by Neal Bascomb
Posing as a journalist, Pier had arrived in November 1945, carrying with him a briefcase with a false bottom containing the notebook and gold sovereigns to fund his operation. He had soon found himself overwhelmed by his responsibilities smuggling refugees to Palestine. He was just now putting together a team to go after the war criminals in earnest and to bring them to trial. "This is not an easy job. None of us here works for money," Pier said. "I know you've experience in this, and I am asking you to work with us, to find these murderers."
Friedman listened. He now understood why he had survived the horrors of the war: to do this work.
"Did you ever hear of Adolf Eichmann?" Pier asked, pointing to his name in the notebook.
Friedman told him no, feeling foolish for not knowing who he was.
"You must find Eichmann. I will say it to you again: you must find Eichmann." Pier gestured again to his notebook. "I want to be able to put a line through it."
Friedman had his mission. He was one of several men Pier was setting on the trail of the lieutenant colonel he had first known in Vienna. Pier had heard many stories about Eichmann over the past two years, particularly about his deeds in Hungary. He wanted him captured and brought to justice.
The Haganah was not the only group after Eichmann. Other pursuers, operating independently, had some of the same information as Pier and believed that they already had their target in sight. Unlike Pier, however, they wanted immediate justice, not a trial.
Five Jewish avengers, outfitted with British army uniforms and Sten guns, hid their jeep in a grove of trees outside a small village between Linz and Salzburg. They waited for the last of the light to drain from the sky. Their eyes were trained on a small two-story chalet. When night completely enveloped them, they slowly made their way up the hillside to kill Adolf Eichmann.
When they neared the house, one of the men crept forward alone, growling like a dog. He had fought with Tito in his guerrilla campaign against the Fascists in Yugoslavia and was experienced in handling watchdogs. The three massive dogs that guarded the chalet came toward him, and he threw a slab of poisoned meat at their feet. Several minutes later, the dogs were dead. The rest of the group went to the side of the house. A brief glance through the window revealed four men eating dinner. The avengers prepared themselves.
They had traveled to Austria looking for Eichmann in the spring of 1946. They had tracked down his wife in Altaussee and his elder brother Otto in neighboring Bad Aussee. After a month of surveillance, they had followed the two twice to this same chalet. The fact that Eichmann's wife and brother had taken different trains to the village, then went their separate ways to meet these men, had made the Jews suspicious. They had staked out the chalet for several weeks. It was clear that four men lived in the house. They never went out during the day, and a villager would deliver food and other supplies every evening. The avengers were convinced that one of the men was Eichmann. His features and height matched the reports they had collected, and the visits by Vera and Otto Eichmann provided even more confirmation.
On a signal, two of the Jews rammed their shoulders into the chalet door, bursting it open. They leveled their guns at the four defenseless men and told them to stand. The men rose from the table, careful not to make any threatening moves.
"You," one of the avengers barked in German. "Come here!"
"Me?" one of the men replied, trembling.
Two men dragged him out of the house, while the others kept their guns on the ones around the table. Once clear of the chalet, one of the two men knocked their prisoner out with a blow to the back of his head. They carried him back to their jeep and drove several miles into the pine forest. Tossed out of the jeep into the mud, the prisoner came to.
The leader of the group climbed out of the jeep and stood over him. "We are Jews, Adolf Eichmann. We've got a big score to settle with you."
"I swear to you by my wife and children, by the memory of my mother, that I am not Adolf Eichmann. He was a killer. I was only a soldier. You are good people," he pleaded. "Show me mercy."
"You know how much mercy you showed to the Jewish people."
The prisoner confessed that he had been part of the Einsatzgruppen and that he had killed some Jews, but only because he had been ordered to do so. He begged them to believe him, telling him that the wife and brother of Eichmann were friends of the chalet's owner. After a few moments, his torrent of words slowed, and he said, "All you can do is kill me."
With that, the avengers fired several rounds of bullets into his chest. They cursed his very existence, then buried him in an unmarked grave.
