Killing the SS Read online

  Bormann was zealous in his determination to see the Jewish extermination to its ultimate end. “The permanent elimination of the Jews from the territories of Greater Germany can no longer be realized through emigration but by the use of implacable force in the camps in the East,” Bormann decreed.

  On September 30, 1944, as the Allies were making advances toward Berlin, it was Bormann who decided that prisoners of war were no longer subject to military justice. Instead, those enemy soldiers and pilots in Nazi captivity would be treated no differently than the Jews. Prisoner of war camps would be under the domain of Heinrich Himmler and the SS.

  Unlike Adolf Hitler, who frequently inserted himself into formulating battle strategy, Bormann had no interest in the actual fighting of the war. On October 1, 1946, when the Nuremberg Trials convicted him in absentia for his war crimes, Bormann was acquitted of the first count against him, that of concerted planning or conspiracy in a wartime effort. Instead, he was convicted solely of war crimes and crimes against humanity. By empowering the SS to run extermination camps and pursue a policy of genocide against the Jewish people, Martin Bormann enabled every atrocity that occurred: from the evil experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, to Klaus Barbie’s torture sessions in Lyon, to the snarling German shepherds at Ravensbrück.

  And without the decisions and decrees of Martin Bormann, Simon Wiesenthal might never have been sent to the death camp at Mauthausen.

  Even though he’s an old man, not a day goes by that Simon Wiesenthal doesn’t think of the horrors he endured. This is why, from his home office in Vienna, the Nazi hunter eagerly awaits news that may finally lead to the capture of Martin Bormann.

  * * *

  But Wiesenthal is once again disappointed. Shimon Samuels of the Los Angeles Wiesenthal Center reports that he is convinced there are still a number of Nazis living in Argentina, but he finds nothing in the files to prove that Martin Bormann is there. “We don’t really think Bormann lived here, but it is a tantalizing story,” Samuels tells the New York Times. And that story remains firm for four years.

  Until the discovery of Martin Bormann’s passport.

  26

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1991

  LYON, FRANCE

  8:30 P.M.

  There is no mystery about the location of Klaus Barbie.

  The Butcher of Lyon has just thirty minutes to live. The Nazi lies unconscious in a prison wing at the Hôpital Jules-Courmont. Intravenous feeding tubes drape from his arms. A respirator mask covers his nose and mouth, making it possible for him to breathe, and a powerful drip bag of painkilling drugs dulls the agony of cancer. The Nazi war criminal was brought here from his cell at St. Joseph’s penitentiary three weeks ago, terminal leukemia coursing through his bloodstream. Barbie is seventy-seven and weighs just 104 pounds.

  In the terminology of Nazi hunters, Klaus Barbie is about to “age out,” meaning he is dying of natural causes, having enjoyed the long and full life denied to his many victims—raising a family, running a business, traveling the world. Though tried and convicted by a French court for his wartime legacy of torture and murder in 1987, Barbie was not executed, as many would have wished. France abolished the death penalty in 1981. So instead of facing a French firing squad, as was once the custom, Barbie was sentenced to a life term in prison. Amazingly, he is up for parole in 2002.

  Barbie’s trial reopened old wounds from World War II, forcing France to confront a quiet history of many citizens collaborating with Nazis during the occupation. So many Frenchmen and -women were marked for life by Barbie’s personal brutality that his trial was delayed four years as authorities gathered testimony from his victims.

  Finally in court, Barbie did not flinch, never once backing down from his beliefs or expressing remorse for his barbaric actions.

  “In times of war there are no goods and no bads,” Barbie told Agence France-Presse in a 1985 interview, conducted in the wake of the Bitburg controversy. “I am a convinced Nazi. I admire the Nazi discipline. I am proud of having commanded one of the best corps of the Third Reich. If I should be born one thousand times I would be one thousand times what I have been.

  “I am not a fanatic.

  “I am an idealist.”

  At 9:00 p.m., the “idealist” breathes his last.

  The Butcher of Lyon has departed the earth.

