3

Detested Anonymity

He was probably bored to death.

—Hannah Arendt, on Eichmann in his North German hideout

At first glance, there was nothing on the Lüneberg Heath to serve as a reminder of a glittering SS career. The lifestyles of Otto Heninger and Adolf Eichmann could hardly have been more different. Instead of a uniform and gleaming boots, an office and an orderly, he was left with a secondhand Wehrmacht coat and a hut in the forest. No plenipotentiary powers, no carte blanche, no trips in his own official car around half of Europe, no new ways to exterminate the “enemy.” In the space of a few months, Eichmann’s existence had become entirely unremarkable—you might even call it tranquil. As a prisoner of war and a fugitive, his life had been in danger, and all his energy was focused on survival. Now, the peace of the forest, his plentiful rations,¹ and an unchanging daily routine provided a certain security and an opportunity for reflection. In Argentina, Eichmann claimed: “In the year 1946 I made a first attempt to set my recollections down in writing, using the figures which at that time were quite freshly lodged in my memory.”²Considering his circumstances and the timing of his later bouts of writing, this wasn’t out of character. Still, it’s impossible to imagine this activity as particularly contemplative: Eichmann might have lost his desk, but he had lost none of his attitude. His writing was not an attempt to comprehend his own actions; it arose from the fact that people were condemning the crimes he felt to be his life’s work. Eichmann wasn’t going in search of the truth; he was looking for a plausible justification of his actions in case the worst should happen.

He must have started formulating this view of his incredible career—a story that would exonerate him as far as possible—when he was still a prisoner of war, constantly threatened with interrogations. News of the numerous cases against his superiors and colleagues made him consider how he would look to a tribunal, be it as witness or as defendant. Eichmann had played the role of interrogator often enough to know that he wouldn’t get away with an outright lie. But the truth was too monstrous to be mitigated. Eichmann might have agreed with the commandant of Auschwitz that the murder of millions of Jews was nothing more than the “battles” that “the next generation will no longer have to fight.”³ But he was intelligent enough to know that most other people wouldn’t see it that way. They were busy trying to forget or repress who and what they had spent the previous twelve years following—but for dedicated National Socialists who were wanted for crimes against humanity, the war was by no means over.

Eichmann always claimed that from the very beginning, he read everything that was written about the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. “In the forested heathland,” he explained somewhat incautiously to Willem Sassen, “I was given a whole pile of old newspapers with articles about me. The headlines were Mass Murderer Eichmann, where is the mass murderer, where is Eichmann and similar.”⁴ His later conversations and statements show that he really was familiar with the major texts and events of the time, although it isn’t entirely clear when he first read them. We only know what he might have read during this period, without being able to rule out the possibility that he might only have had sight of the material at a later date. The first book, which he later would quote repeatedly, was Der SS-Staat (The SS State) by Eugen Kogon, a work based on the Buchenwald Report, a group effort by former inmates of the camp, commissioned by the U.S. military authorities.⁵ The book, published in 1946, contributed to the image of the Nazi perpetrators as a few asocial, perverse sadists, which Eichmann must have found insulting and provoking. It bore no relation to his vision of the Nazi leadership as a new elite, of which he had been a member. Eichmann would also have been able to read about Höttl’s and Wisliceny’s statements in early postwar newspapers and pamphlets, as they were widely covered in the press. He said he also read Das Urteil von Nürnberg (The Judgment of Nuremberg) while he was still in northern Germany. The book was published in fall 1946, in Robert M. W. Kempner’s edition.⁶ Fundamentally, nothing speaks against Eichmann having read these publications during his forestry period: nostalgic political conversations were evidently not unusual on “the Island.” People from the local area recall that the house, inhabited by the woodsmen and by Ruth, the Red Cross sister who lived with them, was a popular meeting place for anyone who fancied a beer and a chat about old times. The pamphlets were certainly not costly to obtain either, since the British occupying forces distributed them as part of the “reeducation” effort. In any case, by the time Eichmann moved out of the woods in 1948, to run a chicken farm in the little hamlet of Altensalzkoth, his interest would have been apparent. Looking back on his life at that time, however, he claims the opposite: “Life went on peacefully on this beautiful heathland. On Sundays I cycled to the village inn near Celle.… It sometimes made me smile when the landlord told me what the local paper was saying about Eichmann. ‘It’s probably all lies and made-up stories,’ he would say—and this made me very glad and content.”⁷

But Eichmann’s special role in history did not confront him only in the newspaper articles and books he read. His new home lay just a couple of miles from the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which was now a displaced persons’ (DP) camp, temporary accommodation for the people who had survived the National Socialists’ deportations. Eichmann was living right next to his victims—only now his business was eggs, not execution. In Argentina he used this spectral scenario to tell Sassen what he wanted to hear: “On the Lüneberg Heath, it was near where Bergen-Belsen had been, and everything round there smelled of garlic and it was all Jews, because who was buying anything at that time? Only the Jews, and then I said to myself, I, I who was bargaining with Jews over wood and eggs, I was amazed and astounded, and I thought you see—goddammit! They all should have been killed, and there those fellas are, doing deals with me, you know?”⁸ In spite of this repugnant Nazi bluster among friends, the proximity of Bergen-Belsen posed a genuine problem for Eichmann (though he mentioned it only in passing): “Throughout these years the fear never left me that someone might come up behind me and suddenly cry: ‘Eichmann!’ ”⁹ Taking a good look in the mirror clearly didn’t cause him the same level of concern.

