The Eichmann Trial (5 page)

At the safe house, Eichmann’s captors searched their prisoner to make sure that he was not hiding a cyanide capsule. Then they matched his physical characteristics—head size, scars, and eye color—to the information contained in the file Bauer had given them. Everything matched except for the dental records: the SS officer of the file had his full set of teeth; the captured man wore dentures. Some of the members of the Israeli team were taken aback to discover that, rather than a haughty SS officer living in splendor, they had caught a trembling factory worker in shabby underwear with false teeth. They were also struck by how mind-bogglingly obedient he was. At one point Malkin and one of his colleagues took Eichmann to the toilet. They waited outside. After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin,
“Darf ich anfangen?”
(“May I begin?”) Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels. Witnessing Eichmann’s behavior, Aharoni wondered if this man could possibly have “decided the fate of millions of my people.” Aharoni conducted the interrogation.

“Name?” “Ricardo Klement,” the name he used in Argentina.

Your previous name? “Otto Heninger,” the alias he used in Germany.

What is your Nazi party number? “889895,” the number in the file.

What is your “SS number”? “45326,” the other number in the file.

Then Aharoni repeated his initial question.

“Name?”

“Adolf Eichmann.”

The hunt was over.
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2

E
ichmann’s captors still had to get him out of the country. Harel arranged for an El Al plane, which was due to bring an Israeli delegation to the celebration of Argentina’s 150th anniversary, to carry a few extra passengers on its return to Tel Aviv. On May 20, shortly before the scheduled departure, the doctor on the team drugged Eichmann, leaving him groggy but compliant. His captors dressed him in an El Al uniform. Phony identification papers had been prepared for him by the team’s master forger. Together with some of his captors, who also donned El Al uniforms, they piled into a car and headed for the airport, where the Britannia turbojet stood ready to depart. If airport security asked about the dazed man’s condition, they would be told that he had overindulged while on leave. The plan proceeded smoothly, and just past midnight the plane lifted off and headed not toward Recife, as the official flight plan indicated, but to Dakar, Senegal. Harel did not want to risk having the Argentines ask Brazilian authorities to waylay the flight in order to stop the kidnapping. This would be the longest stretch a Britannia had ever flown. When it landed, twelve hours later, it was flying on fumes. During the flight, the captain informed the crew that the semicomatose man in first class was Adolf Eichmann. They responded, as would much of Israel a few days later, with amazement, satisfaction, and, for those who had lost family, pain. El Al’s chief mechanic, who Harel had insisted accompany the flight in case of equipment problems, had seen his parents murdered by the Nazis. At age eleven, he had futilely tried to save his six-year-old brother. Upon learning the mystery passenger’s identity, he began to weep. When an Israeli security man handed Eichmann a cigarette, the mechanic exclaimed: “You give
him
cigarettes. He gave
us
gas.” Later, having composed himself, he slipped into the first-class section and sat staring at Eichmann.
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A
s soon as the plane taxied to a corner of Lod Airport, Eichmann was taken to prison and Harel went to brief Ben-Gurion. Shortly thereafter, Ben-Gurion made his dramatic, but terse, announcement. Israeli officials provided no further details on Eichmann’s kidnapping. However, within a few days the operation’s secrecy was breached.
Time
magazine provided an exceptionally detailed and generally correct description of how Israeli operatives had waylaid Eichmann in Buenos Aires, bundled him into a car, and flown him out of the country on an El Al plane. Argentinian police agents who had seen the abduction and knew where he was being held were probably the source of the information. They may not have intervened because of those in the government who were happy to let the Israelis take him off their hands. However, now that the news was public, Argentina played the aggrieved party and demanded details. Israel responded with what has been described as one of the more undiplomatic notes in diplomatic history. Mixing half-truths with fiction, it asserted that “volunteers” who happened to be Israelis had “established contact” with Eichmann and inquired whether he would come to Israel for trial. After he “spontaneously” agreed, they brought him to Israel and turned him over to the authorities. Israel had been “ignorant” of these details until Argentina demanded an explanation and an investigation was conducted. The nine-hundred-word note—a tome by diplomatic standards—also took a swipe at Argentina by observing that it was home to “numerous Nazis.” Foreign diplomats dismissed the explanation as “flagrantly unbelievable.” Even the Israeli ambassador to Argentina described it as
“bobe meises”
