Killing the SS Page 25

  Chapter 11

    1.  A significant example of a secret venture was Operation Solomon, an airlift of 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel on May 25–26, 1991. The political climate in Ethiopia at the time was unstable, and it was feared that a widespread massacre of these Jews was imminent. Thirty-five aircraft took part in the thirty-six-hour operation, including El Al luxury 747s.

  Chapter 12

    1.  Almost thirty years later, the gloves Peter Malkin wore on the night of Eichmann’s kidnapping would be cast in bronze and displayed in Israel as a work of art.

  Chapter 13

    1.  The National Socialist German Workers Party, also known in German as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—more commonly referred to simply as the Nazi Party.

  Chapter 15

    1.  Among the world-changing news stories of 1960–1961 are an American U-2 spy plane being shot down by the Soviet Union; Fidel Castro expanding his power in Cuba; and the inventions of the laser, pacemaker, and contraceptive birth control pill. One lesser-known incident was an unknown band named the Beatles appearing live in the German city of Hamburg.

    2.  Eichmann Special Commando Unit.

    3.  Gellhorn was married to the writer Ernest Hemingway from 1940 to 1945. She is considered one of the great journalists of the twentieth century, having covered almost every important conflict of her time. She lived to be ninety, before taking her life with a cyanide pill rather than endure the ravages of ovarian cancer.

    4.  The United States voted in favor of the resolution, taking the side of their postwar allies Britain and France. In an attempt to save face with the nation of Israel, the United States stipulated that their vote was predicated upon a UN acknowledgment that the Jews had suffered greatly at the hands of Germany, and a second amendment wishing for greater peace and understanding between Argentina and Israel. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and Poland voted against the resolution, then took the subsequent action of making it a propaganda issue.

    5.  Translation: “killer behind the desk.”

    6.  The proceedings of the Eichmann trial are available for viewing on YouTube.

  Chapter 16

    1.  The Tacuara claimed responsibility for the attack on Graciela Sirota. Two weeks later, on July 6, 1962, a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl named Soledad Barrett was attacked in a copycat crime by pro-Nazi thugs. When Barrett refused to repeat the pledge “Long live Hitler,” they used a knife to carve a swastika into both her thighs. Barrett was so traumatized that she became a pro-Communist revolutionary and traveled to Moscow for Soviet training. She was shot and killed on January 8, 1973, while trying to overthrow the Brazilian government.

    2.  It was all about money. Mossad could barely afford to protect the borders of Israel, so international operations were shut down.

    3.  The Mossad’s file on Josef Mengele was released to the public in September 2017. Reports of Mengele’s European travels were wildly exaggerated.

  Chapter 17

    1.  A 2014 study by researchers at Cornell University examined the last meal choices of 247 death row inmates. Those who maintained they were innocent were far more likely to reject a final meal.

  Chapter 18

    1.  While in a concentration camp early in the war, Cyla Wiesenthal became separated from her husband. Afterward, she wrote to a lawyer friend in Kraków, Poland, asking him to help locate her husband’s remains. Coincidentally, Wiesenthal had also written to the same lawyer with a similar request that he help find his wife’s body. Thus, the two were reunited. When they calculated how many members of their immediate families had survived the war, they were shattered to find that the answer was none. In all, eighty-nine of their relatives had been murdered.

    2.  Anne Frank was a fifteen-year-old German-born Jew who spent the war in hiding. She kept a journal of the experience that would later be turned into a bestselling book, The Diary of Anne Frank. When a stage version of the book was performed in Linz, Austria, in 1958, a group of Holocaust deniers picketed the show, proclaiming it to be fiction. To disprove this belief, Wiesenthal spent five years searching for the officer who arrested the Frank family. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen prison just three weeks before it was liberated by Allied troops. Though Karl Silberbauer admitted his guilt in the Frank arrests, he was exonerated of all charges by the Austrian courts.

    3.  CIA and FBI documents declassified as part of the 1999 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act contain extensive details about the ongoing U.S. pursuit of Bormann and the many sightings of him decades after he had allegedly died.

  Chapter 19

    1.  There is no accurate count of how many were shot and killed trying to cross the wall into West Berlin, but the figure is thought to be somewhere between 180 and 200. On the other hand, the number of individuals shot trying to escape into East Berlin is well known: zero.

    2.  Manning utilized captured Third Reich documents, files from the OSS and FBI, British intelligence, and the United States Treasury Department while tracking Bormann and looted Nazi wealth, which Manning referred to as “the Nazi flight-capital program.” Manning was very specific about the details of Bormann’s location, yet provided scant evidence to back up his theories. Given his four decades in the business and wartime work with CBS News, Manning was taken seriously as a journalist, so this breach of protocol is unusual. However, publications such as the New York Times gave enough credence to his work that on March 3, 1973, shortly after the finding of the alleged Bormann skull in Berlin, the paper ran a Manning op-ed piece about Bormann’s ongoing role in the revival of postwar Germany.

