by Gordon Kerr
In 1944, fearful of a Russian invasion, Germany invaded Hungary and Eichman was sent there to organise the deportation of Hungarian Jews. He sent 400,000 to their deaths in the gas chambers.
It was obvious to many in the German leadership by 1945 that the war was lost and they hastily began to cover their tracks. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, put a stop to the extermination of the Jews and hastily ordered all traces of the Final Solution to be destroyed. Eichman was appalled by Himmler’s orders, deciding arbitrarily to carry on as before, sending tens of thousands of Jews to the camps. He was also terrified that he would be assigned to the last-ditch fighting that was taking place. In 1944 he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS which made him eligible for combat duty.
In 1945 the Russians entered Hungary and, finally, Eichman fled, returning to Austria and trying to solicit help from his old friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, now a major figure in the Nazi Party, was trying to save his own skin and would have nothing to do with Eichman. His work in the camps had made him a dangerous man to be associated with.
The US Army captured Eichman around this time, but he gave a false name and escaped from custody in 1946. He went into hiding in Germany, moving from place to place and, although he actually obtained a landing permit for Argentina in 1948, he chose not to use it until later. Instead, he travelled to Italy in 1950. Alois Hudal, a Roman Catholic bishop who had praised Hitler before the war and who helped many Nazi war criminals escape, helped Eichman to obtain a humanitarian passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross and an Argentinian visa made out to ‘Riccardo Klement, technician’. He finally sailed for Argentina on 14 July 1950.
Once established in his new country, he brought his family over and for ten years his career followed a similar trajectory to the earlier years of his life. He worked in a number of jobs in the Buenos Aires area, amongst which were factory foreman, water engineer and even rabbit farmer.
Meanwhile, the authorities were fully aware of his presence. The CIA knew that he was living in Argentina, they thought under the name ‘Clemens’, but took no action as his arrest would represent an embarrassment to both America and Germany by focusing attention on the former Nazis they had recruited at the conclusion of the war, not least of whom was Hans Globke, German President Konrad Adenauer’s national security advisor. Globke had worked directly with Eichman on Jewish affairs and, in 1935, had helped draft the Nuremberg Laws, justifying racial discrimination against German Jews. Globke’s name was even deleted from Eichman’s memoirs which had been sold to Life magazine by the Eichman family.
Meanwhile, not even the Israelis could find Eichman, but many other Holocaust victims refused to give up searching for him. Famous Jewish Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, suspected that he was in Argentina, a suspicion confirmed by a postcard from a friend who had moved to the Argentinian capital: ‘Ich sah jenes Schmutzige Schwein, Eichman,’ (I saw that dirty pig, Eichman) he wrote, adding that he was living near Buenos Aires and working for a water company. Wiesenthal and the Israelis used this and other information to build a picture of Eichman’s life in exile.
Lothar Hermann, a German of Jewish descent, had been sent to Dachau at the time that Eichman was an administrator at the camp. He had fled to Argentina at the end of the war and had established a family there. Coincidentally, his daughter Sylvia became involved with one of Eichman’s sons, Klaus. Klaus foolishly boasted to Sylvia about his father’s past, crediting him with responsibility for the Final Solution. When Sylvia informed her father about this, he realised he was onto something.
He wrote to Fritz Bauer, Chief Prosecutor of the German state of Hesse, and also contacted Israeli officials. For several years they worked on a plan to capture Eichman. Finally, in 1960, the Israeli government approved a plan to kidnap him and bring him to Israel where he could be tried as a war criminal.
On 11 May 1960, following intense surveillance of Eichman’s every move, four agents of the Israeli secret service agency, Mossad, waited for him to return home from his latest job as a foreman in a Mercedes-Benz factory. One waited for the bus he would be travelling on, while another two pretended to repair a broken down car near the bus stop. The fourth agent travelled on the bus with their target.
Arriving at his destination, Eichman climbed down from the bus, setting out in the direction of his house. As he passed the car, one of the agents asked him for a cigarette. He reached into his pocket, but as he did so was pounced on by the other two. One of them, a black belt in karate, dealt him a sharp blow to the back of the neck, rendering him unconscious. They quickly bundled him into the car and drove him to a safe house they had prepared.
Here, he was stripped naked and examined. Under his armpit they found the absolute proof that he was an SS man – a partially removed tattoo. All members of the SS were tattooed as a form of identification. When they asked him for his name, he replied: ‘Ich bin Adolf Eichman!’
On 21 May, heavily sedated, he was smuggled out of Argentina as part of a delegation of Jewish trade union members on a commercial flight to Israel. A few days later, when Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion, announced to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that Eichman had been captured, he received a standing ovation.
The sensational news that Eichman had been caught created an international incident between Argentina and Israel. The United Nations Security Council was convened, the Argentinians claiming that Eichman’s abduction was a ‘violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic’. Israel retorted that Eichman had been captured not by Israeli agents but by private citizens. The Security Council accepted the Argentinian allegation and ordered Israel to make ‘appropriate reparation’. However, it also noted that its decision in no way condoned the crimes with which Eichman was charged.
