Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  The train rattled to a start. Nobody knew where they were headed. As the train passed small railway stations along the way, someone attempted to read the platform signs to get some idea of their direction, but it was too difficult to see through the car's single small window, which was strung with barbed wire to prevent escape. By the end of the first day, the heat, stench, hunger, and thirst became unbearable. Sapir's young siblings wept for water and something to eat; his mother soothed them with whispers of "Go to sleep, my child." Sapir stood most of the time. There was little room to sit, and what room there was, was reserved for the weakest. Villagers of all ages fainted from exhaustion; several died from suffocation. At one point, the train stopped. The door was opened, and the guard asked if they wanted any water. Sapir scrambled out to fill the bucket at the station. Just as he came back, the guard knocked the bucket brimming with water from his hands. They would have to do without.

  Four days after leaving Munkács, the train came to a screeching stop. It was late at night, and when the cattle car door crashed open, the surrounding searchlights burned the passengers' eyes. SS guards shouted, "Out! Get out! Quick!" Dogs barked as the Jews poured from the train, emaciated copies of their former selves. A shop owner from Sapir's village turned back toward the car: he had left behind his prayer shawl. A man in a striped uniform, who was carrying away their baggage, pointed toward a chimney belching smoke. "What do you need your prayer shawl for? You'll soon be in there."

  At that moment, Sapir caught the stink of burning flesh. He now understood what awaited them in this place called Auschwitz. An SS officer divided the arrivals into two lines with a flick of his hand or a sharply spoken "Left" or "Right." When Sapir and his family reached the officer, Sapir was directed to the left, his parents and siblings to the right. He struggled to stay with them but was beaten by the guards. Sapir never saw his family again. As he was led down a dusty road bordered by a barbed-wire fence, his battle for survival had only just begun.

  Six weeks later, at 8:30 on the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1944, air raid sirens rang throughout Budapest, the Queen of the Danube. Soon after, the first of 750 Allied heavy bombers led by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force released their explosives onto the city. Antiaircraft guns and German fighter planes attempted to thwart the surprise attack, but they were overwhelmed by wave after wave of bombers and their escorts. Eichmann hunkered down in his two-story hilltop villa, formerly owned by a Jewish industrialist, as Budapest was set ablaze. Four hours later, the last of the bombers disappeared on the horizon. Columns of smoke rose throughout Budapest. The saturated bombing flattened whole neighborhoods. Refineries, factories, fuel storage tanks, railway yards, and scores of other sites were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died.

  Emerging unscathed from his villa, Eichmann saw Allied leaflets drifting down from the sky and landing on his lawn. The enemy propaganda revealed how the Soviets were pushing east through Romania, while in the west, the Allies had landed in France and Italy and were driving toward Germany. The Third Reich was facing defeat, the leaflets promised, and all resistance should be stopped. Further, President Franklin Roosevelt had declared that the persecution of Hungarian Jews and other minorities was being followed with "extreme gravity" and must be halted. Those responsible would be hunted down and punished. Neither an Allied bombing nor a threat by an American president nor even Hitler himself was going to divert Eichmann from completing his masterpiece, the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, which had begun in earnest with the deportations from Munkács.

  Eichmann left his villa to assess any damage to his headquarters at the Hotel Majestic. His achievements to date were fresh in his mind. By the first week of July, the plan that he had crafted had shown itself to be monumentally effective. Five of the six operational zones where Jews were slated for deportation, totaling 437,402 "units," had been cleared by the Hungarian authorities, who had proved to be more than willing accomplices in his designs. Every day, an average of four trains carrying a load of 3,500 were received at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 10 percent of arrivals were deemed fit enough for the labor camps. The balance earned "special treatment" in the gas chambers. Eichmann's early coordination with the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss, ensured that the extermination camp was ready for the numbers to be processed. The staff had been increased, the ramps expanded, a new three-track railway system built, and the crematoriums updated.

