DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (26 page)

On May 11, 1960, the capture of Eichmann was revealed to an incredulous world. Eichmann had been living under the pseudonym of Ricardo Klement. Each day, the former Gestapo colonel took a bus to his dreary job. Unlike Mengele, Eichmann had no family money to invest in a business of his own or to vacation within Swiss ski resorts.

The man in charge of rounding up all of Europe’s Jews for the death camps was now nothing but a lowly clerk eking out a living to support a wife and four children. Instead of residing in a fine villa such as Mengele’s, his family was squeezed into a little house that had neither running water nor electricity.

Mengele, for whom such things had always mattered, had not really socialized with Eichmann, presumably because his social status was too low. But they did share contacts in the Kameradenwerk, the secret organization that gave aid to former Nazis. Wilhelm Sassens, the journalist for Der Weg who had helped Mengele in his early days, had also befriended Eichmann.

After the kidnapping, Martha decided she had had enough South American adventures and returned to Europe with little Karl Heinz.

It was clear to her that she and Josef would never be able to lead a normal life together, and she had no interest in following him to his next place of refuge: Brazil. Life in the cultured, cosmopolitan Argentine capital had been tolerable for Martha; Paraguay and Brazil would be impossible. Martha’s complaints about her rough life in the backwaters of South America became the talk of Gunzburg. Residents of the sleepy town still chuckle when they remember Martha whining about her ordeal as the bride of Josef Mengele: Why, she had even been forced to do housework. Somehow, the image of sleek Martha mopping floors and scrubbing pots and pans in the wilds of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil engendered more derision than sympathy.

VEEA GROSSMAN: After we were married, my husband and I continued to support our families-even though we had barely enough money to live ourselves.

I suffered, but I never complained. I told myself As long as I am alive, it’s okay. My optimism helped me to overcome the hard times. I got through the hard times because of my spirit. I would tell my husband,

“I don’t mind being poor.” With hope in your heart, you feel optimistic, and you overcome every hardship.

In his Paraguayan hideout, Mengele wrote about the Eichmann capture in his journals, saying he now had to be even more careful than before.

The good old days when he could saunter into the German embassy and coolly request an ID under his own name, then jet off for a European holiday, were gone forever. In the fall of 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil. His friend Rudel had set him up with a man who could help him, an unrepentant Austrian Nazi named Wolfgang Gerhard. Gerhard worked out a safe living arrangement for the Auschwitz doctor. Mengele went into hiding again, and remained out of the public eye for the rest of his life.

The Eichmann capture seemed to augur a new era where Nazihunting would become a more aggressive pursuit. Men like Simon Wiesenthal and Langbein, both working out of Vienna, sought to pressure the German government, eager to forget the war and now securely launched into postwar reconstruction, to do more. Their persistence, combined with the anti-Nazi sentiments fueled by the Eichmann kidnap, jolted Germany out of its lethargy. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, the Germans had appeared reluctant to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Central Agency for Investigation of War Crimes, which had been assembled in 1958, had in two years accomplished very little.

But months after Eichmann’s capture, the Germans revealed some dazzling Nazihunting skills of their own. Richard Baer, the commandant of Auschwitz after Rudolf Hess, was arrested, as were members of the Eichmann “team.” There was a new element at work that added impetus to Germany’s initiative to hunt down Nazis. The Eichmann Capture and trial had stirred up deep feelings of guilt and shame in many Germans.

Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, received many moving apologies from individuals throughout Germany in the course of the trial. One young German wrote Hausner that he wanted to “atone” for what his elders had done “against humanity.” He offered to work in Israel, and indicated his group of friends were ready to do the same. Their only question was,

“Will you take us?” One German family wrote that they had been inspired by the revelations of Nazi atrocities to go see Dachau. Deeply moved, the family emerged from their tour of the death camp convinced that “whatever punishment was meted out to Eichmann was not enough.”

MENASHE LORINCZI: Until the Eichmann trial, survivors never talked about the Holocaust because nobody believed them. When I was in the army, I tried to tell people what had happened to me at Auschwitz under Dr. Mengele.

“Are you crazy?” the other soldiers said to me.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: The Eichmann trial destroyed us inside.

