Killing the SS Page 16

  Zvi Aharoni should not be here at all. He was invited to be an eyewitness at the Eichmann execution, which is due to take place any day now. He attended the trial, where he sat in the front row and locked eyes with the man he so famously kidnapped. “I am not sure whether Eichmann recognized me,” Aharoni will admit in his autobiography. “He looked directly at us several times, but did not give any sign that he knew who I was.”

  The spy is satisfied with the guilty verdict but has no wish to attend the hanging. Aharoni recognizes the evil within the former Nazi, but he has also come to know Eichmann very well and might be haunted by the sight of the condemned murderer dangling from a gallows.

  “Fortunately, I was spared the dilemma,” Aharoni will write, referring to his new Mengele assignment.

  In Buenos Aires, the customs agent motions for Aharoni to step forward.

  The spy does as he is told.

  * * *

  Although Aharoni will not witness it himself, danger lurks for Jews in Argentina.

  University of Buenos Aires science major Graciela Narcisa Sirota learns this while waiting at a bus stop in June 1962. Fascist militant groups such as the Tacuara have become more active in their persecution of Jews since the Eichmann verdict, making telephone threats, setting fire to schools, and toppling headstones in Jewish cemeteries. In all, there have been more than thirty such incidents in the last month—so many that Argentinean police are reluctant to make arrests for fear of inflaming even more violence. Yet that tactic is failing, for on this very day a Jewish restaurant will be sprayed with machine-gun fire for a second time.

  Graciela stands on a busy public thoroughfare, not knowing that she has been targeted, when a gray sedan screeches to a halt at the small kiosk. The doors open and three young members of the Tacuara jump out. One carries a wooden club. He knocks Graciela to the ground with a savage blow to the head. No bystander bothers to help as she is dragged into the backseat of the car, which leaves as quickly as it came.

  Unconscious, Graciela is taken to a remote location, where she is stripped and tied to the top of a table. She wakes up to a symphony of pain as her captors take turns punching, molesting, and burning her body with lit cigarettes. “This is in revenge for Eichmann,” they tell the nineteen-year-old Jewish student.

  Her torso bruised and face swollen, Graciela is helpless to stop the young hoodlums as they carve a swastika into her right breast with a razor blade.

  Once again, Graciela passes out from the pain. Her naked body is dumped on a suburban street, in full view of passing cars. She is alive, but barely.

  Graciela’s horrified parents attempt to file a police report, but it is two days before the Argentinean authorities allow them to press charges. Even after a police physician completes a thorough examination corroborating Graciela’s story, federal police chief Horacio Enrique Green claims she brought it on herself, citing her attendance at a leftist protest. Graciela’s kidnappers, Green announces, are “moved by a deep and purely nationalistic sentiment, which assumed the form of hurt pride and was evidenced by means of a few anti-Semitic incidents.”1

  * * *

  But Zvi Aharoni knows nothing of this violence.

  Instead, he is now tailing a suspect’s vehicle from a respectful distance. He has been lucky so far, evading arrest in Argentina and successfully flying to the Brazilian city of São Paulo in his quest to capture Dr. Josef Mengele. The sickening specifics of Mengele’s atrocities are well known to Aharoni, for he has committed the Mossad’s thick, decades-old file on the death camp doctor to memory.

  Aharoni is following a car driven by Wolfgang Gerhard, a forty-year-old fervent Nazi who was once in charge of the Hitler Youth in Austria. It is believed that Josef Mengele lives on a property owned by either Gerhard or an associate. Aharoni’s best hope is that the Nazi will lead him to the Angel of Death. There have been a half-dozen alleged Mengele sightings in the last year, but this is the closest Aharoni has come to a genuine lead.

  The journey takes them outside the city, onto a highway. Aharoni steels himself for a long ride, hoping he can avoid notice the entire length of the drive. One hundred miles later, upon reaching the Serra Negra region, Gerhard turns onto a small dirt road leading up a hillside. The track is rutted and unpaved, and Aharoni knows all too well that he will attract attention by following Gerhard.

