The Nazi Hunters

by Neal Bascomb

  As the months passed without word from Israel, Wiesenthal became angry over the prospect that no action would be taken, but there was little he could do. He did not have the funds to go to Buenos Aires himself, nor did he speak Spanish. In addition, the Argentine government welcomed former Nazis and was largely hostile to Jews. Even if he found Eichmann, Wiesenthal knew that he would not be able to arrest him and get him out of the country. Still, he held out hope that the Israelis would take some action.

  On March 30, 1954, that hope was lost as well. The Israeli consul met with Wiesenthal and told him that the Israelis did not have the resources to check out every rumor. They had enough to worry about in building the new nation and dealing with escalating tensions with Egypt. They needed to focus on the future, not on the past.

  Soon after, Wiesenthal closed his office. He packed his papers and shipped the boxes, weighing almost twelve hundred pounds, to a museum in Israel. He kept a copy of the Eichmann file, but he was finished with chasing down this phantom about whom nobody else seemed to care. His disappointment at failing to find the war criminal kept him awake at night and haunted him through the day.

  And so the hunt for Eichmann was abandoned and the trail went cold.

  One December afternoon in 1956, Sylvia Hermann brought her new boyfriend, Nick, home to meet her parents. The family lived in Olivos, a mostly German suburb in the Vicente López district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sylvia had met Nick Eichmann at one of the local dance halls and had been out with him a few times. The introductions were made in German, and the young man sought out Sylvia’s father’s hand to shake it.

  Over dinner, they spoke about Germany. Nick boasted how his father had been a high-ranking officer in the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces. The talk turned to the fate of the Jews. “It would have been better if the Germans had finished the job,” Nick declared.

  Lothar remained silent, though the statement stung. His dinner guest was unaware that Lothar was half-Jewish and had been imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp for socialist activities in 1936. Fearful of the increasing Jewish persecution, he had emigrated with his Christian wife to Argentina soon after Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Hitler’s thugs had ransacked Jewish shops and homes. To avoid prejudice from the Argentine German community, Lothar had hidden his background. Sylvia had been raised a Christian, and few people, even close friends, knew of Lothar’s Jewish lineage or that he had lost his sight as a result of Gestapo beatings.

  Lothar Hermann in 1937, before he emigrated to Argentina.

  Lothar quickly moved the conversation in another direction, avoiding an awkward scene. It was not as though the boy were alone in holding his opinion. During the war, the streets of Buenos Aires had been crowded with people raising Nazi banners and repeating Hitler’s hateful philosophy. The defeat of Germany in World War II had not suddenly erased these sentiments.

  Not long after, Sylvia ended her relationship with Nick. A few months later, the Hermanns moved from Olivos to Coronel Suárez, a village in the Pampas a few hundred miles southwest of Buenos Aires. Lothar started a new law practice, helping workers to apply for their retirement pensions. Sylvia had hopes of attending a university in the United States, but for the time being she was happy living with her parents.

  One day, Sylvia was reading the newspaper Argentinisches Tageblatt to her father when she came across an article about a war-crimes trial in Frankfurt. One of the individuals listed as still being at large was the SS officer responsible for overseeing the mass murder of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann.

  Sylvia stopped reading and looked up. Both she and Lothar immediately recalled the night when Nick Eichmann had talked openly about his father having served Germany well and how the Jewish people should have been exterminated. Sylvia put down the newspaper and told her father that Nick had never spoken much about his family, just that his mother had remarried after the war. She did not know if his father was alive. She had never been invited to Nick’s home, nor did she even know where it was.

  Lothar knew that many Nazis had escaped to Argentina after the collapse of the Third Reich, and he was certain that Nick’s father was the war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He had to alert somebody, to do something. If he reached out to the German embassy in Buenos Aires, he was sure they would inform Eichmann, allowing him to escape again. Instead, he decided to write a letter to the German prosecutor mentioned in the newspaper article, Fritz Bauer, and to tell him that Adolf Eichmann was alive and well and living in Buenos Aires.

