2
Therefore one cannot say that in 1953 Israel knew Eichmann was in Argentina: only the file knew.
—Tom Segev1
In 1953, as the oft-repeated story goes, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal visited an aristocratic gentleman in Innsbruck who wanted to sell him some interesting stamps for his collection. The conversation happened to turn to Nazis: Wiesenthal had started the collection on the advice of his doctor, to distract him a little from his fixation on hunting criminals. At this point, his fellow collector fetched an envelope with some particularly attractive colored stamps, which had been lent to him by a friend. Wiesenthal took a moment to realize that this letter from Argentina contained a remarkable P.S.: “You’ll never guess who I saw here … that miserable swine Eichmann, who was in charge of the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water supply company.” This, of course, quickly put an end to the distraction prescribed by Wiesenthal’s doctor. Wiesenthal tried to purchase the letter, but—alas!—the collector couldn’t sell it, as it belonged to his friend. For Wiesenthal (and here we come to the hard facts), this was final confirmation that the trail Eichmann had laid in the Middle East was a red herring. The organizational force behind the Holocaust, the man he had been searching for since the end of the war, was hiding in Argentina. Wiesenthal hurried home and wrote a letter dated March 24, 1953, to Arie Eschel, the Israeli consul in Vienna, telling him about this incident.2
Wiesenthal gave a more sober description of the episode a few months later, in a letter to Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress in New York—although he claimed there that the incident was more recent: “In June 1953 I met one Baron Mast, who was an intelligence officer in the Austrian Armed Forces, and afterwards worked for the American and German intelligence services. Mast, a monarchist with every fiber of his being, and an anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, … showed me a letter that a former officer from Argentina had written him. The letter was dated May 1953, and it said that the writer had met Eichmann at this time in Buenos Aires. It also said that Eichmann was employed on a building site for a power station somewhere near Buenos Aires.”3 We now know that Simon Wiesenthal was holding the truth in his hands, seven years before the Mossad team took Eichmann prisoner. The only thing that remains unclear is the extent to which he was aware that it was neither a love of stamps, nor pure chance, that had brought him this information.
Baron Heinrich “Harry” Mast, fifty-six years old in 1953, was not just a man of independent means with a passion for stamps. He was an experienced agent who had worked for the Vienna intelligence service and then for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence organization. After the war, he had secured large parts of the Canaris archive and the state secrets it contained. “Count Bobby” was recruited by the American secret service shortly after the war ended. He and a friend invested in a publishing house in Bad Aussee, and in 1951 he started building up the Austrian branch of the Gehlen Organization, the German intelligence service that would become the BND in 1956. Wiesenthal was aware of this fact: contrary to his story of a serendipitous meeting between two stamp collectors, he had met Heinrich Mast before, and Mast had introduced himself as a Gehlen employee.4
Heinrich Mast had been brought into the Gehlen Organization by a man with just as much ambition as he had—a man who, during this period, was one of his generation’s most successful retailers of Nazi history: Wilhelm Höttl, the same Wilhelm Höttl whom Adolf Eichmann once thought his friend. Mast employed Höttl in his publishing house. Höttl and Mast worked for Gehlen for a short period, and in 1951 they went over to the Heinz-Dienst (FDHD), the competitor organization to Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence service, founded by Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz in 1950 with direct backing from German chancellor Konrad Adenauer.5 Adenauer wanted his own source of information, independent from the Allied powers, particularly when it came to developments in East Germany, the former Soviet-occupied zone that had become the GDR. Of course, the FDHD was not completely independent of the Allies either. But the real problem in its Linz branch was actually posed by Mast and Höttl themselves, who called their little club “XG” and tended to act on their own authority. Höttl in particular was so adept at juggling his relationships and pulling off confidence tricks that at times he probably forgot exactly who he was working for. He cared more for money than for loyalty, and his ambition knew no bounds. In the year before the Wiesenthal episode, he had tried to establish an intelligence service base right in the middle of Franco’s Spain, partly to spy on North Africa but also to spy on political groups in Argentina.6 Höttl specialized in making big promises, and he considered Josef Adolf Urban one of his main competitors. One reason the CIA and the other services would eventually part company with this oracle was that more than a few pieces of “information” that he gave them turned out, on further investigation, to be entirely made up. This unenviable experience was repeated by numerous historians who approached Höttl in later years, sometimes with disastrous consequences for their work. Peter Black notes with annoyance: “In many cases, the surviving documentation does not support his speculations or reveals some of his anecdotes to be inaccurate.”7
But too many people didn’t notice the problem, and Höttl continued to appear indispensable. Not long after Simon Wiesenthal reported Mast’s letter with the colorful stamps, Wilhelm Höttl was arrested8 on suspicion of being involved in the Ponger-Verber affair, working with two spies from the Soviet Union. The authorities clearly didn’t put much past him. During the interrogation, which was carried out in quite a conversational tone by the CIA, among others, Höttl said that Curt Ponger had contacted him on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee or “some other Jewish organization” and offered $100,000 for Eichmann’s capture. But Höttl didn’t want to work with Israeli secret agents.9 The CIA assumed that it was not Ponger but Wiesenthal who had offered the money, as it was known that Curt Ponger and Simon Wiesenthal were friends.10 Ponger was a Jew who had fled Austria and returned to conduct interrogations for the CIC after the war; Wiesenthal had obtained Wisliceny’s statement about Eichmann though him.11Heinrich Mast, for his part, later wrote to Höttl that he had always thought Ponger was an Israeli spy.12 The German intelligence service received a warning about Höttl,13 and Heinz thought him “crude and characterless,” though he continued to rely on him at least some of the time. Then Heinz too finally dropped him.14 A month after Wiesenthal’s letter, Der Spiegel made an effort to publicly crucify Höttl and his friend Mast for all their intelligence service work, using material from the CIA.15 There was a general fear that Höttl could ultimately be spying for the Soviets, or for Israeli agents like Wiesenthal.
