Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Two days before the funeral, Wiesenthal went out to the cemetery, found the Eichmann family burial plot, and scouted not just the location of the grave, but the terrain for several hundred yards around it. ‘I thought what I had in mind could be done, especially on a dark winter day,’ he recalls in his memoir. He took a train to Vienna and went to the Concordia Press Club, where he sought out two photographers who were also trusted friends. ‘I asked them to come to Linz and photograph the whole Eichmann family while they stood around the grave during the funeral. I told them it was essential that they remain unseen. They did a fine job. Hiding behind large tombstones at a distance of about 200 yards, they made sharp pictures of the members of the funeral procession, although the light was far from perfect.’

  Eichmann did not come to his father’s funeral. Five hours after the ceremony, however, Wiesenthal held photos of his quarry’s four brothers – Emil, Friedrich, Otto, and Robert – in his hand. Reaching into his drawer, he exhumed the 1936 photo of Adolf Eichmann that ‘Manos’ Diamant had pried loose from Frau Masenbacher near Linz more than a dozen years earlier. He put it in the pack with the other four. ‘Next to today’s pictures of the four brothers, Adolf, the eldest, looked like a younger brother. I took out a magnifying glass and studied the features of the five brothers. Many people had told me that Adolf Eichmann most closely resembled his brother Otto. Looking at the photographs through the magnifying glass, I suddenly understood why so many people had sworn they’d seen Adolf Eichmann in Altaussee since the war when they were really seeing one of his brothers. The family resemblance was astonishing. . .

  ‘If “Ricardo Klement” in Buenos Aires was identical with Adolf Eichmann, his face must have gone through the same evolution as the faces of the four brothers. I cut from the photographs the faces of the four brothers who had been at the funeral, and the face from the old picture of Adolf Eichmann. I shuffled the faces like playing cards and threw them on the table. Somehow a composite face emerged: perhaps Adolf Eichmann.’

  When the two young Israelis came to call, Wiesenthal performed his Eichmann card trick. ‘This is how he must look now – probably closest to his brother Otto,’ he told them. ‘All five brothers have the same facial expression. Look at the mouth, its corners, the chin, the shape of the skull.’

  ‘Fantastic!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘May we take the pictures with us?’ the other asked.

  They were out the door with them before he could say yes: ‘Suddenly, they were in a hurry. I didn’t want to detain them, not for a second. I didn’t hear from them, so I assumed that they didn’t need my help. There was nothing else I could do.’

  With Wiesenthal’s portraits in their possession, the Israelis needed to play one more card before they could make positive identification of Eichmann with ‘Klement’ – and he played right into their hands. On his way home from work on Monday, 21 March 1960, ‘Ricardo Klement’ did something he had never done before in the months the Israelis had him under surveillance: he bought his wife a bouquet of flowers.

  Checking his Eichmann file, the leader of the mission read that Adolf Eichmann had married Vera Liebl on 21 March 1935. This was their silver wedding anniversary – and his sentimental gesture did him in. That very night, a three-word cable reached Harel in Tel Aviv: ‘HA’ISH HOU HA’ISH.’ (‘The man is the man.’)

  In early April, while the surveillance team kept watch on Eichmann, a six-man ‘kidnap commando’ was installed by Israel in Buenos Aires. Four were Israelis who had arrived via different routes and were equipped with false identification papers and cover stories that would hold water. Two were Argentinian Jews, recruited locally and warned they might have to leave Argentina for good – particularly if ‘Operation Eichmann’ proved successful.

  When an intelligence report reached him that ‘Klement’ had been seen ‘with another high-ranking Nazi in the neighbourhood of La Gallareta, in the province of Santa Fé. The description of that other man corresponds to that of [Dr] Josef Mengele’, Harel decided to double the stakes by going to Argentina himself and taking charge of Operation Eichmann while keeping an eye out for the Auschwitz medical experimenter as well. When a couple of Israeli Cabinet members who were entrusted with the details of what was afoot complained about committing a large passenger jet and the head of Mossad (Israel’s centralized intelligence organization) just to bringing back Eichmann, Harel told them blithely: ‘To make the investment worthwhile, we’ll try to bring Mengele with us, too.’

