Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Returning to Linz, Wiesenthal phoned Arthur and they agreed to find another mission for Manos. Everywhere Eichmann went, he’d had mistresses. Maybe one of them still cherished a photo of her infamous lover which could be circulated on ‘Wanted’ posters: a far more urgent need than revenge on his family.

  A Margit Kutschera in Munich had been his mistress in Hungary. She told Manos there had been photos of herself with Eichmann, but she had last seen them in her hotel suite in Budapest, which she’d fled during the Allied bombings in 1944, leaving everything behind. Manos went to Budapest, but found the suite and hotel had long ago been looted by the Red Army.

  In 1947, Wiesenthal learned that another ex-mistress of Eichmann’s, Maria Masenbacher, was living in Urfahr, a suburb across the Danube from Linz. Arthur sent for Manos again. As in Aussee, Manos pretended to be a Dutch SS man who didn’t dare return home. He frequented a café where Frau Masenbacher, a striking woman nearing forty, was a steady customer, and it wasn’t long before she allowed him to buy her a drink. Soon she was sharing her home and her confidences with him – and, one day, her photo album. As they flipped the pages, Manos spotted a picture of a well-dressed man in civilian clothes taken just before World War II. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, a friend,’ she said, flipping the page quickly. ‘He died in the war.’

  A few hours later, when she was gone, Manos was joined by a detective friend of Wiesenthal’s from Linz. The man had been a neighbour of Eichmann’s. When he said ‘That’s the rascal!’ Manos lifted the photo from the album – and, within hours, Wiesenthal was circulating copies of it. Though taken in 1939, it was clear and sharp, lending itself to reproduction. For a long while, however, it led only to a ‘Lieutenant Otto Eckmann’ who had walked out of American custody on 30 June 1945.

  Though Wiesenthal no longer worked for the Americans, he and they continued to co-operate. Late in 1947, the CIC in Bad Ischl informed him that Veronika Liebl had applied to the district court for a death certificate for her ‘ex-husband’ Adolf Eichmann ‘for the sake of the children.’ She had submitted an affidavit from one Karl Lukas of Prague, who swore that he had seen Eichmann shot to death during street fighting in the Czech capital on 30 April 1945.

  Wiesenthal asked the CIC to seek a postponement of the hearing: these cases were normally expedited in two weeks to enable widows either to draw their husbands’ pensions or remarry or both. Granted an extra fortnight, he produced testimony sworn at the Nuremberg trials by SS Major Wilhelm Höttl that he had seen Eichmann alive in Bad Aussee on 2 May 1945, and by Rudolf Scheide, the German overseer in Cham to whom Eichmann confessed his identity in mid-June 1945. To clinch the case, Wiesenthal sent a man to Prague, where he learned that the ‘eye-witness’ to Eichmann’s ‘death’, Karl Lukas, an employee of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Agriculture, was married to Frau Eichmann’s sister, Maria Liebl.

  Upon examining Wiesenthal’s evidence, the Austrian judge threw out Frau Eichmann’s application as well as Frau Eichmann herself, warning her that he would have her prosecuted if she ever tried such a trick again. Fifteen years later, after Eichmann’s capture, Wiesenthal, in a rare act of vindictiveness, informed Czechoslovak authorities about Lukas’s affidavit. Lukas was fired immediately by the Ministry of Agriculture.

  ‘I am convinced,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘that my most important contribution to the search for Eichmann was destroying the legend that he had died. If he had been legally declared dead, then his name would have disappeared from all the “Wanted” fists and officially he would no longer exist. His case would be closed. Around the world the search for him would end. A man presumed dead is no longer hunted. Many SS criminals were never caught because they had themselves declared dead and then lived happily ever after under new names. Some of them even remarried their own “widows”.’