If by this point you have lost sight of the bigger picture amid all these names and connections, you will have a very good idea of the confusion created by the myriad spies of the postwar years, particularly in Austria, which was now governed by four different powers. Everyone knew and mistrusted everyone else: two men couldn’t sit and have a cup of coffee together without a third man watching them and without a fourth having infiltrated all three—the whole thing was like a giant children’s party with added surveillance equipment. “Against the background of this fantastic and complex network of relationships,” says Tom Segev, “Mast may have had some reason to disclose to Wiesenthal that Eichmann was in Argentina.”16 Another piece of the jigsaw puzzle takes us closer to what this reason might have been: Wilhelm Höttl later claimed that he was the friend from Austria who had given Heinrich Mast the letter for Wiesenthal.17
If this is true—and some things certainly speak for this version of events—it means that the crucial information came from a man who purported to have been friends with Eichmann.18 Eichmann and Höttl’s relationship was multifaceted, and an understanding of it is vital if we want to comprehend not just these events but the historiography of the Holocaust. Höttl was one of the principal witnesses who condemned Eichmann in absentia at Nuremberg, and he was therefore also one of the leading witnesses to the scale of the genocide. It was he who had mentioned the notorious conversation with Eichmann in Hungary, in which the latter allegedly cited the figure of six million Jews. This testimony had made Höttl famous overnight. Höttl welcomed his fame, bolstering it at every opportunity, though he always posed as simply the man fate had chosen to bear this knowledge. A short time after Mast handed Wiesenthal his letter denouncing Eichmann, Höttl was arrested by the CIC in Salzburg, and he took the opportunity to point out his special role as witness once again. Der Spiegel commented on the interview: “This explanation [Eichmann to Höttl] is still the only authentic source for the figure of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.”19 That wasn’t true, as Eichmann had mentioned the number to more people than just Höttl, but it chimed well with Höttl’s grandstanding. In the postwar period, Eichmann and Höttl seemed like inseparable antipodes: Höttl’s unique insider knowledge made Eichmann a wanted criminal; Eichmann’s story made Höttl an authority. Their personal relationship, however, had certainly not been formed by opposition.20
Eichmann first met Höttl, who was nine years his junior, in Vienna, when he arrived there in 1938 to organize the expulsion of the Jews. The two men worked closely from the beginning, as Höttl headed up the part of the Jewish Office responsible for Vienna. When Eichmann needed the keys to Jewish institutions that had been sealed off, he turned to Höttl, who had custody of them. During this period, they had regular contact both in and out of the office, and Eichmann had fond memories of his conversations with Höttl, whom he admired for his education. Thereafter their contact was limited, as Höttl remained in Vienna, returning to Department IV of the RSHA once a month to give progress reports. After being transferred to the RSHA in 1943, Höttl did not stay long inBerlin and pushed ahead with the relocation of his office back to Vienna. Eichmann and Höttl became close again only in March 1944, when both men were deployed to Hungary, with different assignments: Eichmann was to deport hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths, while Höttl was sent there by the Foreign Secret Service. He acted as an adviser to the Reich plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer, who relayed the murder figures back to Berlin. Both Eichmann and RSHA head Kaltenbrunner later said that no one was better informed on the situation in Hungary than Wilhelm Höttl.21 At the end of 1944, Eichmann went back to Berlin and met Höttl again in April 1945, in Altaussee. Once the war was over, however, there was only one thing on which the two men were agreed: they really had been friends. They even had the same birthday. Höttl’s brother-in-law was none other than Josef Weiszl, one of Eichmann’s closest colleagues in Austria, otherwise known as the “Jews’ emperor of Doppl.” He was the whip-wielding commandant of the first camp personally initiated by Eichmann, and he later excelled as a deportation expert in France, though afterward he claimed to have been Eichmann’s “driver.” Weiszl, who liked to brag, could have informed his brother-in-law about Eichmann’s activities at any time. But Höttl managed to make all this disappear from view by promoting himself as the key witness to Eichmann’s crimes. The success of his disinformation campaign means it is still almost impossible to get a clear picture of Höttl’s own activities in Vienna from 1938 and later in Hungary. He began to style himself as a resistance fighter. Meanwhile he created an image of Eichmann using dates and details that he could not possibly have known and that bore no resemblance to the truth. Using what he already knew about the extermination of the Jews, and what other people had told him about Eichmann’s escape, he established his reputation as an authority on both.22 The year 1953 was not the first time Höttl betrayed Eichmann’s escape plans, even if the clues he initially gave about the Middle East proved false.
