Killing the SS
Page 26
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Petra Kelly, the outspoken German environmental activist and politician who claimed that Josef Mengele had returned home to Günzburg for his father’s funeral, was brutally murdered in her Bonn apartment by her lover in October 1992.
* * *
Vera Eichmann returned to live in the house on Garibaldi Street shortly after her husband’s execution, where she dedicated her life to reading the Bible. Three years later, she moved back to Germany with her youngest son, Ricardo, where she died in 1993 at the age of eighty-four. The three other Eichmann boys—Nick, Dieter, and Horst—all remained in Buenos Aires.
Ricardo Eichmann served for a short time in the German air force. He then returned to school, earning a postgraduate degree in archaeology. He currently lives in Berlin and works at the German Archaeological Institute, where he serves as head of the Orient department. Ricardo has no recollections of his father and turns down all requests for interviews. However, in the summer of 1995, he traveled to London to meet face-to-face with Zvi Aharoni, the man responsible for his father’s kidnapping. During a three-hour lunch of sandwiches and whiskey, the two men discussed the incident. “In a way, my father has come back to me,” Ricardo Eichmann said afterward. “Now I have to push him away.”
* * *
Rolf Mengele admitted his part in the cover-up of his father’s location and returning to Brazil once more after his father’s remains were located. Since 1985, Rolf has led a quiet life as a German attorney. At the time of this writing he is still alive in Freiburg, Germany. The public uproar over the discovery of Dr. Josef Mengele’s corpse made worldwide headlines, but the Angel of Death’s bones never made it back to the Fatherland for reburial. Nor were they burned and scattered at sea. Instead, medical students in São Paulo study them regularly as part of their forensic pathology curriculum.
* * *
Zvi Aharoni retired from the Mossad in 1970. After the Eichmann kidnapping, he successfully ran the Mossad’s Nazi hunting division, which was based in Paris. Unable to capture Josef Mengele or Martin Bormann, the group was shut down in 1964. Aharoni worked for a Hong Kong bank after leaving the spy agency. His first wife died in 1973 and he remarried shortly thereafter to a British woman he met in Hong Kong. The couple eventually moved to England, where Aharoni published his memoirs and worked in security for a London hotel. Eager to set aside the horrors of his previous career, Aharoni preferred to go by the name of Hermann Arndt in the last years of his life. He died on May 26, 2012, in the village of Devon, having told few of his neighbors about his role in the Eichmann kidnapping.
* * *
In May 2010, a ceremony was held in Israel by El Al to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann kidnapping. Among the attendees was the flight’s navigator, Shaul Shaul, who courageously met with Buenos Aires airport controllers when the flight was halted just before takeoff. Not in attendance was Zvi Tohar, the cool and collected El Al pilot who defied Isser Harel’s order to take off from Buenos Aires. He died of a heart attack in 1970 at the age of fifty-five.
* * *
Isser Harel entered the world of politics after resigning from the Mossad on March 25, 1963. He served one term in the Israeli Knesset before leaving office. Subsequently, he continued to spar publicly with Simon Wiesenthal about the Eichmann kidnapping, having published his own version of events in 1975, when the restriction on Mossad silence was lifted. His book, The House on Garibaldi Street, was subsequently made into a television movie in 1979. Harel lived out his remaining years in the Tel Aviv suburb of Zahala, where he enjoyed writing and reading biographies. Isser Harel died on February 18, 2003.
* * *
Rafi Eitan, who directed the Eichmann operation and personally helped subdue the Nazi during the kidnapping, enjoyed a long career with the Mossad. This included his work with Otto Skorzeny in the 1960s. After Eichmann and Skorzeny, Eitan later led the successful assassination operation against Ali Hassan Salameh, the man who coordinated the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Eitan’s spy career came to an end when it was disclosed that he had worked with American Jonathan Pollard as a handler. Pollard served twenty-nine years in American federal prisons for stealing military secrets from the United States. At the time of this writing, Eitan is in his nineties, living in Israel.
* * *
Elfriede Huth is ninety-five years old at the time of this writing. Her location is currently unknown, but she is believed to still reside in Germany, just a few hours’ drive from the Ravensbrück Memorial. The site is built on that of the former extermination camp, fifty miles north of Berlin.
* * *
Simon Wiesenthal resisted a move to Israel during his lifetime, believing that his hunt for Nazi fugitives could better be pursued from his office in Vienna. However, in death Wiesenthal had no such qualms. He was laid to rest in the seaside Herzliya Cemetery in Tel Aviv in September 24, 2005.
