The Nazi Hunters

by Neal Bascomb

  With each challenge, with each victory, he grew a little more obsessive about his work, a little more convinced of its importance, and a little more drawn to the power he held over life and death. Jews were no longer human beings, no longer even units to be moved from one place to another. Jews were a disease. “They were stealing the breath of life from us,” he wrote.

  With this letter, dated March 11, 1942, Eichmann ordered the deportation of six thousand Jews from France to Auschwitz.

  In August 1944, with the war going poorly for Germany, the Nazi leadership came to see the Jews as much-needed bargaining chips. Eichmann thought that this was weakness. When the Russians took Romania, Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of the entire Final Solution, shelved the plans for Jewish deportation, and Eichmann was ordered to disband his unit. He refused. Neither an Allied bombing nor a threat by an American president nor even Hitler himself was going to divert him from completing his masterpiece: the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The Jews needed to be eradicated, and Eichmann was the one who would see it through to the end.

  He stayed in Budapest, waiting for his chance to get back to work. He dined at fashionable restaurants and drank himself into a stupor at cabarets. While away from his wife, Vera, and their three sons, he had two steady mistresses: one a rich, thirty-year-old divorcée, the other the consort of a Hungarian count. He went horse-riding and took his jeep out to the countryside. He spent weekends at castles or just stayed in his villa, with its lavish gardens and retinue of servants.

  In late October, with the Russians only a hundred miles from the city, Eichmann made one last bid to finish what he had started. “You see, I’m back again,” he declared to the capital’s Jewish leaders. There were no trains to take the Jews the 125 miles to the labor camps in Austria because of the bombing raids, so Eichmann sent twenty-seven thousand people, including children and the sick, off on foot.

  With few provisions and no shelter, the weak soon began falling behind. They were either shot or left to die in roadside ditches. It was intentional slaughter, something that Himmler had ordered must now stop. Yet even when Eichmann was given a direct order by a superior officer to call off the march, he ignored it.

  At last, in early December, Himmler himself summoned Eichmann to his headquarters in the Black Forest of Germany. “If until now you have killed Jews,” he told Eichmann, in a tone laced with anger, “from now on, I order you, you must be a fosterer of Jews…. If you are not able to do that, you must tell me so!”

  “Yes, Reichsführer,” Eichmann answered obediently.

  When Zeev Sapir arrived in Auschwitz in May 1944, he was beaten, stripped, deloused, shaved, and tattooed with a number on his left forearm: A3800. The next morning he was forced to work in the gas chambers, where he suspected his family had been killed the previous day. Zeev dragged out the dead and placed them on their backs in the yard, where a barber cut off their hair and a dental mechanic ripped out any gold teeth. Then he carried the corpses to large pits, where they were stacked like logs and burned to ashes. A channel running through the middle of the pit drained the fat from the bodies — fat that was then used to fuel the crematorium fires. The smoke was thick, the flames dark red.

  As the months passed, Zeev lost track of time. He never knew what day of the week it was, or even what hour of the day. The Germans regularly killed workers like him so as to keep their activities secret. Somehow he escaped execution. Eventually, he was sent to Jaworzno, a satellite camp of Auschwitz, where he went to work in the Dachsgrube coal mines. He had to fill forty-five wagons of coal every twelve-hour shift or receive twenty-five lashes. He often fell short.

  Jewish laborers are forced to work in a mine near Lodz, Poland.

  Then it was winter. Curled into a ball on his bunk one morning, Zeev could not stop shivering. The December wind whistled through the gaps in the hut’s walls. He had swapped his spare shirt for a loaf of bread, and his clothes hung loosely in rags on his skeletal body. At 4:30 A.M., a siren sounded, and Zeev leapt down from his bunk. He hurried outside with the hundred other prisoners from his hut, completely exposed now to the bitter wind, and they marched off to the mines.

  When Zeev returned to the camp that evening, bone weary and coated with coal dust, he and the other three thousand prisoners were ordered back out on a march. The Red Army was advancing into Poland, the SS guards told them. Zeev did not much care. He was told to walk, so he would walk. That attitude — and a lot of luck — had kept him alive for eight months.

  They trudged through deep snow for two days, not knowing where they were going. Anyone who slowed down or stopped for a rest was shot dead. As night fell on the second day, they reached Bethune, a town in eastern Poland, and were told to sit by the side of the road. The commanding officer strode down the line, saying, “Whoever is unable to continue may remain here, and he will be transferred by truck.” Zeev had learned not to believe such promises, but he was too tired, too cold, and too indifferent to care. He and two hundred other prisoners stayed put while the rest marched away.

  Zeev slept where he had fallen in the snow. In the morning, his group was ordered out to a field with shovels and pickaxes and told to dig. The earth was frozen, but they dug and dug, even though they knew they were digging their own graves.

