Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  Eichmann joined in these discussions with his usual seriousness of purpose. He explained to Hull that he believed in God but that his study of other religions, as well as of Nietzsche and Kant in his "search for peace through truth," had turned him away from organized religion. He believed in a pantheistic God, one found in nature and in all things. Hull convinced Eichmann to renew his study of the Bible (he refused to read the Old Testament because it was "Jewish fables"), but beyond this, the minister had no success apart from engaging Eichmann in conversation. Eichmann did not fear God's judgment: "There is no Hell," he declared. What was more, he refused to confess: "I have not sinned. I am clear with God. I did not do it. I did nothing wrong. I have no regrets." Hull pressed him on this, but Eichmann was rigid in his self-made faith.

  On May 29, 1962, Eichmann's appeal was denied. He flushed with anger when the five-judge panel restated the reason for the guilty verdict. Later that same day, he pleaded for clemency to the Israeli president. Two days after that, at 7:00 P.M., the commissioner of prisons, Arye Nir, who had overseen Eichmann's incarceration for two years, advised his prisoner that this plea had also been denied. Eichmann had run out of options, and Nir crisply informed him that he would be hanged at midnight.

  Eichmann requested a bottle of white wine, cigarettes, and a paper and pen. Seated at the desk in his cell, the always present guard nearby, he wrote a final letter to his wife and sons. Then he shaved, dressed in brown slacks and a shirt, and brushed his teeth.

  By 11:20 P.M., when Rev. Hull arrived, Eichmann had drunk half the bottle of wine, had smoked his cigarettes, and was unnervingly calm.

  "Why are you sad?" Eichmann asked the minister. "I am not sad."

  They spent twenty minutes together, but any final-hour repentance from Eichmann was not forthcoming. "I have peace in my heart. In fact, I am astonished that I have such peace ... Death is but the release of the soul."

  Two guards and the commandant entered the cell. Before they bound his hands behind his back, Eichmann asked for a moment to pray. He retreated to a corner for a minute and then announced, "I am ready."

  Accompanied by Hull, Eichmann was escorted down the prison corridor. He walked the fifty yards briskly, and Nir had to order the guards to slow down. The group entered the makeshift execution chamber through a hole that had been knocked through one of the walls. Formerly, the third-floor room had been the guards' quarters. A wooden platform had been built over a hole cut in the floor. A rope hung from an iron frame. Bureau 06 chief inspector Michael Goldmann and Rafi Eitan, who had come to see Eichmann to his end, were waiting for them as witnesses to the execution. Over the past few months, Eitan had interrogated Eichmann several times at Camp Iyar about how the SS had been organized and operated.

  The guards placed Eichmann on the platform and tied his legs together. He stared at Eitan and said sharply, "I hope, very much, that it will be your turn soon after mine."

  A white hood was brought out, but he refused it. He looked at the four journalists selected to witness the execution as they scribbled on their pads. A coiled rope, lined with leather to prevent abrasions, was placed over his head.

  "Long live Germany," Eichmann declared. "Long live Argentina. Long live Austria ... I had to obey the laws of war and my flag. I am ready."

  Two guards moved behind the curtain of blankets that shielded the trapdoor's release mechanism from the prisoner. The contraption had been rigged in a way that only one of the two buttons actually opened the platform's flaps.

  Eichmann smiled thinly and called out, "Gentlemen, we shall meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I have believed in God all my life, and I die believing in God."

  It was exactly midnight. The commandant yelled, "Ready!"

  Eichmann half-closed his eyes, looking down at the trapdoor underneath his feet. His face was ashen.

  "Action!"

  The two guards hit their buttons, and the platform opened with a clang. Eichmann fell ten feet into the room below without a sound. The rope went straight, snapped, and then swayed back and forth.

  Goldmann peered through the hole in the floor and said that Eichmann was not moving. A doctor entered the second-floor chamber, inspected Eichmann, and formally declared that he was dead.

