Hunting Eichmann (14 page)

The transcript revealed a man bent on proving that he had done nothing wrong in his role as head of Department IVB
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. He strove to inflate his importance and to place himself among the Nazi elite, while simultaneously arguing that he was not ultimately responsible for any of the killings, because he had just been following orders. He declared that he held no hatred toward the Jews, mentioning a Jewish friend of his youth, and that he would have preferred their emigration from the Third Reich. Yet he also made a fervent case for why the Jews had brought their annihilation upon themselves. In his effort to resolve these opposing points of view, Eichmann ate up hours of tape, and binder after binder was filled with the neatly typed transcripts.

Many of the passages were chilling. He described how he went about his duties: "I sat at my desk and did my work. It was my job to catch our Jewish enemies like fish in a net and transport them to their final destination." He explained how he convinced those within the Nazi hierarchy to follow his methods of deception: "We used the Warsaw example [in reference to the bloody ghetto uprising] like a traveling salesman who sells an article all the more easily by showing a special advertising section." Of his operations in Holland, he said: "I sent my boxcars to Amsterdam and most of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were directed for the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor and Auschwitz ... It went beautifully!"

When Eichmann read the transcript, he was displeased with the result and scribbled hundreds of comments and corrections in the margins. He desperately wanted for his memoirs to justify his past activities. He was losing the battle, but to surrender to the truth meant facing the reality and guilt of what he had done. He continued with the interviews, Sunday after Sunday. One afternoon, he lamented that he would have happily run out the rest of his days as a Linz police chief if the war had gone a different way. His lips twisted into a smile at the thought. Sassen noted every detail.

Returning to the ramshackle section of Olivos after his meeting with Sassen, Eichmann was reminded of how far he was from the position of respect and prominence that he thought he deserved. He rented his modest house from a Jewish landlord, and worse, at least as far as he was concerned, the signatory to his lease was Herbert Kuhlmann. Eichmann had lent money to the Panzer division commander for his journey to Argentina. Since then, Kuhlmann had amassed a fortune in business and lived in the tony neighborhood Palermo Chico, the embassy row of Buenos Aires. Eichmann had needed to go to him in order to get a lease.

Kuhlmann was not the only former Nazi to grow wealthy in Buenos Aires, to inhabit a palatial mansion, and to achieve social prominence in the city. Josef Mengele and many others had also flourished, even in the wake of losing their prime benefactor and protector Juan Perón as a result of a military coup in September 1955. The success of Eichmann's fellow Nazis struck a blow to his pride, and he was convinced that they were running around town declaring, "Beware of Klement. In reality, he is that pig Eichmann."

When Eichmann lost his job in the spring of 1953, he moved his family to Buenos Aires. Every attempt he made to improve his position ended badly. First, he started a laundry with several other Germans. Their Chinese competitors cleaned them out. Next, he invested in a textile store. That, too, went bankrupt, leaving him broke. Afterward, he took an hourly wage job as a transport manager for a sanitation equipment supplier, but he was soon let go. Then he joined some distant relatives to oversee a chicken farm, located forty miles north of the city, that also bred angora rabbits. This business went bankrupt as well, and Eichmann returned to Buenos Aires to take a menial job at an appliance warehouse owned by an ex-Nazi. The birth of his fourth son, Ricardo Francisco, soon after their move from Tucumán was the only happy note in this time of failures. The boy was named after the Franciscan priest who had helped Eichmann in Genoa.

Eichmann was a quiet, introverted presence in Olivos. He walked stooped forward, rarely speaking more than a few words in heavily accented Spanish to his neighbors. He fought with his wife frequently, and her constant reading of the Bible and singing of hymns drove him mad with anger. One night, he snatched the Bible from her hands and ripped it in two before storming off. Nor was he pleased with his older three sons. Despite his lectures on discipline and the need for purpose, he thought they were boorish and intellectually incurious. Klaus was more interested in riding his horse between Buenos Aires and Tucumán to hunt pumas than in studying, and Horst had set his sights on joining the merchant marine. Eichmann's only wish for them was that they did not become soldiers or get involved in politics. They were better off, he advised, working as simple laborers and neither seeing nor speaking of war. Unfortunately for Eichmann, his own beliefs had infected his sons, and they were not nearly as careful as their father would have liked about sharing them with others.

