Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  Plans to capture these criminals were barely in preparation. First, the Allies were having difficulty settling on who should be targeted as a war criminal. The British held the narrow view that the Allies should go after only those major German figures whose "notorious offenses ... have no special geographical location." The Americans and Russians wanted a much broader definition. This resulted in a confusing number of war criminal lists. Not only did the Allies lack one definitive list, but more important, by April 1945 they had organized only seven investigative teams, numbering roughly five officers and seven enlisted men each, to find these war criminals. In contrast, an Anglo-American operation code-named Paperclip recruited 3,000 investigators to spread throughout the Third Reich to arrest top German scientists and to collect technological information before the Russians got their hands on both. Those charged with tracking down the war criminals did not have so much as an operational code name. Such were the priorities of Washington and London as the war in Europe drew to a close.

  Despite the intelligence reports General Eisenhower had read on the German atrocities, he found himself completely unprepared for Ohrdurf. Guided by former inmates, he and his staff saw men in the hospital who had been brutally tortured and were starving, lying shoulder to shoulder, expecting nothing more than death to arrive. In a basement, he saw a gallows where prisoners had been hung by piano wire long enough that their toes touched the floor, delaying death but prolonging the agony that preceded it. In one of the yards, he saw some 40 corpses, riddled with lice, stacked in rows. In an adjoining field, he saw 3,200 more corpses, many with gunshot wounds to the back of the head, next to a pyre of wood clearly intended to destroy all traces of their existence. General Omar Bradley, who accompanied Eisenhower, could not even speak; the hard-nosed General George Patton vomited against a wall. As he left Ohrdurf, Eisenhower told his officers, "I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against." Once back at headquarters, the shaken supreme commander sent messages to Washington and London demanding that legislators and newspaper reporters come to Ohrdurf. He wanted these crimes documented.

  Over the next several days, the Americans liberated larger camps such as Nordhausen and Buchenwald. On April 15, the British finally entered Bergen-Belsen, bringing reporters and cameramen with them to document the 60,000 "living skeletons" who staggered toward their jeeps. An Evening Standard journalist wrote, "The indignity of death above ground—the bared teeth, the revealed frame that should be sacred, and once was sacred to some loved one, the piled bodies in their ghastly grayness, the pitiable little thing with claws instead of a hand that was a baby, still within the protecting grasp of an emaciated bone that was once a mother's arm—all on the Nazi death heap." The photographs and newsreels from Bergen-Belsen and the camps that Eisenhower opened to reporters all made a huge impression on the public. The Jewish Chronicle, which had published details on Auschwitz after its liberation by the Russians months before, now asked, "Why have we had to wait till now for this widespread revulsion?"

  Finally, the flesh-and-blood horror of the Final Solution was revealed, and vividly so, to the public and its leaders. With every day, more monstrous evidence was discovered and documented, and the pursuit of those responsible increased in importance.

  By April 13, the once great capital of Germany was in ruins. Frequent air raids had devastated the city. Black smoke drifted through the streets, often obscuring the sun. The wailing of sirens was constant. Berliners threaded their way through the fog to their offices and factories and stood in long lines for food. Life went on. They greeted one another with the words "Bleib übrig". "Survive."

  At 116 Kurfürstenstrasse, survival dominated the minds of the Gestapo. They had moved into the cavernous building of oversized rooms and marble stairwells where Eichmann had his office after incendiary bombs had ripped apart their main Prinz Albrecht Strasse headquarters. One afternoon Eichmann, who had returned to Berlin the previous December when the Russians had overrun Budapest, came across a number of his fellow Gestapo officers, crowded into a hall where, in the days when the Nazis were advancing across Europe, he used to play his violin accompanied by several of his staff. A table had been set up, and a department official, whose job was to issue forged papers, was taking notes on the new identity each officer wanted so that he could create employment certificates, company correspondence, and other papers. At the back of the hall, standing apart from the crush to get these papers, Eichmann looked on, disgusted by the scene of SS officers now looking to become insurance salesmen and the like to avoid arrest by the Allies.

