Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  In 1959 a voice from Israel caused further concern in the Eichmann case. Tuviah Friedman, who had started hunting Nazi murderers shortly after the war ended, was in touch with Wiesenthal, and since emigrating to Israel, his idealism had led him to start a document collection in Haifa. Now he was asking questions everywhere. On July 13, 1959, he wrote to Erwin Schüle, the head of the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Criminals in Ludwigsburg, accusing the West German government of doing nothing to catch Adolf Eichmann, because it didn’t want to deal with what he had done. Schüle replied within a week, informing Friedman of the existing arrest warrant from 1956 and of the rumors that Eichmann was probably either in Argentina or in one of Israel’s neighboring countries. A short time later Schüle wrote again, requesting documents and information on Eichmann, since Friedman had written to him on Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes letterhead. Friedman threw himself into the work with gusto, but he wanted to go further than discreetly providing documents. What he didn’t know was that huge advances had by now been made in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, and that his actionism actually threatened its success.

  Unlike Isser Harel, Fritz Bauer had not been so quick to give up on the Argentine lead. He had heard nothing more from Lothar Hermann, who had dutifully been sending his letters to the address in North America, but Bauer received other clues that he was on the right track. His colleagues remember their boss getting a visit from Paul Dickopf at the BKA, who had an SS past of his own and was still in touch with people on the extreme right of the political spectrum.80 Dickopf allegedly suggested to Bauer that he give up his pursuit of Eichmann—and that in any case, it was incorrect to suppose he was in Argentina. This “wish” seems to have been the confirmation Bauer needed that he was getting close.81

  There was another reason that the public, or at least a section of the public, was getting anxious about this perpetrator having gone unpunished. East Germany had begun to use West Germany’s failure to come to terms with its past as a weapon in the Cold War and kept threatening the Federal Republic with unpleasant revelations about its leading figures. With the help of documents originally seized by the Soviets, new details were emerging from East Berlin on a weekly basis. The authorities had no idea what to do against this dangerous weapon, since the revelations were, for the most part, entirely true.82 In this context, Eichmann’s prospective reappearance must have looked like the worst possible catastrophe. According to Irmtrud Wojak’s reconstruction of events, which uses accounts by Isser Harel, Fritz Bauer met with the Israeli representatives in summer 1959 and pressed for quick action. Harel claimed that Bauer mentioned a second informant who could attest to Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina, an SS man whom he couldn’t name as it would have put him in danger.

  Rumors about this SS informant have abounded. From what we know today about the close relationships that dedicated National Socialists maintained after the war, in particular the ties between Argentina and West Germany—and if we consider how many people knew where Eichmann was—then the question is not who this informant could have been but whom we can rule out. In 1961 an article in the far-right magazine Nation Europa accidentally revealed how many of the beans had been spilled on Eichmann in right-wing circles: “Let us first note,” wrote F. J. P. Veale (who also contributed to Der Weg), “that Eichmann’s escape to Argentina had been common knowledge for a long time.”83

  We still don’t know who Fritz Bauer’s second informant was, as Bauer didn’t want to reveal the name. When Isser Harel’s book proclaimed to the world that Bauer was using his discretion to shield an SS man, some suspected a “traitor” from within Eichmann’s own camps. This suspicion supported the speculation that Willem Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to maximize his profits from the sale of the interview—or conversely, that his attempts to sell the interview had laid a trail to Eichmann’s door. But later correspondence between Bauer and Sassen proves that Sassen wasn’t his contact in this case.84 There must have been plenty of possible informants who had served in the SS and now knew exactly where and how Eichmann was living. One former SS man accidentally confirmed Bauer’s suspicion that he was on the right track in Argentina: Paul Dickopf, with his cautionary visit to Bauer’s office. This qualified Dickopf as a first-rate informant with an SS background, and it would be understandable if Bauer was reluctant to point out this embarrassment to the Federal Republic.