  A long-scheduled visit to Argentina by Abba Eban, Foreign Minister of Israel, provided Operation Eichmann with a respectable cover. Argentina was observing its 150th anniversary of independence in May 1960, and Eban would be leading Israel’s delegation to the sesquicentennial celebration. El Al, the Israeli government airline, would also be inaugurating air services between Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires at that time. The large prop-jet that brought Eban and his entourage on Wednesday, 11 May would, if all went well, fly home in a matter of hours or days with Eichmann and his captors. As Harel and his team began renting ‘safe houses’ (seven in all) in which to hide Eichmann or themselves, they swore their landlords to silence with the story that Eban wanted to hold secret meetings with Arab diplomats to discuss peace in the Middle East.

  The kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann was set for 6.30 p.m. on 11 May. Early in May, however, the Argentine government postponed the Israelis’ arrival by eight days because its leaders could not receive them before 2 p.m. on 19 May. Rather than alter a well-laid plan, Harel decided to stick to his schedule, but to use the extra week of holding Eichmann captive in Argentina to try to snare Mengele, too.

  On 11 May, the bus from the Mercedes Benz plant dropped Eichmann at his corner, as usual, at one minute before the half-hour. It was autumn in Argentina (in the southern hemisphere) and night was falling. A car was parked on Garibaldi Street with its hood raised and three men bent over the engine. A fourth man, apparently the owner, was pacing impatiently. Another car was parked nearby.

  As Eichmann passed the ‘disabled’ car, he reached into his pocket. The car’s back door had just begun to open, but now – fearing he would produce a gun – the three ‘mechanics’ who were supposed to abandon their engine to shove him inside couldn’t risk waiting the extra fraction of a second. One of them made a flying tackle, diving to deflect Eichmann’s hand, and knocked him to the ground. As they thrashed around, he and Eichmann rolled into a ditch, into which the other two ‘mechanics’ jumped to subdue their quarry. The fourth man slammed the ‘disabled’ car’s hood shut and then stood lookout while the driver started the engine and the two men in the back seat made room for a third.

  Eichmann tried to shout for help, but his false teeth had been dislodged by the tackle and were rattling around his mouth, almost choking him. When his three assailants flung him on to the floor of the car, the two back-seat passengers pinned him down and searched him. The ‘weapon’ he had been reaching for was a flashlight, which he would have used to find his way in the gathering dusk to his unlit door, which he never saw again.

  ‘One move and you’re a dead man!’ the driver said over his shoulder. He was Zvi Aharoni, chief interrogator for Israel’s domestic equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a key figure for the days of dialogue with Eichmann ahead. The three ‘mechanics’ raced for the other car. The look-out ambled back to the Israeli spy-house to keep watch on what the ‘Klements’ did when they realized that the head of the house had disappeared. With Eichmann still in Argentina for the next eight or nine days, who knew what might be done to retrieve him or block their exit?

  Only twenty-seven seconds had elapsed between the moment Eichmann had reached for his flashlight and the car’s take-off with him being bound and gagged in the back. Opaque goggles served as a blindfold. Taking side streets rather than main arteries, Aharoni drove for an hour – with the second car checking that there were no pursuers – before arriving at a villa code-named ‘Tire’ in the Florencio Varela district of Buenos A
ires.

  Inside the house, they searched their captive’s mouth for a vial of poison and found none. Then they looked at his left armpit and found the telltale scars where his SS tattoo had been removed. Only then did Aharoni ask him in German: ‘Who are you?’

  Eichmann didn’t evade the question by pretending to be Ricardo Klement. ‘Ich bin Adolf Eichmann,’ he answered. After a pause, he added wearily but almost with relief: ‘I know I’m in the hands of Jews. I am resigned to my fate.’

  In the next week, Eichmann talked freely with Aharoni and even wrote a three paragraph statement which began:

  I, the undersigned Adolf Eichmann, hereby declare of my own free will that, as my true identity has been discovered, I realize there is no possibility of trying to escape the course of justice. I agree to be taken to Israel and there stand trial before a qualified tribunal.

