Hunting Eichmann (7 page)

Before the Nazis stormed into Poland, Wiesenthal had been an architect with a rising reputation and a husband with hopes for a family of his own. The Nazis had killed his mother, had taken his wife, and he had suffered such terror on his body and mind that he twice had attempted to kill himself. At the war's end, he feared that if he did not go after those responsible, he would have nothing to live for. While recuperating in Mauthausen, the thirty-six-year-old implored an American army War Crimes Unit operating at the camp to hire him. In a letter to the chief, he chronicled the twelve concentration camps he had survived and offered the names and, remarkably, the ranks of ninety-one individuals, along with descriptions of their crimes: "SS Major-General Katzmann—Responsible for the death of at least 1 million people; Gestapo Commissar Shöls—Timekeeper and schedule-maker for mass killing throughout Galicia; Janowska Commandant Friedrich Warzok—A beast who liquidated at least 60,000 Jews and used to burn prisoners alive in their barracks; Plaszow SS guard Hujar—Winner of numerous wagers by sending one bullet through two heads at a time."

The chief investigator hired Wiesenthal, giving him the power to arrest, and he captured more than a dozen SS members with the help of the American unit before he was transferred to the OSS. The American spy agency was also interested in arresting SS officials, albeit more for counterespionage efforts than for war crimes.

In the month after Choter-Ischai informed him of Eichmann's name, Wiesenthal learned little more about the lieutenant colonel other than rumors from former Mauthausen inmates that he spoke Yiddish and Hebrew fluently. In late July, he traveled to Vienna to gather information for his investigations into former SS officers. He met with Gideon Raphael, a senior agent with the Brichah, the underground organization leading the exodus of Jews from Europe to Palestine in defiance of the British blockade. Raphael handed Wiesenthal a list of war criminals that the Jewish Agency for Palestine (forerunner of the Israeli government) had been compiling in earnest since 1944.

The name Eichmann topped the list. Raphael had more information on Eichmann than the Allies did, though still no first name. His nickname was apparently Eichie. He was reported to be married with one child and had allegedly been born in Sarona, a German Templar colony in Palestine. Again, the report stated that he spoke Hebrew and Yiddish. Most important, it said that he was a "high official of Gestapo headquarters, Department of Jewish Affairs." Wiesenthal knew that this meant that Eichmann had been instrumental in running the extermination camps.

After returning to Linz, Wiesenthal went straight to his boss, Captain O'Meara of the OSS, to discuss Eichmann.

"He's the head of the Jewish branch of the Gestapo," O'Meara said. He encouraged Wiesenthal to track Eichmann down.

Unbeknownst to Wiesenthal, the Allies had been collecting more and more information on Eichmann from their interrogations of captured SS officers, including some who had worked closely with him. They knew of his position as chief of the Jewish section of the Gestapo and the broad strokes of his activities.

A few evenings later, at his apartment on Landstrasse 40, only two doors down from the OSS office, Wiesenthal sat at his desk, looking at his list of names. "Eichmann" was now underscored for emphasis. His landlady entered to clean his room and peered over his shoulder at the list.

"Eichmann!" she exclaimed. "That must be the SS general Eichmann who was in command of the Jews. Did you know his parents live here in this street? Just a few houses along, at number 32!"

An astonished Wiesenthal immediately informed the OSS, but he refused, when asked, to go to the house himself. He could not bear the thought of touching the same door handle as an individual who had had a hand in managing so much death.

On July 28, two OSS agents descended on Landstrasse 32. They interrogated Eichmann's father, who reluctantly admitted that his son Adolf had been a member of the SS, but that was all he knew of his wartime activities. Adolf had visited near the end of the war, but his father had heard nothing from him since. The agents learned that he had been born in Solingen, Germany, not Palestine; that he had three children, not one; and that he was married to a woman named Vera Liebl. On a search of the house, they found not a single photograph of Adolf.

"Is there a picture?" an OSS agent asked, suspicious that the man was hiding something.

The older Eichmann shook his head. "He never liked to be photographed," he said.

Standing in a line of SS men, Second Lieutenant Otto Eckmann waited nervously as Jewish camp survivors stared at his face to see if they recognized him. Armed American guards and Allied war crimes investigators looked on expectantly.

Eichmann had passed the summer safely in his new identity, coming through several standard CIC interrogations on his wartime activities without a hitch. None of his answers had provoked further inquiry, and he spent his days stacking heavy ammunition in an air force warehouse. In late August, the Americans moved him to another camp located at Ober-Dachstetten, to the west of Nuremberg. His adjunct Jänisch was sent to a different camp. Eichmann was isolated among three hundred former SS officers and assigned to a work detail. Nobody there knew who he was.

By late September, lineups of former Nazis were occurring more and more often. None of the survivors recognized Eichmann as they moved down the lines. Contrary to the very public strutting of most SS men, whether in the camps or overseeing deportations, Eichmann had preferred to remain in the shadows. Apart from his time in Vienna and Hungary, he had had his staff meet with Jewish representatives and execute his plans. He also had made a point of avoiding having his photograph taken. For his identity cards, he had always used an official Gestapo photograph and destroyed the negatives. This earlier caution was paying off now. Nonetheless, he was sure that one day he would be discovered in one of the lineups.

In October, Eichmann was called in for questioning at the CIC interrogation center in nearby Ansbach. He was certain he was in trouble when confronted by an experienced investigator who spoke perfect German and who knew the Byzantine intricacies of the SS well enough to catch Eichmann in a lie.

