Hunting Eichmann (3 page)

In late October, with the Russians driving only a hundred miles from Budapest and Horthy recently deposed as regent, Eichmann made one last bid to finish what he had started in Hungary. "You see, I'm back again," he declared to the capital's Jewish leaders. He secured permission from the German plenipotentiary to send 50,000 Jews to labor camps in Austria. The fact that there were no available trains to take them on the 125-mile journey, because of Allied bombing raids, did not deter him. As winter settled in, he sent the first 27,000 Jews, including children and the infirm, on a forced march. With few provisions and no shelter, scores began falling behind within a few days. They were either shot or left to die in roadside ditches. Even the Auschwitz commandant Höss, who witnessed the scene while driving between Budapest and Vienna, balked at the conditions the Jews endured. It was intended slaughter, something that Himmler had decreed must stop. When Eichmann was ordered by a superior officer to cease the march, he ignored the order. At last, in early December, Himmler summoned Eichmann to his headquarters in the Black Forest. Before they met, Eichmann cleaned his nicotine-stained fingers with a pumice stone and lemon, knowing well the Reichsführer-SS's aversion to cigarettes.

"If until now you have exterminated Jews," Himmler said in a tone laced with anger, "from now on, I order you, as I do now, you must be a fosterer of Jews ... If you are not able to do that, you must tell me so!"

"Yes, Reichsführer," Eichmann answered, knowing that any other answer or action on his part was suicide.

On a late December morning in 1944, the winter wind cut through a wooden hut at Jaworzno, an Auschwitz satellite camp. On his bunk, Zeev Sapir shivered constantly. He had swapped his extra shirt for a loaf of bread, and his scant remaining clothes hung loosely on his emaciated body.

At 4:30
A.M.,
a siren sounded. Sapir jumped out of bed to avoid the rain of blows he would endure if he delayed. He hurried outside with the hundred other prisoners from his hut, exposed now to the bitter wind and the cold as they awaited roll call. Then he began his twelve-hour shift at the Dachsgrube coal mines. He was required to fill fortyfive wagons of coal per shift or receive twenty-five lashes. This would have been difficult if he had been in the best of health, but after a breakfast of only one cup of coffee and one-sixteenth portion of a loaf of bread, every shift was a Herculean effort. Sapir often fell short.

That evening, when Sapir returned to the camp, exhausted and with his skin coated with coal dust, he and the other 3,000 prisoners were ordered to start walking. The Red Army was advancing into Poland, the SS guards told them. Sapir did not much care. He was told to walk; he walked. This attitude—and the hand of fate—had kept him alive for the past eight months.

Once Sapir had arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary and been separated from his family, he had been beaten, herded off to a barracks, stripped, inspected, deloused, shaved, and tattooed on his left forearm with the sequence A3800. The next morning, he had been forced to work in the gas chambers where he suspected his family had been killed during the night. Sapir dragged the dead from the chambers and placed them on their backs in the yard, where a barber cut off their hair and a dental mechanic ripped out any gold teeth. Then he carried the corpses to large pits, where they were stacked like logs and burned to ashes. A channel running through the middle of the pit drained the fat exuding from the bodies. That fat was used to stoke the crematorium fires. The thick smoke, dark red flames, and acrid fumes poisoned his soul.

Sapir lost track of time, unaware of the day of the week or the hour of the day. He knew only night and day. Somehow he escaped execution, the fate of most workers tasked to operate the gas chambers and crematoriums. The Germans regularly killed these workers to keep their activities secret. Sapir, however, was sent to Jaworzno, where he would endure a different set of savageries.

Now, filing out of the satellite camp, Sapir and the other prisoners trudged through deep snow. They walked for two days, not knowing where they were going. Anyone who slowed down or stopped for a rest was shot. As night fell on the second day, they reached Bethune, a town in Upper Silesia, and were told to sit by the side of the road.

The commanding SS officer strode down the line, saying, "Whoever is unable to continue may remain here, and he will be transferred by truck." Sapir had long since learned not to believe any such promises, but he was too tired, too cold, and too indifferent to care. Two hundred of the prisoners stayed put, while the others marched away. Sapir slept where he fell in the snow. In the morning, the group was ordered out to a field with shovels and pickaxes and told to dig. The earth was frozen, but they dug and dug, even though they knew they were digging their own graves.