We don’t know which of his thoughts Eichmann wrote down on the Lüneberg Heath, because—so he claimed in Argentina, at least—he burned first his recollections, and then even the statistics, not wishing to travel with them once he left his hiding place.¹⁰ The people who met Otto Heninger in the Miele-Kohlenberg district forestry, and then in Altensalzkoth, had no idea about his fears and his inner turmoil. They met a pleasant man who didn’t drink or gamble, organized a fair distribution of rations, knew his way around the “red tape,” was intelligent and polite, and paid his rent on time. This charming man with the slight Viennese accent clearly didn’t have a provincial upbringing. “He was such a quiet, unassuming person. On warm summer evenings he often played his violin for us. He played Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven,” one of the village women told journalists in 1960.¹¹ The men of the area also thought highly of the newcomer: his general technical knowledge meant he could fix broken equipment, and he was the only one in the area with a radio, on which he particularly liked to follow the news. Otto Heninger was a sort of man for all seasons, and although it sounds like a terrible cliché, even the children loved him: he helped tutor them and gave them chocolate.¹² It is unlikely that anyone knew who Otto Heninger really was. The members of this little village community let him into their lives, rented him rooms and fields, drove his chickens to market, bought his eggs, and respected his reserved manner. At this time, shortly after the war, nobody liked to ask too many questions.¹³ Eichmann, however, had none too high an opinion of the villagers. “I wasn’t able to read anything more challenging than a children’s story without making the simple folk around me suspicious.”¹⁴ Although Hannah Arendt had not heard this striking statement, she was nevertheless quite right to suppose that Eichmann must have been “bored to death” on the Lüneberg Heath.¹⁵ One distinct advantage was that at least he wasn’t making attempts on other people’s lives.

Festung Nord

Eichmann portrayed himself as a man alone among strangers, and in later years, he always avoided mentioning his contacts from this period by name. But even out on the Lüneberg Heath, a former SS man was not so very isolated. He wasn’t the only person with a past to choose this part of the country as a hiding place. Before the war’s end, the Nazis in Berlin had considered possible emergency meeting places. While some people fantasized about imaginary defensive positions in the Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress) and Festung Nord (North Fortress), men like Eichmann were probably aware of what these national redoubts were really for: in case of defeat, a coterie of like-minded people could quickly be gathered there, to allow the exchange of important information. The area around Celle in the north, and the Salzkammergut in the Austrian Alps, were strategically favorable. Both were remote but also close to national borders. It would be possible to repopulate networks there without being noticed, and in an emergency, people could make a quick exit: Altausee, in the geographical center of Austria, was a stone’s throw from the Italian part of South Tyrol, and from Altensalzkoth it was easy to reach the major German ports. Eichmann, who had spent so many years as an emigration expert, must have seen the advantages of these “fortresses” immediately. It was no coincidence that he located himself and his family, respectively, in these exact spots. Contemporaries in the Altensalzkoth area remembered visits from SS men like Willi Koch,¹⁶ who in all likelihood knew precisely who Otto Heninger was. One of Eichmann’s other guests certainly knew: Luis Schintlholzer, the man who afterward liked to brag about having been part of the circle that had helped Eichmann escape—and whose words reached the ears of an informant for the West German intelligence service.¹⁷

Luis (Alois) Schintlholzer was one of the brutal criminals and SS thugs whose involvement in the 1938 November pogrom in Innsbruck made them notorious.¹⁸ But this was only the beginning of the young Austrian’s career as a killer. He was born in 1914, and as a young man, he was famed throughout the city as a boxer. Schintlholzer was heavily involved in the Waffen-SS’s so-called reprisals against the Italian civilian population and in the destruction of the village of Caviola in 1943, during which forty people were murdered—a few of them burned alive in their houses. He was also active in the persecution of the Jews, becoming leader of the Trient Gestapo in February 1945. Even his retreat at the end of the war was accompanied by murder and lethal beatings.¹⁹ Despite repeated arrests after the war, Schintlholzer always managed to get away scot-free, although an Italian court sentenced him to life imprisonment in absentia. In the late 1940s, the unrepentant SS man was living in Bielefeld with his wife (and later children). He kept his real name, though he had a forged German passport, because there was a warrant out for his arrest in Austria. We don’t know the circumstances of Schintlholzer and Eichmann’s meeting in northern Germany. They may have made contact through a circle of Austrian SS comrades, of which Schintlholzer was a committed member until his death in 1989. However they met, they both doubtless knew who they were dealing with. Schintlholzer would later say that Eichmann told him about documents and notes on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” that he had hidden in northern Germany. There were statistics there too and, most important, background information on those responsible.²⁰ Schintlholzer was Otto Heninger’s final guest on the Lüneberg Heath: he was there to make sure Eichmann reached the Austrian border undetected. Speaking to Willem Sassen, Eichmann hinted: “On the Lüneberg Heath I got around a fair bit, you know. You see, I had been on the move constantly, I didn’t just go and hide in a hole somewhere.”²¹Given that he even managed to meet up with an old comrade from Bielefeld, we can guess what he might have meant by this remark.

In time, plenty of men returned from the prisoner of war camps. At least one of them took up with Eichmann again: Hans Freiesleben, who came to live in Altensalzkoth after his release. SS comradeship proved lasting. Old associations that, at first, had been useful for pure survival, and the provision of hiding places, developed into a network of escape routes over the following years. The sheer number of former National Socialist officials who found their way to northern Germany points to something more than a collection of individual escape plans. And some of these men would meet Eichmann again in Argentina.

Family Ties

We cannot assume that Eichmann intended to settle permanently on the Lüneberg Heath. But over time he came to feel so comfortable there that, in 1947, he accepted an invitation to the wedding of one of his fellow foresters. Nor did he shy away from the wedding photo, standing quite close to the bride. If he had stayed in this area, he would most likely never have been found. But safety was no substitute for his family. Much to the delight of the village gossips,²² Otto Heninger received the occasional visit from Nelly Krawietz, the pretty straw-blond lady from the south who prepared exotic dishes like Kaiserschmarrn for him. People also spoke of him having a couple of relationships in the local area—but this didn’t stop Eichmann from wanting to go back to his family.

