Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  On December 19, 1945, the Fuldaer Volkszeitung told readers that “Höttl bases his information on the statement of one Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer who played a significant role in the extermination campaign.” “Höttl believes Eichmann’s information is correct as, in his position, he would have had the best overview of the numbers of murdered Jews. Eichmann directed the extermination camps via special commandos, and he also had a senior position in the Gestapo, giving him an insight into the number of Jews killed in other ways.” From this moment on, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind: Eichmann was the crucial witness when it came to victim numbers. In Argentina, this reputation would open the door to the Sassen circle for him. On December 20 the tribunal made an initial attempt to map out how the Gestapo was organized, including Eichmann’s department, though this effort became hopelessly tangled up in the constantly changing department names. At the start of January 1946, the testimonies of Dieter Wisliceny and Otto Ohlendorf, the leader of Einsatzgruppe D, prompted more press articles featuring Eichmann’s name. Eichmann’s former friend and colleague painted a picture of a despotic superior officer who had victimized him, and quoted the now-famous words: “He said he would leap laughing into the pit, because the feeling that he had six million people on his conscience would be a source of extraordinary satisfaction for him.”15 Göring, the highest-ranking defendant in the trial, commented: “This Wisliceny is just a little swine, who looks like a big one because Eichmann isn’t here”16—a sympathetic stance from a man who had known Eichmann personally since the conference following the November pogrom.

  Cool-headed Escape Plans

  Eichmann often said it was these witness statements that prompted his escape from the prisoner of war camp. People had even started to mention his name inside the prison camps, and the CIC interrogations in Ansbach were becoming increasingly unpleasant for the man who was now Prisoner Otto Eckmann. He knew it could only be a matter of time before someone unmasked him. Some of his fellow prisoners in the Oberdachstetten camp either knew or had guessed who Otto Eckmann really was. It had become a risk, and they must have been relieved when he told them about his escape plans. Even being caught in the vicinity of Adolf Eichmann could have endangered their futures. And as he would do again and again in the years that followed, Eichmann skillfully laid a false trail. He was planning, he told the other officers, to go “to the grand mufti.”17 Only a few weeks later this news got out, and it ensured, until his capture in Argentina, that people would suspect he had gone to the Middle East. In reality, he was calmly and cunningly making an entirely different plan, in collaboration with a low-ranking SS man, Kurt Bauer, whose sister Nelly had promised to help him. Most important, Eichmann found a contact in a place where not even his closest friends would have thought to look: northern Germany. While he was still interned in the camp, another SS man, Hans Freiesleben,18 arranged a hiding place for him: with Hans’s brother, Woldemar. He was the forester for a district near Celle, in Lower Saxony, and his discretion could be relied upon. Eichmann’s fellow officers were the first to be questioned on his whereabouts, and they said that Eichmann—an intrepid, seasoned traveler—was trying to reach his Muslim friend in the Middle East. Meanwhile their comrade had used less talkative helpers to organize his new life.

  In January, Otto Eckmann donned a chamois hat and an old Wehrmacht coat altered in a “Bavarian” style. He and Bauer found a hiding place on a farm, with the help of Bauer’s widowed sister, Nelly Krawietz. According to eyewitnesses, she was a very nice-looking young lady. She accompanied him to Hamburg by train. Couples attracted less attention than men traveling alone, and their papers were seldom checked. But before he went on to Celle, Eichmann had another destination: the Rhineland.19 Though there is no concrete evidence, he may even have thought there might be better accommodation there, about which Nelly was to know nothing. One thing we do know is that he was collecting his new identity papers, “the documents I had arranged for Otto Heninger.”20 The identity of the counterfeiter is unknown, but we can guess who was keeping them for him: his father’s brother was still living in the area where Eichmann was born, in the Bergisches Land, near Düsseldorf. Eichmann’s father had such complete faith in his brother that, over the years that followed, he kept him informed of his son’s whereabouts, even writing to him about Eichmann’s escape and his new life in Argentina.21 Adolf Eichmann had been to visit his uncle there before. The address was an obvious depository for a new identity and probably also one of the ways Eichmann kept in touch with his father.22 In any case, Eichmann had planned his escape well in advance, and he had had ample time to commission convincingly forged papers and hide them in the Rhineland. Given the chaos that followed the German capitulation, when all the transport and postal networks collapsed, Eichmann must have made his emergency preparations very early on.

