Hunting Eichmann (6 page)

One afternoon, Eichmann hiked up to Salzburg's famed eleventh-century castle and looked out at the surrounding countryside. He was convinced that he did not deserve to be on the run: he had only abided by his SS oath of "My honor is my loyalty" and executed the orders given to him. He considered whether he had changed from the man who had brought his bride to this very place a decade earlier. No, he decided, he had not changed. He knew he was not some murderer or villain.

The truth was it had been a long, convoluted road for Eichmann to reach the level of hate-fueled fanaticism that had characterized him in Hungary. Born in an industrial town in Germany, he had been raised in Linz, Austria, by a father who was a middle-class manager, a strict Protestant, and fervently nationalistic. In Linz, also Hitler's hometown, as in Austria and Germany as a whole, the majority of the population saw Jews as racially inferior intruders who represented the twin threats of international capitalism and Bolshevism. But anti-Semitism was not Eichmann's motivation to become a Nazi. The disaster at Versailles following World War I, Germany's need for stability, and, more personally, a desire to wear the same smart brown uniform as others his age were reasons enough.

Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in 1932. He went to Germany, received some military training, read more about National Socialism, and enlisted in the SD, which was headed by Reinhard Heydrich. As a member of the party's intelligence operation, Eichmann was charged with compiling a list of German Freemasons, whom the Nazis considered enemies. Diligent, attentive to detail, and respectful of authority, he caught the eye of Edler von Mildenstein, who was in charge of creating a Jewish affairs office. Given the degree of revulsion Hitler felt toward the Jewish people—as evidenced in 1935 by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship—it was a good career move for Eichmann.

At the time, Mildenstein had a far less virulent attitude toward Jews than did many others in the SS, believing that sending them to Palestine was the answer to the Jewish problem. Mildenstein charged Eichmann with studying Zionism. Over the next three years, working in the changing landscape of the SS, Eichmann spent his days writing reports on the Jews, monitoring their organizations, trying to learn Hebrew (a failure), investigating emigration plans, and even traveling to Palestine in 1937, while posing as a journalist for
Berliner Tageblatt.
He soon became the SD "expert" on Jewish affairs. Although his opinion of the Jews had hardened—he wrote in one paper that they were "the most dangerous enemy" of the Third Reich—he still thought that emigration was the best way to deal with them.

In 1938, Eichmann won his first chance to put this idea into practice when Germany occupied Austria. Second Lieutenant Eichmann arrived in Vienna to represent the SD in dealing with the 200,000 Austrian Jews. After arresting the Jewish community's key leaders, he used many of them to organize and finance the emigration of the Jewish population. In his office in the Palais Rothschild, Eichmann felt his first rush of power, writing to a friend, "They are in my hands; they dare not take one step without me." For his success and "requisite hardness," he won a promotion to first lieutenant. He also gained the ability to view Jews not as human beings but as stock to be moved from one place to another. After a year in Vienna, he was sent to Czechoslovakia to set up a similar operation there.

The more territory the Nazis occupied, the more Jews came under their control, which meant career opportunities for Eichmann. When Germany seized Poland in September 1939, Heinrich Müller, the new Gestapo chief, assigned Eichmann to run the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the department responsible for forced deportations of Jews to the edges of German-occupied territory. Emigration was out; deportation was in. After the invasion of Poland, the act that precipitated the Allies' declaration of war, Eichmann's first major task was to resettle 500,000 Poles to make room for ethnic Germans. He was by then adept at uprooting communities and arranging their transportation, but his chief problem was finding places to send them. He formulated a proposal to resettle millions of Jews in Madagascar, a plan brutal in its scope and execution, but one that fell apart due to the vacillation of his superior officers. Nevertheless, Eichmann had proved himself to be an essential part of any planning to do with the Jewish problem.

In the meantime, Jewish families who had been ripped from their homes across Poland and other territories seized by the Germans languished in ghettos and labor camps. But their suffering and deaths were increasingly irrelevant to Eichmann. They were a logistical problem that required solving.

