Killing the SS Read online

  The date is July 28, 1952, just two days after the death of Evita Perón. Argentina is in mourning, with flags at half-mast and all government offices just reopened after a short grieving period. Thousands of Argentineans still line up every day to view her body as it lies in state.

  But none of that matters to the Eichmann family. Finally, seven long years after the end of World War II, Adolf Eichmann, his wife, and their three sons are together again. “The reunion,” he will later remember, “was indescribable.”

  Eichmann must remain careful about hiding his identity, if only so that the Nazi hunters will continue to believe that he is alive and well in Europe. Even as he stands on the dock, he watches closely for signs of suspicious behavior by those around him. But as time passes, Adolf Eichmann lowers his guard. He becomes bitter that he makes so little money. But otherwise, his past slips further into the distance. Eichmann is making friends within the Argentine Nazi community, among them Josef Mengele, who has prospered in Buenos Aires and offers free medical advice that Eichmann routinely ignores. Eichmann reads the pro-Nazi monthly Der Weg, drinks his beer at the ABC Biergarten,9 and enjoys weekends of hunting and womanizing. This is not the Fatherland, but the German community in Argentina is large and welcoming. The Eichmann family has at last resumed a normal life.

  Argentina is truly his “promised land.”

  But Adolf Eichmann is deluding himself.

  Throughout all the years this coldhearted killer deported Jews to the death camps, he never imagined how many would survive the war. These men and women are now building new lives—many of them in a new country.

  The state of Israel, the true Promised Land to the Jews of Europe, now beckons. Its citizens learned well the lessons of the Holocaust. When attacked, they no longer turn the other cheek.

  Instead, the Israelis believe in a practice known as the law of retaliation. As it says in the Torah: “Show no pity—life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”10

  Or, as Adolf Eichmann will soon learn: cold-blooded revenge.

  6

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1957

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY

  8:00 P.M.

  Fritz Bauer comes straight to the point: “Eichmann has been traced.”

  The fifty-four-year-old German attorney is meeting secretly with Dr. Felix Shinnar, Israel’s top diplomat in Germany. The two men were originally supposed to get together in the heart of Frankfurt, but Bauer is well known for his outspoken desire to see all Nazi war criminals brought to justice. Fearing he might be recognized, and knowing the explosiveness of this revelation, Bauer insisted they drive to a small inn outside of town to ensure total privacy.

  “Adolf Eichmann?” Shinnar asks skeptically. There have been countless Eichmann sightings but not a single confirmation since his escape from the American POW camp in 1946.

  “Yes,” Bauer replies with confidence. He has tufts of white hair on his head, and his suit bears the faint aroma of the small cigars he smokes throughout the day. “Adolf Eichmann. He is in Argentina.”

  Fritz Bauer, the relentless crusader who played a vital role in bringing Adolf Eichmann to justice

  It has been more than a decade since the war’s end. Nazi hunters continue searching for Eichmann, but with every passing year it seems more unlikely that he will ever be found.

  In that time, the nation of Israel has been born. After the great suffering endured during the war, the Jewish people built their own homeland. The location is the same place where Moses led the Jews on their journey out of slavery in Egypt more than three thousand years ago. The Jews believe this sanctuary was pledged to them by God—the “Promised Land.” Since the time of Moses, Jews have been driven from their “sanctuary” time and again by the other great kingdoms of the Middle East.

  Time and again they have returned.

  Those same enemies still surround them, most notably the Arab powers intent on crushing Israel by aligning themselves with the Soviet Union. But after the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Jewish people will bear any burden and fight any war to be free.

  A key engine of Jewish survival is the Mossad: Israel’s intelligence agency.1 Surprisingly, up to now, they have shown little interest in capturing Adolf Eichmann—or any other Nazi. As new emigrants from Eastern Europe flood into Israel, the Mossad’s greater concern is investigating these newcomers to make sure they are not spies for the Soviet Union.

  But now, Fritz Bauer hopes to alter that policy.

