The Nazi Hunters (21 page)

That was why when, in 1957, Bauer received a tantalizing tip from a blind half Jewish German émigré in Argentina about the whereabouts of Eichmann, he, too, decided to act according to his own conscience. Rather than passing on this information through normal German channels, he relayed the tip to the Israelis. By so doing, he triggered a chain of events that culminated in a trial that would mesmerize not only Israel and Germany but the entire world.

“
It was well known that there was at least one strong Jewish underground unit that had been working ceaselessly since the end of the war in all parts of the world, tracking down Nazi war criminals who had evaded the Allied net in 1945. He had heard that its members were fanatically devoted to their task, brave people who had dedicated their lives to bringing some of the inhuman monsters responsible for Belsen, Auschwitz, and other hellholes to justice.”

Jack Higgins,
The Bormann Testament
, a novel that was originally published in 1962 with a different title:
The Testament of Caspar Schultz

S
itting in his comfortable living room in his strikingly modern house in the Afeka neighborhood of Tel Aviv in March 2014, Rafi Eitan was in a relaxed mood as he looked back on his long service in the Mossad—and the highlight of his career, leading the commando unit that seized Adolf Eichmann near his home in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He talked about his good fortune to purchase the land for his house in 1950, when he was just starting in the Mossad at age twenty-four. The property was cheap then because there were no bridges across a nearby river that separated the area from the city just south of it, and there was no electricity
or running water. “
I said I’ll buy the land and one day I will be in a private house in the middle of Tel Aviv,” he said, flashing a contented smile.

Today Afeka is an upscale neighborhood of chic villas and apartment buildings connected to the downtown area by pristine highways. But his house is set on a quiet street that looks like it could belong to a Mediterranean resort. The main floor is filled with flowers and plants and is flooded with light—from glass doors that open on his patio and garden, and from a large skylight. Bronze and iron wiry, minimalist sculptures of animals and people decorate the entry hall and his book-lined study. They are the product of his favorite hobby, crafted by the same powerful pair of hands that helped lift Eichmann into his team’s waiting car on that fateful day more than a half century ago. A small man, Eitan had built up the strength in his arms and hands by climbing ropes in his youth.

As he began to recount the story of the most famous kidnapping of the modern era, Eitan—who is a Sabra, as Jews who were born in Palestine or later Israel are called—let slip that he visited Germany for the first time in 1953. As he stepped out of the train in Frankfurt, he recalled thinking to himself: “Just a few years ago, eight years ago, if I would be here, probably I would be executed. But now I am a representative of the Israeli government.” He hastened to add that his visit had nothing to do with Nazi hunting.

One of the great myths of the postwar era was that Israeli agents were constantly scouring hideouts all over the world, relentlessly tracking down Nazi war criminals. Nothing could be further from the truth, he explained. When he showed up in Frankfurt, his mission was to meet with the Mossad agents charged with monitoring the Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and then proceeding to the new Israeli state.

The influx of immigrants from that region during the early days of the Cold War proved to be a major challenge to the Mossad. “The intelligence services of the East—Poland, Romania, Russia of course—recruited many of the immigrants,” Eitan explained. The Kremlin had firmly aligned itself with the Arabs against Israel. When the KGB or their affiliates behind the
Iron Curtain received reports from their planted agents in Israel, they would promptly share that information with Israel’s Arab neighbors. The new state desperately needed more settlers (
Israel’s population was about 1.6 million in 1953), but it also needed to identify those who were serving different masters. “We had to check everyone to understand if he was a spy or not,” Eitan pointed out. “This was the first priority—not capturing Nazis.”

Avraham Shalom—an Austrian-born Mossad agent who later became the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service—served as Eitan’s deputy for the Eichmann operation. In an interview at his home in Tel Aviv three months before he died in June 2014, he echoed Eitan’s sentiments—and took them one step further. “
I was never interested in Nazi hunting as such,” he admitted. His attitude had been that the best solution for Jews who were upset by the thought that so many Nazi criminals were still at large “was to come and live here,” he added.

