Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ he introduced himself to the Jewish Council of Budapest. ‘I’m the one they call “The Bloodhound”.’

  In 1944, Rudolf Höss paid three visits to Eichmann in Budapest to coordinate the stepped-up transports to Auschwitz. ‘This,’ Höss recalled at Nuremberg after the war, ‘gave me the opportunity of observing Eichmann’s methods of negotiating with the Hungarian government departments and the army. His manner of approach was extremely firm and matter-of-fact, but nevertheless amiable and courteous, and he was liked and made welcome wherever he went. This was confirmed by the innumerable private invitations he received from the chiefs of these departments. Only the Hungarian army showed no pleasure in Eichmann’s visits. The army sabotaged the surrender of the Jews whenever they could, but they did it in such a manner that the Hungarian government was unable to intervene.’

  On the other hand, Eichmann played the Jewish Council of Budapest like a violin virtuoso, telling Dr Rezsö Kastner, one of its leaders, ‘Kastner, your nerves are shot. Shall I send you to Theresienstadt to recover? Or would you prefer Auschwitz?’ while bargaining for Jewish freedom by offering to sell one million Jews on a cash basis. ‘Blood for money, money for blood,’ said Eichmann with a grandiose wave in May of 1944. Later that month, trucks and goods were substituted for money and a wandering Jew named Joel Brand, an official of the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest, was sent to Turkey with Eichmann’s offer: For up to 10,000 trucks, he would free one hundred Jews per truck. The trucks were to be winterized for use on the Russian front.

  The Jewish Agency for Palestine’s representative, Moshe Shertok (later Prime Minister of Israel), was supposed to meet Brand in Ankara, but British authorities in Jerusalem refused to give Shertok travel papers – partly because England wouldn’t welcome the tiniest fraction of a million new Jews in Palestine and mostly because they looked upon Eichmann’s proposal as a transparent plot to divide the Allies, which it was. Meanwhile, tired of waiting for Shertok in Turkey, Brand took the Taurus Express for Aleppo, Syria, in the hope of a meeting with Shertok there or in Palestine. Instead, as he stepped off the train in Aleppo, British security agents arrested him. They interned him in Cairo and he spent the rest of the war in British custody.

  It is not likely that either side ever seriously considered meeting the terms of the ‘Jews for trucks’ deal. Eichmann couldn’t have cared less about supplies for the eastern front and was known to have sidetracked troops and supplies bound for combat to make way for trainloads of deportees, but hope and involvement kept the Hungarian Jews working with him instead of against him. Although a strategy of stalling for time while bargaining might have slowed the deportations and saved thousands of lives, when the Russians learned in June 1944 that there was an offer involving equipment to be used against them, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky vetoed all negotiations whatever.

  ‘The worst story I can ever tell you about Adolf Eichmann,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘took place during the time he was in Budapest. In the fall of 1944, a group of high-level SS officers were sitting in the SS casino there. And one of them asked Eichmann how many people had been exterminated already.

  ‘Eichmann said: “Overfive million.”

  ‘Well, because he was among comrades and they all knew it was only a matter of months before they would lose the war, one of them asked whether he was worried about what would happen to him.

  ‘Eichmann gave a very astute answer that shows he knew how the world worked: “A hundred dead people is a catastrophe,” he said. “Six million dead is a statistic.”’

  14

  Eichmann the fugitive

  Eichmann left Budapest on Christmas Eve 1944, fleeing the flames as the Red Army encircled the city. From Sopron, the new Hungarian capital, he was recalled to security headquarters in Berlin in January 1945. There, to his disappointment, ‘serious work was out of the question. Uninterrupted air raids were wreaking worse and worse devastation. Every day the communications network was repaired and every night it was disrupted again. Without communications, evacuations were inconceivable. I paid no more attention to State Police work because nobody paid any attention to me. I spent more time looking around in the ruins than at my desk. . .’

  Every day, his boss and former mentor, Kaltenbrunner, would lunch with all his department heads except Eichmann, who was never invited. Covering their tracks to avoid postwar retribution, most of them avoided this pariah who had executed their wishes; ironically, Kaltenbrunner and several of the others were hanged long before Eichmann. Their daily snub seldom bothered him.

