Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  Even before publication, word of the memoirs' existence prompted a firestorm. The chief of the German intelligence agency BND, Reinhard Gehlen, petitioned the CIA to determine whether the memoirs were genuine and "if so, how much material is damaging to members of the West German government, so as to suppress these memoirs if desirable and possible." Ultimately, CIA director Allen Dulles convinced Life's editors to eliminate the single mention of Globke. The Mossad had learned of the memoirs several days after kidnapping Eichmann, and they had secured a partial copy themselves, knowing it would make their case against Eichmann all the more solid.

  While Eichmann's shocking admissions and reminiscences riveted the rest of the world, Avner Less and the others in Bureau 06 used the memoirs to challenge Eichmann's web of lies, half-truths, and denials in their ongoing interrogations. The inquiry resulted in more than 275 hours of tape, totaling 3,564 pages of transcripts. Bureau 06 also confronted Eichmann with hundreds of documents that pointed to his involvement in the genocide. These documents, among more than 400,000 pages that were collected, came from a range of sources, including war archives in West Germany and the United States and the collections of Tuviah Friedman and Simon Wiesenthal.

  On the day of Ben-Gurion's announcement to the Knesset, Wiesenthal received a cable from Yad Vashem informing him of the capture and stating, "Congratulations on your excellent work." After taking a moment to gather himself over the unexpected news, he turned to his teenage daughter, Pauline. "You never saw your father when you were a baby. You were asleep when I went to work looking for this man and asleep by the time I came home. I don't know how long I will live. I don't know if I will leave you any fortune at all. But this cable is my gift to you. Because through this cable I am now part of history." In the months that followed, Wiesenthal presented Hofstetter with everything he had on Eichmann. He volunteered to look for further incriminating records. He also provided important information on the defense strategy of Robert Servatius, Eichmann's lawyer, through an informant close to the Eichmann family.

  Friedman was equally forthcoming. On the evening of May 23, he heard the news by telephone. His friend in Tel Aviv had to repeat himself before Friedman could take it in. Feeling weak, he walked out of his office to a newsstand, where there was already a late edition plastered with Eichmann's face. Several days later, Friedman met with Bureau 06, presenting his four-hundred-page file on Eichmann. At long last, his years of obsessive searching, uncovering every detail he could find on the man, had a use: proving Eichmann's guilt.

  In their collection of evidence, Bureau 06 investigators sought more than incriminating documents and the confessions of Eichmann himself. They wanted witnesses, people who had had contact with Eichmann during the war, people who could testify to the atrocities committed against the Jews in every country occupied by the Nazis. One of these witnesses, who had seen Eichmann in the days before the clearing of the Munkács ghetto in Hungary, was Zeev Sapir.

  On November 1, 1960, Sapir went to the offices of Bureau 06 for an interview. Many men and women had come forward on their own, but Sapir was not one of them. An Israeli association of Hungarian survivors had suggested his name, and only after the Bureau 06 investigators had contacted him about the possibility of testifying did he agree to discuss his searingly painful memories of the war.

  After being rescued by the Red Army in January 1945, Sapir had spent months recovering in a hospital. A Russian officer had invited him to return to Moscow with him for Passover, and from there Sapir had traveled to Bucharest, where he had been helped by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had given him some money and allowed him to spend some weeks in their displaced persons camp. He had bought a suit with the money; the new clothes had made him feel human again. Sapir had then returned to his hometown of Dobradovo, but there had been nothing left for him there. Back in Budapest, while registering his name with the authorities, as was required at the time, he had spotted his elder brother's name in an entry that was a week old. Sapir had searched everywhere for him; he had always thought that his brother had died in a Hungarian work camp. Then, a few weeks later, on a train to Vienna, he had seen his brother's face reflected in a mirror, and they had been reunited. Together, the brothers had traveled to Austria and, through the Brichah network, by boat to Palestine. Sapir had joined a kibbutz and, like many other refugees, had participated in the fight for an independent Jewish state. Later, he had married, started a family, and worked as a teacher. It was still difficult for him to speak of the past, but he had never forgotten it.

