Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  A specialist was even required when it came to the most repressed and feared topic of all: the Jewish question. The media activity, and the demand for articles, show that even the Nazis in exile felt a growing need for information. And they wanted it from sources that these great lovers of conspiracy trusted: other National Socialists. Those who were too deeply mired in stereotypical National Socialist thought to trust “enemy literature,” as the Sassen circle called it, needed answers from within their own ranks. Most of them had no trouble dismissing every new revelation about concentration camps and mass murder as atrocity propaganda from their opponents. But over the years, all the little stories and details from their own memories had coalesced to form an unsettling picture. And now their children were asking questions. While these men clearly had no right to claim they “didn’t know about any of it,” there were also large gaps in their knowledge, because they had only ever wanted to know about “it” to a limited extent. They may have stood by their lies and their own polemic, but eventually even devoted National Socialists had to face the uncomfortable question: between their own suspicions and the stories in the news, what was truth and what lies? What had Hitler really known? Had gas chambers existed? Gas vans? Had partisans really been shot? How many people had actually been killed?

  Each of them had a different viewpoint and a different set of questions, but at long last, they all wanted to know the details. The “Final Solution” had become an issue they could no longer avoid, now that it was affecting global politics. Germany’s status on the world stage depended on its taking a clear position on the Holocaust, paying “reparations,” and committing itself to a pro-Israeli foreign policy. The events in the Middle East were significant, and if you wanted to understand the new alliances, you needed knowledge, or you wouldn’t get far without harming your own cause. This was even more the case if you continued to suspect that “the Jews” were behind everything and that they were one of the principal forces in the United States, a country that Der Weg’s editorial named as an enemy power.

  Eichmann soon had a reputation for being the only surviving Nazi with any reliable information on the scale of the Holocaust, and on how the extermination process had worked, which made him increasingly sought after. He had actually met “the enemy,” having spoken to representatives of Jewish organizations and communities. Names like Joel Brand and Rudolf Kasztner were familiar to him, and not only from the newspapers. And his talent for promoting himself as a “respected specialist” achieved one more thing: after he was abducted, no one voluntarily admitted to so much as having heard his name, yet the number of people who could be proved to have spoken to him about the extermination of the Jews was remarkably high. In Tucumán, the Schoklitsches and Herbert Hagel had asked him directly how many Jews had been murdered, and even if Eichmann’s answer was as evasive as their reports suggest, the fact remains that people knew Ricardo Klement was really Adolf Eichmann, and that Adolf Eichmann was a specialist on these matters. Nobody who found themselves in a northern province of Argentina would strike up a dinner-table conversation with the first German immigrant they came across by asking what he had to say about the Nazis’ murder of the Jews.

  Another exile known to have approached Eichmann directly was Johann von Leers. Four years older than Eichmann, he was a legal expert who had written books with titles like Blut und Rasse in der Gesetzgebung (Blood and Race in Legislation, 1936), which had earned him a professorship at the University of Jena. There he had lectured on “Legal, Economic and Political History on a Racial Basis” and described “The Criminal Nature of the Jew” (1944), when he wasn’t busy advising the Reich Ministry for Propaganda on racial issues. He fled to Argentina via Italy in 1950.42 There he remained what we might most accurately call a professional anti-Semite, busying himself by writing horrific articles for Der Weg. He left Buenos Aires again, in the mid-1950s, for Cairo. In Egypt, much to the amazement of his old comrades in Germany, he made a different name for himself as an advocate of Islam (his new name being Amin Omar von Leers). But before he left Argentina, he found the time to have a conversation with Eichmann, asking him about the exact number of Jewish victims, among other things. This episode, which Leers described in order to defend himself against the accusation of having been “Eichmann’s best friend in Argentina,” speaks for itself: “I never knew Eichmann, I heard his name for the first time in 1955, in Buenos Aires, where I had a short conversation with him and tried to get the historical truth from him about the number of Jews who died in the concentration camps. But he didn’t give me any information.”43

  Despite Leers’s claim not to have heard the name before, he knew exactly who Eichmann was: the expert on victim numbers. And the fact that he postdated their conversation underlines his intent. Leers left Argentina in 1954, so he must have already known exactly who he was questioning by this point and had a strong enough sense of guilt to know what it meant.44 The incident can be interpreted in two ways: either Leers was lying when he claimed never to have heard the name before, or someone had introduced Eichmann to him using the description that had been linked to Eichmann’s name since the Nuremberg Trials. Leers confessed his acquaintance with Eichmann in self-defense, which leads us to conclude that their conversation lasted rather longer than Leers’s description suggests. Of course, it could not have escaped a man who had been one of Der Weg’s major contributors that his publisher cared so much about Eichmann. When Leers moved to Cairo in 1954, he took the memory of his encounter with him. His obvious postdating of the conversation throws an interesting light on Eichmann’s public life in Argentina prior to the start of the project with Willem Sassen.