    3.  The dental investigation was performed by Dr. Reidar F. Soggnaes, founding dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry. Results were published in the Legal Medicine Annual, 1976. Another of the examining pathologists, Dr. W. H. Thomas of Wales, noted of the discovery: “The dental records, while proving the identity of Bormann, displayed worrying anomalies which suggested that much dental work had been carried out after 1945 … there is, therefore, considerable proof that Bormann’s remains were taken back to Berlin for discovery.” Dr. Thomas puts forth his belief that Bormann had actually died in Paraguay, date unknown. The Welsh doctor based that opinion on soil found on Bormann’s skeleton.

  Chapter 20

    1.  Die Spinne allegedly did work with the Paraguayan government to subjugate the Aché Indians, but Mengele played no role.

  Chapter 21

    1.  Che Guevara was born in Argentina but is best known as a pro-Marxist revolutionary who helped make possible the overthrow of the Cuban government. He trained military forces crucial to the Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs invasion. For this, and later Marxist activities in Africa, Guevara became the object of a CIA manhunt. When Guevara attempted to overthrow the Bolivian government in the mid-1960s, a CIA team captured Guevara in the mountain village of La Higuera. Knowing he was soon to be executed without a trial, one of Guevara’s last acts was to hand his Rolex to Felix Rodriguez, leader of the CIA squad. Che Guevara was shot dead by the Bolivian military on October 9, 1967. His body is buried in an unmarked grave. Rodriguez, who would go on to testify before Congress in the Iran–Contra scandal, still wears the watch to this day.

    2.  “In absentia” takes place when the accused cannot be found and is thus unable to hear the charges in court. Martin Bormann was also convicted in absentia, though at the Nuremberg Trials.

    3.  Devil’s Island was located off the coast of French Guiana and operated from 1852 to 1953. More than eighty thousand prisoners were sent there to serve out a sentence of hard labor. The harsh work and living conditions, tropical diseases, and lack of adequate sanitary facilities ensured that the vast majority never again returned to France. Devil’s Island was made famous in the 1968 book Papillon and the subsequent movie of the same title.

&nb
sp;   4.  Moulin’s remains were originally buried in a large Parisian cemetery. They were moved in 1964 to the Panthéon, a location reserved for France’s greatest individuals.

  Chapter 22

    1.  Wolfgang Gerhard, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, died approximately one month before Mengele in Germany.

  Chapter 23

    1.  Equivalent to $500 at the time.

  Chapter 24

    1.  Grese met Mengele at Auschwitz, where she was employed for a period of time.

    2.  Albert Pierrepoint is thought to have hanged more than four hundred criminals during his career. Great Britain does not have an official executioner, but for many years Pierrepoint held that unofficial title. Two hundred of the hangings over which he presided were of Nazi war criminals.

  Chapter 27

    1.  Incredibly, Priebke was tracked down in Bariloche by American journalist Sam Donaldson. After ABC News ran the story, the Bariloche police had no choice but to arrest the Nazi.

    2.  The court will rule in Priebke’s favor, causing Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to declare that Italy itself is guilty of war crimes. Prosecutors appealed the verdict, and this time Priebke was convicted. Priebke died while under house arrest in 2013. Argentina refused to allow that his body be returned to Bariloche so that he might be buried next to his wife.

    3.  This was the opposite of what Wiesenthal believed. Though unsure of Bormann’s true fate, Wiesenthal long continued to have suspicions about the West German discoveries and DNA issues with the alleged Bormann skeleton. The confidential nature of the CIA report allowed them to internally state otherwise.

  Chapter 28

    1.  In June 2015, a report by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration will reveal that between February 1962 and June 2015, the United States paid $20.2 million in Social Security benefits to suspected Nazi war criminals.

    2.  These Social Security payments to Elfriede and other suspected Nazi war criminals will continue until January 2015, when a new law called No Social Security Benefits for Nazis ends this practice.

  Chapter 29

    1.  Skorzeny’s funeral service was held in Madrid at Cementerio de Nuestra Señora de La Almudena, one of Europe’s largest cemeteries. His body was later cremated and the ashes buried in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna.

    2.  The Nazi World War II rocket program was based in Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea. The men involved were among the top intellects in the world on the subject of rocket propulsion. After the war, their talents were in great demand. The space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union were greatly advanced by the presence of these former Nazis. Dr. Wernher von Braun, who led the team at Peenemünde, was vital to the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) lunar landings and lived out his life in the United States. In the 1950s, von Braun teamed up with animator Walt Disney, where he served as technical adviser and host of television shows about space travel.

    3.  Even though the clandestine Nazi organization called ODESSA achieved fame in Hollywood, it was the group Die Spinne that allegedly aided most of the war criminals who escaped. Though details on all of the postwar Nazi networks are shrouded in deception and innuendo, it is widely believed that Die Spinne was the work of Skorzeny and Reinhard Gehlen. The assistance of Gen. Francisco Franco made it possible for Die Spinne to use Madrid as its home base. The ODESSA organization has never been confirmed as a source in aiding war criminals.

    4.  On July 25, 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism, Italy’s governing body, requested that King Victor Emmanuel III be returned to the throne. This effectively ended the reign of Benito Mussolini. The dictator was taken into custody, where he remained until his rescue by the Nazis.

