by Neal Bascomb
The minute the photographs were taken, Dani got out of the room. He told the others that he had not expected such a rush of emotions. "To even be in the same room with him, I had to force myself not to feel anything," he said, before withdrawing into one of the other rooms to work on his forgeries. When he emerged, he handed Eitan the documents and left Tira, forgetting to say goodbye to the others. He had only one thing on his mind: leaving and never going back.
Peter Malkin was on guard when Eichmann suddenly asked, "Are you the man who captured me?"
"Yes, my name is Maxim," Malkin answered hesitatingly.
Even though Eitan's express orders were not to speak to the prisoner, Malkin wanted to know why Eichmann had orchestrated the slaughter of his people and how the Nazi had been capable of such acts. With Eichmann speaking in German and Malkin in Yiddish, the conversation was rough and stuttering.
Malkin remembered when he had watched Eichmann playing with his young son outside his home. "Your boy, he reminds me so much of my sister's son," Malkin said.
"What happened to him?"
"Nothing happened," Malkin answered bitterly. But then he continued, "There is only one thing I know: Your boy is alive, and the boy of my sister is dead."
"Are you going to kill me?" Eichmann asked.
"No. We're going to bring you to trial, to a fair trial: a chance you never gave your victims."
Then he asked Eichmann, "How did you come to do what you did?"
"It was an order. I had a job to do."
"Just a job?" Malkin said incredulously.
"Are you not a soldier? Don't you have your orders? You captured me. Why did you do it? Because of an order."
"Yes, I got an order to capture you, but there's a big difference between you and me. I had an order to catch a criminal. But you went after innocent people. They had done nothing wrong at all. You followed those orders because you hated these people."
"No ... I, in a way, I love Jews."
Malkin could hardly believe what he was hearing. This was too much. "You love Jews? Then what were you doing in the SS in the first place?"
"I wanted them to have their own country. I wanted to send them away. We didn't want to do anything to the Jews. At first, we just talked about cleaning the Jews from Germany. But there was no nation that would accept them. We talked about Madagascar and all kinds of other plans. I even went to Israel in 1936."
Clearly, Malkin thought, Eichmann was already preparing his defense.
Night after night, they talked. Eichmann would speak in a cloyingly innocent tone, as if he was aiming to please. He would service his ego by boasting about his prominent position in the SS, yet at the same time he would claim that he had not been the one responsible for the decisions that had been made. Malkin was sickened by his denials and his inability to view his actions against the Jews through anything other than the prism of a Nazi mindset—even after fifteen years. His complete lack of empathy for his victims was jarring, even as he claimed to "love" the Jews.
24
ON A CLEAR, BRIGHT Tel Aviv afternoon, May 18, the Israeli delegation for the Argentine anniversary celebrations boarded the Bristol Britannia 4X-AGD at Lod Airport. Photographers snapped pictures as the delegates climbed the mobile staircase into the long, sleek plane with the Israeli flag painted on its tail. At the top of the steps, Abba Eban, the head of the delegation, smiled for the cameras and waved goodbye to the dignitaries who had come to see them off.
Tall and distinguished, Eban had only recently been elected to the Knesset after serving for a number of years as the Israeli ambassador to the United States, as well as at the United Nations. Forty-five years old, he was a rising star in Israeli politics and had helped David Ben-Gurion win reelection the year before. Though a member of Ben-Gurion's cabinet, Eban was a "minister without portfolio"—that is, not in charge of any department—which made him ideal to serve as the Israeli emissary on this occasion. Ben-Gurion had personally informed Eban several days before that the flight was being sent to Argentina to collect Eichmann.
So when Eban boarded the plane, he was already tense. With him in the delegation were General Meir Zorea, chief of the Israel Defense Forces' Northern Command, and a number of Foreign Ministry officials and their families. None of the others had the slightest idea of the flight's special purpose, although Zorea would no doubt have approved. After World War II, he had been a member of an avenger group that had hunted down and killed Nazis. All of the passengers were scheduled to return to Israel on American civilian airlines—ostensibly because the Britannia was needed back earlier for its regular routes.
