Nazi Hunter (23 page)

Wiesenthal won’t waste his time or anyone else’s arguing this question. He insists
ODESSA
was founded in Augsburg or Stuttgart in 1947, when higher-ranking
Nazis in the SS and wartime German industry saw that, despite Allied disinterest, the revelation of war crimes and the question of accountability were not going to die a quiet death. With the
impending new state of Israel and dedicated survivors like Wiesenthal determined to keep the fires alive, the Fourth Reich wasn’t about to happen very soon. Using just a portion of their
plunder, which Wiesenthal values at between $750 million and 1 billion, they were able to set up three escape routes: from the north German seaport of Bremen to the Italian seaport of Genoa, where
Christopher Columbus was born and, centuries later, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele set sail for the New World: from Bremen to Rome, where the Vatican and the International Red
Cross, wittingly or unwittingly, stood ready to expedite their escapes; and from Austria to Italy, which is the way Franz Stangl went.

‘
ODESSA
provides its members with material aid, organizes social activities, and, when necessary, helps ex-Nazis escape to foreign countries,’ said prosecutor
Gideon Hausner at the Eichmann trial. ‘It has its headquarters in Munich with branches all over Germany and Austria as well as in South American countries. The German community at Hohenau in
Paraguay is dominated by
ODESSA
.’

‘
ODESSA
was organized as a thorough, efficient network,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Every forty miles was a shelter manned by a minimum of three and
maximum of five people. They knew only the two surrounding shelters: the one from which the fugitives came to them and the one to which they were to be delivered safely.’ Ironically, some of
the inns and farmhouses along
ODESSA
’
S
‘rat line’, as the escape routes became known, were also used by Jewish refugees making
their way illegally to what was still Palestine under an expiring British mandate which sought to maintain the population balance between Arabs and Jews. For some Displaced Persons, it was harder
to leave Germany and Austria than it was for their former captors. Wiesenthal says: ‘I know of a small inn near Merano, in the Italian Tyrol, and another place near the Resch Pass between
Austria and Italy, where illegal Nazi transports and illegal Jewish transports sometimes spent the night without knowing of each other’s presence. The Jews were hidden on the upper floor and
told not to move. The Nazis, on the ground floor, were warned to stay inside.’

There was also substantial two-way commuter traffic of wanted Nazis across the border between Austria and Germany. Wiesenthal says that
ODESSA
used German drivers, hired
in Munich under their own names or aliases, to deliver
Stars and Stripes
, the US Army’s daily newspaper printed in Germany, to the troops in Austria. Military Police would wave these
US army vans through the border crossing on the Munich-Salzburg
Autobahn
and sometimes the drivers would repay the favour by handing them a few free copies while a Nazi fugitive crouched
behind bundles of
Stars and Stripes
.

The recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, which asked no questions and into which scores of low-ranking SS men fled in the last days of the war, also served
ODESSA
well. In early 1948, Roschmann, the Graz-born ‘Butcher of Riga’, escaped from Austria into Italy with five other Nazi fugitives in a car with French
licence plates and a Foreign Legion chauffeur outfitted with papers enabling the car to cross borders without being searched.

Though he found himself bored to death in northern Germany, ‘Otto Heninger’ stayed until he’d saved enough money to finance an ocean voyage. According to
Hannah Arendt: ‘Early in 1950, he succeeded in establishing contact with
ODESSA
, a clandestine organization of SS veterans, and in May of that year, he was passed
through Austria to Italy, where a Franciscan priest, fully informed of his identity, equipped him with a refugee passport in the name of Richard Klement and sent him on to Buenos Aires.’ The
priest in Rome was actually Father Anton Weber at the St Raphael Society, who, years later, boasted of the hundreds of ‘baptized Jews’ (converts to Catholicism) he’d saved from
Hitler and then admitted that ‘yes, someone called Richard Klement came to me. He said he came from East Germany and didn’t want to go back there to live under the Bolsheviks, so I
helped him.’ How Father Weber, himself a Bavarian, failed to hear Eichmann’s thick Austrian accent must remain an ecclesiastical mystery.

