Hunting Eichmann
Page 13
The front door opened, and Sylvia Hermann entered the house, calling hello to her parents. She stopped on seeing Hofstetter, and her father introduced "Mr. Huppert." Without reticence, Sylvia told him about her visit to the Eichmann house.
"Was there anything special about the way he spoke?" Hofstetter asked her.
"His voice was unpleasant and strident, just as Dr. Bauer described it in one of his letters."
Hofstetter questioned whether these letters might have influenced her thinking.
"No," she said bluntly. "I'm a hundred percent sure it was an unbiased impression."
"What you say is pretty convincing," Hofstetter said, struck by the girl's courage and straightforwardness. Everything she said matched the information he had been given before leaving Tel Aviv. "But it isn't conclusive identification. Vera Eichmann may have married again—we've heard many such rumors—and her children may have continued using their father's name." He explained that he needed to know the alias of the person living with Vera and her sons, as well as where he worked. He also would like to obtain any photographs of him or his family, any documents with his name, and, in the best case, a set of his fingerprints.
"I'm certain I'll be able to get you your proof," Lothar Hermann responded. "I've got many friends in Olivos, as well as connections with the local authorities. It won't be difficult for me to get these things. However, it's obvious I'll have to travel to Buenos Aires again, my daughter too ... This will involve further expense, and we simply can't afford it."
Hofstetter promised that his people would cover any expenses. For the sake of secrecy, he instructed that all their correspondence should be sent to him at an address in the Bronx, New York, care of an A. S. Richter. He tore an Argentine dollar in two and gave one half to Hermann. Anybody with the other half could be trusted.
After two hours of planning and discussion, Hofstetter thanked the family and left. He would report back to Harel that the Hermanns were reliable but that more information was needed and they seemed capable of gathering it. As Hofstetter walked back toward town, the taxi that had taken him to the house pulled to his side. Ilani stuck his head out the back window and jokingly asked, "Can I give you a lift, sir?"
10
ON APRIL 8, Sylvia Hermann and her father visited the land records office in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, thirty-four miles southeast of the metropolis. Their German contact had sent the promised funds, and the amateur detectives were now out to collect the evidence that they had the right man.
A clerk brought them the public records on 4261 Chacabuco Street, and Sylvia read the details to her father. An Austrian, Francisco Schmidt, had bought the small plot in Olivos on August 14, 1947, to build two houses. Eichmann was Austrian, Lothar knew, and he had arrived in Buenos Aires after the war. Schmidt must be the alias he was living under now. Excited by this important discovery, Hermann and his daughter took a train to Buenos Aires to look for confirmation. Through a contact at the local electricity company, they found that two meters were registered at the address under the names Dagoto and Klement. Rather than doubt the Schmidt alias, Hermann surmised that these would be two fake names that Schmidt had come up with to obscure his trail. When Hermann chased down the people who had sold Schmidt the land at Chacabuco, he was given a description that resembled the one that Bauer had sent on Eichmann and that his daughter had confirmed on her brief visit to the house. The seller also told him not only that Schmidt had some scars on his face but also that the rumor was he had arrived in Buenos Aires on board a German submarine in 1945.
The following month, the Hermanns returned to Buenos Aires for five days to continue their investigation. On this trip, they discovered a photograph of Nick and heard another rumor that Adolf Eichmann had lived in the interior of the country for several years after arriving from Europe. Their attempts to find his photograph, fingerprints, or identity documents failed. On May 19, Hermann wrote to Huppert in New York, describing their detective work of the past six weeks. "Francisco Schmidt is the man we want," Hermann wrote, explaining that it was likely he had undergone plastic surgery (hence the scars). He wrote that further investigation would require more funds and that he should "hold all the strings" in pursuing the matter. Hermann was sure his discoveries would be met with a call to action.