  His chief, Heinrich Müller, came to his side. "Well, Eichmann? What's the matter with you?"

  "I don't need those papers." Eichmann patted his holstered Steyr pistol. "Look here: This is my passport. When I see no other way out, this is my last resort. I have no need for anything else."

  "If we had had fifty Eichmanns, then we would have won the war automatically," Müller said. Eichmann inflated with pride at the comment.

  Eichmann had romantic notions of holing up in his Berlin "fox-lair." Since his return from Budapest, where he had narrowly escaped the Russian artillery on Christmas Eve, he had constructed a shelter underneath 116 Kurfürstenstrasse containing a generator, a ventilation system, and enough kerosene, first-aid supplies, water, and food to last several weeks. Outside, he had had his men turn the rubble into defensive positions with tank traps and sharpshooter nests. If worst came to worst, Eichmann had cyanide capsules on hand.

  But his plan of holing up in his lair and waiting for the Allied advance was thwarted by Himmler, who had summoned Eichmann to his new headquarters in a castle outside the capital. The Reichsführer-SS, who was more eager than ever to negotiate with the Allies, had ordered Eichmann to assemble 1,200 of the most prominent Jews held in the Theresienstadt camp, northwest of Prague, and to deliver them to the Tyrolean Alps to be held hostage so that Himmler could bargain with their lives.

  "I have never been so optimistic. Never. We'll get a better treaty than at Hubertusburg [at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763]," Himmler said, slapping his leg. "We'll lose a few feathers, but it will still be a better treaty."

  In the few remaining hours before the attack on Berlin commenced, Eichmann returned to his office and gathered his dejected unit together. He bid them farewell, saying that he knew the war was lost and that they should do what they could to remain alive. "For me," he said, "there is nothing of interest left in the world other than to fight to the last, and think only of finding my death in this struggle." Then he said harshly, "I will gladly and happily jump into the pit with the knowledge that with me are 5 million enemies of the Reich." Five million was the number of Jews Eichmann estimated had been exterminated during the Final Solution. Despite this pride in his accomplishments, he had already burned all of his department's files.

  With that farewell, Eichmann drove south in an armored staff car between the Russian and American forces to Prague to deliver orders to the local SS commander about the removal of Jews from Theresienstadt. From Prague, Eichmann departed for Innsbruck, Austria, to prepare for the arrival of the hostages. On a deserted highway, an Allied fighter plane strafed Eichmann's car. He escaped this attack, only to be caught in a bombing run in an industrial town in northern Tyrol. He was thrown from his car, which was destroyed. It was April 17. The day before, the Russians had begun their final attack on Berlin.

  Eichmann was quick to commandeer a tiny Fiat Topolino to continue his journey. When he reached Innsbruck, he informed Franz Hofer, Tyrol's Nazi Party leader, of the impending arrival of 1,200 Jews. Hofer had other things on his mind and was uncooperative. Eichmann then arranged for two hotels in the Brenner Pass to house the hostages. He tried to contact Prague to begin the deportations, but the phone lines were dead. He would have to return to Prague to ensure that Himmler's orders were car
ried out.

  On his way, he stopped in Linz, in Upper Austria, to visit his father, who told him that Himmler's directives were of little import at this late stage of the war. But Eichmann felt the need to follow his orders, and he left his hometown just a few hours after its state police headquarters were bombed into oblivion by an Allied air raid. The American Third Army would soon follow.

  In Prague, Eichmann found a wasteland. Most of the SS command had scattered, except for its chief, who told him, "Nothing is left in Berlin ... The Russians have broken through."

  Scrambling to find out what he should do, Eichmann reached Ernst Kaltenbrunner by telephone in Altaussee. Since Reinhard Heydrich's assassination in 1942, Kaltenbrunner had been the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), or Reich Security Main Office, a powerful branch within the SS that ran the domestic and foreign intelligence services, the Gestapo, and the criminal police. He ordered Eichmann to Altaussee to receive further instructions. The Theresienstadt Jews were to be forgotten. Eichmann climbed into his Fiat and motored down the highway, holding firm to an order from a command structure that was crumbling from the top down.

