Nazi Hunter (17 page)

11

On Monday, 23 May 1960, the day Israel announced that Adolf Eichmann, abducted from Argentina, was ‘at present in prison here,’ Simon Wiesenthal received an
official cable from Jerusalem at his home in Austria:
‘
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR EXCELLENT WORK
.’
He studied it with satisfaction and then handed it to
his teenaged daughter Pauline, saying: ‘You never saw your father when you were a baby. You were asleep when I went to work looking for this man and asleep by the time I came home. I
don’t know how long I will live. I don’t know if I will leave you any fortune at all. But this cable is my gift to you. Because through this cable lam now a part of
history.’

Simon Wiesenthal is in possession of the devil’s soul: Eichmann’s autobiography, a thousand-page document Eichmann dictated in the 1950s and put finishing touches
to in Buenos Aires just before his capture. Suppressed by Israeli authorities on the ground that it is his family’s property (but not given to his survivors for fear it might become a bible
to neo-Nazis whose old testament is
Mein Kampf
), it begins in silky Satanic style:

The eldest of six Eichmann children (he had four brothers and a sister), young Adolf established himself early as a failure in life: the
only one who
didn’t finish high school. The first high school he didn’t finish was Linz’s Kaiser Franz Federal Scientific Secondary School, which yet another Adolf – Hitler – had
attended at the turn of the century. After a couple of unsuccessful years there, Eichmann transferred to the Federal Vocational School for Electrical, Mechanical, and Structural Engineering, from
which he also didn’t graduate. In both cases, he told an Israeli interrogator, ‘my father took me out of school because – I may as well admit it – I hadn’t been
exactly the most conscientious of students.’

Always polite, and so self-effacing that he looked like a composite portrait of his brothers, he worked at whatever his father’s connections could find for him – three months as a
miner in the Untersberg between Salzburg and the German border; a couple of years as a radio salesman for Austrian Electrotech – before his father, who felt he wasn’t getting anywhere,
suggested he become a travelling salesman.

At this point – in 1927, when Eichmann was twenty-one – his stepmother intervened; his mother had died in 1916 of bearing too many children too close together, according to Eichmann,
and his father had remarried in the same year. The second Frau Eichmann had a cousin in Vienna who was president of the Austrian Automobile Club and married to a Czech Jewish woman. The cousin,
whom Eichmann called ‘Uncle’, contacted a Herr Generaldirektor Weiss, the Jewish head of the Vacuum Oil Company, and, within a fortnight, Eichmann was trained, employed, and given
exclusive rights to sell Sphinx gasoline and Gargoyl-Mobiloil in the
Mühlviertel
(Mill Quarter), a region encompassing half of Upper Austria.

For almost five years during a time of worsening worldwide depression, Adolf Eichmann, the travelling petroleum salesman, made a good living on the road. But he was back in Linz in 1932, when
Austria’s National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party held a rally in the Märzenkeller, a big Bavarian-style beer hall in Linz. Eichmann attended and, during a lull in the diatribes,
he was approached by a giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall, with massive broad shoulders, thick arms, rectangular chin, and duelling scars on his face from his student days at the University of
Graz. Eichmann knew him by sight as a young lawyer from Linz, three years his senior, named Ernst Kaltenbrunner. ‘We’d seen each other around,’ Eichmann recalled. ‘His
father and my father had had business
connections for twenty years; Ernst Kaltenbrunner put it to me straight from the shoulder: “You’re going to join us.”
That’s how it was done in those days, all very free and easy, no fuss. I said “all right”. So I joined the SS.’

Adolf Eichmann enrolled as Nazi party member number 889,895 and SS number 45326 on April Fool’s Day, 1932. His recruiter, Kaltenbrunner, a chain-smoker who was already an alcoholic, soon
became the spokesman for the Nazi Party in Upper Austria and provided legal services to its members while commanding the underground Austrian SS. In early March of 1938, as Austria’s
tottering Catholic fascist regime bargained with the Nazi fascists, Kaltenbrunner was named Minister of State Security. A week later, when Hitler annexed Austria and the country he had betrayed
ceased to exist, Kaltenbrunner also became a member of the
Reichstag
, the German parliament. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was named to
succeed him as chief of the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, which controlled not only the Gestapo, but also the concentration camp system and the machinery of the Final Solution. The Gestapo
was Bureau IV of Kaltenbrunner’s empire. Sub-section IV B 4, with Eichmann in charge, would be created to cope with assembling and transporting Jews to the death camps. After the war,
Kaltenbrunner was hanged in Nuremberg.

All their way up the ladder from young bourgeoisie playing at patriotism to relentless chief exterminators, Kaltenbrunner kept an eye out for Eichmann as his protégé, but
patronized him as his mental, physical, and social inferior. Kaltenbrunner, after all, came from two generations of lawyers, had his own law degree and the right to call himself Doctor (of Law),
while Eichmann hailed from a public utilities background and never finished school or excelled in sports. Eichmann was, however, an unquestioning follower of orders: his father’s, his
employer’s, and now his party’s.

