Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  His compatriot Tuviah Friedman was finished with war criminals. Over the past few years, he had shuddered at the sight of new policemen in Vienna's streets, many in their late twenties and early thirties. He was convinced that several had been guards in the concentration camps, but police administrators refused to check their pasts. Friedman was told to let bygones be bygones, an opinion that he knew was also prevalent in the newly constituted Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). His duties at the documentation center were dwindling, since most camp survivors and displaced Jews had resettled in Israel, Europe, or the United States. Friedman's friends urged him to consider his future, saying, "You've sunk yourself in Jewish sorrows and in Jewish tears" for too long. His bride-to-be, Anna, had resolved to immigrate to Israel to study medicine, and Friedman relented. Anna was a Holocaust survivor from Hungary and felt that Israel was the only place where she would feel at ease. He could not deny her this.

  Friedman was preparing to leave for Israel when he heard of the disappearance of Vera Eichmann and her sons. Though convinced that he and Simon Wiesenthal were the only two people left who still cared about searching for Adolf Eichmann and his ilk, he knew that he had to go to Israel. He shipped his files of survivor testimonials and other records in two huge trunks to Yad Vashem, a center in Israel recently created to document the Holocaust. Then he left for Haifa to find a job and to wed Anna.

  On a return visit to Vienna in December 1952, Friedman met with Wiesenthal. "Tadek," Wiesenthal said, "keep reminding the Israelis about Eichmann: Don't let them tell you to forget it. Let the Israeli government do everything it wants to do—build houses, teach everybody Hebrew, develop a strong army. Fine, very good. But they must also start looking for Eichmann. Make them do something."

  Friedman had kept his file on Eichmann. He had not sent it to Yad Vashem. But, he told his friend, he needed to move on.

  Gripping Friedman's hand, Wiesenthal insisted, "Think of it. When Eichmann is caught, he will be tried by a Jewish court in a Jewish state. History and our people's honor, Tadek: Both are at stake."

  Late in 1953, after a year without news of Eichmann, a miraculous twist of fate gave Wiesenthal his best tip on the fugitive's whereabouts since his search had begun. He had arranged a meeting with an old Austrian baron in Innsbruck to discuss stamps. A devoted monarchist who had suffered under Hitler, Baron Mast told his guest how distraught he was that former Nazis were regaining high positions in the government as if "nothing had changed."

  From his desk drawer, the baron passed Wiesenthal a letter from a Luftwaffe colonel who had never liked Hitler and who now lived in Argentina. "Beautiful stamps, aren't they?" the baron remarked. "But read what's inside."

  Wiesenthal unfolded the letter and quietly read its contents: "There are some people here we both used to know ... A few more are here whom you've never met. Imagine who else I saw—and even had to talk to twice: that awful swine Eichmann who commanded the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company."

  "How do you like that?" the baron asked. "Some of the worst of the lot got away."

  Astounded, Wiesenthal hurried back to his hotel to transcribe what he had read as well as the sender's name and address. Upon his return to Linz, he phoned the Israeli consul in Vienna and followed up by sending him a package that contained the contents of the baron's letter, a biography of Eichmann, examples of his handwriting, his photograph, and a chronicle of the eight-year search for him. Wiesenthal insisted that if the Israelis followed the trail, they would find Eichmann.

  As the months passed without word from Israel, Wiesenthal became distraught over the prospect that no action would be taken, but there was little he could do. He did not have the funds to go to Buenos Aires himself, nor did he speak Spanish. In addition, the Argentine government welcomed former Nazis and was largely hostile to Jews. Even if he found Eichmann, he knew that he would not be able to arrest him and get him out of the country. Still, he held out hope that the Israelis would take some action.