  ODESSA, in capital letters, is not the Soviet seaport where Simon Wiesenthal spent two years apprenticing as an architect and another year designing huts for chicken feathers, but an acronym for Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen: Organization of SS Members. As amorphous as the Mafia, which exists even when one cannot prove it exists, ODESSA, like the Cosa Nostra ‘families’, forms and re-forms to fit the occasion or need. Under such aliases as ‘Spider’, ‘Sluice’, ‘Silent Help’, ‘The Brotherhood’, ‘Association of German Soldiers’, ‘Comradeship’, or even ‘Six-Pointed Star’ (not the Star of David, but an escape network in Austria’s six principal cities), it denies its existence and shrugs off Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling 1972 thriller, The Odessa File, for the fiction it is, even though Forsyth’s novel features such real-life heroes as Simon Wiesenthal and Lord Russell of Liverpool as well as, for a villain, Eduard Roschmann, ‘The Butcher of Riga’ who, as second-in-command of the Latvian capital’s ghetto, was responsible for 35,000 deaths and deportations. In his foreword, Forsyth dissociates fiction from fact by pointing out that ‘many Germans are inclined to say that the ODESSA does not exist. The short answer is: it exists.’

  Wiesenthal won’t waste his time or anyone else’s arguing this question. He insists ODESSA was founded in Augsburg or Stuttgart in 1947, when higher-ranking Nazis in the SS and wartime German industry saw that, despite Allied disinterest, the revelation of war crimes and the question of accountability were not going to die a quiet death. With the impending new state of Israel and dedicated survivors like Wiesenthal determined to keep the fires alive, the Fourth Reich wasn’t about to happen very soon. Using just a portion of their plunder, which Wiesenthal values at between $750 million and 1 billion, they were able to set up three escape routes: from the north German seaport of Bremen to the Italian seaport of Genoa, where Christopher Columbus was born and, centuries later, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele set sail for the New World: from Bremen to Rome, where the Vatican and the International Red Cross, wittingly or unwittingly, stood ready to expedite their escapes; and from Austria to Italy, which is the way Franz Stangl went.

  ‘ODESSA provides its members with material aid, organizes social activities, and, when necessary, helps ex-Nazis escape to foreign countries,’ said prosecutor Gideon Hausner at the Eichmann trial. ‘It has its headquarters in Munich with branches all over Germany and Austria as well as in South American countries. The German community at Hohenau in Paraguay is dominated by ODESSA.’

  ‘ODESSA was organized as a thorough, efficient network,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Every forty miles was a shelter manned by a minimum of three and maximum of five people. They knew only the two surrounding shelters: the one from which the fugitives came to them and the one to which they were to be delivered safely.’ Ironically, some of the inns and farmhouses along ODESSA’S ‘rat line’, as the escape routes became known, were also used by Jewish refugees making their way illegally to what was still Palestine under an expiring British mandate which sought to maintain the population balance between Arabs and Jews. For some Displaced Persons, it was harder to leave Germany and Austria than it was for their former captors. Wiesenthal says: ‘I know of a small inn near Merano, in the Italian Tyrol, and another place near the Resch Pass between Austria and Italy, where illegal Nazi transports and illegal Jewish transports sometimes spent the night without knowing of each other’s presence. The Jews were hidden on the upper floor and told not to move. The Nazis, on the ground floor, were warned to stay inside.’

  There was also substantial two-way commuter traffic of wanted Nazis across the border between Austria and Germany. Wiesenthal says that ODESSA used German drivers, hired in Munich under their own names or aliases, to deliver Stars and Stripes, the US Army’s daily newspaper printed in Germany, to the troops in Austria. Military Police would wave these US army vans through the border crossing on the Munich-Salzburg Autobahn and sometimes the drivers would repay the favour by handing them a few free copies while a Nazi fugitive crouched behind bundles of Stars and Stripes.

  The recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, which asked no questions and into which scores of
low-ranking SS men fled in the last days of the war, also served ODESSA well. In early 1948, Roschmann, the Graz-born ‘Butcher of Riga’, escaped from Austria into Italy with five other Nazi fugitives in a car with French licence plates and a Foreign Legion chauffeur outfitted with papers enabling the car to cross borders without being searched.

  Though he found himself bored to death in northern Germany, ‘Otto Heninger’ stayed until he’d saved enough money to finance an ocean voyage. According to Hannah Arendt: ‘Early in 1950, he succeeded in establishing contact with ODESSA, a clandestine organization of SS veterans, and in May of that year, he was passed through Austria to Italy, where a Franciscan priest, fully informed of his identity, equipped him with a refugee passport in the name of Richard Klement and sent him on to Buenos Aires.’ The priest in Rome was actually Father Anton Weber at the St Raphael Society, who, years later, boasted of the hundreds of ‘baptized Jews’ (converts to Catholicism) he’d saved from Hitler and then admitted that ‘yes, someone called Richard Klement came to me. He said he came from East Germany and didn’t want to go back there to live under the Bolsheviks, so I helped him.’ How Father Weber, himself a Bavarian, failed to hear Eichmann’s thick Austrian accent must remain an ecclesiastical mystery.

