Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends Hardback - 2010

Excerpt

1.

"Eichmann Is My Passion"

1. Between Vengeance and Justice

Adolf Eichmann was the most senior Nazi official to speak to Jewish leaders before the war, first in Berlin and afterward in Vienna and Prague. At first he worked in the Nazi party's security service and later in the Reich Central Security Office. He also talked to several representatives of the Zionist movement. The object of these contacts was to arrange for the transfer of Jews from Germany and some of the territories conquered by the Nazis. As of 1941, Eichmann directed the deportation of the Jews of Europe, first to ghettos and then to systematic annihilation in the death camps.

In January 1942, Eichmann attended an interdepartmental conference held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss the organization of the extermination. He was never a maker of policy; he implemented it. He was one of those Nazi killers who as a rule did their work sitting behind a desk, but he also took many trips into the field. In his memoirs he mentioned an incident that occurred near the city of Minsk in the German-occupied Soviet republic of Byelorussia. As a group of Jews was being readied for execution, Eichmann wrote, he saw a woman with a baby in her arms. He tried to pull the infant away to save it, he wrote, but someone opened fire and it was killed. Fragments of its brain splashed onto his leather coat, and his driver helped him clean them off. The Jews, who never encountered a more senior Nazi than him, looked upon him and Hitler as the two Adolfs who perpetrated the Holocaust.



The leaders of the Jewish people kept a watch on Eichmann's activities. Three months after the war broke out, Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary a report he had received from a Czechoslovakian Zionist official, to the effect that the condition of the Jews in Prague had deteriorated greatly since Eichmann arrived there. Ben-Gurion noted that Eichmann was directly subordinate to the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler. This was not accurate, but it reflected the prevalent notion that Eichmann was a very senior Nazi official.

Indeed, as late as April 1944, Eichmann appeared to be omnipotent, as he initiated negotiations that were to decide not only the fate of Hungary's Jews, but perhaps also the outcome of the whole war. Some of the leaders of Budapest's Jews, among them Rezso Kastner, heard him offer them a deal: the lives of a million Jews in exchange for an assortment of goods, including several thousand trucks. Kastner said that Eichmann had told him the Jews were being sent to be exterminated at Auschwitz, but that he, Eichmann, was prepared to stop this. The proposal was conveyed to the Western Allies by an emissary.

The story of the "blood for trucks" affair was retold many times, and although fewer than two thousand Jews were saved as a result of a deal between Kastner and Eichmann, the proposition contributed to the inflation of Eichmann's image and his identification with the Holocaust. "He is the guiltiest of all in the extermination of millions of Jews in Europe," wrote a Jewish journalist in Palestine soon after the war ended.



The Jewish Agency, which functioned as the government of the Jewish state in the making, began to collect material on the Nazi criminals toward the end of the war from refugees who had managed to reach Palestine, and from other sources. Based on this information, in June 1945 a standard form for war criminals was filled out at the Agency under Eichmann's name; out of several hundred such forms filled out, Eichmann was listed as the most senior of the wanted Nazis. The information was very incomplete and flawed. Even his first name was missing, and he was erroneously listed as having been born in Sarona, a German colony next to Tel Aviv. In the explanatory remarks, he was accurately described as one of those responsible for the annihilation of the Jews.

A few weeks later, one of the heads of the World Jewish Congress, an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations, petitioned the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and requested that steps be taken to arrest Eichmann and prosecute him along with the prominent Nazis being tried there.6 But Eichmann had vanished. Straight after the war, various people had begun searching for him: emissaries from the Jewish community in Palestine, American intelligence agents, and Holocaust survivors, among them Simon Wiesenthal. It was a joint effort and though not always well coordinated, not to mention amateurish, reckless, and replete with mistakes, it was informed entirely by inner passion and devotion to the goal.



Accurate details about Eichmann's life and even a hint as to where he might be hiding were obtained without much difficulty from his deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, who had been arrested in May 1945 by American soldiers. He provided detailed testimony on the destruction of the Jews, placing most of the responsibility on Eichmann's shoulders. Some leaders of the Zionist movement who were in Europe at the time met with Wisliceny; one of them was Gideon Ruffer, who would later change his family name to Rafael and become a top Israeli Foreign Ministry official. What seems to have interested Ruffer most was the cooperation between Eichmann and the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Wisliceny was extradited to Czechoslovakia, where, in Bratislava Prison, he gave a statement to Arthur Piernikraz, an Austrian-born emissary from Palestine who went by the name of "Pier" and was later to change his name to Asher Ben Natan. In days to come he became one of the heads of the Israeli defense establishment, and the Jewish state's first ambassador to Germany.

