A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY

Eichmann was pretty stupid. Everyone knew where he was.

—Inge Schneider, an acquaintance of Sassen’s

The chief prosecutor of Frankfurt, Arnold Buchthal, held a press conference at the start of April 1957. On April 1 he had ordered the arrest of Hermann Krumey, the man who had spent many years working for Eichmann and had been his representative in Hungary in 1944. Buchthal had been tasked with the central handling of all investigations into the historical murder of more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, and over the next few days, his words were published in all the Federal Republic’s large daily newspapers, and even in the Argentinisches Tageblatt. Naturally, the article said, the hunt was still on for Krumey’s superior Adolf Eichmann, a warrant for whose arrest had been ordered on November 24, 1956: “He is said to be living in an unknown location in South America.”¹ We know that Eichmann read this article, as he talked about it in the Sassen circle. And there is much to suggest that someone else also heard about it: Lothar Hermann, a blind man whose family had been killed by the National Socialists and who had escaped this fate himself only by fleeing the country.

People have always delighted in the story of the former inmate of Dachau whose daughter met Eichmann’s eldest son at school. The thought that it was his son’s love life, and not the intelligence services, that proved to be Eichmann’s undoing is so satisfying that it seems to have brushed all questions aside. But as neat as this story of sex and secrets might be, historians must not succumb uncritically to its pulp-fiction charms. We must point out the things that don’t add up and, most important, look at the sources. As is so often the case, the story is much more complex than it appears.² The information about the German jurist Fritz Bauer, Lothar Hermann, his daughter, and Klaus Eichmann became public only many years later. It first appeared in The Avengers (1967) by Michael Bar-Zohar, a close friend of David Ben-Gurion’s. He was the first person to mention Fritz Bauer in connection with the hunt for Eichmann, though initially he did so by implication. Only in interviews, and in the Hebrew edition of the book that appeared after Bauer’s death, did Bar-Zohar talk openly about Bauer’s secret collaboration with the Israeli authorities.³ His book may have been a popular paperback, but Bar-Zohar still had a good reputation as an historian. He wrote well-respected biographies of Ben-Gurion and Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan and had access to the head of Mossad, Isser Harel. He was without question very well connected, so we must take seriously his claim to have spoken to Fritz Bauer in person in March 1967.

Encouraged by the Bar-Zohar book’s success, Isser Harel also went public about the events leading up to Eichmann’s capture, telling his story in interviews, newspaper articles, and finally a book.⁴ By this point, Harel assumed that Hermann was long dead, and he wanted to create a memorial to Mossad’s work (and to himself), for the tenth anniversary of the trial. He quite rightly saw abducting Eichmann as the greatest achievement of his career. His book was published in numerous editions worldwide, on the strength of the love story between the son of a Nazi and the daughter of a Jewish survivor. Sex and Nazis always sell.

When Lothar Hermann heard about Harel’s story, he was aghast: most of it was “completely wrong”; the facts had been twisted “deliberately and publicly.” “I never imagined that men of the Jewish faith could be so bad and treacherous,” he said. Harel had “misused my name and the name of my daughter.”⁵ Hermann rejected the public accolade for his role in Eichmann’s abduction and an invitation to Israel. Given the background to the story and his living conditions at the time, the fact that he still accepted the $10,000 reward from the State of Israel is perfectly understandable, even though by so doing he added the possibility of another anti-Semitic cliché to the story. A glance at the correspondence between Hans Dietrich Sander and Carl Schmitt shows the extent to which Harel’s story played to the public taste. “I recently read a story in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about Eichmann’s arrest,” Sander writes. “According to this, E was not discovered through the resourcefulness of the Isr. secret service, but through a bounty that the secret service put on him. An old blind Jew from Argentina then got in touch, who knew where E was because his daughter was friends with E’s son. E was gotten out of the country as we know, but the bounty was not paid. The old Jew started a legal dispute that went on for years,” Sander continues, adding with regret: “The daughter doesn’t appear in the article again.”⁶ His sense of voyeurism obviously wanted more salacious details.

There are no independent sources for Isser Harel’s version of the Silvia Hermann story, as the events to which he referred took place before the official Mossad operation. All the agents who later gave details about what happened prior to 1960 got them from their superior, Harel. None of them knew anything about the search for Eichmann before the formation of the abduction team. Ephraim Hofstaedter, who had visited Lothar Hermann at the start of 1958, subsequently fell victim to a terrorist attack in Istanbul. Zvi Aharoni, the first Mossad agent to see Eichmann’s address and conduct any real fieldwork, did not stint in his criticism of Harel’s book, accusing him of courting publicity at the expense of the truth, just as Hermann had done.⁷ In his biography of Simon Wiesenthal, Tom Segev also shows how jealously Harel tried to raise his profile as he got older, attempting to efface Wiesenthal’s part in the hunt—which had been officially recognized with an award from the State of Israel. Fairness wasn’t part of Harel’s PR campaign. And there is one more fact we should not ignore: in this version of events, Klaus Eichmann’s behavior played a significant part in his father being discovered, but he never gave any indication that he blamed himself for the events that led to his father’s death, which he saw in a very different light.⁸ We should therefore be a little more cautious than to use Harel as our only source: for one thing, a tactical understanding of truth comes with the job for intelligence service chiefs, and for another, there are alternative routes by which to access the events in Argentina.

The Informant Lothar Hermann

This way I am probably forgoing historical fame.

—Lothar Hermann to Fritz Bauer, June 25, 1960

When Klaus Eichmann⁹ met Silvia Hermann, they were both at school and were at most nineteen and fourteen, respectively. By January 1956, the Hermanns had moved from Buenos Aires to Coronel Suárez, 310 miles away.¹⁰ Lothar Hermann and his first wife had moved to Argentina after he was forced to leave Germany because he was a Jew—a “full Jew,” as he stressed to Harel, who had described him, using Nazi terminology, as a “half-Jew.”¹¹ Hermann, who had been born in Quirnbach in Germany in 1901, was a lawyer. He said he had spent the period between September 14, 1935, and May 7, 1936, in “protective custody” in Dachau, probably because of his interest in socialism.¹² He was then expelled from Germany as a “politicizing Jew” and emigrated to Argentina via Holland, where in 1938 he was finally able to marry his “Aryan” wife. His parents and siblings didn’t survive the National Socialists. In Argentina, Hermann went completely blind, but he continued to work as a legal adviser, specializing in pension claims. He moved to Coronel Suárez, where there was a large German-Jewish community, because his services would be much sought after there. There is nothing to suggest Hermann was ever rich, or even well off.

Silvia Hermann, born in Buenos Aires in 1941, was a gifted child. A friend of the family and Lothar Hermann’s secretary both recall the Hermanns deciding to send their daughter back to Buenos Aires to attend high school. That would enable her to go to college in North America, where the Hermanns had some distant relatives. From Lothar Hermann’s letters, we know that by the fall of 1959, when she was eighteen, Silvia left Argentina for the United States. This makes it impossible that her departure was directly connected to Eichmann’s abduction, but it does tell us when Silvia Hermann and Klaus Eichmann could have met.

The fact that their paths crossed was certainly no bizarre coincidence. In German immigrant life in Argentina, former victims and perpetrators lived quite literally next door to each other, and their children attended the same schools. To be sure, there was a cultural divide—a German-Jewish newspaper, theater, and cinema on the one hand, and German-national and/or National Socialist institutions on the other—but young people seldom adhere to such divisions, having little concern for their parents’ mental barriers. Lothar Hermann never said when and where his daughter met Eichmann’s son; in 1959 he simply indicated that his daughter could confirm everything he had said about Eichmann’s identity and where he was living. But a friend remembers that Silvia met Klaus, who was five years older than she, at school. She fell in love with him and kept a photo of him. It may have been a school photo, a snapshot taken at a party, or something else, but it has never been found. However, numerous people claim to have seen it, and it was even said to have hung on a wall in the Hermanns’ house.¹³

Lothar Hermann had always taken an interest in the Nazis in Argentina, wanting to see the people who had murdered his family brought before a court. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that the name Eichmann immediately rang a bell with him. By the fall of 1957, when Hermann and his family had been in Coronel Suárez just over a year, Fritz Bauer had in his hands the information that Eichmann was in Argentina. Bauer may even have received Hermann’s letter by June 1957.

How Hermann hit upon the idea of sending the information on Eichmann’s exact whereabouts to Fritz Bauer, the attorney general in Frankfurt, is unclear. Hermann mentioned only the time of their correspondence, “the years 1957/58.”¹⁴ His first letter has disappeared, and its date is uncertain,¹⁵ but it could have been addressed to the man named in the Argentinisches Tageblatt as having said Eichmann was in South America: Arnold Buchthal. He may have passed the letter on to Fritz Bauer, about whom nothing had yet been written in Argentina in connection with Eichmann. Bauer and Buchthal not only knew each other, they were both backed by the prime minister of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, a great advocate of coming to terms with the past who placed a lot of hope in these two Jewish jurists. By the time Arnold Buchthal had to vacate the post of chief prosecutor because of a political affair, in favor of a man with a Nazi history, he would certainly have started passing his search results on to Bauer rather than leave them lying on his desk.¹⁶ We know that Bauer took the first real steps in the hunt for Eichmann when he had Vera Eichmann’s mother questioned on June 9, 1957. She said her daughter had been living abroad since 1953, having married an unknown man and gone to America with him.¹⁷ At the start of July, Bauer experienced a significant setback. The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, the Federal Office for Criminal Investigations) informed the Hesse State Office for Criminal Investigations that it would not initiate an Interpol search for Eichmann. He was wanted for crimes of a “political and racial character,” and Interpol’s statutes prevented its involvement in this kind of prosecution. “I therefore have no way of conducting the international hunt for Eichmann via the BKA as a German central office,” Bauer said.¹⁸ The BKA allowed the former SS officer Paul Dickopf (among other old comrades it employed) to make a good career for himself: he eventually became its president and was even president of Interpol. In general, the BKA cannot be accused of showing any real enthusiasm for hunting Nazi criminals. Eichmann would later claim that he had always been reassured by Interpol’s refusal to search for him, but how he could have heard about that remains unclear.¹⁹

At exactly this point in summer 1957, the old rumors about Eichmann in the Middle East were resurrected. For more than a month, stories about Nazis in Cairo haunted the pages of German newspapers.²⁰ They were even discussed and refuted (without mentioning Eichmann’s name) in Der Weg—possibly because in Cairo, Johann von Leers was starting to feel threatened by the articles.²¹ And once again, these clues also turn up in the intelligence service files.²² By this time, Fritz Bauer had to acknowledge that circulating his information within Germany wasn’t going to achieve anything; on the contrary, appealing to the German authorities had actually endangered any chance of success. At the start of November, Bauer had his first meeting with Israeli representatives, to whom he gave the information from Argentina. He also told them he had not just taken it upon himself to cooperate with the State of Israel—he had discussed it with Georg August Zinn, the prime minister of Hesse and a personal friend.²³ In January 1958 Mossad sent a spy, Emanuel Talmor, to check out the address in Buenos Aires, but the house on Chacabuco Street didn’t fit the cliché of influential Nazis in exile. Fritz Bauer, informed of this conclusion, nevertheless pressed for futher investigation. As a result, Ephraim Hofstaedter, a senior officer in the Israeli police, was given the task of visiting Lothar Hermann at home in March 1958; it was no coincidence that he later led the police investigative bureau during the trial. In any case, Hofstaedter was already going to Buenos Aires, for an Interpol conference.²⁴ Unfortunately, it is not known which BKA representatives he met there. But we do know that the deputy head of the BKA, Paul Dickopf, who liked to call himself its “architect,” was also the head of the “Foreign Division” at this point. He frequently represented the organization at international meetings, and the Interpol General Assembly appointed him as its correspondent for these events between 1955 and 1961. Possibly he could have paid a visit to the country that had become a refuge for his old comrades. A glance at the delegation’s report would certainly be worthwhile, if it could be found.²⁵

Hofstaedter used an alias with Lothar Hermann, producing a letter from Bauer to identify himself as an employee of the Frankfurt attorney general’s office. It’s easy to imagine how disappointed everyone must have been to discover that the man claiming to have recognized Eichmann was blind. Hofstaedter prohibited Hermann from making any further contact with Fritz Bauer and gave him an address in the United States to which Hermann was to direct any more mail. Years later Hermann complained that he had never received a reply to the letters he sent there, in which he had enclosed “a photo of Klaus Eichmann” that had fallen into his hands “by chance.” (So far none of the letters Hermann sent to New York have come to light. It would be a fitting recognition of Hermann’s achievement to make the documents public.)²⁶ Hermann later explained that it was “only with great difficulty and effort” that he had “received the sum of 15,000 Argentine pesos in two instalments” from “Karl Hubert” (Hofstaedter’s cover name). But in 1958, when Hermann stopped getting replies to his letters, he sent the whole dossier back to Frankfurt and, as he said later, gave up any further investigations, having received the impression that his work was pointless.²⁷ The Hermanns then sent their daughter away to college, and Hermann thereby lost his point of contact with the Eichmanns. He now had no one to carry out investigations on his behalf. However, his contemporaries recall that later on, there was talk of Silvia’s departure having been for her own safety. The investigations had placed her in a dangerous position, and Lothar Hermann, who in any case was understandably paranoid, had therefore pushed for her to move away, although her enrollment at a foreign university placed a financial strain on the family. As Silvia Hermann decided not to say anything about these events, we can only speculate about the real reasons for her departure.