  Fritz Bauer in 1964.

  Fritz Bauer was the Attorney General of the state of Hesse and the bulldog of the West German court system. The son of a Jewish textile dealer, in 1933 he was sentenced to nine months in a concentration camp for his political activities. After his release, he fled to Denmark, but he returned after the war, convinced that it was his duty to help foster the new democracy.

  Bauer replied to the Hermanns’ letter and sent a few photographs of Adolf Eichmann, among which was the one Manus Diamant had found years before. Along with the photographs, Bauer included Eichmann’s description and family details. The names and ages of Klaus and his brother Dieter matched those of the Eichmann boys Sylvia had met. She and Lothar were certain that they were Eichmann’s sons. The question was whether their father was alive and sharing their house.

  A few weeks later, Sylvia walked down Chacabuco Street in Buenos Aires. She and her father had taken the ten-hour train journey in from Coronel Suárez, then Sylvia had a long bus ride out to Nick Eichmann’s neighborhood, where she hoped to find him and meet his father. She checked the numbers on each house until she reached 4261 Chacabuco.

  Sylvia Hermann, undated.

  The white bungalow at that address was typical of the area. It was no bigger than a few rooms and had a slanted terra-cotta roof. Sylvia went through the gate and knocked on the front door. As she waited for an answer, she spotted someone peeking through the curtains.

  Several moments passed.

  Sylvia stood at the door, knowing there was nobody to help her if things went wrong. She tried to appear as calm as possible while she waited.

  Then a short, stout woman with a toddler in her arms opened the door. Sylvia introduced herself as a friend of Nick’s. The woman said that she was his mother and cautiously welcomed the girl in the blue dress inside, asking if she wanted some coffee and cake.

  “Yes,” Sylvia said, and thanked her. Dieter was in the room, and she smiled at him. “Is Nick home?”

  “No, he left an hour ago,” Dieter replied.

  As Sylvia sat down, a man wearing glasses came into the room. She guessed he was in his sixties, as Adolf Eichmann would have been. He walked with his head bent slightly forward, as if he was inspecting a scuff on the toe of his shoe.

  “Good afternoon,” Sylvia said.

  He bowed slightly and said in perfect German, “Pleased to meet you, young lady.”

  “Are you Mr. Eichmann?” Sylvia asked bravely.

  He did not answer.

  “Are you Nick’s father?”

  The man hesitated before saying, “No … I’m his uncle.” His biting tone matched the description that Sylvia had read in Bauer’s letter, but the photograph had been of a much younger man and was too blurry for her to be certain of his identity.

  Nervous that she had pushed it too far, Sylvia steered the conversation to how she had recently graduated from high school and planned on studying foreign languages at a university. She asked the man if he spoke English or French, and he admitted knowing a few words of French from his time in Belgium during the war. The conversation soon trailed off, but he had relaxed a bit.

  Before Nick’s mother brought in the coffee, Nick himself came through the door. He was shocked to see Sylvia in his living room. “Who gave you my address? Who said you could visit me?”

  Sylvia answered that a mutual friend had given her his address and that she had just wanted to see him while she was in Buenos Aires. “Did I do some
thing wrong?” she asked.

  The older man said there was no problem and that she was most welcome. Nick fell silent.

  Wanting to leave as quickly as possible, Sylvia said that she had to go but that she hoped to return for a longer visit soon. There was an awkward moment of silence as the older man led Nick and Sylvia to the door.

  “Thank you, Father,” said Nick. “I’ll see Sylvia to the bus.”

  While walking toward the bus station, Sylvia said that she was pleased to have met Nick’s family. They walked some more, and then she asked the obvious question: Why had Nick addressed his uncle as “Father”?

  Nick dismissed the question, explaining that it was merely a sign of respect. At the station, she said good-bye and watched him leave. The farther away he got, the safer she felt.

  She hurried to meet her father and recounted everything that had happened at the house. They agreed to write to Bauer again with the story. It was plain to them that the man at the house was Nick Eichmann’s father, not his uncle, and, given the other matching details, that he was without a doubt the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann.

