The Nazi Hunters (25 page)

There was good reason for that. As Attorney General Gideon Hausner, who would become the chief prosecutor in the upcoming trial, pointed out later, once the world learned about Eichmann’s capture, “
Israel itself was on trial. The whole world seemed to be watching to see how we acquitted ourselves of the task we had undertaken.”

The world found out when Ben-Gurion made his brief electrifying statement to the Knesset: “
I have to inform the Knesset that a short time ago one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann—who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ that is, the extermination of
six million of the Jews of Europe—was discovered by the Israeli Security Services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their helpers.”

Hausner was certainly right in saying that Israel was immediately put on trial as well. As Ben-Gurion and others had expected, there was international condemnation of their country’s action. While Israelis were stunned but then elated when they heard their leader’s announcement, the Argentine government was shocked, embarrassed, and outraged.
Its foreign minister summoned the Israeli ambassador and demanded an explanation—along with Eichmann’s return.

The Israeli envoy ruled out the latter, and his government concocted a thinly disguised cover story that “Jewish volunteers, including some Israelis” had tracked down Eichmann, and then obtained his written consent to deliver him to Israel for trial. Argentina’s ambassador to the United Nations pressed his country’s case, winning support for a resolution in the Security Council condemning Israel for violating his country’s sovereignty. But the resolution also noted that Eichmann should face a court of law.

It was not just the usual virulently anti-Israeli voices who joined in the criticism of Eichmann’s abduction.
An editorial in
The Washington Post
accused Israel of resorting to “jungle law” and denounced its claim that it had the right to “act in the name of some imaginary Jewish ethnic identity.” Prominent Jews from abroad joined in the appeals for Israel not to hold the trial.
Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek that to do so would be “politically unwise.” Much better, he argued, for Israel to hand him over to another country for trial, showing that it “refused to plunge the dagger to the hilt.” Psychologist Erich Fromm called the kidnapping of Eichmann an “
act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves . . . have been guilty.”

The American Jewish Committee told Foreign Minister Meir that they were against holding the trial in Israel since Eichmann was guilty of “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.” It also
put together a group of judges and lawyers who recommended that Israel investigate Eichmann’s crimes but then hand over the evidence to an international tribunal.

Ben-Gurion rejected all such proposals out of hand. As Hausner made clear in his opening address for the prosecution when the trial started nearly a year later on April 11, 1961, Israel’s leaders truly believed that they were acting on behalf of all of the Holocaust’s victims. “
With me, in this place and at this hour, stand six million accusers,” Hausner declared. “But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger toward the man who sits in the glass dock and cry: ‘I accuse.’ ” He went on to say that their ashes were now scattered in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other killing grounds “over the length and breadth of Europe.”

Gabriel Bach, one of Hausner’s two deputy prosecutors on the case and the only member of the team who was still alive as of this writing, pointed out another important reason why Ben-Gurion felt it was critical to hold the trial in Jerusalem. “
In Israel before the trial started, teachers told me that many of the young people here didn’t want to hear about the Holocaust,” he said. “Why? Many of our young people were ashamed. A young Israeli can understand that you can be hurt fighting, that you can be killed fighting, that you can lose a battle, but he cannot understand how millions of people let themselves be slaughtered without an uprising. That’s why they didn’t want to hear about it.”
Some Holocaust survivors were derided as
sabonim
(soapers), a reference to the widespread belief that the Germans had made soap from their victims.

The trial would change those attitudes by showing young Israelis how the victims “were misled up to the last moment,” Bach continued, and how “when it was clear to the Jews that death was waiting, like with the Warsaw Ghetto, there was an uprising, they fought to the last man in an incredibly courageous manner.” But the proceedings would still be fraught with controversy, and the debates about the behavior of the Holocaust’s victims were intensified by the competing narratives that began to emerge as Eichmann’s accusers and an audience that spanned the globe tried to decipher the nature of the man at the heart of this drama.

