Nazi Hunter (22 page)

‘Later,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘we found evidence that during the first days of May 1945, the Reichsbank’s special department that handled loot from concentration camps
had sent several boxes containing “tooth gold” to Aussee.’ Wiesenthal explains that gold teeth and fillings pried loose from prisoners in the camps were all sent to a central
depot in the Oranienburg concentration camp and then to the
DEGUSSA
²⁷
company, which smelted the gold into bars.
‘Some
DEGUSSA
gold was later found in the Tyrol in the form of camouflaged gold bricks in the roofs of houses after one overloaded roof collapsed.’

Kaltenbrunner and the other higher-ups who’d holed up with their hoard in Aussee were neither happy to see Eichmann nor the least bit interested in his and Himmler’s
Theresienstadt-to-Tyrol fantasy. They put Eichmann to work giving weapons training to Romanian fascists who had fled the victorious Allies and were to go back to their homeland as partisans helping
to bring about a
Fourth Reich. When an order came down from Himmler that ‘no one is to fire on English and Americans’, the training was abandoned.

After Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945, and was burned along with his bride, Eva Braun (who had married him a day earlier and swallowed poison two minutes
before Hitler shot himself through the mouth), his will repudiated Himmler for making overtures to the Allies. Named instead as his successor was Admiral Karl Doenitz, who swiftly surrendered.
Himmler was apprehended by British troops on 21 May in Flensburg, a German city near the Danish border; the ex-chicken farmer was disguised as an army private with a black patch over his left eye.
Two days later, during a medical examination by British doctors, Himmler bit on a vial of potassium cyanide he’d concealed in his gums and died in twelve minutes.

Early that May, Eichmann reported back to Bad Aussee for reassignment. The hulking Kaltenbrunner, playing solitaire and waiting for the end, didn’t even greet his most notorious Nazi Party
recruit, but simply told him to ‘get the hell out’. Taking him at his word, Eichmann headed for Germany armed with the kind of false papers he had so despised in Berlin. These
identified him as
Luftwaffe
(Air Force) Corporal Adolf Barth.

‘Corporal Barth’ was taken into custody in the Danube city of Ulm by the Americans, but escaped when Army Intelligence probed too deeply for his taste. He didn’t go far,
landing in another US prisoner-of-war camp in Weiden, where he managed to obtain a new identity for later use. Thrice transferred in the next month – to Camp Berndorf near Rosenheim in late
May; to a special camp for SS men in Kemanten in early June; and to a work camp at Cham, a half-timbered medieval town in the Bavarian Forest near the Bohemian border, in mid-June – he
recommissioned himself along the way as an officer: a ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’, no less!

To Rudolf Scheide, the German civilian in charge of work details at Cham, ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ confessed that he really was a ‘Major Eichmann’. The name meant nothing to
Scheide, who told him: ‘It’s your own business what you want to call yourself.’

Eichmann worked on a thirty-man construction detail that was marched by a pair of American military policemen into the town to rebuild Cham, which later became a prime Marshall Plan beneficiary.
On 30 June 1945, someone told Scheide who Eichmann was and a
little of what he had accomplished in the war. This was too much for Scheide, who notified the camp’s
resident CIC (US counterintelligence) man. He and Scheide were waiting for ‘Eckmann’ when the work detail returned that night. Only twenty-nine men came back. Eichmann, alerted, had
disappeared.

Under yet another alias, Otto Heninger, he found work with a farmer in Prien, on the Chiemsee, Bavaria’s largest lake. Then he made his way north into the British Zone of Germany. In the
spring of 1946, in the town of Eversen in Lower Saxony, ‘Heninger’ registered with the police as a forestry worker and quickly found employment in that labour-starved timberland. A few
months later, a currency reform bankrupted his employer, but ‘Heninger’ headed north again – stoppingjust short of Hamburg at the Lüneburg Heath, where the brother of a
friend found him work as a lumbegack. Later, ‘Heninger’ leased a little land, on which he raised chickens, in Altensalzkoth, near the north German city of Celle.