The reaction of the people to whom Hermann gave his information, however, is quite clear: after Hofstaedter’s visit, the informant Lothar Hermann was no longer taken seriously. He really had found Adolf Eichmann—it was just that he didn’t seem all that convincing: a blind man, living in remote Coronel Suárez, claiming to have tracked down the “number-one enemy of the Jews” in Buenos Aires, at an address that was just a modest apartment with no signs of security or luxury. Moreover, in pursuing his investigations, he had mistaken Eichmann’s landlord, Francisco Schmitt, for Eichmann himself, destroying his credibility once and for all. The idea that a Nazi might be living in a rented apartment, in a building like that, was too much for Isser Harel and his colleagues to swallow. But Fritz Bauer didn’t want to give up. Hermann’s letters convinced him, and he was also coming across more and more evidence to substantiate what his informant in Argentina was telling him.

Back to Germany?

It was pure coincidence that at this time, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution was also looking at Eichmann.

—Irmtrud Wojak²⁸

Contrary to the cliché of the rich Nazi, toward the end of 1957 Adolf Eichmann started to have business problems. The rabbit farm failed, allegedly because of a crossbreeding error (racial intermingling, of all things).²⁹ Pipe dreams about the Jewish race had always been more his field. But once again all was not lost for Eichmann. At the turn of the year, helped by yet another old associate, he found a job in a company owned by Roberto Mertig.³⁰ Mertig, who was a business partner of Josef Mengele’s father, owned a gas oven factory, and Mengele himself is said to have been on the payroll. Mengele Sr., who manufactured farm vehicles, had always supported his son, repeatedly finding ways to generate an income for him. Eichmann’s work in a gas oven factory must have provided a source of macabre jokes among his old comrades, but there were also signs of a change in him, if we believe what he would write in Israel to friends and family about his final two years in Argentina. Even Eichmann, it seems, was starting to pay more attention to the here and now—though we may doubt that this change was entirely voluntary.

With the failure of the Dürer project, Eichmann and Sassen’s planned publication also fell through, which had consequences for both men. The German-Argentine community started to change. Many of the “less compromised” exiles, from lower down the Nazi hierarchy, felt the need to return to the place they grew up and went back to Europe. Statutes of limitation and other rehabilitative legislation in West Germany and Austria allowed anyone who had not committed capital offenses or war crimes (or at least none that anyone was trying to prove) to return and start afresh. And in early March 1958 even Eberhard Fritsch, born in Buenos Aires, broke down his tents, publishing house and all, and moved to a house near Salzburg.³¹ The German nationalist community in Argentina lost an important point of reference, and Sassen lost his job. More important, he lost the person who had published his texts and allowed him to be an author, thereby guaranteeing him a position in German-Argentine society as a journalist and writer. The final issue of Der Weg, which appeared shortly before Fritsch’s departure, ended with a piece by Willem Sassen, once again bemoaning the fate of contemporary Germany.³² Sassen and Eichmann were both hoping that Fritsch’s plan to establish a publishing operation in Europe would bear fruit, but Eichmann’s dream of having his book published had passed out of his reach. Still, they stayed in touch, just in case. Later events show that Fritsch must have made contact with Eichmann’s family in Austria: in 1960, when Eichmann’s capture was announced, he promptly met up with Eichmann’s brother to organize his defense.³³ Fritsch’s move to Salzburg also provided Eichmann with a good way of communicating news about his new life to his father.

But Eberhard Fritsch was not the only one who moved back to Germany. Sassen spent the New Year’s holiday in 1958–59 in Europe—partly to gather sworn statements from his old associates attesting that he had a right to German citizenship. (Sassen might have claimed to be a German when he registered in Konstanz in October 1956, but the matter has never been fully clarified.) Within a relatively short space of time, he was not only able to prove that he had successfully applied for citizenship in 1943—an easy undertaking for a member of the Dutch Voluntary SS—he could also provide sworn statements confirming it, including one from his former commander, Günter d’Alquen. Together with his old paybook and his war reporter’s ID, this was enough for the Konstanz legal and regulatory authority to issue a certficate of citizenship on January 26, 1959. By Febuary 4, he had registered as a resident in Munich.³⁴ To the horror of his wife, who was adamant that she didn’t want German citizenship,³⁵ Sassen started telling people he wanted to move to Germany and work as a journalist there. With his typical mix of imposture and the air of the adventurer, he boasted to his family and others that several German newspapers had taken him on as a correspondent. In 1959 he did actually appear on the masthead of a few issues of Stern, as Wilhelm S. von Elsloo. Years later, on reaching the bottom of the first bottle of whiskey, he would still mutter conspiratorially that he had had a specific reason to move to Munich: he was planning a secret service career with “General Gehlen.” Although this plan would come to nothing, the gossip would create substantial difficulties for Sassen after Eichmann had been abducted, when he would suddenly be suspected of being a traitor.³⁶ He had rhapsodized about his travels in Germany a little too much. His visit in summer 1959 in particular must have kept the BfV on its toes: Sassen not only called on his old friend Rudel, he somehow managed to travel to cities in East Germany. At this point in history, the very announcement of such a travel plan would have sufficed to implicate him as a spy for the East.³⁷ Sassen still met Eichmann from time to time, but he had more exciting plans now. And understandably, Eichmann didn’t want to be the only one left behind in the pampas.

Klaus Eichmann remembered that in the late 1950s, his father often talked about handing himself over to a German court. Eichmann’s “letter to the Chancellor” shows that this was more than just idle talk—unlike his halfhearted assurances that he didn’t want the “limelight of publicity.”³⁸ But the other SS leaders and National Socialists, as his son recalled, talked him out of it: “They checked out the possibility of him turning himself in in Europe. An influential man was sent to Europe. After much discussion, the result was communicated to my father. The time, they said, was not right yet. Europe was still too risky. He should wait in Argentina for another five years, at least. They were certain nothing would happen to him in South America during this time.”³⁹ Any of several people could have been the helpful Europe expert. Sassen is the most likely candidate: he had been to Germany a number of times since the end of 1958 and could also draw on the experience of his friend Hans-Ulrich Rudel. But others were more knowledgeable on legal matters. Fritz Otto Ehlert, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent, was acquainted with Horst Carlos Fuldner and was also a source for the Foreign Office. Of course, the German embassy in Argentina also had strong enough connections with the Nazis there to have provided information on the current legal situation directly. We now know that the ambassador himself, Werner Junker, maintained contact with Willem Sassen, whom he thought an “unusually capable journalist.” Junker even had some sympathy for Sassen’s political orientation.⁴⁰

But Eberhard Fritsch’s experience in Europe must have been discouraging for Eichmann. Fritsch told his fellow Nazi sympathizers that, as a child of German parents, he had actually wanted to move to West Germany, but his Argentine citizenship meant he had been denied entry.⁴¹ The truth was less heroic: the West German police had an arrest warrant out for Fritsch, for distributing far-right, anticonstitutional literature. The Fourth Chamber of the Lüneberg District Court had also gone against Dürer Verlag’s main distributor in northern Germany and had seized the warehouse containing the last issues of Der Weg. Fritsch did have Argentine citizenship, and the correct visa and entry permits from the German embassy in Argentina, but he was safe from prosecution only until he entered Germany. He was not denied entry; he was just on a wanted list.⁴² His lofty ambitions to continue his publishing activities in Salzburg also came to nothing, as he was issued with a publishing ban and had to take a job as a hotel porter. The hotel was a top one, on the main square, but still, it was not the life that the man from Buenos Aires had imagined for his wife and five children.

If someone like Fritsch, with no criminal Nazi career behind him, was encountering such problems, then Eichmann’s chances looked significantly worse. We may also suspect that Eichmann’s family in Linz were doing just fine without their notorious brother in Buenos Aires and would not have encouraged him to come back. And Eichmann’s family wouldn’t have been the only ones advising him to stay put. The men in Argentina who had met Eichmann, or had heard of him, had much to fear from him being put on trial. They knew what he thought—and, more important, Eichmann knew who had listened to what he had to say. His knowledge of the Nazi networks, the escape and aid organizations, and the communication routes could make life very unpleasant for people, and no one wanted to think about the ramifications if Eichmann told the German authorities about them. So Eichmann’s friends in Argentina made sure the Obersturmbannführer (retired) felt at ease there in an almost touching way, ensuring that he always had an income and could even afford a vacation at the chic resort of Plata del Mar.⁴³

The exiles in Argentina were not the only ones worrying about the possibility of Eichmann coming to trial. His reappearance would create serious problems for a lot of people in Germany and Austria. The pertinent question is not why friends advised him for or against a return to Europe, but which of the former Nazi functionaries had nothing to fear from an Eichmann trial in West Germany. Given Eichmann’s position within the Nazi regime, we cannot underestimate whom he knew and above all whom he would have recognized. People often mistakenly believe that if they know someone’s name, that person must know theirs, which could only have heightened their fears. Looking at the upheaval that Eichmann’s arrest would cause in 1960 gives us an idea of what people in the Federal Republic associated with his name and what they were afraid of. Too many former Nazis had managed to make new careers by smoothing over one another’s biographies to make them seem harmless. It is difficult to imagine that the BKA’s cohort of former SS men, of whom Paul Dickopf is only the best known, would have given their full support to a trial if they had learned of Eichmann’s intent. The Foreign Office staff who, thanks to the reinstatement article, were now working as diplomats again, and some employees of the BND, would have felt the same. Eichmann’s knowledge of names alone would have threatened to topple his old comrades’ carefully erected facade. Even as late as 2010 the publication of the book Das Amt (The Office) caused turmoil among members of the Foreign Office, and their sometimes less-than-helpful friends; we can imagine the effect it would have had more than fifty years ago. Back then, it wasn’t the more or less posthumous reputation of retired diplomats that was at stake but people’s clean slates, elevated positions, and high salaries.

Eichmann, meanwhile, was surprisingly well informed about the prosecution of Nazi criminals that was starting to take place in the Federal Republic. He knew about the arrest of his colleague Hermann Krumey, and trials against people like Ferdinand Schörner. He also heard about the founding of the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. It had been planned in October 1958, to coordinate all investigations across West Germany. Even news of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich had reached him in Buenos Aires. At the start of his interrogation in Israel, in June 1960, Eichmann said: “I read that somewhere in West Germany, I don’t recall exactly where, there is a kind of central archive concerned with the collection of documentary material.”⁴⁴ Eichmann’s open letter to Adenauer was supposed to be a “report,” given in his real name, with a carefully worked out line of defense. All this speaks for the likelihood that Eichmann had given serious consideration to the route he would take to surrender himself to the Federal Republic. He was probably banking on his status as a star witness, and a sensational trial that would work in his favor, and unfortunately we cannot simply claim that this strategy was ludicrous.