His trial began on 11 April 1961 in the newly built Beth Ha’am (House of the People) where he was indicted on 15 charges. These included crimes against humanity, consisting of the murder of millions of innocents in the death camps; the introduction of the poison gas, Zyklon B; the creation of plans that murdered 80,000 in Lithuania, 30,000 in Latvia, 45,000 in Belorussia, 75,000 in the Ukraine and 33,000 in the city of Kiev. He was further accused of issuing the orders to send hundreds of thousands to Auschwitz, causing the suffering and death inside the Warsaw ghetto in 1939 and 1940, the slaughter of 500,000 Hungarian Jews in just eight months in 1944, enslaving millions across Eastern Europe in forced labour camps, performing forced abortions on pregnant women, forced sterilisation of thousands of Jewish men in Germany and, finally, of being the person in command of the entire Nazi bureaucratic structure that brought starvation, ruin and death to millions of people before and during the Second World War.
The trial was broadcast live around the world and included testimony from many Holocaust survivors. One critical piece of testimony was provided for the court by an American judge, Michael A. Musmanno, who had questioned the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. He said that Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, had ‘made it very clear that Eichman was the man to determine in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die’.
Eichman did not dispute the facts of the Holocaust. His defence was the same as many other Nazi war criminals – he was only following orders. ‘I never did anything, great or small,’ he claimed, ‘without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.’
One witness, Otto Winkelman, who had occupied a senior position in the SS in Budapest in 1944, stated that Eichman ‘had the nature of a subaltern, which means a fellow who uses his power recklessly, without moral restraints. He would certainly overstep his authority if he thought he was acting in the spirit of his commander [Adolf Hitler].’ Another witness, a former brigadier-general in the German secret service, testified that Eichman had been a total believer in Nazi principles and that he adhered to its most extreme doctrines. He also said that Eichman had more power than other department chief
s.
As for Eichman, during the trial he displayed the mediocrity of his personality and demonstrated neither guilt nor hatred.
After 14 weeks, as expected, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death by hanging. He appealed unsuccessfully and then had a plea for mercy turned down by Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi on 29 May 1962.
Adolph Eichman was hanged just after midnight on 1 June 1962 at Ramla prison in the only execution ever to be carried out in Israel. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in international waters in the Mediterranean. He had refused a last meal, opting instead for a bottle of Israeli red wine, of which he drank half. On the gallows he refused to don the customary black hood. He went to his death declaring: ‘Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.’
Phoolan Devi
India
The crowd of almost 10,000 people roared their approval above the blaring Hindi film music, as a slip of a girl – no more than five feet in height – climbed up onto a 23-feet-high stage that had been erected in the village of Bindh. She wore a new khaki police superintendant’s uniform and a red shawl. On her head was a red bandana, holding back her long dark-brown hair. From her shoulder hung a rifle and a silver bangle, a symbol of her Sikh faith, dangled on her wrist. She grinned and waved to the crowd before kneeling in homage, touching the feet of Arjun Singh, chief minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India. She then slowly turned to face the screaming crowd, raising her rifle above her head, before placing her hands together in the traditional form of Indian greeting and lowering her eyes. The crowd went wild and the hordes of VIPs on the dais turned to shake each other by the hand, as the Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi, surrendered to the authorities.
It had been a long and arduous journey to this lavish stage in Bindh from the tiny Utter Pradesh village of Gorha Ka Purwa. A cluster of mud huts with conical thatched roofs, on the banks of the Yamuna River, Gorha Ka Purwa is like the half- million or so other similar villages in India. Sacred cows wander the lanes and tracks between the houses as if they own them and poverty is a way of life for the half-billion peasants who live in them. At best, the peasant family will own less than an acre of land; at worst it will not own any land and will be dependent on its landlord.
In this society, straight-jacketed by the Brahmanical caste system, women have little more value than is allowed by their ability to give birth to sons. They marry young, work long hours in the fields and live the lives of countless generations of poor Indian women, with little chance of escape.
Phoolan Devi was born in August 1963 into a family of the shudra sub-caste of boatmen called mallah, but her father Devidin was at least better off than some in the village, owning about an acre of land. Life was still hard, however, and he had to work hard to support his family of one son and four daughters, of whom she was the second eldest. Devidin was, however, in Phoolan’s words, ‘a simpleton’ and lost almost all his inheritance, some 15 acres, to his smarter, older brother and the brother’s son, Maiyadin. This was a disaster for the family and an outrage to Phoolan who, even when young, fought to regain the land. Once, when she was ten, she staged a sit-in on the land and Maiyadin beat her with a brick until she was unconscious.
At the age of 11, with the connivance of Maiyadin, she was sent far away from her village to marry a widower 20 years older than her. Her family received a cow in exchange. Her life with the widower was miserable. He beat her and raped her until she could take no more and she escaped not long after her twelfth birthday, walking all the way back to her village – a huge distance.