Höttl was not driven by an unusual love of truth or even a desire for justice. When it came to his close associates, like Walter Schellenberg and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, he could be extremely cagey and tended to tell lies. One of his principal strategies for protecting himself and his friends was to incriminate a small group of former colleagues. Eichmann was at the very top of this list, and with extraordinary dedication, Höttl spent the rest of his life doing all he could to flesh out and publicize his own image of Eichmann. He was deeply cunning in what he told the intelligence services, and his manipulation of historians, journalists, and filmmakers was masterly. Shots of a jovial man in a traditional Austrian jacket against an Alpine backdrop, telling Eichmann anecdotes and revealing indiscretions with a wry smile, have become part of the stock in trade of war documentaries. Tellingly, a wartime friend of his termed the media’s fondness for this professional witness “Höttelhörig” (under Höttl’s spell).23
Höttl used his knowledge (both genuine and assumed) to establish his reputation as an important witness to the war years, and he did a brisk trade in this knowledge with various intelligence services. But from the very beginning, he also used it to write books. Under the pen name Walter Hagen, he wrote The Secret Front: The Inside Story of Nazi Political Espionage,24 an imaginative sex-and-crime version of events, told from the viewpoint of the German intelligence services. It was translated into several languages and quickly caused a furor. In Argentina, it gave rise to both criticism and anxiety. The identity of the man behind the pen name was no secret, and Höttl’s gossip formed the basis for hours of discussion. There was even a long guest lecture on him in the Sassen circle. After Wiesenthal’s pamphlet about the grand mufti of Jerusalem, this was the first book to contain a chapter on Eichmann’s superiors Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, and the “Jewish question.” Eichmann read that he had belonged to a tiny group that was secretly guided by “Heydrich’s boundless malevolence and misanthropy.” Under Heydrich’s direction, this group had almost single-handedly carried out “ ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’—that most devilish masterpiece.”25 Above all, Eichmann discovered that Höttl was peddling insider stories in public: the tittle-tattle that Eichmann had passed on to him in Vienna, Berlin, and Hungary.26 While Höttl was becoming a best-selling author at others’ expense, Eichmann had been fleeing across half of Europe, all the way to Argentina. This was no way to behave toward an old friend and comrade.
The letter to Höttl about Eichmann’s location, which Wiesenthal supposedly saw in summer 1953, has never been found.27 Neither Höttl nor Mast seems to have handed it over, or even given out copies of it, although such a letter would have fetched a considerable price even after 1960. If we choose not to assume that the letter was simply a forgery that they both feared would be discovered, the reason for their secrecy must lie with the parts of the letter that undoubtedly contained other names from Argentina—even if only that of the sender. In contrast to Mast, Höttl was respected and famous enough to have received such a letter. He was constantly swamped with inquiries from people, asking for information on the whereabouts of all manner of old comrades. In 1953 he was planning to start a business that would operate between Switzerland and South America, in partnership with Friedrich Schwend, a counterfeiter and one of his associates from the old days, who had escaped to Peru.28 Whoever wrote the letter to Höttl in 1953 knew precisely whom he was entrusting with this explosive information: a man who earned his living by selling this sort of intelligence and was therefore unlikely to keep it to himself. Even before his first book appeared, Höttl was seen as a security risk in Nazi circles. Everyone knew he was building his postwar career on betrayal, and his old comrades believed he had sold himself to the Allies. Some people, like Otto Skorzeny, went so far as to attribute the “invention of the six million” to Höttl, who was acting out of pure opportunism.29 After Höttl’s book and newspaper articles came out, people didn’t need intelligence service experience to realize that passing secret information to Höttl had a similar effect to putting it on a billboard. Whoever told Höttl where Eichmann was living must have known he was effectively turning him in.
The source of the information could have been any one of a great number of people. But from the start, Adolf Eichmann’s family believed one man in particular had betrayed their father (without even knowing about this letter). This was Herbert Kuhlmann, who had made the journey from Europe with him. “My father paid for his passage,” Klaus Eichmann said in 1966. “He betrayed my father. He put it about: ‘Be careful around that Clement. He’s really Eichmann. Eichmann is a swine.’ ”30 The similarity of the phrasing here is hard to ignore. Still, Kuhlmann was not the only person with a penchant for colorful language who might have given Eichmann away. Even in 1953, there were plenty of ways a person could have got hold of the information: not only was Adolf Eichmann becoming increasingly careless, his acquaintances had started traveling back to Germany for business or pleasure, carrying their knowledge with them.