The letter from Lothar Hermann wound its way from Argentina to New York and on to the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, arriving in June 1958. Isser Harel was skeptical about its contents from beginning to end. Hermann was too certain and wanted too much control, both qualities that Harel distrusted by instinct and experience.
Note in hand, he broke down each of its assertions. Merely because Schmidt was listed as the owner of the land where a Nick Eichmann lived did not prove that Adolf Eichmann inhabited the house, nor under that alias. The plastic surgery claim was pure speculation. And what purpose did Hermann have in tracking down where Eichmann lived in the late 1940s if he already knew that Schmidt was Eichmann? One investigated the freshest clues, not the most dated. His demand for more funds and to "hold all the strings" reeked of a potential scam.
Harel had made his way to the top of Israeli intelligence by assembling as much information as he could and then putting himself in his enemies' shoes to understand their motivations and to play out their possible next moves. His agents remarked among themselves that "if you showed Isser Harel one side of a match folder, he could tell you without looking what's printed on the other side." He trusted his intuition, and regarding the Eichmann case, instinct told him not only that Yoel Goren was right that the Nazi fugitive could not be living in such squalor but also that the information Lothar Hermann had sent in his report was suspect at best and perhaps wholly fashioned imagination at worst.
Harel cabled Ilani in Buenos Aires to check on Francisco Schmidt. If this proved to be a dead end, the Mossad chief was going to add the Buenos Aires tip to the pile of unsubstantiated rumors about Eichmann's location in his dossier. One such rumor had him operating an import business in Damascus under the name Brunkmann. In another, he was traveling freely between South America and Switzerland under the alias Dr. Spitzer. Still other rumors had him in Cairo stirring up pogroms against Jews or in Kiel, Germany, calling himself Arthur Sonnenburg. Harel had initially thought that the information from Fritz Bauer sounded credible, but now he doubted it just as much as the other tips.
As the summer passed, Harel was occupied by more pressing concerns. He uncovered a Soviet mole infiltrating his agency, and the Middle East was in a state of upheaval as a result of the continued fallout from the Suez War. Earlier in the year, Egypt and Syria had unified to create the United Arab Republic, increasing the status of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was openly belligerent toward Israel. The Iraqi king, Faisal II, had been assassinated in July, and rebels now threatened his cousin King Hussein of Jordan. Ben-Gurion had placed the Israeli army on high alert, and any intelligence on what might be the next move of the young state's Arab neighbors took priority. Given the Mossad's limited size and strength, Harel was unwilling to take a single agent away from his or her duties to pursue what was probably a false lead. Only a directive from the prime minister would change his mind.
At the end of August, Ilani reported to Harel that Francisco Schmidt was definitely not Eichmann, nor did he even reside at the Chacabuco Street address. He was merely the landlord. As one of Harel's agents said, "Sometimes you put together the jigsaw puzzle of information and it comes out a horse instead of a camel, and there's nothing you can do with it." Harel shelved the Eichmann dossier; Hermann had the wrong man. The Mossad chief apprised Bauer of his conclusion and severed his correspondence with Hermann. Once again, the hunt for Eichmann was called to a halt.
Some months before, in early March 1958, Kurt Weiss, an operative for the West German federal intelligence service Bundesnachrichten-dienst (BND), had met with a CIA agent in Munich to exchange information on former Nazis who might be involved in spying operations in the
Middle East. Both organizations had made it their practice to recruit former SS, Gestapo, and Abwehr agents into their folds, even though they both vehemently denied those agents' presence to the public—and often to each other. Their respective chiefs, Reinhard Gehlen and his American benefactor Allen Dulles, were focused on fighting the Communist threat across the globe. That some of their operatives, including several lieutenants of Adolf Eichmann, had blood on their hands did not rank as a reason for disqualification. These individuals had often proved to be more trouble than they were worth, however, as a number of them had turned out to be double agents or had enlisted their erstwhile comrades to act as informants. This had created a nest of former Nazis, all morally corrupt and of dubious loyalty, clouding the already murky world of intelligence.
