The Nazi Hunters (19 page)

But 1950 was the year when Eichmann made his way to Genoa under the name Ricardo Klement, and from there sailed to Argentina. Friedman indicated that the Israelis did not search for him for long. In that same year, “Arthur permitted the hunt for Eichmann to come to an end,” he declared.

Only he and Wiesenthal refused to accept that the hunt was over, Friedman insisted. They continued to exchange whatever stories were circulating about Eichmann. “
The truth was that no one knew anything,” he wrote. “And with each passing day, there was less and less interest in Eichmann, and in Nazis.” After Friedman moved to Israel in 1952, he came back for a visit to Austria before the year was out. There, he met again with Wiesenthal, who told him to “
keep reminding the Israelis about Eichmann . . . make them do something.”

As Friedman recalled, Wiesenthal offered a final thought when they shook hands as he was embarking on his return journey to Israel in January 1953: “Think of it,” Wiesenthal told him. “When Eichmann is caught, he will be tried by a Jewish court in a Jewish state. History, and our people’s honor, Tadek—both are at stake.”

For Wiesenthal, the most significant near break in the Eichmann case came in that same year, 1953. According to his account, he met an elderly Austrian baron who shared his passion for stamp collecting.
The baron’s name, which he only revealed later, was Heinrich Mast, a former counterespionage officer. Wiesenthal described his views as “Catholic-monarchist,” which meant he was “always skeptical of the Nazis.” After hearing about Wiesenthal’s work, he pulled out a letter from someone he described as a former army comrade who was in Buenos Aires, serving as an instructor for President Juan Perón’s regime. He pointed to the last paragraph in the letter. Wiesenthal stated he “gasped” when he read it: “
Imagine whom else I saw—and even had to talk to twice: this awful swine Eichmann who commanded the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.”

The baron asked rhetorically: “How do you like that? Some of the worst criminals got away.”

Wiesenthal was excited but recognized that he could not pursue this lead on his own. Given the influence of Nazis in Peron’s Argentina, Eichmann could feel safe there, he realized. “
As an adversary, I was now too lightweight for him,” he added. According to Wiesenthal, he consulted with Arie Eschel, the Israeli consul in Vienna, who suggested he put all the information he had collected about Eichmann, including what he had learned from the baron, in a report to the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in New York. He followed those instructions and sent one copy to WJC President Nahum Goldmann and another to the Israeli consulate in Vienna.

Wiesenthal reported that he received no response from Israel. After two months, he did get a letter from Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz of the WJC, acknowledging receipt of his information and asking for Eichmann’s address in Buenos Aires. When Wiesenthal replied that he would need funds to send someone to Argentina to try to get it, Kalmanowitz turned him down, adding that the FBI had informed Goldmann that Eichmann was in Damascus, which effectively put him out of reach, since Syria would not extradite him.

It was 1954 by then, and, like Friedman who had left two years earlier, Wiesenthal concluded that there simply was not enough interest in his efforts to track down Nazis. “
American Jews at that time probably had other worries,” he wrote. “The Israelis no longer had any interest in Eichmann; they had to fight for their lives against [Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel] Nasser. The Americans were no longer interested in Eichmann because of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.” He felt that “along with a few other like-minded fools, I was quite alone.” On another occasion, he pointed out that the “
post-war phase of Nazi hunting was over.”

Nonetheless, Wiesenthal stuck by his decision to remain in Austria. Later, he would explain that he did so because he recognized that he had to be in Europe to continue his work as a Nazi hunter. But 1954 was also the year when he was compelled to close the Linz Documentation Center, just as Friedman had done with his center two years earlier.
He, too, packed up the center’s archives and shipped them off to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It was a clear signal that he had concluded that his records would now be primarily of use for historians instead of prosecutors. But, as Friedman had done, he kept his Eichmann file. “I honestly don’t know why, because in truth I had given up,” he declared. Wiesenthal remained in Linz, working for Jewish relief organizations, writing articles for the local press, and finding other ways to keep busy and support his family.

