Killing the SS Read online

  Of course, the Himmler plan went nowhere.

  Upon hearing of the duplicity, Adolf Hitler angrily removed Himmler from control of the SS, evicted him from the Nazi Party, and ordered his arrest—a command that was never carried out because of Hitler’s suicide just days later.

  But the time for escaping Germany by aircraft had long since passed. Himmler and his cronies remained in the north too long.

  As late as May 9, Himmler still believed he could fight alongside the Allies to defeat the Soviet army advancing through Germany from the east. Even though the German army had already surrendered, the Reichsführer penned a letter to British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. Otto Ohlendorf edited the letter before Himmler handed it to an aide for delivery to Montgomery. Himmler delayed his escape and desperately awaited Montgomery’s response. It never came.

  Now, it is Sepp Kiermaier who pays the price for Himmler’s delay. The bodyguard is detained by the British pending further investigation.

  Heinrich Himmler, however, somehow erroneously believes his bodyguard has been allowed through the checkpoint to safety. Himmler and his traveling companions now approach the checkpoint in their field police uniforms. The blockade is manned by a group of former Russian prisoners of war, who promptly detain Himmler’s suspicious-looking group and turn them over to the British.

  Heinrich Himmler is in custody—but no one yet realizes it.

  * * *

  Capt. Tom Selvester has spent his entire adult life in either the military or law enforcement. The young native of Edinburgh, Scotland, served seven years in the Scottish Black Watch infantry battalion, then left to become a plainclothes policeman on a Scottish police force, before returning to the Black Watch shortly before the war began, whereupon he was commissioned as a lieutenant. Selvester landed at Normandy on D-day and now commands the 031 Civilian Interrogation Camp outside the town of Lüneburg, Germany.

  “One of the usual lorry loads of suspects came in last Wednesday,” Selvester will later recount. “I did not pay much attention to the occupants.”

  But Heinrich Himmler, still in the guise of Sgt. Heinrich Hitzinger, has spotted Captain Selvester. He asks to meet with the British officer. The request is relayed to Selvester, who refuses the meeting. “I was busy,” he will remember.

  But Himmler persists, believing that his status as a Reichsführer would impress the Allied authorities, who would treat him with respect. He is also still hoping that Field Marshal Montgomery will contact him. The belief is delusional, but Himmler has been this way his whole life.

  Hours pass. Finally, Selvester angrily agrees to meet with the prisoner wearing the eye patch. Himmler, along with Major Macher and Colonel Grothmann, are led into Selvester’s office.

  “The three men came in,” Selvester will later remember, “the ill-looking shoddy Hitzinger—as he called himself—and his two powerfully-built adjutants.”

  Himmler waits until everyone is in the room. He then removes his eye patch and puts on his wire-framed glasses.

  “I am Heinrich Himmler,” he states proudly.

  But the instant Himmler dons glasses, Selvester already knows who he is.

  At 7:00 p.m. on the day of his capture, Himmler is placed under armed guard and then strip-searched. He protests when the vial of cyanide is discovered. “This is my medicine,” says Himmler. “It cures stomach cramps.”

  The Reichsführer is then given a change of clothes. Against his protests, he is forced to don British battle dress, including shoes with no laces. Himmler is offered a light dinner of bread, cheese, and tea but barely touches the meal. He asks to bathe, a request that is granted.

  To confirm the prisoner’s true identity, Selvester requests that he provide a specimen of his signature. This is then checked against a known copy of Himmler’s writing provided by the nearby British headquarters, confirming that Selvester is staring face-to-face at a notorious mass murderer. “There was nothing of the arrogant bullying Nazi about him—just an ordinary man in a leather motoring coat and looking shabby,” stated the captain.

  At 9:45 p.m., Col. Michael Murphy, Second British Army chief of intelligence, arrives to take personal responsibility for Himmler. An hour later, after being transferred to a second British facility, Himmler is strip-searched again. He takes off his clothes except for his socks and boots. The examining physician is Capt. C. J. Wells of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He methodically examines the area between Himmler’s buttocks, along with the nostrils, ears, and areas between toes and fingers. Himmler is docile, even as he endures the humiliation of having his most private regions thoroughly examined by another man. Three military eyewitnesses look on.