At the Munich meeting, Weiss wanted to know if the CIA had any guidance to offer on several names that had come to his attention: Abwehr agent Eberhard Momm, supposedly living in Germany; Franz Rademacher (alias Rosello), a Third Reich diplomat responsible for Jewish affairs who had fled to Syria after the war; Johannes von Leers, a Goebbels propagandist who had escaped to Argentina and then moved to Cairo in 1956 to work for Nasser; and Adolf Eichmann. According to the BND agent's information, Eichmann had been "born in Israel and became an SS-Obersturmbannführer. He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952. One rumor has it that despite the fact that he was responsible for mass extermination of Jews, he now lives in Jerusalem."
Simultaneous with these inquiries, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), the West German domestic intelligence agency charged with combating any Nazi resurgence, was trying to verify through the Foreign Ministry and the German embassy in Argentina whether Karl Eichmann, an individual known by the agency to write for the neo-Nazi journal Der Weg, was actually Adolf Eichmann and whether he was living in Buenos Aires under the alias Klement. The embassy responded later that summer that it had no information to that effect and that Eichmann was most likely living in the Middle East.
Someone in the nest of former Nazis who knew of Eichmann's alias was no doubt speaking to the two key German intelligence agencies. Neither of them showed much vigor or enthusiasm in tracking down the war criminal, perhaps not wanting to expose Hans Globke, who oversaw both the BND and the BfV, to any undue attention. Eichmann would have known the state secretary's activities during Hitler's reign very well indeed.
Nor did the CIA take any action. Four years previously, it had been under pressure from Jewish leaders in the United States to investigate reports from Simon Wiesenthal that Eichmann was in Argentina. But the agency had failed to act then, and they failed to act now—not even the simple courtesy of passing along the latest intelligence to their Israeli counterparts. Given the CIA's ties to Globke, who these days was the chief liaison between German intelligence and the agency, and the slew of Eichmann's lieutenants spying for America, it was not in the CIA's interest to stir up the past. And so the fact that Klement was not only Eichmann's known alias but also the name associated with the house where he lived (according to Lothar Hermann) remained unknown.
In San Fernando, an isolated northern neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Eichmann and his three sons were digging a huge rectangular trench in the earth in February 1959. Water seeped in from the sides and bottom, since the land Eichmann had bought was located in a low, flat plain that frequently flooded in the winter from the overflow of the nearby Reconquista River. Once they finished digging, they pumped out the water and sealed the trench. Eichmann wanted his new house to have a foundation that was five feet deep and had walls two feet thick—both measurements triple the standard. He was building a fortress.
Eichmann had purchased the one-fifth acre in late 1958, exhausting his limited savings. He did not want to rent any longer and thought the investment was a good hedge against the plague of Argentine inflation. He was planning for a long future in the country. The land came cheap because of its remoteness and its tendency to flood. There was no access to electricity, water, or sewerage. On the upside, this meant there were also no municipal taxes and few prying neighbors.
Now that the first stage of construction was complete, Eichmann and his sons could start building their home. He had purchased the necessary supplies and arranged for delivery. He had plotted out a schedule of work in exact detail, and he planned to be finished by early 1960. The single-story brick structure would not be spacious, but it would belong to him.
After a series of missteps in his career, he had gained promising new employment at a Mercedes-Benz factory making buses and trucks, located twenty miles southwest of Buenos Aires in the industrial district of González Catan. Hired as a welder in March, Eichmann suspected that there would be room for advancement. Jorge Antonio, a Perón loyalist who allegedly had been connected with the siphoning of Nazi funds into the country after the war, had started the Argentine branch of the German company. Antonio employed more than five hundred people, mostly German émigrés, a number of whom were fugitive Nazis. Once again Eichmann had called on his former comrades for help, and once again they had answered—though more out of pity this time around.
