Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Which the director did.

  PART II

  Adolf Eichmann

  Wherever the murderer may hide away,

  There shall we be, night and day,

  Our eyes mil be fixed on him

  As the sunflower follows the sun.

  –Nathan Alterman

  11

  Eichmann the Zionist

  On Monday, 23 May 1960, the day Israel announced that Adolf Eichmann, abducted from Argentina, was ‘at present in prison here,’ Simon Wiesenthal received an official cable from Jerusalem at his home in Austria: ‘CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR EXCELLENT WORK.’ He studied it with satisfaction and then handed it to his teenaged daughter Pauline, saying: ‘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 lam now a part of history.’

  Simon Wiesenthal is in possession of the devil’s soul: Eichmann’s autobiography, a thousand-page document Eichmann dictated in the 1950s and put finishing touches to in Buenos Aires just before his capture. Suppressed by Israeli authorities on the ground that it is his family’s property (but not given to his survivors for fear it might become a bible to neo-Nazis whose old testament is Mein Kampf), it begins in silky Satanic style:

  Today, fifteen years and a day after May 8,1945,21 I begin to lead my thoughts back to that nineteenth of March of the year 1906, when at five o’clock in the morning I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being.

  The eldest of six Eichmann children (he had four brothers and a sister), young Adolf established himself early as a failure in life: the only one who didn’t finish high school. The first high school he didn’t finish was Linz’s Kaiser Franz Federal Scientific Secondary School, which yet another Adolf – Hitler – had attended at the turn of the century. After a couple of unsuccessful years there, Eichmann transferred to the Federal Vocational School for Electrical, Mechanical, and Structural Engineering, from which he also didn’t graduate. In both cases, he told an Israeli interrogator, ‘my father took me out of school because – I may as well admit it – I hadn’t been exactly the most conscientious of students.’

  Always polite, and so self-effacing that he looked like a composite portrait of his brothers, he worked at whatever his father’s connections could find for him – three months as a miner in the Untersberg between Salzburg and the German border; a couple of years as a radio salesman for Austrian Electrotech – before his father, who felt he wasn’t getting anywhere, suggested he become a travelling salesman.

  At this point – in 1927, when Eichmann was twenty-one – his stepmother intervened; his mother had died in 1916 of bearing too many children too close together, according to Eichmann, and his father had remarried in the same year. The second Frau Eichmann had a cousin in Vienna who was president of the Austrian Automobile Club and married to a Czech Jewish woman. The cousin, whom Eichmann called ‘Uncle’, contacted a Herr Generaldirektor Weiss, the Jewish head of the Vacuum Oil Company, and, within a fortnight, Eichmann was trained, employed, and given exclusive rights to sell Sphinx gasoline and Gargoyl-Mobiloil in the Mühlviertel (Mill Quarter), a region encompassing half of Upper Austria.

  For almost five years during a time of worsening worldwide depression, Adolf Eichmann, the travelling petroleum salesman, made a good living on the road. But he was back in Linz in 1932, when Austria’s National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party held a rally in the Märzenkeller, a big Bavarian-style beer hall in Linz. Eichmann attended and, during a lull in the diatribes, he was approached by a giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall, with massive broad shoulders, thick arms, rectangular chin, and duelling scars on his face from his student days at the University of Graz. Eichmann knew him by sight as a young lawyer from Linz, three years his senior, named Ernst Kaltenbrunner. ‘We’d seen each other around,’ Eichmann recalled. ‘His father and my father had had business connections for twenty years; Ernst Kaltenbrunner put it to me straight from the shoulder: “You’re going to join us.” That’s how it was done in those days, all very free and easy, no fuss. I said “all right”. So I joined the SS.’