  On March 30, 1954, that hope was extinguished as well. The Israeli consul, Arie Eshel, met with Wiesenthal and told him that the Israelis would need more details on Eichmann's location before engaging in an investigation. They did not have the resources to check out every rumor concerning Eichmann. They had enough to worry about, building the state and dealing with the escalating tensions with Egypt. Israel needed to focus on the future, not the past. Eshel suggested that Wiesenthal contact Nahum Goldmann, the founder of the World Jewish Congress and, next to Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the most influential Jewish leader on the world stage. According to Eshel, Goldmann was interested in what Wiesenthal had learned about Eichmann.

  That same day, Wiesenthal wrote a letter to Goldmann. He opened the letter this way: "I have been dealing with Eichmann for years, and even if I was more fortunate with countless other persons, I have always had bad luck with this case." He repeated the details he had sent to the Israelis and then pleaded for Goldmann to move aggressively on the information. He concluded, "I only hope that the man you are putting in charge of the case will be luckier than I was. In any case, I would be willing with all my heart to get involved in the case again if it was of interest to you."

  Then Wiesenthal waited once more. He expected a quick response, but two months passed without word. Eventually, he received a note from Abraham Kalmanowitz, a prominent New York rabbi and Jewish scholar. Goldmann had passed his material on to the rabbi. Kalmanowitz wanted to know whether Wiesenthal had Eichmann's exact address, his alias, and certain proof that he was still alive. "This is of great importance, as we have no reliable witness that Eichmann has been seen since the end of the war," Kalmanowitz wrote. Wiesenthal, frustrated, responded that there were many indications that Eichmann was alive, including his escape from Ober-Dachstetten and the suspicious activities of his wife. As for his address and alias, he did not have either, but he suggested that they could hire a Spanish-speaking investigator for $500 to go to Buenos Aires. Kalmanowitz retorted that Eichmann was more likely to be in Damascus, Syria, according to the most recent intelligence from his sources. Further, the rabbi stated, he was "most interested in definite proof of Adolf Eichmann's whereabouts, as that is the only information upon which our Government will act."

  Unbeknownst to Wiesenthal, Rabbi Kalmanowitz had made repeated attempts to spur the CIA to engage in an investigation of Eichmann, starting in the fall of 1953. The rabbi had sent letters to the U.S. president, the secretary of state, and the director of central intelligence. He also had recruited a New Jersey senator to exert pressure on Washington. That October, the CIA responded: "We are not in the business of apprehending war criminals." Further, the agency said, even if the CIA found Eichmann, its only recourse would be to inform the West German government, which, according to recent law, had jurisdiction over all war criminals. However, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was not much interested in pursuing them either, having made this statement two years before: "The time has come to abandon the smelling out of Nazis ... If we once start on that, nobody knows where it will end." Kalmanowitz had passed Wiesenthal's letter on to the CIA, but this had not spurred the agency to take any action.

  Dispirited by his exchange with Kalmanowitz, Wiesenthal wrote a final letter to Goldmann, informing him that a recent report by Reuters that Eichmann had been killed by Jewish avengers in a forest outside Linz was patently false and that Kalmanowitz had proved useless in advancing the investigation into the Argentina tip. Goldmann did not respond. Soon after, Wiesenthal closed his office, packed his papers in boxes weighing almost twelve hundred pounds, and shipped the boxes to Yad Vashem. Like Friedman, he kept his file on Eichmann, but in his mind, he was finished with chasing down this phantom about whom nobody else seemed to care. His disappointment at failing to find the war criminal kept him awake at night and haunted him through the day. In many ways, Eichmann had come to embody the Nazi machine that had first come into Wiesenthal's life in July 1941, when h
e had been arrested and lined up against a wall with forty other Jews in Lvov. Half the group had been killed with shots to the neck before an evening Mass, signaled by the ringing of church bells, interrupted the massacre.

  With battles raging in Korea and the standoff between the West and the Soviet Union escalating in intensity, the world could not be bothered with crimes of the past. "We've got other problems," Wiesenthal was told by his American friends. This seemed to be everyone's attitude, and so the hunt for Eichmann was abandoned.