  Admittedly, not all the Nazi exiles needed to question Eichmann in order to learn about the scale of the Holocaust. Men like Erich Müller, Josef Vötterl, and Curt Christmann had their own experience in this field. They had been in the Einsatzgruppen that shot people en masse behind the front lines from 1941 and that later murdered them in gas vans. Gerhard Bohne and Hans Hefelmann were specialists in “euthanasia” murders, and former ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger had a pretty good idea of what extermination through labor meant. Most of them had the opportunity to meet—and not only because the immigrant world is usually a small one. Like Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Dieter Menge was a former Luftwaffe pilot. He had an imposing estate near Buenos Aires and a lucrative scrap metal business. He also had the unpleasant habit of surrounding himself with his ghoulish contemporaries. To this day, people still speak of the social events at his house as cultish gatherings of the dregs from the Nazi regime. At these events, no one held back or used an alias, and men like Eichmann and Josef Schwammberger became attractions. One of the running jokes there was a play on the names of the host and his favorite guest: Menge particularly liked to play host to Mengele.45

  Later, Sassen claimed he had introduced Eichmann to the concentration camp “doctor,” who had his own special interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. Many Jewish survivors were unable to forget him: he was the man who had conducted the “selections” in Auschwitz. And how could you forget a man who decided the fates of hundreds of people with a wave of his hand?46 The two men did not necessarily get to know each other over the course of their murderous careers, although they may well have met briefly during one of Eichmann’s frequent visits to Auschwitz in 1944. However, they took the same route to Argentina, and the false identity papers they both had received from Termeno were produced in fairly quick succession. Mengele arrived in Argentina the year before Eichmann—though unlike Eichmann, he had the advantage of his father’s generous financial support. Still, the two men’s paths crossed repeatedly in Argentina. Sassen, who was a close friend of Mengele’s and still had a high regard for the latter’s “experiments” in 1991, was convinced that Eichmann and Mengele had little to say to each other: “They embodied two completely different types.”47 As far as their financial prospects and their educational background went, this was true. Mengele had plenty of money and two doctorates,
one in medicine and another in philosophy (the latter with a thesis entitled Racial-Morphological Investigation of the Lower Jaw Segment in Four Racial Groups). But Sassen was not entirely correct. When Eichmann was hanged in 1962, of all the acquaintances from his old circle, it was only the “Auschwitz Angel of Death” who acknowledged the organizer of the genocide and dedicated some surprisingly sensitive words to him. They must have found some common ground after all.

  Long before the start of Sassen’s recording sessions, Eichmann had once again become part of a society that interested him and, more important, that was interested in him. And contrary to later claims, their curiosity was probably not the result merely of horrified fascination. People’s general forgetfulness and discreet silence would become a direct consequence of Eichmann’s abduction. But in the mid-1950s, Eichmann was recognized as a specialist who was much too interesting to be forgotten, and it is only human nature to talk about unforgettable things. This interest posed a threat to Eichmann, because at this point, ten years after the war’s end, many of his fellow Nazis were starting to lose their fear of prosecution and were making contact with West Germany and Austria more frequently. While some were placing advertisements in Germany to find a wife,48 many even dared to move back there. The father of the “economic miracle,” Ludwig Erhard himself, paid a visit to Argentina in December 1954, and Otto Skorzeny, who had been working for the intelligence services for some time, traveled to see Perón as the official representative of Krupp’s industrial empire. Mengele even managed to get divorced in Germany in 1954.49 Former comrades with Nazi pasts were making surprising new careers. Josef Vötterl, who came from Salzburg and was four years younger than Eichmann, had also fled the country on a Red Cross passport. As a member of the criminal and border police with Einsatzkommando 10A of Einsatzgruppe D, his role had involved reconnaissance, and then carrying out “border protection” and “partisan control.” Nonetheless, in 1955 he moved back to Germany for three years. He found employment with the BfV; we will meet him again later on.50

  When he went off to meet his comrades, both old and new, Eichmann left his family at home. He was probably eager to avoid questions from his wife, who was naturally convinced that her husband was an innocent man. Admittedly, he couldn’t entirely prevent his wife and children from meeting these people, because the world of Buenos Aires was a small one: “One day, Father said: last week you shook hands with Josef Mengele.” But according to Klaus Eichmann, disclosures like this were the exception rather than the rule: “Father was very serious about keeping secrets. If someone came to visit, he would give us boys a clip round the ear to remind us not to blab about it the next day at school.” When the journalist asked what sort of visitors these were, Klaus Eichmann answered, “I only remember the slaps.” Looking at the interviews and witness statements from later years, Eichmann’s abduction must have had a similar effect on the memories of all the people in Argentina who knew who Ricardo Klement really was.

  The Triumph of Life

  Marriage: A union between two different sexes for the reproduction of their kind.