Adolf Eichmann was still very much alive the morning after the five Jewish avengers shot the man in Austria. He woke up in a bunk hut deep in the woods in British-occupied northern Germany with nineteen woodsmen, all of them discharged Wehrmacht soldiers. After breakfast, Eichmann and his workmates trudged into the forest with their axes and saws. They called the heavily wooded area in the Lüneburg Heath "the island." For Eichmann, the island, which had neither electricity nor telephone, was an ideal hiding place from his pursuers, who, he saw in one of the rare newspapers that found their way into the camp, were calling him a "mass murderer."
After escaping from Ober-Dachstetten, Eichmann had hunkered down in an abandoned railway station several miles from the camp until the next morning. He had then caught a train to Munich, then one to Prien. He had presented a letter of introduction to Nellie Krawietz, the sister of SS officer Bauer and a striking war widow of twenty-four. She had asked no questions, providing Eichmann with a room at a farm on the town's edge. For the next six weeks, they had met almost daily, though he had revealed little more than that his name was Otto Heninger and he was the divorced father of three children whom he had not seen since the war's end.
The American military was everywhere in the district, and in February 1946, Eichmann had become increasingly nervous. He had asked Nellie to buy him two tickets to Hamburg; she was to accompany him so that they looked like a couple traveling for the weekend. This would be more inconspicuous, he had explained. Having fallen for the quiet, somewhat melancholic man, Nellie had agreed. During the journey, she had pleaded with him to turn himself in to a de-Nazification tribunal so that he would not have to stay underground for the rest of his life. In a moment of carelessness, he had explained that he had been involved in the concentration camps and that his name was really Adolf Eichmann. If caught, he had assured her, he would be imprisoned by the Allies for much longer than a few years—if they did not execute him, the fate they planned for those convicted in the ongoing Nuremberg trial. Nellie had promised to keep his secret and to visit him whenever possible.
In March, Eichmann had walked into the town hall of Eversen, on the southwestern edge of the Lüneburg Heath, sixty miles from Hamburg. He had presented forged documents to the British zone officials stating that he was a Breslau-born, discharged Wehrmacht POW—the same information as his previous identity. The clerk had not questioned any of the details and had approved his resident documents in the name of Otto Heninger. Eichmann had located the brother of SS officer Feiersleben and secured a lumberjack job. He had been working there for several months.
At the end of a long day in a fire-ravaged section of the forest, Eichmann returned to the camp, his clothes and face black from the charred wood. With the other men, he washed himself in rainwater collected in old munitions barrels and then settled down by the campfire, where he ate a watery stew. Into the night, the lumberjacks played cards, drank the local schnapps, and smoked Lucky Strikes. They were a rough bunch, coarse of talk and behavior. On occasion, Eichmann borrowed a violin from one of the rangers, but otherwise he made every effort to blend in. He liked the peace of the woods; he felt safe. For now, this was all he wanted.
On a frosty Vienna morning early in 1947, Arthur Pier and Tuviah Friedman entered the Vienna jail where Joseph Weisl, Eichmann's former chauffeur, awaited trial for war crimes. Friedman had arranged the interview and, as always
, was amazed at the doors that had opened when he had mentioned that he worked with the Haganah chief.
The prison commandant loaned them his office for the interrogation. A guard led the twenty-eight-year-old prisoner into the room. Pier leaned back in the commandant's chair, smoking a cigar, while Friedman sat next to him with a notebook and pen. First, Pier led Weisl through some basic questions about his war experiences and how he had escaped to Austria. Then he asked bluntly, "Are you trying to tell me that Eichmann was killed in the war?"
"No, no. I don't know what happened to him. All I know is that about a month before the war ended, the SS officers all changed their ranks—nobody wanted to be higher than a lieutenant."
"What kind of man was he, Weisl?"
"Well, in the last few years, everybody was afraid of him, really terrified ... He stopped smiling and laughing. I guess he knew too many things."