‘I was a relatively young man and used to being led, in business and in everything else,’ is how he put it. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75), herself a refugee
from Nazi Germany, put it another way in her profound but tendentious account of his trial,
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, subtided
A Report on the Banality of Evil
:

His career with Vacuum Oil stopped mattering to him as much as pulling Friday-night SS duty at the party’s Brown House in Linz, where he slept on a straw pallet, stood
guard, and ‘since I was one of the few who was working and making good money’, bought the boys beer and cigarettes at the tavern next door. On Sundays, his SS regiment – whose
members came from Salzburg and Linz – would be driven across the border from Salzburg in Austria, where their uniforms and parades (and, from 1933, their party) were forbidden, to Freilassing
in Germany, where an SS auxiliary police unit played host to their training and marching.

Living for his weekends with ‘the boys’, it hardly mattered to him when, in the spring of 1933, ‘Director Blum said to me: “We’ve got to cut down on
personnel.” He said I was the only unmarried salesman and that’s why he’d hit on me. So they gave me notice.’

Cushioned by five months’ severance pay (one month for each year with the firm), he stayed with his family in Linz, where his father had opened his own appliance store, Elektro-Eichmann.
While looking around for work in Austria, where the Austro-fascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuss had just oudawed the Nazi Party, it occurred to him that he might be better off in Nazi Germany, where
Hitler had just come to power. Since the Eichmann family had never relinquished German nationality when moving from Solingen to Linz in Adolf’s childhood, ‘I said to myself:
“After all, I’m a German citizen.
²²
Why not go to Germany and try my luck?’”

Armed with letters of introduction from Kaltenbrunner, he crossed the Danube from Upper Austria into Passau, Germany. There he looked up the SS
Gauleiter
(regional commander) who had
been the main speaker at the rally where he’d been recruited a year earlier. Eichmann asked for help finding a job with the Bavarian branch of Vacuum Oil, but the Gauleiter suggested he
become a storm trooper
instead. Ever one to follow someone else’s ideas, Eichmann enlisted: ‘I said to myself: “All right, I’ll be a soldier.” I
had no one to provide for.’

He had crossed more than one frontier. Sent first to Lechfeld, an SS and SA camp near a monastery and a brewery, he found himself – despite his German identity – in what the SS
called the ‘Austrian Legion in exile’. Assigned to shock-troop training, he specialized in street fighting, but distinguished himself in the kind of tedious plodding that wins
recognition as true grit in most military or paramilitary organizations:

‘Let me tell you a story to show how little I minded the tough training. I used to tell it later on to the officers and non-coms under me. This was still in Lechfeld. A common punishment
– later it was forbidden – was to make us crawl through rushes and over gravel. The first time it happened, some of the men went on sick call and got themselves declared unfit for duty.
Because I thought we were being treated unfairly, I gritted my teeth and stuck it out. The skin had been scraped off my elbows, but I didn’t have them bandaged. After lunch, we had to start
in again. The bits of plaster I’d stuck on my wounds were scraped off in a minute. I had no skin left on my elbows at all. But I stuck it out. That way, I attracted attention and got myself
promoted.’

He left Lechfeld in late 1933 as a corporal. His next destination was Dachau. The very first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau – on the outskirts of Munich – in those days held more
Gentile opponents of Hitler than Jews. More of the former, however, were likely to leave alive, though many came home crushed, intimidated, and unwilling to relate their experiences to others, even
to their families. Eichmann’s battalion of the Deutschland Regiment, however, was billeted ‘just outside the concentration camp, in an enormous iron and concrete hangar formerly used
for storing munitions. We slept in triple-decker bunks.’

Dachau had been designed by the SA as a place to
concentrate
– in the physical rather than mental sense – Hitler’s enemies for restraint or elimination. First came
revenge: the head of the Bavarian state government, which had suppressed Hitler’s ‘beer-hall putsch’ in 1923, was hacked to death with pick-axes in Dachau in 1933. Then came the
suppression of dissent: political opponents, outspoken clergymen, liberal editors, balky Nazis who asked aloud whether
Hitler was going too far or too fast, and others who
uttered their thoughts were flogged and tortured, sometimes murdered, at Dachau. Next would come ‘undesirables’ – homosexuals, gypsies, Jews. On 12 April 1933, four Jewish
prisoners – three merchants and a Nuremberg lawyer – were ordered to fall out of ranks and were shot to death by storm troopers before the eyes of their fellow prisoners, who were told
the four Jews had been ‘hostile elements that had no right to live in Germany’ and had ‘received their due punishment’.

By the time Eichmann reached Dachau, some fifty concentration camps had mushroomed around Germany, with the SS taking over from the SA to streamline them for specialization and ruthless
efficiency: Sachsenhausen for Berliners, Ravensbriick for women, etc. Though terror and brutality reigned, it was on a relatively individual basis. Not until well into the 1940s did the needs of
the Final Solution create
extermination
camps like Belzec and Sobibor, where victims were gassed
en masse
upon arrival.