  Vera Eichmann waited three days before approaching anyone about her missing husband. She made the rounds of hospitals and morgues while her sons contacted Nazi welfare and Argentine fascist organizations, none of which paid much heed to an obscure émigré named Klement who seemed to have left his family. When the police finally were notified, their inquiries, too, were strictly routine. Eichmann’s oldest son, Klaus (who preferred to call himself Nikolaus), said in 1965 that he did activate ‘one of father’s friends, also an SS member’, in an effort to intercept Eichmann when his abductors tried to transport him out of the country. ‘He organized a network of checks . . . There was no harbour, railway station, airport, or important intersection that didn’t have one of our men stationed there.’

  Around 14 or 15 May, one of the Israeli commandos thought he saw suspicious activity outside the hideaway, so Eichmann, his interrogator and guards were transferred to another villa. Otherwise, his brief incarceration in Argentina went smoothly and undetected. Harel’s only disappointment was that Eichmann maintained he hardly knew Mengele and had certainly not seen him lately. When Eichmann said that Mengele might have gone where most Nazis went when they were between addresses – Gilda Jurmann’s boarding house in Vicente Lopez – Harel ordered a stake-out there, much to the dismay of Aharoni and other members of Operation Eichmann, who felt this was jeopardizing their mission.

  ‘Mengele burned like a fire in my bones,’ Harel admitted later in explaining why he dispatched agents to every one of Mengele’s former addresses. Only on Friday, 20 May, the new date set for the arrival of Abba Eban’s delegation on El Al, did Harel concede that Mengele had vanished without a trace.

  The ‘Whispering Giant’ Britannia prop-jet landed in Buenos Aires at 5.52 p.m. with an unusually large staff of nineteen – including a well-rested cockpit crew for the return flight. After the passengers had disembarked and been welcomed, the plane was towed into a hangar for servicing. Three hours later’ crew members who weren’t working the return flight, but were riding it home, came drifting back from downtown Buenos Aires in varying condition. One uniformed ‘steward’ was in such bad shape that he had to be driven to the plane’s side and helped up the stairs by two of his colleagues. ‘I’m glad there are no passengers,’ an Argentine airport guard remarked. ‘I’d hate to be served by him.’

  The ‘drunken steward’, listed as ‘George Doron’, was, in fact, the principal passenger. Adolf Eichmann had been uniformed, fed a soporific, and doused with whisky just before leaving the villa. The plane took off without incident. With a refuelling stop in Dakar, Senegal, it touched down in Tel Aviv just before dawn the next day.

  The following afternoon, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion addressed the Knesset, Israel’s parliament:

  ‘I must inform the Knesset that the security services of Israel have just laid their hands on one of the greatest of the Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible with other Nazi leaders for what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” – that is to say, the extermination of six million European Jews. Eichmann is already under arrest here in Israel, in accordance with the law on the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators’, which specified that crimes against the Jewish people could be punished in Israel even if they took place outside the country and before it existed.

  The reaction in Argentina was swift and vehement, but too late. On 5 June 1960, at Argentina’s request, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to condemn Israel for violating Argentine sovereignty with its ‘illicit and clandestine transfer’ of Eichmann. Even before then, the ‘transfer’ had unleashed a pogrom across South America. Home-made bombs were thrown at Israeli embassies and consulates, Hebrew schools and synagogues, Jewish cultural and community centres, and homes of prominent Jews. Cemeteries were desecrated, kosher restaurants machine-gunned, and ‘Death to the Jews’ scrawled on walls in Buenos Aires, Asunción, Montevideo, Bogota, Rio, and São Paulo. Argentina’s fascist organization, Tacuara, to whom the Eichmann boys had turned for help in finding their father, plotted to kidnap the Israeli ambassador and blow up his embassy. (West German Nazis put a price on the head of Isser Harel.) A noted Argentine Jewish scholar, Maximo Handel, was beaten unconscious by Nazi thugs who cut swastikas in his body. A young Jewish woman, Merta Penjerek, said to have brought food to the villa where Eichmann was held, was abducted and murdered. The pogrom would continue until 1 June 1962, the day after Eichmann was executed, when a Tacuara gang kidnapped Graciella Narcissa Sirota, daughter of the owner of the same hideaway, and tortured her, abused her sexually, and burned a swastika into her breast with their cigarettes.

  And in Vienna around the time Ben-Gurion was addressing the Knesset, Simon Wiesenthal received a cable from Yad Vashem that congratulated him on his work well done.