Despite his improving job prospects, Eichmann remained trapped in the past. He bought history after history on the war, scribbling his reactions in the margins of these books. In Hitler: The Last Ten Days, Gerhard Boldt criticized the foolishness and cowardly acts of Hitler's inner circle. Whenever Boldt, a former Nazi officer who had been in the bunker with Hitler, appeared in the text, Eichmann drew a line through his name and wrote "Traitor," "skunk," or "scoundrel." In one section, Eichmann scrawled, "The author should be skinned alive for his treachery. With crooks like this, the war was bound to be lost." On the last page of the book, Eichmann wrote his opinion of the nature of duty, a virtue that Boldt obviously did not understand: "1. Every man is entitled to live as he pleases; 2. But then he has no right to call himself an officer, because; 3. Officer = fulfillment of duty as specified in the soldier's oath."
Eichmann was increasingly becoming a pariah within the German community in Buenos Aires because of his obsession with the war. Over drinks at the ABC biergarten, he often raged about the many people who had betrayed the Third Reich and how things could have gone differently. At other times, he was merely a dour presence, spare with words, highly nervous, and known for having a handshake as weak as a damp cloth.
Eichmann's sessions with Sassen had ended, removing this outlet for his spleen. In early 1959, Eichmann attempted to articulate his thoughts on what he had done and how he felt almost a decade and a half after the war. It would be the introduction to his memoirs.
I am growing tired of living the life of an anonymous wanderer between two worlds. The voice of my heart, which no man can escape, has always whispered to me to look for peace. I would also like to be at peace with my former enemies. Maybe that is a part of the German character.
I would be only too glad to surrender to the German authorities, if I were not obliged to consider that people may still be too much interested in the political aspect of the matter to permit a clear, objective outcome. Far be it from me to doubt that a German court would arrive at a just verdict, but I am not at all clear about the juridical status that would be accorded today to a former receiver of orders, whose duty it was to be loyal to his oath and to carry out the orders and instructions given him.
I was but a faithful, decent, correct, conscientious, and enthusiastic member of the SS and of Reich Security Headquarters, inspired solely by idealistic feelings toward the fatherland to which I had the honor of belonging. Despite conscientious self-examination, I must find in my favor that I was neither a murderer nor a mass murderer. But, to be absolutely truthful, I must accuse myself of complicity in killing, because I passed on the deportation orders I received and because at least a fraction of the deportees were killed, though by an entirely different unit. I have said that I would have to accuse myself of complicity in killing, if I were to judge myself with merciless severity.
Such was the belief that Eichmann reaffirmed to himself every day, confident that his pursuers had given up looking for him and that he would never have to face the justice that he contemplated in the abstract.
11
AT DUSK ON SATURDAY, October 10, 1959, Tuviah Friedman stood on his balcony and looked out over Haifa. The Sabbath rest drew to a close as the sun set, and the city on the northern coast of Israel came alive. People chatted as they poured onto the streets to savor the cool evening at outdoor cafés. Motorcycle engines roared up the steep Mount Carmel streets, and bus brakes squealed on their descent. Friedman could hear neighbors laughing in the courtyard as they headed out. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere. He stared out at the flickering lights of boats in the harbor, knowing that he could not enjoy himself. The envelope in his breast pocket was burning a hole through his chest.
When Friedman had first come to Israel six years before, he had been determined to put aside his hunt for Nazi war criminals, Eichmann most of all. He had floated from job to job before beginning to work at Yad Vashem, helping to organize the collection on Holocaust history and to register the names of Jewish victims. He had started the museum's office in Haifa but then gradually had found himself pressing officials for information on war criminals. He could not help himself, despite his bosses' urging that "we are not a police agency." In 1957, they had let him go. With a small government stipend, Friedman had reopened his documentation center and focused again on the capture of Eichmann. Since then, he had not earned a salary, and his wife, Anna, now a practicing eye surgeon, had supported him and their newborn son.