However, every effort at secrecy could not keep the crew members from suspecting that there might be more to this flight than El Al had told them. First, there were three men in El Al uniforms whom none of them had seen before. They sat together and made no effort to do any work (though they were listed on the crew manifest as a navigator, flight engineer, and flight attendant). Second, only a limited number of El Al employees participated in "monkey business crews." When enough of them were brought together for a flight, it usually meant there was a hidden agenda. After checking the crew roster, Captain Shmuel Wedeles, one of two copilots selected by Tohar for the mission, was sure there was an ulterior motive. A Viennese Jew who, as a child, had seen a mob force an elderly rabbi to eat pork before setting his beard on fire, Wedeles had escaped alone to Israel; the rest of his family had died in the Holocaust. He had been a Haganah fighter and a pilot in the War of Independence. As soon as he saw Yehuda Shimoni on the plane, he asked him bluntly, "Who are they bringing, Mengele or Eichmann?" Shimoni denied the implication, but his look of astonishment told Wedeles everything he needed to know.
The chief purser was also suspicious. When he asked his friend Tohar what was going on, the pilot cryptically said, "You won't be sorry you've been chosen to participate in the flight."
Once all the passengers had settled into their places and the crew was ready, loudspeakers in the terminal building and outside on the tarmac boomed in Hebrew and then English, "Announcing the departure of Flight 601, Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires." The four turbo-propelled engines hummed to life, and the Britannia, nicknamed "the Whispering Giant," taxied toward the runway. At exactly 1:05 P.M., the wheels lifted off Israeli soil, and the journey to Argentina began.
The passengers first had a short jaunt to Rome, then a nine-and-a-half-hour flight to Dakar, where they would pick up a second El Al crew. After a brief layover, they would travel for six hours across the Atlantic to Recife, where they would refuel a final time before flying seven and a half hours south to Buenos Aires, scheduled to arrive there on the afternoon of May 19.
There was nothing especially difficult about the flight, except that the cockpit crew had never flown to South America before. The chief navigator, Shaul Shaul, had to purchase navigational charts for South America in New York because El Al did not have any in its possession. This was new territory for everyone involved.
May 20 was the target date for smuggling Eichmann onto a plane and out of the country. This gave Harel only two more days to find Josef Mengele. Hilel Pooch had visited the post office in Vicente Lopez but had discovered that Mengele had not left a forwarding address. Further inquiries around the neighborhood elicited no new information. Either people were protecting him or he had covered his tracks well.
The boarding house address was not the only piece of intelligence in Harel's notebook. He also knew that Mengele's alias several years before had been Gregor Helmut and that he had owned a mechanical equipment shop close to where he was supposed to live. Although the Mossad chief was still insistent on finding Mengele, the hesitancy of both Eitan and Shalom to divert their focus from Eichmann had made an impression on him, and he decided not to involve his team in the search.
So Harel provided Pooch with a new cover story: he was looking to purchase a large order of special screws that he had heard were made by Helmut's shop. When the young Israeli arrived at the shop and
told the secretary that he wanted to speak to the owner, Gregor Helmut, about an order, she turned skittish and retreated to a side room. Pooch heard some urgent whispering, then the secretary returned. She eyed him for a long while, then crisply said there was nobody at the shop named Gregor and they were unable to help him.
When Pooch reported back to Harel, the chief felt that they were on the right track but they needed to be more aggressive. More agents were required to survey the shop and, potentially, to search the boarding house to see if Mengele had truly left.
Later that day, it became clear that clandestine behavior had become much more difficult in the city, whether to transport Eichmann to the airport, to sneak him onto the plane, or to launch an operation to seize Mengele should he be located. With international delegations arriving, security was tight. All of the major roads and those leading between the airport and the capital were awash with police patrols. Shalom had found it all but impossible to map a route to the airport that circumvented police checkpoints.
