Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  The reply from the German embassy, just over two months later, is surprising in several respects: “Inquiries about the wanted man, under the name Clement or other names, have so far yielded no results.” A naïve researcher might assume that the embassy would begin its hunt for this name in its own archive, where it would, of course, have found it. As you will remember, Vera Eichmann had appeared at the embassy in person with her sons in 1954, when the Eichmann boys needed passports. The person who got the children to name SS ranks could hardly claim that their name meant nothing to him. But “inquiries” would have been a good idea, too, particularly as the embassy had no shortage of contacts in the Nazi scene. The ambassador, Werner Junker, knew and admired Willem Sassen and had a few other connections to the far right as well. When his stepdaughter wanted to do an internship with a magazine, Junker had no problem with the young lady applying to the Freie Presse; its editor-in-chief was Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’s former press adviser.51 Given that the ambassador himself wasn’t exactly taking a “hands-off” approach to the right-leaning elements of the German community, we may wonder whether the inquiries had really been all that fruitless—to say nothing of why such a negligible response required over two months.

  After Eichmann was abducted and the passport affair came to light, questions were raised about this remarkable failure. The Foreign Office’s legal department announced that the embassy could not have known at that time “that conclusions about the whereabouts of the wanted man Adolf Eichmann could be drawn from these applications.”52 Internal investigations revealed the main reason: prior to Eichmann’s abduction, “according to a survey in the embassy, with one exception none of the staff, including the ambassador, had ever heard anything about Adolf Eichmann and his crimes.” Heinz Schneppen, who was an ambassador for West Germany himself before becoming an author of academic history books, generously calls this rationale “insufficient vigilance by the consular officers responsible.”53 But a closer look at German relations in Buenos Aires at that time quickly leads one to the conclusion that embassy staff must have been lacking in more qualities than “vigilance”: for example, money to buy local newspapers. Otherwise they could have read frequent, detailed articles on exactly who Adolf Eichmann was, and what crimes he had committed, in Argentina’s biggest-selling German-language paper. The ladies and gentlemen of the embassy had clearly never read any books on German history, or press coverage from their homeland, either. But they must have been gifted with second sight: the name that, with one exception, they claimed never to have heard in 1960 was one they had given a tip-off for in 1958: Eichmann was “suspected to be in the Middle East.” Every little bit helps.

  The German embassy’s employees seem to have rather exaggerated their willingness to assist: “The embassy will, however, continue to investigate Eichmann’s whereabouts, and will report in due course. To this end, we would be grateful for notification of any former members of the NSDAP who at one time were resident here—for example, the editor or employees of the magazine Der Weg—who have now been identified in Egypt or the Middle East.”54 Even the BfV was irritated by this disingenuous request. Quite apart from the irrelevance of this information to the search for Eichmann in Argentina, the Foreign Office had forgotten one thing: on August 11, 1954, its own employees had told the BfV that Johann von Leers, who was sometimes mistaken for Der Weg’s editor rather than a contributor, had left for Cairo.55 From today’s perspective, it looks like someone was taking the opportunity to find out exactly what the BfV knew. In any case, the BfV in Cologne chose to remind the Foreign Office about its own file in minute detail and to dispense with any further questions about Eichmann.56 Its correspondence with the Foreign Office would return to the subject only after Eichmann’s abduction. In 1958, the BfV must have come to the conclusion that it was pointless asking the Foreign Office and its embassy in Argentina about him.

  Unfortunately, we don’t know what else the BfV did to find Eichmann in 1958. Apart from the files already mentioned, no further documents have been made public. This also means we are unable to clarify whether Josef Vötterl’s position played a role here. Vötterl, who came from Salzburg, had made a career in the criminal and border police, including an assignment with Einsatzgruppe D “in the East,” conducting “border security” and “partisan control.” Like Eichmann, he had escaped to Argentina, but in 1955 he moved back to Germany for three years. He found work with the BfV. In September 1958, a few days after the BfV’s depressing correspondence with the Foreign Office, Vötterl returned to Buenos Aires. He had, as Heinz Schneppen phrases it, “received an offer from an Argentine firm”—and in any case, his salary at the BfV had been so very low.57 We have no further information about this new, more lucrative offer, but it could hardly have been made on the strength of his experience in “partisan control.”