  27

  JUNE 17, 1996

  BARILOCHE, ARGENTINA

  DAY

  The middle-aged man of German descent steps into the offices of his local newspaper. “I want the story of Bormann’s death to be written as it really was,” he announces in a thick accent to the small team of journalists. Before the staff at La Mañana del Sur (Southern Morning) can dismiss him as a crackpot, the gentleman—who refuses to give his name—produces a most dramatic piece of evidence: the alleged passport of the heinous Nazi Martin Bormann.

  The shocked journalists have more than a passing awareness of SS war criminals. The resort town of Bariloche has a reputation as a Nazi haven. Its steep mountains and thick forests are reminiscent of Bavaria. The local architecture features the lacquered wooden beams and mottled brick of alpine chalets. The local cafés serve the same plump sausage, green olive pizza, and thick black beer more common to Europe than South America. Located a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, in a region not easily accessible to the outside world before the age of commercial air travel, Bariloche was an ideal place for former SS officers to remain hidden after World War II. It has long been rumored to be the site of clandestine Nazi social gatherings.

  Just last year, Nazi Gestapo chief Erich Priebke was captured here and then extradited to Italy to stand trial for the 1944 murders of 335 Roman citizens.1 The deaths were retribution for a bomb blast that killed thirty-three German soldiers. Adolf Hitler personally ordered that ten Italians be shot for each Wehrmacht death. Priebke rounded up men and boys, ordered that their hands be tied behind their backs, then took them to the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. Over a twenty-four-hour period the victims were led inside the cave five at a time, then shot in the back of the head by candlelight.

  For good measure, Priebke killed five more citizens than the Führer demanded.

  Like many of his SS brethren, Priebke was rounded up and imprisoned after the war, only to escape and make his way to South America via the Italian ratlines. He lived under his own name in Bariloche, where he ran a local deli and was active in the German-Argentinean cultural association. In 1996, Priebke is tried in Italy, where he pleads not guilty.2

  The staff at La Mañana del Sur are well acquainted with the Priebke case, which has attracted worldwide press coverage. Now the Bormann passport presents the paper with another chance to create a media stir. The document certainly looks authentic. It is in almost perfect condition, bearing the number 9892. It was issued on January 3, 1946, in Genoa, Italy, by the Uruguayan embassy. The photograph of a balding man in a dark jacket bears a strong resemblance to Martin Bormann. The name “Ricardo Bauer,” to whom the passport was issued, is a known alias of Bormann.

  The passport fell into the hands of the unnamed German visitor to the offices of La Mañana del Sur several years ago, when he purchased property from “a man I suspected was a Nazi in exile.” The passport was left behind on the premises, but when the German buyer tried to return it, the man he thought to be Bormann turned him down, stating that he was moving away for good and would not be needing it anymore. The German then departed, leaving the passport behind.

  In June 1996, La Mañana del Sur publishes the story, which flashes around the world. In Buenos Aires, a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center states for the record, “We do not discount it, nor do we endorse it.”

  The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires does doubt the story. That sentiment is echoed by the CIA. “Many are heavily discounting that the passport, issued in Genoa in 1946, actually belonged to Bormann,” reads an internal CIA memo, written just days later.

  That document continues: “The ongoing tria
l of Priebke undoubtedly is making the newspapers, particularly small, regional papers like the one that ‘broke’ this story on Bormann, eager to cash in on public interest in Nazi hunting. We also side with the skeptics in this sensationalist story, and wait to be convinced by better evidence than the fuzzy picture resembling Bormann on the Uruguayan passport.”

  A few years later, “better evidence” finally turns up.

  * * *

  It is mid-August 1999. The Baltic Sea is calm as the small boat motors away from the German coast into open water. A small urn carrying the cremated remains of Martin Bormann is the vessel’s most prized cargo. In response to a recent British book by Christopher Creighton titled Op JB—short for Operation James Bond—that claims that Winston Churchill had Bormann spirited out of Germany in the final days of the war and taken to Britain, German authorities have had enough of the entire Bormann matter. They decide to put it to rest, once and for all.