German-Argentine Relations
By the early 1950s, the men of the Dürer circle were following events in West Germany for more than just sentimental reasons. Their overtly political ambitions were expressed in Der Weg, in increasingly direct comments on the new democracy. The people behind this magazine didn’t hide the fact that they had no interest in any other country, not even in a special German community in Argentina: they wanted the return of a different Germany. They started trying to intervene in German politics and increasingly wrote for a German audience. Even if this idea sounds as naïve today as it did in the early 1950s, Sassen, Rudel, Fritsch, and the other authors were trying to foment a revolution in Germany. Their National Socialist stance was primarily defined by what they opposed: the Western integration of the Federal Republic; rearmament; the United States; and Konrad Adenauer, the man who stood for it all. They wanted to do more than just produce the Monatsschrift für Freiheit und Ordnung (Monthly Magazine for Freedom and Order—Der Weg’s new subtitle). They wanted a strange kind of freedom and a palpable new order. They wanted the “building of a new Germany.” For a while, there was even talk of forming a German government in exile.31
The behavior of these men, who were now nicely established in Argentina, cannot be explained rationally—though closer inspection reveals the principal motivation for their political ambitions. Anyone who has labored under the delusion that he belongs to the world’s new elite, and who helped shape the politics of the German Reich that shook the world for twelve years, would be incapable of resigning himself to a normal life. Hans-Ulrich Rudel phrased it memorably, with help from Sassen:
We live on, and we certainly live better from a material point of view than many millions of our defeated countrymen. But can one really narrow one’s field of vision like this, down to the most limited circle, in the space of a few years? I often … think back over this short time, to my last conversation with Hitler, and the idea that always got us back on our feet and kept us doing our duty during those last months of war, the great goal that had ruled my entire life until this point: the prosperity and happiness of the Fatherland. And then my present existence seems so pitiful, so small and meaningless! Is it possible suddenly to change so much, to think only of yourself and the smallest circle of your family and comrades?32
The end of the war, and their escape from the Allies, had thrown these men back into an everyday reality that had never really been the norm for them and that must now have seemed trivial. It was difficult to dream of world domination from the sobering context of exile in Buenos Aires. And the change hit them all the harder because they were still relatively young. The end of the war had pulled them up abruptly in the middle of their careers. Rudel was born in 1916, Sassen in 1918, and Fritsch in 1921; Eichmann, in his mid-forties, was among the oldest. But back in West Germany, people were electing a chancellor of over seventy. All this reminded the exiles of the Weimar Republic, where “the youth” had succeeded in seizing power from the old Reich president, Hindenburg, and getting rid of the hated democracy. They wanted to try the same thing again. For them, National Socialism was a mission that had not yet ended.33
It was not only in Argentina that people were dreaming of a second coup d’état. In the early 1950s, all the influential far-right groups were attempting to organize themselves in greater numbers. The most famous example is the group led by Werner Naumann, the former state secretary to Joseph Goebbels. He attempted to infiltrate the North Rhine–Westphalia Free Democratic Party, pursuing opaque political ambitions in West Germany—and by 1952 he had also started making contact with fascists from other European countries. The most important names here were also to be found on Eberhard Fritsch’s list of authors and correspondents: the Englishman Oswald Mosley, and the Frenchman Maurice Bardèche. At the same time, the Dürer circle was attempting to build its political influence in Germany. The first step was an association with the Sozialistischen Reichspartei (SRP), a National Socialist party led by Otto Ernst Remer and the völkisch author Fritz Dorls. Both men were radical anti-Semites, who could potentially be very useful to anyone in the business of falsifying history.34 The “solution of the Jewish question” was an overt part of their manifesto, though they took pains to be at least a little critical of Hitler’s methods. The immediate aim was to win a large number of votes in the upcoming federal election of 1953, preventing Adenauer’s victory and thereby becoming an influential voice in the conservative camp. Like Remer and his party, the men of the Dürer circle firmly believed that the majority of the population was secretly right-leaning and on their side. The SRP’s first electoral victories at a national level fueled their hopes.35 In 1951 there was clear cooperation between the far-right Der Weg and the equally unambiguous magazine Nation Europa, which had been founded that year. Willem Sassen wrote a caustic polemic against the United States and rearmament for Nation Europa, raising the circulation figures in Germany so significantly that the rest of the press, including Der Spiegel, began to take note of the publication.36 There is also evidence of contact between Argentina and the Plesse publishing house in Göttingen, in which Werner Naumann was involved.37 And perhaps Fritsch really did travel to Germany, as he claimed in letters to his authors, for a personal discussion on how similar waves could be made in the future with the newspaper cofounder Karl-Heinz Priester.
In summer 1952 several members of the Argentine camp traveled to West Germany. They formed close working relationships there, with positive outcomes for Fritsch’s network in particular. The SRP’s established network of members was integrated into Der Weg’s card index of subscribers, boosting circulation by three thousand. This also meant three thousand extra contact addresses for the “ring circle.” A political career had always been part of the plan. The war hero Hans-Ulrich Rudel was seen as a good potential election candidate, and he traveled to Germany several times, closely observed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).38 Press reports even claimed that Eberhard Fritsch (who was also on the BfV’s watch list) had secretly entered the country.39 There is evidence that one of Fritsch’s closest colleagues, Dieter Vollmer, moved back to Germany permanently, though he stayed in regular contact with the Dürer circle and had an intimate knowledge of their plans and projects.40 All these travelers knew that Adolf Eichmann was in Argentina, and men looking to impress like-minded friends are not usually reticent about their sensational contacts.