Everything came back-the dead bodies they piled up in front of our barracks, day and night, day and night, day and night. We kept thinking about that throughout the trial.

Until then, no one spoke about what happened in the war. We would tell friends our stories, and nobody believed us-nobody.

ALEX DEKEL: I went to see Eichmann, face-to-face, in his cell the day before he was executed. I asked him if he remembered me. He said no.

Then I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the tattooed number on my arm. He turned away.

MIRIAM MOB: After the war, it was something shamful to admit you were a Holocaust victim. Nobody wanted to talk about it.

I was lucky. I was able to confide in my husband from the start.

He was a good listener. I told him the whole story of what had happened to me at Auschwitz as a Mengele twin. He was a Sabra, and he had not lived through the war, but he was very interested-even in those years when nobody cared. He wanted to know all about the Holocaust.

He sympathized with what I had gone through.

He would tell me,

“How could a child without a mother or father return to the world, go to school, get married and lead the life of a normal person?”

He made me feel like a heroine.

But in those years, I didn’t feel especially heroic. No one wanted to listen to my story. I had aunts and uncles, and several cousins. They never asked me what had happened to me at Auschwitz. They never wanted to know. And my feeling was that nobody wanted to know, except my husband-until Eichmann.

During the Eichmann trial, this changed dramatically. Even though there was no television, only radio and newspapers, we all allowed it.

Some survivors were so upset by the revelations, they committed suicide after the trial.

The Germans refrained from requesting Eichmann’s extradition from Israel, presumably so as not to embarrass the Israelis or themselves.

Germany had abolished capital punishment, and there was the disturbing possibility that even if they tried Eichmann, he would receive a lenient sentence.

This, indeed, had been the outcome in the trials of most of the Nazis Germany had caught since the end of the war. Eichmann’s legal adviser had been sentenced to only five years’ hard labor. Otto Bradfish, who killed fifteen thousand Jews as part of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units in the East, got ten years’ hard labor. And Josef Lechthaler, who had slaughtered Jews in Russia, got only three-and a-half years behind bars.

But however minimal Germany’s reckoning with its past, at least arrests were made. Germany even managed to apprehend a few high ranking Nazis still at large. Karl Wolff, for example, who had served on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff, was nabbed and tried. He was quoted as saying how he had greeted “with particular joy. … he news that for two weeks now, a train has been carrying every day members of the Chosen People from Warsaw to Treblinka.”

The seizure of Eichmann sent Nazis who were hiding around the world deeper into the underground. Like Eichmann-and Mengele -many of Hitler’s henchmen had sought refuge in South America, posing as simple citizens. They were in close touch with one another by way of what Hausner called a “grapevine that spanned the South American continent and reached into the remotest parts of the pampas and jungle.” From then on, every one of them would be haunted by the fear that a team of Israeli agents was on his tail, ready to pounce on him.

Around the time of the Eichmann kidnapping and trial, Rolf Mengele was told by his stepfather, Hackenjos, that

“Uncle Fritz,” the man he had corresponded with and loved from afar, was really his father.

Interviews Rolf has given suggest he was deeply shaken by the revelation, coming as it did on the heels of newspaper stories depicting Mengele as a monster, and a perverted, ruthless war criminal.

German newspapers were replete with sensational accounts of the Auschwitz Angel of Death, and young Rolf fifteen at the time, was teased about his last name.

But as Rolf later told journalists, his family insisted to him the media accounts were wrong. He was told he should be proud to have Josef Mengele as a father. The Mengeles told Rolf that Josef was a good and brilliant man who spoke Greek and Latin fluently and had earned several advanced degrees. Rolf’s own cousin, Karl Heinz, who had lived with Mengele in South America, confirmed what the rest of the family was saying. Mengele was clever and caring. He had been a good father to him, strict, but extremely fair, Karl Heinz insisted.

It was difficult for the teenager to try to reconcile the two images of Dr. Mengele-that provided by his family and the one offered by the rest of the world. Anguished by the revelations, he began failing at school. His teachers attributed this to the trauma of being the son of Josef Mengele. The tenor of his correspondence with the man he had known all his life as Uncle Fritz changed as a result, becoming erratic and petulant, he confided in these same interviews.