It was Vera Eichmann who made the first attempt to return to their old life. Her behavior following her infamous husband’s disappearance betrays the fact that the Eichmanns had discussed their emergency plans in advance. She was not only cautious but showed surprising strength, enduring interrogations, house searches, and surveillance by the Allies and survivor groups. It was thanks to Eichmann’s wife that for a number of years not a single photograph of him was to be found. Like his family in Linz, Vera must have kept all her papers very well hidden, bringing them out only in 1952, shortly before her departure for Argentina. When she was questioned by the CIC in November 1946, she told them she had divorced her husband in March 1945 and had seen him for the last time in April, when he had wanted to say good-bye to the children in Altaussee. She seemed clueless about her husband’s crimes and gave a statement that bore a striking resemblance to those given by Eichmann’s parents and siblings the month before.²³

Everyone repeated the legend that Eichmann was the black sheep of the family, which Eichmann himself put about among his comrades before the end of the war. The fact that Vera Eichmann received support from her husband’s family doesn’t seem to have raised any eyebrows.²⁴ Nor did it occur to anyone that Karl Adolf Eichmann would never have fallen out with his son over the latter’s National Socialist worldview, because he himself was a committed Nazi. Eichmann’s father had joined the NSDAP at the end of the 1930s, which as Vera Eichmann later said caused him some difficulties in 1945. But it wasn’t simply “because he was a Nazi”: there were also items in his possession for which he had no proof of ownership, and the things that obviously didn’t belong to him were subsequently confiscated. David Cesarani is right to warn us not to underestimate the “dynamic interplay between father and son.”²⁵

In April 1947 Eichmann’s wife took the next step, attempting to have her husband declared dead in Bad Ischl. She claimed he had fallen in Prague in 1945. This may have been done in collaboration with Eichmann’s father, who had also discussed escape plans with his son early on. If it had been successful, Adolf Eichmann might really have managed to spend his life undiscovered in Europe, particularly given how adaptable we know he was. It would also have given his wife the right to a pension. At first glance, Vera Eichmann’s evidence looked convincing: she brought Lisa Kals, who was married to a man from Altaussee and was also resident there, with her as a witness. She was able to produce a letter from a Czech captain by the name of Karl Lukas, giving a report of Eichmann’s death. But Simon Wiesenthal immediately realized he had heard the name before: it belonged to Vera’s sister’s husband, who now lived with her mother near Linz. Alerted by Wiesenthal, the Altaussee police spotted a further inconsistency: Lisa Kals, the recipient of the letter from Vera’s brother-in-law, had been born Lisa Liebl.²⁶ Vera Eichmann had tried to obtain a death certificate for her husband with the aid of her two sisters and her brother-in-law.²⁷

When Wiesenthal produced two sworn statements proving that Eichmann had been seen alive in Altaussee in May, Vera Eichmann withdrew the application, having achieved the exact opposite of what she had intended. It was now clear to everyone that Eichmann was still alive; otherwise this subterfuge on the part of his family would not have been necessary. The CIC made another search of the Eichmann family’s houses, and the house of one of his lovers. An Israeli spy even managed to secure a photo of Eichmann through Maria Mösenbacher, another of his female acquaintances.²⁸ Wisliceny had put the investigator on to a man who claimed to have been Eichmann’s driver and could therefore provide him with a substantial list of these female acquaintances. In truth, this man was Josef Weiszl, the “Jews’ emperor of Doppl,” a notorious sadist whose dog whip had become his trademark; he was also Wilhelm Höttl’s brother-in-law.²⁹ Weiszl appeared before a military court in Paris a short time later, where he told more tales on his boss; Weiszl, of course, had practiced sadism only under orders. Although the Eichmanns were probably unaware of the photo, Adolf Eichmann would surely have heard about the house searches from his father. During conversations with his associates in Argentina, it emerged that Eichmann even knew about the arrest warrant that had been issued in Vienna.³⁰ All the members of the Eichmann family could see there was no alternative for Adolf Eichmann. He would have to resort to his emergency plan: escape from Germany. For Vera Eichmann, this would mean more years of waiting, doing nothing to alert suspicion. When she finally met her husband again in Buenos Aires, she had not seen him for seven years.

Eichmann’s Hesitation

We can make an educated guess at how Eichmann came to consider Argentina as a possible destination. He would later say he had read “that the former National Socialist Gauleiter of Carinthia was living in Argentina.”³¹ Eichmann was obviously referring toSiegfried Uiberreither, who, strictly speaking, had been the gauleiter of Styria. He had managed to escape from Dachau in May 1947, before he could be handed over to Yugoslavia along with the real gauleiter of Carinthia, Friedrich Rainer. The Austrian papers were full of this matter, and speculations soon surfaced that Uiberreither had fled to Argentina.³² By the end of the 1940s, a surprising number of people knew that former Nazi bigwigs were living in Argentina. Rumors were not the only things circulating; books and magazines from the Dürer publishing house were also making the rounds. Based in Buenos Aires, Dürer spread extreme National Socialist ideas, openly peddling authors with very familiar names. Germans with far-right leanings also eagerly read Der Weg—El Sendero, the most right-wing of all the postwar Nazi magazines, which was published by Dürer from 1947. It was as openly anti-Semitic, racist, and National Socialist as if the Third Reich had never collapsed.

Eberhard Fritsch, Dürer’s young publisher, relied on the huge publicity he received in Germany. He was so aggressive and self-confident that the ever-increasing circulation of this fascist propaganda sheet from abroad unleashed a wave of warnings and exposés in the German media. People wrote of “Nazi resistance cells” in Argentina and “the Hitlers of South America”; they warned readers about “the Weg that leads into the abyss.” Munich’s Neue Zeitung called Fritsch the “up-and-coming man of the Fourth Reich.”³³The Hamburg-based Der Spiegel also claimed that prominent Nazis had been ordered to flee to Argentina by the Wehrmacht’s high command.³⁴ Der Weg also ran ads for travel agencies and for a trustworthy-sounding club called Kameradenwerk (Comrade Work). For a devoted National Socialist like Eichmann, these must have sounded like messages from the Promised Land.