  Only the Jews of Budapest remained in Hungary. They had already been relocated into designated houses marked with a yellow star, and a curfew prohibited them from leaving these abodes except between 2:00 and 5:00 P.M. Police and gendarmes from the outlying provinces were in place to assist in the upcoming deportation, and the trains were being scheduled.

  Still, there were forces gathering against Eichmann's plans, and with the Allied advance on both fronts and now the attack on Budapest, these forces had some teeth. Over the past few weeks, international protests—from Roosevelt to Pope Pius XII to the king of Sweden—had urged Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary (whom Hitler had kept in a figurehead position), to end the actions against the Jews. Horthy was receptive to these calls, not only because of what he had recently learned about the extermination camps from a report by two Auschwitz escapees but also because of the recent coup attempt by Hungarian state secretary László Baky, a key ally of Eichmann's in the Interior Ministry. Five days after the Allied bombing, on July 7, Horthy suspended the deportations and dismissed Baky and his cronies from their positions.

  Incensed at the interruption, Eichmann nonetheless ordered his deputies to send 7,500 Jews held in a brick factory north of the city to Auschwitz. He met no resistance. A week later, he attempted the same with 1,500 Jews at the internment camp Kistarcsa, eleven miles outside Budapest. After the city's Jewish Council learned of the train's departure, they convinced Horthy to halt it en route to the extermination camp and return to Kistarcsa. Berlin had yet to respond to Horthy's suspension of the deportations, but Eichmann did not care. He was not about to allow the regent to block his plans. On July 19, he summoned the Jewish Council to his office. While one of his underlings kept the members of the council occupied, Eichmann sent SS troops to Kistarcsa and brutally forced the Jews back onto the train. Only when it crossed the border into Poland did Eichmann re-lease the council.

  That same week, Hitler weighed in on the conflict with Horthy. Wanting to keep him in alliance with Germany, Hitler offered to allow 40,000 Budapest Jews to immigrate to Palestine, but the rest were to be deported to the camps as planned. This did not please Eichmann, who did not want one single Jew to escape his hands. He strode into the office of the German plenipotentiary in Hungary.

  "Under no circumstances does the SS Reichsführer Himmler agree to the immigration of Hungarian Jews to Palestine," Eichmann raged. "The Jews in question are without exception important biological material, many of them veteran Zionists, whose emigration is most undesirable. I will submit the matter to the SS Reichsführer and, if necessary, seek a new decision from the Führer."

  The plenipotentiary and Berlin were unmoved. With the war going poorly for Germany, many in the Reich leadership, including Himmler, viewed the Jews as much-needed bargaining chips. Eichmann thought this was weakness, even though he was worried about his own future, admitting to an SS colleague that he feared that his name would top the war criminal lists announced by the Allies because of the unusually public role he was playing in Hungary.

  In August, when the Russians conquered Romania, Himmler shelved the plans for the deportations completely. Eichmann was ordered to disband his unit in Hungary, but still he did not relent. Except for a short mission to Romania, he lingered in Budapest for the next two months, waiting for his chance to return to his plans.

  He rode horses and took his all-terrain vehicle out to the countryside. He spent long weekends at a castle owned by one of his Hungarian counterparts or stayed at his two-story villa, with its lavish gardens and retinue of servants. He dined at fashionable Budapest resta
urants and drank himself into a stupor at cabarets. With his wife and three sons in Prague, he kept two steady mistresses, one a rich, thirty-year-old divorcée, the other a Hungarian count's consort. Eichmann had enjoyed some of these pursuits since first coming to Budapest, but now he had more time than ever to indulge in them. Even so, he was increasingly edgy at the progress of the war. He smoked heavily and often barked at his underlings for no reason.

