The reaction of the people to whom Hermann gave his information, however, is quite clear: after Hofstaedter’s visit, the informant Lothar Hermann was no longer taken seriously. He really had found Adolf Eichmann—it was just that he didn’t seem all that convincing: a blind man, living in remote Coronel Suárez, claiming to have tracked down the “number-one enemy of the Jews” in Buenos Aires, at an address that was just a modest apartment with no signs of security or luxury. Moreover, in pursuing his investigations, he had mistaken Eichmann’s landlord, Francisco Schmitt, for Eichmann himself, destroying his credibility once and for all. The idea that a Nazi might be living in a rented apartment, in a building like that, was too much for Isser Harel and his colleagues to swallow. But Fritz Bauer didn’t want to give up. Hermann’s letters convinced him, and he was also coming across more and more evidence to substantiate what his informant in Argentina was telling him.
Back to Germany?
It was pure coincidence that at this time, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution was also looking at Eichmann.
—Irmtrud Wojak28
Contrary to the cliché of the rich Nazi, toward the end of 1957 Adolf Eichmann started to have business problems. The rabbit farm failed, allegedly because of a crossbreeding error (racial intermingling, of all things).29 Pipe dreams about the Jewish race had always been more his field. But once again all was not lost for Eichmann. At the turn of the year, helped by yet another old associate, he found a job in a company owned by Roberto Mertig.30 Mertig, who was a business partner of Josef Mengele’s father, owned a gas oven factory, and Mengele himself is said to have been on the payroll. Mengele Sr., who manufactured farm vehicles, had always supported his son, repeatedly finding ways to generate an income for him. Eichmann’s work in a gas oven factory must have provided a source of macabre jokes among his old comrades, but there were also signs of a change in him, if we believe what he would write in Israel to friends and family about his final two years in Argentina. Even Eichmann, it seems, was starting to pay more attention to the here and now—though we may doubt that this change was entirely voluntary.
With the failure of the Dürer project, Eichmann and Sassen’s planned publication also fell through, which had consequences for both men. The German-Argentine community started to change. Many of the “less compromised” exiles, from lower down the Nazi hierarchy, felt the need to return to the place they grew up and went back to Europe. Statutes of limitation and other rehabilitative legislation in West Germany and Austria allowed anyone who had not committed capital offenses or war crimes (or at least none that anyone was trying to prove) to return and start afresh. And in early March 1958 even Eberhard Fritsch, born in Buenos Aires, broke down his tents, publishing house and all, and moved to a house near Salzburg.31 The German nationalist community in Argentina lost an important point of reference, and Sassen lost his job. More important, he lost the person who had published his texts and allowed him to be an author, thereby guaranteeing him a position in German-Argentine society as a journalist and writer. The final issue of Der Weg, which appeared shortly before Fritsch’s departure, ended with a piece by Willem Sassen, once again bemoaning the fate of contemporary Germany.32 Sassen and Eichmann were both hoping that Fritsch’s plan to establish a publishing operation in Europe would bear fruit, but Eichmann’s dream of having his book published had passed out of his reach. Still, they stayed in touch, just in case. Later events show that Fritsch must have made contact with Eichmann’s family in Austria: in 1960, when Eichmann’s capture was announced, he promptly met up with Eichmann’s brother to organize his defense.33 Fritsch’s move to Salzburg also provided Eichmann with a good way of communicating news about his new life to his father.