  Among friends, however, Fritz Bauer did name someone: he had heard about Ricardo Klement’s employment with Mercedes-Benz from a man named “Schneider” (though other spellings are possible), as Thomas Harlan revealed toward the end of his life.85 This Schneider had something of a past himself, in the Einsatzgruppen, but in the late 1950s he had been the head of the “trainee department” at Mercedes in Stuttgart. In this position, he was able to assist in the hunt for Eichmann by giving Bauer access to personnel files and other information. Unfortunately, I have not been able to convince Daimler that the possibility their staff may have included not only a notorious mass murderer but also someone who aided a famous German attorney general makes cooperating with a researcher a worthwhile exercise. They didn’t even take up my offer of a list of possible Schneiders, with their dates of birth.86 On making inquiries, I was merely told that in 1959 no one in the company could have known who Ricardo Klement was.87 I am obviously not the right person to tell them that his identity has now been known for fifty years, and that the knowledge brings its own responsibility. But there are some things it takes time to realize. Perhaps someone else will succeed in convincing a globally respected company that having once employed a man who helped in the search for Adolf Eichmann would not cast a shadow over its history or even dent its image. Even if this Mercedes employee helped Fritz Bauer only because Bauer knew about his (possible) past with the Einsatzgruppen, he still showed more courage in doing the right thing than most people could take credit for.

  But when it comes to Fritz Bauer’s informants, another clue points in a different direction entirely. In private, Bauer once referred to a second Jewish informant in addition to Lothar Hermann. Bauer told a close friend about this source, who had informed him of Eichmann’s living situation in Argentina. This was, as Thomas Harlan remembered, a “Brazilian Jew, formerly Polish, a survivor of the Sobibór uprising, but he never told me the name.”88 Shortly after Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that Eichmann was a prisoner in Israel, for a brief period claims were made in Tel Aviv that a Jewish refugee from Poland had provided the clue to where Eichmann was living.89 There was also much talk about Brazil, as Josef Mengele was suspected to be there. Only the key word Sobibór is missing from this connection. But in 1960 that name meant very little to most people. Detailed studies of this site of atrocities, and of its survivors, have begun to appear only in recent years.

  Sobibór was one of the death camps of Operation Reinhard, and the National Socialists planned to leave no survivors there.90 Largely thanks to an inmates’ uprising, at least forty-seven people managed to escape. In total, only sixty-two people survived the inferno. And only two of those Polish-born men emigrated to Brazil in the late 1940s: Chaim Korenfeld, who was born in 1923 in Izbica, and Stanislav “Shlomo” Szmajzner, born in 1927 in Puławy. Szmajzner was one of the masterminds of the Sobibór uprising. We know little about Korenfeld’s life in Brazil, except that he traveled there via Italy in 1949. Szmajzner, however, originally wanted to emigrate to Israel and was just visiting relatives in Rio de Janeiro. He arrived in Brazil in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of his life. He opened a jeweler’s, built it into a successful business within ten years, and sold it in 1958, buying an island in the rain forest with the profit. He then went into cattle farming.91 In 1968 he published his story under the title Sobibór—The Tragedy of an Adolescent Jew,92 which sounds like an understatement in the face of what he had experienced. Szmajzner had arrived in the Sobibór camp in May 1942, with his jeweler’s toolkit. He was not yet fifteen and had been naïve enough to believe the lies
about “relocation.” What saved this goldsmith’s apprentice from immediate death was that the SS men in Sobibór were keen on gold rings with SS runes and classy monograms for their whip handles.93 Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant, recognized the boy’s talent, and fortunately, gold coins and teeth were readily available. Szmajzner always knew where the material came from for the jewelry he had to make. He also knew his parents and siblings had been killed in Sobibór. His forced labor brought him into contact with Wagner and the camp commandant, Franz Stangl, whose faces were indelibly imprinted on the young man’s mind. Many years later Szmajzner would meet the pair for a second time. In 1968 he saw Stangl on a street in Brazil, and following effective pressure from Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was brought to trial.94 Gustav Wagner’s former prisoner also identified him in 1978, and although Wagner escaped prosecution, he committed suicide—at least, according to the official police report. “Szmajzner let it be known,” another Sobibór survivor said, “that he was entirely uninvolved in Wagner’s death.”95