  16

  Should Eichmann die?

  ‘I saw Adolf Eichmann for the first time on the opening day of his trial in the courtroom in Jerusalem,’ Simon Wiesenthal says in his 1967 memoir. ‘For nearly sixteen years I had thought of him practically every day and every night. In my mind I had built up the image of a demonic superman. Instead I saw a frail, nondescript, shabby fellow in a glass cell between two Israeli policemen; they looked more colourful and interesting than he did. Everything about Eichmann seemed drawn with charcoal: his greyish face, his balding head, his clothes. There was nothing demonic about him; he looked like a bookkeeper who is afraid to ask for a raise. Something seemed completely wrong, and I kept thinking about it while the incomprehensible bill of indictment (“the murder of six million men, women, and children”) was being read. Suddenly I knew what it was. In my mind I’d always seen SS Obersturmbannführer [Major] Eichmann, supreme arbiter of life and death. But the Eichmann I now saw did not wear the SS uniform of terror and murder. Dressed in a cheap, dark suit, he seemed a cardboard figure, empty and two-dimensional.’

  Noticing that witnesses, too, had trouble identifying the shabby little civilian in the bullet-proof glass booth as the awesome Eichmann they once knew, Wiesenthal suggested to Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, that Eichmann should wear a uniform. Hausner rejected the idea because, while emotionally right, it would give the whole event the theatrical aura of a show trial. And, with Israel already in the international limelight for having abducted the defendant, the whole world was watching critically to see that Eichmann was treated humanely even while it heard hour after hour of his inhumanity.

  Simon had another suggestion, to which he also knew Hausner would say no. There were fifteen counts in the indictment: ‘causing the killing of millions of Jews’, placing ‘millions of Jews under conditions which were likely to lead to their physical destruction’, ‘causing serious bodily and mental harm’ to them, ‘directing that births be banned and pregnancies interrupted among Jewish women’, ‘racial, religious, and political persecution’, ‘plunder of property’ by means of murder, the expulsion of ‘hundreds of thousands of Poles from their homes’ and ‘fourteen thousand Slovenes’ from Yugoslavia, and the deportation of ‘scores of thousands of gypsies’ to Auschwitz. Fifteen times, Eichmann was asked how he pleaded, and fiftee
n times, he answered, ‘Not guilty.’

  To Wiesenthal, this procedure seemed inadequate: ‘I thought that Eichmann should have been asked six million times, and he should have been made to answer six million times.’

  Since the trial would last eight months, Hausner’s negative reply could be anticipated. But, a dozen years after Adolf Eichmann was hanged in 1962, when Wiesenthal confessed to me that he wondered whether his quarry should have been executed, it was on this same ground: ‘When you take the life of one man for the murder of six million, you cheapen the value of the dead. It means, if you look at it a certain way, that one German life is worth six million Jewish lives. In general, I am against the death sentence, though I can understand that Eichmann is a special case. But, in the moment they killed him, the case was closed. Yet, even today, there are people appearing with new testimony, new evidence against him. Maybe it would have been better to give him six or eleven million life sentences and kept him in prison as a warning to the murderers of tomorrow and, each time new charges surface, to bring him back into the glass booth and let him answer them and let a judge decide. The trial is a lesson. But I don’t know.’

  What was the lesson of the Eichmann trial? At a time when the world was distancing itself from the Holocaust as a historical aberration and neo-Nazi revisionists were beginning to claim that Auschwitz and Anne Frank never really happened, Eichmann’s testimony belied these lies. And, as Wiesenthal put it in the original German version of the 1988 memoir, Justice, Not Vengeance: ‘The Eichmann trial conveyed an essential deep understanding of the Nazi death machinery and its most important protagonists. Since that time, the world now understands the concept of “desk murderer”. We know that one doesn’t need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one’s duty for a Führer, and that mass murderers absolutely need not be – indeed, cannot be! – asocial. On the contrary, mass murder on a large scale presupposes a social conformist for a murderer.’ To which he added in an interview: ‘These people were often good family men, good fathers. They gave to the poor. They loved flowers. But they killed people. Why? Because they had the idea that they did not need to think. Hitler would think for them. Not one was born a murderer.’