Eichmann in My Hands

In one important sense Adolf Eichmann stands as an exception to that rule. Thirty years after his execution his name still rings notorious; he was the number-one war criminal hunted down in the postwar era. Yet tellingly, the lessons of even the Eichmann case have grown hazy, the general impression somehow being that the notorious SS Obersturmführer was merely an important cog in a vast and impersonal machine, and, more, that Nazism itself was an aberration, and we will never see its like again.

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None of this was surprising, of course. Through almost three months of eyewitness testimony, some of it so gruesome as to challenge the very capacity for comprehension, the government had painstakingly described the Nazis’ highly organized systems of terror and barbarity and then tied specific acts directly to the commands of the defendant. The world had learned that it was Eichmann who had commissioned the design of the first gas chambers; Eichmann who had instituted the campaign of deceit to encourage the victims’ compliance, denying them their dignity even as they were led to the slaughter; Eichmann who, in his single-minded pursuit of the National Socialist agenda, dispatched to the ovens even those Jews whom his superiors were ready to spare. In fact, it was Eichmann who even at the very end, when others were looking to save their skins, ignored explicit orders from the top that the liquidation be halted. This was a man who, on hearing a conscience-stricken subordinate exclaim, “God grant that our enemies never have a chance to do the same to the German people!” replied with cool contempt, “Don’t be sentimental …”

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Still, watching now, there was something disturbing in the way Hausner was going after him. Striding the courtroom in his black robes like a balding, bespectacled bat, now raging, now full of mocking contempt, incessantly waving an accusing finger or pounding a fist, exasperated by even the legitimate objections of Eichmann’s attorney, the rotund Dr. Robert Servatius, this was a man out to enhance his reputation. Did the fact that we had been victims give us license to be less than just?

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done wrong. The fact is that Eichmann believed himself a man of honor. Yes, he was cruel when he had to be, and remorseless—this he admitted—but never indiscriminately so. Even now, listening with equanimity to accusations of mass murder, he bridled at any suggestion that he had been anything other than “correct” in his one-to-one dealings with the Jewish leaders he had so masterfully used to his horrifying ends. To him this was the heart of the matter. The content of his beliefs, the acts themselves, were secondary. Just a couple of weeks earlier, flipping through the papers, I had been keenly reminded of this side of the man. His own version of his capture had just appeared for the first time in a London tabloid, and according to the account I read, he had gone out of his way to compliment those of us who had carried it out, terming the operation “an elegant job,” handled “impeccably and with precision.” Immediately I recognized this as a gesture aimed at me. In fact, characteristically, Eichmann didn’t have a clue. He knew little more of what had gone on behind the scenes than those in the Israeli popular press who for a year had been touting us as heroes, or those abroad who imagined us some Israeli version of grim, faceless men in trenchcoats. The bringing of Eichmann to justice had been, in the end, less a model of crisp, military precision than a seat-of-the-pants adventure. Above all, what Eichmann himself could not grasp—given who he was, would never have been capable of understanding—was that we had regarded the operation as a task of almost biblical moral weight. And that some of us had been transformed by

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But my brush with Eichmann had started to change all that. In the guise of professional responsibility I had been forced to face myself. Long an accomplished agent, I was at last becoming a complete human being. Now, in the courtroom, I watched closely as, head bowed, listening to the translation, the defendant formed the answer to another question. Only this time, when he raised his eyes, he happened to glance in my direction. He abruptly stopped, registering surprise, then a kind of bewilderment. For a long moment our eyes remained locked. “Accused!” shouted Hausner into the stillness. “You are required to answer the question!” Eichmann turned toward him and began speaking. I listened a moment longer, then rose and headed for the exit. I had seen who I came to see, the only soul in that vast, historic assemblage who had the slightest idea of who I was.

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And another. Straying from my mother and Fruma, I am drawn to the village church. Inside, it is such a contrast to our drab wooden synagogue. I am most fascinated by the statue of the naked, bloody man on the cross. When they find me, my mother is furious; back on the street, she shakes me violently, tells me I’ll end up like Piatnik the Thief. It is my sister who takes me home, explaining once again about the Poles and the Jews, and telling the story of Piatnik.