  Letters from Lothar Hermann to Fritz Bauer, 1957–8.

  Near the crystal-blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the village of Sarona, Israel, stood an old stone house with a red tile roof. It looked like any other house in the Tel Aviv historic quarter, and none of the people who passed its door gave the place a second thought. Nor did they notice the spark plug of a man who came and went from it throughout the day.

  At 5 feet 2, with jug ears and slate-blue eyes, he sometimes wore a neat, inexpensive suit, sometimes his shirt open to his thick chest. If anyone overheard him speaking — which would happen only if he wanted to be heard — they would hear short, sharp machine-gun bursts of Hebrew spoken with a slight Eastern European accent. He walked with a lively step and a straight back, looking like he always had a place to go. Israel was a young country populated by many people with a strong sense of purpose, and he was one of them.

  The man was Isser Harel, Chief of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, better known as the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence agency. The old stone house was the organization’s headquarters.

  Spymaster Isser Harel in 1965.

  Harel was the youngest son of Orthodox Jews from Vitebsk, in central Russia. The family’s prosperous business was seized after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and they moved to Latvia, where a young Isser survived his harsh new surroundings on the strength of his fists, a sphinxlike calm, and an omnivorous reading habit — everything from Russian classics to detective stories to Zionist literature. At sixteen, he decided to emigrate to Palestine. He obtained forged identity papers and traveled to Jaffa, the ancient port city at the southern end of Tel Aviv, with a small gun and a pocketful of bullets. When British officials searched the ship’s passengers for weapons, Harel easily passed inspection, his revolver and ammunition hidden in a hollowed-out loaf of bread.

  In 1942, fearing that Hitler might attack Palestine, Harel enlisted in the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization. He was recruited to its intelligence service, the Shai. They ran a network of informants and spies, stole records, tapped phones, decoded messages, and built up weapons caches. Though not as educated or cultured as many Shai agents, Harel quickly took to the trade. He soon learned to read, interpret, and remember the most important details of an operational file, and he earned a reputation as a bloodhound, capable of tireless work digging up the smallest details. In 1947, he was promoted to run Shai operations in Tel Aviv, where he developed an extensive network of Arab informants.

  On the eve of May 14, 1948, as David Ben-Gurion prepared to announce the creation of an independent Jewish state, Harel personally carried a message to him from an informant: “Abdullah is going to war — that’s certain. The tanks are ready to go. The Arab Legion will attack tomorrow.” Ben-Gurion sent several Israeli army units to establish a defense against the forces of King Abdullah I of Jordan, thwarting their surprise attack. Harel had earned the leader’s attention.

  Two months later, while Israel was still in the midst of war with Arab forces on all sides, Harel joined the other four section heads at Shai headquarters to reorganize Israeli intelligence and espionage operations. He was selected to run the Shin Bet, the internal security service (similar to the American FBI). The Arab forces withdrew in 1949, setting the legal boundaries of Israel where they are today. In 1952, Harel took over the Mossad.

  Now, on a late September day in 1957, Harel had a rushed meeting at a nearby café with the Israeli Foreign Minister. The minister had urgent news from Germany that he did not want to share over the telephone: “Adolf Eichmann is alive, and his address in Argentina is known.”

  When he got back to his office, Harel tasked his secretary to retrieve whatever files they had on Eichmann. He had heard that the Nazi had played a leading role in the Holocaust and that there had been many rumors as to his whereabouts over the years. But that was all he knew.

  The Mossad’s lack of activity in pursuing war criminals reflected a lack of interest within Israeli society in general. Holocaust survivors, roughly a quarter of the population, rarely spoke of their experiences, both because it was too painful and because they did not want to focus on the past. They had a country to build.

  Harel himself was haunted by what the Nazis had done to the Jewish people. The state of Israel existed in part to make sure that the Holocaust was never repeated. But he had never delved too deeply into the history of the genocide. His eighteen-hour working days were otherwise occupied.