  On April 30, the Russians reached the heart of Berlin. The Red Army had swiftly overrun the city with the sheer scale of its firepower. Two weeks before, at exactly 3:00 A.M., a massive artillery barrage from 40,000 guns had heralded the Russians' arrival. Wave after wave of heavy bombers had soon followed. Now their tanks rolled through the streets of central Berlin, blasting apart any building suspected of hiding German soldiers. The Red Army infantry followed, outflanking any street barricades by shooting its bazookas through courtyard walls and basements. Flamethrowers rooted out those hiding in cellars. The bodies of the many who had tried to escape the fighting, civilians and soldiers alike, littered the streets, dust from pulverized brick and stone coating their still forms.

  Fifty feet under the Reich Chancellery, in a fortified thirty-room bunker, Adolf Hitler refused to flee Berlin. Over the past two weeks, he had gone from promising a miracle victory at one moment to turning purple with rage, limbs shaking, certain that the war was lost the next. Only his ravings against the Jews remained constant. His command had fallen apart: Himmler, Hermann Göring, and his generals had betrayed his trust by starting treaty negotiations, and his contact with the outside world had diminished to a trickle. With the Russians closing in on the smoldering shell of the nearby Reichstag, Hitler retreated to his room, took a dose of cyanide, and shot himself in the right temple with his Walther pistol. The Thousand-Year Reich was over.

  Hitler's faithful—from his inner circle, who had only recently lorded it over the whole of Europe, to the SS officers in the camps, who every day had held life and death in their hands—possessed no power at all. Most of the minor players had already shed their uniforms and fled. Over the past month, the price of a car with petrol, a good forgery, and an authentic Yellow Star had reached outrageous sums. Of the top leadership, only Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, and two other generals were still with Hitler in his bunker when the Führer took his life. The rest of the inner circle had abandoned Berlin in the days and weeks before. Goebbels chose suicide, as did his wife. Their six helpless children had no choice. The two generals also committed suicide. Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, made a desperate dash through the Soviet encirclement. He disappeared, believed to have died, though his death was never confirmed.

  When Eichmann arrived in Altaussee on May 2, the lakeside village was teeming with Nazi Party leaders and members of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and other units from Berlin. Located in a narrow wooded valley at the foot of the two-mile-high snowcapped peaks of the Dachstein and Totengebirge mountains, the village was perfectly situated to serve as part of the Alpine redoubt that the Allies so greatly feared. The two roads leading into the village could easily be made impassable, and any bombers would have difficulty hitting its center. Eichmann knew, however, that the redoubt was a myth. There was no mountain fortress, nor any coordinated plans for guerrilla operations behind enemy lines. Still, it did provide a retreat from Berlin. Along with other SS officers, Eichmann, who had known the area since he was a boy, had moved his family there as the war had turned against them.

  Without delay, he went straight to the villa outside town where Kaltenbrunner was quartered. An aide led Eichmann into the dining room, where their boss was playing solitaire. Kaltenbrunner was dressed in his SS coat, ski pants, and boots. At six foot seven, with tree trunks for arms and a deep scar that ran across his cheek to his sledgehammer jaw, the RSHA's leader was an imposing presence. A family friend from Linz, he had been instrumental in Eichmann's joining the SS, telling him at the time, "You: You belong to us."

  "Did everything turn out well?" Eichmann asked, hoping for news from Berlin.

  "It's bad," Kaltenbrunner replied.

  He asked his aide to bring Eichmann a cognac, and while they drank, he told Eichmann that Hitler was dead. Eichmann was stunned. He had worshiped the Führer, believing that an individual who had risen from lance corporal to leader of all of Germany was worth subordinating himself to blindly. Now Hitler was gone, and the Third Reich was lost.

  Kaltenbrunner ordered Eichmann to take some troops into the mountains and establish a resistance. He explained that this would give Himmler some influence in any peace negotiations with the Allies.

  The two parted without much ceremony or sentiment. As Eichmann left the room, he heard Kaltenbrunner quietly say to himself, "It's all a lot of crap. The game is up."