  He is no stranger to challenge. In 1930, at the age of twenty-seven, the Jewish Bauer became the youngest judge in Germany. The Nazi rise to power in 1933 saw Bauer arrested and sent to a concentration camp for nine months. He was released only after signing a pledge of loyalty to the party.2

  Knowing that he would never be safe in this new Germany, Bauer fled to Denmark. From there he moved to Sweden, where he lived out the war. Since returning to the German bench in 1949, Bauer has kept a low profile. He does not talk about his religion, knowing that many people in Germany still revile the Jews. Nor does he reveal that he is gay, because Nazi-era statutes against homosexuality are still enforced.

  Jewish, gay, and anti-Nazi—there can be no greater pariah in West Germany than Fritz Bauer. He regularly receives death threats and is shunned by his peers. Yet the prosecutor risks his welfare each day in his fervent desire to prosecute Nazi war criminals.

  Bauer has already issued an official warrant for Eichmann’s arrest. But he knows that the decree will never be enforced. It was a ceremonial gesture, designed to remind Germans that the hunt for Nazi war criminals is far from over.

  Immediately after the war, a group of Jewish partisans known as the Nokmim traveled throughout Germany and Austria hunting down former members of the SS. Also known as the Avengers, this band of mercenaries paid by the government of Great Britain made northern Italy their home base.3 The Avengers would sometimes appear at a suspect’s home late at night. Other times, they grabbed men off the street, shoving them into cars. Their message was simple: the SS wasn’t safe anywhere.

  The Avengers never turned their captives over for a trial. They became executioners. Death was swift once the SS tattoo under the left armpit was confirmed. Some Avengers took war criminals into the forest and shot them in the head. Others were strangled—the use of bare hands was preferred to piano wire because it was cleaner. Sometimes the SS captives were forced to hang themselves in order to make the death look like a suicide.

  The Avengers disbanded more than a decade ago. But even as Bauer and Shinnar meet here outside Frankfurt, small bands of Jewish mercenaries in Europe, South America, North America, and Egypt are still tracking down and murdering the SS.

  But Fritz Bauer is a man of the law, opposed to vigilante killing. Ideally, Adolf Eichmann should be taken alive and made to stand trial.

  Using the Israeli military is out of the question. Their intervention would constitute an act of war. Also, Bauer knows that America will not help. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency pronounced: “We are not in the business of hunting war criminals.”

  So that leaves only the Mossad. While Dr. Shinnar’s official capacity is diplomatic, Bauer has no doubt that this conversation will soon make its way to the spy bureau in Israel. What will happen after that, Bauer does not know, but he is desperate and out of options.4

  “I’ll be perfectly frank with you,” he tells Shinnar, anticipating the diplomat’s question about why Bauer chose to give him this news instead of telling the German police. “I don’t know if we can altogether rely on the German judiciary here, let alone the German embassy staff in Buenos Aires. That is why I was so interested in talking to you. I see no other way but to turn to you.”

  This is an understatement. The West German government is rife with former Nazis. The national security adviser, for example, is Hans Globke, who helped write the Nazi race laws that sought to destroy the Jews.5

  “You are known to be efficient people,” Bauer tells Felix Sh
innar, “and nobody could be more interested than you in the capture of Eichmann. Obviously, I wish to maintain contact with you in connection with this matter, but only provided that strict secrecy is kept.”

  Shinnar understands the subtext. If Bauer had brought this information to German police, someone would likely tip off Eichmann, sending him deeper into hiding. So Bauer has reached out to the Israelis, even though it is an act of treason in Germany to pass information to the representative of a foreign government.

  “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” Dr. Shinnar replies. “Israel will never forget what you have done.”

  * * *

  It is spring in Argentina, as seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are the opposite of those in the north. And it is love that is finally flushing Adolf Eichmann from hiding. His twenty-year-old son Nicholas—known alternately as Klaus or Nick—has adapted well to life in Buenos Aires. While his father still pretends to be Ricardo Klement, his four sons keep the family surname. The tall, blue-eyed Nicholas is fond of riding horses and hunting pumas. He frequently spouts anti-Semitic rhetoric, so it will one day surprise him to learn that the pretty German immigrant, with whom he has fallen in love, is half-Jewish.