  In spite of the behavior of West Germany’s offices abroad, and the people there who were authorized to issue directives, the fact remains that in early 1958 the West German authorities once again had enough information to find Eichmann. However, very little is known about it even now: all the files that have been accessed so far have been incidental discoveries. Neither the BND nor the BKA has made its documents available to researchers, even after more than fifty years. And as nice as it would be to reference editions of primary sources like the Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the collections of files commissioned by the Foreign Office, the volumes produced so far reveal the problem: they cover 1949–53 and 1963–79. The 1962 volume was published only in 2010.58 If one thinks how many classified documents must still be sitting in various archives, and how little enthusiasm there is for transparency, the facts become both obvious and embarrassing: before Eichmann was abducted, people didn’t want him to be brought to trial in West Germany—and there are still people who don’t want transparency on who, and why this was.

  In 1963 the Foreign Office did at least take steps to counter its leading diplomats’ dreadful ignorance of German history, by appointing Ernst-Günther Mohr as the new ambassador to Argentina.59 At least they could be sure he knew who Eichmann was: at the embassy in The Hague in 1941, Mohr had prepared detailed progress reports on the deportation of Dutch Jews for Eichmann’s office. Eichmann certainly remembered this episode, mentioning Mohr’s energetic support in “Götzen” in 1961.60 This concern for continuity was not confined to Argentina. Hubert Krier became the ambassador to Paraguay at the end of 1965. In an interview he gave in retirement, he was still visibly perturbed as he recalled: “At that time, before my departure, I received the instruction from the Foreign Office to leave the matter of Mengele alone.”61 If Eichmann had been as cautious as Mengele and confined himself to weeping silently over his deep hatred of Jews and writing paeans to National Socialism in his diaries, then he too would have had a good chance of dying at leisure. Mengele would drown in 1979 while swimming in the sea.

  Bormann in Argentina

  They had radically changed names, histories and much else. This is the only way for one man or another to live when the world is hunting them, or believes them dead.

  —Eichmann on Nazis in South America, 196262

  Eichmann was hardly unobtrusive during his final year in Argentina. Since he had gone out on a limb in 1957, making no secret of his presence or his worldview, it would have been impossible for him to retreat into anonymity once more. He would have had to vanish from Buenos Aires and start over somewhere else. Instead, he bought a plot of land on the edge of the city. Klaus Eichmann remembered his father paying 56,000 pesos for 755 square feet of land. Eichmann himself spoke of a lease with a ten-year duration.63 A person with so many good friends could bank on having a steady income. The receipt for building materials was in the name of Señora Liebl de Eichmann. Eichmann threw himself wholeheartedly into the plans for constructing his house, though he also continued to move in Willem Sassen’s circles.

  Eichmann’s corrections on the transcripts of the Sassen interviews
appear right up to the final tape. He even reviewed the texts Sassen had written, though he couldn’t give them his blessing as they had very little to do with what he had actually said. Eichmann’s wife said more than once that her husband finished his work with Sassen at the end of 1959.64 There is even hard evidence that Eichmann’s political activities didn’t stop when the Sassen conversations came to an end. He started writing a new manuscript for his children, the “Roman Tucumán” (Tucumán Novel), and took part in a surprising project that historians have never really been able to evaluate: the collection of documents from the Nazi period. In 1966 Eichmann’s son Klaus would speak of the National Socialists’ attempt to create a tighter international network. “There are connections among the National Socialists in South America, the Middle East, North America and Europe,” he explained. The far-reaching cooperation of right-wing publishers at the time gives us an impression of what that might mean. In the last issues of Der Weg, these contacts were obvious even to the outside world. In Cairo, Johann von Leers was writing a large number of articles from the Middle East, under various names, and the section of news from around the world expanded significantly. But Klaus Eichmann also spoke of another network: “The thing is [!] organized in such a way that every former department head living somewhere abroad edits and collects the material from his former field. My brother Horst says that departments whose original bosses are dead were allocated other specialists, but under the name of their dead boss. So there was a ‘Göring’ for the Luftwaffe, a ‘Goebbels’ for propaganda and so on.” And Eichmann’s son specifically said: “Our father helped gather this material.”65 Eichmann had one thing in particular to offer in this regard: his second son, who was in the merchant marine. He traveled “between Canada, USA, Africa, South America and Europe from 1959 to 1961,” transporting “thick bundles of files.” Despite all his later assertions that he wanted his children to stay out of politics and the military, Eichmann clearly involved at least one of his sons in his political activities. And dispatching an international courier with the name Horst Eichmann was anything but a good cover for a perpetrator of crimes against humanity living in Buenos Aires.