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For Jews, being afraid of the Poles was a way of life. It was understood we were at their mercy. Indeed, our very speech was full of code and double meaning. We would never refer to the taxman but to “the one with the papers”; we would say “yellow” when we meant gold. The resistance of the powerless. One never knew when “they” would lash out, or why. As a grown-up my brother Yechiel would still bear scars from the time he was beaten unconscious by a Polish peasant with a club for being too slow in pulling his cart to the side of a dusty road to let him pass. At the time Yechiel was eleven years old.

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But that is almost secondary. What I recall most clearly of that evening is my parents fighting. They never fought. My parents were as devoted to one another as any man and woman I have ever known. Though she was capable of wicked sarcasm, my mother never turned it on my father; she always got her way through gentle persistence. In the end my father, allowed to maintain the delusion that he was in charge, could deny her nothing. But on this night my mother is screaming. He can stay, she cries, and she will take us by herself. My father, controlled at first, starts yelling back; then he storms out of the house. Huddled together in bed, terrified, disbelieving, Jacob and I take it all in.

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We were heading for the eastern slope of Mt. Carmel. My father had some distant relatives living there and my mother had written them of our impending arrival. We were therefore more shocked by what happened next than anything that had come before. Arriving at the tiny building of concrete and stone after a grueling three-hour walk through the heat and desolation, we were greeted by the woman of the house, a certain cousin Ruchele, tight-lipped and severe, wire-rimmed glasses perched on a sharp nose. Having come to Palestine some twenty years before on her own, Ruchele and her husband had chosen to live in this place with their baby through their commitment to Socialist Zionism, and she could hardly inform us soon enough of her contempt for all we represented: We were in the land of Israel now, there was a country to be built. Here there was no place for parasites.

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thought about it. What did he know that I didn’t? I didn’t think of myself as brave at all. I was only a little boy. My father pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with a long-wicked Polish lighter. “Papa, tell me about Piatnik the Thief.” “He was a nobleman, Piatnik the Thief. I knew his father a little.” “But why did they kill him? He wasn’t a Jew.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “He was friendly with the Jews. He was a good and very brave man. He would warn us of what was coming.” “He helped us?” He nodded. “If Piatnik were still alive, they wouldn’t have been able to burn the synagogue.” He paused, looking around at our barren surroundings, then at me. “He gave his life trying to do what was right. It is something worth trying to live up to.”

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Eichmann’s anti-Semitism undoubtedly started more as a theoretical position than as anything visceral. His closest childhood friend was a Jew named Harry Selbar.

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By ten, among my growing claims to others’ esteem was my reckless unpredictability. I loved testing myself. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I would dream up something I would claim I could do—say, run to the top of Mt. Carmel and back in three hours, or eat an entire roast chicken, plus its eyeballs, in five minutes—and then proceed to take bets. If it was a matter of persistence, or will, or just dumb stubbornness, I knew I couldn’t be beaten. If my capacity for introspection had faded, so too had any trace of self-doubt.

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(After the war, American Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, himself a Jew, recounted a story I very much understood. He told of listening in 1942 to the account of a Pole who had escaped from the Belzec death camp, desperately trying to sound the alarm in the West. When the man finished, Frankfurter told him he could not believe him. The Pole started to protest vehemently. “You don’t understand,” Frankfurter cut him off, “I know you are telling the truth. But I cannot believe you.”)

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Jewish homeland could no longer be deferred; that, if recent history had established nothing else, it was that even those purporting to be our friends would not extend themselves on our behalf—was readily brushed aside. Yes, it was conceded, in the desperate years before the war, country after country had closed its borders. Even ships laden with refugees from Nazi Germany, unwelcome in every free country, had been forced to return to German ports. And, yes, no one had been more intransigent than the British in Palestine. But that was then and this is now. Nothing, nothing, could be allowed to subvert the war effort. The goal now, the only goal, had to be the eradication of Hitlerism.

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always, Eichmann was keenly aware that these measures would also have a severely debilitating effect upon the morale of the Jews, breaking them psychologically, limiting the possibility of widespread resistance to the imposition of more stringent measures later on. “Eichmann was very cynical in his attitude toward the Jewish question,” his subordinate Dieter Wisliceny would later explain. “He gave no indication of human feeling toward these people. He was not immoral; he was amoral and completely ice-cold in his attitude.”

