Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Aside from their fascination with his right-wing nationalist tone, these authors were attracted to Eberhard Fritsch for a far more tangible reason: he offered to pay them. Even his letters to potential authors usually came with a little Knorr packet, as a “small gift.” Dürer’s overseas authors actually welcomed the fact that they were mostly paid in grocery parcels rather than money: these people didn’t know how to write anything other than “blood and soil” literature, and when faced with a ban on teaching and publishing, they had no idea what they were going to live on. For all their uplifting dreams of an all-powerful ODESSA, it was the food parcels from the EROS Liebesgaben-Dienst that actually delivered the goods.32

  At first, Fritsch sent parcels via Caritas, Pax (a charity in Basel), and Christian Aid, but then EROS established an office at 680 Reconquista, Buenos Aires. It was no coincidence that the EROS travel service was situated in the same part of town as the offices of CAPRI and Horst Carlos Fuldner’s bank. It had good reason to be there, as it was known as a “Nazi agency.”33 EROS was managed by Heiner Korn, who also headed the Argentine branch of the NSDAP and was the successor to its first leader, Heinrich Volberg, the head of the overseas arm of IG Farben.34 They advertised in Der Weg. Fritsch and Korn knew each other from their Nazi Party work, and they were alternately named as silent partners. Korn, who looked after his business well into his old age,35 built up a firm that was partly a bank and partly a money transfer business, aid organization, travel agency, and courier service. It was improvised and flexible. Its central warehouse for “charitable” aid supplies was in Düsseldorf, but it also had outposts in Switzerland, used for sending manuscripts and complementary copies back and forth.36 Fritsch was able to offer his authors a variety of things: as well as scarce and highly prized goods like coffee, cocoa, canned meat, fat, and chocolate (which were also a black-market currency), he could provide leather shoes and tailored suits. He had contacts for money transfers, and subscribers could pay their bills directly into the authors’ accounts. The letters of thanks from Dürer’s freelancers were suitably effusive, though there was also the occasional complaint when unexpected fees were levied at the transport stations. Even in the best Nazi circles, it would seem, people still liked to turn a profit from others’ desperate situations.

  Eichmann’s new home country was a land of opportunity. Der Weg provided pragmatic route maps for people who had been forced to flee Germany, in the form of ads for travel agencies and Kameradenwerk, along with legal aid and people-tracing services. It also printed contact addresses in Buenos Aires, from the ABC Café to the store that specialized in quality German products—and was naturally staffed by “honest German servers.”

  Fritsch’s greatest stroke of luck came in 1948, when he met the Dutch war correspondent and SS man Willem “Wim” Sassen. Fritsch not only rented a house to Sassen and his wife and children;37 he immediately signed him up to his publishing house. Sassen, a charismatic man with a remarkable talent for self-promotion, had a skill that the old overseas authors did not: he wrote in a fresh, inspiring, modern style of German. Writing under a number of pseudonyms, and ghostwriting for former Nazi bigwigs, he almost single-handedly raised Dürer’s circulation figures to previously undreamed-of levels. Sassen was also working as a chauffeur for Hans-Ulrich Rudel when Fritsch commissioned him to write Rudel’s first book, Trotzdem (In Spite of Everything). With his addition, the young, ambitious trio was complete.38 Rudel, Fritsch, and Sassen, with their diverse contacts, became sworn companions. They were bound by personal sympathy, a shared National Socialist worldview, and, not least, a common eye for profit. The existence of the trio far outlasted Dürer, and their joint projects would even include the defense of Adolf Eichmann.

  Rudel, the flying ace, opened doors to vital contacts all over the world and kept up the connection with Germany through the legal aid he provided to comrades in need. Fritsch’s publishing house offered a refuge and a contact database. Sassen’s seductive language gave voice to Nazi nostalgia and kept the hope of a National Socialist renaissance alive. Backed by the highest Argentine circles, from Horst Carlos Fuldner all the way up to Perón himself, the far-right German immigrants had a powerful organization on their side. It’s no wonder that over the following years, they came to vastly overestimate their political influence.