In Coronel Suárez, a village in the Pampas a few hundred miles southwest of Buenos Aires, the Hermann family enjoyed a much more peaceful life than the one they had recently left behind in Olivos. Lothar had started a new law practice, mostly helping workers apply for their retirement pensions. Sylvia had hopes of attending university in the United States, but for now she still lived with her parents, helping out as much as she could.

One day in April 1957, Sylvia was reading the newspaper
Argentinisches Tageblatt
to her father when she came across an article about a war crimes trial in Frankfurt. One of the individuals mentioned as still being at large was the SS officer responsible for overseeing the mass murder, Adolf Eichmann.

She stopped reading and looked up. In an instant, Lothar Hermann recalled the dinner months before when Nick Eichmann had spoken openly about his father having served Germany well and had said that the Jews should have been annihilated.

Sylvia put down the newspaper. She told her father that Nick had never spoken much about his family, saying only that his mother had remarried after the war. She did not even know if his father was alive, although Nick had mentioned that he had been a high-level Wehrmacht officer who had moved the family around Europe, including a stay in Poland. She had never been invited to her boyfriend's home, and even now she wrote to him through a mutual friend because he had not given her his address.

Lothar Hermann knew that many former Nazis had come to Argentina after Germany's defeat. Given the comments that Nick had made about his father's service and the Jews, Lothar was sure that he was the war criminal's son. The fact that Nick had never told Sylvia where he lived cemented his belief.

Lothar knew that he had to tell somebody, to do something. If he contacted the German embassy in Buenos Aires, he was sure they would alert Eichmann. The place was infested with people who still held Hitler in the highest regard. Instead, Hermann decided to write a letter to the Frankfurt prosecutors mentioned in the newspaper article. He told them that he believed that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires with his wife and sons.

Several weeks later in Frankfurt, Fritz Bauer received the letter. A state prosecutor had forwarded it to him, knowing well his interest in pursuing war criminals. Lothar Hermann could not have found a better recipient for what he had to convey. Bauer, a man with sagging jowls, a broad round face, and a compact body, was the attorney general of the state of Hesse and the bulldog of the West German court system. Many jurists found him a force to be reckoned with, especially those who had once been loyal Nazi Party members and who resisted efforts to prosecute Nazis who had committed atrocities during the war.

Born in Stuttgart in 1903, the son of a Jewish textile dealer, Bauer began studying law at eighteen, received his doctorate at twenty-two, and became Germany's youngest district judge at twenty-six. From these early days, his fundamental philosophy of law focused on the jurist's responsibility to serve as the constitution's defender against "the state's innate disposition toward the police state." When the Nazis seized power in 1933, the new government dismissed him from his post because he was Jewish. A few months later, the Gestapo imprisoned him in a concentration camp for his activities in the Social Democratic Party. Released nine months later, he fled to Denmark, where he lived until the Germans occupied the country in 1940. After another stint in prison, Bauer went into hiding and escaped to Sweden with his family in a fishing boat. He spent the rest of the war publishing a Social Democratic magazine with future West German chancellor Willy Brandt and considering the legal outlets to punish the Nazis for their crimes.

Once the war ended, Bauer hesitated to return to his homeland. He had married a Danish woman and disliked the thought of living in a country that had supported a man such as Hitler. But after the establishment of West Germany's constitution, he felt that it was his duty to help foster the democracy and to resist any future rise of totalitarianism. He also believed that coming to terms with the past was essential to achieving this end.