Wilfred von Oven, a former subordinate of Goebbels’s and an unrepentant National Socialist, also ended up in northern Germany after the war. He made no secret of the fact that it was the Dürer publications that had first made him curious about Argentina. Eberhard Fritsch published Oven’s book on Goebbels while he was still living in Schleswig-Holstein, using communication networks between Germany and Buenos Aires that were clearly already fully functioning.³⁵ In Argentina, Eichmann would come to value this network.

Argentina didn’t just sound good; it was a realistic destination for Nazi fugitives. Thanks to groundbreaking source studies by the Argentine author Uki Goñi, we now know a great deal about the networks that made escape possible for those who were keen to emigrate. For someone with a biography like Eichmann’s, improvisation in this area was not advisable. At first, the established escape route went via harbors in Sweden, which from northern Germany were practically on Eichmann’s doorstep. But after this route was exposed in 1948, people had to rely on the southern alternative. A chain of German helpers, Argentine public officials, Austrian border guards, Italian records offices, the Red Cross, men from Vatican circles, and influential shipping magnates allowed people to escape. In order to start down this route, it was imperative to have two documents. The first was a short-term visa for Argentina, provided by Horst Carlos Fuldner, a people smuggler who had the blessing of the Argentine caudillo Juan Perón. The second was identity papers in the same name, which in Eichmann’s case were issued by the commune of Termeno, in South Tyrol. Eichmann, the concentration camp “doctor” Josef Mengele, and Himmler’s chief adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben (all particularly problematic cases), were issued papers there at the same time in 1948. Eichmann’s paper was dated June 11, numbered 131, and made out in the name of Riccardo Klement.³⁶ Bishop Alois Hudal, the self-appointed protector of persecuted and tortured persons—by which he meant Nazis—would later become famous for having arranged papers from Rome for this particular fugitive.³⁷

Almost two years elapsed between these papers being issued and Eichmann’s actual escape. He made use of the visa only at the last minute, just before it expired. What could have made him hesitate? One possible answer is the political upheaval in Germany between 1947 and 1950. At the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in December 1947, it became obvious that differences with the Soviet Union were continuing to grow, and a split between the Allies was no longer to be avoided. A lot of Nazis had speculated about this east-west conflict before the end of the war. They hoped that the Western powers’ anti-Bolshevism would ultimately prove stronger than their desire to bring down Hitler’s Germany. Germany could then reemerge as a sovereign state. “Eichmann firmly believed in the dispute between the Western powers and Russia, and saw it as his last chance,” one of his close colleagues later reported.³⁸ Göring also expressed this belief several times in Nuremberg, hoping that it might even return him to power.³⁹

The year 1948 saw the gradual realization of this split. With it came the hope of a new beginning for Germany and, more important, of a general amnesty. Another development came as a more unpleasant surprise to Eichmann: on June 20, 1948, the currency reform came into effect. It meant the loss of his job, as the company he worked for after Burmann & Co. promptly went bankrupt. The currency reform also threatened the money that Eichmann had been carefully putting aside. For someone living illegally, the introduction of the Deutschmark posed a serious problem. Avoiding all contact with officials meant receiving neither the so-called bounty allowance of forty Deutschmarks nor the new currency. It would also be impossible for him to exchange his old Reichsmarks without help: for this exchange you needed a bank account and the correct documentation for the Finance Office’s checks. Eichmann had neither. Although he had a legitimate resident’s permit and valid papers, he had carefully avoided any contact with officials. People living illegally would now have to rely on money launderers, which didn’t make the exchange rate particularly favorable. He would also have no protection against any misappropriation of funds. Someone like Eichmann, who had used unfair exchange rates in Vienna to generate millions for the Reich, knew this only too well.

When he wasn’t “quartered” in confiscated villas with well-stocked wine cellars, Eichmann had always made a conscious effort to live frugally, and the currency reform was a setback to his plans to find a new life overseas. Even old comrades wouldn’t provide help for free. His investment in the chicken farm should possibly be seen in this light. In the 1930s, when Jews were routinely robbed of everything they owned before being allowed to leave the country, Eichmann had learned that if you wanted to safeguard your funds, you had to invest in material assets—as long as a criminal state didn’t set out laws prohibiting the purchase of material assets for this very reason.

No one prevented Eichmann from investing in chickens, and no one would have stopped him from exchanging his poultry for the new currency a few weeks later. However, once this new, stable currency had been introduced, the earning potential of his investment became apparent. As the children of the village remembered, Eichmann kept more than one hundred chickens and charged a steep twenty pfennigs for an egg. For comparison, his monthly rent was ten Deutschmarks.⁴⁰ And so he was able to put some money aside, and wait a little while, hoping that the milestone of five years after the end of the war might lead to an amnesty after all. But another event might also have played a role in Eichmann’s hesitation: a failed attempt by the police, Israeli “guests,” and a Nazi hunter to arrest him in Austria, in the winter of 1948.

A Family Visit?

During a press conference in 1960, Simon Wiesenthal explained to an astonished audience that he had tried to catch Adolf Eichmann on his planned Christmas visit to Altaussee in 1949: “The house was surrounded, but Eichmann didn’t come. He was warned off, or became suspicious, and disappeared again.”⁴¹ This was not just one of Wiesenthal’s dramatic stories but a genuine operation, even if his dates were not entirely accurate.

