Hunting Eichmann Read online

  The more territory the Nazis occupied, the more Jews came under their control, which meant career opportunities for Eichmann. When Germany seized Poland in September 1939, Heinrich Müller, the new Gestapo chief, assigned Eichmann to run the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the department responsible for forced deportations of Jews to the edges of German-occupied territory. Emigration was out; deportation was in. After the invasion of Poland, the act that precipitated the Allies' declaration of war, Eichmann's first major task was to resettle 500,000 Poles to make room for ethnic Germans. He was by then adept at uprooting communities and arranging their transportation, but his chief problem was finding places to send them. He formulated a proposal to resettle millions of Jews in Madagascar, a plan brutal in its scope and execution, but one that fell apart due to the vacillation of his superior officers. Nevertheless, Eichmann had proved himself to be an essential part of any planning to do with the Jewish problem.

  In the meantime, Jewish families who had been ripped from their homes across Poland and other territories seized by the Germans languished in ghettos and labor camps. But their suffering and deaths were increasingly irrelevant to Eichmann. They were a logistical problem that required solving.

  In the late summer of 1941, Heydrich summoned Eichmann to Berlin and told him, "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." Hitler had already mandated the slaughter of Jews in the invasion of the Soviet Union, but now he wanted the same fate extended to every European Jew. Eichmann was sent to report on localized killing operations already under way in Poland under the direction of SS police chief Odilo Globocnik, as well as those conducted by the Einsatzgruppen, death squads organized by Heydrich to follow the Wehrmacht into eastern Europe and Russia to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and any other "enemies" of the Reich. Near Lodz, men, women, and children were rounded up and loaded into vans into which the vehicles' exhaust fumes were pumped. In Minsk, they were forced into pits, ordered to strip, and then shot by the hundreds. Despite his feelings toward Jews, Eichmann was unnerved by what he saw and told Müller as much. This was no longer a "political solution," Eichmann said. At the same time, he feared that the new policy would obviate the need for his department. This fear of losing his position and power outweighed his misgivings, and after further consideration, he accepted the necessity of ridding Europe of the Jews through extermination.

  On January 20, 1942, Heydrich gathered fifteen leading Reich officials with an interest in the Jewish problem at a lakeside villa in Wannsee, a suburb southwest of Berlin. The agenda was to create systematic plans for the Final Solution and to centralize them under the SS. Eichmann prepared briefings on anti-Jewish measures, deportations, and a country-by-country breakdown of the 11 million Jews targeted for extermination. He also took the meeting minutes. Later, he drank brandy with Heydrich and Müller, toasting their leadership, as they sat beside a fire and gazed out at the falling snow.

  Though only recently promoted to lieutenant colonel, Eichmann was entrusted with being the "competent official" in charge of coordinating all matters related to the Final Solution at the RSHA. He dispensed with any remaining guilt and discomfort he might have felt about being involved in the mass murder by telling himself that his bosses, "the Popes," had "given their orders."

  Eichmann took on his new job with characteristic vigor. He had not set the policy of annihilation, he reasoned, but it was his responsibility to manage its successful execution. The more Jews he brought to the extermination camps, the better he looked to his superiors and the better, he thought, he served the Reich. He excelled in his task, delivering millions of Jews throughout Europe to their deaths. But with each challenge, with each victory, he grew more obsessive about his work, more convinced of its importance, and more drawn to the power he held over life and death. A Jew was no longer a person, nor even a unit to be moved from one place to another. Judaism was a disease that threatened every German. "They were stealing the breath of life from us," he wrote. They needed to be eradicated, and he was the one who would see it through to the end. In Hungary, Eichmann reached the height of his barbarity. He was a living testament to the adage "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

  While looking out over Salzburg in May 1945, Eichmann strove to deny who he had become, but he was not so deluded as to think that the Allies would not hunt him down, particularly given the unusually public role he had played in Hungary. He was keen to return to Germany, knowing there was a better chance of avoiding detection there than in Austria, where he had spent most of his life. But it would not be easy. From his vantage point by the castle, he could see Americans guarding all the roads leading into and out of Salzburg.

