Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Some people clearly feared that the Adviser on Jewish Affairs might turn up during this phase of the delicate German-Israeli discussions, as we can see from later insinuations that the Israelis abducted him only to influence these negotiations in their favor. But what must Ben-Gurion have been feeling as he met Konrad Adenauer, knowing that an Eichmann trial was finally within striking distance? The German chancellor had no idea that, three days before the meeting in New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Zvi Aharoni had reported from Buenos Aires that he had found Eichmann’s new address.

  Even for a resourceful agent, it had been no easy task. Investigations in Buenos Aires became more difficult in February–March 1960, despite ample help from the embassy staff. Eichmann had just moved and left no forwarding address: the plot that he had bought was in a kind of no-man’s-land on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Aharoni managed to discover the new address only after making thorough investigations and using some very clever tricks. The man whom people called “Mossad’s Grand Inquisitor” laid a trap for one of the Eichmann sons by claiming he had a present for him. Rafael Eitan is still full of praise for Aharoni, without whom, he is certain, the trail would have gone cold. The operation certainly wouldn’t have succeeded without luck and a great deal of skill. Still, Zvi Aharoni proved that even an Israeli, who had no relationship to the right-wing German community, could find Eichmann—provided, of course, one really wanted to find him.

  Unfortunately, a visit to the embassy would have yielded only the information that Vera Eichmann and the children were known (and on record) there. No current address was given for them. The Federal Republic representatives whom José Moskovits remembered would not likely have been able to discover where Eichmann was living in the short time they were on hand. And what would they have done with this information? Still, following their visit to the embassy, they did not step up their search. People tend not to think others are more resourceful than themselves, and as the events that followed show, the German representatives didn’t attribute this quality to the Israeli intelligence service. One of the German Chancellery’s reasons for keeping the Eichmann files closed to researchers is the danger that some ambiguous remark made by staff at that time might “substantially compromise or even endanger friendly relations with foreign public offices.”142 Given the events at the start of 1960, we can at least guess what this rationale could mean. But it makes full disclosure of the BND’s Eichmann files all the more important. It’s bad enough that the service did very little to find Eichmann, and that BND workers didn’t think their Israeli colleagues or an attorney general in Hesse capable of it. But unless the files are released, the terrible suspicion also remains that the BND might even have tried to prevent the capture.

  Mossad’s triumph obviously came as a surprise to everyone. On May 23, 1960, the news of Eichmann’s reappearance spread quickly, along with a frenzy of activity. The daily papers were suddenly full of photos of Eichmann and details of his crimes. Based on the wealth of information that had long been held in libraries and archives, people all over the world managed to write pages and pages of articles. The announcement also caused turmoil in West German politics. The news was sprung on the former federal president, Theodor Heuss, during his first visit to Israel. His reaction was remarkably collected, as he explained to the press that Eichmann would, without question, receive a fair trial in Israel. Reactions in Bonn were more horrified: Konrad Adenauer wanted to have Eichmann retrospectively declared to be Austrian, so Germany wouldn’t be responsible for him. Defense commissions were hastily convened, and an attempt was made to coordinate all the institutions involved in the case, from the Federal Press Office to the Bf V and intelligence service. They formed “Eichmann working groups”—but not, of course, with the aim of discovering who this unknown man in an Israeli jail was. The Federal Press Office mounted an elaborate media campaign in a very short space of time. Raphael Gross has found evidence of a planned film project, designed to paint the Federal Republic in a positive light, titled Paradise and Fiery Furnace.143 The fear and helplessness in the face of the approaching trial could not have been described more clearly.

  Only a small percentage of the material that West German institutions prepared at this point is currently accessible, but even that shows that people feared the worst. Eichmann was back and had brought with him more than a shadow of the past. The people who feared the trial most included all those former Nazis who had found their footing in the Federal Republic, with no real repercussions for their own involvement in mass murder. They were all afraid for their jobs. Former employees of the RSHA now had careers in the police, the BKA, and the BND. The staff of the Foreign Office also had cause for concern. The fact that the embassy in Argentina had issued passports to Eichmann’s sons in their real names several years previously did not bode well. And the embassy’s “inability” to find Eichmann in 1958, following a very specific request, looked embarrassingly like aiding and abetting a wanted criminal. The comprehensive dossiers on Eichmann’s life in Argentina, which the embassy personnel were suddenly able to send to Bonn upon request, revealed just how much they could have found out (or had found out) by conducting an investigation there. Their awkward assurance that before the abduction no one in the embassy knew who Eichmann was simply seemed impertinent. And the contact between the embassy staff and Eichmann’s circle of friends could no longer be concealed. The German ambassador was able to provide a detailed report on Willem Sassen, which reveals that he not only knew Sassen well but also shared many of his political views. This level of involvement nearly made his boss, Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano, lose his composure. It seemed, he said, “that some of our missions are not giving sufficient reports of these remnants [!] of National Socialism, and are not taking adequate precautions to distance themselves from them in an unambiguous way.”144

