Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  Eichmann had bought a basket of peas and some flour in Altaussee. It was all he could find. Unlike some of his SS comrades, he had not hidden away a fortune in gold and foreign currency. He sorely regretted that he had not personally extorted ransoms from Jewish leaders—they would have gladly given him whatever he asked in exchange for their lives.

  "The war is over," he told Vera. "You don't need to worry. It'll be the Americans or British who are coming." But in case it was the Russians who arrived first, he gave his wife a cyanide capsule and one for each of his sons. Then he left instructions for her if anyone came to the house to investigate. He would contact her once he had settled somewhere safe.

  Then Eichmann went out by the lake, where his sons—Klaus, age nine; Horst, five; and Dieter, three—were playing and embraced them in turn. While he watched them play, little Dieter slipped and fell into the lake. Eichmann fished the boy out of the water, took him over his knee, and slapped him hard several times. While his son screamed, Eichmann told him never to go near the water again. He might never see his boys again, he reasoned; it was best to leave them with a bit of discipline. To his mind, this was the most a father could do for his children.

  "Be brave and look after the children," he told Vera, and then he hiked away.

  Without any orders to fulfill or leaders to follow, Eichmann was rudderless. As he climbed into the mountains, the U.S. Army, including a detachment of Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigators looking for Kaltenbrunner, was heading toward Altaussee. By dark, Eichmann had reached Blaa-Alm. Most of the Hitler Youth and other soldiers he had brought into the mountains had disbanded. His own men, the Waffen-SS, and Horia Sima and his guard remained, knowing that they were targets of the Allies. Eichmann spent the night in the village, deciding to head higher into the mountains the next day with as many men as would come with him. He was certain that he could evade capture by staying in the mountains that he knew so well.

  At dawn, his long-serving driver, Polanski, asked if he could take one of their vehicles and leave. Now that the war was over, he planned to start a transport business. Eichmann suggested that he take one of the trucks; the fleet was useless to him now. Later that morning, one of his SS officers, Otto Hünsche, who had also gone down to Altaussee to see his family, returned with news that American tanks had just entered the area. Hünsche had evaded them, hiding in the fields outside Altaussee before making his way back to Blaa-Alm.

  Eichmann's party hiked to Rettenbach-Alm and put themselves up in some mountain huts. Over the next several days, they scouted the surrounding hills for Allied patrols or Austrian resistance fighters who might tip off the Americans as to their location. They posted signs warning that anybody who entered the area would be shot. But they knew that their discovery was inevitable. While Eichmann was away, his comrades had decided that they did not want to be found with the overseer of the Final Solution. They elected Anton Burger to deliver the news.

  "Colonel, we've been talking about the situation. We mustn't fire on the English or Americans, and the Russians aren't coming here," Burger ventured. "You are being hunted as a war criminal. We are not. We feel you'd be doing us a great service if you would leave us and appoint another commander."

  The disloyalty of his men stung, but Eichmann knew they were right. Only RudolfJänisch volunteered to stay with him. They dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms they had brought with them and discarded their personal papers and anything else that might identify them. After a farewell toast of schnapps, Eichmann and Jänisch walked out of Rettenbach-Alm, heading north.

  A year before, in Hungary, Eichmann had met Joel Brand, a Jewish representative who was attempting to trade 10,000 trucks for 1 million Jewish lives. When Brand had glanced down at Eichmann's pistol on the desk, the officer had smiled coldly and said, "Do you know, I often think how glad some of your people would be to bump me off. But don't be too optimistic, Mr. Brand. It may be that times will change, it may be that we shall lose the war, but you won't catch me ... No, I have made all arrangements against that eventuality."

  It had all been bluster. Eichmann was far from prepared to be a man on the run. He had little money, no safe house, no forged papers, and only one young adjunct still loyal to him. As they made their way toward Germany, they found Allied troops everywhere. The net was tightening.

  Once the peace was secured, the Allies rapidly occupied Germany. Martial law was imposed, checkpoints were established at bridges and road intersections, curfews and blackouts were set, roving patrols were sent out, and Wehrmacht soldiers were interned in POW camps. The aim was to secure the country, to prevent the development of an organized underground resistance, and to provide routine policing to restore public order without delay. Allied headquarters issued directives to every army group in every sector to arrest and question any Nazi Party members, starting with Hitler's inner circle and continuing all the way down to local group leaders; members of the SD, Gestapo, and other branches of the SS; and high officials from the police, Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, and propaganda ministry, among many others. The Allied leaders meant to pin Germany down and to remove every last trace of the Nazi state.

  Since the liberation of the first concentration camps, the Allies had dramatically increased the number of individuals devoted to capturing the Nazi leadership and other war criminals. The CIC, whose chief job in Germany was to collect intelligence and help secure the U.S. Army against subversive agents, found that there was little to do in this respect at the end of hostilities, so they turned their attention to the most-wanted lists. British intelligence also contributed to the effort, though with less immediate vigor. The Allies had recruited war crimes investigators, whose specific mandate was to gather evidence and to seize those suspected of involvement in the atrocities. In Versailles, Allied intelligence agents pored over captured records and personnel files, developing a registry of war criminals and security suspects. This registry, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), was added to a long list that had already been compiled by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. By the first week of May, the list contained more than 70,000 names. As British foreign minister Anthony Eden boasted to the House of Commons at the time, "From Norway to the Bavarian Alps, the Allies are carrying out the greatest manhunt in history."

