Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  In December 1947, Simon Wiesenthal traveled to CIC headquarters in Bad Ischl, Austria, after a CIC agent called him for an urgent meeting. The agent told Wiesenthal the disturbing news that Vera Eichmann had just applied to the local court for her husband to be declared legally dead "in the interest of her children." According to an affidavit from Karl Lukas of Czechoslovakia, which was included with the application, Eichmann had been shot and killed by partisans in Prague on April 30, 1945. This was a story the CIC agent had been hearing from the Eichmann family for the past year, but now they had a corroborating witness.

  From his own investigations, Wiesenthal knew that this was impossible. He had interrogated associates of Eichmann who had met with him in Altaussee in May 1945, just before he disappeared. He had also read the news items about his Ober-Dachstetten escape, and he had heard Nuremberg war crimes testimony from the German officer Rudolf Scheide, who had sworn to American investigators that on June 15, 1945, a prisoner who had first revealed himself as Eichmann wanted to be known as Eckmann before he even reached Ober-Dachstetten. This twice-confirmed alias was distributed to all Allied investigative offices, but with no result. Eichmann would have changed his name again by now. Still, the reports proved that he had definitely not been killed in Prague at the end of the war.

  If Vera Eichmann succeeded in her court request, Adolf Eichmann would disappear from the wanted lists of the Allies and the Austrian police. One did not search for a dead man. Wiesenthal was certain that Vera had made her application not so that she could remarry or collect a widow's pension but because she wanted the hunt for her husband to end, and she was probably acting on his command. Although the police intercepted all her mail, Wiesenthal was convinced that Eichmann could pass word to her through other channels if he wished.

  The CIC agent impressed on Wiesenthal that he could convince the judge to delay the hearing only for a month. Wiesenthal moved quickly, sending one of his assistants to Prague to investigate this Karl Lukas. Ten days later, he received word that Lukas was married to Maria Liebl, Vera's sister. The judge quashed the application.

  It was a minor victory but an important one in light of Wiesenthal's fruitless pursuit of Eichmann over the past two and a half years. His file on the Nazi had grown. He had interrogated almost every one of Eichmann's staff members. He had spent weeks at Nuremberg scouring court records for any mention of Eichmann, a labor that revealed to him the true extent of Eichmann's involvement in the Final Solution. Since then, Wiesenthal had discovered many Nazi documents on the extermination program and the role that Eichmann and his underlings had played in executing it. In Linz, people on the street called the Nazi-hunter "Eichmann-Wiesenthal" because he was known for constantly searching out clues and watching the family.

  But his failure to find Eichmann was wearing on him, and in this he was not alone. Manus Diamant had told him about an incident a few months after his success in acquiring the photograph at Maria Mösenbacher's house. Despite the photograph's wide distribution and Diamant's close contact with the Eichmann family (also by posing as a former Dutch SS officer), there were no more clues as to his whereabouts, and Diamant was angry at their lack of progress. One afternoon he went out on the lake with Eichmann's three sons, who had come to call him "Uncle Henry." Sitting in the boat, he became overwhelmed by memories of scenes he had witnessed during the war: children taken from their mothers' arm; Jews fleeing in advance of the black-uniformed SS marching through the streets; shootings and shootings and shootings.

  When his mind cleared, he found himself gripping one of the oars and staring at Dieter Eichmann, who was laughing and playing in the summer sunshine. Diamant had the urge to strike down Dieter and the other two boys in revenge. Adolf Eichmann deserved to pay at least this price for his deeds, Diamant silently raged. But then he relaxed his grasp on the oar and returned to shore. Vera Eichmann greeted him on his return, commenting that he looked strained. "Nothing happened," Diamant reassured her. "The children all behaved very well." He swore never to go back to the house.

  That December, Diamant left Austria. After the United Nations resolution of November 27, 1947, partitioning Palestine for the establishment of a Jewish state, Arthur Pier disbanded his group of Haganah agents and returned to Palestine along with Diamant. A war was expected against the Arab states that opposed the creation of Israel, and they were needed to smuggle arms and prepare a defense.