  Adolf Eichmann enrolled as Nazi party member number 889,895 and SS number 45326 on April Fool’s Day, 1932. His recruiter, Kaltenbrunner, a chain-smoker who was already an alcoholic, soon became the spokesman for the Nazi Party in Upper Austria and provided legal services to its members while commanding the underground Austrian SS. In early March of 1938, as Austria’s tottering Catholic fascist regime bargained with the Nazi fascists, Kaltenbrunner was named Minister of State Security. A week later, when Hitler annexed Austria and the country he had betrayed ceased to exist, Kaltenbrunner also became a member of the Reichstag, the German parliament. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was named to succeed him as chief of the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, which controlled not only the Gestapo, but also the concentration camp system and the machinery of the Final Solution. The Gestapo was Bureau IV of Kaltenbrunner’s empire. Sub-section IV B 4, with Eichmann in charge, would be created to cope with assembling and transporting Jews to the death camps. After the war, Kaltenbrunner was hanged in Nuremberg.

  All their way up the ladder from young bourgeoisie playing at patriotism to relentless chief exterminators, Kaltenbrunner kept an eye out for Eichmann as his protégé, but patronized him as his mental, physical, and social inferior. Kaltenbrunner, after all, came from two generations of lawyers, had his own law degree and the right to call himself Doctor (of Law), while Eichmann hailed from a public utilities background and never finished school or excelled in sports. Eichmann was, however, an unquestioning follower of orders: his father’s, his employer’s, and now his party’s.

  ‘I was a relatively young man and used to being led, in business and in everything else,’ is how he put it. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75), herself a refugee from Nazi Germany, put it another way in her profound but tendentious account of his trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtided A Report on the Banality of Evil:

  From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him – already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well – could start from scratch and still make a career.

  His career with Vacuum Oil stopped mattering to him as much as pulling Friday-night SS duty at the party’s Brown House in Linz, where he slept on a straw pallet, stood guard, and ‘since I was one of the few who was working and making good money’, bought the boys beer and cigarettes at the tavern next door. On Sundays, his SS regiment – whose members came from Salzburg and Linz – would be driven across the border from Salzburg in Austria, where their uniforms and parades (and, from 1933, their party) were forbidden, to Freilassing in Germany, where an SS auxiliary police unit played host to their training and marching.

  Living for his weekends with ‘the boys’, it hardly mattered to him when, in the spring of 1933, ‘Director Blum said to me: “We’ve got to cut down on personnel.” He said I was the only unmarried salesman and that’s why he’d hit on me. So they gave me notice.’

  Cushioned by five months’ severance pay (one month for each year with the firm), he stayed with his family in Linz, where his father had opened his own appliance store, Elektro-Eichmann. While looking around for work in Austria, where the Austro-fascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuss had just oudawed the Nazi Party, it occurred to him that he might be better off in Nazi Germany, where Hitler had just come to power. Since the Eichmann family had never relinquished German nationality when moving from Solingen to Linz in Adolf’s childhood, ‘I said to myself: “After all, I’m a German citizen.22 Why not go to Germany and try my luck?’”

  Armed with letters of introducti
on from Kaltenbrunner, he crossed the Danube from Upper Austria into Passau, Germany. There he looked up the SS Gauleiter (regional commander) who had been the main speaker at the rally where he’d been recruited a year earlier. Eichmann asked for help finding a job with the Bavarian branch of Vacuum Oil, but the Gauleiter suggested he become a storm trooper instead. Ever one to follow someone else’s ideas, Eichmann enlisted: ‘I said to myself: “All right, I’ll be a soldier.” I had no one to provide for.’

  He had crossed more than one frontier. Sent first to Lechfeld, an SS and SA camp near a monastery and a brewery, he found himself – despite his German identity – in what the SS called the ‘Austrian Legion in exile’. Assigned to shock-troop training, he specialized in street fighting, but distinguished himself in the kind of tedious plodding that wins recognition as true grit in most military or paramilitary organizations:

  ‘Let me tell you a story to show how little I minded the tough training. I used to tell it later on to the officers and non-coms under me. This was still in Lechfeld. A common punishment – later it was forbidden – was to make us crawl through rushes and over gravel. The first time it happened, some of the men went on sick call and got themselves declared unfit for duty. Because I thought we were being treated unfairly, I gritted my teeth and stuck it out. The skin had been scraped off my elbows, but I didn’t have them bandaged. After lunch, we had to start in again. The bits of plaster I’d stuck on my wounds were scraped off in a minute. I had no skin left on my elbows at all. But I stuck it out. That way, I attracted attention and got myself promoted.’