  The senior Nazi leadership, identified and targeted by the Allies long before the war's end, was at the top of the list. The day after Eichmann retreated back into the mountains, Colonel Robert Matteson, a thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated CIC officer attached to the U.S. Third Army, drove his troops into Altaussee. He had been tipped off that Kaltenbrunner was in the area with his mistress. Soon after their arrival, Matteson and his team rounded up at least twenty Nazis and seized the villa that Kaltenbrunner had just left—as well as the wireless station through which he kept in contact with Berlin. A few days later, another tip came from a local Austrian resistance fighter that Kaltenbrunner, his adjunct, and two SS guards were hiding in a hunting cabin high in the Totengebirge.

  Guided by four former Wehrmacht soldiers who knew the territory and backed by an American infantry squad, Matteson climbed into the mountains, disguised in lederhosen, an Alpine jacket, and spiked shoes. The party hiked through the deep snow during the night to avoid detection. Five hours later, at first light, they sighted the cabin. Matteson walked the last five hundred yards to the door alone. In his pocket, Matteson had a note from Kaltenbrunner's mistress that he had made her write, pleading for her lover to surrender peacefully to the Americans. Matteson knocked.

  An unshaven man in civilian clothes opened the door a crack. "What do you want?"

  "I want to come in. I'm cold," Matteson responded, his gun hidden.

  The German shook his head no. The CIC agent passed the mistress's note, and the moment the man read its contents, he slammed the door shut. Through the window, Matteson saw the man run across the room and grab a revolver. Another man on the bed reached for a gun as well. Matteson darted to
ward a wall of the cabin without windows and whistled for his squad. They surrounded the house and called for Kaltenbrunner and his men to surrender. The door opened, and out they came, arms high in the air. At first Kaltenbrunner pretended to be a Wehrmacht doctor, but he was given away by his height, the scar across his cheek, and his Gestapo identification badge, engraved "#2." Kaltenbrunner had ranked behind only Himmler in the SS.

  Himmler himself did not go so easily. At the war's end, he brought his staff together, saying, "Well, gentlemen, you know what you have to do now? You must hide yourselves in the ranks of the Wehrmacht." Himmler followed his own advice. Shorn of his mustache and dressed as a sergeant with a black patch over his eye, he tried to pass through British lines with six of his men, but they were caught by a random patrol. During a routine medical examination before his interrogation, Himmler bit into a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth and died fifteen minutes later.

  Other top Nazi leaders soon found themselves incarcerated at the Allied prison in Mondorf-les-Bains, in southeastern Luxembourg. Hermann Göring surrendered in the Alps, insisting that he would speak only to General Eisenhower. Two soldiers unceremoniously hauled the 264-pound Göring, who had been Hitler's second in command, out of his car. Grand Admiral Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer surrendered without protest. Fritz Sauckel, head of the slave labor program, was trapped while hiding in a cavern. On a routine patrol, an American Jewish major identified a bearded Julius Streicher, the virulently anti-Semitic publisher, who was disguised as an artist, paintbrush in hand. Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland, attempted to hide among German POWs, but he grew so nervous over the risk of discovery that he slashed his left wrist and neck, barely surviving. Troops from the 101st Airborne uncovered Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, in a mountain hut very much like the one in which Kaltenbrunner was found. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was one of the last to be caught. The son of a wine merchant, who Ribbentrop had hoped would give him sanctuary, informed the police of his whereabouts. British soldiers arrested Ribbentrop while he was still in bed at his Hamburg hideaway. Wearing pink-and-white-striped silk pajamas, he sat up and said in flawless English, "The game is up. I congratulate you."

  The most notorious Nazis fell into Allied hands within the first weeks of the occupation. Every day, more than seven hundred individuals on the automatic arrest list were imprisoned and held for further interrogation in order to discover the nature of their actions during the war for a potential trial. Many of their brethren were dealt with more swiftly.

  Although the Russians took several top Nazis into custody for Allied trials, their revenge was often exacted on the spot—contrary to Stalin's earlier admonishment to Churchill about the need for fair trials. With the help of local Communists and camp survivors, the Russian secret service, the NKVD, rounded up many suspected Nazi criminals and shipped them to prisons in the Soviet Union, where they were never heard from again. Others were executed, their backs crisscrossed with machine gun bullets.

  The Russians were not the only ones to administer rough justice. After the war was over, groups of Jewish avengers—made up of camp survivors, resistance fighters, and soldiers from the Jewish Brigade (settlers in Palestine who had joined a special British army group in 1944)—hunted down and summarily killed Gestapo and other SS men who had committed crimes against Jews. The Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force based in Palestine, directed some of these squads. Others operated completely on their own. Often masquerading as British military police, the squads seized their victims at night, drove them to a secluded spot in the woods or by a lake, and then shot or drowned them. One group even carried out a plan to kill 15,000 German POWs held in an American camp near Nuremberg by sprinkling their bread with white arsenic powder. More than 2,000 prisoners became sick, but none died.