  He recruited a local nurse to help him and Jänisch escape. She walked them to the checkpoint and told the Americans that these two Luftwaffe corporals were poor and wanted only to return to their country. The guards let them pass.

  Eichmann and Jänisch then needed to cross the German border to gain entry into Bavaria. Crouching out of sight by the highway, they watched a funeral cortège and some mourners accompanied by soldiers cross the border without so much as a question from the Americans. But when Eichmann and Jänisch attempted to follow them, the two were stopped. This time, one of the soldiers inspected them more thoroughly and discovered the quarter-inch-long black tattoo on the underside of Eichmann's left arm indicating his blood type. Under his breath, Eichmann cursed Himmler for requiring the tattoos for SS members. While in the mountains, he had tried to burn his off with a lit cigarette, but it was still distinguishable.

  The men were taken by truck to a well-guarded detention camp. Eichmann presented himself as Waffen-SS sergeant Barth, but over the next few days, he could not fail to notice that the Americans treated the German officers better than the enlisted men. By the time he was interrogated by an American lieutenant who spoke German, he had concocted a new identity for himself.

  When asked his name, he responded, "Otto Eckmann." It was a name close enough to his own that he would answer to it even if distracted. Also, if someone he knew did call out his real name, it might not arouse the suspicion of the guards.

  "Rank?"

  "Second lieutenant, 22nd Waffen-SS Cavalry Division."

  "Born?"

  "Yes, of course," Eichmann said, with a glimmer of arrogance, but he added, "March 19, 1905. In Breslau."

  It was a year earlier than his actual birth date—simple to remember—and he had chosen Breslau because the city was in Russian hands and had been decimated by repeated bombing campaigns, which, he suspected, would have also destroyed any parish registers or official records.

  The American officer noted these details, and after asking a few basic questions about Eichmann's wartime service, he dismissed Eichmann and instructed him to go back to his work detail. The lieutenant had a whole German transport unit to question before the end of the day.

  During June, Eichmann and Jänisch were moved from temporary camp to temporary camp, living off combat rations and mourning the loss of the Third Reich. On the journeys between camps, Eichmann witnessed the ruins around him. Wrecked tanks and cars littered the roads, and twisted heaps of metal that had once been airplanes dotted the fields. Bridges had been destroyed and railway tracks severed, and most towns had suffered indiscriminate bombing campaigns, their buildings reduced to piles of rubble. None of this matched the human devastation. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them recently freed from concentration and slave labor camps, packed the roads and filled the villages the POWs passed through. Dressed in little more than rags, their tattered shoes stuffed with newspapers, they hunkered down in hollowed-out and blackened houses or walked in small groups toward some unknown destination, carrying what few possessions they had in cloth bags slung over their shoulders. They hastily dug graves on the sides of the road for forgotten corpses.

  At a camp in the Bavarian forest, Eichmann encountered a German officer named Rudolf Scheide, who was acting as an adjunct to the camp c
ommander. Obediently, Eichmann revealed his real name and explained that he wished to be registered under his assumed name, Eckmann. "It is your own business what you do with your name," Scheide told him dismissively. He was dealing with hundreds of POWs arriving by truck every day.

  In late June, Eichmann and Jänisch were loaded onto yet another transport and shipped off to yet another camp, at Weiden, fifty miles east of Nuremberg. This camp was a vast barbed-wire enclosure. A sea of soldiers, including more than 2,000 officers, occupied the camp, many of them sheltering in holes they had dug in the ground, as there were few tents. The soldiers used slit trenches for latrines, and there was little food and water for the thousands of men.

  Eichmann had fallen a long way since the days in his elegant villa overlooking Budapest, pampered by servants and drinking the finest of wines. Yet Weiden was nothing compared to where he had sent the "enemies of the Reich." While Otto Eckmann labored on his work detail, those enemies, the ones who had survived, were beginning to understand the nature of his position in the SS. Soon Adolf Eichmann would no longer be just one among tens of thousands sought for arrest. He would be a chief target.

