Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Only a single newspaper firmly refuted the story: Der Reichsruf, the propaganda sheet of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP). On October 24, Adolf von Thadden, the man who was so concerned with Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s political career in Germany, published an article headlined “So Where Is Eichmann?” “Eichmann was hidden in Italy by a Catholic monastery,” Thadden said, “and, with the help of senior Catholic connections, was then taken from Italy to Argentina.” It was simple, public betrayal. “Herr Schüle and Israel’s search in Kuwait will be in vain,” Thadden scoffed. And he added threateningly, “It is very regrettable, because if Eichmann really were the notorious murderer of the Jews, greater clarity about this horrific event could be gained through his conviction.” The dream of the six million being exposed as a lie oozes from between the lines. And whether Der Reichsruf was determined to provoke a testimony from Eichmann that would redeem National Socialism, or the garrulous editor had simply been unable to keep his mouth shut,110 something very strange had happened. Thadden later expressed contempt for his former contributor Willem Sassen, accusing him of being a faithless traitor to Eichmann—and yet here Thadden himself was, thumbing his nose at the Nazi hunters and trumpeting Eichmann’s hiding place when there was no need to. It was the first time Argentina had been mentioned in the press. And the extremist from Lower Saxony made no secret of his source: he openly referred to “German emigrant circles,” although he did stress that they “avoided” Eichmann. The clue was given more weight by the fact that everyone—or at least the readership of Der Reichsruf—knew that a member of these circles had been on the DRP candidate list since 1953. So did anyone spot Thadden’s piece? Yes: the observant staff of the BfV.111 There, the article from the anticonstitutional publication was thought “noteworthy” and dutifully pasted into the Eichmann file. This actually causes one to wonder whether even releasing all the government files would suffice for us to grasp what must have gone on among the German authorities during these months.

  Der Reichsruf ’s distribution had dwindled to almost nothing, and the article provoked no real reaction. Thadden, who would later become chair of the National Democratic Party and worked for the British intelligence service, MI6, was never accused of having betrayed his comrade.112 Fritz Bauer’s disinformation strategy, however, was working splendidly. It was a necessary diversion, as Eichmann’s reaction to the news demonstrates. Klaus Eichmann remembered the evening his wife heard on the radio that Adolf Eichmann, who was suspected of being in Kuwait, was wanted by Interpol. “I raced out to San Fernando and shook Father awake: ‘Interpol is hunting you.’ It left him cold. He just said: ‘Damn it, you’re waking me in the middle of the night for this? You could have waited ’til morning with it. Go home and get some sleep.’ ” His father consulted friends over the following days, and none of them found the news disconcerting or even took it seriously.113

  In the meantime, Lothar Hermann had read the article in the Argentinisches Tageblatt in which Tuviah Friedman spoke of a reward of $10,000. He had lost all contact with Bauer and had not received an answer from anyone else either, so he immediately wrote to Friedman in Israel offering information. The article gave him the impression that at last someone was taking the matter seriously. At first Hermann said nothing about his daughter, who was now living in the United States.114 He had no idea that the “documentation center” was the private collection of a dedicated Nazi hunter with no financial resources at his disposal. He believed it was a national office, which also led to the misunderstanding that a reward really existed. Hermann made it clear that this time he wouldn’t reveal any information without being paid in advance. Friedman conveyed this information to Schüle on November 8, without mentioning Hermann’s name. By this point, Schüle seems to have heard about the real status of the manhunt and urged Friedman in the strongest terms to hold back. He had been “disappointed to learn that there has still been no let-up in the Eichmann affair. Please support me in keeping the ‘Eichmann case’ absolutely taboo for the immediate future, … no publications, no speeches, no other actions of any sort,” because it all “disrupts our efforts to clear up the Eichmann case.” To emphasize this point, Schüle hinted at definite success in the manhunt.115 Still, he would have to repeat this exhortation before Friedman actually backed off. Friedman let Hermann know that he had passed on his information to the World Jewish Congress representative in Jerusalem, and that someone was certain to be in touch.116

  From Lothar Hermann’s perspective, the course of events became even more tortuous than for Tuviah Friedman. On December 26, 1959, a representative of the Jewish Community of Argentina, one “Herr G. Schurmann,” visited him, and he couldn’t figure out who had actually sent him. He assumed it was Friedman, but Friedman later claimed not to have done anything further.117 Now that he had heard the Middle East news, Friedman didn’t believe Hermann anymore.118 Hermann’s subsequent letters show that for him, Fritz Bauer, Tuviah Friedman, and Mossad formed a single entity, conspiring with one another to extract information from him without providing appropriate compensation.