  He left Lechfeld in late 1933 as a corporal. His next destination was Dachau. The very first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau – on the outskirts of Munich – in those days held more Gentile opponents of Hitler than Jews. More of the former, however, were likely to leave alive, though many came home crushed, intimidated, and unwilling to relate their experiences to others, even to their families. Eichmann’s battalion of the Deutschland Regiment, however, was billeted ‘just outside the concentration camp, in an enormous iron and concrete hangar formerly used for storing munitions. We slept in triple-decker bunks.’

  Dachau had been designed by the SA as a place to concentrate – in the physical rather than mental sense – Hitler’s enemies for restraint or elimination. First came revenge: the head of the Bavarian state government, which had suppressed Hitler’s ‘beer-hall putsch’ in 1923, was hacked to death with pick-axes in Dachau in 1933. Then came the suppression of dissent: political opponents, outspoken clergymen, liberal editors, balky Nazis who asked aloud whether Hitler was going too far or too fast, and others who uttered their thoughts were flogged and tortured, sometimes murdered, at Dachau. Next would come ‘undesirables’ – homosexuals, gypsies, Jews. On 12 April 1933, four Jewish prisoners – three merchants and a Nuremberg lawyer – were ordered to fall out of ranks and were shot to death by storm troopers before the eyes of their fellow prisoners, who were told the four Jews had been ‘hostile elements that had no right to live in Germany’ and had ‘received their due punishment’.

  By the time Eichmann reached Dachau, some fifty concentration camps had mushroomed around Germany, with the SS taking over from the SA to streamline them for specialization and ruthless efficiency: Sachsenhausen for Berliners, Ravensbriick for women, etc. Though terror and brutality reigned, it was on a relatively individual basis. Not until well into the 1940s did the needs of the Final Solution create extermination camps like Belzec and Sobibor, where victims were gassed en masse upon arrival.

  At Dachau in 1933–4, the concentration camp was guarded by Bavarian SS men wearing a skull on their collar patch. ‘We called them Death’s-headers,’ Eichmann recalled. His unit, commanded by Prussians, wore the lightning SS symbol with the number 1. They were foot-troops. Given regular German Army training and strict military discipline, Eichmann preferred this diet to ‘the shock-troop nonsense we’d had in Lechfeld’, but chafed at the ‘crushing monotony’ of military life – ‘day after day always the same, over and over again the same’ – and schemed to escape the routine.

  When he heard that the SS’s own intelligence service, the SD, was recruiting from the ranks, he applied. In the fall of 1934, Eichmann received orders to travel immediately to Berlin.

  SD headquarters in the Hohenzollern Palace on the Wilhelm-strasse proved doubly disappointing to Eichmann: ‘I expected to see what I’d seen in the illustrated magazines: SS commandos riding in cars behind high party leaders; men standing on running boards.’ He had confused the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) with the bodyguard branch of the Reich Security service, but, never having learned the right bureaucratic word, Begleitkommando, he couldn’t complain. It is typical of Adolf Eichmann’s career that the aimless, boyish mishmash of misinformation and mistaken identity that brought him to Berlin landed him in the information department of the SD as his first step up the ladder of extermination.

  He was put to work on a file of suspected freemasons – classifying their cards in alphabetical order. Masonic lodges, with their mystic rites and secret signs, had long perturbed the Roman Catholic Church and the Habsburgs; almost two and a half centuries earlier, the libretto for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute was written in code to conceal its parallels to masonic initiation. The Nazis were quick to lump masons into their early witches’ stew of enemies along with Jews, communists, and gypsies.

