Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  Two hours before dawn on November 21, guards awakened the prisoners at Nuremberg to prepare them for their first day of the International Military Tribunal. After many months of political and legal wrangling among the Allies, they had settled on an indictment and a list of twenty-four defendants for the major war crimes trial. The defendants had been interrogated at length. The prosecutors had gathered piles of incriminating Nazi documents, many found hidden in salt mines, stored in country chateaus, or secreted behind false walls in government buildings. Now the trial was to begin in earnest.

  The guards gave the prisoners a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal, shaved their faces, and dressed the military men in plain uniforms and the civilians in suits and ties. As had been the case since their arrest, their every movement was watched to prevent any attempt at suicide. Swinging a billy club, the prison commandant warned them that if they misbehaved during the proceedings, they would suffer a loss of privileges. Then they were led in groups of four through the prison, down the covered walkway, and into the Palace of Justice. An iron door was slid open, revealing a steel-cage elevator large enough for the prisoners and their guards.

  On the second floor, the guards escorted them into the courtroom and sat them on two long wooden benches, according to the order of their names in the indictment. First row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joaquim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, and Hjalmar Schacht. Second row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche. Of the other four defendants, Ernst Kaltenbrunner had suffered a brain hemorrhage three days before, Robert Ley had hanged himself with a towel in his cell, Gustav Krupp had been found too frail to stand trial, and Martin Bormann was still at large.

  Ten guards, with white clubs, white belts, and white helmets, stood to the side and behind the defendants. The rest of the amphitheaterlike courtroom was empty. At 9:30 A.M., the doors swung wide. The defense attorneys streamed in and arranged themselves in front of the dock. The prosecutors settled on the opposite side. Interpreters and court stenographers took their positions, and more than 250 journalists took theirs. At 10:00 A.M. sharp, the marshal called for order, and four judges, one each from the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France, entered to hushed silence.

  After a brief introduction by the tribunal president, the prosecution listed the four-part indictments against the defendants for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and a conspiracy to commit these crimes. Hour after hour, the indictment was read, a damning portrait of international treaty violations, totalitarian control, aggressive war, slave labor, the slaughter of captured soldiers, looting, the wanton destruction of thousands of villages and cities, and the torture, shooting, gassing, hanging, starvation, and systematic extermination of innocents to clear way for the "master race." Some of the defendants grimaced, wiped their brows, and shifted uneasily in their seats. Others were stone still. Göring mugged for the cameras. Hess groaned miserably, from stomach pain he claimed, and had to be given a shot to relax him. Tears rolled down Ribbentrop's face, and eventually he was removed to sob alone in an adjoining hallway. During the break for lunch, Schirach, the dapper thirty-eight-year-old former leader of the Hitler Youth, turned to a clinical psychologist who was supervising the prisoners and said dryly, "I suppose we'll get steak the day you hang us."

  The following day, the defendants entered their pleas of guilty or not guilty. First, Göring answered, with a defiant stare, "I declare myself, in the sense of the indictment, not guilty." The rest followed with not guilty pleas as well. Then Robert Jackson, the lead American prosecutor, stood to give an opening statement. Dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit with a watch chain dangling from his vest, he spoke with measured intensity.

  The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

  Over the following weeks, the prosecution laid out its case on each of the indictments, considering seized Nazi papers and testimonials on how plans for these crimes had been developed by the defendants, the methods they had taken to achieve them, and the orders they had given to execute them. Their guilt was clear, but the trial also made obvious that many other Nazis had had a direct hand in these crimes. One of the names that became most prominent was that of Adolf Eichmann.

  Eichmann was first mentioned on the trial's twentieth day. The prosecution quoted a Hungarian Jewish leader writing about the arrival of the Germans in March 1944: "Together with the German military occupation, there arrived in Budapest a 'Special Section Commando' of the German secret police with the sole object of liquidating the Hungarian Jews. It was headed by Adolf Eichmann ... Commanders of the death camps gassed only on the direct or indirect instructions of Eichmann." The next day, Eichmann was noted as the "Chief of the Jewish Section of the Gestapo," who had once authoritatively declared that 4 million Jews had been deported and then killed in the extermination camps.

  Shortly after the restart of the proceedings, on January 3, 1946, SS captain Dieter Wisliceny took the witness stand. Wisliceny had worked with Eichmann for eleven years, and he was also a close family friend. His testimony would lay bare the part that Eichmann had played in the genocide.

  In answer to a question from Lieutenant Colonel Smith Brookhart of the prosecution as to whether Eichmann had shown Wisliceny the order from Himmler to begin the Final Solution, the witness said, "Yes, Eichmann handed me the document and I saw the order myself."

  "Was any question asked by you as to the meaning of the words 'Final Solution' as used in the order?" Lieutenant Colonel Brookhart asked.

  "Eichmann went on to explain to me what was meant by this. He said that the planned biological annihilation of the Jewish race in the Eastern Territories was disguised by the concept and wording 'Final Solution.'"

  "Was anything said by you to Eichmann in regard to the power given him under this order?"

