by Isser Harel
By the time he reached the door of Eichmann’s room Shalom was trembling all over, but he did manage to regain control. And Eichmann went out of his way to help the photographer. He even understood the precautions Shalom had to take to keep his face hidden and suggested of his own accord that before he took off his goggles someone could switch on the floodlights so that he couldn’t see the photographer’s face.
But Shalom saw Eichmann; in fact he couldn’t take his eyes off him. He stood as if hypnotized in front of this fiend who was so eager to cooperate with his captors.
Shalom never said a word the whole evening. At first he was absorbed in developing the photographs, and later on he sat bowed over the table preparing the documentation. When he eventually completed his work, very late at night, he didn’t go over it again to check it as he customarily did. This time only one thing interested him: to be rid of the documents and never to see them again. When he got up to go he even forgot to say good-bye to the friends he had always treated with affection. He literally fled from the safe house. Eichmann’s physical presence was too much for such a refined and sensitive man. Kenet was the only one I authorized to speak to Eichmann. We had no desire to satisfy Eichmann’s curiosity about the men around him, about the circumstances in which he had been brought to the villa, about the area he was living in, and other such matters. Kenet questioned him about everything connected with his life in Argentina, his flight from Europe to South America, and his whole history since the conclusion of World War II. The interrogations usually took place in the early evening and at night because Kenet was busy all day running errands in the city or reporting to me on the progress of the interrogation. Eichmann tended to sleep during the day and wake up at night, anyway, as the twenty-four-hour light burning in his room made him lose all sense of time. At first Kenet took notes, but later on he used a tape recorder.
I asked Kenet to discuss with Eichmann the possible reactions to his disappearance. I wanted to know what steps he thought would be taken by his family, his friends, his employers, and the authorities. Not that I trusted for one moment that he would be truthful, but I believed I could glean something useful from what he did say and obtain information about those unknown quantities who were then our most dangerous enemies: the Nazis in Argentina. We didn’t know a thing about them or their connections with influential state bodies, nor did we have any notion of the extent of solidarity among the exiled criminals. We didn’t know if they had an organized system of communications or if their contacts were purely personal. I hoped that Eichmann’s replies to Kenet’s questions would teach us something about the strength of the Nazis in Argentina, even if he tried to mislead us, it would not be difficult for us to see through his deception and draw correct inferences.
On hearing Kenet’s first report, I came to the conclusion that Eichmann was not trying to throw us off the scent. To my great astonishment, his hypothesis about the reaction of his family and friends vas absolutely identical with mine. To his way of thinking, they would hesitate to ‘make a fuss’ and would start by looking for him in all the likely places – at his friends’ homes, at hospitals, and at casualty clearing stations. He didn’t hang any hopes on his friends. He was positive they wouldn’t exert themselves particularly in trying to find him, for fear of endangering their own safety. Though he refused at this juncture to disclose the names of his numerous friends, he spoke about them with unconcealed scorn. He even hinted that he was convinced they had a hand in betraying him to us.
Commenting on the special security measures we had taken, he remarked that we need have no cause for concern – the danger of our being traced was extremely slight. His remarks were somewhat obsequious, no doubt, but in the course of time it was proved that they were made with a degree of honesty.
That doesn’t mean to say that he identified himself with the interests of his captors. He knew only too well what we had in store for him and had apparently anticipated much worse things than had actually been done to him thus far. I had no doubt that if he saw the slightest chance of slipping through our fingers he would not hesitate for an instant. But he knew he couldn’t escape by his own efforts, nor could he expect any practical help from his friends outside. He may also have been afraid that an escape attempt could cost him his life. From the beginning, he showed open appreciation of our capability and great admiration for our efficiency and resourcefulness. Indeed, some time later, from his prison cell in Israel, he went so far as to say, The thing was done in a sporting fashion and was outstanding for its organization and exemplary planning.’ His captors, he noted, ‘took special pains not to hurt me physically.’ And he knew what he was talking about: ‘I take the liberty of expressing my opinion on the subject because I have had some experience in police and intelligence matters.’
I assume he had no doubt that in the event of any danger whatsoever we would not hesitate to kill him, so he had virtually no hope of escaping. Thus it was in the interests of prolonging his life that he cooperated with us. He appeared to have decided from the very beginning to show no sign of rebellion but to remain passive and to submit completely to his captors. Self-respect did not seem to enter into his calculations.
During the course of his interrogation Kenet asked Eich-mann if he had noticed any unusual events in the months preceding his capture. Eichmann enumerated several occurrences which made him suspect that he was being observed -only one of them had any connection with our activities, while the others merely bore witness to the unremitting state of fear in which he must have lived. What had aroused his suspicions were his neighbors’ stories about strangers who said they wanted to buy land for a factory. He knew there were no facilities for electricity or water in the area, and therefore he didn’t believe anyone could really be interested in setting up a manufacturing plant there. He suspected then that the inquiries were a blind.