  8

  ONE AFTERNOON in late December 1956, Sylvia Hermann welcomed her new boyfriend, Nick Eichmann, into her home. She lived with her parents in Olivos, a mostly German suburb within the Vicente López district of Buenos Aires on the Río de la Plata, ten miles north of the city center. The two made for a striking couple. Nick was tall and fair-haired, with clear blue eyes and a roguish smile. Sylvia was also attractive, with rich brown hair, blue eyes, and an expressive face. She also had a sharp mind and a willful personality. The two had recently met at one of the neighborhood's dance halls and had been out several times since then. Sylvia had invited Nick over to meet her parents, who were German émigrés.

  The introductions were made in their mother tongue. Nick sought out the hand of Sylvia's father, Lothar Hermann, a slight man who was blind. Over dinner, they spoke of Germany. Nick proudly said that his father had been a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer who had served his country well. Lothar, a lawyer, said nothing of his own experiences. Later on, the talk turned to the fate of the Jews.

  "It would have been better if the Germans had finished their job of extermination," Nick declared.

  Lothar was struck by the statement but again stayed silent. What his dinner guest did not know was that Lothar was half-Jewish and that he had been imprisoned at Dachau for socialist activities in 1936. Mindful of the increase in the persecution of the Jews, he had immigrated with his Christian wife to Argentina soon after Kristallnacht. To avoid any prejudice from the German community there, he had made no mention of his family background. Sylvia had been raised a Christian, and few people, even close friends, knew of her father's Jewish lineage or that he had lost his sight due to beatings delivered by the Gestapo.

  Lothar did not reveal any of this to Nick and instead carefully steered the conversation in another direction. He saw no need for an awkward scene, and it was not as though the boy was alone in holding this opinion. During the war, the streets of Buenos Aires had been filled with people from the German community carrying Nazi banners and espousing Hitler's hate-filled philosophy. The defeat of the Third Reich had not magically eliminated such sentiments.

  Although Lothar remembered every word that was spoken that evening, Nick did not think twice about what he had said. He may have switched his name from Klaus (the Germanic short form of Nikolas), but for his father's sake, it would be wise to remember that he still carried the Eichmann name before spouting such vitriol. Even after six years in Argentina, Adolf Eichmann was still very secretive about his identity and about his true relationship to the boys. When visitors were expected at the house, he often slapped his sons across the face to impress on them the importance of being careful about what they said and to whom. One never knew whom to trust and who might want to betray them.

  As he had done every Sunday morning for the past four months, Adolf Eichmann rode the bus from Olivos to the wealthy Florida quarter of Buenos Aires. It was a typically warm and humid summer day in February 1957. He rang the bell for the bus to stop at Liberty Street and then walked at a leisurely pace to a white house with an elegant porch shaded by silver birch trees.

  Willem Sassen, a lanky thirty-eight-year-old Dutchman, ushered Eichmann straight into his study. His wife made herself scarce, not liking the frequent visitor, while his two young daughters spied on the guest from the hallway, thinking how sinister and creepy this man, whom their father interviewed for hours on end behind closed doors, was.

  Sassen and Eichmann went to work. The Dutchman placed the microphone on the table, inserted a new tape into his reel-to-reel recorder, and pursued his line of questioning on how Eichmann saw his role in the Holocaust.

  In a gravely stern voice, broken by frequent draws on a cigarette, Eichmann replied.

  I would like to describe the careful bureaucrat in more detail, which could be to my own disadvantage. This careful bureaucrat was joined by a fanatic fighter for my people's liberty. I say it one more time, the louse that bites you doesn't disturb me, but the louse that sits under my collar does. What is useful for my people is holy order and holy law to me. And finally, I have to tell you, I don't regret anything. I am not eating humble pie at all. In the months during which you have recorded the whole matter, during which you have endeavored to refresh my memory, a great deal has been refreshed ... It would be too easy, and I could perfectly reasonably, for the sake of current opinion, play a role as if a Saul had turned into a Paul. But I must tell you that I cannot do that, because I am not prepared to, because my innermost being refuses to say that we did something wrong.