  It was also clear to Wiesenthal that the rest of the world was moving on. The start of the cold war drained the will and resources of the Allies away from pursuing war criminals. The convictions at Nuremberg had satisfied many political leaders that adequate punishment had been meted out for the Nazi atrocities. Follow-up trials there against Einsatzgruppen leaders, concentration camp doctors, and Third Reich judges, among others, were in progress. In the end, these proceedings indicted only 185 defendants. There was a scattering of other trials and the de-Nazification court proceedings for those interned in camps after the war. Some 9,600 former Nazis spent time in jail for their crimes, typically serving short sentences. These numbers represented only a small fraction of the 160,000 Germans who Wiesenthal and others estimated were involved in war crimes, from leaders such as Heinrich Müller and Adolf Eichmann; to notorious individuals such as Josef Mengele, who oversaw the selections at Auschwitz and conducted bestial experiments on prisoners; to the rank-and-file soldiers, policemen, and SS troops who participated in the atrocities. They were either released from the POW camps or never caught in the first place. Few people showed any further interest in bringing these criminals to justice.

  Only Tuviah Friedman remained in Vienna to continue the hunt with Wiesenthal. The CIC and the Austrian police helped them, but these organizations were more reactive in their efforts than proactive. The two men labored night and day to gather survivor testimonials and any evidence they could find against war criminals. Although they ran separate documentation centers, they often worked together, exchanging information and tracking down individuals on their wanted lists, most recently some of those involved in the Belzec extermination camp. Eichmann was constantly on their minds, but they had run into dead end after dead end in pursuit of him. He seemed to have vanished like a ghost, and their wish for a clue on where he was hiding remained unfulfilled at the end of every day.

  One gloomy wintry afternoon, as 1947 drew to a close, Wiesenthal sat in his office, surrounded by the reports of murders, tortures, and other horrors that filled his filing cabinets and teetered in piles on his desk. On the wall opposite him was a large map of the world, with a few lines drawn in pencil representing the routes he had heard war criminals had taken to reach the Middle East and South America. The previous month, Wiesenthal had met a former Nazi intelligence officer who had told him about a secret organization created by SS officers to smuggle Nazis out of Europe. Staring at the map, Wiesenthal could not help but think that if Eichmann had already taken one of those routes, he would never be found.

  In Altensalzkoth, a village in the Lüneburg Heath, Eichmann sat at his desk and penned a farewell letter to Nellie Krawietz dated April 1950. He thanked her for her help and companionship and explained that he was leaving for Soviet territory with the hope that the Russians would recruit him. "If you don't hear from me within the next four weeks," he wrote, "you can put a cross through my name."

  The morning of his departure, Eichmann put on a suit and tie for the first time in a long while. For the past two years, he had rented a room in the house of Anna Lindhorst, a war widow who lived with her teenage son. After the lumber company had gone under and he had lost his job, he had leased a parcel of land from her and had started a chicken farm. Because of price controls, he sold his eggs on the black market, mostly to the Jewish community in nearby Belsen, the site of the former concentration camp. Eichmann found it ironic. He often passed by British soldiers in the area and occasionally even sold them eggs, but he wasn't worried. Nobody suspected that he was anything other than a chicken farmer. Eichmann sa
ved his money and waited.

  The time had come to make his escape. The previous year, the British had announced a halt in their efforts to try war criminals, and the Americans were preoccupied with the Russians, especially with the divided Berlin. Eichmann's identificat ion card, issued in June 1948, would expire in six weeks. He had obtained it after connecting with some former SS officers in Celle who were involved with an underground network to smuggle fugitives out of Europe.

  Before leaving, Eichmann sat down with his landlady, giving her a different story from the one he had written to Nellie in order to confuse anyone who might attempt to follow him. He explained that he was leaving for Scandinavia, where his mechanical engineering experience would help him secure a job. He told her that the forest ranger Feiersleben would come by the next day to look after his chickens. Since their first meeting, Anna Lindhorst had never suspected anything amiss with her tenant, who was always pleasant with her son and paid his rent exactly on time. She believed his story.