  Now, as he sat in front of the Bureau 06 investigators, the memories came out of him haltingly: the Munkács brickyards, Auschwitz, the Dachsgrube coal mines. He also told them about when Adolf Eichmann had gone into the ghetto in Munkács and announced that the Jews had no cause to worry. Days later, he explained to the investigators, he and the rest of his village had been shipped off to the extermination camp.

  28

  IN THE VALLEY below the Old City stood Beit Ha'am, the House of the People, a white stone and marble four-story edifice in the middle of modern, chaotic Jerusalem. On April 11, 1961, at 8:55 A.M., one hundred police and military guards with automatic weapons surrounded the building. Inside, Adolf Eichmann, dressed in a dark blue suit and tie and wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, was brought into the courtroom and directly into a bulletproof glass booth on the left side of the converted auditorium. He sat facing the empty witness stand. Two guards stood directly behind him.

  Already seated in the hall, the 750 spectators gazed at him with unblinking eyes. Straight ahead of them, on the first level of a three-stepped raised dais, were the five prosecutors and two defense attorneys in their black gowns, seated at tables, side by side. Above them were the court stenographers and clerks.

  For five minutes, there was little movement in the hall. Eichmann sat stoic and still, rarely glancing beyond his glass booth. There was muffled conversation as those gathered attempted to understand how this single man, with his remarkably ordinary face and measured demeanor, could be responsible for so much death. They would have been less taken aback if a monster had been clawing at his chains. Cameras and microphones, hidden in the acoustically tiled walls, recorded every moment for the world to see and hear.

  At last the three judges walked into the court and took their places in high-backed chairs at the top of the dais. In quiet but stern Hebrew, the presiding judge, Moshe Landau, opened the proceedings. "Adolf Eichmann, rise!"

  Eichmann snapped to his feet the instant the judge's words were translated through the headset hanging around his neck.

  "Are you Adolf Eichmann, son of Adolf Karl Eichmann?"

  "Yes," he answered.

  When instructed by the judges, Eichmann turned toward them, his jaw slightly cocked, his face still impassive. Landau began reading the indictment, head down, hands together as if in prayer.

  "First count. Nature of Offence: Crime against the Jewish People. Particulars of the Offence: (a) The Accused, during the period from 1939 to 1945, together with others, caused the deaths of millions of Jews as the persons who were responsible for the implementation of the plan of the Nazis for the physical extermination of the Jews, a plan known by its title 'The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.'"

  Landau's words were like drips of water against a stone. The indictment went on for an hour: fifteen counts, numerous charges within each. He had uprooted whole populations. He had assembled Jews in ghettos and deported them en masse. He had committed mass murder at the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek. He had enslaved Jews in forced labor camps and had denied their rights as human beings. He had inflicted inhuman torture and suffering. He had plundered the property of Jews through robbery, terror, and torture. He had been directly involved in the deaths of one hundred children in Lidice, Poland. He had operated across Europe as well as in the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—always, always,
with the intention of "destroying the Jewish People."

  When the judge asked Eichmann for his plea, he answered with the same phrase for each count. "In the sense of the indictment, no." This was the exact statement Hermann Göring had used at Nuremberg.

  Directly after Eichmann's plea had been heard, Gideon Hausner, the forty-five-year-old attorney general, a man of stout figure and hooded blue eyes, began his opening speech. He had the flourish of a man who knew he was speaking for history.

  When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: "I accuse." For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman.