  What did annoy him was the discovery that one of the bureau heads was working full-time at making out false documents, certificates, and IDs: ‘He was working for the security police in Section IV, who wanted to change their names and prove they’d been insurance agents or something during the war.’ Invited to partake, Eichmann said he could do without. ‘That absurd business with the false papers sickened me,’ he told his Israeli interrogators years later. ‘I’d rather have put a bullet through my brain than issue myself an official document.’

  Aside from giving visiting Red Cross inspectors a couple of guided tours of Theresienstadt, his showcase concentration camp in Bohemia, Eichmann hung around Berlin until early April. From his field headquarters in a nearby castle, Heinrich Himmler ordered Eichmann to go back to Theresienstadt, which was due for liquidation as the Allied armies approached. He was to select 100 to 200 prominent Jews and bring them to a safe place in the Austrian Tyrol as pawns in possible negotiations with the Allies’ supreme commander, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower. From all realms of his empire of death, Himmler was collecting hostages who might keep him and Germany from going down in flames with Hitler. Among these pawns were former French Prime Minister Leon Blum, imprisoned in Austria, and ‘the Jewess Gemma LaGuardia Glück, born in New York on 24 April 1887 and imprisoned in Ravensbrück.’ She was the sister of New York City’s most popular mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882-1947); their father was Italian, their mother and Gemma’s husband Jewish.

  Though Eichmann looked upon Himmler as the most prominent rat deserting the sinking ship, and had even harangued his Red Cross guests against ‘Himmler’s humane line’, he was not one to disobey an order unless he could exceed it. Hurrying to Theresienstadt by car, he put the Jewish Council there to work drawing up a ‘Who’s Who’ without telling them its benign purpose. When he saw Rabbi Leo Baeck, one of the leaders of modern Jewry, passing by, he expressed surprise that Baeck was still alive. The Council members held their breath, but Eichmann wasn’t dealing out death that day; he simply told them to put Baeck’s name at the top of their list of bargaining chips. Just before leaving, however, he told his terrified puppets: ‘Jewish death lists are my favourite reading matter before I go to sleep.’ Then he took a few from another pile and sauntered off.

  After a brief stop in Prague, Eichmann headed into Austria to search for a mountain sanctuary for his hostages. In the Tyrolean town of Brixlegg, where there was a heavy-water plant, he was caught in a fierce bombardment, but survived. In Innsbruck, the Tyrolean capital, the Gauleiter was too busy to see his visitor from Berlin and sent word out, according to Eichmann, ‘that he had other things on his mind than to bother about Jews.’ One of his department heads, however, found a couple of villages in the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy which had empty hotels, and these were put at Himmler’s disposal.

  By then, however, Bohemia was encircled and the roads to Theresienstadt were blocked by the Red Army. After frantic visits to Linz and Prague, with no communications open to Berlin, Eichmann retreated to the SS’s last resort: the Austrian spa of Bad Aussee in the remote reaches of the Styrian Salzkammergut, the salt-mine district. This Ausseerland had been christened the ‘Alpine fortress’ by propaganda minister Goebbels, who saw it as a Wagnerian setting for Nazism’s heroic last stand. Instead, it proved to be a secret treasure chest, where SS intelligence and counter-intelligenc
e agencies stashed their loot to finance a Fourth Reich or, more likely, to save their own skins. Art masterpieces from Italy, France, Belgium, Denmark, and Holland were stored in an abandoned salt mine; their value, when recovered by the Austrian resistance in May of 1945, was estimated at two and a half billion dollars.

  Far more negotiable were the assets of the Reich Main Security Office which were shipped by its chief, Kaltenbrunner, from Berlin to the town of Altaussee early in the spring of 1945: 110 pounds of gold bars; fifty cases of gold coins and other gold articles, each case weighing one hundred pounds; two million US dollars; two million Swiss francs; five cases of diamonds and precious stones, and a stamp collection worth at least five million gold marks.