  Then Eichmann picked up his suitcase and walked away from the heath. After his usual uniform of faded blue overalls, his new clothes made him feel as though he stood out. Under the name Otto Heninger, he traveled by train to Munich, nervous that he might be exposed at any moment now that he had stepped out of the relative safety of the forest. From Munich he journeyed to a town near the Bavarian border. The challenge would be getting across to Austria, then to Italy. Eichmann had memorized every stopping point and contact on the route that the underground network's agent—a man he had contacted through coded advertisements in the newspaper and knew only as "Günther"—had given him. Eichmann had paid Günther 300 marks, one-fifth of his savings, for his help.

  The town was swarming with border police, obviously on the lookout for fugitives. Eichmann trembled as he filled out the hotel registration form, and he panicked when his contact missed their rendezvous. (He later learned from the man's associates that he was in the hospital.) After he waited a week, his contact arranged for a local hunter to guide Eichmann across the border. He was glad to leave. Eichmann slung his suitcase onto his back, and the two men hiked along well-worn paths through the woods and into the mountains, not stopping until they reached a cabin high on the slopes. As night fell, Eichmann looked down into the German countryside: after tomorrow, he was unlikely to see the country of his birth again.

  As they ate breakfast the next day, the hunter looked out the window and spotted a border guard coming up the path. "Don't worry," the man told Eichmann. "He'll have seen the smoke from the chimney. He probably only wants coffee." Eichmann hid, petrified, in a dusty closet, trying not to sneeze as the hunter and border guard chatted and drank coffee. After the guard left, Eichmann tumbled out of the closet, and the hunter led him along a winding route, away from any patrols, down into Kufstein, Austria. After spending the night in a monastery that was on his list of safe houses, he hired a taxi to Innsbruck. There he had two contacts. The first, a former SS lieutenant, sent him packing, saying huffily, "They really send every damn tramp this way." The second brought Eichmann to an inn near the Brenner Pass, which leads through the Alps between Austria and Italy. French soldiers were active in the area, so Eichmann had to be hidden in the attic, which was full of spider webs and the innkeeper's junk.

  Several days later, the innkeeper judged that it was safe to leave and brought him along the edge of the pass. This time, Eichmann was not allowed to bring his suitcase; the innkeeper was afraid it would arouse suspicions if they came across a patrol. A mile past the border into Italy, a black-robed priest on a bicycle met the two men on the road. The priest had Eichmann's suitcase; he had crossed the border without difficulty.

  After the innkeeper returned to Austria, Eichmann and his new companion shared a glass of wine to celebrate the successful crossing. The priest arranged for a car to take them to Merano, a Tyrolean village in northern Italy. Eichmann spent the night at a castle, another safe house for fleeing Nazis. The next day, he received a new identity card, issued by the town hall of a neighboring village, Termeno.

  Everything had been arranged. To travel across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to South America, Eichmann had tapped into a network whose tendrils reached throughout the continent, including the Vatican and the highest levels of the Argentine government. His new name would be Ricardo Klement. The underground agent who brought the ID also had a landing permit for his final destination: Buenos Aires.

  In February 1945, Juan Perón had brought together the leading lights of the influential German community in Buenos Aires, most of whom were enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich. The forty-nine-year-old vice president and minister of war of Argentina—a Machiavellian opportunist to his enemies and a graceful, charismatic savior of the masses to his supporters—announced that Argentina was going to end its commitment to neutrality and declare war on Germany. "It was a mere formality," Perón explained apologetically, to save the country from punishment when the fighting ended. There was little secret that Argentina had been a staging area for the Nazis' intelligence-gathering and covert warfare activities in the Western Hemisphere. At the meeting, Perón made it clear that he would not abandon the German community.

  Perón came from a long line of nationalistic military officers who were fervently Catholic and who had little taste for democratic principles. From 1939 to 1941, he had lived in Rome as a military attaché and greatly admired Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. Two years after his return to Argentina, he had staged a coup with a handful of other military men. With his courtship of industrial workers, he had earned enough popularity to win the presidential election less than a year after the war. It was more a stamp of approval than an election, since he already ruled the country of 15 million people in everything but name.

