Killing the SS Page 5

  Espejo anticipated this moment. He calmly speaks into the microphone, explaining to the mob that Eva Perón has chosen not to attend the rally.

  The people don’t seem to hear him. “Evita! Evita!” they cry.

  Feigning indignation, Espejo leaves the stage. The boisterous chanting only grows louder. It is all President Juan Perón can do to remain stoic, his face creased in a benign smile as he awaits the hysteria that is soon to come.

  At last, Evita Perón steps onto the balcony. Avenida 9 de Julio becomes a scene of bedlam. Evita is five foot five with golden hair. The former actress and radio star rose from a poor childhood to a life of wealth and power. Her heavily chronicled Rainbow Tour of Europe in 1947 saw her feted by dictators and the pope alike.1 She has graced the cover of Time magazine, cementing her worldwide celebrity. But it is Evita’s connection with the Argentinean people that makes her so special. She loves them, and they love her in return, giving her a unique political strength El Presidente will never know.

  Evita moves quickly to the microphone at the center of the stage. Juan Perón stands to her left. Instead of the elaborate hairdos for which she is well known, Evita’s hair this night is pulled back in a tight bun. Unlike the designer couture and Cartier jewels that so often grace her lithe figure, she wears a simple tailored suit. Evita is thinner than normal today, just beginning to show signs of the fatal illness now ravaging her body.

  The crowd grows still. Evita is second to no man when it comes to public speaking. Her message tonight is aimed at the working poor. The words pour forth in a powerful narrative, reminding the masses of her loyalty to the people and her disdain for the wealthy. She pounds her fist and makes dramatic hand gestures, speaking loudly in curt, declarative sentences. It is no coincidence that Evita’s speaking style is very similar to those of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, for both she and her husband patterned their rise to power after those Fascist leaders.

  Comrade is a favorite word of Evita’s, and she uses it several times to reinforce her bond with the left-leaning crowd.

  “Comrades, it is said throughout the world that I’m a selfish and ambitious woman. You know very well that this isn’t the case. But you also know that everything I did, it was never so I could have any political position in my country. I never want any worker of my country to lack arguments when those people full of resentment, those mediocre people who never understand me and do not believe everything I do, I do for the lowest motives.”

  Evita Perón knows the people want her to run for vice president. But whether or not Evita chooses to seek that office is tonight’s great secret. “We shall wait here for her decision,” labor leader Espejo announces as Evita concludes her speech and leaves the stage. “We shall not move until she gives us a reply in accordance with the desires of the people.”

  And so the crowd waits noisily, chanting their hopes that Evita will announce her candidacy.

  Darkness falls, and still the people linger, clamoring for her to step forth and confirm their wishes. They believe in her and see their beloved Evita as a woman they can trust.

  However, Evita Perón is keeping two great secrets tonight.

  The first is that she is dying. The First Lady is already experiencing fainting spells and severe internal bleeding. Evita refuses to see a doctor and has no idea what her illness might be, but as her weight drops and she continues to lose great amounts of blood, something is clearly wrong. In fact, cervical cancer is now racing quickly through her body. Tonight’s speech will be among the last Evita will ever give.

  The second secret is Juan and Eva Perón’s deep ties to the Nazi Party. During Perón’s previous career as a military attaché, he toured Germany just as the Second World War began. In the process, he developed a disturbing respect for the efficient manner in which the Nazis waged war. He also shares their anti-Semitic views and actively works to prevent Jewish migration to Argentina. Perón’s personal secretary and intelligence chief, Rodolfo “Rudi” Freude, is a Nazi sympathizer whose father funneled German money into Perón’s first presidential election campaign in 1946. While the majority of the world saw the Nuremberg Trials as the moment when evil finally got its due, Perón considers the tribunals “a disgrace, and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity.”2

  Perhaps the most shocking part of Juan Perón’s worldview is that he has designed a secret program to convince millions of European refugees to resettle in Argentina. Immigrants with a scientific background and a history working with armament were preferred—so much so that Perón paid their airfare. In all, forty thousand immigrants with a German heritage are allowed to enter Argentina during Perón’s reign. It is a program designed to advance Argentina’s standing on the world stage by bolstering their industry and military. But a significant, though less well known, aspect of Perón’s agenda is to help Nazi war criminals escape justice. The Argentine president has gone so far as to recruit a group of former SS soldiers to comb Europe for hidden war criminals, find them wherever they might be, and bring them to Argentina.