  Writing his report in the third person, Wells describes the proceeding: “Having searched the prisoner thoroughly he came to the mouth, where he noticed a small blue tit-like object sticking out of the lower sulcus of the left cheek.”

  Wells places his finger into Himmler’s mouth to sweep out the curious article, only to have the Nazi bite down hard on his fingers. As Wells recoils, Himmler crushes the glass vial between his molars. The deadly aroma of prussic acid fills the small examination room. Wells, knowing this is another cyanide vial, grabs Himmler and shoves his head in a bowl of water, placed there for just such an instance to wash out the poison. He grabs Himmler’s tongue to prevent him from swallowing any more poison, suffering repeated bites.

  Maj. Norman Whitaker, one of the military observers, works with Wells to get Himmler under control. “There were terrible groans and grunts coming from the swine,” Whitaker will later recall.

  Himmler’s body soon goes limp, but the fight to keep him alive continues for another fifteen minutes. Wells even risks his own life by attempting to resuscitate Himmler, but to no avail.

  Heinrich Himmler is dead, soon to be consigned to an unmarked grave in a forest outside of Lüneburg.

  This devil has received his due.

  * * *

  Yet there are many Nazi war criminals actively evading justice. Postwar Germany has provided them with chaos and confusion as millions of people are in transition. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler are no more, but some of the Third Reich’s most brutal murderers have slipped the Allied noose. In Berlin, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, remained in the Führer’s underground bunker for three days after Hitler shot himself. Then Bormann, the SS-Reichsleiter specifically selected by Hitler to assume control of the Nazi Party after the war, vanished.

  To the east, a thirty-four-year-old physician named Dr. Josef Mengele is racing west, terrified of being captured by the advancing Soviet army. The SS-Hauptsturmführer, called the Angel of Death, performed horrific medical experiments on prisoners at the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Mengele oversaw the murder of thousands of innocent human beings and is well aware that he will hang if captured. He now seeks to blend in with the thousands of displaced persons clogging the roads of Germany.

  In France, Klaus Barbie, the notorious “Butcher of Lyon” who not only tortured and killed thousands of French citizens but also ordered the deportation of children to the Auschwitz death camp, has successfully slipped away from the French partisans seeking his execution.

  And in Austria, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, perhaps the most ruthless Nazi of all, and the man responsible for sending millions to their deaths, is hiding in plain sight. He has returned to his family in Linz as if the war had never happened.

  These four men—Bormann, Mengele, Barbie, Eichmann—are among the thousands of SS war criminals slipping quietly into the shadows. The Nazi postwar machine will help these war criminals gain passports, cross borders, and build new lives in sympathetic nations.

  To counter that, a small band of men who will soon call themselves “Nazi hunters” are organizing teams of assassins and kidnappers.

  The killing of the SS is about to begin.

  1

  DECEMBER 26, 1945

  FORT DIX, NEW JERSEY

  MORNING
/>   Benjamin Ferencz is finally out of the army. It is seven months almost to the day that the war ended, and almost as long since Heinrich Himmler killed himself. Discharge papers in hand, the scrappy twenty-five-year-old Harvard-educated attorney steps out into the pale midday light of this military demobilization center, eager to return home to New York City.

  Though just five feet tall, Sergeant Ferencz served as an active duty enlisted man throughout the war. Ferencz survived the Normandy D-day landings, the Allied advance across France, and the Battle of the Bulge before the army began making use of his legal background. In 1945, he was reassigned from his artillery unit to the headquarters of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. A brand-new unit known as the War Crimes Section was being formed. Benny Ferencz was one of the first recruits.

  Ferencz is known for being openly defiant of authority. “I am not occasionally insubordinate,” Ferencz corrected an officer, who noted that description of his behavior in an official file. “I am usually insubordinate. I don’t take orders that I know are stupid or illegal.”