  Desperate for direction, Eichmann applied himself to his assignment as if the fate of Germany was not already sealed. He recruited several officers in his department, including his personal secretary, Rudolf Jänisch, and Anton Burger, who had been with him since his days in Vienna. They took over the Park Hotel and assembled roughly two hundred men, a disparate collection of Waffen-SS and Hitler Youth, many handicapped by injuries or little military training. Before Eichmann left for the mountains, Kaltenbrunner instructed him to take the Romanian fascist Horia Sima and several of his Iron Guard militia with him on the mission. The RSHA chief was emptying Altaussee of its war criminals to separate himself from them. Kaltenbrunner had delusions that he was of a different breed.

  Fearing an Allied attack, a doctor from the local field hospital begged Eichmann to leave the village with his combat troops. After outfitting his men with winter fatigues, weapons, a cache of gold and reichsmarks, and a fleet of trucks, Eichmann led them up into the mountains. He had enough assault rifles and bazookas to wreak havoc on the enemy for at least a month

  A heavy snow began to fall, and the men were soon forced to shovel a path for the jeeps and the radio van. By sunrise the next day, the company had reached the mountain village of Blaa-Alm, high in the Alps. During the hike, Eichmann had seen enough of his men to know that they were an ill-trained, disorganized, and, worst of all, disobedient bunch, who would not make for much of a partisan resistance. At Blaa-Alm, he released the worst of the lot, giving each man 5,000 marks, accounting for every financial outlay in a notebook. The soldiers left without protest. Eichmann then ordered weapons training for the remaining troops and sent Burger, a proficient skier, to scout the hamlet Rettenbach-Alm, higher still in the mountains.

  When Burger returned, Eichmann led his forces to the hamlet and settled them into some mountain huts. After a few days, an orderly sent by Kaltenbrunner arrived with a directive from Himmler: "It is prohibited to fire on Englishmen and Americans." The order, the last Eichmann received from the Reich, eliminated the need for his motley troops. There would be no glorious last stand. Eichmann's war was over.

  3

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, May 8, after a long, sleepless night in the mountain hut, Eichmann informed the men of the directive. They were free to do what they pleased; he planned to visit his family one final time and then hide in the mountains. Given his wartime activities, he had no illusions that the Allies would brand him as anything other than a war criminal. He had to av
oid capture.

  Alone and on foot, Eichmann descended through the snow to Blaa-Alm, then down to Altaussee. When he reached the village in the late afternoon, he learned that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, acting German head of state, had agreed to an unconditional surrender. In the neighboring valley, just across the mountains, American troops were dancing in the streets of Bad Ischl. Allied troops would soon arrive in Altaussee.

  Wearing a camouflage uniform and carrying a machine gun, Eichmann slipped through the village to the lake where his family lived. They had rented a small chalet overlooking the water at the end of Fischerdorf Strasse, a road that snaked steeply around the hillside. There was no time for a long goodbye. He had spent much of the war away from his wife and three sons, and he was no longer the man who had met Veronika (Vera) Liebl, the petite, blue-eyed daughter of a Czechoslovakian farmer, at a concert in Linz in 1931.

  At the time, Eichmann had been a twenty-five-year-old traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company who had not even graduated from high school. He was from a nice middle-class family of five children and rode his ruby red motorcycle to impress his new girlfriend. The only hint of his politics, such as they were, was his membership in a youth group of a larger German war veterans organization that was militantly nationalist and campaigned against "Jewish Bolsheviks." In 1935, Eichmann and Vera were married in a church, despite the derision of his SS comrades, who looked down on religious rituals. An innocent, uncomplicated Catholic girl, Vera shared her husband's taste in classical music but did not much care for politics and declined to join the Nazi Party. If not for the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, the two might have lived a quiet existence in Linz. But Eichmann was soon swept away by the SS, and Vera concentrated on raising their three sons. They never discussed his activities, and his infrequent visits and numerous infidelities had created a distance between them. Despite their strained marriage, Vera remained devoted to her husband.