  "Eichmann told me that within the RSHA he personally was entrusted with the execution of this order," Wisliceny responded. "For this purpose, he had received every authority from the Chief of the Security Police; he himself was personally responsible for the execution of this order."

  "Did you make any comment to Eichmann about his authority?"

  "Yes. It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled death to millions of people. I said to Eichmann, 'God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people,' in reply to which Eichmann told me not to be sentimental."

  With this stark testimony, the significance and character of Adolf Eichmann was revealed to the general public for the first time. However, since the summer, the Allied investigators had grown increasingly keen on his capture. The CIC had interviewed his wife in Altaussee in August. She had informed investigators that she had had no contact with her husband since they had separated in March 1945. Nor did she have a picture of him to give them.

  By early September, interrogations of several other intimates of Eichmann, including Wisliceny, had provided an exhaustive chronicle of Department IVB4's leader and his close associates. It was clear that he had been alive at the war's end, and his associates doubted that he would have committed suicide. The investigators had several tips as to his whereabouts, among them Altaussee and Salzburg. Later that month, the Allies targeted Eichmann in a special report as "urgently wanted at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force center for interro
gation and possibly for trial by the War Crimes Commission." By November, notices distributed to various CIC regions labeled him "of the highest importance among war criminals" and provided a vivid, precise portrait of him:

  Age: Approximately 40

  Height: 1.78 meters

  Weight: 70 kilograms

  Build: Gaunt, sinewy

  Hair: Thinning on top, dark blond

  Eyes: Blue-gray

  Face: Prominent features, beak nose

  Posture: Erect, military, mountaineer's gait

  Dialect: Speaks Austrian accent, strident, hoarse, unmodulated voice, always loud

  Other identifying marks: Usually carries a walking stick. Motions are strikingly nervous; while talking, he has a nervous cough, a twitch in one corner of the mouth, closes one eye.

  Yet at the start of 1946, Eichmann remained undetected after more than six months in Allied hands, revealing the fractured and overstretched state of the war crimes investigators. Beyond their early targets of the Nazi elite, who were now on trial, the British dragged their feet, and the Americans still did not have enough investigators to handle the number of individuals they had targeted. Further crippling their efforts, the much-vaunted CROWCASS list of suspects was not widely distributed until the fall of 1945, and even then it was too voluminous to be effective.

  The Allies had proved more than capable of rounding up tens of thousands of suspects in their automatic arrest categories. They had been photographed and interrogated, and their physical characteristics had been noted. But without a coordinated, fully staffed center for this information, neither Eichmann nor the others who lied about their identities could be exposed in a POW system with more than two hundred American camps in Germany alone.

  Nonetheless, individual Allied investigators struggled mightily against these challenges. A few days after Wisliceny's testimony, the CIC issued another bulletin to its regional offices, requesting every lead on Eichmann, who was "at least partly responsible for the extermination of about 6,000,000 Jews," to be followed to secure his arrest. The bulletin warned that Eichmann was "a desperate type who, if cornered, will try to shoot it out. He is a resourceful alpinist and presumably frequently changing his location."

  At the Ober-Dachstetten camp, Eichmann was planning his escape. In early January 1946, through the prisoner grapevine, he learned of the testimony of Dieter Wisliceny. He had named his youngest son after Wisliceny. If one of his closest friends was singing to the Allies, Eichmann could be sure that others were as well, perhaps his adjutant Jänisch, who knew of his fake identity. Now that Eichmann had been publicly identified as being the center point of the Final Solution, the price on his head was certain to be high.

  For months now, the fear of capture had gnawed at him. He could never be certain who was searching for him, how diligently, whether they had his photograph, whether they had informants. He had survived another Ansbach interrogation, yet it had left him even more convinced that his interrogators did not believe him. Either they would eventually identify him as Eichmann or some Jewish survivor would recognize him. One way or the other, his discovery was certain if he remained in the camp.

  Eichmann went straight to Colonel Opperbeck, the camp's top-ranking SS officer. Eight months after the collapse of the Third Reich, Eichmann still felt the need to seek approval before making a move. He revealed to Opperbeck his name and rank, his position in the RSHA, and his desire to escape.

  "I have known who you are for quite a while," Opperbeck said. "Since you never said anything to me, I kept it to myself."

  They agreed to hold a meeting of the SS officers. That night, they assembled by the latrine, and Eichmann told the officers that he wanted to get out of the camp. He did not reveal his name, only that he feared that the Allies were after him for his political activities. He told the group that he planned to travel to Egypt, where he might find safe harbor.

  The officers consented to the escape. One, Hans Feiersleben, suggested that Eichmann stay in Germany for a while. He had a brother who was a forest ranger in northern Germany and could get him a job in an isolated area where the Allies would never find him. Another, Kurt Bauer, advised him to travel first to Prien, southeast of Munich, where Bauer's sister would hide him and assist in his travels.

  By the time the meeting concluded, Eichmann had a plan. The other officers helped him forge papers in the name of Otto Heninger. An orderly made an attempt to burn off his SS tattoo. And a woman he used to flirt with at the camp's fence slipped him a Tyrolean jacket and some dye to color his Luftwaffe pants green. With a pair of wool socks pulled over his pants, he would look like any hunter out in the woods.

