Killing the SS Read online

  Then on November 17, 1959, Karl Mengele died in Günzburg. He was seventy-five. His death came after the best year in the history of his business, for the success of their new Doppel-Trumpf manure spreader has allowed the company to double its size to two thousand employees. It was rumored that West Germany’s secret police would be incognito at the funeral, in the hopes that Josef Mengele might try to slip into the crowd to pay his respects to his father. Just a few years ago, in 1956, the Angel of Death did actually travel to Switzerland for a family skiing vacation. He was never stopped or questioned, and returned to South America without incident. The vacation would be one of the few times that his son Rolf, from his first marriage that ended in divorce, had the chance to speak with his father in person.

  But West German agents do not attend the graveside service. If they had, they would have seen a massive floral wreath that Josef Mengele sent anonymously, with the words “Greetings from Afar” across the ribbon.

  Authorities might also have noticed something ominous at the funeral. A bearded stranger stands on the outskirts of the cemetery wearing sunglasses. This is odd, as the first days of the Bavarian winter, when the light is pale, have descended. Nobody thinks to approach the stranger to ask his business, or why he would intrude upon a private family burial. However, his appearance is a poorly kept secret in town. Students at the local Catholic girls’ school know him to be the man who has been secretly lodging there for about a week.

  That evening, the bearded stranger disappears.

  For years to come, when the people of Günzburg are asked about whether Josef Mengele attended his father’s funeral, they will adopt a tight-lipped code of secrecy.

  Incredibly, some of these folk will wonder why the world cannot show forgiveness to the brutal Mengele.2

  * * *

  In Cologne, where the Roonstrasse Synagogue has been cleansed of the hateful markings, there have been arrests. Two youths swearing allegiance to a neo-Nazi Party are imprisoned. Their actions have an unlikely inspiration: the word Kristallnacht is uttered again and again by the local people who remember that night all too well. Within days, copycat crimes in New York, Vienna, London, and even South Africa will demonstrate that Nazi fanaticism has been reborn. For a solid month, well into January 1960, Jewish sites worldwide are desecrated.

  * * *

  In Jerusalem, Isser Harel and the Mossad seethe. “The worldwide scope of these paintings of swastikas and vilifications aroused grave anxiety,” Harel will write.

  But rather than just wringing his hands, Harel plans to do something about the Nazi revival.

  And soon.

  9

  MARCH 3, 1960

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  MORNING

  The Mossad is on the move.

  Agent Zvi Aharoni landed at Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza Airport two days ago, traveling on a diplomatic passport. Aharoni is a loner skilled in espionage. He is not a formal member of the Israeli spy agency but has been borrowed from Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI. Aharoni’s primary strength is interrogation: there is no man better qualified to question a high-level suspect in order to secure conviction in a court of law.

  Aharoni travels under the name Rodan, taking the cover from his old wartime friend Bobby Rodan, with whom he served in Italy. The anti-Semitic violence that began in Germany has also spread to Argentina. Aharoni poses as an employee of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, allegedly traveling to South America to investigate this global rise of anti-Jewish fervor. He utilizes the Israeli embassy on tranquil Arroyo Street as his home base of operations.

  In fact, Aharoni is in Argentina to identify once and for all the location of Adolf Eichmann. If the Nazi is alive, the Mossad plans to kidnap Eichmann and smuggle him to Israel. Despite his considerable skills in extracting the truth from men who would prefer to keep silent, Zvi Aharoni believes it would be easier to kill Eichmann and make it look like an accident. But no less than Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion has decreed that Eichmann must stand trial for his war crimes in Jerusalem. The global rise in anti-Semitism demands that Nazi atrocities be publicly exposed, so that such horror can never happen again.

  But first, of course, Eichmann must be located.

  Agent Aharoni flew out of Jerusalem on February 26. He made stops in several South American countries along the way to give credence to his cover story. He traveled light, just a suitcase and a sealed diplomatic pouch containing a thick dossier on Adolf Eichmann, which includes his SS personnel file and physical measurements. Aharoni has committed the documents and old photographs to memory.