  Barely three months after Otto Eckmann’s disappearance from the camp in Bavaria, Otto Heninger23 was officially registered as a resident of the Lüneberg Heath. It was March 20, 1946—the day after Adolf Eichmann’s fortieth birthday. Heninger was a salesman from Breslau, born on March 1, 1906, and he is resident number 1,757 in the records. His entry contains the additional information: “married, evangelical, refugee,” previous place of residence Prien am Chiemsee. Woldemar Freiesleben gave Heninger a helping hand. He had fled to the area himself in June 1945, with his wife and children, and he now lived in the Kohlenbach forester’s house, as the area forester in the service of the Abbey forestry commission.24 Like a number of other men registered as living “at Freiesleben’s” during this period, Heninger’s refuge was a hut in the woods, affectionately named “the Island.” He was employed collecting wood and felling trees for a company called Burmann & Co.

  Eichmann remained cool-headed and calculating. Not even Wisliceny, who knew him better than most, would have imagined a hiding place like this. When he offered to hunt down his former colleague for the Allies, the list of possible hideouts Wisliceny put together betrayed an intimate knowledge of Eichmann’s habits. “Anyone who knows Eichmann,” said Wisliceny confidently, “knows he’s too cowardly to be alone.”25 Clearly no one knew Eichmann well enough. The list contained no hint of the hiding place in northern Germany or even the Rhineland. Wisliceny believed his superior was capable of anything, but not of deceiving him. And Eichmann was correct in his estimation of the danger that the Nuremberg Trials represented for him.

  The Nuremberg Ghost

  … the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program.

  —Robert H. Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg

  Eichmann did not immediately become the subject of the Nuremberg Trials’ press coverage. On January 10, 1946, a few days after Wisliceny’s testimony, a circular was sent to all CIC offices containing the order to find and arrest Adolf Eichmann, the man jointly responsible for the murder of six million Jews. It came with a warning, describing him as a “desperate type who, if cornered, will try to shoot it out.”26 In February, Eichmann’s name turned up in documents on the persecution of Jews in France. On March 4, 1946, Kaltenbrunner’s defense counsel assumed that everyone would know who Eichmann was when he said, “Eichmann, as is well known, was the man who carried out the whole extermination operation against the Jews.” On April 5, while Dömö Sztójay was busy testifying against Eichmann in Budapest, Rudolf Höß submitted his declaration under oath to the tribunal in Nuremberg. It contained a lecture on Eichmann’s symbolic role in recent years, which had given him “an enormous boost,” though this was still only partially correct in 1946, just as it had been in 1942. This development supported the old clique’s line of defense, and they were quick to make use of it. Höttl lied for Kaltenbrunner, confirming under oath that Eichmann had had no “direct official contact” with his comrades in Austria.27 Kaltenbrunner in turn claimed that Eichmann usually reported directly to Himmler, going over his head and bypassing Gestapo chief Müller. By this point, Müller had to all intents and purposes vanished, and Him
mler was dead. Kaltenbrunner told a brazen lie about having seen Eichmann only twice in his life.28 Wilhelm Bruno Waneck, Höttl’s superior and a close acquaintance of Kaltenbrunner’s, leaped to defend this version of events, saying that Kaltenbrunner had often been criticized for “paying too little attention to Department IV, and leaving everything to Müller.” After Heydrich’s death, Himmler had handed over “the solution to the Jewish question … entirely to Eichmann.” “Even when Heydrich was alive, Eichmann assumed a dominant position, an absolutely exceptional post which continually grew and broadened in scope, and he acted completely independently in the whole Jewish sector [meaning within the RSHA]. After Heydrich’s death, he was answerable to Himmler directly. Within the RSHA, this fact was generally known, to my knowledge” (April 15, 1946). Kaltenbrunner’s defense counsel referred to Auschwitz as having been “under the spiritual leadership of the infamous Eichmann.”29

