The Capture And Trial Of Adolf Eichmann

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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THE CAPTURE AND TRIAL OF ADOLF EICHMANN

BY

MOSHE PEARLMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

1—PRELUDE TO CAPTURE 5

2—THE CHASE BEGINS 14

3—ON THE RUN 26

4—THE CHASE RESUMED 37

5—THE CAPTURE 43

6—THE DIPLOMATIC BATTLE 52

7—THE COURTROOM 66

8—THE PRELIMINARY ARGUMENTS 81

9—THE CRIME 115

10—THE ACCUSED 145

11—THE INTERROGATION 156

12—THE EVIDENCE 175

I—A VANISHED COMMUNITY 175

II—EVE OF MURDER 179

III—FINAL SOLUTION 193

IV—THE LIVING SPEAK 205

V—THE GHETTO FIGHTERS 220

VI—SLAUGHTER IN THE PIT 233

VII—THE BRANCHES FALL 248

VIII—BLOOD FOR GOODS 269

IX—CAMPS OF DEATH 284

13—ON THE STAND 315

14—THE CROSS-EXAMINATION 354

15—QUESTIONS FROM THE BENCH 404

16—THE JUDGMENT 427

APPENDIX—FULL TEXT OF THE INDICTMENT 480

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 493

1—PRELUDE TO CAPTURE

THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING WAS A fateful day in the life of Adolf Eichmann. On that day, in 1935, he got married. On that day, in 1960, the seal was put on the plan for his capture.

On March 21, 1960, Eichmann rose early, as usual, pottered about the small, stark, mud-colored brick house in the dreary San Fernando suburb of Buenos Aires where he lived with his wife and three of his four sons, shaved carefully, washed in a primitive bathroom which lacked running water, dressed and sat down to a German-style breakfast. At 6:45 he left the house, on whose door was a card bearing the name Klement. It was now as Señor Klement that he walked the two hundred yards to the nearest bus stop to wait for one of the three buses he would be taking to reach his place of work, the Mercedes-Benz factory in Suárez, at the other, southeastern, end of the city. When he reached the factory, he clocked in with a card made out in the name of Ricardo Klement.

As he left the house, his face and every movement were watched through powerful binoculars by a young man half his age whom we shall call Gad.

Gad was seated behind the drawn blind of a window in a house situated four hundred yards from, and offering an uninterrupted view of, the house marked Klement. Two small holes in the blind, looking like moth holes from the outside, gave vision for the lenses of binoculars. He watched the house, as he had watched it now every morning for several weeks, saw Señor Klement open the door, turn to say good-bye to someone inside, close the door, and then walk down the dirt path to the edge of the cottage grounds, ringed by a chicken-wire fence. Gad followed him with his eyes as he walked toward the bus stop and stayed with him until the bus pulled up. He left his seat at the window only when the bus was out of sight. He then went to the telephone to make a two-word call. Yigal? he queried; and then, when he received the affirmation, he added, "Karagil. The word is Hebrew for as usual." He hung up and went to make himself some coffee.

Yigal, at the other end, after hearing from Gad, put through his own call to Dov. "Beseder, he said—Okay."

Dov had a room not far from the Mercedes-Benz works. For what he had to do now, there was plenty of time. He waited thirty minutes and then, taking a special briefcase which did not look special, he casually sauntered over to the bus stop nearest the factory. He got there at 7:20. A few minutes later, a bus hove into sight. As it approached he scrutinized its destination sign, giving a slight show of disappointment for the benefit of the three persons waiting with him, to suggest that this was not his bus. The four waited as the passengers began to alight. Dov watched them all, apparently idly, as people in a waiting queue usually do. He seemed, if anything, more listless than the others—since he would have to wait for the next bus. He stood with slightly sagging shoulders, his briefcase now in front of him resting on his body, its base supported by both hands, as if, with the long wait, he was reluctant to overburden one arm. The passengers got off, Señor Klement among them. Dov watched him. And the concealed tip of the middle finger of his right hand pressed sharply against the back of the briefcase near the bottom. As the bus pulled away, carrying the three who had waited with him, Dov continued watching Señor Klement as he walked across the road to the factory gate. Dov turned slowly so that the front of his briefcase always faced the figure of Klement. The finger on his right hand kept repeating its pressure. No one observing him could have seen the camera lens behind the small aperture of the lock on the briefcase. As Klement disappeared inside the plant, Dov lingered a few minutes at the bus stop. No one had joined him and no one appeared to be watching him. So he left and walked back to his room, telephoning Yigal that "Hakol Beseder—All’s well." Had there been anyone about, he would have caught the next bus as a bona fide commuter, and telephoned later to Yigal that Señor Klement had gone to work as usual.

Yigal, Gad and Dov were Israelis. All three were in their late twenties. Yigal, taller than his companions, was dark, his hair black, his brown eyes set in a long, pale face that belied an outdoor youth spent in the desert. He was the leader of the trio. The expression on his face suggested the grave young executive, heavily conscious of his responsibilities. In fact, he carried responsibilities easily, was a deft planner, and exercised command with a light touch. Gad and Dov were both of medium height, blond, and of cheery countenance; they moved through life as if they had not a care in the world. Gad was broad-shouldered, and his bronzed round face was topped by thick woolly hair. Dov, of slim build, had a mop of corn-colored spikes, which gave his healthy suntanned face a perpetually boyish air.

All three had spent many years as youthful pioneers creating a cooperative farm village in a desert outpost in southern Israel. Now they were together again, in Buenos Aires. They had come to kidnap Adolf Eichmann.