  But only a handful of people knew what had really taken place, in absolute secrecy. Hermann was not one of them. For by this point, the abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad was a done deal.119

  The hunt for Eichmann is the best example of a success achieved via a complex nexus. Human activity is rarely monocausal; it is usually the cumulative effect of various strands of activity with many people involved, all doing what they do for different reasons. Of course Paul Dickopf had not intended to encourage Bauer with his behavior, and obviously Tuviah Friedman had never wanted to endanger the success of the hunt. Simon Wiesenthal simply refused to give up, and was determined to see Eichmann stand trial. Isser Harel was looking for a sensational operation for his intelligence service, and naturally, he was also searching for the “number-one enemy of the Jews,” as was David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion also had to keep in mind the German-Israeli dialogue, on which their trade agreement and Israel’s supply of armaments depended. And finally Fritz Bauer wanted to prosecute Eichmann in Germany. Eichmann’s capture was the result not of a chain of events but of a series of threads that gradually wove themselves into a net. But then in hindsight, as I said, this is a much more common pattern for human activity than we would like to think.

  In contrast to the hunt for Eichmann, his final arrest almost seems a simple matter. On December 6, 1959, Ben-Gurion confided to his diary that he had asked Isser Harel to prepare a Mossad team to identify and abduct Adolf Eichmann.120 Fritz Bauer had been to Israel again, stressing the need for quick action. In November the Israeli ambassador to Vienna, Ezechiel Sahar, had told Simon Wisenthal about the renewed interest in Eichmann. Wiesenthal put together a comprehensive dossier, using all the information in his possession. This time Sahar was able to tell him that Israel was very impressed with his work. He even gave Wiesenthal a list of further questions. When Eichmann’s father, “Adolf Eichmann, retired company director,” died on February 5, the death notice,121 like the one for Eichmann’s stepmother, named Vera Eichmann among the mourners. When Wiesenthal saw it, he reacted quickly. On the slim chance that Eichmann or his wife would turn up at the funeral, he had someone take photographs of all the mourners. Neither of them was there, but Wiesenthal now had photos of Eichmann’s brothers, who had always looked similar to him.122 Isser Harel later claimed that Wiesenthal had had no part in the Mossad operation, but his own agent Zvi Aharoni confirmed that these photos had allowed him to identify the fifty-four-year-old Eichmann more easily than the photos from the Nazi period alone would have done.123 Harel sent Aharoni to Argentina in February 1960. It was not his first time in Buenos Aires: Aharoni had stayed there in March 1959 for another assignment.124 His knowledge and contacts allowed him to track Eichmann down, even though he had just moved from Chacabuco Street to his new house. The Mossad team followed at the end of April. Helped by useful contacts in Buenos Aires, they achieved the success that would make Mossad famous: the “number-o
ne enemy of the Jews” was abducted on May 11, 1960, outside his house, as he was returning home.