  On the evening of March 1, he finally landed in Buenos Aires. The late summer heat was intense, even so late in the day. After depositing the Eichmann dossier in a safe at the Israeli embassy, he checked into his hotel and went to his room. Sylvia Hermann, the only eyewitness so far to Eichmann’s location, has moved to America to attend college. However, that does not matter to Aharoni. He prefers to go it alone and has made no attempt to contact Lothar Hermann or his beautiful daughter.

  At his hotel, Aharoni pored through the local phone books, looking for the name “Klement.”

  He found two listings.

  Now, two days later, using a newly purchased street map, Aharoni drives his rented Fiat down the tree-lined dirt streets of the Olivos neighborhood. At first, he passes by large villas, but those are soon replaced by crumbling apartment buildings. He is searching for 4261 Chacabuco Street, an apartment, and the suspected home of Eichmann.

  Aharoni is almost forty. He made his name by interrogating captured Nazis for the British during the war. He is a thin man known for being stubborn, honest, and logical. His feelings about Eichmann are very clear—the Nazi was responsible for the deaths of many relatives and friends, and if not for a series of fortunate events, Aharoni himself might have been one of Eichmann’s victims.

  Parking the Fiat five hundred yards from the apartment on Chacabuco Street, Zvi Aharoni wonders to himself if finding this wanted mass murderer can really be so simple as looking up a name and address in the phone book.

  * * *

  It has been three months since Israeli intelligence reluctantly reopened the Eichmann file. Fritz Bauer returned to Israel in December 1959 with new evidence from a second source, a high-ranking former SS officer who requested that his name not be revealed, who claimed that Adolf Eichmann traveled to Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement.

  Bauer’s contact assured him that Eichmann is living in Buenos Aires under this name. A check of the records showed that Lothar Hermann previously stated that “Klement” was the name on one of the electricity meters at 4261 Chacabuco Street.

  Bauer did not hand this information directly to the Mossad, as he felt Isser Harel had mishandled the investigation. Instead, he flew to Jerusalem and arranged a meeting with Israeli attorney general Haim Cohen. Bauer didn’t choose Cohen at random. The balding, middle-aged jurist is considered a founder of Israeli law, and even the “conscience of this country,” in the words of one prominent Israeli judge.

  This matter of conscience is what drives Fritz Bauer. He is still haunted by the memory of signing the loyalty oath to Nazi Germany that allowed him to be freed from a concentration camp before the war.1 Bauer is also well aware that he is living a double life, married to a Danish woman since 1943 but secretly pursuing male lovers. The only blemish on Bauer’s otherwise pristine legal reputation is a prewar arrest for soliciting gay prostitutes in Denmark—a fact he struggles to keep hidden from his German legal counterparts.2

  Perhaps Bauer’s biggest personal contradiction is that he pretends not to be Jewish. Fearing that his fellow German prosecutors will think him a man whose zeal for tracking Nazis would lead to witch hunts, he keeps his religion a secret.

  Yet as a Jew living in Germany, he is deeply unsettled by the rising national desire to pretend the Holocaust never happened. Death camps are not mentioned in school textbooks, and incredibly, the actions of Adolf Hitler
and the Nazis are sometimes taught as heroic. A neo-Nazi group known as the German Reich Party is growing in power. Even now, in West Germany, there is talk of reducing the statute of limitations for murder to twenty years. This means that in just five years Adolf Eichmann and every other Nazi war criminal will be shielded from paying for their crimes.

  An apathetic Isser Harel reluctantly attended the meeting with Bauer and Attorney General Cohen. The drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is long and he resented having to make the journey for an investigation gone cold. He considered the invitation to be a courtesy, but he soon learned that this was not the case.

  Fritz Bauer’s true intentions were to humiliate the Mossad leader. After presenting the new intelligence about Eichmann, Bauer taunted Harel’s incompetence. “This is simply unbelievable!” Bauer yelled. “Here we have the name Klement: Two completely independent sources, who are strangers to each other, mention this name. Any second-class policeman would be able to follow such a lead! Just go and ask the nearest butcher or greengrocer and you will learn all there is to know about him!”

  There was a fourth man at the meeting—Zvi Aharoni. The spy was there by order of Attorney General Cohen, who has made use of his specialized services on numerous occasions for cases involving espionage and high treason. The two men have enormous respect for each other and maintain a friendship outside their work.

