from the vibrant boom years it had enjoyed a decade previously, under Perón. The “movement” had become outmoded, and those who didn’t want to be stuck in the past had to start keeping pace with the new world and its possibilities. Even Der Weg ceased publication. And so the Sassen project didn’t go out with a well-orchestrated bang or a dramatic bombshell; it simply died of boredom and disappointment.

  But Eichmann’s confession had changed not only the eyewitnesses in Argentina. It was spreading inexorably among the other people who were still dreaming of the Führer-state’s return. The first role that the Sassen interviews played in Eichmann’s downfall was to help destroy the virulent sympathy for the National Socialist worldview that had protected the perpetrators of crimes against humanity for so long.

  A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY

  Eichmann was pretty stupid. Everyone knew where he was.

  —Inge Schneider, an acquaintance of Sassen’s

  The chief prosecutor of Frankfurt, Arnold Buchthal, held a press conference at the start of April 1957. On April 1 he had ordered the arrest of Hermann Krumey, the man who had spent many years working for Eichmann and had been his representative in Hungary in 1944. Buchthal had been tasked with the central handling of all investigations into the historical murder of more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, and over the next few days, his words were published in all the Federal Republic’s large daily newspapers, and even in the Argentinisches Tageblatt. Naturally, the article said, the hunt was still on for Krumey’s superior Adolf Eichmann, a warrant for whose arrest had been ordered on November 24, 1956: “He is said to be living in an unknown location in South America.”1 We know that Eichmann read this article, as he talked about it in the Sassen circle. And there is much to suggest that someone else also heard about it: Lothar Hermann, a blind man whose family had been killed by the National Socialists and who had escaped this fate himself only by fleeing the country.

  People have always delighted in the story of the former inmate of Dachau whose daughter met Eichmann’s eldest son at school. The thought that it was his son’s love life, and not the intelligence services, that proved to be Eichmann’s undoing is so satisfying that it seems to have brushed all questions aside. But as neat as this story of sex and secrets might be, historians must not succumb uncritically to its pulp-fiction charms. We must point out the things that don’t add up and, most important, look at the sources. As is so often the case, the story is much more complex than it appears.2 The information about the German jurist Fritz Bauer, Lothar Hermann, his daughter, and Klaus Eichmann became public only many years later. It first appeared in The Avengers (1967) by Michael Bar-Zohar, a close friend of David Ben-Gurion’s. He was the first person to mention Fritz Bauer in connection with the hunt for Eichmann, though initially he did so by implication. Only in interviews, and in the Hebrew edition of the book that appeared after Bauer’s death, did Bar-Zohar talk openly about Bauer’s secret collaboration with the Israeli authorities.3 His book may have been a popular paperback, but Bar-Zohar still had a good reputation as an historian. He wrote well-respected biographies of Ben-Gurion and Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan and had access to the head of Mossad, Isser Harel. He was without question very well connected, so we must take seriously his claim to have spoken to Fritz Bauer in person in March 1967.

  Encouraged by the Bar-Zohar book’s success, Isser Harel also went public about the events leading up to Eichmann’s capture, telling his story in interviews, newspaper articles, and finally a book.4 By this point, Harel assumed that Hermann was long dead, and he wanted to create a memorial to Mossad’s work (and to himself), for the tenth anniversary of the trial. He quite rightly saw abducting Eichmann as the greatest achievement of his career. His book was published in numerous editions worldwide, on the strength of the love story between the son of a Nazi and the daughter of a Jewish survivor. Sex and Nazis always sell.

  When Lothar Hermann heard about Harel’s story, he was aghast: most of it was “completely wrong”; the facts had been twisted “deliberately and publicly.” “I never imagined that men of the Jewish faith could be so bad and treacherous,” he said. Harel had “misused my name and the name of my daughter.”5 Hermann rejected the public accolade for his role in Eichmann’s abduction and an invitation to Israel. Given the background to the story and his living conditions at the time, the fact that he still accepted the $10,000 reward from the State of Israel is perfectly understandable, even though by so doing he added the possibility of another anti-Semitic cliché to the story. A glance at the correspondence between Hans Dietrich Sander and Carl Schmitt shows the extent to which Harel’s story played to the public taste. “I recently read a story in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about Eichmann’s arrest,” Sander writes. “According to this, E was not discovered through the resourcefulness of the Isr. secret service, but through a bounty that the secret service put on him. An old blind Jew from Argentina then got in touch, who knew where E was because his daughter was friends with E’s son. E was gotten out of the country as we know, but the bounty was not paid. The old Jew started a legal dispute that went on for years,” Sander continues, adding with regret: “The daughter doesn’t appear in the article again.”6 His sense of voyeurism obviously wanted more salacious details.