  By 1950 Der Weg’s circulation in West Germany had reached five figures. Distribution had largely been banned the previous year, and Fritsch tasked one of his authors with restructuring the distribution network, using intelligence service methods. The author, Juan (Hans) Maler, was a National Socialist who had been born in Harburg, near Hamburg; his real name was Reinhard Kopps. His methods didn’t rely on the official mail service, meaning that distribution could be neither prevented nor checked—and they were also fast. The two German distribution centers that have come to light also have strangely familiar names: Lüneberg and Berchtesgaden.39 The fact that the magazine was circulated regularly to 16,000 illegal subscribers in Germany, and to a further 2,500 in South Africa, tells us just how efficiently this network must have functioned. Unfortunately, in the 1960s Eberhard Fritsch instructed his wife to use the handwritten card index file of subscribers as fire lighters.40

  Rudel hints at a crucial element of what Eichmann called the “ring circle” in his book Zwischen Deutschland und Argentinien. “Contact with the old homeland,” it claims, was “frequent and active” in Argentina, because “almost every week one acquaintance or another takes a trip to Europe, and every week there is someone who has ‘just got back from Germany.’ ”41 Fritsch and Rudel were adept at making people dependent on them, and they easily convinced travelers to carry more than just their own luggage. For men like Eichmann, whose CV prohibited any return to Germany, Nazi-run organizations like EROS, and Fritsch and Rudel’s willing mailmen, were the only sure way of sending letters and money home. Eichmann used this network because it was by far the most established. He worked for CAPRI and Horst Carlos Fuldner, for whom Willem Sassen also did the odd bit of work.42 Over the years that Eichmann spent in Argentina, the circle of people around Eberhard Fritsch would play an important role.43 The mutual trust was so great that in 1952, Eichmann charged Fritsch with taking care of the most valuable thing he had: his family. He didn’t have to improvise a method of making contact with his wife and children—plenty of organizational structures were on hand, and he was clearly aware of how to use them.

  Over Christmas 1950, news reached Vera Eichmann in Altaussee that “the uncle of your children, whom everyone presumed dead, is alive and well.”44 From then on, she began telling her sons her very own Christmas story, about a far-off uncle they were going to visit, who had a horse named El Bravo. The letters were presumably sent via Vera’s father-in-law in Linz, for as Adolf Eichmann rightly suspected, various people were still keeping a close eye on his wife and children. Ever since Dieter Wisliceny and Wilhelm Höttl, under interrogation at the end of 1945, had told the CIC that Eichmann’s family was in Altaussee, Vera Eichmann had grown accustomed to house searches and constant surveillance. At first it was just the Allies’ representatives, but other hunters were soon sniffing around. Henryk “Manus” Diamant, the Romeo agent dispatched by Asher Ben Natan, had not only managed to find the first photo of the wanted man in the house of one of Eichmann’s lovers; he was also getting closer to Eichmann’s wife and children in his search for clues. Surveillance recommenced in 1947 at the latest, after Simon Wiesenthal prevented Vera Eichmann from having her husband declared dead. In July 1948 the family moved to an even smaller fishing village in the Altaussee commune, which did nothing to make discreet observation easier.45 The Christmas attempts to capture Eichmann in the late 1940s had not gone unnoticed; this little community was clearly too tight-knit for anything to remain a secret.46 Sending letters direct to the little village from Argentina would have been careless, particularly since the criminal investigator Valentin Tarra regularly questioned the mailman.47 And in Altaussee any visit from a stranger wou
ld be spotted. Linz, however, was an ideal place for a covert exchange of information, particularly as the Eichmanns still had an electronics store on one of the main shopping streets. Eichmann’s father relayed the happy news of his son’s safe arrival in Argentina to his brother in the Rhineland, making it all the more certain that the Christmas greeting had originally arrived in Linz.48

  Once again Vera Eichmann was extremely circumspect. She took care not to tell the children the whole truth, so they would be in no danger of accidentally letting it slip. They had already mentioned “nice men” to her on several occasions. “They gave us chocolate and chewing gum,” Klaus Eichmann remembered many years later. “They wanted to know where Father was.”49 When Valentin Tarra questioned nine-year-old Dieter, the boy unwittingly gave out a cunning piece of disinformation: “He told me they were going to a big house in northern Germany, and he would have a father again. His uncle in northern Germany was going to give each of the boys a riding crop, and they would be very rich.”50 Vera Eichmann had to make preparations for their trip, and her husband made sure she received the necessary money and support for their travel documents. She was able to count on the support of her husband’s family. Tarra observed: “Eichmann’s brother who had the electrical store in Linz began to visit more often.”51