But Eberhard Fritsch was not the only one who moved back to Germany. Sassen spent the New Year’s holiday in 1958–59 in Europe—partly to gather sworn statements from his old associates attesting that he had a right to German citizenship. (Sassen might have claimed to be a German when he registered in Konstanz in October 1956, but the matter has never been fully clarified.) Within a relatively short space of time, he was not only able to prove that he had successfully applied for citizenship in 1943—an easy undertaking for a member of the Dutch Voluntary SS—he could also provide sworn statements confirming it, including one from his former commander, Günter d’Alquen. Together with his old paybook and his war reporter’s ID, this was enough for the Konstanz legal and regulatory authority to issue a certficate of citizenship on January 26, 1959. By Febuary 4, he had registered as a resident in Munich.34 To the horror of his wife, who was adamant that she didn’t want German citizenship,35 Sassen started telling people he wanted to move to Germany and work as a journalist there. With his typical mix of imposture and the air of the adventurer, he boasted to his family and others that several German newspapers had taken him on as a correspondent. In 1959 he did actually appear on the masthead of a few issues of Stern, as Wilhelm S. von Elsloo. Years later, on reaching the bottom of the first bottle of whiskey, he would still mutter conspiratorially that he had had a specific reason to move to Munich: he was planning a secret service career with “General Gehlen.” Although this plan would come to nothing, the gossip would create substantial difficulties for Sassen after Eichmann had been abducted, when he would suddenly be suspected of being a traitor.36 He had rhapsodized about his travels in Germany a little too much. His visit in summer 1959 in particular must have kept the BfV on its toes: Sassen not only called on his old friend Rudel, he somehow managed to travel to cities in East Germany. At this point in history, the very announcement of such a travel plan would have sufficed to implicate him as a spy for the East.37 Sassen still met Eichmann from time to time, but he had more exciting plans now. And understandably, Eichmann didn’t want to be the only one left behind in the pampas.
Klaus Eichmann remembered that in the late 1950s, his father often talked about handing himself over to a German court. Eichmann’s “letter to the Chancellor” shows that this was more than just idle talk—unlike his halfhearted assurances that he didn’t want the “limelight of publicity.”38 But the other SS leaders and National Socialists, as his son recalled, talked him out of it: “They checked out the possibility of him turning himself in in Europe. An influential man was sent to Europe. After much discussion, the result was communicated to my father. The time, they said, was not right yet. Europe was still too risky. He should wait in Argentina for another five years, at least. They were certain nothing would happen to him in South America during this time.”39 Any of several people could have been the helpful Europe expert. Sassen is the most likely candidate: he had been to Germany a number of times since the end of 1958 and could also draw on the experience of his friend Hans-Ulrich Rudel. But others were more knowledgeable on legal matters. Fritz Otto Ehlert, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent, was acquainted with Horst Carlos Fuldner and was also a source for the Foreign Office. Of course, the German embassy in Argentina also had strong enough connections with the Nazis there to have provided information on the current legal situation directly. We now know that the ambassador himself, Werner Junker, maintained contact with Willem Sassen, whom he thought an “unusually capable journalist.” Junker even had some sympathy for Sassen’s political orientation.40
But Eberhard Fritsch’s experience in Europe must have been discouraging for Eichmann. Fritsch told his fellow Nazi sympathizers that, as a child of German parents, he had actually wanted to move to West Germany, but his Argentine citizenship meant he had been denied entry.41 The truth was less heroic: the West German police had an arrest warrant out for Fritsch, for distributing far-right, anticonstitutional literature. The Fourth Chamber of the Lüneberg District Court had also gone against Dürer Verlag’s main distributor in northern Germany and had seized the warehouse containing the last issues of Der Weg. Fritsch did have Argentine citizenship, and the correct visa and entry permits from the German embassy in Argentina, but he was safe from prosecution only u
ntil he entered Germany. He was not denied entry; he was just on a wanted list.42 His lofty ambitions to continue his publishing activities in Salzburg also came to nothing, as he was issued with a publishing ban and had to take a job as a hotel porter. The hotel was a top one, on the main square, but still, it was not the life that the man from Buenos Aires had imagined for his wife and five children.