When Kenet told me all this I wondered why Eichmann had not acted on his suspicions, why he had stayed on in San Fernando even after Kenet and Kornfeld’s activities had awakened these suspicions. A possible explanation was that he had been prey to fears and suspicions for so long that he had eventually made up his mind that life wasn’t worth living if every unusual incident and every breath of suspicion drove him to leave his home and find himself a new hiding place, a new identity, and new employment. Here is a portion of Kenet’s interrogation of Eichmann. Kenet opened the questioning by asking Eichmann why he had said his name was Otto Heninger the night he was caught.
EICHMANN: That was my name for more than four years.
KENET: Where was that?
EICHMANN: At Kulmbach in the Province of Celle, in Germany. I worked there as a lumberjack before coming to Argentina
KENET: How did you get there?
EICHMANN: I made my way there after leaving the American prisoner-of-war camp at Oberdachstetten.
KENET: The Americans released you?
EICHMANN: No, I escaped.
KENET: Did they know who you were?
EICHMANN: No. They didn’t know my true identity.
KENET: And did you use the name Otto Heninger in the camp also?
EICHMANN: No. There I was called Otto Eckmann.
KENET: The name Eckmann is similar to Eichmann. Did you choose it?
EICHMANN: Yes, and on purpose. I thought that if anybody should recognize me as Eichmann and address me by my real name, then Eichmann would sound the same as Eckmann to American ears.
KENET: And what did you tell them about your service during the war?
EICHMANN: I told them I was a lieutenant in the 22nd SS Cavalry Division.
KENET: As an SS officer, weren’t you interrogated about your past?
EICHMANN: I explained to them that I was serving in a fighting unit of the Waffen-SS, the Armed SS. SS officers didn’t interest the Americans much. They were interested in members of the Gestapo.
KENET: But why did you have to admit at all that you were an SS officer?
EICHMANN: Because of t
he blood type tattooed below my armpit, as with all SS officers.
KENET: That tattoo has been obliterated. When was it done?
EICHMANN: Before I ran away from the camp I tried to erase it altogether. The rest of the prisoners helped me, but we didn’t succeed in eliminating it completely.
KENET: How long were you in that camp?
EICHMANN: Nearly six months.
KENET: Were there others there from your division?
EICHMANN: Yes, Janisch was there, my adjutant.
KENET: Were you both taken prisoner at the same time?
EICHMANN: Yes.
KENET: Where?
EICHMANN: Not far from Ulm.
KENET: And from there you were transferred to Ober-dachstetten?
EICHMANN: No. First we were in another camp, but we stayed there only a few weeks. It wasn’t comfortable for us there.
KENET: What do you mean by that? Weren’t the conditions good? Were your quarters overcrowded?
EICHMANN: No. But the Americans started looking for tattoos below the armpits of the prisoners.
KENET: Why did that upset you? After all, hadn’t you introduced yourself as an officer in the Waffen-SS?
EICHMANN: No. There I made myself out to be a corporal in the air force.
KENET: Under the name of Eckmann?
EICHMANN: No. Under another name: Adolf Karl Barth.
KENET: When was that?
EICHMANN: May 1945.
KENET: What were you doing when you were captured?
EICHMANN: By then I wasn’t doing anything. Before that I had taken my wife and children to Austria, and I went to Alt Aussee. Kaltenbrunner was there, Chief of the Reich Security Head Office. But none of us knew what to do. Those were days of chaos. It was when I started walking with Janisch, my adjutant, in the direction of Bad Ischl that I was arrested by American soldiers.
KENET: And when were you caught the second time?
EICHMANN: That was at the end of July or beginning of August
KENET: And that was when you introduced yourself as Waffen-SS officer Otto Eckmann.
EICHMANN: Yes.
KENET: Why did you decide to run away from Oberdach-stetten?
EICHMANN: Because of the Nuremberg trials. My name was mentioned several times there, and I was afraid there might be more thorough investigations which would reveal my identity. I became particularly alarmed after Dieter Wisli-ceny’s testimony, which leveled all kinds of accusations against me.
KENET: How did you escape?
EICHMANN: I went to the officer in charge of prisoners, Lieutenant Colonel Offenbach, and asked for authority to escape. He called a meeting of officers. They discussed my request and approved it. They also helped me, naturally. They gave me papers in the name of Otto Heninger. One of them gave me a letter of recommendation to his brother in Kulmbach asking him to help me find work in forestry. I arrived in Celle during the first few days of March 1946. I stayed there more than four years.
KENET: And then?
EICHMANN: I was cut off from my family all those years. I wanted to see my wife and children again, and I was getting fed up with the game of hide-and-seek. I knew I had to wait until the storm died down and their attention was diverted from me. But in the newspapers and on the radio, as well as in books, my name was continually being mentioned. I heard about organizations that had helped others to leave Germany. At the beginning of 1950 I made contact with one of those organizations. They arranged for me to go to Italy. A Franciscan monk in Genoa got me a refugee passport in the name of Ricardo Klement, and a visa for Argentina. In the middle of July 1950 I arrived in Buenos Aires.
KENET: And when did your wife and children join you?
EICHMANN: They came about two years later.