  Höß’s first appearance before the court on April 15, 1946, finally cemented the image of the “men in the shadows” in everyone’s minds—not least because of his ghostly appearance. Höß had been commandant of the concentration camp with the most horrific record of all. He stated that Eichmann had not only been involved in the building of the camp and the decision to use Zyklon B, but that he had also conveyed orders to Höß and was an even more fervent anti-Semite than Höß himself. On April 29, 1946, Julius Streicher mumbled that he had never heard of this Eichmann (whom he had invited to the party congress in 1937). On June 17, 1946, Helmut Knochen, who was responsible for the deportation of Jews from Paris, explained that direct orders came to him from Eichmann or Himmler. On June 28, Werner Best spoke about “Eichmann’s office.” Kaltenbrunner’s defense counsel made a logical plea for acquittal on July 9, since “only to the knowledge of Bormann, Himmler and Eichmann was a mass crime plotted and carried out from 1941.” It had been “Himmler’s and Eichmann’s anti-Jewish campaign.” On July 13, 1946, Konrad Morgen explained why he had brought a lawsuit against Eichmann when he was an SS judge, thus strengthening the picture of Eichmann as having been a special case even in the SS. Three days later Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, called Eichmann “the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program”—a formulation that Eichmann found particularly provoking when he read it afterward.30 On July 18, 1946, Walter Huppenkothen, a Gestapo Gruppenleiter in the RSHA and a member of the July 20 special commission, said: “The Jewish Office (IV B 4, later IV A 4b) and its leader, SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, assumed a special position in Department IV. It was accommodated in a house in Kurfürstenstraße, in which Eichmann and most of the other members of his office also lived.” Eichmann had “traveled frequently.” Officially Müller had been his “immediate superior.” Intending to publicly place some distance between himself and Eichmann, Huppenkothen added: “Eichmann and his colleagues never spoke about their assignments. But from conversations with my comrades, I know that Eichmann often met with Himmler.”31

  Karl Heinz Hoffmann, the former head of the Gestapo in Denmark, took this line and ran with it: “The treatment of the Jewish question was at that time in the hands of Eichmann, who had not come out of the State Police, but had been transferred from the SD to the State Police. He and his personnel were located in a building set aside for that purpose and had no contact with the other officials.… Theoretically he was attached to Department IV, but he conducted a very intense activity of his own and I also emphasized that this may be traced back largely to the fact that he did not come from the Police” (August 1, 1946).

  Rudolf Merkel, the defense counsel in the case against the Gestapo, summed up: “In April 1942, Hitler ordered the ‘final solution of the Jewish question,’ that is, the physical extermination, the murder, of the Jews.… The tool which was used by Hitler and Himmler for the carrying out of that order was SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann who with his department was attached to the organization of Amt IV of the RSHA; however, he actually had an entirely independent and autonomous position, which above all was wholly independent of the Gestapo.” Merkel talked about “Eichmann’s organization” and claimed there were only two people responsible for the persecution of the Jews: Eichmann and Christian Wirth, one of the architects of Operation Reinhard (August 23, 1946). In his defense of the SS, Horst Pelckmann explained that the Foreign Office also became a helpless victim of Eichmann’s lies, “through his skillful juggling of truth and untruth” (August 26, 1946). Finally, even the SD’s defense tried to cut all ties between Eichmann’s office and the SD, claiming that the “Eichmann Department” was outside its jurisdiction. This trend even reached a point where a former Waffen-SS general and a former police general,32 who were both SS Obergruppenführers, ended up arguing about who had been more afraid of the lowly SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann. They were supporting each other’s statements, which explained that they would dearly have liked to do something about the deportations and foot marches out of Hungary, but it had been completely impossible for them to act against Eichmann in his position of power. In 1945 Kasztner had termed this “Eichmannism.”33