  The witnesses all signed a statement confirming their presence at the hanging. Then Nir told the reluctant guards to cut the body down from the noose. Eichmann's face was white, and the rope had cut into his neck. As one of the guards, Shlomo Nagar, lifted Eichmann, he expelled some air caught in the dead man's lungs, producing a sound that almost made Nagar faint and that he would hear in his nightmares for years to come. He and several other guards placed Eichmann on a stretcher, covered him with gray wool blankets, and carried him out into the prison yard. Eitan stayed behind. He had seen enough.

  Goldmann, whose parents and ten-year-old sister had been separated from him at Auschwitz, accompanied Nir and Hull in following the guards and the stretcher out into the yard.

  There was a mist in the air, and with the prison lights shining through the barbed-wire fence, Goldmann was reminded of the extermination camp where his family had been killed. The guards brought the body out of the prison gates into a clearing in an orange grove. There a man who had once worked at an extermination camp crematorium attended a furnace. As the guards struggled to place the corpse into the smoldering fire with a long, two-pronged iron fork, one of them lost his balance, and the body tumbled to the ground. Everyone froze at the sight. Goldmann rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward to help place the corpse inside the furnace. In the fiery glow, Hull saw the Auschwitz tattoo on the Bureau 06 officer's arm.

  Two hours later, the ashes were retrieved from the blackened reservoir. They filled half of a small nickel canister. Goldmann considered how many Jews must have made up the mountains of ashes outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums. In the wintertime, the SS guards had forced him to spread these ashes on the paths to keep the Nazis from slipping on the ice.

  With Hull joining them, Nir and Goldmann drove into the port of Jaffa. They arrived in the dark hours of the morning of June 1. Several other observers were waiting beside the police patrol boat Yarden, and together they motored out into the open sea. By casting Adolf Eichmann's ashes into the water, there would be no place to pay homage to his life or to build a monument honoring him. Six miles out, just outside Israeli territorial waters, the captain switched off the engines. The boat drifted in silence, rising and falling in the swells. A sliver of red light appeared on the horizon. As Hull said a prayer to himself, Nir walked to the back of the boat and emptied the canister into the swirling waves. The ashes drifted up on the crest of a wave, then disappeared. The engines were started, and the captain turned back to the coast. They reached the shore just as the sun slowly rose in the sky and Tel Aviv came back to life.

  * * *

  Epilogue

  ELIE WIESEL, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, author, and Auschwitz survivor, attended the Eichmann trial as a reporter. Years later, he said that the capture and trial of the Nazi war criminal showed that

  Jewish history had a tremendous sense of imagination. A few Jews caught him and brought him to justice. They didn't kill him, which they could have in Buenos Aires. No, they brought him to the free and sovereign state of Israel where men could serve as his judges. The trial was almost more important in the field of education than in the field of justice. It was important for the Israeli youth to know what had happened, where we came from. And that's what the Eichmann trial really did. But not only in Israel, the real turning point was the awareness of the world towards the tragedy of the Jewish people.

  David Ben-Gurion had achieved his ambition. The trial had a profound impact on Israel. It unified the country in a way it had not been unified since the 1948 war. It educated the Israeli public, particularly the young, on the true nature of the Holocaust. And, after sixteen years of silence, it allowed survivors to openly share their experiences. The trial also reinforced to Israelis that
a sovereign state for Jews was essential for their survival.

  As for the rest of the world, the Eichmann affair rooted the Holocaust in the collective cultural consciousness. The intensive coverage and the wave of Eichmann biographies and fantastic accounts of his capture contributed to the process. The debate stirred by the trial, particularly after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt in 1963, nourished and strengthened those roots. Her comments on the banality of evil paled in comparison to the firestorm caused by her criticism of the trial and her indictment of many Jews as essentially having been complicit in their own extermination during the war. Hundreds of articles and books were published to counter or support her arguments, causing a thorough and passionate reexamination of the history of the genocide. The Holocaust was finally anchored in the world's consciousness—never to be forgotten—by the outpouring of survivor memoirs, scholarly works, plays, novels, documentaries, paintings, museum exhibits, and films that followed in the wake of the trial and that still continues today. This consciousness, in Israel and throughout the world, is the enduring legacy of the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann.