That evening, they were taken to the dining hall at a nearby mine. All the windows had been blown out by air raids. A number of SS officers followed them inside, led by a deputy officer named Lausmann. "Yes, I know you are so hungry," he said in a sympathetic tone as a large pot was brought into the hall.

Sapir gathered with the other prisoners, starved and almost too weary to stand. The most desperate pushed to the front, hoping for food. They were killed first. Lausmann grabbed one prisoner after the next, leaned him over the pot, and shot him in the neck. He fired and fired. In the middle of the massacre, a young prisoner began making a speech to whoever would listen. "The German people will answer to history for this," he declared before receiving a bullet as well.

Lausmann continued to fire until there were only eleven prisoners left, Sapir among them. Before Sapir could be summoned forward, Lausmann's superior called him out of the hall. The SS guards took the remaining prisoners by train to the Gleiwitz concentration camp, where they were thrown into a cellar filled with potatoes. Ravenous, they ate the frozen potatoes. In the morning, they were marched out to the forest with thousands of others. Suddenly, machine guns opened fire, mowing down the prisoners. Sapir ran through the trees until his legs gave out. He was knocked out by the fall. He awakened alone, with a bloody foot and only one shoe. When the Red Army found him, he weighed sixty-four pounds. His skin was as yellow and dry as parchment. It was January 1945. He would not regain anything close to physical health until April.

Sapir would never forget the promise Eichmann had made in the Munkács ghetto or the call to justice by his fellow prisoner the moment before his execution. But many, many years would pass before he was brought forward to remember these things.

2

AS THE WAR DREW
to a close, the world was about to come face-to-face with the vestiges of the horror that Sapir had survived. On April 12, 1945, the Allies opened a road to Berlin. The Rhine River had been crossed weeks earlier, and the British and Canadian armies stormed east across northern Germany in their Sherman tanks. The American armies had encircled the Ruhr Valley, cutting off Hitler's industrial complex and opening up a huge hole in the western front. Only a handful of ragtag German divisions stood between eighty-five Allied divisions and Berlin. A spearhead of the U.S. Ninth Army was already establishing bridgeheads on the Elbe River, just sixty miles from the capital of the Third Reich. To the east of Berlin, 1.25 million Russian soldiers with 22,000 pieces of artillery were on the banks of the Oder River, a mere thirty-five miles away from the capital.

While these forces mustered for the final defeat of Germany, two Wehrmacht colonels flying a white flag from their Mercedes approached the forward headquarters of the British 159th Battalion. They came with an offer of a local cease-fire in order to hand over control of Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp plagued with typhus located a few miles from the advancing British tanks. That same day, General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, entered the work camp near the village of Ohrdurf. He shuddered at what he saw.

Reports of the genocidal acts committed by the Germans had reached the Allies over the course of the war. As early as the summer of 1941, code breakers at Britain's Bletchley Park had intercepted transmissions that described in detail the mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1942, Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish resistance movement, had put himself in a position to be thrown into Auschwitz, from which he periodically sent out reports that reached Western governments. Two Slovakian Jews had escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau at the cusp of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, and they had provided detailed reports on the number of transports coming to the camp, the nationalities of the arrivals, and their fate in the gas chambers. It was their account that had led to the spate of protests to Admiral Horthy against the Hungarian deportations in 1944, including one from President Roosevelt that stated, "To the Hitlerites, subordinates, functionaries, and satellites, to the German people and all other peoples under the Nazi yoke, we have made clear our determination to punish all participation in these acts of savagery."

Roosevelt had made a similar declaration as early as October 1942. Two months later, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden had announced to the House of Commons that Hitler's aim was to exterminate the Jewish people. The British view at that time, penned by Winston Churchill in a note to his cabinet in 1943, was that after arrest, the German leaders should have a brief trial to ensure their identity and, six hours later, be "shot to death ... without reference to higher authority." Curiously, it was Joseph Stalin, no stranger to kangaroo courts, who had reined in Churchill with the help of Roosevelt. On a visit by Churchill to Moscow in October 1944, Stalin had insisted that no executions should occur without a fair trial, "otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them." Still, as the war neared its close, Allied leaders continued to jostle over how best to bring the Nazis to justice.