  That evening, they were taken to the dining hall at a nearby mine. All the windows had been blown out by air raids. A number of SS officers followed them inside, led by a deputy officer named Lausmann. “Yes, I know you are so hungry,” he said in a sympathetic tone as a large pot was brought into the hall.

  The most desperate pushed to the front, hoping for food. Lausmann grabbed one of them, leaned him over the pot, and shot him in the neck. Then he reached for the next one. He fired and fired. One young prisoner began making a speech to anyone who would listen. “The German people will answer to history for this,” he declared. Then he received a bullet as well.

  Lausmann continued to fire until there were only eleven prisoners left, Zeev among them. Before he could be summoned forward, Lausmann was called away by his superior officer. He did not return. The guards took the remaining prisoners by train to the Gleiwitz concentration camp, where they were thrown into a cellar filled with potatoes. Starving, they ate the frozen, raw potatoes.

  The next morning, with thousands of others, they were marched out to the forest. Suddenly, machine guns opened fire on them. Zeev ran through the trees until his legs gave out. His fall knocked him unconscious. He woke up alone, with a bloody foot and only one shoe. When the Russian army found him later that day, he weighed sixty-four pounds. His skin was as yellow and dry as parchment. It was January 1945, and he would not regain anything close to physical health until April.

  Zeev Sapir never forgot the promise Eichmann made in the Munkács ghetto or the call to justice by his fellow prisoner the moment before his execution. But many, many years would pass before he was brought forward to remember these things.

  In the few remaining hours before the Allies’ final attack on Berlin in April 1945, Adolf Eichmann returned to his German office and gathered his dejected unit together. He bid them good-bye, saying that he knew the war was lost and that they should do what they could to stay alive. Then he said, “I will gladly and happily jump into the pit with the knowledge that with me are 5 million enemies of the Reich.” Five million was the number of Jews Eichmann estimated had been killed in his Holocaust.

  On May 2, he went to the lakeside village of Altaussee, Austria, in the narrow wooded valley at the foot of the Dachstein and Totengebirge mountains, where he met up with his family. The village was teeming with Nazi Party leaders and members of the Gestapo. A few days later, an orderly arrived with a directive from Himmler: “It is prohibited to fire on Englishmen and Americans.” The war was over.

  Eichmann knew that the Allies would brand him a war criminal, and he was determined to avoid capture. He said good-bye to his wife, Vera, and told her that he would contact her again when he had settled somewhere
safe. Then he went out to the lake, where his sons — Nikolas (who was known as Klaus and who was nine years old), Horst (five), and Dieter (three) — were playing. Little Dieter slipped and fell into the lake. Eichmann fished his son out of the water, took him over his knee, and slapped him hard several times. Over Dieter’s yells, Eichmann shouted at him not to go near the water. He might never see his boys again, he thought; it was best to leave them with a bit of discipline. Then he embraced them in turn.

  “Be brave and look after the children,” he told Vera.

  As he hiked away into the mountains, Eichmann was far from prepared to be a man on the run. He had little money, no safe house, and no forged papers. Unlike some of his SS comrades, he had not salted away a fortune in gold and foreign currency. Now he regretted that he had not kept the bribes he took from the Jewish leaders, who would have given him everything they had in exchange for their lives.

  “Have you heard of Adolf Eichmann?” asked a captain of the Jewish Brigade, a British army unit.

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

  “Better look it up,” the captain replied.

  It was mid-June 1945. Only four weeks earlier, weighing ninety-seven pounds, Wiesenthal had staggered out of a barracks at the Mauthausen concentration camp to see 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 and taken his wife, and he had suffered such terror on his body and mind that he had twice attempted to kill himself.

  After his liberation, Wiesenthal was afraid that if he did not go after those responsible for the slaughter, he would have nothing to live for. He sent a letter to the chief investigator of an American army war-crimes unit, chronicling the twelve concentration camps he had survived and listing the names, ranks, and crimes of ninety-one Nazis. The investigator hired him immediately. Wiesenthal captured more than a dozen SS members with the army unit before he was transferred to the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), based in Linz, Austria.

  Simon Wiesenthal in the 1960s.

  Now Wiesenthal searched through the files at the OSS headquarters. There was limited information on Eichmann, but he noted the name so that he could make future inquiries. In the month that followed, he heard little more than rumors about Eichmann from former Mauthausen inmates. Then, in late July, he was given a list of war criminals’ names by the Jewish Agency for Palestine (a forerunner of the Israeli government). The name Eichmann topped the list, stating that he was a “high official of Gestapo headquarters, Department of Jewish Affairs.” Wiesenthal knew that this meant Eichmann had been instrumental in running the extermination camps.

  A few evenings later, at his apartment on Landstrasse 40, just two doors down from the OSS office in Linz, Wiesenthal sat at his desk, looking at his own list of names. Eichmann was now underscored for emphasis.