  No, I must tell you quite honestly that if, of the 10.3 million Jews shown by Korherr [an SS statistician], we had killed 10.3 million, then I would be satisfied and I would say all right, we have destroyed an enemy. Since the majority of these Jews stayed alive through a trickery of fate, I tell myself that's what fate had intended, and I have to subordinate myself to fate and providence. We would have fulfilled our duty for our blood, for our people, and for the liberty of all people, if we had destroyed the most cunning spirit of today's mankind. Since that is not the case, I will tell you that our children will have to deal with the agony and misfortune of our failure, and maybe they will curse us.

  Eichmann paused, taking off his glasses and running his tongue across his false upper teeth. Sassen knew that whenever Eichmann was nervous and evasive, his lips pursed and there was a slight twitch below his left eye. In this session, however, he was unusually candid, though in his typically elliptical manner.

  It was this kind of frank talk that Sassen wanted, and he was anxious to move on to editing these interviews for a biography. He had already approached Life magazine about a "real hot story," but since he could not reveal Eichmann's identity, the editor had told him the magazine did not want anything to do with it. Sassen persevered nonetheless, sure that he had the scoop of a lifetime.

  After the war, the Dutch journalist, who had served in a special SS corps of war correspondents and propagandists, had escaped to Argentina with his family on board a chartered schooner. On arrival, he had wooed the former Luftwaffe ace and Perón intimate Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Sassen ghostwrote Rudel's memoirs and also became a presidential public relations adviser and a writer for Der Weg, the monthly Nazi rag in Buenos Aires. The magazine was produced in the back of a bookstore that served as a meeting place for fugitive Nazis and their sympathizers.

  Sassen and Eichmann had known each other for several years (the journalist had escorted Eichmann to his new home in Tucumán), but ever since Eichmann had moved back to Buenos Aires after the collapse of CAPRI, they had seen each other more frequently. During drinking sessions with his fellow fugitives—whether at the ABC biergarten, where the waiters clicked their heels on arrival at the table, or on weekend hunting retreats dominated by conversations of war and women—Eichmann spoke bitterly of the war's end and of his own patriotism. "I have been a good German in the past, I am a good German today, and I will die a good German," he said. The only time he showed much passion was when he spoke about setting the record straight on the Final Solution. One night in 1956, over a bottle of wine, Sassen had convinced Eichmann to recount his story, urging, "Let us write a book together to counter the enemy propaganda."

  So began their sessions. Eichmann came to the house every week. They spoke for four hours, often drinking a couple of bottles of red wine in an effort by Sassen to relax his interviewee. Other Nazis occasionally sat in on the interviews, curious to hear what Eichmann had to say. After each sess
ion, Sassen had a secretary transcribe the recording on a huge roll of paper that his daughter Saskia cut into separate pages with a kitchen knife.

  The transcript revealed a man bent on proving that he had done nothing wrong in his role as head of Department IVB4. He strove to inflate his importance and to place himself among the Nazi elite, while simultaneously arguing that he was not ultimately responsible for any of the killings, because he had just been following orders. He declared that he held no hatred toward the Jews, mentioning a Jewish friend of his youth, and that he would have preferred their emigration from the Third Reich. Yet he also made a fervent case for why the Jews had brought their annihilation upon themselves. In his effort to resolve these opposing points of view, Eichmann ate up hours of tape, and binder after binder was filled with the neatly typed transcripts.

  Many of the passages were chilling. He described how he went about his duties: "I sat at my desk and did my work. It was my job to catch our Jewish enemies like fish in a net and transport them to their final destination." He explained how he convinced those within the Nazi hierarchy to follow his methods of deception: "We used the Warsaw example [in reference to the bloody ghetto uprising] like a traveling salesman who sells an article all the more easily by showing a special advertising section." Of his operations in Holland, he said: "I sent my boxcars to Amsterdam and most of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were directed for the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor and Auschwitz ... It went beautifully!"