    5.  Simon Wiesenthal refused to cooperate. To convince Skorzeny that his name had been removed from the list, the Mossad forged a letter stating it had occurred.

  Postscript

  Heinrich Himmler’s body remains buried in an unmarked grave, somewhere in a German forest. Allied trucks were driven over the grave immediately after his self-inflicted death to obscure the location. The reason he chose to commit suicide after initially attempting to make contact with the Allies is still unclear. Upon his capture by the British, Himmler seemed to believe the Allies might protect him to some extent. But in his short captivity his fears got the better of him. The consensus is that Himmler panicked during the second body search, leading him to bite down on his cyanide vial.

  * * *

  As for the remaining members of Himmler’s travel group, SS Col. Werner Grothmann, Himmler’s personal bodyguard Josef Kiermaier, and Maj. Heinz Macher escaped prosecution and lived well into old age. Drs. Rudolf Brandt and Karl Gebhardt were not so fortunate. Both were among the worst SS war criminals. Both men conducted gruesome experiments on human beings in concentration camps. Brandt was not even a medical doctor at all, having earned his doctorate in law. This did not prevent him from murdering and then beheading Jews in order to remove the flesh from their bones and study their skeletons for racial characteristics. Rudolf Brandt and Karl Gebhardt were hanged for war crimes on June 2, 1948. Intelligence officer SS-Gen. Otto Ohlendorf was convicted of war crimes and hanged on June 7, 1951. While later generations of SS war criminals would be cremated to avoid neo-Nazi groups from making shrines of their graves, Brandt, Gebhardt, and Ohlendorf were all buried in traditional cemeteries. Ohlendorf’s grave is the simplest of these. He is buried beneath a headstone shaped like a crucifix in the Heger Friedhof Cemetery in Osnabrück, Germany.

  * * *

  At the time of this writing, Benjamin Ferencz, the original Nazi hunter, is ninety-seven and living in Florida with his wife of seventy years, Gertrude. Ferencz has been widely honored for his pivotal role in the Ohlendorf trial and is an outspoken advocate for compassion and tolerance and the use of judicial means to bring war criminals to trial. Ferencz was particularly incensed by the execution of Osama bin Laden in 2011, arguing in a letter to the New York Times that the “illegal and unwarranted execution—even of suspected mass murderers—undermines democracy.” To maintain his vitality, Ferencz swims and does one hundred push-ups each day. He was the subject of a May 2017 Lesley Stahl story on 60 Minutes.

  * * *

  Evita Perón was not immediately laid to rest after her state funeral in August 1952. The subsequent journey of Evita’s corpse is bizarre. She was embalmed through a process utilizing glycerin, giving her body a lifelike appearance. Instead of being buried immediately, Evita’s corpse was placed on public display in her former office. It remained there for two years, awaiting the construction of a permanent monument the size of the Statue of Liberty in which she would be entombed. In 1955, a military coup ousted Juan Perón from the Argentinean presidency. He fled the country, leaving Evita’s body behind. The corpse disappeared for sixteen years, before it was finally discovered in an Italian crypt. The body was missing one fingertip and appeared to have been beaten with blunt objects. Damage to the legs suggested that it had been stored in a standing position. Evita’s body was returned to Juan Perón, now remarried and living in Spain with his new wife. Perón placed the corpse on display in his dining room, where it remained for two more years until his return to power in Argentina in 1973. Evita Perón was finally laid to rest on October 22, 1976, in Buenos Aires’s La Recoleta Cemetery. The tomb is said to be strong enough to withstand a nuclear attack in order that no one will ever steal her body again.

  * * *

  Juan Perón remained in exile until June 20, 1973, when he returned to Argentina and served a third term as president. An estimated three million supporters awaited his plane at Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza Airport. A scene of bedlam ensued, and snipers supporting the opposition party opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen. Perón died suddenly one year later, on July 1, 1974. His body is entombed in the La Chacarita Cemet
ery in Buenos Aires.

  * * *

  West German prosecutor Fritz Bauer was found dead in the bathtub of his Frankfurt home on July 1, 1968. Bauer’s corpse was discovered one day after he drowned. There were a large number of sleeping pills in his system and a glass of red wine next to the tub. German officials will speculate that he committed suicide due to stress. Bauer was long known to struggle with societal pressure, hiding both his true religion and sexual orientation.

  After years of secrecy, Bauer had recently disclosed publicly that he was the German administrator responsible for helping the Mossad pinpoint the exact location and false identity of Adolf Eichmann. Zealous about eradicating former Nazis from positions of authority in the West German government, Bauer had accumulated a long list of enemies and received numerous death threats.

  But to those who know Bauer, suicide made little sense.

  Bauer was eulogized by one former member of the U.S. Nuremberg Trials prosecution team as “the greatest ambassador the [German] Federal Republic ever had”—a man with “clear vision of what needed to be done to help Germany.” Bauer long argued that any soldier working in a death camp was complicit in the murder of prisoners. Almost fifty years after his death, as a series of books and films on Bauer showed his heroism, the German legal system finally adopted this point of view in dealing with its Nazi past.