  Stanislav Szmajzner was a Polish Jew and a businessman in Brazil, and if he had heard about Eichmann’s life in Argentina, he might well have put this information to use in the late 1950s. It’s certainly possible that he knew where Eichmann was. Business trips between Brazil and Argentina were frequent occurrences. Hans-Ulrich Rudel had been to Brazil early on, and even Eberhard Fritsch had visited the country. Pedro Pobierzym, the former Wehrmacht soldier from Poland who did business with the Nazis in Argentina, and procured the tape recorder for Sassen, also traveled to Brazil on business. A resourceful man could easily have made inquiries in the Nazi community of Buenos Aires, especially if he already knew what he was looking for. If you needed a man to make discreet inquiries in Argentina in 1959, Szmajzner would have been the ideal person to approach. Since we have no reason to doubt what Fritz Bauer said, we have every reason to believe that two Jewish informants in Latin America, as well as former SS men, provided the crucial clues that allowed Eichmann to be brought to trial in Jerusalem.

  Eichmann in Kuwait

  At the start of 1960, Attorney General Bauer will make a request to the Emirate in Kuwait, via the responsible ministries in Bonn, for Eichmann to be extradited. Bauer sees no impediment to the extradition in international law.

  —Press release, December 23, 195996

  From mid-1959 the rumors that Eichmann was in the Middle East started to be aired more frequently, with a new variation. Hans Weibel-Altmeyer, a journalist with a vivid imagination, acting on a suggestion from Simon Wiesenthal, traveled to the Middle East to search for Nazis there.97 During an interview, the ex-mufti Amin al-Husseini apparently handed him an anti-Semitic brochure by Johann von Leers and even confirmed: “Yes indeed, I know Eichmann well and I can assure you that he is still alive.” Weibel-Altmeyer was also offered Eichmann “for sale” in Damascus at a price of $50,000.98 If a reporter was able to find out that “certain Arab circles have been discussing the ‘Eichmann deal’ for days,” then this information must also have come to the attention of one of the intelligence services. The BND in particular had informants in the field, in the shape of Alois Brunner and Franz Rademacher. In any case, in late September 1959, the BfV received information to the effect that Eichmann was in Damascus or Qatar.99 The informant even claimed he had met Brunner and Eichmann personally. Tom Segev suggests that this source may have been Weibel-Altmeyer himself: the reporter wrote a story for the Cologne tabloid Neue Illustrierte in summer 1960, about visiting a bar where Eichmann and Brunner were sitting at the next table.

  The BfV, however, had clues of a very different sort as well—clues that pointed to friends in the Middle East trying to create a new life for Eichmann in 1959. The source here was Ernst Wilhelm Springer, an arms dealer from Bad Segeberg who had set himself up in the Middle East. According to the BfV report, Springer “said, regarding the articles in the press in October 1959, that Eichmann is currently in a Middle Eastern country friendly with the FLN, and from time to time meets his associate Fischer [Alois Brunner]. The intention is for Eichmann to be found a management position with an oil company in Kuwait, however this plan is said to have been dropped following the press campaign.”100

  These fresh headlines about the Middle East caused a commotion, and the Federation of German Industry immediately denied the rumors. At least, this is what they said when a query arrived from Hermann Langbein, on Comité International d’Auschwitz–headed paper.101 But they “took your letter as an opportunity to conduct thorough inquiries into the matter of whether any large German industrial firms are employing a certain Adolf Eichmann in Kuwait.” They searched for two months. Even the group representing the interests of German firms in Kuwait had been tasked with this investigation. “The result is completely negative,” and no one in the Middle East even knew who this Eichmann was. But anyone who did know now also knew how much effort was being put into the hunt for Eichmann in the Middle East. And if anyone had been thinking of employing Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Langbein’s inquiry (which had been approved by a confidant of Fritz Bauer’s) would certainly have put him off.102 The BfV’s report contains a further remarkable detail: according to Springer, “The Head of the United Arab Republic Medani apparently knew that Eichmann was in Bad Godesberg.”103