  So it is that in May 1998, almost fifty-three years to the day after the Nazi is thought to have died in Berlin, DNA testing is performed on the skull discovered in a German rail yard in 1972. An eighty-three-year-old relative of Martin Bormann provides a specimen of the family’s DNA to be compared with that of the alleged Bormann skull.

  The samples match.

  But there are still questions. The German man in Bariloche claims that Martin Bormann died from liver cancer on Argentinean soil. Other investigators who agree with that scenario suggest that Bormann’s body was then smuggled back to Berlin to be reburied in the rail yard. That would explain how Bormann’s skull contained dental work from the 1950s and how his bones were coated in a dark red soil found only in South America. But most people dispute that scenario.

  The German government doesn’t care. It only wants to prevent neo-Nazi groups from making a shrine of Bormann’s grave. Thus, authorities have ordered that his ashes be committed to the Baltic Sea.

  Without ceremony, the captain brings the boat to a halt. The urn is dumped into the water. It bobs on the surface for an instant, then sinks below the waves.

  * * *

  Six years later, Simon Wiesenthal is retired from full-time Nazi hunting, though he still keeps himself apprised of ongoing investigations. He is well aware that most Nazis have already died of old age, and those who remain will not be far behind. Even before the 1998 DNA findings about Martin Bormann, Wiesenthal had come to believe that the Nazi was already dead. The CIA even used Wiesenthal’s reputation to buttress their own findings about Bormann when the alleged passport was unearthed in Bariloche: “Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has reportedly reaffirmed his complete belief that Bormann died in Germany in 1945,” the report stated.3

  Strangely, even after the discovery of Dr. Josef Mengele’s body in 1985, Simon Wiesenthal could not accept that the Angel of Death had truly been located. At first he believed official reports but then changed his mind. “I see the whole matter of Mengele in absolutely another light,” Wiesenthal stated in 1989. “It was too perfect.”

  The remark is so controversial that even Rabbi Marvin Hier, international chairman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, backpedals. “Simon is very much his own man,” Hier tells the Los Angeles Times. “He’s been that way for forty-five years.”

  It is only in 1992, when DNA testing on Mengele’s bones confirm his identity, that Wiesenthal reluctantly lets go of his favorite conspiracy theory. However, he remains a “relentless Nazi hunter,” as described by the New York Times.

  To Simon Wiesenthal, it was not just about hunting Nazis but the historical implications: “When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” Wiesenthal once stated.

  On the morning of September 20, 2005, at the age of ninety-six, Simon Wiesenthal dies peacefully in his sleep. The relentless Nazi hunter was fulfilled. The world will never forget the gross atrocities committed by the Third Reich.

  28

  OCTOBER 4, 2004

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  MORNING

  Investigator Eli Rosenbaum climbs the five flights of stairs to the top floor of the shabby apartment building. As always, the forty-nine-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School is nattily dressed in a dark suit and tie, looking very much like the federal agent he is. Rosenbaum did not have to make this trip from his office in Washington, D.C., but he likes to be on the scene when a Nazi is confronted. In his twenty-five years seeking out war criminals as head of the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), Rosenbaum has unmasked 132 Nazi murderers.

  He is about to confront the 133rd.

  Rosenbaum knocks on the door. Elfriede Huth Rinkel answers. “She did not seem terribly surprised I had found her,” Rosenbaum will later tell reporters. Elfriede is eighty-two now. She leans on a cane and invites Rosenbaum to come inside. She is still plump and still wears her hair dyed red. Her husband, Fred, succumbed to a massive heart attack this past January, which devastated her, leading to a deep, lingering depression. Fred is buried in a Jewish cemetery south of San Francisco and she hopes to lie next to him one day in their double plot. Now, Elfriede gets by on Social Security—an investigation will reveal she has been paid more than $120,000 by the U.S. government since her retirement—in fact, her monthly stipend has just been increased to include widow benefits.1

  Eli M. Rosenbaum, the Nazi hunter who brought Elfriede Huth to justice more than five decades after she went into hiding

  Elfriede offers Rosenbaum a place to sit. He has found her through a meticulous cross-referencing of U.S. immigration records and lists of known concentration camp guards. Rosenbaum’s staff at OSI includes lawyers and historians dedicated to unearthing such documents.