  The prosecutors and judges could see exactly what was going on here. The American prosecutor Thomas J. Dodds set the record straight on August 29, 1946: “There was no ‘Department Eichmann’ as such. Eichmann was simply the head of the department of the Gestapo which was charged with matters pertaining to the Churches and to the Jews. It was this department of the Gestapo which had primary executive responsibility for the rounding-up of the Jews of Europe and the committing of them to concentration camps. The Eichmann Department, so-called, within the Gestapo, was no more independent of the Gestapo than any other department under Mueller.” And his Russian colleague agreed: “Eichmann’s plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe with the help of the death camps came from the Gestapo system” (August 30, 1946). But this portrayal of Eichmann still had an impact, and traces of it remained in the final judgment. Eichmann was mentioned by name three times. “A special section of the Gestapo office of the RSHA under Standartenführer Eichmann was set up with responsibility for Jewish matters, which employed its own agents to investigate the Jewish problem in occupied territory.”34 Eichmann’s name was then linked to the term that was to become a synonym for the extermination of the Jews: “This ‘final solution’ meant the extermination of the Jews, which early in 1939 Hitler had threatened would be one of the consequences of an outbreak of war, and a special section in the Gestapo under Adolf Eichmann, as head of Section B4 of the Gestapo, was formed to carry out the policy. The plan for exterminating the Jews was developed shortly after the attack on the Soviet Union.” And Eichmann’s legitimation for it was clearly stated: he “had been put in charge of this program by Hitler.”35

  Whenever Eichmann is discussed in the context of the Nuremberg Trials, sooner or later a particular quote from Francis Biddle appears.36 Next to the name Eichmann in the margin of one of the trial documents, the U.S. judge wrote: “Who is he?” It is generally assumed that, rather than this being a philosophical or psychological question, Biddle simply didn’t know to whom the document referred. But it’s easy to overlook the time when this note was made: the very short period before the trial started, when a handful of (mostly non-German) jurists were struggling to come to grips with the Nazi regime and the scale of its crimes. Even today no one can seriously claim to have a complete and thorough overview of this subject. And the Allied list of wanted war criminals contained more than sixty thousand names. So it isn’t surprising that a judge was unfamiliar with one of them, which appeared in a draft document: on the contrary, his note shows how seriously he was taking these preparations. But it is rather surprising to learn where Francis Biddle read this name, because there it was, on the document that Biddle was reading when he drew his question mark next to it. The document was an early draft of the “frame of the judgment,” a highly classified counterpart to the indictments.37 A year later, when the panel of judges decided to include this name among a mere eight
y mentioned in the text of the judgment, and to refer to it no fewer than three times, Biddle’s question had obviously been answered.

  Eichmann became the “Nuremberg Ghost,” ever present but impossible to lay hands on.38 His name haunted all the war crimes trials that followed. In a manner of speaking, Nuremberg in 1946 was no different from Vienna in spring 1939: Eichmann’s name was once again being dropped by his superiors and associates, and it was inextricably linked with anti-Jewish policy. But times had changed, and (at least initially) Adolf Eichmann could take no pleasure in it. There was no more “work” to which he and his prominence could have given “an enormous boost.” He was no longer surrounded by admirers; he was an outcast, someone it was better not to have known, and the only way to profit from him was by sending him to his doom. Eichmann was now, for the most part, alone in the forest. Later he would manage to muster some understanding for his former comrades and their efforts to offload their guilt onto him: “I possibly wouldn’t have done anything different.”39 Of course, if the boot had been on the other foot, it would have been difficult for Eichmann to find someone half as well suited to the role of scapegoat. As it was, there was nothing he could do about it, and he had no choice but to read his famous name in the papers and in the first pamphlets he was able to get hold of in northern Germany. As he put it years later, he had now finally been dragged into “the international limelight,”40 and he made the logical decision to remain invisible—something he would never have countenanced during the previous decade.