The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (27 page)

I didn't know what sort of man Eichmann was. I didn't know with what morbid zeal he pursued his murderous work or how he went into the fray to destroy one miserable Jew with the same ardor he devoted to the annihilation of an entire community. I didn't know that he was capable of ordering the slaughter of babies – and depicting himself as a disciplined soldier; of directing outrages on women – and priding himself on his loyalty to an oath […] I knew that he was a past master in police methods, and that on the strength of his professional skill and in the light of his total lack of conscience, he would be an exceedingly dangerous quarry. I knew that when the war was over he had succeeded in blotting out all trace of himself with supreme expertise.
⁸

In fact, Eichmann's whereabouts had initially been located, not by any intelligence agencies, but by an aging, blind refugee from Nazi persecution by the name of Lothar Hermann. Hermann, who had been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp for his socialist politics, was now living with his wife and daughter in the Olivos area of Buenos Aires. There his daughter, Sylvia, had made friends with Eichmann's eldest son, Klaus. The young boy often made anti-Semitic remarks and stated that his father had been proud to serve in the war, but it wasn't until Sylvia's father heard the name Adolf Eichmann in reference to a Nazi trial back in Germany, that he put two and two together and realized the true nature of Eichmann's identity. From that moment on, Lothar Hermann made it his mission to alert the Israeli and German authorities and see to it that Eichmann did not escape justice for a second time. Mossad operatives flew into Argentina and, on May 11, 1960, kidnapped Eichmann as he returned from work, spiriting him away to a secret hiding place outside Buenos Aires.

For the following ten days Eichmann was kept prisoner, blindfolded and handcuffed to a bed, until Mossad was able to arrange to smuggle their captive out of the country without alerting the authorities. Argentina would not, after all, take kindly to Israeli forces operating within its borders, and would certainly block any attempts to extradite Eichmann through official channels. Meanwhile, back at the Eichmann house, pandemonium reigned as his sons contacted their father's former SS friends in an attempt to find out what might have happened. In addition, a ‘Perónist youth group' also approached the Eichmanns with an offer to help search for the missing man. They also offered to launch a campaign of terror against the Israelis by kidnapping the Israeli Ambassador to Argentina and torturing him until Eichmann was released, or even by blowing up the Israeli Embassy.

Finally, on May 21, 1960, Mossad managed to move Eichmann out of the country. He was heavily drugged and dressed in the uniform of an El Al flight attendant, his captors explaining that Eichmann was suffering some form of food poisoning, but that he would be taken care of by the rest of the flight staff until they reached Tel Aviv. The plan worked and on May 23 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced: ‘Eichmann is already in this country under arrest and will shortly be brought to trial.'

Naturally, the Argentine government was incensed at the kidnapping of one of its ‘citizens' and demanded that Israel return Eichmann to Buenos Aires. Argentina's Ambassador to the United Nations, Mario Amadeo, even made a formal protest before the Security Council in New York, but to no avail. Other prominent figures also joined the fray, notably the Argentine Cardinal Antonio Caggiano, who had also been involved in Odessa's escape network. Speaking to the press Caggiano said:

He [Eichmann] came to our fatherland seeking forgiveness and oblivion. It doesn't matter what his name is, Riccardo Klement or Adolf Eichmann, our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he's done.
⁹

But all their outrage and pleading came to nothing. Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem where, in court, he was kept in a bullet-proof glass box to prevent him being assassinated by the surviving victims of his crimes, and having been found guilty of all the charges against him was put to death on May 31, 1962. His last words were, ‘Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.'

Sadly, Eichmann's fellow Odessa escapee, Josef Mengele, was not to face the hangman's noose, for although he never enjoyed a peaceful existence in Paraguay, nor later in Brazil, always fearing arrest, no Mossad team spirited him back to Israel to face trial for his terrible crimes. Instead, Mengele died by drowning while swimming off the beach at Betrioga, near Sao Paulo, Brazil on February 7, 1979.