Pier was based in Vienna, where he was one of the commanders of the Briha-the operation for getting the Jews who had survived the Holocaust out of Eastern Europe and sending them to Palestine (briha is Hebrew for "flight" or "escape"). His mission was not to hunt Nazi criminals, but he nevertheless harbored a hope of trapping Eichmann. Wisliceny told him that Eichmann's chauffer was in detention. The driver was interrogated and gave the names of a number of women whom Eichmann was friendly with. Wisliceny also reported that Eichmann had left his wife and three sons in a village called Altaussee. This was the most significant information that existed then.

In Vienna, Pier had agreed to assist a refugee from the Polish city of Radom to find the murderers of his family and the other Jews there. The man's name was Tadek (Tuvia) Friedman. Pier gave him a little money and Friedman opened a "center for documentation." His aim was to take revenge on the murderers of Radom's Jews. Pier instructed him to concentrate on one man. "He is the greatest murderer of them all," he told Friedman, and Friedman began the search for Adolf Eichmann.



Wiesenthal heard about Eichmann only after the war, and he later recalled precisely from whom he had heard the name and when: from Aharon Hoter-Yishai, an officer in the Jewish Brigade (which had fought the Axis as part of the British army) and a well-known attorney in Palestine, in July 1945. Wiesenthal, who had begun public activities on behalf of the refugees, was then in touch with the American occupation forces and was helping them locate Nazi war criminals. On one or two occasions, he traveled to Nuremberg to attend the trials.

One of the Briha agents, Avraham Weingarten, put him in touch with Pier, and not long after that Gideon Ruffer also came to see him in Linz. They brought with them the list of Nazi criminals drawn up by the Jewish Agency, and told him that Eichmann was the most important of all.

Eichmann's family had settled in Linz when he was a child. His parents had an electrical goods store on one of the city's main streets. It still bore their family name after the war, and finding them was no problem. But Wiesenthal, who lived nearby in a rented room, was not sure that they were the same Eichmanns. He found out for sure by chance, as he relates in his memoirs. One evening, his landlady was serving him tea, and when she placed the tray on his desk she glanced at the papers lying there.

Her eye caught the name Eichmann. "Eichmann? Isn't that the SS general who persecuted the Jews?" she asked inquisitively, and mentioned that his parents lived nearby. Wiesenthal was excited and he asked her if she was sure. "What do you mean, sure? Don't I know my own neighbors?" the landlady replied. The next day, the police questioned Eichmann's parents, but they said they had no idea where he was.

It may have been this development that led Pier to write to Ruffer, "In the matter of Eichmann, we have begun to address it. So far, only Wiesenthal has done anything, because I was away for a week in Prague and Bratislava. Yesterday he told me that there has been some progress, and that I'd get a letter from him today. In two or three days' time I'll know more." But Pier had also taken action. On the basis of the information divulged by Wisliceny, he sent one of the Jewish refugees in Vienna to get to know one of Eichmann's female friends, in order to get a photograph of him. The man was Manus Diamant, from Katowice in Poland, who was then twenty-four years old.



During the war, Diamant roamed from city to city; the Nazis had killed his mother and his father. After the war he found himself in Vienna, where he met Tuvia Friedman and through him reached Pier. The passion for revenge raged within him. He had known Eichmann's name since 1943. A handsome young man, Diamant posed as an SS officer from Holland and set out to search for Eichmann's girlfriend. It was not an easy task, and when he found her he could not get her to show him her photo album right away. But eventually he managed to get a photograph of Eichmann out of her.

Pier sent Diamant to Linz to work with Wiesenthal, who showed him the Eichmann family's electrical goods store. Diamant began to keep an eye on it. Eichmann's brother also worked there. One day, the brother set out in the direction of the railroad station. Diamant followed him and got onto the same train. They arrived at Altaussee, the village mentioned by Wisliceny. As expected, Eichmann's brother had come to visit his sister-in-law, Veronika; now her address was known to those searching for her husband.

Many years later, Asher Ben Natan wrote to Diamant: "In daring personal actions, you managed to find out where his wife and children were living and to obtain the only photograph of Eichmann, which was the important first step toward trapping the criminal. Eichmann's photograph was used later to identify him in Buenos Aires, before he was abducted."

In the coming weeks, the Jewish refugee impostor managed to make friends with Veronika Eichmann, who was using her maiden name, Liebel, and sometimes he even frolicked with her children on the shore of the lake. Ben Natan would later reveal that at one stage a proposal to kidnap the children had been weighed, "but it was ultimately rejected for fear of possible entanglements."