In the fall of 1948, there were clues that Eichmann was going to try to visit his family between Christmas and the New Year. Reports on the operation that followed have been written by several of the people involved; their details don’t always tally, but they can be reduced to a common core and a set of dates.⁴² In December 1948, representatives of the Austrian police force from Linz (including Leo Frank-Maier⁴³), together with Israeli agents (including Michael Bloch⁴⁴)and Simon Wiesenthal, were lying in wait in Altaussee. The plan was to arrest Eichmann and hand him over to the Israelis, for which the chief of police in Linz would receive five thousand dollars in addition to the operation’s costs. And so they attempted to distribute themselves as unobtrusively as possible through the sparsely populated area—in the middle of a cold winter, when nighttime temperatures fell to -4 degrees F. The team all spoke of interruptions in their surveillance but couldn’t agree on who was ultimately to blame for Eichmann being warned off. The most likely explanation is that in a place as small as Altaussee, it simply wasn’t possible to conduct an operation on this scale without being discovered. The reports even mention rumors circulating in the town that Israelis were there, or the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who was not unknown in Austria.

Did Eichmann really attempt to visit his family in the period between Christmas and New Year 1948? Did he run the costly risk of traveling across Germany and crossing the border under a false name? We know from later years that despite beinggottgläubig(adhering to a racially based Nazi religion), Eichmann associated Christmas with a strong sense of family. And his papers were waiting for him in Italy, so the visit to his family could have been a stopping point along an escape route that he actually took later. But in that case, Eichmann would have disappeared from Altensalzkoth without selling his property there, incurring a huge financial loss. Neither Vera Eichmann nor the children would speak of such a plan in later years; nor did Eichmann’s observant neighbors in Altensalzkoth notice any long absence. Eichmann later indicated that the possibility had crossed his mind, though he was talking about 1950, when his escape route took him within a few miles of his wife and children as he traveled across Austria. He briefly considered whether to run the risk of meeting his family but, with great self-discipline, decided against it.⁴⁵ It is unlikely that Eichmann was less disciplined in 1948. In any case, he thought too much like an investigator to make the error of arriving on such a significant date, especially after Vera Eichmann’s failed attempt to have him declared dead.

But something else speaks against Eichmann having been close to his family at this time: at the end of September 1948, an interview in Linz gave rise to a series of newspaper articles. “Eichmann’s parents,” the Vienna Welt am Abend reported, “have heard nothing from their son since the end of the war.” Investigations in the area had, however, brought to light the rumor that Adolf Eichmann had been an American prisoner of war until 1946. He had taken the name Eckermann and was now said to be in the Middle East, “as an adviser to the grand mufti of Jerusalem, El Husseini, helping him to rid Palestine of its Jewish problem.” The stories, with headlines like “The Reich Commissar for the Jews” and “A Member of the Arab Legion,” persisted stubbornly in the press throughout October 1948.⁴⁶ Curt Riess, who had just finished his biography of Goebbels, went to Altaussee as a “special correspondent” to try to track Eichmann down. This trip resulted in nothing more than a somewhat labored and sensationalistic series of articles on “the merry wives of Altaussee,” which also managed to tap into legends of hidden Nazi gold. Die Neue Welt did at least provide a revealing document on Eichmann: his two-page, handwritten CV from 1937, taken from his service record, which pinpointed exactly when and where he was born, and how he began his murderous career. Riess also described exactly where Eichmann’s family now lived. One piece of information in particular came up again and again in the articles and must have caused the Eichmann family grave concern: “Eichmann is first on all the lists of war criminals.” Whatever travel plans Eichmann might have made, the end of 1948 was not a good time to put them into action. Clearly the man who had dreamed of becoming the “Reich Commissar for the Jews” was still on everyone’s mind.

A few years later the Gehlen Organization (the predecessor of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND) discovered that in 1949, a year after the failed Christmas operation, the Israeli consul in Vienna had set aside fifty thousand schillings for a campaign to find and arrest Eichmann.⁴⁷ There was even talk of a vast bounty of a million schillings on his head. Gehlen’s informant said that an Israeli unit had taken up residence in Austria, to kidnap Eichmann when he visited his family at Christmas. It had even chartered a plane from Salzburg airport. Was there another attempt to catch Eichmann, a year later?

Gehlen’s informant, according to the files, was Josef Adolf Urban. He was a man of many talents, born in 1920, and had been arrested in 1948 in a Linz coffeehouse that served as a trading center for fake passports. He had a bag full of counterfeit documents on him, which was enough for the Linz police to take him into custody. Leo Frank-Maier, one of the police officers involved, reported on Urban’s interrogation. He had allowed Simon Wiesenthal to listen in, because the man they had apprehended was clearly helping war criminals escape. In spite of the hard evidence, they were forced to release Josef Adolf Urban after two days. According to Frank-Maier, two American CIC agents turned up and demanded that the suspect be released: Urban was a vital coordinator in a spy network being deployed against the Soviet Union. Frank-Maier quickly discovered that in reality, Urban was feeding the U.S. agency made-up “information” from his also largely made-up “field agents.” He had even invented a number of weapons factories in the East.⁴⁸

What Frank-Maier could not know was that the Americans weren’t the only ones keen to avoid Urban being put on trial. The intelligence fabricator was also an informant for the national security division of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, and this fact would inevitably have come to light if he were put on trial.⁴⁹ Urban actually supplied pretty much every agency going, from the Deuxième Bureau to the Israeli intelligence service and of course the Gehlen Organization.⁵⁰ He was, as the authors of a comprehensive study on the BND put it, a “roving secret-service mercenary.”⁵¹ Reinhard Gehlen commissioned Urban, who he thought was well connected, together with Bruno Kauschen, to expand the Austrian branch of the German secret service.⁵² It is not known whether Gehlen was aware of how Urban sometimes came up with his explosive information and where he had learned to do so.