Priebke, Mengele and Eichmann were Odessa's most famous ‘members', but it is thought thousands of Nazis escaped Europe using this secret network, engineered and aided by all the various groups and nations previously mentioned. Whether Odessa was a coordinated organization, conceived by the Nazis and made operational by Perón, is not quite so clear. Rather than being established as part of a grand plan to further the cause of the Nazis, it is far more likely that the whole Odessa escape network grew together piecemeal, according to necessity, as the last option for a group of frightened and desperate fugitives running for their lives.

Protest is when I say this or that doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I ensure that what doesn't suit me no longer occurs.

ULRIKE MEINHOF,
Vom Protest zum Widerstand
(
From Protest to Resistance
)

D
uring the 1960s, perhaps more than any other decade in history, the world was party to some of the most violent, politically radical underground movements it had ever experienced. Governments were attacked were as the military – in fact, all mainstream institutions and ideologies came under fire, with 1968, in particular, coming to symbolize the whole of that decade. Left-wing rebellions broke out in all corners of the world: Paris was affected, as were Tokyo, Berlin, Saigon, New York, Prague and Mexico City. Militant direct action became commonplace, with predominantly middle-class students espousing the teachings not only of Karl Marx, but also, Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh, in the hope of combating fascism, imperialism and capitalist exploitation. This was a revolution both an exciting, thought-provoking time, and yet a dangerous, heavily bloodstained one.

In Germany a group known as the Rote Armee Fraktion (the Red Army Faction) or RAF began their campaign of terror hoping to overthrow the government, only to be joined by other, smaller organizations such as the West Berlin Anarchists or ‘June 2 Movement', as well as a group which called itself the Socialist Patients Collective (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or SPK), a gathering of psychiatric patients who had formed their own armed terrorist cell. But what was it that first drove seemingly privileged, middle-class men and women to such extreme lengths? Who were they attacking, and with what aim in mind?

In the 1960s, Germany's fascist past was still a matter of deep concern, particularly to the New Left, whose younger members condemned their forebears' involvement with Nazism and accused them of not facing up to the reality of what they had done. Students could see for themselves that there was a direct personal link between the old Nazi regime and the new German state.

As of 1965, fully 60 percent of West German military officers had fought for the Nazis, and at least two-thirds of judges had served the Third Reich. Students clamored to know the past of their professors and conducted research revealing that many of them had been affiliated with the Nazis.'
¹

The New Left generation felt disenfranchised and angry – an anger that rapidly translated itself into political activism. The Vietnam War was one of the first causes taken up by young Germans, determined to demonstrate their disillusion. Siding with the Viet Cong, they saw it as their duty to oppose the war and America's imperialist stance. They also claimed that their government's support for the conflict ably illustrated just how little Germany's values had changed since the Nazi period.

The student protests escalated, particularly in West Berlin where the Cold War was at its zenith, with right-wing newspapers such as
Bild
and the
Berliner Morgenpost
stirring up anti-student hysteria, a campaign that eventually, on June 2, 1967, resulted in the death of a twenty-six-year-old protestor at the hands of an undercover policeman, Karl Heinz Kurras.

Benno Ohnesorg had been attending his first big, mass rally (organized to protest against the Shah of Iran's imminent arrival in Germany) when he was shot and killed. Later that same night, Gudrun Ensslin – the future founder of the RAF – was quoted as saying:

This fascist state means to kill us all […] Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there's no arguing with them.
²

It was against this backdrop of brutality and fighting that the Socialist Patients Collective first came into being. The year was 1969 and the place was the Psychiatric Neurological Clinic at Heidelberg University where Doctor Wolfgang Huber had begun encouraging patients to see capitalist society as the root cause of their illness.