  With Weber’s help, Eichmann arrived in Argentina in mid-July 1950 as ‘Ricardo Klement, thirty-seven, stateless, Catholic’. By 1951, Simon Wiesenthal was back on his trail. Early that year, ‘a former member of German counter-intelligence who had good ODESSA contacts told me Eichmann had been seen passing through Rome last summer, probably bound for South America.’

  Further confirmation came a few months later in a personal visit from ODESSA itself. After publishing magazine articles on treasure-hunters seeking Eichmann’s hidden store of gold melted down from his victims’ teeth and jewellery, Simon was called upon in his office in Linz by a slim, dapper Austrian aristocrat whom he identifies in his memoirs as ‘Heinrich von Klimrod’. His guest came right to the point: ‘I represent a Viennese group of former SS men. Our mutual interests converge at one point. We know that you are a fanatical idealist. You want to find Eichmann to bring him to justice. We, too, want him – for a different reason. We want his gold. I believe we could establish a useful collaboration.’

  Not willing to go into partnership with former SS men or make a deal for gold ‘that doesn’t belong to me and doesn’t belong to Eichmann either’ (and, he added to himself, ‘may have come from my eighty-nine relatives who had been killed by Eichmann’s men’), the ‘fanatical idealist’ declined the offer – but not before eliciting from ‘Klimrod’ that Eichmann was probably in South America after being sheltered in a Capuchin monastery in Rome and helped by a Father Weber and a Father Benedetti. The one name he didn’t have was ‘Ricardo Klement.’

  15

  The Eichmann abduction

  ‘The 1950s were bad years for Eichmann-hunters,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘The Cold War had reached its climax and the former Allies were dug in on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Americans had their hands full with the war in Korea. No one was interested in Eichmann or the Nazis. When two Nazis met, they would say “A new wind is blowing!” and slap each other on the back.’

  It seemed to Arthur Pier’s (Asher Ben Nathan’s) successor, Tuviah Friedman, that ‘only the two of us – Wiesenthal and I – cared about Eichmann. Everyone else had forgotten. The Jews who had remained in Germany were involved in her postwar business recovery. Many were living as Gentiles and had married Gentile girls.’ By the end of 1951, most Displaced Persons who were Jewish had resettled in Western Europe, Israel, Australia, and the Americas. The stream of witnesses flowing into Wiesenthal’s Documentation Centre in Linz and Friedman’s in Vienna had slowed to a trickle.

  Upon learning that Eichmann had escaped from Europe, Simon could maintain just two frail links with his quarry. In terms he never uses now, he told Friedman how he haunted Eichmann’s family:

  ‘I’m in their filthy store every few weeks. I ask them if they’ve heard from Adolf lately, where is he writing from these days, and always they have the same answer for me: “Please, leave us alone, we don’t know anything, leave us alone.” Do you know how many times I’ve been to Frau Vera Eichmann’s place? Ask me and I’ll tell you. Her three bastard sons know me on sight already.’

  In the spring of 1952, his next-to-last link was severed when Eichmann’s wife and three boys vanished from Altaussee. Wiesenthal fell into a deep depression. ‘Obviously, no one cared,’ he said. ‘Even the Israelis had more cause to be concerned about Nasser28 than Eichmann.’

  While ODESSA viewed Wiesenthal as an unco-operatively ‘fanatical idealist’, Tuviah Friedman has described the Cold War Wiesenthal as ‘a right-wing Zionist, a militant who admired the policies of extremists like Menachem Begin.’29 Although Friedman is not to be trusted as an historical source and Asher Ben Nathan calls him ‘abnormal’, ‘indiscreet’, ‘unreliable’, and a ‘braggart’ and a blabbermouth from whom truly important secrets had to be concealed, Simon Wiesenthal says that, between 1946 and 1952, Friedman and he ‘worked together well – possibly because we were almost two hundred kilometres [125 miles] apart, him in Vienna, I in Linz. We exchanged information and supplied each other with evidence.’

