Altaussee was a lovely, small village surrounded by Austrian lakes at the foot of the Dead Mountains (Totes Gebirge). When he arrived at headquarters, Eichmann was met by Kaltenbrunner’s chief aide, “an old and trusted friend of mine, Major [Arthur] Scheidler.” His RSHA boss was seated at a table in the next room, remembered Eichmann, “clothed in the uniform blouse of an SS general and some wedge-shaped ski pants tucked into some wonderful ski boots. It was an odd costume for the ‘Last Days of Pompeii’ feeling that then oppressed us all.” Lunch had just ended. Few official duties remained for the once all-powerful head of RSHA. The tall figure was hunched over a table playing solitaire; a glass of cognac sat a few inches from his hand. Kaltenbrunner ordered up a snifter for Eichmann, who remembered (or imagined) that it tasted “good despite my gloomy mood.”
“What are you going to do now?” inquired Kaltenbrunner.
Duty, as Eichmann later realized, had become of secondary importance. It was hard to concentrate on what was happening, and he later admitted as much. Nervous shock, which “hit him like a hammer” a few days later, was beginning to set in. His beloved Third Reich, to which he had sold his soul in exchange for the power of life and death over others, had all but exited history’s stage. “I am going into the mountains,” he answered.
“That’s good,” Kaltenbrunner responded. “Good for Reichsführer Himmler, too. Now he can talk to Eisenhower differently in his negotiations, for he will know that if Eichmann is in the mountains he will never surrender, because he can’t.” Kaltenbrunner was referring to the recent public announcement that Heinrich Himmler had been trying to negotiate a surrender to General Dwight D. Eisenhower through the auspices of Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte.
As Eichmann remembered it, the pair “concluded… official business and I went off to become a partisan chief in Austria. I took my leave formally without any personal overtones, as did Kaltenbrunner. He remained sitting at his solitaire, only his expression revealing a certain friendliness to me.”
“It’s all a lot of crap. The game is up,” Kaltenbrunner suddenly blurted pathetically as Eichmann left the room. They were the last words Eichmann ever heard “from my good friend Kaltenbrunner.” Tens of millions of civilians and soldiers had been killed, millions more wounded or dislocated, and a large swath of the civilized world lay in smoking ruins, and the best parting phrase the RSHA chief could come up with was an analogy to excrement. The final words he would speak the following autumn would be no more meaningful.
Eichmann left Altaussee, “collected all the heavy equipment we had there and set out to organize a resistance movement in the Totes Gebirge, above the town. The whole thing had now been dumped in my lap.” It had indeed. According to Eichmann he had with him:
the regularly assigned people in my department … some groups of Waffen SS soldiers, and a wild bunch from [Walter] Schellenberg’s Intelligence Section of the SS. Schellenberg’s crowd had been burned out of the [Austrian] Kremsmünster monastery. I think they set it on fire themselves, but they managed to get a few truckloads out with them. In the trucks were scattered piles of uniforms, all kinds of uniforms except winter equipment and ski gear. Instead they had down sleeping bags and emergency rations—chocolate, hard sausage, etc., of the sort we hadn’t seen for a long time. They also brought a small chest full of dollars, pounds and gold coins.