  4

  "HAVE YOU HEARD of Adolf Eichmann?" Captain Choter-Ischai of the Jewish Brigade asked the man across from him, who was only beginning to fill out his tall, wide-shouldered frame after years in concentration camps.

  "I heard the name from some Hungarian Jews at Mauthausen," Simon Wiesenthal said. "It means nothing to me."

  "Better look it up," Choter-Ischai said, explaining that he had information that Eichmann was deeply involved in Jewish affairs in Berlin and should be arrested. "Unfortunately, he comes from our country. He was born in Palestine."

  After the captain left, Wiesenthal combed through the files at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) headquarters in Linz where he worked. The information on this Eichmann was scant. There was no first name, only a rank: lieutenant colonel. The entry detailed that Eichmann had been involved in actions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, and Hungary, but there was nothing specific. Wiesenthal noted the name so that he could make future inquiries and returned to his whirlwind of activities in mid-June 1945. Only four weeks before, weighing ninety-seven pounds, he had staggered out of the dark barracks at Mauthausen into the sunlight and seen a gray American tank coming through the entrance. He had collapsed at the sight.

  Before the Nazis stormed into Poland, Wiesenthal had been an architect with a rising reputation and a husband with hopes for a family of his own. The Nazis had killed his mother, had taken his wife, and he had suffered such terror on his body and mind that he twice had attempted to kill himself. At the war's end, he feared that if he did not go after those responsible, he would have nothing to live for. While recuperating in Mauthausen, the thirty-six-year-old implored an American army War Crimes Unit operating at the camp to hire him. In a letter to the chief, he chronicled the twelve concentration camps he had survived and offered the names and, remarkably, the ranks of ninety-one individuals, along with descriptions of their crimes: "SS Major-General Katzmann—Responsible for the death of at least 1 million people; Gestapo Commissar Shöls—Timekeeper and schedule-maker for mass killing throughout Galicia; Janowska Commandant Friedrich Warzok—A beast who liquidated at least 60,000 Jews and used to burn prisoners alive in their barracks; Plaszow SS guard Hujar—Winner of numerous wagers by sending one bullet through two heads at a time."

  The chief investigator hired Wiesenthal, giving him the power to arrest, and he captured more than a dozen SS members with the help of the American unit before he was transferred to the OSS. The American spy agency was also interested in arresting SS officials, albeit more for counterespionage efforts than for war crimes.

  In the month after Choter-Ischai informed him of Eichmann's name, Wiesenthal learned little more about the lieutenant colonel other than rumors from former Mauthausen inmates that he spoke Yiddish and Hebrew fluently. In late July, he traveled to Vienna to gather information for his investigations into former SS officers. He met with Gideon Raphael, a senior agent with the Brichah, the underground organization leading the exodus of Jews from Europe to Palestine in defiance of the British blockade. Raphael handed Wiesenthal a list of war criminals that the Jewish Agency for Palestine (forerunner of the Israeli government) had been compiling in earnest since 1944.

  The name Eichmann topped the list. Raphael had more information on Eichmann than the Allies did, though still no first name. His nickname was apparently Eichie. He was reported to be married with one child and had allegedly been born in Sarona, a German Templar colony in Palestine. Again, the report stated that he spoke Hebrew and Yiddish. Most important, it said that he was a "high official of Gestapo headquarters, Department of Jewish Affairs." Wiesenthal knew that this meant that Eichmann had been instrumental in running the extermination camps.

  After returning to Linz, Wiesenthal went straight to his boss, Captain O'Meara of the OSS, to discuss Eichmann.

  "He's the head of the Jewish branch of the Gestapo," O'Meara said. He encouraged Wiesenthal to track Eichmann down.