  The investigator has also obtained Elfriede’s official Ravensbrück record card that SS officials mistakenly failed to destroy in the camp’s final days. Rosenbaum confronts Elfriede about her time at Ravensbrück, nine months that included the greatest number of murders and atrocities in the camp’s six-year history.

  “I did nothing wrong,” Elfriede insists, adding that she had no choice but to work in the slave labor camp. She admits that she is the same Elfriede Huth who once handled vicious dogs, and also admits to lying on her visa application in 1959 by omitting her service at Ravensbrück.

  But Elfriede Huth insists to Rosenbaum that she did not witness any atrocities.

  Rosenbaum is offended by her lack of remorse. He personally knows the horror of Nazi violence, having lost several relatives to the Holocaust. He might not even be alive if his grandparents had not fled Germany after the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938. So he makes it his business to be relentless in tracking down Nazis. The investigator has a low profile, keeping to a strict regimen of hard work. He is constantly aware that time is against him. As is clear by one look at Elfriede, many former Nazis will die of old age before they can be brought to justice. Rosenbaum personally avoids publicity and believes the term Nazi hunter is too swashbuckling for his life’s work. “It’s not a sport, it’s not a game—it is something that has to be done by professionals,” he tells a journalist.

  Now, as Rosenbaum sits in Elfriede’s dilapidated apartment, she shows him a picture of her husband’s gravestone with its prominent Star of David. In her own mind, the former persecutor of Jews has been living a life of atonement. She married a Jewish man and gives to Jewish charities. That should be enough to absolve her.

  “Have you converted to Judaism?” Rosenbaum asks.

  “No,” she admits, adding that despite not being a Jew, it is her wish to be buried next to her husband. She points again to the photograph, and her name and date of birth are already chiseled into the headstone.

  Rosenbaum believes this will be impossible. Even though he cannot actually arrest Elfriede for war crimes, she can be deported to Germany for lying on her visa application.

  “If I am deported, I would like to request that my coffin be brought back to the U.S. for burial,” Elfriede says.
She has already told Rosenbaum she will not fight the deportation process, preferring to maintain her privacy rather than engage in an expensive public legal battle.

  It is an absurd request. Rosenbaum is powerless over what happens to Elfriede after death, but once the news gets out about her Nazi past, the likelihood of a Jewish cemetery allowing a Ravensbrück camp guard to be buried in one of its plots is nonexistent.

  Rosenbaum leaves Elfriede’s apartment, off to begin the deportation process.

  Soon after, the elderly woman returns to the cemetery and sells her burial plot. She also purchases a new headstone, showing only her husband’s name beneath a Star of David.

  * * *

  Back in 1946, as Elfriede’s peer, the notorious Dorothea Binz, stood trial for war crimes, observers were struck by how ordinary she appeared—as if she “might have stepped out of a bread queue in any German city,” wrote one journalist covering the trial.

  The same is true for Elfriede Huth Rinkel. She is so outwardly normal that no one suspects her Nazi past. Since she is legally still a German citizen, the Department of Justice is forbidden from making the charges against her public. Throughout the deportation process, she does not tell anyone what is happening, not even her aging brother, Kurt.

  In the summer of 2006, Elfriede moves out of her apartment so that it might be renovated. When a neighbor asks how soon she will be returning, Elfriede tells him that she’s decided to return to her homeland. Tired of the United States, and free to go home after Fred’s death, she longs to live out her final days in Germany.

  Kurt drives Elfriede to San Francisco Airport on September 1, 2006. After more than sixty years of silence and secrecy, the habit is hard to break, and it will not be until Kurt reads the astounding news in the San Francisco Chronicle that he will know his sister’s vile past and her real reasons for fleeing the country.