  The trial was launched. Following the direction and aim of David Ben-Gurion, it was as much about laying bare the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews as it was about prosecuting a single man. For the next fifty-six days, Hausner unfolded his case against Eichmann, placing him at the nexus of the Holocaust. He presented Eichmann with the Avner Less interrogations, captured German documents, statements from his former collaborators such as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, pages from the Sassen interviews, and witness testimony. Throughout the prosecution, Eichmann remained composed and alert. Every time he entered his booth before a session, he wiped his desk and chair with a handkerchief, then arranged his papers about him as if he were preparing for a day at the office. Usually, he kept his eyes focused on the prosecutor. Occasionally, though, his head would jerk to the left, seemingly involuntarily, or he would draw in his cheeks to the point where the skin was tight against the bones of his face. "In moments like these," one witness recounted, "he is somewhat like the Eichmann we would like to see: an inexplicably merciless face, sending a shiver up my spine."

  On May 28, Zeev Sapir was called to the witness stand. While making his way into the chamber, Sapir looked at Eichmann and felt an overwhelming rush of pride and elation at seeing the enemy of his people sitting between two Israeli guards. After one of the judges swore him in, the young assistant prosecutor Gabriel Bach began his questions. The first were easy: name, town of birth, date the Germans arrived. Then he was asked about the clearing of Dobradovo.

  "How many Jews were you in your village?" Bach asked.

  "One hundred and three souls, including children of all ages," Sapir responded. He continued to speak, as the memories of what had been lost there came back to him.

  Bach then inquired about when Sapir had heard that an important SS officer was expected in Munkács. Sapir described the roll call and the man named Eichmann coming into the ghetto at the head of a party of German and Hungarian officers.

  "You see the accused here. Can you identify him as the man whom you saw then?"

  Sapir stared again at Eichmann, who was sitting in his booth, eyes averted, scribbling something in his notebook. The name was the same, but the man across from Sapir was missing the uniform, the weapon, and the aura of power. What was more, seventeen years had passed. "It is hard to compare," Sapir said. "He's different from what he was, but there is some resemblance that I can see in him." The witness then recounted the horrors that had awaited him after Eichmann had departed the camp. The memories were still fresh and raw.

  Sapir told the courtroom that he never saw his parents or his younger brothers and sister again after the selection process at Auschwitz. He almost broke down when he remembered the ages of the little ones: eleven, eight, six, and three. The courtroom was silent as he recounted his march from the coal mines and then the SS officer Lausmann preparing to massacre those who could not continue: "A pot was brought into the room, and we all thought that there was food in it. But he took us, one by one, bent each down into the pot and shot him in the back of the neck."

  Sapir was having trouble standing upright on the witness stand. A clerk brought him a chair. He sat down uneasily and held his bowed head in his hands. He did not touch the glass of water offered to him. The prosecutor offered to waive the question about how he had ultimately escaped, but Sapir wanted to tell his story. He had earned the right. He wanted to tell them that he had been forced to eat frozen potatoes to survive and about the indiscriminate shootings in the forest. Judge Landau allowed it. When he had finished speaking, Sapir raised his sleeve and showed the courtroom his Auschwitz tattoo: A3800.

  At that time, it was impossible to know what role his testimony would play in the trial's outcome, but the important thing for him was that the facts of what he had experienced because of Eichmann were now known. Indeed, given the exhaustive coverage of the trial in the newspapers and on radio and television, Sapir's story, like every other aspect of the trial, became known across the globe.

  Several of the agents whose successful operation had made the trial possible came to see Eichmann in his glass booth. Most didn't bother with more than one session; they were busy with other operations. It was enough to know that they had succeeded in bringing him to justice.

  Once Hausner finished presenting his case, the defense took over, claiming that the Nazi state had been responsible for the crimes. Eichmann had merely followed orders, and his role in the atrocities had been limited and carried out without any particular willingness on his part. In fact, Servatius argued, Eichmann had actually wanted to save the Jews by promoting their emigration. At last Eichmann spoke in his own defense.