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Quite simply, Eichmann saw his mission, the elimination of Jews from the face of the earth, as a priority at least equal to that of winning the war. Nothing could be allowed to impede it. Traveling the Continent, from France in the west, north to Denmark, then down to middle Europe and the Balkans, meeting with SS authorities and officials of the local police, urging them to greater efforts, he allowed no exceptions to the Final Solution. When in 1943 there arose some question as to the racial origins of the Krimchaks in the Crimea, he decreed that, for safety’s sake, they had to be eliminated. Where others argued that Mischlinge (the offspring of Aryan-Jewish marriages) ought merely to be sterilized, thereby preserving their useful qualities for the Reich while eliminating any chance of their handing down undesirable traits, he succeeded in having most of them sent to the camps. When friendly embassies issued pleas on behalf of this or that Jew who in the past had rendered a great service, or who had highly placed friends, always they were refused. “Any exception will create a precedent which would impede the dejudaization measures,” he brusquely dismissed one such plea.

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Following the scenario that was now almost an art form, he assembled the leaders of the Jewish community and demanded their cooperation. “I am not an adherent of violence,” he told them, “but any opposition will be broken. If you think of joining the partisans or applying their methods, I shall have you mercilessly slaughtered. After the war the Jews will be free; all the Jewish measures will be abandoned and the Germans will be good-natured, as before. You tell me if anyone harms you and I will protect you; but I warn you not to try to mislead me. I know all about Jews. I have been dealing with Jewish affairs since 1934; I know Hebrew better than you do. I will visit your museum soon, because I am interested in Jewish cultural affairs. You can trust me and talk freely to me. As you see, I am quite frank with you. ”

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The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Even those accustomed to the numberless cruelties of war looked on in horrified disbelief. General George Patton became physically ill while inspecting the newly liberated camp at Ohrdruf. Supreme Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower, deeply shaken, noted soberly, “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” And he ordered all camps under his jurisdiction thrown open to the world’s press. At least they could take some action. For us, there was only bottomless sorrow and unassuageable guilt.

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It was during this period that one first started hearing the name Adolf Eichmann. He was one the survivors talked about the most, more than Himmler, or Hermann Goring, more even than Hitler; the most bloodthirsty of them all. Newspaper articles appeared. Eyewitness accounts were recorded. In the public mind he soon began to take on mythic proportions of evil, a contemporary satan, the one who had organized it all.

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Jacob, my gentle, fragile older brother, never recovered. In June 1949 he was hit by a car and died en route to the hospital. Witnesses reported he never looked up from the book in his hand. Only those in the immediate family knew how profoundly my father had changed. He ate less, he smoked more. He seemed to sleep hardly at all. Always an amusing and easily amused man, he never laughed anymore. A couple of years later his heart gave out on the job.

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This, in a real sense, was my generation’s reaction to the Holocaust: a fearlessness born of the certainty it would never happen to us. We would be strong and self-reliant; if we went, it would be the opposite of passively. Indeed, a case can be made that we became too free of fear. Few outsiders have a full understanding of how much, even today, Israeli policy remains a visceral reaction to the specter of our loved ones being herded into the ovens.

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What to do? What conceivable excuse is there for sitting on a bench with a newspaper for six hours? Out of necessity, the two of us designed a surveillance based on the simple truth that the casual eye takes less notice of someone moving than of someone who stays in place. For the next three days we walked the area in a coordinated pattern, each of us periodically changing his gait or subtly altering his appearance, but being always certain that one of us had the doorway in sight, until finally we spotted our man. But, too, like just about everything else in the business, there is a commonsense aspect to undercover work that cannot be taught. One fellow I knew, otherwise a perfectly competent agent, actually made a hobby of collecting matchbooks from the restaurants he visited, potentially a fatal error. So, for example, and far more common, is not knowing when to ease off a surveillance and lie low. All in all, the work was not far from what I had had in mind when I answered that question on the application. And it also had other,

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libraries. Yet—and I see this clearly now, only in retrospect—the life took a devastating toll. An agent spends his life keeping things to himself, covering up as a matter of course, not only with strangers but among friends, family, lovers, everyone who is not a part of his tiny circle of professional intimates. You lie so often that invariably you start to contradict yourself, forgetting the lies you’ve already told. Even after decades of marriage, the most revered agent of us all—Isser Harel—rarely told his wife what he was up to; and she knew never to ask.