  Eichmann blamed himself for his capture. He had “felt so safe in Argentina, where I lived for 11 years in freedom and safety,” that he had overlooked all the signs of danger.125 He had been a “fool” not to go to Tucumán, Chile, or Asia—tellingly, he didn’t mention the Middle East. In Israel, Eichmann set down a detailed description of the abduction from his own perspective.126 These accounts confirmed that it happened the way the Mossad agents claimed, even if their descriptions differ on various details.127 Eichmann said he realized he had been under surveillance for months, which was more than a refusal to admit he had been outsmarted. In his notes, he describes incidents that had actually happened as the team was searching for him, though he couldn’t have read the Mossad agents’ report. Aharoni’s attempt to question his daughter-in-law had been suspicious. And he had noticed the series of cars parked near his house. The danger had been so palpable that his son had offered to lend him a gun. His wife suffered nightmares commensurate with her Catholic upbringing: she saw her husband in a white, blood-soaked hair shirt.128 But the man who had felt so welcome in Argentina made one fatal error. “However, I didn’t think,” Eichmann wrote in 1961, “that this could lead to an abduction, but believed it was an operation by the Argentine police, and that maybe there was an investigation going on here, as had happened with other people.”129 For a National Socialist, the Argentine police force was a true friend in need, upon whose protection one could always rely.

  I Had No Comrades

  I am especially delighted that my many Argentine friends remembered me with their gifts of flowers on my birthday.

  —Eichmann to his family, April 17, 1961

  When her husband didn’t arrive home that night as expected, Vera Eichmann raised the alarm with her son. Eichmann’s disappearance unleashed a flurry of activity that shows how much a part of Argentina’s shady German community the Eichmanns had become. Adolf Eichmann was abducted on May 11, 1960. He was hidden in a house in Buenos Aires and put on a plane to Israel ten days later.130 Until David Ben-Gurion’s announcement on May 23, no one in Argentina knew where Eichmann was, though this information was very important to a great many people. Saskia Sassen remembers a crowd, including the Eichmann boys, suddenly turning up at the house, and the days of upheaval that followed, with more and more people wanting information or offering help. It was disconcerting for the children: they were used to social gatherings in the house, but now people had stopped caring what they did or didn’t hear. Saskia Sassen’s mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and when Eichmann’s abduction became known, she left the family for a few weeks, unable to stand the tension or her husband’s entanglement in the whole affair.131 Vera Eichmann claimed she never knew what her husband had done, though she also said her first thought was that he had been kidnapped by Jews. Only Willem Sassen and her husband’s other friends prevented her from going to the police. Horst Carlos Fuldner was among those friends. He felt a responsibility toward the family and responded to the call for help right away.132 “Father’s best friend,” Klaus Eichmann said later, “forced us to think calmly.” Perhaps their father had stayed out after one too many glasses of wine, or maybe he had had an accident and had been taken to the hospital—two possibilities that the Eichmann family had not thought of at first, out of sheer terror of Jewish retribution. “We spent two days searching the police stations, the hospitals and the morgues. In vain. What remained was the realization: they had got him.” Klaus Eichmann traveled to Mercedes-Benz with Sassen, to meet his father’s friend and to hide manuscripts there.133 The most trusted of Eichmann’s associates spread out across the city and kept watch on the transport hubs: the harbors and railroad stations. Sassen, as Klaus Eichmann recalled in 1966 without a trace of suspicion, took the airport. They also organized a guard for the family. Up to three hundred members of a “Peronist youth group” kept watch over the house, said Eichmann’s son with some pride. Some even talked of violent retaliation, like kidnapping the Israeli ambassador or mounting an attack on the embassy. But instead Fuldner found the family alternative accommodations, and for the time being they waited to see what would happen.134

  In spite of the fevered search that followed the abduction on May 11, 1960, Ben-Gurion’s speech almost two weeks later took the rest of the world by surprise. The CIA files show that the agency too had had to ask other “friendly intelligence services” what had actually happened, perhaps because the sympathizers in Argentina behaved with particular discretion in this volatile situation,135 or because the clues were wrongly evaluated. In any case, the files that have since been released by the U.S. intelligence services, the Bf V, and the German Foreign Office contain no evidence to show that anyone had the slightest awareness of the Mossad operation. However, one of the German ambassador’s close contacts in the Buenos Aires Nazi scene may not have been completely unsuspecting.