One small chest of gold? Perhaps not.4
April had given way to May by the time part of Eichmann’s entourage took up temporary quarters at the (as yet unburned) monastery in Kremsmünster. A series of encounters and experiences with Eichmann at the monastery, in Altaussee, and on the Blaa Alm, seared themselves into SS Oberscharführer (Technical Sergeant) Rudolph Doskoczil’s memory forever. Doskoczil was a native of Vienna and had been a member of the SS since 1938. As far as he was concerned the organization provided food, shelter, and pay. It kept him off the streets. From the perspective of the 1930s he could not see what was lurking in the decade that would follow. By 1943 he had reached the rank of Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant). He was also demoralized by the war and the role played thus far by his SS. Doskoczil spoke out on the subject and was demoted to sergeant. As an administrative aide to Dr. Wilhelm Höttl, Doskoczil found himself quartered in Kremsmünster as the war wound its way to a fitful conclusion. Just when it looked as though the end would arrive without much fanfare, Adolf Eichmann’s men came calling that final May of the war.5
Doskoczil was returning to his quarters in the Kremsmünster monastery on May 2 when he spotted several heavily armed SS men milling about. Discreet inquiries revealed they were part of “SS-Group Eichmann.” Unsure exactly what that meant, Doskoczil entered the monastery and discovered, to his complete surprise, “great amounts of gold and foreign exchange … being packed into sheet-iron chests by the administrative officer of the group.” The next day Doskoczil was ordered to take command of a truck supposedly filled with food, weapons, clothes, and other items, and see to it that it arrived safely in Altaussee. His carefully worded orders were to report to the police station in Altaussee and make a phone call to the Villa Kerry “for further instructions.” In the company of a Ukrainian driver, Doskoczil did as he was told and arrived at the police station on the evening of May 3. “The phone call was answered by a woman’s voice telling me to wait in front of the police station … until somebody came and gave me further instructions,” he told his postwar Austrian investigator. A few minutes later a pair of civilians on a motorcycle arrived and instructed Doskoczil to drive the truck to the Park Hotel. Curious, but smart enough to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told, Doskoczil followed the men to the inn. He was ordered to leave the truck in their custody, which was fine with him. The exhausted solder took a room and fell promptly to sleep. To Doskoczil’s dismay, he discovered the next morning that the truck was missing and he had forgotten to remove his personal trunks from the back of the vehicle. Everything he owned, which was not much, was stuffed into those missing trunks. He promptly reported the truck stolen to the local police, but all they would tell him was that he “would learn where the lorry was [later].”
More surprises were in store for Doskoczil that morning of May 4. Without advance warning an assembly of SS men was called in front of the Park Hotel. Doskoczil was still a member of the SS so he fell in with the rest of them. He was standing there waiting to see what the gathering was all about when a second heavily loaded truck arrived from Kremsmünster carrying food, ammunition, office equipment and, as he later discovered, more gold. His attention snapped back to an SS lieutenant colonel. A new “fighting-group” led by a “Dr. Müller” was being formed, he barked at them. While Doskoczil looked on as “the alleged ‘Dr. Müller’ was introduced as the new commander.” Doskoczil’s mouth fell open. “I at once recognized that man; he was SS Obersturmführer [Adolf] Eichmann, whom I myself had known for many years.” At least part of the fog surrounding the puzzle was beginning to lift. Eichmann walked slowly in front of the men, his heavy leather boots crunching in the snow. With his hands on his hips, the SS officer called out, “Who knows how to ski?”
Doskoczil and many others unwittingly raised their hands.
“You will step forward and select ski equipment at the hotel,” Eichmann snapped. “You will then prepare to head out to the Blaa Alm in order to defend the mountain post against the approaching U.S. Forces.”
Doskoczil realized immediately his mistake, but did as he was told. In the milling confusion that followed, he quietly slipped out of the group and a few hours later headed to see Dr. Höttl, who was visiting his wife and family at their home in Altaussee. When Doskoczil told him about his new mission at Blaa Alm, Höttl cut him short. “You cannot be party to this undertaking,” he advised his subordinate. “It is nothing but a suicide mission aimed at buying the high brass a few more days to make good their escape.” Doskoczil agreed to take this good advice and remain in Altaussee. After his afternoon visit with Höttl he learned that both trucks—the on
e he had driven to Altaussee and the one that had arrived during the SS assembly—had departed for Blaa Alm.6