  In late October, with the Russians driving only a hundred miles from Budapest and Horthy recently deposed as regent, Eichmann made one last bid to finish what he had started in Hungary. "You see, I'm back again," he declared to the capital's Jewish leaders. He secured permission from the German plenipotentiary to send 50,000 Jews to labor camps in Austria. The fact that there were no available trains to take them on the 125-mile journey, because of Allied bombing raids, did not deter him. As winter settled in, he sent the first 27,000 Jews, including children and the infirm, on a forced march. With few provisions and no shelter, scores began falling behind within a few days. They were either shot or left to die in roadside ditches. Even the Auschwitz commandant Höss, who witnessed the scene while driving between Budapest and Vienna, balked at the conditions the Jews endured. It was intended slaughter, something that Himmler had decreed must stop. When Eichmann was ordered by a superior officer to cease the march, he ignored the order. At last, in early December, Himmler summoned Eichmann to his headquarters in the Black Forest. Before they met, Eichmann cleaned his nicotine-stained fingers with a pumice stone and lemon, knowing well the Reichsführer-SS's aversion to cigarettes.

  "If until now you have exterminated Jews," Himmler said in a tone laced with anger, "from now on, I order you, as I do now, you must be a fosterer of Jews ... If you are not able to do that, you must tell me so!"

  "Yes, Reichsführer," Eichmann answered, knowing that any other answer or action on his part was suicide.

  On a late December morning in 1944, the winter wind cut through a wooden hut at Jaworzno, an Auschwitz satellite camp. On his bunk, Zeev Sapir shivered constantly. He had swapped his extra shirt for a loaf of bread, and his scant remaining clothes hung loosely on his emaciated body.

  At 4:30 A.M., a siren sounded. Sapir jumped out of bed to avoid the rain of blows he would endure if he delayed. He hurried outside with the hundred other prisoners from his hut, exposed now to the bitter wind and the cold as they awaited roll call. Then he began his twelve-hour shift at the Dachsgrube coal mines. He was required to fill fortyfive wagons of coal per shift or receive twenty-five lashes. This would have been difficult if he had been in the best of health, but after a breakfast of only one cup of coffee and one-sixteenth portion of a loaf of bread, every shift was a Herculean effort. Sapir often fell short.

  That evening, when Sapir returned to the camp, exhausted and with his skin coated with coal dust, he and the other 3,000 prisoners were ordered to start walking. The Red Army was advancing into Poland, the SS guards told them. Sapir did not much care. He was told to walk; he walked. This attitude—and the hand of fate—had kept him alive for the past eight months.

  Once Sapir had arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary and been separated from his family, he had been beaten, herded off to a barracks, stripped, inspected, deloused, shaved, and tattooed on his left forearm with the sequence A3800. The next morning, he had been forced to work in the gas chambers where he suspected his family had been killed during the night. Sapir dragged the dead from the chambers and placed them on their backs in the yard, where a barber cut off their hair and a dental mechanic ripped out any gold teeth. Then he carried the corpses to large pits, where they were stacked like logs and burned to ashes. A channel running through the middle of the pit drained the fat exuding from the bodies. That fat was used to stoke the crematorium fires. The thick smoke, dark red flames, and acrid fumes poisoned his soul.

  Sapir lost track of time, unaware of the day of the week or the hour of the day. He knew only night and day. Somehow he escaped execution, the fate of most workers tasked to operate the gas chambers and crematoriums. The Germans regularly killed these workers to keep their activities secret. Sapir, however, was sent to Jaworzno, where he would endure a different set of savageries.

  Now, filing out of the satellite camp, Sapir and the other prisoners trudged through deep snow. They walked for two days, not knowing where they were going. Anyone who slowed down or stopped for a rest was shot. As night fell on the second day, they reached Bethune, a town in Upper Silesia, and were told to sit by the side of the road.

  The commanding SS officer strode down the line, saying, "Whoever is unable to continue may remain here, and he will be transferred by truck." Sapir had long since learned not to believe any such promises, but he was too tired, too cold, and too indifferent to care. Two hundred of the prisoners stayed put, while the others marched away. Sapir slept where he fell in the snow. In the morning, the group was ordered out to a field with shovels and pickaxes and told to dig. The earth was frozen, but they dug and dug, even though they knew they were digging their own graves.

  That evening, they were taken to the dining hall at a nearby mine. All the windows had been blown out by air raids. A number of SS officers followed them inside, led by a deputy officer named Lausmann. "Yes, I know you are so hungry," he said in a sympathetic tone as a large pot was brought into the hall.

