Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Was Eichmann ever really the “man in the shadows”?41 Perhaps only during the short time he spent playing the SD commissar in a long leather coat, as feared and mysterious as a film noir villain. But by 1937 at the latest, other roles had become more tempting, and they soon also turned out to be more useful. Eichmann became a symbol for anti-Jewish policy, exactly as he had planned. The symbol was perpetuated by other people’s perception and by his own behavior, but it was also how he saw himself. The only difference in the postwar period was that he was elevated even further and held up as an isolated perpetrator. This was thanks to his associates and accomplices’ efforts to defend themselves, and to all the people who took comfort in the fact that it had only been a small group, a secret society made up of a few insiders, all of them strange and sinister even among the National Socialists, who had committed the greatest crime in history. The more closed this society of murderers appeared to be, the more plausible were the claims of the “others” to have known nothing about it.

  Only in Israel in 1960 would it dawn on Eichmann: being thought of as a man in the shadows could have its advantages. At that point, he would agree with Wisliceny’s description only too willingly, though as the head of the Jewish Office he would have found it incredibly insulting. Sitting in his cell in Israel, he wanted nothing more than to be able to prove that no one knew him—not because of his vast, mysterious power, but because he was so unobtrusive and unimportant. Eichmann’s incomprehension, bewilderment, and personal disappointment over the lies told by people who had once been his friends and comrades was so pitiful, you might almost think he believed it himself some of the time. How did he manage to talk away his own prominence so successfully that the world began to ignore Eichmann’s image before 1960–61? A brief glance at this pretrial image quickly teaches us that he could not have been both a symbol and an unknown.

  The fact is that none of the colleagues with whom Eichmann tried to compare himself during his trial had ever reached his level of prominence, either in the literature up until 1960 or in the public eye during the Nazi period, whether among perpetrators or victims. In magazines that were riddled with Eichmann’s name, you would search in vain for the names of Rademacher, Thadden, Wisliceny, Brunner, or even Six, and his colleagues weren’t mentioned in the Nuremberg judgment either. In 1951, when the State of Israel formulated its claim for reparations from Germany before the whole world, it named only five perpetrators in the original document. Eichmann was one of them,42 and none of the newspapers that reported it asked why.

  3

  Detested Anonymity

  He was probably bored to death.

  —Hannah Arendt, on Eichmann in his North German hideout

  At first glance, there was nothing on the Lüneberg Heath to serve as a reminder of a glittering SS career. The lifestyles of Otto Heninger and Adolf Eichmann could hardly have been more different. Instead of a uniform and gleaming boots, an office and an orderly, he was left with a secondhand Wehrmacht coat and a hut in the forest. No plenipotentiary powers, no carte blanche, no trips in his own official car around half of Europe, no new ways to exterminate the “enemy.” In the space of a few months, Eichmann’s existence had become entirely unremarkable—you might even call it tranquil. As a prisoner of war and a fugitive, his life had been in danger, and all his energy was focused on survival. Now, the peace of the forest, his plentiful rations,1 and an unchanging daily routine provided a certain security and an opportunity for reflection. In Argentina, Eichmann claimed: “In the year 1946 I made a first attempt to set my recollections down in writing, using the figures which at that time were quite freshly lodged in my memory.”2 Considering his circumstances and the timing of his later bouts of writing, this wasn’t out of character. Still, it’s impossible to imagine this activity as particularly contemplative: Eichmann might have lost his desk, but he had lost none of his attitude. His writing was not an attempt to comprehend his own actions; it arose from the fact that people were condemning the crimes he felt to be his life’s work. Eichmann wasn’t going in search of the truth; he was looking for a plausible justification of his actions in case the worst should happen.

  He must have started formulating this view of his incredible career—a story that would exonerate him as far as possible—when he was still a prisoner of war, constantly threatened with interrogations. News of the numerous cases against his superiors and colleagues made him consider how he would look to a tribunal, be it as witness or as defendant. Eichmann had played the role of interrogator often enough to know that he wouldn’t get away with an outright lie. But the truth was too monstrous to be mitigated. Eichmann might have agreed with the commandant of Auschwitz that the murder of millions of Jews was nothing more than the “battles” that “the next generation will no longer have to fight.”3 But he was intelligent enough to know that most other people wouldn’t see it that way. They were busy trying to forget or repress who and what they had spent the previous twelve years following—but for dedicated National Socialists who were wanted for crimes against humanity, the war was by no means over.