  It was that independent streak, however, that allowed Ferencz to do a job few men would tackle. The New York native traveled by himself in a jeep with the German words “Immer Allein” (Always Alone) painted across the hood. His gruesome mission was to enter concentration camps immediately after their liberation and compile evidence of atrocities.

  Benny Ferencz was born a Jew in the Transylvania region of Romania. If not for his parents’ decision to immigrate to the United States just before his first birthday, Ferencz would most likely have been rounded up and sent to a death camp. In that respect, Benny Ferencz is lucky, for the United States would soon turn a blind eye to the growing German suppression of the Jewish population. Between 1933 and 1943, just 190,000 Jews were allowed to immigrate into America—a small fraction of the millions seeking asylum.

  Ferencz has an active imagination, and as he drives alone through the hostile German countryside, he imagines himself to be a military version of the Lone Ranger.

  In fact, the Brooklyn native is something far more daring: the world’s first Nazi hunter.

  * * *

  “They were all basically similar,” Ferencz will later write of entering the death camps. “Dead bodies strewn across the camp grounds, piles of skin and bones, cadavers piled up like cordwood before the burning crematoria, helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse-ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help. Few had enough strength to muster a smile of gratitude. My mind would not accept what my eyes saw. It built a protective barrier to enable me to go on with my work in what seemed an incredible nightmare. I had peered into Hell.”

  Though Ferencz was not a trained investigator, his role required him to approach his job with the keen eye of a detective. His first stop at each camp was the Schreibstube—camp office—to pore over official files. The German penchant for detailed record keeping proved to be their undoing: the date and cause of death for each inmate was dutifully recorded. All too often the notation “auf den flucht erschosssen”—shot while attempting to escape—would appear next to a name.

  “In English,” Ferencz will write, “they would call it murder.”

  Thanks to the meticulous files, Ferencz learned when trains arrived in a camp, which country they came from, and how many prisoners were on board. At first, the job was intense but satisfying after three years of combat duty. However, over time, the gruesome work drained the young attorney.

  “There is no doubt,” Ferencz will later write, “that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers.”

  The camp at Ebensee has left the most haunting impression. Upon liberation, “some inmates caught one of the SS guards as he was trying to flee; judging by the violence of the assault, he may have been the camp commandant. First he was beaten mercilessly. Then the mob tied him to one of the metal trays used to slide bodies into the crematorium. There he was slowly roasted alive, taking him in and out of the oven several times.

  “I watched it happen and did nothing,” Ferencz will later write. “It was not my duty to stop it, even if I could have. And frankly, I was not inclined to try.”

  Ferencz’s labors will make headlines on November 21, 1945, when the first Nazi war criminals are put on trial in Nuremberg, Germany. But that is none of his concern. All Benny Ferencz wants to do is go home. So the day after Christmas 1945, the war finally over and his discharge complete, Ferencz puts Nazi hunting behind him. He makes plans to marry Gertrude, his longtime sweetheart. What will happen after that, Benny Ferencz does not know. Like ten million other American soldiers just home from the war, he is out of a job and hoping to find work fast.

  Of one thing, Ferencz is certain: he will never return to Germany as long as he lives.

  He is wrong.

  * * *

  On the same date of Heinrich Himmler’s death, Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, former leader of the Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads, is detained by the Allies in the town of Lüneburg. Ohlendorf had separated from Himmler shortly before the Reichsführer’s capture. It is the general’s bad luck that he is captured by the British instead of Americans. The United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) is not aggressively pursuing war crimes prosecutions. Instead, it is recruiting members of the Nazi Party to spy against the Soviet Union.

  The American OSS station chief in Switzerland, the aristocratic Allen Dulles, is in fact actually subverting the work of Benny Ferencz and giving assistance to a number of leading Nazis. Incredibly, Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, finds sanctuary with the OSS.