Her return was a scandal for her family and her mother ordered her to kill herself by jumping down the village well. Naturally she did not, although many would have, and spent her adolescence coming and going from Gorha Ka Purwa. When she was there, she cut the grass on the family land and tended their water buffalo. She married a cousin but the marriage did not last and gradually she began to develop a reputation for promiscuity. She never gave up her war with her cousin, however, even taking the case to the High Court in Allahabad when she was 20. He took revenge a year later when he had her arrested for a robbery he claimed had taken place at his house. She was held in custody for a month and, during that time, she was raped repeatedly by the policemen who had arrested her.
In July of that same year, 1983, Phoolan heard that a band of dacoits were camped near her village. One night they came to her hut and kidnapped her, marching her out of the village and into the ravines in which the dacoit gangs hid out. For three days she was sexually assaulted by the leader of the gang, Babu Gujar, but on the evening of the third day, his second-in-command, a tall good-looking young man called Vikram Mallah, who had always liked Phoolan, shot and killed Gujar. He snatched the leadership and Phoolan became his mistress and partner. As the news spread, the people in villages for miles around made up songs and stories about the low-caste village girl who had restored her honour.
For her part, Phoolan had a rubber stamp made that said: ‘Phoolan Devi, dacoit beauty; beloved of Vikram Mallah, Emperor of Dacoits.’ Vikram made her cut her hair short and bought her a radio and a cassette recorder on which she could listen to her beloved Indian film music. He taught her the ways of the dacoits; she learned how to handle a gun and became an excellent markswoman.
He also taught her a valuable lesson: ‘If you are going to kill, kill 20, not just one. For if you kill 20, your fame will spread; if you kill only one, they will hang you as a murderess.’
The fame of the couple spread as they rampaged through the lands of Utter and Madhya Pradesh, robbing, looting, holding up trains, plundering higher-caste villages and houses, and murdering and kidnapping. They ransacked the village where Phoolan's husband lived. She stabbed him and dragged him in front of the villagers. Then they left him lying close to death with a note pinned to him warning old men not to marry young girls.
All the while, Phoolan interpreted omens and took signs from the goddess Durga. Once, she said, she was wakened in the middle of the night by a snake slithering across her legs. She woke Vikram and their men and ordered them to flee. Minutes after they had left, the police arrived at their empty campsite.
Another time, in August 1980, they were not so lucky, however. She claims to have seen a crow perched on a dead tree at the edge of their camp and pleaded with Vikram to leave the place in which they were preparing to spend the night. He refused and a short while later when she heard noises, she thought they were surrounded by police. When Vikram sat up, he was felled by two bullets and died, his head cradled in her lap.
The killers were two brothers, Sri Ram and Lala Ram, who had returned to the gang after being released from prison. They were avenging the murder of the former leader, Babu Gujar, and because they were of the opinion that Vikram was too low caste to be leader. There had been a great deal of tension between Shri Ram and Vikram, especially after Shri had made advances to Phoolan.
The brothers abducted Phoolan, sailing downriver to the village of Bahmai. There, she was locked in a filthy hut and subjected to terrible sexual abuse for three weeks. She was raped repeatedly every night by the turbaned Thakur men of the village. Eventually, Santosh Pandit, a priest from a neighbouring village, freed her, carrying her to safety.
Back in the ravines, she formed her own band of dacoits with Man Singh and they carried out a series of violent robberies, targeting upper-caste homes and villages. Seventeen months after her escape from Bahmai, she finally returned to wreak revenge on the men who had assaulted her.
The gang, dressed in police uniforms, entered the village and gathered to pray at its shrine. Then, when they had sealed off all the exits from the village, she spoke to the terrified villagers through a megaphone, telling them to bring out all their gold and valuables and to hand over the Ram brothers who she thought were hiding in the vil
lage. When the Rams were not forthcoming, she ordered 30 young men to be brought out. She again asked them where the Rams were, spitting in their faces and striking them in the genitals with her rifle butt as they pleaded for their lives, saying they did not know where the brothers were. The men were then lined up beside the river, ordered onto their knees and shot. Twenty-two of them died in what was the largest dacoit massacre in Indian criminal history and most of them had not been involved in the sexual assaults she had endured. Later, she claimed she had not carried out any killings, blaming her gang instead.
There was outrage, and for the Indian government it was an atrocity too far. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was afraid that a caste war could break out as a result and ordered a massive police search. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh was forced to resign, and dolls depicting Phoolan as the Bandit Queen, as she was now being called, dressed in a blue police uniform and with a bandolier of bullets around her body, were being sold in Uttar Pradesh markets.
For two years the police failed to locate her, in spite of a reward of 412,620 rupees (£5,300) being offered, and the government finally announced that it would negotiate a surrender. She was happy to give up the dacoit life, as she was in poor health and the majority of her gang had now been killed. She said she would only surrender on her own terms and only to the Madhya Pradesh authorities; she did not trust the Uttar Pradesh police. Her conditions were numerous: she and her gang would not be hung; they would serve no more than eight years in prison; her 14-year-old brother would be given a government job; her father should have the land stolen by her cousin returned to him; her family would be settled in Madhya Pradesh on government land and they would be accompanied by her goat and cow.