Eichmann talked the investigator through his service, how he had been part of a Waffen-SS division that had battled the Russians outside Budapest, then had served under the famed General Sepp Dietrich in the defense of Vienna at the war's end. As to why he had come into the camp without any papers, Eichmann explained that he had destroyed them after his retreat from Vienna, following standard army procedure. The investigator stopped him several times, probing for military details that any Waffen-SS lieutenant should know but that Eichmann did not. Further, when the investigator put him under pressure, Eichmann could not help but reveal an arrogance that betrayed him as a more superior officer. When the interrogation ended, the investigator told Eichmann that his answers would be verified and that more interrogations were sure to follow.

Even though Eichmann had provided information that would require time and travel to investigate, he feared that he had exposed himself. He returned to Ober-Dachstetten by military bus, shuddering to think how the camp's Polish guards would treat him if they learned his identity. Thoughts of suicide crept into his mind, and he even asked one of the other SS officers, who had been a pharmacist before the war, how much morphine he would need to kill himself. His desperation spiked on hearing that the Allies were about to parade the Third Reich's great leaders into a courtroom in Nuremberg.

Two hours before dawn on November 21, guards awakened the prisoners at Nuremberg to prepare them for their first day of the International Military Tribunal. After many months of political and legal wrangling among the Allies, they had settled on an indictment and a list of twenty-four defendants for the major war crimes trial. The defendants had been interrogated at length. The prosecutors had gathered piles of incriminating Nazi documents, many found hidden in salt mines, stored in country chateaus, or secreted behind false walls in government buildings. Now the trial was to begin in earnest.

The guards gave the prisoners a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal, shaved their faces, and dressed the military men in plain uniforms and the civilians in suits and ties. As had been the case since their arrest, their every movement was watched to prevent any attempt at suicide. Swinging a billy club, the prison commandant warned them that if they misbehaved during the proceedings, they would suffer a loss of privileges. Then they were led in groups of four through the prison, down the covered walkway, and into the Palace of Justice. An iron door was slid open, revealing a steel-cage elevator large enough for the prisoners and their guards.

On the second floor, the guards escorted them into the courtroom and sat them on two long wooden benches, according to the order of their names in the indictment. First row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joaquim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, and Hjalmar Schacht. Second row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche. Of the other four defendants, Ernst Kaltenbrunner had suffered a brain hemorrhage three days before, Robert Ley had hanged himself with a towel in his cell, Gustav Krupp had been found too frail to stand trial, and Martin Bormann was still at large.

Ten guards, with white clubs, white belts, and white helmets, stood to the side and behind the defendants. The rest of the amphitheaterlike courtroom was empty. At 9:30
A.M.,
the doors swung wide. The defense attorneys streamed in and arranged themselves in front of the dock. The prosecutors settled on the opposite side. Interpreters and court stenographers took their positions, and more than 250 journalists took theirs. At 10:00
A.M.
sharp, the marshal called for order, and four judges, one each from the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France, entered to hushed silence.

After a brief introduction by the tribunal president, the prosecution listed the four-part indictments against the defendants for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and a conspiracy to commit these crimes. Hour after hour, the indictment was read, a damning portrait of international treaty violations, totalitarian control, aggressive war, slave labor, the slaughter of captured soldiers, looting, the wanton destruction of thousands of villages and cities, and the torture, shooting, gassing, hanging, starvation, and systematic extermination of innocents to clear way for the "master race." Some of the defendants grimaced, wiped their brows, and shifted uneasily in their seats. Others were stone still. Göring mugged for the cameras. Hess groaned miserably, from stomach pain he claimed, and had to be given a shot to relax him. Tears rolled down Ribbentrop's face, and eventually he was removed to sob alone in an adjoining hallway. During the break for lunch, Schirach, the dapper thirty-eight-year-old former leader of the Hitler Youth, turned to a clinical psychologist who was supervising the prisoners and said dryly, "I suppose we'll get steak the day you hang us."

The following day, the defendants entered their pleas of guilty or not guilty. First, Göring answered, with a defiant stare, "I declare myself, in the sense of the indictment, not guilty." The rest followed with not guilty pleas as well. Then Robert Jackson, the lead American prosecutor, stood to give an opening statement. Dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit with a watch chain dangling from his vest, he spoke with measured intensity.

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

Over the following weeks, the prosecution laid out its case on each of the indictments, considering seized Nazi papers and testimonials on how plans for these crimes had been developed by the defendants, the methods they had taken to achieve them, and the orders they had given to execute them. Their guilt was clear, but the trial also made obvious that many other Nazis had had a direct hand in these crimes. One of the names that became most prominent was that of Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann was first mentioned on the trial's twentieth day. The prosecution quoted a Hungarian Jewish leader writing about the arrival of the Germans in March 1944: "Together with the German military occupation, there arrived in Budapest a 'Special Section Commando' of the German secret police with the sole object of liquidating the Hungarian Jews. It was headed by Adolf Eichmann ... Commanders of the death camps gassed only on the direct or indirect instructions of Eichmann." The next day, Eichmann was noted as the "Chief of the Jewish Section of the Gestapo," who had once authoritatively declared that 4 million Jews had been deported and then killed in the extermination camps.

Shortly after the restart of the proceedings, on January 3, 1946, SS captain Dieter Wisliceny took the witness stand. Wisliceny had worked with Eichmann for eleven years, and he was also a close family friend. His testimony would lay bare the part that Eichmann had played in the genocide.

In answer to a question from Lieutenant Colonel Smith Brookhart of the prosecution as to whether Eichmann had shown Wisliceny the order from Himmler to begin the Final Solution, the witness said, "Yes, Eichmann handed me the document and I saw the order myself."

"Was any question asked by you as to the meaning of the words 'Final Solution' as used in the order?" Lieutenant Colonel Brookhart asked.