  With so many hell-bent on rooting out the Nazis, Adolf Eichmann had one advantage: he had not yet been identified as a major war criminal. His name was on the Allied lists, specifically for his "activities" in Czechoslovakia, but at this point he was a mere lieutenant colonel among tens of thousands of entries. The Allies had yet to learn the degree of his involvement in the Final Solution. If Colonel Matteson had been aware of the activities of the chief of Department IVB4 when he had captured Kaltenbrunner, perhaps Eichmann also would have been captured within days. But given the late start of the Allied investigation into Nazi war crimes, he had escaped.

  Eichmann and Jänisch walked and hitchhiked west from Altaussee toward Salzburg. They evaded Allied troops, hiding in fields when they heard soldiers approach, and slept in abandoned barns at night. The fifty-mile journey took several days, but just when they had the city in their sights, an American patrol spotted them, and they were forced to surrender. Eichmann introduced himself as Luftwaffe corporal Adolf Barth, using the surname of his Berlin grocer, but there was little further interrogation. The patrol brought Eichmann and Jänisch to a hastily erected camp, which had a single strand of barbed wire as a fence and no searchlights. It was crowded with German soldiers who had been found wandering around the area, all of them worn-out and hungry and still wearing their uniforms for lack of other clothes. Most wanted some food and a place to sleep, much like the 9 million POWs already held by the Allies throughout northwestern Europe, and there was not much need for security.

  As soon as night fell, Eichmann and Jänisch sneaked out of the camp and walked to Salzburg. The dome of the city's main cathedral had collapsed, and many of the buildings and houses by the train station had been razed, but for the most part, Salzburg was one of the few cities in Germany and Austria whose historic center had survived the war. Eichmann knew its prewar beauty well; he had spent his honeymoon there ten years before. For the next few days, the two SS officers hid in the winding cobblestone alleys of the old city, away from the Allied patrols.

  One afternoon, Eichmann hiked up to Salzburg's famed eleventh-century castle and looked out at the surrounding countryside. He was convinced that he did not deserve to be on the run: he had only abided by his SS oath of "My honor is my loyalty" and executed the orders given to him. He considered whether he had changed from the man who had brought his bride to this very place a decade earlier. No, he decided, he had not changed. He knew he was not some murderer or villain.

  The truth was it had been a long, convoluted road for Eichmann to reach the level of hate-fueled fanaticism that had characterized him in Hungary. Born in an industrial town in Germany, he had been raised in Linz, Austria, by a father who was a middle-class manager, a strict Protestant, and fervently nationalistic. In Linz, also Hitler's hometown, as in Austria and Germany as a whole, the majority of the population saw Jews as racially inferior intruders who represented the twin threats of international capitalism and Bolshevism. But anti-Semitism was not Eichmann's motivation to become a Nazi. The disaster at Versailles following World War I, Germany's need for stability, and, more personally, a desire to wear the same smart brown uniform as others his age were reasons enough.

  Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in 1932. He went to Germany, received some military training, read more about National Socialism, and enlisted in the SD, which was headed by Reinhard Heydrich. As a member of the party's intelligence operation, Eichmann was charged with compiling a list of German Freemasons, whom the Nazis considered enemies. Diligent, attentive to detail, and respectful of authority, he caught the eye of Edler von Mildenstein, who was in charge of creating a Jewish affairs office. Given the degree of revulsion Hitler felt toward the Jewish people—as evidenced in 1935 by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship—it was a good career move for Eichmann.

  At the time, Mildenstein had a far less virulent attitude toward Jews than did many others in the SS, believing that sending them to Palestine was the answer to the Jewish problem. Mildenstein charged Eichmann with studying Zionism. Over the next three years, working in the changing l
andscape of the SS, Eichmann spent his days writing reports on the Jews, monitoring their organizations, trying to learn Hebrew (a failure), investigating emigration plans, and even traveling to Palestine in 1937, while posing as a journalist for Berliner Tageblatt. He soon became the SD "expert" on Jewish affairs. Although his opinion of the Jews had hardened—he wrote in one paper that they were "the most dangerous enemy" of the Third Reich—he still thought that emigration was the best way to deal with them.

  In 1938, Eichmann won his first chance to put this idea into practice when Germany occupied Austria. Second Lieutenant Eichmann arrived in Vienna to represent the SD in dealing with the 200,000 Austrian Jews. After arresting the Jewish community's key leaders, he used many of them to organize and finance the emigration of the Jewish population. In his office in the Palais Rothschild, Eichmann felt his first rush of power, writing to a friend, "They are in my hands; they dare not take one step without me." For his success and "requisite hardness," he won a promotion to first lieutenant. He also gained the ability to view Jews not as human beings but as stock to be moved from one place to another. After a year in Vienna, he was sent to Czechoslovakia to set up a similar operation there.