  Eichmann always claimed that from the very beginning, he read everything that was written about the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. “In the forested heathland,” he explained somewhat incautiously to Willem Sassen, “I was given a whole pile of old newspapers with articles about me. The headlines were Mass Murderer Eichmann, where is the mass murderer, where is Eichmann and similar.”4 His later conversations and statements show that he really was familiar with the major texts and events of the time, although it isn’t entirely clear when he first read them. We only know what he might have read during this period, without being able to rule out the possibility that he might only have had sight of the material at a later date. The first book, which he later would quote repeatedly, was Der SS-Staat (The SS State) by Eugen Kogon, a work based on the Buchenwald Report, a group effort by former inmates of the camp, commissioned by the U.S. military authorities.5 The book, published in 1946, contributed to the image of the Nazi perpetrators as a few asocial, perverse sadists, which Eichmann must have found insulting and provoking. It bore no relation to his vision of the Nazi leadership as a new elite, of which he had been a member. Eichmann would also have been able to read about Höttl’s and Wisliceny’s statements in early postwar newspapers and pamphlets, as they were widely covered in the press. He said he also read Das Urteil von Nürnberg (The Judgment of Nuremberg) while he was still in northern Germany. The book was published in fall 1946, in Robert M. W. Kempner’s edition.6 Fundamentally, nothing speaks against Eichmann having read these publications during his forestry period: nostalgic political conversations were evidently not unusual on “the Island.” People from the local area recall that the house, inhabited by the woodsmen and by Ruth, the Red Cross sister who lived with them, was a popular meeting place for anyone who fancied a beer and a chat about old times. The pamphlets were certainly not costly to obtain either, since the British occupying forces distributed them as part of the “reeducation” effort. In any case, by the time Eichmann moved out of the woods in 1948, to run a chicken farm in the little hamlet of Altensalzkoth, his interest would have been apparent. Looking back on his life at that time, however, he claims the opposite: “Life went on peacefully on this beautiful heathland. On Sundays I cycled to the village inn near Celle.… It sometimes made me smile when the landlord told me what the local paper was saying about Eichmann. ‘It’s probably all lies and made-up stories,’ he would say—and this made me very glad and content.”7

  But Eichmann’s special role in history did not confront him only in the newspaper articles and books he read. His new home lay just a couple of miles from the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which was now a displaced persons’ (DP) camp, temporary accommodation for the people who had survived the National Socialists’ deportations. Eichmann was living right next to his victims—only now his business was eggs, not execution. In Argentina he used this spectral scenario to tell Sass
en what he wanted to hear: “On the Lüneberg Heath, it was near where Bergen-Belsen had been, and everything round there smelled of garlic and it was all Jews, because who was buying anything at that time? Only the Jews, and then I said to myself, I, I who was bargaining with Jews over wood and eggs, I was amazed and astounded, and I thought you see—goddammit! They all should have been killed, and there those fellas are, doing deals with me, you know?”8 In spite of this repugnant Nazi bluster among friends, the proximity of Bergen-Belsen posed a genuine problem for Eichmann (though he mentioned it only in passing): “Throughout these years the fear never left me that someone might come up behind me and suddenly cry: ‘Eichmann!’ ”9 Taking a good look in the mirror clearly didn’t cause him the same level of concern.

  We don’t know which of his thoughts Eichmann wrote down on the Lüneberg Heath, because—so he claimed in Argentina, at least—he burned first his recollections, and then even the statistics, not wishing to travel with them once he left his hiding place.10 The people who met Otto Heninger in the Miele-Kohlenberg district forestry, and then in Altensalzkoth, had no idea about his fears and his inner turmoil. They met a pleasant man who didn’t drink or gamble, organized a fair distribution of rations, knew his way around the “red tape,” was intelligent and polite, and paid his rent on time. This charming man with the slight Viennese accent clearly didn’t have a provincial upbringing. “He was such a quiet, unassuming person. On warm summer evenings he often played his violin for us. He played Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven,” one of the village women told journalists in 1960.11 The men of the area also thought highly of the newcomer: his general technical knowledge meant he could fix broken equipment, and he was the only one in the area with a radio, on which he particularly liked to follow the news. Otto Heninger was a sort of man for all seasons, and although it sounds like a terrible cliché, even the children loved him: he helped tutor them and gave them chocolate.12 It is unlikely that anyone knew who Otto Heninger really was. The members of this little village community let him into their lives, rented him rooms and fields, drove his chickens to market, bought his eggs, and respected his reserved manner. At this time, shortly after the war, nobody liked to ask too many questions.13 Eichmann, however, had none too high an opinion of the villagers. “I wasn’t able to read anything more challenging than a children’s story without making the simple folk around me suspicious.”14 Although Hannah Arendt had not heard this striking statement, she was nevertheless quite right to suppose that Eichmann must have been “bored to death” on the Lüneberg Heath.15 One distinct advantage was that at least he wasn’t making attempts on other people’s lives.