Within his family, Eichmann mentioned another reason for not returning to Germany to testify, in addition to the advice from his friends. “As long as Müller was alive, he didn’t want to reveal all,” Klaus Eichmann said. We still know very little about the life of “Gestapo Müller” after May 1945, although some evidence points to his death.⁴⁵ Eichmann, at least, was working on the assumption that Heinrich Müller, whom he admired unreservedly, was still alive and on the run in the East. “But he never said he was living in Eastern Europe,” Klaus Eichmann added nebulously. It is unlikely that Eichmann really knew anything about Müller’s life after the war. We cannot rule out the possibility that this explanation for Eichmann’s reluctance to give himself up was partly an idle wish and partly a symptom of his indecision. Ultimately, life in Argentina was a life of freedom with his family, and things were going increasingly well for him. He had bought a plot of land, planned and built a house, and watched his sons grow up. Under these circumstances, it was easy to heed his former comrades’ advice against returning to Europe.

Whether it was because of Fritz Bauer’s initial investigations, or something Eberhard Fritsch said in Austria, or the increasing number of people returning to Germany, or incautious inquiries by Eichmann’s friends—by early 1958, the evidence of Eichmann’s whereabouts was mounting. In March a CIA agent in Munich saw a BND file that said Eichmann was in Argentina, living under the name Clemens (though of course with the caveat that he might also be in the Middle East).⁴⁶ The addition “since 1952” and the spelling error in the name tells us which file the CIA employee had seen: it was the index-card information on Eichmann from the West German intelligence service, based on the informant’s report from June 24, 1952. According to that report, Eichmann’s address in Argentina could be obtained from the “editor-in-chief” of Der Weg. By 1958, the BND should have had more precise information than that; their colleagues at the BfV in Cologne were already much better informed.⁴⁷ The BfV was even making a serious effort to discover more details. “According to unconfirmed information we have here,” they told the Foreign Office on April 11, 1958, “a Karl Eichmann (further personal details unknown), who organized the deportation of Jews during the ‘Third Reich,’ fled to Argentina during the years after the collapse, traveling via Rome under the name CLEMENT. In Argentina he is connected to Eberhard Fritsch, co-owner of the ‘Dürer Verlag’ and editor of the magazine ‘Der Weg,’ Buenos Aires, and moves in the circles of former NSDAP members.” It would be helpful, the BfV explained, to alert the German embassy in Buenos Aires to this man, who might in fact be Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, whose birth date and former departmental designation were given below. In particular, the office in Cologne wanted to know where Eichmann was living. The embassy should also be instructed “to confirm his personal details and report on his political activities.”⁴⁸ Whoever the source of this unconfirmed intelligence was, he was certainly reliable and well informed. The small spelling error in the surname (Clement instead of Klement) is both understandable and unimportant: the letter K is less common outside Germany and is frequently altered in the Spanish-speaking world. Even in Lothar Hermann’s letters, “Klement” is sometimes spelled with a C: Hermann was able only to hear the name, not see it written, and he chose the most likely spelling. However, Hermann was not the source in this instance: the BfV’s source knew more than anyone would have been able to discover from remote Coronel Suárez. Like the BND, he knew about Eichmann’s associates in Argentina, and he also knew the Catholic Church had aided his escape and that “Clement” was a name Eichmann had used during his escape, rather than an alias adopted in Argentina. Of course, we now know that the Red Cross passport and all his other documents had been issued in this name in 1948. But at the start of 1958, only someone in Eichmann’s circle, or who had helped him escape, would have known these details. This person could have had several reasons for wrongly thinking Eberhard Fritsch was still in Argentina: the information could have been given in the period before Fritsch left, at the end of February, or the informant might have thought he returned to Argentina following his unsuccessful attempt to enter West Germany. Neither Dürer Verlag nor the magazine officially existed anymore at this point, and Fritsch had sold all his real estate.⁴⁹ This information allows us to rule out one possible informant, namely Fritsch. Unfortunately, the Bf V has not yet made Fritsch’s file public, so we must continue to wait in eager anticipation of what else we might learn from its reports on the enterprising publisher.⁵⁰ But the BfV’s letter contains another revealing clue. It was openly working on the assumption that Eichmann might be politically active again, in a way that could affect the West German constitution. We now know this suspicion was well founded.

The reply from the German embassy, just over two months later, is surprising in several respects: “Inquiries about the wanted man, under the name Clement or other names, have so far yielded no results.” A naïve researcher might assume that the embassy would begin its hunt for this name in its own archive, where it would, of course, have found it. As you will remember, Vera Eichmann had appeared at the embassy in person with her sons in 1954, when the Eichmann boys needed passports. The person who got the children to name SS ranks could hardly claim that their name meant nothing to him. But “inquiries” would have been a good idea, too, particularly as the embassy had no shortage of contacts in the Nazi scene. The ambassador, Werner Junker, knew and admired Willem Sassen and had a few other connections to the far right as well. When his stepdaughter wanted to do an internship with a magazine, Junker had no problem with the young lady applying to the Freie Presse; its editor-in-chief was Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’s former press adviser.⁵¹ Given that the ambassador himself wasn’t exactly taking a “hands-off” approach to the right-leaning elements of the German community, we may wonder whether the inquiries had really been all that fruitless—to say nothing of why such a negligible response required over two months.

After Eichmann was abducted and the passport affair came to light, questions were raised about this remarkable failure. The Foreign Office’s legal department announced that the embassy could not have known at that time “that conclusions about the whereabouts of the wanted man Adolf Eichmann could be drawn from these applications.”⁵² Internal investigations revealed the main reason: prior to Eichmann’s abduction, “according to a survey in the embassy, with one exception none of the staff, including the ambassador, had ever heard anything about Adolf Eichmann and his crimes.” Heinz Schneppen, who was an ambassador for West Germany himself before becoming an author of academic history books, generously calls this rationale “insufficient vigilance by the consular officers responsible.”⁵³ But a closer look at German relations in Buenos Aires at that time quickly leads one to the conclusion that embassy staff must have been lacking in more qualities than “vigilance”: for example, money to buy local newspapers. Otherwise they could have read frequent, detailed articles on exactly who Adolf Eichmann was, and what crimes he had committed, in Argentina’s biggest-selling German-language paper. The ladies and gentlemen of the embassy had clearly never read any books on German history, or press coverage from their homeland, either. But they must have been gifted with second sight: the name that, with one exception, they claimed never to have heard in 1960 was one they had given a tip-off for in 1958: Eichmann was “suspected to be in the Middle East.” Every little bit helps.

The German embassy’s employees seem to have rather exaggerated their willingness to assist: “The embassy will, however, continue to investigate Eichmann’s whereabouts, and will report in due course. To this end, we would be grateful for notification of any former members of the NSDAP who at one time were resident here—for example, the editor or employees of the magazine Der Weg—who have now been identified in Egypt or the Middle East.”⁵⁴ Even the BfV was irritated by this disingenuous request. Quite apart from the irrelevance of this information to the search for Eichmann in Argentina, the Foreign Office had forgotten one thing: on August 11, 1954, its own employees had told the BfV that Johann von Leers, who was sometimes mistaken for Der Weg’s editor rather than a contributor, had left for Cairo.⁵⁵ From today’s perspective, it looks like someone was taking the opportunity to find out exactly what the BfV knew. In any case, the BfV in Cologne chose to remind the Foreign Office about its own file in minute detail and to dispense with any further questions about Eichmann.⁵⁶ Its correspondence with the Foreign Office would return to the subject only after Eichmann’s abduction. In 1958, the BfV must have come to the conclusion that it was pointless asking the Foreign Office and its embassy in Argentina about him.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what else the BfV did to find Eichmann in 1958. Apart from the files already mentioned, no further documents have been made public. This also means we are unable to clarify whether Josef Vötterl’s position played a role here. Vötterl, who came from Salzburg, had made a career in the criminal and border police, including an assignment with Einsatzgruppe D “in the East,” conducting “border security” and “partisan control.” Like Eichmann, he had escaped to Argentina, but in 1955 he moved back to Germany for three years. He found work with the BfV. In September 1958, a few days after the BfV’s depressing correspondence with the Foreign Office, Vötterl returned to Buenos Aires. He had, as Heinz Schneppen phrases it, “received an offer from an Argentine firm”—and in any case, his salary at the BfV had been so very low.⁵⁷ We have no further information about this new, more lucrative offer, but it could hardly have been made on the strength of his experience in “partisan control.”

In spite of the behavior of West Germany’s offices abroad, and the people there who were authorized to issue directives, the fact remains that in early 1958 the West German authorities once again had enough information to find Eichmann. However, very little is known about it even now: all the files that have been accessed so far have been incidental discoveries. Neither the BND nor the BKA has made its documents available to researchers, even after more than fifty years. And as nice as it would be to reference editions of primary sources like the Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the collections of files commissioned by the Foreign Office, the volumes produced so far reveal the problem: they cover 1949–53 and 1963–79. The 1962 volume was published only in 2010.⁵⁸ If one thinks how many classified documents must still be sitting in various archives, and how little enthusiasm there is for transparency, the facts become both obvious and embarrassing: before Eichmann was abducted, people didn’t want him to be brought to trial in West Germany—and there are still people who don’t want transparency on who, and why this was.

In 1963 the Foreign Office did at least take steps to counter its leading diplomats’ dreadful ignorance of German history, by appointing Ernst-Günther Mohr as the new ambassador to Argentina.⁵⁹ At least they could be sure he knew who Eichmann was: at the embassy in The Hague in 1941, Mohr had prepared detailed progress reports on the deportation of Dutch Jews for Eichmann’s office. Eichmann certainly remembered this episode, mentioning Mohr’s energetic support in “Götzen” in 1961.⁶⁰ This concern for continuity was not confined to Argentina. Hubert Krier became the ambassador to Paraguay at the end of 1965. In an interview he gave in retirement, he was still visibly perturbed as he recalled: “At that time, before my departure, I received the instruction from the Foreign Office to leave the matter of Mengele alone.”⁶¹ If Eichmann had been as cautious as Mengele and confined himself to weeping silently over his deep hatred of Jews and writing paeans to National Socialism in his diaries, then he too would have had a good chance of dying at leisure. Mengele would drown in 1979 while swimming in the sea.

Bormann in Argentina

They had radically changed names, histories and much else. This is the only way for one man or another to live when the world is hunting them, or believes them dead.

—Eichmann on Nazis in South America, 1962⁶²

Eichmann was hardly unobtrusive during his final year in Argentina. Since he had gone out on a limb in 1957, making no secret of his presence or his worldview, it would have been impossible for him to retreat into anonymity once more. He would have had to vanish from Buenos Aires and start over somewhere else. Instead, he bought a plot of land on the edge of the city. Klaus Eichmann remembered his father paying 56,000 pesos for 755 square feet of land. Eichmann himself spoke of a lease with a ten-year duration.⁶³A person with so many good friends could bank on having a steady income. The receipt for building materials was in the name of Señora Liebl de Eichmann. Eichmann threw himself wholeheartedly into the plans for constructing his house, though he also continued to move in Willem Sassen’s circles.

Eichmann’s corrections on the transcripts of the Sassen interviews appear right up to the final tape. He even reviewed the texts Sassen had written, though he couldn’t give them his blessing as they had very little to do with what he had actually said. Eichmann’s wife said more than once that her husband finished his work with Sassen at the end of 1959.⁶⁴ There is even hard evidence that Eichmann’s political activities didn’t stop when the Sassen conversations came to an end. He started writing a new manuscript for his children, the “Roman Tucumán” (Tucumán Novel), and took part in a surprising project that historians have never really been able to evaluate: the collection of documents from the Nazi period. In 1966 Eichmann’s son Klaus would speak of the National Socialists’ attempt to create a tighter international network. “There are connections among the National Socialists in South America, the Middle East, North America and Europe,” he explained. The far-reaching cooperation of right-wing publishers at the time gives us an impression of what that might mean. In the last issues of Der Weg, these contacts were obvious even to the outside world. In Cairo, Johann von Leers was writing a large number of articles from the Middle East, under various names, and the section of news from around the world expanded significantly. But Klaus Eichmann also spoke of another network: “The thing is [!] organized in such a way that every former department head living somewhere abroad edits and collects the material from his former field. My brother Horst says that departments whose original bosses are dead were allocated other specialists, but under the name of their dead boss. So there was a ‘Göring’ for the Luftwaffe, a ‘Goebbels’ for propaganda and so on.” And Eichmann’s son specifically said: “Our father helped gather this material.”⁶⁵ Eichmann had one thing in particular to offer in this regard: his second son, who was in the merchant marine. He traveled “between Canada, USA, Africa, South America and Europe from 1959 to 1961,” transporting “thick bundles of files.” Despite all his later assertions that he wanted his children to stay out of politics and the military, Eichmann clearly involved at least one of his sons in his political activities. And dispatching an international courier with the name Horst Eichmann was anything but a good cover for a perpetrator of crimes against humanity living in Buenos Aires.