With Weber’s help, Eichmann arrived in Argentina in mid-July 1950 as ‘Ricardo Klement, thirty-seven, stateless, Catholic’. By 1951, Simon Wiesenthal was back on his trail.
Early that year, ‘a former member of German counter-intelligence who had good
ODESSA
contacts told me Eichmann had been seen passing through Rome last summer, probably
bound for South America.’

Further confirmation came a few months later in a personal visit from
ODESSA
itself. After publishing magazine articles on treasure-hunters seeking Eichmann’s
hidden store of gold melted down from his victims’ teeth and jewellery, Simon was called upon in his office in Linz by a slim, dapper Austrian aristocrat whom he identifies in his memoirs as
‘Heinrich von Klimrod’. His guest came right to the point: ‘I represent a Viennese group of former SS men. Our mutual interests converge at one point. We know that you are a
fanatical idealist. You want to find Eichmann to bring him to justice. We, too, want him – for a different reason. We want his gold. I believe we could establish a useful
collaboration.’

Not willing to go into partnership with former SS men or make a deal for gold ‘that doesn’t belong to me and doesn’t belong to Eichmann either’ (and, he added to himself,
‘may have come from
my eighty-nine relatives who had been killed by Eichmann’s men’), the ‘fanatical idealist’ declined the offer – but
not before eliciting from ‘Klimrod’ that Eichmann was probably in South America after being sheltered in a Capuchin monastery in Rome and helped by a Father Weber and a Father
Benedetti. The one name he didn’t have was ‘Ricardo Klement.’

15

‘The 1950s were bad years for Eichmann-hunters,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘The Cold War had reached its climax and the former Allies were dug in on both sides of the
Iron Curtain. The Americans had their hands full with the war in Korea. No one was interested in Eichmann or the Nazis. When two Nazis met, they would say “A new wind is blowing!” and
slap each other on the back.’

It seemed to Arthur Pier’s (Asher Ben Nathan’s) successor, Tuviah Friedman, that ‘only the two of us – Wiesenthal and I – cared about Eichmann. Everyone else had
forgotten. The Jews who had remained in Germany were involved in her postwar business recovery. Many were living as Gentiles and had married Gentile girls.’ By the end of 1951, most Displaced
Persons who were Jewish had resettled in Western Europe, Israel, Australia, and the Americas. The stream of witnesses flowing into Wiesenthal’s Documentation Centre in Linz and
Friedman’s in Vienna had slowed to a trickle.

Upon learning that Eichmann had escaped from Europe, Simon could maintain just two frail links with his quarry. In terms he never uses now, he told Friedman how he haunted Eichmann’s
family:

‘I’m in their filthy store every few weeks. I ask them if they’ve heard from Adolf lately, where is he writing from these days, and always they have the same answer for me:
“Please, leave us alone, we don’t know anything, leave us alone.” Do you know how many times I’ve been to Frau Vera Eichmann’s place? Ask me and I’ll tell you.
Her three bastard sons know me on sight already.’

In the spring of 1952, his next-to-last link was severed when Eichmann’s wife and three boys vanished from Altaussee. Wiesenthal fell into a deep depression. ‘Obviously, no one
cared,’ he said. ‘Even
the Israelis had more cause to be concerned about Nasser
²⁸
than Eichmann.’

While
ODESSA
viewed Wiesenthal as an unco-operatively ‘fanatical idealist’, Tuviah Friedman has described the Cold War Wiesenthal as ‘a right-wing
Zionist, a militant who admired the policies of extremists like Menachem Begin.’
²⁹
Although Friedman is not to be trusted as an historical
source and Asher Ben Nathan calls him ‘abnormal’, ‘indiscreet’, ‘unreliable’, and a ‘braggart’ and a blabbermouth from whom truly important secrets
had to be concealed, Simon Wiesenthal says that, between 1946 and 1952, Friedman and he ‘worked together well – possibly because we were almost two hundred kilometres [125 miles] apart,
him in Vienna, I in Linz. We exchanged information and supplied each other with evidence.’