  The fourteen-year-old brunette’s name is Sylvia Hermann. Her father, Lothar Hermann, is a Socialist. The Nazis murdered his parents and he himself was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich, Germany, in 1935 for his political leanings. The severe beatings he endured at the hands of the Gestapo left him blind. Now fifty-six, Hermann immigrated to Argentina in 1938, shortly after the horrific night of rioting and destruction known throughout Germany as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. This pogrom took the National Socialist Party’s persecution of the Jews to a new magnitude in an attempt to force mass emigration. Though the two have never met, Adolf Eichmann was stationed at Dachau shortly before Hermann’s imprisonment.

  Sylvia is taken with Nick Eichmann, yet she is not allowed to visit his home or even know the address. But Nicholas often comes calling, making himself comfortable in the Hermann household. While there, he speaks in German, claiming that his father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht, and openly laments that the Nazis did not complete their extermination of the Jews.

  Lothar Hermann listens to the vitriol—yet says nothing.

  Hermann wears the dark glasses of a blind man and tends to dress in a natty suit and tie. He is a handsome man with the unassuming air of someone who has learned to keep his opinions to himself. But inside he seethes about his family’s treatment in Germany and chafes at Nick Eichmann’s offensive ranting. Lothar longs to “even the score with the Nazi war criminals who caused me and my family so much agony and suffering.”

  At first it seems bewildering to Lothar Hermann that the young man in front of him is the son of the notorious Adolf Eichmann. Legends abound about the massive amounts of wealth the Nazi higher-ups smuggled out of Germany after the war, yet the Eichmanns, like the Hermanns, live in the lower-middle-class Olivos neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Houses are simple and in some places squalid. The odds of a once-powerful man like Eichmann living in such a run-down part of town are unlikely.

  Sylvia Hermann and Nick Eichmann begin dating in December 1956, and the relationship is still blossoming a few months later when Lothar Hermann decides to move his family away from Olivos. In a radical change, Hermann relocates from the cosmopolitan Buenos Aires to the ramshackle village of Coronel Suárez, hundreds of miles southwest in the grasslands of Central Argentina. A single dirt road lined by small wooden shacks runs through the distant town.

  But Coronel Suárez is safe, free from the pro-Nazi elements so common to Buenos Aires. In fact, it is home to a prominent German-Jewish community. While Hermann makes plans to open a new law practice, Sylvia and Nick correspond by mail. Young Eichmann still refuses to give her his home address, asking Sylvia to post her love letters to him through a mutual friend.

  In April 1957, four months after falling for Nick Eichmann, Sylvia comes across a newspaper article detailing a war crimes trial in Frankfurt, Germany. The prosecuting attorney is Fritz Bauer. Argentinisches Tageblatt, the anti-Nazi German-language daily, specifically reports that one prominent Nazi has escaped prosecution. His name, the newspaper notes, is Adolf Eichmann.

  In an instant, Sylvia is convinced that Nick Eichmann is the son of this killer. She is conflicted, for her feelings for Nick are still strong, but she shares the revelation with her father, knowing he will take action. She is correct.

  Lothar has never seen Adolf Eichmann and does not even know where he lives, but the former concentration camp inmate’s desire for revenge is strong.

  So Hermann makes the bold move of writing to the famous anti-Nazi jurist Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt.

  The letter contains the explosive revelation—Adolf Eichmann is alive in Argentina.

  There are few people with whom Fritz Bauer can share the news. “As soon as I leave the confines of my office,” he once confided to a friend, “I am on enemy territory.”

  But in Lothar Hermann, Fritz Bauer has a true ally—a man willing to take enormous risks to capture Adolf Eichmann.

  The three-hundred-mile train ride from Coronel Suárez to Buenos Aires lasts ten hours. Sylvia Hermann, wearing a blue dress, sits with her father. They depart the train at the stately Retiro Station, located right next to the port where Adolf Eichmann first arrived in Argentina almost a decade ago. Their goal for the long journey is simple: pinpoint the SS killer’s home address.