• • •

The Israelis had carefully planned what they would do with Eichmann once he arrived. They put him in a large prison in Camp Iyar, a well-guarded police compound near Haifa.
Eichmann occupied a cell that was ten by thirteen feet; the only furnishings were a cot, a table, and a chair. There was also an electric light that remained on at all times, and an adjoining toilet and shower room. All the remaining cells in the complex had been emptied of prisoners. The only other regulars were more than thirty police officers, and a detachment of border police whose members also served as guards. To preclude any attempt at an act of vengeance, no one was allowed to serve as a guard who had lost family members in the Holocaust.

But the same rule did not apply to the man who was chosen to be the prisoner’s interrogator during the months of preparation for the trial, enabling him to spend 275 hours gathering testimony directly from Eichmann.
Police Captain Avner Less had escaped Germany as a teenager after Hitler took power. His father, a Berlin businessman who had earned an Iron Cross for his service in World War I, perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. As Less archly noted, his father’s distinguished war record had won him “the privilege of being one of the last to be deported from Berlin, and thus one of the last to be liquidated.”

Eichmann’s main contact with the outside world was Bach, who would become the deputy prosecutor at his trial. While Less was busy with the prisoner’s testimony, Bach’s role was to make sure that the investigation was running smoothly and to act as an intermediary on practical matters; for instance, he was the one who informed Eichmann that he could pick anyone as his lawyer, and the Israeli government would foot the bill. The prisoner chose Robert Servatius, a prominent Cologne attorney who had been part of the defense team in Nuremberg.

Bach lived in a hotel in Haifa during the investigation stage and had an office in the prison. On the day that he met Eichmann for the first time, the young lawyer had been reading the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, who was hanged in Poland. He read the passages where Höss described the herding of mothers and children
into the gas chambers, and how he always felt compelled not to betray any sign of wavering in the face of their appeals for mercy. He also read the parts where Eichmann explained the alleged necessity of this mass murder. A few minutes later, the police came and said that Eichmann wanted to see him. “I heard his steps outside [my office] and then he was sitting opposite me the way you are now,” Bach recalled. “It was not so easy to keep a poker face.”

Bach faced much less of a challenge than Less, who had to meet with the prisoner day after day for extensive questioning and then for careful review of the transcripts of each session, which in the end totaled 3,564 pages. All of this was later submitted as evidence for the trial.

At their first meeting on May 29, 1960, Less found himself facing a balding man wearing a khaki shirt and trousers and open sandals who “looked utterly ordinary,” as he recalled. After having reviewed the files on hand about Eichmann, including those that had been provided by Tuvia Friedman, he confessed that he had a feeling of disappointment. “The very normality of his appearance gave his dispassionate testimony an even more depressing impact than I had expected after examining the documents,” he wrote.

But Less also observed that Eichmann was “a bundle of nerves” during that first encounter, keeping his hands under the table to hide his trembling. “I could feel his fear, and it would have been easy to make short work of him,” he reported. The Israeli realized that his prisoner was expecting the kind of treatment that he might have meted out if their roles were reversed. But after a week of unfailingly by-the-book handling by Less, Eichmann visibly relaxed. Realizing that his charge was a heavy smoker, the police captain arranged for an increased cigarette ration for him. “I did it because it made him more talkative and improved his powers of concentration,” Less recalled. Jan Sehn, the Polish investigating judge, had used the same tactic with Höss.

Eichmann did everything possible to play down his role and influence during the Holocaust and to deny that he harbored any personal feelings of anti-Semitism, signaling the approach he would take throughout his trial.
He explained to Less that he had a Jewish friend in elementary
school, and that when he had first become involved with Jewish matters, he had worked closely with Jewish leaders in Prague. His initial goal was to find a way for Jews to emigrate elsewhere, and he “wasn’t a Jew hater,” he insisted.

