Killing the SS Read online

  The first day of training is simple: a line of prisoners stands before Elfriede and her new group of guards. At the command of Deputy Chief Wardress Dorothea Binz, each trainee must select a prisoner and then beat her. This is a test. Most new guards do as they are told immediately, Elfriede Huth among them. Those few who ask why the inmate should be beaten are dismissed. Those recruits brave enough to refuse to strike a prisoner are themselves taken into custody.

  Soon, Elfriede takes possession of the German shepherd that will remain at her side daily. The dog’s name is Albert. He has black ears and tan markings on his snout. In photographs, he sits in docile fashion at Elfriede’s feet as she gazes toward the camera in her guard uniform and peaked cap.

  Elfriede’s indoctrination takes place at a time when Ravensbrück is home to two of the most sadistic women in wartime history. Dorothea Binz is a young blonde personally responsible for the training of new guards. Just nineteen when she began her SS career in 1939, Binz openly cavorts with her lover, an SS officer named Edmund Bräuning, who is employed at the camp. One of her favorite pastimes is strolling arm in arm with Bräuning through Ravensbrück, giggling as she stops to watch prisoners whipped and beaten. Binz herself is good with the bullwhip and is fond of letting her own German shepherd off leash to attack inmates.

  Ravensbrück is a slave labor camp. Its primary focus is not extermination, although the harsh living conditions mean that more than twenty thousand women will die here. Guards periodically undertake “selections,” in which the camp population is thinned by randomly choosing prisoners for death. These unfortunates will either be taken out to the woods and shot, or loaded onto trucks the prisoners call Himmelfahrt—“heaven bound”—for transportation to a gas chamber. The prisoners never know when the “selections” will take place, but the presence of Binz on the Appellplatz is a sure sign. Prisoners hold their breath in fear as she strolls through their ranks with her Alsatian and coiled whip. Binz is always immaculately coiffed, her blond bob tucked perfectly under her cap. Her uniform blouse and blazer are creased and starched. Even at 4:00 a.m., she looks wide-awake and focused.

  The Raven’s Women all seek to emulate her appearance. Even some prisoners will remark about the beauty of their guards and the pride they take in their daily hygiene. A special hair salon for female guards ensures a coiffure just as smart as that of Binz. Despite the rigors of their job, the dog handlers revel in the stylish cut of their culotte skirts, knee-high leather boots, and gray blazers. Some are fond of wearing pink underwear.

  There is nothing specific in the choices Binz makes—the prisoner might be ill, or showing defiance by looking at the guards the wrong way, or simply the victim of bad luck. And not all are killed immediately. Some are sent to the infirmary, where they become “rabbits”—the subjects of gruesome medical experiments conducted by female doctors.

  Ravensbrück prisoners are also killed by typhus, dysentery, or exposure to the cold during winter mornings of roll call that can last for hours. But when the camp constructs a gas chamber of its own late in 1944, the number of “selections” increases from a few dozen weekly to several hundred, then into the thousands. Between January and April 1945, 6,993 women and children are murdered. If a baby is born while in the camp, it is immediately taken from its mother and placed in a crib with five or six other infants—packed in so tight that many die from suffocation. As Germany suffers setbacks in the war, Ravensbrück crematoriums burn around the clock, clearly visible through the curtains in the guards’ quarters.

  In a recorded observation, Dorothea Binz leaves the camp on a bicycle to monitor a group of prisoners working in the forest. When it appears that one woman is not putting forth the proper effort, Binz leans her bicycle against a tree and beats the woman with a pickax until her mutilated body is unrecognizable. Then Binz shines her bloody boots with the dead woman’s skirt.

  On another occasion, a truckload of prisoners is being driven out of the camp to be murdered. Binz runs after the truck, yelling, “Wait for me. I want to watch.”