In the late summer of 1941, Heydrich summoned Eichmann to Berlin and told him, "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." Hitler had already mandated the slaughter of Jews in the invasion of the Soviet Union, but now he wanted the same fate extended to every European Jew. Eichmann was sent to report on localized killing operations already under way in Poland under the direction of SS police chief Odilo Globocnik, as well as those conducted by the
Einsatzgruppen,
death squads organized by Heydrich to follow the Wehrmacht into eastern Europe and Russia to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and any other "enemies" of the Reich. Near Lodz, men, women, and children were rounded up and loaded into vans into which the vehicles' exhaust fumes were pumped. In Minsk, they were forced into pits, ordered to strip, and then shot by the hundreds. Despite his feelings toward Jews, Eichmann was unnerved by what he saw and told Müller as much. This was no longer a "political solution," Eichmann said. At the same time, he feared that the new policy would obviate the need for his department. This fear of losing his position and power outweighed his misgivings, and after further consideration, he accepted the necessity of ridding Europe of the Jews through extermination.

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich gathered fifteen leading Reich officials with an interest in the Jewish problem at a lakeside villa in Wannsee, a suburb southwest of Berlin. The agenda was to create systematic plans for the Final Solution and to centralize them under the SS. Eichmann prepared briefings on anti-Jewish measures, deportations, and a country-by-country breakdown of the 11 million Jews targeted for extermination. He also took the meeting minutes. Later, he drank brandy with Heydrich and Müller, toasting their leadership, as they sat beside a fire and gazed out at the falling snow.

Though only recently promoted to lieutenant colonel, Eichmann was entrusted with being the "competent official" in charge of coordinating all matters related to the Final Solution at the RSHA. He dispensed with any remaining guilt and discomfort he might have felt about being involved in the mass murder by telling himself that his bosses, "the Popes," had "given their orders."

Eichmann took on his new job with characteristic vigor. He had not set the policy of annihilation, he reasoned, but it was his responsibility to manage its successful execution. The more Jews he brought to the extermination camps, the better he looked to his superiors and the better, he thought, he served the Reich. He excelled in his task, delivering millions of Jews throughout Europe to their deaths. But with each challenge, with each victory, he grew more obsessive about his work, more convinced of its importance, and more drawn to the power he held over life and death. A Jew was no longer a person, nor even a unit to be moved from one place to another. Judaism was a disease that threatened every German. "They were stealing the breath of life from us," he wrote. They needed to be eradicated, and he was the one who would see it through to the end. In Hungary, Eichmann reached the height of his barbarity. He was a living testament to the adage "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

While looking out over Salzburg in May 1945, Eichmann strove to deny who he had become, but he was not so deluded as to think that the Allies would not hunt him down, particularly given the unusually public role he had played in Hungary. He was keen to return to Germany, knowing there was a better chance of avoiding detection there than in Austria, where he had spent most of his life. But it would not be easy. From his vantage point by the castle, he could see Americans guarding all the roads leading into and out of Salzburg.

He recruited a local nurse to help him and Jänisch escape. She walked them to the checkpoint and told the Americans that these two Luftwaffe corporals were poor and wanted only to return to their country. The guards let them pass.

Eichmann and Jänisch then needed to cross the German border to gain entry into Bavaria. Crouching out of sight by the highway, they watched a funeral cortège and some mourners accompanied by soldiers cross the border without so much as a question from the Americans. But when Eichmann and Jänisch attempted to follow them, the two were stopped. This time, one of the soldiers inspected them more thoroughly and discovered the quarter-inch-long black tattoo on the underside of Eichmann's left arm indicating his blood type. Under his breath, Eichmann cursed Himmler for requiring the tattoos for SS members. While in the mountains, he had tried to burn his off with a lit cigarette, but it was still distinguishable.

The men were taken by truck to a well-guarded detention camp. Eichmann presented himself as Waffen-SS sergeant Barth, but over the next few days, he could not fail to notice that the Americans treated the German officers better than the enlisted men. By the time he was interrogated by an American lieutenant who spoke German, he had concocted a new identity for himself.