"You were in charge of the barracks in Doppl for a long time, weren't you? And Eichmann frequently visited Doppl, right?" Pier asked. They had already gathered a dossier on the chauffeur. A few months previously, Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's deputy, had been transferred to a prison in Czechoslovakia after the Nuremberg trials. Upon his arrival there, he had provided a wealth of details on Eichmann's associates and had even offered to help track Eichmann down to evade punishment for his own crimes.
Weisl hesitated to answer the question, looking from one of them to the other. Pier offered him a cigarette, and Friedman put down his pen in an attempt to ease him.
"You know, of course, that Eichmann had a mistress in Doppl. Frau Maria Mösenbacher. She was quite a woman, and he spent a lot of time with her," Weisl said.
"Where does she live now?" Pier asked.
Weisl explained that she still lived there. He took the pen and pad from the desk and drew a map of Doppl, indicating exactly where. "She must still have a photo of Eichmann. I saw one there myself. She was very proud of him."
"Tell me," Friedman said. "Does he really know Hebrew?"
Weisl chuckled. "Eichmann spoke to the Vienna Jews, the rich ones, who did not understand any Hebrew. Afterwards, he used to laugh about it because he convinced the Jews that he was born in Palestine."
Pier stood. He and his family were among those that Eichmann had forced out of Vienna in 1938. "That's all for today," he said, waving to the guard at the door and then turning back to Weisl. "You SS men were a fine group, a very fine group," he said sarcastically. "But it's all over. Finished. Kaput."
Friedman and Pier returned to their headquarters at 2 Frankgasse. Over the past eight months, while securing the arrest of many SS officers and gathering a vast collection of documents on war crimes, Friedman and a handful of others working out of the Haganah office had followed many leads on Eichmann. Some of the Nazi's closest staff, including Anton Burger, had been caught and questioned. They had also chased down Eichmann's family and several of his mistresses. Nobody knew where he was.
Friedman and Pier had heard a rumor that he was being held in a German POW camp, and they urged the Allies to inquire at all the camps, but they were unable to supply a photograph of him. Of the dozens of people they had interviewed, not one possessed a single picture. They had a good physical description of Eichmann, but this was nothing compared to a photograph. Now, at least, Weisl might have given them a good lead for obtaining one.
Pier wanted Manus Diamant on the job, and Friedman knew he had made the right choice. The next day, Diamant was on a train from Vienna to Linz.
Handsome and suave, Diamant often played the Romeo agent for the Haganah team in Austria. He had blue eyes and a full mustache, and he could play any role assigned to him with ease and confidence. In a different life, he might have been a great stage actor, but he had been born a Jew in Katowice, in southern Poland, in 1923. When he was eleven, he was stealing swastikas off the Mercedes parked in front of the German consulate. As a teenager, he had seen Nazis pummeling Jewish refugees, a fate he swore would not be his. At eighteen, he had gone to Warsaw with his family and joined the underground resistance. When the Nazis had cleared the ghettos, Diamant had escaped the city with forged Aryan papers, but he had not been able to save his family. At the age of twenty-one, he was in Austria helping Jews escape while posing as Dr. Janowski, a pathologist at a Graz hospital. From there he had gone to Hungary, where he had purchased arms for the resistance and sabotaged German ammunitions trains. Arrested in a roundup at the border, he had been sent to Auschwitz but had managed to convince his guards that he was a Pole.
After the war, Diamant had come to Vienna to work with the Haganah. He had already earned the confidence of Eichmann's wife in Altaussee, and he had wooed several of Eichmann's mistresses. Every effort, however, had ended in frustration. Vera Eichmann had been closely guarded and offered no hint of her husband's whereabouts or even whether he was alive. The mistresses proved equally unhelpful, none of them owning so much as a snapshot of their former lover.
This time, Diamant prayed, they would have more success. Posing as a former Dutch SS officer, he stopped in Linz to meet with Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal still lived in the town with his wife, who had survived the war. He knew the surrounding area well. Although they worked separately, Wiesenthal and the Haganah investigators often traded tips and contacts. Wiesenthal gave Diamant some insight into Doppl and mentioned some people to connect with in his search for Maria Mösenbacher, Eichmann's mistress there.