On his return to Germany, Bauer was appointed a regional attorney general. He rapidly made a name for himself pursuing slander charges against Otto Remer, a right-wing politician who had labeled those who had plotted the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944 "traitors to their country." (Remer had helped foil the plot.) Bauer won the case, pushing his point that resistance to government authority was the obligation of a responsible citizen. A few years later, he became attorney general of Hesse, where he actively prosecuted cases against Nazi war criminals. In December 1956, he filed arrest warrants for Adolf Eichmann and twelve others on the charges of murder and accessory to murder.

After reading the letter from Lothar Hermann, Bauer realized that he had in his hands a solid tip as to the location of one of the architects of the Final Solution. He did not intend to delay. He charged his senior prosecutor with gathering as much information as possible on Eichmann, including his war activities, physical description, photographs, last known whereabouts (for both him and his family)—anything that would help this Argentine source positively identify him. Bauer then sent this information to Hermann in Coronel Suárez, along with a request for him to find an address for the individual concerned. At the same time, Bauer attempted to convince Interpol to initiate an international search for Eichmann.

Wearing a blue dress, Sylvia Hermann walked down Chacabuco Street, in one of the poorer sections of Olivos. After a ten-hour train ride from Coronel Suárez with her father, she had taken the bus that weaved through the neighborhood, hoping to run into Nick and to find out where he lived. This failed, but she did meet a friend of hers who knew where he lived. She checked the numbers on each house until she reached 4261. The one-story white house surrounded by a low fence was typical of the area. It was no bigger than a few rooms and had a slanted terra cotta roof. She passed through the gate and knocked on the front door. As she waited for an answer, she noticed someone at the curtains. Several moments passed.

Sylvia's father had received a letter from Fritz Bauer with a blurred photograph of Adolf Eichmann, along with a description of him and details of his family. The names and ages of Nick and his brother Dieter, whom Sylvia had also met, matched the description. She and her father were certain that they were Eichmann's sons. Now the question was whether their father was alive and sharing their house.

Sylvia had come defenseless to the door. There was nobody to help her if her purpose was revealed. Adolf Eichmann was obviously a murderer, and if he was in fact hiding in Buenos Aires, he had gone to great lengths not to be exposed. Sylvia tried to appear as calm as possible as she waited for an answer.

A short, stout woman with a toddler in her arms opened the door. Sylvia introduced herself as a friend of Nick's. The woman said that she was his mother and cautiously welcomed Sylvia inside, asking if she wanted some coffee and cake.

Yes, Sylvia said, and thanked her. She smiled at Dieter, whom she spotted across the room. "Is Nick home?" she asked.

"No, he left an hour ago," Dieter replied, surprised to see her.

As she sat down at a table, a man with glasses entered the room. He was in his sixties, the same age Adolf Eichmann would be. He walked with his head bent slightly forward, as if he was inspecting something on the ground.

"Good afternoon," Sylvia said.

He bowed slightly and said in German, "Pleased to meet you, young lady."

"Are you Mr. Eichmann?" she asked bravely.

He did not answer.

"Are you Nick's father?"

He hesitated before saying harshly, "No ... I'm his uncle." His strident tone matched what she had read in Bauer's letter, but the photograph Bauer had provided was of a much younger man and too blurry for her to be certain whether this was Adolf Eichmann.

Nervously, Sylvia began talking about how she had recently graduated from high school and planned on studying foreign languages at university. She asked the man whether he spoke English or French, and he admitted that he knew a few words of French from his time in Belgium and France during the war. The conversation soon trailed off, but he had become more pleasant toward her.

Before Vera brought in the coffee, Nick walked through the door. Shocked to see Sylvia in his living room, he blurted, "Who gave you my address? Who said you could visit me?"

She replied that some mutual friends had given her his address and that she had merely wanted to see him while she was in Buenos Aires. "Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

The older man said that everything was quite okay and that she was most welcome. Nick fell silent.

Sylvia then said that she had to go and that she hoped to return for a longer visit soon. There was an awkward moment of silence as the older man accompanied her to the door.