  Though he tried to wriggle out of the work by claiming he knew nothing about freemasonry and had never even heard of it, he didn’t persist, for he had tracks to cover. A born joiner who had belonged to the Young Men’s Christian Association in elementary school and a couple of German youth movements in high school on his way to the Nazi Party and the SS, he’d been on the verge of joining the Schlaraffia lodge of freemasons in Linz in 1932 when Kaltenbrunner had warned him this was incompatible with Nazism. No wonder the new work in Berlin gave him ‘the creeps’.

  To make matters worse for Eichmann, his section was inspected every second or third day by either Heinrich Himmler, the failed chicken-farmer who headed the SS, or Kaltenbrunner. Knowing that Kaltenbrunner was aware of his flirtation with freemasonry, the inconsequential Eichmann was quick to endorse (or at least pay lip-service to) his mentor’s eugenics: compulsory child-bearing for all Aryan women under thirty-five; if their husbands couldn’t or wouldn’t father their children, or if women weren’t married, then fathers of families with more than four children should be made available for stud duty. On the other hand, Jews should be exterminated and Slavs extinguished via sterilization and the annihilation of their leaders.

  After three weeks in this uneasy seat in the information department, however, Eichmann was made an assistant to a curator creating a freemasonry museum made up of materials seized from lodges across Germany: aprons, medallions, seals, photos, whole libraries: ‘One room was supposed to represent a St John’s Temple and another a St Andrew’s Temple. My work was to classify, catalogue, and label thousands of “ritual objects”. It must have kept me busy for five months.’

  One day in 1935, an Austrian Nazi aristocrat named Leopold von Mildenstein stopped by Eichmann’s desk in the St John’s Room and asked him to explain his work. Impressed by Eichmann’s capability as a custodian of cults that would soon be extinct if Hitler had his way, von Mildenstein said he had just organized a Jewish department at SD headquarters and asked the young clerk to come to work for him. Eichmann didn’t hesitate: ‘I’d have gone in with the devil himself just to get away from those seals!’

  One can wonder now who would have become the senior partner in such a union. At the time, Eichmann impressed his superiors only with his diligence in doing whatever was asked of him. Though one of his colleagues described him as ‘a most colourless creature – the typical subordinate: pedantic, punctilious [and] devoid of any thorough knowledge’, he did have an ingratiatingly subservient manner, springing to attention and clicking his heels whenever an officer passed in the hall.

  As part of Eichmann’s
on-the-job training, von Mildenstein, who had served as the SD chief of intelligence in Palestine, gave him Theodor Herzl’s seminal work, The Jewish State (1896), to read and report back on. In doing so, he inadvertently converted Eichmann to Zionism.

  Yes, Zionism! ‘The book interested me very much,’ Eichmann would recall later. ‘Up until then, I had no knowledge of such things. Somehow . . . this book touched a chord in me and I took it all in . . .

  ‘When I’d finished reading, I was told to make an abstract of it to serve as an orientation booklet for the SS general staff and also for the specific use of the SD. . .

  ‘In it, I described the structure of the Zionist world organization, the aims of Zionism, its sources and the difficulties standing in its way. I also stressed the need to encourage it, because it fell in with our own desire for a political solution: the Zionists wanted a territory where the Jewish people could finally settle in peace. And that was pretty much what the Nazis wanted.’ Perhaps, under the relatively benign (compared to Kaltenbrunner) influence of von Mildenstein, Eichmann sincerely believed for a time that there was a political solution to the Jewish problem.

  By 1936, Eichmann had become the SD’s leading expert on Jewish problems. Citing Herzl and reading further – starting with the Encyclopedia Judaica and Adolf Böhm’s History of Zionism – he gave lectures and wrote pamphlets. Among the documents Simon Wiesenthal came across in his postwar manhunt was a mid-1930s application by Eichmann for ‘special funds’ to enable him to study Hebrew with a rabbi. Though Eichmann noted that the lessons would cost only three marks – ‘a real bargain’, Wiesenthal insists – his Nazi chiefs turned him down for fear of further contamination.