  Father and daughter then travel by commuter bus to their old neighborhood ten miles north. But when it comes time to step off and begin the journey on foot, Sylvia Hermann must travel alone. To appear at the house of her old boyfriend with her blind Jewish father in tow would be too conspicuous.

  Sylvia and Lothar agree on a rendezvous location, then the now fifteen-year-old boldly marches off by herself to find one of the world’s most notorious killers. No one knows exactly where she is going, not even her father.

  Sylvia’s plan is simple, at best: walk the streets of Olivos until she finds Nick Eichmann. She will then ask him where he lives.

  By chance, Sylvia runs into an old friend who knows Nick’s address.

  Summoning up her nerve, the teenager walks alone down Chacabuco Street to number 4261. Her story is simple: she is a girlfriend of Nick’s who has moved away but returned for a brief visit. Her heart pounds as she steps through the front gate and knocks on the door.

  Nick’s mother answers. She has given birth to a fourth child since leaving Germany and has gained considerable weight.

  “Is this the home of the Eichmann family?” asks Sylvia.

  Vera Eichmann is pleasant, if guarded.

  Much to Sylvia’s surprise, a man roughly sixty years old steps to the plump woman’s side. He wears glasses and walks slightly stooped. His appearance matches the photograph of Eichmann.

  Sylvia introduces herself as a friend of their son. “Is Nick at home?” Sylvia says nervously.

  “Pleased to meet you, young lady,” the gentleman answers in German. He bows slightly at the waist, in an Old World display of manners.

  To Sylvia’s surprise, she is invited to come inside for coffee and cake. Nick has stepped out, but Sylvia is welcome to stay and wait for him.

  Vera holds the door open. Sylvia has come too far to lose her courage now. She steps into the home. Dieter Eichmann, Nick’s younger brother, sits in the small room.

  “He left an hour ago,” Dieter informs Sylvia. Though Nick’s mother does not refer to Dieter by name, he appears to be in his late teens, as the German prosecutor’s dossier suggested.

  So far, there is nothing at all sinister about the Eichmann family. Their warmhearted courtesy toward a complete stranger is unexpected, but Sylvia does not relax her guard.

  Impulsively, Sylvia asks, “Are you Mr. Eichmann?”

  The elderly man does not answer.

  “Are you Nick’s father?” Sylvia presses the ma
tter. Her tone is polite and deferential, as would be expected from a teenager addressing the head of a household.

  But the man is upset nonetheless. “No,” he replies sharply. Sylvia will remember his tone as “unpleasant and strident.”

  A long and uncomfortable silence fills the room as the man prepares his answer.

  “I’m his uncle,” he finally declares.

  Sylvia backs off. The conversation descends into small talk as everyone awaits Nick’s return home. No one seems to suspect that Sylvia has an ulterior motive. As her father would later point out, the Hermanns were accepted as “German in every way” in the Olivos area. Sylvia does not do anything to dissuade the Eichmanns from this assumption.

  Coffee is served. Time passes. The man claiming to be Nick’s uncle is no longer angry with Sylvia. When she professes that she would like to one day study foreign languages, he even admits to learning a little French during his wartime service.

  Suddenly, Nick bursts through the door. The sight of Sylvia fills him with rage. It is as if they never had any feelings for each other. “Who gave you my address?” he demands.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she replies, adding that mutual friends had shown her the way.

  It is the uncle who defuses the scene, telling Nick that he has no problems with Sylvia’s presence. But she has had enough. There is every reason to believe that she is in the room with Adolf Eichmann himself. That is the purpose for her visit and nothing more can be gained.

  As the middle-aged uncle sees Sylvia to the door, Nick steps forward. In an unguarded moment, he makes a slip.

  “Thank you, Father,” he states. “I will see Sylvia to the bus.”

  The family says a warm good-bye, but Nick is tense as he walks Sylvia back to the bus station. He has been forbidden to bring home guests and he is unsure if there will be any punishment upon his return.