* * *
Eli M. Rosenbaum continues hunting Nazis and other war criminals to this day. In 2010, the Office of Special Investigation merged with the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. This expanded jurisdiction now allows Rosenbaum to search for not just former Nazis but perpetrators of genocide and modern-day war crimes around the world.
* * *
Though his body was identified by its DNA, cremated, and the ashes dropped into the Baltic Sea, there are some who believe that the corpse of Martin Bormann was a fake. Pointing to the method of DNA testing in 1996 as compared with more modern methods, these doubters continue to propel various conspiracy theories about the actual fate of Hitler’s top assistant. However, at this writing, if Bormann were still alive, he would be a remarkable 118 years old.
* * *
Of course, there are also those who believe that Adolf Hitler survived the war. Despite eyewitness evidence that he shot himself, some insist that he escaped to South America in a Nazi submarine. A declassified 1955 CIA report showed a photograph of a man bearing a strong likeness to the Führer in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo in that same year. The accuracy of the photograph was never confirmed.
Sources
As always, the Killing books are researched through a comprehensive examination of books, newspapers, magazines, archives, and personal travel. However, the web of myth, secrecy, and inconsistencies surrounding this subject matter required a more in-depth sort of research. For example, the existence of groups such as ODESSA and Die Spinne is still widely debated, more than seven decades after World War II ended. This is just one of the many mysteries that continue to confound Nazi hunters. We have presented the facts both for and against any such speculative issues, letting readers draw their own conclusions.
What is known for certain is that millions were murdered in the Holocaust. The eyewitness testimony to Nazi atrocities delivered at the Nuremberg Trials and other postwar tribunals is brutal and detailed. In many cases we have abridged these sworn statements, removing long or repetitive passages, but no words have been changed in any way.
This also holds for the testimony of Adolf Eichmann and his accusers. Readers wishing to read the entire testimony of the Eichmann or Nuremberg trials will find them available online.
Many of the conversations recorded in this book come directly from books by figures such as Benjamin Ferencz, Zvi Aharoni, and Isser Harel, who played such pivotal roles in bringing Nazi war criminals to trial. Harel’s The House on Garibaldi Street and Aharoni’s Operation Eichmann (with Wilhelm Dietl) are particularly specific about conversations and events leading up to the Eichmann kidnapping. It’s worth noting that Ferencz has placed his memoirs, in their entirety, on his website for easy reading: www.benferencz.org. There is no charge.
From a research point of view, the years immediately following World War II were best discovered through the eyewitness memoir of Ferencz and transcripts of the postwar tribunals. This testimony was essential to early portions of the book. Information about Eichmann was glea
ned from the numerous first-person accounts published subsequent to his execution. Newspapers and magazines began following the world of Nazi hunting more closely after the Eichmann trial and continue to do so to this day, as the many accounts of Elfriede Huth’s saga illustrate. In addition, a number of authors have stepped forth to investigate the murky world of postwar Nazi flight and the existence of the ratlines that made these escapes possible. We are indebted to reporting in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Der Spiegel, and a host of other print sources for their insight.
The authors consulted a small library of works about the Nazi world in order to better understand the Holocaust and the methods utilized by SS murderers to evade justice for their crimes. However, all works of history lean on a smaller bank of key resources as a gateway into the research: The Nazi Hunters and Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb; The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski; Hunting Evil by Guy Walters; Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev; Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File by Alan Levy; Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice by Gerald Steinacher; The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau; the seminal Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt; and the equally spectacular Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth. The best research we came across concerning the validity of claims about the existence of an ODESSA group can be found in The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina by Uki Goni.
It is worth taking a moment to discuss Paul Manning’s Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. Manning was a respected journalist with a lifetime of impeccable credentials. There is no reason to believe he would somehow revert to a more sensational standard to document the search for Bormann. The many specific details contained within the book are compelling, presenting a plausible case for Bormann’s successful escape from Berlin in 1945—although in many cases Manning does not provide sources. Readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions. If nothing else, the claims made by Manning and the later scientific evidence about Bormann’s demise make for a striking contrast. The search for Martin Bormann remains one of history’s great detective stories, and Manning’s book clearly shows why Bormann’s last days still remain a mystery to many.
Finally, there is no substitute for visiting in person the exact locations of Nazi horrors in order to attempt to comprehend what happened there. A considerable amount of our research time was spent in Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, where there are many powerful memorials to the Holocaust. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located in Berlin, is not easily forgotten—nor is the location of Adolf Hitler’s former Führerbunker, located just a few hundred yards away. But it is the camps such as Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau that serve as the most haunting reminder of the past. Setting foot inside them is fundamental to understanding what transpired—and why Nazi hunters are still relentless in their search.