  * * *

  Dorothea Binz has a soul mate at Ravensbrück who is, perhaps, even more terrifying. Irma Grese spends her days in a constant pursuit of human suffering. She kicks inmates with her boots until they are unconscious, forces prisoners to kneel for hours at a time while holding a rock above their heads, and is particularly fond of whipping well-endowed women across their bare breasts. She is one of the few guards who carries a pistol. To ensure that her dog maintains a strong appetite for female flesh, she is in the habit of not feeding him before reporting for duty.

  Grese is an insatiable nymphomaniac, forcing herself on prisoners and fellow camp guards—men and women alike. To Irma Grese, whom the prisoners nickname “the Beautiful Beast,” this punishment is more than cruelty or perversion—it is a hobby. One prisoner, a Romanian gynecologist named Gisella Perl, will testify that she believes Grese becomes “sexually aroused just watching the women suffering.”

  Among the many lovers Irma Grese takes during World War II is Dr. Josef Mengele.1

  As the Soviet army closes in on Berlin in 1945, many SS guards flee, terrified of abuse at the hands of Russian soldiers. Elfriede Huth is one of them. In April, she walks the 120 miles to Leipzig, a city reduced to rubble and now under Soviet jurisdiction. There she returns to her home at Holzhauser Strasse 36 and her previous life as a seamstress, sewing fur coats. It is as if nothing has happened. When asked to name all of her previous residences on her United States visa application in 1959, Elfriede will carefully omit any mention of her wartime service.

  Of the more than thirty-five hundred German women who serve as SS camp guards, most will succeed in hiding their evil doings. Fewer than two hundred will be imprisoned. The actual number of convictions is unknown, for the German court system does not keep a running tally of female camp guards arrested for war crimes. Those few who are caught generally serve very short sentences.

  This is not the case for Dorothea Binz and Irma Grese. Taking the advice of her lover, SS officer Edmund Bräuning, Binz flees on her bicycle in April 1945 as the Allies race for Berlin. Bräuning also goes on the run, quite successfully. He is never heard from again.

  But Dorothea Binz does not get far. She is captured by British troops in May and held for a short time in a former concentration camp, before transfer to Hamelin Prison outside Hamburg. She is among sixteen Ravensbrück staff members put on trial. Seven of these are women, of whom three are former inmates who conspired with the SS against their fellow captives. Binz is convicted and hanged on May 2, 1947. The famed British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, is her hangman. Just before the hood is placed over her head, Dorothea Binz removes her necklace and hands it to Pierrepoint. “I hope you won’t think we were all evil people,” she says as her last words.

  A moment later, the trapdoor swings open and she drops to her death.

  * * *

  In March 1945, Irma Grese is transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and chooses not to flee as the British army closes in. Along with other camp administrators, she is forced by the British to bury the many bodies covering the grounds. Grese stands trial in late 1945. Throughout the war, she had dreamed of becoming a movie star once the fighting was over. But the Belsen Trial, as the legal proceedings are known, ensure that she will never set foot outside a prison again. A long line of victims testify to her brutality. And while more than half of the forty-five SS officials and Nazi collaborators on trial receive lengthy prison terms, Grese is the only woman condemned to die.

  Her hangman is again Albert Pierrepoint.2 Grese’s last word to the executioner is “Schnell”—“Quickly.”

  Pierrepoint complies.

  * * *

  Almost fourteen years later, on September 21, 1959, TWA Flight 771 lands in San Francisco. The United States’ borders are amazingly porous. With the Cold War intensifying, people fleeing from countries such as East Germany and other satellite nations of the Soviet Union are given quick appr
oval to migrate to America. In this way, an estimated ten thousand former Nazis successfully relocate to the United States and now live under assumed identities.

  Elfriede Huth is the latest to arrive. She could have chosen any port of entry into the United States but picked San Francisco because her brother Kurt, a former Wehrmacht soldier, settled in nearby Berkeley after the war and has offered to take her in. Though Elfriede has managed to avoid arrest since the war, the East German secret police have recently begun a vigorous prosecution of Nazi war criminals in an effort to embarrass West Germany. The time for her to run has come.