Before the election, the SRP was found to be unconstitutional and was outlawed. Remer was also convicted of slandering the July 20 resistance group. The new Argentines then placed their hopes on the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) in Hanover, which was not a great deal more democratic. But this party had the added advantage of not objecting to a market economy—a stance that accommodated the approach of the economically active émigrés. Rudel’s new contact was Adolf von Thadden, who was a similar age to Eberhard Fritsch and one of the most active Nazis of the postwar period; he would later make a substantial contribution to the rise of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). By December 1952, Thadden had met Rudel, and he financed Rudel’s next trip in 1953, to support the DRP’s election campaign.41 Like Remer, Thadden expected the flying ace to exude the old National Socialist glamour. Rudel appointed Werner Naumann as his political adviser after only one meeting, a man whom the Frankfurter Rundschaucalled the “spider in the web of systematic infiltration.”42 He too joined the DRP. Thadden, however, seemed disillusioned by his Argentine reimport: “Personally he seems to be a very proper man. In terms of German domestic policy, he sometimes has completely incorrect ideas, which are evidently the result of him only associating with a certain type of former comrade.” Thadden, who had some fairly peculiar ideas about the future of Germany himself, was irritated by Rudel’s suggestion of “getting a real populist movement going.” He thought a more realistic option was to infiltrate the new democracy and use a political party to put some National Socialists in government—a goal that seemed “extremely modest” to the impatient Rudel. Thadden did, however, see the “allure of his name” and immediately recognized Rudel’s drive: “In any case, he has political ambition, and may play a role in Germany.”43 He was also impressed by the Dürer circle’s logistics.
Adolf von Thadden’s later notes show that Rudel was anything but reserved in their meetings, chatting openly and without inhibitions. Long before Eichmann’s arrest, Thadden knew that the Adviser on Jewish Affairs was living in Argentina and had connections to the Dürer circle.44 The DRP fielded Rudel as a candidate, though nothing came of it. He didn’t even fulfill the formal criteria to become an election candidate, and his National Socialist speeches kept getting him banned from appearing in public. The files that the BfV compiled on Rudel and Eberhard Fritsch in the early 1950s are still under wraps (though parts of them, at least, will apparently be classified “archivable” in the future). The German Foreign Office was also keeping an eye on these new far-right machinations. Rudel and Fritsch had been traveling around South America since 1950, collecting for Kameradenwerk and advertising the coming revolution. The German diplomatic mission in Chile had sent back alarming reports, fearing for Germany’s reputation abroad in the face of so much open Nazi nostalgia. The Foreign Office was, however, reassured by the answer to its inquiry from the embassy in Buenos Aires: at the end of 1953, there were apparently only fifty to one hundred German emigrants there, and none of them were of any importance. They were therefore not worthy of being mentioned or properly counted.45 The CIA clearly thought otherwise. In the same year, its report on the activities of German nationalists and neo-Nazis in Argentina was fifty-eight pages long.46 We still don’t know the length of the report compiled by the West German intelligence services.
In the early 1950s the many activities of National Socialists, and of fascists of whatever stripe, might look like a huge, worldwide conspiracy, but that is the one thing the postwar Nazis never achieved. On the face of it, the conditions for such an undertaking were not unfavorable. A few years after the war, West Germany was a long way from reaching the democratic consensus that the Allies had hoped to achieve with their “re-education” measures. Even so, the old faithful and their dreams of coups did not make it big in the postwar world. Taking a closer look at the pieces in this bizarre game, we can guess at the reasons. Quite apart from the fact that “an international alliance of National Socialists” was always a contradiction in terms, the men involved came from completely different worlds. As much as they wanted a conspiracy, they lacked something unifying to swear allegiance to and common aims that went beyond the purely negative. Their memories of old times were also wildly divergent. Ultimately, their conspiracy was based on an image of the past, and they had no practical ideas on how to bring about a coup in the present. And mourning the past did nothing to inspire faith in their abilities, either within their own ranks or with potential voters.
Still, the connections between the Nazis who had fled to Argentina and those in Germany and Austria were multifaceted and went far beyond sending airmail letters with colorful stamps. Even without a secret-monger like Höttl, with his multiple intelligence service contacts, in 1953 plenty of people knew about Eichmann’s hiding place and Perón’s power plant project. If the Gehlen Organization had followed up on the clue it received in June 1952, its agents could have discovered where Eichmann was working, a fact not mentioned in the original message. The nervousness with which the West German institutions reacted to Fritsch and Rudel’s ambitions shows that they had at least some idea of who else was in Argentina. They would not have needed to pay Mast and Höttl a small fortune to obtain this information.