  Juan and Eva Perón’s “rescue teams” are spreading their tentacles throughout Europe, opening up new escape routes through Switzerland, Belgium, and even Sweden and Denmark. They are successfully bringing not just German war criminals in from the cold, but also hundreds of French and Belgian collaborators who committed atrocities on behalf of the SS. All are given safe haven and immunity from extradition upon their arrival in Argentina.

  Each of these killers believes himself untouchable once he steps off the boat in Buenos Aires.

  As the night falls over Avenida 9 de Julio, the people of Buenos Aires make torches by lighting rolled-up newspapers—all the better to see and hear their beloved Evita. In less than two months she will be too weak to stand without assistance and will then undergo a lobotomy in a misguided attempt to manage her pain.3 It will be Juan Perón himself who will order the procedure. As Evita’s cervical cancer progresses, her public appearances become erratic—sometimes she says inappropriate things, threatening her husband’s hold on power. The lobotomy will help her manage the tortures of cancer, but it will also numb her passion and silence her fiery speaking voice once and for all. She will never run for the vice presidency.

  But the people of Argentina cannot possibly imagine that right now. In Evita’s rise from poverty to power, they see their own lives, believing she is the face of their ascendant nation. So great is Evita’s aura that she will soon become the one and only person in Argentinean history to be given the official title Spiritual Leader of the Nation.

  Nor does the crowd realize that hundreds of Nazi war criminals are now part of their nation. And while Juan Perón may be offering his government’s full protection to these callous murderers, the people who are hunting them will not relent in their determination to track them down.

  * * *

  It is January 3, 1946, when Dieter Wisliceny testifies at the Nuremberg Trials. The pudgy SS-Hauptsturmführer from East Prussia worked hard to eradicate the Jewish population of Hungary, Slovakia, and Greece during the war. Even though the thirty-four-year-old SS henchman committed mass murder on a grand scale, he does not take responsibility for his many executions. Instead, he shifts blame to those who gave the orders. The SS motto—“Meine Ehre heist Treue” (My Honor Is Loyalty)—that Wisliceny once held dear is now forgotten as he desperately tries to save his skin. The only loyalty he knows now is to himself.

  Under oath, Wisliceny tells the Nuremberg tribunal about the man who gave him the orders to destroy Jews. The individual is bowlegged and walks slightly bent forward. His handshake is soft and limp, his forehead is high, and his hair is dark blond. For purposes of dental verification, Wisliceny swears that the individual in question has two gold bridges and many fillings. Wisliceny knows this because they went to the same dentist.

  This man, Wisliceny states for the record, is the true architect of the Holocaust, an officer who zealously pursued the extermination of the entire Jewish race. Wis
liceny also testifies that this officer enjoyed the process of capturing, transporting, and executing Jews so completely that he once flippantly stated that having the deaths of “five million people on his conscience” gave him “extraordinary satisfaction.”

  Meanwhile, just thirty miles east, the SS officer of whom Wisliceny speaks is being held inside an American prisoner of war camp. The mass murderer once described as “a block of ice” for his emotionless demeanor has changed his name and gone undetected during seven months of captivity.

  Adolf Eichmann is five foot nine, a man so thoroughly ordinary in appearance that it seems ludicrous he might be a killer—no bulging muscles, no sadistic gleam in his eye. Just a simple man approaching middle age. He has a receding hairline, a bemused smile, and claims to have served as an Untersturmführer—second lieutenant—in the SS during the war. The Americans have no reason to disbelieve him.