  There are no independent sources for Isser Harel’s version of the Silvia Hermann story, as the events to which he referred took place before the official Mossad operation. All the agents who later gave details about what happened prior to 1960 got them from their superior, Harel. None of them knew anything about the search for Eichmann before the formation of the abduction team. Ephraim Hofstaedter, who had visited Lothar Hermann at the start of 1958, subsequently fell victim to a terrorist attack in Istanbul. Zvi Aharoni, the first Mossad agent to see Eichmann’s address and conduct any real fieldwork, did not stint in his criticism of Harel’s book, accusing him of courting publicity at the expense of the truth, just as Hermann had done.7 In his biography of Simon Wiesenthal, Tom Segev also shows how jealously Harel tried to raise his profile as he got older, attempting to efface Wiesenthal’s part in the hunt—which had been officially recognized with an award from the State of Israel. Fairness wasn’t part of Harel’s PR campaign. And there is one more fact we should not ignore: in this version of events, Klaus Eichmann’s behavior played a significant part in his father being discovered, but he never gave any indication that he blamed himself for the events that led to his father’s death, which he saw in a very different light.8 We should therefore be a little more cautious than to use Harel as our only source: for one thing, a tactical understanding of truth comes with the job for intelligence service chiefs, and for another, there are alternative routes by which to access the events in Argentina.

  The Informant Lothar Hermann

  This way I am probably forgoing historical fame.

  —Lothar Hermann to Fritz Bauer, June 25, 1960

  When Klaus Eichmann9 met Silvia Hermann, they were
both at school and were at most nineteen and fourteen, respectively. By January 1956, the Hermanns had moved from Buenos Aires to Coronel Suárez, 310 miles away.10 Lothar Hermann and his first wife had moved to Argentina after he was forced to leave Germany because he was a Jew—a “full Jew,” as he stressed to Harel, who had described him, using Nazi terminology, as a “half-Jew.”11 Hermann, who had been born in Quirnbach in Germany in 1901, was a lawyer. He said he had spent the period between September 14, 1935, and May 7, 1936, in “protective custody” in Dachau, probably because of his interest in socialism.12 He was then expelled from Germany as a “politicizing Jew” and emigrated to Argentina via Holland, where in 1938 he was finally able to marry his “Aryan” wife. His parents and siblings didn’t survive the National Socialists. In Argentina, Hermann went completely blind, but he continued to work as a legal adviser, specializing in pension claims. He moved to Coronel Suárez, where there was a large German-Jewish community, because his services would be much sought after there. There is nothing to suggest Hermann was ever rich, or even well off.

  Silvia Hermann, born in Buenos Aires in 1941, was a gifted child. A friend of the family and Lothar Hermann’s secretary both recall the Hermanns deciding to send their daughter back to Buenos Aires to attend high school. That would enable her to go to college in North America, where the Hermanns had some distant relatives. From Lothar Hermann’s letters, we know that by the fall of 1959, when she was eighteen, Silvia left Argentina for the United States. This makes it impossible that her departure was directly connected to Eichmann’s abduction, but it does tell us when Silvia Hermann and Klaus Eichmann could have met.

  The fact that their paths crossed was certainly no bizarre coincidence. In German immigrant life in Argentina, former victims and perpetrators lived quite literally next door to each other, and their children attended the same schools. To be sure, there was a cultural divide—a German-Jewish newspaper, theater, and cinema on the one hand, and German-national and/or National Socialist institutions on the other—but young people seldom adhere to such divisions, having little concern for their parents’ mental barriers. Lothar Hermann never said when and where his daughter met Eichmann’s son; in 1959 he simply indicated that his daughter could confirm everything he had said about Eichmann’s identity and where he was living. But a friend remembers that Silvia met Klaus, who was five years older than she, at school. She fell in love with him and kept a photo of him. It may have been a school photo, a snapshot taken at a party, or something else, but it has never been found. However, numerous people claim to have seen it, and it was even said to have hung on a wall in the Hermanns’ house.13

  Lothar Hermann had always taken an interest in the Nazis in Argentina, wanting to see the people who had murdered his family brought before a court. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that the name Eichmann immediately rang a bell with him. By the fall of 1957, when Hermann and his family had been in Coronel Suárez just over a year, Fritz Bauer had in his hands the information that Eichmann was in Argentina. Bauer may even have received Hermann’s letter by June 1957.