  So the Israeli agent turns around and drives back to São Paulo. Three days later he returns to the jungle road. This time he travels with two Mossad agents who have come to aid the hunt for Mengele. Aharoni arrives at the dirt road once again but this time makes the turn. His rental car absorbs the ruts and bumps for several miles before arriving at a small group of heavily fortified farm buildings. A three-story cement block tower with a red tile roof is the most prominent feature, manned by a solitary individual holding binoculars.

  Aharoni’s plan of action for what will come next is absurd, but it is important that he make a visual confirmation that the suspect is truly Josef Mengele. So the Mossad agent has no other choice. Stepping out of the car with the other two agents, Aharoni sets out a picnic lunch of sandwiches.

  Almost as soon as the men begin eating, three individuals step from the farm to challenge them. Two are dark-skinned and appear to be Brazilians. Wolfgang Gerhard is known to have spoken contemptuously about the locals, referring to them as “half monkeys.”

  The third man walking toward Zvi Aharoni and his Mossad companions has the pale skin of a European. Aharoni is familiar with the many photographs in Mengele’s file, and by all appearances, it is him. Though this man the Brazilian farmhands refer to as “Pedro” tries to conceal his identity by pulling his broad-brimmed straw hat down low over his eyes, the mustache, the height, even the gap between the two front teeth—all match the photographic evidence. Yet now is not the time for a kidnapping. There is no airport nearby for a quick escape from the country and Israel cannot afford another diplomatic fracas in South America. Aharoni must gather proof that this is Mengele, then seek proper official approval to launch a plan of action to capture the Nazi.

  Aharoni has a camera within arm’s reach, but Mengele is standing too close for the spy to surreptitiously snap a picture. Instead, Aharoni and his companions allow themselves to be chased off the property. His only proof is his gut instinct. “I thought the man may well be Mengele,” Aharoni will later write. “In fact, I was sure of it.”

  A cable is immediately dispatched to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv: “Zvi saw on Gerhard’s farm a person who in form, height, age and dress looks like Mengele.”

  Aharoni flies from Brazil to Paris to personally discuss the matter with Isser Harel, who has traveled there on business. “I was certain that in a little while we would be able to bring Mengele to Israel to be tried,” he will later remember.

  But Harel refuses to approve a kidnapping plan. He has just received news that the same German scientists who devised rockets capable of attacking London during the war are now working for Egypt, Israel’s sworn enemy. Until that crisis is solved, all of the Mossad’s threadbare resources must be devoted to defeating the threat.

  Isser Harel’s single-minded focus does not allow him to pay attention to more than one mission at a time. As Aharoni will remember while discussing the history of Mossad, “when Isser began dealing with something, he dealt only with that.”2

  Zvi Aharoni is experienced enough to know that Josef Mengele will now remain a free man. In fact, the Nazi has been operating in Brazil under his real name, although he sometimes introduces himself as a native of Switzerland named Peter Hochbichler. Recently, however, Mengele has become nervous about whether or not he will be protected by Brazilian authorities, and he has started to take the same secretive precautions as Adolf Eichmann.

  The Angel of Death is, indeed, living on the farm twenty-five miles outside of São Paulo, growing tropical fruit, coffee, and rice and overseeing a large herd of cattle. Mengele also consorts with Nazis all over the world. The Mossad suspects he t
ravels extensively to cities like Rome and Milan.3

  So it is that one of the most notorious and brutal Nazi war criminals lives a fairly normal life, protected by state and local authorities in Brazil and Paraguay, where he frequently travels.

  But that situation will soon change.

  17

  MAY 31, 1962

  RAMLEH PRISON, ISRAEL

  7:00 P.M.

  “You will be hanged at midnight,” Israeli prison commissioner Arye Nir informs Adolf Eichmann.

  It has been six months since the death sentence was passed. Eichmann’s attorney immediately filed an appeal, giving the condemned murderer time to write his autobiography while awaiting the outcome. Two days ago, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the decision. Eichmann’s final hope was a plea for clemency to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, president of Israel.