  A few nights later, Eichmann shaved his beard and put on his new outfit. He made his way to a section of the barbed-wire fence out of the guards' view. In the darkness, he gingerly climbed through the barrier, avoiding the razor points. On the other side of the fence, he hesitated, feeling helpless, exposed to any random patrol. He hastened into the woods.

  5

  IT WAS LATE MAY 1946, and Tuviah Friedman was waiting on a Vienna street for a man he knew only as Arthur. Arthur was the chief of the Haganah in Vienna as well as the leader of the Brichah organization that was helping the twenty-four-year-old Friedman and thousands of other Jews secretly to immigrate to Palestine. Friedman's request to meet with Arthur had nothing to do with this journey, but it was of equal, if not greater, importance to him.

  Near the end of the war, Friedman had returned to his little house in Radom, a small industrial city in the heart of Poland that the Russians had freed on their advance toward Berlin. Standing on the street outside the house, he was flooded with childhood memories: his young sister, Itka, pedaling her bicycle and keeping her blond curls from her face with one hand; his daring younger brother, Hershele, playing on the roof; his older sister, Bella, reading one of her precious books; his father showing him the workings of the printing presses; his mother in one of the pretty dresses she made at her shop. His parents, Itka, and Hershele were all dead, thanks to the Nazis, and he still did not know whether Bella was alive. He had survived the ghettos, the slave labor, the murderous whimsy of the SS guards, and a half-planned breakout from a work camp through the sewers. He had ultimately managed to escape only by burying a bayonet into the neck of a German soldier. Standing outside his house, now inhabited by a family that had moved in as soon as the Jews had been cleared from Radom, Friedman knew that this world was dead to him. He would not return again.

  He joined the Polish militia and was sent to Danzig to arrest any Germans still in the ruined city. His superior advised him to take the name Jasinki—with his blond hair, he could pass as a Gentile. He reluctantly agreed, wanting the position. Soon he found he had a knack for police and interrogation work, not to mention a real zeal, fueled by his grief and anger, for making his SS prisoners cower in front of him. While in Danzig, Friedman was reunited with Bella, who had miraculously survived Auschwitz.

  Over the passing months, he became more and more uncomfortable living a lie, pretending to be Jasinki. Early in 1946, he retired from the military, joined a kibbutz outside Danzig, and a couple of months later contacted the Brichah and began the trek toward Palestine. En route, he met an old friend in the streets of Vienna, who told him about an SS man from there whom they knew from Radom. Friedman marched straight to the man's house, learned that he was hiding in an American POW camp, went undercover to find him, and won his confession. Then he heard of another SS officer from Radom, also hiding in Vienna. Friedman asked to see the Haganah chief, hoping to get his help in gathering evidence against the officer.

  A black sedan pulled to the curb, and its driver rolled down the passenger's side window. Cigar smoke plumed out. "Friedman?" the driver asked. He nodded and got into the car.

  Arthur Pier introduced himself as he drove. He was tall and slender, and he spoke and dressed like an aristocrat. Though only a few years older than Friedman, Pier had an air of calm competence that impressed Friedman stra
ightaway. He told Pier about his desire to get to Palestine.

  "And we're anxious to get you there," Pier said. "I'm a kibbutz member myself, and we need healthy young men like you, Tadek."

  Friedman was surprised that Pier knew his nickname, but he said nothing. They arrived at 2 Frankgasse in the center of Vienna. The sign on the door read AUSTRIAN REFUGEE ORGANIZATION, but it was actually the Brichah headquarters, a six-room office that hummed with activity. Pier invited Friedman into his office and closed the door. Friedman explained that before leaving for Palestine, he wanted assistance in getting to Stuttgart to collect testimony against two SS officers.

  "What are their names?" Pier asked, paging through a small black notebook on his desk. "This little notebook is the result of two years of hard work in Palestine ... Konrad Buchmayer? Yes, he's listed ... There's a Gestapo officer named Schokl in Radom. That must be your man, Richard Schoegl." He made a quick mark with a red pencil by each name. Then Pier looked up at Friedman. "Tadek, a few weeks ago, the leader of your kibbutz told me about you, and about your work in Danzig."

  Pier explained that he had emigrated from Vienna when the Nazis had taken over. After a few years helping others get to Palestine, the Jewish Agency had tasked him with collecting evidence on Nazi war criminals from refugees arriving in Haifa. Over the next eighteen months, he had collected dossiers on thousands of Germans, which he had then passed to the American OSS and the International Criminal Tribunal in Nuremberg. Pier told Friedman that at the end of the war, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish Agency, had brought Pier and other top people in the organization together and had called on them to go to Europe to lead the movement of Jews to Palestine. This would further their efforts to create an independent state. Ben-Gurion also had instructed them to join the Allies in hunting down war criminals, using the information that Pier had collected. They must be brought to justice, Ben-Gurion had insisted, hammering his fist on the table for emphasis.