  José Moskovits, the chair of the Jewish Association of Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Buenos Aires, remembers a surprising incident in the German embassy. He is entirely certain that it took place “two, maximum three months” before Eichmann’s abduction. “Two gentlemen arrived from Bonn, one of them from the German intelligence service, and demanded Eichmann’s file.” An altercation took place, as a helpful member of the embassy staff had lent Moskovits this file shortly before, together with Josef Mengele’s, and so it wasn’t at hand in the embassy. The person responsible, according to Moskovits, was fired immediately.136

  We can prove that José Moskovits was indeed gathering information on Eichmann and Mengele at that precise point, since he was Simon Wiesenthal’s point of contact in Argentina, and his correspondence with Wiesenthal documents their exchange of information.137 He also remained active in the search for Mengele for many years. Moskovits, who was born in Hungary, had excellent contacts in the Argentine security services and was active in many other areas as well. Having made numerous compensation claims that resulted in the return of Jewish property stolen during the Nazi period, he had turned the Association of Survivors into an institution that was taken seriously. And he had another reason to remember the time of Eichmann’s abduction. Zvi Aharoni and the Mossad team turned to him for assistance, and he used his connections to help them rent the apartment and obtain the vehicles for the planned abduction.138

  Moskovits’s contacts with the German embassy even enabled him to take Zvi Aharoni into the building to do research. On his first trip, between March 1 and April 7, 1960, Aharoni traveled under a false name on a diplomatic passport, posing as a representative from the finance department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.139 There is little reason to doubt Moskovits’s recollections and the dates he provided. The only troubling thing in this story is the idea that an ambassador might come down so heavily on an employee, for giving archive access to the recognized representative of a survivors’ organization. We will leave aside for the moment the point that the embassy had a file on Eichmann, even though it claimed not to have any kind of information about him in 1958 and, a few months after the abduction, declared that only one person there had known who Eichmann was. Still more irritating is the question of what made representatives of the Federal Republic travel all the way to Buenos Aires in spring 1960 to ask about Eichmann. If they had been looking into the current state of the investigation or the arrest warrant, a glance at the files in West Germany would have sufficed. The timing of the visit is significant, in any case.

  At the end of February 1960, as Zvi Aharoni was setting off for Argentina to prepare for the abduction, preparations for another delicate mission were being made in West Germany. The first meeting between Konrad Adenauer and David Ben-Gurion was to be a crucial step for future German-Israeli relations. A wave of anti-Semitism had swept through the Federal Republic just after Christmas 1959; it started with swastikas appearing on synagogues and ended with the destruction of Jewish cemetaries. The BfV counted “470 incide
nts” up to January 28, 1960, “and an additional 215 instances of childish graffiti.” The effect abroad was devastating, and the federal government fell over itself to take action, rushing through changes to the school history curriculum.140 Its eagerness to avoid any embarrassment in the run-up to the highly sensitive meeting could have led it to conduct investigations in Argentina. Information had been stacking up on Eichmann’s whereabouts, and an “open letter to the chancellor” from Obersturmbannführer (retired) Adolf Eichmann at the time of a German-Israeli meeting could have had serious repercussions.

  Fritz Bauer’s increasing devotion to the hunt for those responsible for exterminating the Jews was also becoming impossible to ignore. As excessively cautious as Hesse’s attorney general was, his efforts to take the search to Buenos Aires via Brazil seem not to have gone entirely unnoticed. A short time after Ben-Gurion’s declaration that Eichmann was in Israel, Der Spiegel published exclusive clues about Fritz Bauer’s second informant. It said the initial tip-off on Eichmann’s whereabouts had come from a “Brazilian Jew.”141 The article also speculated on whether the Israelis had abducted Eichmann at this specific time to “keep up the moral pressure on the Federal Republic, thereby ensuring further economic aid.” The Hamburg magazine was brimming with information from well-informed sources. Bauer was extremely concerned that his progress would be discovered, as shown by more than simply his exasperation as he pressed for action in Israel in late 1959. The wealth of ideas that the attorney general fed to federal German agencies like the Foreign Office, making misleading requests in an apparent effort to force the extradition of Eichmann from Kuwait, reveals Bauer’s mistrust of the German authorities. In spring 1960, if the Foreign Office, the BKA, or even the BND had asked Bauer where Eichmann was, it would have received the same answer they had all been giving out for years: Eichmann was in the Middle East.