They were almost certain that the man they had kept under continual surveillance for several weeks, and who went under the name of Ricardo Klement, was Eichmann. But their certainty had to be absolute before they could proceed with the capture plan. He was living as the second husband of a lady who was known beyond doubt to have been the wife of Adolf Eichmann. Three of the four sons of the family were known beyond doubt to be the sons of Adolf Eichmann. What was not clear beyond doubt was whether Ricardo was Eichmann or whether he was indeed what he and Señora Klement claimed him to be, her second husband, whom she had married after the death of her first.

The reason for the uncertainty was that, while much was known of the activities of Eichmann during the heyday of Nazi rule, very little was known of the man himself. For he had taken good care to remain in the shadow while engaged in his grim Gestapo business. He rarely had appeared in front of the cameras. And details of his person were recorded only in the secret documents in his personal file at Nazi SS headquarters.

These particulars were in the file which Yigal had brought with him from Israel. And so he knew Eichmann’s height, the color of his eyes, the color of his hair, the size of his collar, the size of his shoes, the dates of his promotions, the date of his marriage and the birth dates of his sons. He also had a photograph which had been taken in the late thirties and which had been found in 1946. But many years had now passed. He might today have no hair. His face would have undergone changes in more than twenty years, even if he had not resorted to plastic surgery—a possibility which could not be ruled out. His height would have remained the same, and this tallied with the height of Klement. So did the color of his eyes. The size of his neck and feet could be checked only with physical custody; they could not help to identify him from a distance.

The three Israelis had managed to photograph Klement numerous times since they had started their surveillance. A casual encounter, with a concealed camera, while he walked to the bus that took him to work; camera shots as he descended from the bus near his factory. They could not be perfect portraits. For they had to be taken surreptitiously, with no time to linger, no time to focus. It was important to snap him. It was even more important to give him not the slightest ground for suspecting that he was being watched or followed. The results, at times, were odd. Yigal today has some fine shots of Señor Klement’s shoes and the cuffs of his trousers. He also has some excellent enlargements of a waist-coated belly.

But they also managed to get shots of his face. There was a good likeness to the old photograph they had of Eichmann. And there seemed to be no signs of plastic surgery. But Señor Klement was a much older man. And they could not decide with complete certainty that the subjects of the two sets of photographs were the same. Nor could they tell definitely whether the likeness was real or whether it reflected wishful thinking. They needed something more concrete to convince them that Klement was Eichmann living under an assumed name.

This Monday, March 21, passed as every weekday had passed since the three Israelis had begun their vigil. Klement had been seen to leave the factory at 12:30 P.M. and to enter a nearby restaurant, where he had ordered the same meager lunch he ordered every day. At 1:30 he had left the restaurant and strolled away from the factory for some three blocks, and by 2 P.M. he was back at work. At 5:30 P.M. he had left. But today, instead of walking straight to the bus stop, he stepped into a nearby horticultural nursery and emerged carrying a cellophane-wrapped bunch of flowers. He then caught his bus.

Dov added this fact to the usual telephone report he made to Yigal as soon as the bus had moved off. Yigal was careful to avoid mentioning it when he telephoned Gad that Klement had left work.

Three quarters of an hour later, Gad telephoned Yigal. The man, he said in Hebrew, had reached home, but he was carrying a bouquet. Yigal’s response was the code word for a meeting. He set it for 9:30 that night. He called Dov to give him the same order. Such meetings were held in a room they had rented in a Buenos Aires suburb far from both the Klement residence and the Mercedes-Benz factory.

Yigal was already there when Gad and then Dov arrived. His eyes showed excitement, but the rest of his expression was as grave as usual. His first question to both was, What do you make of the flowers? They thought for a few minutes and then Yigal added, What is today’s date?

The twenty-first of March.

What happened to him on the twenty-first of March?

Seconds went by before both exploded at the same moment. He got married!

Precisely, said Yigal. So today is his wedding anniversary. The twenty-fifth, in fact. Does anything strike you as odd?

Heavens, of course, Gad exclaimed. What would the second husband of Mrs. Eichmann be doing remembering her first wedding anniversary? And why, if he did, would he wish to commemorate that event with flowers?

Dov grinned. So Klement is Eichmann after all. There can be no doubt now. This is the break we’ve been waiting for.

Boys, said Yigal, this calls for two immediate acts. A drink, and a cable home. The drink we’ll have right away. The signal I’ll send on my way back.

Forty minutes later, the following cable was sent to an address in Israel from a post office midway between the meeting place and Yigal’s apartment: "Ha’ish hu ha’ish. The nearest English translation is The man is the man."

Who was this man Adolf Eichmann?

The first whisper of his name in public came dramatically from the witness box at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg at the end of 1945. Overnight it became a symbol of horror. And as the trial proceeded, defendants, witnesses and counsel unfolded a tale of slaughter unprecedented in its magnitude and cruelty—the slaughter of six million Jews. The man responsible for the organization of this mass murder, they said, was Adolf Eichmann.

In the dock were men whose names were familiar to the world, neon stars of the dark sky that was Nazi Germany. Göring and Keitel, Ribbentrop and Seyss-Inquart, Kaltenbrunner and Frank, Frick and Streicher, Sauckel and Jodl and others. For twelve years they, as principal ministers of the Führer, had ruled Germany, and for five of those years more than half of Europe. In that brief period, they had loosed upon the universe more misery than had any regime in history. They had launched a world war in which millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed in military operations. But this was only one of the reasons why these men were now in the dock facing charges as war criminals before a tribunal comprising judges from America, Russia, Britain and France. The basic charge against them was the crime against humanity.

In war, soldiers meet death. Civilians too are often casualties when caught in the cross fire of opposing units. But these men were now charged with the deliberate killing of wholly innocent people—men, women and children—for no other reason than that they belonged to a national, religious or ethnic group whom the Nazis despised. This was the crime against humanity.

