Nazi Hunter (26 page)

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:

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

‘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 fifteen 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.’

Criticism from Israel hurts Simon. In practically the same breath, Tuviah Friedman claimed that Eichmann’s first words to his captors were ‘Which one of you is
Friedman?’ and complained that ‘They always talk about Wiesenthal, never about me.’ And Isser Harel, leader of the Eichmann abduction, not only made Wiesenthal a non-person in his
1975 memoir,
The House on Garibaldi Street
(even though Simon had supplied Harel’s publisher with an important postwar, pre-capture photo of Eichmann, available nowhere else, to
illustrate it), but, when questioned about the omission by a Dutch interviewer, said of Simon that ‘his information didn’t lead to Eichmann’s tracks.’

Wiesenthal’s response back in 1975 was to term Harel’s words ‘an assault on the credibility of my Documentation Centre. Harel is trying to get even more honour than he has
coming, although I’m not trying to belittle his accomplishments of arresting and kidnapping Eichmann. Look, the capture of Eichmann was a mosaic, a picture puzzle, and in it I had my place.
Harel is trying to deny me this and I protest this.’

Over the years, Harel kept bad-mouthing Wiesenthal. He was cited in a footnote to a 1986 book,
Mengele: the Complete Story
, as telling co-authors Gerald L. Posner and John Ware that
neither Friedman nor Wiesenthal played any role in finding Eichmann. On a 1989 trip to the US, Harel found that ‘everywhere I visited, people would say, “Where is Wiesenthal in the
[Eichmann] operation?” because he was telling everybody he was behind all this. I was obliged to tell them it’s not true.’ Finally, in May 1991, when Harel went to New York to be
honoured by the World Jewish Congress, he gave an interview to the
Jerusalem Post’s
correspondent there, Jonathan Schachter, which the newspaper headlined:
WIESENTHAL HAD
“
NO ROLE
”
IN EICHMANN KIDNAPPING
’.