The structure of this document-gathering operation throws some light on a frequent question about senior Nazi functionaries in Argentina. Apart from the ridiculous legend about Adolf Hitler in Antarctica, awaiting his return like a deep-frozen version of Napoleon on Elba,⁶⁶ one of the most stubbornly persistent rumors about postwar Nazis has been that Martin Bormann was in South America. If Klaus Eichmann’s story about how the collection was divided is correct, then “Martin Bormann” really was in South America, as the name for the person collecting files from the Party Chancellery. This would at least explain why credulous journalists like Ladislas Farago and Gerd Heidemann kept protesting they had seen pieces of writing and other information from the postwar period that were signed by “Bormann.”

“Avoid Eichmann!”

He was quick to learn the ropes and was greatly valued by his manager.

—Unidentified Daimler-Benz staff member⁶⁷

It is always claimed that Eichmann was a pariah in National Socialist society, with whom nobody wanted to be associated. Up until the end of the 1950s, this claim is insupportable, but Eichmann’s son had the impression that in the last year his father spent in Argentina, people started to avoid him. For Klaus, the reason was clear: “Dr. Mengele had spread the word: avoid Eichmann. Getting close to him could be dangerous.” However, this version of events doesn’t add up. It’s doubtful that Josef Mengele would have initiated this practice, as he was by no means the less dangerous of the two. The idea that he, of all people, had enough influence in the backward-looking German community to warn people off the organizer of the Final Solution is not particularly plausible. Still, the fact that Eichmann’s son believed it points to events that really did take place.

Mengele was worried that he was being pursued, and with good reason. In February 1959 the Frankfurt District Court had issued an arrest warrant for him, and unlike Eichmann, he was living quite openly in Buenos Aires under his own name. By the time the warrant was issued, Mengele had given up his house, which was on the same street as Sassen’s, and had fled Argentina to go underground in Paraguay. His diaries show that friends in Argentina thought this response was over the top.⁶⁸ In any case, Mengele was no longer in Buenos Aires and could not have called on people to avoid Eichmann. But Eichmann did leave Roberto Mertig’s company at this point, which was partly owned by Mengele’s father. So we can say that Mengele distanced himself from Eichmann, but not because he was avoiding him. He simply disappeared, and his old-boy network with him. What Klaus Eichmann observed was a general change in mood among the Nazi sympathizers in Buenos Aires. Word of Mengele’s frantic flight must have gotten around, as well as news of the changing legal situation in the Federal Republic. The arrest warrants and actual arrests were heaping up, and the trial of the Einsatzgruppen in Ulm in 1958 had finally given rise to a public debate on the handling of war crimes. Max Merten, the former head of administration for the Wehrmacht, stood trial in Athens in early 1959 for his involvement in the deportation of Jews from Salonika, having been so astonishingly brazen as to take a vacation in Greece, of all places. In September 1959 a warrant was issued for the arrest of Gerhard Bohne, who had returned home from Argentina and was to be tried for the ten thousand insidious murders committed in the name of euthanasia. The press in Argentina reported on all of it.

As interest in prosecuting Nazi criminals increased, so did people’s knowledge about the mass murders, and the number of questions being asked about their organizer. Eichmann’s name now reliably turned up in newspapers and books wherever there was mention of Nazi crimes. Even the fact that he always appeared as “Adolf Eichmann,” and that nobody was confused about his forenames any longer, shows that something had changed. Other legends about him also started to crumble rapidly. “Not a Templar After All” was the title of an article in the weekly magazine Die Zeit.⁶⁹

Eichmann’s son would later say that people started bringing his father more and more newspaper articles from their travels. And of course, the fact that the men Eichmann used to spend a lot of time with were traveling abroad was another reason for him to feel abandoned.

But the distance between Eichmann and his old associates can’t have been all that great, because they were the people who got him his next job. Horst Carlos Fuldner found him a position at Mercedes-Benz Argentina in Gonzáles Catán, an industrial area two hours’ drive to the north. Eichmann started work there on March 20, 1959, as a warehouseman for replacement parts.⁷⁰ His references were provided by Horst Carlos Fuldner, a Dr. Dr. Ing. Krass, and Francisco José Viegener. As the deputy director, Hanns Martin Schleyer, learned after Eichmann had been abducted, the applicant “had good references and also made a good impression.”⁷¹ Ricardo Klement was properly registered for the statutory pension scheme (no. 1785425). He put his salary expectations at 5,500 pesos per month, around 1,100 Deutschmarks—which at this time was more than the average wage in West Germany.⁷² The payroll from the second quarter of 1959 shows that this is what he actually earned.⁷³ Mercedes-Benz employed a lot of Germans during this period, and several members of the SS. One employee stated that “practically the whole management team [was made up of] immigrants from postwar Germany.” Some of them would have known who “Klement” was, but the subject would have been taboo.⁷⁴ The sociable Eichmann quickly made new friends at Mercedes-Benz. He introduced them to his family, and after he was abducted, Klaus Eichmann and Willem Sassen asked them to help hide incriminating papers.

Eichmann’s new job meant commuting for four hours on the bus every day. He spent his weekends working on the house with his sons, on the plot of land he had bought. It demanded all his attention, as Klaus Eichmann remembered. It also reduced his chances of cultivating other contacts. Eichmann spent his remaining free time at home and seemed calm and secure, reading a lot and playing his violin often. He “particularly loved cśardas and other gypsy airs.” In 1939 Eichmann had wanted to put the Austrian Romanies on the first transport to Nisko, but that didn’t seem to pose a contradiction for him.⁷⁵ Not even his son believed Eichmann was as innocent as he appeared in 1959. Still, Klaus did him the favor of getting married the day before his parents’ wedding anniversary and bringing a granddaughter into the family shortly afterward. But another family event was to have greater consequences for Eichmann: in April 1959 his stepmother, Maria Eichmann, died in Linz, and the family carelessly named her daughter-in-law as well as her sons among the mourners. They had evidently forgotten that Vera was officially divorced: the death notice gave her name as “Vera Eichmann.”

Fritz Bauer’s Sources

I had no enemies among the Jews.

—Eichmann, Sassen discussions⁷⁶

Simon Wiesenthal read the death notice for Eichmann’s stepmother in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten—and later wrote, “But to whom should I have given the news?”⁷⁷ Although he had people to talk to in Austria—the Israeli ambassador, for example—previous experience may have made him hesitate. Elsewhere, events were gaining momentum in the hunt for Eichmann—ever more people from various corners of the globe were becoming involved. It is no wonder, then, that the threads of this story sometimes become entangled.

In Austria criminal charges were formally brought against Eichmann on March 25, 1959, in the name of Hermann Langbein’s International Auschwitz Committee. Langbein had agreed on this course of action with the Frankfurt lawyer Henry Ormond, who specialized in representing the Nazis’ victims. An arrest warrant for Eichmann had been out since the end of the 1940s, and he had been on the wanted list since 1955, but these charges sent a definite signal. On his travels through Poland, Langbein managed to get hold of another photo of Eichmann. He was constantly on the lookout for information or evidence that could be useful in the pursuit of war criminals. Ormond and Langbein were both in touch with Fritz Bauer, although no proof has yet been found that Bauer had taken either of them into his confidence at this point. Still, Langbein’s efforts in particular raised the pressure.⁷⁸ Hence the following message from the authorities appears all the more confusing: the BfV had obtained “unconfirmed information” in spring 1959 that “Eichmann’s wife and his four children have been living in South America, while Eichmann himself is said to have been living somewhere in Europe.”⁷⁹ It’s unclear whether this rumor was due to someone confusing Eichmann with, for example, Sassen on his travels, or whether it originated in a diversionary tactic in Argentina. The remarkable thing about it is that by this point, people clearly knew how many children Adolf Eichmann, and not Ricardo Klement, had.

In 1959 a voice from Israel caused further concern in the Eichmann case. Tuviah Friedman, who had started hunting Nazi murderers shortly after the war ended, was in touch with Wiesenthal, and since emigrating to Israel, his idealism had led him to start a document collection in Haifa. Now he was asking questions everywhere. On July 13, 1959, he wrote to Erwin Schüle, the head of the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Criminals in Ludwigsburg, accusing the West German government of doing nothing to catch Adolf Eichmann, because it didn’t want to deal with what he had done. Schüle replied within a week, informing Friedman of the existing arrest warrant from 1956 and of the rumors that Eichmann was probably either in Argentina or in one of Israel’s neighboring countries. A short time later Schüle wrote again, requesting documents and information on Eichmann, since Friedman had written to him on Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes letterhead. Friedman threw himself into the work with gusto, but he wanted to go further than discreetly providing documents. What he didn’t know was that huge advances had by now been made in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, and that his actionism actually threatened its success.

Unlike Isser Harel, Fritz Bauer had not been so quick to give up on the Argentine lead. He had heard nothing more from Lothar Hermann, who had dutifully been sending his letters to the address in North America, but Bauer received other clues that he was on the right track. His colleagues remember their boss getting a visit from Paul Dickopf at the BKA, who had an SS past of his own and was still in touch with people on the extreme right of the political spectrum.⁸⁰ Dickopf allegedly suggested to Bauer that he give up his pursuit of Eichmann—and that in any case, it was incorrect to suppose he was in Argentina. This “wish” seems to have been the confirmation Bauer needed that he was getting close.⁸¹

There was another reason that the public, or at least a section of the public, was getting anxious about this perpetrator having gone unpunished. East Germany had begun to use West Germany’s failure to come to terms with its past as a weapon in the Cold War and kept threatening the Federal Republic with unpleasant revelations about its leading figures. With the help of documents originally seized by the Soviets, new details were emerging from East Berlin on a weekly basis. The authorities had no idea what to do against this dangerous weapon, since the revelations were, for the most part, entirely true.⁸² In this context, Eichmann’s prospective reappearance must have looked like the worst possible catastrophe. According to Irmtrud Wojak’s reconstruction of events, which uses accounts by Isser Harel, Fritz Bauer met with the Israeli representatives in summer 1959 and pressed for quick action. Harel claimed that Bauer mentioned a second informant who could attest to Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina, an SS man whom he couldn’t name as it would have put him in danger.

Rumors about this SS informant have abounded. From what we know today about the close relationships that dedicated National Socialists maintained after the war, in particular the ties between Argentina and West Germany—and if we consider how many people knew where Eichmann was—then the question is not who this informant could have been but whom we can rule out. In 1961 an article in the far-right magazine Nation Europa accidentally revealed how many of the beans had been spilled on Eichmann in right-wing circles: “Let us first note,” wrote F. J. P. Veale (who also contributed to Der Weg), “that Eichmann’s escape to Argentina had been common knowledge for a long time.”⁸³

We still don’t know who Fritz Bauer’s second informant was, as Bauer didn’t want to reveal the name. When Isser Harel’s book proclaimed to the world that Bauer was using his discretion to shield an SS man, some suspected a “traitor” from within Eichmann’s own camps. This suspicion supported the speculation that Willem Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to maximize his profits from the sale of the interview—or conversely, that his attempts to sell the interview had laid a trail to Eichmann’s door. But later correspondence between Bauer and Sassen proves that Sassen wasn’t his contact in this case.⁸⁴ There must have been plenty of possible informants who had served in the SS and now knew exactly where and how Eichmann was living. One former SS man accidentally confirmed Bauer’s suspicion that he was on the right track in Argentina: Paul Dickopf, with his cautionary visit to Bauer’s office. This qualified Dickopf as a first-rate informant with an SS background, and it would be understandable if Bauer was reluctant to point out this embarrassment to the Federal Republic.

