The One From the Other (48 page)

I returned to the car, and seeing the green Buick again, I thought it a great shame that Jacobs would escape. Out of habit I checked the door, and as before, it wasn’t locked. Which looked too tempting to ignore. So I fetched an insectary from the second package on the back seat of the Mercury and laid it on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Once again I stabbed through the cage wall, and then quickly slammed the car door shut.

Of course it wasn’t the revenge I had imagined. For one thing I wouldn’t be around to see it. But it was the kind of justice that Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch, and Quintilian would have recognized. And perhaps even celebrated, in some axiomatic way. Small things have a habit of overpowering the great. And that seemed good enough.

I drove back to the monastery, where Carlos Hausner had a bag of money waiting for him. And, eventually, a new passport and a ticket to South America.

EPILOGUE

Several months passed at the monastery in Kempten. Another fugitive from Allied justice joined us and, in the late spring of 1950, we four crept across the border to Austria and then into Italy. But somehow the fourth man disappeared and we never saw him again. Perhaps he changed his mind about going to Argentina. Or perhaps another Nakam death squad caught up with him.

We stayed in a safe house in Genoa, where we met yet another Catholic priest, Father Eduardo Dömöter. I think he was a Franciscan. It was Dömöter who gave us our Red Cross passports. Refugee passports he called them. Then we set about applying for immigration to Argentina. The president of Argentina, Juan Perón, who was an admirer of Hitler and a Nazi sympathizer, had set up an organization in Italy known as the DAIE, the Delegation for Argentine Immigration in Europe. The DAIE enjoyed semidiplomatic status and had offices in Rome, where applications were processed, and Genoa, where prospective immigrants to Argentina underwent a medical examination. But all of this was little more than a formality. Not least because the DAIE was run by Monsignor Karlo Petranovic, a Croatian Roman Catholic priest who was himself a wanted war criminal, and who was protected by Bishop Alois Hudal, who was the spiritual director of the German Catholic community in Italy. Two other Roman Catholic priests assisted our escape. One was the Archbishop of Genoa himself, Giuseppe Siri; and the other was Monsignor Karl Bayer. But it was Father Dömöter we saw most of all at the safe house. A Hungarian, he had a church in the parish of Sant’Antonio, not very far from the DAIE offices.

I often asked myself how it was that so many Roman Catholic priests should have been Nazi sympathizers. But more pertinently, I also asked Father Dömöter, who told me that the pope himself was fully aware of the help being given to escaping Nazi war criminals. Indeed, said Father Dömöter, the pope had encouraged it.

“None of us would help in this way if it wasn’t for the Holy Father,” he explained. “But there’s something important you must understand about this. It’s not that the pope hates Jews, or loves the Nazis. Indeed, there are many Catholic priests who were persecuted by the Nazis. No, this is political. The Vatican shares America’s fear and loathing of communism. Really, it’s nothing more sinister than that.”

So that was all right then.

All applications for a landing permit from the DAIE had to be approved by the Immigration Office in Buenos Aires. And this meant that we were in Genoa for almost six weeks, during which time I got to know the city quite well, and liked it enormously. Especially the old town and the harbor. Eichmann did not venture out of doors for fear of being recognized. But Pedro Geller became my regular companion, and together we explored Genoa’s many churches and museums.

Geller’s real name was Herbert Kuhlmann, and he had been an SS Sturmbannführer with the 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division. That explained his youth, although not his need to escape from Germany. And it was only toward the end of our time in Genoa that he felt able to talk about what had happened to him.

“The Regiment was in Caen,” he said. “The fighting was pretty heavy there, I can tell you. We had been told not to take prisoners, not least because we had no facilities for doing so. And so we executed thirty-six Canadians, who, it’s fair to say, might just as easily have executed us, if our situations had been reversed. Anyway, our Brigadeführer is currently serving a life sentence for what happened in a Canadian jail, although the Allies had originally sentenced him to death. I was advised by a lawyer in Munich that I would also probably receive a prison sentence if I was charged.”

“Erich Kaufmann?” I asked.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“He thinks the situation will improve,” said Kuhlmann. “In a couple of years. Perhaps as long as five. But I’m not prepared to take the risk. I’m only twenty-five. Mayer, my Brigadeführer, he’s been in the cement since December 1945. Five years. There’s no way I can do five years, let alone life. So I’m buggering off to the Argentine. Apparently there are plenty of opportunities for business in Buenos Aires. Who knows? Perhaps you and I can go into business together.”

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps.”

Hearing Erich Kaufmann’s name again almost made me glad that I was leaving the new Federal Republic of Germany. Like it or not I was the old Germany, just as much as people like Göring, Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann. There was no room for someone who makes a living out of asking awkward questions. Not in Germany, where the answers often prove to be bigger than the questions. The more I read about the new Republic, the more I looked forward to a simpler life in a warmer climate.

Our application forms approved, on June 14, 1950, Eichmann, Kuhlmann, and I went to the Argentine consulate where our Red Cross passports were stamped with a “Permanent” visa, and we were issued the identification certificates we would need to present to the police in Buenos Aires, in order to obtain a valid identity card. Three days later we boarded the
Giovanni,
a steamship bound for Buenos Aires.

By now Kuhlmann knew my whole story. But he did not know Eichmann’s. And it was several days into the voyage before Eichmann felt able at last to acknowledge me and to inform Kuhlmann who he really was. Kuhlmann was appalled and never again spoke to Eichmann, referring to him ever after as “that pig.”