Later, after Eichmann was abducted in Buenos Aires in 1960, Wiesenthal’s account about his meeting with the baron and the lack of follow-up would be hotly disputed. After all, it suggested that the Israelis had missed a chance to track down Eichmann much earlier. Isser Harel, the Mossad chief who would ultimately oversee the capture of Eichmann, was infuriated by this version of events, which Wiesenthal first publicized in his initial volume of memoirs, which was published in 1967. If Wiesenthal’s story was accurate, this reflected badly on him.

Eichmann’s capture would be Israel’s most spectacular foray into the Nazi hunting field. But it would also set the stage for a lifelong battle between Wiesenthal and Harel.

• • •

In Germany itself, of course, the appetite for pursuing Nazis, whether to bar them from particular jobs or to prosecute them, had largely disappeared by the early 1950s.
By the middle of the decade, Western Allies were holding fewer than two hundred war criminals; the rest had benefited from the successive amnesties. Chancellor Adenauer declared in 1952: “
I think we now need to finish with this sniffing out of Nazis.” It would seem unlikely, therefore, that a new Nazi hunter would emerge in, of all places, a Germany that desperately wanted to take their new leader at his word.

But that’s exactly what happened. A hunter emerged who was nothing like Wiesenthal or Friedman, who were both more flamboyant and operated usually on their own. Fritz Bauer was much more like Jan Sehn, the Polish investigating judge who had constructed the cases against Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and other concentration camp personnel.

The two men had very different histories: Bauer was raised as a secular
German Jew and he survived most of the Nazi era in exile; Sehn was brought up in a Catholic family with German roots, and his brother had registered as a
Volksdeutscher
—an ethnic German—during the occupation. But those differences were less important than their similarities. Both Bauer and Sehn were chain-smoking judges and prosecutors with a low-key style, who focused on meticulously laying the groundwork for victories in the courtroom. At a time when cooperation across the Iron Curtain was a rarity, they proved it could happen, working together to collect evidence for trials.

Most significantly, both viewed their mission as one of not only punishing the perpetrators but also setting out the historical record—providing the foundations for educating current and future generations. In Germany, the land of the perpetrators, much more so than in Poland, this was both an urgent task and a challenge of staggering proportions.

Bauer was more of a public figure in Germany than Sehn was in Poland. He generated headlines as early as 1952 by prosecuting a landmark case against a former Nazi general. His aim was to demonstrate that resistance to Hitler was a noble act, not treason. In the 1960s, he orchestrated Germany’s own Auschwitz trial, which began the process of shaking the country out of its willful amnesia about the Holocaust and other crimes of that era. He became a familiar participant in televised discussions about how the country should deal with its Nazi past. But he operated completely behind the scenes when he played a pivotal role in the Eichmann saga in the late 1950s.

All of which should have won him widespread recognition. Yet Bauer never received his country’s highest award for distinguished service, and after his death in 1968 at age sixty-four, he was largely forgotten. Outside Germany, he was never well known in the first place. It’s only in the past few years that Germans have begun to rediscover Bauer—and, as so often happens in the case of Nazi hunters, this process has been accompanied by heated controversies. But it’s a process that was long overdue.

As Irmtrud Wojak, the author of the first major biography of Bauer, a well-researched tome that was published in 2009, pointed out: “
At a time when people hardly wanted to hear about this past anymore and the
word ‘closure’ was mentioned increasingly frequently” he was the person who admonished them at every turn that the recent past could not be dismissed so easily. Wojak argued that he “
contributed significantly to the fact that Germany has developed into a state based on the rule of law.”

Bauer’s persistence in reminding his countrymen of the crimes committed in their name won him far more enemies than it did admirers, along with many more threats than Sehn ever had to deal with in Poland. Anonymous callers would shout: “
Jewish pig, die!” And a typical letter writer asked: “Have you in your blind fury not understood that most of the German people are sick and tired of the so-called Nazi criminal trials?” But he was very popular with students, particularly those studying law.