And this is what made the men in the Nuremberg dock feel so uncomfortable. It was natural that men like Göring and Kaltenbrunner should look deflated, brought low by disaster, their egos shattered by the fall from dizzy heights of power to a humble place before the bar of justice, facing the judicial representatives of peoples against whom their might had been flung—and broken. But before appearing for trial, they were reported to have retained a certain cockiness, as if they were recalling the peaks they had reached before the collapse, the piles of winning chips the gamblers had amassed before their luck had turned. They had lost all. But they had come near to gaining all. They had been unfortunate. But misfortune was not a crime. They had a fleeting hope that they might yet cheat the gallows.

But then they were brought into court. And in court they heard the stories, told quietly, dispassionately, factually, by prosecuting counsel, backed by documents, records and living witnesses. They were stories of murder. And as the grim record was unrolled, the men in the dock began to lose whatever jauntiness they had mustered. As the eyes of the court and public and representatives of the world press turned to watch them, their own eyes dropped, their shoulders sagged, and they fidgeted in embarrassment. It was one thing to be a glamorous warrior in an army that had fought and lost. It was quite another to be a common criminal, part of a sordid gang whose power had enabled them to undertake, on a mighty scale and in more than sixteen countries, every crime known to man, and some not known until they had conceived them.

These crimes included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations before and during the war, and persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds.

The Nuremberg court itemized some of the methods used. The murders and ill treatment were carried out by divers means, including shooting, hanging, gassing, starvation, gross overcrowding, systematic undernutrition, systematic imposition of labor tasks beyond the strength of those ordered to carry them out, inadequate provision of surgical and medical services, kickings, beatings, brutality and torture of all kinds, including the use of hot irons and pulling out of fingernails and the performance of experiments, by means of operations and otherwise, on living human subjects....

The men in the dock listened. Some had the grace to look shamefaced.

The inexorable list continued. They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups...particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others. And they did so by novel means. Here are random samples taken from the evidence:

Methods used for the work of extermination in concentration camps were: Bad treatment, pseudoscientific experiments (sterilization of women at Auschwitz and at Ravensbrück, study of evolution of cancer of the womb at Auschwitz, of typhus at Buchenwald, anatomical research at Natzweiler, heart injections at Buchenwald, bone grafting and muscular excisions at Ravensbrück, etc.), gas chambers, gas wagons, and crematory ovens.... The many charnel pits give proof of anonymous massacres.

In one camp 200,000 Jews were exterminated. The most refined methods of cruelty were employed in the extermination, such as disemboweling and the freezing of human beings in tubs of water. Mass shootings took place to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra.... In some cases, the victims were used as human mine detectors—All these people lost their lives as a result of exploding mines. Tortures included suspension from the ceilings. Many were shot after the torture.

In one place in Eastern Europe overrun by the Nazis, more than 1,000 mutilated bodies were found bearing marks of torture...139 women had their arms painfully bent backward and held by wires. From some, their breasts had been cut off and their ears, fingers and toes had been amputated. The bodies bore the marks of burns. As a refinement, and to underline the fact that the victims were Jews, on the bodies of the men the six-pointed star was burned with an iron or cut with a knife. And some were disemboweled.

Nor were children spared. The Nazi leaders in the Nuremberg dock heard the charge that along with the adults the Nazi conspirators mercilessly destroyed even children. They killed them with their parents, in groups, and alone. They killed them in children’s homes and hospitals, burying the living in graves, throwing them into flames, stabbing them with bayonets, poisoning them, conducting experiments upon them, extracting their blood for the use of the German Army, throwing them into prison and Gestapo torture chambers and concentration camps, where the children died from hunger, torture, and epidemic diseases.

The defendants were surprised at these revelations. They had thought they had covered their tracks. For, as the Nuremberg court recounted, Beginning with June 1943, the Germans carried out measures to hide the evidence of their crimes. They exhumed and burned corpses, and they crushed the bones with machines and used them for fertilizer.

But there were too many victims. And not all could be exhumed, burned and crushed. And so these men were now on trial, faced with the evidence of crime.

And as they listened to this mounting tale of horror, they were no longer the proud leaders of a fallen nation. They were a sorry group of vulgar miscreants. And now they began to stroke their necks against the imagined roughness of the rope they feared they would one day feel. For they may have hoped to get away with a humbling sentence on the charge of launching war. But for murder, with such brutality, and on such a scale, there could be only one verdict. And they knew it carried the death penalty.

Each now tried to save his skin. They revealed the guile and venality of conspirators who seek to save their lives by blaming their fellows. Each of the defendants, men who had gloried in the power they had wielded, suddenly, mouse-like, claimed the ignorance of subordinates. We were under orders, said some. We didn’t know, said others. We knew, but these actions were the responsibility of an office other than mine, was the plea of most.

Which office?

Office IV B 4 of the R.S.H.A., Reich Security Head Office, responsible for the disposal of the Jews, headed by SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann. He was the man.

Eichmann was a name known very well to the men in the dock. It was almost unknown to those in court who had had no hand in the preparation of the charges. Suddenly, it was a name on everyone’s lips, an unknown, revealed by the central spotlight as the star player in a stark tragedy, symbol of the awesome crimes this international tribunal had been convened to judge. If the ghost of Hitler hovered over Nuremberg as the trial opened, it was now joined by another ghost—the ghost of Adolf Eichmann. For most of them thought that Eichmann was dead.

This thought, perhaps, made it easier for the defendants to try passing the blame. It did not help them. They were condemned for their responsibility. And the court made clear that their condemnation in no way absolved others involved in the initiation, planning or execution of these crimes against humanity. If Eichmann were alive and within reach, he would be in the dock, too.