After a few inquiries in Doppl, Diamant learned that Fraulein Mösenbacher was an attractive, frivolous woman of forty who was not very well liked and who had often bragged of her relationship with "Adolf," a high-ranking SS officer. Diamant also found out that she had moved and rented a tiny furnished apartment in Urfahr, a town on the opposite side of Linz. For the next week, he followed her, noting when she went to the hairdresser, grocer, pharmacy, and post office and when she returned home to her apartment opposite the pastry shop. So when some groceries fell from her basket, Diamant was there to pick them up. He introduced himself with a smile as Henry van Diamant.
"Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Maria ... Thank you."
He tipped his hat and offered to walk her home. Over the next few weeks, he slowly grew closer to her. They met for coffee, then dinner, then a walk in the country. One evening at dinner, he purposefully let his wallet fall open to show his forged Dutch SS identification so as to explain why he could not return to Holland. He bought her blouses and chocolates. To convince her of his avid interest in amateur photography, he gave her some landscape photographs that he pretended to have taken himself but had actually bought. Then one evening at her home a few weeks after they had met, he showed her an album filled with his "family photos" (all bought).
"I also have one," Mösenbacher said proudly, taking a gold-edged album from a shelf. She thumbed through the pages, pointing out pictures of her brother and parents.
Day after day, Diamant had tolerated this vapid woman, who spoke so viciously about the Jews, all to arrive at this point. He prayed that she had the photograph of Eichmann.
"You know, I had many admirers." She stopped at a photo of a man in his early thirties with a long, sharp nose and pursed lips. "This is Adolf ... He was my regular boyfriend. Who knows what happened to him. He probably didn't survive the war, otherwise he would surely have given me a sign of life."
For the next two hours, lingering over dinner and drinking wine with Mösenbacher, Diamant wanted only to leave so that he could set into motion his plan to get the photograph. The next morning, he went to the Austrian police with a letter from Arthur Pier. A few hours later, the police seized the albums on the pretense of a tip that Mösenbacher was hiding stolen ration cards within them. Diamant could not keep his hands from trembling when he held the photograph.
He returned to Vienna and showed it to Pier and Friedman. "You've done a good job, Manus. This is the murderer of our people." Hundreds of copies were made and distributed to police and Allied investigators throughout Europe.
Diamant personally delivered a copy to Wiesenthal, who told him, "Now we know what he looks like. This is the first step in getting him."
6
EICHMANN WANTED TO get out of the woods. Eighteen months as a lumberjack, pretending to be a simple laborer without any family, ambition, or status, had worn on him. The only time he ventured out of the forest was for a Sunday drink at the tavern in Celle and an occasional meeting with Nellie Krawietz. Although Eichmann was safe in Lüneburg Heath, he felt more like a mole than a man. He wanted a new life.
He was reminded of his old one in the newspapers. The capture and confession of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had brought Eichmann the "mass murderer" into the headlines again. Höss provided even more proof of Eichmann's involvement in the extermination camps, detailing his frequent visits, his discussions about the suitability of Zyklon B for the gas chambers, and his complete obsession with "destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on."
One day Eichmann read that a squad of Jews had seized him at a cabin in Austria, taken him by jeep into the woods, and shot him. According to the killers, he had remained defiant to the end. Eichmann enjoyed that last detail, certain that he himself would prove equally brave in the face of death. More disturbing, however, was a report that chronicled his flight from Ober-Dachstetten, including the exact date of his escape. Either his adjutant Jänisch or one of the SS officers at the camp had told investigators that the escaped Otto Eckmann was actually Adolf Eichmann. At least there was no mention of his new identity, and he was reportedly on his way to connect with the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
As the first winter storms of 1947 whipped the Lüneburg Heath, Eichmann turned his mind to how and where he could build a new existence with his family and without the fear of being revealed at any moment. He began to ask around, discreetly, if anyone knew a route out of Europe. He also plotted to find a way to get his name removed from the wanted lists. His rumored killing by Jewish avengers was not enough to convince war crimes investigators to stop searching for him.