  His landlady entered to clean his room and peered over his shoulder. “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.”

  On July 28, two OSS agents were at the elder Eichmanns’ door. They questioned 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. A search of the house failed to deliver a single photograph. “Is there a picture?” one of them asked, suspicious that the man was hiding something.

  “He never liked to be photographed,” answered Eichmann’s father.

  The Nazi hunters were on Eichmann’s trail, and finding a photograph for identification purposes was high on their list. In 1947, Jewish agent Manus Diamant was given the task. Handsome as a movie star, and with all the charm of one, Diamant could play any undercover role with ease. Using the story that he was a former Dutch SS officer by the name of Henry van Diamant, he earned the confidence of Eichmann’s wife, Vera, who was still living in Altaussee, and he wooed several of Eichmann’s mistresses in his efforts to gather information.

  Undercover agent Manus Diamant.

  Vera Eichmann was very guarded and offered no hint of her husband’s whereabouts — or even whether he was alive. None of Eichmann’s mistresses had as much as a snapshot of him. Then Diamant tracked down Fräulein Maria Mösenbacher. An attractive, frivolous woman, Mösenbacher often bragged of her relationship with “Adolf,” the high-ranking SS officer. For a week Diamant followed her, noting when she went to the hairdresser, the grocer, and the post office. When some groceries fell from her basket one day, he was there to pick them up. He introduced himself with a smile. “Henry van Diamant.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Maria … Thank you.” Diamant tipped his hat and offered to walk her home. Over the next few weeks, he gained her trust. They met for coffee, then dinner, then a walk in the country. One evening, he deliberately let his wallet fall open to show his forged Dutch SS identification. He bought her blouses and chocolates. To convince her of his interest in photography, he gave her some landscape shots he said he had taken himself but which he had in fact bought.

  Then, one night, a few weeks after they had met, he brought an album of “family photos” (all bought) to her apartment. “I also have one,” Mösenbacher said, taking a gold-edged album from a shelf. She thumbed through the pages, pointing out pictures of her family. For weeks, Diamant had tolerated this vapid woman, who spoke viciously about the Jews, all to arrive at this point. He prayed that she had a photograph of Eichmann.

  “You know, I had many admirers.” Maria stopped at a photo of a man in his early thirties with a long, sharp nose and pursed lips. “This is Adolf … He was my boyfriend. Who knows what happened to him!? He probably didn’t survive the war, otherwise he would surely have been in touch.”

  Diamant sat through two more hours of Maria’s unpleasant company. The next morning the police seized the album on the pretense that they had received a tip that Mösenbacher was hiding stolen ration cards in it. Diamant could not keep his hands from trembling when he held the photograph.

  Hundreds of copies were made and distributed to police and Allied investigators throughout Europe. Diamant himself delivered a copy to Simon Wiesenthal, who told him, “Now we know what he looks like. This is the first step in getting him.”

  Yet despite the photograph’s wide distribution, there were no further clues to Eichmann’s whereabouts.

  Diamant was angry at the lack of progress. He continued to spend time with the Eichmann family in the hope of learning something new. A few months after his success with Maria Mösenbacher, he was out on the lake with Eichmann’s three sons, who called him “Uncle Henry.” Sitting in the boat, Diamant became overwhelmed by memories of the war: children taken from their mothers’ arms, Jews fleeing through the streets, shootings and shootings and shootings.

  When his mind cleared, he found himself gripping one of the oars and staring at Dieter Eichmann, who was laughing and playing in the summer sunshine. Diamant had an urge to strike the child down in revenge — and the other two boys as well. Adolf Eichmann deserved to pay at least this price for what he had done, he silently raged. But then he relaxed his grasp on the oar and returned to shore.

  Vera greeted him on his return, commenting that he looked strained.

  “Nothing happened,” Diamant said. “The children all behaved very well.”

  He swore never to go back to the house.

  A youthful Vera Eichmann, undated.

  That December, Diamant left Austria, bound for Palestine. The United Nations resolution of November 27, 1947, had partitioned the territory for the establishment of a Jewish state. War was coming with the Arab states that opposed
the creation of Israel, and Diamant knew where he wanted to be.

  It was also clear to Simon Wiesenthal that the rest of the world was moving on. The start of the Cold War with the USSR drained the will and resources of the Allies away from pursuing Nazi war criminals. Justice took a backseat to preventing the spread of Communism. Wiesenthal hoped that the new state of Israel would support his continuing efforts.

  Late in 1953, Wiesenthal 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 upset he was that former Nazis were regaining high positions in the German government as if “nothing had changed.” From his desk drawer, the baron passed Wiesenthal a letter from a German air force 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 read its contents: “There are some people here we both used to know … 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 write down 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, the photograph, and a chronicle of the eight-year search for him. Wiesenthal insisted that if the Israelis followed the trail, they would find Eichmann.