For Adolf Eichmann emerged as the principal figure in the execution of the Nazi program for dealing with the Jewish people which had been euphemistically designated the Final Solution. The final solution for the Jews was death.

Yet strangely enough it was the prosecution and not the defense that brought the principal witnesses to testify about the activities of Adolf Eichmann. Once the evidence was there, counsel for several defendants seized the golden chance of seeking, in cross-examination, to present Eichmann as the sole repository of guilt.

One of the most dramatic moments in the Nuremberg trial came when the witness stand was taken by the first man to corroborate and amplify on Eichmann’s central function in the program for destroying the Jewish people. He was Dieter Wisliceny, a captain in the SS. His report was all the more impressive—and damning—because he could speak with knowledge from the inside. He was a Prussian. He was a Nazi. And he worked in the same office as Eichmann, IV B 4 of the R.S.H.A. He was, indeed, one of Eichmann’s chief assistants and had helped him carry out the final solution in Slovakia, Greece and Hungary. He told the Nuremberg Tribunal that Adolf Eichmann had been the principal executive officer in the program to exterminate the Jews. And, toward the end of the war, Eichmann had told him that he would leap laughing into the grave with extraordinary satisfaction at the knowledge that he had helped to exterminate five million Jews.

Wisliceny at the time was awaiting trial in Bratislava on a war crimes charge and had been specially brought from Slovakia to give evidence at Nuremberg. I myself saw him in November 1946, when he had already been condemned to death and was awaiting execution. He was hanged some weeks later. I interviewed him in the commandant’s office in the central jail of Bratislava. In his talk to me, he was absolutely consistent in his report, confirming the evidence he had given in January before the international tribunal and going into somewhat more detail. He added one interesting piece of information which I passed on two days later to the appropriate persons in Vienna. Unlike the men in the Nuremberg dock, he, Wisliceny, was convinced that Eichmann was still alive. He based his conviction on his personal knowledge of the man and his character, his information that Eichmann had taken careful measures to safeguard his future, his certainty that Eichmann had not the nerve to take his life. Wisliceny said he would like to record this on paper. I gave him my pen and he wrote the note which appears here in facsimile.

He told me then that he was certain that Eichmann would eventually be caught. He was right. But he could never have imagined that his forecast would be fulfilled so many years later on a dreary street corner of a Buenos Aires suburb.

Wisliceny’s statement of his conviction that Eichmann was still alive and hiding in Austria

2—THE CHASE BEGINS

"ADOLF EICHMANN—THAT’S THE MAN who must be brought to justice if he is still alive." The man who thundered these words, punctuating each with a fist-rap on the table, was a leader without a state, head of the Jews in Palestine and of the World Zionist Movement, silver-haloed David Ben Gurion, destined to become Israel’s first Prime Minister.

The year was 1945, shortly after the war.

This started the search for Eichmann, which was to end fifteen years later in a South American shantytown.

With liberation, the veil had been lifted from the grim, shattered face of Europe. The full measure of Jewish tragedy was now revealed. Millions slaughtered. A comparative handful of survivors. They sought to reach their land of hope—Palestine. But the gates had been barred by the British government, which ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

Ben Gurion was determined to fight the ban on Jewish immigration. He called together his top aides in the Jewish Agency for Palestine, precursor of the Israeli government, and of Haganah, the Jewish underground defense force which later became the Army of Israel, to organize the dispatch of trusted emissaries to Europe to handle the underground movement of Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were to be sent to each country where there were Jews who had survived the Nazi occupation and who wished to reach Palestine. When they were ready, Ben Gurion personally briefed the emissaries before their departure. Their task was not easy. They would be pitting themselves against the might of Great Britain, the country with whom the Jews of Palestine had just fought against the common enemy. But Britain’s policy rigidly restricting the entry of Jews into Palestine was indefensible. It had to be resisted—resisted not by an open armed battle but by circumvention.

A few hundred yards from Ben Gurion’s office in Jerusalem sat Britain’s High Commissioner for Palestine, in close touch with the Foreign Office in London and reporting on rumored Jewish plans to defeat the immigration ban. To back their policy, the British government would order the Royal Navy to blockade the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. There would be lively diplomatic action throughout Europe to prevent the movement of Jews across the frontiers. And there would be direct restrictions within the British zones of occupied territories to stop the stream of immigrants at the source. Those who slipped through the net would be dealt with by the blockading Navy.

Ben Gurion told the emissaries: It is your job to tear giant holes in this net. We must give tangible expression to the hopes of Jewish survivors of Nazism to leave the cursed continent which has become the graveyard of their families and to make a new life for themselves and their children in the land of their fathers, the Land of Israel.

And then he gave them a further objective. Many Nazi leaders had been caught. They would soon stand trial at Nuremberg. But many had got away. Some were no doubt dead. But some were still alive, hiding in the funk holes of Berlin and Vienna, Munich and Bratislava, or in the forests of Austria and Slovakia, Germany and elsewhere.

They included men directly involved in the slaughter of Jews. Personal reports he had received from the few European Jewish leaders who had remained alive spoke of Adolf Eichmann as the leading Nazi active in the extermination of Jewry. Eichmann had not been caught. But there was reason to believe that he was alive. He had to be found. The emissaries were authorized to contact Allied intelligence agencies in the countries in which they would be operating and propose mutual cooperation in the search for Nazi war criminals.

With a Good luck and success, the briefing ended. A few days later, the Haganah emissaries were on their way. The countries in which they were to operate included Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Italy, Rumania and Hungary.