Plans to capture these criminals were barely in preparation. First, the Allies were having difficulty settling on who should be targeted as a war criminal. The British held the narrow view that the Allies should go after only those major German figures whose "notorious offenses ... have no special geographical location." The Americans and Russians wanted a much broader definition. This resulted in a confusing number of war criminal lists. Not only did the Allies lack one definitive list, but more important, by April 1945 they had organized only seven investigative teams, numbering roughly five officers and seven enlisted men each, to find these war criminals. In contrast, an Anglo-American operation code-named Paperclip recruited 3,000 investigators to spread throughout the Third Reich to arrest top German scientists and to collect technological information before the Russians got their hands on both. Those charged with tracking down the war criminals did not have so much as an operational code name. Such were the priorities of Washington and London as the war in Europe drew to a close.

Despite the intelligence reports General Eisenhower had read on the German atrocities, he found himself completely unprepared for Ohrdurf. Guided by former inmates, he and his staff saw men in the hospital who had been brutally tortured and were starving, lying shoulder to shoulder, expecting nothing more than death to arrive. In a basement, he saw a gallows where prisoners had been hung by piano wire long enough that their toes touched the floor, delaying death but prolonging the agony that preceded it. In one of the yards, he saw some 40 corpses, riddled with lice, stacked in rows. In an adjoining field, he saw 3,200 more corpses, many with gunshot wounds to the back of the head, next to a pyre of wood clearly intended to destroy all traces of their existence. General Omar Bradley, who accompanied Eisenhower, could not even speak; the hard-nosed General George Patton vomited against a wall. As he left Ohrdurf, Eisenhower told his officers, "I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting
against.
" Once back at headquarters, the shaken supreme commander sent messages to Washington and London demanding that legislators and newspaper reporters come to Ohrdurf. He wanted these crimes documented.

Over the next several days, the Americans liberated larger camps such as Nordhausen and Buchenwald. On April 15, the British finally entered Bergen-Belsen, bringing reporters and cameramen with them to document the 60,000 "living skeletons" who staggered toward their jeeps. An
Evening Standard
journalist wrote, "The indignity of death above ground—the bared teeth, the revealed frame that should be sacred, and once was sacred to some loved one, the piled bodies in their ghastly grayness, the pitiable little thing with claws instead of a hand that was a baby, still within the protecting grasp of an emaciated bone that was once a mother's arm—all on the Nazi death heap." The photographs and newsreels from Bergen-Belsen and the camps that Eisenhower opened to reporters all made a huge impression on the public. The
Jewish Chronicle,
which had published details on Auschwitz after its liberation by the Russians months before, now asked, "Why have we had to wait till now for this widespread revulsion?"

Finally, the flesh-and-blood horror of the Final Solution was revealed, and vividly so, to the public and its leaders. With every day, more monstrous evidence was discovered and documented, and the pursuit of those responsible increased in importance.

By April 13, the once great capital of Germany was in ruins. Frequent air raids had devastated the city. Black smoke drifted through the streets, often obscuring the sun. The wailing of sirens was constant. Berliners threaded their way through the fog to their offices and factories and stood in long lines for food. Life went on. They greeted one another with the words "
Bleib übrig".
"Survive."

At 116 Kurfürstenstrasse, survival dominated the minds of the Gestapo. They had moved into the cavernous building of oversized rooms and marble stairwells where Eichmann had his office after incendiary bombs had ripped apart their main Prinz Albrecht Strasse headquarters. One afternoon Eichmann, who had returned to Berlin the previous December when the Russians had overrun Budapest, came across a number of his fellow Gestapo officers, crowded into a hall where, in the days when the Nazis were advancing across Europe, he used to play his violin accompanied by several of his staff. A table had been set up, and a department official, whose job was to issue forged papers, was taking notes on the new identity each officer wanted so that he could create employment certificates, company correspondence, and other papers. At the back of the hall, standing apart from the crush to get these papers, Eichmann looked on, disgusted by the scene of SS officers now looking to become insurance salesmen and the like to avoid arrest by the Allies.