Nazi Hunter (21 page)

With the extinction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the only large Jewish community left in the Third Reich was in Axis-allied Hungary, where territorial acquisition and an
influx of refugees had doubled the Jewish population to more than three-quarters of a million. Half-heartedly but effectively, Admiral Miklos von Horthy, an ageing anti-Semitic, but not genocidal,
regent had protected his Jews from deportation. On 19 March 1944, however, Hitler forced Horthy to appoint a more militantly anti-Semitic government which immediately stripped all Jews of their
jobs, property, civil rights, and citizenship, ordered them to wear the Star of David, and herded them into ghettoes where they were systematically starved. German troops occupied friendly Hungary
for the first time and Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to expedite the Final Solution. As the Axis war machine wore down, the German machinery of genocide sped up to fulfil at least one
of Hitler’s missions on earth.

‘I wanted to send the Master personally,’ Heinrich Himmler said when he ordered Eichmann to Budapest. The final step of the Final Solution, the martyrdom of the Hungarian Jews, was
to be the culmination of Eichmann’s career: the blaze of glory in which the Third Reich would crumble into ashes.

Whether Germany won or lost the war, Eichmann was convinced that if he could ‘succeed in destroying the biological basis of Jewry in the East by complete extermination, then Jewry as a
whole would never recover from the blow. The assimilated Jews of the West, including America, would . . . be in no position (and would have no desire) to make up this enormous loss of blood and
there would therefore be no future generation worth mentioning.’ So fanatical was Eichmann by the end of 1944, says Simon Wiesenthal, that
‘when even Himmler
ordered Eichmann to stop the killing in Hungary, he no longer understood the word “Stop!” any more.’

In April, the Germans started a systematic sweep of the provinces, uprooting Jews from the land for deportation to Poland in sealed boxcars holding as many as seventy people and two buckets: one
for water, one for human waste. Heat and suffocation took their toll – and, in Hungary at least, there could be no ‘good Germans’ contending they had no idea what was going on,
for the Hungarian press reported the deportations and one newspaper boldly described the deaths of three Jewish women in a cattle car. Their ages were given as 104, 102, and ninety-two.

Up to four freight trains a day, ferrying up to 12,000 Jews to the death camps, crawled through the Hungarian countryside and paused at city stations. The cries and moans of men, women, and
children were audible to all. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr Josef Mengele and his colleagues had their hands full at selections as gas chambers and ovens went on round-the-clock duty to roast the new
shipments of what they called ‘Hungarian kosher salami’. An extra railway siding was built at Birkenau to deliver the deportees directly to death’s door and, when crematorium
capacity was overtaxed, Commandant Rudolf Höss ordered new burning-pits dug. The cadre of Jewish death commandos manning the gas chambers was quadrupled. Between May and July of 1944, some
600,000 Jews were deported from Hungary as Eichmann tightened the vise around the 200,000 remaining in the capital.

‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ he introduced himself to the Jewish Council of Budapest. ‘I’m the one they call “The Bloodhound”.’

In 1944, Rudolf Höss paid three visits to Eichmann in Budapest to coordinate the stepped-up transports to Auschwitz. ‘This,’ Höss recalled at Nuremberg after the war,
‘gave me the opportunity of observing Eichmann’s methods of negotiating with the Hungarian government departments and the army. His manner of approach was extremely firm and
matter-of-fact, but nevertheless amiable and courteous, and he was liked and made welcome wherever he went. This was confirmed by the innumerable private invitations he received from the chiefs of
these departments. Only the Hungarian army showed no pleasure in Eichmann’s visits. The army sabotaged the surrender of the Jews whenever they could, but they did it in
such a manner that the Hungarian government was unable to intervene.’

On the other hand, Eichmann played the Jewish Council of Budapest like a violin virtuoso, telling Dr Rezsö Kastner, one of its leaders, ‘Kastner, your nerves are shot. Shall I send
you to Theresienstadt to recover? Or would you prefer Auschwitz?’ while bargaining for Jewish freedom by offering to sell one million Jews on a cash basis. ‘Blood for money, money for
blood,’ said Eichmann with a grandiose wave in May of 1944. Later that month, trucks and goods were substituted for money and a wandering Jew named Joel Brand, an official of the Zionist
Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest, was sent to Turkey with Eichmann’s offer: For up to
10,000 trucks, he would free one hundred Jews per truck
. The trucks were to be winterized
for use on the Russian front.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine’s representative, Moshe Shertok (later Prime Minister of Israel), was supposed to meet Brand in Ankara, but British authorities in Jerusalem refused to give
Shertok travel papers – partly because England wouldn’t welcome the tiniest fraction of a million new Jews in Palestine and mostly because they looked upon Eichmann’s proposal as
a transparent plot to divide the Allies, which it was. Meanwhile, tired of waiting for Shertok in Turkey, Brand took the Taurus Express for Aleppo, Syria, in the hope of a meeting with Shertok
there or in Palestine. Instead, as he stepped off the train in Aleppo, British security agents arrested him. They interned him in Cairo and he spent the rest of the war in British custody.

It is not likely that either side ever seriously considered meeting the terms of the ‘Jews for trucks’ deal. Eichmann couldn’t have cared less about supplies for the eastern
front and was known to have sidetracked troops and supplies bound for combat to make way for trainloads of deportees, but hope and involvement kept the Hungarian Jews working with him instead of
against him. Although a strategy of stalling for time while bargaining might have slowed the deportations and saved thousands of lives, when the Russians learned in June 1944 that there was an
offer involving equipment to be used against them, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky vetoed all negotiations whatever.