Typical of the emissaries was a young man whose assignment was Austria. His name was Arthur Pier. That, at least, is the name he went under in Vienna. Today he is known as Asher Ben Natan, the able Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

He thought he had the brightest chance of all of hitting Eichmann’s trail. For Eichmann was an Austrian. Members of his family were living in Austria. Traces of him were more likely to be found there than anywhere else. Arthur found this aspect of the assignment very satisfying. He was also intrigued by the paradox of the two jobs. For in his search for war criminals he would be working closely with Allied intelligence officers, particularly American and British. And as organizer of the escape routes for Jewish survivors and their onward transmission to Palestine, he would be working against the British.

In the event, he did both tasks well. Undetected by British agents, he received thousands upon thousands of Jewish refugees from the Czech and Hungarian borders and moved them on by underground routes to places from which they could be embarked on Haganah ships to run the Mediterranean blockade to Palestine. He set up transit centers inside the official displaced-persons camps at Linz, Salzburg and Innsbruck. Some were moved into camps in Germany from which they would be taken to southern French ports. Others were moved, also illegally, to Italy and shipped to Palestine from there. Arthur, operating from his headquarters in Vienna, always appeared the calm, unruffled, debonair representative of an apparently respectable and legal organization of refugees.

And at the same time he succeeded in unearthing the hiding places of several war criminals, who were handed over to the Allied authorities for custody and trial. He was also the man who revealed the first traces of Adolf Eichmann.

This had not been his first introduction to the name. For in 1944 Arthur had been sent from Jerusalem to Haifa by the research department of the Jewish Agency’s Political Office, headed then by Moshe Sharett, later Israel’s Foreign Minister and, for a time, Prime Minister, to gather information on Nazi war criminals. A thin trickle of Jewish survivors had begun to reach the Palestinian port of Haifa at the end of 1944. They were interrogated by Arthur both on their experiences in the concentration camps and on Nazis known to them as having been associated with the extermination program in their countries. The results had been thick dossiers on war criminals which Arthur had compiled. These were handed over to the American O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) and later to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Eichmann was one of the key names he had encountered. His was a thick file. There were numerous reports of his activities. But there was very little on his personal life and nothing firm on his whereabouts after leaving Hungary at the end of 1944.

Characteristically enough, Arthur left Palestine aboard a Haganah vessel which had successfully run the British blockade with a full load of Jewish refugees the night before and was now returning to Europe for more. Eleven days later he landed at Santa Maria di Leuca, in southern Italy, and from there he made his way to Graz in Austria. He stayed in Graz just long enough to forge for himself a respectable passport in the name of Arthur Pier and arrived in Vienna at the beginning of November. He set up headquarters as Haganah and illegal-immigration chief in Austria at No. 2 Frankgasse. According to the sign on the door, it was the headquarters of the Austrian Refugee Organization.

He got to work quickly. Within a week, he had chosen some eighty good young men among the refugees in the D.P. camps, bright, alert and with a knowledge of the local languages, and had deployed them along the Czech and Hungarian borders to handle the illegal crossing. He got another hundred to organize the transit arrangements inside the D.P. camps. From then on, the escape operations ran reasonably smoothly, and Arthur could turn to his second task—the chase after war criminals.

It was fairly easy at that time to ingratiate himself with the police authorities in Austria. Anxious to show that they had not collaborated with the Nazis, they were eager to cooperate with Jewish survivors in hunting down the killers of the Jews. With Allied intelligence officers it was less easy. They tended to be suspicious of local personnel who offered their help. Chance gave Arthur the immediate entree to both the American counterintelligence unit and the O.S.S.

To secure additional nourishment for the refugees, Arthur had had food packages sent in, which were stored before distribution in the Frankgasse headquarters. This excited the suspicion of neighbors, who informed American intelligence officers that it was probably a black-market center. One morning, while Arthur was out, they entered his office and carried out a search. But the only item of interest they found was a can of microfilm in one of his drawers. The microfilm was a record made by the O.S.S. of the files which Arthur had compiled on Nazi war criminals during his service in Haifa the previous year, and which had been sent to the O.S.S. in Washington. They had filmed the dossiers and sent a copy back to Palestine. Arthur had taken it with him to Vienna, which was where it would now be needed. But this was not known by the intelligence officers. All they could see was that it was an O.S.S. film. They questioned Arthur’s assistants about the food packages, and these just told the truth. The needs of refugees were great. Their families overseas, having heard that they had survived, were anxious to do whatever was possible, quickly, to help. They sent food parcels. The officers listened and left.

That same evening, Arthur received a call from an American major. He had come, he said, to investigate a story he had heard that Arthur was in possession of an O.S.S. can of microfilm. Arthur casually went to a drawer, pulled out the can and asked if he was talking about that. The American nodded. Arthur then showed him what it was, adding that he hoped he would be in a position to offer the O.S.S. further information on war criminals and that they could perhaps work together. The officer was noncommittal, said he would let him know, and took his leave.

Two days later he called again. He had checked with Washington, and they had confirmed that they had received the records from Arthur’s office in Haifa and had sent a microfilmed copy back to the Jewish Agency. He had also received permission to cooperate with Arthur in Vienna. This, incidentally, had the subsidiary effect of taking the British intelligence service off Arthur’s back, and he was able in the following two years to proceed with his underground emigration job comparatively unmolested by them.

Arthur’s first request to the O.S.S. was to institute inquiries in all the German prisoner-of-war camps within the American zone as to whether Adolf Eichmann was among the inmates. But the very utterance of the request laid bare the enormous difficulties in knowing even how to start, or where. Austria was a likely country to look for him in, for he had been brought up in Linz and his family presumably was there. It was believable that he would try to find a hiding place in the region he knew best. But there was no certainty that he would indeed go there. He might, on the contrary, hole up somewhere else. No one knew where he had been when the war ended, or whither he had flown.