Back in Eichmann’s home town of Linz, Wiesenthal was keeping tabs on his quarry’s relatives and had made his first contact with the future Israelis – then represented fairly
furtively, but aggressively, in Austria by
Bricha
(which means
escape
), the Jewish organization that smuggled displaced persons into what was still Palestine, and
Haganah
, the secret Jewish defence army. Both were headed in Austria by a tall, slim, dapper man known only as ‘Arthur’, who managed to look aristocratic to Wiesenthal even
while smoking cigars and wearing what Simon saw as ‘an inter-Allied fantasy uniform that looked like – and was meant to look like – a confusing combination of American, British,
and French fashions.’ The debonair ‘Arthur’ was the former Arthur Pier, who, as a teenager early in Eichmann’s 1938 tenure in Vienna, had applied by mail for his emigration
papers rather than condescend to stand in line. In Palestine, he had joined
Haganah
while working as a journalist, changed his name to Asher Ben Nathan, and, in 1944, in a small office
near the port in Haifa, started collecting the stories of arriving survivors and drawing up a list of Nazi criminals in order of importance. Returning to his native Vienna in November 1945,
he’d reassumed his identity of Arthur Pier and arrived with a suitcase whose false bottom secreted not just gold to finance clandestine Jewish emigration to Palestine, but even more vital
cargo: microfilmed dossiers on many of the major missing Nazi genocidists, with AdolfEichmann at the top of the list. Under
the auspices of the Association ofjewish Students,
‘Arthur’ had set up the first Documentation Centre in Vienna. Most of his agents – including his eventual successor, Tuviah Friedman – were enrolled at the University of
Vienna, which gave his operation a cloak of legitimacy.

‘Arthur’ preached to all his associates that they must never take the law into their own hands. ‘Only the legal authorities and properly appointed judges have the right to
punish criminals,’ he told them. ‘Our job is to find wanted Nazis and have them arrested by the Allies. Acts of personal revenge can only harm our cause, which is not only justice, but
sending as many Jews as possible to Palestine.’ And, belligerent though he still was, Wiesenthal had already subscribed to some of this reasoning.

After exchanging data on Eichmann’s crimes, past, and reported whereabouts, ‘Arthur’ and Simon decided to send a seducer to visit Eichmann’s grass widow in Altaussee to
try to penetrate the ‘divorcée’s’ veil of silence. ‘Arthur’ picked Henyek Diamant, a handsome Polish Jew from Katowice who, while his family was being herded
into a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz, had simply put on his best suit and, carrying a bunch of red roses, pretended to be a Gentile passing by on his way to a wedding. Blessed with blue eyes to
begin with, he bought a Tyrolean hat, grew a Hitler moustache, bleached his hair and eyebrows, and fitted a plastic sheath over his penis to conceal circumcision when stopped by German street
patrols. In 1943, he arrived in Hungary, where he walked into a hospital and introduced himself as a surgeon named ‘Dr Ulensky’. Nobody asked for his medical credentials and he was put
to work dissecting corpses. He fought in the Hungarian underground and, when the Germans grew suspicious of him in 1944, he became ‘Dr Yanovsky’ in eastern Hungary, where he helped Jews
escape into Romania after it declared war on Hitler that August. From his helping hands as well as his career as a bogus surgeon, he was nicknamed ‘Manos’ (Spanish for
hands
).

Manos didn’t relish his newest assignment. ‘That’s a terrific idea, Arthur,’ he responded sarcastically. ‘You want me to become that bitch’s lover. Are you
crazy? I have feelings, too. You want me to kiss the same mouth that Eichmann kissed? You want me to move right in and live with her? Hah!’ When he calmed down, he agreed to try.

In Aussee, posing as a Dutch collaborationist named Henryk van Diamant, Manos charmed some SS ‘widows’, but had no success with Vera Eichmann, though he
delighted her sons. One day, he reported to Wiesenthal by phone that he was taking the three boys rowing the next day. Something in his voice made Simon drop everything and hurry to Aussee to take
a walk along the lake with Manos.

‘You lost your family in the camps, Manos,’ Wiesenthal said. ‘Were there children?’

‘Two brothers and a sister,’ Manos replied, looking away.

‘And you think you could get back at Eichmann by having an “accident” out there?’ Simon said, beckoning towards the water. He spent the next half hour talking Manos out
of killing Eichmann’s sons, eventually convincing him that ‘a man who unemotionally ordered the death of one million children would show no emotion for his own.’

Returning to Linz, Wiesenthal phoned Arthur and they agreed to find another mission for Manos. Everywhere Eichmann went, he’d had mistresses. Maybe one of them still cherished a photo of
her infamous lover which could be circulated on ‘Wanted’ posters: a far more urgent need than revenge on his family.

A Margit Kutschera in Munich had been his mistress in Hungary. She told Manos there had been photos of herself with Eichmann, but she had last seen them in her hotel suite in Budapest, which
she’d fled during the Allied bombings in 1944, leaving everything behind. Manos went to Budapest, but found the suite and hotel had long ago been looted by the Red Army.

