Hunting Eichmann (45 page)

Even so, some in Argentina were keen to punish the Israelis. Unable to strike against them directly, right-wing groups unleashed a string of attacks on the Jewish community in Argentina. Tacuara carried out the worst of the incidents, beating up several Jewish students at the University of Buenos Aires and chanting "Long live Eichmann. Death to Jews." One student was shot, and later, in a vicious assault, Tacuara radicals branded a swastika onto the chest of a teenage girl whose father was suspected of having helped the Israelis. Nick and Dieter Eichmann hung a swastika flag in front of their Garibaldi Street house and talked tough.

Vera Eichmann called upon the Argentine courts to instigate proceedings against those involved in her husband's kidnapping. On July 12, a judge approved the case and launched an investigation, aided by the Argentine security services. None of Harel's team was in harm's way, but Luba Volk, who had signed her name to numerous documents related to the El Al flight, was still in the country. One afternoon when she was driving to her house in Belgrano, she sensed that a car was following her. After a few turns, she was certain of it, but whether it was the police or some vigilantes, she did not know. She went straight to the Israeli embassy, where security officials instructed her not to leave her house alone at night and to watch over her son carefully.

Volk tried to ignore the fear she felt, carrying on with her day-today activities as much as she could. A week later, she and her husband were called to the office of Joel Baromi, the acting Israeli ambassador. Baromi informed them that he had reliable intelligence that the Argentines, prompted by the proceedings brought by Eichmann's wife, were going to arrest Volk for her connection to the flight.

"Get out of this country as soon as you can, and by any means you can—legal or illegal," Baromi advised.

The next day, Volk and her family packed their most important belongings into a few bags and boarded a small plane to Uruguay. After a couple of weeks in Montevideo, she and her son traveled to Israel. Her husband followed shortly after, his business career in shambles because of his hasty exit from Argentina and the rumor that he was actually a Mossad agent.

By the fall, relations between Argentina and Israel had improved, and the case instigated by Vera Eichmann faltered. Investigators failed even to discover the names of those who had returned on the El Al flight. The Mossad had covered its tracks too well. In addition, the impetus to continue with the inquiry met with resistance, no doubt because of the embarrassment of various Argentine agencies, including the police and security services, at having been outwitted.

The other major player in this drama was West Germany. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer publicly chastised Israel for the kidnapping and for its commitment to trying the war criminal. He was supported by a host of his country's top newspaper editors, who demanded that Eichmann be extradited and "tried by judges instead of by avengers." But Adenauer never made any serious attempt to extradite Eichmann, knowing that the Israelis would not relinquish their right to try him. Still, as the trial approached, Adenauer grew increasingly worried about what Eichmann might reveal about the war activities of his national security adviser, Hans Globke. Israeli and West German officials made back-channel efforts to ensure that the trial did not embarrass the chancellor's government.

THE ACCOUNTANT OF DEATH
and
EICHMANN'S STORY, PART
1:
I TRANSPORTED THEM TO THE BUTCHER
were the headlines in the German magazine
Der Stern
and the American magazine
Life,
respectively. Throughout the fall of 1960, both magazines published serial installments of Eichmann's memoirs, drawing millions of readers across the globe into the mind and history of the Nazi war criminal. One issue recounted a scene in late 1941 when Eichmann had seen the first preparations for exterminating the Jews: "General Heydrich ordered me to visit Majdanek, a Polish village near Lublin. A German police captain showed me how they had managed to build airtight chambers disguised as ordinary Polish farmers' huts, seal them hermetically, then inject the exhaust gas from a Russian U-boat motor. I remember it all very exactly because I never thought that anything like that would be possible, technically speaking." Such statements revealed Eichmann's callous disregard for his victims' suffering.

The memoirs came from the 850-page typescript that Willem Sassen had made from his taped interviews with Eichmann. Within days of Ben-Gurion's announcement, Sassen had approached publishers around the world to sell the rights to the interviews. For a share of the proceeds, he even convinced Vera Eichmann to grant permission for the sale. She later declared that she had had no idea of the nature of their content.

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.