If someone like Fritsch, with no criminal Nazi career behind him, was encountering such problems, then Eichmann’s chances looked significantly worse. We may also suspect that Eichmann’s family in Linz were doing just fine without their notorious brother in Buenos Aires and would not have encouraged him to come back. And Eichmann’s family wouldn’t have been the only ones advising him to stay put. The men in Argentina who had met Eichmann, or had heard of him, had much to fear from him being put on trial. They knew what he thought—and, more important, Eichmann knew who had listened to what he had to say. His knowledge of the Nazi networks, the escape and aid organizations, and the communication routes could make life very unpleasant for people, and no one wanted to think about the ramifications if Eichmann told the German authorities about them. So Eichmann’s friends in Argentina made sure the Obersturmbannführer (retired) felt at ease there in an almost touching way, ensuring that he always had an income and could even afford a vacation at the chic resort of Plata del Mar.43
The exiles in Argentina were not the only ones worrying about the possibility of Eichmann coming to trial. His reappearance would create serious problems for a lot of people in Germany and Austria. The pertinent question is not why friends advised him for or against a return to Europe, but which of the former Nazi functionaries had nothing to fear from an Eichmann trial in West Germany. Given Eichmann’s position within the Nazi regime, we cannot underestimate whom he knew and above all whom he would have recognized. People often mistakenly believe that if they know someone’s name, that person must know theirs, which could only have heightened their fears. Looking at the upheaval that Eichmann’s arrest would cause in 1960 gives us an idea of what people in the Federal Republic associated with his name and what they were afraid of. Too many former Nazis had managed to make new careers by smoothing over one another’s biographies to make them seem harmless. It is difficult to imagine that the BKA’s cohort of former SS men, of whom Paul Dickopf is only the best known, would have given their full support to a trial if they had learned of Eichmann’s intent. The Foreign Office staff who, thanks to the reinstatement article, were now working as diplomats again, and some employees of the BND, would have felt the same. Eichmann’s knowledge of names alone would have threatened to topple his old comrades’ carefully erected facade. Even as late as 2010 the publication of the book Das Amt (The Office) caused turmoil among members of the Foreign Office, and their sometimes less-than-helpful friends; we can imagine the effect it would have had more than fifty years ago. Back then, it wasn’t the more or less posthumous reputation of retired diplomats that was at stake but people’s clean slates, elevated positions, and high salaries.
Eichmann, meanwhile, was surprisingly well informed about the prosecution of Nazi criminals that was starting to take place in the Federal Republic. He knew about the arrest of his colleague Hermann Krumey, and trials against people like Ferdinand Schörner. He also heard about the founding of the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. It had been planned in October 1958, to coordinate all investigations across West Germany. Even news of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich had reached him in Buenos Aires. At the start of his interrogation in Israel, in June 1960, Eichmann said: “I read that somewhere in West Germany, I don’t recall exactly where, there is a kind of central archive concerned with the collection of documentary material.”44 Eichmann’s open letter to Adenauer was supposed to be a “report,” given in his real name, with a carefully worked out line of defense. All this speaks for the likelihood that Eichmann had given serious consideration to the route he would take to surrender himself to the Federal Republic. He was probably banking on his status as a star witness, and a sensational trial that would work in his favor, and unfortunately we cannot simply claim that this strategy was ludicrous.
Within his family, Eichmann mentioned another reason for not returning to Germany to testify, in addition to the advice from his friends. “As long as Müller was alive, he didn’t want to reveal all,” Klaus Eichmann said. We still know very little about the life of “Gestapo Müller” after May 1945, although some evidence points to his death.45 Eichmann, at least, was working on the assumption that Heinrich Müller, whom he admired unreservedly, was still alive and on the run in the East. “But he never said he was living in Eastern Europe,” Klaus Eichmann added nebulously. It is unlikely that Eichmann really knew anything about Müller’s life after the war. We cannot rule out the possibility that this explanation for Eichmann’s reluctance to give himself up was partly an idle wish and partly a symptom of his indecision. Ultimately, life in Argentina was a life of freedom with his family, and things were going increasingly well for him. He had bought a plot of land, planned and built a house, and watched his sons grow up. Under these circumstances, it was easy to heed his former comrades’ advice against returning to Europe.