  Sapir gathered with the other prisoners, starved and almost too weary to stand. The most desperate pushed to the front, hoping for food. They were killed first. Lausmann grabbed one prisoner after the next, leaned him over the pot, and shot him in the neck. He fired and fired. In the middle of the massacre, a young prisoner began making a speech to whoever would listen. "The German people will answer to history for this," he declared before receiving a bullet as well.

  Lausmann continued to fire until there were only eleven prisoners left, Sapir among them. Before Sapir could be summoned forward, Lausmann's superior called him out of the hall. The SS guards took the remaining prisoners by train to the Gleiwitz concentration camp, where they were thrown into a cellar filled with potatoes. Ravenous, they ate the frozen potatoes. In the morning, they were marched out to the forest with thousands of others. Suddenly, machine guns opened fire, mowing down the prisoners. Sapir ran through the trees until his legs gave out. He was knocked out by the fall. He awakened alone, with a bloody foot and only one shoe. When the Red Army found him, he weighed sixty-four pounds. His skin was as yellow and dry as parchment. It was January 1945. He would not regain anything close to physical health until April.

  Sapir would never forget the promise Eichmann had made in the Munkács ghetto or the call to justice by his fellow prisoner the moment before his execution. But many, many years would pass before he was brought forward to remember these things.

  2

  AS THE WAR DREW to a close, the world was about to come face-to-face with the vestiges of the horror that Sapir had survived. On April 12, 1945, the Allies opened a road to Berlin. The Rhine River had been crossed weeks earlier, and the British and Canadian armies stormed east across northern Germany in their Sherman tanks. The American armies had encircled the Ruhr Valley, cutting off Hitler's industrial complex and opening up a huge hole in the western front. Only a handful of ragtag German divisions stood between eighty-five Allied divisions and Berlin. A spearhead of the U.S. Ninth Army was already establishing bridgeheads on the Elbe River, just sixty miles from the capital of the Third Reich. To the east of Berlin, 1.25 million Russian soldiers with 22,000 pieces of artillery were on the banks of the Oder River, a mere thirty-five miles away from the capital.

  While these forces mustered for the final defeat of Germany, two Wehrmacht colonels flying a white flag from their Mercedes approached the forward headquarters of the British 159th Battalion. They came with an offer of a local cease-fire in order to hand over control of Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp plagued with typhus located a few miles from the advancing British tanks. That same day, General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander
of the Allied Expeditionary Force, entered the work camp near the village of Ohrdurf. He shuddered at what he saw.

  Reports of the genocidal acts committed by the Germans had reached the Allies over the course of the war. As early as the summer of 1941, code breakers at Britain's Bletchley Park had intercepted transmissions that described in detail the mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1942, Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish resistance movement, had put himself in a position to be thrown into Auschwitz, from which he periodically sent out reports that reached Western governments. Two Slovakian Jews had escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau at the cusp of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, and they had provided detailed reports on the number of transports coming to the camp, the nationalities of the arrivals, and their fate in the gas chambers. It was their account that had led to the spate of protests to Admiral Horthy against the Hungarian deportations in 1944, including one from President Roosevelt that stated, "To the Hitlerites, subordinates, functionaries, and satellites, to the German people and all other peoples under the Nazi yoke, we have made clear our determination to punish all participation in these acts of savagery."

  Roosevelt had made a similar declaration as early as October 1942. Two months later, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden had announced to the House of Commons that Hitler's aim was to exterminate the Jewish people. The British view at that time, penned by Winston Churchill in a note to his cabinet in 1943, was that after arrest, the German leaders should have a brief trial to ensure their identity and, six hours later, be "shot to death ... without reference to higher authority." Curiously, it was Joseph Stalin, no stranger to kangaroo courts, who had reined in Churchill with the help of Roosevelt. On a visit by Churchill to Moscow in October 1944, Stalin had insisted that no executions should occur without a fair trial, "otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them." Still, as the war neared its close, Allied leaders continued to jostle over how best to bring the Nazis to justice.