  Unbeknownst to Wiesenthal, the Allies had been collecting more and more information on Eichmann from their interrogations of captured SS officers, including some who had worked closely with him. They knew of his position as chief of the Jewish section of the Gestapo and the broad strokes of his activities.

  A few evenings later, at his apartment on Landstrasse 40, only two doors down from the OSS office, Wiesenthal sat at his desk, looking at his list of names. "Eichmann" was now underscored for emphasis. His landlady entered to clean his room and peered over his shoulder at the list.

  "Eichmann!" she exclaimed. "That must be the SS general Eichmann who was in command of the Jews. Did you know his parents live here in this street? Just a few houses along, at number 32!"

  An astonished Wiesenthal immediately informed the OSS, but he refused, when asked, to go to the house himself. He could not bear the thought of touching the same door handle as an individual who had had a hand in managing so much death.

  On July 28, two OSS agents descended on Landstrasse 32. They interrogated Eichmann's father, who reluctantly admitted that his son Adolf had been a member of the SS, but that was all he knew of his wartime activities. Adolf had visited near the end of the war, but his father had heard nothing from him since. The agents learned that he had been born in Solingen, Germany, not Palestine; that he had three children, not one; and that he was married to a woman named Vera Liebl. On a search of the house, they found not a single photograph of Adolf.

  "Is there a picture?" an OSS agent asked, suspicious that the man was hiding something.

  The older Eichmann shook his head. "He never liked to be photographed," he said.

  Standing in a line of SS men, Second Lieutenant Otto Eckmann waited nervously as Jewish camp survivors stared at his face to see if they recognized him. Armed American guards and Allied war crimes investigators looked on expectantly.

  Eichmann had passed the summer safely in his new identity, coming through several standard CIC interrogations on his wartime activities without a hitch. None of his answers had provoked further inquiry, and he spent his days stacking heavy ammunition in an air force warehouse. In late August, the Americans moved him to another camp located at Ober-Dachstetten, to the west of Nuremberg. His adjunct Jänisch was sent to a different camp. Eichmann was isolated among three hundred former SS officers and assigned to a work detail. Nobody there knew who he was.

  By late September, lineups of former Nazis were occurring more and more often. None of the survivors recognized Eichmann as they moved down the lines. Contrary to the very public strutting of most SS men, whether in the camps or overseeing deportations, Eichmann had preferred to remain in the shadows. Apart from his time in Vienna and Hungary, he had had his staff meet with Jewish representatives and execute his plans. He also had made a point of avoiding having his photograph taken. For his identity cards, he had alway
s used an official Gestapo photograph and destroyed the negatives. This earlier caution was paying off now. Nonetheless, he was sure that one day he would be discovered in one of the lineups.

  In October, Eichmann was called in for questioning at the CIC interrogation center in nearby Ansbach. He was certain he was in trouble when confronted by an experienced investigator who spoke perfect German and who knew the Byzantine intricacies of the SS well enough to catch Eichmann in a lie.

  Eichmann talked the investigator through his service, how he had been part of a Waffen-SS division that had battled the Russians outside Budapest, then had served under the famed General Sepp Dietrich in the defense of Vienna at the war's end. As to why he had come into the camp without any papers, Eichmann explained that he had destroyed them after his retreat from Vienna, following standard army procedure. The investigator stopped him several times, probing for military details that any Waffen-SS lieutenant should know but that Eichmann did not. Further, when the investigator put him under pressure, Eichmann could not help but reveal an arrogance that betrayed him as a more superior officer. When the interrogation ended, the investigator told Eichmann that his answers would be verified and that more interrogations were sure to follow.

  Even though Eichmann had provided information that would require time and travel to investigate, he feared that he had exposed himself. He returned to Ober-Dachstetten by military bus, shuddering to think how the camp's Polish guards would treat him if they learned his identity. Thoughts of suicide crept into his mind, and he even asked one of the other SS officers, who had been a pharmacist before the war, how much morphine he would need to kill himself. His desperation spiked on hearing that the Allies were about to parade the Third Reich's great leaders into a courtroom in Nuremberg.