  But the safety and anonymity of the man called Otto Eckmann, as the SS killer now calls himself, disappears the moment Wisliceny addresses the court.

  Eichmann instantly becomes a wanted man. Alarmed by Wisliceny’s testimony, and not knowing he is already in American captivity, the United States Army’s war crimes section begins an intense manhunt, scouring all of Germany for this bureaucrat who happily murdered millions.

  It is a moment Eichmann has anticipated for years. Even at the height of SS success, he rarely allowed himself to be photographed. Not only do the Nazi hunters not know where Eichmann might be, they also have little idea what he looks like.

  Two days later, alerted by a clandestine SS network that his life is in danger, Eichmann escapes from the American POW camp at Oberdachstetten. He is just two months shy of his fortieth birthday and still has a long life ahead of him—if he can evade the Nazi hunters.4

  In truth, Eichmann did not personally murder a single human being. “I never killed a Jew,” he will one day explain. “I’ve never killed anybody. And I never ordered anybody to kill a Jew, or ordered anybody to kill a non-Jew. No. Never.”

  Eichmann’s role was actually far more insidious.

  So-called concentration camps had been established in 1933 as a means of removing anti-Nazi individuals from the general population. As the war began, a system of more than one thousand ghettos was also established as a means to segregate the Jewish population. Families were forcibly relocated to these cramped, squalid communities, where they could be closely monitored. The first ghetto was built in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. None were created in Germany, but ghettos soon spread throughout Poland, and eventually the Soviet Union as the German army conquered more and more territory. The largest ghetto, in Warsaw, saw more than four hundred thousand Jews jammed together within 1.2 square miles of the city. Understandably, they became hotbeds of sedition.5

  Adolf Eichmann, shown here in 1942

  In July of 1941, the SS began systematically murdering the Jews within the newly captured regions of the Soviet Union. But the mobile death squads that gassed and shot a million people were deemed inefficient. Thus, on January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, a conference of top Nazi Party officials gathered to coordinate official policy about the extermination of German and European Jews. This new phase of the “Final Solution” would remain in the hands of the SS. Instead of slow death through slave labor, this new phase would see the establishment of death camps whose sole function was extermination. Jews would be rounded up from the ghettos, jammed into cattle cars, and taken by train to these new killing grounds. Upon their arrival they would be gassed, shot, or worked to death as slave labor.

  Adolf Eichmann became the acknowledged “master” of these deportations, in the words of Heinrich Himmler. Eichmann likened the rounding up of Jews to catching fish, and he took delight in combing through France and Belgium in search of men, women, and children to load onto his death trains. “When I reached the conclusion that it was necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism a man can expect from himself. No doubt they considered me the right man in the right place,” he proudly stated.

  “My interest here was only in the number of transport trains I had to provide. Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on these trains meant nothing to me.”

  In 1944, recognizing that the Jewish population of Hungary was still intact, Himmler gave an order to “send down the master in person.” The approximately eight hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were the largest remaining Jewish community within the German occupation. As the Third Reich’s “Expert for the Jewish Question,” Eichmann reveled in the task, requiring just a few weeks to round up more than five hundred thousand men, women, and children for deportation to death camps. Most were gassed immediately. Just one in four survived the war.

  Describing Eichmann, Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss will marvel: “[He] was completely obsessed with his mission and also convinced that this extermination action was necessary in order to preserve the German people … if he could succeed in destroying the biological basis of Jewry in the East by complete extermination, then Jewry as a whole could never recover from that blow.”

  But because the SS officer never pulled a trigger, or turned on the gas, Eichmann comforts himself with the thought that he had never killed a single person.

  Incredibly, his loving wife, Vera, to whom he is routinely unfaithful, insists that her husband spent the war as nothing more than a pencil-pushing bureaucrat.