  —Eichmann’s psychological evaluation, early 196151

  The year 1955 opened a period of great unrest. The president of Argentina, who had had so much time for the Germans, was deposed; on June 16, Argentine naval officers began a series of attempted putsches that soon led to Perón’s fall. In 1960 Life reporters heard rumors that Eichmann had worked as a gaucho under the name Ernst Radinger; spent time in Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru; and gone to Bolivia for several months after Perón was ousted.52 It was clearly a case of mistaken identity, but the legend provides a vivid reflection of the German immigrants’ situation. Nobody was sure what the political change would mean for them, particularly as the new regime was taking action against the corruption of the Perón dictatorship and, in the process, closed seven German firms that were under suspicion.

  In December 1955 the police called at Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s house in Córdoba province, as he had been an intimate friend of Perón’s. On searching the house, they discovered numerous documents, three passports in different names, and proof of his political activities and contacts.53 Although it had been known that Perón’s protégé had been attempting to create an international network of fascist movements for years, the extent of his connections still came as a surprise, particularly as Rudel had clearly burned numerous other documents prior to his hasty departure. Unfortunately, the documents confiscated by the police have not resurfaced. However, the investigating commission’s report contained some initial findings, including notes on the Red Cross passport that, together with various entry and exit stamps in the false passports, proved that Rudel had been hard at work peddling his far-right dreams. Among his papers were found begging letters to Kameradenwerk, some from eager networkers in West Germany like Hans Rechenberg, who was collecting money for Hitler’s sister. Both Rechenberg and Rudel would later work on Adolf Eichmann’s defense. The greatest sensation in this affair was understandably caused by the news that Rudel had succeeded in bringing the British fascist Oswald Mosley into the country and arranging a personal audience for him with President Perón. The German embassy was so alarmed that it took the precaution of sending newspaper articles from Buenos Aires to Bonn.54 But after the initial excitement, it came to the conclusion that “Peronazism” was just a “charade” and that Rudel represented “the typical postwar course taken by so many ‘heroes’ … who refused to surrender even though their roles had long been played out.”55 The media told Rudel’s allies that their figurehead was a “fairly laughable and arrogant” character. Their political ambitions and their connections were now out in the open. Rudel took temporary refuge in Paraguay. Argentina obviously no longer held the same attraction it had in Perón’s era—especially for those who, unlike Rudel, had no means of escape.

  The fear of currency inflation had been in the air for some time in Argentina, and the putsch against Perón had partly been a reaction to the worsening conditions. The economic situation may also have prompted Eichmann’s change of job. In uncertain times, the best policy is to invest in natural resources, and in March Eichmann took over management of the Siete Palmas rabbit farm in Joaquín Gorina, twenty-eight miles from Buenos Aires. The business belonged to Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer, who wanted to return to Europe and leave a reliable deputy in his place.56 Klaus Eichmann spoke of “two uncles, who are now [1966] back in Europe,” with whom his father ran the farm. “They had around 5,000 hens and 1,000 rabbits.” The rabbits were Angora.

  The cuddly white animals provided both expensive wool and a coveted fertilizer. Rabbit dung contains high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash, a very useful mixture that was highly sought after in Argentina (a country that remains a major exporter of citrus fruits). Day-to-day life on the farm consisted, quite prosaically, of feeding the rabbits, mucking out their cages, and collecting the dung. They were sheared three or four times a year. It was an economically sound route to independence and success. During the war, Eichmann liked to tell his fellow murderers, he had put in a request to the Reichsführer-SS for an estate in Bohemia after the final victory so he could become a farmer.57 The disciples of the Black Sun allegedly revered the simple life, but when they had been in power, none of them would have traded in their careers to work the soil. And so it was no real comfort to Eichmann that he had once been successful with chickens and could now have told Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that he was a rabbit farmer. This also meant a major change for his family. Life “on the ranch,” as Eichmann liked to call it, was rural, and although he did occasionally take his family with him, they were still separated for much of the time. His three sons, who were now between thirteen and nineteen, had to carry on going to school. His writing, and his children’s recollections, show that he was concerned about their willingness to learn. Eichmann deplored his three sons’ “intellectual arrogance” and “ignorance,” as they were unable to summon any enthusiasm for identifying the
differences between the Nazi Gottgläubigkeit and Marxism.58

  It was like being back in Altensalzkoth. Eichmann didn’t have to worry about his family; he could just earn his money and dwell on his thoughts. The only difference was that the rabbit farm was a little more remote than the village on the Lüneburg Heath, meaning that on balmy evenings, Eichmann was unable to make the local women swoon with his Schubert and his gypsy airs. On those long evenings, the former master of deportation now played to thousands of hens and fluffy white rabbits. But the income was pretty good—Eichmann put it at 4,500 pesos a month, which was just over 1,000 Deutschmarks.59 The family urgently needed the money, as an unexpected event had taken place: Vera Eichmann was pregnant again. Five years later Eichmann would come up with some bizarre words to describe his feelings about it: “Our happiness found its zenith through the birth of our fourth son. This meant more to me than just becoming a proud father. For me this was a symbol of freedom, and life triumphing over the powers that sought to destroy me. Even now, thinking about it in my cell, the birth of my son fills me with triumphant satisfaction.”60