  It’s impossible to establish whether this story was fantasy, a case of mistaken identity, or a deliberate rumor, but the increasing interest in Eichmann is obvious. Still, it is certain that until his abduction, Eichmann never left Argentina and his family. Whether he might somehow have managed to get to the Middle East and live there incognito in 1959, had he chosen to, is another question. He was already sitting in a trap of his own making; relocating to North Africa would only have made it easier for those hunting him to capture him. In any case, the rumors provided an effective cover for Fritz Bauer’s hunt for the mass murderer. All the little pieces of misinformation that emerged in summer 1959 were probably more than just coincidence.

  On August 20, 1959, Erwin Schüle sent new, confidential information from Ludwigsburg to Tuviah Friedman: Eichmann was in Kuwait, working for an oil firm.104 We don’t know if Schüle was aware that his information was incorrect or if he was being used to lay a false trail. The evidence suggests that Fritz Bauer, in cooperation with the Israeli police, was using Schüle to spread this new version of the Middle East story. Experience in hunting Nazi criminals in Argentina had shown that the German embassy there was not entirely reliable. Bauer may also not have trusted the head of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, although nothing suggests that he knew about Schüle’s own SS history. In any case, the danger that Eichmann would find out how close they had already come to him was growing with every month, so disinformation was an obvious strategy.

  Tuviah Friedman was so delighted with this progress that in October he took it upon himself to give the Kuwait news to the press. An October 12 article in the Argentinisches Tageblatt was headlined “Claims Adolf Eichmann Has Been in Kuwait Since 1945.” Among other things, it reported that “the leader of the Israeli institute in Haifa, … Tuviah Friedman, said this institute had earlier put out a reward of $10,000 for finding and capturing Eichmann.” Friedman apologized to Schüle for this obvious indiscretion, though Schüle was angered by it—but that didn’t stop Friedman from taking further action. His desire to see Eichmann in court was irrepressible. Fritz Bauer and the Israeli intelligence service made cunning use of the Kuwait feint, acting as if it were a clue to be taken seriously. On October 13 the Süddeutsche Zeitung considered the possibility of having Eichmann extradited, and over the next few days, the press reported on the official inquiry, apparently made by the Israeli foreign minister to the West German and British authorities, as to whether Eichmann really was in Kuwait. The spokesman for the Israeli government said that “Israel is addressing the case of Eichmann, who is on the list of wanted persons from the Attorney General’s office in Frankfurt am Main.” The Argentinisches Tageblatt, among others, reported this announcement as well.105 N
ot knowing anything about the disinformation, Tuviah Friedman used an election event for Ben-Gurion to call for a reward to be offered for Eichmann’s capture in Kuwait, which the press also encouraged.106

  Over the following months, the Nazi hunters did all they could to keep this erroneous information in the media. Bauer kept holding press conferences and giving interviews, and more press releases emerged from Israel, achieving the regular coverage Bauer had hoped for. At the start of January 1960, there was talk of an extradition agreement, though the British authorities denied it and the British Foreign Office refused to help. Bauer fed the press details about the “sheikh” for whom Eichmann was supposed to be “working as an agent for German companies,” although “discretion” prevented him from naming these companies. Bauer even announced he would prepare this information for the Foreign Office, now that all the obstacles of international law had been overcome.107 Journalists were left wondering why the Foreign Office had stayed so quiet on the matter: “So the question is now,” said the Deutsche Woche in Munich, “why the Foreign Office has neither denied the rumor, nor officially confirmed whether it is correct.”108 The story was so convincing that the German authorities started to doubt their own information. The Foreign Office asked the Federal Ministry for Justice whether it had any information on Eichmann’s whereabouts in Kuwait or Egypt and received an irritated reply: “It cannot even be said with any degree of certainty that Eichmann is still alive.”109