Among friends, however, Fritz Bauer did name someone: he had heard about Ricardo Klement’s employment with Mercedes-Benz from a man named “Schneider” (though other spellings are possible), as Thomas Harlan revealed toward the end of his life.⁸⁵ This Schneider had something of a past himself, in the Einsatzgruppen, but in the late 1950s he had been the head of the “trainee department” at Mercedes in Stuttgart. In this position, he was able to assist in the hunt for Eichmann by giving Bauer access to personnel files and other information. Unfortunately, I have not been able to convince Daimler that the possibility their staff may have included not only a notorious mass murderer but also someone who aided a famous German attorney general makes cooperating with a researcher a worthwhile exercise. They didn’t even take up my offer of a list of possible Schneiders, with their dates of birth.⁸⁶ On making inquiries, I was merely told that in 1959 no one in the company could have known who Ricardo Klement was.⁸⁷ I am obviously not the right person to tell them that his identity has now been known for fifty years, and that the knowledge brings its own responsibility. But there are some things it takes time to realize. Perhaps someone else will succeed in convincing a globally respected company that having once employed a man who helped in the search for Adolf Eichmann would not cast a shadow over its history or even dent its image. Even if this Mercedes employee helped Fritz Bauer only because Bauer knew about his (possible) past with the Einsatzgruppen, he still showed more courage in doing the right thing than most people could take credit for.

But when it comes to Fritz Bauer’s informants, another clue points in a different direction entirely. In private, Bauer once referred to a second Jewish informant in addition to Lothar Hermann. Bauer told a close friend about this source, who had informed him of Eichmann’s living situation in Argentina. This was, as Thomas Harlan remembered, a “Brazilian Jew, formerly Polish, a survivor of the Sobibór uprising, but he never told me the name.”⁸⁸ Shortly after Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that Eichmann was a prisoner in Israel, for a brief period claims were made in Tel Aviv that a Jewish refugee from Poland had provided the clue to where Eichmann was living.⁸⁹ There was also much talk about Brazil, as Josef Mengele was suspected to be there. Only the key wordSobibór is missing from this connection. But in 1960 that name meant very little to most people. Detailed studies of this site of atrocities, and of its survivors, have begun to appear only in recent years.

Sobibór was one of the death camps of Operation Reinhard, and the National Socialists planned to leave no survivors there.⁹⁰ Largely thanks to an inmates’ uprising, at least forty-seven people managed to escape. In total, only sixty-two people survived the inferno. And only two of those Polish-born men emigrated to Brazil in the late 1940s: Chaim Korenfeld, who was born in 1923 in Izbica, and Stanislav “Shlomo” Szmajzner, born in 1927 in Puławy. Szmajzner was one of the masterminds of the Sobibór uprising. We know little about Korenfeld’s life in Brazil, except that he traveled there via Italy in 1949. Szmajzner, however, originally wanted to emigrate to Israel and was just visiting relatives in Rio de Janeiro. He arrived in Brazil in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of his life. He opened a jeweler’s, built it into a successful business within ten years, and sold it in 1958, buying an island in the rain forest with the profit. He then went into cattle farming.⁹¹ In 1968 he published his story under the title Sobibór—The Tragedy of an Adolescent Jew,⁹² which sounds like an understatement in the face of what he had experienced. Szmajzner had arrived in the Sobibór camp in May 1942, with his jeweler’s toolkit. He was not yet fifteen and had been naïve enough to believe the lies about “relocation.” What saved this goldsmith’s apprentice from immediate death was that the SS men in Sobibór were keen on gold rings with SS runes and classy monograms for their whip handles.⁹³ Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant, recognized the boy’s talent, and fortunately, gold coins and teeth were readily available. Szmajzner always knew where the material came from for the jewelry he had to make. He also knew his parents and siblings had been killed in Sobibór. His forced labor brought him into contact with Wagner and the camp commandant, Franz Stangl, whose faces were indelibly imprinted on the young man’s mind. Many years later Szmajzner would meet the pair for a second time. In 1968 he saw Stangl on a street in Brazil, and following effective pressure from Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was brought to trial.⁹⁴ Gustav Wagner’s former prisoner also identified him in 1978, and although Wagner escaped prosecution, he committed suicide—at least, according to the official police report. “Szmajzner let it be known,” another Sobibór survivor said, “that he was entirely uninvolved in Wagner’s death.”⁹⁵

Stanislav Szmajzner was a Polish Jew and a businessman in Brazil, and if he had heard about Eichmann’s life in Argentina, he might well have put this information to use in the late 1950s. It’s certainly possible that he knew where Eichmann was. Business trips between Brazil and Argentina were frequent occurrences. Hans-Ulrich Rudel had been to Brazil early on, and even Eberhard Fritsch had visited the country. Pedro Pobierzym, the former Wehrmacht soldier from Poland who did business with the Nazis in Argentina, and procured the tape recorder for Sassen, also traveled to Brazil on business. A resourceful man could easily have made inquiries in the Nazi community of Buenos Aires, especially if he already knew what he was looking for. If you needed a man to make discreet inquiries in Argentina in 1959, Szmajzner would have been the ideal person to approach. Since we have no reason to doubt what Fritz Bauer said, we have every reason to believe that two Jewish informants in Latin America, as well as former SS men, provided the crucial clues that allowed Eichmann to be brought to trial in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Kuwait

At the start of 1960, Attorney General Bauer will make a request to the Emirate in Kuwait, via the responsible ministries in Bonn, for Eichmann to be extradited. Bauer sees no impediment to the extradition in international law.

—Press release, December 23, 1959⁹⁶

From mid-1959 the rumors that Eichmann was in the Middle East started to be aired more frequently, with a new variation. Hans Weibel-Altmeyer, a journalist with a vivid imagination, acting on a suggestion from Simon Wiesenthal, traveled to the Middle East to search for Nazis there.⁹⁷ During an interview, the ex-mufti Amin al-Husseini apparently handed him an anti-Semitic brochure by Johann von Leers and even confirmed: “Yes indeed, I know Eichmann well and I can assure you that he is still alive.” Weibel-Altmeyer was also offered Eichmann “for sale” in Damascus at a price of $50,000.⁹⁸ If a reporter was able to find out that “certain Arab circles have been discussing the ‘Eichmann deal’ for days,” then this information must also have come to the attention of one of the intelligence services. The BND in particular had informants in the field, in the shape of Alois Brunner and Franz Rademacher. In any case, in late September 1959, the BfV received information to the effect that Eichmann was in Damascus or Qatar.⁹⁹ The informant even claimed he had met Brunner and Eichmann personally. Tom Segev suggests that this source may have been Weibel-Altmeyer himself: the reporter wrote a story for the Cologne tabloid Neue Illustrierte in summer 1960, about visiting a bar where Eichmann and Brunner were sitting at the next table.

The BfV, however, had clues of a very different sort as well—clues that pointed to friends in the Middle East trying to create a new life for Eichmann in 1959. The source here was Ernst Wilhelm Springer, an arms dealer from Bad Segeberg who had set himself up in the Middle East. According to the BfV report, Springer “said, regarding the articles in the press in October 1959, that Eichmann is currently in a Middle Eastern country friendly with the FLN, and from time to time meets his associate Fischer [Alois Brunner]. The intention is for Eichmann to be found a management position with an oil company in Kuwait, however this plan is said to have been dropped following the press campaign.”¹⁰⁰

These fresh headlines about the Middle East caused a commotion, and the Federation of German Industry immediately denied the rumors. At least, this is what they said when a query arrived from Hermann Langbein, on Comité International d’Auschwitz–headed paper.¹⁰¹ But they “took your letter as an opportunity to conduct thorough inquiries into the matter of whether any large German industrial firms are employing a certain Adolf Eichmann in Kuwait.” They searched for two months. Even the group representing the interests of German firms in Kuwait had been tasked with this investigation. “The result is completely negative,” and no one in the Middle East even knew who this Eichmann was. But anyone who did know now also knew how much effort was being put into the hunt for Eichmann in the Middle East. And if anyone had been thinking of employing Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Langbein’s inquiry (which had been approved by a confidant of Fritz Bauer’s) would certainly have put him off.¹⁰² The BfV’s report contains a furtherremarkable detail: according to Springer, “The Head of the United Arab Republic Medani apparently knew that Eichmann was in Bad Godesberg.”¹⁰³

It’s impossible to establish whether this story was fantasy, a case of mistaken identity, or a deliberate rumor, but the increasing interest in Eichmann is obvious. Still, it is certain that until his abduction, Eichmann never left Argentina and his family. Whether he might somehow have managed to get to the Middle East and live there incognito in 1959, had he chosen to, is another question. He was already sitting in a trap of his own making; relocating to North Africa would only have made it easier for those hunting him to capture him. In any case, the rumors provided an effective cover for Fritz Bauer’s hunt for the mass murderer. All the little pieces of misinformation that emerged in summer 1959 were probably more than just coincidence.

On August 20, 1959, Erwin Schüle sent new, confidential information from Ludwigsburg to Tuviah Friedman: Eichmann was in Kuwait, working for an oil firm.¹⁰⁴ We don’t know if Schüle was aware that his information was incorrect or if he was being used to lay a false trail. The evidence suggests that Fritz Bauer, in cooperation with the Israeli police, was using Schüle to spread this new version of the Middle East story. Experience in hunting Nazi criminals in Argentina had shown that the German embassy there was not entirely reliable. Bauer may also not have trusted the head of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, although nothing suggests that he knew about Schüle’s own SS history. In any case, the danger that Eichmann would find out how close they had already come to him was growing with every month, so disinformation was an obvious strategy.

Tuviah Friedman was so delighted with this progress that in October he took it upon himself to give the Kuwait news to the press. An October 12 article in the Argentinisches Tageblatt was headlined “Claims Adolf Eichmann Has Been in Kuwait Since 1945.” Among other things, it reported that “the leader of the Israeli institute in Haifa, … Tuviah Friedman, said this institute had earlier put out a reward of $10,000 for finding and capturing Eichmann.” Friedman apologized to Schüle for this obvious indiscretion, though Schüle was angered by it—but that didn’t stop Friedman from taking further action. His desire to see Eichmann in court was irrepressible. Fritz Bauer and the Israeli intelligence service made cunning use of the Kuwait feint, acting as if it were a clue to be taken seriously. On October 13 the Süddeutsche Zeitung considered the possibility of having Eichmann extradited, and over the next few days, the press reported on the official inquiry, apparently made by the Israeli foreign minister to the West German and British authorities, as to whether Eichmann really was in Kuwait. The spokesman for the Israeli government said that “Israel is addressing the case of Eichmann, who is on the list of wanted persons from the Attorney General’s office in Frankfurt am Main.” TheArgentinisches Tageblatt, among others, reported this announcement as well.¹⁰⁵ Not knowing anything about the disinformation, Tuviah Friedman used an election event for Ben-Gurion to call for a reward to be offered for Eichmann’s capture in Kuwait, which the press also encouraged.¹⁰⁶

Over the following months, the Nazi hunters did all they could to keep this erroneous information in the media. Bauer kept holding press conferences and giving interviews, and more press releases emerged from Israel, achieving the regular coverage Bauer had hoped for. At the start of January 1960, there was talk of an extradition agreement, though the British authorities denied it and the British Foreign Office refused to help. Bauer fed the press details about the “sheikh” for whom Eichmann was supposed to be “working as an agent for German companies,” although “discretion” prevented him from naming these companies. Bauer even announced he would prepare this information for the Foreign Office, now that all the obstacles of international law had been overcome.¹⁰⁷ Journalists were left wondering why the Foreign Office had stayed so quiet on the matter: “So the question is now,” said the Deutsche Woche in Munich, “why the Foreign Office has neither denied the rumor, nor officially confirmed whether it is correct.”¹⁰⁸ The story was so convincing that the German authorities started to doubt their own information. The Foreign Office asked the Federal Ministry for Justice whether it had any information on Eichmann’s whereabouts in Kuwait or Egypt and received an irritated reply: “It cannot even be said with any degree of certainty that Eichmann is still alive.”¹⁰⁹

Only a single newspaper firmly refuted the story: Der Reichsruf, the propaganda sheet of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP). On October 24, Adolf von Thadden, the man who was so concerned with Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s political career in Germany, published an article headlined “So Where Is Eichmann?” “Eichmann was hidden in Italy by a Catholic monastery,” Thadden said, “and, with the help of senior Catholic connections, was then taken from Italy to Argentina.” It was simple, public betrayal. “Herr Schüle and Israel’s search in Kuwait will be in vain,” Thadden scoffed. And he added threateningly, “It is very regrettable, because if Eichmann really were the notorious murderer of the Jews, greater clarity about this horrific event could be gained through his conviction.” The dream of the six million being exposed as a lie oozes from between the lines. And whether Der Reichsruf was determined to provoke a testimony from Eichmann that would redeem National Socialism, or the garrulous editor had simply been unable to keep his mouth shut,¹¹⁰ something very strange had happened. Thadden later expressed contempt for his former contributor Willem Sassen, accusing him of being a faithless traitor to Eichmann—and yet here Thadden himself was, thumbing his nose at the Nazi hunters and trumpeting Eichmann’s hiding place when there was no need to. It was the first time Argentina had been mentioned in the press. And the extremist from Lower Saxony made no secret of his source: he openly referred to “German emigrant circles,” although he did stress that they “avoided” Eichmann. The clue was given more weight by the fact that everyone—or at least the readership of Der Reichsruf—knew that a member of these circles had been on the DRP candidate list since 1953. So did anyone spot Thadden’s piece? Yes: the observant staff of the BfV.¹¹¹ There, the article from the anticonstitutional publication was thought “noteworthy” and dutifully pasted into the Eichmann file. This actually causes one to wonder whether even releasing all the government files would suffice for us to grasp what must have gone on among the German authorities during these months.