  Festung Nord

  Eichmann portrayed himself as a man alone among strangers, and in later years, he always avoided mentioning his contacts from this period by name. But even out on the Lüneberg Heath, a former SS man was not so very isolated. He wasn’t the only person with a past to choose this part of the country as a hiding place. Before the war’s end, the Nazis in Berlin had considered possible emergency meeting places. While some people fantasized about imaginary defensive positions in the Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress) and Festung Nord (North Fortress), men like Eichmann were probably aware of what these national redoubts were really for: in case of defeat, a coterie of like-minded people could quickly be gathered there, to allow the exchange of important information. The area around Celle in the north, and the Salzkammergut in the Austrian Alps, were strategically favorable. Both were remote but also close to national borders. It would be possible to repopulate networks there without being noticed, and in an emergency, people could make a quick exit: Altausee, in the geographical center of Austria, was a stone’s throw from the Italian part of South Tyrol, and from Altensalzkoth it was easy to reach the major German ports. Eichmann, who had spent so many years as an emigration expert, must have seen the advantages of these “fortresses” immediately. It was no coincidence that he located himself and his family, respectively, in these exact spots. Contemporaries in the Altensalzkoth area remembered visits from SS men like Willi Koch,16 who in all likelihood knew precisely who Otto Heninger was. One of Eichmann’s other guests certainly knew: Luis Schintlholzer, the man who afterward liked to brag about having been part of the circle that had helped Eichmann escape—and whose words reached the ears of an informant for the West German intelligence service.17

  Luis (Alois) Schintlholzer was one of the brutal criminals and SS thugs whose involvement in the 1938 November pogrom in Innsbruck made them notorious.18 But this was only the beginning of the young Austrian’s career as a killer. He was born in 1914, and as a young man, he was famed throughout the city as a boxer. Schintlholzer was heavily involved in the Waffen-SS’s so-called reprisals against the Italian civilian population and in the destruction of the village of Caviola in 1943, during which forty people were murdered—a few of them burned alive in their houses. He was also active in the persecution of the Jews, becoming leader of the Trient Gestapo in February 1945. Even his retreat at the end of the war was accompanied by murder and lethal beatings.19 Despite repeated arrests after the war, Schintlholzer always managed to get away scot-free, although an Italian court sentenced him to life imprisonment in absentia. In the late 1940s, the unrepentant SS man was living in Bielefeld with his wife (and later children). He kept his real name, though he had a forged German passport, because there was a warrant out for his arrest in Austria. We don’t know the circumstances of Schintlholzer and Eichmann’s meeting in northern Germany. They may have made contact through a circle of Austrian SS comrades, of which Schintlholzer was a committed member until his death in 1989. However they met, they both doubtless knew who they were dealing with. Schintlholzer would later say that Eichmann told him about documents and notes on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” that he had hidden in northern Germany. There were statistics there too and, most important, background information on those responsible.20 Schintlholzer was Otto Heninger’s final guest on the Lüneberg Heath: he was there to make sure Eichmann reached the Austrian border undetected. Speaking to Willem Sassen, Eichmann hinted: “On the Lüneberg Heath I got around a fair bit, you know. You see, I had been on the move constantly, I didn’t just go and hide in a hole somewhere.”21 Given that he even managed to meet up with an old comrade from Bielefeld, we can guess what he might have meant by this remark.

  In time, plenty of men returned from the prisoner of war camps. At least one of them took up with Eichmann again: Hans Freiesleben, who came to live in Altensalzkoth after his release. SS comradeship proved lasting. Old associations that, at first, had been useful for pure survival, and the provision of hiding places, developed into a network of escape routes over the following years. The sheer number of former National Socialist officials who found their way to northern Germany points to something more than a collection of individual escape plans. And some of these men would meet Eichmann again in Argentina.

  Family Ties

  We cannot assume that Eichmann intended to settle permanently on the Lüneberg Heath. But over time he came to feel so comfortable there that, in 1947, he accepted an invitation to the wedding of one of his fellow foresters. Nor did he shy away from the wedding photo, standing quite close to the bride. If he had stayed in this area, he would most likely never have been found. But safety was no substitute for his family. Much to the delight of the village gossips,22 Otto Heninger received the occasional visit from Nelly Krawietz, the pretty straw-blond lady from the south who prepared exotic dishes like Kaiserschmarrn for him. People also spoke of him having a couple of relationships in the local area—but this didn’t stop Eichmann from wanting to go back to his family.

  It was Vera Eichmann who made the first attempt to return to their old life. Her behavior following her infamous husband’s disappearance betrays the fact that the Eichmanns had discussed their emergency plans in advance. She was not only cautious but showed surprising strength, enduring interrogations, house searches, and surveillance by the Allies and surviv
or groups. It was thanks to Eichmann’s wife that for a number of years not a single photograph of him was to be found. Like his family in Linz, Vera must have kept all her papers very well hidden, bringing them out only in 1952, shortly before her departure for Argentina. When she was questioned by the CIC in November 1946, she told them she had divorced her husband in March 1945 and had seen him for the last time in April, when he had wanted to say good-bye to the children in Altaussee. She seemed clueless about her husband’s crimes and gave a statement that bore a striking resemblance to those given by Eichmann’s parents and siblings the month before.23