Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  Was the information on the Israelis’ planned kidnap genuine? It wouldn’t have been difficult to find out about the failed operation in Altaussee in winter 1948–49, details of which had not escaped the local barkeeper. We cannot rule out the possibility that there was more fiction than truth in the insider knowledge that Urban passed on in 1952: at this point, as we will see, Gehlen was very interested in Eichmann. Urban then also claimed he had personally helped Eichmann escape—a confession that seems not to have harmed his career in the postwar West German intelligence service.53 As is usually the case with intelligence service information, the publicly available files reveal very little. But we do know where Josef Adolf Urban learned the art of manipulation: first in the SD, then with Adolf Eichmann in Hungary.54

  The young careerist joined the NSDAP at eighteen (membership no. 6312927), and quickly became an SD leader in Vienna. He was one of Walter Schellenberg’s Balkan experts and finished up as head of the SD control center in Budapest, where Adolf Eichmann was proving to the world just how many people you could “transport to extermination” in the space of six weeks. Even Wiesenthal was taken aback by Urban’s stories about Rudolf Kasztner.55 Reinhard Gehlen certainly had an eye for well-trained people.

  Urban would have been one of the last people with an interest in Eichmann’s reappearance. Urban knew what Eichmann had done before 1945, and Eichmann knew Urban’s history. If Eichmann had turned up, Urban would have given him false papers for free (although Eichmann would never have relied on a petty criminal like Urban). But the former Budapest SD boss had another reason for not betraying Eichmann: he would remain a committed National Socialist as long as he lived. Colleagues reported that he always swore his employees into office “on the Führer Adolf Hitler, as he had reliable information that he was still alive and, according to Urban, living in a warm oasis in the South Polar region.” An insufficient knowledge of geography was clearly the least of Urban’s problems.56 But his political views didn’t stop Reinhard Gehlen from continuing to employ Josef Adolf Urban in the BND as late as 1956. He remained on the BND’s payroll until the 1970s.

  However, there is more evidence of a second attempt to smuggle Eichmann out of Austria besides that in the Gehlen Organization’s files. In addition to Simon Wiesenthal, two other men reported on a possible operation over the New Year period of 1949–50: the tireless Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, and Asher Ben Natan, who at that time was still the head of the Israeli Foreign Office’s political department, the forerunner of Mossad. But this plan also failed when Eichmann didn’t arrive.57

  The Gehlen Organization files contain more than just Urban’s finagling, due to a crucial development during the year between the two kidnap attempts. The bounty on the head of the “number one enemy of the Jews” had grown, according to Urban, though it had also shifted. The transformation from five thousand dollars into fifty thousand schillings would, in spite of the extra zero, have more than halved its value—but the huge sum of a million Austrian schillings was also mentioned. Discrepancies like these do not exactly speak in favor of the information’s reliability.

  Twelve years later Eichmann really would be abducted by plane, after an Israeli unit finally managed to apprehend the man who had been hunted for so long. The CIA was certain that the plan must have originated with Simon Wiesenthal.58 It had obviously got wind of the failed abduction attempts in the late 1940s.

  We don’t know whose tip-off alerted Simon Wiesenthal to Eichmann’s visit to Altaussee, or why so many people believed an arrest operation would prove successful. We may doubt that this was a serious announcement about a planned visit. Whether it was a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity, or even a test by the family to find out how closely they were being observed, it served to let Eichmann know that people’s interest in him was undiminished. If the rumor of Israelis in Altaussee reached him after the fact, he must have found it extremely unsettling. After he was kidnapped in 1960, he spoke of his fear that the Jews, having lost so many of their own children, might now exact revenge on the children of the man who was (at least partly) to blame.59 But because the list of war criminals was generally known, and because the Austrian police were on the alert, he had good reason to stay as far away from danger as possible. No wonder Eichmann decided to remain in remote Altensalzkoth a little longer, living the life of harmless Otto Heninger, farming chickens and selling expensive eggs to the people he had failed to deport to their deaths. But by 1950, Eichmann had money, and he had to face the fact that the founding of West Germany had not brought him immunity from prosecution. His visa for Argentina was about to expire. It was high time he was on his way.