Der Reichsruf ’s distribution had dwindled to almost nothing, and the article provoked no real reaction. Thadden, who would later become chair of the National Democratic Party and worked for the British intelligence service, MI6, was never accused of having betrayed his comrade.¹¹² Fritz Bauer’s disinformation strategy, however, was working splendidly. It was a necessary diversion, as Eichmann’s reaction to the news demonstrates. Klaus Eichmann remembered the evening his wife heard on the radio that Adolf Eichmann, who was suspected of being in Kuwait, was wanted by Interpol. “I raced out to San Fernando and shook Father awake: ‘Interpol is hunting you.’ It left him cold. He just said: ‘Damn it, you’re waking me in the middle of the night for this? You could have waited ’til morning with it. Go home and get some sleep.’ ” His father consulted friends over the following days, and none of them found the news disconcerting or even took it seriously.¹¹³

In the meantime, Lothar Hermann had read the article in the Argentinisches Tageblatt in which Tuviah Friedman spoke of a reward of $10,000. He had lost all contact with Bauer and had not received an answer from anyone else either, so he immediately wrote to Friedman in Israel offering information. The article gave him the impression that at last someone was taking the matter seriously. At first Hermann said nothing about his daughter, who was now living in the United States.¹¹⁴ He had no idea that the “documentation center” was the private collection of a dedicated Nazi hunter with no financial resources at his disposal. He believed it was a national office, which also led to the misunderstanding that a reward really existed. Hermann made it clear that this time he wouldn’t reveal any information without being paid in advance. Friedman conveyed this information to Schüle on November 8, without mentioning Hermann’s name. By this point, Schüle seems to have heard about the real status of the manhunt and urged Friedman in the strongest terms to hold back. He had been “disappointed to learn that there has still been no let-up in the Eichmann affair. Please support me in keeping the ‘Eichmann case’ absolutely taboo for the immediate future, … no publications, no speeches, no other actions of any sort,” because it all “disrupts our efforts to clear up the Eichmann case.” To emphasize this point, Schüle hinted at definite success in the manhunt.¹¹⁵ Still, he would have to repeat this exhortation before Friedman actually backed off. Friedman let Hermann know that he had passed on his information to the World Jewish Congress representative in Jerusalem, and that someone was certain to be in touch.¹¹⁶

From Lothar Hermann’s perspective, the course of events became even more tortuous than for Tuviah Friedman. On December 26, 1959, a representative of the Jewish Community of Argentina, one “Herr G. Schurmann,” visited him, and he couldn’t figure out who had actually sent him. He assumed it was Friedman, but Friedman later claimed not to have done anything further.¹¹⁷ Now that he had heard the Middle East news, Friedman didn’t believe Hermann anymore.¹¹⁸ Hermann’s subsequent letters show that for him, Fritz Bauer, Tuviah Friedman, and Mossad formed a single entity, conspiring with one another to extract information from him without providing appropriate compensation.

But only a handful of people knew what had really taken place, in absolute secrecy. Hermann was not one of them. For by this point, the abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad was a done deal.¹¹⁹

The hunt for Eichmann is the best example of a success achieved via a complex nexus. Human activity is rarely monocausal; it is usually the cumulative effect of various strands of activity with many people involved, all doing what they do for different reasons. Of course Paul Dickopf had not intended to encourage Bauer with his behavior, and obviously Tuviah Friedman had never wanted to endanger the success of the hunt. Simon Wiesenthal simply refused to give up, and was determined to see Eichmann stand trial. Isser Harel was looking for a sensational operation for his intelligence service, and naturally, he was also searching for the “number-one enemy of the Jews,” as was David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion also had to keep in mind the German-Israeli dialogue, on which their trade agreement and Israel’s supply of armaments depended. And finally Fritz Bauer wanted to prosecute Eichmann in Germany. Eichmann’s capture was the result not of a chain of events but of a series of threads that gradually wove themselves into a net. But then in hindsight, as I said, this is a much more common pattern for human activity than we would like to think.

In contrast to the hunt for Eichmann, his final arrest almost seems a simple matter. On December 6, 1959, Ben-Gurion confided to his diary that he had asked Isser Harel to prepare a Mossad team to identify and abduct Adolf Eichmann.¹²⁰ Fritz Bauer had been to Israel again, stressing the need for quick action. In November the Israeli ambassador to Vienna, Ezechiel Sahar, had told Simon Wisenthal about the renewed interest in Eichmann. Wiesenthal put together a comprehensive dossier, using all the information in his possession. This time Sahar was able to tell him that Israel was very impressed with his work. He even gave Wiesenthal a list of further questions. When Eichmann’s father, “Adolf Eichmann, retired company director,” died on February 5, the death notice,¹²¹ like the one for Eichmann’s stepmother, named Vera Eichmann among the mourners. When Wiesenthal saw it, he reacted quickly. On the slim chance that Eichmann or his wife would turn up at the funeral, he had someone take photographs of all the mourners. Neither of them was there, but Wiesenthal now had photos of Eichmann’s brothers, who had always looked similar to him.¹²² Isser Harel later claimed that Wiesenthal had had no part in the Mossad operation, but his own agent Zvi Aharoni confirmed that these photos had allowed him to identify the fifty-four-year-old Eichmann more easily than the photos from the Nazi period alone would have done.¹²³ Harel sent Aharoni to Argentina in February 1960. It was not his first time in Buenos Aires: Aharoni had stayed there in March 1959 for another assignment.¹²⁴ His knowledge and contacts allowed him to track Eichmann down, even though he had just moved from Chacabuco Street to his new house. The Mossad team followed at the end of April. Helped by useful contacts in Buenos Aires, they achieved the success that would make Mossad famous: the “number-one enemy of the Jews” was abducted on May 11, 1960, outside his house, as he was returning home.

Eichmann blamed himself for his capture. He had “felt so safe in Argentina, where I lived for 11 years in freedom and safety,” that he had overlooked all the signs of danger.¹²⁵ He had been a “fool” not to go to Tucumán, Chile, or Asia—tellingly, he didn’t mention the Middle East. In Israel, Eichmann set down a detailed description of the abduction from his own perspective.¹²⁶ These accounts confirmed that it happened the way the Mossad agents claimed, even if their descriptions differ on various details.¹²⁷Eichmann said he realized he had been under surveillance for months, which was more than a refusal to admit he had been outsmarted. In his notes, he describes incidents that had actually happened as the team was searching for him, though he couldn’t have read the Mossad agents’ report. Aharoni’s attempt to question his daughter-in-law had been suspicious. And he had noticed the series of cars parked near his house. The danger had been so palpable that his son had offered to lend him a gun. His wife suffered nightmares commensurate with her Catholic upbringing: she saw her husband in a white, blood-soaked hair shirt.¹²⁸ But the man who had felt so welcome in Argentina made one fatal error. “However, I didn’t think,” Eichmann wrote in 1961, “that this could lead to an abduction, but believed it was an operation by the Argentine police, and that maybe there was an investigation going on here, as had happened with other people.”¹²⁹ For a National Socialist, the Argentine police force was a true friend in need, upon whose protection one could always rely.

I Had No Comrades

I am especially delighted that my many Argentine friends remembered me with their gifts of flowers on my birthday.

—Eichmann to his family, April 17, 1961

When her husband didn’t arrive home that night as expected, Vera Eichmann raised the alarm with her son. Eichmann’s disappearance unleashed a flurry of activity that shows how much a part of Argentina’s shady German community the Eichmanns had become. Adolf Eichmann was abducted on May 11, 1960. He was hidden in a house in Buenos Aires and put on a plane to Israel ten days later.¹³⁰ Until David Ben-Gurion’s announcement on May 23, no one in Argentina knew where Eichmann was, though this information was very important to a great many people. Saskia Sassen remembers a crowd, including the Eichmann boys, suddenly turning up at the house, and the days of upheaval that followed, with more and more people wanting information or offering help. It was disconcerting for the children: they were used to social gatherings in the house, but now people had stopped caring what they did or didn’t hear. Saskia Sassen’s mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and when Eichmann’s abduction became known, she left the family for a few weeks, unable to stand the tension or her husband’s entanglement in the whole affair.¹³¹ Vera Eichmann claimed she never knew what her husband had done, though she also said her first thought was that he had been kidnapped by Jews. Only Willem Sassen and her husband’s other friends prevented her from going to the police. Horst Carlos Fuldner was among those friends. He felt a responsibility toward the family and responded to the call for help right away.¹³² “Father’s best friend,” Klaus Eichmann said later, “forced us to think calmly.” Perhaps their father had stayed out after one too many glasses of wine, or maybe he had had an accident and had been taken to the hospital—two possibilities that the Eichmann family had not thought of at first, out of sheer terror of Jewish retribution. “We spent two days searching the police stations, the hospitals and the morgues. In vain. What remained was the realization: they had got him.” Klaus Eichmann traveled to Mercedes-Benz with Sassen, to meet his father’s friend and to hide manuscripts there.¹³³ The most trusted of Eichmann’s associates spread out across the city and kept watch on the transport hubs: the harbors and railroad stations. Sassen, as Klaus Eichmann recalled in 1966 without a trace of suspicion, took the airport. They also organized a guard for the family. Up to three hundred members of a “Peronist youth group” kept watch over the house, said Eichmann’s son with some pride. Some even talked of violent retaliation, like kidnapping the Israeli ambassador or mounting an attack on the embassy. But instead Fuldner found the family alternative accommodations, and for the time being they waited to see what would happen.¹³⁴

In spite of the fevered search that followed the abduction on May 11, 1960, Ben-Gurion’s speech almost two weeks later took the rest of the world by surprise. The CIA files show that the agency too had had to ask other “friendly intelligence services” what had actually happened, perhaps because the sympathizers in Argentina behaved with particular discretion in this volatile situation,¹³⁵ or because the clues were wrongly evaluated. In any case, the files that have since been released by the U.S. intelligence services, the Bf V, and the German Foreign Office contain no evidence to show that anyone had the slightest awareness of the Mossad operation. However, one of the German ambassador’s close contacts in the Buenos Aires Nazi scene may not have been completely unsuspecting.