Ilona Ziok, whose powerful documentary about Bauer premiered at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival and put him back in the public spotlight, emphasized how lonely a battle he waged throughout his life. Titled
Death by Installments
, the documentary portrayed him as “
the historical figure,” in Ziok’s words, that she is convinced he was. Her film also made clear how isolated he often felt. “Essentially, Bauer had nothing but enemies,” it pointed out.

The resurrection of Bauer as a historical figure has accelerated since that first biography and documentary. Ronen Steinke, an editor at the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, published a shorter, breezier biography of Bauer in 2013. It included some touchier subjects that the earlier book and film had omitted, prompting charges that he was sensationalizing Bauer’s story. When the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt opened a Fritz Bauer exhibition in April 2014 that drew heavily on Steinke’s version of events, Wojak and Ziok were particularly incensed. The controversies soon spilled into print, triggering a broader debate within the intellectual community.

• • •

The arguments begin with the question of Bauer’s Jewish roots and how much emphasis should be put on that part of his identity. His family in Stuttgart was so secular, Ziok said, that “for the Jews, he wasn’t a Jew; for Hitler he was a Jew.” Or, as Bauer characterized it, he was a Jew according to the Nuremberg laws that enshrined Nazi racial policy—but in no other
way. According to the Jewish Museum’s exhibit, “
Fritz Bauer’s family was representative of the Jewish middle class in the German empire” and in his childhood home “Jewish festivals were celebrated for as long as one of the grandmothers was living in the household.” But the signs also pointed out: “The family saw itself as secular. Assimilation was associated with the promise of social recognition and equality.”

Bauer’s father, a World War I veteran, was a staunch German nationalist—and Fritz’s upbringing was typical for the times, which made him understand why so many of his generation responded so obediently to orders. Speaking to students in 1962, he recalled that “
there were many people who were brought up like me . . . in an authoritarian way. You sit obediently at the table, and you shut up when dad speaks, you don’t have the right to say anything . . . we all know this type of father. I myself sometimes have nightmares when I think of when I had the cheek on a Sunday afternoon to move my left arm instead of obediently keeping it under the table.”

“The authoritarian education in Germany was really the foundation of German ethics,” he continued. “The law is the law and an order is an order—that is the alpha and omega of German efficiency.” But if that appeared to place him squarely in the German cultural tradition, he added that his parents did add a caveat that could easily be interpreted as the product of their Jewish values, no matter how nonobservant they were. “You must always know yourself what is right,” they told him.

Bauer did not dwell on his personal experiences with anti-Semitism while he was growing up, but he could hardly avoid the topic altogether since he spent part of his university years in Munich just as the Nazis were on the rise there. In talking to students, he recalled seeing “
the rowdy crowds of Nazis” and their bright red posters proclaiming: “Jews not allowed entry here.” When Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the most prominent Jewish member of the government, was assassinated in 1922, he added, “We were deeply shaken, and we had the impression that the Weimar democracy, on which our heart was set . . . was endangered.”

Two years earlier, while still in high school, Bauer joined the Social Democratic Party and remained a fiercely engaged partisan his entire life.
The Frankfurt exhibition called him “a Jewish Social Democrat,” which Ziok and Wojak feel made it sound like both terms had equal weight. In fact, most of Bauer’s early troubles with the Nazis stemmed from his political views, particularly his defense of the Weimar Republic in the face of attacks from both the far right and the far left. He firmly believed in a left-leaning social order that adhered to democratic principles.

Appointed the youngest judge in Stuttgart in 1930, Bauer was particularly interested in making the law more favorable for young criminal offenders, providing them with the chance for rehabilitation. A year later,
NS-Kurier
, the local Nazi newspaper, ran a story under the headline: “
A Jewish District Judge is abusing his office for party purposes.” The story demanded to know if the Justice Ministry was “defending the behavior of the Jew Bauer?” No doubt that Bauer’s primary sin, in the eyes of the Nazis, was his Social Democratic politics, but they were happy to seize on his Jewish identity to make their point.

In this case, they failed—but not completely. Bauer decided to sue the paper for defamation. The court ultimately ruled in his favor, but it was not an unambiguous triumph. The
NS-Kurier
proclaimed: “The expression ‘Jewish district judge’ is defamatory.”