Radio reports indicated that security was going to get even tighter. Bombs, likely set by Peronist terrorist groups, had exploded at the state-run telephone company and gas office, damaging both significantly. The government was calling for a lockdown and launching a manhunt for the culprits—a move that put Tira in even more jeopardy than before.
That night, Nick and Dieter broke through the front door of a Jewish synagogue in the city, brandishing their guns. A former SS officer whom they knew through their father had tipped them off that Eichmann might be in the synagogue's basement. Their search revealed nothing. The synagogue was empty, and they left without a confrontation.
Throughout Buenos Aires, Tacuara members were out patrolling on their motorcycles, watching the airport as well as the bus and train stations. They also staked out synagogues and checked the hospitals and morgues in every neighborhood. The heavy police presence did little to slow their search.
Nick and Dieter had no idea whether their father was still alive. For all they knew, he might have been taken outside the city and shot, his body buried. His assailants might well be long gone by now. With each passing day, the two brothers grew more and more desperate.
Some of the young firebrands who were helping them were convinced that they needed to make a bold gambit if they had any chance of finding Eichmann. They were certain the Israelis were behind the abduction, and they suggested kidnapping the Israeli ambassador Levavi, offering him in trade. If the Israelis balked, they would torture the ambassador until Eichmann was returned.
This plan was too rash for Nick and Dieter. A former SS officer helping them warned, "Don't do anything stupid. Stay reasonable. Or you will lose everything, absolutely everything." They decided to rely on searching alone.
"Let me ask you this," Malkin said to Eichmann in the early-morning hours of May 19. "When it was determined that the policy was not to be resettlement but death, how did you feel about that?"
"There was nothing to be done. The order came down from the Führer himself."
"But how did you feel?"
"There was nothing to be done."
"I see. So you turned into a killer."
"No. That's not true. I never killed anyone," Eichmann insisted, explaining that he had tried to avoid spending much time at the extermination camps—and besides, they had not been under his direct control. "I was involved in collection and transport," he explained.
Malkin did not understand how Eichmann could be convinced that his actions had been moral and proper, that he had done nothing wrong. The order had come from his superiors; he had obeyed them. Duty had demanded it.
Eichmann went on to explain how diligent he had been in making his schedules. Malkin interjected, "You do realize we are talking about innocent people here? Small children? Old men and women?"
Eichmann was unfazed by this statement, and Malkin realized that he was completely immune to any regret for his actions. In the end, Malkin was more affected by the discussions than Eichmann. He had never thought it possible for someone to be so emotionally crippled and impervious to feeling. He returned to his drawings, unnerved and saddened. Although sometimes he felt an urge to strike Eichmann because of his lack of pity, he also felt incredibly sorry for him.
Later that evening, during his watch, they picked up the conversation again. Eichmann spoke of his love for red wine, and Malkin considered it harmless to give him a glass. For eight nights straight, he had been bound to the bed. At least he could feel human again for a moment, Malkin thought.
A few minutes later, he returned to the cell with a bottle of wine and a record player that belonged to Medad. Malkin poured the wine and guided the glass into the prisoner's hands.
"I do like wine so very much," Eichmann said after draining the glass.
Malkin drank his more slowly. He placed a record on the player and then lit a cigarette for Eichmann. Flamenco music filled the small, stuffy room.
The prisoner sucked deeply on the cigarette until it was almost at its butt.
"Don't burn your fingers," Malkin advised him.
"Why are you doing this for me?" Eichmann asked, more at ease than he had been since his arrival at the house.
"I don't know. But I don't hate you," Malkin replied, realizing that they had built a strange kind of relationship over the past eight days. "I just felt it was something I wanted to do for you."
Eichmann was silent.