This was only part of the story. Diamant filled in the gaps. Once, he said, he had gone sailing on the lake, with Eichmann's three children in the boat with him, all happy and full of joy. He remembered a book that he had read, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, the story of a murder on a lake in New York State, and an idea occurred to him: "to drown Eichmann's three children to punish the chief butcher, so that he would feel what millions of Jewish mothers and fathers had felt when their children were torn away from them by force and murdered by his orders." The idea would not leave him alone, he wrote, giving him insomnia and refusing to go away.

All his efforts to locate Eichmann failed, so Diamant decided to return to Vienna and report to Pier. The night before, he slept in Wiesenthal's room in Linz and told him the plan for vengeance that he had thought of. Wiesenthal objected strenuously. "There's no room for revenge," he declared. Diamant tried to convince him. "It's not just revenge, it's punishment. It would be fitting for Eichmann to have to dive into the lake to seek the bodies of his children, the same way we are looking for our million and a half lost children."

Wiesenthal remained adamant. Pier was also opposed to the proposal but nevertheless passed it on to his superiors, who forbade killing Eichmann's children. Diamant was disappointed, but many years later, as a successful Israeli industrialist, he wrote: "When I thought of rocking the boat that I was sitting in with Eichmann's children, I had a vision of my mother shaking her head from side to side, in doubt and in worry; out of respect for her, I threw the oar down and made for the shore."

Media reviews

Praise for Tom Segev's Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends

"Mr. Segev, justly celebrated for his histories of formative moments of the state of Israel, is as careful a biographer as he is an historian....Gripping yet sober, this meticulous portrait of a complicated man is unlikely to be bettered."
—The Economist 

"[A] meticulous yet forceful new biography...[Segev's] book delivers not merely an intimate account of Wiesenthal's life and times, but also judicious examinations of the many controversial and little-known aspects of that life....It is a serious pleasure to imagine a new generation of readers discovering his life in this careful telling."
—The New York Times

"Segev reveals…a man of profound conflict and contradiction, a lightning rod for controversy and recrimination, but unquestionably a crucial figure in the struggle to retrieve and preserve the evidence of the Holocaust….Segev himself sticks to the ‘true story’. That’s his stock-in-trade and that’s what makes all of his work so compelling. But telling the unvarnished truth ultimately honors the man he is writing about, and Wiesenthal emerges from Segev’s book as an even richer and more consequential character than the one he invented for himself."
—Los Angeles Times

“Segev is one of the world’s great investigative reporters—in a class with bloodhounds like Seymour Hersh and the late David Halberstam….The real achievement of this warts-and-all biography [is] that truth, justice, and memory are the province not of saints, but of flawed human beings.”
—Susan Jacoby, The Washington Post

"Tom Segev has produced a biography that is a model of fascinating description and measured analysis."
—The Sunday Times (UK)

"Segev paints a vivid portrait of this human dynamo who made it his life’s work to make people not only confront and remember the Nazi genocide but also to punish as many of its perpetrators as possible."
—San Francisco Chronicle


"A brilliant and gripping account of an extraordinary life. It draws upon extensive research to offer new insights into the complex personality as well as the notable achievements of Simon Wiesenthal."
—Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: A Biography

Praise for Earlier Books by Tom Segev

The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust

“Richly documented and written with great passion.”
—Elie Wiesel, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Superb . . . Throws new light on the central trauma of Israeli society, and the uses and abuses of this trauma for political manipulation. I, for one, learned from this book that, in order to survive, societies must learn not only to remember but also to forget.”
—Amos Elon, author of The Israelis: Founders and Sons

“Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Israel’s self-image and identity . . . Any further discussion of the Holocaust must confront Tom Segev’s work.”
—George L. Mosse, author of Nazi Culture


1967: Israel and the Year That Transformed the Middle East

“A marvelous achievement . . . Anyone curious about the extraordinary six days of Arab-Israeli war will learn much from it.”
—The Economist

“Tom Segev’s 1967 offers a brilliant description of the Six-Day War in its widest context . . . This is probably the best book on those most fateful days in the history of Israel and the Middle East.”
—Saul Friedländer, author of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945


One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The best single account of Palestine under the British mandate . . . This will doubtlessly become the authoritative text for the pre-state history of Israel.”
—Omer Bartov, New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant, truthful, and compassionate book . . . In all the vast literature about Palestine/Israel, this is the only book with equal insight into all of the protagonists.”
—Arthur Hertzberg, author of Jews: The Essence and Character of a People