  In March, at a time when Germany and America were still very much at war, another high-ranking SS official, Gen. Karl Wolff, made his way to Zurich, Switzerland—a neutral country. There he enjoyed a scotch with Dulles to discuss the early surrender of German forces in Italy. But Wolff also had a secondary goal of impressing upon Dulles that the Nazi SS general might be of assistance to the American spymaster once Germany finally surrendered.1

  But Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, SS badge number 880, has no such connection to the OSS—and thus, no protection from the legal fury of Benny Ferencz.

  Which will soon come with a vengeance.

  2

  OCTOBER 1, 1946

  NUREMBERG, GERMANY

  9:00 A.M.

  The hangman awaits.

  This morning begins the final day of what will go down in history as the Nuremberg Trials. The purpose of the proceedings is not only to prosecute the highest echelon of Nazi war criminals but also to reveal to the world once and for all the true extent of their depravities.

  The Nazi defendants sit in the docket of the great courtroom at the Justizpalast—Palace of Justice. Behind them stands a row of white-helmeted American guards, hands clasped behind their backs. This security detail does not carry handguns, fearing that one of the accused might somehow gain possession of a weapon and open fire in the courtroom. Instead, each guard clutches a short billy club, prepared to maintain order if force is needed.

  The chief prosecutor for the United States is Supreme Court Justice and former U.S. attorney general Robert H. Jackson. “The trial began on November 20, 1945, and occupied 216 days of trial time,” Jackson will summarize in his report to American president Harry S. Truman. “Thirty-three witnesses were called and examined for the prosecution. Sixty-one witnesses and nineteen defendants testified for the defense; 143 additional witnesses gave testimony by interrogatories for the defense. The proceedings were conducted and recorded in four languages—English, German, French, and Russian—and daily transcripts in the language of his choice was provided for prosecuting staff and all counsel for defendants. The English transcript of the proceedings covers over 17,000 pages. All proceedings were sound-reported in the original language used. In preparation for the trial over 100,000 captured German documents were screened or examined and about 10,000 wer
e selected for intensive examination as having probable evidentiary value.” More than twenty-five thousand captured still photographs were brought to Nuremberg, together with Hitler’s personal photographer, who took most of them. More than eighteen hundred were selected and prepared for use as exhibits. The tribunal, in its judgment, states: “The case, therefore, against the defendants rests in large measure on documents of their own making.”

  The trial has been a phenomenon captivating the world. Four hundred spectators are on hand each day. Correspondents from more than three hundred media outlets from twenty-three countries chronicle the testimony.

  The most anticipated testimony begins on March 13, 1946, when Hermann Göring is called to testify. He was arrested on May 9, 1945, by the U.S. Seventh Army’s 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion. Wrongly believing that he could negotiate his freedom directly with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Göring turned himself over to American troops at the former SS headquarters at Fischhorn Castle in the mountains of Bavaria. As the most powerful Nazi figure to stand trial, his appearance is eagerly anticipated. The head of the German air force—the Luftwaffe—Göring has lived a full life. He grew up in a castle just thirty miles from where he now sits, the son of a cuckolded government official whose wife openly slept with the castle’s owner. Young Hermann was sent to boarding school as a boy, then on to a military academy. He seemed destined for a career in the infantry, but Göring’s sense of daring led him to the world of aviation. Initially passed over for a spot in flight school, Göring ended World War I as one of Germany’s top fighter pilots, an ace credited with twenty-two aerial kills. By then, he had risen to become commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, nicknamed the “Flying Circus.”1

  But the arrogant Göring was deeply bitter about Germany’s defeat, believing that Jews and a weak German government had betrayed the German people. Eventually, Göring witnessed a speech by a young former soldier who shared these views. Adolf Hitler was just thirty-three when Hermann Göring heard him speak in Munich in 1922. Göring believed so completely in the platform of Hitler’s Nazi Party that he joined the next day. Hitler reciprocated by giving Göring command of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the fledgling paramilitary wing of the party. As Hitler’s power grew, so did Göring’s.