  The structure of this document-gathering operation throws some light on a frequent question about senior Nazi functionaries in Argentina. Apart from the ridiculous legend about Adolf Hitler in Antarctica, awaiting his return like a deep-frozen version of Napoleon on Elba,66 one of the most stubbornly persistent rumors about postwar Nazis has been that Martin Bormann was in South America. If Klaus Eichmann’s story about how the collection was divided is correct, then “Martin Bormann” really was in South America, as the name for the person collecting files from the Party Chancellery. This would at least explain why credulous journalists like Ladislas Farago and Gerd Heidemann kept protesting they had seen pieces of writing and other information from the postwar period that were signed by “Bormann.”

  “Avoid Eichmann!”

  He was quick to learn the ropes and was greatly valued by his manager.

  —Unidentified Daimler-Benz staff member67

  It is always claimed that Eichmann was a pariah in National Socialist society, with whom nobody wanted to be associated. Up until the end of the 1950s, this claim is insupportable, but Eichmann’s son had the impression that in the last year his father spent in Argentina, people started to avoid him. For Klaus, the reason was clear: “Dr. Mengele had spread the word: avoid Eichmann. Getting close to him could be dangerous.” However, this version of events doesn’t add up. It’s doubtful that Josef Mengele would have initiated this practice, as he was by no means the less dangerous of the two. The idea that he, of all people, had enough influence in the backward-looking German community to warn people off the organizer of the Final Solution is not particularly plausible. Still, the fact that Eichmann’s son believed it points to events that really did take place.

  Mengele was worried that he was being pursued, and with good reason. In February 1959 the Frankfurt District Court had issued an arrest warrant for him, and unlike Eichmann, he was living quite openly in Buenos Aires under his own name. By the time the warrant was issued, Mengele had given up his house, which was on the same street as Sassen’s, and had fled Argentina to go underground in Paraguay. His diaries show that friends in Argentina thought this response was over the top.68 In any case, Mengele was no longer in Buenos Aires and could not have called on people to avoid Eichmann. But Eichmann did leave Roberto Mertig’s company at this point, which was partly owned by Mengele’s father. So we can say that Mengele distanced himself from Eichmann, but not because he was avoiding him. He simply disappeared, and his old-boy network with him. What Klaus Eichmann observed was a general change in mood among the Nazi sympathizers in Buenos Aires. Word of Mengele’s frantic flight must have gotten around, as well as news of the changing legal situation in the Federal Republic. The arrest warrants and actual arrests were heaping up, and the trial of the Einsatzgruppen in Ulm in 1958 had finally given rise to a public debate on the handling of war crimes. Max Merten, the former head of administration for the Wehrmacht, stood trial in Athens in early 1959 for his involvement in the deportation of Jews from Salonika, having been so astonishingly brazen as to take a vacation in Greece, of all places. In September 1959 a warrant was issued for the arrest of Gerhard Bohne, who had returned home from Argentina and was to be tried for the ten thousand insidious murders committed in the name of euthanasia. The press in Argentina reported on all of it.

  As interest in prosecuting Nazi criminals increased, so did people’s knowledge about the mass murders, and the number of questions being asked about their organizer. Eichmann’s name now reliably turned up in newspapers and books wherever there was mention of Nazi crimes. Even the fact that he always appeared as “Adolf Eichmann,” and that nobody was confused about his forenames any longer, shows that something had changed. Other legends about him also started to crumble rapidly. “Not a Templar After All” was the title of an article in the weekly magazine Die Zeit.69

  Eichmann’s son would later say that people started bringing his father more and more newspaper articles from their travels. And of course, the fact that the men Eichmann used to spend a lot of time with were traveling abroad was another reason for him to feel abandoned.