There was still the matter of his missing personal belongings. While other SS men drank boisterously or prepared themselves for the ski mission, Doskoczil searched about for his trunks. He was under the impression they had been off loaded at the hotel. “I supposed that they were still at the Park Hotel as numerous boxes and trunks were lying around there,” he later explained. The sergeant poked his head into each room occupied by the SS, inquiring about his belongings. No one had seen his things. One of his last stops was the office of the administrator of Eichmann’s group. What he observed inside remained with him for the rest of his life. “I saw a table, 2 meters long, which was entirely covered with piled-up foreign exchange and gold coins, the heap having a height of nearly half a meter,” he remembered. “On the floor there were also cases containing foreign exchange and gold coins.” One of Eichmann’s assistants, a man Doskoczil had never seen before, was casually counting and sorting the stolen loot as though he were sitting in a toy aisle of a store taking inventory. In his hand was a list on which he was scribbling numbers. The sandy-haired officer looked up at the stunned, and by now a bit embarrassed, Doskoczil. Inquiring about misplaced underwear and toiletry items seemed ridiculously out of place. Still, they were the only things he owned. The officer, whom history has not named, waved Doskoczil away with a gruff, negative reply.7
Unable to find his things in Altaussee, Doskoczil hitched a ride in a jeep with two SS officers heading for Blaa Alm. They were seeking Eichmann to obtain food rations; Doskoczil simply hoped to find his belongings inside one of the two trucks already at that place. The jeep bumped along the single-lane mountain dirt road, but the two miles were slow going. Mud, slush, deep tire ruts, and eventually blowing snow forced the men to pull the jeep over and walk the last several hundred yards to the Blaa Alm Inn. The trucks were parked about fifty meters from the building next to a radio car. As the three men approached, two SS guards armed with machine guns refused to allow them near the vehicles. Doskoczil and his comrades raised their hands to show they understood and then backed away, heading instead for the inn. Perhaps they would find Eichmann there. Music, laughter and song rose to greet them as they entered a taproom. Inside were a dozen fully armed SS men throwing down cognac as fast as it could be poured. All of them were “drunk and in a state of complete helplessness,” remembered Doskoczil with some disdain. [A few years ago, author Kenneth Alford enjoyed a dark ale in the Blaa Alm Inn, which was rebuilt on the original foundation. It is still located at the end of the same, single dirt lane in a remote splash of Austrian pasture land.]
Eichmann and his adjutant were quickly located. One of Doskoczil’s companions approached and requested “emergency rations by order of Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner.” Eichmann immediately took a dislike to the unnamed solder, whom he later described as “a fresh, arrogant fellow.” SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Anton Burger, one of Eichmann’s top aides, asked for permission to shoot him, but Eichmann declined. “I told the man he could have half a case and no more. Otherwise, I’d have [him] done in.” On their way back to their jeep the trio passed the watchful, wary (and obviously sober) machine gun-wielding guards standing next to the parked trucks. “It struck me” at that time that the [trucks were] so strongly guarded that the assets of gold and foreign exchange were stowed away in [them],” recalled Doskoczil. He walked with his companions to the abandoned jeep and motored back that night to the Park Hotel in Altaussee. He never saw his personal belongings again, but he did have some vivid memories that would last a lifetime.8
Adolf Eichmann had already discovered just how difficult it was to reach Blaa Alm. The SS leader described the remote place, “a stretch of mountain pasture land about an hour’s march from Altaussee.” Late April and early May are usually snowy months in this region, and the early spring of 1945 was no exception. “I had the Bürgermeister order out 150 of the Hitler Youth—they were all we had—to shovel the snow out of our path,” he recalled in his postwar memoirs. “It was already one or two meters deep in spots. At least we could get through with the vehicles.” (Eichmann’s vehicles and marching soldiers left behind the deep truck ruts and churned mud that Doskoczil’s jeep was ultimately unable to navigate.) There was only one place to stay on the Blaa Alm, and Eichmann headed directly for the small inn. He was requisitioning a room when “an old party man in the town warned me about the innkeeper. He said I would do well to have the traitorous anti-Nazi clerk done in, and I decided to do so.” As Eichmann breezily noted, “it was the time when everybody was doing everybody else in.” When the innkeeper was brought to him for execution, Eichmann decided to spare his life—not because it was the moral or just thing to do but because he was “a little sausage of a man,” and not a threat to anyone. A number of SS men discovered a large barrel of wine in a nearby storehouse. “I set it upon the street so that all the soldiers coming up to the mountain could stop for a few glasses before going on,” explained Eichmann. “I allowed each man only a five-minute stop. The barrel was soon empty.”