José Moskovits, the chair of the Jewish Association of Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Buenos Aires, remembers a surprising incident in the German embassy. He is entirely certain that it took place “two, maximum three months” before Eichmann’s abduction. “Two gentlemen arrived from Bonn, one of them from the German intelligence service, and demanded Eichmann’s file.” An altercation took place, as a helpful member of the embassy staff had lent Moskovits this file shortly before, together with Josef Mengele’s, and so it wasn’t at hand in the embassy. The person responsible, according to Moskovits, was fired immediately.¹³⁶

We can prove that José Moskovits was indeed gathering information on Eichmann and Mengele at that precise point, since he was Simon Wiesenthal’s point of contact in Argentina, and his correspondence with Wiesenthal documents their exchange of information.¹³⁷ He also remained active in the search for Mengele for many years. Moskovits, who was born in Hungary, had excellent contacts in the Argentine security services and was active in many other areas as well. Having made numerous compensation claims that resulted in the return of Jewish property stolen during the Nazi period, he had turned the Association of Survivors into an institution that was taken seriously. And he had another reason to remember the time of Eichmann’s abduction. Zvi Aharoni and the Mossad team turned to him for assistance, and he used his connections to help them rent the apartment and obtain the vehicles for the planned abduction.¹³⁸

Moskovits’s contacts with the German embassy even enabled him to take Zvi Aharoni into the building to do research. On his first trip, between March 1 and April 7, 1960, Aharoni traveled under a false name on a diplomatic passport, posing as a representative from the finance department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.¹³⁹ There is little reason to doubt Moskovits’s recollections and the dates he provided. The only troubling thing in this story is the idea that an ambassador might come down so heavily on an employee, for giving archive access to the recognized representative of a survivors’ organization. We will leave aside for the moment the point that the embassy had a file on Eichmann, even though it claimed not to have any kind of information about him in 1958 and, a few months after the abduction, declared that only one person there had known who Eichmann was. Still more irritating is the question of what made representatives of the Federal Republic travel all the way to Buenos Aires in spring 1960 to ask about Eichmann. If they had been looking into the current state of the investigation or the arrest warrant, a glance at the files in West Germany would have sufficed. The timing of the visit is significant, in any case.

At the end of February 1960, as Zvi Aharoni was setting off for Argentina to prepare for the abduction, preparations for another delicate mission were being made in West Germany. The first meeting between Konrad Adenauer and David Ben-Gurion was to be a crucial step for future German-Israeli relations. A wave of anti-Semitism had swept through the Federal Republic just after Christmas 1959; it started with swastikas appearing on synagogues and ended with the destruction of Jewish cemetaries. The BfV counted “470 incidents” up to January 28, 1960, “and an additional 215 instances of childish graffiti.” The effect abroad was devastating, and the federal government fell over itself to take action, rushing through changes to the school history curriculum.¹⁴⁰ Its eagerness to avoid any embarrassment in the run-up to the highly sensitive meeting could have led it to conduct investigations in Argentina. Information had been stacking up on Eichmann’s whereabouts, and an “open letter to the chancellor” from Obersturmbannführer(retired) Adolf Eichmann at the time of a German-Israeli meeting could have had serious repercussions.

Fritz Bauer’s increasing devotion to the hunt for those responsible for exterminating the Jews was also becoming impossible to ignore. As excessively cautious as Hesse’s attorney general was, his efforts to take the search to Buenos Aires via Brazil seem not to have gone entirely unnoticed. A short time after Ben-Gurion’s declaration that Eichmann was in Israel, Der Spiegel published exclusive clues about Fritz Bauer’s second informant. It said the initial tip-off on Eichmann’s whereabouts had come from a “Brazilian Jew.”¹⁴¹ The article also speculated on whether the Israelis had abducted Eichmann at this specific time to “keep up the moral pressure on the Federal Republic, thereby ensuring further economic aid.” The Hamburg magazine was brimming with information from well-informed sources. Bauer was extremely concerned that his progress would be discovered, as shown by more than simply his exasperation as he pressed for action in Israel in late 1959. The wealth of ideas that the attorney general fed to federal German agencies like the Foreign Office, making misleading requests in an apparent effort to force the extradition of Eichmann from Kuwait, reveals Bauer’s mistrust of the German authorities. In spring 1960, if the Foreign Office, the BKA, or even the BND had asked Bauer where Eichmann was, it would have received the same answer they had all been giving out for years: Eichmann was in the Middle East.

Some people clearly feared that the Adviser on Jewish Affairs might turn up during this phase of the delicate German-Israeli discussions, as we can see from later insinuations that the Israelis abducted him only to influence these negotiations in their favor. But what must Ben-Gurion have been feeling as he met Konrad Adenauer, knowing that an Eichmann trial was finally within striking distance? The German chancellor had no idea that, three days before the meeting in New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Zvi Aharoni had reported from Buenos Aires that he had found Eichmann’s new address.

Even for a resourceful agent, it had been no easy task. Investigations in Buenos Aires became more difficult in February–March 1960, despite ample help from the embassy staff. Eichmann had just moved and left no forwarding address: the plot that he had bought was in a kind of no-man’s-land on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Aharoni managed to discover the new address only after making thorough investigations and using some very clever tricks. The man whom people called “Mossad’s Grand Inquisitor” laid a trap for one of the Eichmann sons by claiming he had a present for him. Rafael Eitan is still full of praise for Aharoni, without whom, he is certain, the trail would have gone cold. The operation certainly wouldn’t have succeeded without luck and a great deal of skill. Still, Zvi Aharoni proved that even an Israeli, who had no relationship to the right-wing German community, could find Eichmann—provided, of course, one really wanted to find him.

Unfortunately, a visit to the embassy would have yielded only the information that Vera Eichmann and the children were known (and on record) there. No current address was given for them. The Federal Republic representatives whom José Moskovits remembered would not likely have been able to discover where Eichmann was living in the short time they were on hand. And what would they have done with this information? Still, following their visit to the embassy, they did not step up their search. People tend not to think others are more resourceful than themselves, and as the events that followed show, the German representatives didn’t attribute this quality to the Israeli intelligence service. One of the German Chancellery’s reasons for keeping the Eichmann files closed to researchers is the danger that some ambiguous remark made by staff at that time might “substantially compromise or even endanger friendly relations with foreign public offices.”¹⁴² Given the events at the start of 1960, we can at least guess what this rationale could mean. But it makes full disclosure of the BND’s Eichmann files all the more important. It’s bad enough that the service did very little to find Eichmann, and that BND workers didn’t think their Israeli colleagues or an attorney general in Hesse capable of it. But unless the files are released, the terrible suspicion also remains that the BND might even have tried to prevent the capture.

Mossad’s triumph obviously came as a surprise to everyone. On May 23, 1960, the news of Eichmann’s reappearance spread quickly, along with a frenzy of activity. The daily papers were suddenly full of photos of Eichmann and details of his crimes. Based on the wealth of information that had long been held in libraries and archives, people all over the world managed to write pages and pages of articles. The announcement also caused turmoil in West German politics. The news was sprung on the former federal president, Theodor Heuss, during his first visit to Israel. His reaction was remarkably collected, as he explained to the press that Eichmann would, without question, receive a fair trial in Israel. Reactions in Bonn were more horrified: Konrad Adenauer wanted to have Eichmann retrospectively declared to be Austrian, so Germany wouldn’t be responsible for him. Defense commissions were hastily convened, and an attempt was made to coordinate all the institutions involved in the case, from the Federal Press Office to the Bf V and intelligence service. They formed “Eichmann working groups”—but not, of course, with the aim of discovering who this unknown man in an Israeli jail was. The Federal Press Office mounted an elaborate media campaign in a very short space of time.Raphael Gross has found evidence of a planned film project, designed to paint the Federal Republic in a positive light, titled Paradise and Fiery Furnace.¹⁴³ The fear and helplessness in the face of the approaching trial could not have been described more clearly.

Only a small percentage of the material that West German institutions prepared at this point is currently accessible, but even that shows that people feared the worst. Eichmann was back and had brought with him more than a shadow of the past. The people who feared the trial most included all those former Nazis who had found their footing in the Federal Republic, with no real repercussions for their own involvement in mass murder. They were all afraid for their jobs. Former employees of the RSHA now had careers in the police, the BKA, and the BND. The staff of the Foreign Office also had cause for concern. The fact that the embassy in Argentina had issued passports to Eichmann’s sons in their real names several years previously did not bode well. And the embassy’s “inability” to find Eichmann in 1958, following a very specific request, looked embarrassingly like aiding and abetting a wanted criminal. The comprehensive dossiers on Eichmann’s life in Argentina, which the embassy personnel were suddenly able to send to Bonn upon request, revealed just how much they could have found out (or had found out) by conducting an investigation there. Their awkward assurance that before the abduction no one in the embassy knew who Eichmann was simply seemed impertinent. And the contact between the embassy staff and Eichmann’s circle of friends could no longer be concealed. The German ambassador was able to provide a detailed report on Willem Sassen, which reveals that he not only knew Sassen well but also shared many of his political views. This level of involvement nearly made his boss, Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano, lose his composure. It seemed, he said, “that some of our missions are not giving sufficient reports of these remnants [!] of National Socialism, and are not taking adequate precautions to distance themselves from them in an unambiguous way.”¹⁴⁴

Brentano didn’t seem worried that some of his colleagues in Bonn were among these remnants. And his instructions were wasted on Ambassador Werner Junker. At the end of 1962, Junker would still do everything in his power to prevent the extradition of the mass murderer Josef Schwammberger. He would be strongly supported by Constantin von Neurath, the director of Siemens Argentina S.A. Neurath would explain at length that he had employed this expert in ghetto management “at the company for 12 years.” The idea of handing men like him over to the West German judicial system made both the ambassador and the Siemens director “objectively very concerned.” They anticipated that Schwammberger would be “urgently needed” in the following years, “and his absence [would] create huge problems for the firm.”¹⁴⁵ And the inventive ambassador added suggestions for how Argentine law could be cleverly deployed against the interests of German courts. So the hope that the Eichmann trial might have changed things was not fulfilled—on the contrary, the affair taught people a few tricks. In the fall of 1960, the embassy’s errors were effectively dismissed as a communication issue resulting from a lack of expertise, and a public scandal was avoided. The only fear was that Adolf Eichmann probably remembered his Foreign Office colleagues only too well. Nobody could say whether he would mention them during the trial. So taking care of their charges in Argentina became even more important.

Eichmann’s knowledge also posed a problem for institutions that had “denazified” a large number of former comrades by employing them in public services. They included the BKA, where a former SS man served as the president’s permanent representative; at least forty-seven gentlemen from the death’s head order served alongside him.¹⁴⁶ The intelligence services had also been storing up this kind of trouble for themselves. Out of a fear of Bolshevism, they had taken into their ranks men with a past whom Eichmann knew very well, among them Wilhelm Höttl, Otto von Bolschwing, Franz Rademacher, and Alois Brunner.¹⁴⁷ The BND had succeeded in removing Brunner’s name from the wanted list in Greece only a few months previously, with the help of the German embassy in Athens. It didn’t want to risk losing one of its most important connections in the Middle East.¹⁴⁸

Compared with such revelations, the case of Adenauer’s (far-)right-hand man Hans Globke looked comparatively harmless. People had grown used to East Germany’s attacks on prominent people like Globke and routinely discredited them as Eastern propaganda. But these nerves were particularly raw, as evidenced by the federal government’s firm refusal to provide legal aid for Eichmann—although as a German citizen, he had every right to it.¹⁴⁹ The government preferred to tolerate National Socialists financing Eichmann’s defense in secret, with the knowledge of the BND. His lawyer, however, would have his “costs” paid by the State of Israel.¹⁵⁰ As a precaution against too many damaging revelations during the course of the trial, the deals agreed to in advance with Israel were frozen “until the end of the Eichmann trial.”¹⁵¹ Only on January 22, 1962, did Adenauer let Ben-Gurion know the promised accommodations could now be granted.¹⁵²

Other people had more specific concerns. Luis Schintlholzer had always taken a great deal of pleasure in telling people he had helped Eichmann escape Germany and had even chauffeured him personally to the Austrian border. He was now confronted with a summons to provide a witness statement.¹⁵³ As the holder of a fake West German passport, he appears to have thought complying too risky a prospect; he absconded and went into hiding in Munich. An acquaintance of his told the BND that Schintlholzer had made some inquiries in Innsbruck, wanting to turn himself in, but had been advised to wait until September 1960 at the earliest. Schintlholzer told this acquaintance, with some relief, that if he waited, he would apparently face a prison term of just five to seven years, of which he would have to serve two or three. His concern about being incriminated by Eichmann’s testimony proved unfounded. Schintlholzer did, in fact, turn himself in at the start of the trial in April 1961. He was placed in custody and investigated for a year but was then released and remained a free man until his death in 1989. He held back a little on the stories about how he had been the notorious prisoner’s chauffeur, but he never hid his political views. His wife headed his death notice with the SS motto “His honor was called loyalty,” and the notice next to it, placed by his mourning SS comrades, showed that Frau Schintlholzer had not chosen this phrase unwittingly.¹⁵⁴

Eichmann’s abduction caused alarm outside Germany as well. At the start of June 1960, turmoil broke out in Rome.¹⁵⁵ Umberto Mozzoni, the apostolic nuncio in Buenos Aires, went to see the Argentine foreign minister—and their discussion didn’t just cover the president’s upcoming audience with the pope. According to a surprisingly well-informed journalist on the Austrian paper Volkswille, Vatican diplomats had called on several United Nations member states to demand Eichmann’s return to Argentina: “Via semi-official channels, the papal officials expressed their opinion that the Second World War’s leading Nazis should no longer be prosecuted. They should be playing an active role in the defense of Western society against Communism: today, it is more necessary than ever to gather together all anti-Communist forces.” This view, which had been heard during the Nuremberg Trials, served as a rationale for people helping National Socialists evade justice. If the Church was now invoking international law and the struggle against the “barbarism of the East,” it was because everyone would shortly be hearing about Eichmann’s Red Cross passport and the character references that Catholic priests had provided for a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. The first detailed newspaper article disseminated details about Bishop Hudal and others, explained their cooperation with the International Red Cross, and described the dubious role of the Yugoslav priest Krunoslav Draganovic. People started talking about “Vatican passports,” and no one could predict how many “Vatican documents” Eichmann would know about.