  An Orderly Escape

  But even as he left Altensalzkoth, Eichmann kept a cool head. Absconding in the middle of the night would have aroused suspicion and led to stories that could have reached the wrong ears. But moving on, or even emigrating, was not a rare occurrence during these years. The war and its aftermath—escape, abduction, eviction, DP camps, and a shortage of accommodation—had created conditions in which a great number of people were looking for somewhere to call home. Eichmann managed to place Otto Heninger in their ranks. He sold his chickens to Forester Freiesleben, explained to his landlady that he wanted to go to work in Scandinavia as a mechanical engineer, and wrote a farewell letter to Nelly that laid a false trail for her as well.60 He told her he was turning himself over to the Russians, which didn’t sound as absurd then as it might to our ears: there was a lot of speculation at the time about senior Gestapo officials, like Eichmann’s old boss Müller, escaping to the Soviet-occupied zone; who chose this escape route has still not been systematically investigated. The story had the added advantage of not exactly being simple to check out. In any case, Otto Heninger didn’t vanish like a thief in the night: he paid his outstanding rent and bade a proper farewell to Altensalzkoth. Nobody asked questions, and nobody informed the police. The neighbors retained a memory of him as a pleasant incomer. If they missed his reserved manner or his violin playing, they had only to look at him in the wedding photo. It might have been nice to hear from him occasionally and learn how he was doing out there in the big wide world. But nobody anticipated a postcard from Israel.

  One of the questions that remains unanswered is whether Eichmann somehow managed to make contact with the escape network, or whether it sought him out. We can’t rule out help from his father in Linz: if an article from an Austrian newspaper about Uiberreither’s escape really made it all the way to northern Germany, Eichmann must have been in close contact with Austria. He himself gave contradictory accounts of these events. In one version, he found the people smugglers by placing carefully coded advertisements in local newspapers.61 According to the wildly romantic story he told at the start of 1961, the contact was the result of some risk-taking on his part, and thanks to a trustworthy comrade: “So I confessed to one of my closer friends on the Heath my intention to go overseas, and asked him if he knew anyone who knew about things to do with making this journey. In this way I came into contact with a man in Hamburg in 1950, a former SS man, who traveled a lot between Germany and Italy. I gave him 300 Marks out of my savings (2500 Deutschmarks of profit from the egg business), and obtained from him the most precise information about the ‘U-boat route’ to South America. He gave me every detail, every stopping place, every contact point.”62

  All his versions have one thing in common: they aim to deflect attention away from the people involved. Eichmann maintained this grateful solidarity with the people who had helped him right up until his execution. Today we can see that one basic element of his story simply doesn’t make sense: the papers necessary for the first part of his escape were produced at the start of June 1948, before the currency reform, and even before Eichmann lost his forestry job and became a chicken farmer. He deliberately gave a later date in his stories. Giving false dates was a disinformation tactic he described in detail to Sassen.63 He perfected it to a frightening degree and used it at various points in his
life.64 During his trial, he managed to persuade the world that his role was less than it had really been by giving later dates for his activities. A man who is present for the first time at the opening of a new institution has a very different role from someone who visited the future site of that institution in the planning stages. He applied this tactic to places like the Central Emigration Offices and to the death camps. Similarly, a person who plans his escape carefully over the course of two years is very different from a person who makes a snap decision to travel to Italy, with nothing but a few addresses in his pocket, trusting he’ll be able to find out where to go from there. This sort of redating can draw a veil over large periods of time. All kinds of unpleasant questions can be avoided, like how Eichmann had the money and the connections to find out about an escape route in 1948, immediately before the currency reform; and how he came by the contact for the church offices that helped him obtain identity papers from South Tyrol and a short-term visa for Argentina. There was no way Eichmann could have traveled there in person. And Nelly Krawietz was out of the question, as he evidently didn’t trust her.

  The path to constructing a new identity was complex, and obtaining the identity papers and the short-term visa was just the first step. With these papers, photos, and a character reference from the Franciscan priest Edoardo Dömöter, Eichmann could apply for a passport with the Red Cross in Genoa. Once he had the passport and the short-term visa, he could apply for a long-term visa at the Argentine embassy, and this, together with a doctor’s reference and another proof of identity, was what Eichmann needed in order to apply for personal documents in Buenos Aires. And then he needed passage on a ship. This whole process took a good two weeks in Genoa. Even Eichmann, the seasoned emigration specialist, could not have improvised such an efficient use of tiny bureaucratic loopholes across several countries and institutions—let alone men like Josef Mengele and Ludolf von Alvensleben, who had no experience at all in the flexible handling of exit arrangements.