  On February 12, 1952, the German embassy in Vienna issued Vera Eichmann temporary passports for herself and her sons. She had been able to show them a Heimatschein (certificate of family origin). This document had been used in Germany and Austria up to the mid-1930s as proof of nationality, giving people citizen’s rights in a particular commune; Heimatscheine are still recognized today as proof of German citizenship.52 Through her marriage in 1935, Vera Eichmann had Heimat rights to her husband’s place of birth, in Solingen, and the children of that marriage inherited the same rights. The Heimatscheine she showed the German embassy were produced on January 2, 1952, by the regional authority in Cologne. She hadn’t been to Cologne herself, so this must have been one of the services provided by the “organization.” The family disappeared in summer 1952, as inconspicuously as they could. “Frau Eichmann did not register her departure with the police, hand in her ration books, or request a leaving certificate for Klaus Eichmann from the school in Bad Aussee, not wanting to advise anyone of her new address. The rent continued to be paid,” as the observant Valentin Tarra later reported. By January 1, 1953, Tarra had more detailed information. “As I learned an hour ago,” he wrote to Simon Wiesenthal, “Veronika Liebl-Eichmann seems to have emigrated to South America in July 1952.”53 Disappearing from Altaussee was no easy matter. Still, the family accomplished their escape just as Adolf Eichmann had done two years previously, with flying colors. Vera Liebl and her sons, Klaus, Horst, and Dieter Eichmann, traveled from Vienna to Genoa and on to Argentina, with a visa from the Argentine embassy in Rome issued in their real names.54

  We have known since the start of 2011 that the Eichmann family’s travel preparations did not go entirely unnoticed. On July 24, 1952, shortly before they boarded a ship in Italy, someone informed the Gehlen Organization (the precursor of the BND) that “Standartenführer EICHMANN is not in Egypt, but is using the alias CLEMENS in Argentina. E’s address is known to the editor-in-chief of the German newspaper Der Weg in Argentina.”55 In contrast to intelligence that claimed Eichmann was in Damascus or Egypt, the Argentine information is incredibly precise. Even with the knowledge we have today, it still provides a couple of remarkable insights. The news clearly didn’t come from an informant in Argentina, as we can deduce from the incorrect rank it attributes to Eichmann. Eichmann had been promised a promotion to Standartenführer at the end of 1944—a fact that had been celebrated by his department—but he had not actually received it. The judgments from the trials of leading Nazis were the only places where he was referred to as Standartenführer, although the judgment from the Nuremberg Trials was so well known that this information had spread throughout Europe.56 But in Argentina, Eichmann introduced himself using the rank under which he had become notorious: he was SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann from the Jewish Department, and this was how he signed dedications to comrades old and new. He chose to stick with the rank he had made into a symbol of terror for four years. In Argentina, at least, this wasn’t an attempt to make himself seem less important; as we will see, he used it ostentatiously, like a trademark. In Argentina, no one would have thought to pass on information about a Standartenführer. The misheard name Clemens also suggests this is secondhand intelligence. But the card from the intelligence service file reveals much more.

  With help from his Argentine contacts, Eichmann had ensured that his wife received money and information for her escape, but Vera Eichmann also needed an address in Buenos Aires that she would be able to find in case of emergency. During the four-week trip, something unforeseen might happen, and a shack in a distant province would have been a tricky place for her to locate on her own, with no knowledge of the local language. A smarter idea was to give her Eichmann’s alias and the name of that reliable Buenos Aires host for German refugees, Eberhard Fritsch. It was this message that an informant, someone close to the “ring circle,” conveyed to the Gehlen Organization.57