When asked his name, he responded, "Otto Eckmann." It was a name close enough to his own that he would answer to it even if distracted. Also, if someone he knew did call out his real name, it might not arouse the suspicion of the guards.

"Rank?"

"Second lieutenant, 22nd Waffen-SS Cavalry Division."

"Born?"

"Yes, of course," Eichmann said, with a glimmer of arrogance, but he added, "March 19, 1905. In Breslau."

It was a year earlier than his actual birth date—simple to remember—and he had chosen Breslau because the city was in Russian hands and had been decimated by repeated bombing campaigns, which, he suspected, would have also destroyed any parish registers or official records.

The American officer noted these details, and after asking a few basic questions about Eichmann's wartime service, he dismissed Eichmann and instructed him to go back to his work detail. The lieutenant had a whole German transport unit to question before the end of the day.

During June, Eichmann and Jänisch were moved from temporary camp to temporary camp, living off combat rations and mourning the loss of the Third Reich. On the journeys between camps, Eichmann witnessed the ruins around him. Wrecked tanks and cars littered the roads, and twisted heaps of metal that had once been airplanes dotted the fields. Bridges had been destroyed and railway tracks severed, and most towns had suffered indiscriminate bombing campaigns, their buildings reduced to piles of rubble. None of this matched the human devastation. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them recently freed from concentration and slave labor camps, packed the roads and filled the villages the POWs passed through. Dressed in little more than rags, their tattered shoes stuffed with newspapers, they hunkered down in hollowed-out and blackened houses or walked in small groups toward some unknown destination, carrying what few possessions they had in cloth bags slung over their shoulders. They hastily dug graves on the sides of the road for forgotten corpses.

At a camp in the Bavarian forest, Eichmann encountered a German officer named Rudolf Scheide, who was acting as an adjunct to the camp commander. Obediently, Eichmann revealed his real name and explained that he wished to be registered under his assumed name, Eckmann. "It is your own business what you do with your name," Scheide told him dismissively. He was dealing with hundreds of POWs arriving by truck every day.

In late June, Eichmann and Jänisch were loaded onto yet another transport and shipped off to yet another camp, at Weiden, fifty miles east of Nuremberg. This camp was a vast barbed-wire enclosure. A sea of soldiers, including more than 2,000 officers, occupied the camp, many of them sheltering in holes they had dug in the ground, as there were few tents. The soldiers used slit trenches for latrines, and there was little food and water for the thousands of men.

Eichmann had fallen a long way since the days in his elegant villa overlooking Budapest, pampered by servants and drinking the finest of wines. Yet Weiden was nothing compared to where he had sent the "enemies of the Reich." While Otto Eckmann labored on his work detail, those enemies, the ones who had survived, were beginning to understand the nature of his position in the SS. Soon Adolf Eichmann would no longer be just one among tens of thousands sought for arrest. He would be a chief target.

4

"
HAVE YOU HEARD
of Adolf Eichmann?" Captain Choter-Ischai of the Jewish Brigade asked the man across from him, who was only beginning to fill out his tall, wide-shouldered frame after years in concentration camps.

"I heard the name from some Hungarian Jews at Mauthausen," Simon Wiesenthal said. "It means nothing to me."

"Better look it up," Choter-Ischai said, explaining that he had information that Eichmann was deeply involved in Jewish affairs in Berlin and should be arrested. "Unfortunately, he comes from our country. He was born in Palestine."

After the captain left, Wiesenthal combed through the files at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) headquarters in Linz where he worked. The information on this Eichmann was scant. There was no first name, only a rank: lieutenant colonel. The entry detailed that Eichmann had been involved in actions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, and Hungary, but there was nothing specific. Wiesenthal noted the name so that he could make future inquiries and returned to his whirlwind of activities in mid-June 1945. Only four weeks before, weighing ninety-seven pounds, he had staggered out of the dark barracks at Mauthausen into the sunlight and seen a gray American tank coming through the entrance. He had collapsed at the sight.