I myself didn’t care to judge Eichmann. It was not my right. For all the fact that he had escaped justice, he cut a rather sad, forlorn figure on the boat. He knew he would never see Germany or Austria again. We didn’t speak very much. Mostly he kept himself to himself. I think he felt ashamed. I like to think so.

On the day we sailed out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean, he and I stood together on the stern of the boat and watched Europe slowly disappear on the horizon. Neither of us spoke for a long while. Then he heaved a big sigh and said: “Regrets do not do any good. Regretting things is pointless. Regrets are for little children.”

I feel much the same way myself.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Nakam, or Vengeance, squads were real. Just after the war, a small group of European Jews, many of them survivors of the death camps, formed the Israeli Brigade. Others acted from within the U.S. and British armies. Their sworn purpose was to avenge the murders of six million Jews. They murdered as many as two thousand Nazi war criminals, and planned or carried out several large-scale acts of reprisal. Among these was a very real plan to poison the reservoirs of the cities of Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, and kill several million Germans—a plan that fortunately was never carried out. However, a plan to poison the bread for 36,000 German SS POWs, at an internment camp near Nuremberg, did go into action, albeit in a limited way. Two thousand loaves were poisoned; four thousand SS men were affected, and as many as a thousand died.

Lemberg-Janowska, the camp where Simon Wiesenthal was interned, was one of the most barbaric in Poland. Two hundred thousand people were murdered there. Friedrich Warzok, the deputy commander, was never caught. Eric Gruen, the Nazi doctor, was never caught.

Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen really did visit Israel. Eichmann was trying to make himself an expert in Hebrew affairs. He planned to learn the language. He also met with Haganah representatives in Berlin.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a ferocious anti-Semite who led several pogroms in Palestine, which resulted in the deaths of many Jews. He had been canvassing a “final solution to the Jewish problem” as early as 1920. He met with Eichmann in 1937, and first met Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. This was less than eight weeks before the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe” were outlined by Reinhard Heydrich.

During the war, Haj Amin lived in Berlin, was a friend of Hitler’s, and personally raised an SS Moslem Division of 20,000 men in Bosnia, which murdered Jews and partisans. He tried to persuade the Luftwaffe to bomb Tel Aviv. It seems quite probable that his ideas had a profound influence on the course of Eichmann’s thinking. Numerous Jewish organizations tried to have Haj Amin prosecuted as a war criminal after the war, but they were unsuccessful, despite the fact that arguably he was as culpable as Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann in the extermination of the Jews. Haj Amin was a close relative of Yasser Arafat’s. It is believed that Arafat changed his name in order to obscure his relationship with a notorious war criminal. To this day, many Arab political parties, most notably Hezbollah, have identified with Nazis and adopted symbols from Nazi propaganda.

In 1945, the American Office of Scientific Research and Development conducted medical experiments on prisoners in state penitentiaries in an effort to develop a vaccine for malaria. See
Life,
June 4, 1945, pages 43-46.

Philip Kerr’s next novel featuring

Bernie Gunther will be available from Putnam
in hardcover in March 2009

 

Read on for the first chapter of

ISBN 978-0-399-15530-7

ONE

 

 

 

 

The boat was the SS
Giovanni,
which seemed only appropriate given the fact that at least three of its passengers, including me, had been in the SS. It was a medium-sized boat with two funnels, a view of the sea, a well-stocked bar, and an Italian restaurant. This was fine if you liked Italian food, but after four weeks at sea at eight knots, all the way from Genoa, I didn’t like it and I wasn’t sad to get off. Either I’m not much of a sailor or there was something else wrong with me other than the company I was keeping these days.

We steamed into the port of Buenos Aires along the gray River Plate and this gave me and my two fellow travelers a chance to reflect upon the proud history of our invincible German Navy. Somewhere at the bottom of the river, near Montevideo, lay the wreck of the
Graf Spee,
a pocket battleship that had been invincibly scuttled by its commander in December 1939, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the British. As far as I knew, this was as near as the war ever came to Argentina.

In the North Basin we docked alongside the customs house. A modern city of tall concrete buildings lay spread out to the west of us, beyond the miles of rail track and the warehouses and the stock-yards where Buenos Aires got started—as a place where cattle from all over the Argentine pampas arrived by train and were slaughtered on an industrial scale. So far, so German. But then the carcasses were frozen and shipped all over the world. Exports of Argentine beef had made the country rich and transformed Buenos Aires into the third-largest city in the Americas, after New York and Chicago.

The population of three million called themselves
porteños
—the people of the port—which sounds pleasantly romantic. My two friends and I called ourselves refugees, which sounded better than fugitives. But that’s what we were. Rightly or wrongly, there was a kind of justice awaiting all of us back in Europe, and our Red Cross passports concealed our true identities. I was no more Dr. Carlos Hausner than Adolf Eichmann was Ricardo Klement or Herbert Kuhlmann was Pedro Geller. This was fine with the Argentines. They didn’t care who we were or what we’d done during the war. Even so, on that cool and damp winter morning in July 1950, it seemed there were still certain official proprieties to be observed.

An immigration clerk and a customs officer came aboard the ship and, as each passenger presented his documents, they asked questions. If these two didn’t care who we were or what we’d done, they did a good job giving us the opposite impression. The mahogany-faced immigration clerk regarded Eichmann’s flimsy-looking passport and then Eichmann himself as if both had arrived from the center of a cholera epidemic. This wasn’t so far from the truth. Europe was only just recovering from an illness called Nazism that had killed more than fifty million people.