  There is no documented evidence of atrocities committed personally by Elfriede Huth, but there is no doubt she was brutal. Dog handlers who showed lenience toward prisoners, or who held back when it came time to set their animal loose to attack inmates, were relieved of their duties. Their ruthless actions were considered a part of their obligation to protect the German homeland from all enemies. The barbarities of all concentration camp guards have been well documented.

  Nonetheless, Elfriede believes she can conceal her past.

  However, unbeknownst to her, a random but grave mistake was made in the waning days of the war: Elfriede’s Ravensbrück camp identity card was not among those destroyed by the SS, giving potential investigators a clear starting point to discover her postwar location.

  * * *

  Thirty years after coming to America, Elfriede Huth still takes precautions. Because she lied on that long-ago visa application, she will never apply for U.S. citizenship for fear of an investigation into her SS past.

  Her husband, Fred, known as “Fritz” in his native Berlin, found asylum in China during the war. Now, the couple are fond of being together, to the point of being standoffish to others. They never socialize. Elfriede doesn’t allow Fred to talk on the phone with most friends or relatives.

  It is common among San Francisco’s Jewish immigrant population to play a game of one-upmanship: who left Germany earliest before the war, who left latest, who survived the death camps. Elfriede refuses to socialize in these circles, knowing that too many questions may be asked.

  Otherwise, life in America is satisfying. Fred is dashing and flamboyant. He is punctual and sings opera, sometimes on the Powell Street trolley car. The couple often spends nights ballroom dancing in their fifth-floor flat. Fred usually sings along to the music in his polished tenor. The two of them always dress well and are fond of strolling arm in arm throughout the city. Neighbors call Fred “Einstein,” for his bushy gray mustache and strong resemblance to the scientist. Elfriede, meanwhile, is often referred to as “a sweet lady.”

  Elfriede Huth, Ravensbrück concentration camp guard

  Elfriede is just happy to be in the United States. Not once has anyone shown suspicion about her Nazi past.

  Not even her husband.

  Fred openly acknowledges to Elfriede that he lost both his parents in Nazi death camps. But Elfriede never speaks about the war—and Fred never asks.

  Thus, after almost three decades of marriage, Fred Rinkel has no idea that his wife once terrorized innocent Jewish women and children in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

  But someone knows. And that someone is coming.

  25

  MARCH 17, 1992

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  2:42 P.M.

  The Ford F-100 panel van is on the move. After an hour and a half of summoning his courage in a nearby parking lot, a young man starts the engine and proceeds down Arroyo Street. The rear of the vehicle is weighed down with 220 pounds of metal shards packed into high explosives. There is great patience in the driver’s approach to his target in this tranquil neighborhood. He takes almost three minutes to drive just two blocks to a pedestrian walkway.

  Suddenly, the van swerves up off the street onto the sidewalk, whereupon the driver detonates his cargo, instantly killing himself and twenty-nine other people. Shrapnel flies through the air, and buildings erupt in a fountain of dust and stone. Bodies are crushed in the debris. The nearby Mater Admirabilis Catholic Church is also partially destroyed, and the parish priest is among the dead. But neither Father Juan Carlos Brumana nor the local sanctuary in which he once celebrated Mass is the primary target of the suicide bomber.

  Instead, the Israeli embassy, on the corner of Arroyo and Suipacha Streets is no more. The five-story building where Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni once planned the abduction of Adolf Eichmann has been completely destroyed. In addition to the dead, 242 men, women, and children lie wounded, many of them trapped in the extensive rubble. Body parts are strewn up and down the street.

  On the surface, it appears that the Nazis have finally had their revenge.

  * * *

  Mossad agents quickly fly from Tel Aviv into Buenos Aires to track down the killers. The many threats by local Fascist organizations over the years, as well as numerous plots against the embassy by anti-Jewish organizations, instantly place suspicion on Nazi terror groups.