  “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,” Eichmann wrote to Ben-Zvi.

  “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty. I am not able to recognize the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honor Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.”

  That request was quickly denied.

  The execution will take place here in this prison outside Jerusalem. Israeli law dictates that the death penalty must be carried out by hanging, but until recently, a working gallows did not even exist in the country. During the time of British rule it was common to hang Jews convicted of terrorism against the Crown, but the gallows once used has been relocated to a museum as a reminder of Israel’s painful struggle to become a nation.

  So a former guards’ quarters in Ramleh has been converted to a place of execution. A hole was cut in the third floor and a special wooden platform and trapdoor were built over the opening. The frame from which the rope dangles is made of iron. A button controls the trapdoor. Once it is sprung, Eichmann will plummet straight down into a darkened room on the second floor. Witnesses to the execution will be able to see Eichmann as the noose is draped around his neck. However, once the Nazi drops through to the level below, onlookers will be spared the aftereffects of a hanging—swollen tongue jutting from the mouth, eyes popping from the skull, the final release of the bowels as the sphincter muscle relaxes.

  The new gallows have been inspected by a police commissioner and engineer. The rope has also been tested, utilizing a bag loaded with weight to match Eichmann’s own body mass. By Israeli law, the execution must take place between midnight and 8:00 a.m. A black flag must be raised over the prison immediately afterward.

  Eichmann is well aware that many considered the appeals process to be a formality. He also knows that Ramleh Prison has been preparing for his execution. The gallows are just fifty yards from his cell and the sounds of construction have been impossible to ignore.

  Prison commissioner Nir now asks Eichmann what he would like for his last meal. But Eichmann prefers not to eat. Instead, he requests a bottle of Carmel, a kosher Israeli wine. He also asks for cigarettes, along with pen and paper.1

  Over the next four hours, Adolf Eichmann writes to Vera and their sons. She has refused to admit to his crimes, still believing that her husband was just following orders. Since Eichmann’s kidnapping, Vera has left Buenos Aires and returned to Germany. But she has had trouble adapting after such a long absence and is eager to return to South America. Just one month ago, on April 30, Israeli authorities allowed Vera and Adolf Eichmann one final visit. The meeting was so secret that Israeli authorities will not acknowledge it for forty-five years.

  Vera was smuggled into Israel via Zurich, using a passport in her maiden name of Vera Loebel. She was then escorted into the prison shortly after midnight and visited her condemned husband from 12:20 to 1:43 in the morning.

  One month later, Eichmann chain-smokes and sips half the bottle of wine while writing his final letters. In preparation for his execution, he brushes his teeth and shaves. The Nazi has become obsessed with cleanliness during his time in prison and is prone to washing his hands compulsively.

  At 11:20 Eichmann is visited by Rev. William Hull, a Canadian missionary who has made it his goal to convert Eichmann to traditional Christianity. The task has been futile, with Eichmann labeling the Old Testament as “Jewish fairy tales” and refusing to ask forgiveness for his crimes under the premise that he is not guilty.

  “Why are you sad?” Eichmann asks the minister. “I am astonished that I have such peace.”

  Twenty minutes before midnight, the men are joined in Eichmann’s cramped cell by two guards and prison commandant Nir. They have come to take the prisoner to his death. Eichmann prays alone in a corner for a brief moment, then submits to the guards, who tie his hands behind his back.

  The unrepentant Nazi is led from his second-floor cell and marched down the hall, then upstairs to the execution chamber. The group enters the room containing the gallows, where four members of the press, a policeman, and Agent Rafi Eitan await. It was Eitan who helped subdue Eichmann on the night of the kidnapping. Just one hour ago, he was sitting at home when he got the call to witness Eichmann’s execution. Now the two men look across the small room at each other. They are less than thirty feet apart.

  Adolf Eichmann is led to the wooden platform and made to stand over the trapdoor. He wears brown trousers, a matching shirt, and slippers with a checkered design. The guards tie his legs together. This will prevent him from kicking and fighting the rope once the trapdoor is sprung.