  Brentano didn’t seem worried that some of his colleagues in Bonn were among these remnants. And his instructions were wasted on Ambassador Werner Junker. At the end of 1962, Junker would still do everything in his power to prevent the extradition of the mass murderer Josef Schwammberger. He would be strongly supported by Constantin von Neurath, the director of Siemens Argentina S.A. Neurath would explain at length that he had employed this expert in ghetto management “at the company for 12 years.” The idea of handing men like him over to the West German judicial system made both the ambassador and the Siemens director “objectively very concerned.” They anticipated that Schwammberger would be “urgently needed” in the following years, “and his absence [would] create huge problems for the firm.”145 And the inventive ambassador added suggestions for how Argentine law could be cleverly deployed against the interests of German courts. So the hope that the Eichmann trial might have changed things was not fulfilled—on the contrary, the affair taught people a few tricks. In the fall of 1960, the embassy’s errors were effectively dismissed as a communication issue resulting from a lack of expertise, and a public scandal was avoided. The only fear was that Adolf Eichmann probably remembered his Foreign Office colleagues only too well. Nobody could say whether he would mention them during the trial. So taking care of their charges in Argentina became even more important.

  Eichmann’s knowledge also posed a problem for institutions that had “denazified” a large number of former comrades by employing them in public services. They included the BKA, where a former SS man served as the president’s permanent representative; at least forty-seven gentlemen from the death’s head order served alongside him.146 The intelligence services had also been storing up this kind of trouble for themselves. Out of a fear of Bolshevism, they had taken into their ranks men with a past whom Eichmann knew very well, among them Wilhelm Höttl, Otto von Bolschwing, Franz Rademacher, and Alois Brunner.147 The BND had succeeded in removing Brunner’s name from the wanted list in Greece only a few months previously, with the help of the German embassy in Athens. It didn’t want to risk losing one of its most important connections in the Middle East.148<
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  Compared with such revelations, the case of Adenauer’s (far-)right-hand man Hans Globke looked comparatively harmless. People had grown used to East Germany’s attacks on prominent people like Globke and routinely discredited them as Eastern propaganda. But these nerves were particularly raw, as evidenced by the federal government’s firm refusal to provide legal aid for Eichmann—although as a German citizen, he had every right to it.149 The government preferred to tolerate National Socialists financing Eichmann’s defense in secret, with the knowledge of the BND. His lawyer, however, would have his “costs” paid by the State of Israel.150 As a precaution against too many damaging revelations during the course of the trial, the deals agreed to in advance with Israel were frozen “until the end of the Eichmann trial.”151 Only on January 22, 1962, did Adenauer let Ben-Gurion know the promised accommodations could now be granted.152

  Other people had more specific concerns. Luis Schintlholzer had always taken a great deal of pleasure in telling people he had helped Eichmann escape Germany and had even chauffeured him personally to the Austrian border. He was now confronted with a summons to provide a witness statement.153 As the holder of a fake West German passport, he appears to have thought complying too risky a prospect; he absconded and went into hiding in Munich. An acquaintance of his told the BND that Schintlholzer had made some inquiries in Innsbruck, wanting to turn himself in, but had been advised to wait until September 1960 at the earliest. Schintlholzer told this acquaintance, with some relief, that if he waited, he would apparently face a prison term of just five to seven years, of which he would have to serve two or three. His concern about being incriminated by Eichmann’s testimony proved unfounded. Schintlholzer did, in fact, turn himself in at the start of the trial in April 1961. He was placed in custody and investigated for a year but was then released and remained a free man until his death in 1989. He held back a little on the stories about how he had been the notorious prisoner’s chauffeur, but he never hid his political views. His wife headed his death notice with the SS motto “His honor was called loyalty,” and the notice next to it, placed by his mourning SS comrades, showed that Frau Schintlholzer had not chosen this phrase unwittingly.154

  Eichmann’s abduction caused alarm outside Germany as well. At the start of June 1960, turmoil broke out in Rome.155 Umberto Mozzoni, the apostolic nuncio in Buenos Aires, went to see the Argentine foreign minister—and their discussion didn’t just cover the president’s upcoming audience with the pope. According to a surprisingly well-informed journalist on the Austrian paper Volkswille, Vatican diplomats had called on several United Nations member states to demand Eichmann’s return to Argentina: “Via semi-official channels, the papal officials expressed their opinion that the Second World War’s leading Nazis should no longer be prosecuted. They should be playing an active role in the defense of Western society against Communism: today, it is more necessary than ever to gather together all anti-Communist forces.” This view, which had been heard during the Nuremberg Trials, served as a rationale for people helping National Socialists evade justice. If the Church was now invoking international law and the struggle against the “barbarism of the East,” it was because everyone would shortly be hearing about Eichmann’s Red Cross passport and the character references that Catholic priests had provided for a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. The first detailed newspaper article disseminated details about Bishop Hudal and others, explained their cooperation with the International Red Cross, and described the dubious role of the Yugoslav priest Krunoslav Draganovic. People started talking about “Vatican passports,” and no one could predict how many “Vatican documents” Eichmann would know about.