Eichmann on a Silver Platter
However Höttl and Mast got wind of of Eichmann’s whereabouts, their decision to pass this information to Simon Wiesenthal, of all people, is worth examining more closely. At the start of 1953, anyone with a connection to the intelligence services knew what Höttl did with information, but they also knew exactly who the philatelist Simon Wiesenthal was. He had always been a loud and enthusiastic voice in the hunt for Nazis, founding the Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz in 1947 and making his own contacts with the American and Israeli intelligence services. Höttl and Mast must have been well aware of what they were doing: they were turning Adolf Eichmann in. The power plant clue was so precise that a few inquiries in Buenos Aires would have led straight to CAPRI, a company working on one of the Argentine government’s largest projects. The only reason they failed to expose Eichmann was because, in classic Nazi fashion, they overestimated Simon Wiesenthal’s influence. Their belief in a Jewish world conspiracy made them think of “the Jews” as a single entity.47 National Socialist thought ascribed more influence to any little Jewish corner-store owner than even large Jewish organizations had in reality. “The Jews” were entirely focused on world domination and revenge. Outwardly, sending this letter looked like handing “the Jews” their enemy Adolf Eichmann on a silver platter. This fact forces us to ask the difficult question: who had a vested interest in this development in 1953?
When one person wants to damage another, he or she may well be acting from a personal motive like fear or revenge or from some other desire to see them suffer. Höttl doubtless knew that Eichmann had sworn to kill him for revealing his confession about the six million. But Eichmann was far away, and Höttl was no stranger to this kind of threat, having made plenty of other enemies through his work for the Allies. Dr. Langer, a member of the Sassen group, told people in Argentina that by May 1945, threats were being made against Höttl all over Vienna: “Everyone had a great hatred for Höttl. So I heard ‘if I catch that fellow, I’m going to kill him’ etc. not from one person, but from several of these people.”48 Wilhelm Höttl clearly took great pleasure in painting Eichmann in the worst possible light, and he seemed to envy Eichmann’s fame even after he had been hanged—but it is difficult to believe that malice alone would have driven him to such lengths. If it had been Höttl’s intention (or the intention of whoever made him take this step) simply to reveal where Eichmann was, he could have made copies of the letter and distributed them to the international press. But as far as we know, Höttl and Mast didn’t show the letter to anyone apart from Wiesenthal in 1953. As the Germany security services’ archives remain firmly closed, we can only speculate on whether Höttl and Mast could have made this move without the Gehlen Organization, the Heinz-Dienst, or the BfV knowing about it, being involved in it, or at least being informed of it after the fact.
For men of boundless ambition, one possible motive could have been the desire to raise their profile in the intelligence business. But if they had wanted to score points by tracking down a war criminal, they would surely have made their own intelligence services the first recipients of the news. But then Höttl’s reputation with the American and German services was by then so terrible that an indirect approach might have seemed best. In November 1952 Höttl had become a candidate for blacklisting by the BfV. All the German and American services treated him as unreliable, for having invented one piece of intelligence after another.49 An indirect approach via a suspected Israeli spy would, however, have been a very complex plan. Greed was not the motive, either: the letter was never sold, and Wiesenthal certainly didn’t pay them $100,000, if only because he never had access to that kind of money. Even if another party had paid Mast and Höttl a princely sum for their action, the question remains why anyone would have had an interest in publicizing Eichmann’s address.
What might have been accomplished if this action had done something beyond just causing Wiesenthal’s heart to skip a beat and had actually succeeded in telling “the Jews” where Eichmann was? What reaction might Mast and Höttl, or their paymaster, have been expecting from Nahum Goldmann, the man whom the crazed Jewish-conspiracy theorists believed to be the supreme head of world Jewry? What could “the Jews” have done? From today’s perspective, there are two possible scenarios. One of the vengeance squads that were still active could have quietly murdered Eichmann or he could have been brought to trial (as he was, later on)—provided he didn’t hear that his cover had been blown and manage to find another hiding place in time. But apart from his victims, the Jews, who would have had an interest in pursuing either of these possibilities?
Höttl made a very good living from being the only person able to offer a firsthand account of what Eichmann had said. For him, having this man killed on the quiet would have one benefit: Eichmann’s knowledge about the Holocaust would vanish along with him. There was one problem with the theory that Höttl and Mast were hoping the Jews would get rid of Eichmann (do the dirty work, so to speak), so that the real key witness would no longer be able to testify to the figures: it would mean they had to accept that the numbers Eichmann had quoted corresponded to the truth. Silencing someone makes sense only if you think they have something unpleasant to reveal. In 1953 few people in Germany and Austria, not even Wilhelm Höttl, believed that of Eichmann.50
Today it’s difficult to imagine what people in the early 1950s knew or wanted to know about the National Socialists’ crimes—namely, almost nothing. Most of the information to be had on the Holocaust in Germany and Austria (for those who weren’t too busy making a new start to find out) came from press coverage of the war crimes trials. In a recently defeated country, these trials didn’t have a particularly good reputation. Terms like “victors’ justice,” “propaganda statements,” “atrocity stories,” “collective guilt,” and “vengeance verdicts” were widespread, and the number of six million seemed so extraordinary that people needed more evidence and explanations to make it even remotely comprehensible. These were not yet available in 1953. Although the first books about Hitler and National Socialism had begun to appear, there was as yet no published account of the Holocaust. Eight years after the end of the war, the only way to get an impression of this mass extermination was to study the trial documents, and very few people had access to them. Under the circumstances, the easiest reaction was to disbelieve and repress the facts. Holocaust deniers had an easy ride, when even the perpetrators could reassure themselves that “nobody knows the details.”