‘The worst story I can ever tell you about Adolf Eichmann,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘took place during the time he was in Budapest. In the fall of
1944, a group of high-level SS officers were sitting in the SS casino there. And one of them asked Eichmann how many people had been exterminated already.

‘Eichmann said: “Overfive million.”

‘Well, because he was among comrades and they all knew it was only a matter of months before they would lose the war, one of them asked whether he was worried about what would happen
to him.

‘Eichmann gave a very astute answer that shows he knew how the world worked: “A hundred dead people is a catastrophe,” he said. “Six million dead is a
statistic.”’

14

Eichmann left Budapest on Christmas Eve 1944, fleeing the flames as the Red Army encircled the city. From Sopron, the new Hungarian capital, he was recalled to security
headquarters in Berlin in January 1945. There, to his disappointment, ‘serious work was out of the question. Uninterrupted air raids were wreaking worse and worse devastation. Every day the
communications network was repaired and every night it was disrupted again. Without communications, evacuations were inconceivable. I paid no more attention to State Police work because nobody paid
any attention to me. I spent more time looking around in the ruins than at my desk. . .’

Every day, his boss and former mentor, Kaltenbrunner, would lunch with all his department heads except Eichmann, who was never invited. Covering their tracks to avoid postwar retribution, most
of them avoided this pariah who had executed their wishes; ironically, Kaltenbrunner and several of the others were hanged long before Eichmann. Their daily snub seldom bothered him.

What did annoy him was the discovery that one of the bureau heads was working full-time at making out false documents, certificates, and IDs: ‘He was working for the security police in
Section IV, who wanted to change their names and prove they’d been insurance agents or something during the war.’ Invited to partake, Eichmann said he could do without. ‘That
absurd business with the false papers sickened me,’ he told his Israeli interrogators years later. ‘I’d rather have put a bullet through my brain than issue myself an official
document.’

Aside from giving visiting Red Cross inspectors a couple of guided tours of Theresienstadt, his showcase concentration camp in Bohemia, Eichmann hung around Berlin until early April. From
his field headquarters in a nearby castle, Heinrich Himmler ordered Eichmann to go back to Theresienstadt, which was due for liquidation as the Allied armies approached. He
was to select 100 to 200 prominent Jews and bring them to a safe place in the Austrian Tyrol as pawns in possible negotiations with the Allies’ supreme commander, US General Dwight D.
Eisenhower. From all realms of his empire of death, Himmler was collecting hostages who might keep him and Germany from going down in flames with Hitler. Among these pawns were former French Prime
Minister Leon Blum, imprisoned in Austria, and ‘the Jewess Gemma LaGuardia Glück, born in New York on 24 April 1887 and imprisoned in Ravensbrück.’ She was the sister of New
York City’s most popular mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882-1947); their father was Italian, their mother and Gemma’s husband Jewish.

Though Eichmann looked upon Himmler as the most prominent rat deserting the sinking ship, and had even harangued his Red Cross guests against ‘Himmler’s humane line’, he was
not one to disobey an order unless he could exceed it. Hurrying to Theresienstadt by car, he put the Jewish Council there to work drawing up a ‘Who’s Who’ without telling them its
benign purpose. When he saw Rabbi Leo Baeck, one of the leaders of modern Jewry, passing by, he expressed surprise that Baeck was still alive. The Council members held their breath, but Eichmann
wasn’t dealing out death that day; he simply told them to put Baeck’s name at the top of their list of bargaining chips. Just before leaving, however, he told his terrified puppets:
‘Jewish death lists are my favourite reading matter before I go to sleep.’ Then he took a few from another pile and sauntered off.

After a brief stop in Prague, Eichmann headed into Austria to search for a mountain sanctuary for his hostages. In the Tyrolean town of Brixlegg, where there was a heavy-water plant, he was
caught in a fierce bombardment, but survived. In Innsbruck, the Tyrolean capital, the
Gauleiter
was too busy to see his visitor from Berlin and sent word out, according to Eichmann,
‘that he had other things on his mind than to bother about Jews.’ One of his department heads, however, found a couple of villages in the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy which
had empty hotels, and these were put at Himmler’s disposal.

By then, however, Bohemia was encircled and the roads to Theresienstadt were blocked by the Red Army. After frantic visits
to Linz and Prague, with no communications open
to Berlin, Eichmann retreated to the SS’s last resort: the Austrian spa of Bad Aussee in the remote reaches of the Styrian Salzkammergut, the salt-mine district. This Ausseerland had been
christened the ‘Alpine fortress’ by propaganda minister Goebbels, who saw it as a Wagnerian setting for Nazism’s heroic last stand. Instead, it proved to be a secret treasure
chest, where SS intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies stashed their loot to finance a Fourth Reich or, more likely, to save their own skins. Art masterpieces from Italy, France, Belgium,
Denmark, and Holland were stored in an abandoned salt mine; their value, when recovered by the Austrian resistance in May of 1945, was estimated at two and a half billion dollars.

Far more negotiable were the assets of the Reich Main Security Office which were shipped by its chief, Kaltenbrunner, from Berlin to the town of Altaussee early in the spring of 1945: 110 pounds
of gold bars; fifty cases of gold coins and other gold articles, each case weighing one hundred pounds; two million US dollars; two million Swiss francs; five cases of diamonds and precious stones,
and a stamp collection worth at least five million gold marks.