21
THE NERVES of the personnel at Tira were being put to a severe test. The initial tight security had been relaxed, which created a comparatively routine atmosphere and within it many idle hours. True, they had been in the house only four days so far, but that can be an exceedingly long time when people are living in isolation with round-the-clock pressures of watchfulness, fear, uncertainty – and hatred. For what caused the greatest and most constant tension in them was the contradiction between the way they were expected to treat Eichmann and the way they were feeling about him. They had been ordered to ignore as much as possible the identity of their prisoner and to remember that only the judges before whom he would be brought were qualified to pronounce sentence on him.
But how could they control themselves day after day? They had to shave the man because he couldn’t be allowed to have a razor. They had to bathe him because he couldn’t be permitted freedom of movement. They even had to accompany him to the toilet.
And through it all they had to command their raging hearts to be still. They had to forget their fathers and mothers, their little brothers and sisters, who had been turned into heaps of bones and piles of ash by their prisoner’s extermination machine. They had to push out of their minds the humiliations and tortures, the abominable sadism of this man’s campaign of genocide. They had to swallow the anger, the contempt, and the disgust that they felt day and night.
Of all the phases and hardships of the operation this was the most difficult. And I knew that I could neither save them from it nor alleviate their suffering. But we did decide that each of them, in rotation, should be allowed out for a day’s holiday.
Eli went first. He was given detailed instructions about how to conduct himself in the city, and he was advised that to avoid losing his way in the maze of lavish dishes which constitutes an Argentine restaurant menu, he should order a ‘baby steak’. Eli set out early in the morning and returned toward evening – furious. The instructions for behavior in the city, he said, so hampered him that he was bored stiff all day, and if not for the order that he mustn’t set foot in Tira in daylight he would have been back after a few hours. As for the ‘baby steak’, he discovered that it wasn’t a small steak but a hunk of meat the size of a baby, and, he insisted, no sane person could eat such a slab of meat in less than a week.
Eichmann’s guards spent long hours playing chess. Those who knew English could read the few English books they had. Others listened to music on the radio or invented games to kill time. On a few occasions Eli and Zev organized apple-eating competitions and the consumption of apples at Tira reached gigantic proportions.
The evening of May 15 I visited Tira, taking stringent security precautions coming and going. I noticed nothing about the outside appearance of the house to give any indication of the drama being enacted within – it differed in no way from the other houses in the area.
We were all pleased to see each other. I hadn’t seen most of the men since the day of the operation, and this was my first opportunity to congratulate them on their achievement. I told them I intended to take Eichmann to Israel by plane, but promptly added that if my plan failed we would be forced to hold him until we could transport him by sea. I felt I could almost touch their shock and dismay.
Before I went into Eichmann’s room I listened to Kenet’s detailed report on his latest talks with the prisoner. Lately, he said, Eichmann had begun expressing regret for all he had done to the Jews during the war. He described himself as a small cog in the mighty and tyrannical machinery of the Nazi regime, and he claimed that he was unable to exert any influence on its decisions; but now he realized that serious crimes had been committed against the Jewish people, and he was prepared to do all he could to prevent any recurrence of such things. He was prepared, consequently, to report to the world all the atrocities perpetrated during the war, as a warning and deterrent to the rest of humanity.
Since Eichmann didn’t deny his crimes but merely sought to minimize their importance, I asked Kenet to question him about his attitude toward standing trial. It was at this point that I suggested that we try to obtain his written consent to travel to Israel and stand trial there. Not for an instant did I suppose that such a document would have any
legal validity when the question was raised of our right to try a man after abducting him to Israel. Nevertheless, I attached a certain ethical importance to such a statement.
Eichmann told Kenet he was ready in principle to stand trial for his part in the crimes committed under Nazi rule, but he wanted the trial to take place in Germany, since he was a German citizen. When he was told that he had to rule out any such possibility he made a slight concession and agreed to be tried in Austria, the country of his birth. Kenet explained that we would consider no country but Israel as the venue for his trial, because that was now the home of the majority of those who had suffered from his actions, as well as most of the witnesses who would appear at his trial. Israel, he was told, is the legitimate representative of the Jewish people, and as the point at issue deals with crimes against the Jewish people only Israel is qualified to pass judgment. I promised that he would have a proper trial according to all the rules of law, and that he could be represented by counsel and defend himself by all legal means. After a long discussion, in which Eichmann was told repeatedly and emphatically that we wanted him to sign the document of his own free will and would not use coercion to make him sign it, he asked for twenty-four hours to consider his reply. His request was granted.
When I actually saw Eichmann for the first time, I was amazed at my reaction. I didn’t respond to the sight of him with the loathing and hatred my people had described to me. My first thought was, Well now, doesn’t he look just like any other man! I don’t know how I imagined a man who had massacred millions would look. All I know is that I kept saying to myself, If I met him in the street I would see no difference between him and the thousands of other men passing by. And I kept asking myself, What makes such a creature, created in the likeness of man, into a monster? Is there no outward sign that distinguishes him from normal men? Or is the difference only in the corrupt soul?