  The same cannot be said of Aharoni and Isser Harel. They drove up from Tel Aviv together but spoke little. Aharoni was insulted that he was not told about the Eichmann case before. He’d been in Buenos Aires on top-secret business just a few months ago and could have easily detoured to the house on Chacabuco Street to see if Hermann’s story was true.

  After hearing Bauer’s outburst, Aharoni collected his revenge.

  “I want Zvi to go to Buenos Aires and check out this story once and for all,” demanded Attorney General Cohen. “We can’t play around with this any longer.”

  Isser Harel does not take orders from Haim Cohen. But the consequences of not following through on the investigation could be enormously embarrassing. The payoff, on the other hand, could be world changing.

  Isser Harel had no choice: the Mossad leader reopened the Eichmann case.

  * * *

  The boy was born in Germany and given the name Hermann Aronheim in 1921. His father had fought for the Fatherland in the trenches of World War I, but when the Nazis came to power Heinrich Aronheim’s years of service did not matter because he was a Jew. No longer allowed to practice law or otherwise pursue his chosen career as a result of growing Nazi oppression, he moved his family to Berlin in the hopes of being less conspicuous in the big city. Heinrich was wrong. With every passing year, life became more horrendous for German Jews. Simple pleasantries like eating in a café or attending the theater were banned. The books of Jewish writers were burned in great bonfires, and Jewish musicians were forbidden from performing the works of Bach and Brahms.

  In 1937 Heinrich died of cancer. His widow, Eugenie, took charge. She wisely arranged for the family to immigrate to Palestine. It was a year before the proper documents could be arranged, but in late October 1938, just a few short weeks before Kristallnacht, she and her two young sons began the journey to Palestine by boarding the train in Berlin.3

  “At the station we met some of our relatives,” Hermann Aronheim will later remember. He was just seventeen when the time came to flee Germany.

  “They had come to say a tearful good-bye. We were well aware that centuries of Jewish life and Jewish culture in Germany were coming to an end. But obviously no one could conjure up a detailed picture of the approaching ‘Endlösung’ (Final Solution), even in his wildest fantasies. The fact was, that we were never again to see any of our relatives. They all died in the Holocaust.”

  The journey by train and ship to Palestine was grueling, but upon stepping ashore in Tel Aviv—at the time, the world’s only Jewish city—Aronheim and his family felt instantly at home.

  “We had reached the land of our dreams—our Holy Land,” he will later write. “Everything about this new country was strange to me, from the very first day I had the feeling of having come home. I knew that we belonged here. Here, being a Jew was normal. We were not an unloved minority. Here, no one would shout ‘dirty Jew’ at our backs. No one would taunt us with ‘Go home to Palestine.’ We had come home.”

  Thus, Hermann Aronheim was no more. The seventeen-year-old immigrant adopted the Hebrew spelling of his name: Zvi Aharoni.

  A quarter century later, as he prepares to stalk Adolf Eichmann, the Mossad agent is haunted by the knowledge that his father had to die in order that his family might be safe. “If he had lived another year, I would have gone up the chimney at Auschwitz,” Aharoni will recall.

  And the man who would have sent him there is Adolf Eichmann.

  * * *

  At almost the exact same time that Zvi Aharoni’s family reached sanctuary in Palestine, Adolf Eichmann’s personal war against the Jews began in earnest.

  Working from his new office in Vienna, the newly christened Obersturmführer started the ethnic purification of Austria by brutally accelerating the emigration of the nation’s Jews. Ironically, a year earlier he had traveled to Palestine to explore the option of forcibly relocating the Jewish population to that location, but the logistical and financial realities were too great. Now he just wanted them gone, leaving it to the Jews to figure out their own final destination.

  Within eight months, almost one hundred thousand Jews were evicted from their homes and forced to leave Austria. The most influential Jewish leaders were sent to concentration camps. Others became refugees, wandering Europe as winter approached. Traveling with only the clothes on their back and a few minor possessions, they desperately searched for a nation willing to take them in. In a tragic act of misjudgment, the first choice for many was Poland, which would soon be home to more death camps than any other nation in Europe. But by the fall of 1938, even Poland had closed its borders.