Doctor Huber, who had been appointed to his teaching position (as a scientific assistant) at the age of twenty-nine in August 1964, had already been warned several times by the Director of the university, Doctor von Baeyers, for refusing to collaborate with colleagues. Now he was taking his disdain of authority even further. In group-therapy sessions, Doctor Huber was outspoken in his opinion that the capitalist agenda of the Federal Republic was sick to its very core and was, as a result, responsible for producing physically and mentally sick people – a situation which could only be reversed through violent opposition to the government. His teachings left the university with no choice and, on February 21, 1970, he was dismissed without notice. Huber's lawyer immediately lodged a complaint against the dismissal and on February 28 Huber rallied those of his patients who were psychiatrically fit enough to stage a sit-in in the offices of the university's administration block. Doctor Huber also stated that some of his more fragile patients might well commit suicide if he wasn't reinstated to his post. The university ultimately backed down and agreed to continue paying Huber until September 30, 1970, as well as giving him four rooms out of which to work. Relieved to have his old job back, Doctor Huber began formally to organize his patients into the Socialist Patients Collective. Margrit Schiller, Klaus Jünschke, Siegfried Hausner and Carmen Roll were just a few of the patients from this group who were more than willing to ‘cure' their personal mental disturbances through violent action. In her book,
Hitler's Children
, Jillian Becker also points out that although Huber's university contract ran out in September 1970, meaning his work would no longer receive finance, he continued to be funded by the institution:

[ … the] university continued to support the organization well beyond this deadline, not out of its normal funds, as hitherto, but out of its special “charity funds”. In all DM 31,875 was made available by the “sick system” to those who planned to cure themselves by destroying it, from its inception to its dissolution, at which point the balance of the money was “distributed” to the private accounts of leading members.
³

But Doctor Huber's group was not the only organization taking up arms at this time. In 1968, another collective comprising Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Söhnlein and Thorward Proll – all of whom had previously been convicted and imprisoned on charges of arson – were given temporary parole while their case was sent to appeal. On their release Baader, Proll and Ensslin took up jobs working with troubled teenagers but in 1969, when their appeal was rejected, instead of returning to prison, all three decided to take flight. With the help of Proll's sister, Astrid, they escaped to Paris, but Baader and Astrid Proll returned to Germany shortly afterwards, settling in West Berlin. It was at this point that Ulrike Meinhof (who already knew Baader through his work with the teenagers) helped house both fugitives while they in turn began trying to source weapons for use in forthcoming terrorist activities.

In many ways, Ulrike Meinhof was typical of the kind of white, middle-class, well-educated woman who was signing up to including Dr. Huber's terrorist cause. Born in 1934, the year after Hitler came to power, her father, Werner, was the assistant director of a museum, while her mother, Ingeborg, stayed at home looking after the children. It was a comfortable, pleasant life in the type of leafy neighborhood so many films and novels represent as being the perfect place for a family to live in. Sadly, Werner died when she was only six years old – and with his death Ulrike's mother was forced to take a job. Ingeborg coped well with the situation and financially the family wasn't much worse off than before the death of her husband. Even during the war (which her mother survived as a silent critic of the Nazis) Meinhof continued to receive a good education and didn't lack love and attention. Shortly after the war ended in 1945, however, Ingeborg was diagnosed with cancer and died soon afterwards. A close family friend, Renate Riemeck, now took over as Meinhof's substitute mother. Well educated, with a strong maternal streak, she was the perfect candidate for the job. Riemeck ensured Meinhof received everything she required, and also introduced her to a wide range of subjects including philosophy, literature and politics – all of which interested the young girl, who had begun to show a real talent for writing. Soon Meinhof was enjoying the company of young left-wing intellectuals who shared her ideas and goals. In 1960 she joined a Hamburg-based magazine called
Konkret
, which heightened her interest in left-wing politics.Admittedly, Meinhof had experienced more than her fair share of trauma in her life up until this point, but there can be no argument that her parents, while they were alive, provided their child with a safe, happy home in which to grow up, and that she was given a good education. In this respect she was no different from many of the SPK members whose future reputation, though overshadowed by Meinhof's, was equally violent. In
Hitler's Children
Jillian Becker goes so far as to pose the theory that this post-war generation was indeed united in an unconscious desire to prove to themselves that they would have fought tooth and nail to defeat Nazism had they lived in that era. In effect, they were fighting Hitler ‘a generation too late.'