No one knew whether he was still alive. He may well have been killed. Or he may have committed suicide.

If he was alive, it was probable that he had been captured and was at present in one of the P.O.W. camps. But which? And in which country? And under which occupying power? And if he was a prisoner of war, it was most likely that he had given a false name, was wearing a different uniform and had equipped himself with false papers. No one knew better than Arthur how easy it was at that time and in those conditions to secure false documents.

But what did he look like? To carry out a thorough search in the P.O.W. camps, the commandants needed a description of the wanted man. The files in Arthur’s possession gave only his age, an account of his activities, and a written description of his appearance gathered from reports of Jewish leaders in Vienna who had met him in 1938 and 1939 and those in Budapest who had seen him in 1944. But a written description is not enough. They needed a photograph of Eichmann. And no one had a photograph.

The first job, before the chase could even begin, was to obtain a picture of the man. Arthur set his people to tracing any Austrian Nazi of any standing who was likely to have had dealings with Eichmann. And he requested the Austrian police to comb the jails to find out if they had such a man in prison.

The police came up with several names, and Arthur managed to visit them in prison. But the interrogations proved fruitless. Some professed ignorance of the name Eichmann, and those who had heard of him claimed to know nothing about him.

All this took many months. And the authorities were still without a picture of Eichmann. But by early 1946 a good deal more was revealed by Eichmann’s own colleagues about his key part in the operations in which millions of Jews had perished. Among the most important of these witnesses was Dieter Wisliceny.

After giving evidence at Nuremberg, Wisliceny was returned to jail in Bratislava, where he had been charged with war crimes in Slovakia. Reading reports of the Nuremberg trials, Arthur decided that Wisliceny might be the one man who could put them on the track of Eichmann. He went to Bratislava and through local connections managed to interview Wisliceny.

Wisliceny knew nothing specific, but he said he was convinced that Eichmann was now somewhere in Austria. Arthur showed him some group photographs which had been found in the SS offices of Germany and Austria immediately after the war and asked whether Eichmann was on any of them. He was not. Arthur then asked him whether he knew of any Austrian Nazis who had worked with Eichmann and who might now be in Austria. Wisliceny gave him several names, including a certain SS officer named Weisel who had been on Eichmann’s staff since before the war. Wisliceny said that he believed Weisel might well have been with Eichmann at the end of the war and might know what had happened to him.

Wisliceny then said that he himself had left several photographs in his apartment in Vienna, including a group picture taken in 1937 showing Eichmann, Hauptsturmführer Dannecker (later Eichmann’s aide in France), Wisliceny and a certain Kruhl, on the Baltic Sea. You will find it in the left-hand drawer of my writing desk.

Of Eichmann’s personal friends, all Wisliceny could say was that Eichmann had had intimate relations with a woman whom I do not know very well but who lived in the village of Doppel. I believe her name was something like Messenbacher. Eichmann always referred to her as his ‘old flame’ whom he had known in Linz. He also mentioned a Margit Kutschera as one of Eichmann’s Hungarian loves.

Arthur returned to Vienna. Together with the local police he went to Wisliceny’s apartment. They found many photographs of Wisliceny, of his mother and of Austrian landscapes. But none of Eichmann. And no group pictures. They must have been removed by a member of the family at the end of the war. This was a set-back.

Arthur next asked the police whether there was a Weisel in any of their jails. He also asked the O.S.S. officer to make inquiries in the P.O.W. camps.

At about this time, there turned up in Vienna a Polish-Jewish refugee who had survived the concentration camps. His name was Tuvia Friedman. He received considerable publicity two years ago as the man who had pursued a dedicated search for Eichmann over the last fifteen years and whose investigations had led to Eichmann’s capture. Let me say now that Friedman played no part in the capture of Eichmann. And at no stage was he even consulted by the persons who planned and carried out the operation. Friedman did not even know it had taken place until a newspaper reporter telephoned him shortly after the Prime Minister’s announcement in the Knesset and gave him the news. The persons closely involved in the capture claim that not even his documentation work was of any help to them. They go further and tell me that his publication of his search for Eichmann at a crucial stage in their operations caused them anxiety. Nevertheless it is my personal belief that to Friedman must go some credit for maintaining an unswerving passion in keeping interest alive in Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals.

But when he met Arthur in Vienna, he knew nothing of Eichmann. He had come with a burning zeal to find the Nazis responsible for the liquidation of the Jewish community of his home town in Poland, Radom. And he sought Arthur’s help in establishing a Jewish documentation center in Vienna to pursue this purpose. Arthur agreed to help finance it, adding to its aims the search for other war criminals who might be in Austria. (Friedman later transferred this center to Haifa, in Israel, and carried it on as a private concern.)

A few weeks later, Arthur received a call from the local police. They had in the central prison of Vienna a former SS man by the name of Josef Weisel. Perhaps he was the man Arthur had inquired about as having been mentioned by Wisliceny.

Arthur hurried over to the jail. Weisel was brought to the office of the commandant. The interrogation began. Yes, he knew Eichmann. He had worked with him since 1938. He had been with him in Prague toward the end of the war. In February 1945 they knew it was all over, and the Gestapo officers there, worried about the future, discussed escape plans. Eichmann was among them. But, characteristically, he suddenly left Prague and went off on his own. It was believed he was aiming for Austria. He, Weisel, and his remaining colleagues did not leave Prague until April, and they split into two groups some forty miles outside Prague, his party making for Budweis.