Malkin remembered the statement that Aharoni had been trying to get Eichmann to sign over the past week. This might be their opportunity. "Eichmann, I think you are mistaken about not signing the papers to go to Jerusalem," he said.
"I don't want to go. Why can't I go to Germany?"
"I'm not going to force you to do it. If I were you though, I would sign the papers, and I will tell you why. It's the only time in your life that you will have the opportunity to say what you think. And you will stand there in Jerusalem and tell the whole world what you think was right, in your own words."
Eichmann finished his second glass of wine, obviously mulling over the idea. Then he asked to be allowed to stand and to remove his goggles. Malkin obliged, knowing that Eichmann had already seen his face on the night of the capture. Still, he kept careful watch. This might be a trick, an attempt to escape.
At last Eichmann said, "Where is the paper?"
Aharoni had prepared a draft statement for Eichmann to copy, saying that he was going of his own free will to stand trial in Israel. Malkin passed him the paper, along with a pen. Eichmann read the draft, then leaning on the night table, he wrote his statement in neat German.
I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, declare of my own free will that, since my true identity has been discovered, I realize that it is futile for me to attempt to go on evading justice. I state that I am prepared to travel to Israel to stand trial in that country before a competent court. I understand that I shall receive legal aid, and I shall endeavor to give a straightforward account of the facts of my last years of service in Germany so that a true picture of the facts may be passed on to future generations. I make this declaration of my own free will. I have been promised nothing, nor have any threats been made against me. I wish at last to achieve inner peace. As I am unable to remember all the details and am confused about certain facts, I ask to be granted assistance in my endeavors to establish the truth by being given access to documents and evidence.
Once finished, he turned to Malkin and asked, "What date should I put, yesterday's or today's?"
"Just leave it May 1960."
He nodded and signed the paper "Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960."
"You have done a very good thing. You won't regret it," Malkin said, allowing him another cigarette before refastening the goggles over his eyes.
Suddenly, they heard footsteps charging down the hall, and Medad burst into the room in his gray pajamas. "What the hell are you doing?" he yelled, looking at the wine and cigarettes. "Throwing a party for this murderer?"
Hearing the shouting, Eitan, Gat, and Nesiahu all rushed to the room. Malkin tried to explain, showing them the signed statement, but they were preoccupied with calming down Medad, then berating Malkin for disobeying orders and speaking to the prisoner.
Eventually, everyone settled down, and Tabor relieved Malkin of his watch. As Malkin retreated down the hall, Eitan stopped him long enough to say, "Good work."
Captain Shmuel Wedeles was at the controls. At 6:25 A.M. on May 19, en route from Dakar to Recife, he pointed the Britannia down through the clouds over the South Atlantic, and they crossed over the Brazilian coast. They were on track with their flight plan.
Fifteen minutes later, they reached the radio beacon of Campina Grande, eighty nautical miles from Recife, the altimeters indicating they were now at 10,000 feet. Wedeles shifted onto a course heading southeast toward the airport. Then he contacted air traffic control.
"Recife Control, this is El Al 4X-AGD from Dakar to Recife, heading 135, altitude 7,500, descending, estimating Recife on the hour."
"Roger, El Al," the controller radioed in return. "Maintain course. Report when reaching 2,000."
At an altitude of 4,000 feet, the forecast cloud base, the Britannia had yet to descend out of the clouds. In another few minutes, they would be at the airport. Forty nautical miles away, they reached 2,000 feet. Wedeles prepared to contact air traffic control to inform them of their position when the plane finally cleared the clouds. Suddenly, he saw an expanse of green straight ahead. The plane was heading into a hilltop forest. Wedeles immediately pulled back on the stick, bringing the nose of the plane up. Simultaneously, he pushed the engine throttles forward, increasing the speed of the plane to prevent the aircraft from stalling. The plane leveled off, just above the treetops. Everyone in the flight cabin stared out the window as they flew less than a wingspan over the forest.