Was the information on the Israelis’ planned kidnap genuine? It wouldn’t have been difficult to find out about the failed operation in Altaussee in winter 1948–49, details of which had not escaped the local barkeeper. We cannot rule out the possibility that there was more fiction than truth in the insider knowledge that Urban passed on in 1952: at this point, as we will see, Gehlen was very interested in Eichmann. Urban then also claimed he had personally helped Eichmann escape—a confession that seems not to have harmed his career in the postwar West German intelligence service.⁵³ As is usually the case with intelligence service information, the publicly available files reveal very little. But we do know where Josef Adolf Urban learned the art of manipulation: first in the SD, then with Adolf Eichmann in Hungary.⁵⁴

The young careerist joined the NSDAP at eighteen (membership no. 6312927), and quickly became an SD leader in Vienna. He was one of Walter Schellenberg’s Balkan experts and finished up as head of the SD control center in Budapest, where Adolf Eichmann was proving to the world just how many people you could “transport to extermination” in the space of six weeks. Even Wiesenthal was taken aback by Urban’s stories about Rudolf Kasztner.⁵⁵ Reinhard Gehlen certainly had an eye for well-trained people.

Urban would have been one of the last people with an interest in Eichmann’s reappearance. Urban knew what Eichmann had done before 1945, and Eichmann knew Urban’s history. If Eichmann had turned up, Urban would have given him false papers for free (although Eichmann would never have relied on a petty criminal like Urban). But the former Budapest SD boss had another reason for not betraying Eichmann: he would remain a committed National Socialist as long as he lived. Colleagues reported that he always swore his employees into office “on the Führer Adolf Hitler, as he had reliable information that he was still alive and, according to Urban, living in a warm oasis in the South Polar region.” An insufficient knowledge of geography was clearly the least of Urban’s problems.⁵⁶ But his political views didn’t stop Reinhard Gehlen from continuing to employ Josef Adolf Urban in the BND as late as 1956. He remained on the BND’s payroll until the 1970s.

However, there is more evidence of a second attempt to smuggle Eichmann out of Austria besides that in the Gehlen Organization’s files. In addition to Simon Wiesenthal, two other men reported on a possible operation over the New Year period of 1949–50: the tireless Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, and Asher Ben Natan, who at that time was still the head of the Israeli Foreign Office’s political department, the forerunner of Mossad. But this plan also failed when Eichmann didn’t arrive.⁵⁷

The Gehlen Organization files contain more than just Urban’s finagling, due to a crucial development during the year between the two kidnap attempts. The bounty on the head of the “number one enemy of the Jews” had grown, according to Urban, though it had also shifted. The transformation from five thousand dollars into fifty thousand schillings would, in spite of the extra zero, have more than halved its value—but the huge sum of a million Austrian schillings was also mentioned. Discrepancies like these do not exactly speak in favor of the information’s reliability.

Twelve years later Eichmann really would be abducted by plane, after an Israeli unit finally managed to apprehend the man who had been hunted for so long. The CIA was certain that the plan must have originated with Simon Wiesenthal.⁵⁸ It had obviously got wind of the failed abduction attempts in the late 1940s.

We don’t know whose tip-off alerted Simon Wiesenthal to Eichmann’s visit to Altaussee, or why so many people believed an arrest operation would prove successful. We may doubt that this was a serious announcement about a planned visit. Whether it was a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity, or even a test by the family to find out how closely they were being observed, it served to let Eichmann know that people’s interest in him was undiminished. If the rumor of Israelis in Altaussee reached him after the fact, he must have found it extremely unsettling. After he was kidnapped in 1960, he spoke of his fear that the Jews, having lost so many of their own children, might now exact revenge on the children of the man who was (at least partly) to blame.⁵⁹ But because the list of war criminals was generally known, and because the Austrian police were on the alert, he had good reason to stay as far away from danger as possible. No wonder Eichmann decided to remain in remote Altensalzkoth a little longer, living the life of harmless Otto Heninger, farming chickens and selling expensive eggs to the people he had failed to deport to their deaths. But by 1950, Eichmann had money, and he had to face the fact that the founding of West Germany had not brought him immunity from prosecution. His visa for Argentina was about to expire. It was high time he was on his way.

An Orderly Escape

But even as he left Altensalzkoth, Eichmann kept a cool head. Absconding in the middle of the night would have aroused suspicion and led to stories that could have reached the wrong ears. But moving on, or even emigrating, was not a rare occurrence during these years. The war and its aftermath—escape, abduction, eviction, DP camps, and a shortage of accommodation—had created conditions in which a great number of people were looking for somewhere to call home. Eichmann managed to place Otto Heninger in their ranks. He sold his chickens to Forester Freiesleben, explained to his landlady that he wanted to go to work in Scandinavia as a mechanical engineer, and wrote a farewell letter to Nelly that laid a false trail for her as well.⁶⁰ He told her he was turning himself over to the Russians, which didn’t sound as absurd then as it might to our ears: there was a lot of speculation at the time about senior Gestapo officials, like Eichmann’s old boss Müller, escaping to the Soviet-occupied zone; who chose this escape route has still not been systematically investigated. The story had the added advantage of not exactly being simple to check out. In any case, Otto Heninger didn’t vanish like a thief in the night: he paid his outstanding rent and bade a proper farewell to Altensalzkoth. Nobody asked questions, and nobody informed the police. The neighbors retained a memory of him as a pleasant incomer. If they missed his reserved manner or his violin playing, they had only to look at him in the wedding photo. It might have been nice to hear from him occasionally and learn how he was doing out there in the big wide world. But nobody anticipated a postcard from Israel.