In 1952, Friedman gave up the ghost – in Austria, at least. ‘My files were bulging with documents, with sworn affidavits,’ he recalls. ‘But nobody clamoured to get at
them and use them to prosecute Nazis. The Germans didn’t want them, the Austrians didn’t want them, and neither did the Western Allies or the Russians.’ Upon learning that the Yad
Vashem Historical Archives – sponsored by the Israeli government and the world’s Jewish communities – had been set up in Jerusalem as an on-going centre for information on and
documentation of and memorial to ‘the Six Million’, Friedman packed his files into two large trunks, arranged for the Israeli Consulate to ship them to Yad Vashem, and shut down his
Vienna office.

‘One file I did not send to Jerusalem,’ he notes. ‘That was the file on Adolf Eichmann.’ He took that with him when he emigrated to Israel later that year –
‘vomiting all the way,’ he remembers.

Later that year, Friedman emigrated to Haifa, married a Hungarian doctor he’d known in Vienna on her way to Israel, and returned to Austria to wind up his university studies there. Toward
the end of
1952, Friedman paid a farewell visit to Wiesenthal in Linz and copied
his
Eichmann files – just in case. Simon’s despair had deepened; he
hardly ate, drank, or slept and, if his wife Cyla had to ask why, he’d reply: ‘The Nazis lost the war, but we are losing the postwar.’ Yet he was still fighting his private war
when he escorted Friedman to the Linz railroad station and told him:

‘Tadek, you go back to Israel and don’t let them push you around. Keep reminding the Israelis about Eichmann. Don’t let them tell you to forget about him. Let the Israel
Government do everything it wants to do: build houses for immigrants, teach everybody Hebrew, make a strong army. Fine! Very good! But they must also start looking for Eichmann. And only you can
nag at them and make them do something.’

As they embraced on the platform, Simon added:

‘Just think of it, Tadek! When Eichmann is caught, he will be tried by a Jewish court in a Jewish state. History and our people’s honour – both are at stake.’

The depression into which Simon Wiesenthal fell in 1952, upon learning that first Eichmann and then his family had disappeared from Europe, mostly took the form of insomnia. In
the sleepless midnight hours, while others lay awake counting sheep or naming stars, he watched the dead – first his family, then his friends, then the thousands he met in the camps, and then
the cases that crossed his desk every day – parade before his eyes, always with Eichmann, sometimes cracking a whip, bringing up the rear. Simon never had nightmares, for his nights were
waking hours spent with ghosts. A doctor he consulted told him he needed relaxation, diversion, a hobby.

‘I have a hobby,’ Wiesenthal told him. ‘I collect witnesses.’

‘And from this hobby you are sick,’ the doctor said. ‘You are prolonging the concentration camp for yourself. When your witnesses cry, you cry, too. And when they suffer, you
suffer. How many victims were there? Six million? Well, you will be number six million and one unless you get yourself a real hobby, like stamp-collecting.’

Wiesenthal plunged into philately with the intensity he brings to everything else. Instead of taking his mind off Nazis, however, his hobby focused it on crucial details which, in the end,
revitalized his
work. Some of mankind’s greatest revelations have come only when scientists, researchers, even artists, have taken necessary breaks or detours after
intensive concentration: the mind at play can sometimes energize the mind that’s at its wits’ end. Once, Wiesenthal’s contribution to a war crimes trial was calling the
judges’ attention to the stamp on an envelope addressed home from Poland. Its date of issue contradicted an SS man’s alibi that he was back in Germany by the time of an atrocity in
Poland.