  The Nazi looks across the room, focusing his gaze on Rafi Eitan. “I hope, very much, that it will be your turn soon after mine,” Eichmann coldly tells him.

  The hangman steps forward. His name is Shalom Nagar. A short Yemenite Jew, he is one of twenty-two men specially chosen to guard Eichmann during the previous six months at Ramleh. He has seen Eichmann in his most intimate moments and was tasked with tasting Eichmann’s food to ensure it was not poisoned and with preventing the condemned man from committing suicide.

  Now it is no longer Nagar’s job to keep Adolf Eichmann alive, but to ensure that he dies.

  Nagar offers to place a black hood over Eichmann’s head. The Nazi refuses.

  Eichmann now speaks directly to the gathered journalists. “Long live Germany,” he tells them. “Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. Those are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family, and my friends. I was required to obey the laws of war and my flag. I am prepared.”

  Nagar places the noose over Eichmann’s head and tightens the knot around his neck. The rope has been lined with leather to prevent friction burns.

  Nagar and another guard step behind a blanket that has been draped over the trapdoor’s electrical release mechanism. Two buttons are hidden behind the curtain, but only one activates the actual release. Both guards will depress their buttons at the same time, neither man knowing whether his is the lethal device.

  Eichmann’s face goes pale. The peace he professed forty minutes ago is nowhere to be seen.

  “Gentlemen, we shall meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I have believed in God all my life, and I die believing in God,” says Eichmann, uttering his final words.

  “Ready!” barks prison commandant Arye Nir.

  Adolf Eichmann’s pallor turns to gray. He looks down at the trapdoor beneath his feet, his lips pursed.

  “Action,” orders Nir.

  The two guards behind the blanket press their buttons. Eichmann immediately drops from sight as the trapdoor falls open.

  For the rest of his life, Shalom Nagar will claim it was his button that sprang the mechanism. In fact, he will contradict some accounts and say that he was the only man sent to execute Eichmann and that it was a lever instead of a button that did the job.

  What is certain is that one hour later, Nagar is sent downstairs to the second f
loor to remove Eichmann’s body from the rope. “His face was white as chalk, his eyes were bulging and his tongue was dangling out. The rope rubbed the skin off his neck, and his tongue and chest were covered with blood. I didn’t know that when a person is strangled all the air remains in his stomach. So when I lifted him, all the air that was inside came out and the most horrifying sound was released from his mouth—‘baaaaa,’” Nagar will long remember.

  “For years I had nightmares of those moments.”

  * * *

  Adolf Eichmann’s body is placed on a stretcher and carried to a crematorium just outside the prison walls. A jailer who was once an inmate at Auschwitz, where he was forced to operate the ovens that burned the bodies of murdered Jews, has been given the task of incinerating Eichmann. One of the observers is police inspector Michael Goldman-Gilad who still bears the telltale tattoo given to all Auschwitz prisoners. It was once his job to spread ashes of the dead on icy Auschwitz walkways in the winter to prevent the SS guards from slipping on the slick paths.

  The task of burning Eichmann’s dead body takes two long hours.

  Adolf Eichmann’s ashes are then placed inside a small urn and driven one hour to the port city of Haifa. Police patrol boat Yarden waits at the dock. The ashes are motored six miles out into the Mediterranean. The Israelis are determined that neo-Nazis not portray Eichmann as a martyr and raise a memorial to his place of burial. Instead, the Nazi murderer’s ashes are dumped at sea without ceremony.

  At long last, justice has been served.

  18

  FEBRUARY 28, 1967

  SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

  EVENING

  The trap is set.

  For fifty-nine-year-old Franz Stangl, one of life’s simple pleasures is ending his workday by joining his youngest daughter for a beer at a local tavern. Like many Germans who immigrated to South America after the war, the Stangl family works for a company with ties to the Fatherland. Franz and Isolde both have jobs at Volkswagen. In addition, Franz’s wife, Theresa, who prefers to call him by his middle name of “Paul,” is one of the head bookkeepers at the local Mercedes-Benz plant.