One of the questions that remains unanswered is whether Eichmann somehow managed to make contact with the escape network, or whether it sought him out. We can’t rule out help from his father in Linz: if an article from an Austrian newspaper about Uiberreither’s escape really made it all the way to northern Germany, Eichmann must have been in close contact with Austria. He himself gave contradictory accounts of these events. In one version, he found the people smugglers by placing carefully coded advertisements in local newspapers.⁶¹ According to the wildly romantic story he told at the start of 1961, the contact was the result of some risk-taking on his part, and thanks to a trustworthy comrade: “So I confessed to one of my closer friends on the Heath my intention to go overseas, and asked him if he knew anyone who knew about things to do with making this journey. In this way I came into contact with a man in Hamburg in 1950, a former SS man, who traveled a lot between Germany and Italy. I gave him 300 Marks out of my savings (2500 Deutschmarks of profit from the egg business), and obtained from him the most precise information about the ‘U-boat route’ to South America. He gave me every detail, every stopping place, every contact point.”⁶²

All his versions have one thing in common: they aim to deflect attention away from the people involved. Eichmann maintained this grateful solidarity with the people who had helped him right up until his execution. Today we can see that one basic element of his story simply doesn’t make sense: the papers necessary for the first part of his escape were produced at the start of June 1948, before the currency reform, and even before Eichmann lost his forestry job and became a chicken farmer. He deliberately gave a later date in his stories. Giving false dates was a disinformation tactic he described in detail to Sassen.⁶³ He perfected it to a frightening degree and used it at various points in his life.⁶⁴ During his trial, he managed to persuade the world that his role was less than it had really been by giving later dates for his activities. A man who is present for the first time at the opening of a new institution has a very different role from someone who visited the future site of that institution in the planning stages. He applied this tactic to places like the Central Emigration Offices and to the death camps. Similarly, a person who plans his escape carefully over the course of two years is very different from a person who makes a snap decision to travel to Italy, with nothing but a few addresses in his pocket, trusting he’ll be able to find out where to go from there. This sort of redating can draw a veil over large periods of time. All kinds of unpleasant questions can be avoided, like how Eichmann had the money and the connections to find out about an escape route in 1948, immediately before the currency reform; and how he came by the contact for the church offices that helped him obtain identity papers from South Tyrol and a short-term visa for Argentina. There was no way Eichmann could have traveled there in person. And Nelly Krawietz was out of the question, as he evidently didn’t trust her.

The path to constructing a new identity was complex, and obtaining the identity papers and the short-term visa was just the first step. With these papers, photos, and a character reference from the Franciscan priest Edoardo Dömöter, Eichmann could apply for a passport with the Red Cross in Genoa. Once he had the passport and the short-term visa, he could apply for a long-term visa at the Argentine embassy, and this, together with a doctor’s reference and another proof of identity, was what Eichmann needed in order to apply for personal documents in Buenos Aires. And then he needed passage on a ship. This whole process took a good two weeks in Genoa. Even Eichmann, the seasoned emigration specialist, could not have improvised such an efficient use of tiny bureaucratic loopholes across several countries and institutions—let alone men like Josef Mengele and Ludolf von Alvensleben, who had no experience at all in the flexible handling of exit arrangements.

The escape organization was a highly professional affair, as can be seen from the photographs that are still in the International Red Cross’s passport application files. Adolf Eichmann is surprisingly well dressed in his photo. With his carefully clipped hair, round glasses, beard, suit, and bow tie, he not only looks much older but is also the very model of an engineer, nothing like an officer. And Eichmann’s photos are no exception. Ludolf von Alvensleben, Himmler’s former chief adjutant, stood almost six feet tall and had a pronounced receding hairline, but here he appears in a curly toupee, with a little beard and drooping shoulders. There was a costumer at work here who knew exactly what he was doing.

Like many others going into exile, Eichmann used a system supported by a number of different parties, not least the professional people smugglers employed by the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina had an interest in German professionals who could help to drive forward the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrialized nation, and assisting their escape seemed like a solid investment. Conditions in postwar Europe were favorable for tempting these people overseas: the whole region had been reduced to rubble, everyone had to find a new place for himself, and people were open to offers. Argentina was not the only country trying to convince well-educated men to emigrate, but it was one of the few that also provided this opportunity to criminals like Eichmann. On the Argentine side, aid for fugitives was organized by the German-Argentine Rudolfo Freude, who had close connections to emigration officials. Another German-Argentine, the aforementioned Horst Carlos Fuldner, traveled to Europe in 1948 to provide papers and organizational structures to help people escape; he was assisted by the Argentine consulate. Fuldner was the man whom, years later, Eichmann’s son would call “Father’s best friend.”⁶⁵

The myth of ODESSA has obscured our view of reality for a long time. It was said to be a tightly run “Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen” (organization of former SS members), established after the fall of the Third Reich, that continued to run like clockwork in the underground. Initially, Odessa was just a code word in the prison camps, by which SS members could identify one another in order to provide mutual support.⁶⁶ Myths survive because they feed our imagination, and the myth of this organization fed the minds of two traumatized groups at once: the Nazi hunters, who over time began to overestimate their opponents the way hunters tend to do, and who were fond of conspiracy theories; and the National Socialists, who had idealized the efficiency of an organization like the SS when they had been in power and were comforted by the idea that it might still exist in some way following Germany’s capitulation. The notion that an association existed underground, to which all SS men were automatically given membership after 1945 and that continued to exist as if nothing had happened that May, was obviously a fantasy born variously of fear or hope. But just as obviously, people who are committed to an ideology don’t lose faith in it, or stop feeling a certain bond with one another, just because the state that sustained it and them has collapsed. On the contrary: Germany’s defeat created an omnipresent new enemy at home—the Allied forces—and having a common enemy strengthened Nazi solidarity. Romantic notions of the SS did not become nostalgic memories; they created a network suited to the new era. No large underground organization of former SS members ever existed, but there were former SS members in the underground who needed help and obtained it more easily from people for whom the SS had positive associations. Alliances like these are based on recommendations and relationships, especially when they are operating illegally. Membership in a strongly ideological organization served as a “recommendation” when it came to securing accommodations, contacts, a mailing address, or something more significant. The basic structure, like that of other National Socialist institutions such as the RSHA, changed in response to new developments. A rigid organization for aiding fugitives, if such a thing were possible, could never have been as effective as this flexible common-interest group, which allowed complete strangers to rely on one another for help. It shaped Eichmann’s escape through Europe just as it would shape his life in Argentina and even his behavior in the Jerusalem District Court. If we want to understand the context of Eichmann’s life in Argentina, we will get nowhere unless we look at how his escape was organized. Old comrades and their new sympathizers provided a kind of mutual aid that didn’t readily reveal itself: their network was oriented toward discretion. Help had to be given silently, because the enemy was everywhere, and maintaining the value of seemingly loose connections rested on never revealing how they worked. Eichmann still believed this in 1962 and always expressed his gratitude when he spoke of “the organization” to which he and his family owed their escape and their new life.⁶⁷