Today we have the testimonies of the concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höß, the Wannsee Conference transcript, reports from the Einsatzgruppen commandos, descriptions of concentration camps, murder statistics, and of course Eichmann’s testimonies, not to mention brilliantly edited collections of documents—enough secondary literature to fill a library, and more images than we can bear. In 1953 there was not a single book, aside from the Nuremberg judgment. The perpetrators and the people in the know relativized and denied everything, and the survivors had barely started finding their voices again. Even statements from the representatives of the new West Germany often sounded like stock phrases and political correctness: things people knew they had to say, without really acknowledging what they meant.51 Aside from the people who knew exactly what had happened because they had been directly involved in the crimes, most of the population couldn’t imagine that Eichmann might have anything worse to reveal. It would just be another incomprehensible witness statement that nobody wanted to hear. So why spare a thought as to why someone might want to keep this statement quiet? You would have to have been in the know to want Eichmann silenced before he started naming names. But betraying Eichmann, rather than leaving him to ride through the mountains of Tucumán in peace, was a risky business.
Things looked rather different from the perspective of vehement Holocaust deniers—people who were stubbornly clinging to a different truth. The writers associated with Der Weg, ex-general Otto Ernst Remer, and a frightening number of unreformed anti-Semites had such an intense hatred of Jews that they favored the idea of extermination. But they also either believed the millions of murders to be a lie, or tried to relativize those murders as far as possible. From this point of view, the figure of Adolf Eichmann, the man who knew the truth better than anyone, took on a different significance. In the deniers’ world, the only truth Eichmann had to tell was theirs: he would say it wasn’t at all like people had claimed in Nuremberg, and that “the Jews” had lied about the scale of the killing. His statement would lift the burden of blame from the Germans and reveal that—as usual—the Jews had abused the truth, to gain the upper hand. One of Der Weg’s most successful articles was entitled “The Lie of the Six Million.”52 Written under the pseudonym Guido Heimann, this text claimed that there had only been 365,000 deaths among the National Socialists’ opponents, with no systematic mass murder, gas vans, or gas chambers. All claims to the contrary were a gigantic falsification of history. A key witness was needed to refute this “lie,” and even in this crude vision of history, that was Adolf Eichmann.
In the middle of the election campaign in West Germany, this alleged “lie” had gained a political dimension that would change the country. Konrad Adenauer finally brought himself to publicly acknowledge the German people’s guilt and responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. He spoke of every German’s duty to Israel and to the Jewish people.53 Pressure from the Western Allies on the issue of reparations had made it impossible to remain silent any longer. West Germany had to acknowledge the past; otherwise it would be impossible to rejoin the international community. There were protracted negotiations between the federal government and the representatives of the Jewish Claims Conference. In 1952 the government signed the Luxembourg reparations agreement, promising Israel payments, goods, and services totaling 3.45 billion Deutschmarks over twelve years, and in many people’s eyes, this agreement was a scandal. For the Bundestag to ratify it, Adenauer needed the Social Democrats’ (SPD) votes, as too many members of his own coalition had withheld their consent. The debate over the contract with the Jewish Claims Conference led to a huge crisis within the Christian-Liberal coalition government, and Adenauer seemed stricken. Far-right voices were not the only ones arguing against any kind of payments. Opinion polls showed that only 11 percent of Germans were in favor of the Luxembourg Agreement.54 If the conspiracy theorists’ version of Adolf Eichmann could step into this situation—a man who could produce detailed calculations showing that the Nazis’ crimes had not been committed, or at least not by Germans—the consequences would be tremendous. Adenauer would be discredited, the rug would be pulled from under the whole agreement, the Jews would lose all respect on the world stage because of their “deception,” and—most important—the Germans would be freed from guilt. The truth would finally come out: “the Jews” had staged the whole thing themselves, just so they could get their hands on Palestine and reap the financial rewards.