  The escape organization was a highly professional affair, as can be seen from the photographs that are still in the International Red Cross’s passport application files. Adolf Eichmann is surprisingly well dressed in his photo. With his carefully clipped hair, round glasses, beard, suit, and bow tie, he not only looks much older but is also the very model of an engineer, nothing like an officer. And Eichmann’s photos are no exception. Ludolf von Alvensleben, Himmler’s former chief adjutant, stood almost six feet tall and had a pronounced receding hairline, but here he appears in a curly toupee, with a little beard and drooping shoulders. There was a costumer at work here who knew exactly what he was doing.

  Like many others going into exile, Eichmann used a system supported by a number of different parties, not least the professional people smugglers employed by the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina had an interest in German professionals who could help to drive forward the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrialized nation, and assisting their escape seemed like a solid investment. Conditions in postwar Europe were favorable for tempting these people overseas: the whole region had been reduced to rubble, everyone had to find a new place for himself, and people were open to offers. Argentina was not the only country trying to convince well-educated men to emigrate, but it was one of the few that also provided this opportunity to criminals like Eichmann. On the Argentine side, aid for fugitives was organized by the German-Argentine Rudolfo Freude, who had close connections to emigration officials. Another German-Argentine, the aforementioned Horst Carlos Fuldner, traveled to Europe in 1948 to provide papers and organizational structures to help people escape; he was assisted by the Argentine consulate. Fuldner was the man whom, years later, Eichmann’s son would call “Father’s best friend.”65

  The myth of ODESSA has obscured our view of reality for a long time. It was said to be a tightly run “Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen” (organization of former SS members), established after the fall of the Third Reich, that continued to run like clockwork in the underground. Initially, Odessa was just a code word in the prison camps, by which SS members could identify one another in order to provide mutual support.66 Myths survive because they feed our imagination, and the myth of this organization fed the minds of two traumatized groups at once: the Nazi hunters, who over time began to overestimate their opponents the way hunters tend to do, and who were fond of conspiracy theories; and the National Socialists, who had idealized the efficiency of an organization like the SS when they had been in power and were comforted by the idea that it might still exist in some way following Germany’s capitulation. The notion that an association existed underground, to which all SS men were automatically given membership after 1945 and that continued to exist as if nothing had happened that May, was obviously a fantasy born variously of fear or hope. But just as obviously, people who are committed to an ideology don’t lose faith in it, or stop feeling a certain bond with one another, just because the state that sustained it and them has collapsed. On the contrary: Germany’s defeat created an omnipresent new enemy at home—the Allied forces—and having a common enemy strengthened Nazi solidarity. Romantic notions of the SS did not become nostalgic memories; they created a network suited to the new era. No large underground organization of former SS members ever existed, but there were former SS members in the underground who needed help and obtained it more easily from people for whom the SS had positive associations. Alliances like these are based on recommendations and relationships, especially when they are operating illegally. Membership in a strongly ideological organization served as a “recommendation” when it came to securing accommodations, contacts, a mailing address, or something more significant. The basic structure, like that of other National Socialist institutions such as the RSHA, changed in response to new developments. A rigid organization for aiding fugitives, if such a thing were possible, could never have been as effective as this flexible common-interest group, which allowed complete strangers to rely on one another for help. It shaped Eichmann’s escape through Europe just as it would shape his life in Argentina and even his behavior in the Jerusalem District Court. If we want to understand the context of Eichmann’s life in Argentina, we will get nowhere unless we look at how his escape was organized. Old comrades and their new sympathizers provided a kind of mutual aid that didn’t readily reveal itself: their network was oriented toward discretion. Help had to be given silently, because the enemy was everywhere, and maintaining the value of seemingly loose connections rested on never revealing how they worked. Eichmann still believed this in 1962 and always expressed his gratitude when he spoke of “the organization” to which he and his family owed their escape and their new life.67