The Emigration Expert

Although Adolf Eichmann’s escape would not have been possible without the help of church institutions close to the Vatican, his road did not lead to Rome. Nevertheless the idea of Eichmann in the Eternal City persisted for a long time. In 1961 Moshe Pearlman named Genoa as Eichmann’s point of departure as well as the Franciscan priest who helped him there—he had had special access to the statements Eichmann made during his interrogation.⁶⁸ Hannah Arendt brought Pearlman’s information to a wider audience, but this still didn’t dispel the tenacious rumor that Eichmann had met Alois Hudal in Rome and had been made to take a test of faith with Anton Weber, the padre of the St. Raphael Society. Hudal may have had a hand in organizing Eichmann’s false papers, but we can rule out a personal encounter in Rome. Still, the name Hudal had been associated with efforts to help Nazi fugitives leave Europe since the early 1950s. So what could have been more natural, once Eichmann was arrested, than to fabricate a connection between Eichmann’s escape via Italy, aided by the church, and the only name people had heard in that context, Alois Hudal?

Although Bishop Hudal personally welcomed Nazis to Rome and looked after them during their escape, Eichmann was not one of them. His escape route took him out of Altensalzkoth in May 1950 and south to the border with Austria. The journey was easy and comfortable. Luis Schintlholzer from Bielefeld drove his old comrade from Celle to Bad Reichenhall on the Austrian border—at least, this is the story that got the former SS officer from Innsbruck into trouble in later years.⁶⁹ It was only a day’s drive, so no accommodation was necessary. From there a people smuggler took Eichmann along the back roads to Kufstein in Austria, and he went from there to Innsbruck, where he had a contact address, by taxi. In Nazi circles, Innsbruck was well known as a stopping place for people on the run from their past. There is much to suggest that Eichmann met his father there, or at least a middleman, as he left part of his savings behind in Austria.⁷⁰ From Innsbruck, he went south to the Vinaders guesthouse, in Gries am Brenner, and people smugglers helped him cross the border into Italy. Johann Corradini, the vicar of Sterzing, met Eichmann there and gave him back his luggage, which the man of God had personally taken across the border by bicycle. He also arranged a “taxi driver.” This wasn’t a one-off job for Corradini, and it’s safe to assume that the taxi driver was also in the know, earning good money from driving special passengers. In any case, he drove the fugitive to Bolzano, where, according to Eichmann’s new CV, he had been born in 1913, as the illegitimate child of Anna Klement. This was where Eichmann said he received a free short-term visa from the Argentine immigration authority. He must also have been given the identity papers from Termeno that had been deposited for him there, which declared him “stateless.”

From Bolzano, Eichmann’s journey continued through Verona to Genoa, where he found refuge in a Franciscan monastery. We are still largely ignorant of which of his former comrades he met there. Eichmann mentioned only Pedro Geller, a former officer in a tank regiment whose real name was Herbert Kuhlmann. Eichmann claimed to have lent him money for the crossing. We can assume that Kuhlmann, alias Geller, was not the only person Eichmann met on his journey; he made contacts during this period for his new life overseas. Eichmann spent his last weeks in Europe in the monastery, passing the time by attending various appointments at the Red Cross offices and the outpost of the Argentine immigration authority in Genoa (DAIA) or playing chess and discussing worldviews with the “old monk Franciscus.” Rumors that Eichmann officially converted to Catholicism and was baptized at this point are not to be believed.⁷¹ Baptism would have been neither smart nor necessary, as his false papers from Termeno already said he was a Catholic. Eichmann would later consistently describe himself as gottgläubig and took up his host’s request for him to attend the morning service with his usual self-importance: “On the day before my departure the monk, Pater Franciscus, urged me to come to mass, as he wanted to bless me. ‘It can’t hurt,’ he said. I put my arm around his shoulders and called him ‘my good old Pharisee.’ ”⁷² The fake religion in his passport didn’t trouble his conscience, and he described his attitude with an astonishing lack of tact: “Without hesitation I called myself [not: I became!] a Catholic. In reality I belonged to no church, but the help bestowed on me by the Catholic priests remained deep in my memory, and so I decided to honor the Catholic Church by becoming an honorary member.”⁷³ The men around Himmler had a slightly idiosyncratic idea of honor.

Eichmann’s relief, as the Giovanna C finally left Genoa’s harbor with about fifteen refugees on board, could still be heard in his voice when he recalled the crossing in Israel.⁷⁴ Reveling in the pathos of his salvation, he was struck by a particularly tasteless parallel between himself and earlier refugees: “Once it was the Jews, now it was—Eichmann!”⁷⁵ This comparison is revealing as well as offensive: in 1960 Eichmann was trying to convince everyone that he had been a complete unknown, but here he was, using the name Eichmann with all its symbolic meaning. On a first reading, it sounds like an incredible liberty, a perpetrator trying to rank himself alongside his victims—but on second glance, it reveals Eichmann as exactly what he was: a man who stood in irreconcilable opposition to the Jews, and who knew that other people saw him that way too. They would immediately understand the juxtaposition of Jews with Eichmann, which rested on “the famous name Eichmann.” It was surely no coincidence that Eichmann remembered these feelings as he cast his mind back to the last leg of his escape. He felt that the power of his old name promised the opportunity to make a new start in his new homeland: “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann.”⁷⁶ Friends who would help him precisely because of who he was. From the start, Ricardo Klement had been just a name on an identity document. The crossing to Argentina would give Eichmann back his freedom and his name.