(fiction). The far-fetched story and the reference to “many Nazis” intensified Argentina’s anger. In a thinly veiled comparison to Nazi Germany, Argentina responded by describing the Israelis’ actions as “typical of the methods used by a regime completely and universally condemned.” Attempting to salvage Israel’s good relations with Argentina, Ben-Gurion crafted a personal letter to President Frondizi, in which he hewed to the myth of the “volunteers” but apologized for their violation of Argentina’s sovereignty. He beseeched Frondizi to understand that a trial in Israel would be “an act of supreme historic justice.”
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Frondizi, pressured by Argentinian nationalists who were livid at the breach of their country’s sovereignty, ordered Argentina’s UN representative, Mario Amadeo, to take the matter to the Security Council. Amadeo, a Catholic nationalist who had supported Franco, Mussolini, and the Axis, demanded Eichmann’s return and, using unvarnished language, compared Israel’s actions to lynchings and mob violence. Israel, he declared, threatened world peace and security. Equating Jews who fled the Nazis with Nazi war criminals who fled punishment at the end of the war, he observed that not just Eichmann, but Jewish refugees had also benefitted from his country’s liberal admissions policy. Had Argentina been more vigilant, he mused, it might have ensnared not only Eichmann but also these Jews. Again equating victim and victimizer, he lauded his country’s open door to those “flee[ing] persecution.” His comments infuriated Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir, who described Amadeo’s linkage of Eichmann with his victims as “quite extraordinary.” She found the notion of Eichmann “flee[ing] persecution” striking. Eichmann’s captors, she observed, could have lynched him “on the nearest tree.” Instead, they turned him over to face justice. She apologized for their actions but asked whether the “threat to peace” was posed by Israel’s actions or by “Eichmann at large, Eichmann unpunished.”
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Initially, most Security Council members, including the United States, supported Argentina’s repatriation demand. However, attitudes changed when the Soviet Union intimated that it might call for reconvening the Nuremberg tribunals, as was its right. In an attempt to resolve the matter, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge declared that Argentina’s demand for “reparation” had been fulfilled by Meir’s apology. The other members agreed. As one pundit observed, Argentina got an apology and Israel got Eichmann. Apparently, Lodge’s compromise resulted from more than just Cold War politics. Richard Nixon “suggested” to Lodge that if he was still interested in being his vice-presidential candidate, he find a resolution that was less hostile to Israel and recognized Eichmann’s crimes.
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Given that both Israeli and Argentine officials knew precisely what had happened and Argentina had not tried to prevent the Israelis from leaving with Eichmann, this debate was rather farcical. While many Argentines protested the violation of their country’s sovereignty, others were prompted to ask why their country had become the “favorite refuge” for Nazis such as Eichmann.
La Prensa
declared Eichmann “human scum.” In
El Mundo
, the prominent Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato asked, “How can we not admire a group of brave men who … had the honesty to deliver him up for trial by judicial tribunals instead of … finish[ing] him off on the spot?”
La Razón
reminded readers that the man whose abduction Argentina was now protesting had in 1944 sent fourteen hundred Jews with Argentinian passports to Bergen-Belsen. Even papers that protested the violation of Argentina’s sovereignty acknowledged that Israel’s reference to “numerous Nazis” in Argentina was hardly “gratuitous” and wondered how someone who had been an “enthusiastic supporter of Hitler” could represent Argentina in the United Nations.
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By August, the two countries had decided to declare the matter resolved. Official relations returned to the
status quo ante
. Matters, however, were not so easily solved for Argentina’s Jewish community, which was subjected to a barrage of violent anti-Semitic attacks.
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I
n the United States, the story was the lead news item. CBS said the news had “electrified the world … as though Hitler himself had been found.”
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Some of the reaction, however, was negative. In the space of a month,
The Washington Post
ran two vituperative editorials condemning Israel’s “jungle law” and predicting that an Israeli trial would be “tainted with lawlessness,” “wreak vengeance,” and “debase the law.” The proceedings would be “divorced from justice.” An Indiana paper branded Israel “a little upstart foreign state.”
Time
condemned Israel’s “high handed disregard of international law.”
The New York Post
predicted that this would be a “show trial” which should rightfully be held in Germany.
The Christian Science Monitor
, taking an even more extreme stance, argued that Israel’s claim to have the authority to adjudicate crimes against Jews committed outside of Israel was identical to the Nazis’ claim on “the loyalty of persons of German birth or descent” wherever they lived.
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Some of the more vituperative attacks came from William Buckley’s
National Review
. He devoted three editorials to the topic within weeks of the capture. In surprising statement, Buckley described Eichmann as having had “a hand in exterminating