  In 1952, Friedman gave up the ghost – in Austria, at least. ‘My files were bulging with documents, with sworn affidavits,’ he recalls. ‘But nobody clamoured to get at them and use them to prosecute Nazis. The Germans didn’t want them, the Austrians didn’t want them, and neither did the Western Allies or the Russians.’ Upon learning that the Yad Vashem Historical Archives – sponsored by the Israeli government and the world’s Jewish communities – had been set up in Jerusalem as an on-going centre for information on and documentation of and memorial to ‘the Six Million’, Friedman packed his files into two large trunks, arranged for the Israeli Consulate to ship them to Yad Vashem, and shut down his Vienna office.

  ‘One file I did not send to Jerusalem,’ he notes. ‘That was the file on Adolf Eichmann.’ He took that with him when he emigrated to Israel later that year – ‘vomiting all the way,’ he remembers.

  Later that year, Friedman emigrated to Haifa, married a Hungarian doctor he’d known in Vienna on her way to Israel, and returned to Austria to wind up his university studies there. Toward the end of 1952, Friedman paid a farewell visit to Wiesenthal in Linz and copied his Eichmann files – just in case. Simon’s despair had deepened; he hardly ate, drank, or slept and, if his wife Cyla had to ask why, he’d reply: ‘The Nazis lost the war, but we are losing the postwar.’ Yet he was still fighting his private war when he escorted Friedman to the Linz railroad station and told him:

  ‘Tadek, you go back to Israel and don’t let them push you around. Keep reminding the Israelis about Eichmann. Don’t let them tell you to forget about him. Let the Israel Government do everything it wants to do: build houses for immigrants, teach everybody Hebrew, make a strong army. Fine! Very good! But they must also start looking for Eichmann. And only you can nag at them and make them do something.’

  As they embraced on the platform, Simon added:

  ‘Just think of it, Tadek! When Eichmann is caught, he will be tried by a Jewish court in a Jewish state. History and our people’s honour – both are at stake.’

  The depression into which Simon Wiesenthal fell in 1952, upon learning that first Eichmann and then his family had disappeared from Europe, mostly took the form of insomnia. In the sleepless midnight hours, while others lay awake counting sheep or naming stars, he watched the dead – first his family, then his friends, then the thousands he met in the camps, and then the cases that crossed his desk every day – parade before his eyes, always with Eichmann, sometimes cracking a whip, bringing up the rear. Simon never had nightmares, for his nights were waking hours spent with ghosts. A doctor he consulted told him he needed relaxation, diversion, a hobby.

  ‘I have a hobby,’ Wiesenthal told him. ‘I collect witnesses.’

  ‘And fro
m this hobby you are sick,’ the doctor said. ‘You are prolonging the concentration camp for yourself. When your witnesses cry, you cry, too. And when they suffer, you suffer. How many victims were there? Six million? Well, you will be number six million and one unless you get yourself a real hobby, like stamp-collecting.’

  Wiesenthal plunged into philately with the intensity he brings to everything else. Instead of taking his mind off Nazis, however, his hobby focused it on crucial details which, in the end, revitalized his work. Some of mankind’s greatest revelations have come only when scientists, researchers, even artists, have taken necessary breaks or detours after intensive concentration: the mind at play can sometimes energize the mind that’s at its wits’ end. Once, Wiesenthal’s contribution to a war crimes trial was calling the judges’ attention to the stamp on an envelope addressed home from Poland. Its date of issue contradicted an SS man’s alibi that he was back in Germany by the time of an atrocity in Poland.

  The matching up of Ricardo Klement with Adolf Eichmann was as painstaking a process as the mounting of a Penny Black or Twopenny Blue in a stamp album. And the breakthrough, though it wasn’t recognized at the time, came from Wiesenthal’s hobby. At a philately exhibition in Innsbruck in late 1953, he met an old baron who invited him home to his villa in the Tyrol to look at his collection. Over a bottle of wine, the baron – a lifelong Catholic and ardent monarchist who had suffered for his views under Hitler – told his Jewish guest how dismayed he was to see prominent Nazis regaining high positions in the Tyrol ‘as if nothing had changed. And it’s not only here.’ Rummaging in a drawer for a recent letter from a friend in Argentina, he handed it, still in its envelope, to Wiesenthal. ‘Beautiful stamps, aren’t they?’ the baron remarked. ‘But read what’s inside.’