  The Emigration Expert

  Although Adolf Eichmann’s escape would not have been possible without the help of church institutions close to the Vatican, his road did not lead to Rome. Nevertheless the idea of Eichmann in the Eternal City persisted for a long time. In 1961 Moshe Pearlman named Genoa as Eichmann’s point of departure as well as the Franciscan priest who helped him there—he had had special access to the statements Eichmann made during his interrogation.68 Hannah Arendt brought Pearlman’s information to a wider audience, but this still didn’t dispel the tenacious rumor that Eichmann had met Alois Hudal in Rome and had been made to take a test of faith with Anton Weber, the padre of the St. Raphael Society. Hudal may have had a hand in organizing Eichmann’s false papers, but we can rule out a personal encounter in Rome. Still, the name Hudal had been associated with efforts to help Nazi fugitives leave Europe since the early 1950s. So what could have been more natural, once Eichmann was arrested, than to fabricate a connection between Eichmann’s escape via Italy, aided by the church, and the only name people had heard in that context, Alois Hudal?

  Although Bishop Hudal personally welcomed Nazis to Rome and looked after them during their escape, Eichmann was not one of them. His escape route took him out of Altensalzkoth in May 1950 and south to the border wit
h Austria. The journey was easy and comfortable. Luis Schintlholzer from Bielefeld drove his old comrade from Celle to Bad Reichenhall on the Austrian border—at least, this is the story that got the former SS officer from Innsbruck into trouble in later years.69 It was only a day’s drive, so no accommodation was necessary. From there a people smuggler took Eichmann along the back roads to Kufstein in Austria, and he went from there to Innsbruck, where he had a contact address, by taxi. In Nazi circles, Innsbruck was well known as a stopping place for people on the run from their past. There is much to suggest that Eichmann met his father there, or at least a middleman, as he left part of his savings behind in Austria.70 From Innsbruck, he went south to the Vinaders guesthouse, in Gries am Brenner, and people smugglers helped him cross the border into Italy. Johann Corradini, the vicar of Sterzing, met Eichmann there and gave him back his luggage, which the man of God had personally taken across the border by bicycle. He also arranged a “taxi driver.” This wasn’t a one-off job for Corradini, and it’s safe to assume that the taxi driver was also in the know, earning good money from driving special passengers. In any case, he drove the fugitive to Bolzano, where, according to Eichmann’s new CV, he had been born in 1913, as the illegitimate child of Anna Klement. This was where Eichmann said he received a free short-term visa from the Argentine immigration authority. He must also have been given the identity papers from Termeno that had been deposited for him there, which declared him “stateless.”

  From Bolzano, Eichmann’s journey continued through Verona to Genoa, where he found refuge in a Franciscan monastery. We are still largely ignorant of which of his former comrades he met there. Eichmann mentioned only Pedro Geller, a former officer in a tank regiment whose real name was Herbert Kuhlmann. Eichmann claimed to have lent him money for the crossing. We can assume that Kuhlmann, alias Geller, was not the only person Eichmann met on his journey; he made contacts during this period for his new life overseas. Eichmann spent his last weeks in Europe in the monastery, passing the time by attending various appointments at the Red Cross offices and the outpost of the Argentine immigration authority in Genoa (DAIA) or playing chess and discussing worldviews with the “old monk Franciscus.” Rumors that Eichmann officially converted to Catholicism and was baptized at this point are not to be believed.71 Baptism would have been neither smart nor necessary, as his false papers from Termeno already said he was a Catholic. Eichmann would later consistently describe himself as gottgläubig and took up his host’s request for him to attend the morning service with his usual self-importance: “On the day before my departure the monk, Pater Franciscus, urged me to come to mass, as he wanted to bless me. ‘It can’t hurt,’ he said. I put my arm around his shoulders and called him ‘my good old Pharisee.’ ”72 The fake religion in his passport didn’t trouble his conscience, and he described his attitude with an astonishing lack of tact: “Without hesitation I called myself [not: I became!] a Catholic. In reality I belonged to no church, but the help bestowed on me by the Catholic priests remained deep in my memory, and so I decided to honor the Catholic Church by becoming an honorary member.”73 The men around Himmler had a slightly idiosyncratic idea of honor.