Illustration Credits
Maps by Gene Thorp
akg-images
PhotoQuest/Getty Images
PJF Military Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
AP Photo
akg-images/Fototeca Gilardi
akg-images/picture-alliance/dpa
akg-images/Interfoto
akg-images/WHA/World History Archive
Courtesy El Al
Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons
akg-images/picture-alliance/dpa
akg-images/picture-alliance/dpa
U.S. Dept. of Justice
akg-images
Chuck Kennedy/KRT/Newscom
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
ABC News
ABC Restaurant and Bar
abortion
Aharoni, Zvi
background of
capture of Eichmann
interrogation of Eichmann
search for Eichmann
search for Mengele
transport of Eichmann to Tel Aviv
Alps
American Chemical Foundation
Amit, Meir
Andrus, Burton C.
anti-Semitism
in Argentina
in Brazil
global rise of
postwar
Antra
Arab League of Buenos Aires
Argentina
Eichmann in
Jews in
May Revolution
Mengele in
Nazism in
Perón presidency
ratlines to
Argentinisches Tageblatt
Aronheim, Eugenie
Aronheim, Heinrich
Aronheim, Hermann. See Aharoni, Zvi
Associated Press
Asunción
Atlantic Monthly
Auschwitz
medical experiments
tattoo
Austria
Jews
postwar
Avengers
Axmann, Artur
Bach, Gabriel
Baltic Sea
Barbie, Klaus
aided by Americans
arrest of
in Bolivia
as Butcher of Lyon
convicted in absentia
death of
escape of
interrogation techniques of
Izieu roundup of Jewish children
search for
trial of
war crimes of
Bariloche
Barrett, Soledad
bathtub torture
Battle of the Bulge
Bauer, Fritz
in concentration camp
search for Eichmann
Bavaria
Beer Hall Putsch
Belgium
Jews
Belsen
Belsen Trial
Ben-Ari, Mordechai
Ben-Gurion, David
Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak
Bergen-Belsen
Berlin
fall of
postwar division of
Soviet occupation of
Berlin Wall
Bertioga
Besymenski, L.
Binz, Dorothea
Bitburg
Blaschke, Hugo
Blobel, Paul
Bolivia
Barbie in
Nazi community
Bonn
Bormann, Martin
alleged skeleton of
as Brown Eminence
buried at sea
dental history
DNA findings on
escape of
in Hitler’s bunker
as Hitler’s confidant
passport of
physical appearance of
role in Holocaust
search for
Bossert, Liselotte
Bossert, Wolfram
Brandt, Rudolf
Brandt, Willy
Bräuning, Edmund
Brazil
Jews in
Mengele in
Nazi community
Bremervörde
Brixen
Brumana, Juan Carlos
Brunsbüttel
Budapest
Buenos Aires
Eichmann in
Ezeiza Airport
May Revolution
Cairo
Canada
CAPRI
Castro, Fidel
Catholic Church
Nazism and
CBS News
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
children
in concentration camps
Izieu roundup of
medical experiments on
> Chile
Christianity
Churchill, Winston
Clay, Lucius D.
Cohen, Haim
Cold War
Cologne
Communism
concentration camps
conditions
female guards and prisoners
gas chambers
liberation of
map of
medical experiments
record keeping
survivors’ testimony against Eichmann
see also specific camps
Coronel Suárez
Creighton, Christopher, Op JB
Cuba
cyanide
Czechoslovakia
Dachau
medical experiments
war crimes trials
Dakar
D-day
Death’s Head Units
de Gaulle, Charles
Denmark
Devil’s Island
Diamant, Manus
Diem Bien Phu, Battle of
Die Spinne
disease
Donaldson, Sam
Doron safe house
Dreyfus, Alfred
Dulles, Allen
Düsseldorf
Dutch Jews
dwarfs, medical experiments on
East Germany
Eban, Abba
Ebensee
Egypt
Eichmann, Adolf
in Argentina
capture of
celebrity of
escape of
Garibaldi Street house of
hanging of
Holocaust survivors’ testimony against
imprisonment in Israel
interrogation of
Klement alias of
Mossad’s role in capture of
physical appearance of
reunion with family
role in Holocaust
search for
sentenced to death
transport to Israel
trial of
Eichmann, Dieter
Eichmann, Klaus
Eichmann, Nick
Eichmann, Ricardo
Eichmann, Vera
capture of her husband and
final visit with her husband