  Given his clipped, military tone, one might have expected straightforward answers, but Eichmann spoke in long-winded, elliptical passages whose beginnings were often bewilderingly contradicted by their endings. His arguments seemed to make perfect sense to him, however, as did his long excursions into the intricacies of the Nazi hierarchy, full of indecipherable SS jargon. The translators had a burdensome task in relaying his statements. As for his guilt as an accomplice in the murder of millions, he explained:

  From the point of view of human guilt, a question which I have to judge in a much graver manner, because in this respect I must sit in judgment with myself—in this respect I must admit that I have played my part, though under orders. From the legal point of view, as a recipient of orders, I had no choice but to carry [them] out. How far the fact that I had to carry out part of the deportations and that the Jews who were thus deported found their death, how far I am legally guilty is a question which, in my opinion, should be left until the question of responsibility has been examined.

  Eichmann rarely backed down over the next fifty hours of cross-examination, even when caught in a skein of his own lies. The Sassen tapes proved damning, particularly in terms of demonstrating Eichmann's willingness and vigor in executing his duties against the Jews. He won many of the exchanges, most of them when Hausner attempted to overreach by implicating Eichmann in every facet of the Jewish genocide. To the chagrin of the Adenauer government, Eichmann reminded the attorney general that Hans Globke had also played a role, but because Globke was never called to testify, this mention had little impact.

  Throughout the cross-examination, Eichmann was a formidable presence, unmoved by the attorney general's many attempts, some ill-advised, to force him into an admission of legal guilt. Still, Eichmann could not elude the weight of evidence against him, particularly that related to his actions in Hungary.

  After closing statements on August 14, the judges adjourned the trial. Four months later, they returned with their verdict. Eichmann was found guilty on all counts of the indictment, but he was acquitted on several individual charges within these counts. As Eichmann listened to the judges read their 211-page judgment, he slowly lost control of himself. His face twitched, and he looked frantically from side to side.

  At the end of the second day, Eichmann gave a statement, repeating many of the arguments he had used in h
is defense. On Friday, December 15, 1961, Judge Landau asked Eichmann to rise and delivered the sentence:

  For the dispatch of each train by the Accused to Auschwitz, or to any other extermination site, carrying one thousand human beings, meant that the Accused was a direct accomplice in one thousand premeditated acts of murder ... Even if we had found that the Accused acted out of blind obedience, as he argued, we would still have said that a man who took part in crimes of such magnitude as these over years must pay the maximum penalty known to the law ... But we have found that the Accused acted out of an inner identification with the orders that he was given and out of a fierce will to achieve the criminal objective ... This Court sentences Adolf Eichmann to death.

  It was the first—and to this day only—sentence of death by an Israeli court.

  Eichmann was motionless, his lips drawn together as if he was forcing himself to suppress even the slightest reaction. His throat and the collar of his shirt were soaked with sweat. Eight minutes after the session began, the bailiff called, "All rise!" and the judges filed out. The trial was over.

  Eichmann appealed the judgment, and hearings were held in March 1962. While he waited for the decision in Ramleh prison, the heavily guarded garrison outside Jerusalem where he had been kept throughout both sets of proceedings, he penned his second autobiography. This was his third attempt to tell his story. The Sassen interviews had been his first; a memoir he wrote while at Camp Iyar between interrogation sessions with Avner Less had been his second. Each time, his aim had been to justify his role in the Holocaust and to place his actions in what he saw as the best possible light: three documents created more for himself than for anyone else.

  Eichmann began to meet with the Reverend William Hull, a Canadian Protest ant missionary in Jerusalem. On his own initiative, Hull petitioned the Israelis to allow him to act as Eichmann's spiritual counsel. At first Eichmann refused, but Hull persisted, and eventually the two met in Eichmann's prison cell for the first of thirteen sessions. Hull wanted to save the soul of the Nazi war criminal by having him repent his sins, confess to his past deeds, and confirm that "the Lord Jesus Christ was his Savior," a tall task given that Eichmann had spent the past seventeen years convincing himself exactly why he did not need to seek forgiveness for what he had done.