  Eichmann’s best friends in Argentina, who had earlier done so much to try to find him, now distanced themselves as quickly as possible. When the police went to interrogate his traveling companion “Pedro Geller” (Herbert Kuhlmann), who had been the guarantor for Eichmann’s apartment in Chacabuco Street, they met Horst Carlos Fuldner. To their surprise, he opened the door to them and chattered away cheerfully. He said he was still the head of CAPRI, as the insolvency process was a long one, and had known both Geller and Eichmann. The police noted: “Fuldner explained that until May 26, he had not known Ricardo Klement’s true name. Klement had given up his post with CAPRI in 1953.… On the day in question, at ten in the morning, a distraught young man had come to his house at 2929 Ombú Street. Fuldner had never met him before, but he introduced himself as Klaus Eichmann, the son of the man Fuldner had known as Ricardo Klement.” Off the top of his head, the extremely helpful Fuldner managed to tell the police the exact date Kuhlmann and Eichmann had arrived in Argentina and even to name the Giovanna C as the ship on which they crossed the Atlantic. Nobody seems to have noticed that he was admitting to assisting Nazi fugitives.156 A few people made public denials: when the press described Otto Skorzeny as Eichmann’s friend, Skorzeny, who now had a mailbox south of Hamburg, published a denial and threatened to take legal action against anyone trying to insinuate this sort of thing.157 Like Fuldner, Johann von Leers told the police and the press that he had known Eichmann only fleetingly. Eichmann’s employer, colleagues, and friends (most of whom were lying) said they had never known who this Ricardo Klement really was.

  The seeds of insecurity planted by the impending trial yielded some bizarre fruit. Two weeks after the forthcoming Eichmann trial was announced, a man turned up at the CIA’s office in Frankfurt, claiming he had always worked for the CIA and therefore had a right to immunity. He was Leopold von Mildenstein, whom Eichmann had so admired in Jewish Office II 112 of the SD. He was obviously afraid of revelations from the man whose interest in the “Jewish question” he had sparked. But the CIA classified him as uninteresting and denied him any special protection. An inquiry revealed that the agency’s last contact with him had been in 1956, when he settled in the Middle East and tried to support Gamal Abdel Nasser against Israel.158 Some of Eichmann’s other fellow soldiers were also spurred into action. At the start of 1961, the CIA received rumors about Otto Skorzeny, who was so admired by his former Nazi comrades for liberating Mussolini. Some of those comrades had been making plans to free Eichmann, but that turned out to be too difficult, so they now wanted to kill the prisoner in Israel.159 Looking at the files, one wonders which the Americans found more confusing—the fact that such absurd plans allegedly existed, or that their German colleagues in the BND seemed to believe in them. In any case, they give us a good impression of what old Nazi heroes were discussing late into the night.160

  Eichmann’s abduction altered the lives of the SS men and other perpetrators of the genocide more radically than any event since the defeat in May 1945. It changed the way they interacted with one another for good; the years of comfortable exile and the natural trust between old comrades were suddenly over. For those who hadn’t known much about the extermination of the Jews, their new knowledge dispelled any sense of nostalgia, and the others were suddenly fugitives once more. They realized there would be no return to normality. “Now they see that I was right,” an agitated Josef Mengele noted in his diary, before moving even farther away, to Brazil, in October 1960.161 Fifteen years after the end of the war, the expatriates suddenly remembered that they had to be careful not to draw attention to themelves. And they only had a short time to consider their strategy.

  Israel was eager to put off the inevitable debate about its violation of international law for as long as possible, and it resurrected the old Middle East story, spreading the news that Eichmann had been taken prisoner in a neighboring country.

  But the real location of Eichmann’s capture soon came to light, and from that moment on, Argentina was full of journalists trying to find out more about Eichmann’s life. Wilfred von Oven finally got an opportunity to display his considerable knowledge of the Dürer circle; Fuldner gave interviews to his friend Fritz Otto Ehlert, a correspondent from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; the Mercedes director William A. Mosetti took pains to convince Ehlert
not to publish the company’s name, at least. But for the people who had known Eichmann too well, all that remained was to lie low.162 The Sassen circle disintegrated. Any further involvement in wide-ranging discussions about old times was now impossible, as were prominent positions in society and conspicuous celebrations of Hitler’s birthday. In 1965 the Latvian Herbert Cukurs, who had murdered Jews in Riga, was shot dead in Montevideo, reminding the old comrades in South America of their fear.163

  But one Argentine friend took his Eichmann connection and went on the offensive with it: Willem Sassen. On June 6, according to an Argentine police report, two men in civilian clothing broke into Eichmann’s house and took photographs of everything.164 That was the same day that Sassen persuaded Vera Eichmann to sign the contract with Life, which required photos; the police seem to have observed a secret visit rather than a break-in. A short while later pictures from the hastily abandoned house appeared alongside articles in the German magazine Stern and the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, to which Sassen apparently also sold material from the Argentina Papers.165 From then on the former SS war correspondent presented himself as an investigative journalist selling the story of a lifetime. He brazenly claimed that his true friends had always called him (Sassen, the great anti-American) “Willy.” To his family, he carefully explained that he had actually never liked the man who had been his guest every weekend for almost a year.166