OLGA GROSSMAN: How scary it was for me to have children. All the unpleasant memories came back to me. We had watched little babies thrown into the ovens.

I was very, very worried during my pregnancies. I suffered all the time. What will come out of me? I wondered. This child, will it be normal?

I would agonize over what had been done to me by Dr. Mengele.

I was sure I would have an abnormal baby-because of all the tests and experiments.

After the childbirth, when they told me I had a beautiful, healthy baby, I collapsed.

It was too good to be really true. I had a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized.

MIRIAM MOZES: I was very depressed after the birth of my first child.

I saw other women in the hospital being visited by their mothers, and that was very painful to me. For even though I was very happy, very excited over the birth of my daughter, I felt badly [that] my mother wasn’t there.

Only my husband came to see me. And Eva. My twin became like my mother. She went to buy everything for the child. She would come all the time. But I still found myself staring at the other young women, and envying the fact that their mothers would come and fuss over them.

The Eichmann case also had serious side effects that threatened the safety of Jewish communities the world over. If the capture had forced old Nazis to lay low, it also prompted their supporters to emerge.

There were rabid antiSemitic outbursts throughout Latin America, and a renewed interest in Nazi causes and ideals. The rise in pro-Nazi sentiment was an offshoot of the resentment many South American nations felt toward Israel. These countries viewed the kidnapping of Eichmann as a violation of their sovereignty-a lawless affront to Argentina’s honor. There were also angry formal protests at the United Nations.

In June 1960, Argentina made a formal complaint to the UN Security Council, protesting what Israel had done.

Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who had given the Mossad, the Jewish intelligence service, the go-ahead to nab Eichmann, began to see the negative consequences of the operation. Although the trial had certainly raised the world’s consciousness, he worried that there would be a backlash. In addition, Israel had been rebuked by some of its staunchest friends, including General Telford Taylor, for violating international law.

With the May 1962 execution of Eichmann, Ben-Gurion’s worst fears were realized. There were antiSemitic episodes around the world.

On June 24, 1962, a young Argentine Jewish girl, Graciella Sirota, was kidnapped on her way to school. Her assailants carved a swastika on her breast and inflicted severe burns all over her body. She was told, “This is revenge. You Jews are responsible for Eichmann’s death.”

Four days later, a male student, son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, was attacked by four youths who slashed swastikas in his cheeks and forehead and beat him savagely.

Secret memoranda sent by Argentine Jewry to major American Jewish organizations reflected the panic roused by the antiSemitic incidents.

There was a sense that the Nazis were capable of regrouping in South America to “recreate” the Third Reich. It was believed the Nazis were involved in a plot to install a fascist regime in Argentina, and that once in power, its first goal would be to exterminate the Jews.

Since the fall of Peron, the instability of the Argentine government had indeed helped stir up antiSemitism in a population already predisposed against Jews. There were dozens of nationalist and reactionary groups fomenting hatred and advocating violence and other forms of retribution, an extremism that recalled some of the blackest days of Hitler’s Germany. For the vulnerable Jewish community, with its many war refugees, all the ingredients were there for a terrible repeat of history. As one 1962 memorandum from a local Jewish organization noted,

“Events have crystallized, particularly after the conclusion of the Eichmann trial. It has been proven to us that the Nazi minority have entrenched themselves. While today, they represent no Immediate danger, they can under disturbed general conditions come to the fore. . The major question was what the Nazis would do to avenge the execution of Eichmann.

As Israel had to decide whether to pursue more Nazis, Ben-Gurion began to have doubts about continuing. The Mossad, however, was buoyant over the success of the Eichmann capture. Isser Harel, then head of Israeli intelligence, was especially proud. From an operational point of view, it had gone practically without a hitch. His handpicked team had entered Argentina undetected and left the country with no one guessing whom they had in tow. Although they had been prepared to kill anyone who stood in their way, there was no loss of life. With the Eichmann operation completed, the Mossad team was eager to return and mount a full-scale attempt to apprehend the elusive doctor Josef Mengele.