  * * *

  After escaping the POW camp, Adolf Eichmann makes his way to northern Germany, where he takes a job cutting down trees near Bremen. The SS officer who once enjoyed an opulent lifestyle leases a primitive hut in the forest, where he lives alone, reading newspapers and books about his “exploits.” He takes extreme precautions to remain hidden, still refusing to have his picture taken. His wife and three young sons live hundreds of miles south in Linz, Austria, but Eichmann stays away for fear of being arrested. To ensure that his deception is complete, Eichmann makes no contact with his wife whatsoever, allowing his family to believe he is dead.

  For four long years, Eichmann waits, hoping his pursuers will give up the chase. He hides in plain sight, unwilling to leave Germany, sure that the passage of time will make the Nazi hunters grow frustrated and quit. When the lumber company closes, he takes a job raising chickens. Very often he sells the eggs on the black market, particularly to the Jews of the nearby town of Belsen, former site of one of his death camps. Eichmann remains a steadfast Nazi, firm in his belief that murdering the Jews was right and just. “I’m no anti-Semite,” he will explain. “I was just politically opposed to the Jews because they were stealing the breath of life from us.”

  Above all, Eichmann never retreats from his sworn SS oath: “I vow to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you and to the leaders that you set for me, absolute allegiance until death. So help me God.”

  But Eichmann underestimates his pursuers. If anything, they are just as dogmatic as he is. Instead of abandoning the hunt, they become more daring: one Nazi hunter, a swashbuckling Polish Jew named Manus Diamant, locates a photograph of Eichmann by going to the extreme measure of seducing one of his former mistresses.6

  To Eichmann’s great frustration, the German public grows more rather than less curious about his whereabouts. In a nation now occupied and controlled by four of Germany’s former enemies, Eichmann becomes a symbol of defiance. “In the press, on the radio, and in books my name was being constantly mentioned,” he will lament of this unwanted celebrity.7

  By early 1950, Adolf Eichmann’s travel documents are about to expire. He must act.

  Through SS networks still in place throughout Germany, he makes contact with Juan Perón’s Nazi rescue teams. Another group known as Die Spinne,8 said to be led by legendary Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny, assists Eichmann in his final preparations for escape. By June 1950, Eichmann is following the same ratline
across northern Italy utilized by Josef Mengele a year earlier. When he arrives in Genoa, the willing alliance of the Red Cross, the Swiss government, and members of the Catholic Church provides the falsified documents and official passport that Eichmann needs. Just like Mengele, he receives a new name: Ricardo Klement.

  * * *

  On June 17, 1950, Adolf Eichmann boards the SS Giovanna C, bound from Genoa to Argentina. He does not call attention to himself by traveling in the relative opulence of first class but instead settles for a cramped third-class berth below the waterline. He wears a black hat and bow tie with his suit. In Eichmann’s coat pocket is a small vial of German soil. But he is ready to leave. “I felt like a hunted deer that has finally managed to shake off his pursuer,” Eichmann will write about the moment the Giovanna cleared the harbor. “I was overcome by a wave of the sense of freedom.”

  Four weeks later, on July 14, 1950, the freighter chugs up the broad Rio de la Plata estuary and waits for the morning sun to allow docking in Buenos Aires.

  Eichmann is ecstatic. At long last, he is free to reveal his true identity.

  “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America,” he will later recount, “I had a few good friends, to whom I could openly, freely and proudly say that I am Adolf Eichmann, former SS-Obersturmbannführer!”

  Eichmann immediately begins to set up his new life. Within a month, he is employed in the northern Argentine city of Tucumán. Though he has no background in construction, his SS connections allow him to land a position with a company called CAPRI, known throughout the SS community for hiring German-speaking men who are less than fluent in the Argentinean national language of Spanish.

  Four months later, Eichmann utilizes the ratlines once more, sending a coded message to his wife admitting that he is alive: “the uncle of your children, whom everybody presumed dead, is alive and well—Ricardo Klement.” Almost two more years pass before Eichmann also sends enough money to allow Vera and their three sons to book passage to Argentina. Posing as “Uncle Ricardo,” he greets the SS Salto as it docks in Buenos Aires.