  After Germany's defeat, Perón wanted to secure the immigration of Nazi scientists and engineers to benefit his country's military research and to promote industrialization. But he also felt that it was his duty to be a friend to the Germans and to others from the Axis states, and he helped any who wanted to come to his country to build a new life, no matter what they had done during the war. He viewed the Nuremberg trials as an "outrage that history will never forgive" and pledged to do whatever he could to help others avoid the fate of their defendants. He was far less welcoming to those who wanted to join the country's large Jewish community, installing a feverish anti-Semite as immigration chief, who published a book saying that Jews "lodge like a cyst in the people where they establish themselves."

  Led by the head of the Argentine secret service, Rodolfo Freude, the escape network's agents established bases of operation throughout Europe. Freude was the scion of a wealthy Argentine businessman with significant Nazi connections who had helped finance Perón's presidential campaign.

  The network included Carlos Fuldner, an Argentine German and former SS captain close to Himmler; former members of the Waffen-SS and Abwehr (a German intelligence organization); a Croatian ambassador to Berlin during the war; a Spanish journalist; and war criminals from Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Germany, who repaid the debt of their freedom by rescuing fellow fugitives. Receiving orders directly from Freude at the presidential palace Casa Rosada, in the heart of Buenos Aires, these agents facilitated the financing of operations, dispensed bribes to local officials, arranged safe houses and transportation for their charges, maneuvered between the immigration office and Argentine consulates to produce the necessary landing permits and other paperwork, and coordinated with Vatican representatives.

  The network would never have been as effective without the aid of the Catholic Church, most notably that of Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome. Once a hospice for the poor, the church had become the center of German-speaking Catholics in Italy in the fifteenth century and still flew the German imperial eagle on its spire. Under Hudal, an Austrian and a devotee of Hitler who proudly brandished his golden Nazi Party membership badge, the church harbored and smuggled
war criminals out of Europe, working hand in hand with Perón's agents. In 1948, Hudal personally wrote to Perón to request visas for 5,000 Germans and Austrians who had "bravely fought" against communism. He did not accept the term "war criminal," believing that those he helped were innocent of any crimes because they had only executed orders from their superiors. Hudal was aided in his efforts by cardinals above him and priests below him. A string of monasteries and convents in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy served as refuges along the Nazi ratlines. Pope Pius XII did not officially approve of the Vatican's involvement in the network, but he certainly turned a blind eye to it, primarily because of the church's commitment to act as a bulwark against the spread of communism.

  According to a confidential CIC report in 1947, postwar Europe was rife with people on the run. Fake passports, forged identification papers, and willing smugglers were all easy to find. Argentina and the Vatican were not alone in providing sanctuary for former Nazis, many of whom were involved in atrocities during the war. The Allies also smuggled out a number of war criminals, among them former SS officers, who were recruited for intelligence activities against the Soviet Union and its satellites. In fact, the United States and others were using some of the same routes and safe houses to smuggle individuals out of Europe as were Argentina and the Vatican.

  However, none of the smuggling operations was run with the same professionalism and on the same scale as the one created by Juan Perón. When Eichmann reached out from the Lüneburg Heath to find a way out of Germany, one of the network's chief operators, Reinhard Kops, who served as a link between Bishop Hudal and the Argentines, instantly picked up his name. Kops was a former anti-Mason expert and Abwehr captain, and he knew Eichmann well from Berlin and Hungary. Eichmann's escape to Argentina would be most welcome. In June 1948, an immigration file was opened for him in Buenos Aires. A landing permit was issued and the Termeno ID arranged. Eichmann needed to be present for the other steps in the process, following a clear path that Kops had helped establish. Eichmann was only one among many whose escapes were fashioned within the same few months, including "the Angel of Death," Josef Mengele; "the Butcher of Riga," Eduard Roschmann; the mass murderer Erich Priebke; the "mercy killer" of the mentally ill and handicapped Gerhard Bohne; and the dreaded SS commandant Josef Schwammberger. Now Eichmann, the last among this group to leave Germany, looked to follow them to the freedom that a country located on the other side of the world and led by a friend of the Nazis would provide.