In the early days of Israel’s existence, there was simply not enough time, energy, or desire to hunt Nazis. That led Eitan to shrug off the controversy that surfaced later about the value of Wiesenthal’s 1953 tip from the Austrian baron about the Eichmann sighting in Argentina. Even if Wiesenthal had provided more precise information about Eichmann’s whereabouts, Eitan asserted, Israel was in no position to dedicate the necessary manpower and resources to track him down that early. The struggle for Israel’s survival in a region filled with enemies trumped everything else.

• • •

By the late 1950s, however, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and other top Israeli leaders were feeling more confident about their fledgling country’s prospects. The notion that they might authorize a major operation to seize a notorious Nazi war criminal no longer seemed far-fetched. That is, if such an opportunity presented itself—if, in effect, the opportunity fell into the lap of the Mossad.

Which is exactly what happened.

On September 19, 1957, Fritz Bauer, who by then was attorney general of the West German state of Hesse, arranged a meeting with Felix
Shinar, the head of Israel’s reparations mission in West Germany. To make sure it was as hush-hush as possible, the two men met at an inn just off the Cologne–Frankfurt highway.

According to Isser Harel, the Mossad director who would later issue the orders that sent Eitan, Shalom, and other operatives to Argentina to kidnap Eichmann, Bauer came straight to the point. “Eichmann has been traced,” he told Shinar.

When the Israeli queried whether he really meant Adolf Eichmann, Bauer responded: “Yes, Adolf Eichmann. He is in Argentina.”

“And what do you intend to do?” asked Shinar.

“I’ll be perfectly frank with you, I don’t know if we can altogether rely on the German judiciary here, let alone on the German embassy staff in Buenos Aires,” Bauer responded, leaving no doubt that he distrusted many of his country’s public servants and was worried that someone would tip off Eichmann if they learned that he was in danger of arrest. “I see no other way but to talk to you,” Bauer continued. “You are known to be efficient people, and nobody could be more interested than you in the capture of Eichmann.” Then he threw in a word of caution: “Obviously I wish to maintain contact with you in connection with this matter, but only provided that strict secrecy is kept.”

It was clear that Bauer meant that all their communications had to be kept secret from the German authorities, and Shinar happily agreed, pointing out that he would pass on the information on that basis to his higher-ups in Israel. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the great faith you have shown in us,” he said. “Israel will never forget what you have done.”

Shinar made good on his promise, filing a detailed report to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.
When Walter Eytan, the ministry’s director general, met Harel at a café in Tel Aviv to relay the news, the Mossad chief promised that he’d investigate fully. The same evening and well into the night, he read the Eichmann file that he had instructed the agency’s archivist to pull for him. “I didn’t know then what sort of man Eichmann was,” he wrote later, or “with what morbid zeal he pursued his murderous work.” But when he got up from his desk at dawn, he knew “that in everything
pertaining to the Jews he was the paramount authority and his were the hands that pulled the strings controlling manhunt and massacre.”

Harel also knew that, in his words, “People were tired of atrocity stories.” But he claimed that he immediately came to a critical decision: “That night I resolved that if Eichmann were alive, come hell or high water he’d be caught.”

Perhaps he did, but even some members of his team would later question Harel’s handling of the case, pointing out how long it took for him to act on Bauer’s information because of early missteps. More than two years would elapse between Bauer’s meeting with Shinar and the serious preparation for Operation Eichmann, the kidnapping of the famous fugitive. But if Harel’s initial decisions were easy to second-guess later, there is no doubt that in the end he implemented a stunningly daring plan that was brilliantly executed.

• • •

Shinar, the Israeli representative in West Germany, returned to Israel for a visit shortly after Harel received the Eichmann news. That allowed the Mossad chief to question him further about his conversation with Bauer, and, most significantly, to get his personal evaluation of the man. “
What Dr. Shinar told me about Fritz Bauer’s personality impressed me a great deal,” Harel wrote, adding that he assured Shinar that he would send a special envoy to continue the contacts with Bauer and elicit additional information.

The man he chose for that task, Shaul Darom, had gone to France in 1947 to study art and then linked up with a group there that funneled Jews to Israel. He did well both as a painter and as an intelligence agent. He had “a natural flair” for such work, Harel reported, and he moved easily around Europe as an increasingly recognized artist who spoke several languages.