  ‘Later,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘we found evidence that during the first days of May 1945, the Reichsbank’s special department that handled loot from concentration camps had sent several boxes containing “tooth gold” to Aussee.’ Wiesenthal explains that gold teeth and fillings pried loose from prisoners in the camps were all sent to a central depot in the Oranienburg concentration camp and then to the DEGUSSA27 company, which smelted the gold into bars. ‘Some DEGUSSA gold was later found in the Tyrol in the form of camouflaged gold bricks in the roofs of houses after one overloaded roof collapsed.’

  Kaltenbrunner and the other higher-ups who’d holed up with their hoard in Aussee were neither happy to see Eichmann nor the least bit interested in his and Himmler’s Theresienstadt-to-Tyrol fantasy. They put Eichmann to work giving weapons training to Romanian fascists who had fled the victorious Allies and were to go back to their homeland as partisans helping to bring about a Fourth Reich. When an order came down from Himmler that ‘no one is to fire on English and Americans’, the training was abandoned.

  After Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945, and was burned along with his bride, Eva Braun (who had married him a day earlier and swallowed poison two minutes before Hitler shot himself through the mouth), his will repudiated Himmler for making overtures to the Allies. Named instead as his successor was Admiral Karl Doenitz, who swiftly surrendered. Himmler was apprehended by British troops on 21 May in Flensburg, a German city near the Danish border; the ex-chicken farmer was disguised as an army private with a black patch over his left eye. Two days later, during a medical examination by British doctors, Himmler bit on a vial of potassium cyanide he’d concealed in his gums and died in twelve minutes.

  Early that May, Eichmann reported back to Bad Aussee for reassignment. The hulking Kaltenbrunner, playing solitaire and waiting for the end, didn’t even greet his most notorious Nazi Party recruit, but simply told him to ‘get the hell out’. Taking him at his word, Eichmann headed for Germany armed with the kind of false papers he had so despised in Berlin. These identified him as Luftwaffe (Air Force) Corporal Adolf Barth.

  ‘Corporal Barth’ was taken into custody in the Danube city of Ulm by the Americans, but escaped when Army Intelligence probed too deeply for his taste. He didn’t go far, landing in another US prisoner-of-war camp in Weiden, where he managed to obtain a new identity for later use. Thrice transferred in the next month – to Camp Berndorf near Rosenheim in late May; to a special camp for SS men in Kemanten in early June; and to a work camp at Cham, a half-timbered medieval town in the Bavarian Forest near the Bohemian border, in mid-June – he recommissioned himself along the way as an officer: a ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’, no less!

  To Rudolf Scheide, the German civilian in charge of work details at Cham, ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ confessed that he really was a ‘Major Eichmann’. The name meant nothing to Scheide, who told him: ‘It’s your own business what you want to call yourself.’

  Eichmann worked on a thirty-man construction detail that was marched by a pair of American military policemen into the town to rebuild Cham, which later became a prime Marshall Plan beneficiary. On 30 June 1945, someone told Scheide who Eichmann was and a little of what he had accomplished in the war. This was too much for Scheide, who notified the camp’s resident CIC (US counterintelligence) man. He and Scheide were waiting for ‘Eckmann’ when the work detail returned that night. Only twenty-nine men came back. Eichmann, alerted, had disappeared.

  Under yet another alias, Otto Heninger, he found work with a farmer in Prien, on the Chiemsee, Bavaria’s largest lake. Then he made his way north into the British Zone of Germany. In the spring of 1946, in the town of Eversen in Lower Saxony, ‘Heninger’ registered with the police as a forestry worker and quickly found employment in that labour-starved timberland. A few months later, a currency reform bankrupted his employer, but ‘Heninger’ headed north again – stoppingjust short of Hamburg at the Lüneburg Heath, where the brother of a friend found him work as a lumbegack. Later, ‘Heninger’ leased a little land, on which he raised chickens, in Altensalzkoth, near the north German city of Celle.