Weisel was asked about Eichmann’s friends who might know his whereabouts. He gave Arthur the names of two women who had been Eichmann’s mistresses. One was Margit Kutschera, who had been with Eichmann in Budapest as late as 1944 and whom Weisel believed to be now in Germany. (This lady never was traced.) The other was a woman in Doppel named Maria Masenbacher whom Eichmann had visited very frequently. She was the owner of a cardboard factory in Doppel which Eichmann arranged for the SS to buy and convert into a re-education center for Jews. The sale was effected, and Mrs. Masenbacher got a good price. She appeared to be the same woman mentioned by Wisliceny as Messenbacher. Weisel said he thought the lady was still in Doppel, and he drew for Arthur a sketch map showing him how to reach Doppel from Lembach. He also marked the house in which Mrs. Masenbacher lived.

This was the best lead yet. But Arthur could not follow it up himself. His main job was saving Jews. Besides, it was likely to take too much time. For one had to get to know the lady and worm oneself into her confidence before she was likely to talk. And there were many other pressing matters in Vienna which demanded his attention. About this time, thousands of Jewish refugees were streaming westward from Central and Eastern Europe. They were being brought across the borders by Arthur’s men, temporarily housed in Vienna and then moved on to Camp Rudenberg, in Salzburg, from where they would be taken to one of the Mediterranean ports in France or Italy.

There were problems of housing and feeding at the Salzburg camp and Arthur went there to decide what could be done. It was a few days after his interview with Weisel. At the camp he met with his assistants. One of them was a young man named Manus Diamant, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, who had himself come west hoping to get to Palestine and had brought a group of young Jewish refugees with him. A good organizer, he had been asked by Arthur to stay behind for a spell and help the underground movement. He would get to Palestine later.

As Arthur watched him now, he had an idea. Diamant was a good-looking young man, of medium height, charming, with good German, who could easily pass as a Volksdeutscher. He had brains. He was subtle. He would be an excellent person to send to Doppel to win the friendship of Mrs. Masenbacher. After the meeting, Arthur asked Diamant to stay behind, and he put the proposition to him. Diamant accepted immediately. High up on the list of items Arthur instructed him to try to obtain was a photograph of Eichmann. The main information he was asked to get was, of course, whether she knew if Eichmann was alive and, if so, where he was, and if she knew the answer to neither, what his movements were toward the end of the war and details of any other friends who might know.

Diamant went to Doppel. Since his German, though good, was not impeccable, he posed as a Dutchman who had collaborated with the Nazis and had been compelled to leave Holland. He was well received. But not by Maria Masenbacher. She was not there. Yes, she was known in the district, but she had not been seen for some time.

The nearest hotel was at the village of Lembach, five miles away. Diamant went there and got friendly with the owners of the Woess Inn. They knew Eichmann and confirmed that he had stayed at the inn several times on his visits to Doppel. They did not know where he was now. They believed he was dead. Diamant also obtained from them information about other Nazi SS officers who had served in the district and whose addresses they knew. He passed the information to Arthur, who transmitted it to the O.S.S. and the Austrian state police, and at least three were apprehended. But it was several weeks before he discovered from an old lady in Doppel that Mrs. Masenbacher was now living in Urfahr.

A few days later, he presented himself at Building Number 20, Entry 1, Harbachsiedlung, a residential suburb of Urfahr, to be greeted by a thirty-five-year-old, slim, dark-haired, rather plain-looking woman with buck teeth. This was Mrs. Masenbacher. He told her that Eichmann had been a friend of his family, had spoken of her several times, and since he had left some valuables with them and they did not know where to send them, he thought she might be able to help.

Mrs. Masenbacher showed interest, but was very guarded in her references to Eichmann. Still, she was not suspicious. And being lonely—she had divorced her husband, she said, who had been fifteen years her senior—she encouraged Diamant’s friendship. It was several weeks before they had reached the stage where, sitting in her home, she took out an album of old photographs and began reminiscing. As they turned over the pages, she turned to one on which was pasted a single photograph. What do you think of my Adolf? asked Maria. Diamant stared hard at it and made enthusiastic noises. Eichmann had been much younger. It had been taken in the middle thirties.

As soon as he left, Diamant telephoned Arthur. A few days later the local police, accompanied by Diamant, raided the Masenbacher apartment with a search warrant on instructions from the Vienna police commissioner, Arthur’s friend. They said there was information that she was in possession of forged ration cards. During the search, Diamant got the album and tore from it the page with Eichmann’s photograph.

Back in Vienna, Diamant and Arthur had the photocopied and it was transmitted to O.S.S. and the Austrian state police, who in turn circulated it to all prisons, P.O.W. camps and police headquarters of all the states where Eichmann was likely to be hiding. The search could now begin in earnest.

Meanwhile, Diamant had discovered where Eichmann’s family was now living. Mrs. Eichmann and her three children were in Austria, residing at the village of Alt Aussee. He had got her address through Eichmann’s father and brothers, who were still in Linz. Diamant had got friendly with them without their suspecting his identity. They had been easy to find. For the father had never left Linz. But no one knew where Mrs. Eichmann had gone after the war. Now they were at Alt Aussee. Diamant went there.

He tried the same tack with Mrs. Eichmann which he had successfully worked with Eichmann’s mistress. And, after several days, he was being invited into the house and accepted as a friend of the family, even playing with the children. But he gathered no information of any importance. There were no photographs of Eichmann and no letters from him. He received the strong impression, which he passed to Arthur, that Mrs. Eichmann was firmly convinced of her husband’s death. This did not mean that he really was dead. Nor did it mean necessarily that Mrs. Eichmann truly believed that he was. But, as an experienced investigator by now, Diamant considered that there was nothing to be gleaned from her.