Darom and Bauer met in Cologne on November 6, 1957. The meeting yielded key pieces of information. Bauer explained that his source was a half Jewish German in Argentina who had written to the German authorities after he had read in the newspapers that Eichmann had disappeared. Bauer did not reveal the man’s name at that point, since he was
corresponding directly with him and he wanted to protect his source. But he emphasized that the details the source provided corresponded to what he already knew about Eichmann and his family, including the ages of the sons who were born before his wife, Vera, and those boys had also left Germany, supposedly to live with a second husband. The informant provided an address for the man he presumed to be Eichmann: 4261 Chacabuco Street in Olivos, a suburb of Buenos Aires.

Bauer was open about why he had turned to the Israelis instead of going to the German authorities. “I am sure that you were the only ones who would be ready and willing to act,” he told Darom. When the Israeli agent said he was worried that any extradition proceedings could tip off Eichmann and allow him to escape again, Bauer responded: “I too am worried about that and I won’t reject the idea of your getting him to Israel in your own way.”

Those words left little room for ambiguity. As a representative of the law in West Germany, Bauer was, in effect, urging the Israelis to come up with a practical solution that ignored normal legal procedures. The only person in Germany he had informed about what he was doing, he added, was someone he trusted completely: Georg-August Zinn, a fellow Social Democrat who was the prime minister of Hesse.

Darom was impressed by Bauer’s “courage” not only in bypassing his own government and reaching out to the Israelis, but also in his willingness to offer the assurance that he was ready to accept whatever action they decided on. Harel wrote later that he viewed him as “an honest man with a warm Jewish heart.” Alluding to the return of many former Nazis to public positions, he added: “I gather he is disappointed with present developments in Germany, and I have the feeling that he is not at peace with himself for having decided to resume his political activities in such a Germany.”

Yet Harel’s initial attempts to check out Bauer’s leads resulted in apparent failure.
In January 1958, he sent Yael Goren, an agent who had spent considerable time in South America, to Buenos Aires, with strict instructions not to take any actions that might attract attention. Accompanied by an Israeli who was doing research in Argentina, Goren checked
out the address that Bauer had provided and the neighborhood—but they immediately concluded that something was off. It was an impoverished area, the street was unpaved, and, as Harel put it, “the wretched little house could in no way be reconciled with our picture of the life of an SS officer of Eichmann’s rank.” At the time, the common assumption was that prominent Nazi fugitives had managed to smuggle out vast wealth, most of it seized from their wartime victims.

The two men were also thrown off by the slovenly-looking European woman they spotted in the yard of the house. Eichmann was known as a womanizer, and they couldn’t believe she could be his wife. Harel claimed that Goren’s report on his mission was “a great disappointment” to him. In his account of the entire Eichmann affair that he was only able to publish in 1975, twelve years after stepping down as head of the Mossad, he declared: “The obvious conclusion was that the information passed on by Bauer was unfounded, but it was my belief that this wasn’t so.”

In all likelihood, Harel’s “belief” was shaky at best, but he did take the logical next step: he asked Darom to meet with Bauer again, this time insisting that they had to learn the name of his source so that they could check his story further. On January 21, 1958, they met in Frankfurt and Bauer quickly relented, providing the name of Lothar Hermann and his address in Coronel Suárez, a city more than three hundred miles from Buenos Aires. Bauer also provided a letter of introduction for whoever Harel would decide to send Hermann’s way.

That somebody was Efraim Hofstaetter, a top Israeli police investigator who was on his way to South America on a different case. Harel asked him to check out Hermann once he had completed his other business, supplying him with Bauer’s letter of introduction. Hermann rebuffed his request that they meet in Buenos Aires, so Hofstaetter traveled on an overnight train to Coronel Suárez. When he knocked on Hermann’s door, Hermann invited him in but immediately asked for assurances that he really represented the German authorities, which was the cover story that he and Harel had agreed on. “How am I to know that you are telling the truth?” Hermann asked.