  Infuriated by the cruelty of these German deportations and forced emigrations, a young Jew living in Paris marched into the German embassy and assassinated a low-level diplomat named Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938. Two days later, enraged Nazis used the murder as a pretext for the night of terror known as Kristallnacht.

  * * *

  Zvi Aharoni prepared himself to hunt Eichmann by meeting with Fritz Bauer. The interrogation was friendly but thorough. By the time Aharoni flew to Buenos Aires, he was convinced that Ricardo Klement and Adolf Eichmann were one and the same.

  It has been established that Eichmann was recently employed by a corporation known as CAPRI, which specializes in hydroelectric power. He also owned a rabbit farm, which went bankrupt in 1958 due to crossbreeding issues.

  The idea of Eichmann needing to work for a living is still confusing to the Israeli investigators, who labor under the belief that the Nazis smuggled large amounts of gold out of the country to secure the future of the Fourth Reich. In the final days of the war, the U.S. Army found gold coins, bundles of banknotes, and crated boxes of gold bullion and platinum hidden in the caves of the Merkers salt mines. Surely that was only one of many Nazi caches.4

  Further suggestions of Eichmann’s fantastic wealth came from a series of stories in the Austrian press in 1954. The newspaper Der Abend published reports that Eichmann was alive and well in Europe, eager to claim his stash of stolen Nazi gold. The rumors still persist, even in Argentina, among the expatriate Nazi community. It is not uncommon for fellow Germans to ask Eichmann about his gold after they’ve enjoyed a few lagers together at the ABC Biergarten.

  Either Eichmann is not receiving any of the stolen Nazi wealth or he is under orders to lead a modest life until the Nazi hunters go away.

  Time has not changed Eichmann’s heart. Among the recently unearthed new research is a vignette Zvi Aharoni learns from a source close to Eichmann. The South American country of Bolivia has recently been enduring political upheaval. It was su
ggested by some in Argentina’s Nazi community that Eichmann travel there to take a temporary position with state security services to help the Bolivian leaders, who are openly sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

  “When I hear those words, ‘state security services,’” Eichmann is said to have responded, “my appetite for killing is whetted all over again.”

  * * *

  Zvi Aharoni arrives at 4261 Chacabuco Street on March 3, 1960. The house is white, with a terra-cotta roof and ringed with a gated fence.

  The apartments are empty. Rather than the Eichmann family, Zvi Aharoni encounters a team of house painters who have come to apply a fresh coat at the home owner’s request. “The German,” as the painters refer to Adolf Eichmann, moved three weeks ago.

  That the case is moving so slowly is frustrating. But Zvi Aharoni now knows that Lothar Hermann, the blind man who first claimed to have located Eichmann, was essentially correct.

  “I could not return to Tel Aviv without a conclusive answer,” Aharoni will write. “I therefore had to accept calculated risks. It was clear to me that Harel would never have approved certain steps had he been informed. But now I was on my own and my own boss. I carried full responsibility for all my decisions and maneuvers.”

  Zvi Aharoni is certain of one thing: The war criminal is somewhere in Buenos Aires.

  At least for now.

  10

  MARCH 8, 1960

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  5:15 P.M.

  Zvi Aharoni sits in his rented Fiat on the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Sarmiento. With him is “Juan,” a young local man who has volunteered to help the Mossad at any time, no questions asked. These sayanim—“helpers” in Hebrew1—are Jews who live outside Israel and make themselves available to help the homeland. They are taught not to ask questions and do not receive payment for their services.

  Juan does not know why he is sitting in this compact vehicle, nor does he know Zvi Aharoni’s real name. Yesterday he sat with Aharoni for three hours. He has so far spent another sixty minutes holding vigil today. Aharoni has only told him that they are searching for a man who is thought to work as a mechanic in a shop across the street from where they now sit. Aharoni’s investigation has led him to believe that Dieter Eichmann gets off work at 5:00 p.m., but thus far there has been no sign of him. If they do spot him, his next step is to follow Dieter home from work to the family residence, where Aharoni believes Adolf Eichmann is living under the name Ricardo Klement.