Eichmann’s best friends in Argentina, who had earlier done so much to try to find him, now distanced themselves as quickly as possible. When the police went to interrogate his traveling companion “Pedro Geller” (Herbert Kuhlmann), who had been the guarantor for Eichmann’s apartment in Chacabuco Street, they met Horst Carlos Fuldner. To their surprise, he opened the door to them and chattered away cheerfully. He said he was still the head of CAPRI, as the insolvency process was a long one, and had known both Geller and Eichmann. The police noted: “Fuldner explained that until May 26, he had not known Ricardo Klement’s true name. Klement had given up his post with CAPRI in 1953.… On the day in question, at ten in the morning, a distraught young man had come to his house at 2929 Ombú Street. Fuldner had never met him before, but he introduced himself as Klaus Eichmann, the son of the man Fuldner had known as Ricardo Klement.” Off the top of his head, the extremely helpful Fuldner managed to tell the police the exact date Kuhlmann and Eichmann had arrived in Argentina and even to name the Giovanna C as the ship on which they crossed the Atlantic. Nobody seems to have noticed that he was admitting to assisting Nazi fugitives.¹⁵⁶ A few people made public denials: when the press described Otto Skorzeny as Eichmann’s friend, Skorzeny, who now had a mailbox south of Hamburg, published a denial and threatened to take legal action against anyone trying to insinuate this sort of thing.¹⁵⁷ Like Fuldner, Johann von Leers told the police and the press that he had known Eichmann only fleetingly. Eichmann’s employer, colleagues, and friends (most of whom were lying) said they had never known who this Ricardo Klement really was.

The seeds of insecurity planted by the impending trial yielded some bizarre fruit. Two weeks after the forthcoming Eichmann trial was announced, a man turned up at the CIA’s office in Frankfurt, claiming he had always worked for the CIA and therefore had a right to immunity. He was Leopold von Mildenstein, whom Eichmann had so admired in Jewish Office II 112 of the SD. He was obviously afraid of revelations from the man whose interest in the “Jewish question” he had sparked. But the CIA classified him as uninteresting and denied him any special protection. An inquiry revealed that the agency’s last contact with him had been in 1956, when he settled in the Middle East and tried to support Gamal Abdel Nasser against Israel.¹⁵⁸ Some of Eichmann’s other fellow soldiers were also spurred into action. At the start of 1961, the CIA received rumors about Otto Skorzeny, who was so admired by his former Nazi comrades for liberating Mussolini. Some of those comrades had been making plans to free Eichmann, but that turned out to be too difficult, so they now wanted to kill the prisoner in Israel.¹⁵⁹ Looking at the files, one wonders which the Americans found more confusing—the fact that such absurd plans allegedly existed, or that their German colleagues in the BND seemed to believe in them. In any case, they give us a good impression of what old Nazi heroes were discussing late into the night.¹⁶⁰

Eichmann’s abduction altered the lives of the SS men and other perpetrators of the genocide more radically than any event since the defeat in May 1945. It changed the way they interacted with one another for good; the years of comfortable exile and the natural trust between old comrades were suddenly over. For those who hadn’t known much about the extermination of the Jews, their new knowledge dispelled any sense of nostalgia, and the others were suddenly fugitives once more. They realized there would be no return to normality. “Now they see that I was right,” an agitated Josef Mengele noted in his diary, before moving even farther away, to Brazil, in October 1960.¹⁶¹ Fifteen years after the end of the war, the expatriates suddenly remembered that they had to be careful not to draw attention to themelves. And they only had a short time to consider their strategy.

Israel was eager to put off the inevitable debate about its violation of international law for as long as possible, and it resurrected the old Middle East story, spreading the news that Eichmann had been taken prisoner in a neighboring country.

But the real location of Eichmann’s capture soon came to light, and from that moment on, Argentina was full of journalists trying to find out more about Eichmann’s life. Wilfred von Oven finally got an opportunity to display his considerable knowledge of the Dürer circle; Fuldner gave interviews to his friend Fritz Otto Ehlert, a correspondent from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; the Mercedes director William A. Mosetti took pains to convince Ehlert not to publish the company’s name, at least. But for the people who had known Eichmann too well, all that remained was to lie low.¹⁶² The Sassen circle disintegrated. Any further involvement in wide-ranging discussions about old times was now impossible, as were prominent positions in society and conspicuous celebrations of Hitler’s birthday. In 1965 the Latvian Herbert Cukurs, who had murdered Jews in Riga, was shot dead in Montevideo, reminding the old comrades in South America of their fear.¹⁶³

But one Argentine friend took his Eichmann connection and went on the offensive with it: Willem Sassen. On June 6, according to an Argentine police report, two men in civilian clothing broke into Eichmann’s house and took photographs of everything.¹⁶⁴ That was the same day that Sassen persuaded Vera Eichmann to sign the contract with Life, which required photos; the police seem to have observed a secret visit rather than a break-in. A short while later pictures from the hastily abandoned house appeared alongside articles in the German magazine Stern and the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, to which Sassen apparently also sold material from the Argentina Papers.¹⁶⁵ From then on the former SS war correspondent presented himself as an investigative journalist selling the story of a lifetime. He brazenly claimed that his true friends had always called him (Sassen, the great anti-American) “Willy.” To his family, he carefully explained that he had actually never liked the man who had been his guest every weekend for almost a year.¹⁶⁶

As the trial in Israel approached, accompanied by a media storm, nobody in the world wanted to be connected with Adolf Eichmann. Facts were coming to light, and for the first time people discussed them instead of dismissing them. But Eichmann’s appearance before the court also offered an opportunity for one of the most astonishingly successful acts of suppression in European history. This nervous shadow of a man in a glass box, who gradually disappeared behind his little desk, the stacks of files, his unintelligible German—how could this man ever have been someone? Eichmann described himself as the man behind the desk, allowing former colleagues who had never actually entered his office to claim they had never met him. Nobody knows a little cog in the machine—especially people who don’t know anything else, either. The success of this strategy in the 1960s, and the fact that it still appears today in almost every book about the Holocaust, is frightening. But a glance at the daily papers from May 24, 1960, shows the level of knowledge that journalists assumed of their readers when they wrote articles with headlines like “The Manager of the ‘Final Solution.’ ”¹⁶⁷ Long before the trial began, Eichmann’s name had become a symbol that required no further explanation. And yet here we are, still explaining to the world why no one knew this man before 1960—a man whose arrest unleashed an outpouring of emotions from New York to Warsaw, from Bonn to Tel Aviv. This was a moment when world history was suddenly brought into focus, and no further explanation was required.

The saying goes that in a crisis, you find out who your real friends are. But Adolf Eichmann didn’t find the friends he expected. Those who still cleaved undeterred to National Socialist ideals wanted nothing to do with their comrade. Nor did the far-right press step into the breach: unusually, it stood shoulder to shoulder with public opinion in Germany. It wasn’t the Germans—no, it was the Eichmanns who had secretly murdered six million Jews, and it was a terrible business. Ever since then the neo-Nazi movement has run roughshod over reality in the way Willem Sassen and Ludolf von Alvensleben planned to in 1957. Their attempts to redeem Hitler and the Reich are based on claims that Adolf Eichmann and his colleagues had not belonged there. “Das Verbrechen hat kein Vaterland” was the new slogan: the crime has no fatherland; the fatherland recognizes only its heroes.¹⁶⁸ The extermination of the Jews in Europe is seldom called that in the country that perpetrated it; Germans prefer the terms Holocaust or Shoah. In Argentina the crime was dismissed as an imported item that someone must have foisted upon the unsuspecting Germans. Like Hitler, the Buenos Aires Nazis had known nothing, and so ultimately the crime had nothing to do with them. With obvious relief, an anonymous writer for the monthly Nation Europa quoted the words Eichmann uttered at the start of his trial: “I never met him [Hitler] personally.” That cleared everything up: Eichmann had never seen the Führer in person, and neither the Jews nor the Germans recognized Eichmann’s name. The statement cast doubt on the “Führer’s order” that he claimed to have been following, and “even Herr Eichmann would never dare appeal to the German people.”¹⁶⁹ The writer was wrong about that, too, but the Germans who wrote for far-right magazines took the precaution of not listening to any more of the trial. Still, the number of pseudonyms used increased noticeably: the authors were more frightened than they wanted to admit.

“Nobody shed a tear for him then,” said the former Wehrmacht soldier Pedro Pobierzym—but that was not entirely true. After Adolf Eichmann’s execution, in far-off Brazil, Josef Mengele wrote a “very heavy-hearted” farewell to his comrade. It wasn’t just an expression of gratitude to Eichmann for not betraying him or any of the other people he had met in Argentina. Eichmann’s execution had a personal as well as a historic dimension for Mengele: “The event of 1 June [Eichmann’s execution], which I only heard about days afterward, did not surprise me, but it made a deep impression. Was there any sense in this killing? One is tempted to draw parallels, but then abandons the idea, horrified by the reality of the course history has taken over the last 2000 years. His people betrayed him despicably. This was probably the heaviest human burden for him. And that is probably the core of the problem in this case! One day the German people will be ashamed of this! Or else they will not be ashamed of anything!”¹⁷⁰

Eichmann as a German Jesus in Jerusalem? Mengele’s Catholic upbringing isn’t an adequate explanation for this monstrous idea. But two things are obvious: Mengele understood Eichmann better than any of the other National Socialists in Argentina, and he also knew that something united the two of them. The Germans wanted nothing to do with Eichmann, and since an arrest warrant had also been issued for Mengele in 1959, they wanted nothing to do with him either. A quarter of a century earlier, the people of Germany had succumbed to the fever of National Socialism just as Eichmann and Mengele had. Without the German people, neither of these men could have become what they became, but now these people refused to extend them the respect that both were certain they deserved. They had considered themselves the executors of the Führer’s orders and the executive of the entire German population. And now this population no longer wanted to know them. Eichmann’s fears went even further. He advised his family: “Don’t go to Germany too much for the time being. I think it’s better for you to be careful.”¹⁷¹

In his concluding statement in Israel, Eichmann said he had the feeling he was being tried as a proxy for others. He was unquestionably an ideal proxy, having heaped a degree of guilt upon himself for which no earthly punishment would suffice—but that didn’t change the fact that his feeling was correct. The German people were only too happy to pretend that Eichmann had murdered six million Jews by himself. His offer to hang himself in public, to take the guilt from “German youth,” was grotesque, but it revealed the fundamental problem with the trial. Israel was hoping for catharsis, a collective reflection on collective guilt, and even Eichmann grasped the fact that his warped martyrdom might endow his pitiful situation with pathos and heroism. But the perpetrators, collaborators, and willing sympathizers just wanted to be rid of their scapegoat. “You make things so difficult for so many of your sons, sacred Fatherland! But we will not leave you, and we will always, always love you!” wrote Mengele, attempting to comfort himself.¹⁷² “Leave history to create a judgment,” Eichmann wrote in his farewell letter to his family.¹⁷³ Neither man could expect anything more from the present.