The first times he observed the killing of Jews in makeshift gas chambers in huts or trucks where engine exhaust was piped in, Eichmann said, “
I was horrified.” The screams left him “shaken” and he fled after he saw the corpses dumped into a trench where a civilian began pulling out gold teeth with pliers. He claimed to have had nightmares because he could not help but be affected by violence and suffering. “Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away,” he declared. But that did not stop him from visiting Auschwitz and other camps, inspecting the death machinery on a regular basis. He also attended the Wannsee Conference, the meeting of top Nazi security officials on the outskirts of Berlin on January 20, 1942; this was where they coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution, and Eichmann prepared the minutes of that infamous gathering. But he claimed he sat in the corner with the stenographer, which demonstrated how “
insignificant” he was.

In organizing the transport of Jews to Auschwitz and other camps, he was simply following orders, Eichmann proclaimed again and again. He admitted to carrying out his duties with “
unusual zeal,” but argued that this did not make him responsible for murder. Others made those life-and-death decisions, he maintained. “
If they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I’d have done it,” he said. “At that time, I obeyed my orders without thinking.”

A few times Eichmann tried to demonstrate normal emotions and curiosity, trying to find a personal connection with his interrogator. He once asked Less if his parents were still alive. When the interrogator told him about his father’s fate, Eichmann cried out: “
But that’s horrible, Herr Hauptmann [Mr. Captain]! That’s horrible!”

The interrogator discovered that his best weapon for breaking through Eichmann’s defenses was provided by the ghost of Höss, especially by the same autobiography of the Auschwitz commandant that Bach had been
reading earlier. Because Höss’s trial and execution had taken place in Poland behind the newly erected Iron Curtain, he never achieved the kind of notoriety that Eichmann would during his trial. But Less had carefully studied what Höss had written and knew how to use it.

When Less began reading from Höss’s autobiography, Eichmann became visibly agitated. He made sarcastic comments about the commandant, but, as during their first encounter, his hands began to tremble. Höss had written about his many discussions with Eichmann about the Final Solution. When they were alone and “
the drink had been flowing freely,” Höss recalled, “he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on.” His message couldn’t have been clearer: “Without pity and in cold blood we must complete this extermination as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest, would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date.”

When Less read him passages with a similar tone, Eichmann protested that they were completely untrue. “
I had nothing to do with killing Jews,” he said. “I’ve never killed a Jew. And I’ve never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.” That gave him “a certain peace of mind,” he added. He did admit: “I’m guilty, because I helped with the evacuation. I’m ready to pay for that.” But then he promptly talked about how those who were packed into the trains he organized were going for “labor service” and he was not responsible for their fate once they reached their destinations in the East.

To undercut Eichmann’s claims that he never made life-and-death decisions, Less proceeded to offer multiple examples of cases where Eichmann methodically tried to eliminate any exemptions for Jews who had initially evaded deportation. In one document he signed, Eichmann argued that the Thai ambassador in Berlin was only employing a Jewish language teacher “to shield him from difficulties.” He urged the Foreign Office to pressure the envoy “to dispense with the further employment of the Jew”—which, as Less pointed out, would have meant “deportation with the next or one of the next shipments.” Eichmann also instructed his representatives in The Hague to rescind an exemption for a Dutch Jewish woman who had been planning to travel to Italy, apparently at
the request of Italy’s fascist government, which was less than enthusiastic about helping Germany implement the Final Solution. The woman should be sent “immediately to the East for labor service,” he wrote.

As Less pointed out, the practical consequence of his action was that she would be sent to Auschwitz. Confronted with such evidence, Eichmann stumbled in his reply: “That is . . . the . . . the. . . . That was our job.” Once he had recovered a bit, he added the usual protestations that “these were not personal decisions.” He was only following instructions, he continued, and if he had not issued such orders, anyone else occupying his position would have done the exact same thing; the real decisions were always made higher up. “I wasn’t expected to make any decision at all,” he concluded.