Whether it was because of Fritz Bauer’s initial investigations, or something Eberhard Fritsch said in Austria, or the increasing number of people returning to Germany, or incautious inquiries by Eichmann’s friends—by early 1958, the evidence of Eichmann’s whereabouts was mounting. In March a CIA agent in Munich saw a BND file that said Eichmann was in Argentina, living under the name Clemens (though of course with the caveat that he might also be in the Middle East).46 The addition “since 1952” and the spelling error in the name tells us which file the CIA employee had seen: it was the index-card information on Eichmann from the West German intelligence service, based on the informant’s report from June 24, 1952. According to that report, Eichmann’s address in Argentina could be obtained from the “editor-in-chief” of Der Weg. By 1958, the BND should have had more precise information than that; their colleagues at the BfV in Cologne were already much better informed.47 The BfV was even making a serious effort to discover more details. “According to unconfirmed information we have here,” they told the Foreign Office on April 11, 1958, “a Karl Eichmann (further personal details unknown), who organized the deportation of Jews during the ‘Third Reich,’ fled to Argentina during the years after the collapse, traveling via Rome under the name CLEMENT. In Argentina he is connected to Eberhard Fritsch, co-owner of the ‘Dürer Verlag’ and editor of the magazine ‘Der Weg,’ Buenos Aires, and moves in the circles of former NSDAP members.” It would be helpful, the BfV explained, to alert the German embassy in Buenos Aires to this man, who might in fact be Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, whose birth date and former departmental designation were given below. In particular, the office in Cologne wanted to know where Eichmann was living. The embassy should also be instructed “to confirm his personal details and report on his political activities.”48 Whoever the source of this unconfirmed intelligence was, he was certainly reliable and well informed. The small spelling error in the surname (Clement instead of Klement) is both understandable and unimportant: the letter K is less common outside Germany and is frequently altered in the Spanish-speaking world. Even in Lothar Hermann’s letters, “Klement” is sometimes spelled with a C: Hermann was able only to hear the name, not see it written, and he chose the most likely spelling. However, Hermann was not the source in this instance: the BfV’s source knew more than anyone would have been able to discover from remote Coronel Suárez. Like the BND, he knew about Eichmann’s associates in Argentina, and he also knew the Catholic Church had aided his escape and that “Clement” was a name Eichmann had used during his escape, rather than an alias adopted in Argentina. Of course, we now know that the Red Cross passport and all his other documents had been issued in this name in 1948. But at the start of 1958, only someone in Eichmann’s circle, or who had hel
ped him escape, would have known these details. This person could have had several reasons for wrongly thinking Eberhard Fritsch was still in Argentina: the information could have been given in the period before Fritsch left, at the end of February, or the informant might have thought he returned to Argentina following his unsuccessful attempt to enter West Germany. Neither Dürer Verlag nor the magazine officially existed anymore at this point, and Fritsch had sold all his real estate.49 This information allows us to rule out one possible informant, namely Fritsch. Unfortunately, the Bf V has not yet made Fritsch’s file public, so we must continue to wait in eager anticipation of what else we might learn from its reports on the enterprising publisher.50 But the BfV’s letter contains another revealing clue. It was openly working on the assumption that Eichmann might be politically active again, in a way that could affect the West German constitution. We now know this suspicion was well founded.
The reply from the German embassy, just over two months later, is surprising in several respects: “Inquiries about the wanted man, under the name Clement or other names, have so far yielded no results.” A naïve researcher might assume that the embassy would begin its hunt for this name in its own archive, where it would, of course, have found it. As you will remember, Vera Eichmann had appeared at the embassy in person with her sons in 1954, when the Eichmann boys needed passports. The person who got the children to name SS ranks could hardly claim that their name meant nothing to him. But “inquiries” would have been a good idea, too, particularly as the embassy had no shortage of contacts in the Nazi scene. The ambassador, Werner Junker, knew and admired Willem Sassen and had a few other connections to the far right as well. When his stepdaughter wanted to do an internship with a magazine, Junker had no problem with the young lady applying to the Freie Presse; its editor-in-chief was Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’s former press adviser.51 Given that the ambassador himself wasn’t exactly taking a “hands-off” approach to the right-leaning elements of the German community, we may wonder whether the inquiries had really been all that fruitless—to say nothing of why such a negligible response required over two months.
Eichmann Before Jerusalem Page 42