People really did think like this (and in fact, some still do),55 as we can see from numerous published treatises featuring an ever-changing array of conspiracies. They range from unsophisticated denial to an elaborate outline of a Jewish-infiltrated Gestapo, working behind Hitler’s back to stage a mass murder of Jews by Jews. As the deniers rode roughshod over reality, the perpetrator Adolf Eichmann mutated into a figure of hope, the star witness to this peculiar truth. The frightening extent of these paranoid hopes of redemption would be revealed immediately after Eichmann’s arrest, in media reactions that did not come exclusively from right-wing publications. The articles were full of warnings to Israel about the unwelcome things Eichmann would supposedly reveal.The New York Times prophesied that a public trial would “do Israel more harm than good” and that “reprisals against Israel” would be unavoidable. Der Spiegel quoted the “first unexpected reactions” before they had even happened. The far-right monthly Nation Europalisted all these warnings with relish. Or almost all—Stern’s warning “that the State of Israel is now in danger [of] coming into the Nazis’ inheritance” was apparently not worth repeating to Nation Europa’s National Socialist readers.56
Willem Sassen, the Dutch SS man, would encapsulate the deniers’ delusions neatly in an interview at the end of 1960. It was, he explained, quite obvious that the Israeli government could have had nothing to do with Eichmann’s capture: the Israelis were the last people who wanted Eichmann to talk, for fear that he would expose the lie upon which their country was founded. A small group of Jews acting independently—elementos fanáticos—must have kidnapped him, and now the truth that people had tried to suppress for so long would finally come to light.57 As late as 1981, Adolf von Thadden, one of the most influential far-right voices in the new Federal Republic, would still hold out hope for the publication of Eichmann’s thoughts from Argentina: “The ‘six million’ would be proved a lie, an untruth consciously disseminated over 35 years.”58 This whole tangled mess, however, had one problem: the mass murder of the Jews was not a Jewish lie but a thoroughly German idea, and Eichmann, as a German, was much too proud of having implemented the murder project to deny it. Any hope that this man could in some way free Germany of its guilt was plainly absurd. In the event, the only thing Eichmann’s statements would reveal was the monstrous scale of this German crime and the immeasurable suffering of the people who had fallen victim to the German mania.
Now that we have access not only to those statements, but to more than fifty years of documentation and research, it’s hard to imagine that in 1953 many people still believed that Eichmann would bring to light their idea of the truth, or that his very survival could be a threat to Israel’s position and to Adenauer’s reconciliation policies. The Federal Republic and postwar German society were far from stable, and “revelations,” if they had been possible, would have shaken the country. This paranoid belief in Eichmann as a key witness for the far right might have been the hidden motive that made Mast show Wiesenthal the letter from Argentina. It would have allowed people to threaten “the Jews” with Eichmann’s testimony, and it could have unleashed explosive political consequences. Where people’s reasoning runs so far into madness, their actions are not based on reality.
Wiesenthal was now certain that all the information he had obtained in the hunt for Eichmann would lead to something. The clue to where Eichmann was living, from Wilhelm Höttl and Heinrich Mast, was not the only one he received during this period. A friend of Vera’s sister near Linz told him that Vera had emigrated to South America and that “in July 1953 I was in Vienna and … had a talk with the Director General for Public Security, Min. Rat Dr. Pammer, and the conversation happened to turn to Eichmann. Pammer also told me he had information that Eichmann … was living in Argentina.” Wiesenthal had already been given another, equally portentous hint in a letter from none other than Amin al-Husseini.59 This letter, received by an acquaintance of Wiesenthal’s in Munich named Ahmed Bigi,60 who translated it for him, contained a direct question from the mufti “on Eichmann’s whereabouts.” Wiesenthal received this news with a degree of mistrust. It could, of course, have been “a cunning move on the mufti’s part.” The question to Bigi could have been an attempt to deflect suspicion that Eichmann was living in the Middle East. Wiesenthal spoke no Arabic, but his personal connection with Bigi made him believe that the letter genuinely contained what Bigi had translated for him. When it then emerged that the inquiry had come not from al-Husseini but from another Muslim who had worked for Hitler’s Foreign Ministry, it changed nothing for Wiesenthal. He could “of course not guarantee 100% that Eichmann is in Argentina,” as he wrote to Nahum Goldmann,61 but he was certain that the headlines about the “Reappearance of Eichmann in Tel-Aviv,” the “Mass Murderer as Military Adviser to the Egyptian Army,” the “SS General in the Middle East,” or the “German Adviser” to the mufti were simply wrong.62
Within a relatively short space of time, Wiesenthal received several hints that Eichmann was to be found in South America and not the Middle East. But surprisingly, although he passed his new information on to all his contacts, from the Israeli consulate in Vienna to Nahum Goldmann—and there is also evidence it also reached the CIA63—nobody stepped up the hunt for Adolf Eichmann. The information was practically everywhere, but it was ignored. The non-German intelligence services showed as little enthusiasm for bringing this war criminal to justice as the Gehlen Organization had the previous year.
Anyone who had hoped that divulging information about Eichmann’s whereabouts would have an impact was disappointed. Wiesenthal was hardest hit by the lack of interest. In his memoirs, he painted himself as the lone campaigner for a justice in which hardly anyone else was interested: “I feel that, along with a few other like-minded fools, I was quite alone.”64 The politics of the day were more important. A cold war was going on between the world powers, a hot war had broken out in Korea, and “against this background the picture of Adolf Eichmann was fading. If I tried to talk to my American friends about him, they would reply a little wearily: ‘We’ve got other problems.’ ”65 Konrad Adenauer had made his declaration of responsibility, but that didn’t mean he wanted a thorough search for those responsible. Immediately after the Luxembourg Agreement was finalized, people started asking questions about some surprising people working for the Foreign Office. Adenauer announced to the Bundestag: “In my opinion, we should call a halt to trying to sniff out Nazis.”66 For the next few years, the chancellor’s word became law for German institutions.