  How Hermann hit upon the idea of sending the information on Eichmann’s exact whereabouts to Fritz Bauer, the attorney general in Frankfurt, is unclear. Hermann mentioned only the time of their correspondence, “the years 1957/58.”14 His first letter has disappeared, and its date is uncertain,15 but it could have been addressed to the man named in the Argentinisches Tageblatt as having said Eichmann was in South America: Arnold Buchthal. He may have passed the letter on to Fritz Bauer, about whom nothing had yet been written in Argentina in connection with Eichmann. Bauer and Buchthal not only knew each other, they were both backed by the prime minister of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, a great advocate of coming to terms with the past who placed a lot of hope in these two Jewish jurists. By the time Arnold Buchthal had to vacate the post of chief prosecutor because of a political affair, in favor of a man with a Nazi history, he would certainly have started passing his search results on to Bauer rather than leave them lying on his desk.16 We know that Bauer took the first real steps in the hunt for Eichmann when he had Vera Eichmann’s mother questioned on June 9, 1957. She said her daughter had been living abroad since 1953, having married an unknown man and gone to America with him.17 At the start of July, Bauer experienced a significant setback. The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, the Federal Office for Criminal Investigations) informed the Hesse State Office for Criminal Investigations that it would not initiate an Interpol search for Eichmann. He was wanted for crimes of a “political and racial character,” and Interpol’s statutes prevented its involvement in this kind of prosecution. “I therefore have no way of conducting the international hunt for Eichmann via the BKA as a German central office,” Bauer said.18 The BKA allowed the former SS officer Paul Dickopf (among other old comrades it employed) to make a good career for himself: he eventually became its president and was even president of Interpol. In general, the BKA cannot be accused of showing any real enthusiasm for hunting Nazi criminals. Eichmann would later claim that he had always been reassured by Interpol’s refusal to search for him, but how he could have heard about that remains unclear.19

  At exactly this point in summer 1957, the old rumors about Eichmann in the Middle East were resurrected. For more than a month, stories about Nazis in Cairo haunted the pages of German newspapers.20 They were even discussed and refuted (without mentioning Eichmann’s name) in Der Weg—possibly because in Cairo, Johann von Leers was starting to feel threatened by the articles.21 And once again, these clues also turn up in the intelligence service files.22 By this time, Fritz Bauer had to acknowledge that circulating his information within Germany wasn’t going to achieve anything; on the contrary, appealing to the German authorities had actually endangered any chance of success. At the start of November, Bauer had his first meeting with Israeli representatives, to whom he gave the information from Argentina. He also told them he had not just taken it upon himself to cooperate with the State of Israel—he had discussed it with Georg August Zinn, the prime minister of Hesse and a personal friend.23 In January 1958 Mossad sent a spy, Emanuel Talmor, to check out the address in Buenos Aires, but the house on Chacabuco Street didn’t fit the cliché of influential Nazis in exile. Fritz Bauer, informed of this conclusion, nevertheless pressed for futher investigation. As a result, Ephraim Hofstaedter, a senior officer in the Israeli police, was given the task of visiting Lothar Hermann at home in March 1958; it was no coincidence that he later led the police investigative bureau during the trial. In any case, Hofstaedter was already going to Buenos Aires, for an Interpol conference.24 Unfortunately, it is not known which BKA representatives he met there. But we do know that the deputy head of the BKA, Paul Dickopf, who liked to call himself its “architect,” was also the head of the “Foreign Division” at this point. He frequently represented the organization at international meetings, and the Interpol General Assembly appointed him as its correspondent for these events between 1955 and 1961. Possibly he could have paid a visit to the country that had become a refuge for his old comrades. A glance at the delegation’s report would certainly be worthwhile, if it could be found.25

  Hofstaedter used an alias with Lothar Hermann, producing a letter from Bauer to identify himself as an employee of the Frankfurt attorney general’s office. It’s easy to imagine how disappointed everyone must have been to discover that the man claiming to have recognized Eichmann was blind. Hofstaedter prohibited Hermann from making any further contact with Fritz Bauer and gave him an address in the United States to which Hermann was to direct any more mail. Years later Hermann complained that he had never received a reply to the letters he sent there, in which he had enclosed “a photo of Klaus Eichmann” that had fallen into his hands “by chance.” (So far none of the letters Hermann sent to New York have come to light. It would be a fitting recognition of Hermann’s achievement to make the documents public.)26 Hermann later explained that it was “only with great difficulty and effort” that he had “received the sum o
f 15,000 Argentine pesos in two instalments” from “Karl Hubert” (Hofstaedter’s cover name). But in 1958, when Hermann stopped getting replies to his letters, he sent the whole dossier back to Frankfurt and, as he said later, gave up any further investigations, having received the impression that his work was pointless.27 The Hermanns then sent their daughter away to college, and Hermann thereby lost his point of contact with the Eichmanns. He now had no one to carry out investigations on his behalf. However, his contemporaries recall that later on, there was talk of Silvia’s departure having been for her own safety. The investigations had placed her in a dangerous position, and Lothar Hermann, who in any case was understandably paranoid, had therefore pushed for her to move away, although her enrollment at a foreign university placed a financial strain on the family. As Silvia Hermann decided not to say anything about these events, we can only speculate about the real reasons for her departure.