  For newly installed Argentinean president Carlos Saúl Menem, the attack could not come at a worse time. He has openly been seeking a dialogue with Israel to heal the fractured relationship between the government of Argentina and its Jewish population. On February 3, just six weeks before the bombing, Menem signed an executive decree making Argentina’s secret government files on Nazi war criminals available to the public. It is not a popular decision—supporters of the former Argentinean president Juan Perón claimed this was an attempt coordinated by the “Jews” to “tarnish the memory of General Perón.”

  But Menem stood firm.

  “We are taking this step to make this country and its affairs as open as possible. Argentina has been hiding a truth for forty years that the whole world wants to see. This is a debt Argentina is paying to the world.”

  The files are housed in forty cardboard containers. Much of the evidence has been “cleansed” over the decades to remove details that could be embarrassing to Argentina. For this reason, these records will not prove any collaboration with the Third Reich.

  But many pieces of information are remarkable. Among the files are documented chronicles of Nazi travel in and out of Argentina, as well as banking records revealing the flow of gold and other securities to war criminals. The records also prove that the Catholic Church and the Red Cross have long been complicit in the smuggling of Nazis into Argentina and other South American nations. Most damaging of all, the new evidence proves that Argentinean officials were fully aware that Dr. Josef Mengele once lived in their country.

  But to Simon Wiesenthal’s international army of investigators, the file they most want to see is the one with information about Martin Bormann. In the wake of Mengele’s death, Wiesenthal has toned down his rhetoric. He is eighty-four now, and in semiretirement, but no less determined to find Nazi war criminals like Bormann than he was forty-five years ago. Wiesenthal is still haunted by the many deaths he witnessed during the war, and the memory of relatives who died. To carry on his legacy, he now loans his name to a group in Los Angeles calling itself the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The longtime Nazi hunter is paid a stipend for the use of his brand.

  As an indication of the ongoing power of the Nazi movement in Argentina, a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent to Buenos Aires to view the new evidence has already received death threats. Shimon Samuels has received several harassing phone calls to his hotel room, condemning his ongoing pursuit of Nazis. However, one call, allegedly from a policeman, is different. The caller offers to sell Samuels photographs of Martin Bormann taken after the war.

  This is the sort of hard evidence Simon Wiesenthal wants to see. Bormann would be ninety-two this year. Wiesenthal was not convinced by the German discovery of Bormann’s skull twenty years ago and does not believe that Hitler’s personal secretary died in Berlin. Any tangible proof that Bormann might have entered Argentina would be dramatic.

  Martin Bormann, whose disappearance at the end of World War II remained a mystery for decades, sh
own in 1942

  Simon Wiesenthal is initially disappointed when President Menem goes on the record stating that Argentina has no official files relating to Bormann. Then, as if by magic, Menem locates two thick files pertaining to Bormann. The files contain hearsay stating that the Nazi was living in Bolivia, Colombia, and the backcountry of Argentina. The Argentinean president makes no assertion of validity, but the information is widely dispersed.

  * * *

  Martin Bormann was always the subject of mystery.

  Unlike other Nazi chieftains, Himmler, Göring, and the Führer himself, Bormann did not want any publicity. He even objected to having his picture taken. But his power was well known throughout the Reich. In May 1941, Martin Bormann became Adolf Hitler’s top aide, and he remained so until the Nazi surrender in May 1945.

  Bormann wielded authority in the Nazi regime surpassed only by Hitler himself. One German writer stated shortly after the war ended that Bormann was “Germany’s secret ruler.” Bormann remained at the Führer’s side almost around the clock, so complicit in the evil perpetrated by the Third Reich that some Nazi insiders called him “Hitler’s Mephistopheles.” Bormann oversaw Adolf Hitler’s personal finances and carried out orders the Führer often made in an irrational frenzy. SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, who would be assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942, marveled at Bormann’s ambition, referring to him as “a real master of intrigue and deceit.”

  Walter Schellenberg, SS foreign intelligence chief, described Bormann as “a thickset man, with square shoulders and a bull neck. His eyes were like those of a boxer advancing on his opponent.… Those who were rivals and even enemies always underestimated his abilities.”