In 1947, Wiesenthal learned that another ex-mistress of Eichmann’s, Maria Masenbacher, was living in Urfahr, a suburb across the Danube from Linz. Arthur sent for Manos again. As in
Aussee, Manos pretended to be a Dutch SS man who didn’t dare return home. He frequented a café where Frau Masenbacher, a striking woman nearing forty, was a steady customer, and it
wasn’t long before she allowed him to buy her a drink. Soon she was sharing her home and her confidences with him – and, one day, her photo album. As they flipped the pages, Manos
spotted a picture of a well-dressed man in civilian clothes taken just before World War II. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘Oh, a friend,’ she said, flipping the page quickly. ‘He died in the war.’

A few hours later, when she was gone, Manos was joined by a detective friend of Wiesenthal’s from Linz. The man had been a neighbour of Eichmann’s. When he
said ‘That’s the rascal!’ Manos lifted the photo from the album – and, within hours, Wiesenthal was circulating copies of it. Though taken in 1939, it was clear and sharp,
lending itself to reproduction. For a long while, however, it led only to a ‘Lieutenant Otto Eckmann’ who had walked out of American custody on 30 June 1945.

Though Wiesenthal no longer worked for the Americans, he and they continued to co-operate. Late in 1947, the CIC in Bad Ischl informed him that Veronika Liebl had applied to the district court
for a death certificate for her ‘ex-husband’ Adolf Eichmann ‘for the sake of the children.’ She had submitted an affidavit from one Karl Lukas of Prague, who swore that he
had seen Eichmann shot to death during street fighting in the Czech capital on 30 April 1945.

Wiesenthal asked the CIC to seek a postponement of the hearing: these cases were normally expedited in two weeks to enable widows either to draw their husbands’ pensions or remarry or
both. Granted an extra fortnight, he produced testimony sworn at the Nuremberg trials by SS Major Wilhelm Höttl that he had seen Eichmann alive in Bad Aussee on 2 May 1945, and by Rudolf
Scheide, the German overseer in Cham to whom Eichmann confessed his identity in mid-June 1945. To clinch the case, Wiesenthal sent a man to Prague, where he learned that the
‘eye-witness’ to Eichmann’s ‘death’, Karl Lukas, an employee of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Agriculture, was married to Frau Eichmann’s sister, Maria Liebl.

Upon examining Wiesenthal’s evidence, the Austrian judge threw out Frau Eichmann’s application as well as Frau Eichmann herself, warning her that he would have her prosecuted if she
ever tried such a trick again. Fifteen years later, after Eichmann’s capture, Wiesenthal, in a rare act of vindictiveness, informed Czechoslovak authorities about Lukas’s affidavit.
Lukas was fired immediately by the Ministry of Agriculture.

‘I am convinced,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘that my most important contribution to the search for Eichmann was destroying the legend that he had died. If he had been legally declared
dead, then his name would have disappeared from all the “Wanted” fists and officially he would no longer exist. His case would be closed. Around
the world the
search for him would end. A man presumed dead is no longer hunted. Many SS criminals were never caught because they had themselves declared dead and then lived happily ever after under new names.
Some of them even remarried their own “widows”.’

ODESSA
, in capital letters, is not the Soviet seaport where Simon Wiesenthal spent two years apprenticing as an architect and another year designing
huts for chicken feathers, but an acronym for
O
rganisation
d
er
E
hemaligen
SS-A
ngehörigen
: Organization of SS
Members. As amorphous as the Mafia, which exists even when one cannot prove it exists,
ODESSA
, like the Cosa Nostra ‘families’, forms and re-forms to fit the
occasion or need. Under such aliases as ‘Spider’, ‘Sluice’, ‘Silent Help’, ‘The Brotherhood’, ‘Association of German Soldiers’,
‘Comradeship’, or even ‘Six-Pointed Star’ (not the Star of David, but an escape network in Austria’s six principal cities), it denies its existence and shrugs off
Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling 1972 thriller,
The Odessa File
, for the fiction it is, even though Forsyth’s novel features such real-life heroes as Simon Wiesenthal and Lord
Russell of Liverpool as well as, for a villain, Eduard Roschmann, ‘The Butcher of Riga’ who, as second-in-command of the Latvian capital’s ghetto, was responsible for 35,000
deaths and deportations. In his foreword, Forsyth dissociates fiction from fact by pointing out that ‘many Germans are inclined to say that the
ODESSA
does not exist.
The short answer is: it exists.’