At about this time, another SS man stopped by seeking gold. His orders bore Kaltenbrunner’s signature. “I knew the writing and it seemed genuine to me,” remembered Eichmann, “although I had no reason to test its authenticity. In any case gold or money meant nothing to us in the mountains, while bread and emergency rations were everything. Although I was harsh to this fellow at first, I finally had … our paymaster pay out the gold that he requested, thus translating Kaltenbrunner’s wish into fact.” Exactly how much gold he gave the officer, who the officerwas, and whether the metal ever reached Kaltenbrunner, is unknown.9
Eichmann surveyed his ragtag command and estimated his chances of survival. What he saw did not please him. “What a bunch of good-for-nothings you have here, I said to myself. There were guys from the Waffen SS, who probably were just out of [the] hospital and at the disposal of almost any unit, rounded up and turned over to me by the Security Police; this absolutely insubordinate gang from the Intelligence Section, a few women, my own men. And add to this 150 Hitler Youth. Then there were some Romanians on my neck, too. With this I was supposed to fight a war.” He was at least well armed. “I had plenty of the most modern weapons, however, I had never before seen assault rifles, and now I had piles of them. I had never seen as much ammunition as I had up here—bazookas lying in heaps.”10
One may legitimately doubt whether Eichmann ever seriously considered conducting a last stand in the snowy mountains of Austria. He was a bureaucrat, not a front line soldier. His stomach was cast iron when it came to shipping unarmed people to their deaths; picking up a rifle and directing a military action was not in his psychological play book. Even the pretense of a redoubt-style defense was finally, irrevocably, abandoned when he ordered most of his weapons and ammunition dumped into a stream and “the majority of the men” released from duty. Discipline by this time was all but nonexistent. “I had 5,000 Reichsmarks paid out to each one against his signature,” he later wrote. “I was hard and brusque with them. Each man, on hearing he was no longer needed, gladly took off down the mountain without further formalities. I was even hard on a little SS girl, an office worker, who had begged and implored me to take her along. Scorning all her feminine wiles, I said, ‘Pay out 5,000 marks. Dismissed!’” The trip from Prague to Altaussee and beyond merely bought Eichmann a few additional days of semi-organized freedom, its end uncertain but its purpose clear. Orders were issued to the remaining small group of men “to evacuate the Blaa-Alm and go farther away to the Rettenbachalm, which lies even higher.” Captain Burger, Eichmann’s “best skier,” was sent ahead to investigate the condition of the mountain roads and seek advance lodging. In all likelihood, the volunteer skiers gathered in front of the Park Hotel, accompanied him.11
Eichmann’s smaller motorized party was moving, snail-like, higher into the mountains when, as he recalled it, “an orderly arrived from Kaltenbr
unner with a directive from Reichsführer Himmler ordering us not to shoot at Americans or Englishmen. I countersigned it and the boy rushed off back to the valley.” Eichmann passed the directive down to his men. “It looked like the end.” Kaltenbrunner was resigned to defeat; his actions in Altaussee at the card table bespoke as much. Eichmann was simply angry. “The Americans were now sitting in Bad Ischl, not very far away, and we heard that our girls were already dancing with the Americans in the marketplace,” he scribbled with undisguised contempt almost two decades later. “Even the huntsmen were hostile to us. Gangs of them—home guardists they called themselves—were crawling around us in the hills, all of them punks. They were probably people who had shouted themselves hoarse yelling ‘Heil Hitler!’ in 1938. Now they prowled about us, with weapons of course. Whether or not my men shot at them I did not know, nor do I know now if they ever did. There was shooting everywhere at that confused time.”12
One would have had to have been blind and deaf to have not recognized for many weeks that “the end” was near. The Americans arrived faster than even the Germans anticipated, and by now Altaussee was firmly in their grip. The Russians had reached Liezen in the Enns Valley. Now even his faithful inner circle began to unravel. Eichmann’s driver, “Polanski,” sought him out and asked for a vehicle or two “so that he might go off and set up a peacetime trucking concern on his own.” Eichmann saw no harm in the request. After all,” he thought, he had served me loyally for many years. “Take a truck for yourself,” he told him, “or whatever you need from the Blaa-Alm, and make off with my Fiat Topolino.”
Nazi Millionaires Page 28