  Now he sat in silence with the Eichmann dossier his secretary had brought him. He read transcripts from the Nuremberg trials of high-ranking Nazis, SS files, testimony from Eichmann’s staff members, and numerous reports of Eichmann’s whereabouts.

  Harel was completely unnerved by the portrait he formed. It was clear to him that Eichmann must be an expert in intelligence methods: He had managed to elude his pursuers for years. If they were going to bring this man to the justice he deserved, Harel knew one thing: They would need much more than an extradition request to the proper authorities in Argentina.

  The first step was to see if the information that the Foreign Minister had given Harel in the café checked out. Harel wanted to know more about the minister’s German contact, Fritz Bauer, and whether he was a reliable individual with whom to work. He decided to send one of his agents to Frankfurt to meet with him.

  Pleased at the rapid Israeli response, Bauer explained that his source, whom he did not name, had given him facts about Eichmann that matched known details of his life, particularly regarding his family. The source had also provided an address where the family was living with a man of the same age as Eichmann. Bauer was willing to do whatever it took to get to Eichmann — even to risk his position as attorney general — and Harel concluded that his tip was solid.

  In January 1958, he sent another operative, Yoel Goren, to the address Bauer had given him: 4261 Chacabuco Street in Olivos, Buenos Aires. Goren had spent several years in South America and spoke fluent Spanish. Harel warned him to be cautious, fearing that the slightest error might cause Eichmann to run again.

  Over the course of a week, Goren went to Olivos several times. Chacabuco Street was an untrafficked, unpaved road, and strangers were eyed suspiciously. This made surveillance a challenge, but what Goren saw convinced him that there was little chance Adolf Eichmann lived there. The house was more suited to a single unskilled laborer than the family of a man who had once held a prominent position in the Third Reich. Adolf Eichmann was supposed to have extorted the fortunes of Europe’s greatest Jewish families, not to mention the more limited wealth of many thousands of others. It seemed unlikely he could have been reduced to such poor quarters, even in hiding.

  After taking several pictures of the house, Goren returned to Tel Aviv and reported to Harel that he had not seen anyone resembling Eichmann’s description enter or leave while the house was under his surveillanc
e. In his estimation, Adolf Eichmann could not possibly live in that “wretched little house” on Chacabuco Street.

  Harel was now skeptical about Bauer’s source and insisted on knowing his identity before getting more involved. Bauer agreed to write to Lothar Hermann to set up a meeting. When this was arranged, Harel sent the head of criminal investigations from the Tel Aviv police, Ephraim Hofstetter, to meet with Hermann.

  Harel had tremendous faith in Hofstetter, a sober professional with twenty years of police experience. Polish by birth, Hofstetter had lost his parents and sister to the Holocaust. He spoke German fluently and could easily pretend to be working for Bauer — an important consideration, as Harel did not want the Eichmann investigation to be connected to Israel in any way. He told Hofstetter to find out how exactly Hermann knew about Eichmann, whether he was reliable, and whether he was holding anything back. He also asked him to identify the residents at 4261 Chacabuco.

  Hofstetter arrived in Buenos Aires at the end of February, wearing winter clothes, only to discover that it was in fact the height of Argentina’s summer. He was greeted outside the airport terminal by the laughter of a pale man with a bald pink head: Ephraim Ilani.

  Ilani was a Mossad agent who had taken a leave of absence to study the history of Jewish settlements in Argentina. Fluent in Spanish (as well as nine other languages), Ilani knew the country well and had a wide network of friends and contacts in Buenos Aires thanks to his easy humor and gregarious nature. Harel had asked him to work closely with Hofstetter, who spoke only a few words of Spanish.

  The two journeyed by overnight train to Coronel Suárez. The following morning, they stepped onto the platform of a dilapidated station. Apart from a single road bordered on either side by wooden houses, the remote town was little more than a stopping-off point before the endless grasslands of the Pampas. It was hard to imagine a less obvious place for a clue to Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts.