Minister of Death: The Adolf Eichmann Story

Minister of Death T H E A D O L F E I C H M ANN STORY

H e shall

not

f a il

DISCOURAGED TILL

nor

HE

be

HAVE

SET J U D G M E N T IN T HE E A R T H . Is a ia h

42:4

ALSO

BY

QUENTIN

REYNOLDS

Known But to God They Fought for the Sky Fiction Factory: The Story of Street and Smith Headquarters The Amazing Mr. Doolittle I, Willie Sutton Courtroom Leave It to the People

Minister of Death THE ADOLF EICHMANN STORY

By Quentin Reynolds EPHRAIM KATZ Z WY A L D O U B Y

THE

V IKING

N E W YORK

•

PRESS 1960

Copyright © 1960 by Quentin Reynolds, Ephraim Katz, and Zwy Aldouby All rights reserved First published in 1960 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N.Y. Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited

Library of Congress catalog card number: 60-15500 Printed in the U.S.A. by American Book-Stratford Press, Inc.

Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge the help received from: The Israeli, German, and Argentine authorities; Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; The Holocaust Museum, Kibutz Lochamei Hagettaoth, Israel; Centre de Documen­ tation Contemporaine Juive, Paris; the Israeli press: Yedioth Aharonoth, Maariv, Haaretz, Davar, Jersusalem Post, Haboker, Bamahane, Dvar Hashavua, Haolam Haze; the German press: Der Stern, Neue Illustrierte, Münchener Illustrierte, Quick; the French press: Paris Match, Lectures Pour Tous; the Argentine press: La Razón, La Prensa; The New York Times; The Brooklyn Daily (Mr. Arnold Fine); and all those in Israel, France, Germany, England, Argentina, and the United States whose anonymous service helped us greatly in writing this book.

PREFACE

Zwy Aldouby and Ephraim Katz are two Israeli journalists who have served as foreign correspondents throughout E u­ rope. Aldouby speaks eight languages, Katz five. Both speak Arabic, which made their services invaluable during Israel’s struggle for independence, when they served in the under­ ground, in the Palmach (comm andos), and later in the Israel Defense Forces as officers. Since 1945 the name Adolf Eichmann has been seared into their memories. They and their associates knew the men who, viewing the apathy that peaceful living brings, decided that they would become the instruments of justice. They be­ came acquainted w ith dozens who had known Eichmann and others who had miraculously survived death in his con­ centration camps. The Eichmann story grew as the years passed. Aldouby and Katz felt that in time he would be caught. W hen he was, they were able to tell the whole story from the time Eichv

vi

Preface

mann was a schoolboy in Linz, Austria, until May 11, 1960, when the arm of justice reached out and seized him in Buenos Aires, Argentina. W hen that happened, they came to me. Although they speak fluent English they think in either Hebrew or German, and they felt th at it would be a long, laborious task to or­ ganize the vast amount of material (more than 800 type­ w ritten pages) th at they had gathered into English. First they told me the whole incredible story and then I read the material. It was so fantastic that I expressed some doubt about its authenticity. “We forgot to tell you,” Aldouby said, “that we have many photostated documents which prove everything we wrote.” “And one other thing,” Katz added. “W hen Eichmann was hiding out in Argentina, he wrote his memoirs. He gave them to a friend for safekeeping. We managed to obtain access to these memoirs. W hen we quote Eichmann’s con­ versations w ith other SS officers or w ith co-workers they are actual quotes taken from his memoirs.” I have studied the documents and asked experts to give me their opinion. There was not a dissenting voice—they were unquestionably authentic. And so I wrote this book with their material. This is really their story. —Q u e n t i n R e y n o l d s

CONTENTS

PARTI

THE CAPTURE

3

p a rt

n

THE PURSUIT

26

p a rt

in

T H E MAN

60

p a rt

iv

THE CRIMES

95

p a rt

v

THE ESCAPE

177

T H E CASE

205

p a r t VI

ILLUSTRATIONS

Following page 118

STAGES

IN

A CAREER

1. Eichmann in SS uniform at the beginning of his career; photo of Eichmann from Frau Mistelbach’s album found in Doppl in 1946 by “Manos,” a member of “the Avengers”; Eichmann as a recruit in the SS Austrian Legion (Photo by Paris Match). 2. Eich­ mann at school in Linz (Maariv, Tel Aviv). 3. Eichmann as Haupt­ scharführer, 1936. 4. Eichmann in Vienna, receiving Adolf Hitler immediately after the Anschluss (Panim El Panim, Tel Aviv). 5. Eichmann in Haifa, 1937 (Stern, Hamburg). 6. Koch, Himmler, Eichmann on a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem). 7. Veronika Liebel before her marriage to Eichmann (Stern, Hamburg). 8. Eichmann in Vienna in 1938, with wife and oldest son, Klaus (Stern, Hamburg). 9. Eichmann while posing as Otto Heninger at wedding of Edward Tramer in Altensalzkoth, 1947 (Stern, Hamburg). ARGENTINA

10. Eichmann aboard SS Giovanrm C. on way from Genoa to Argentina, 1950 (Stern, Hamburg). 11. Eichmann on Brazilian farm, 1954 (Look Magazine Photo). 12. Eichmann in Perón’s

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Illustrations

private railroad car. 13. Eichmann as a land surveyor in Tucumán province, 1951 (Stern, Hamburg). JEWS

WHO

MET

EICHMANN

14. Naftali Palatin (Maariv, Tel Aviv). 15. Joel Brand. 16. Dr. Israel Kastner. 17. Bandi Grosz. FIVE

PURSUERS

18. Simon Wiesenthal, member of “the Avengers.” 19. Tuvia Friedman, member of “the Avengers” (Maariv, Tel Aviv). 20. Hen­ rik Diamant (“Manos”), member of “the Avengers” (Yedioth Aharonoth, Tel Aviv). 21. Gertrude, “Avengers” agent planted in Frau Eichmanns house (Yedioth Aharonoth, Tel Aviv). 22. Asher Ben-Nathan (Arthur Pier), head of the Haganah intelligence in Europe in 1946, now director general of the Ministry of Defense of Israel (Bamahane, Tel Aviv). ARGENTINA

23. Eichmann annotates his picture: SS Lieutenant Colonelretired, 1958. 24. Eichmann while in charge of angora rabbit farm, Siette Palmas, in Joaquin Gorina (Stern, Hamburg). 25. House built by Eichmann and his sons outside Buenos Aires (Stern, Hamburg). t h e

e i c h m a n n

f a m i l y

26. Klaus, the oldest son, at the time he attended technical high school in Buenos Aires (Stern, Hamburg). 27. Sons Dieter and Klaus in the Eichmann house (Stern, Hamburg). 28. With un­ identified neighbor: Margarita (Klaus's wife); Frau Adolf Eich­ mann, holding her granddaughter, Monica; and Eichmann’s youngest son, Ricardo (Stern, Hamburg). 29. Dieter, Frau Eich­ mann, and Ricardo in living room of Eichmann house (Stern, Hamburg). 30. Ricardo with pet outside Eichmann house in Argentina (Stern, Hamburg). E I C H M A N N ’s

AIDES

31. Richard Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary. 32. Otto Ohlendorf, Commander of Einsatzgruppe D. 33. Anton

Illustrations

X

Alois Brunner, deputy in Hungary, France, and Greece. 34. Adolf Heinz Bekerle, Eichmann’s deputy in Bulgaria. 35. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz. 36. Dieter von Wisliczeny, Eich­ mann’s deputy for Slovakia, Hungary, and Greece. e i c h m a n n

’s

s u p e r i o r s

37. Heinrich Himmler, SS Reichsführer. 38. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD and “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.” 39. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, successor to Heydrich as head of the SD. 40. Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo. 41. Hermann Gor­ ing, Reichsmarschall. TECHNIQUE

FOR

MASS

MURDER

42. Container of Cyclone B. 43. Bill for Cyclone B. 44. Some of the victims at Buchenwald concentration camp (Pictorial Parade). 45 and 46. Blueprints for gas chambers and crematories at Majda­ nek. 47. Crematories at Buchenwald (Pictorial Parade). CAPTURE

AND

IMPRISONMENT

48. Scene of the capture at Buenos Aires city limits (Stern, Hamburg). 49. Zvi Tohar, El Al’s chief pilot (Maariv, Tel Aviv). 50. First judicial order to remand Eichmann to custody for 14 days, Tel Aviv (Hans H. Pinn, Tel Aviv). 51. Nitz Avraham Zellinger, Eichmann’s chief interrogator and head of Bureau 06. 52. The type of prison building (known as a Taggart) in which Eich­ mann is being held. 53. Mario Amadeo, Argentina’s delegate to the UN (United Press International Photo). 54. Eichmann in Israeli prison (Israeli Press Office). 55. Golda Meir, Israel’s For­ eign Minister, listens to the Eichmann debate in the UN Security Council (United Press International Photo). 56. Dr. Robert Ser­ vatius, German lawyer who will defend Eichmann (Photo by London Daily Express). 57 to 62. Facsimiles of some documents.

Minister of Death THE ADOLF EICHM ANN

To the m en and wom en of Israel who chose not to forget that justice comes to those who seek it This Book Is D edicated

STORY

Bibliography

Blond, Georges: The Death of H itlers Germany. Bullock, Alan: Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Crankshaw, Edward: Gestapo. Friedman, Filip: This Was Oswiecim. Frischauer, Willi: Himmler, the Evil Genius of the Third Reich. Gilbert, G. M.: Nuremberg Diary. Gisevius, Hans Bernd: To the Bitter End. Hoess, Rudolf: Commandant of Auschwitz. Hoettl, Wilhelm: The Secret Front. Kästner, Dr. Roszoe: Der Bericht des Jüdischen Rettungskomitees aus Budapest (1942-1945). Kimche, Jon and David: The Secret Roads. Kogon, Eugen: The Theory and Practice of Hell. Lengyel, Olga: H itlers Ovens. Mitscherlich, Alexan­ der, and Mielke, Fred: Doctors of Infamy. Poliakov, Leon: Harvest of Hate. Poliakov, Leon, and Wolf, Joseph: Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener and Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Reitlinger, Gerald: The Final Solution and The SS. Tenenbaum, Joseph: Race and Reich. Trevor-Roper, H.R.: The Last Days of Hitler. Von Horthy, Nikolaus: Ein Leben für Ungarn. Weissberg, Alex, and Brand, Joel: Desperate Mission. The Black Book: The Nazi Crimes against the Jetvish People. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (10 volumes). Trials of Major War Crim­ inals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (15 volumes). Trials of the German War Criminals before the International Military Tri­ bunal (42 volumes). War Crimes Trials (9 volumes).

PART I

The Capture u

JLR i c a r d o K l e m e n t was a precise, methodical man who lived with his wife Catalina and three sons on Calle Gari­ baldi in the San Fernando suburb of Buenos Aires. They lived in a primitive house without gas, electricity, or w ater but Señor Klement was very proud of it. He and his two sons, Horst, twenty-one, and Dieter, nineteen, had built it with their own hands. Ricardo Junior was only four. An older brother, Nikolaus, twenty-four, lived at Number 33, Avenida General La Paz, in the heart of the city. Ricardo Klement kept a small chicken farm in back of the house. Every morn­ ing at six a.m. Ricardo Klement walked two blocks to the bus stop. H e caught the same bus every morning. A twentyminute trip brought him to the Liniares section of the city, where he changed to bus No. 195 that would take him to San Jarosto. This bus was filled with men who, like himself, worked in the Mercedes-Benz factory in Suareze San Ja­ rosto, but he never spoke to them. In fact, this thin unsmil­ ing man seldom spoke even to the administrative clerks with 3

MINISTER OF DEATH

4

whom he worked. Invariably he lunched alone at a small in­ expensive restaurant a block from the plant. He almost always ordered the same meal. Señor Klement never knew th at for weeks he had been closely w atched and followed. There was very little the shadowers did not know about the graying fifty-four-year-old man. They knew that he spoke Spanish fairly well w ith a slight German accent. They knew th at he patronized only one grocery store, where, in addition to ordering food, he invariably ordered several bottles of beer and wine. They knew that he never talked to his neighbors beyond a brief hello. They knew th at he was often visited by his son Niko­ laus and his son’s wife and child. They also knew that occa­ sionally he was visited by members of the strong Buenos Aires German population but that, besides these, very few visitors ever came to the small stone house. At five o’clock on the evening of May 11, 1960, Señor Klement attended a meeting of the factory workers th at lasted about an hour. He caught the six-o’clock bus from the factory and started home. W ith the exception of the hourlong meeting it was just another routine day—until seven p.m. At that time he left the bus at the city line on Liniares Avenue and headed for the intersection of Coriantes and Dorgunal Avenues, where he was accustomed to catch the Biancalari bus for the final lap on his trip home. The small green and yellow bus from the factory roared away. Ricardo Klement stopped to buy cigarettes. H e left the shop and had walked only tw enty feet when a black sedan pulled up be­ side him. Those tw enty steps were the last he would ever take as a free man. A man leaped from the car and seized him. He was too surprised to p u t up any resistance. He was pushed into the back of the car, which immediately started off.

“Who are you?” Klement dem anded in Spanish.

The Capture

5

N either his two captors nor the driver answered him. The car headed for a suburb on the other side of Buenos Aires. It had to go through the traffic-filled heart of the city. The driver had rehearsed this trip several times in anticipa­ tion of this abduction attempt. He drove carefully, always keeping below the speed limit: it was no time to be stopped by a traffic officer. There were three danger spots, three in­ tersections where traffic lights might force them to stop. There were police at each intersection. The driver could only hope that the lights would be green. The first light was red, and as the car slowed to a stop the two men in the back felt Ricardo Klement stiffen. Each pushed a gun into his ribs. “One shout from you and you’re a dead man,” one of them said in German. Señor Klement knew the man m eant it. H e could see a policeman tw enty feet away but he couldn’t take the risk of calling for help. The car was stopped by the other two lights, and the guns remained pressed against him. F i­ nally it left the crowded main streets and reached the quiet suburb. “W here are you taking me?” Señor Klement asked franti­ cally. No one answered him. The car stopped before a two-storied white house. The two men pulled Ricardo Klement from the car. They hurried him into the house and up the stairs to a small low-ceilinged room that contained nothing but two chairs and a small bed. Then the silence was broken. One of his captors, a large man with blond hair and blue eyes, snapped in German, “Sit down!” The big man w ent out of the room, leaving his two fellow abductors to guard Klement. Not a word was said. The big man returned in tw enty minutes. Undress,” he said curtly. The prisoner removed his coat, üe, and shirt.

6

m in is t e r o f d e a t h

“Lift your left arm,” the big man ordered. Klement obeyed reluctantly. The three men fixed their eyes on a large ugly scar in the left armpit. Now they knew they had the right man. It had been a custom for each SS commander to have the insignia of his organization and his blood type tattooed in the left armpit. It was clear from the excoriated ugly scar that the tattoo had not been removed through surgery—obviously Klement had gouged it out him­ self. One of his captors produced a military cap of the kind formerly worn by SS officers. H e put it on the prisoners head and then looked closely at a picture he held in his hand. H e passed it to the others. Both nodded. Eichmann shivered. Another man walked into the room. He carried two X-ray plates. One showed a broken collarbone, the other a fractured skull. His trained physician’s fingers ran over the head, then the upper chest. H e merely said, “There is evi­ dence of two old fractures in the places shown by the X-rays.” The prisoner was asked to write a few words, and his handw riting was compared w ith previous documents. “You are Karl Adolf Eichmann,” the tall man said. “Are you Americans?” the prisoner asked. “You are Karl Adolf Eichmann,” the tall man repeated. “Are you Israelis?” “You are Karl Adolf Eichmann.” “You m ust be Israelis.” And now for the first time fear showed in his eyes. “The others are not interested in me. Ich habe die ganze Zeit gezittert dass es so kom m en w ird " (I have always feared this is how it would happen.) The big man said coldly, “If you cooperate and don’t try anything foolish, you will be given a fair trial and the benefit of legal counsel.” “All right,” the prisoner said wearily, “I will cooperate.”

The Capture

7

Later that night he wrote out the following statement in his own handwriting: I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, declare of my own free will that since my true identity has been revealed, it has become clear to me that there is no point in hiding any more from justice. I declare that I am willing to go to Israel and face there an authorized court. I understand that I will be given legal aid, and I will do everything possible to give an explanation of the facts of my last years of service in Ger­ many, in order that a true picture of the facts will be de­ scribed for the coming generation. I make this declaration of my own free will. I was not promised a thing and I was not threatened. I only want to gain at last some peace of mind. Since I do not remember many details, and it happens that certain things are mixed up in my mind, I hereby ask to be assisted by having access to documents and testimonies, for I have made up my mind to help reveal the whole truth. (Signed) Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960 A fifteen-year-old search for the greatest mass m urderer in history had thus finally come to an end, and Eichmann had fallen into the hands of the men whose people he once vowed to erase from the face of the earth. On May 16, 1960, the newspapers of Israel carried adver­ tisements by the El A1 Airline of Israel saying that air service direct from Israel to Argentina would be inaugurated on May 18. Until then El A1 had confined its overseas flights to the United States. A few businessmen phoned to make reservations on the inaugural flight. They were told regretfully that the first flight would be an official one. Argentina was to celebrate the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of her independence on May 19, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was send-

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MINISTER OF DEATH

ing Abba Eban, former Ambassador to the United States, now a cabinet minister, and several high-ranking foreignoffice and military officials to represent him and to present the respects of the young twelve-year-old democracy to her older South American sister. W hen would the next flight to Argentina take place? some asked. The airline officials said truthfully and w ith some embarrassment th at they didn’t know. No second flight had been scheduled, b u t as soon as it was, the newspapers would carry an announcement. Actually, the El A1 officials and the El Al pilots were a bit puzzled. The airline was doing capacity business flying to New York, Rome, Paris, Zurich, and other European capitals. To take a plane or several planes away from these scheduled flights seemed pretty silly. And how many citizens of Israel would w ant to fly to Argentina? The American-type California Café on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv is owned by two former El Al pilots and has be­ come the off-duty meeting place for the air crews. A dozen pilots, navigators, and radio operators were sipping beer there the night of May 16, and they weren’t very happy about the announcement. “That’s about tw enty hours’ flying time,” a pilot com­ plained. “W here will we change crews?” “They posted the boss to handle the first flight. Glad it wasn’t me,” an Israeli-born pilot said. “Hell, I don’t even know Spanish.” The flight was the subject of discussion on the terrace of the D an H otel on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv, in the cocktail bar of the Hotel Zion in Haifa, and in the restaurant of the Nassi Hotel in Jerusalem, where members of Israel’s Knesset (parliam ent) occasionally dine. Some members argued that air service to Argentina could be maintained only at a great financial loss. El Al is government-owned, and any loss would come out of the taxpayers’ pockets.

The Capture

a

"Funny thing,” one puzzled member of the Knesset said, “I hear it was the Old M an’s idea.” “Well, nobody can accuse Ben-Gurion of throwing money away,” another said. “And God knows if Levi Eshkol ap­ proved it, and I know he did, there must be some way to make the flight pay for itself. O ur Minister of Finance can’t stand wasting an agora [half a cent], much less a pound [fifty cents].” At 2:45 in the afternoon on May 18 a four-engine Bristol Britannia began to warm up at th e huge Lydda Airport outside Tel Aviv. It was a beautiful w hite aircraft w ith its El Al emblem and its num ber (4X-AGE) painted in blue. A loudspeaker blared (in H ebrew and in English), “An­ nouncing the departure of Flight 601, Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires.” Zvi Tohar, El Al’s chief pilot, was at the controls. H e had two co-pilots w ith him, Shmuel (Sam ) Vedels and Arieh Shkolnik. Both were first pilots on the line and they were a bit puzzled to be assigned to co-pilots’ jobs, but neither cared much; the long flight would mean overtime pay and they had been promised vacations when they returned. Besides, both were accustomed to obeying orders. They had been among the first combat pilots in 1948 during Israel’s fight for independence. The passengers streamed out of the terminal, blinking in the glare of the hot sun. Handsome six-foot-three, dark­ haired, smiling Abba Eban was in the lead with Colonel Meir Zorea and Colonel Shmuel Aloni. General Chaim Laskov, Army Chief of Staff, the Argentine ambassador to Israel, and a num ber of officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were there to see the delegation off. The general handed Colonel Zorea an Israeli-manufactured submachine gun (the Uzi) and asked him to present it to the Argentine Chief of Staff.

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MINISTER OF DEATH

“We re rather proud of the Uzi.” General Laskov laughed. “Perhaps our Argentine friends would like to buy some from US.

They all climbed the ramp and entered the plane. In addition to Eban and the two officers the passengers in­ cluded Yehuda Yaari, Schmuel Yeshaia, and Miss Shomria Shabtai, who for ten years had been the secretary of Joel Palgi. It was he who parachuted into Hungary in 1944 in a desperate attem pt to save w hat was left of H ungarian Jewry. The names of the remaining passengers were not listed on the manifest. They were merely put down as "crew mem­ bers,” which made Chief Pilot Tohar chuckle. The trip was interrupted by a landing in Recife, Brazil, where the plane was delayed for some hours. Finally it landed at the Buenos Aires airport at 5:52 p.m. (Argentine tim e), May 20. Abba Eban and the official members of the mission were greeted at the airport by Argentine repre­ sentatives. A car took them to their hotel. Another car was waiting for the “crew.” Pilot Zvi Tohar had been told to refuel immediately and check his engines in preparation for a quick departure. Shortly after m idnight two closed cars approached the air­ port. They drove onto the field, to within a few feet of the waiting plane. Shadowy figures emerged from the cars and hurried tow ard the big aircraft. A customs clerk in the air­ port saw them and heard one of them shouting at him; he could not make out the words. The alert pilot was already warming up the engines. Then the turbo-jet roared off down the runway, heading for Tel Aviv. It made one stop at Dakar to refuel and then headed directly for Lydda Airport, where it landed at dawn on Sunday, May 22. Eichmann was imme­ diately taken to a well-guarded, isolated house on the outskirts of Jaffa, which was to be his temporary jail for forty-eight hours.

The Capture

^

At ten a.m. Police Inspector Schmuel Roth went to the home of Emanuel Yedid-Halevi, chief justice for the district of Tel Aviv. H e asked the chief justice to accompany him to where Eichmann was being held. By the time the judge arrived at the old Arab house, large groups of security men and police officers, including Chief Inspector of Police Jo­ seph Nachmias, were present. At eleven a.m. Eichmann was brought from his cell to the room where Judge Yedid-Halevi was waiting. His handcuffs were removed. The judge asked Inspector Roth to inform Eichmann in German that he stood before a judge. Eichmann stiffened to attention, his face expressionless. The judge asked in Hebrew, “W hat is your name?” Adolf Eichmann, who reputedly speaks Hebrew, did not seem to understand. He waited for the question to be trans­ lated into German by Inspector Roth: “W ie heissen Sie?” “Ich bin Adolf Eichmann!” (I am Adolf Eichmann.) “Adolf Eichmann,” Inspector Roth said, “you are accused of causing the death of millions of Jews in Germany and occupied countries between the years 1938 and 1945, w ith the intention of exterminating European Jewry while you were commanding SS units in Germany, and while you were in charge of the deportation of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territories. Do you plead guilty?” Eichmann hesitated a moment and then answered, “I have nothing to say except that I am not responsible for the acts attributed to me. I will prove it at the proper time. I ask permission to defend myself.” Judge Yedid-Halevi said solemnly, “I remand you into custody for fourteen days.” The law in Israel is that no person can be held longer than fourteen days without trial. However, at the end of each fourteen days, if the prosecution says that it needs more time to prepare its case, a judge has the power to remand

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MINISTER OF DEATH

the prisoner for an additional two-week period. ( The second extension a fortnight later was granted by Dr. Alfred Bach of the Haifa co u rt.) The whole procedure of the rather informal, quiet arraign­ ment took less than tw enty minutes, but it seemed to ex­ haust the prisoner, who, in a typical Prussian fashion, stood at attention throughout. His whole appearance was that of a weary man whose shrunken face made him look older than his fifty-four years. Eichmann was handcuffed again and transferred to a perm anent Taggart police building outside Haifa. (The British during their occupation of Israel built about fifty square concrete blockhouses, called Taggarts, after Sir Charles Taggart, who had designed them when he was a police official in India. W hen the British left, the Israeli government turned them over to the police.) Since that time, Eichmann has been the only prisoner in this particular blockhouse. Except for his guards and a few highranking officials, no one in Israel knows exactly where he is imprisoned. Before being adm itted to the cell which would be his home for the many months of his confinement, Eichmann was given a complete physical examination. The rumor th at he had had plastic surgery proved false. Doctors examined him very thoroughly, looking for a cyanide pellet. During the first few days Eichmann displayed considerable anxiety and fear. H e was positive that he would be executed without a trial, b ut he was treated with kid gloves, and gradually his confidence was restored. For weeks he was interrogated for four or five hours each day by men of Bu­ reau 06. The police in Israel are divided into General H ead­ quarters and four regional headquarters, called bureaus. A special new bureau was established to deal w ith the Eich­ mann case, and it was given the simple designation “Bureau 06.” The whole project of preparing the trial of Eichmann was given the name “Operation Iyar,” after the month in

The Capture

13

the Hebrew lunar calendar w hen Eichmann was captured. The prison where Eichmann is held has been given the nickname “Camp Iyar” by the guards. On May 23, the day following Eichmann’s arrival in Israel, the Knesset convened in Jerusalem for its regular afternoon session. The heat was oppressive, the mood of the House lackadaisical. Members listened w ith half-attention to a rou­ tine debate on the budget. But in the front rows there were signs of tension (a half-hour earlier Ben-Gurion had sum­ moned his cabinet and told them the great new s), and in the balcony a handful of visitors of military bearing ex­ changed glances. At exactly four o’clock Premier D avid Ben-Gurion took the platform to make an announcement. Twice he flung back his famous snowy mane. He spoke, and at his first words the audience was electrified. “I have to inform the Knesset,” he said, “that a short time ago one of the greatest Nazi w ar criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who together w ith other Nazi leaders collaborated in the socalled Final Solution of the Jewish question—namely, the extermination of six million European Jews—was found by the Israeli Secret Services.” Strong emotion carried the Prime Minister’s voice to the farthest comers of the House. For an instant the members sat speechless; but bedlam broke out when he continued. “Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be p u t on trial in Israel under the law for trial of Nazis and their collaborators.” The keen-eyed visitors in the balcony rose silently and left. They were the men who had had Eichmann in their hands and were now charged with the preparation of his trial; they were officers of the Israeli intelligence services. Jews throughout the world rejoiced at the fact that the

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MINISTER OF DEATH

State of Israel had stretched out its strong arm and brought one of the most notorious war criminals to justice. Secretservice experts of many nations called the Eichmann capture one of the most daring intelligence operations on record. But the real heroes of the day, the men of the Israel Security Services, known as the Shin Beth, who had risked their lives and done the job, remained behind the scenes. Nevertheless, the official announcement of the conclusion of “Operation Eichmann” presented one of the rare occasions when the security services could be given formal credit for carrying out a vitally im portant mission. When Eichmann failed to return home from work on the evening of May 11, 1960, his wife grew frantic. For fifteen years she had lived in dread of his being captured—as her brother Franz Liebel, a Czech officer, had been captured after the w ar and hanged for his collaboration with the Nazis. She spent a sleepless night and in the morning went with her son Nikolaus to the police. She said she thought her husband had been a victim of robbers. The police es­ corted her to the hospitals and to the morgue, but of course she did not find her husband among the dead or the injured. A few days later she wrote to the Mercedes-Benz factory, telling of her husband’s disappearance and pleading that they hold his job open until he returned. They were glad to reassure her on this point; he had been, as always, a precise, meticulous worker. A week later Eichmann’s son Nikolaus (christened Klaus) appeared at the plant and told them what seemed to him to be the truth. He said that he feared his father had been kidnaped and urged the Mercedes-Benz people to help find him. They for the most part were German. Nikolaus told them the facts about his father: that he was not Ricardo Klement at all b u t was actually Adolf Eichmann. He pro­

The Capture

15

duced something very rare—a picture of his father in his SS uniform. They promised to do everything they could. Nikolaus Eichmann then went to the police, but with a different story. He told them that Ricardo Klement was his uncle. The twenty-four-year-old Nikolaus said that he feared for the safety of his eighteen-year-old Argentine-born wife, M argarita ( whom he called R ita) and their four-month-old daughter, Monica. Obviously young Eichmann was actually concerned about the fate of his father. Then the news of Eichmann’s capture broke. A British newspaperman interviewed Nikolaus Eichmann. He insisted that Adolf Eichmann was not his father but that he was an uncle. The interviewer brought up the question of young Ricardo Junior, aged four. It seemed hardly likely that the child had been bom to Veronika Eichmann and her brother. Nikolaus became confused. “I just don’t know anything about it!” he said. D id he know th at his father was being accused of the m urder of six million Jews? “I don’t know anything about it,” he said stubbornly. “I studied in an Argentine school. W e were never taught any­ thing about concentration camps or the extermination of Jews in our history classes.” H e was then asked if he intended to go to Israel to attend his father’s trial. “W hat good would that do? Besides, I don’t believe that the man in jail in Israel is my father. My mother always told me that he had been killed just after the war ended.” Meanwhile Veronika Eichmann, her three other sons, and her two pet dogs, a dachshund and a fierce German shep­ herd, disappeared from the family home in the San F er­ nando suburb. Late at night a large red truck with three German occupants drove up to the house and hurriedly car­ ried her furniture out and loaded it onto the truck. Frau

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Eichmann’s neighbors, awakened by the sound of the truck, said that the three German-speaking men did their job swiftly and almost silently. The Argentine police suspected th at the Eichmann family had been whisked away by the active Nazi underground, which is very powerful in the country. A few days later another car stopped at 33 Avenida General La Paz to pick up Nikolaus, Margarita, and young Monica. The next day Nikolaus Eichmann (w ho was an electrical engineer working for a firm headed by Nikolas Ziess, an Austrian refugee who came to Argentina before the w ar) phoned his boss and asked for a two-month leave of absence. The Argentine police believe th at he was persuaded to go into hiding by th e Nazi underground. A day later Nikolaus Eichmann phoned a British corre­ spondent at his Buenos Aires hotel. He spoke quickly and nervously. “I don’t have much time,” he said. “I sneaked out secretly. I need money. How much will you pay for my personal story?” “It depends on how much you will tell,” the reporter replied cautiously. “Why can’t we meet and talk it over?” “I can’t wait. I have to go now.” And Nikolaus hung up. A couple of weeks later Nikolaus sent his story to the German magazine Stern, offering it for sale. The story con­ tained nothing w orth printing, and the editors returned it. One of the few friends Eichmann had m ade during his years in Argentina was a D utchm an who never made any secret of his pro-Nazi sympathies and affiliations. This D utch­ m an soon learned the true identity of his friend. Eichmann, perhaps anticipating th at he would eventually be found and tried, asked the D utchm an—who has requested the authors not to reveal his name—to help him write his side of the story. The D utchm an bought a tape recorder, and day after

The Capture

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day Eichmann recorded his memoirs. In them he repeated the familiar Nazi defense heard so often at the Nuremberg trials, th at he had acted during the w ar only under orders from his superiors. (T he present authors have had access to these memoirs.) W hen the D utchm an left for Germany for the purpose of marketing the m anuscript, he took w ith him a letter from Nikolaus to his father. In H am burg he m et a reporter from Stern m agazine who was just leaving for Israel and asked him to take this letter and try to have it delivered to Adolf Eichmann. W hen the reporter arrived in Israel he tried to give th e letter to Pinchas Rosen, Minister of Justice; to Police Commissioner Joseph Nachmias; and to Inspector Avraham Zellinger, who is in charge of Bureau 06. They all read the letter, b u t refused to deliver it to the prisoner, saying th a t it should be sent by regular mail. The letter was copied by Yad-Vashem, the Israeli Documentation Institute, and examined by Israeli investigators, who be­ lieved it m ight contain a secret message. Later it was sub­ m itted to the press bureau of the government and released. The letter, d ated “The beginning of June, Buenos Aires,” read: Mein lieber Papa, There are so many rumors around, that we have no choice but to believe that Adolf Eichmann, who is in jail, is no one other than you. You must understand that I cannot acquiesce in these accusations against you, and even if they should prove correct, you remain my father and I, your eldest son, will never abandon you. I promise to take care of Mother and the children. Al­ though for the moment I do not know exactly where Mother is, I was assured that she was completely safe. The house is now almost empty and I have found time to repair the fence and take care of the plants. Also the

18

MINISTER OF DEATH fertilization of the tree was arranged, so everything will be all right. I write you all this, knowing that this news will please you in your difficult circumstances. They are not easy for us either, for because of the furor in the press we have encountered difficulties in our places of work. But don’t worry about us. We will succeed and manage somehow. We are healthy and this is the most important thing, as you have always said. I have stopped attending evening courses for the past few days until the furor in the press is over, and then I shall be able to catch up. Generally, the men in my place of work showed understanding, but nevertheless I think it is better for them and for me that I stopped working there tempo­ rarily. In my profession I can find many working possibil­ ities, but another document or, better still, another name would be most convenient in this difficult period. But Mother does not want even to speak about it. She says, “We were registered in this name. Why should we use another and get involved with unpleasantness?” But then, you know Mother well. There is no use arguing with her. We wouldn’t like to do this anyway, as we should all be united at this moment. Dear Papa, I’m almost finished with the page and I will be most happy to know that you have read my lines and that Mother is also permitted to write. Kisses, Klaus.

Meanwhile in Argentina M argarita Eichmann told re­ porters that she and her husband Klaus had lived in peace, believing that Klauss father had died. “Now we have to face this new situation,” she said. “You ask me w hat does my husband Klaus think of this? Well, to put it simply, you have to put on your raincoat and let it rain. Since we didn’t have anything to do with the original matter, we think that the bitter experiences this situation can cause us should not disrupt our modest home here where we have been so happy.” Frightened and nervous, Adolf Eichmann’s son and

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daughter-in-law are anxiously trying to avoid the spotlight cast on them in the wake of Eichmann’s arrest. The news of Adolf Eichmann’s capture created great ex­ citement in Linz, Austria. Although Eichmann’s father had died in 1959, two of his brothers, Robert and Otto, still lived in Linz with their families. Robert, a lawyer, has always been an avowed anti-Nazi; Otto, a merchant, however, had had pro-Nazi sympathies. A third brother, Emil Rudolf, is employed by the German Railways in Frankfurt am Main. Upon hearing the news of his brother’s arrest, Otto Eich­ mann, who took over the management of his late father’s electrical appliance store in Linz, scoffed, “We, the members of the Eichmann family, are convinced th at Adolf was killed in Prague in April 1945 and th at the m an in an Israeli jail is a dummy being used by Israel to condemn the Nazi regime.” Since Eichmann’s arrest, Otto Eichmann’s store has been besieged by curious spectators, obviously not interested in buying electrical appliances but in following the electrifying story that made world-wide headlines. In a letter to the German magazine Christ and W orld Otto wrote of his brother, Adolf: “He was a tolerant and sympathetic man. He was not politically minded. Everybody liked him and he joined the SS because of his military fervor. He should be given the opportunity to make a declaration before an international forum in a neutral land. H e is the last man on earth who can tell details on the story of the pursuit of Jews that is attributed to the German people. There are documents which show that my brother helped many Jews because of his wonderful heart. I am sure that the w ar crimes that are attributed to my brother will not hold up in court. Israel doesn’t w ant an objective trial. It has a political and financial reason for letting the German people not forget their guilt. If my brother is tried behind the

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scenes, the crimes attributed to him will again lie on the conscience of the German people. Therefore the Bonn gov­ ernment shouldn’t throw away this opportunity to clear the name of the German people. They should give my brother Adolf legal aid because he is a German subject and they should by no means refuse to review the trial itself.” Lawyer Robert Eichmann, who is actually Adolf Eich­ mann’s stepbrother, w hen asked if he would defend the prisoner, said, “O ur family does not believe th at Adolf Eich­ mann is the m an in jail. W e are convinced th at he died long, long ago. If he does prove to be my stepbrother and requests me to defend him I could not refuse.” Two months after the capture of Adolf Eichmann his wife dem anded th a t Argentina’s court punish the Israeli com­ mandos who kidnaped him and force Israel to pay damages for depriving him of his liberty. Veronika Eichmann ap­ peared before Federal Judge Leopoldo Insaurralde to press her suit for redress personally. H er action charged th at Eich­ mann had lived peacefully in Argentina until the night of May 11, 1960, w hen he was abducted at a street corner near Buenos Aires city limits. Back in Tel Aviv, Inspector Avraham Zellinger, long con­ sidered to be Israel’s most brilliant investigator, was ques­ tioning Eichmann four to five hours every day. Zellinger escaped from Germany shortly before W orld W ar II and emigrated to Palestine. In 1948 he lost a leg w hen he stepped on an Arab land mine. After Israel proclaimed its independ­ ence and became a state, he was put in charge of the detective force in Tel Aviv. His assistants in the questioning of Eichmann were Inspector Ephraim Hoffstatter, Avner Less of the Police Criminal Investigation Division, and Menachem Zafir. In addition to their experience in investi­ gating crime, these men are also fluent in German and

The Capture

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Y id d is h , a language which, strangely enough, Eichmann had learned. At first Eichmann was vague and evasive under interro­ gation; inevitably he m aintained his innocence, blaming his superiors for the crimes w ith which he has been charged. He declared repeatedly th at he was just a soldier following orders. Again and again he replied in answer to questions, “I just don’t remember—it was so long ago.” But the interro­ gators could always produce documents to refresh his mem­ ory. H e was especially shaken w hen he was shown a confession m ade by SS H auptsturm führer Dieter von Wisliczeny, his former aide. Von Wisliczeny, who had charge of exterminating the Jews of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, wrote his confession in September 1946 in the Bratislava ( Czechoslovakia) jail while awaiting execution. His twentytwo-page handw ritten report put the entire responsibility for the extermination of European Jews on Adolf Eichmann. After reading this and dozens of other such documents which Bureau 06 had obtained from former associates of Eichmann and from survivors of concentration camps, the prisoner seemed to realize th at further protestations of innocence were futile. He became more cooperative in his answers. Every day new evidence against Eichmann came to Bu­ reau 06. It came from eighteen countries once under Nazi occupation; eyewitnesses to Eichmann’s crimes made sworn affidavits and forwarded them to the Israeli investigators. They came not only from Europe; tw enty witnesses from New York wrote, offering to testify at Eichmann’s trial. One of the most striking exhibits at the trial will probably be an actual container of “Cyclone B,” the poison gas th at was used in the camps for extermination purposes. The Israeli author­ ities, who have said very little about the evidence they have collected, have declared that they have overwhelming proof

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that it was Eichmann who selected Cyclone B as the medium for destruction. All Eichmann’s answers are being tape-recorded with his knowledge. After several weeks of interrogation Eichmann asked if he could write his personal memoirs. He was warned that anything he wrote that might incriminate him would be used at his trial. W hen he agreed to this he was given paper and pencil and allowed to write his version of his career as an SS man, which he entitled “The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in the Third Reich.” He has, of course, been kept in ignorance of the fate of the memoirs dictated in Argentina. While in jail Eichmann is perhaps the best-guarded man in the world. To begin with, every precaution is taken to prevent him from committing suicide. He is given Germanlanguage books to read but is allowed to wear his glasses only while reading and while under the watchful eyes of the two unarm ed guards who are always with him in his cell. He is not allowed to wear a belt or shoelaces. Each morning he is perm itted to shave with a low-voltage electric razor and is given a metal mirror. The guards are divided into three units. One unit is assigned to Eichmann, person­ ally guarding him in his cell and accompanying him to the washroom and to the room where the daily interrogation is held. This unit works in four shifts. (D uring July one guard was discharged for falling asleep on duty.) A second unit guards the prison within and without. A third unit is in charge of food and supplies for the prisoner and his guards. The food is prepared under the watchful eyes of the guards. He is given the same food that his jailers are served. To prevent any possibility that some fanatic may attem pt to poison the prisoner, four plates on a tray are always brought into his cell; one of his personal guards then selects one for him at random, and the remaining three are given to his

The Capture

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guards. Police Commissioner Nachmias confided with a chuckle to newspapermen that Eichmann was thoroughly enjoying the kosher food served him. His menu is substantial: for breakfast and supper, tomato salad, one egg, cottage cheese, white bread, marmalade, and tea or coffee (both ready-poured so that there can be no question of a special request that might serve as a signal); for lunch, different dishes, always including meat. The guards assigned to the blockhouse where Eichmann is confined are all selected very carefully. They are interro­ gated at great length about their pasts, their prejudices; not one man who has ever been in a concentration camp or has had any relatives who were victims of the Nazi persecution is selected. One veteran police sergeant of German origin declined to serve. He confessed that if he ever got close to the prisoner he would not be able to control his hatred. Most of the guards are native-born Israelis. Only men who speak no German, Yiddish, or other European language, are selected. All of them have been trained in judo. Eichmann speaks very little Hebrew and can communicate with his guards only by sign language. He is allowed four cigarettes a day, and when he wishes one he indicates this by holding two fingers to his mouth in a smoking gesture. A guard gives him a cigarette, lights it, and then hands the bum ed-out match to a guard outside the cell who is constantly observing everything through a peephole. “Danke schön ” says Eich­ mann punctiliously. Eichmann sleeps deeply at night and during his waking hours shows no outward signs of nervousness. Once a day he is given a sponge and a pail of water with which he scrubs the floor of his cell and lavatory w ith typical German effi­ ciency. To every gesture of command he responds with a brisk “Jaw ohl” He wears the khaki uniform of Israeli pris­ oners; he washes these clothes every day with soap and hot

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water. Occasionally he is allowed into the corridor outside his cell to exercise, again with unarmed guards on either side of him. W henever he leaves his cell an alarm is sounded, and guards remove all weapons that he might seize and use against them or himself. He has gained weight during his confinement, and his hollow cheeks have filled out. A dentist was brought to the jail to take care of his teeth, and once a week he is examined by a specially appointed staff doctor. Except for the confinement, Adolf Eichmann lives consider­ ably better than he did in his primitive house in Buenos Aires. Again and again he has confided to his interrogators ( the only persons with whom he speaks) his amazement and gratitude for the excellent treatm ent he is receiving. Precautions against escape or suicide have been pushed to the limit. The prison schedule is varied daily to prevent the establishment of a routine which the prisoner might be clever enough to exploit. For the same reason a log book is kept of his every move, and this is inspected nightly by the commanding officer. W hen police officials were asked to explain these unusual measures, one of them said, “O tto Skorzeny contrived to whisk Mussolini out of a mountain fortress. Goring com­ m itted suicide, after his conviction at Nuremberg, with a cyanide pellet smuggled in to him by a pro-Nazi German newspaperman. W e are not going to take any chances.” Only two crimes in Israel carry the sentence of capital punishment—treason and Nazi w ar crimes. However, if Adolf Eichmann is found guilty and condemned to death the Israeli authorities will face a minor problem; no execution has taken place in Israel since the birth of the state in 1948. There has been no professional public executioner in the country since the end of the British mandate, but a great many people whose families were victims of the gas chambers have volun­ teered their services. Among them is a certain Moshe Bene-

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diet, an eighty-year-old inhabitant of the Malben (a home for the aged in Natania, Israel), who presented his qualifications for the job in a letter to Ben-Gurion. He had spent three years in a German concentration camp and he had witnessed hangings almost daily, which made him an “expert” on the subject. Another volunteer is Jan Kaminski, a wild-animal trainer. Not only from Israel but from all over Europe come re­ quests for the distasteful job. A Scotsman wrote from Edin­ burgh to the Israeli authorities saying he would be glad to hang Eichmann if the price was satisfactory. The excitement produced in Israel when the news of Eichmanns capture was released spread even to the young­ est children, sometimes with nearly tragic results. In Haifa, a group of youngsters were playing a game they had invented called “Eichmann’s Trial.” An eight-year-old named Dubi Preis was chosen to play the part of the defendant. He was found guilty by his playmates and “condemned to death.” They actually hanged him from a tree, and it was only at the last moment that his twelve-year-old brother rushed up and saved his life.

P ART II

The Pursuit A j L a r l A d o l f E i c h m a n n had a passion for anonymity. Although he was one of the most influential men in Germany during the war, his name was hardly known outside the borders of the Third Reich. But he was well known to his superior officer, Heinrich Himmler, who gave him orders (which came initially from Hitler) for what the Führer called “the Final Solution.” This meant the extermination of every Jewish inmate of every concentration camp. Eichmann approached his task with limitless energy and enthusiasm. It wasn’t until 1943 that officials in Palestine became con­ vinced that Eichmann was the evil genius directing the mass executions. By then thousands of German, Hungarian, and Polish Jews had escaped and had made their way to Pales­ tine. Each arriving refugee was interviewed by a special section of the Haganah—the illegal resistance m ovementheaded by Gideon Raphael, who today is assistant director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Again and again the name of Adolf Eichmann was mentioned. Stories were checked and 26

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then rechecked, and gradually the whole horrible picture of what was happening in the concentration camps became clear. Finally Raphael had the names of five hundred Nazis who, he felt, could properly be classified as war criminals. High on this list was the name of Adolf Eichmann. Shortly after the war ended, Raphael went to London, where the newly born United Nations had established a committee to investigate war crimes. With him he had hun­ dreds of affidavits from the men and women he had inter­ viewed in Haifa. These were the evidence that was later used at the Nuremberg trials. Eventually many of the listed war criminals who were still alive were captured. Some were executed, others were im­ prisoned, but Adolf Eichmann had apparently vanished into thin air. Several groups working independently began the search. In 1946 a special squad of five men attached to the Haganah went from Palestine to Austria for the specific purpose of tracing Eichmann’s family. (Two years later the leader of this squad was to be a high-ranking officer in the Army of Israel.) After months of searching they located Veronika Eichmann and Eichmann’s older brother Otto, a known Nazi sympathizer, in the town of Bad Aussee. Soon it became apparent that Eichmann’s brother and his wife periodically made mysterious trips to the small village Chiem See between Linz and Salzburg. They traveled by train and always separately. On arrival each was picked up by a car and driven to the house of the local doctor, a former army medic sought by the French authorities at Rastatt for his ‘medical experiments” at Bergen-Belsen. After nightfall they would, still separately, walk to a wooded hill a short distance outside the village. Hidden by the trees was a two-story frame house where they would spend a few hours and then return to the village. The mysterious house was immediately put under surveil­

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lance. In it, the agents discovered, lived four men who never went outdoors during the daytime and who had no visible occupation. The house was guarded by three large dogs. After dark the men would go walking in pairs, accompanied by two of the three dogs. Nightly, another man would ap­ pear with a big basket, presumably containing food. This was the only regular contact with the outside world. The members of the special squad became increasingly convinced that one of the four men must be Adolf Eichmann. Finding the house deserted on one occasion, they broke in through a back window and searched the place thoroughly. It contained some interesting documents, including a birth certificate. Then the agents decided to act. When the inhabitants returned from their evening walk, the agents prepared their attack. Three of them were to remain outside to make sure that none of the inmates tried to make a dash for safety. One of these three had been a partisan under Tito and was experienced in dealing with watchdogs. Tempting the three big animals with food, he managed to poison them all. Two agents then threw them­ selves against the door simultaneously, and under the impact it opened. They were armed, one with a Schmeiser sub­ machine gun, the other with a Parabellum revolver. Four men, too surprised to do anything but freeze into immobility, sat at the dinner table. “Aufstehen!” one of the agents barked. The four men stood up meekly. The agents were interested in only one—a dark-haired man with Semitic features. “Du,” one of the agents snapped, “komm her!” Their contempt for the man they felt sure to be Adolf Eichmann was such that they refused to use the conventional Sie, which connotates respect. “Ich?” The man shrank in terror. "Ja. What is your name?” the agent asked.

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"Wolfgang Bauer,” the man gasped. “Aber warum —” “I ask you again, what is your name?” “Wolfgang Bauer. I swear to God it is Wolfgang Bauer.” The agent shook his head, his machine gun pointed at the prisoner. “We know you are SS Hauptsturmführer Adolf Barth.” “Nein , nein . Ich bin W olfgang B au er” the prisoner babbled. “As a matter of fact Adolf Barth is one of the names you used,” the agent said coldly. “We have a copy of your birth certificate, and the name on the certificate reads Adolf Eichmann.” “M ein G ott , ich bin nicht Adolf Eichmann . But I knew Adolf Eichmann.” The agent said nothing. Finally the man broke down. “All right. All right,” he cried, “Bauer is not my real name. I served in the SS Einsatzgruppe under General Otto Ohlen­ dorf. I was in Colonel Gustav Nosske’s Einsatzkommando 12. It is true what they say about us. We executed the enemies of the Reich in Stalino, Novocherkassk—hundreds of them, thousands of them. I have committed crimes and killed Jews. Yes, but under orders. Do you understand me? Under orders! Under the orders of Adolf Eichmann!” “Come with us!” one of the agents ordered. They dragged the weeping man out of the house and threw him into an old military command car. The other agents climbed in, and the car roared away. They drove half a mile deeper into the forest and pushed their prisoner from the car. He dropped to the muddy soil, pleading for his life. “I swear to you by my wife and children, by the memory of my mother, that I am not Adolf Eichmann! He was a killer. I was only a soldier. You are good people,” he sobbed. “Show me mercy!” The leader said coldly, “If you are not Adolf Eichmann,

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why were his wife and his brother visiting the house? Are you a good friend of theirs?” "They never came to see me,” the prisoner said desper­ ately. “They are friends of the owner of the house. They came to see him.” The leader of the agents aimed the Schmeiser at the man’s heart. The latter suddenly burst into high-pitched hysterical laughter. When he could finally control the fit, he said with relative calm, “All you can do is kill me.” When the execution ended with the roar of the sub­ machine gun, one of the five said, “At the end, he was a man again.” The body was loaded into the car and driven deeper into the woods, where it was left in a grave unmarked except by the curses of the departing agents. That night, the five men reported to Haganah headquar­ ters that Adolf Eichmann had been found and executed. It was weeks later before it was discovered that this man had been not Adolf Eichmann but an SS Oberscharführer who had indeed supervised the murder of thousands of Jews. Apparently Eichmann’s wife and brother had been visiting not him but some link with him. Another war criminal had been run to earth, but the scent on Eichmann’s trail was cold. Captain Yechiel Grienschpan, who had been a Polish Partisan leader in the region of Lublin during the war, organized a group of his former comrades. They had just one aim—the capture of Eichmann. There were ten of them, and although they worked in cooperation with the Polish security service they were independent of it and their hunt, which took them to Germany, Austria, Spain, Sweden, South America, and the Middle East, had to be financed from funds given them by Polish private citizens. This team was

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dissolved when Captain Grienschpan was mysteriously killed in West Germany in 1948. Many times “Adolf Eichmann” was captured, but always the suspects had to be released after interrogation. Eichmann was a shadowy figure, almost without substance. None of the hunters even had so much as a photograph of him. About this time Arthur Pier, now called Asher Ben-Nathan, one of the leading figures in the Haganah underground move­ ment, went to Vienna to head Haganah intelligence and to organize the transfer of refugees into Palestine. He was known by the code name “Arthur” ( today he is director gen­ eral of the Israeli Ministry of Defense). With evidence assembled in Haifa by refugees and with additional evidence he turned up in Vienna, Arthur was able to hand over to American intelligence incriminating evidence against six hundred Nazi war criminals. Later on these docu­ ments were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. In April 1946, Arthur summoned a young man named Tadek Tuvia Friedman to Haganah headquarters in Vienna at Num­ ber 2 Frankengasse. The headquarters was located in a beautifully furnished, luxurious eight-room apartment. It had previously belonged to a Nazi leader who had escaped from Vienna after the liberation. (In 1947 the Nazi leader re­ turned to Vienna and sued the Haganah on the charge of unlawfully occupying “the possession of an honest citizen.” In 1950, an American court ironically ordered the Haganah to return the apartment to the former Nazi and to pay 10,000 shillings in compensation for the damage done to the floor and walls. The Haganah paid.) Arthur, tall, blond, and broad-shouldered, received Fried­ man in his office. He opened the conversation by saying, “My name is Arthur. You probably know what I am doing here.” “Illegal immigration,” Friedman said.

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Arthur nodded. "Right, but I have an additional duty. Something special. I am trying to track down Nazi war crimi­ nals. Friedman, I want you to know that much has already been done in this field.” Arthur produced a small greencovered book and handed it to Friedman. “Look at this,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find some familiar faces and names there.” Friedman looked over the list and found quite a few names he knew well. More than a dozen of them had come from his Polish home town, Radom. While he was going over the names Arthur suddenly asked him, “Tell me, does the name Eichmann mean anything to you?” Friedman shook his head. “No, what’s so special about him?” “Friedman, how come a man with your experience doesn’t know the name of Eichmann?” “I know about Hitler, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich, Kreuger, and Hoess of Auschwitz.” Friedman shrugged his shoulders. “But Eichmann, who is he?” “Eichmann,” Arthur said coldly, “is the smartest, the most dangerous, and the most poisonous of all Nazi leaders. Eich­ mann is the devil who acted from behind the scenes. The head butcher who directed, organized, planned, and exe­ cuted the extermination of European Jewry. He speaks Yid­ dish as well as you do, and some Hebrew. He slipped through our fingers at the end of the war, and to this day no one can say where Adolf Eichmann is hiding. “Hitler is dead,” Arthur continued. “Himmler committed suicide. Kaltenbrunner is facing trial and is certain to be hanged, and Heydrich was liquidated by the Czechs. This leaves three leaders of the Nazi hierarchy at large; Heinrich Mueller, chief of the Gestapo; Martin Bormann, Hitler’s dep­ uty; and the cruelest of them all, Adolf Eichmann. Remem­ ber that name—Adolf Eichmann!”

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Friedman listened attentively, then asked, “But what is all this to me?” The Haganah chief picked up the green book again. “This contains the names of five hundred wanted Nazis. Our aim is to erase as many names as possible from this book. Above all I want Eichmann’s name erased from it. Do you under­ stand?” Tu via Friedman understood. For Tu via Friedman this was more than just another rou­ tine intelligence job; it was a personal mission of revenge and the payment of an unsettled account. In 1939, when he was sixteen, Germany invaded Poland. He was picked up in his home town of Radom and spent the next five years in concentration camps, forced-labor stockades, and prison cells. He had seen his family cruelly battered to death with Nazi rifle butts. He was saved temporarily only because he was young and strong enough to work. One day while scrub­ bing the floor of the officers' latrine in a concentration camp in Poland he overheard a conversation between two SS offi­ cers. One of them, the deputy camp commandant, was about to go on leave, and his friend asked him to take a gift parcel to his wife. He said laughingly that he had some jewelry he had taken from Jewish prisoners before they entered the gas chambers. Friedman memorized the names of those two offi­ cers and their addresses. He resolved then that if he ever emerged from the concentration camp alive he would pay them a visit. The chances of his survival at that time were very slim, for by now the strength was nearly starved out of his once sturdy body. But just before his turn to enter the gas chambers came, he made a daring escape through the electrified barbed-wire fences and fled into the woods, where he finally joined a band of Polish guerrillas. Although he was only twenty, his complete fearlessness made him the leader of the group. He and his Partisans took frightening risks in committing sabotage, in destroying Ger-

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man detachments, in carrying out swift, merciless raids, and in helping inmates of concentration camps to escape. When Poland was freed he joined the regular Polish army and later was made a member of the Polish security police. His job was to find and capture every Nazi who had taken part in the liquidation of the Jews. He was transferred to Danzig and was annexed to the “German department” of General Kurczinsky. There were many former SS and Gestapo men hiding in the Danzig area. This gave him a great deal of prac­ tical experience. Because his German was perfect, he was selected to interrogate all Nazi suspects. Two of his first ob­ jectives were the SS officers whom he had overheard in the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned. He hunted them down, captured them, and interrogated them. Hoping to save their own lives, they gave Friedman much information on Nazi war criminals who were still at large. Both SS men were tried by a Polish court and hanged, but the information they had given Friedman resulted in the arrest of 108 wanted Nazi criminals. By now the Soviets were supervising Polish intelligence; Friedman and the Russian military leaders did not see eye to eye. They were interested primarily in using captured Nazis in espionage and technical work; the relentless, toughminded Friedman only wanted to see them hang; and indeed he circumvented Soviet orders and shipped many Nazi cap­ tives to Western powers for trial. He thought it was time for him and the Russians to separate. Henceforth he would carry on a one-man vendetta against all those who had had anything to do with “the Final Solution” of the Jewish prob­ lem. He escaped from Poland and was picked up by an American counter-intelligence corps in Germany. When he confessed ruefully that he had been a former Gestapo officer he was thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp. He soon won the friendship and trust of the German prisoners by boasting

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about how he had directed the slaughter of thousands of Jews. Dozens of his fellow prisoners now did some boasting of their own, and within a few months he had a dossier on more than fifty of them who were, in fact, undisclosed war criminals. Then he revealed his true identity to the American commander of the camp, and the men against whom he had secured evidence were turned over to the proper tribunals to be tried. Altogether, Friedman contributed to the arrest of 237 major wanted Nazi criminals. It was then that he went to Vienna to join Arthur's organization. “You will work with a team of five on Operation Eich­ mann,” Arthur explained. “Margoulis, Max Levinski, and one of them I think you know—Henrik Diamant, known as ‘Ma­ nos/ ” Friedman's eyes lit up. He knew all about Manos. Before the war Manos had been active in the Zionist Youth Movement in his native Poland, and when the Germans en­ tered his country he went underground in the ghetto of Sosnowiec. Eventually he escaped to Vienna to become ac­ tive in rescue operations of Jewish refugees. Later he went to Budapest, where he continued his activity in organizing Zionist underground groups to fight the Nazis and to transfer thousands of Jews from Hungary to Romania. The Germans finally caught up with him and put him on a train headed for the Auschwitz gas chambers. He managed to leap from the moving train but was recaptured and sent on to Ausch­ witz; but before the Germans had a chance to liquidate him the advancing Red army liberated the concentration camp. Like Friedman, Manos then swore to devote the rest of his days to finding war criminals and bringing them to justice. His activities resulted in the capture, conviction, and hang­ ing of a great many SS men. He and Friedman were de­ lighted to be working together. The five men assigned to Operation Eichmann had one thing in common. They were all bitterly disappointed with

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the results of the Nuremberg trials, which had started with a clash of cymbals and ended like the rustle of leaves. At the beginning, thousands of war criminals were arrested, but before long hundreds were released, and finally only about fifty SS leaders were left to be sentenced to death. Actually, only twelve were hanged. The rest spent a few years in jail and were gradually released. The young group of ex-partisans, now students, felt their burning desire for revenge still unsatisfied. With enthusiasm they began Operation Adolf Eichmann, as well as a widely ranging hunt for other wanted Nazi criminals. They worked under the innocent academic cover name of the “Bureau of Jewish Historical Documentation in Vienna.” Some time after Eichmann’s capture, Friedman recalled his first meeting with Arthur. “That meeting changed the course of my whole life. From that time on, I was obsessed with the thought of tracking down Eichmann. I thought about him by day and dreamed about him at night. For fifteen years I gathered every note and every document and every bit of testimony and every affidavit in which the name Eichmann was mentioned. I got to know him well, his faults and his caprices. I knew the fillings in his teeth, the broken collarbone, the fractured skull. If he were disguised as a Bedouin sheik, I felt I would be able to recognize him.” During that time the American counter-intelligence corps was active in Eichmann’s pursuit. An officer of his agency invited Frau Eichmann to Alt Aussee for an “interview.” She lived in nearby Bad Aussee under her maiden name of Veronika Liebel with her sons Klaus, Horst, and Dieter at the guesthouse “Sweewis.” One of her neighbors was Frau Kaltenbrunner, who was a close friend of hers and whose husband the Allies caught on May 6 and were then trying. By now Frau Eichmann was a small stocky woman, looking bitter and neglected.

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“Where is your husband?” asked the American major. “He is dead,” said Veronika Eichmann. “The last news I had from him was in April from Prague. Some of his com­ rades told me later that he fell in battle.” She almost broke down. During the next few weeks Frau Eichmann was summoned to the CIC more than twelve times. She remained firm in her answers. “He is dead,” she stated and kept on stating. “I have no picture of him, no documents whatsoever—nothing.” But it was not long before other sources sent in their own versions. Eichmann was alive. In 1947 the American authorities had captured the Czech quisling Dr. Wacheck and Hauptsturmführer Dieter von Wisliczeny, who had been one of Eichmann’s most important assistants. The Americans interrogated both prisoners. The two Nazis tried to put the whole blame on Eichmann. Wacheck finally broke down and cried hysterically. “Set me free and I will show you where Eichmann is hiding.” His interrogator, convinced that this was merely a ruse to save Wacheck’s neck and that actually he had no idea of Eichmann’s whereabouts, turned down the offer. Von Wisliczeny also offered his cooperation, hoping to save his neck. He gave a full description of his ten years with Eichmann and promised that if his life was spared he him­ self would find Eichmann in Austria within weeks. He told his interrogators, “I saw Eichmann on May 5, 1945, in Bad Aussee. He told me then that he was willing to commit suicide. He said, ‘I will end it in time, I and my family,’ but he was too much of a coward. He is still alive!” Von Wisliczeny begged his American captors to let him go and find his superior, Adolf Eichmann. “I know him, I know his staff members, I am friendly with his family,” he said. Von Wisliczeny outlined a full-scale “operation Eich-

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mann.” He suggested that the Americans put him at the head of a commando team that would comb all German prisoner-of-war camps and search for Eichmann’s closest associates. Then the team would interrogate those Nazis, and Von Wisliczeny was certain that they would reveal the hiding place of their commander. As a second stage, Von Wisliczeny suggested the capture of Mrs. Veronika Eichmann. “I will take it upon myself to identify her and bring her forward,” Von Wisliczeny said. “I have exact information as to her whereabouts. Adolf Eich­ mann is probably not with her, but she has to know where he is hiding.” Von Wisliczeny literally knelt down and begged, “Give me a chance, and I will bring him to you. Every day that passes by is erasing the tracks of Eichmann. I swear that every word I said is true and I promise you to cooperate with full trustworthiness without expecting any reward.” The Americans delivered Von Wisliczeny to the Czech authorities, who tried him and condemned him to death. Shortly before his execution on November 14, 1946, Dieter von Wisliczeny wrote from his prison cell Number 133 in the Bratislava jail a note which was forwarded to the Jewish pursuers of Adolf Eichmann. In his note he stated, “I am posi­ tively convinced that Eichmann is alive and is hiding in Austria. I am sure that within a few weeks I could find Eich­ mann in Austria.” Arthur came especially from Vienna to interrogate Von Wisliczeny in his cell once more. “If anyone can find Eichmann, it is I alone,” Von Wislic­ zeny said. “No one knows him as well as I do. No one even has any idea where he is hidden, but I know the addresses of nine women who would hide him any time. I am ready to take you to them. Why should I hang alone? Eichmann should hang near me. All of them should hang near me.”

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“Will you give me the names and where they can be found?” Arthur asked. “But first, give me the names of all of Eichmann’s close associates in the SS.” The prisoner said, “Eichmann’s deputies were: Alois Brun­ ner, Rolf Gunther, and myself. Members of our commandos were: Victor Nagler, Anton Winniwarter, Alfred Hauer, Franz Stuschka, Otto Schwaner, Ernst Giezick, Josef Weisel, Alfred Slawik, Ferdinand Daurach, Franz Tenfel, Josef Uschau, Oscar Senger, Otto Heischmann, and Josef Szasny. “You should not look for Eichmann in Linz, nor will you find him with his wife in Bad Aussee. He could only be with one of his nine women—his nine mistresses.” He wrote down the names. Among them were two maids, three secretaries, one businesswoman, and a countess from Budapest. When he finished he looked at Arthur uncertainly and said, “I hope that this will help you. But what will hap­ pen if you don’t get him there? I do not know how long I will still be at your disposal. My execution may take place any day.” One of the crucial questions in Arthur’s interrogation of Von Wisliczeny was: When did Eichmann last pose for a photograph and where could such a photograph be found? Von Wisliczeny said that ever since 1942 Eichmann had not been within close range of a camera. In public ceremonies he hid behind the last row of officers. He was so careful that he took his official photographs by the Gestapo photographer and personally checked to make sure that the negatives were destroyed. He would order only the exact number of photo­ graphs needed for the purpose and did not let anyone have copies of them. “I myself photographed Eichmann twice, once with a group of SS officers and once alone in uniform,” Von Wislic­ zeny said to Arthur. “But even from me, his close associate, he demanded the negatives and I had to give them to him.

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The photos are to be found in the left-hand drawer of my desk in my apartment, in Buchleitengasse Number 8 in the eighteenth district of Vienna.” The pursuers of Eichmann went to Von Wisliczeny’s home, which was still intact. The agents forced the apartment door, went straight to the desk, and broke open the left-hand drawer. They emptied all its contents and found a pile of photos of SS officers in and out of uniform; Eichmann’s pho­ tograph was not there. Either it had never been there or it had somehow mysteriously disappeared. Arthur returned to Bratislava jail, furious. He told Von Wisliczeny that no picture of Eichmann had been found in any drawer of his desk. “How is that possible?” Von Wisliczeny asked, “I put them there myself.” Then he frowned thoughtfully and said, “There is one man who could have a photograph of Eich­ mann, and that man is his personal chauffeur, Oberschar­ führer [sergeant] Josef Weisel. If you don’t find a photograph with him,” Von Wisliczeny added, “you might try your luck with the two last mistresses of Adolf Eichmann. They must have some shots of him.” Von Wisliczeny went on to describe a certain Frau Anne Marie Mistelbach, who lived in the Aus­ trian town of Doppl, and whom Eichmann had last seen in 1939. From Von Wisliczeny, Arthur also learned that in the last month of the war Eichmann sent word to his brother Robert, in Linz, telling him that he was in Austria. This new information enabled the hunters to start working in new directions. They began with the chauffeur Josef Wei­ sel. He was found in the central prison of Vienna. But how does one enter a well-guarded prison? Arthur summoned Friedman. “Friedman,” he said, “I must see Weisel today.” “But how?” Friedman asked. “He is in prison.” “That is your business,” Arthur ordered. “I count on you.”

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( Friedman recalled recently, “I managed to arrange Arthurs visit to the jail in a manner I can't discuss.” ) It was arranged that the office of the warden would be put at the disposal of Arthur for three hours. Arthur sat in the wide armchair of the warden, and the guards brought in Eichmann's chauffeur. Josef Weisel, think­ ing Arthur was the warden, jumped obediently to attention and saluted. Arthur had a big cigar in his mouth, and he asked Weisel in fluent Viennese German, “You were Eich­ mann's driver?” “Jawohl, m ein Herr ” Weisel replied. On the table lay a pack of cigarettes. Arthur noticed that Weisel's eyes were fixed on them. “Take a cigarette,” he said. “But I am not allowed.” The German sighed. “I allow you,” Arthur said authoritatively. Josef Weisel took a cigarette, but before he had taken two puffs of it Arthur shot a question at him. “What do you know about Adolf Eichmann?” “Until February 1945, Eichmann was in Prague,” the chauffeur replied. “It was rumored that various passports were distributed among the officers of the Gestapo. I didn't get one. Eichmann and his staff of officers left Prague at the end of April 1945 in five German staff cars loaded with suit­ cases. That is all I know. I don't know where they went. I am only a simple chauffeur. I never even had permission to speak to Eichmann. I was only allowed to answer questions. I was one of the last to see him as far as I know. But I swear to you, I don't have any photographs of him.” Weisel also expressed his opinion that one of Eichmann's mistresses in Austria, Frau Anne Marie Mistelbach, might be in possession of a picture of him. Weisel remembered well the road to the small town of Doppl, where he used to drive his boss to his frequent visits with her. Since the place was rather isolated, Weisel very willingly drew a map, in which

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he described the way to Doppl and the road to the woman’s red-roofed house. This information further encouraged Eichmann’s pursuers, who knew that a photograph of him could serve as a first-rate clue to his capture. Arthur assigned lanky, blond, blue-eyed Henrik Diamant to find Frau Mistelbach. Manos was able to get a complete dossier on this strange woman. She was of Jewish origin, and her hatred of this had turned her into a vicious anti-Semite. Since her youth she had been known for her loose morals. In 1939, in a desperate effort to conceal her Jewish origin, she married a Nazi, but he soon discovered this deception and divorced her. Then she met Eichmann and became his mistress. During the course of their affair he gave her a farm requisitioned from Jews, and sent her a few hundred of “his Jews” to maintain it. The SS, not pleased by Eichmann’s private labor camp, conducted a special investigation, but the affair was whitewashed. Now Frau Mistelbach was a frus­ trated, bitter middle-aged woman. She had long since moved from Doppl, but Manos located her in Uhrfahr. He introduced himself as a Dutchman—he even had a Dutch passport to prove it. He said that he had cooperated with the Nazis and joined the Dutch Waffen SS Viking Divi­ sion in 1943, and that his brother had been Eichmann’s best friend. “Frankly, I arranged an introduction to you, Frau Mistelbach,” he told her guilelessly, “because shortly before the war ended Eichmann entrusted a considerable sum of money and jewelry to my brother. He wants to return these to Eich­ mann. Do you have any idea where he lives?” The fading blonde shook her head. “But his father lives in Linz. If anyone knows where Adolf is, he should.” Manos cultivated his friendship with the woman. She in­

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vited him to her home several times, and cleverly he always managed to bring up the subject of Adolf Eichmann. She was never reluctant to talk about the man she called “Adi.” Manos often told her that he was afraid of being picked up by the authorities as a wanted war criminal. One night Anne Marie asked, “You don’t intend to go back to Holland, do you?” “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Manos answered wearily. “I am dead tired and I’m hungry.” “I will make you something to eat,” she said. “Would you like something special? I can get you just about anything you want.” When she noticed his look of astonishment, she laughed. “I had some jewelry to sell and when the Ameri­ cans came here they paid very well for it. Thats why I am able to get all the food I want. I have some of the jewelry left, but it’s quite old. None of it is modern.” “I know something about jewelry,” Manos said. “My father had a jewelry store in Amsterdam.” “That’s wonderful. Maybe you can advise me as to how much it is worth,” she said. “I’d be glad to,” Manos said, shaking his head sadly, “but you know they’re after me, and I have no idea where I can stay.” Anne Marie looked at him with sympathy. She reached across the table and pressed his arm. “You can stay here as long as you wish,” she whispered. When Eichmann’s name recurred in the conversation, Frau Mistelbach suddenly said, “Would you like to see a picture of him?” Manos nodded indifferently. His hostess produced an album. She identified old friends, turned a page, and said, “How do you like my Adolf?” “It’s a good picture,” Manos replied calmly. When he left he immediately went to the Austrian police. He had been

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given an official letter from police headquarters in Vienna, ordering all police stations throughout Austria to extend him every possible help. The local police were glad to cooperate. Manos was convinced that there might be other pictures of Eichmann hidden away in Frau Mistelbach’s home. If she had taken one picture of her lover, it seemed reasonable that she had taken many more; but the search was in vain. Manos had to be satisfied with the one photograph that he snatched from Frau Mistelbach’s album. He hurried to Arthur with it. Arthur said gratefully, “This is the first bit of tangible help we have had. W ell send hundreds of copies of this picture to police stations and newspapers throughout the entire world.” When the team (they called themselves “the Avengers” ) discovered that Veronika Eichmann had moved from Linz and was now living in the resort town of Bad Aussee, the Avengers kept constant watch on the house, shadowing all guests who visited Frau Eichmann and eventually learning their identities. Manos somehow managed to meet a woman friend of Frau Eichmann who had visited her several times. Again he told of his cover story of having been a Dutch Nazi. The Manos charm worked once more. When he said that he would like very much to meet Frau Eichmann, whose husband had been such a great friend of his brother, the woman made a telephone call. The result was an invita­ tion to tea the very next afternoon. Veronika Eichmann was very friendly to her guest. She immediately told him that he reminded her of her own brother who had been killed in action—a happy coincidence for Manos. The three Eichmann children took a great liking to this handsome Dutchman who spoke German so perfectly. Manos asked Frau Eichmann if he could take them sailing on the nearby lake—the first of many such excursions he made with them. Again and again when he was alone with them he casually brought up the question of their father,

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hoping to get some hint of his whereabouts, but to his dis­ appointment he found that the children honestly believed their father had died in the last days of the war. Frau Eich­ mann had already told him this, but the nervous manner in which she confided it served only to strengthen Manos’s sus­ picion that she knew her husband was alive. During one of his visits Frau Eichmann complained to Manos that she was not able to find a suitable maid. Manos said he knew a girl who was loyal and experienced, and the next day he brought Gertrude C., a Jewish girl with pure Aryan features and blond hair, to the Eichmann home. Frau Eichmann was delighted with her, never suspecting that the maid was a member of the intelligence branch of the Ha­ ganah. Now the team had a direct pipeline to the Eichmann household. Quiet, unobtrusive, good-looking Gertrude kept her ears open and relayed to Manos the name of every visitor Frau Eichmann entertained, but never once did any of the visitors in conversation with Frau Eichmann give a hint as to the whereabouts of Eichmann. Arthur sent Manos to visit other mistresses of Eichmann to get information or to find photos. He traveled to Salzburg, Hamburg, Bremen, and Munich. In Munich he located Mar­ git Kutchira, one of the names furnished Arthur by Dieter von Wisliczeny. She was attracted by this handsome “Dutch­ man” and she too talked freely about Eichmann. She said rather reluctantly that her affair with him had been a short one. Pictures? She once had some pictures, but after the war she had destroyed them. Manos immediately lost interest in her and went on to Berlin. He met three of Eichmann’s for­ mer mistresses, and all succumbed to his charm, but he left Berlin convinced that none of them had any photos of Eich­ mann or any idea where he was. For a while, Manos continued his activities, assembling important evidence against Nazi criminals, which was later

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used in various European courts. Then he gave all the documents in his possession to Tuvia Friedman and immi­ grated to Israel to start a new life. Now members of the Avengers located Eichmann’s father, who operated an electrical-appliance store in Linz. They questioned him again and again, always asking, “Where is Adolf?” and the stubborn old man would say angrily, “I don’t know a thing about him except that he is dead. Und lasst mich in Ruher ( Leave me alone.) But the Avengers didn’t believe him. They sent a young Jewish architect, Simon Wiesenthal, to live in Linz and to observe everything that went on in the shop and in the home of the elder Eichmann. Wiesenthal shadowed people who came to visit Eichmann, but not one clue developed. He did, however, manage to search Eichmann’s apartment, and there he obtained one valuable document—Karl Adolf Eichmann’s résumé of his life in his own handwriting, which had been prepared for the archives of the Gestapo. Now at last the team had a picture of their quarry and an example of his handwriting. The elu­ sive and insubstantial wraith was beginning to assume a form. Wiesenthal was a persistent man. Bom in Lemberg, Po­ land, he spent four years in the concentration camp at Maut­ hausen. Like Tuvia Friedman and Manos, he swore that if he survived he would do everything possible to bring his persecutors to justice. The young architect, whose entire family was exterminated in German concentration camps, settled in Linz after the war and founded a Jewish Docu­ mentation Bureau. The first place he investigated was the lovely Austrian re­ sort region of Bad Aussee. In the last months of the war, this region became a meeting place for many high Nazi offi­ cials and officers. Among them were Eichmann, Kaltenbrun­ ner, and their families. In their desperate retreat the Nazis

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had brought with them invaluable treasures to this meeting place. Wiesenthal learned about a treasure which was taken out of Hungary at Eichmann’s order and transported in twentyfour freight cars—destination Bad Aussee. In the document which Wiesenthal discovered, a detailed list of this treasure was given: 31 crates of gold, weighing 45 kilograms each; 3 crates filled with gold coins, weighing 100 kilograms each; 18 crates of pieces of jewelry, weighing 35 kilograms each; 35 crates with gold watches; $44,639 and 52,360 Swiss francs; 1560 crates filled with silverware; one crate of silver bars; 100 art masterpieces; 3000 rugs of great value; 8 crates of gems; and 2 crates of pearls. In the last month of the war, Eichmann himself brought 22 crates of valuables to Bad Aussee by truck—crates filled with gems and gold teeth. Besides all this, Kaltenbrunner’s officers transferred an­ other treasure to Bad Aussee, which, according to docu­ ments in possession of Wiesenthal, contained 50 kilograms of gold bars; 50 crates of gold articles, weighing 40 to 50 kilograms each; 2000 Swiss francs; 5 crates of diamonds and other precious stones; and a rare stamp collection which was worth about 5000 marks. Among the German treasures that disappeared were the vaults from which the German secret service financed its spy network throughout the world. Only one of these vaults was found by the American Army—the Greek vault. All others have officially remained undiscovered (unrecovered). The supposition is that they are somewhere at the bottom of either the Alt Aussee Lake, the Grindle Lake, or the Toplitz Lake. Some may have been discovered by private treasure-hunters in the last fifteen years. This area yielded many secrets to Wiesenthal. He found a file cabinet containing copies of many hitherto undisclosed secret documents. One of these told of a special meeting of German industrialists which took place in a hotel in Strass-

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burg on August 10, 1944. This memorandum stated that the industrialists now realized that the war could not be won by Germany and they had decided to get in touch with foreign firms, invest money in them, and eventually gain control of them so that the Nazi party could be refinanced and reborn after the war. The document mentioned the names of 750 companies in France, 58 in Portugal, 112 in Spain, 35 in Turkey, 98 in Argentina (one of them the Capri Corporation for whom Eichmann later worked), 240 in Switzerland, and the rest in Central America. A few months after Wiesenthal found the documents which led him to believe that an enormous amount of treas­ ure was either buried in the Alt Aussee region or sunk in one of the lakes, an incident occurred which confirmed his suspi­ cions. One morning a truck pulled up at the beach of Grindle Lake, and a dozen men dressed in blue overalls and sport caps jumped off and unloaded a small boat. They pushed it into the water. Two of them put on diving equipment and rowed out onto the lake and anchored. The two divers dis­ appeared beneath the water. A half-hour later one of them came up with a crate in his arms. Surprisingly enough, about a hundred spectators assembled on the beach to watch these strange proceedings. In all, six crates were brought up from the bottom of the lake. Among the spectators was an Ameri­ can CIC officer from Bad Aussee. “What’s going on here?” the officer asked one of the spec­ tators. The spectator shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe they’re tak­ ing gold out.” The American officer laughed and walked away. Later, Wiesenthal received many reports that strange-looking men questioned gendarmes who had been stationed by the Aus­ trian authorities to guard the lakes in this region from “treasure hunters.”

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Wiesenthal’s persistent search finally resulted in the dis­ covery of a few boxes containing 20,000 gold coins in the Villa Keri, the last known residence of the Kaltenbrunners. Discouraged by their futile efforts to discover Adolf Eich­ mann, some of the “Avengers” desperately suggested a plan to kidnap Eichmann’s wife and three sons. They hoped that this would compel Eichmann to give himself up. A detailed plan for the operation was prepared. But the idea was re­ jected by the Haganah headquarters in Palestine. Then events occurred in Palestine that made it necessary for Arthur and his group to discontinue Operation Eichmann. In anticipation of an attack by the Arabs as soon as the Brit­ ish mandate ended in May 1948, all members of the Haga­ nah in Europe were ordered to concentrate their efforts on acquiring weapons for the fighting forces of the future State of Israel. When the actual fighting began, they were ordered to return to Israel. When Israel had fought her way to inde­ pendence and had beaten back the Arabs, the country faced an enormous task of economic rehabilitation. Operation Eichmann was almost forgotten, except by Tuvia Friedman. In Israel, Friedman set up the Institute for the Docu­ mentation of War Crimes. He was one man who was con­ vinced that Eichmann was still alive, a belief based on the fact that Eichmann had confiscated hundreds of passports from his Jewish victims and could easily have obtained an entry visa to almost any country in the world. It was known that at the height of his activities he had been given a yearly budget of 250 million Reichsmarks to finance “the Final Solution” of the Jewish question, and according to testimony given by some of his aides he had transferred part of this money to other countries. Friedman by now had a thorough understanding of Eichmann’s character. To those who were sure that the German had committed suicide with the usual

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capsule of cyanide carried by all top Nazi officers, Tuvia Friedman answered, “Eichmann was too great a coward to take his own life; during the war he refused to travel by plane for fear of being shot down. He was neurotic in his constant fear of assassination, changed his headquarters frequently, and never left his home without a heavy guard.” It appeared that everyone but Friedman had given up the hunt. He still collected documents and assembled evidence from newly arrived refugees, but not even the government would subsidize this one-man operation. His wife was a suc­ cessful doctor, and during these discouraging years she sup­ ported her obstinate husband. Friedman continued to turn up evidence against lesser war criminals, which he sent to Dr. Erwin Schüle, head of the Central Institute of the German State Department of Justice, in charge of investi­ gating war crimes. On October 11, 1959, Friedman received a short letter from Dr. Schüle which merely said, “I have secret information that Adolf Eichmann is in Kuwait.” Friedman spent a whole night reviewing his Eichmann file, and the more he read, the more convinced he became that Schüle was right. In his youth Eichmann had worked as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company of Linz. Kuwait of course is an important oil center in the Persian Gulf. Friedman remembered that during the war Eichmann had been a very good friend of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini, who had a home in the Persian Gulf port. It seemed logical to Friedman that Eichmann might have found refuge in Kuwait. In the morning he went to see his former Haganah chief (Asher Ben-Nathan, now Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense), and Joseph Nachmias, Inspector Gen­ eral of the Israeli Police. He gave them the reasons for his conviction that Eichmann was in Kuwait.

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“Give me some funds and four men, and if Eichmann is in Kuwait I promise to bring him back here, alive or dead.” Unfortunately, the young democracy had no funds to spare, and Friedman’s request was turned down, but the tenacious man-hunter refused to give up. He gave the whole story to a Tel Aviv evening newspaper, which printed it. It caused a sensation in Israel, and then the wire services picked it up and spread it all over the world. The British Authorities in Kuwait strongly denied the fact. Government officials called Friedman in and rebuked him for releasing the story. “I wanted to remind the world that Adolf Eichmann is still alive, still at large, and is probably in Kuwait,” he said. “I wanted to compel the free world to start looking again for this murderer.” Friedmans strategy worked. Security services of Great Britain and Germany showed revived interest in the almost forgotten Eichmann. “This story has been printed in almost every country in the world,” Friedman told foreign correspondents stationed in Tel Aviv. “I think he is hiding in Kuwait, but no matter where he is, by now he has read this story and he must be living in constant fear. This is part of his punishment.” Toward the end of 1959, during the election campaign for the Knesset, Friedman was asked to speak at a political rally for the majority party, Mapai. He made one of the strangest political speeches ever heard. “I am not interested in politics,” he said. “Only one thing in the world means anything to me—tracking down Adolf Eichmann.” Then he turned to Prime Minister David BenGurion, who was sitting on the platform, and asked dramat­ ically, “Will you put a price on Eichmann’s head? I hope that the Prime Minister will take this matter into his own hands.”

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Ben-Gurion smiled, took out a small notebook from his pocket, and made a notation. Within a few days Tuvia Friedman was asked by the Central Institute for Intelligence and Security for all the information he had on Eichmann. Friedman’s stubbornness at last was paying off. For the last several years, Friedman had been inundated with letters from all comers of the earth, written by people who swore that they had seen Eichmann walking in the streets of their towns. An Argentine of German descent was a particularly persistent correspondent. He read, in a German local paper, on October 17, 1959, Friedman’s declaration that Eichmann was in Kuwait. Then he sat down and wrote his first letter to Friedman, claiming positive information that Eichmann lived under an assumed name, with his wife and four children, in his own house near Buenos Aires. The informer added that he was willing to reveal Eichmann’s exact address on the condition that his name would not be revealed and that he would get a reward of $10,000. On November 5, the Argentine sent his second letter to Friedman, in which he expressed again his willingness to assist in Eichmann’s capture. He pointed out that he had no doubt about Eichmann’s identity and that he knew the name of the street, the number of the house, and other exact details about Eichmann and his family. Furthermore, he added, he could provide documents confirming the validity of his information. He asked Friedman to send a representa­ tive to see him, and suggested that the utmost caution be used because Eichmann was surrounded by Nazi agents. In another letter, on March 28, 1960, the man informed Friedman that a Jewish representative had visited and spoken with him. He repeated his request for a reward, said that precious time was being wasted, and added that the Argentine authorities knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts. In two following letters, written after Eichmann’s capture,

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dated May 26 and May 30, the writer continued to demand a reward and added more information: Eichmann, before his capture, had bought two plots of land at 4261 Chacabuco Street in Olivas, a suburb of Buenos Aires. He had registered the land under the name of his Jewish landlord, Francisco Schmidt, through the notary Marcello Quarido. The sale was officially recorded under the number 3814. Later on, Eich­ mann sold one plot, and on the second he built himself a home. The letters also repeated personal data on Eichmann which the informer had originally given to the Israeli representative during their meeting. This included Eichmann’s assumed name (Ricardo Klement), his height (5'10"), the size of his shoes (9) and the size of his head (22). Then, in a final bid for a reward, the Argentine added that he had shown the representative a picture of Eichmann’s son, Klaus, and given him Klaus’s address. Therefore, convinced that he had been the immediate cause of Eichmann’s capture, he now expected payment without delay. This was Tuvia Friedman’s last connection with the Eichmann affair. A spokesman for Israeli intelligence said in Tel Aviv, “Tuvia Friedman had no part in the actual capture of Adolf Eichmann.” Agents were sent to every place where Eichmann was re­ ported to have been seen. Special surveillance was used in Vienna. Veronika Eichmann had disappeared, but the Israeli agents knew that her Austrian passport had lapsed and that she would have to return to Vienna to renew it. Austrian authorities, as usual, were cooperative; they alerted passport officials to inform the Israeli agents immediately if she ap­ peared. One day an Austrian passport-office clerk picked up a telephone, dialed a number, and said, “She’s here.” From that moment on, Frau Eichmann was closely followed. By now Israel had developed a very efficient intelligence service. This organization comes directly under David

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Ben-Gurion’s jurisdiction. In addition to being Prime Minis­ ter, he is also Minister of Defense. The four security and intelligence groups are coordinated and supervised by the Central Institute for Intelligence and Security. The head of this institute accounts directly to the Prime Minister and to no one else. The four groups are: the Army intelligence Corps, the General Security Service, the Research Depart­ ment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Department for Special Investigation, which is attached to the Israeli police force. These security bodies are so well and so closely integrated that quite often they exchange men who are specialists in their jobs. Many of these experienced men received their training as members of the underground Haganah during the days of the British mandate. A great many others served as intelligence officers with the Allied forces during World War II. Experts have studied the meth­ ods used by the United States, England, and France, and special schools have been established to train men in the newest techniques. The status of security agents in Israel is that of civil servants. The public knows very little about these services, for successful missions and operations are rarely publicized. The security organizations do not even have public-relations officers as do most government agen­ cies. Not even the names of the men who head these organi­ zations are known to the Israeli public. Operation Eichmann was handled by two Israeli security services: the General Security Service, acting under the direction of the Central Institute of Intelligence and Security. The General Security Service, colloquially called Shin Beth —an abbreviation of its Hebrew name, Sheruth Bitachon— is headed by a man who works in complete anonymity, his name known only to fellow security officers. The son of wealthy parents, he was born in Transylvania on the Hungarian-Romanian border. He grew up to be a tall, handsome

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young man, an excellent student and an outstanding athlete. He studied engineering in Paris, but the war put an end to his studies before his final year. He returned home, was captured by the Germans and sent to a hard-labor camp. But even a trained athlete could not survive the desperately hard work and scanty rations; when his health broke and he was of no more use to the Nazis he was loaded on a freight car and sent to Auschwitz. When the Allies liberated the camp he was barely alive. He recovered, however, and soon after was married to a girl who had been on the death train to Auschwitz with him—by some miracle she too had survived. As soon as he regained his health he joined the Bricha (“the Escape” ), an underground movement that was getting Jews out of Europe illegally and into Palestine. When the state of Israel was proclaimed he and his wife left Transylvania and succeeded in reaching the new state. His name and his activities were of course well known to Israeli security officers, and he was immediately given a place in the Shin Beth. Within a few years his intelligence and his experience earned him the number one spot in the organization. He lives in a modest apartment in Tel Aviv. He is a genial man who likes good food, enjoys a good joke, and owns a large collection of American jazz records. The man who is in charge of the Central Institute of Intelligence and Security has quite a different background. He came to Israel as a boy some forty years ago when his parents, seeing no future for a Jewish family under Russian communism, decided that the future lay in what was then Palestine. The boy joined a kibbutz ( communal farm), where his first job was to pack oranges. Later he worked on irri­ gation projects. When he was old enough he joined the Haganah and because of his keen mind was given a place in the Sheruth Yedioth, the underground intelligence service. His work was so outstanding that he came to the attention

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of David Ben-Gurion, who eventually appointed him chief of the General Security Service. Then a few years ago he was made head of the Central Institute, which raised him to number one intelligence and security officer in the country. Veronika Eichmann, known as Vera to her friends, was a woman with an intense loyalty to her husband. The Israeli agents were certain that she had renewed her passport for the sole purpose of rejoining him. She knew that he had had several mistresses during their married life, she knew that he was an excessive drinker, but she remained devoted to him —an attitude typical of many European women. She had been bom Veronika Liebel in Czechoslovakia and was a devout Catholic. Her family meant everything to her; she had great affection for her children. By now Israeli agents searching for Eichmann had re­ ceived many tips on his whereabouts from all over the globe. Most of these proved false, such as the ones that said that Eichmann was training Arab troops, had been assigned as a military adviser to the Egyptian Army, was hiding in Austria, was living in Spain, etc. A special squad of volunteer security men was dispatched to Vienna, another to Argentina, and a third to Brazil. These volunteers were carefully selected; some of them were sabras (native-born Israelis) and some were German or Polish, men who still carried the tattoo of the concentration camp on their arms. All were under orders that if they found Eichmann there should be no violence against him; he was to be captured and somehow returned to Israel for trial. Vera Eichmann spent a few weeks with her family in Linz, and then she bought an airline ticket for Buenos Aires. The assumption that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina now found substantial support. A cable was sent to Tel Aviv

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Intelligence headquarters, and an order was cabled back to Vienna to accompany Frau Eichmann on the flight. When Frau Eichmann boarded the plane for Buenos Aires three Israeli agents were among the passengers. Ironically, she took a seat beside one of them. Once during the flight she asked him for the time; his answer in precise German was re­ ceived with a grateful smile. No one met Frau Eichmann at the airport. She left alone and went directly to a small home in the rather shabby workers’ community of San Fernando, some fifteen miles from the center of Buenos Aires. She was followed from the airport by agents who had been in Buenos Aires for several weeks. When Frau Eichmann left her cab and knocked on the door of the small house where “Ricardo Klement” lived, he himself opened the door and threw his arms around his wife. The Israeli agents now knew for sure that their fifteenyear search was at an end. An exchange of cables with Tel Aviv headquarters followed, and the head of the Israeli team in Buenos Aires received these orders: “Continue to follow the man twenty-four hours a day. Don’t let him out of your sight, and above all be sure that he doesn’t become aware of your presence.” Capturing the man was the least difficult part of the task. The real problem was how to whisk him from this foreign territory to his judgment before an Israeli court. This was a matter for Tel Aviv headquarters to solve. Meanwhile the team of Israeli agents in Buenos Aires kept Adolf Eichmann under strict surveillance. They were skilled in the art of shadowing a man without being spotted. There was always one of them riding the buses with Eichmann; there was al­ ways one of them at the restaurant where he had his solitary lunch. They rented a room across the way from Eichmann’s home and kept constant watch over it. During the twentyfour-hour-a-day surveillance, every move of Eichmann was

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photographed by hidden cameras. Later photographs were checked against those in possession of the Israeli agents. The agents frequently changed guard for fear that Eichmann might recognize their faces, and for this purpose more men were sent from Israel. One man had to be replaced perma­ nently just because a strange look in Eichmann’s eye was interpreted as a suspicious glance. Finally they received word of the plan to send an official mission to Buenos Aires, which was to arrive on May 20. They decided to abduct Eichmann on May 11. In antici­ pation of the capture the agents had made contact with a Jewish couple living in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Knowing the two to be completely trustworthy, they asked for assist­ ance. These were well-off people who lived in a rather large house, and they readily agreed to let the agents use the top floor to entertain an “unknown” guest for a week or two. Next, the agents rented a black sedan from a Buenos Aires garage. The head of the team assigned four men to the actual task of nabbing Eichmann. His plan was meticulously thought out: Agent A would travel from the Mercedes-Benz factory on the bus with Eichmann, Agent B would drive the car, Agents C and D, armed, would sit in the back of the car. When Eichmann alighted to change buses at the intersection of Coriantes and Dorgunal Avenues, Agent A would leave the bus and remain close to him. As soon as the bus left, the black sedan would drive alongside Eichmann and Agent C would jump out through the right rear car door and grab him. Agent A would be there to help if needed. Agent A waited outside the Mercedes-Benz factory. He was a bit dismayed that when the whistle blew ending the work day only a few workers came out of the big building. Eichmann was not among them. In Spanish he asked one of them why the whole force of workers had not yet been

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dismissed. He was told that a meeting had been called for a discussion of working conditions. “How long will they be in there?” he asked. “I’m waiting for my brother.” “About an hour,” the man replied. Agent A hurried to the restaurant where Eichmann habitu­ ally lunched and phoned the leader of the team, telling him that the schedule would be slightly delayed. Exactly one hour later the meeting ended and Eichmann came out of the factory and headed for the bus stop. Agent A was right behind him as he boarded the bus. He turned his face away from Eichmann. His hands were shaking. He had seen Eichmann before—sixteen years ago at Auschwitz, where he had been a prisoner awaiting his turn in the gas chambers. His mother and father had already been sent to their deaths, but he was one of the lucky few who had escaped. The green and yellow bus hurried on its way to the stop where Coriantes and Dorgunal Avenues met. Eichmann stepped off the bus with Agent A only a few feet behind him. He was totally unaware as he stopped for cigarettes. But thirty seconds later Eichmann’s freedom had ended. Operation Eichmann, in all its stages since the beginning of the pursuit in the autumn of 1959, cost the Israeli taxpayers only one hundred thousand Israeli pounds (about $50,000). No one in Israel grumbled at this expense. “We could have nabbed Eichmann earlier, but we had to be cautious, because our big problem was getting him alive,” said an Israeli in­ telligence official.

PART III

The Man A

Senior, was the father of six sons. He and his wife were bom in Elberfeld, Germany, but soon after their marriage moved to Solingen in the Ruhr region, and it was there that Karl Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19,1906. When Adolf was only four years old his mother died while giving birth to his younger brother. Adolf and his three little brothers were left alone with their father, and had to rely upon the good will of two aunts, who took care of them. Father Eichmann, however, soon decided to leave his sad memories behind, take his children, and start a new life. He sold his home and property and left Solingen for the Austrian town of Linz, where his married sister lived. At first it wasn’t easy for the Eichmann family to become adjusted to the new kind of life they encountered in Linz. Not only were the people different in nature and behavior, but most of them were members of the Roman Catholic Church, and Father Eichmann, who was a devout Protestant, 60 _L A d o l f E i c h m a n n ,

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had to look for a church to which he could take his sons. In his new home, at Number 3 Bischofsstrasse, five-yearold Adolf Eichmann was lonely and somewhat melan­ choly. As a rule, he kept away from playmates, spending much of his time with books in solitude. Once in a while he joined the children of his neighborhood in playing marbles, or ball games, but before long he returned to his secluded comer, where he seemed to be more contented. Eichm anns childhood could hardly be defined as a happy one. Not only was he motherless and introverted, b u t his widowed father could not afford to clothe the children decently, and had little time to keep their shabby clothes in good condition. Adolf had to swallow his pride and accept castoffs from relatives and friends. W hen he was eight, his father m arried again, but his stepmother, who was a harsh, domineering woman, did little to improve his life. Adolf also suffered from the fact th at he was dark-com­ plexioned, almost Semitic-looking, and his schoolmates often taunted him with the cry, “Der kleine Jude” (the little Jew ). A psychiatrist might say that his later fanatic hatred for the Jews stemmed in part from these early incidents. His teachers recalled young Adolf as a boy who hated school and refused to study. They said that he was a strange child, withdrawn from the world around him, preferring to sit alone in the rear of the classroom and daydream. Time after time the boy would be startled out of his reveries by the teacher s stem voice: “Adolf Eichmann, pay attention!” Adolf Eichmann had no real friends. The only boy with whom he could claim as much as a casual relationship was Hans Becker, and even Hans kept his distance. There was never quite enough food at home, and Adolf was a frail child. He never joined in the games or activities of his

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schoolmates; he was always afraid of being hurt. Neglected by his parents, shunned by his classmates, he developed into a problem child whose moods were never understood by his family or his teachers. While every other pupil in class had a nickname, Adolf resented the idea and never allowed his friends to call him by anything shorter than his full name. Nevertheless, behind his back he was called Revolverschnauze ( revolver m uzzle). W hen he was thirteen and a pupil at the W ermingrode public school in Thuringia, his nam ed was mentioned in a local newspaper as one of the leaders of a gang of school­ boys who had cruelly torm ented a Jewish classmate, Ulrich Cohn. The children beat up the Jewish boy, tore his clothes, made him jump in the air while they danced around him. Adolf Eichmann, who was to grow up into a precise, m e­ thodical man, was assigned by his friends to do a meticulous job: keep precise account of each one’s turn to beat the Jewish boy. Eichmann’s name, of course, was at the top of the list. Twenty years later the Jewish boy died in a con­ centration camp by order of the same m an who had made his childhood so miserable. A more gruesome incident occurred when Eichmann had finally finished elementary school and was continuing his studies at the Staatsoberral Schule in Linz. There were two Jewish boys in the class. One of them, Ludwig, was a con­ stant victim of his classmates, led by adolescent Adolf Eich­ mann. One day the boys, encouraged by the anti-Semitic attitude of their teachers, beat up Ludwig in the school yard. As he lay on the ground, battered and bleeding, Eich­ mann placed his foot on the boy’s chest, in the tradition of conquerors. W hen Ludwig was finally able to get up on his feet, he jumped at Adolf and bit his arm. Ludwig was taken home. He never returned to school. Ten days later he was found hanged in his room.

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Adolf’s father changed jobs frequently. He finally saved enough money to open an electrical-supply shop. This did badly, so he sold it and purchased a small gas station. Eventually young Adolf entered the Linz Polytechnic School. Always a poor student, he left after two years and w ent to work for his father in the gas station. Failure was a habit w ith Eichmann, Senior, and it wasn’t long before he had to give up the gas station. For a long time his son walked the streets of Linz, unemployed and disillusioned. In 1925 he was employed by the sales departm ent of the U pper Austrian Electrical Construction Corporation. Two years later he was hired by the Vacuum Oil Company A.G. of U pper Austria, Salzburg, and North Tyrol and worked as a traveling salesman. The most attractive part of his new job was the fact that he was given a motorcycle. His years as a traveling salesman were the first happy ones he had experi­ enced. No longer the shy introvert, he was emerging as a talkative, gregarious m an whose red motorcycle was a familiar sight on the road betw een Vienna and Linz. H e became a habitué of the roadhouses along this route and be­ gan w hat was later to become habitual and heavy drinking. He had to make several business trips to Germany and was greatly impressed by the brown shirts and the red swastikas th at were beginning to appear all over the country. In 1931, having fallen under the hypnotic spell of Adolf Hitler, he joined the illegal Austro-German Veterans’ Association. A year after, following a long session at a roadhouse, he m et w ith a very serious motorcycle accident in which he suffered severe head injuries. He was in a hospital for three months, recovered, and returned to work. He was initiated into the Austrian National Socialist party on April 1,1932. Apparently he inherited the propensity to failure which had always plagued his father, and in 1933 he was discharged from his job.

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“I was fired," Eichmann confides in his memoirs taperecorded in Buenos Aires, “because I was a member of the Austrian Nazi Party.” Dirk von Langen, the German consul in Linz, acknowl­ edged that this was true. The firing did, however, give Eich­ mann a full-time job w ith the Austrian Nazi Party. He was immediately accepted into the ranks of the unofficial Austrian SS, which even then was working tow ard Anschluss. That year he was sworn in by the Reichsführer SS when the latter was inspecting the U pper Austrian SS. There he m et Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was later to become chief of the Reich’s Security Office. K altenbrunner felt th at this intense young m an had the potential to go far, and Eichmann became his protégé. If it had not been for Kaltenbrunner, it seems possible that Adolf Eichmann would have lived and probably died in obscurity. K altenbrunner gave him increasingly im portant work to do. This brought young Eichmann a great sense of satisfaction, but it also brought him to the attention of the Austrian police, who at that tim e were completely loyal to the government. One night in February 1933 there was a heavy knock at Eichmann’s apart­ m ent door. H e knew w hat it was. H e had been expecting it for some time. H e slipped out of a back window and w ith the aid of some of his fellow party members made his way to the German border. The border was heavily patrolled, but he managed to crawl through the tall grass, which hid him. He finally arrived in Berlin, where he immediately joined the Austrian division of the SS, which was training in prepara­ tion for the future invasion of Austria. On Gauleiter G. Bolleck’s recommendation, he was sent on August 1,1933, for military training in Lechfeld-bei-Passau on the GermanAustrian border. On September 29 he was assigned to the SS liaison staff at Passau, but after its dissolution on January 29, 1934, he was assigned to Dachau.

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There once again he was fortunate in meeting a man who could give him a boost up the ladder. This was an officer named Zikem. Like Kaltenbrunner, Zikem felt instinctively that Eichmann would eventually prove to be useful. He recommended that he be sent to the party school in East Prussia. W hen Eichmann returned from the school, strength­ ened by the propaganda th at had been incessantly pum ped into his brain, he was transferred to the German security service and assigned to the Munich office. At first his work was little more than that of a clerk, but he was driven now by a fierce compulsion to become eventually an SS leader. One of the most im portant documents found by Simon W iesenthal in Nuremberg was Eichm ann’s private dossier. A photostatic (docum ented) copy of this dossier made its way into the hands of the Israeli Documentation Bureau in Haifa. I t contains a great deal of information of the man Adolf Eichmann, Number 45326 in the SS and Number 889895 on the list of the Nazi Party. His promotions are all listed in the dossier, together w ith one or two revealing incidents which give clues to his character. On April 22, 1934, at nine p.m. Eichmann went into a Munich tavern to refresh himself w ith a few glasses of beer. It wasn’t long before he got into a fight. An SS officer hap­ pened to be in the tavern that night and the next morning sent a report of what had happened to his superior officer. The report was then filed in the dossier. It read: Tonight a fight occurred in a Munich tavern. Two men entered the tavern and insisted that the proprietor play Jewish records. The owner refused and the two became loudly insistent in their demands. Adolf Eichmann, private first class, was present. Eichmann interfered in the discus­ sion, taking the owner’s viewpoint, objecting to the playing of that type of music. He attacked the two men. I, as an officer of the SS, restored order. At the same time I checked

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Apparently Eichm ann’s superior officers thought that he acted correctly in objecting to the playing of Jewish music, for his dossier does not contain any record of a reprimand. Moreover, he was promoted to sergeant a month later. About this time twenty-eight-year-old Sergeant Eichmann decided it was time he settled down. SS officers who were not married were often overlooked in favor of men with families. Since 1932 he had known a young, attractive girl, Veronika Liebel, who was three years younger than he. She was a native of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. While she was a child her family had moved to Fischendorf near Alt Aussee, east of Salzburg in Austria. Apparently she was not the type of acquiescent blond woman he had been accustomed to, b u t in the SS prospective brides had to be investigated thoroughly before permission to m arry was granted. Eichmann wrote to his superiors (and his letter went into his d ossier): I, the undersigned, herewith request permission to marry Miss Veronika Liebel and attach herewith the necessary documents. I refer these documents for analysis by the In­ stitute to reaffirm the purity of the race. My superior officer is R. Heydrich. I also attach a medical certificate from the physician who has examined the aforementioned girl. (Signed) Adolf Eichmann The examining doctors statement merely said, “Fräulein Veronika Liebel is in perfect health.” On January 23, 1935, SS headquarters answered, “There is no objection to giving Adolf Eichmann approval for his marriage. After examining Veronika Liebel’s racial back­

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ground she has been found fit to become the wife of an SS officer.” While Eichmann was at Passau, Veronika came to see him every week end. Later, when he was transferred to Munich and Berlin, they made Passau their meeting place, and it was there that they were married. Eichmann, a stickler for formality, wrote on May 17, 1935, “I hereby announce in accordance with your reply of Janu­ ary 23, 1935, that I have married Fräulein Veronika Liebel.” The dossier of every SS man contained an analysis of his personality. These were considered top secret and were referred to only when promotion was contemplated. Some of the highlights used in describing Eichmann were: Religion: Does not believe in religion. Race: Nordic. Personality: Sure of himself. Appearance out of Uniform: Correct without fail. General Character Analysis: Objective. Sociable. Ambitious. Training: A first-class expert in his field (Head of Jewish Department of SS). Special Characteristics: Knows how to negotiate and is an expert in relations with organizations. Sports Activities: Received the Sports Decoration of the SA [Nazi Party Militia]. General Note: Has great organizational capabilities in his field. The notation “Received the Sports Decoration of the SA” m eant nothing except that he had passed a physical exami­ nation mandatory for all SS men before each promotion. The SS was very sports-minded, but those who distinguished themselves in competitive games received the “General Sports Decoration.” Eichmann was still not the competitive type when it came to football (soccer), boxing, swimming, or fencing. Apparently he was sensitive about it, for he wrote

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a note of apology which found its way into his dossier: “I hereby announce that due to a broken right arm I was unable to qualify for the General Sports Decoration. I hope by next year I will be more fit, possibly by summer, to earn the Decoration. H erew ith I attach a medical report subm itted by Dr. Rentl which describes my condition.” His explanation was apparently accepted because shortly after that he was promoted and his superior officer wrote, “Because of Eichmann’s physical condition he could not pass the sports test but because of his devoted work and his National Socialistic ideals this fact should not stand in his way.” After their marriage the Eichmanns lived in a villa on the outskirts of Berlin, where Veronika later gave birth to their first son, Klaus. Frau Eichmann was a typical Hausfrau in the Nazi tradition. She was interested only in her husband, her children, and her kitchen. She bore him three sons— Klaus, Horst, and D ieter—and although her husband wor­ shiped the three boys he gradually grew indifferent to his wife, who had no interest in the social or political life he was leading. By now Eichmann had become a meticulously dressed man, impressive in his always well-pressed uniform and glistening boots. Women found him attractive, and he was receptive to their charms. H e had the short but intense affair with Frau Mistelbach in Austria which years later would come back to haunt him. There were several girls in Berlin to whom he gave fleeting attention. H e was easily infatuated and just as easily bored. In spite of his constant infidelity he made it a point to spend nearly every week end with his family in Prague. There is no question about his love for and pride in his three sons. It was politically expedient for an SS officer to sire three sons to give to the Third Reich.

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Eichm anns job at this point wasn’t very important. He did little more than type out index files giving data on Freemasons, who were under constant surveillance because of their liberal democratic ideas. They were organized as a semi-secret body with their own codes and signs. As such they became the nucleus of an opposition movement to the Nazi government. He did this small chore well and learned a great deal about the SS organizational procedures. Eichmann realized that to progress higher he would have to master a specialty, and he was smart enough to select the “Jewish question.” The man who had once scorned education now resolved to study the whole Jewish social structure in Germany and every other European country, as well as the organization of Zionism. He read every book on Jewish affairs that he could obtain and even took lessons in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He did develop a fair knowledge of Yiddish but never went beyond a little elementary Hebrew. W ithin two years he no doubt knew as much about Zionism and Jewish internal affairs as any student of Jewish lore. W hen Himmler decided to establish the “Scientific Mu­ seum for Jewish Affairs” in the SD, Eichmann applied for and was appointed to head the project. His immediate superior was Sturmbannführer Six, who made a request on his behalf in 1937: Berlin, 18 June, 1937 Subject: Translations Modem Hebrew-German. SS Hauptscharführer Eichmann, after teaching himself basic Modem Hebrew, has previously asked for permission to continue his studies with the help of a rabbi, for the pe­ riod of one year, since at that time there was no possibility of obtaining an Aryan teacher. This application was denied. Eichmann continued studying by himself, a more difficult and time-consuming method. In order to enable this SD man to acquire the knowledge

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of Hebrew in speech and writing, we hereby ask that the possibility of continuing his studies with the additional aid of a rabbi be checked, and the necessary means (approxi­ mately 3 marks per hour) supplied. His request was turned down, but Eichmann continued his intensive study of the Jews of Europe in general and the Jews of Germany in particular. He obtained a very thorough understanding of the subtle distinctions among the major groups within the world-wide Zionist movement. Once he even gave a speech to the Jewish section, defining the differ­ ence between “Poalei-Zion” and “Tzeirei-Zion” (tw o small factions in one of the major Zionist movements). Eichmann received several promotions and rapidly gained a reputation as an expert on the “Jewish question.” By now the Nazis had established a special Palestinian and M iddle Eastern intelligence section in the SD under the leadership of Theodor von Mildenstein, who had worked in Palestine as a German intelligence officer for three years. Eichmann had become an astute manipulator. He knew which men to flatter, which to ignore. He decided that Von Mildenstein was the man to work for. About this time a small incident occurred that gave the basis to the so-called “Palestinian legend.” H auptm ann Hans Glück stopped Eichmann in the corridor of the Berlin Ge­ stapo building one afternoon. He had met him once at a party where Eichmann had been very articulate in discussing the “Jewish question.” “Heil Hitler,” Glück said in the then obligatory greeting. “Heil Hitler, H auptm ann Glück,” Eichmann replied, click­ ing the heels of his boots together. The two shook hands, and Glück, remembering Eichm anns conversation at the party, asked, “W hat is the secret of your great knowledge of Jewish affairs?”

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Eichmann thought quickly and responded, “I was born in Sarona. That is a German Templar colony near Tel Aviv in Palestine.” Hauptm ann Glück was greatly impressed. He spread the word, and within a few months the legend had spread. Eichmann was now thought to be the best authority on the “Jewish problem” in the SD. Even Von Mildenstein believed the legend. One morning in 1937 he summoned Eichmann to his office. “I think I have a job for you which your special talents fit,” he said. “Our intelligence organization working in the Middle East needs a strong hand. It also needs a man to head it up. That’s what I have in mind for you. I have w ritten this suggestion to headquarters. Do you like the idea?” Eichmann’s face showed his gratitude. A month later Gestapo headquarters ordered H aupt­ scharführer Eichmann and one of his office colleagues, Ober­ scharführer Hans Hagen, to prepare to leave for Palestine. Their preparations are outlined in the following corre­ spondence: From: Secret Commando 1 July 1937 To: The Director of the Central Dept. I 4 Through: SS Oberführer Albert Subject: The trip of Eichmann and Hagen to Palestine After the Gruppenführer approved the trip, an approxi­ mate calculation of their expenses was made: 1. The expense for the trip itself, via Munich-Naples-Alexandria-Cairo-Jerusalem-Haifa-Trieste-Berlin, amounts to about 680 marks for each. Total: 1360 marks. 2. Other expenses (hotels, restaurants, etc.) approximately 130 pounds or about 2000 marks. Therefore we hereby ask you to pay the Director of the

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MINISTER OF DEATH Central Department II-l, or his representative, the sum of 3600 marks. The account will be settled after their return. The Director of the Central Department II-l Officer in Charge SS Hauptsturmführer

Eichmann always lived beyond his means, and his appetite for good living had increased. By now he was a habitué of the Adlon Hotel Bar and of the great restaurant H orchers, and he was usually accompanied by a comely blond girl. He saw in this proposed trip not only an opportunity for official promotion but an opportunity to increase his w ard­ robe. He wrote to his immediate superior: To: The Director of the Central Department II-l Subject: Trip Abroad For the purpose of the trip abroad that has already been certified, there is an urgent need to add to my wardrobe. Since 111 have to come in contact with Arab princes and the like, I will need a light suit, a dark suit and a trench coat. Therefore I ask for an allowance, the amount of which is to be computed when I arrive there. Whatever is left, if any­ thing, I ask you to regard as a loan which 111 pay back in installments. (Signed) Adolf Eichmann SS Hauptscharführer Eichm anns request for a new wardrobe was turned down. On the margin of the memorandum he had w ritten was scrawled in pencil, “Denied for reasons of principle by the Director of Central Departm ent II-l.” SS Sturmbannführer Six sent a list of instructions to Von Mildenstein as to how Eichmann and Hagen should conduct themselves. It read: Berlin, 4 September 1937 Subject: The Trip of Eichmann and Hagen The plan was again submitted on September 3, 1937, to C.,

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who approved the expense account (according to the note of Untersturmführer Schellenberg of 4 September 1937). With regard to this, C. notified us that he does not take upon himself any responsibility, and all responsibility will rest with Untersturmführer Schellenberg and II-l. Therefore, clear directions must be given to Hagen and Eichmann, telling them to act with caution and discretion. They must be told not to become involved in difficult situa­ tions. In the event that it proves necessary, they are to halt the trip before its completion. Written notes of any sort must be avoided, as well as conversations in public places or in their hotel rooms. During the entire trip, words such as SS, SD, and Gestapo must not be mentioned. Hagen and Eich­ mann are not to send postcards to acquaintances who live at or near the post where they served nor to any other acquain­ tance nor to members of the SS or SD. For emergency one address should be decided upon, per­ haps that of SS Hauptsturmführer Ehrlinger. (Signed) Six SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Reichart headed the German intelligence forces in Palestine. His cover job was director of the German tele­ graphic agency in Jerusalem. His specialty was to cement good relations with the M ufti of Jerusalem and other Arab officials. His assistant, O tto von Butschwing, was os­ tensibly the owner of a building-supplies shop in Jaffa. His principal assignment was to get acquainted with members of the Haganah in hopes of finding some who would work with the Gestapo. Feivel Polkes, today an Israeli citizen whose Hebrew name is Feivel Poles, then a commander in the Haganah, was brought by Von Butschwing to Dr. Reichart. The two men became acquainted. At that time this policy coincided with the desires of the Third Reich. By now Reichart had been in­ formed that Adolf Eichmann and Hans Hagen would be

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leaving for Palestine soon. He suggested that Polkes visit SS headquarters in Berlin and see Eichmann. W hen Polkes agreed, Reichart gave him eighteen Palestinian pounds as expense money. Polkes arrived in Berlin and immediately got in touch with Eichmann, who was very impressed by his intelligence. Polkes gave him considerable information (which may not have been true) about the intelligence setup of the Haganah. Polkes said th at he would cooperate if Jewish immigration from Germany to Palestine were directed by the German authorities themselves. Eichmann wrote his impression of the Palestinian to his superiors: “In spite of his race, he is a true National Socialist in his soul. The H aganah is the most efficient intelligence service in the circles of world Jewry, particularly of Jewry in the Middle East. The Haganah often cooperates with French and British intelligence services but works against them when a conflict of interests arises.” Polkes, in the name of the Haganah, invited Eichmann and Hagen to visit Palestine. He said th at the two SS men would be able to inspect all Jewish organizations and learn of their activities. They would be able to examine the settle­ ments developed by Jewish immigrants and would be con­ sidered guests of the Jewish community. Eichmann wrote a report to Sturm bannführer Six, who forwarded his recom­ mendations to his superior officer: Secret Commando Affair: Berlin, 17 June 1937 Stamp: Chief Secret Police Personnel Subject: Polkes, Feivel, Tel Aviv. Bom 11 September 1900 in Sokal, Poland Previous Reference: None The above-mentioned Jew, who works as a central figure in the Jewish intelligence service, Haganah, was known here while visiting Berlin between February 26 and March 2,

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1937, as referred by Dr. Reichart, correspondent for the DNB [the German telegraphic agency]. Following the contact which was made with him at that time, it was found that Polkes is well acquainted with all im­ portant matters occurring in the Jewish world. The Gestapo (II 94) formulated a plan to enlist Polkes as a steady source of information for the Security Service. Biographical Data on Polkes: Polkes was born on September 11, 1900, in Sokal, Poland (according to his passport in Tel Aviv and in Kloster-Neuburg). After he finished his studies in the 8th class of the Jewish Gymnasium in Lemberg on April 26, 1920, he passed the matriculation examinations. He seems afterward to have emigrated to Palestine, because in 1921 he passed the en­ trance examinations for the Haganah underground of the Palestinian Zionists. From 1923 and until May 23, 1928, he worked, according to documents in his possession, as an accountant in the ac­ counting office of the “Sinai Military Railway.” From there he was transferred in 1928 to the “Palestine Railways” when the latter took charge of the office he worked in. As of now, he is active in the Jewish intelligence service, Haganah. As he claims, he was in charge during the last Arabic rebellion of the entire self-defense network of Palestinian Jewry. In February-March 1937 he left as a courier for the Haga­ nah for a trip to Europe and the United States, but he never reached the United States, having been urgently recalled to his country. Our Security Service in Palestine made contact with him. In conversations with him (in the beginning he did not know that he was talking to Security Service agents), it was learned that because of his important standing in the Haga­ nah, Polkes knows about all important affairs in the Jewish

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world. He noted that the Haganah’s objective is to reach, as soon as possible, a Jewish majority in Palestine. Therefore, he worked as this objective required, with or against the British intelligence Service and the Süreté Général, with Germany and Italy. He stated that he is ready to serve Germany and supply information as long as this does not affect his political goal. Among other things he is ready actually to stand by the interests of the German foreign policy in the Middle East. He will try to give to the German Reich the oil sources with­ out affecting the British regions of influence, and all this on the condition that Germany will assist Jewish immigration to Palestine and on the condition that Germany also ease the monetary regulations toward these Jewish emigrants. From the above-mentioned explanations it seems that Polkes is ready to provide us with important information for a reasonable reward. His standing assures that in this way important information and material will reach us con­ cerning the world Jewry plans. To make the contact we suggest SS Hauptscharführer Eichmann, who was in charge of the previous conversation with Polkes while in Berlin and was invited by the latter to visit Jewish settlements in Palestine as his guest. Because Polkes, according to information from Palestine, is thought of as needed and important to the situation, it will be impossible to contact him on neutral grounds. There­ fore, the only way to enroll Polkes will be direct contact with him while making a trip to Palestine. For this trip it is possible to get two free tickets from the leader of the Palestine Zionists and Director of Bank Ivriah, Karski, but this might be unwise, since it might reveal that the people visiting Polkes are Gestapo men. Despite the savings in expenses that could be accom­ plished by this, it is advisable that the Security Service itself cover the travel expenses. If the trip is acknowledged, SS Hauptscharführer Eichmann will be accompanied by an­

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other expert. The couriers will receive press cards, and the most advisable cards will be those of Frankfurter Zeitung or the Berliner Tageblatt. The report contained details of further conversations with Polkes in which he was asked to supply information on the plans of the Jews concerning the economical boycott, and the so-called plots against the lives of the leaders of the Nazi Party. One very interesting part dealing with the Jewish set­ tlem ent project in Palestine stated, “The knowledge of these facts about the settlement is viewed as especially im portant because after the proclamation of a Jewish state or a Jewish regime in Palestine, a new political opponent of Germany will rise which will be able to influence Middle Eastern policy. Furthermore, the establishment of a Jewish state m ight worsen the problem of the Jews residing in Germany.” The change in German policy was further discussed in the report, which proclaimed Germany’s willingness to put pres­ sure on the representatives of German Jewry, who would direct immigration of their people to Palestine, and also to support Polkes’s plans for the achievement of a Jewish majority in Palestine. Also discussed was the promise of the Germans to release Jewish prisoners suspected of belonging to the Haganah. Shortly thereafter Polkes returned to Palestine. Eichmann and Hagen found it easy to obtain visas to Palestine with the help of their spurious press credentials. They had no trouble passing the Palestine customs, but, unknown to them, British intelligence agents were waiting for them at the exit gate. They never lost sight of the two German agents. Eichmann and Hagen met with Dr. Reichart, who gave them a full report on the Palestine situation. He also told them ruefully that Von Butschwing had been arrested by British agents and deported to Germany. On the same day Eichmann and

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Hagen met w ith Polkes, who took them to visit a kibbutz. Eichmann had a great vision of forming a spy network throughout the Middle East, but the next day the British arrested him and H agen and they were summarily deported. They were sent back by way of Cairo. W hile in Cairo, Eichmann m et the M ufti of Jerusalem. This was the begin­ ning of a friendship th at would last all during the war, for the Mufti was a firm believer in National Socialism and a great admirer of Hitler. Strangely enough, Feivel Polkes followed the two Germans to Cairo. The mystery surround­ ing the Feivel Polkes affair will probably be unraveled at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. A month later Eichmann, w ith Hagen, returned to Berlin. Although his mission had been a complete failure, he did bring back a long report filled w ith information and mis­ information he had received from Feivel Polkes and also from Dr. Reichart. H e laid the blame for the failure of the mission on Palestinians who had been on the Gestapo pay­ roll but who had obviously tipped off the British as to who Eichmann and H agen were. In his memoirs dictated in Argentina, Eichmann had this to say about his trip to Pales­ tine: “I stood on the top of Mount Carmel and looked down upon the refineries of Haifa and the landscape around me and w hat I saw there truly impressed me. I was astounded at the Jewish development, prosperity, and Lebenswille, being myself an idealist.” Eichmann always had the knack of turning seeming defeat into victory, and his superiors actually thought th at the mission had been a profitable one. Part of a report his su­ perior in Berlin w rote follows: As the experience of the visit in Egypt has proved, there are wide and promising possibilities for the establishment of an intelligence network there which will encompass the Middle East. Therefore, we hereby suggest a consideration

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of the possibility of recruiting SD men proficient in lan­ guages, as assistants in the offices of the DNV. From conversations with local directors of the DNV it has been made clear they believe this plan feasible. If this arrangement is possible and its efficiency demon­ strated, we may be able to extend this method of operation, with the agreement of the DNV, to all agencies abroad. Eichmann was still regarded as the foremost authority on issues dealing with Judaism. O berführer Naumann, com­ mander of the SS in northern Austria, requested his services. One of the heads of the SS in Berlin replied to Naumann, and a copy of this reply was filed in Eichmann’s dossier. (Strangely, it bore no signature. The probability is th at it was w ritten by Sturmbannführer Six.) D ated May 16, 1938, it read: Dear Comrade Naumann: I was just informed that you intend to appoint SS Unter­ sturmführer Eichmann to the post of Department Director in the southern region of Linz and to replace him in Berlin with Kronberger. I am sorry to inform you that I initially agreed to Eichmann’s transfer to the northern region of Austria only on the assumption that he would be entrusted with central supervision of the Jewish problem in this re­ gion. The concentration of Jews in Vienna requires the presence of an expert like Eichmann. I want you to understand that I did not easily relinquish the services of an expert such as Eichmann in the head office, and that he is still indispensable in this office since I have found no replacement for him. On March 11, 1938, Seyss-Inquart seized power in Austria. Eichmann was immediately sent to Vienna. He flew from Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport in company with the top SS leaders, including Himmler and Heydrich.

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Three days after Seyss-Inquart’s coup, H itler arrived in Vienna to arrange for the Anschluss. There he was given a tumultuous reception by his fellow countrymen. Himmler and Heydrich had already left for Linz to prepare a great demonstration to welcome Hitler back to his childhood home. They took Adolf Eichmann with them, and because of his acquaintance w ith Linz and its officials they put him in charge of protocol. This marked Eichmann’s sudden rise to glory. The backward boy from Linz was now adm ired by the whole town and was seen constantly in the company of Himmler, preparing for the reception of the great Adolf Hitler. After the frantic celebration in Linz was over, Hitler signed the Anschluss proclamation. In the terror following the Anschluss several hundred Jews had been killed and about twenty thousand who were con­ sidered to be dangerous had been sent to German concentra­ tion camps. Eichmann, who was showing an increasing talent for administration, suggested to Heydrich, who was in charge of the Gestapo bureau in Vienna, that the numerous bureaus concerned with immigration be consolidated into a single Gestapo departm ent. This, he said, would speed up Jewish immigration. H eydrich accepted his plan and p u t him in charge of w hat was called the Central Office for Jewish Im ­ migration. Now Eichmann was given the responsibility for the entire Austrian Jewish community, the second largest in Europe. At first he handled the Jewish leaders very tactfully, saying that he w anted their cooperation. He appointed Pro­ fessor Adolf Boehm, one of Vienna’s leading Jewish citizens, to head all the various Zionist and Jewish organizations. Shortly thereafter he told Boehm to summon all the other Jewish leaders to his office. These men were searched by Gestapo guards upon their arrival and then lined up along a dimly lit corridor leading to Eichmann’s office. They were

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finally led into Eichmann’s presence by Dr. Alois Ruttenberg, director of the Palestine office in Vienna. Eichmann asked each man the exact purpose of the organization he headed and num ber of members in each group. M. Henish, a leader of the Austrian branch of the PoaleiZion, recalls that meeting vividly. “During the question­ ing I put my hand in my pocket to get a handkerchief,” he said. “Eichmann shouted at me to get my hand out of my pocket. It was a sign of his insecurity. Even though we had all been thoroughly searched he was apparently in fear of assassination. I noticed Adolf Boehm sitting in the com er of the room. I looked at him but he averted his eyes and stared at Eichmann. This was th e last time we ever saw Boehm. A few days later, having completely lost his sanity, he was sent to a sanitarium. He felt th at in cooperating with Eichm ann he had been a traitor to his people, and it was obviously these feelings of guilt and remorse th at led to his breakdown.” The Central Office for Jewish immigration was located in the Palais de Rothschild in Vienna. Any Jew who wished to em igrate had to apply there for exit visas and had to pay w hat was called a “flight tax,” which m eant confiscation of virtually all his property and money. Eichmann, always a paradox, told his Viennese staff to treat the Jewish applicants courteously. But occasionally he acted in a most irrational way. One day three Jewish gentlemen were standing in a room on one of the upper floors of the Palais de Rothschild. A young SS officer, his face red with anger, approached them. H e ordered them to pick up three Gestapo helmets that lay in one com er of the room and put them on. He then held out a Bible, made them lay their hands upon it, and then told them to swear their loyalty to the Gestapo. The three men obeyed. After this unusual ceremony the SS officer relaxed

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and shook hands with each man. Then he handed them docu­ ments giving them free access to all Gestapo offices. He scribbled his signature on each; the signature was Adolf Eichmann. One of the three gentlemen was Gershon Fried­ man, who now lives in Natanya, Israel. “The incident made no sense at all,” Friedman says, “but during those first few months of the Anschluss many things happened which made no sense. One day I saw a large crowd outside the Jewish community headquarters. W hen I neared the building I saw a few squads of German soldiers assigned to guard the headquarters trying to prevent about an equal num ber of SS men from entering the building. The SS men said they w anted a list of every Jewish resident in Vienna. After a bitter fight the SS emerged victorious. Some of them entered the building, while others who remained outside struck haphazardly at the Jews who were watching. Sud­ denly I saw one of them hitting a frail old woman and I rushed to her aid.” Friedman, a tall blond man, was a perfect example of the Nordic German. W hen he put himself between the SS man and the old woman the German looked at him in amazement and asked why he bothered to defend this Jewess. Friedm an didn’t hesitate. " Im a Jew,” he said simply. He was immedi­ ately arrested and brought before Commissar Malik at Gestapo headquarters. “I naturally expected to be either executed, thrown into prison, or sent to a concentration camp,” Friedman says now, “but to my surprise Malik was friendly and genial. He asked me to help the Gestapo establish law and order in the chaotic city of Vienna. He even gave me a special signed document authorizing me to do this.” Friedman m ade good use of his two documents. Some of the Jews who applied for exit visas were arbitrarily denied them, and the Gestapo clerks stamped these applications

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with a huge D (transportation to D achau); the approved applications were stamped with the initials PD. Friedm an discovered that the poorly paid Gestapo men were not averse to accepting bribes. By judicious bribery he managed to ob­ tain one of the stamps used to approve applications seeking asylum outside Austria. Then he himself stamped the ap­ proved PD instead of the death sentence D on the applica­ tions. Again and again he saved fellow Jews with the use of this stamp. Then he took a big gamble. He made an appointment with Eichmann, handed him a bulky envelope, and said gravely, “I plead with you to facilitate the approval of emigration applications. I know that to do this you will have to hire extra clerks. I would be very happy to pay their salaries.” Eichmann opened the envelope, blinked, smiled with satis­ faction, and said, “Thank you, H err Friedman. This will help a great deal.” Friedm an collected money from every Austrian Jew he knew, and every now and then he would go to Eichmann’s office and repeat the fiction of wishing to pay for the addi­ tional clerks. One day during one of these visits Eichmann turned to him and asked curiously, “Aren’t you afraid of me, Friedm an?” Friedm an smiled and said with a confidence that he did not feel, “Not at all, H err Obersturmführer.” Actually Friedman lived in constant dread that the per­ mits he had forged which were in the emigration files at headquarters would be discovered and traced to him. He decided to do one more job of forgery. Once again he found the right clerk to bribe. He obtained an emigration permit, filled it out himself, and stamped it with the magic letters PD. The clerk gave him full value for his money. He tipped him off that he had heard rumors that Friedman would soon be arrested. Two days later Friedman, with his very authen­

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tic-looking emigration permit, left Austria and headed for Palestine. A bit later Moshe Auerbach, who had been a youth in­ structor in a Palestinian kibbutz, arrived in Vienna. His forged documents identified him as “Braverman,” which had been his code name in Palestine. He went first to the Halutz (the Youth Pioneering M ovement) headquarters. He had come w ith orders to supplement w hat was known as Umschlag (the change from useless occupations to produc­ tive ones). Eichmann had shown some interest in the inclu­ sion of the Jewish youth in the framework of this plan to increase agricultural and industrial production. Braverman had his instructions from Palestine. Through the leaders of the Halutz he m ade an appointment w ith Eichmann. He had been well briefed as to how to conduct himself. He entered Eichmann’s office, stopped a few feet from his desk, came to attention, and saluted him smartly. “Come closer,” Eichmann snapped. Young Braverman took a step forward and stopped. “I said come closer!” Eichmann shouted. “I am a Jew,” Braverman said coldly. Years later this cou­ rageous young m an would be known to Nazi officers as der W ilde von der syrischen Grenze—the wild man from the Syrian border. Eichmann pointed to a chair and ordered him to sit down. Then he showered Braverman with a swift series of ques­ tions. How long had he lived in Palestine? W here had he been bom? W hat had his job been in Palestine? He listened attentively to Braverman’s answers. “The H alutz is interested in teaching a thousand Jewish youths of Austria agricultural and vocational work,” Braver­ man explained, “in order to bring them into Palestine trained to help build our country.” Eichmann nodded approvingly. “While these youngsters

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train they could be producing, and then if they could be sent to Palestine it would mean another thousand Jews out of Austria.” Eichmann’s chief aim at this time continued to be emi­ gration rather than deportation. He had no compunction about sending Jews he thought to be dangerous to concen­ tration camps or to death, but he saw no reason why he should not get some useful work out of a thousand young Jews before deporting them. “How will you transport these young men and women to Palestine?” he asked. “How will you get ships and get them through the British blockade?” “If you approve of our plan,” Braverman said gravely, “I guarantee the transportation will be arranged. We have friends in Italy and Greece who will take us there.” Eichm ann nodded. “All right, Braverman, but keep in mind that your only interest is in the training of youth.” Eichmann gave every means of cooperation, and soon a thousand youngsters were working on farms and in factories. W ith the approval of Jewish leaders in Palestine, including David Ben-Gurion, Braverman later found Gestapo members more cooperative than Eichmann in issuing exit visas, and thus succeeded in getting many of his people to Palestine. A native-born Viennese, Moshe Galili, now living in Israel, was one of the heads of another movement to get the youth out of Austria. He helped organize the famous ‘youth train,” w ith the help of Eichmann, but as the date for de­ parture approached Eichmann became apprehensive. He called Moshe Galili to his office. “W hat happens if the transport fails? Will failure create a disturbance throughout the world?” Eichmann asked. “Everything has been arranged,” Galili said. “The one thing we haven’t been able to arrange, of course, is the train

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to take them to Athens, where their ship will be waiting to take them to Palestine.” “On what day do you want the train?” Eichmann asked. W hen Galili told him, Eichmann reached for the phone and gave crisp orders that a train should be ready on the ap­ pointed day. H e also ordered that SS troops surround the railway station to protect these thousand young men and women. Galili found it hard to believe that this slight, well-dressed, courteous man could at times show himself to be completely evil. The train was ready on schedule. Eichmann was show­ ing himself to be a firm supporter of illegal immigration. He not only was, of course, desirous of ridding Austria of Jews but also liked the idea of embarrassing the British. The train arrived safely in Athens, and a few days later the emigrants boarded three small ships and, after evading Britain’s Coast Guard cutters, landed safely on the shores of Palestine. In the summer of 1938 two young Palestinians arrived in Europe to arrange for further immigration of Jews to Pales­ tine. They were M. Bar Gilead and A. Pino. Bar Gilead went to Vienna and Pino to Berlin. Both were successful in en­ listing the aid of the Gestapo in helping Jews to enter Pales­ tine illegally. Eichman was especially cooperative during this period and agreed to let them set up training camps to prepare future emigrants for life in Palestine. On one occa­ sion he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for the young Jews. It seemed almost as though he were protecting the Jews, but Bar Gilead did not know that Eichmann was behind “Jewish Emigration for Money”—red tape involved in emigrating could be elimi­ nated for a certain price. Eichmann w anted Bar Gilead to do nothing but establish camps, but he used the Gestapo to organize transports. Furi-

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ous at this, Eichmann called Bar Gilead into his office and told him to leave the country immediately. “Sie verschwinden oder ich werde Sie verschwinden ma­ chen!” (Either you disappear or I will make you disappear!) he shouted at him. Bar Gilead left the country and w ent to Switzerland. Strangely enough, Eichmann said that while he found Jews in general rather a despicable lot, he liked the young Zionists, especially the members of Halutz. “They were good biological material.” Eichmann’s activities in Vienna and the fact that he had raised huge sums of money from the 97,000 Jews who had left the country brought him into high favor with his su­ perior, Reinhard Heydrich. W hen Eichmann proposed a plan for getting rid of another thousand Jews, Heydrich enthusi­ astically endorsed it. These would be only Jews who could pay for their transport. They were to be sent on the H am ­ burg-Amerika liner St. Louis, leaving H am burg with orders to sail for the West Indies. Each refugee had to pay $165 for first-class fare or $140 for second-class fare and put up an additional $120 against the possibility th at the ship would have to return to Germany. If the emigrants had other money or property it was confiscated. Each of the 907 passengers was given $11 to help him start a new life abroad. The St. Louis arrived in Cuba, but the Cuban authorities insisted that her passengers put up $15,000 in cash as a guarantee that they would not become burdens on th e state. As they were unable to do this, they were not allowed to land, and the St. Louis turned toward the Dominican Republic. The same situation prevailed there. Pleas to the United States, Canada, and the South American countries to grant these refugees asylum were in vain. Various “technical” reasons were given—immigration quotas, and opposition by profes­ sional and labor groups to being flooded w ith foreign com­

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petition. The situation was one of the greatest examples of man’s inhumanity to man in the tw entieth century. The German government ordered the ship to return. A great many of the passengers had vowed to jump into the sea rather than disembark in Germany. This elicited the sym­ pathy of Holland, Belgium, and France, and these countries agreed to grant temporary asylum to the refugees, “pending final arrangements for their emigration.” For the moment they were saved, but when the Germans overran Belgium, Holland, and France the St. Louis passengers were all sent to concentration camps and extermination. Back in Vienna the unpredictable Adolf Eichmann re­ ceived Chaim Berls, Director of the Immigration D epart­ m ent of the Jewish Agency, and Dr. Ruttenberg, President of the Palestine office in Vienna. One of the greatest Jew­ ish shrines in the world is the Viennese tomb of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism. Several times hooligans had at­ tem pted to vandalize H erzl’s grave. W hen an opportunity presented itself during the conversation, the two m en told Eichmann that an Italian shipping company had promised to transfer Herzl’s remains to Rome w ithout cost. They begged Eichmann either to allow the remains to be transferred or to give an order to keep the grave from being desecrated. Eichmann had a small bookcase in his office. He walked to it and removed one of the books. “I know all about Theodor Herzl from this book w ritten by Professor Adolf Boehm. I’ll think it over and remember your request.” The next day Eichmann issued an order saying that any­ one who desecrated the grave would be punished. Several months later ten Viennese Jews were perm itted to visit Herzl’s grave on the thirty-fifth anniversaiy of his death in Austria. The sole survivor of this group, Dr. Daniel Brunner, in charge of internal medicine in Donolo Hospital in Jaffa, says that w hen the small group entered the Jewish cemetery

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they were astonished to find Adolf Eichmann standing there alone. While the ten performed a commemorative ceremony Eichmann stood there quietly. He left without saying a single word. The grave was never molested, and after the war the remains of Theodor Herzl were transferred to a perm anent resting place in Palestine. Then on March 15, 1939, the Germans occupied Czecho­ slovakia. On July 26, 1939, Eichmann officially opened the Central Office for Jewish Immigration in the building of the Jewish Community Council in Prague. His job was to force every Jew in the country to leave Czechoslovakia. Of course the Jews’ property was first confiscated. Thousands were p u t aboard German ships w ith bogus visas for Latin American countries or with British permits to enter Palestine. Eich­ mann negotiated almost daily w ith Dr. Kapka, president of the Prague Jewish Community Council. As the deported Jews had no money, it was up to the Community Coun­ cil to pay the tax on each person leaving the country. Dr. Kapka protested that the funds of the council had been blocked by the German authorities and he expressed his doubt about the capabilities of the council to raise any more. Eichm ann answered (as sworn to by Dr. Kapka in London in 1945), “If you do not get these Jews out of the country I will order the arrest of three hundred men per day and I will send them to Dachau and Merkelgrün, where I am sure they will become very enthusiastic about emigration.” Somehow the money was forthcoming. Czechoslovakian Jewry was completely stripped of its property and personal possessions. For the first time Eichmann had real power, and he enjoyed it to the fullest. He became more ruthless. While waiting in line for exit visas, Jews were pushed, beaten, and cursed. It was difficult to find countries that would accept the Jews

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of Czechoslovakia. Most of the civilized world refused to adm it penniless refugees. Argentina and Chile were the most generous in establishing large immigration quotas. The United States and Canada accepted only a token num ber of refugees. Most countries insisted th at a refugee show a cer­ tificate of land ownership or required th at he p ut up enough money to guarantee his independence so as not to become a burden on the country to which he was going. Eichmann left the dirty work to the Gestapo. H e moved in Czech society, elegantly dressed in civilian clothes, and con­ ferred w ith bank representatives on the value of confiscated property. H e m ade it a point to force rich Jews to finance the emigration of poor ones. The only answer th at would save thousands of lives was illegal immigration. Naftali Palatin, a medical student at the University of Prague, was selected to organize this. H e knew that Eichmann’s main objective was to remove Jews from Czechoslovakia and he felt that Eichmann did not much care how they were removed as long as each one paid a tax. H e decided on a bold move. He would go to see Eichm ann himself. He w rote to him and was invited to appear at Ge­ stapo headquarters. Armed SS guards escorted him to the third floor and ordered him to stand at attention in front of a door. Finally the door opened. He was alone w ith Adolf Eichmann. Eichm ann spoke smoothly and gracefully, as though sympathizing w ith the young medical student. He listened to Palatin’s story that he had secured visas for 350 Jews, that they were all ready to go, and th at negotiations were being m ade for a ship to take them to South America. Eichmann smiled and said, “Yes, I know who issued you those visas to the South American country but I w ant to ask you where you are really going. Don’t bother answering. I know exactly where you intend to go—Palestine.” Eichmann was affable; smiling, he asked Palatin a great

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many questions about the objectives of Zionism. Then he instructed Palatin to go downstairs and take all the necessary forms for the new emigration certificates. Palatin was en­ couraged by the meeting and was convinced that Eichmann was an anxious as he to permit the transport to leave. He enlarged his original list of 350 passengers to 550. The emi­ gration certificates were all prepared, and Palatin was again summoned to report to Eichmann. But this was a different Adolf Eichmann. “So it’s you again, Palatin,” he snapped. ‘‘W hen are you leaving?” “W e are just finishing filling out the necessary documents.” “You are a liar,” Eichmann shouted. “The documents are all ready. If you don’t leave the country within fourteen days none of you will ever leave! Do you understand?” Palatin could only nod glumly and leave the office. Eich­ mann was right. The documents were all completed, but so far no ship was available. The Irgun Zvi Leumi headquarters in Palestine (in charge of illegal immigration) was trying desperately to find a ship. Finally from headquarters came an order that dismayed the young medical student. He was ordered to leave Czechoslovakia and to go with the others on the transport, accompanied by his wife; the same orders forbade him to take Adina, their six-month-old daughter. In fact headquarters had decided th at no children under four would leave on the transport. There was the possibility that the ship might be stopped on the high seas and would have to fight its way to freedom, and very young children would prove a handicap. Palatin determ ined to see Eichmann again and ask permission for his wife to take their baby to its grandparents in Latvia and to return in time for the depar­ ture of the transport. Again he was summoned to the spacious villa where Eich­ mann had his office. Once more he was ordered to wait be­

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fore the door of the office. Suddenly a sergeant and two sol­ diers armed w ith rifles and fixed bayonets appeared in the corridor. “Are you the Jewish swine named Palatin?” the sergeant asked. “Yes,” the medical student answered. “Come with us,” ordered the sergeant. W hereupon they led him down the stairs and out of the villa. They circled the building and reached the door to the cellar. Palatin had re­ signed himself to death. The sergeant ordered, “Knock on the door!” Palatin knocked, and an old Czechoslovakian woman opened it. The sergeant shouted, “Ask her for pruning shears!” Pala­ tin asked her for the shears, wondering what kind of hideous execution they had planned for him. The old woman disap­ peared and returned a moment later, carrying the shears. Then Palatin was ordered to retrace his steps to the third floor of the villa. Prodded with the bayonets, he went up the three flights of stairs and again stood before Eichmann’s office. The soldiers snatched the shears from his hands. This time Eichmann opened the door himself and motioned for Palatin to enter the room. Eichmann walked around behind the table, looked at Palatin’s understandably pale face, and burst out laughing. Then he shouted, “W hat did you need the shears for? W hat were you going to do with them? You appear fright­ ened. Why? W hy did you ask for the shears?” Palatin could never rationalize the episode of the shears. Was Eichmann drunk and in his drunken fancy trying to frighten him by playing a practical joke, or was a sadistic streak in his nature, dormant until now, beginning to assert itself? Eichmann finally calmed down and listened to Palatin’s request for exit and re-entry permits for his wife. Again Eichmann burst out laughing and asked, “W hat kind

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of solution is it to send a child to Latvia? How long do you think it will be before we arrive there? Now I want to show you something.” From the table he picked up a Hebrewlanguage newspaper, The Daily Davar of Tel Aviv. He threw it on the table. “Read this story, Jew,” Eichmann shouted. “Read it, it is in your language—Hebrew.” “I don’t know a word of Hebrew,” Palatin said quite frankly. “W hat, you don’t know H ebrew?” Eichmann screamed. “Then why are you going to Palestine? W hat language will you speak? German, perhaps. It is the most beautiful lan­ guage in the world, but not many people in Palestine speak it.” Eichmann took the newspaper back into his hands. “For your benefit I will translate the contents of this beautiful article.” It was a bitter attack on the Nazis. It threatened a world-wide Jewish boycott of German goods. Palatin found out subsequently that the translation was roughly correct; apparently it had been pre-translated for Eichmann by a Hebrew-speaking member of his staff. “You Jews hate us. If you had arms you would fight us. W e in the Gestapo have rifles, machine guns, and bullets. We will line you up before the transport you use and start shoot­ ing. W here will you stand? At the beginning of the line or at the end? You are the leader. You could choose. You will be able to stand at the end of the line and live a few more minutes I” Then Eichmann sat down. His whole mood changed. “All right,” he said wearily, “you can have an exit perm it and a re-entry permit for your wife.” Amazingly enough, he kept his word. Palatin’s wife took their baby to Latvia and returned. A week later Eichmann again summoned Palatin.

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The meeting started smoothly enough. Eichmann said they would have to set a definite date for the departure of the transport from Prague. His m anner was obliging, almost affa­ ble. W hen Palatin pointed out that the first date suggested by Eichmann fell on Yom Kippur and hence was out of the question, the latter acquiesced at once. “Oh, certainly,” he said understandingly, “you cannot be expected to leave on such a holiday.” They settled on October 13 for the depar­ ture. Palatin stood up, giddy with relief, and moved toward the door. W ith his hand on the knob, he was halted by the silky voice of the German. “Just a moment, sir. I wonder if you would do me a small favor?” In bewilderment Palatin turned to face his tormentor. A request of any kind from Eichmann, let alone a polite re­ quest, was unheard of. Palatin could only nod numbly. “Tomorrow morning you will bring me the passports of your father and m other.” Now the voice was steel. “They are not leaving w ith the transport.” “W hy?” Palatin ventured to ask. “They remain as hostages,” Eichmann snarled. “I will kill them like dogs if any of the passengers on the transport ever return here. I will kill them if w hen you arrive in Palestine you say one bad word about Germany. I will kill them if you say that I handled you cruelly or th at you suffered under the rule of the Third Reich!” A few days later Naftali Palatin and his wife left on the transport for Palestine. Long afterward he learned that his father had been shot, th at his mother had been exterminated in the gas chambers, and that his baby daughter and her grandparents w ith whom she had been staying in Latvia had all been killed. But Naftali Palatin survived. It is quite possi­ ble that he will meet Adolf Eichmann again—in an Israeli courtroom.

PART IV

The Crimes

T

J L h e i n v a s i o n a n d c o n q u e s t of Poland in September 1939 brought the largest and most vital Jewish community in Eu­ rope under the Nazi thumb. There were three million Jews living in Poland, and the question of their emigration was complicated—in fact, made impossible—by the reluctance of the world democracies to accept them. It was Alfred Rosen­ berg, head of the Foreign Political Section of the Nazi party, who originated a plan to settle a million European Jews in the occupied Polish region of Lublin. This was a territory of about four hundred square miles, close to the Russian border. The plan was prepared by Dr. Wetzel, one of Rosenberg’s experts. Heinrich Himmler was given unlimited power to deal with the matter of ‘resettlement/’ He directed Rein­ hard Heydrich to take immediate action. Heydrich informed Adolf Eichmann (and other high officials of the security police) that now Danzig, western Prussia, Poznan, and Upper and Lower Silesia were to be cleared of Jews, who would be removed to the Lublin reservation. Eichmann was

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to be in charge of transporting the Jews. With his usual efficiency he managed to send 87,883 Jews and 30,000 gyp­ sies to the Jewish reservation at Lublin within four months. On the face of it, the Lublin Plan seemed to be moderate enough. It was almost as though the Third Reich was set­ ting up a Jewish state, but actually the Jews who arrived at Lublin could not be economically self-sustaining. In ad­ dition, sanitary facilities were almost non-existent, and thou­ sands died of disease. Governor General Hans Frank, in charge of Poland, disliked the Lublin Plan intensely. H e had only one burning ambition, to make Poland Judenrein (clear of Jews), but orders were orders. Odilo Globocnik, former Gauleiter of Vienna, was sent to Lublin in November 1939 to take charge. The program which Globocnik evolved was known as “Action Reinhard” as a tribute to his chief, Reinhard Heydrich. It had a three­ fold aim: deportation of Jews (that was Eichmann’s job); confiscation of Jewish property; exploitation of Jewish man­ power and, sometime later, annihilation. In 1940 Globocnik established ten forced-labor camps in the Lublin reservation. By 1941 he had fifty-one labor camps in the district. At the same time he built four extermination camps: Belzec, Maj­ danek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Globocnik’s aim was to head a large industrial empire of his own. He established factories in Lublin and used 50,000 Jews to work them. Casualties among the workers were high, but Eichmann was always ready to feed many thousands more to his friend Globocnik. Globocnik created a corporation called Eastern Industries, Ltd. His partners were Oswald Pohl, Georg Loenner, Wilhelm Kreuger, and Max Horn. Theoretically, all property confiscated from the Jews and all profits from the factories were earmarked to go to a central fund in Berlin. Actually a great deal of the profits stuck to the fingers of the men who organized Eastern Industries, Ltd.

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About this time there was a change in Nazi policy from forced emigration to mass deportation of Jews to specific places. As early as 1931 a German, Egon von Wingheue, pub­ lished a pamphlet suggesting that all German Jews be col­ onized on the island of Madagascar. “This,” he wrote, “would afford the possibility of control and minimize the danger of infection of Aryans with all those physical and spiritual dis­ eases the Jews are known to transmit.” In 1934 Himmler also suggested what became the Mada­ gascar Plan to Hitler. Three years later the Polish govern­ ment, trying to solve the “Jewish problem” on its own, formed a commission headed by Major Lepecki, who, after investigation, suggested the settlement of 15,000 Jewish families in Madagascar. In 1938 Oswald Pirow, South African Defense Minister, was invited to Berlin by Hitler to discuss closer economic ties between South Africa and the Third Reich. He also brought with him a plan for resettlement of German Jews in Madagascar, Tanganyika, and British Gui­ ana, but Pirow brought more than that. He offered the pros­ pect of a substantial loan by an Anglo-American syndicate in order to finance Jewish immigration to Africa. On No­ vember 12, 1938, Goring told the German Cabinet that Hit­ ler was going to take up the Madagascar Plan with the Western powers. Late in December 1938, Hitler sent Hjalmar Schacht to London to discuss the loan aspect of the Madagascar Plan. He discussed it with George Rublee, Di­ rector of the Inter-Governmental Committee for Refugees, and his assistant, Lord Peel. Schacht’s plan envisaged the removal of 150,000 Jews to Madagascar in three years’ time. The cost of resettlement, Schacht estimated, would amount to IV2 billion marks. This sum would have to be provided by Jewish financiers in the form of a loan. The astute Ger­ man financial wizard pointed out that \Vz billion marks’ worth of confiscated Jewish property would be kept in Ger­

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many as collateral for this loan. The liquidation of the loan would be accomplished through gradual amortization over a span of 20 years. The financial world, eager to help the Jews find a haven somewhere in Africa, found the plan at least a step in the right direction. On June 3, 1940, Franz Rademacher, who had been given the directorship of a new Bureau of Internal Affairs, Referat D III, wrote a few notes for submission to Von Ribbentrop dealing with “National Socialist war aims in regard to the Jewish question.” According to these aims, the Jews had to leave Europe. Rademacher was not sure whether all the Jews had to be evacuated, or whether it would be better to “make a distinction between western and eastern Jews.” On July 2 a “plan for the solution of the Jewish question” was pro­ posed by Referat D III, and it was followed on August 15 by some “notes on the creation of an inter-European bank for the utilization of Jewish funds in Europe.” In planning the administration of the Madagascar super-ghetto, Rade­ macher envisioned the Jews as governing themselves, with their own mayors, police, post offices, and railroads. But the political administration was to stay in German hands. “Thus the Jews will remain as hostages in our hands, guaranteeing a suitable attitude on the part of their American co-religion­ ists. . . . We shall be able to utilize for our propaganda the magnanimity which Germany is showing by granting cul­ tural, economic, and administrative freedom to the Jews, while at the same time we emphasize that our sense of re­ sponsibility prevents us from allowing independence to a race which for thousands of years has not known independ­ ence.” On June 30, 1940, the plan was approved by Hitler, and responsibility for the details of its implementation was given by Himmler and Heydrich to Adolf Eichmann. A few

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months earlier he had been transferred to Berlin and put in charge of the Gestapo’s Jewish office. Eichmann and his aides prepared a detailed resettlement plan. He put SS Lieutenant Theodor Dannecker in charge of documentation and sent him to Paris, where he conducted an inquiry at the French Ministry of Colonies. In August 1940 Dannecker handed over a report suggesting the reset­ tlement of 4,000,000 Jews in Madagascar. The selection would be made by several offices, which would also confis­ cate and evaluate the emigrants' property. Special convoys were to be set up, including primarily farmers, construction specialists, artisans, manual workers, and doctors. Four thou­ sand ironworkers, builders, bricklayers, etc., were to be sent ahead to the island in order to build the first camps. Eich­ mann suggested that each Jew be allowed to take 400 pounds of personal luggage with him. He suggested the establish­ ment of special headquarters in which to assemble the desig­ nated deportees and transfer them to the island. He worked actively on the plan until the summer of 1941. He surrounded himself with maritime experts and prepared a detailed plan of transportation involving a pool of ships provided by Ger­ man steamship companies, with embarkation at North Sea and Mediterranean ports. Always meticulous in matters of administration, he sent representatives into the occupied countries to select Jews who were still known to have money. Of course all property and money would be confiscated be­ fore each person left. Eichmann selected artisans from labor camps as those who would make the first trip to build barracks for the proposed Jewish settlement. There was no question but that he showed exceptional ability in the implementation of the Madagascar Plan. By now he had raised Schacht’s proposed quota of 150,000 Jews to 1,000,000. But three unexpected incidents killed the plan. Eichmann had sent his assistant, Franz Rade­

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macher, to Lisbon to discuss with delegates of international Jewish organizations fiscal arrangements for the resettlement of the Jews. They bluntly refused to pay what they felt amounted to blackmail. At the same time, the Vichy govern­ ment of Pétain objected strongly to the thought of a Jewish settlement on Madagascar, and then Hitler attacked Russia and all of the energies of the Third Reich had to be utilized; so the Madagascar Plan died. Now Eichmann was put in charge of the whole Jewish population in Germany and the occupied countries. He still looked for a Jewish “reservation,” and established a minia­ ture Jewish state in the Czechoslovakian village of The­ resienstadt. This village was sealed off from the rest of the world. Twenty thousand Jews were settled here under rela­ tively good conditions. The village had its own Jewish offi­ cials, policemen, currency, and even its own stamps. There were no gas chambers or crematories and no forced labor at Theresienstadt. And then came the order from Hitler for “the Final Solution.” The reservation in Theresienstadt was the last moderate act Eichmann was to supervise; henceforth all Jews were to be liquidated. In the memoirs he wrote in Argentina, Eichmann said, “It was really terrible but quite necessary. Anyhow the Führer ordered it, and I did not have anything to do with the anni­ hilation. I was not a killer but a man who executed orders. I did the same thing as an Allied transport officer did when he transferred bombs to the airfield without knowing if those bombs would be dropped on troops and bridges or on women and children.” The SS (Schutzstaffel or Protective Troops) was a very complex organization. In the beginning it was merely an elite section of the SA (Storm Troopers), whose duty it was to guard Hitler and other party leaders. Heinrich Himmler

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was in charge of it, and it consisted of only two thousand men. During the 1930s Himmler grew in power. He had blind loyalty to Hitler and a talent for organization, plus impas­ sioned faith in the Nazi philosophy. Himmler was also in­ tensely ambitious. By the beginning of the war he had raised the SS to one million men; at war's end this had been raised to five million. The bulk of them belonged to the Waffen SS (Combat Troops), but the SS had many departments, agen­ cies, and branches, and by now its influence had penetrated into every field of governmental and party activity. One of the most important divisions was the Gestapo, it­ self divided into seventeen different agencies. One of these, Department S 4b, organized to handle the “Jewish problem,” was under Adolf Eichmann. His immediate superior was Reinhard Heydrich. The word “Gestapo” is an abbreviation of “Geheime Staatspolizei” (Secret State Police). It was the invention of a clerk in the Berlin post office who needed an­ other abbreviation for one more government department. The Gestapo was relatively small. Even when its mastery extended from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, it never employed more than forty thousand men and women. But because Heinrich Himmler had created it and because Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, Eichmann s immediate superiors, had the same quality of loyalty and organization as did Himmler, the Gestapo assumed an importance far out of proportion to its numbers. Actually, it was even technically above the law of the land. On February 10, 1936, a statute was added to the constitution. Clause 7 of this statute stated that there could be no appeal by anyone arrested by the Gestapo; even the highest court in the land was forbidden to re-examine any Gestapo decisions. It meant further that a man who was ac­ quitted by the courts could immediately be rearrested by the

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Gestapo and without trial taken into “protective custody,” i.e., sent to a concentration or extermination camp. A special section of the SS, known colloquially as SD (Security Service), and under the command of Heinrich Himmler, was a party organization, while the Gestapo was a state organization. But by a Nazi edict the Gestapo be­ came a part of the SD and was designated Department 4 under Heinrich Müller. The Nazis were always meticulous in cataloguing every agency and department. Eichmann’s bureau was designated in full IV A 4b: IV stood for Gestapo, A for internal affairs, 4 for religion, and b for Jews. This department was camou­ flaged as a minor operation in an attempt to avoid publicity. Contrary to world opinion, there is some reason to believe that the majority of the German people never did know to what extent the extermination of Jews reached in the concen­ tration camps. This is one reason why Eichmann worked in relative anonymity. Until the closing months of the war his rank was only that of Obersturmführer (major); then in 1944 he was promoted to Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colo­ nel). Actually, of course, all during the war Eichmann had more power at his command than any general in the Ger­ man Army. His actual importance may best be indicated by the fact that he had a four-story office at Number 116 Kur­ fürstenstrasse in Berlin, a luxurious office with living quarters in Paris at 72 Avenue Foch, the Palais de Rothschild in Vi­ enna, and the Majestic Hotel in Budapest. His main aide was Rolf Günther, one of the few men who had influence over him. When Eichmann received orders to supervise “the Final Solution,” Günther said happily, “The faster we get rid of them the better.” Another man close to Eichmann was Dieter von Wisliczeny ( Eichmann named one of his sons after the man who, at his own trial, gave damning evidence against his former

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superior). Von Wisliczeny worked for Eichmann for eleven years. Eichmann always maintained very good relations with his superiors, but he was brutal with his subordinates. A driver in Berlin who had worked for him for four years was arrested for stealing a small piece of linoleum from Eichmann s office. Eichmann testified against him at a court martial, and the driver was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a concen­ tration camp. He refused to allow any of his staff to transfer to any other department, even though they were offered higher rank and pay. Many, finally sickened by the mass exterminations, asked permission to join the regular army or the combat SS troops. Eichmann denied their applications. “We are all in the same boat and no one is entitled to leave it!” he once said angrily to Dieter von Wisliczeny. The SS was increasing its membership and in many ways had more power than the army. The chain of command was rigid. Hitler was all-powerful, Goring number two man. Himmler, head of the SS, had Hitler’s complete confidence (even though he constantly fought with Goring) and was number three man. Kaltenbrunner was next, and under him Heinrich Müller, who presided over all the Gestapo sections. Eichmann had exclusive domination of Section IV A 4b, for the Jewish question was of extreme importance. He worked in harmony with Müller and Kaltenbrunner, and, when the occasion called for it, with Himmler. The failure of the Madagascar Plan had been a blow to Eichmann’s pride. He attacked his new job of extermination with enthusiasm. He was no longer concerned with emigra­ tion, expulsion, and resettlement. Special task groups of the Nazi security police and security service had been launched in September 1938 in anticipa­ tion of Czechoslovakia’s invasion. Scattered forces were also

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active in the Sudeten and on Austrian territory, softening them for the German conquest. In 1939 Heydrich and Müller had already formed the special patrolling units that usually followed the regular army into occupied countries to liquidate any “enemies of the state.” They had liquidated thousands of Jews in Poland, France, Belgium, and Holland. For their part in the liquida­ tion of Jews, these Einsatzgruppen (battalions) were now put under the command of Eichmann. They were given a special three-week course to train them for their job of ex­ termination. One of their instructors was Brigadier General Streckenbach, chief of personnel in RSHA Division A-l. He was the son of a customs official and in the early days of Nazism had commanded an SS unit in Hamburg. When the Gestapo absorbed the Hamburg political police, Strecken­ bach was appointed to run it. After the conquest of Poland he was made commander of the security police, and it was he who directed the mass arrests ( and in many cases execu­ tions ) of the Polish intelligentsia. The Einsatzgruppen were organized into four battalions identified by the letters A, B, C, and D. The strength of each one varied from five hundred to nine hundred men, but they were often augmented by outside sources. Each Einsatz­ gruppe was composed of a number of composit units, called Einsatzkommandos (special commandos) and Sonderkommandos (partial commandos), each the size of a company. These in turn were split into platoon-size units of Teilkom­ mandos and special-purpose squads. The Einsatzgruppen went into action July 15, 1941. Eichmann was also given the services of two brilliant doctors, Dr. Kelmeir and Dr. Chris­ tian Wirth, who had been in charge, during the 1930s, of liquidating by poison injections about seventy thousand men and women who were characterized as insane, incurable criminals, or race defilers. They had also been in charge of

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the castration or sterilization of additional thousands of men and women who were called Mischlinge (half-Jews). The leaders of the four Einsatzgruppen were old friends of Eichmann whom he had appointed—always, of course, with Heydrich’s approval. They were: SS Brigadeführer and Ge­ stapo official Franz Walter Stahlecker, Einsatzgruppe A; Chief of Criminal Police and SS Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, Ein­ satzgruppe B; Police General and SS Brigadeführer Doctor Otto Rasch, Einsatzgruppe C; and General of Police SS Ober­ gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D. Franz Stahlecker, in charge of Einsatzgruppe A, was as­ signed to the Baltic region and to Leningrad. A report on his activities, dated October 15, 1941, revealed at the Nurem­ berg trials, showed that he was a zealous worker. He an­ nounced proudly that within four months his units had killed 135,567 Jews and Communist officials; six months later he was able to add that the total had risen to 221,000. There was no time to build extermination centers; Stahlecker's men used guns. In his report he told how he operated. He sent some of his men into occupied cities first in an attempt to stir up native anti-Semitic forces in the hopes that a pogrom would result. “It was desirable,” he wrote, “that our security police should not put in an immediate appearance, since the ex­ traordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native popu­ lation itself took the first action by way of natural reaction against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period.” (Stahlecker was the only Einsatzgruppe leader who was rewarded properly for his bloody activities; he was killed by Russian Partisans.) Arthur Nebe, in charge of Einsatzgruppe B, with head­ quarters at Minsk and later Smolensk, was a slower worker. In his first six months of action his group of 700 men were

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able to kill only 45,476 Jews. He did, however, capture 915 gypsies, and in a letter dated June 28, 1944 he suggested to the SS Medical Corps that they might be used for experi­ ments to see how long human beings could live drinking only sea water. The 915 all died in the course of the experiments in Buchenwald. Nebe had been a police official and always resented the fact that his Criminal Police Department was taken over by the SS. Later he was a rather doubtful member of the resist­ ance group which conspired to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. For this he was shot by the Gestapo without trial a few weeks before the end of the war. Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, was an el­ derly man who was finally detached from his command. He received a bonus for his part in the exterminations and was elected mayor of Wittenberg. He later became director of the Continental Oil Company. He was never tried because he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, was one of Eichmann’s closest friends. He was only thirty-three when, on Eichmann’s recommendation, Heydrich appointed him head of the group. Ohlendorf was a strange character who more than once quarreled with Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler described him as “an unbearable Prussian without humor, a defeatist and an anti-militarist.” Einsatzgruppe D under Ohlendorf was directly attached to the 11th Army, under the command of Von Manstein, which operated in the Ukraine. It was given orders that all Jews in its area of operation were to be liquidated. Himmler and Eichmann visited Ohlendorf in September 1941 at the latter’s headquarters at Nikolaev. Here his dislike of Ohlen­ dorf was intensified when he learned that the man had spared the lives of the workers on the collective farms in the Jewish settlement between Krivoi Rog and Kherson. Actu­

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ally, Ohlendorf had not been motivated by any tender feel­ ings; he had spared their lives in order that they might harvest the crops in this predominantly agricultural region. Himmler gave orders, and the farm workers were killed. In all, Ohlendorf disposed of 90,000 Jews. In his testimony at the Nuremberg trials Ohlendorf gave the following answers to questions about the operation of the Einsatzgruppen. Col. Amen: Did you personally supervise mass executions of these individuals? Ohlendorf: I was present at two mass executions tor pur­ poses of inspection. Col. Amen: Will you explain to the Tribunal in detail how an individual mass execution was carried out? Ohlendorf : A local Einsatzkommando attempted to collect all the Jews in its area by registering them. This registration was performed by the Jews themselves. Col. Amen: On what pretext, if any, were they rounded up? Ohlendorf: On the pretext that they were to be resettled. Col. Amen: Will you continue? Ohlendorf: After the registration the Jews were collected at one place; and from there they were later transported to the place of execution, which was, as a rule, an anti-tank ditch or a natural excavation. The executions were carried out in a military manner, by firing squads under com­ mand. Col. Amen: In what way were they transported to the place of execution? Ohlendorf : They were transported to the place of execu­ tion in trucks, always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was at­ tempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was

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about to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible. Col. Amen: Was that your idea? Ohlendorf: Yes. Col. Amen: And after they were shot what was done with the bodies? Ohlendorf: The bodies were buried in the anti-tank ditch or excavation. Col. Amen: What determination, if any, was made as to whether the persons were actually dead? Ohlendorf: The unit leaders or the firing squad command­ ers had orders to see to this end and, if need be, finish them off themselves. Col. Amen: And who would do that? Ohlendorf: Either the unit leader himself or somebody designated by him. Col. Amen: In what positions were the victims shot? Ohlendorf: Standing or kneeling. . . . Col. Amen: Were all victims, including the men, women, and children, executed in the same manner? Ohlendorf: Until the spring of 1942, yes. Then an order came from Himmler that in the future women and children were to be killed only in gas vans. Col. Amen: How had the women and children been killed previously? Ohlendorf: In the same way as the men—by shooting. Col. Amen: What, if anything, was done about burying the victims after they had been executed? Ohlendorf: The Kommandos filled the graves to efface the signs of the execution, and then labor units of the population leveled them. Col. Amen: Referring to the gas vans which you said you received in the spring of 1942, what order did you receive with respect to the use of these vans? Ohlendorf: These gas vans were in future to be used for the killing of women and children.

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Col. Amen: Will you explain to the Tribunal the construc­ Ohlendorf:

Col. Amen: Ohlendorf:

Col. Amen: Ohlendorf: Col. Amen: Ohlendorf: Col. Amen: Ohlendorf: Col. Amen: Ohlendorf:

tion of these vans and their appearance? The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. They looked like closed trucks, and were so constructed that at the start of the motor, gas was conducted into the van, causing death in ten to fifteen minutes. Explain in detail just how one of these vans was used for an execution. The vans were loaded with the victims and driven to the place of burial, which was usually the same as that used for the mass executions. The time needed for transportation was suffi­ cient to insure the death of the victims. How were the victims induced to enter the vans? They were told that they were to be trans­ ported to another locality. How long did it take to kill the victims ordinar­ ily? About ten to fifteen minutes; the victims were not conscious of what was happening to them. How many persons could be killed simultane­ ously in one such van? About fifteen to twenty-five persons. The vans varied in size. Are you familiar with the letter from Becker to Rauff with respect to these gas vans? I saw this letter during my interrogation.

Otto Ohlendorf was hanged in the Landsburg prison on June 8, 1951, the only one of Eichmann’s Einsatzgruppen leaders to be officially sentenced to death. There were twenty-four members of the Einsatzgruppen tried at Nuremberg. They were a heterogeneous group. Among them were six SS generals and five SS colonels. Al­

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though Eichmann was only a lieutenant colonel ( Obersturm­ bannführer) his power was such that in effect he occasionally commanded officers of much higher rank. There were also six lieutenant colonels, four majors, and three junior officers among the defendants. Among them were eight lawyers, one university professor, one grossly fat former opera singer, one unfrocked Lutheran pastor, and one architect (a dipsoma­ niac). Himmler, accompanied by Eichmann, paid several visits to Einsatzgruppen commanders. His first visit was to Minsk, which at that time was headquarters for Nebe’s group. Himmler and Eichmann were witnesses of one of Nebe’s mass executions. It was a relatively small affair with only four hundred victims, but it upset Himmler very much. Eich­ mann recalled later that Himmler nearly fainted. He cried hysterically, but his cries were drowned out by the clatter of the machine guns. He even tried to save one young Jew be­ cause he was fair-haired and looked Aryan, but before he could give the order the young man had been shot through the head. When Himmler returned to Berlin he ordered Dr. Becker, a member of the SS, to discover more humane meth­ ods of mass killing than the firing squad. The death vans, forerunners of the standard German exterminating system, made their appearance in Russia before the end of 1941. Later on Himmler became quite accustomed to watching the mass executions. Himmler was a man who liked to make speeches. On Oc­ tober 4, 1943, he spoke to the SS officers at Poznan. One of Eichmann’s men took down the transcript of his speech, which read in part: Now I would like to bring another matter to your atten­ tion. Very frequently the member of the Waffen SS thinks about the deportation of these people here. These thoughts came to me today when watching the very difficult work

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out there performed by the Security Police, supported by your men, who help them a great deal. Exactly the same thing happened in Poland in weather 40 degrees below zero, where we had to haul away thousands, ten thousands, hun­ dred thousands; where we had to have the toughness—you should hear this but also forget it again immediately—to shoot thousands of leading Poles, where we had to have the toughness, otherwise there would have been revenge on us later. We also had to bring in, in this winter of 40 degrees below zero, ten thousand Germans, and had to take care of their needs—that the women were warm; that, when they bore children, these children did not experience want and destitution; we had to take care of their horses; we had to take care of the baggage of these poor Germans from Volkynia; all duties where the proud soldier says, “My God, why do I have to do that, this ridiculous job . . . I” Gentle­ men, it is much easier in many cases—and that I would like to tell you this once, or would like to recall to you; you will gladly admit it: in many cases it is much easier to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level in some area with a com­ pany, or to carry out executions, or to haul away people, or to evict crying and hysterical women, or to return our Ger­ man racial brethren across the border from Russia and to take care of them. I want to tell you, in the entire Waffen SS we must begin to view the other great activity of the entire SS and entire police. We must see to it that you consider the activity of the man in green uniform as just as valuable as the activity you yourselves are engaged in. You have to consider the work of the SD man or of the man of the Security Police as a vital part of our whole work, just like the fact that you can carry arms. You are the ones to be envied, because if you do something, if a unit achieves fame, then one can talk of fame, and the unit can be decorated. It is much more difficult in many other positions—and with that I do not want to underestimate your achievements; I would be the last one to do that—but, believe me, in many

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places it is much more difficult, this silent compulsory labor, this silent activity, this standing guard over our ideology, this necessity of remaining steadfast, this necessity of not compromising is very much more difficult in places. . . . This activity is necessary, as I said, 1) to eliminate these negative people from the German people, 2) to exploit them once more for the great folk community by having them break stones and make bricks so that the Führer can again erect his grand buildings, and 3) in turn to invest the money earned soberly this way, in houses, in ground, in settlements so that our men can have houses in which to raise large families and lots of children. This in turn is necessary be­ cause we stand or die with this leading blood of Germany and if the good blood is not reproduced we will not be able to rule the world. One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What hap­ pens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnaping their children and raising them here with us. Whether na­ tions live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; other­ wise, it is of no interest to me. . . . I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which, I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders were issued and if it were necessary.

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I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about—‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,” says one party member. “That’s quite clear, it’s in our program—elim­ ination of the Jews, and were doing it, exterminating them.” And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are ver­ min, but this one is an A-one Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time —apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if—with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war—we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the stage when the Jews were still in the German national body. A great many members of the four Einsatzgruppen finally sickened of the almost daily slaughter they had to perform. Some committed suicide, many others went insane, and the majority had to rely on alcohol to fortify them before the executions. A clear description of how the killings took place before the advent of the gas chambers was given after the war by Hermann Graebe, a civilian engineer employed by the army in the Ukraine. Describing an execution at an abandoned airport in Dubno on October 4, 1942, Graebe wrote: I, the undersigned, Hermann Friedrich Graebe, make the following declaration under oath: From September 1941 to January 1944 I was director and chief engineer of the Sdolbunow branch of the Josef Jung

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Construction Company of Solingen. In this capacity I had, among my other duties, to visit the firm’s projects. Under the terms of a contract with the army construction services, the company was to build grain warehouses on the old Dubno airfield, in the Ukraine. On October 5, 1942, at the time of my visit to the con­ struction offices in Dubno, my foreman, Hubert Moennikes, living at 21 Aussenmuehlenweg, Hamburg-Haarburg, told me that some Dubno Jews had been shot near the building in three huge ditches about 30 meters long and 3 meters deep. The number of people killed daily was about 1500. The 5000 Jews who had lived in Dubno before the pogrom were all marked for liquidation. Since the executions took place in the presence of my employee, he was painfully im­ pressed by them. Accompanied by Moennikes, I then went to the work area. I saw great mounds of earth about 30 meters long and 2 high. Several trucks were parked nearby. Armed Ukrainian militia were making people get out, under the surveillance of SS soldiers. The same militia men were responsible for guard duty and driving the trucks. The people in the trucks wore the regulation yellow pieces of cloth that identified them as Jews, on the front and back of their clothing. Moennikes and I went straight toward the ditches without being stopped. When we neared the mound I heard a series of rifle shots close by. The people from the trucks—men, women, and children—were forced to undress under the supervision of an SS soldier with a whip in his hand. They were obliged to put their effects in certain spots: shoes, cloth­ ing, and underwear separately. I saw a pile of shoes, about 800 to 1000 pairs, great heaps of underwear and clothing. Without weeping or crying out, these people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing one another and saying good-by while waiting for a sign from the SS soldier, who stood on the edge of the ditch, a whip in his hand too. During the fifteen minutes I stayed there, I did not hear a single complaint or a plea for mercy. I watched a family of

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about eight: a man and woman about fifty years old, sur­ rounded by their children of about one, eight, and ten, and two big girls about twenty and twenty-four. An old lady, her hair completely white, held the baby in her arms, rock­ ing it, and singing it a song. The infant was crying aloud with delight. The parents watched the group with tears in their eyes. The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand, speaking softly to him; the child struggled to hold back his tears. Then the father pointed a finger to the sky and, strok­ ing the child’s head, seemed to be explaining something. At this moment, the SS soldier near the ditch called some­ thing to his comrade. The latter counted off some twenty people and ordered them behind the mound. The family of which I have just spoken was in the group. I still remember the young girl, slender and dark, who, passing near me, pointed at herself, saying, “Twenty-three.” I walked around the mound and faced a frightful common grave. Tightly packed corpses were heaped so close together that only the heads showed. Most were wounded in the head and blood flowed over their shoulders. Some still moved. Others raised their hands and turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was two-thirds full. I estimated that it held a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes toward the man who had carried out the execution. He was an SS man; he was seated, legs swinging, on the narrow edge of the ditch; an automatic rifle rested on his knees, and he was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, climbed down a few steps cut in the clay wall and stopped at the spot indi­ cated by the SS man. Facing the dead and wounded, they spoke softly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots. I looked in the ditch and saw their bodies contorting, their heads, already inert, sinking on the corpses beneath. The blood flowed from the napes of their necks. I was astonished not to be ordered away. A new batch of victims approached the place. They climbed down into the ditch, lined up in front of the previous victims, and were shot. On the way back, while rounding the mound, I saw an-

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other full truck which had just arrived. This truck contained only the sick and crippled. Women already naked were un­ dressing an old woman with an emaciated body, her legs frightfully thin. She was held up by two people and seemed paralyzed. The naked people led her behind the mound. I left the place with Moennikes and went back to Dubno in a car. The next morning, returning to the construction, I saw some thirty naked bodies lying 30 to 50 yards from the ditch. Some were still alive; they stared into space with a set look, seeming not to feel the coolness of the morning air, nor to see the workers standing all around. A young girl about twenty spoke to me, asking me to bring her clothes and to help her escape. At that moment we heard the sound of a car approaching at top speed; I saw that it was an SS de­ tachment. I went back to my work. Ten minutes later rifle shots sounded from the ditch. The Jews who were still alive had been ordered to throw the bodies in the ditch; then they had to lie down themselves to receive a bullet in the back of the neck. (Signed) Graebe Wiesbaden, November 10, 1945 Ohlendorf, in a report to Eichmann, expressed his amaze­ ment at the quiet and resigned courage shown by his Jewish victims: “I was surprised to see how calm they were, almost too calm. The tranquillity with which these people accept their fate seemed horrible to me. It was surprising to see the Jews consoling one another as they descended into the ditches. Some prayed and many others sang hymns.” Before the advent of the mobile gas chambers, shooting was the main method used in the executions; however, on the shores of the Black Sea there were mass drownings. At Bachtchissarai, 1029 Jews were drowned during two weeks in July 1942. After the war, dozens of Russians living in Minsk testified that they saw hundreds of Jews being burned

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alive. Even when the gas trucks arrived they could handle only a portion of the victims because no more than 50 people could be packed into a truck. Eichmann was present at many of the executions. In his memoirs written in Argentina he describes the scene: It was a very cold and foggy day when I arrived at the place chosen by the Einsatzkommando for the job. I was freezing though I wore a leather coat which reached my ankles. On the spot chosen was an enormous grave. It looked to me like an anti-tank ditch, but as I came nearer to it I saw that the grave was almost half filled with naked corpses: men, women, old people, and children. Then the Kommandos brought a new group of Jews to the place. There were about 150 of them. They had to undress and stand nude in the cold, were ordered to enter the grave, walk over the corpses, and stand ready to die. The entire action was done in complete quietness. No one complained, no one cried. In the last moment when the firing Kommando prepared their machine guns I saw a Jewish woman holding a small child of about two years in her arms acting as if she wanted to run away and save her child. I was touched. I wanted to jump into the grave so as to save the child, but it was too late. The machine gun spit fire; the child was hit by a bullet in his head, and his blood and brains splattered on my coat. Later on I went with my driver and washed off the blood and brains from my coat. I understood that this was an in­ human solution, and I immediately went back to Berlin to tell Heinrich Müller what I had been through and asked him if it would be possible to find a more humane method for this solution. Müller heard my account and then he stared at me with a long look which I couldn’t define. Was it a look of pity because of my weakness? A few months later they found a more “humane method” and again Müller found it necessary for me to see the demon­ stration. He sent me to Berlin, where they used buses for ex­

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termination with the help of fume gas, and as Müller put it, “The whole story was finished in three minutes.” I went to Lublin and found that Müllers information was incorrect. They demonstrated this system for me. About 80 to 100 Jews were seated in the truck, the door was auto­ matically closed and the driver invited me to step into the cabin. We started rolling. After a few minutes the people inside started crying and shouting. The driver told me to look through the small window into the back of the truck. In there were Jews who fought with death. A lamp was burning. We had already been five minutes on our way and it still was not quiet inside. “Look inside,” the driver said to me, but I couldn’t. I was simply afraid. I tried to force myself but I saw a grasping hand. I ordered the driver to stop immediately. I wanted to get off. “Don’t worry,” he said to me, “we are almost fin­ ished.” Then the truck went back to the big streets on the way to camp. After fifteen minutes of driving through the city, no one moved in the bus. I did not wait until the corpses were taken out from the death car. I ran to my car and went immediately back to Berlin. Upon arrival I saw Müller again and asked him to develop this method if possible so that those taking part in it should not go through such terrible psychological torture. Eichmann meant by “those taking part” not the Jews but the drivers and the SS personnel—the murderers. When I went for the second time to Müller asking for a humane method, the latter looked at me again with a long look, a fatherly look, and I couldn’t understand what this look meant coming from this man. Maybe I should have been ashamed because I was so weak, for the problem of the solu­ tion was a matter of life and death and of great importance for Germany. The Jews declared war against us through their Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann. Shortly thereafter a man named Victor Brack evolved a

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PURSUERS

B e l o w : Gertrude, “A v e n g e r s ” a g e n t p l a n t e d in F r a u E i c h m a n n ’s h o u s e

Tuvia Friedman, m e m b e r o f “ t he Avengers” Simon Wiesenthal, m enilicr ol “ the Avengers”

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Blueprints lor gas chambers and crematories at Majdanek

Crematories at Buchenwald

C A P T U R E AND IMPRISONMENT

Scene of the capture at Buenos Aires citv limits

Zvi Tohar, El Al’s chief pilot

First judicial order to remand Eiehinann to custody for 14 days, Tel Aviv

Below: The tvpe of prison building (known as a T ag ­ gart) in which Eichmann is bein'; held

Nitzav Avraham Zellinger, E i c h m a n n ’s c h i e f in te rro g a to r and head of Bureau 06

Mario Amadeo, Argen­ tina’s delegate to the UN

Eiehmann in Israeli prison

A bove: Gokla Meir, Isra­ el’s Foreign Minister, lis­ tens to the Eiehmann debate in the UN Security Council

Dr. Robert Servatius, Ger­ man lawyer who will de­ fend Eiehmann

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method which would hurry the extermination of Jews in spe­ cially constructed gas chambers. Even Eiehmann was satis­ fied with these, and he had them installed at most of the concentration camps. To him, the most rewarding feature of the gas chamber was the fact that no one had to see the vic­ tims in the death struggles. There were, of course, peepholes through which SS men could peer if they so desired. The entire SS organization was meticulous in keeping rec­ ords, and no one was more meticulous than Adolf Eiehmann. Each Einsatzgruppe was divided into four Einsatzkommando units. Each of these Kommando units sent regular reports to the head of the Einsatzgruppe, telling just how many had been exterminated. These figures were sent not only to SS headquarters in Berlin but also to Eiehmann. The reports arrived almost daily (two hundred of them from July 1941 through April 1942) and were summarized by SS Colonel Kurt Lindow, head of subdivision A-l, with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel Knoblich, an inspector from the criminal police. In May 1942 the task of compiling and summarizing these reports was shifted to the newly established Headquarters Staff of the Chiefs of the Security Police and Security Serv­ ices. This of course was presided over by Major General Heinrich Müller, although the work of coordinating was done by a small group under Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Nosske. Usually the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, titled “Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories,” were short and terse—“During the action against the Jews, 3412 were shot in March 1942 at Minsk.” Another read: “During No­ vember 1941, 10,600 Jews were shot at Riga.” Occasionally an enterprising Einsatzgruppe leader would send along suggestions which Müller thought merited attention, and they would be forwarded to all officers in charge of exteimi-

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nation. One such report, dealing with the murder of Jews in Minsk, read: 1. The forces assigned to the rounding-up [of Jews] abso­ lutely have to be furnished with axes, hatchets, or similar instruments, since almost all of the doors, etc., are bolted or locked and can only be forced. 2. Even if access to the attic cannot be discovered at first, it must be considered possible that people may be found there. Each attic must eventually be carefully searched, from the outside if necessary. 3. Even if there is no cellar, a large number of people may be found in the little space between the floor and the ground. In such places it is advisable to lift the flooring from the outside and to send in police dogs (during the Pinsk action, the police dog Oste performed wonders) or to throw in a grenade, which inevitably forces the Jews out of their holes. 4. It is advisable to explore the ground around the houses with a hard object, for many people hide away in wellcamouflaged holes. 5. In order to uncover the hiding places, it is recommended that the aid of adolescents be enlisted, on the promise of their lives. This method is always effective. Besides such terms as “shot,” “executed,” or “liquidated,” we find the most varied and ingenious code words which the exterminators used for their operations; for example, some reports stated that Jews had been “rendered inoffensive.” Other reports mentioned “having got rid” of Jews. Other ex­ pressions used were “Jews were treated . . .” “areas were lib­ erated,” “swept clean of their Jews,” “Jews were taken care of.” “Special treatment” was another euphemism, but the most definitive term was “Final Solution”: “The problem of the Jews has been definitively solved.” The Nazis were experts in the use of euphemism, and when it came to killing they disliked calling a spade a spade.

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"Special treatment,” “extermination,” “liquidation,” “elimi­ nation,” “resettlement,” and “Final Solution” were all syno­ nyms for murder. Occasionally the reports, in addition to giving the number killed, explained why it had been necessary to liquidate the victims. Some of the reports justified the operations. Some of the reasons given: “Jewish women were particularly recalci­ trant in their behavior, and for this reason 28 Jewesses were shot at Krougloye and 337 at Moguilev.” “The Jews displayed an impudent and provocative attitude,” “were unwilling to work,” or “were suspected Communists and arsonists.” The danger of epidemics furnished another pretext. “In order to prevent contagion, 640 Jews were liquidated.” “It was im­ possible to provide food for the Jews and their children, which increased the danger of epidemics. To put an end to this situation, 1107 adult Jews were shot by the Kommando and 561 children by the Ukrainian militia.” Again and again the reports mentioned the difficult task and its effect upon the executioners. Colonel Paul Blobel wrote: “Our men taking part in the executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who were to be shot.” Otto Ohlendorf reported: “Many of our men have suffered terribly and have had to be sent home for various reasons. Some because their nerves were shattered or because they were not able to stand it morally. The Waffen SS attached to my group said they preferred fighting at the front to staying here.” In May 1942, Himmler became concerned about the evidence left behind by the extermination groups. The thou­ sands of mass graves were only lightly covered with earth. He decided to have this evidence destroyed and selected the drunken and decadent architect, Colonel Paul Blobel, to supervise this grisly assignment. Blobel had chemists con-

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coct a special highly combustible fluid which would bum the bodies much more quickly than the gasoline they usually used. His group was known as Kommando 1005 and came directly under Eichmann’s jurisdiction. Blobel described the way he operated: “I was present at the incineration of the bodies taken from a common grave near Kiev during my visit in the month of August 1942. The tomb was 55 yards long, 3 wide, and 2Y¿ deep. After the tomb was opened, the bodies were sprinkled with a combustible and burned. The cremation took nearly two days. I was careful to see that the tomb turned cherry red down to the bottom. In this way all trace was destroyed.” The former architect did such a good job that Eiehmann brought him back in order to teach his method to others, for the work was piling up. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, wrote that he put teams of Jewish workers at the disposal of Blobel sev­ eral times. A team would work for a week or so and then be either shot or gassed. Blobel was constantly experimenting; he even tried dynamite but found that this method did not yield good results. Eiehmann took great pride in the efficiency of his Einsatz­ gruppen. There were only about three thousand men and women assigned to Russia, yet according to Heydrich’s sta­ tistics they liquidated nearly a million Jews, gypsies, and Russian commissars. Occasionally some courageous soul oc­ cupying a governmental position in conquered territory pro­ tested. When 40,000 Jews were liquidated in the ghetto of Vilna, many deplored the mass slaughter, but there was nothing they could do about it. Heinrich Lohse, Reichskom­ missar of Riga, and Wilhelm Kube, who held the same posi­ tion at Minsk, wrote to Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Ex-

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temal Affairs, protesting the wanton and, they felt, useless slaughter. (Today Lohse draws a pension from the Bonn government, but Kube was murdered in 1943.) Nothing came of the protest. The truth is that any Kommissar who challenged the authority of Eichmanns Einsatzgruppen would be challenging the authority of Heinrich Himmler himself, so the mass executions continued. Of course “the Final Solution” did not wholly succeed; it was not because the executioners were unable to produce enough corpses but because it took so long to bury them. Eiehmann once said to one of his few friends, “Wir kämpf­ ten mit offenem visier.” (We fought with open visors.) When asked the meaning of this, he answered, “I had nothing to do with it! The dirty work was done by the SS Wirtschafts and Verwaltungs headquarters. We did not fight with knives and poison, we fought with geistige weapons. . . . I did a special job and listened to my superiors. The political hierarchy of the Reich ordered the solution of the Jewish problem, and I was appointed to carry this policy out. I was a soldier; I had to take orders.”

2 On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA, called a conference in the former Interpol house at 56-58 Grossen Wanseestrasse in a fashionable suburb of Ber­ lin. At this conference fifteen top German officials partici­ pated in a discussion concerning “the Final Solution.” Adolf Eiehmann played the major role at this important confer­ ence, later called the Wansee Conference. It was decided that “It will be necessary to apply the definitive solution of the Jewish question to approximately eleven million persons, distributed among thirty-four countries, some already under

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German rule, and the rest about to be conquered.” At the end of the conference, Eiehmann was appointed chief exe­ cutor of the plan. Once the official government policy had decided it was time for “the Final Solution,” Adolf Eiehmann became a very busy man. For his devoted work, Himmler promised that after the victory of the Reich he would be given an estate in Bohemia and the title of World Commissar for Jewish Affairs. Poland presented a real problem with its more than 3,300,000 Jews. Governor General Hans Frank had said impatiently in 1941, “What are we to do with these Jews? Do you think we can settle them all in the East? Why all this nonsense? In short, they must be liquidated. Poland must be as free from Jews as the Reich!” Ghettos had already been established in all the large cities, the largest, of course, being the one in Warsaw. This ghetto was inhabited by upwards of 400,000 Jews, who were forced to live as many as six in a room. Periodically groups of them were sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, where the gas chambers were now functioning efficiently. Gestapo records show that, in 1942 and 1943, 316,322 Jews were removed from Warsaw and liquidated. Thousands of others were rounded up and moved into the ghetto. In January 1943 there were armament factories and other war industries operating within the ghetto, using Jewish la­ bor; Himmler decided to transfer these industries to Lublin. Then, in April 1943, orders came from Himmler to destroy the ghetto. At that time there were some 80,000 Jews remain­ ing; this was too big an operation for Eiehmann and his Ein­ satzgruppen, for the ghetto inhabitants had managed to secure arms from the Polish underground. The task of de­ stroying the ghetto was given to the combat groups of SS men and a tank detachment. The Jews showed unexpectedly stubborn resistance, and reserves had to be called up. The

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operation was in charge of SS Major General Jürgen Stroop. When the inevitable end came, General Stroop was proud to write a seventy-five-page report (bound in leather) to Himmler. On the title page of his report was inscribed in decorative Gothic lettering the words, “There Are No More Jewish Dwellings in Warsaw.” The resistance put up by the Jews [he wrote], could be broken only by the relentless and energetic use of our shock troops by day and night. . . . I therefore decided to destroy the entire Jewish residential area by setting every block on fire. . . . The Jews then emerged from their hiding places and dugouts. Not infrequently the Jews stayed in the burn­ ing buildings until finally, through the heat and fear of be­ ing burned alive, they preferred to jump down from the upper stories after having thrown mattresses and other up­ holstered articles into the street. With their bones broken they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which were not yet alight. . . . The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the Waffen SS, Police, and Wehrmacht became. They fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comrade­ ship and stood together as models and examples of sol­ diers . . . only through the continuous and untiring efforts of all involved did we succeed in catching a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved. To these should be added those who lost their lives in explosions or fires but whose numbers cannot be ascertained. In August 1943, four months after the Warsaw rebellion and the destruction of the ghetto, the population in the Lodz, Poland, ghetto was increased by hundreds of ragged and starving Jews from the municipal labor camps of the Poznan region. At the beginning of 1944, there were 80,062 Jews in the ghetto, of whom 60,200 were registered workers. On Jan­ uary 3, 1944, Eiehmann visited Lodz to confer with Hans Biebow, the ghetto commissioner, the local authorities, and

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the representatives of the SS Economic Administration, and to play his characteristic role. There were 5365 children liv­ ing in the ghetto who were under the age of ten—the age at which they were sent to work. Eiehmann decreed that these little children were to be liquidated—with one exception; the children of the privileged personnel would be spared. “The Final Solution” was almost achieved in Poland; when the war ended, fewer than 50,000 Jews could be traced. It was obvious (and SS records confirm this) that at least 2,600,000 Polish Jews had perished. Denmark was one country which had temporarily managed to escape Eichmann’s activities. The country, after being oc­ cupied, became what the Germans called a Musterprotek­ torat (model protectorate), which implied non-interference by the Nazis in the civil affairs of the country. For some time the 8000 Jews in Denmark were not molested by the Nazi military authorities. In August 1943, however, riots broke out after the strike by the dock workers followed by the scuttling of the Danish fleet. The pleasant fiction that Denmark was a model protectorate now came to an end, and Lieutenant General Hermann von Hanneken, commander of occupation troops, became in effect ruler of the country. Hitler charac­ teristically blamed the Jews and told Himmler to clear the country of them. Himmler’s order for evacuation came in September 1943. Eiehmann dispatched a Sonderkommando unit (a section of an Einsatzgruppe) under the command of his adjutant Rolf Günther. Two ships had been chartered for the purpose of deporting the Jews, but 6000 of them had al­ ready fled to Sweden. Only 467 were rounded up and sent to a concentration camp; by some miracle all except 45 sur­ vived. Eiehmann had much more success in Holland. After the country was invaded, Artur Seyss-Inquart was made Reich

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Commissioner of the Netherlands. Early in 1941, in a speech made in Amsterdam, he declared: “We do not consider the Jews here to be Dutch. They are enemies with whom we can never come to an armistice or a peace. We will beat the Jews whenever we meet them and those who shelter them must bear the consequences. The Führer has declared that the Jews have played their final act in Europe, and they have, therefore, played their final act.” Eiehmann opened a branch office under the disarming name of Office for Jewish Emigration and put SS Obersturm­ führer Aus der Fuenten in charge. Passports for Honduras and Paraguay were available to Jews who could afford them; very few could. So the familiar pattern was again followed. Three ghettos were established in Amsterdam, and most of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were herded into them. Eiehmann sent his boxcars to Amsterdam, where they were loaded with Jews destined for the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Lieutenant General Hans Rauter, who was Chief of Police and Security, wrote to Himmler on March 2, 1942, saying, “In ten days the last Jew in Holland will be sent east.” He did not quite make good his promise, but when the war was ended fewer than 50,000 Dutch Jews returned to their homeland. Little Luxembourg did not escape either, although records are not reliable because the country was incorporated into the Reich. It is thought that at least 3000 of the nearly 4000 Jews were deported and were not seen again. The task of clearing Jews from France was given to an obscure, small man, SS Obersturmführer Theodor Dannecker. He delighted in writing long, precise reports. In one of these, which he titled, “The Jewish Question in France and Its Treatment,” he stated, “From a study of the records collected in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland the con­ clusion is inevitable that the center of Judaism in Europe

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and the chief lines of communication overseas must be sought in France.” Dannecker had a difficult assignment. He could never un­ derstand why even the most pro-German Vichy officials in­ sisted on regarding French Jews as Frenchmen first, and Jews second. Thousands of Jews went underground to work with the Maquis. Eiehmann sent Dannecker an order saying that Goring himself had banned all voluntary emigration of Jews from France. The time was approaching for “the Final Solution.” In 1942, 100,000 Jews were sent to forced-labor camps. Dannecker had great difficulty finding Jews to de­ port. He did not have the manpower to do the job properly so in desperation he went to Field Marshal von Steulpnagel and demanded help from his regular army. (Technically, SS Colonel Helmuth Knochen was Dannecker’s immediate superior but Knochen had other duties, and the section of IV A 4b in occupied France was the sole responsibility of Dannecker.) In effect, of course, Dannecker was a repre­ sentative of Himmler. Even though Dannecker was far down in the chain of command, the elderly Field Marshal von Steulpnagel virtually had to obey this obscure, inefficient Obersturmführers orders. On March 4, 1942, a conference was held in Eichmann’s office in Berlin, at which time he told his French representa­ tives that the “J ewfch resettlement” operation must be stepped up. At this meeting Dannecker complained of the attitude of the French public. All Jews in France were re­ quired to wear the conventional badge—the yellow Star of David—displayed prominently on their clothing. Dannecker said that hundreds of non-Jews wore the badges in public, and he said too that many Jews who had been in the French Army wore their badges below the medals and decorations they had won. A bit after this, Dannecker was removed from his office

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and court-martialed for corrupt practices. This had nothing to do with his activities against the Jews. Dannecker had started a chain of night clubs in Paris and was growing wealthy. Usually the SS superior officers looked the other way if their subordinates indulged in minor peccadilloes which increased their bank accounts, but Dannecker was spending much more time in his night clubs than he was in rounding up Jews. His successor, appointed by Eiehmann, was SS Captain Heinz Roethke. Late in 1942 an incident occurred which embarrassed Eiehmann considerably. The Vichy French were being in­ comprehensibly stubborn about the Jewish problem. The at­ titude of Vichy was that Jews who were French citizens should be left alone and only stateless Jews be used as fodder for the gas chambers. Eiehmann had ordered that a thousand Jews be rounded up in Bordeaux and sent to Ausch­ witz. The train was ready to transport them, but the trip had to be canceled because there were only 150 stateless Jews in Bordeaux. It was the first time that one of Eichmanns trains had ever failed to leave on schedule. Eiehmann now told Knochen and Roethke that Heydrich and General Müller were very impatient at the way in which the Jewish problem was being handled in France and that they must put more pressure on the Vichy officials. This they did. Toward the end of 1942 they had a great roundup in Paris, collecting 7000 Jews (4051 of whom were children). These were herded into the bleak expanse of the Velodrome d’Hiver. Paris officials protested, demanding that the chil­ dren be spared and sent to French orphanages. For five days they held a conference with Knochen and Roethke, and there Were numerous telephone calls between these two and Eichftiann. During these five days the Jewish children and their

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parents were given no food and very little water. There were only ten lavatories for the 7000. Many of the women were pregnant, and a number of them gave birth without the aid of anesthetics or medical attention. Thirty of them died, and a great many went insane. On the fifth day the parents were taken away, leaving the children alone. They were told that the children would be taken care of. They were taken care of; a few days later Eiehmann arranged for a train to take the 4051 children directly to Auschwitz. They followed their parents into the gas chambers. Eiehmann received a tip that 15,000 Jews were hiding out in the mountains of the principality of Monaco. The German consul in Monaco was instructed to arrange for Eichmann’s men to enter the country and to collect these Jews and trans­ port them to Germany. The German consul was bewildered. He knew the little country well, and he reported that there were only about 1000 Jews in Monaco, all of them perma­ nent residents. It developed afterward that Eiehmann had received the bogus tip at a party in Nice where the cham­ pagne had flowed freely. However, the inquiries by the Ger­ man consul in Monaco had made the Jews apprehensive, and most of them found their way to Switzerland, to Spain, or into the ranks of the Maquis. “The Final Solution” never became a fact in Denmark, France, or Italy. When Marshal Ion Antonescu took over the reins of gov­ ernment in Romania it was a death sentence for a large seg­ ment of the Jewish population. As fascist-minded and as anti-Semitic as Hitler, the marshal was more than willing to cooperate with Eiehmann. Eiehmann, Dr. Ernst Wetzel (an assistant to Alfred Rosenberg), and General Lecca, the Romanian commissioner for Jewish affairs, held a meeting at Bucharest. After the war a memorandum as to the results of this meeting was found in the files of the German embassy

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in Bucharest. It read in part: “110,000 Jews are being evacu­ ated from Bucovina and Bessarabia to the forests in the area of the River Bug. The purpose is the liquidation of these Jews.” Eiehmann did not have to use his Einsatzgruppen in Ro­ mania. Special Romanian units drawn from the fascist “Green Shirts” handled most of the details. By now the Rus­ sian region of Transnistria had come under Romanian ad­ ministration. Three ghettos were established in this region. Able-bodied Jews worked at forced labor, and when they were rendered physically useless they were eliminated. Be­ tween 1943 and 1944 the Romanian Jewish Salvation Com­ mittee made immense efforts to save about 70,000 children from being transported to the Transnistria ghettos. Antonescu, for the first time, hesitated; being essentially a mili­ tary man, he saw the handwriting on the wall. He visited Hitler in Berlin, suggesting that these children be deported to Palestine. He said that the Jewish Committee for the Sal­ vation of the Romanian Jews would pay a good price per capita for the freedom of the children. Hitler gave his implied approval, but the counsel of Adolf Eiehmann led him to re­ verse this decision. Ambassador Manfred von Killinger, the German envoy to Romania, asked the German Foreign Office for its advice on the Romanian request. The German Foreign Office solicited Eichmann’s opinion. Ambassador Killinger received a message that stated: “This plan runs contrary to the official policy of the Third Reich, which forbids Jewish emigration from German-occupied territory, especially to Palestine—which would hurt the pro-Arab policy of Ger­ many.” The children were sent to Transnistria. Later in 1943 the international Red Cross proposed to Antonescu that 5000 Jewish children be removed from the ghettos and trans­ ported by Red Cross ships to Palestine. Eiehmann again gave

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the final answer. He wrote: “The plan for the emigration of these Jewish children must be withdrawn. If, however, the emigration of 5000 Jewish children from the occupied terri­ tory of eastern Europe should be completed—definitely against my will—it should be done according to an exchange agreement. These children should be exchanged for German prisoners of war at the rate of one child for four German prisoners, and it should be understood that this exchange should not involve any of the 20,000 elderly Germans now captured but only men under the age of forty. This exchange, if made, should be completed immediately, for in the near future, because of our 'Jewish measures/ the emigration will be technically impossible.” Nothing came of this halfhearted suggestion for exchange, but the idea of bartering human lives had taken root in Eichmann’s mind and was to bear fantastic fruit later on. Many other propositions were made to Antonescu, but they did nothing but fill wastepaper baskets. On August 23, 1944, the Putsch of King Michael changed the whole situa­ tion. Romania withdrew from the Axis and two days later was at war with Germany. The Soviet troops were moving fast now. They overran Transnistria before Eiehmann could send his units in to destroy the children. When Soviet troops entered Bucharest, Eichmann’s job in Romania was over and he left for Hungary, where he could work under better con­ ditions. Slovakia, a nominally independent territory since 1939, and a strong Catholic area, presented still another problem to the Gestapo; a great many Slovakian Jews had been con­ verted to the Catholic faith. The local authorities rebelled at the German insistence that these should be treated purely as Jews, but were more cooperative when it came to the Or­ thodox Jews. On March 25, 1942, Eiehmann demanded

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20,000 strong young Jews for forced labor, and he got them. The trains which carried them to labor camps were marked XD—Transport David. Within six months, 52,000 Jews had been removed from the region, and the Slovakian authorities paid the German government 500 marks per deportee to cover the cost of transportation. Goring kept calling for more strong young workers, and Eiehmann tried to find them in Slovakia. He complained bitterly that some 40,000 Jews, be­ cause of their having been baptized, had received special dispensation from deportation. Rumors had reached Slovakia that those who went to work remained to die, and further deportation now became very unpopular among the people of Slovakia. The bishops issued a pastoral letter against antiSemitism, saying that this was the Vatican’s viewpoint. Die­ ter von Wisliczeny, assigned to Slovakia as an adviser to the government on all Jewish questions, and always Eichmann’s troubleshooter, was told to put pressure on the local au­ thorities. Dr. Wojtech Tuka, Premier of Slovakia, proved to be very obstinate. He told Von Wisliczeny that the people believed that the deportees who were sent to camps such as Ausch­ witz were not there for the purpose of working but rather to be exterminated. Von Wisliczeny said that this was pure fabrication invented by Jewish enemies of the Reich. Then Tuka suggested that a Slovakian commission visit Auschwitz to convince themselves that the rumors were in fact fabrica­ tion. When this was reported to Eiehmann he wrote to Tuka. He could not of course allow any outsiders to visit Ausch­ witz, but his letter read in part: . . . For the rest, to counteract the fantastic rumors cir­ culating in Slovakia about the fate of the evacuated Jews, attention should be drawn to the postal communications of the Jews with Slovakia, which are forwarded directly through the adviser on Jewish affairs with the German Le-

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gation in Slovakia, and which, for instance, amount to more than 1000 letters and postcards for February and March this year. Concerning the information apparently desired by Prime Minister Dr. Tuka about the conditions in Jewish camps, no objection would be raised by this office against any possible scrutinizing of the correspondence before it is forwarded to the addressees. Canny Eiehmann had forced thousands of inmates to write undated cards and letters to their families in Slovakia. Long after the writers had died in the gas chambers, the cards and letters were mailed. Nothing, of course, became of the Premier’s request to visit Auschwitz, but cards did keep coming and the population was somewhat mollified. Eichmann, however, was not satisfied, and neither was the For­ eign Office. SS Colonel Edmund Veesenmeyer was sent to Bratislava to impress President Monsignor Josef Tiso with the importance of settling the “Jewish problem” in Slovakia. Tiso promised completion of the plan by April 1, 1944. It was upon his return from his unsuccessful errand to Slovakia that Eiehmann took Von Wisliczeny into his confidence. Until now, Hitlers order for “the Final Solution” had been given only to the high-ranking members of the SS. When Eiehmann explained that the whole Jewish race was to be exterminated, Von Wisliczeny said he was horrified. In the memoirs he wrote afterward, while waiting to be hanged, he said, “It was perfectly clear to me that this order spelled the death of millions of people. I said to Eiehmann, ‘God grant that our enemies never have the opportunity of doing the same to the German people/ In reply to which Eiehmann told me not to be sentimental; it was an order from the Führer and would have to be carried out.” But this was long after the fact. Actually Von Wisliczeny returned and speeded up the deportation of Jews. In all about 87,000 Jews, the bulk of Slovakian Jewry, died in

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Auschwitz, Lublin, Poniatow, Lubartow, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Neither the Greeks nor the Italians were anti-Semitic. The Italians and Germans occupied Greece jointly after its defeat. Greek Jews living in the Italian zone of occupation were treated exactly the same as the Greek Orthodox Catho­ lics or any others. For a long time Greek Jews living in the German zone of occupation (Salonika and northern Greece) were treated as the rest of the conquered people. It was not until the end of 1942 that General Alexander Löhr, German occupation commandant, suggested to his opposite number General Carlo Geloso and to General Tripicione, who headed the Italian 11th Army, that they use the Jews in their territory as forced laborers. They both said they had no instructions from their government to do this. Then Eichmann, his adjutant Rolf Günther, and Major Alois Brunner arrived. Brunner requisitioned trains for the deportations from the transport command of the armed forces. All he had to do was indicate the number of cars needed and the exact time they were required. Eiehmann, always backed by the authority of the feared Himmler, practically gave orders to the German occupation general. The same old pattern was followed. The Jews were first ordered to wear yellow badges, were then collected and put into ghettos. Once Eiehmann had set up his plan, he called for his friend Von Wisliczeny to implement it. This was routine work to Von Wisliczeny. By 1944, he had shipped 60,000 Jews from Greece to Auschwitz. An interesting fact is that thousands of Jews es­ caped to the Italian zone of occupation and were hidden by the Italian Army. There had been a bad epidemic of typhus and tuberculosis in Salonika, and when the victims arrived at Auschwitz, Commandant Rudolf Hoess complained that they were in no condition to work. In fact, he said, “They

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were of such poor quality that they had to be exterminated.” People in Italy were always puzzled by Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. The 50,000 Jews living in Italy were for the most part respected tradesmen, professional men, and industrial workers. By the end of 1942 Italy occupied the region of Nice and the Maritime Alps, which of course had been French territory. Helmuth Knochen sent messages to his superior Eiehmann from Paris, telling him that French Jews in the South of France were leaving by the thousand, seeking refuge in the Italian zone. Jews had no trouble crossing the French-Italian frontier, Knochen added, and he said that Italian frontier guards were actually helping the Jews to reach such resort towns as Mégéve and Vence. Knochen and Heinz Roethke estimated that there were at least 55,000 Jews in the Italian zone. On March 6, 1943, Roethke made a complaint to Eiehmann, saying that “the Final Solution” to the Jewish question could be cleared up only if the Italians would abandon their friendly attitude toward their own na­ tionals and the Jewish refugees. This was a political matter to be considered by a higher echelon than that commanded by Eiehmann, so he presented these protests to Heinrich Müller, and then, of course, they came to the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, who turned them over to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Foreign Minister went to Rome to confer with Mus­ solini. With him was the German ambassador, Hans Georg von Mackensen. The Italian Foreign Minister was present at the conference. Von Ribbentrop told Mussolini bluntly that the Jews were needed to work in the war plants of the east. The Duce, always subservient to a representative of Hitler, agreed and promised to deport the Jews in the Italian zone of occupation. Von Ribbentrop left, satisfied that his mission had been a success. Then Mussolini found out some­ thing that, incomprehensibly, he had not known; his Foreign

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Office officials told him, and backed up their statements with signed affidavits, that Hitler had instituted “the Final Solu­ tion,” his aim being to wipe out all of European Jewry. They told him that the Jews in Italy and its zone of occupation were needed not for work but merely to feed the gas ovens of the concentration camps. Mussolini, who had never hesi­ tated to torture and imprison enemies of his own type of fascism, balked at the idea of mass liquidations of Jewish families who were apparently innocent of everything but being born Jews. He ordered no deportations. This was one of Eichmann’s few defeats. But after Mussolini’s arrest and Italy’s surrender to the Allies conditions swiftly changed. The Germans moved into the Italian zone, and Alois Brunner be­ gan a mass roundup of Jews in the South of France for de­ portation. Despite Eichmann’s occasional setbacks, he still fed the 184 concentration camps in Germany and the occupied coun­ tries with thousands of victims daily. Since the war, virtually every high-ranking Nazi officer who was tried has sung the same song—“I was only obeying orders.” Strangely enough, this was true. There was only one man primarily responsible for inaugurating “the Final Solution”—Adolf Hitler. In fact it was he who verbally, and in writing to Himmler, used the German phrase “die Lösung der Judenfrage.99Literally translated, this means “the solution of the Jewish problem,” but it found its way into the collo­ quial language as “the Final Solution.” Neither Himmler, Heydrich (who was replaced by Ernst Kaltenbrunner after his assassination), nor General Heinrich Müller originated the plan, but of course when the Führer ordered it they enthusiastically implemented it. Hitler had a strange, almost incredible flair for inspiring complete worship among his subordinates. At the height of his power Dr. Josef Paul

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Goebbels said that every woman in Germany idolized Hit­ ler to such an extent that she slept with him every night in her dreams. There are those who have tried to advance the theory that Hitler was a homosexual. Nothing could be further from the truth, but he did have the ability to make men worship him. The Nazi philosophy, as expounded in Mein Kampf, was based to a great degree on a distorted version of Nietzsche’s “superman theory,” and the SS in particular, who had been indoctrinated in this materialistic philosophy, were especially devoted to their Führer. When the direct order came from Hitler to effect “the Final Solu­ tion,” and made its way down through Himmler and his subordinates, they accepted it without reservation. The Führer could do no wrong. Eiehmann, for instance, except for the small incident when his long nose and dark features caused his schoolmates to taunt him with the phrase “der kleine Jude,” had no reason for being anti-Semitic. His own mother had died when he was very young, and his father remarried a woman of Jewish origin, but there is no evidence that he ever felt any animosity toward her because of this. Eiehmann repeats over and over again in his memoirs and at his interrogation in prison that he was a subordinate obeying orders. If the orders came from Hitler himself, he would obey them with fanatical enthusiasm. In the beginning, when Hitler’s policy was to deport Jews, Eiehmann did his job well and even, on rare occasions, humanely. When the order came for “the Final Solution,” he did this job just as well and just as enthu­ siastically. He thought in terms of producing Jewish corpses, as an industrialist might think of producing more and more goods. It was he who had the power of suggesting men to head the concentration camps and although, of course, these appointments had to be approved by his superiors, they were invariably accepted.

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Never satisfied with the number of Jews who had been done away with, he urged his camp commandants to increase the production of corpses. There was one man he never had to rebuke, SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, who commanded not only Auschwitz but its neigh­ boring extermination center Birkenau. On May 1, 1940, Hoess was transferred to Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen, where he had been adjutant to the commandant since 1935. In the eyes of the whole world Auschwitz has become the symbol of the extermination camp; actually, some executions were carried out there, but Auschwitz was primarily a labor camp. The Polish town of Auschwitz ( Oswiegim) had a pop­ ulation of 12,000 and was about 160 miles southwest of War­ saw. It was located in an unhealthy terrain in the bottom of a flat basin surrounded by a great many stagnant ponds. Hoess was a quiet, diffident man with a talent for adminis­ trative work. He was one of the camp commandants who had been appointed directly by Himmler. In the summer of 1941 he was summoned to Himmlers office, where in a private meeting he was told that the Führer had ordered the Jewish question solved once and for all. The SS was to implement the order. Auschwitz was chosen for this purpose because of its central location, isolation, and suitability for camouflage. Himmler told Hoess, “You will learn further details from Sturmbannführer Eiehmann of RSHA, who will call on you in the immediate future. You will treat this order as secret, even from your superiors. After your talk with Eiehmann you will immediately forward to me the plans of the projected installations.” Soon Eiehmann arrived to visit Hoess at Auschwitz. Sitting in the office of his subordinate, he explained to him in gen­ eral the plan to destroy European Jewry. The two went out to design the construction on the spot. They inspected the camp and the final blueprint was drawn up. Hoess says,

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“Eiehmann had the entire plan of the camp figured out in his head. As a matter of fact, he had already planned it previ­ ously.” In the beginning, those who were condemned to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau were shot in the forest of Braezinsky. Eiehmann said to Hoess on one of his official visits to Ausch­ witz, “We expect large quantities of people, and technically it will be very hard to finish them off by shooting them. The women’s and children’s shouts disturb the SS men in their action and cause inconvenience.” Eiehmann asked Müller to put chemists to work; he wanted something that would work more efficiently than the carbon monoxide gas then being used in Belzec, Treblinka, and Wolzec concentration camps. The chemists came up with several answers, and Eiehmann selected Cyclone B, a crystal­ lized prussic acid. This was a great improvement over all pre­ vious methods. At Auschwitz there were several war factories, including the Deutsches-Aufrustungswerk, Siemens, and Krupp, all devoted to the production of weapons. It was in fact a slavelabor camp and when the inmates grew too weak to work, as most eventually did, they were sent to Birkenau, less than a quarter of a mile away. Birkenau was regarded as an annex of Auschwitz. It was really the death chamber for the huge Auschwitz camp. The first extermination of Jews began in September 1941. There were five gas chambers erected at Birkenau, and the Cyclone B proved to be a great success. Four crematory units were installed, all planned by Eiehmann, making Auschwitz the largest extermination center. When the victims arrived at the railroad siding which separated Auschwitz from Birkenau they were greeted by the Auschwitz orchestra, composed of camp inmates dressed in blue and white striped pajamas. It was a good orchestra, which not only played the Viennese and German classics but

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often played American jazz. This friendly greeting soothed and raised the hopes of the deportees, who had previously been told that they were being resettled in work camps. As they emerged from the crowded boxcars, SS doctors sat at a table inspecting each of the new arrivals. Those who looked able to work were sent to the left, to the main Auschwitz camp. Those who were either too young or too old or too emaciated were sent to the right, to Birkenau, just across the railroad tracks. There they were herded in front of the five gas chambers and told they must remove their clothing in order to be deloused. They usually complied without any protests, for the music and the affable welcome had lulled their suspicions. The five gas chambers could accommodate up to one thousand victims. Completely naked, they entered the death chambers; the heavy steel doors were then closed tightly and the Cyclone B discharged through special vents in the floor and in the walls. Each gas chamber had one small glass opening through which the executioners could look to deter­ mine when the victims were dead. Cyclone B did not work as quickly as had been expected. Those who were closest to the vents perished very rapidly, but the others, feeling the horror in their throats, screamed and banged on the steel doors until the fumes finally killed them. It took twenty-five minutes for the electric pumps to remove the gas from the chambers. Then the steel doors were opened and groups of Jewish inmates, called Sonderkommandos, selected by Hoess, entered, wearing gas masks and rubber boots and carrying hoses and grappling hooks. Their first task was to clean up the blood and excrement, and then with the grappling hooks they hauled the corpses out of the death chambers. They removed gold teeth, bridgework, and human hair (afterward used for making cloth). The clothing of the victims was taken to a sorting office called

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“Canada,” where anything of value was removed by a special squad. Currency and often jewelry were found and sent by truck to the Economic Administration office in Berlin and thence to the Reichsbank. The jewelry and foreign currency were later sent to Switzerland and converted into Swiss francs. Meanwhile the bodies had been transferred by small wag­ ons to the four crematory units. The ovens at Birkenau were heated by a total of 30 fires. There were 120 openings in the four ovens, into each of which three corpses could be placed at one time, which meant that 360 bodies could be reduced from human flesh to ashes every half-hour, or 720 per hour, or 17,280 per 24-hour shift, and Birkenau operated 24 hours a day. In the death-pits nearby another 8000 bodies were destroyed daily. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled in Birkenau each day. The ashes from the crema­ tories were thrown into a nearby river, but the bones which resisted the searing heat were put into a grinding machine to be made into fertilizer. Hoess was always proud of the fact that the cabbages he grew in fields outside the camps were the best in Germany. The Jewish groups who had to perform these grisly tasks did not have to work long. It must be emphasized that they had no part in the killing of their fellow Jews; they were merely cleanup squads and had to accept their assignments or join their fellow victims. They were selected on the basis of their health and strength. Many of them went mad and were hurriedly thrown into the gas chambers. The average life of these Jewish squads was only three or four weeks; then they were exterminated and new groups recruited. Every detail in this whole operation had been planned and supervised by Adolf Eiehmann. It was familiarly called the “Eiehmann Plan.” Hoess had opportunities to talk with Eichmann on many occasions about Auschwitz. “Even Eiehmann,

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who was tough enough, had no wish to change places with me. We discussed the details of the final solution many times and I tried to discover his innermost convictions about it. Even when we were alone together and the drink had flowed freely, he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew he could lay his hands on. ‘Without pity and in cold blood we must complete the ex­ termination as rapidly as possible.’ ” Hoess, a rather modest man who lived happily with his wife, children, and dogs in a magnificent house three miles from Auschwitz, wrote plaintively in his memoirs that he was merely obeying Eichmann’s orders. He obeyed them well. In fact, he made what will probably stand for all time as a world record—during May, June, and July of 1944 he liquidated ( according to his precise records) 1,300,000 help­ less people at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During this period vic­ tims would be driven into the gas chambers with their hands held high above their heads in order that more could be squeezed in, and the children were piled one upon another to make room for more. When he was interrogated at his trial, Hoess said without shame that he had exterminated 2 V2 million Jews during the time he was in charge of Ausch­ witz. He had always had a very good head for figures, and it is very probable that his estimate is a fairly accurate one. However, before the Götterdämmerung, Hoess received orders from Eiehmann to destroy all his records, so he was testifying from memory. But he had been a very good book­ keeper and there is no reason to doubt his figure unless he was boasting in order to prove he had outproduced the other camps of death—although Eiehmann and his aide Rolf Günther were the only ones who knew the exact total number of those destroyed. Auschwitz may have led when it came to producing

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corpses, but Buchenwald, established as early as 1937, earned special distinction for the great variety of torture and death it meted out to its guests. It was commanded by SS Colonel Karl Koch, who had a wife named Ilse. Colonel Koch was relieved of his command in November 1941, but his wife remained and became the real camp commandant. Buchen­ wald was relatively small, with accommodations for only 21,000, but by April 1945 Eiehmann had sent 49,000 internees to the camp. Food, clothing, and medical care were grossly inadequate. Ilse Koch instituted a practice which few other camp commandants used; when she ordered a prisoner to be hanged, she insisted that all the inmates watch the pro­ ceedings. She was an expert in hanging; she had her assist­ ants dangle their victims from iron hooks, and in some cases death did not occur for forty minutes. Strangulation rather than shooting was the favorite method of extermination employed by the guards at Buchenwald. Hundreds died in the medical experimental bloc after injections of typhus bacilli, various poisons, or air into the bloodstream. When­ ever an inmate broke even a minor camp rule he or she was stripped and then beaten with clubs, whips, riding crops, rubber hoses, rifle butts, or shovels (affidavits from the few survivors were unanimous in testifying as to this at the Nuremberg trials). Buchenwald was not intended to be an extermination camp like Birkenau. It was nominally a labor camp. However, the frightful living conditions, in addition to the impossible working hours demanded of each inmate, made survival extremely difficult—almost impossible. Ilse Koch was known to both guards and inmates as Frau Kammandantin or “Mrs. Kommandant.” This devoted wife and mother had a unique hobby; she liked to make lamp­ shades out of tattooed skin. In her home she had a skin lampshade, a skin-bound album, and a pair of gloves—all made from human skin. At Nuremberg, Ilse Koch escaped

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the death penalty. She was condemned to imprisonment for life. Another infamous extermination center was Mauthausen. Occasionally Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who now had replaced Heydrich, visited there. He enjoyed himself thoroughly one afternoon. After the war Johann Kanduth, one of the guards, said that when Kaltenbrunner’s visit was announced the guards were ordered to demonstrate for him three different kinds of execution. He saw men hanged, he saw them shot in the backs of their heads, and he saw them gassed. Be­ sides the extermination camps there were others—labor camps—where the prisoners were worked to death for “the glory of the Reich.” These camps created a great difficulty for the German gov­ ernment in its attempt to end the “Jewish problem.” Most of the economic departments of the government were against the destruction of the Jews working in labor camps. The army officers in charge of recruiting labor also fought against the total destruction of Jewish manpower. Nazi documents de­ scribe the use of Jewish labor as “the near goal,” and the elements in the government who favored it officially asked to have the final exterminations ( “the far goal”) postponed. In the middle of 1942 the Germans had 300,000 Jewish slaves working in various industries. Eiehmann was a determined opponent of postponing the extermination of Jews who were fit to work. He regarded "the near goal” as a constant danger to his scheme for “the Final Solution,” for he was afraid that a mass escape or some other eventuality would enable the Jews to survive. In his view, action should be quickly taken against every Jew within reach, “since the final result of the war is unpredict­ able.” Eiehmann made periodic inspections of the concentration and labor camps. A former Czech, Jan Judak, now living in

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Israel, describes the excitement produced by an Eiehmann visit: I was interned in a hard-labor camp situated on the bor­ der between Moravia and Bohemia. I was only twenty at the time but luckily I was pretty strong. Our commander was Hauptscharführer Hans Lederer, who had come from Vienna. The camp consisted of about 300 Jewish men work­ ing in a factory and doing some agricultural work. One day he called us together and told us he was expecting a very im­ portant official to visit us the next day and that we must put the camp in spick-and-span order. He added that when this man inspected us we must be cheerful and clean; if he asked us questions we were to reply that we were being well treated. Lederer was nervous; obviously, if this high-ranking visitor found anything wrong with the camp, Lederer would end up on the Eastern Front. At ten o’clock the next morning our distinguished visitor arrived. He was Adolf Eiehmann. This good-looking, ele­ gantly dressed SS officer with his shiny boots appeared to be about thirty-six years old. We were lined up, and he in­ spected us. We stood at attention. For some reason Eichmann stopped in front of me and asked, “Are you in charge of your work group?” and I answered, “Yes, Obersturmbann­ führer.” “How many men are in your group and what do they do?” “We are construction workers,” I answered. “There are sixteen of us in the squad; five bring sand, four work in the actual building, and the other seven carry bricks.” Eichmann went on, “How many of your squad report sick every day?” I answered, “It is very seldom that any of our men report sick.” Eiehmann asked, “Are you satisfied? How is the food?” I said, lying of course, “We are very satisfied, Obersturmbannführer, and our food is very good.” Eichmann was very affable and he smiled in satisfaction at my answers, which were the ones I knew Hans Lederer would want me to give. He went down the line, stopped suddenly, and demanded, “Which one of you speaks Hebrew?” Many

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0f my fellow prisoners had come from Eastern Europe and they knew Hebrew, but no one spoke up; they were afraid that one word too much might mean death. Then Eiehmann roared, “You are the stupidest damned people I have ever seen. Perhaps you would like a German like myself to teach you your Hebrew languagel” I learned long afterward that he knew only a few words of Hebrew, but apparently he just wanted to show off to us. Eiehmann and Lederer then went off to lunch together. Eiehmann must have been very well satisfied with conditions at our camp, for Lederer was not transferred. Eiehmann was a man who never shirked his duties. He was one of the hardest-working members of the Gestapo, but he continued to indulge in his two favorite pastimes, drinking and women. Even during his frenzied attempts to effect “the Final Solution,” he still found time for romance. In 1944 he met a wealthy Hungarian, the Baroness Ingrid von Ihama. She was a socialite who was separated from her husband. She opened up a completely new world for Eichmann, and she was one of the few women in his life who ever had any personal influence over him. He felt great satis­ faction in that he, who had sprung from bourgeois stock, was now the lover of a beautiful woman of noble birth. When the Russian offensive in Hungary began, Eiehmann formed a suicide pact with her in case of their capture by the Russians. He obtained cyanide pellets for them both and two specially designed rings in which the pellets were hidden. When he was not dallying with the baroness, he was having a genial affair with Fräulein Margit Kutchira. One of Eiehmann s more grotesque duties, but one which he found interesting, was to furnish subjects for medical experimentation. Actually this program had been inaugu­ rated before the war. By a special and secret decree of Hitler issued to Philip Bouhler, head of the Führers Chancel­

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lery, mercy killing, or euthanasia, was made legal. The Führers Chancellery had originally been an ordinary private secretariat, but Hitler trusted Bouhler, and the Führers Chancellery developed into an executive organization for transmitting decrees which were kept completely secret from the public. Karl Brandt, Hitlers private physician, also had a hand in this program. Thousands of mentally unbalanced Germans became vic­ tims of euthanasia, the killing accomplished usually by in­ jections of phenol and barbiturates. As more and more men and women were judged to be insane or incurably ill, the program was expanded. Headquarters for the doctors was an abandoned sanitarium at Brandenburg, about thirty miles from Berlin. This was put in charge of Christian Wirth, a commissioner in Arthur Nebe’s Criminal Investigation De­ partment. The Reich’s Department of Health at that time was staffed with reputable doctors, among the best in Germany, and these men wanted no part in the mercy killings, so SS doctors (Fritz Mennecke was one of these) had to be with­ drawn from active service in the field SS and utilized. In the beginning, this was not a program designed to exterminate either political enemies or Jews; virtually all the victims were Aryan. The public in general knew nothing of the project un­ til Bishop von Galen preached a scathing sermon in Münster Cathedral, condemning the practice. Cardinal Faulhaber also condemned the program; so did Dr. Bernard Lichtenberg, dean of the famous St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin. Even Hitler hesitated at directly opposing the will of such eminent Protestant and Catholic churchmen, so the euthanasia pro­ gram was slowed up and was never used again for the murder of German citizens. But the doctors and chemists who had been engaged in doing this work still retained their positions and worked under the general instructions of Adolf Eichmann. Out of this came the implementation of the death

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vans, and later, of course, the faster-working Cyclone B. Once the word was given for “the Final Solution” to be e f f e c t e d , these doctors and chemists were given a free hand. Sigmund Rascher was a young intern working with the Luftwaffe in Munich. His wife, fifteen years older than he, was a good friend of Himmlers wife. She was distinguished only by the fact that she had produced three children after passing the age of forty-eight. Himmler became interested in the young man who had contributed to this rather un­ usual phenomenon. When young Rascher asked Himmler if he could furnish him with some human guinea pigs for the purpose of experiments of use to the Luftwaffe, Himmler told Eiehmann to take care of the details. Rascher established his headquarters at Dachau. He used pressure chambers which could simulate high altitudes; hundreds of victims died in these experiments. Then Rascher busied himself on freezing experiments. He wanted to find just how much in­ tense cold the human body could stand before death ensued. A hopelessly incompetent medical researcher, he next came up with the idea that “animal heat” might revive frozen air­ men. Eiehmann sent him a group of prostitutes to cooperate in the experiment. As any second-year medical student could have foretold, it was a complete failure. Nevertheless Himm­ ler had Rascher transferred to the Waffen SS and perma­ nently installed at Dachau. By late 1942, medical experiments were being carried out in half a dozen concentration camps. At Ravensbrück, Polish girls were given gas gangrene wounds by Dr. Karl Gebhardt. At Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, Doctors Horst Schumann and Hans Clauberg experimented with the sterilization of Jewesses. SS Dr. Joachim Mugrowski specialized in the effect of poison bullets. There is an interesting postscript to the career of young Dr. Sigmund Rascher. In May 1944, Freiherr von Eberstein,

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SS leader in Munich, went to Dachau and arrested Rascher on a very strange indictment. It had been discovered that the three children whom Frau Rascher had borne after the age of forty-eight had actually been abducted from orphan­ ages. Himmler was very unhappy that his young protégé and his wife’s friend had deceived him, but he merely ordered that they be held in protective custody. Germany had once been famed the world over for medical research, but now these experiments were in the hands of third-rate party doctors, all of whom had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the racial theories of Hitler. It is hard to believe that Julius Streicher, self-styled “Jew-baiter Number One” was the editor of a once reputable semi-medical jour­ nal called The People's Health. In it he wrote an absurd editorial which was actually taken seriously by its readers. It is established for all time: “alien albumen” is the sperm of a man of an alien race. The male sperm in cohabitation is partially or completely absorbed by the female and thus enters her bloodstream. One single cohabitation of a Jew with an Aryan woman is sufficient to poison her blood for­ ever. Together with the “alien albumen” she has absorbed the alien soul. Never again will she be able to bear purely Aryan children . . . they will all be bastards. . . . Now we know why the Jew uses every artifice of seduction in order to ravish German girls at as early an age as possible, why the Jewish doctor rapes his female patients while they are under anesthetics. One of the more bizarre centers for experiments was the Strassburg Anatomical Institute. This was in charge of SS Dr. August Hirt and was a special pet of Himmler. Hirt was especially interested in skulls, his theory apparently being that skulls differed according to racial origin. Eiehmann obligingly furnished Hirt with victims and also established a small concentration camp complete with gas chamber at

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Natzweiler. Colonel Sievers, an associate of Dr. Hirt, was in constant touch with Eiehmann. He kept him informed of the progress of the anatomical experiments, and on one occasion reported: “Altogether 115 persons were experi­ mented on; 79 were Jews, 30 were Jewesses, 2 were Poles, and 4 were Asiatics. At the present time these prisoners are segregated by sex and are under quarantine in two hospital buildings.” These victims were soon killed and became part of Dr. Hirt’s skeleton and skull collection. Later Hirt wrote Eichmann a long letter headed, “Subject: Securing Skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars for the Scientific Research at the Reichsuniversität Strassburg.” He mentioned that he had a nearly complete collection of skulls of all races, but complained that he did not have enough Jewish skulls for proper research. He suggested that any Jewish-Bolshevik commissars captured should be treated well, adding that, following their subsequently induced deaths, the heads should not be damaged but should be separated from the bodies and forwarded to Strassburg in hermetically sealed tin cans filled with a preserving fluid. Adolf Eiehmann was happy to oblige. Himmler visited Strassburg several times. He thought that work of great scientific value was taking place there. Mr. Norbert Wolheim, today an accountant, active mem­ ber of a Jewish community on Long Island, and also the head of the Organization of Survivors of Auschwitz, met Eiehmann while he was a high official in the Central Jewish Committee of Germany. Norbert Wolheim was born in Berlin, studied in a German university, and was raised on German culture. He couldn’t believe in 1939 that the Germans would do what they did later and therefore he remained in Germany until 1943,

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working in an armaments factory. Wolheim was active in the offices of the Central Jewish Committee of Germany. He tried to help Jews leave Germany. In June 1940 he was in­ vited to the Gestapo to “confer” on a few issues. He will never forget the four hours he spent in the Gestapo offices in Berlin. “First they made me wait an hour; then they photographed me, and later on a man about thirty-two opened a brown door and came out of one of the rooms. He made a sign to me to come with him. This was Adolf Eiehmann,” recalls Wolheim. “The door closed behind us, and I remained alone with him. A large picture of Hitler hung on the wall behind the desk. He spoke very politely and made a good impression on me—that of a young, intelligent, and efficient man. First he wanted me to tell him about myself and later he asked me about my work in the Central Committee. During our conversation Eiehmann took out from his desk a dossier of documents and letters. ‘Eventually/ he mumbled, ‘we will have to find a solution to the Jewish question/ ” To Wolheim these words didn’t mean much then. He thought that Eiehmann really had good intentions, that here for once was a young, intelligent German officer who would try to find a solution for German Jewry. Wolheim was disappointed. In 1943 he was sent to Ausch­ witz, and only then did he realize what Eiehmann had really meant by finding a solution to the Jewish problem. He would be glad to testify. Although Adolf Eiehmann has been charged with the mur­ der of six million Jews, no one has ever actually seen him kill —except one man, a rabbi living in Philadelphia. This man, whose identity will remain secret until the trial, in an ex­ clusive interview tells of being an eyewitness to a murder committed by Adolf Eiehmann himself. This is the actual

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account that will be given in Israel when the Eiehmann trial gets under way. I saw the butcher of Auschwitz actually shoot a sevenmonth-old baby to death in the spring of 1943. I saw Adolf Eiehmann take a pistol from his belt, walk smiling to the in­ fant’s side, press the barrel of the German Lüger to the child’s head, then turn to an SS man and say, “This is the way to do it.” Then he pulled the trigger. The half-starved infant stopped its whimpering—it was at peace. I knew of Eiehmann even before most of the world began to realize this madman existed. It was in Prague that I first heard about him. I was a businessman in the ’thirties and had occasion to be at a meeting at which Eiehmann was to speak. After the meeting I was introduced to Eiehmann as " . . . an important Jew in the community.” Eiehmann was cordial—a forced cordiality. As I turned away I could hear him laughing with one of his aides. He pointed in my direction and laughed even more loudly. The years passed. Then one morning in 19431 heard a com­ motion outside my home, I ran to the window and noticed an SS car with many German officers scurrying about. Sud­ denly, an officer in the car motioned to one of his men and pointed toward me in the window. A moment later there was a knock at the door. An SS man stood there, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me into the street. I kept asking, “What is the trouble? Please don’t pull, I can walk___ ” He continued to nearly drag me toward a car with little flags attached to the front fenders. I stood before the young officer as he leaned back smiling. His face looked familiar, but I did not recognize him. His smile turned into a scowl as he said, “You don’t re­ member me—important Jew.” I admitted that I did not recognize him.

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He rose from his seat, walked toward another car, mo­ tioned the SS man to place me in the car, then returned to his car. They told me the officer was Adolf Eiehmann. About half an hour later we arrived at a building on the outskirts of the town. Eiehmann left his car, walked into the building, and disappeared. A few moments later an SS man motioned to me to leave the car and follow him. He led me through the same door Eiehmann had entered. Inside we passed through two other doorways. Soldiers with rifles guarded every entrance and exit. Once inside the third room, we entered a huge room. This was Eichmann’s office. He was seated at a huge mahogany desk, with a large picture of Hitler hung from the wall be­ hind the desk. Two soldiers stood at each door as Eiehmann gave orders to SS men standing before him. He shouted another order to one of the guards at the door, and the door was flung open. Five soldiers brought in two boys. One was thirteen years of age and the other about eight years old. Another guard entered from another door carrying a small seven-month-old infant that kept whimper­ ing. The child as well as the boys looked as if they had not eaten a square meal in months. Eiehmann turned to me and said, “You will remember me after this day.” Then he ordered one of the SS men to “teach these Jews a lesson.” I had no idea what Eiehmann was talking about but I later learned the two boys had struck one of the soldiers when the soldier hit an old woman with the butt of his rifle. The two boys stood silently awaiting their fate. One of the SS men took a cigarette from his mouth and walked toward the eight-year-old youth. Two other SS men grabbed the boy and held his hand out on the desk. The SS man then placed the lit cigarette to the boy’s hand, and the stench of burning flesh filled the air. The boy screamed, but the cigarette was held firmly against his hand.

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The boy tossed his head in every direction, his facial muscles taut with pain. About three minutes later, the child passed out. The cig­ arette was removed and the boy carried out of the room by one of the soldiers. The other youth tried pulling away from his guard, but was held firmly. One of the SS men flicked a huge cigar lighter on Eichmann’s desk and placed an upholstery needle over the flame. He held it there until the needle glowed. Then he walked toward the thirteen-year-old boy and placed the needle in his eye. The child did not pass out but continued screaming as he was led out of the room. Eiehmann leaned back in his huge leather chair and smiled contentedly. “You won’t forget me,” he said softly. “Oh, don’t be afraid, we will not harm you. After all, you are an im­ portant Jew,” he added mockingly. Then Eiehmann turned to me and said, “The Jews are the scourge of the earth. They must be destroyed. And the only way to destroy them is to destroy all the young—the old will destroy themselves.” Then Eiehmann motioned to another SS man and pointed to the whimpering infant. The SS man approached the child, looked at it hesitantly, then faltered. “I’m sorry”—he turned to Eiehmann—“but I can’t. It is only an infant. . . .” Eichmann’s face turned red with rage. “Report to your captain immediately.” As the SS man turned toward the door, Eiehmann said, “but first wait. You must learn not to be soft—after all, it is only a Jew.” Eiehmann rose from his seat, unsnapped the Lüger in his belt, and walked toward the child, smiling. He turned to me and said, “Now watch—you will never forget me, important Jew.” He pressed the barrel of the gun to the infant’s head, and without a moment of hesitation pulled the trigger. “That’s the way to do it.” He turned to the SS man. “Now

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see your captain. I have some things for you to do that will harden your nerves.” He had held the gun so close to the infant’s head that some of the blood splattered on his gun. Noticing the blood, he threw the gun to one of his SS men and said, “Clean this”— and, pointing to the blood that covered the floor, added, “and get this mess cleaned up.” He then turned to me and said, “That child’s meat will feed my dogs, and the bones will be ground to make soap and fertilizer.” I managed to pull loose from my guards and tore toward Eiehmann. As agile as a cat, he grabbed another pistol that lay on the top of his desk and brought it smashing down on my head. I was pulled from the chair and led to a car and sent to Auschwitz. “Welcome to your new home,” one of the men who was seated at my side said mockingly. “You won’t be lonesome— your wife and children have been here for almost an hour.” I later learned he was right. It was only a matter of time before my wife, my son, and my daughter were fed to the ovens of Auschwitz concentration camp. I have written Premier David Ben-Gurion volunteering to testify at Eichmann’s trial; to face this butcher once more and tell him, “This important Jew will never forget you.”

3 Adolf Eiehmann reached the height of his power in the spring of 1944, when he was sent to Budapest to assume control of the Hungarian “Jewish problem.” Although his name was still almost unknown to the public of Germany, and although he was still merely a lieutenant colonel, he was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi hierarchy.

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In the spring of 1944 Hungary was the only country ruled by the Axis that still enjoyed political independence. On March 17, however, Hungarian government officials were summoned to Hitler’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden, and two days later the SS and the Gestapo were rioting in the streets of Budapest. Until then the million Jews of Hungary had enjoyed relative peace. The Jewish nobility was still re­ spected, and there were many Jews of great wealth in the country. Recently rumors had reached Hungary that some five million Jews had been exterminated, but the Hungarians just did not believe it. Their attitude was, “Even if there is some basis for this rumor, it can never happen to us.” The arrival of Eiehmann in Budapest soon made them reluctantly face reality. Eiehmann brought his troubleshooter, Haupt­ sturmführer Dieter von Wisliczeny, and SS Major Hermann Krumey as his two chief assistants. He also brought Major Alois Brunner and a specially selected Einsatzgruppe, all veterans of Eichmann’s methods of extermination. Hitler, through the chain of command, relayed the word to Eichmann that the Jews of Hungary must be exterminated before the country turned into a combat area, as the Allies were advancing. He was incensed because thousands of Jews had escaped from occupied countries to find a haven of a sort in Hungary. There were a great many anti-Semites in the Hungarian quisling government, and it promised to do everything pos­ sible to help in liquidating Hungarian Jewry. Vites Endre and László Baky, important figures in the Ministry of Home Affairs, were happy to cooperate with and work under Adolf Eiehmann. Eiehmann upon his arrival in Budapest was informed that Hitler had not only given him a citation for his achieve­ ments in the field of extermination, but had also given

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him a new title; henceforth he would be commander of the security police for Hungary. He put into operation the technique that had served him so well before: first, the genial, charming manner, the statement that the Jews had no real cause for alarm; then, gradually, the wearing of the yellow badge, the confiscation of property, the ghettos and concen­ tration camps, and eventually deportation and extermination. However, he had to work faster than usual because of the Russian threat to the Hungarian border provinces. By the summer of 1944, as many as 12,000 Jews from greater Hungary were arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp daily. They were all told that they were being sent to labor camps, and, incredibly, most of them believed it. Rudolf Hoess visited Budapest three times to see Eiehmann in order to obtain an estimate of the number of able-bodied Jews who might arrive at his camp in condition to work. “These visits gave me the opportunity to observe Eichmann’s methods of negotiating with the Hungarian government offi­ cials. His manner of approach was firm but nevertheless amiable and courteous, and he was liked and made welcome wherever he went,” Hoess wrote. As far as Eiehmann was concerned, the fate of the Hun­ garian Jews had been settled in 1942. In that year the Hun­ garian Minister for Home Affairs in the puppet Horthy regime had written to Eiehmann in a clear attempt to curry favor with the then all-powerful Germans. He “complained” that, as the German armies advanced into Russia, Russian Jews were escaping to Hungary across the Dniester River. He asked if the Germans couldn’t take them off Hungary’s hands. He received a curt rebuke from Eiehmann, who de­ spised such unmethodical solutions. This is the letter that sealed the doom of Hungarian Jewry. It was written in 1942.

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Reichsicherheitshauptamp (Reich Security Main Office) IVA 4b 3433/42g (1446) (Stamped) EXPRESS LETTER SECRET To the Hungarian Minister of Home Affairs. Re: deportations of Jews who have escaped to Hungary from the territory east of the Dniester. In answer to your express letter of 17.9.42, I wish to tell you that for technical reasons of the moment it is not pos­ sible to start a special action in Hungary. Such a partial op­ eration would concern only the Jews who, some time ago, escaped into Hungary. We have learned from experience that the preparations needed for the fulfillment of such partial measures require the same number of forces as general ac­ tions, which include all Jews of a particular country. I think, therefore, that such an action should not, at the moment, be prepared. The whole apparatus would concern only those Jews who escaped to Hungary before the Final Solution. For these reasons it would be better, in my view, to wait until Hungary is ready to take measures against all the Hungarian Jews. (Signed) Eiehmann Playing the role of the star of the liquidation program in Hungary, Eiehmann let his aides make the preparatory con­ tacts with Jewish representatives before his own dramatic appearance. The first contact was established by Dieter von Wisliczeny, who invited a Jewish religious leader to his office to discuss what he called “the European Plan,” a proposal he had first made when he was in charge of Czechoslovakia. There he had tried to negotiate with the Jews, by promising that he would stop the exterminations if two million dollars was paid as ransom. Now he produced a letter written in He­ brew from Rabbi Weissmandel of Bratislava (capital of Slovakia), suggesting that the Jewish leaders in Budapest

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could save their fellow Jews by complying with the European Plan. The proposition was discussed by Jewish leaders, and later the negotiations were resumed by two Zionist leaders, Dr. Israel Kastner and Joel Brand. Dr. Kastner suggested that they might be able to raise two million dollars from world Jewry if the Nazi regime would guarantee that it would no longer put Hungarian Jews in ghettos, that it would no longer deport them, and that it would permit emigration to Pales­ tine. Dieter von Wisliczeny seemed agreeable, but as always he added that he would have to consult higher authority. It was agreed that the Jews would pay two hundred thou­ sand dollars as an advance “to show good will.” But when payday arrived, it was Krumey who came to receive the money and resume negotiations. He ignored Von Wislic­ zenys promises and was furious that the Jews had not brought the whole amount of money agreed upon. Kastner had great trouble in arranging another meeting with Von Wisliczeny. When an appointment was finally made, he asked, “Tell me the truth. What has happened?” “After the last meeting, Eiehmann dropped me from the negotiating team. Perhaps I was too friendly with you. He assigned me to the dirtiest job imaginable. Now I am in charge of transporting Jews to the ghettos. In this way Eichmann hopes to humiliate me and give himself an alibi. But I am in uniform and I must obey orders. I have softened measures against the Jews whenever I could, but this Hun­ garian Endre wants to eat alive every Jew in Hungary, and Eiehmann is certainly not the man to stop him.” Eiehmann made his first personal appearance before the Jewish negotiators on March 31. His words diminished their last hopes: “Usually I am a nice fellow, but today I am a bloodhound.” Despite all negotiations and promises, measures to concen­ trate Jews in ghettos were begun in the middle of April, three

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weeks after the occupation. In all, 320,000 Jews were kid­ naped from their homes and packed into open areas, in dirt and misery, without food or drink. Many could not stand the suffering. Hundreds committed suicide. The situation be­ came uncontrollable—and this, in fact, was Eichmann’s ob­ jective, to create a situation that would make a deportation project necessary. At a meeting at the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, he, Endre, and Baky decided on the total deportation of all Jews. Deportation and extermination started on April 23, 1944. On May 8 Joel Brand was summoned to Eichmanns office at the Hotel Majestic. “I believe you know who I am,” Eiehmann said. “I was in charge of the actions in Germany, Poland, and Czecho­ slovakia. Now it is Hungary’s tum. I have investigated you and the people of the Joint and the Jewish Agency, and I know we can come to terms. Now I am prepared to sell you one million Jews; blood for money, money for blood. You can take them from any country you like, wherever you can find them—from Hungary, Poland, the eastern provinces, There­ sienstadt, Auschwitz, wherever you wish. Whom do you want to save? Men who can beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me.” Brand said, “We want to ransom our people and save them from extermination, but all our Jewish factories and busi­ nesses in Hungary are closed, and all our property has been seized. Still, I can offer you money. How much do you want?” “I know, of course,” Eiehmann said, “what you say is true. I am not interested in Hungarian goods. I had you brought here to make you a proposition that I believe will achieve our mutual objective. I want you to go abroad and get in direct touch with your people and with representatives of

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the Allied powers. Then come back to me with a concrete proposal. When we reach an agreement you can rely on us to perform our part with our usual German thoroughness. I will get you the necessary documents for your journey.” "I will have to go to Istanbul, Colonel,” Brand said. “I will have to think that over, Herr Brand. You too must consider what you have to oifer me. And another thing: these negotiations are top secret. No one in Budapest must know about them, or lives will be lost.” Brand immediately met with his colleagues, and they ap­ proved of his suggestion that he go to Istanbul, where the Jewish Agency had headquarters. Two days later Eiehmann summoned Brand to his office, where he made a startling proposition. “I have obtained assent to our negotiations,” Eiehmann said. “Are you ready to go to Istanbul?” “I am ready to leave at once,” Brand told him, “and I think I can offer you a large amount of foreign currency.” “Money is of little interest to me, Herr Brand. W hat I really want are army trucks. I’ll make you a fair offer. You deliver me one army truck for every hundred Jews. That is not a stiff price.” Brand was too stunned to reply. “Give me ten thousand trucks, brand new, complete with spare parts, and I will give you one million Jews. If you want to make a further deal, fill the trucks with a few thou­ sand tons of tea, coffee, soap, and similar commodities. You can rest assured that we are giving you a decent price for them. Incidentally, you can give the Allies definite assurance on my word of honor that these trucks will never be used in the West. They are required for exclusive use on the Eastern Front.” “What kind of guarantee can you give me that a million Jews will really be set free?” Brand asked.

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“If you return from Istanbul,” Eiehmann said, “and tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will close Auschwitz and bring back ten per cent of the promised million to the frontier. You can take one hundred thousand Jews away and afterward bring me one thousand trucks. We will go on like that, a thousand trucks for every hundred thousand Jews. You cannot ask for anything more reasonable than that.” “I am convinced, Colonel, that your offer will be accepted. When may I start for Istanbul?” “Within a few days,” Eiehmann answered. “If, when you arrive in Istanbul, you find it necessary to go to Jerusalem, London, or even New York, get on the first available plane and go. Your people in Istanbul can arrange that for you. If you have to do this, send me a cable and I will slow down the deportations.” Brand arose and started to leave. As he reached the door, Eiehmann called after him, “Hurry, Herr Brand, and come back quickly. I am not joking!” The next day passports and exit permits were issued to Brand and Bandi Grosz, who was to accompany him on this mission. Bandi Grosz was a wealthy Hungarian Jew, shrouded in mystery. There was a rumor that he was a spy, though no one could say for whom. Brand said good-by to his wife, Hanzi, and his two children, and although they did not mention it, both knew that she and the children were actually being held as hostages; if Brand failed in his mission, they would die. Major Hermann Krumey, one of Eichmann’s aides, drove them to Vienna. Amazingly, Krumey took Brand aside and told him to remember that, although he was an SS officer, he was not a murderer like Eiehmann. He would do anything in his power to save the Jews. Brand sensed that smart Major Krumey felt that the power of the Russians and the display of might by America’s military and industrial forces

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heralded the end of the Nazi dynasty and that he was trying to curry favor. Brand (with Passport Number 65380-K40 made out in the name of Eugen Band) and Bandi Grosz, whose passport was made to George Andre, arrived in Istanbul without any trouble. Bandi Grosz, always a rather shadowy, mysterious character, was very much at home in the city. He under­ stood well the language of the country, which was un­ abashed bribery. They stayed at the Hotel Palace Pera, headquarters for representatives of the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee (which had raised millions of dollars in America for the purpose of ransoming European Jews to save them from the gas chambers). Representatives of other independent Jewish groups were also there, and Brand told them of Eichmanns proposal. All agreed that the Allies would never consent to giving such vital war materials as trucks to save the Jews of Hungary. They de­ cided to ask Moshe Sharett (then Shartok), head of the Jew­ ish Agency in Palestine (and later Foreign Minister of Israel), to come to Istanbul immediately to resolve the prob­ lem. Rather incredibly, Sharett was denied a Turkish visa, although he had been to Turkey several times before. Brand, frantic at the delay, cabled Eiehmann that negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily and pleaded for more time. Brand received a message to meet Sharett in Aleppo, Syria. On the Syrian border Brand was arrested by British officials. When he finally met Sharett and spent eighteen hours in a conference with him, British officers were present. Brand explained everything about the Hungarian situation to the third most important man in Palestine (only Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion outranked him). At the end of the meeting, which was inconclusive, the British said regretfully that Brand could not return to either Istanbul or Budapest but must proceed to Cairo under the guard of a

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British officer. There was nothing the frantic Joel Brand could do about it. He was taken to Cairo, where he spent four and one-half months—not in prison, but in a beautiful villa where he was given excellent food but not allowed to leave the grounds. He was interrogated day after day, though his guards assured him he was not a prisoner. While Brand was in British hands, Lord Moyne, British deputy in the Middle East, heard of Eichmann’s offer. He retorted, “A million Jews? W hat shall I do with a million Jews?” At about this time Winston Churchill wrote to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden: There is no doubt that the persecution of Jews in Hungary is the most horrible crime ever committed in the world’s history. And the thing is done with the help of a scientific machine, and by apparently civilized people and in the name of a great country and one of the most important races in Europe. It goes without saying that all people involved in this crime who might fall into our hands, including those who only executed orders, should be executed, after their part in these murderous deeds will be proved. When British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden pressed Parliament to declare what the Western powers were pre­ pared to do in order to salvage the remnants of Hungarian Jewry, Brand was still being held by the British in Cairo. “God only knows how bad the situation is,” Anthony Eden said. God knew, and so did Joel Brand, the one man who, had he been given a free hand, might conceivably have worked out a deal with Eiehmann; but by the time he was released and sent to Jerusalem it was too late. This coura­ geous, dedicated man had to spend the remainder of the war in Palestine. Meanwhile in Budapest the situation was very bad. Kast-

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ner had many conferences with Eiehmann, who by now was drinking very heavily. Kastner urged him to allow the group of six hundred “privileged” Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Eiehmann spoke of his friendship with the Mufti of Jeru­ salem. “I promised Haj Amin El-Husseini that there would be no emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine.” When asked to stop the deportation he said, “Don’t think I am a fool. If I stop the deportations the negotiations in Istanbul won’t even start.” On one occasion Kastner complained that a hundred Jews were being packed into each railway coach. Eiehmann snapped, “The Jews have many children, and therefore it is possible to pack more of them into the coaches.” Eiehmann summoned Kastner and Hanzi Brand for fre­ quent conferences about the results of the negotiations in Istanbul. At last Hanzi learned that her husband was being held by the British. Eiehmann flew into a rage, for it meant that negotiations had probably been unsuccessful. Afterward Hanzi Brand recalled that, strangely enough, Eiehmann did not give the impression of a cruel man. Sometimes he was very nervous, and at other times it was very obvious that he had been drinking much too much. When he was in a good, genial mood she always knew that the Hungarians had de­ livered another transport of Jews to him—a transport that was on its way to Auschwitz. One day Kastner complained to Eiehmann that hundreds of Jews were dying on the way to the concentration camps in the sealed boxcars because of lack of food and water. “Enough of your horror tales,” Eiehmann snapped. “I have the full reports. Only fifty or sixty people die on every transport.” “May I ask you this? Suppose within the next week the negotiations in Istanbul are successful. If you keep on de-

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stroying Hungarian Jews, where then will you secure enough to use in trade for the trucks?” “Don’t worry about that.” Eiehmann laughed. “Remember we still have thousands of children between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Those we have kept alive, and two years from now they will reach the working age; and I can always give you Jews from Poland and from Theresienstadt.” “I have another proposition to make,” Kastner said. “Let us have one hundred thousand Hungarian Jews—children* the old, and the sick. If you allow them to emigrate to safety, we will give you five million Swiss francs, jewelry, foreign currency, and Hungarian money.” “Where will you get the money?” Eiehmann demanded. “From our friends abroad,” Kastner told him. Eiehmann flatly replied that he was not interested in money or gold; only in merchandise such as trucks. Colonel Kurt Becher was one of Eichmann’s staff who headed what might roughly be called the finance depart­ ment. Hanzi Brand and several of her colleagues tried ne­ gotiating with him. They collected five valises filled with jewelry and currency and delivered them to his apartment. Becher, one of the milder of the SS group, apparently per­ suaded Eiehmann to free 1300 Jews. Surprisingly enough, Eiehmann did allow these 1300 to go to Switzerland. Before his capture by American forces, Becher handed a valise loaded with valuables to a Jewish leader and asked him to give it back to the Jewish Agency and the Joint. By now the Allies had landed in Normandy, and Premier Horthy began to worry about what would happen after Germany lost the war. Would he be held responsible for the acts of Eiehmann? Protests from the Vatican, a diplomatic note from the United States State Department, threatening postwar criminal proceedings, and a strong condemnation

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by Anthony Eden in the House of Commons, during the course of which he stated that one million Hungarian Jews were being systematically destroyed, gave Horthy some sleepless nights. Cordell Hull broadcast a speech threatening war trials for those responsible for the extermination of the Jews. General Lakatos, always a moderate, disarmed the Budapest police who had been active in rounding up Jews. During the first week of July 1944, 17,500 Jews had been collected for deportation. On the day of deportation, Eichmann had scheduled four trains to take them to Auschwitz. Only one train left. During the following three weeks, 150,000 Jews were scheduled to leave for the gas chambers, but only three trains reached Auschwitz. Eiehmann was fighting a losing battle, but with the persistence of a madman he continued his campaign. “If Germany collapses,” he said to Von Wisliczeny, “we will at least be able to say that we achieved something. We will have completely wiped out the Jews of Europe.” Against Himmler s orders, Eiehmann and Kaltenbrunner went on with the extermination program. One trainload of 1500 Jews left late in July, but when Horthy’s office was informed of it the train was stopped and returned. Eiehmann was now in a position of having to smuggle Jews out of Hungary. He managed to collect the same 1500 and this time sent a train off secretly. The Hungarian government was not quite courageous enough to oppose Eiehmann openly, but it did, by a variety of protestations, delay the deportations. One reason Horthy gave was the fact that thousands of Jews had been converted to Christianity, and he asked that these be isolated and not deported. He said that the churches of Hungary were exert­ ing strong pressure to save these converts; so was the Vati­ can. The churches in Hungary cooperated and converted every Jewish applicant without asking too many questions.

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jsjow Eiehmann, his position weakening, resorted to com­ promise. He said he would be satisfied with the deportation of the Budapest Jews alone. Horthy objected. Then Eichmann invented a story that the Reich needed 10,000 strong Jews for work in military plants. He guaranteed that they would not be sent to concentration camps because the Reich needed these men for hard labor. The Hungarian War Ministry denied his request. Eiehmann was embarrassed because he had already sent to Berlin a victory cable declaring Hungary free of Jews. Desperate, he tried, with the help of Baky, Endre, and their group, to seize power in Hungary. The action was to be dis­ guised as a Hungarian Putsch, apparently without SS ini­ tiative. Horthy was to be taken prisoner by the same special police who had been recruited for the Jewish deportation. The SS would help the plan discreetly. But Horthy’s supporters discovered the conspiracy. The army throughout the country was alerted to fight the special police and armored and infantry regiments hastened into Budapest from rural areas. On July 8 the special police were ordered to leave the city. Eiehmann reported to Müller, asking him to relay to the highest quarters the message that Horthy’s sudden friend­ liness with the Jewish leaders was the first step in what, Eiehmann predicted, would be treason against the Reich. Finally the Hungarian Foreign Office delivered a memoran­ dum to the German ambassador demanding the ousting of the Gestapo from Hungary, the immediate departure of Eiehmann and his Einsatzgruppe, and the delivery of all camps under the control of the SS into the hands of the Hungarian authorities. Shortly thereafter, Dieter von Wisliczeny called Kastner to his office. He welcomed him with what Kastner said was

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a sickly smile and said, “You win. Our headquarters is leaving.” Within a week Eiehmann and his aides had been recalled to Berlin, but other Gestapo units remained. It is probable that Hitler desperately needed the Hungarian Army in his last-ditch stand and that he did not want to do anything to irritate the sensitive Hungarians. However, on October 17, 1944, Eiehmann returned to Budapest and immediately ordered Kastner to report to him. “You see, I am back again,” he said, sneering. “Don’t forget Hungary still exists in the shadow of the swords of the Reich and our arms are still long enough to reach the Jews of Budapest. They will be deported immediately, but this time they will walk. If that doesn’t suit you, supply us with a suitable number of trucks, and I will transport them in those.” Eiehmann was a happy man again. Horthy had abdicated, and the fanatical anti-Semite Ferenc Szálasi was now in power in Hungary. During the next month nearly 40,000 Jews were deported. They were forced to march under guard 120 miles to the nearest German labor camps in Reich territory. Hundreds of the very young and the very old died during this forced march. The Red Cross made a protest to Himmler, and he sent the white-haired chief of the Waffen SS, General Hans Jüttner, to observe and give him a report. Jüttner was shocked at the sight of bodies of elderly women and children lying beside the road. Even Rudolf Hoess, who accompanied him, was indignant. Jüttner gave Himmler a strongly worded report condemning the forced march. On November 25 Himmler gave the order to destroy the gas chambers. This order made all Himmler’s subordinates di­ rectly responsible for any atrocities committed after that date. During November and the first week of December an additional 17,000 Jews were deported to German concentra-

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tion camps. By the end of December 1944, Budapest was encircled by Russian forces. Eichmann’s dream of exterminating every Jew in Hungary was ended. Nevertheless he had been directly responsible for the death of 450,000. This was only about half of the Jewish population, but it must be remembered that he had had only eight or nine months to work on the problem. The whole case of the various negotiations with Eiehmann while he was in Budapest was raised in 1955. An old man named Malchiel Greenwald printed a circular which he sent to several hundred people in Israel. In the circular he ac­ cused Dr. Israel Kastner of having cooperated with the Nazis and of being directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews. Kastner, by now a highly respected lawyer and jour­ nalist, immediately sued for libel. The trial lasted many weeks and was conducted before Judge Benjamin Halevi. Kastner was on the witness stand during sixteen sessions, stoutly defending himself. Several who had survived deporta­ tion from Hungary testified that Kastner never warned them of the fate in store for them, so they never tried to resist or escape. One survivor, Joseph Katz, testified that the 24,000 Jews in Nodoroad, which was only two miles from the Romanian border, could easily have fought their way to safety had they been warned. One of the witnesses was Bandi Grosz. He had given everything up to ransom himself and his family. He testified that his relationship with Kastner had been very friendly. He also said that Kastner had special papers from the Gestapo which exempted him from arrest. “In the beginning I often played cards with the Germans. The stakes were very high. One night I won eighteen thou­ sand dollars from them. They gave me IOUs, but I wanted to live and so I never tried to collect the money. I was

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arrested twice, and after that Kastner wanted nothing more to do with me.” Bandi Grosz was on the witness stand for three hours, and it developed that he had in fact been an international spy “whom anyone could hire,” and a smuggler. Now he was merely a shabby kibitzer of card games in Tel Aviv cafés. Shortly after the trial ended, Bandi Grosz attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. The judge made a scathing denunciation of Kastner. In his opinion he said in part: “Eiehmann was systematically laying a trap for Kastner. He made promises he never in­ tended keeping. Step by step he got him under his influence. All German authorities operated in full harmony. Kastner wrote in his book, ‘There was full coordination between all German departments. Eichmann’s department exterminating, while Becher’s department was collecting/ “Eiehmann was a master at creating quislings. Kastner sold his soul to the Devil. Even when the situation of the Jews was relieved, when the expulsion was halted, Kastner was sitting with Eiehmann and drawing up a plan of what to do in case Eiehmann won. “Eichmann’s tactics were scientific. He played with Kast­ ner. He made promises and then postponed their execution with all kinds of excuses. “Eiehmann was not interested in the results of Brand's negotiations in Istanbul. He went on with his favors to Kastner even when Brand’s trip seemed a failure. For he knew that by granting this small favor he was confusing and sabotaging Jewish rescue efforts. He knew that by sending the prominent leaders away to Switzerland in the BergenBelsen train, he was actually ridding the Jewish communities of their leaders.” The prosecution immediately began to prepare an indict­ ment against Kastner charging him with having collabo­

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rated with Eiehmann. The trial against Kastner never took place. Kastner was mysteriously assassinated on the streets of Tel Aviv. One of the most unusual friendships that occurred during World War II was that between Adolf Eiehmann and Haj Amin El-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They first met briefly in Cairo. The Mufti made contact with Hitler in June 1940, through Franz von Papen, at that time the German Ambassador in Ankara, Turkey. Haj Amin El-Husseini sent his messenger, Nagi bey Shabkat, Minister of Justice in the Iraqi govern­ ment, to Von Papen. In the letter from the Mufti that Shab­ kat delivered and which was later discovered in the archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Haj Amin wrote in part: . . . I am requesting your Excellency the Ambassador to hand to the Führer my high compliments for the political and military achievements that he has attained, thanks to his cleverness and genius. I request your Excellency to con­ vey to him words of honor and worship from me and my appreciation for the success in creating a new regime. . . . (Signed) The Grand Mufti of Palestine Haj Mohammed Amin El-Husseini In the beginning of 1941 the Reich decided to accept the Mufti’s friendship. The Director of the Führer’s Chancellery, the Baron von Fritzker, sent a cordial letter through the Iraqi embassy in Ankara in which he stated, among other things: “Germany and the Arabs have two common enemies, the English and the Jews. Our two nations have to be joined in the fight against them.” In December 1941, Haj Amin arrived in Berlin and was welcomed with a royal reception. The Mufti was seated at Hitler’s side in the Sports Palace at one of the big parades.

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The Mufti of Jerusalem with his famous red beard and green turban toured Germany, lived in expensive hotels, ad­ dressed many audiences, and spoke about the instant need to destroy the Jewish cancer that was “eating the flesh of the world.” The Mufti and Eiehmann met again in Berlin. The com­ mon background the elderly Arab leader and the young Austrian SS officer had was their hatred of the Jews. The Mufti accompanied Eiehmann on his inspection tours of the concentration camps. His green turban was seen many times in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek. On his tours the Mufti was also accompanied by Major Fawzi el Kaukji, who later fought with his private army against Israel in 1948. The Mufti asked Eiehmann to explain the little details to him: how the crematories worked, how the mass murders were executed, and also the capacity of the crematories. The Mufti told his close companions that he had always felt "the Palestine problem will not be solved in a diplomatic conference but by other means—simple and radical like the gas chambers.” Eichmann’s appetite for transports was enormous, but Haj Amin’s was even greater. On May 13,1943, he sent a personal letter to the heads of the German government in which he claimed that "4000 Jewish children have escaped from the big massacre. This is an unbearable scandal,” he wrote. “It has come to my attention from reliable sources that the English and American governments asked their representa­ tives in the Balkans (especially in Bulgaria) to intervene with the governments and request that they be given per­ mission to allow Jews to emigrate to Palestine. In connection with this, the British Minister of Colonies, Sir Oliver Stanley, announced in the British Parliament that the discussions for the emigration of 4000 children escorted by 500 adults from Bulgaria have been ended successfully and he hopes that

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similar occurrences will be achieved in Romania and Hun­ gary. The Arabs see in this emigration a great danger to their lives and their existence. The Arab peoples put them­ selves at the disposal of the Axis without any hesitation in the fight against communism and international Jewry. The Jews will take out with them from the Balkans many military secrets and will give them to Allied agents who are awaiting their arrival at the port.” The Mufti closed his letter by saying, “I request your Excellency to act with all possible effort to avoid this plan of the international Jewry and AngloAmericans without delay. This service will never be forgotten by the Arab people.” The friendship between Eiehmann and Haj Amin grew day by day. Haj Amin started learning German, and Eichmann decided to study Arabic. On March 12, 1944, a meeting took place in Linz, Eich­ mann’s home town, at which were present Eiehmann, his aide Günther, Dr. Seidl, Dieter von Wisliczeny, Schmidt, and Krumey. Eiehmann told them that in a couple of days the invasion of Hungary would take place. On that same day Eiehmann called the Mufti and told him “soon your Emi­ nence will be able to witness a very important affair.” Haj Amin was delighted. On March 19,1944, the Germans invaded Hungary. Fortyeight hours later, Eiehmann was in Budapest. At that time Eiehmann invited the Mufti to be his personal guest. The Mufti spoke about the international Jewish danger and Eichmann nodded in agreement. To his men, Eiehmann stated night and day, “The war is coming to its end, we are going to win. When peace comes, we won’t be able to operate the same destruction machines we have today. We have to speed it up. In other words—the maximum of Jews in a mini­ mum of time.” On Septembr 28, 1944, Himmler received a letter from

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General Berger of the Waffen SS in which he stated: “Today the Mufti came to me for a long talk. He talked about his work and noted happily that the day is nearing when he will head an army to conquer Palestine. The Mufti was satis­ fied with the heavy losses that both the British and Ameri­ cans had in their last battles. He also said that he had spoken to high SS officials about the Moslem volunteer division, HB-13. Because of the low morale of the division the Mufti has decided to visit them and speak to the men and officers.”

P A RT

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The Escape J —^ i e i e k von W is l ic z e n y te s tifie d a t h is tria l t h a t th e la s t

time he saw Eiehmann the latter said, “I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction!” Adolf Eiehmann, at the age of thirty-nine, now knew that the Third Reich which Hitler had said would endure for a thousand years was on the point of complete collapse. He would never be able to assume the title of World Commissar of Jews which Hitler had once promised him. He knew that the Götterdämmerung was near but in true Wagnerian fash­ ion he wanted to make sure that there would be nothing left when he went. One of his last official orders was to Rudolf Hoess, commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, to liquidate all inmates. His order read, “No one will walk out of Auschwitz. There is only one way they will leave —through the smokestacks.” When the Red Army approached Budapest, Eiehmann 177

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received an order, signed by Heinrich Müller, to return im­ mediately to Berlin. From there all SS officers were supposed to join the remnants of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s army in Schleswig-Holstein. On the road to Berlin he stopped off at Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, once the al­ most model Jewish state but now merely another liquidation center. Eiehmann walked into the commandant’s office, where a group of nervous officers had gathered. They were destroying all secret documents. Only a week before Eichmann had ordered four trainloads of Jews who had been working in German heavy industry to Theresienstadt to be gassed, but the Russian advance was so swift that the trains never reached their destination. Eiehmann, pale, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and heavy drinking, shook hands with the commandant and ordered everyone else out of the office. He and the commandant talked alone for nearly an hour. His staff car waited, but Eiehmann never appeared. He slipped out a back door and vanished into the darkness which was to cloak him for the next fifteen years. How did he spend those fifteen years? Detailed research, his own memoirs, and interviews with many who saw him during that time, all combine to give an almost complete solution to the giant jigsaw puzzle of his escape and life in exile. He left the concentration camp April 11, 1945, intending to go to Berlin, but he soon learned that the Red Army was advancing upon the capital so he changed his plans and went to Alt Aussee, Austria. Two weeks later he met Ober­ sturmbannführer Wilhelm Hoettl, a former SS director of intelligence in southeast Europe and Italy. Eiehmann told him that he had gathered some remnants of German units stationed in eastern Germany and some members of the SS and that he planned to organize them into a guerrilla band, and that he would command them. He told Hoettel that they had gathered together enough money, food, and ammunition.

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He would establish his headquarters in the Austrian moun­ tains he knew so well from his childhood and wait until the war was over. He was confident that shortly thereafter there would be war between the Allies and Russia, at which time his group of partisans would volunteer their services to either side as mercenaries. He left for his mountain re­ treat. The men he had gathered did not take kindly to his leadership. They knew his record and they knew that if they were captured, even though most of them were combat soldiers, their association with Eiehmann would bring doom to them all. They held a meeting one night and told Eichmann bluntly that his very presence was jeopardizing them. He was forced to flee. With him went his adjutant, Jaenisch. The men he left behind him thought that Eiehmann would use the poison capsule that he carried in a cavity of a tooth, but Eiehmann had no intention of committing suicide. Confused and frightened, he went to Linz, where his family was living. He took his wife and children to Salzburg, where on May 5, 1945, he visited his old friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner wanted no part of him. Eiehmann was hurt and puzzled. He said plaintively, “I just carried out the Führers orders when I sent Jewish transports to concentra­ tion camps for extermination.” “That was your big mistake,” Kaltenbrunner answered. “You, the executor of those orders, will have to give your life for them.” At Kaltenbrunners headquarters he met Wilhelm Hoettl, Dieter von Wisliczeny, and his exhumation expert, Colonel Blobel. From these men who had once seemed to be his warm friends he received a cold welcome, and after a polite conversation each went his own way. After he left, Eiehmann finally realized the desperate plight he was in. He realized too that his presence could only

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endanger his wife and three sons. When they parted, Eichmann gave his wife some money and he also gave her four cyanide capsules. “If the Russians arrive and discover who you are, you have no alternative, you must commit suicide. If the French arrive first,” he added, “use your own judgment, but if the British or Americans arrive first throw the capsules away.” (He did not see his family again until 1952, when they joined him in Argentina.) The instinct for survival was strong in Adolf Eiehmann. One of the first things he knew he had to do was to get rid of his name and rank. He managed to obtain the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal and he took the name of Adolf Barth, for no other reason than that it was the first name that occurred to him. Adolf Barth was the name of the grocer who had served his family in Berlin. Now Eiehmann, still accompanied by Jaenisch, hitchhiked into Bavaria, and in the region of Ulm they were taken prisoner by a patrol from General Pattons 3rd Army. There was nothing in Eichmanns behavior or bearing that gave his captors any reason to believe that he was anything other than an ordinary sol­ dier. He and Jaenisch were marched to the nearest selection center for prisoners-of-war, Daggendorf. From there he was sent to Bemdorf POW camp. When he was questioned he gave the name of Adolf Barth and when asked for his identity papers he stated that he had destroyed them in accordance with German military regulations. Soon after he was trans­ ferred to Rosenheim POW camp. Eiehmann had been clever in selecting the rank of corpo­ ral, though perhaps he would have been better treated had he taken the rank of an officer, but he realized that as an enlisted man he would not be scrutinized too closely. Under his left arm was tattooed his rank in the SS as well as his blood type. He was right. He was not closely questioned nor

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was he given any physical examination that would disclose his SS insignia. From time to time the prisoner-of-war camp was visited by American intelligence officers. He was in constant fear that some other prisoner might recognize him and tip off one of the Americans. While in Rosenheim he volunteered to work as a mechanic in the jeep pool. He maintained good re­ lations with his captors and was assigned as a driver to the American sergeant in charge of the pool. But his fears were realized. A fellow prisoner recognized and reported him. However, meaning to take full advantage of the situation, he also approached Eiehmann and offered to give him some information in exchange for two cartons of cigarettes. Aware of the danger, Eiehmann decided to escape from the camp—not a very difficult feat, since the prisoners were not closely guarded and in addition they were well fed and well clothed and actually there w asnt any place to which they could escape. The same day two twelve-ton trucks arrived from Czechoslovakia and stopped at Rosen­ heim. Eiehmann was assigned to load jerry cans of gas onto them. The next morning, when the roll was called at six a.m., Adolf Barth did not answer. He was on a truck, headed for Munich. Eiehmann enjoyed two days of freedom but was again spotted by an American patrol. He gave himself up but this time he claimed that he was a lieutenant in the Waffen SS. Now if his tattooed insignia were discovered he would be accepted as a combat SS man. He was sent to an intern­ ment camp at Weiden-Oberpfalz. This camp was much better organized. The prisoners were divided into work companies to complete the building of the camp and the roads around it. Lieutenant Adolf Barth was put in charge of one of the work companies. No one worked harder than he. He knew that a good record would prove helpful in re­

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laxing the guards if he ever had to flee. In recognition of his diligent efforts he was soon promoted to Zugführer within the ranks of the prisoners. Now he was beginning to regain confidence and felt that he would eventually survive. One thing bothered him, however: several times when he was addressed as Lieutenant Barth he merely looked blank, for­ getting for the moment the pseudonym he had taken. He then decided to take a name more closely resembling his own. He presented himself to the prison commandant and disarmingly explained that he had been using a false name out of fear. He said that after he saw how the Americans treated prisoners his fears had disappeared. He added that his real name was SS Untersturmführer Otto Eckmann. In August he was transferred to Oberdachstetten prison camp. When he filled out a questionnaire he changed his date of birth by one year, making it March 19, 1905, and he gave as his place of birth Solingen-Breslau, knowing that the office of public records in Silesia had been destroyed. One part of the routine disturbed him. Once a week small groups of prisoners were put on a bus and taken to Ansbach for questioning. A great many of them never returned. In December 1945, after five months at Oberdachstetten, Eichmann was put on the bus. Now, for the first time, he knew what real desperate fear was. All they had to do was strip him and see his tattooed identification marks, and this would surely lead to his real identity. But to his amazement his American interrogators asked him only routine questions and ordered him to fill out another questionnaire. He was re­ turned to Oberdachstetten. The same thing happened twice again, but each time the questioning became sharper. He told his last interrogators, Robert Humphrey and Charles Spivak, that he had escaped when the Russians took Buda­ pest and hid in a cave while they massacred his Waffen SS companions. He insisted that he had been stationed in Hun­

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gary and had even helped some Jews in Budapest. To gain their sympathy he displayed a small knowledge of Yiddish. He was sure that the Americans did not know his true iden­ tity but he felt their suspicions mounting and feared that they were beginning to believe he had held a position of some importance. He decided it was time to attempt another escape. There was a strict rule in the camp that before anyone tried to flee he was to get permission from a committee of German officers who ran the internal affairs of the camp. The former SS colonel in charge knew Eichmann’s identity. The eleven other officers on the committee did not. “During the war I committed what the Allies will say were political crimes,” he told them. “Sooner or later they will find out my real name. If I do not escape soon I will end up being tried as a war criminal. However, I know the officers’ code and without your consent I will not make the attempt.” They asked him where he intended to go and he told them he would try to reach the Mufti of Jerusalem. The other offi­ cers were greatly impressed with the important connection this officer had and gave him their consent to make the es­ cape attempt. Eiehmann had made two friends at the camp, one an SS officer named Hans Feiersleben. He confided to him his des­ perate need to leave the camp, and Feiersleben was most cooperative. He said that his brother was a forest ranger in northern Germany and that if Eiehmann could reach him he could help him get a job at the lumber camp in Kohlenbach, located comfortably deep in a forest three miles from Ever­ son. He gave Eiehmann a letter of introduction to his brother. Next day, January 25, 1946, Eiehmann and another friend, Waffen SS Unterscharführer Kurt Bauer, managed to escape while working on the road. Bauer knew Eiehmann only un-

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der the name of Otto Heninger, but he did know that he had been an Obersturmbannführer in the SS, and was therefore eager to serve him in any way he could. He told his friend that they could find refuge with his father and mother and sister, who lived in Prien-am Chiemsee. This they decided to do, but when they came in sight of the house they saw that an MP patrol was just entering it, obviously in search of Bauer. Bauer decided to leave the area without seeing his parents. He gave Heninger a letter to his sister Nellie, and the two parted, Bauer going to Munich. Nellie had married a man named Krawietz and was now a war widow, living with her parents in their apartment. It was she who opened the door to Heninger and received from him the letter from her borther Kurt. Eiehmann, alias Hen­ inger, who still retained his knack of fascinating women, made a good impression on her and was invited into the house, where the family had a long conversation with him about old times. The upshot was that he stayed with them for two days. Then Nellie found lodgings for him with a farmer not far from where they lived. There he remained for several weeks, seeing Nellie almost daily. He gave her an account of his early life: he had been married once, was now divorced, and had three lovely children whom he had not seen since the end of the war. In a recent interview Nellie recalled those days. “He was a charming man, quiet, withdrawn, never talking too much and always smiling and good-natured. We talked about everything under the sun. We used to take long walks in the evening and we had a lot of fun together.” In Prien, however, the American military police were ac­ tively searching for Nazi war criminals. Heninger expressed his bitterness at having to hide and occasionally showed his nervousness in the presence of military policemen. Finally

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he told Nellie that he would have to leave the district be­ cause it was dangerous for him to stay in one place too long. At this, she made a suggestion. “Why don’t you present yourself to a denazification tribunal,” she asked, “as so many of our people do? They will try you and you will have to sit in jail for a few years but then you will be released, denazified, and live happily ever after. So many of us,” she added, “have had to go to prison for what happened. This is our fate, but it is much better than hiding and running about in the dark.” “No, no, that's not possible for me,” he said. “They are searching for me everywhere and a few years of prison wouldn’t be what I’d get.” “What have you done?” she asked. “Did you have anything to do with the concentration camps?” “Yes, in a way I did—I had something to do with the concentration camps, but beyond that I was involved in the Jewish solution. I have to confess to you that my name is not Otto Heninger but Adolf Eichmann, and you are the only person in the world who knows that today.” Nellie looked at him in surprise. “Adolf Eichmann?” she said. “I never heard the name. If you had to do with con­ centration camps and the Jewish affair, so what? Many SS men did.” “No, that wasn’t all. I was involved in many political affairs and I played an important political role in the last few years of the war.” “Oh,” she said, “now I understand.” “I had never heard the name of Adolf Eichmann before,” she confessed to us. “I was old enough to know all about Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, and about what they did. But Adolf Eichmann I had never heard of before. Now, from him, I gathered that he had been a high-ranking officer. He told me he was an Obersturmbann­

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führer.. . . But I was lonely and so was he. He talked to me a lot about the war, about his superiors—somehow he hardly touched on his job, what he actually did, but he told me about his subordinates, especially Dieter von Wisliczeny, the man he loved and honored and whose name he gave to his third son. He talked, too, about many of his other subordi­ nates and comrades-in-arms. Stories I can hardly recall be­ cause they were told so long ago. We became good friends. I liked him and he liked me, and so we fell in love.” Heninger felt compelled to leave Prien and head north to the forest where lumberjack Feiersleben was working. The dangerous part of the trip would be from Prien to Hamburg. He begged Nellie to go that far with him. “A couple will be less conspicuous than a man traveling alone,” Heninger said. Nellie agreed, the more readily since she wanted to see her brother Kurt in Munich. Together they traveled to Munich, and no one looked twice at this attractive and obviously devoted couple. There Heninger changed trains for Hamburg. On March 20, 1946, “Otto Heninger” walked boldly into the town hall of Everson and registered with Mayor Rickmann. He said he was a merchant bom on March 19, 1906, in Breslau, that he was married, was a Protestant, and was seeking work. The Mayor accepted this in good faith. “Otto Heninger” finally located Forest Ranger Feiersleben and delivered the letter. “If you are a friend of my brother I will do anything I can for you,” the ranger said. “Until now I had no idea whether or not he was still alive.” Ranger Feiersleben persuaded the lumber firm of Bermann and Company to give Eichmann a job as a lumberjack. Living was rather primitive in the bar­ racks isolated deep in the woods, but it was reasonably safe. Those who lived there called the community “the island.” The rangers and lumberjacks had to lead the kind of monas-

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tic life to which Eichmann had never been accustomed. There was only one woman in camp, a nurse named Ruth. The twelve lumberjacks, all war veterans, lived two in a room, and Eichmann was put in with Edward Tramer, today a mailman in the German postal system. Tramer, who had no idea of the real identity of “Otto Heninger,” recalls this period vividly. “I always thought Otto was a good fellow. He was com­ pletely honest. He divided our food portions and never gave me the worst of it. We gambled a lot at ‘Skat’ or twenty-one [card games], but Otto never gambled. He was very intelli­ gent and he spoke with a slight Austrian accent. He always wore an old Wehrmacht uniform and a green Tyrolean hat. Except with me he was very reserved but always polite. He was a sort of individualist.” The lumber firm of Bermann and Company went out of business and was taken over by Braun and Company. In an attempt to curb inflation, officials in Western Germany in­ stituted an economic reformation under which Braun and Company found it impossible to operate with a profit. The lumber workers were all dismissed. Eichmann rented a room in the home of Mrs. Anna Lindhorst, a war widow who lived in nearby Altensalzkoth. He became a handyman around the house and helped pay for his room and board by sawing and splicing logs, the humblest work he had ever performed in his life. Then he suggested that he be allowed to build a chicken coop in her back yard and start a small chicken farm. The obliging Frau Lindhorst not only allowed him to do this but told him he could keep any profits he made. “He built everything all by himself,” Frau Lindhorst and her son Willie, now twenty, remember. “He was a very handy man.” Eichmann began to make money from the eggs his chick­ ens were laying, and now he insisted upon paying rent to

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Frau Lindhorst. A rather pretty platinum blonde arrived in town and boarded at the home of Max Helms, just down the street from Frau Lindhorst’s home. This blonde was Nellie Krawietz. Eichmann led such a discreet life that neither his landlady nor Helms knew of his friendship with the lovely lady. Otto Heninger and Nellie had kept up a steady correspond­ ence. She had become devoted to him, and when he urged her to come and visit him, assuring her that it would not be dangerous and that his being a divorced man made it prac­ tically respectable, she agreed. On several occasions she came to Altensalzkoth, each time boarding at the home of Max Helms. Heninger did not want to be seen in public with her, but they visited in each other’s rooms and occasionally went for long walks in the woods. Price control was strictly enforced in Altensalzkoth. To make any money from his eggs Eichmann had to sell them on the black market. There was a desperate shortage of eggs in the region, and he had no trouble finding customers, many of whom were Jews, former inmates of the concentration camps he had supervised. He lived frugally. “Otto Hen­ inger” was quiet, unobtrusive, and the villagers liked him. He seldom appeared in the village tavern on Saturday nights to join his neighbors in a few glasses of beer. When he ex­ plained that he just could not afford it they understood and respected him. Then one day Nellie Krawietz, who still lived in Prien, received a letter from Eichmann which must have dismayed her. He wrote thanking her for her kindness and help and saying that he had decided to cross the border into the Rus­ sian zone to give himself up and offer his services to the Russians. “If you do not hear from me in four weeks write a cross over my name,” he ended plaintively. (Nellie never did

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hear from him again. In 1953 she met and married an Ameri­ can of German origin named George Kulen. She went to America with him and helped him run his delicatessen busi­ ness in a Midwestern city. Now a widow, she still lives there.) The fiction that he would give himself up to the Russian authorities was one that Eichmann kept only for Nellie. He told Frau Lindhorst that he was going to Norway or Sweden to take a job as an electrical engineer. Hans Feiersleben had escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp and had joined his brother, the forest ranger. When Eichmann left he gave his poultry to his friend Hans. “Otto Heninger” disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived, and soon the country village forgot about him. After Eichmann’s capture in 1960, Richard Kilian, a corre­ spondent for the London Daily Telegraph, visited Altensalz­ koth (located, incidentally, only an hour’s walk from the extermination center Bergen-Belsen). Kilian tried to find and interview everyone who knew Eichmann during his months of hiding in the village. He approached a policeman and showed him a picture of Eichmann. “Where did you ever get this?” the policeman asked curi­ ously. “That’s a picture of Otto Heninger, who used to live here.” The policeman refused to believe that “Otto Hen­ inger” and Adolf Eichmann were one and the same. Kilian located Frau Tramer, wife of Eichmann’s former roommate in the lumber camp. She could not believe that “Otto Heninger” could have been a murderer. “He was a quiet, withdrawn man. During the hot evenings he often played the violin for us. He played Mozart, Schubert, Bach, and Beethoven.” A nurse named Eva, who had replaced Ruth, confessed to Frau Tramer that she had a strong liking for “Otto Henin­ ger,” but she added a bit sadly, “Otto told me that his wife

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and children were still living in Czechoslovakia and that he would never be unfaithful to them.” Herr Karl Schwarz, who owned the local Gasthaus in the village, remembers “Otto Heninger” very well. “He came in here once in a while. He was a good man but he was never very friendly. He always drank alone. He didn’t have much money. The rest of us always respected his obvious desire for privacy. It’s hard for me to believe that he was such an important Nazi.” It was in 1948 that Eichmann disappeared from his village retreat. The progress of the Nuremberg war trials was highly publicized, and again and again the name of Adolf Eichmann was mentioned. He read these reports assiduously. Even his farewell scene in the Oberdachstetten prisoner-of-war camp had become testimony at the trials. His statement, “I am go­ ing to the Mufti,” was in headlines. SS Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Hoettl testified against him. It seems apparent that he felt he was no longer safe in the little village. While Eichmann was thriftily saving his money, mark by mark, in order to pay for his escape from the country, a pow­ erful Nazi underground, financed by men who had prospered in the black market during the war, had grown up in Ger­ many and Austria. The extent and variety of its operations were discovered years later by Simon Wiesenthal when a member of the organization offered to trade him information about the Nazi escape routes to the Orient and South Amer­ ica in return for whatever Wiesenthal could tell him about the buried treasures in the Aussee region. The secret center of operations, at any rate for the smuggling of wanted war criminals out of Europe, in the years 1948-1953 was in the romantic town of Lindau on Lake Constance. Actually there were three organizations working in close cooperation: “Die Spinne” (The Spider), “Sechsgestim” (Six Heads), and “Odessa” ( Organisation der SS Angehörigen—Organization

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of Former SS Men). One of the leaders of the first of these groups was a former Nazi noncommissioned officer by the name of Robert Fitzner, whose headquarters were in Mu­ nich. He was in touch with a widespread net of agents in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy and in turn collaborated with a secret organization working in Egypt, Syria, Central and South America—and most particularly in Argentina. It was Fitzner who arranged the transportation of former Nazis from Lindau to Switzerland. His method was to bring his customers in small groups to Bregenz and provide them with a place to stay. He would then procure one-day passes for them which allowed them to cross the border to Saint Gallen. From there his clients were flown to Rome. The price was 500 marks per head. There was not much profit, of course, in this operation, but the organization had other sources of revenue. Arms of all sorts—mines, ammunition, rifles, and in particular the heavy German machine guns, MG 42s and MG 34s—were smug­ gled out. These arms for the most part had been stolen from stores captured by the American troops in Germany and Austria; they were transferred to Egypt, Syria, and a few South American countries. From the Near East, The Spider and its fellow organizations received hashish and opium, thus plying a profitable two-way trade. In the Middle East this underground movement consisted of pro-Nazi Arabs supported by former Iraquian Premier Rashid Ali El-Gailani and by high-ranking government offi­ cials in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. The under­ ground had two headquarters in Italy, Rome and Bari. From the former, illegal emigrants were smuggled to Da­ mascus, Cairo, and other Middle Eastern capitals, and from Bari they were mostly transported to South American coun­ tries. Other centers of this Nazi underground were Meran, Ulm, Munich, Hanover, and Bremen.

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During his stay in Altensalzkoth, Eichmann had made con­ tact with members of this underground. It was The Spider that got him to Rome, but not by the deluxe route through Switzerland. That had temporarily become unsafe. Eich­ mann, with three companions, had to cross into Italy from Austria. This presented a difficult problem. The Nazi under­ ground had no influence on the border guards. Eichmann, with the three others, ran into a patrol. Three of them, in­ cluding Eichmann, made it, but one was caught and brought before the officer of the border guards. The prisoner ad­ mitted that his papers were all forged; he confessed all de­ tails and the names of the men who had succeeded in crossing the border. Had the Austrian officer taken action, Eichmann would have been caught in a matter of hours, but the fugitive’s diabolical luck continued to ride with him. It happened that the Austrian officer was an ardent Nazi, and he never reported the incident to his superiors. Arrived in Rome, Eichmann found sanctuary in a Fran­ ciscan monastery on the Via Frascatti. The monks there had harbored Jews, Christians, and Nazis—never asking ques­ tions. They had no idea who Eichmann was or where he came from, nor did they care. It was enough for them that he was a fear-ridden man who was in some political trouble. The underground had merely told them that their help was badly needed and Pater Benedetti saw to it that Eichmann was given every possible aid. At this point The Spider took a hand again. Eichmann was supplied with a complete set of excellent documents of iden­ tification in the name of Ricardo Klement. The Spiders source for these forged papers was an international crime syndicate and counterfeiting ring that had been in operation for twenty years. At this time it was specializing in passports and other papers made out for fictitious characters who were described as displaced persons from behind the Iron

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Curtain or, alternatively, as natives of Italy or South America. When the forged papers arrived, it did not take Eichmann long to secure a refugee passport from the Vatican, which at that time was cooperating with the Italian Red Cross and the repatriation services of various nations. “Ricardo Klement” left Italy quite openly, via the so-called “Roman SD route,” for one of the few countries where all enemies of Jews were (and still are) highly honored guests— Syria. In Damascus he took the name of “Karl Brinkmann.” Except for the hard core of Israeli hunters, the search for Eichmann had about died out. Sometime previously he had got in touch with his wife in Linz and told her what to do. She had spread the rumor that he had been killed during the last days of the war. To strengthen this report, Frau Vera Eichmann appeared in the district court of Bad Ischel and asked to have a sworn statement acknowledged. The state­ ment read: “Karl Adolf Eichmann, born March 19, 1906, in Solingen, is dead. Attached is a sworn statement, issued in Prague, that the witness Karl Lukas saw Eichmann shot to death in Prague on May 6, 1945.” The district judge signed it as a matter of routine. Simon Wiesenthal found out about this statement, and he knew that if it was accepted Eichmann would be con­ sidered a dead man and no one would ever look for him. Through some of his many connections he obtained a copy of the statement, and after a short investigation it was dis­ covered that the witness was Vera Eichmann’s brother-inlaw. Wiesenthal appealed to the district court, and when Frau Eichmann was brought before it she admitted that Karl Lukas was married to one of her six sisters in Prague. The judge retracted his endorsement of the statement, and Vera’s attempt to proclaim Adolf dead failed. Two of Eichmanns former colleagues, Rauff, former SD

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chief of Mailand, and Alois Brunner, were already in Da­ mascus. They found many old friends there who had helped Syrian units to fight against Israel. Men like Von Hiegel, German Luftwaffe major, and Von Strachwitz, tank general, were among them. So was Franz Rademacher, former expert on the “Jewish problem,” now wanted as a war criminal. Eichmann, Rauff, and Brunner received a hearty welcome from their former associates. Eichmann (“Karl Brinkmann” ) and Brunner ( “Dr. George Fischer” ) immediately went into the import business. They dealt in European articles, mostly in the trade of arms not only to Syria but to other Arab coun­ tries. They called their firm the Kathar Office, and its head­ quarters was a comer house located at Number 22 George Haddad Street in Damascus. Nominally “Dr. Fischer” was the director of the company, with reserved, soft-spoken “Karl Brinkmann” his chief aide. “Brinkmann” had an affinity for languages (except for Hebrew) and he soon became very adept at mixing Arabic words with German cocktails for the benefit of potential customers. “Fischer’s” assistant did a great deal of traveling to Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Trans-Jor­ dan, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and up to the Persian Gulf. He used many names on these travels—Brinkmann, Eckmann, Hirth, etc. The Arab leaders with whom he did business never knew that he was Adolf Eichmann. He cov­ ered most of the Middle East, excluding, of course, Israel, on camel back, by car, by plane, and by train. After Eichmann’s capture the German reporter Heinz Weizel Altmeyer met an Arab friend at the Caravan Bar in Damascus. The Arab said that for $300 he would give the reporter a sensational story—the story of Syrian-German col­ laboration in the city, with special emphasis on the officers of the Kathar Office. The German reporter paid the $300 and received the story. He learned that Fuad Nahdif, an Arab, was a third partner. He was told that Ibrahim Haschin, a

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representative of the Algerian rebels, bought arms from the Kathar Office. These arms were purchased from Czechoslo­ vakia, Poland, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany. They were paid for through a Swiss bank, delivered to Latakia in Syria, and from there transported to Algeria. The German reporter learned just about everything there was to know about the Kathar Office. Some time before he had been offered infor­ mation that would lead to both Nazis’ arrest—for $100,000. He did not believe the offer was on the level, and the deal never came through. Adolf Eichmann spent two profitable years working for the Kathar Office. During all this time he kept in contact with his wife, but German authorities and other countries’ intelligence services could not track him down because his letters were written in special code and signed with different names. Then he suddenly left for Spain, apparently on a busi­ ness trip. Something made him feel that Europe was too small a continent in which to hide permanently. He still had the passport that he had obtained from the Vatican under the name of Ricardo Klement. He left Spain and went to Genoa. He submitted his passport to the Argentine consulate and was issued a visa on June 14, 1950, and then left Italy aboard the ship Giovanna C. for Argentina. Four weeks later he arrived in Buenos Aires, having traveled via the Canary Islands. Eichmann felt sure that Juan Perón’s Argentina would show sympathy to immigrants like himself. He knew that refugees were not only welcome but requested. There was one thing that Eichmann did not know: although many exNazi were hiding in Argentina, there were also thousands of Jewish refugees living there. The Argentina of Perón, strangely enough, was not anti-Semitic. Perón’s Minister of the Interior, Angel Sorlenghi, was a Jew and an active Zionist, as was the Secretary of State, Samuel Krislavin. When an anti-Semitic

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organization called the Alianza Libertadora Nazionalista sprang up it was immediately suppressed by Perón’s order. On July 14, 1950, Ricardo Klement arrived in the port of Buenos Aires. He rented a room in a boarding house at 1429 Calle Monesterio, in the Florida section of Vincente Lopez, a suburb of the capital, and immediately went looking for work. He found a job as a mechanic in a small metallurgical factory at 1818 Calle Serrano. Always adaptable, Ricardo Klement became a skilled and hard-working employee, and it was not long before he was made a foreman. On August 3, 1950, Eichmann applied for an identification card at the Dirección de Identificación Civil y Estadística General. When he filled out the necessary application form to receive a cédula ( identification card), he gave the follow­ ing information: Name, Ricardo Klement; son of Anna Klem­ ent of Bolzano, Austria; born, May 23, 1913; unmarried; Catholic; occupation, mechanic; can read and write; went through high school; speaks German and English, and is a “Displaced Person.” All information with the exception of his knowledge of languages and reading and writing was false. He was also fingerprinted. Two months later, October 2, 1950, he was issued identification card number 1378538. On that day Eichmann’s temporary freedom began. The Argentine iden­ tity card gave him—unlike his Vatican passport—a new unquestionable identity. From now on he could travel freely throughout the country without fear, no longer using false papers. Eichmann, now forty-four years old, started a new life, but he was not satisfied; he wanted his family to share this new life with him. Shortly before Christmas in 1950 a letter arrived for Frau Vera Eichmann at Bischofsstrasse Number 3 in Linz, from a certain Ricardo Klement, Rio Portredo in the Province Tucumán, Argentina. The letter didn’t contain much, but for Vera

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Eichmann it was enough. She told her sons about an “Uncle Ricardo” who lived in South America, where they had horses, mules, beautiful forests, and mountains. She promised the boys that some day they might even go to visit “Uncle Ri­ cardo.” Eichmann now felt fairly secure. His only danger lay in the fact that he might be recognized by a refugee from one of the concentration camps. After a few months he took a new job with the Capri Company, a construction firm which built dam projects under government contracts. Partners in this firm were an Argentine named Carlos Fuldner and Dr. Schocklitz, a German geologist. Many of the engineers, scien­ tists, and technical workers in the Capri firm were Germans who had to flee Germany after the war or face trial. Eich­ mann obtained his job by enlarging on his engineering edu­ cation at the Linz Polytechnic School, from which he had been expelled. It was not long before he was put in charge of a small group of workers and asssigned to survey the land at La Cocha and Rio Portredo. Then he was sent to the northern region of Tucumán with a raise in salary from 1000 to 2500 pesos a month. Tucumán was a region where hun­ dreds of former Nazis lived, but none of them recognized the graying, thin-faced, stoop-shouldered, poorly dressed man who, having been in the country almost two years, spoke Spanish fairly well, as the once elegant Adolf Eichmann, Minister of Death. Adolf Eichmann, always unpredictable, took out a second identification card from the Dirección de Identificación Civil y Estadística General de la Provincia Tucumán. He gave exactly the same information as he gave to the Buenos Aires authorities, but now he added that he spoke Spanish. Once again he had to be fingerprinted. He knew that before the debacle in Germany fingerprints of all SS men had been de­ stroyed, so he had no fear of complying with the regulation.

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Back in Linz, Vera Eichmann was making preparations to join her husband. She obtained an Austrian passport made out in her maiden name, Veronika Liebel, and then brought her three sons, Klaus (sixteen), Horst (twelve), and Dieter (ten) to Genoa, Italy. After being issued an Argentine visa, they sailed aboard the ship Salta. It was June 30, 1952. The Salta arrived in Buenos Aires on July 28. The whole country was in national mourning; Eva Perón, wife of the dictator, had died the day before. Frau Eichmann and her sons remained in the capital for eighteen days, shopping for all the necessary articles they would need for their sojourn in the rural and rather primitive region of Tucumán. On August 15, they left Buenos Aires. When the train stopped at the small Tucumán station a man dressed in winter clothes was waiting. Frau Eichmann em­ braced her husband, whom she had not seen for seven years. The children stared at him curiously, and then their mother said, “This is your Uncle Ricardo.” For nearly a year the Eichmann family enjoyed life. Eich­ mann usually traveled on horseback when he made his sur­ veying trips, and he had become an excellent rider. He taught his three sons to ride, and the four of them spent many happy days riding across the pampas of Tucumán. This rural area was a paradise for the youngsters. In addition to riding the boys hunted and fished. They went to a local school and soon learned Spanish. Although Frau Eichmann had to use the name Liebel for legal purposes because it was on her passport, she was known to the neighbors as Señora Klement, the wife of the Austrian engineer. Finally Vera Liebel Eichmann became Catalina Klement. This wonderful life in the mountains and on the plains of Tucumán came to an end in 1953, when work on the govern­ ment contracts under which the Capri firm operated in this region was completed and the company liquidated. Eich-

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mann was again unemployed, but he had lived simply and had saved some money. He wanted desperately to keep his family in this northern region, but his chances of getting a job here were very slim. He moved his family to Buenos Aires and rented a house in the suburb Olivas, at Number 4261 Chacabuco Street. It was a small, damp, inexpensive house. Eichmann and his wife became very friendly with their landlord, Francisco Schmidt, an Argentine Jew. Eichman remained unemployed for two months and then found a job in a fruit-juice factory; this job lasted only a few short weeks. Then with what money he had left he opened a small laundry. He worked with tenacity and competence, but he could not compete with the Japanese and Chinese laundries, whose prices were much lower than his. He then went to work as a warehouse foreman in a small Buenos Aires metal factory. By this time, his two older sons, both studying to be technicians, in the eventual hope of becoming engineers, were working part-time. The compelling drive which had taken him into high office in the Nazi regime was still with him; he hated to work for anyone else. In 1954 he found what he wanted. He was of­ fered the management of a rabbit farm called Siette Palmas, located in the small village of Joaquin Gorina, about fifty miles from Buenos Aires. The only unpleasant feature of the job was the fact that it was impossible for him to live at home, but he did spend every week end with his family. He was paid a good salary and whenever he sold the angora rabbit skins to Argentine merchants, most of whom were Jews, he received a percentage of the profits. There wasn’t much to do in Joaquin Gorina, so Eichmann spent most of his leisure time reading and playing his violin. He had little taste for fiction but greatly enjoyed books on physics, as­ tronomy, biology, and history. He had a habit of scribbling notes on the margins of the pages. After reading Dr. Fritz

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Kahn’s The Atom, he wrote: “I have intellectually mastered this book, as well as others of the same stamp, and I found it a marvelous confirmation of National Socialism’s ‘divine faith,’ German theism. And because this is distantly related to the materialistic doctrine of the Communist view, and also to Lenin’s materialism, which is derived from Marx’s posi­ tion, I warn my children against lumping all these together. “The Lenin-Marx doctrine teaches materialism. It is cold and lifeless. German theism, on the contrary, is warm, natu­ ral, and always alive. “But unfortunately I have to fear, because of the intellec­ tual pretentiousness and ignorance of my three sons, that all this will seem only ‘worthless chaff to them. And this I de­ plore I” Eichmann retained his fierce hatred for anyone who had not remained true to Hitler to the end. After reading The Last Days of the Reich’s Chancellery by Gerhard Boldt, he discovered that Boldt had eventually repudiated the Führer, His written comment was, “This young officer was a no­ body.” When the author described the last moments of the Reich he wrote that many of the SS officers were arrogant and impudent to their superiors. Eichmann’s marginal com­ ment on this was: “The author of this book is an ass, dumb as a sow. Boldt is the name of this sowl!. . . The author ought to be flayed alive for his vileness. With scoundrels like this the war had to be lost!” Eichmann read a book on the Nuremberg trials which included testimony against him by Dieter von Wisliczeny. Beside Wisliczeny’s testimony quoting Eichmann as saying, “I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction,” Eichmann scribbled, “Every word is correct except one. I did not say ‘Jews’ but ‘enemies of the Reich.’ ”

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The rabbit farm went bankrupt, and Eichmann once more was unemployed. Unable to find work in Buenos Aires, he went to Brazil, leaving his family in Argentina. Using the name of Ernst Radiger, he found a job as a gaucho and remained there for nearly a year. For no known reason he suddenly quit and went to Paraguay, where he held several different jobs. A few months later he traveled to Chile, Uru­ guay, and Peru. Then he returned to his family. Juan Perón was ousted from Argentina in 1955, and Eichmann felt un­ easy under the new rule. He felt that a more democratic regime might conceivably search for ex-Nazi leaders and turn them over to the Western powers. He slipped out of the country, entered Bolivia, and stayed in hiding there for several months. There is no doubt that during these years when Eichmann was constantly on the move he lived in terror of being recognized, kidnaped, or killed. He disliked staying in one job for any length of time. A suspicious look from a fellow employee was often enough to make him pack up and leave. During these flights his wife kept in constant touch with him and was able to inform him that, as far as Nazis were concerned, their status quo remained. No one seemed inter­ ested in them. She also reminded him that everyone thought he was dead, except perhaps for the Israeli intelligence serv­ ice, and they presented no danger because Argentina did not have an extradition treaty with Israel. Eichmann then returned home. Shortly thereafter a fourth son was born to Catalina and Ricardo Klement. The boy was given the name of Ricardo Francisco Klement. The Francisco was in fond memory of the Franciscan monks who had sheltered Eich­ mann and helped him obtain the passport which permitted him to go to Syria. For some odd reason the baby was regis­ tered officially under the name Ricardo Francisco KlementLiebel-Eichmann.

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Eichmann at this time began to write his memoirs with the help of his Dutch friend. He did not want his newborn son to grow up thinking that his father had been a murderer. He had already told his two older sons, Klaus and Horst, that he was actually Adolf Eichmann’s brother. “My brother Adolf is called a criminal, but he was no more than an obedient clerk who never killed anyone.” From time to time he told the boys stories about “their father” and his devotion to Germany. “None of the things attributed to your father are true. He was no more than an obedient soldier.” It was hardly likely that either of these two young men believed the story. In 1956 Eichmann held several jobs. He worked as a me­ chanic in one job on the outskirts of the city. He changed that to become a clerk in an automobile spare-parts shop and then for a while worked as a foreman on a truck farm in the agricultural region some miles from the capital. Then in 1958 the unpredictable Adolf Eichmann left Argentina for the Middle East, once again leaving his family. He was hired by a sub-company of the German Erdöl A. G., Dea-Concordia, which was drilling for oil east of the Euphrates River. He disliked the job and the bleak life of the oil camp and in January 1959 he made his way to Damascus to spend some time with his old friend “Dr. George Fischer,” who was still running the Kathar Office there. His family still held an enormous attraction for him, so early in 1959 he returned to Buenos Aires. Upon returning he found work at the Mercedes-Benz fac­ tory. His job was a very minor one; he worked on the assem­ bly line that turned out trucks, but his inherent ability helped him to get quick systematic promotions. On March 20,1959, he was made a supervisor of clerks by the technical manager of the plant, Dr. Binder, also a German. Meanwhile he had purchased a small piece of land on Calle

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Garibaldi in San Fernando, Biancalari, a northwest suburb of Buenos Aires. With the help of his sons and an Argentine friend he started to build a home. His wife bought the mate­ rials needed and on one of the invoices sent to her from the Cabora factory on December 17, 1959, she is called "Señora Liebel de Eichmann.” Eichmann was to live in the house only two months. Eichmann continued to work with his Dutch friend on his memoirs. He finished them in April 1960. He ended them by saying: I have slowly wearied of living as an anonymous wanderer between the worlds. The voice of my heart, which no human being can escape, has kept whispering to me to seek peace. Even with my former opponents I would like to be at peace. Perhaps this is a part of the German character. And I would be the last person to be unwilling to present himself to the German authorities if I did not have to consider that the interests involved in this affair might still be too great for the matter to reach a clear, objective conclusion. Far be it from me to want to cast any shadow of doubt on the justice of a decision by a German court, but I am still by no means clear about the legal status accorded today by a court of inquiry to a former subordinate who had to be­ have in conformity with his then valid oath of office and had to execute the orders and directives he received. I was nothing but a loyal, methodical, correct, and diligent member of the SS and the Reich Central Security Office, inspired by nothing but ideal emotions for the Fatherland to which I had the honor to belong. Never was I a secret Schweinehund and traitor. Despite conscientious self-examination, I have to conclude in my own defense that I was neither a murderer nor a mass murderer. No more were my immediate subordinates. But in order to adhere to the truth with hair-splitting ac­ curacy I would like to charge myself with being an acces-

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sory to killings, because I transmitted deportation orders, which I had received, and because at least some of those deported were killed, although by an entirely different unit. I said that I would have to charge myself with being an accessory to the killings if I sat in harsh and ruthless judg­ ment upon myself. Only I do not yet clearly see whether I have the right to do so in view of my immediate underlings. And so here I find myself still in inner conflict for I couldn’t, could I, as a former small subordinate (this, too, is something one must understand) be more popish than the Pope? My subjective attitude toward the facts of what was happening was my belief in the national emergency preached by the leadership of the then German government; it was, moreover, my increasing belief in the necessity of a total war because I had to believe, with steadily increasing certainty, in the constant pronouncements of the leadership of the then German Reich: “Victory in this total war or de­ struction of the German people.” On the basis of this attitude, I carried out with clean con­ science and faithful heart the duty imposed upon me. I was always a good German, I am today a good German, and I shall always be a good German! And then on May 11, 1960, he took the bus as usual, thinking this would be just another uneventful day.

PART IV

The Case 23,1960, after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made his sudden and dramatic announcement to the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann had been captured, correspondents dashed wildly to the press room, and within moments the story was being sent all over the world by the press services. That night the newspapermen, unable to reach Ben-Gurion, pleaded with Police Commissioner Joseph Nachmias to hold a news conference. He did, but revealed nothing more than had the Prime Minister earlier in the day. They asked Nachmias dozens of questions. When was he caught? Where was he caught? Who captured him? Nachmias did not an­ swer these questions; in fact, he said that the details about where Eichmann had been caught and how would never be revealed. Then he made a surprising statement: “The reason why we are not going to reveal any of the details is that Eichmann pleaded with us not to. His wife and four sons are living in the country where he was found and n

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Eichmann is afraid that their lives would be endangered if their true identities were known.” But the Police Commissioner could not prevent them from indulging in speculation. One paper stated that a foreign country had cooperated in the capture of Eichmann; a Tel Aviv paper printed a story that the first clue to his where­ abouts had been supplied by a Jewish refugee from Poland; there were stories that bribes and rewards were paid to people who helped in the abduction; an American paper said that Eichmann had been living in luxury on the money he had managed to escape with; some papers said that he had been seized in Kuwait; others claimed it was Damascus, Germany, or Brazil; a Viennese paper, Die Kronenzeitung, printed a story that Eichmann had been brought to Israel on one of the country’s two submarines; another American newspaper called the capture of Eichmann “a daring com­ mando operation not unlike the capture of the German commander of Crete during World War II,” and added that the operation was performed in Kuwait; the London News Chronicle related that Eichmann had been hiding in Syria until 1949 and that he was then assisted by Otto Skorzeny (the man who kidnaped Mussolini), who smuggled him out of Kuwait and had given him a Spanish passport; the London Daily Telegraph reported that Eichmann had been arrested at his home in one of the Arab countries, and the Daily Mail insisted that he had been apprehended in Kuwait; an Ameri­ can newspaper version said that one of Eichmann’s many mistresses had tipped off Israeli security agents as to where he was living, and according to this version plastic surgery had been performed on Eichmann’s face; one of the strangest accounts, which appeared in a Cairo paper, said that Eich­ mann was captured in Baghdad by Iraqi Communists as­ sisted by General Abdul Karim el-Kassem, head of the Iraqi government, and delivered to Israel; a German paper dis­

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closed that Eichmann had been picked up in Syria because of a tip passed on to the Israeli security service by German security men. There was not a word of truth in any of these reports, but since they continued to be printed Police Commissioner Nachmias summoned local and foreign correspondents to his office and told them that all the stories were false. Meanwhile foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires were looking for an answer to the riddle, for they knew that a great many former high-ranking Nazis had found refuge in Argentina—why not Adolf Eichmann? The rumors became so persistent that the government assigned the foreign department of its federal police to investigate. The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the authorities in Jerusalem maintained a “no comment” attitude, saying only that the details of Eichmanns appre­ hension would never be revealed, although Jerusalem ad­ mitted that he had been arrested by Israeli security agents who had transferred him to Israel. It wasn't long before the Argentine federal police re­ ceived information, from certain Air Force officers, that Eichmann had in fact been secretly removed from Argentina on a special plane that had brought the Israeli delegation to the Argentina Independence Day ceremonies. Abba Eban, who was still in Buenos Aires, refused to comment on this. When he arrived back in Israel all he told correspondents was that his delegation had been received in a warm and friendly manner. There was a cable awaiting Abba Eban from President Arturo Frondizi of Argentina, expressing his thanks for the participation of the Israeli delegation in the celebration of his country’s independence. A few days later, when the Argentine government was convinced that Eichmann had been abducted from its coun­ try, relations between the two nations became strained. Argentina made an official request that the Israeli govern-

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ment “explain the reports that Adolf Eichmann had been captured in Argentina.” David Ben-Gurion and his Cabinet were faced with an embarrassing situation, especially in view of the fact that Argentina even during the Perón adminis­ tration had been very friendly to the new democracy. In fact, the Eichmann incident threatened to endanger Israels relations with all Latin American countries who had been among Israel’s stanchest friends. Back in 1947 Argentina had voted in the United Nations General Assembly in favor of a partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and Argentina was one of the very first nations to recognize Israel’s independence in May 1948. Argentina has a Jewish population of 450,000, and this community has always been loyal to Argentina even though friendly to Israel. Argentina is virtually free from any politi­ cal or social discrimination against its Jewish citizens. Chairs for the study of Hebrew have been established in Argentine universities, and the Argentine radio system features Israeli music. Argentina showed her good will toward Israel when she appointed Dr. Rudolfo García Arias as ambassador to the country. An experienced and popular diplomat, Ambas­ sador Arias had been Secretary General of the Argentine Foreign Ministry and before that, ambassador to Japan. Now all this reservoir of good will threatened to disappear. On June 6, the Israeli government dispatched a long note to its ambassador, Aryeh Levavi, in Buenos Aires. It was headed, “The Explanatory Note on the Eichmann Case.” Ambassador Levavi immediately presented it to the Argen­ tine Foreign Ministry, and Foreign Minister Diogenes Taboada revealed its contents to the press. It read in part: The Embassy of Israel presents its respects to the Min­ istry of Foreign Relations and has the honor of communi­ cating the following: The Government of Israel was ignorant of the fact that

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Adolf Eichmann had arrived in Argentina since the security services of Israel had not given information in this respect. Only after receiving the telegram of the Israeli Ambassador in Buenos Aires, dated June 1, 1960, the Government investi­ gated the details of the case with the security services which had detained Eichmann and these are the circumstances re­ sulting from those investigations. 1. After the termination of the Second World War, Jew­ ish volunteers (among them some Israelis) began the search for Eichmann, the main one responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Europe. 2. For fifteen years those groups of volunteers searched for Eichmann in different European countries, in Arab countries, and on the Latin American continent without results. 3. Some months ago news reached one of these groups of volunteers engaged in the search that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina under a false name, without the knowledge of the Argentine authorities but with the aid of other Nazis who live in the country. It was not clear to the investigators if this news was reliable or not. But they were able to establish the fact that in Argentina there lived numerous Nazis. 4. The investigations were renewed with more intensity and uncovered the domicile of Eichmann, who lived under a false name. The volunteer groups which were investigating established contact with Eichmann and asked him if he would be disposed to go to Israel to be tried. On realizing that he had been recognized, Eich­ mann admitted his true identity and related that he lived in Argentina with false documents and under an­ other name; when asked if he was willing to present him­ self for trial in Israel, he asked for a period of 24 hours to reply. That period of time was granted. The next day he expressed his willingness to go to Israel spontane­ ously to be tried and, at the same time, turned over to

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the group which had found him a letter written in his own handwriting in which he manifested his willing­ ness “to give expression without adornment to facts of his last five years of service in Germany, in order that the true picture of the facts be transmitted to future generations.” 5. The group of volunteers then took Eichmann, with his permission, out of Argentina and turned him over to the security services of Israel. 6. The security services on May 23, 1960, informed the Israeli Government that Eichmann was in their hands, and the Government instructed the police and the State Attorney General to prepare the trial. Only later was the Government informed that Eichmann had come from Argentina. . . . 8. In the event that the group of volunteers have violated the Argentine law or have interfered in the Argentine sovereign rights, the Government of Israel wishes to ex­ press its regret in this respect. The Government of Is­ rael asks that consideration should be given to the extraordinary significance which surrounds the fact that there has been brought before the tribunal the man on whom weighs the responsibility for the extermination of millions of persons belonging to the Jewish people, and implores that the fact be contemplated that the volunteers themselves, survivors of the massacre, put this historic mission above any other consideration. The Government of Israel entertains the full certainty that the Argentine Government will show understanding be­ fore such historic and moral values. Argentina was understandably puzzled by portions of the note. It appeared to contradict David Ben-Gurion’s an­ nouncement in the Knesset on May 23 that Eichmann had been discovered by Israeli security services. The repeated references to the “group of volunteers” who found the former

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Nazi colonel also seemed rather incredible. The Argentine diplomats reasoned that any operation such as the one that resulted in the abduction of Eichmann must have been a fairly expensive one; would a group of volunteers have money enough to charter a plane to transport Eichmann to Israel? It hardly seemed likely. They also were a bit doubtful as to the credibility of the statement attributed to Eichmann that he was going to Israel voluntarily. Most Latin American countries, especially Argentina, attach great importance to the principle of political asylum. The Foreign Office, in short, was thoroughly dissatisfied with Israel’s explanation of how Eichmann had been caught and whisked to Israel for trial. On June 8, Argentina, in a vigorously worded note given to Ambassador Levavi, made a formal protest “against the illicit act committed in violation of one of the most funda­ mental rights of the Argentine state” and demanded the immediate return of Adolf Eichmann. The note asked that those who violated Argentina’s territory by capturing Eich­ mann be punished, and stated further that if Israel refused to return Eichmann, Argentina would take the case to the United Nations and charge Israel with violating the United Nations charter. It added that if Eichmann were returned, Israel could then ask his extradition “through means contem­ plated by international law” (Argentina and Israel had signed an extradition treaty on May 9, just two days before Eichmann was seized). “Extradition would be permitted only when the crime involved was punishable in both coun­ tries by prison sentences of three years or more.” The treaty also stipulated that extradition was forbidden “in cases of military, political or related crimes.” The Argentine note also said that if Eichmann were extradited on a charge of geno­ cide ( systematic measures for the extermination of a cultural or racial group), he would have to be tried either in Ger­ many where the crime took place or before an international

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court under the terms of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which both Israel and Argentina had ratified. The note rejected as “gratuitous” the charge made by Israel that “numerous Nazis reside in Argentina.” Argentina said that if she took her complaint to the United Nations she would do so under Articles 33 through 38, which provide for the “peaceful settlement of disputes either through the Security Council or the General Assembly.” "This Government understands perfectly,” the note said, “the sentiments which Jewish people harbor toward a man charged with extermination in the concentration camps.” It also recognized that Eichmann was living in Argentina under false documents and that his "evidently irregular situation was in no way in conformity with conditions for asylum or territorial refuge. But these circumstances do not alter the obligations of member states of the United Nations to abide by international law.” In Argentine Foreign Ministry circles comparisons were drawn between the Eichmann case and Argentina’s conduct toward former dictator Juan D. Perón. After the fall of the dictator in September 1955, he took asylum on a Paraguayan gunboat in the Buenos Aires harbor. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said, "We had at least as much reason to seize Perón at a moment of political crisis that would only be aggravated by his liberty in exile, yet we abided by the rules of international conduct and his asylum was respected.” The Argentine note demanding the return of Eichmann came as a shock to Israel. David Ben-Gurion looked for a way to refuse the demand without completely wrecking good relations with Argentina. Even had the Prime Minister been willing to return Eichmann, it would have been almost impossible to do so because of the strong feelings that had been aroused in Israel. On June 9, Ben-Gurion wrote a long, conciliatory personal letter to President Frondizi which read:

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Dear Mr. President, At this time, as a result of the capture of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and his transfer to Israel, misun­ derstandings may arise in the relations between the Republic of Argentina and the State of Israel, and I therefore regard it my duty to send you this direct message. I take the liberty of doing so precisely because the relations between our two Governments and our two peoples are dear to our hearts and because we should regard it as a matter for profound sor­ row and regret if they were to be in any way impaired as a result of recent happenings in connection with Adolf Eich­ mann. I understand that you are personally at the present time giving due consideration to the Diplomatic Note which our Ambassador at Buenos Aires delivered to your Minister for Foreign Affairs on Friday, June 3. In that Note you will find all the elements of our case in this matter. There are, how­ ever, certain points touching the very core of the issue which transcend the confines of a Diplomatic Note. It is on these points that I wish briefly to enlarge and I do so in the con­ viction that only by fully appreciating them is it possible to pass judgment on the issue involved. During the Second World War this man Eichmann was the person directly responsible for the execution of Hitlers orders for the “final solution” of the Jewish problem in Eu­ rope, i.e., the murder of every single Jew on whom the Nazis could lay their hands throughout the territories of Europe which they had occupied at that time. Six million of our peo­ ple were murdered in Europe, and it was Eichmann who or­ ganized this mass murder, on a gigantic and unprecedented scale throughout Europe. I need not explain to you, Mr. President, what it means for any people on earth to be the victims of such a satanic murder campaign, and what profound scars such an experi­ ence must leave in a people’s soul. Never, even in the age-old annals of our martyrdom, has there been such a fiendish atrocity. Not only were millions

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murdered—including a million infants—but the cultural and spiritual center of our people, which until World War II had its seat in Europe, was extirpated. Hundreds of thousands of the survivors are living in our midst, and hundreds of people in Israel and abroad would not rest until they had found the man who had been in charge of this appalling campaign of extermination. They regarded it as their mission in life to bring the man responsible for this crime, without precedent in history, to stand trial before the Jewish people. Such a trial can take place only in Israel. I do not underestimate the seriousness of the formal vio­ lation of Argentine law committed by those who found Eichmann, but I am convinced that very few people any­ where can fail to understand their feelings and appreciate the supreme moral validity of their act. These events cannot be approached, Mr. President, from an exclusively formal point of view. Though I do not question for a moment the duty of every State to respect its neighbors laws—and we regard the Argentine Republic, of which you are the head, as an outstanding example of a state founded on respect for law—yet we can appreciate the over-riding motives whose tremendous moral and emotional force underlay the deter­ mination to find the chief murderer and to bring him, with his consent, to Israel. I am convinced that Your Excellency will give full weight to the transcendental moral force of these motivations, for you yourself have fought against tyranny and shown your deep regard for human values. I hope you will understand our feelings, accept the expression of our sincere regret for the violation of your country’s laws which was the result of an inner moral imperative, and associate yourself with all the friends of justice in the world, who see in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel an act of supreme historic justice, and that the friendly relations between Israel and your country will not be impaired. President Frondizi and his Foreign Ministry were not satis •

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fied with David Ben-Gurion’s plea that the case be judged by moral rather than legal standards. Both the press and the public were angry that the seizure of Eichmann violated Argentine sovereignty; even many Argentine Jews agreed with this. The people of Argentina, apparently still bearing scars from the years of Perón’s brutal dictatorship where political murder was commonplace, seemed to think that their country was indirectly handing Eichmann over to an executioner. During the previous months a small group of terrorists had murdered a great many Argentine citizens. The situa­ tion had become so bad that the government sponsored a bill demanding the death penalty for those who had been caught (there had been no death penalty in the country); the bill was overwhelmingly defeated in the Parliament. The average citizen of Argentina considered the death penalty to be the hallmark of the barbarian, and this in part explains their at­ titude toward Israel’s high-handed action in spiriting Eich­ mann away. There was no sympathy in any quarter for Adolf Eichmann himself. There were those, however, who ap­ proved of Israel’s action. One deputy in the Argentine Par­ liament made a speech in which he said: Adolf Eichmann invested the best of his diabolical efforts in annihilating the Jewish people. Fundamental justice de­ mands that Jews should be his judges. Of course, we nonJewish Argentinians cannot understand it. Our children were not thrown to the flames, our graybeards were not buried alive, the bodies of our sons and daughters were not made into soap. And instead of congratulating the survivors of the hellish contrivance for their determination and patience in tracking down the man responsible for these enormities, Ar­ gentina bases itself on formalism and asks for his return. The criminal activity of Eichmann and his ilk was based on murder and violence. Equally illegal and illegitimate

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was his flight from justice to Argentina, where the authorities claim not even to have been aware of his existence. If cap­ turing him here was a violation of the laws of Argentina, it was based on international moral law that calls for the pun­ ishment of Nazi criminals by national and international courts of law. The Argentinian attitude which holds that the protection of criminals is constitutional while discoveries by the vic­ tims of beastly inhumanity are unjust and illegal, vitiates the laws of decency and good order. But the Foreign Ministry did not share this deputy’s views. The real feelings were expressed when the Argentine Am­ bassador Rudolfo García Arias was summoned to return from Israel. The Chargé d’Affaires, Mr. Eduardo Antonio Co­ lombo, took his place. Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, an anonymous call to the Argentine embassy threatened to blow up the building. The terse message was in English. The Israeli po­ lice searched the building and reinforced police guards, but the call proved to be a false alarm. On June 15 Argentina complained to the United Nations Security Council that the “illicit transfer of Eichmann to Israel had created an atmos­ phere of insecurity and mistrust, incompatible with the preservation of international law.” While Argentina was taking the Eichmann case before the UN, there were incidents of anti-Semitic violence on June 15 in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In the latter city two bombs exploded at a synagogue and at a community center. Another bomb intended for the Israeli embassy blew up the home of one of the terrorists, killing a boy of eighteen and wounding two others. In Caracas, Venezuela, police guarded the Israeli legation after the minister, Mr. Moshe Avidan, was threatened by an anonymous telephone caller. In Buenos Aires walls were daubed with anti-Je wish

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slogans and demands for Eichmann’s return to Argentina. Leaflets were distributed condemning “Jewish aggression and espionage directed from Israel against Argentina’s sovereignty.” Mark Turkow, Latin American representative of the World Jewish Congress, stated on June 16 in Buenos Aires that authorities there and in Uruguay had been approached about the incidents and that investigations were being made to determine the organization behind the acts. In Brazil the Governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel Brizóla, ordered the arrest of “any foreign agent” found in­ vestigating German immigrants presumably charged with war crimes. The Governor said that the Eichmann case con­ firmed reports that agents had been making such investiga­ tions. Although Argentina had requested an urgent meeting, the Security Council decided to meet five days later to consider the protest. The delay was due to the fact that several mem­ bers hoped that a settlement between the two countries could be reached before the Council was forced to act. Dur­ ing the previous week President Frondizi and Prime Min­ ister Ben-Gurion had both been in Europe. It had been announced that they would meet in Brussels and perhaps resolve the whole question, but the meeting did not take place. In the complaint the hope was expressed that the Security Council would make a decision insisting that there be “just reparations for the rights violated.” Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir had arrived in New York and had met with Dr. Mario Amadeo, the Argentine delegate, and confirmed Israel’s refusal to return Eichmann. She also rejected a compromise suggestion by Dr. Amadeo under which the International Court of Justice in The Hague would be asked to decide what court should try Eichmann,

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while Eichmann would be kept in custody in the Argentine Embassy in Tel Aviv. The talk between Mrs. Meir and Dr. Amadeo took place in the New York home of Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat, Uruguayan delegate to the United Na­ tions. Mrs. Meir said that the talk with Dr. Amadeo had been a friendly one, but at the time she refused to disclose any particulars. United Nations representatives chatting amiably in the air-cooled Delegates' Lounge (which serves drinks of every country in the world) felt that the presenta­ tion of the case to the Security Council did not signify a stiffening of the Argentine position but was probably part of a diplomatic process to resolve it with a face-saving for­ mula for both nations. Some questioned whether the Security Council had jurisdiction over such a dispute, but Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld said, "Without in any way touching on the merits or demerits of this case, the Security Council can definitely be used, not as a kind of court or any­ thing of that type, but within the limits of its authority to pronounce itself on whether certain rules of the game are or are not essential—that is to say whether breach of such rules may create tension or even some risks.” On June 22, the Security Council began its debate on Argentina’s complaint. Henry Cabot Lodge opened the de­ bate with the statement that the Security Council should do nothing to embitter relations between Israel and Argen­ tina or prejudice a settlement. Also, he declared, "inter­ national law and practices should be upheld, and the Eichmann case could not be considered ‘apart from the monstrous acts' with which the Nazi had been charged.” Mr. Lodge further suggested the insertion of two passages in the Argentine resolution: Mindful of the universal condemnation of the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, and of the concern of people

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in all countries that Eichmann should be brought to appro­ priate justice for the crimes of which he is accused and expresses the hope that the traditionally friendly relations between Argentina and Israel will be advanced. The biggest surprise of the day was the speech of Arkady A. Sobolev, the Soviet Union delegate to the United Nations. However, Mr. Sobolev devoted most of his speech to a condemnation of West Germany for employing former Nazi officials in leading positions. Israeli supporters were encour­ aged when Mr. Sobolev reminded the Council that the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a decla­ ration in 1943 stating that Axis war criminals should be arrested and returned for trial to the countries where their crimes were committed. The Soviet delegate added that this had been accepted at a conference of the American States in March 1944 and endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations the following year. He declared that Argentina’s failure to arrest Eichmann and turn him over for trial had not been in accordance with these declarations. But Mr. Sobolev leaned toward the Argentine side with the statement that the Soviet Union believed that there must be no violation of the sovereignty of states for any reason whatever. He declared that the Soviet Union agreed with the position of Argentina on the violation of sovereignty, but did not mention the Argentine resolution. It was a fine example of double talk. In presenting the Argentine case Dr. Amadeo emphasized his country’s friendship with Israel and the number of refu­ gees, including Jews, who were given harbor in Argentina. He insisted that Argentina was not defending “the physical person of Adolf Eichmann” but security for present and future refugees in Argentina.

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Dr. Amadeo contended that, regardless of whether private persons or Israeli officials were responsible for capturing Eichmann, and regardless of whether the Nazi went to Israel willingly, Argentina’s sovereignty had still been violated. Mrs. Golda Meir had drafted a speech that virtually ignored the legal aspects of the case, except for an assertion that the Security Council lacked jurisdiction. The Israeli Foreign Minister quoted extensively from the testimony at the Nuremberg war crimes trials on Eichmann’s primary role in carrying out Hitler’s plan for "the Final Solution” of the Jewish problem. She thanked Argentina for her kindness to Jewish refugees but protested against their being mentioned “in the same breath” with Eichmann. She could not accept “this kind of equalization.” Mrs. Meir noted that Dr. Amadeo in his speech had mentioned that there were thousands of Jews in Argen­ tina who were not discriminated against. She wished to assure Argentina that the Jewish people appreciated this. Repeatedly Mrs. Meir insisted that, while Argentine laws had been violated, there had been no infringement of Argen­ tine sovereignty. Israel had previously expressed regret to Argentina, she said, and apologized again this day for the illegal actions. However, she insisted that no further action was called for, and that the Security Council had no right to make the finding called for in the Argentine resolution. At the end of her speech Mrs. Meir asked Dr. Amadeo to explain what Argentina meant by “an adequate reparation.” The Argentine delegate told newspapermen later that he would make his answer in the Security Council. After the meeting Mrs. Meir expressed disappointment over the United States position. She declared that the Jews knew the atrocities that had been committed by Eichmann and did not need the statements contained in the United States amendment.

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The only critical statements on Argentina’s demand for Eichmann’s return came from Armand Bérard of France and Bohdan Lewandowski of Poland, two of the countries in which the Gestapo operated during the Nazi occupation. Both delegates denounced the Nazis, and M. Bérard de­ clared that Israel’s actions regarding Eichmann did not threaten international peace and security and were there­ fore not a matter for the Security Council. Mr. Lewandowski, who was making his first speech in the Security Council after having presented his credentials the day before, said that Poland’s soil “is soaked with the blood of six million victims of Nazi cruelty,” and he made it clear that he would not vote for the Argentine resolution. A radical shift in the United States position defeated the hopes of Argentina to use the resolution as an argument to support her demand for Eichmann’s return. Mr. Lodge told Dr. Amadeo before the Security Council met that morning that he had received instructions to follow up the question posed the day before by Mrs. Meir regarding the meaning of the request that Israel provide “reparation” for the rights violated. Mr. Lodge, who had endorsed the Argentine reso­ lution the preceding day without questioning its meaning, now said that Mrs. Meir had made “the thoroughly reason­ able contention that if the Council was to accept the word ‘adequate reparation,’ the Council should know beforehand what adequate reparation’ was intended to mean.” Dr. Amadeo limited his reply to the statement that during the debate each member of the Security Council was en­ titled to his own “personal” interpretation of the resolution and that after its adoption its meaning would be a question for Argentina and Israel. After the meeting, Dr. Amadeo said that he could not say how his government would inter­ pret the resolution. The vote on adopting the resolution was 8 to 0. The Soviet

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Union and Poland abstained on the ground that Israel's action did not, as charged by Argentina, threaten interna­ tional peace and security. Poland contended also that the resolution might make it more difficult to bring other war criminals to trial. Argentina did not participate in the vote under a charter provision stating that the party to a dispute before the Security Council shall not vote. The Argentine delegate said that he took his decision out of “courtesy.” The United States, Britain, France, Ceylon, Nationalist China, Italy, Ecuador, and Tunisia voted for the resolution. The official translation made public of the operative para­ graphs of the Argentine resolution to the Security Council read: 1. Declares that acts such as that under consideration, which affect the sovereignty of a member state and therefore cause international friction, may, if repeated, endanger international peace and security. 2. Requests the Government of Israel to make appropri­ ate reparation in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the rules of international law. Dr. Amadeo later accepted the two minor amendments submitted by the United States and incorporated them in the resolution. The net result of the two-day debate, as one Western delegate remarked, was that Argentina obtained the adop­ tion of its resolution, but Israel would keep Eichmann. There is an ancient legal axiom to the effect that a man must come into a court of equity with clean hands. The hands of Dr. Mario Amadeo, spokesman for Argentina, would hardly bear close scrutiny. A lawyer, he entered the diplomatic service and served at the Vatican, in Chile, and in Brazil. In Argentina he is known as a “right-wing Catho­ lic,” a strong supporter of Generalissimo Francisco Franco,

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and a man who, during the war, sympathized with the aims of Adolf Hitler. In a booklet issued by the United States Department of State in 1946, he was referred to as a "trusted collaborator” of the Nazi security forces. An eighty-six-page Blue Book circulated in Latin America and titled Consultation among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation, on page 29 cited Amadeo, linking him with Juan Carlos Goyeneche, an ardent pro-Nazi Argentine who sought to strengthen his country's ties with the Axis through a series of interviews with Himmler, von Ribben trop, Mussolini, Ciano, and Franco. Although he is a Ro­ man Catholic, leaders of the Republican Catholic movement as recently as 1955 refused to cooperate with him on grounds that he was seeking to turn Argentina over to an extreme right military junta. While the Security Council was listening to Dr. Amadeo’s speech, the people back in Buenos Aires were listening to a nationwide broadcast by Arturo Marthof, a member of Par­ liament. He branded Amadeo "a follower of Hitler” and declared that "he cannot be our spokesman at the United Nations.” "There is no justification for our going to such extremes to defend a Nazi murderer,” he said. Before the end of World War II the British Foreign Office had reason to believe that many Nazi leaders had fled to Argentina and that it was possible that a great many more would follow. The Argentine ambassador in London, Dr. Cárcano, assured the British government on September 29, 1944, that his country would not give refuge to Axis war criminals, stating: 1. In no event will persons accused of war crimes be al­ lowed in Argentine territory. 2. Neither will they be allowed to create capital deposits or acquire property of any kind. The Argentine Gov­ ernment has the right to claim that these declarations

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shall be accepted as bona fide, as in justice this has been the case regarding the intentions of other coun­ tries which by their neutrality and geographical prox­ imity would appear to be more easily accessible as places of refuge. Neither of these promises was kept by Argentina. An inter­ esting sideline on the whole effort of Argentina to protect Eichmann is the fact that in 1944 he had ordered the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of all Argentine Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. There were several thousand Jews of Argentine citizenship living in Europe. The original of Eichmann’s order is on file in the Paris archives of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation. It reads: All Argentine Jews and Jewesses are to be arrested imme­ diately. They are to be removed at once under escort to Bergen-Belsen near Hanover. They are to be handed over to SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Seidl, responsible for Security Police affairs. The property of the arrested Jews is to be seized. Further instructions will be sent on receipt of reports that the order has been carried out. [Signed] Eichmann, Obersturmbannführer Thousands of Argentine Jews were victims of Adolf Eichmann. Yet another stage in the Israel-Argentina dispute came to an end as the Israeli ambassador in Buenos Aires, Mr. Aryeh Levavi, was declared persona non grata and left for home on July 23. After he returned to Israel the legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Shabtai Rosenne, left for Buenos Aires to conduct talks with Argentine officials in an effort to formulate some kind of statement or declaration that would be acceptable to both sides and close the entire affair. Finally, on August 3, Israel and Argentina announced that the matter was closed. The joint statement, issued simultane-

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ously in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires, said that the two gov­ ernments had been “animated by the wish to comply with the resolution of the Security Council of June 23.” There was no reference to the “adequate reparation” that Argentina had been demanding. Presumably the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador gave Argentina the satisfaction she had de­ manded. The dispute settled, Israel entered the second and more difficult stage of the Eichmann case—the trial.

2 The trial of Adolf Eichmann will take place in the spring of 1961. It is one of the few cases in the history of criminal procedure in which there is no adequate way to punish the defendant if he is found guilty. If he is given the death sentence he can still, as he once declared, “jump into his grave laughing,” for he will be merely exchanging his own life for the close to six million Jews he exterminated. Israel is a constitutional democracy with tremendous respect for the ancient axiom of British law that “a man is innocent until proved guilty.” Eichmann will never suffer any of the tor­ tures he inflicted upon his victims. His trial before the Jerusalem District Court will be an open one, and it is expected that a thousand correspondents from all over the world will be assigned to cover it. In addi­ tion, Ben-Gurion (often called B-G) has announced that qualified foreign observers such as judges, United Nations representatives, and others, will be welcome. A political op­ ponent of B-G has argued that Israel has no right to try a man who committed no crimes against Israeli nationals or upon Israeli soil. It must be recalled that Israel did not be­ come a state until May 14, 1948. Ben-Gurion answered by saying, “Historic justice and the honor of the Jewish people

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demand that Adolf Eichmanns trial should take place before an Israeli court in the sovereign Jewish state. This is the decision of the Israeli Government and the opinion of prac­ tically all our citizens.” Other critics have been urging him to restrict the charges against Eichmann to crimes that can be directly attributed to him and not to the Nazi regime as a whole. The Prime Minister answered in effect that no penalty imposed upon Eichmann could compensate for the magnitude of his of­ fense. He insisted that the trial disclose the full account of the Nazi regime’s atrocious crimes against the Jewish people. For the crimes they committed against the world as a whole, Ben-Gurion indicated that the Nazis received retribution in World War II, but there was no retribution in the war for the Nazi program against the Jews, “a specific and unpar­ alleled act—an act designed for the utter extermination of the entire Jewish people. It is, therefore, the duty of the State of Israel,” he went on, “the only sovereign authority in Jewry, to see that the whole of this story in all its horror is fully told because this was a unique and unexampled crime.” In a letter to Israel Galili, a member of the Knesset, the Prime Minister wrote: In my opinion, the importance of the capture of Adolf Eichmann and his trial in Israel lies not in the extraordinary resource and skill of the staff of the Security Services but in the privilege of having the entire story of the holocaust re­ vealed in an Israeli court, so that the facts shall be known and remembered by the youth of Israel, who have grown up and received their education after the holocaust, and whose ears only a faint echo of that atrocious crime has reached; and so that world opinion, too, shall learn the truth. The indictment against Eichmann which is now being prepared is based on the “Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law” passed by the Knesset several years ago.

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This law provides the death penalty for anyone who com­ mitted a crime against the Jewish people which is a crime against humanity. It will be the task of the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, to prove that Eichmann has violated this statute. There is no television in Israel. Perhaps that is the reason Israel is one of the few countries remaining where conver­ sation is not a lost art. The favorite subject of conversation in Tel Aviv sidewalk cafés, in Ley land buses, on boulevard benches and hotel terraces and crowded beaches is the Eich­ mann case. They all know that he will claim, as so many Nazis before him have, that he was simply a soldier obeying orders and therefore is not directly responsible for any crime. The knowledgeable citizens of Israel believe it will be impossible for him to maintain this line of defense. First, the legal principle of responsibility in such cases has already been decided both in Nuremberg and, oddly enough, in Israel, where eleven border guards were tried and convicted for unlawfully killing Arabs although they were doing so under orders of their superiors. Moreover, documents prove that after November 25, 1944, Eichmann continued his atrocities against the orders of his superiors. However, there are still those in Israel and other countries who think that Eichmann should be tried by an international tribunal or handed over to Germany, on which territory (plus the occupied countries) he committed his atrocities. General Telford Taylor, who was the Chief American Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, expressed the opinion that since Israel is in no need of edu­ cating its citizens in detail about “the Final Solution,” he should be tried somewhere else. Taylor has said, “Everybody in Israel recognizes well the Nazi crimes; on the other hand, pupils in the schools of West Germany do not have any idea about the extent of the extermination of the Jews, and it would be better to try Eichmann there. Eichmann did not

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commit his crimes in Israel; all other Nazi war criminals were tried either in Germany or in the country where they committed their crimes.” Many voices outside Israel have been raised in protest against his trial in that country. The objection coming from lawyers is based chiefly on the manner in which Eichmann was captured. Some legal experts in Europe and the United States claim that an illegal apprehension (and Eichmann’s certainly was) of a criminal is technical grounds for his release. Other legal pundits express their doubt because they do not think the Jewish state is capable of conducting an objective trial of a murderer of Jews. Moreover, they main­ tain that even though the trial be conducted with meticulous objectivity, the world will still be skeptical. Other lawyers argue the fact that the top Nazi criminals, whose crimes were not connected with one particular coun­ try, were tried in the international military tribunal in Nuremberg, established by the Allies, on the basis of the London Agreement of 1945, and the Nuremberg Charter that was a supplement to the Agreement. In 1946 an inter­ national tribunal was formed in Tokyo for trying war crimi­ nals in the Far East. The assumption was that all other war criminals would be tried by the respective countries against which they had committed their crimes. The number of Nazis tried by the international courts was relatively small. Most of the cases against war criminals were heard in the national courts of the previously Nazi occupied countries, or in special courts formed by the Allies after the liberation in Germany and other Axis countries. The law under which the war criminals and their col­ laborators were tried, in most countries, was mainly the ordinary criminal code of each country involved, with few adaptations and alterations.

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Actually during the Nuremberg trials Eichmann, “in ef­ fect,” was tried and convicted. American Judge Robert Jackson said in the tribunal: Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of six million Jews. Of these, four million were killed by extermination institutions, and two million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD which pursued Jews in the ghettos and in their homes and slaughtered them by gas wagons, by mass shooting in anti-tank ditches, and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive. Sometime toward the end of the war, a special investigator named Konrad Morgen was appointed by the SS to inspect concentration camps. W hat this Nazi saw during his tour ap­ palled him. Morgen then wrote a frank report to the special internal court of the SS in Berlin, demanding to open a thorough investigation of the acts of Adolf Eichmann. The SS court in Berlin handed this recommendation over to the head of the Security Services, adding to it a warrant to ar­ rest Eichmann. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who obviously appre­ ciated the services of Eichmann, immediately contacted Heinrich Müller, and both Nazis explained to the SS judges that arresting Eichmann was out of the question, for he had been receiving special orders directly from the Führer him­ self. Eichmann remained free to continue his horrible crimes. The Israeli “Nazi punishment law” is based on interna­ tional law. The relation between the two is evident in three points: first, international law prevails in all countries and for all persons; second, in many countries (France for in­ stance), international law takes precedence over national legislation; third, the General Assembly of the United Na­ tions decided to make the principles of the Charter and the Nuremberg trials prevail in all member countries of the

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United Nations, through a general codex of laws pertaining to offenses against the peace and the security of humanity. The question remains, however, how is it possible to try individuals by international law, which provides only for nations? The verdict pronounced in the Nuremberg trials changed this basic concept, setting a new precedent, accord­ ing to which the regulations of international law can prevail upon individual persons. According to the conception of the unity of the law, the law of the country and the international law are merely two parts of the same law, two divisions of the same monistic judicial system. The verdict in the Nuremberg trials specifically said, “The persecution of Jews by the Nazi government was proved in detail before this court. It was systematic cruelty at its worst. Plans were drafted for the Final Solution of the Jews in Europe. The Final Solution meant the extermination of Jews. According to the estimations of Adolf Eichmann the number of Jews killed reached six million. The persecution of Jews was established beyond doubt.” The international tribunal frequently used the term “the Jewish people” and always spoke of Jews as such, and not as citizens of the various countries. According to the Israeli concept of international law, the Nazis committed crimes against the Jews as such and not against them as citizens of other countries. Its position is that Israel, as the only sovereign authority that represents world Jewry, has every right to bring a Nazi war criminal to trial. One of the most eloquent defenders of Israel’s right to try Eichmann is the scholarly Max Lemer, who in a New York Post column of June 22, 1960 wrote in part: An Israeli trial would apply legal rules as correctly as a trial by a West German or an International Tribunal. There

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is certainly as much due process of law in Israel as in Argen­ tina or West Germany or at Geneva. Let it be remembered that the Jews started as the people of the book and the law, and that for centuries they have invested some of their best talents in the interpretation of the law. Let it also be recalled that by a savage irony, the Jews have for centuries been hunted and harassed and have died by the strict letter of the law—someone else’s law. They suffered at the hands of men whose only law was hate, but who codified their hate in legal forms—as witness the Nuremberg Laws behind the sadism of Hitler and Heydrich, Eichmann and Bormann. They were also ground slowly but pitilessly in the mills of another kind of law—the Weimar Republic Laws, for example, which held the balance evenly between the just and unjust, the murdered and the murderers, and let the Nazi Party gangsters slip through the meshes in their campaign of terror. . . . This is why I don't feel particularly stirred when someone invokes the legality of a German or an International Tribu­ nal for Eichmann. What I want to know is whether it will again be a hollow form, or whether there is will behind the law. Argentina, for example, has kept sending back the ex­ tradition forms in the case of a Nazi death camp doctor, to correct the fine print, until now he can’t be located. And who can doubt, as the Argentinian deputy Mathov [Marthof] has charged, that something of the same sort would have happened if the Israelis had spotted Eichmann and then correctly asked for his extradition? There are no serious and practicable alternatives to an Israeli trial for Eichmann. When Ben-Gurion speaks of Is­ rael’s “moral” claim, he cannot mean that it has no legal base as well. There is no nation except Israel to speak for the victims of Eichmann. You don’t have to be a Jewish nationalist to recognize this fact of history. Cutting across national boundaries, the Jews form not a race and more than a religion. They are a historic community in Otto Bauer’s definition: "An aggregate of peo-

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pie bound into a community of character by a community of fate.” The intent behind the trial? The intent is not revenge or retribution, but justice. Put differently, the intent is that the fate which the death camp inmates met shall never again be the fate of any people, whether Jews or Christians, Moslems or Hindus or Buddhists, whatever the minorities who are proscribed for genocide by some fanatical Master Plan and the criminals bent on carrying it through. . . . If he is convicted, how about his punishment? My own feeling is that no punishment could ever be adequate for the monstrousness of the crimes. That being so, I hope the Israelis will be imaginative enough to assign a symbolic punishment. Not death, but life—a life of hard labor spent in working on the soil and building the state whose survival mocks Eichmann’s fate. Only thus would the symmetry of history be truly fulfilled. While the people of Israel and other countries were argu­ ing as to the right of Israel to try Eichmann, the American Jewish Congress secured the services of several distinguished legal experts on international law. This group wrote a report supporting Israel's claim to jurisdiction in the case. One of the points made was that international law does recognize crimes against humanity such as piracy. This is based on the premise that the defendants are the enemies of the human race and that such crimes may be tried under inter­ national law by any state that acquires physical custody of the accused. Some comment is relevant here as to which acts constitute crimes against humanity. If piracy is of sufficient enormity to qualify as a crime against the human race, then by analogy the genocidal acts of which Eichmann is accused would seem equally to comprise a universal crime, cognizable as such under international law. In this connection it is signifi­

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cant that the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 11,1946, unanimously adopted a resolution affirm­ ing the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. (U.N. Gen. Ass. Off. Rec. 1st Sess., Plenary 1144 [A/PV 55] [1946]; cf. Gross, “The Criminality of Aggressive War,” 41 Am. Pol. Sei. Rev. 205 [1947].) This unanimous endorsement by the duly recognized world parliament would seem to come as close to the affir­ mation or establishment of an international common law as is possible in present-day international society. If the Nurem­ berg principles, therefore, have been incorporated into the common law of mankind, any nation, including Israel, that succeeds in obtaining custody of the person of Eichmann would have the right to conduct his trial. Indeed, if Eich­ mann had been abducted and brought to the United States, he could under this principle just as readily be tried by the domestic criminal courts. And American jurisdiction in that case would be equally unassailable. In the United States there have been frequent instances in which judgments of American courts have been chal­ lenged on the ground that the defendant was forcibly brought to the United States from abroad. The United States Supreme Court has consistently maintained that the acqui­ sition by force in no way contaminates a subsequent trial or impairs the judgment or competency of the trial court. There are numerous citations to this effect. The leading case is Ker v. Illinois (1886), 119 U.S. 436, in which an ac­ cused sought to defeat jurisdiction of an Illinois court on the ground that he had been seized in Peru in violation of law and forcibly brought against his will into the United States and delivered to authorities of the State of Illinois. The de­ fendant claimed that he had protested his arrest and from

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the time of his being seized in Peru had been prevented from communicating with his family or friends and from seeking legal counsel. The court held that although the case was clearly one "of kidnaping within the Dominion of Peru without any pretense of authority, this in no way disabled the criminal courts of the United States from proceeding against the accused.” As stated more recently in a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court, "The power of a court to try a person for a crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court's jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible' abduction.” ( Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 522 [1952].) This rule of the Ker case reflects the attitude not only of United States courts but of the Executive as well. On April 12, 1935, the Mexican Embassy in Washington delivered an "aide-memoire” to the American government demanding the return of one Luis Lopez, who had been abducted from Mexico and later convicted in Texas of violating the Harrison Narcotics Act. Lopez' return was demanded on the ground that "instead of being extradited by legal channels” he "was brought into American territory in a manner which consti­ tutes an invasion of jurisdiction by American officials com­ mitted in Mexican territory.” The Attorney General to whom the matter was referred, while recognizing the irregular recovery of Lopez, pointed out that in accordance with the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Ex Parte Johnson, the trial of the accused and his subsequent imprisonment were valid and lawful. In the circumstances, the court held, Mexico's only relief would be to apply to the President for such redress as he might be persuaded to order. (See Hackworth, Digest of International Law, Volume IV, 224 [1942].) Although a valid extradition treaty is now in force between

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Israel and Argentina, the act of extradition is never simple or easily accomplished. Within the past year the Argentine government in two separate cases refused to extradite—not to Israel but to West Germany—two major Nazi war criminals now residing in Argentina. In both cases extradition was refused because the offenses were allegedly “political” in character. One of the criminals thus protected is Karl Klinghofer, the former head of the Jewish Section of the Nazi Foreign Ministry. The other is Dr. Joseph Mangele, the doctor who personally made the selection of prisoners for the crematories at Auschwitz and the man personally responsible for the performance of inhuman experiments upon Jewish women in the camp. Ar­ gentina denied the German request in the last case, on the ground that it was submitted in German instead of in Span­ ish. Apparently as a result of pressures arising out of the Eichmann case, Argentina finally agreed, on June 23, 1960, to extradite Mangele to West Germany, but by then the canny Dr. Mangele had moved to another South American country (probably Chile). One of the customarily acknowledged grounds for juris­ diction is that the criminal act should have occurred within the territorial bounds of the nation conducting the trial. To understand the import of this rule one must look to its ulti­ mate purpose. The rationale of the rule is concerned less with geography than with procedural convenience. It is based on the assumption that evidence, witnesses, and all the other elements necessary for a finding of fact are likely to be found most readily where the act occurred. It is precisely these considerations that may be said to argue for Israeli jurisdiction in the Eichmann matter. Prob­ ably nowhere in the world are there more witnesses who can testify to Eichmann’s role and his activities on behalf of the Nazis. Probably nowhere in the world has there been as

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systematic and careful an attempt to collect and retain infor­ mation relating to the operation of the Eichmann office. Thousands of persons now living in Israel can testify sig­ nificantly to Eichmann’s activities. The documents and files assembled by the Yad Vashem (the Central Documentation Center sponsored by the government of Israel, engaged in systematic world-wide collection of materials on the Jewish catastrophe under the Nazis) and by the Haifa Documenta­ tion Center are among the most nearly complete in the world. For reason of trial convenience, therefore—if for no other—Israel can claim jurisdiction. It may be argued, in rebuttal, that Israel’s claim must be balanced by the difficulty that Eichmann may find in calling defense witnesses to testify in Israel. It may be said that the facts tending to show Eichmann’s guilt are by now so well established that they require no elaborate proofs or testi­ mony. On the other hand, since Eichmann’s defense unques­ tionably will be that of “superior orders,” and since he doubtless will argue that he was only carrying out directives from above, it will be indispensable to his case that he have free access to witnesses familiar with the Nazi hierarchy and chain of command. And these witnesses are in Germany, not in Israel. Moreover, it is argued, even if ample defense witnesses could be found or brought to Israel, the atmosphere in Israel would preclude anything approaching freedom of testimony. This is the classic case, it is stated, in which a change of venue would be granted in the United States. Support for such a change of venue is further indicated, it may be said, by the difficulty that Eichmann would encounter not only in bringing defense witnesses to Israel but in obtaining ade­ quate counsel. Not one member of the Israeli bar was willing to accept his defense. Even those sources that have been most critical of Israel in

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this controversy have admitted that Israeli concepts of due process and fair trial are of the highest standards. It is un­ thinkable that Eichmann s trial in Israel would be anything less than impeccably and scrupulously fair, even according to the most strict canons of Western judicial procedure. A number of critics have urged that Eichmann be tried in West Germany, as the country where he perpetrated most of his crimes. The arguments advanced have been many, em­ bracing political, moral, and psychological considerations. The German people, it is suggested, 4needs the educational value of such a trial more than Israel.” Moreover, the trial of Eichmann in Germany would be a demonstration of Germany's good intentions “to overcome the past.” Finally, as one New York newspaper noted, the Eichmann drama is ‘part of the fateful morality play that began in Germany. It should properly end there.” These are impelling reasons and merit consideration. Under its law West Germany certainly is capable of jurisdic­ tion on the theory that it is the country where the crimes were committed. Despite all the controversy over Eichmann and despite the jurisdictional claims asserted by others on its behalf, West Germany itself has not asked that Eichmann be transferred to its custody. On the contrary, it has given signs that it does not want to assume responsibility for his trial. It is known that for some time an extensive dossier on Eichmann has been maintained by the West German government; never­ theless, the Association of Attorney Generals of the various Länder (states) in West Germany have indicated that they would not overly object to the actual trial's being conducted elsewhere. The West German government conducted an in­ vestigation to determine the citizenship of Adolf Eichmann. It was finally decided that he was legally Austrian and not German.

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One of the obstacles to trial in West Germany, and a major risk of serious embarrassment to that government, is the diffi­ culty of providing adequate security—of insuring, in other words, that if returned to West Germany Eichmann could be successfully detained in prison and made to stand trial and punishment. The record of post-World War II prosecution by West Germany of war criminals and leading members of the Nazi Party has been rather disheartening. It is acknowledged that there has been in operation in West Germany a well-organ­ ized “underground railway” which has regularly extricated convicted Nazi war criminals from the hands of the civil government and succeeded in transporting them abroad to Arab and South American countries for propaganda and mili­ tary purposes. This apparatus has been able to supply Nazis facing trial or sentence with passports, false papers and easy transit of frontiers. Among those who have thus been spirited out of Germany from under the very noses of the German courts have been Franz Rademacher, a high official of the Nazi foreign office, convicted and sentenced in 1958 for the murder of thousands of Jews, who succeeded in escaping imprisonment by flight to Syria; Dr. Johannes von Leers, one of the leading antiSemitic hate-mongers in Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, and now an advisor to United Arab Republic President Nasser; Ludwig Zind, who was sensationally captured by four Israeli sailors in Naples; and many others. An interesting aspect of the Eichmann case is the fact that in 1956, when his whereabouts were unknown, a German court in Frankfurt issued an order for his arrest. This order is still valid, and if by any chance Eichmann is found not guilty West Germany can ask Israel to extradite him. Practically speaking, there seems small chance that this eventuality will

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come to pass. As has been mentioned, the ruling circles in Bonn did not put any pressure on Israel to deliver him for trial. On the contrary, many West German officials offered their help to the Israeli investigators. The few voices that were heard in Germany, demanding that Israel deliver Eich­ mann to the Germans, were not the voices of legal represent­ atives but those of a few scared German leaders, who were afraid that in his trial Eichmann would unmask some people of dubious past who are now holding prominent positions in the political life of Bonn. The German Attorney General, Dr. Fritz Bauer, shows vivid interest in the progress of the preparations for Eich­ mann’s trial in Israel. He is especially interested in the con­ tents of Eichmann’s confessions in jail, realizing that they will enable him to complete his investigation of other Nazi war criminals such as Krumey and Beckerle, who were re­ cently rearrested, following Eichmann’s capture. The bureaus of many other prosecutors in West Germany have asked for copies of Eichmann’s confessions in jail in order to complete the investigation of many war-crime files that are still undecided. East European countries, which as a rule are hostile toward the state of Israel in accordance with the policy of the Kremlin, are surprisingly backing Israel all the way in her fight for the right to try Eichmann. At least one big East European power officially approached Israel and offered to furnish Israeli investigators with evidence and documents connected with Eichmann’s crimes. Some of the documents kept in a museum behind the Iron Curtain are said to be of great value. The Czechoslovakian organization of war veterans issued a call to all its members to provide Israel with any evidence they may have in their possession which might help incrimi­ nate Adolf Eichmann.

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A special authority, composed of representatives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, Justice, and Police, has been established in Israel for the sole purpose of the or­ ganization of Eichmann s trial and its technical execution. The technical problems involved in the preparation of the trial are enormous. Special security precautions must be taken during the trial, which will attract unusually large crowds. There was some discussion among Israeli officials at first as to the scope of the trial. One suggestion offered was to try Eichmann only for his Hungarian crimes, and thus make it a short, quick affair. But Ben-Gurion and his Minister of Justice, Pinchas Rosen, finally decided to try Eichmann for all his crimes in Europe—which means a long, complicated investigation leading to a long, involved case. One of the toughest problems was whether or not to allow Eichmann’s choice of defense attorney, a lawyer from Germany. The tendency, however, was to allow it in order to grant the prisoner a fair trial. This involved a special amendment by the Knesset of the Lawyers Act, which said that only an Israeli attorney could represent a defendant in court. The trial will be held before the Jerusalem District Court, the Presiding Justice of which is Dr. Benjamin Halevi, who is well acquainted with the subject. (Actually there will be either three or five judges presiding.) He presided at the Kastner trial in 1955 and studied numerous documents re­ garding Eichmann’s activities. No other Israeli judge is so well versed in the relevant events of the period. The Israeli officials feel that this is more than a criminal proceeding against an individual. Even today, nearly twenty years after the tragic events, many riddles remain, and they hope that Eichmann’s testimony on the witness stand will help to solve some of these.

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There is no doubt that the name of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini, who visited Hitler more than once during the war, will come up at the trial. It is known that he had many contacts with Eichmann himself, and that Eich­ mann personally took him on a tour of concentration camps in order to see how the Jews died. This might seem irrele­ vant, but among the documents found after the war there was a joint declaration by Germany and Italy concerning their attitude toward the Arab world. This document was written in French, a language the Mufti knows well, and it contains marginal notes in Arabic in the Mufti’s own hand­ writing. Article 7 of this document stated: Germany and Italy recognize the illegality of the “national Jewish home” in Palestine. They recognize on the other hand the right of the Palestine Arabs and all other Arab countries to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries according to the Arabian national in­ terests, in the same manner in which this problem was solved in the Axis countries. This clear statement leaves no trace of doubt as to what end the Mufti had in mind for the Jews of Palestine and the Arab countries. The phrase “in the same manner in which this problem was solved in the Axis countries” means liter­ ally extermination by gas. Apparently Haj Amin, who had as his ultimate goal the liquidation of Zionism, understood that by exterminating the Jewish potential in Europe he would in fact attain his goal. The trial of Eichmann may also illuminate the question of just how much influence the Mufti had over the Nazi leaders. W hat gives this question significance is the fact that the Mufti is still alive and is believed to be a source of inspira­ tion for Nasser and all Arab rulers in the Middle East. Other questions may arise at the trial which are apt to

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embarrass the Western nations, particularly Great Britain and the United States. Until the holocaust, Winston Churchill was considered to be in sympathy with the Jews of Europe; so was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but for the most part they remained silent while thousands of Jews died each day in the crematories. The protests they made were mild during the early years of the war and were never accom­ panied by threats. Defenders of Churchill say that he was too busy doing his magnificent and difficult job of saving Eng­ land to take an active part in any collateral issues. But this does not explain the fact that Britain, by closing the gates of Palestine, prevented the rescue of many thousands. For many years the Jewish people saw, in Roosevelt, their best friend. Only after his death some documents appeared that have made them wonder if they were right. Some be­ lieve that during the time that Jewish lives were being so ruthlessly taken, Roosevelt’s thoughts were more concerned with oil. On his way back from the Yalta conference he met with King Ibn Saud for a friendly conversation aboard an American cruiser. Ibn Saud, a persuasive man, informed Roosevelt of the Arab resentment of the Jewish plan to make Palestine into a Jewish state. A document in President Roose­ velt’s handwriting has been discovered which reads, “During the five minutes I talked with King Saud, the problems of the Middle East and the question of Zionism were clarified to me more fully than they had been during all my years as President.” Today the citizens of Israel are discussing these questions and are also asking why General Dwight D. Eisenhower maintained what amounted to a passive position on the Nazi extermination plan. It must be emphasized that these are the views of certain Israeli citizens, not of the authors. Eichmann is talking very freely to his interrogators in Is­ rael. Eichmann’s attitude apparently is that he can’t gain any­

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thing by remaining quiet. If he talks as freely at his trial he will probably reveal the identities of some Jews and many non-Jews who cooperated in one way or another with the Nazis and are now free. The trial is likely to prove embar­ rassing to the Western world for another reason as well. During the first year or two of the war Eichmann offered to let thousands of Jews leave German-occupied territories if other countries would grant them asylum, but for the most part the great Western powers, including England and the United States, would accept only a token number even though they must have known that the Jews of Europe were doomed. The press of Israel has been amazingly temperate in writ­ ing about Eichmann. This is because Minister of Justice Pinchas Rosen, immediately following Eichmann’s imprison­ ment, addressed all the Israeli newspaper editors at a press conference and called their attention to a regulation of the law which forbids any publication of a “sub judice” case ( a case that has not yet been judged), if the publication in­ cludes statements that might influence the trial or its results. A violation of this law is considered a criminal offense. This was further emphasized when the Minister of Justice stated, “A constitutional democracy respecting itself and conscious of world opinion, has to be mindful that these regulations are kept.” Dr. Rosen quoted the words of Justice Robert Jackson, Taylor’s predecessor as chief prosecutor for the United States in the Nuremberg trials, in his opening speech at the trial of the Nazi war criminals in 1945: “In spite of the fact that pub­ lic opinion has long pronounced its verdict on the actions of the defendants, we agree that the defendants are privileged to enjoy the doubt of innocence; we take upon ourselves the burden of proving the crimes and the responsibility of the defendants for their execution.” The newspaper editors protested that while the “sub

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judice” principle applied to ordinary criminals, it should not be applied to a man like Eichmann whose guilt was estab­ lished without doubt at the Nuremberg trials. One editor, who is also a lawyer, brought up the fact that a matter does not become “sub judice” until a prisoner is indicted; a war­ rant for arrest is not enough to bring this principle into effect. It will be some time before the prosecutors draw up the actual indictment. Though the editors won their legal point they had to accept the spirit of the Minister of Justice. The defense of Eichmann has created some technical prob­ lems. According to Israeli law, foreign lawyers must obtain special permission to appear in an Israeli court. This has al­ ready been granted, but Israeli court procedure is based on the English system, and a German lawyer unaccustomed to these methods would find himself at some disadvantage. Another stumbling block is the fact that the trial will be con­ ducted in Hebrew, although many of the affidavits and docu­ ments which the prosecutor will introduce are in German and English. Judges, of course, will be men who have mastered these three languages, and a German translation of the proceedings will be made for the benefit of Eichmann and his attorney. Since Eichmann’s arrest, many prominent attorneys, mostly from Germany, have expressed their willingness to defend him. Among them was Erich Schmidt-Leichner of Frankfurt, who is an expert on cases with Nazi background. During the Nuremberg trials, he successfully defended offi­ cials of the German Foreign Office and prominent industrial figures. In 1954 he secured the acquittal of Dr. Peters—who had been accused of supplying the gas Cyclone B to the Auschwitz extermination cam p-on the grounds of insuffi­ cient evidence. He is now acting on the defense of Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s former deputy. Another candidate was Dr. Alfred Seidel, the attorney who represented Rudolf

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Hoess in the Nuremberg trials. An offer for help also came from Eichmann’s stepbrother, Robert, who is a successful lawyer in Linz. But Eichmann’s family, and finally Eichmann himself, chose a figure of lesser prominence, Dr. Robert Servatius, who did not achieve much fame in the Nuremberg trials, although he participated as a defense attorney. Dr. Servatius, a husky man in his sixties, was an officer of the German Army in World War I. In 1935 he joined the new German Army and held the rank of major. A thorough check of his past by Israeli authorities proved, however, that his name was not connected with Nazi activities. He himself claimed he had clashed constantly with the Nazi party during the war. He believes Eichmann will get a fair trial in Israel, and he is dedicating one hour every day to the study of Hebrew in the hope that by the time of the trial he will have some knowledge of the language. He is also studying records of war crimes and reading books about Israel. He has stated that he just could not deny Eichmann’s family’s re­ quest to defend the prisoner. “After all-somebody will have to do this job.” Witnesses from all comers of the world will be swarming to Jerusalem for the opening of Eichmann’s trial. Some of them are expected to be most colorful figures. Outstanding among those is Charles Joseph Coward, a former sergeantmajor in the British Artillery, famous for his nickname, “Count of Auschwitz.” Fifty-six-year-old Coward said that three men appeared in his London home three weeks before Eichmann’s capture and asked him if he would agree to testify in “a possible trial of another war criminal.” Coward has promised the three not to reveal their identity. The “Count of Auschwitz” was captured by the Germans in Calais in 1940 and was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he met Eichmann three times. He gained his “title” through his unfailingly noble appearance—even in the conditions

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of a concentration camp. With the help of the Polish under­ ground, Coward organized a series of escapes from the camp, and thus saved some four hundred Jews. He testified twice during the Nuremberg trials. David Ben-Gurion is a stubborn man. When he is con­ vinced that his policy is right he does not compromise. He is positive that Israel has not only a moral right, but a legal right to try Eichmann in Israel. It seems inevitable that the final chapter of this story will be written in the District Court of Jerusalem.