  All those involved in the fifteen-year chase were marked by the experience.

  Simon Wiesenthal and Tuviah Friedman won a tremendous amount of attention for their participation. Their roles were often inflated, largely because of the long absence of any statements by the Mossad. Encouraged by the renewed public interest in war crimes, both returned to hunting Nazis, although Wiesenthal pursued his cases with more vigor and more success than Friedman. Despite Wiesenthal telling his daughter that the Eichmann case would guarantee his name in history, it was his further forty-five years of relentless activity afterward, promoting "justice, not vengeance," that secured his legacy.

  Fritz Bauer, whose involvement remained a secret for two decades, moved quickly on the cases of other war criminals already under investigation. In the weeks after Ben-Gurion's announcement, Bauer and his fellow West German prosecutors arrested a host of former Nazis implicated in the atrocities, including several of Eichmann's deputies. Right up to his death in 1968, the Hesse attorney general cracked down on German fascist groups and campaigned vigorously to unseat former Nazis from power, including Globke. He continued to prosecute war crimes, most famously in the 1963 Auschwitz trials.

  For the Hermann family, whose contact with Bauer had been pivotal in the hunt, their experience after the capture was disturbing. Somehow, whether it was because of the visit from Ephraim Hofstetter or because Jewish officials in Buenos Aires investigated his claim that he knew where Eichmann was, reporters got a tip in March 1961 that Hermann was actually Josef Mengele. After he was arrested, then quickly released by the police, an Argentine newspaper further exposed him by publishing reports that he was withholding information on Mengele and Eichmann. Before the operation to catch Eichmann unfolded, Sylvia Hermann left Argentina for the United States, where she remains today. In 1971, after Tuviah Friedman personally petitioned Prime Minister Golda Meir, Lothar Hermann received a reward for information leading to the arrest of Eichmann. Until then, his and his daughter's role in the capture had been kept a secret.

  As for the Eichmann family, Vera and her youngest son, Ricardo, moved back and forth between Buenos Aires and West Germany for several years before settling in Osterburken, forty miles west of Heidelberg. Vera never accepted that her husband was guilty of his crimes, nor did she get over his execution. Ricardo scarcely remembers his father, and sharing his name is a weight that he continues to carry. Now a professor of archaeology in Germany, he recognizes the terrible deeds of Adolf Eichmann and is reluctant to speak about him. Of the three older sons, Horst continues to live in Buenos Aires and is reportedly a neo-Nazi leader. Dieter and Nick moved back to Germany, to Lake Constance, on the Rhine. They remain convinced that their father just obeyed orders and that most of what was said against him at the trial was false. Beyond that, they do not wish to discuss him.

  Forty-seven years would pass before the Shin Bet and Mossad agents, as well as the El Al crew, were publicly recognized by the Israeli state for their role in the operation. For the crew, a simple but heartfelt note from the chief pilot, Zvi Tohar, thanking them for their "extraordinary devotion to duty" on this flight—"a landmark in the progress of Israeli aviation"—was the only reward they ever received. They all went back to their jobs and said nothing of the affair until very recently.