hundreds of thousands
” (emphasis added). Condemning the proposed trial as a “pernicious” effort designed to speak for a “mythical legal entity (the Jewish People),” Buckley marveled that it was to last three months, whereas the Christian Church’s focus “on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ [lasts] for only one week of the year.” This, he declared, was symptomatic of the Jewish “refusal to forgive.” Buckley saw in the trial the “advancement of Communist aims” and the fanning of the “fire of anti-Germanism.” (In later years, Buckley spoke with an exceptionally different voice. In a stunning forty-thousand-word essay titled
In Search of Anti-Semitism
, he admitted to his father’s overt anti-Semitism and concluded that the writings of two conservative commentators and long-term contributors to the
National Review
, Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan, were anti-Semitic.
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) The criticism grew so intense that Amos Elon,
Haaretz
’s New York correspondent, mused: “The world … did not think like we did.… What appears to us to be ‘historic justice’ looks to others like a semi-pathological legacy of a traumatic experience.” However, even the more severe critics made some grudging concessions about Israel’s action.
The Washington Post
declared it “far wide of the mark” to attribute Israel’s commitment to trying Eichmann to “animal vengeance.” It came from a “mighty spiritual yearning for some measure of redress.”
The New York Times
, which condemned Israel’s actions as “immoral” and “illegal,” conceded that Eichmann’s trial would be fair because “Israeli courts yield to no one in the probity of their judges or the objectivity of their justice.”
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The critics of Israel’s actions did not just focus on the kidnapping. Some argued that because the law under which Eichmann would be tried was passed in 1950 the trial constituted retroactive justice. Others questioned whether Jewish judges could be impartial when the defendant was a Nazi criminal. They failed to note that Nuremberg had also relied on what could be considered retroactive justice—that is, crimes against humanity. The concept of crimes against humanity had been discussed in the international arena early in the twentieth century and in relation to Turkey’s actions against the Armenians. Only at Nuremberg, however, was the notion of such crimes established as positive international law. The critics who questioned the impartiality of Israeli judges also failed to note that the Poles conducted war-crimes trials after the end of the war and few people had questioned whether their judges could be impartial, despite the fact that the Poles had been victims. Even the solutions critics offered—that the trial should be held in Germany or before an international tribunal—did not take account of basic realities. There
was
no international body to try him. The World Court adjudicated cases between nations, not against individuals. The Nuremberg tribunals could be reconstituted to hear successor cases, but, given Cold War realities, that was a far-fetched possibility. There was no groundswell of West German support for holding the trial there. Many of the major German press outlets were quite content to see it held in Israel. The
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung observed, “It is not for us to question the Israelis as to the where and how of the arrest.… It is of no importance
where
Eichmann is brought to justice.” The
Neue Ruhr Zeitung
declared Israel “legitimized to try Eichmann.” The
Frankfurter Rundschau
found “any legal basis acceptable” as long as it “guarantees an orderly trial.”
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Chancellor Adenauer feared that a trial in Germany would highlight that the German government was riddled with former Nazi officials. In fact, his closest security adviser and the head of the Federal Chancellery was Hans Globke, who in 1935 had authored the legal commentary on the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Globke had determined the application of these laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship, forbade marriages between Jews and “Aryans,” and banned Jews from employing Aryan women in their homes (to protect them from being molested). Globke also had a hand in a 1938 rule that Jews must add the names “Israel” or “Sara” to their given names. The law exempted Jews with blatantly Jewish names from this regulation. Globke compiled the list of exempted names. One imagines him deliberating which names were “Jewish enough” so that adding “Israel” and “Sara” was superfluous. Globke was not the only former Reich official in an important position in postwar Germany. In the early 1950s, most of the leading positions in the Foreign Office were occupied by officials who had served the Third Reich. In 1952, Adenauer, reluctant to sweep them out, told the Bundestag, “I think we now need to finish with this sniffing out of Nazis.” Adenauer found an unlikely ally in his efforts to keep Germany out of the picture. David Ben-Gurion, eager to forge ties between the two countries, wanted to convince Israelis that there was “one Germany before the Nazis” and “another after the Nazis.” Consequently, as the trial drew near, he asked the prosecutor to make sure that his references to Germany were to
Nazi
Germany and to avoid mention of people such as Globke.
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