  There could hardly have been a more precise clue as to where Eichmann was. The name of the editor-in-chief of the German newspaper in Argentina could be found in every issue of 1952: “Editor-in-chief: Eberhard Fritsch” was plainly printed in the masthead, together with his address and telephone number.58 We could give the Gehlen Organization the benefit of the doubt here and accept that the misheard name and the incorrect rank made the information too vague for a successful search, so that “in 1952, even a thorough check would not have turned up a match,” especially as Eichmann didn’t even live in Buenos Aires.59 But this assumption is an insult to the German intelligence service, whose employees should at least have been able to manage a job one might assign to a newspaper intern. The rank was no reason to be “skeptical”; this was how Eichmann was described at the Nuremberg Trials. And a “double misspelling” of the name is also nonsense: anyone operating in the Spanish-speaking world knows that C and K can be interchangeable, meaning the residents’ register should be searched for both variations.60 But most important, Gehlen now had a contact address. No special training was necessary to read Der Weg’s masthead: if someone had made a call to colleagues in the BfV, which collected issues of Der Weg, they wouldn’t even have needed to purchase a copy.

  The only hurdle then would be getting Fritsch to talk. But that would not have required extreme measures, as the behavior of the expats around Eichmann demonstrated—just a little cunning and a good story, the tools of the intelligence service trade. The Dürer office was like Grand Central Station; it was not a secret organization carefully concealed down a back alley. The publishing house was the place to go to find old friends in Argentina, no matter where they had moved, and the names Clemens and Eichmann would have meant something to people there, even if an erroneous “s” had crept into the alias. Misheard names were a common phenomenon in Argentina, as people so rarely used their aliases in their own circles. It may be an uncomfortable insight for the German authorities, but a single check carried out in Buenos Aires would have sufficed to find Eichmann in 1952. We don’t know whether it was done, but we know only too well that neither the information nor the intelligence service’s response to it had any consequences.

  Some might object that other, similar leads pointed to Eichmann being in the Middle East, and with such a confused mass of material, it was difficult to act on any one piece of information. Leaving aside the fact that imprecision was a common basic feature in these tip-offs, not one of the Middle East sources provided anything that was simultaneously as precise and as easy to check out as the Argentine lead, which was given to the Gehlen Organization before Vera Eichmann left Austria. Reports back from Syria and Egypt, where investigators soon reached a dead end, for obvious reasons, prove that in all those years, the German intelligence servic
e assiduously checked out even the most fantastic of rumors. So there is no reason to suspect that the Gehlen Organization was less thorough in the case of the Argentine tip-off. On closer inspection of the index card, one detail jumps out: Clemens is not only quoted in the informant’s report of June 24, 1952; the name also appears in the card index and the file itself.61 Until the start of Eichmann’s trial, the former Obersturmbannführer was suspected of having used a number of other aliases in the Middle East. However, on this index card, Eichmann’s “DN” (for Deckname, or alias) is not Rudolfo Spee, Eckermann, Hirth, Alfred Eichenwald, Ernst Radinger, Smoel, Veres, Azar, Karl Brinkmann, or Eric.62 The entry is simple and almost correct: “Eichmann, Adolf DN Clemens.”

  The tip-off and the alias remained hidden away in the Gehlen Organization’s card index. It took until 1957 for the people who were openly searching for Eichmann to piece together this puzzle, using information that had been available to the German intelligence service since 1952. In 1958 the CIA noted that the BND had an old report of Eichmann living in Argentina under the name Clemens. Nonetheless at the end of 1959, when the Rhineland-Pfalz State Office for the Protection of the Constitution put some specific queries to the BND, it replied that unfortunately, nothing more was known on Eichmann’s whereabouts than that he had been rumored to be in Egypt in 1952 and later in Argentina.63

  During the shooting of his film Eichmanns Ende in 2009, the director Raymond Ley asked Rafael Eitan, the leader of the Israeli kidnap team, why it had taken Mossad two years to recognize the accuracy of a tip-off and put it to use. Eitan answered, with some embarrassment, that the clue had remained unheeded for two years: “We did nothing! It was only after two years that we started doing anything about it.” It is about time the heads of the German authorities summoned up the courage to be this candid about the failures of their long-dead predecessors and opened their archives to the public. Instead, they leave it to a tabloid newspaper to finally make these shaming documents available to all. In the best-case scenario, West Germany simply did nothing for eight years. It was only the Israelis, and a courageous German attorney general, who stopped Germany from being guilty of inaction for even longer.