  But the distance between Eichmann and his old associates can’t have been all that great, because they were the people who got him his next job. Horst Carlos Fuldner found him a position at Mercedes-Benz Argentina in Gonzáles Catán, an industrial area two hours’ drive to the north. Eichmann started work there on March 20, 1959, as a warehouseman for replacement parts.70 His references were provided by Horst Carlos Fuldner, a Dr. Dr. Ing. Krass, and Francisco José Viegener. As the deputy director, Hanns Martin Schleyer, learned after Eichmann had been abducted, the applicant “had good references and also made a good impression.”71 Ricardo Klement was properly registered for the statutory pension scheme (no. 1785425). He put his salary expectations at 5,500 pesos per month, around 1,100 Deutschmarks—which at this time was more than the average wage in West Germany.72 The payroll from the second quarter of 1959 shows that this is what he actually earned.73 Mercedes-Benz employed a lot of Germans during this period, and several members of the SS. One employee stated that “practically the whole management team [was made up of] immigrants from postwar Germany.” Some of them would have known who “Klement” was, but the subject would have been taboo.74 The sociable Eichmann quickly made new friends at Mercedes-Benz. He introduced them to his family, and after he was abducted, Klaus Eichmann and Willem Sassen asked them to help hide incriminating papers.

  Eichmann’s new job meant commuting for four hours on the bus every day. He spent his weekends working on the house with his sons, on the plot of land he had bought. It demanded all his attention, as Klaus Eichmann remembered. It also reduced his chances of cultivating other contacts. Eichmann spent his remaining free time at home and seemed calm and secure, reading a lot and playing his violin often. He “particularly
loved cśardas and other gypsy airs.” In 1939 Eichmann had wanted to put the Austrian Romanies on the first transport to Nisko, but that didn’t seem to pose a contradiction for him.75 Not even his son believed Eichmann was as innocent as he appeared in 1959. Still, Klaus did him the favor of getting married the day before his parents’ wedding anniversary and bringing a granddaughter into the family shortly afterward. But another family event was to have greater consequences for Eichmann: in April 1959 his stepmother, Maria Eichmann, died in Linz, and the family carelessly named her daughter-in-law as well as her sons among the mourners. They had evidently forgotten that Vera was officially divorced: the death notice gave her name as “Vera Eichmann.”

  Fritz Bauer’s Sources

  I had no enemies among the Jews.

  —Eichmann, Sassen discussions76

  Simon Wiesenthal read the death notice for Eichmann’s stepmother in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten—and later wrote, “But to whom should I have given the news?”77 Although he had people to talk to in Austria—the Israeli ambassador, for example—previous experience may have made him hesitate. Elsewhere, events were gaining momentum in the hunt for Eichmann—ever more people from various corners of the globe were becoming involved. It is no wonder, then, that the threads of this story sometimes become entangled.

  In Austria criminal charges were formally brought against Eichmann on March 25, 1959, in the name of Hermann Langbein’s International Auschwitz Committee. Langbein had agreed on this course of action with the Frankfurt lawyer Henry Ormond, who specialized in representing the Nazis’ victims. An arrest warrant for Eichmann had been out since the end of the 1940s, and he had been on the wanted list since 1955, but these charges sent a definite signal. On his travels through Poland, Langbein managed to get hold of another photo of Eichmann. He was constantly on the lookout for information or evidence that could be useful in the pursuit of war criminals. Ormond and Langbein were both in touch with Fritz Bauer, although no proof has yet been found that Bauer had taken either of them into his confidence at this point. Still, Langbein’s efforts in particular raised the pressure.78 Hence the following message from the authorities appears all the more confusing: the BfV had obtained “unconfirmed information” in spring 1959 that “Eichmann’s wife and his four children have been living in South America, while Eichmann himself is said to have been living somewhere in Europe.”79 It’s unclear whether this rumor was due to someone confusing Eichmann with, for example, Sassen on his travels, or whether it originated in a diversionary tactic in Argentina. The remarkable thing about it is that by this point, people clearly knew how many children Adolf Eichmann, and not Ricardo Klement, had.