It is now known, from Eichmann himself, that his wife really believed him dead. For she had thought that, had he been alive, he would surely have sent her some signal, even though it would have been accompanied by the warning to maintain silence. He, Eichmann, knew that, however much she would have tried, she could not convincingly pretend that he was dead unless she herself believed it. And so, being cautious and afraid of discovery, he had let her believe it until he could escape from the Continent. Mrs. Eichmann’s conviction of her husband’s death communicated itself to Diamant. And it is my belief, from interviewing persons associated with the search and reading their reports at the time, that at the back of their minds they too were infected by this doubt and at times imagined they were chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. For, as one of them said to me, even if he had not been killed in the final stages of the war, he might have been run over by a truck during his escape or died of pneumonia. After all, there was no firm evidence that he was alive.

It is this, I believe, that did much to take the heart out of the search. Not that Arthur or Diamant gave up immediately. Still not entirely convinced, they arranged for a Jewish girl who occasionally worked with them to pose as a maidservant and secure a job in the Eichmann household. She worked there for several weeks. But she too reported that there was no doubt of their conviction that Eichmann was no longer living.

I am certain in my own mind that, from then on, the search for Eichmann became less spirited. It would be incorrect to presume, as many now have done, that there was a continuous hunt every day, week and month of the fifteen years between his escape and his capture. There was the semi-serious search during the period that Arthur was in Vienna and the other Haganah emissaries were in other countries in Europe. I say semi-serious because it was not their full-time task. And I cannot avoid the feeling that part of the work was carried out in somewhat amateur fashion, except for the operation of Manus Diamant, who did a good professional job. Thereafter, there would be a burst of activity when a tip seemed hopeful, followed by long periods of inaction when the lead turned out to be false. It is this, perhaps, which makes the capture even more impressive. Once it was established that there was a good chance that a man in Argentina living as Ricardo Klement was in fact Adolf Eichmann, there was nothing half-hearted or amateurish about the chase, the kidnap and the ultimate arrival of the prisoner in an Israeli jail. But in the meantime there was only a sporadic sniffing around to find the trail.

Late in 1947, Arthur was transferred from Vienna to other duties. He toyed with the idea of taking a year off to continue his search for Eichmann, but the urgent needs of building the new state claimed priority on his services. He has ended up, as I have said, at the head of the Ministry of Defense. And he had no hand in the final chapter of the Eichmann chase. Nor did Manus Diamant, who reached Israel after his Austrian mission and lives happily today in a pleasant suburb of Tel Aviv.

That did not mean that the Eichmann file had been closed. Arthur transferred his reports and documents to Israel, and the dossier was kept open. But Eichmann could not be the central interest of the kind of people who could be most effective in his pursuit. The State of Israel had now come into being and had fought and won its War of Independence, having beaten off attack by the armies of the neighboring Arab States. These states threatened a second round. And neither men nor resources could be diverted for anything not directly concerned with strengthening Israel’s defenses. Nevertheless there was a group which kept a lookout for whatever news there was of Eichmann and maintained an up-to-date record of information on his rumored movements.

In Austria, some of the people who had worked with Arthur followed any lead that seemed hopeful. They decided to maintain frequent spot checks on the house in Linz where Eichmann’s father lived and in Alt Aussee, where his wife and children were living, to find out if there were any signs that Eichmann had been in touch with them.

There was nothing special of note until the summer of 1952, when a local agent reported that Mrs. Eichmann had left Alt Aussee with her three children. He could not say exactly when they had left nor where they had gone. They had simply disappeared. Had they been kept under constant surveillance by a professional investigation team, it is possible that the chase would have ended in that year. It was now as difficult to pick up their trail as it was to pick up Eichmann’s. It did, however, suggest that Eichmann was probably still alive and had somehow got a message through to his family to join him wherever he was. It meant that henceforth no rumor could be ignored and every tip had to be followed up, however phony it seemed. There was no dearth of such rumors in the years that followed, and each was tracked down to its frustrating end.

There was the Moslem student in Munich who produced the likely story that the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, knew where Eichmann could be found. He said that the Mufti was a friend of his father, a former professor at the El Azhar University in Cairo, and had been in touch with him to secure his help in arranging the release and transport to Egypt of Moslems who had served in the Bosnian Division which the Mufti had helped to raise for the Nazis. These men apparently were being held in Munich. The student believed that since the Mufti had worked with Eichmann on anti-Jewish measures during the war, they had been in communication with each other since. He was prepared, for a fee, to secure Eichmann’s address from the Mufti. Two and a half weeks later, he came up with an address. But the agent checked it before paying the fee. It was false.

There was a German lawyer who asked ten thousand dollars as payment for information on Eichmann’s whereabouts. That too took several weeks before the man was found to be peddling a three-year-old story that had been known at the time and was now out of date.

There were two separate cases, one in Germany and one in Austria, where a woman came to a local Jewish organization with a story that the man she was living with behaved mysteriously, never left the apartment, and was probably a Nazi leader in hiding. Both cases were investigated. But no Eichmann.

An agent in Austria got a tip that there was a man calling himself Ohmann whose age was about the same as Eichmann’s, who had, according to a former mistress, been a Nazi officer during the war, and who now seemed to be afraid to stay in the same place for any length of time and was constantly on the move. The description of his height and build tallied with that of Eichmann. His movements were checked and he was finally traced. But he was not Eichmann.

There was the Arab in Damascus who offered a German newspaperman delivery of Eichmann for fifty thousand dollars. He said Eichmann was a member of the German colony in Syria living under a false name. This Arab was only one of many in the Middle East prepared to sell similar locally fabricated material. But it was perfectly feasible to expect that Eichmann might be in one of the Arab countries. Other well-known Nazis had found refuge in the Middle East. And they had been helpful to their hosts. Hatred of Jews gave them a common interest with some of the Arab leaders, particularly in Egypt and Syria. And their skills and organizational activity were put to effective use. Eichmann could well have been among them.

For several