  After returning to Israel, Zvi Aharoni was transferred to the Mossad by Isser Harel and charged with heading a new group to hunt for war criminals—most importantly Josef Mengele, Martin Bormann, and Heinrich Müller. In 1962, on the day Eichmann was executed, Aharoni was back in South America searching for Mengele. He received a tip from a former SS officer in Montevideo, Uruguay, that a German in Brazil was helping the Auschwitz doctor to hide. A few weeks later, Aharoni was in a jungle twenty-five miles south of'Säo Paolo when he spotted Mengele between two local bodyguards heading down a trail. All Aharoni had to do was keep following him until an operation could be launched to take Mengele back to Ramleh Prison. Aharoni was certain it could be done. But then he received word from Isser Harel that he was to abandon the mission immediately. Earlier that spring, an eight-year-old boy named Yossele Schumacher had been kidnapped out of Israel by extreme Orthodox Jews who were against the Zionist state. Harel marshaled many of his agents, Aharoni included, to get him back. Yossele was eventually found in New York, but Mengele escaped, eluding capture for the rest of his life. The Auschwitz doctor drowned in Brazil in 1979. Aharoni had retired from the Mossad long before then to become a businessman, settling in the southwest of England.

  Avraham Shalom continued with the Shin Bet, rising to become its director in 1981. He was forced to leave his post three years later after two Palestinian youths, who had hijacked a bus with hand grenades and were then arrested by the army, were beaten to death on his orders. It was an ignoble conclusion to an otherwise courageous and remarkable career. Shalom entered the private security business and now lives in Tel Aviv and London.

  Peter Malkin became head of the Shin Bet operations department. He left the world of espionage in 1976 to pursue his lifelong ambition of becoming an artist. His best-known paintings are those he sketched while in Buenos Aires. Malkin died in 2005.

  Yaakov Gat also achieved further success within the Shin Bet. Later, he joined a private security firm, where he worked until his retirement.

  Moshe Tabor, who (among numerous others) had volunteered to hang Eichmann when his sentence was declared, spent many more years with the security services and retired on a pension. He died in 2006.

  Shalom Dani died of a heart attack in 1963. His former colleagues still speak of him with reverence.

  Rafi Eitan has enjoyed an illustrious career that is seemingly without end. He remained with the Israeli security services for fifteen years. Then he became a security and antiterror adviser to several Israeli prime ministers. Subsequently, Eitan ran the Defense Ministry's spy unit (where he recruited the American spy Jonathan Pollard), oversaw the Israeli state chemical industry, and in 2006 was elected to the Knesset.

  Only three years after the Eichmann operation, at the height of his success and at just fifty years of age, Isser Harel resigned as chief of the Mossad and Shin Bet. Some within the Israeli halls of power feared that he was gaining too much influence within the government and grooming himself as a replacement for Ben-Gurion. After Harel launched a deadly, indiscreet campaign against German rocket scientists working for Egypt, his enemies maneuvered him out of the prime minister's favor. When Harel left Mossad headquarters for the last time, many of his staff were in tears. Aside from a brief stint in the Knesset, he spent his time writing books and advising on security issues. He died in 2003.

  Harel and all of his operatives—no matter how long they remained in the security services or where their careers brought them—recounted their involvement in the mission to capture Eichmann and bring him to trial in Israel with unall
oyed pride. In a profession known for its duplicitous acts, moral compromises, and often unforeseen and unwanted consequences, this is a rare state of affairs.

  Rafi Eitan stated, with a level stare, not only that the operation had been executed almost flawlessly but also that its impact was clear: "All over the world, and also in Israel, we started to understand the Holocaust."

  For those like Peter Malkin, whose families had been devastated by the Nazis, their participation carried an even greater personal satisfaction. In 1967, while on a job in Athens, Malkin received a call from Avraham Shalom, who told him that his mother had been rushed to the hospital. Malkin returned to Tel Aviv immediately and went straight to her bedside. Her eyes were closed, her face drained of color. She did not react when he spoke to her.

  "She can't talk," the old woman in the other bed said.

  "Mama," Malkin whispered close by her ear, "I want to tell you something. What I promised, I have done. I got Eichmann."

  His mother did not open her eyes, nor did she turn her head. It was seven years after he had grabbed Eichmann on Garibaldi Street. Malkin had kept the secret from her because of the oath he had sworn, but now he could not bear for her to die without knowing what he had done.

  "Mama, Fruma was avenged. It was her own brother who captured Adolf Eichmann."