  Back in Eichmann’s home town of Linz, Wiesenthal was keeping tabs on his quarry’s relatives and had made his first contact with the future Israelis – then represented fairly furtively, but aggressively, in Austria by Bricha (which means escape), the Jewish organization that smuggled displaced persons into what was still Palestine, and Haganah, the secret Jewish defence army. Both were headed in Austria by a tall, slim, dapper man known only as ‘Arthur’, who managed to look aristocratic to Wiesenthal even while smoking cigars and wearing what Simon saw as ‘an inter-Allied fantasy uniform that looked like – and was meant to look like – a confusing combination of American, British, and French fashions.’ The debonair ‘Arthur’ was the former Arthur Pier, who, as a teenager early in Eichmann’s 1938 tenure in Vienna, had applied by mail for his emigration papers rather than condescend to stand in line. In Palestine, he had joined Haganah while working as a journalist, changed his name to Asher Ben Nathan, and, in 1944, in a small office near the port in Haifa, started collecting the stories of arriving survivors and drawing up a list of Nazi criminals in order of importance. Returning to his native Vienna in November 1945, he’d reassumed his identity of Arthur Pier and arrived with a suitcase whose false bottom secreted not just gold to finance clandestine Jewish emigration to Palestine, but even more vital cargo: microfilmed dossiers on many of the major missing Nazi genocidists, with AdolfEichmann at the top of the list. Under the auspices of the Association ofjewish Students, ‘Arthur’ had set up the first Documentation Centre in Vienna. Most of his agents – including his eventual successor, Tuviah Friedman – were enrolled at the University of Vienna, which gave his operation a cloak of legitimacy.

  ‘Arthur’ preached to all his associates that they must never take the law into their own hands. ‘Only the legal authorities and properly appointed judges have the right to punish criminals,’ he told them. ‘Our job is to find wanted Nazis and have them arrested by the Allies. Acts of personal revenge can only harm our cause, which is not only justice, but sending as many Jews as possible to Palestine.’ And, belligerent though he still was, Wiesenthal had already subscribed to some of this reasoning.

  After exchanging data on Eichmann’s crimes, past, and reported whereabouts, ‘Arthur’ and Simon decided to send a seducer to visit Eichmann’s grass widow in Altaussee to try to penetrate the ‘divorcée’s’ veil of silence. ‘Arthur’ picked Henyek Diamant, a handsome Polish Jew from Katowice who, while his family was being herded into a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz, had simply put on his best suit and, carrying a bunch of red roses, pretended to be a Gentile passing by on his way to a wedding. Blessed with blue eyes to begin with, he bought a Tyrolean hat, grew a Hitler moustache, bleached his hair and eyebrows, and fitted a plastic sheath over his penis to conceal circumcision when stopped by German street patrols. In 1943, he arrived in Hungary, where he walked into a hospital and introduced himself as a surgeon named ‘Dr Ulensky’. Nobody asked for his medical credentials and he was put to work dissecting corpses. He fought in the Hungarian underground and, when the Germans grew suspicious of him in 1944, he became ‘Dr Yanovsky’ in eastern Hungary, where he helped
Jews escape into Romania after it declared war on Hitler that August. From his helping hands as well as his career as a bogus surgeon, he was nicknamed ‘Manos’ (Spanish for hands).

  Manos didn’t relish his newest assignment. ‘That’s a terrific idea, Arthur,’ he responded sarcastically. ‘You want me to become that bitch’s lover. Are you crazy? I have feelings, too. You want me to kiss the same mouth that Eichmann kissed? You want me to move right in and live with her? Hah!’ When he calmed down, he agreed to try.

  In Aussee, posing as a Dutch collaborationist named Henryk van Diamant, Manos charmed some SS ‘widows’, but had no success with Vera Eichmann, though he delighted her sons. One day, he reported to Wiesenthal by phone that he was taking the three boys rowing the next day. Something in his voice made Simon drop everything and hurry to Aussee to take a walk along the lake with Manos.

  ‘You lost your family in the camps, Manos,’ Wiesenthal said. ‘Were there children?’

  ‘Two brothers and a sister,’ Manos replied, looking away.

  ‘And you think you could get back at Eichmann by having an “accident” out there?’ Simon said, beckoning towards the water. He spent the next half hour talking Manos out of killing Eichmann’s sons, eventually convincing him that ‘a man who unemotionally ordered the death of one million children would show no emotion for his own.’