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notorious Obersturmführer Eichmann. Already, too, other commando units made up of veterans of the Jewish Brigade (recruits from Palestine who had fought with the British) had targeted Eichmann for summary justice; and working independently but with enormous resourcefulness and tenacity, such camp survivors as Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman were launching what would become lifelong efforts to see justice done by combing records, interviewing sources, following up on even the most unlikely leads. But the pursuers were operating under one severe handicap. Though Eichmann’s name was somewhat known, only those in his circle of acquaintance knew him by sight. This was no matter of happenstance. For years Eichmann had refused to pose for any photos other than those essential for official purposes, even then seeing to it that the negatives were destroyed and keeping tabs on every print. Frustrated investigators found that even in group shots he had managed to obscure his face, positioning himself in the last row behind larger men. In fact, it would be almost a year before his pursuers would lay their hands on a usable recent shot, obtained from a onetime mistress of the former SS man. And by then the trail would be cold.

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is hardly a secret that innumerable German scientists, formerly engaged in research for the Third Reich, played a decisive role in the rocket programs of the United States and the Soviet Union. What remains largely unknown even today is that others, including more than a few rabid and unrepentant Nazis, were brought into the employ of the Arab states, most notably Nasser’s Egypt, to fight Israel. But we knew, and that intelligence was a source of acute concern at the highest levels of our government and military.

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Trailed by Hans, Uzi and I led Attila to his room, Shutting the door behind us, we studied the prisoner for the first time. He stood in the center of the room, still in his overcoat, his eyes obscured by the goggles. He was utterly rigid, except for hands that kept opening and closing spasmodically. The man was terrified. Months before, Fritz Bauer had forwarded to Tel Aviv a list of Eichmann’s identifying characteristics obtained from the SS files. Hans, whose primary responsibility as interrogator was to make a positive identification, knew it by heart. • A scar of three centimeters beneath left brow • Two gold bridges in upper jaw • A scar of one centimeter on left tenth rib • Tattoo under left armpit listing blood type • Height: 5′8½″–5′10″ • Weight: 154 lbs. (in 1934) • Circumference of head: 22” • Hair: Dark blond • Eyes: Blue-gray • Shape of head: Elongated and narrow • Shoe size: 8½ • SS nos.: 45326 and 63752 • Nazi party membership no.: 889895. At Hans’s direction we lay him down on the bed, still fully clothed. “Was ist dein Name?” demanded Hans sharply, a master addressing a disobedient dog. (What is your name?) “Ich bin Ricardo Klement,” came the trembling reply. His voice was weak and very raspy. “Was ist dein Name?!” “Ich bin Ricardo Klement.” Four times the question was asked and the answer repeated. “Take off his coat and shirt,” snapped Hans in English finally, with sharp contempt. I could see why he was known around headquarters as “the Spanish Inquisitor.” To a man in the prisoner’s position, the tone must have been extraordinarily menacing, indeed, harrowingly familiar. As we pulled the prisoner to his feet, it suddenly struck me: He’s not wearing his glasses. My God! What happened to his glasses? I didn’t say a word. What was I going to do, tell Hans I had lost his glasses? We removed the coat, his jacket, white shirt, tie, and shoes. He stood before us in trousers and socks, his hands still working. At Hans’s direction I lifted his left arm. Where the tattoo with his blood type should have been was a small scar. Something had been removed. The scar on the chest was just where it should have been. Silently we began to take his measurements. His height, the circumference of his head. His shoe size. All three of us buzzed around him with measuring tapes like so many tailors fitting a gentleman for a fine suit. Everything matched perfectly except the dental information. The man before us wore dentures. “Was ist dein Name?” demanded Hans again. “Otto Heninger,” he said now. It was the one he had used all those years before, as a forest ranger. We looked at each other. It meant nothing to us. “Your SS number,” spoke up Hans sharply, “was 45526.” There was a pause. “No,” he corrected, “45326.” “Good. Now—Was ist dein Name?” “Ich bin Adolf Eichmann.”

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was back in Eichmann’s room very early the following morning, sitting on the stool at the foot of the bed. He was awake. Indeed, he had slept only briefly. Nor, since his arrival, had he accepted anything to eat. We did not speak—strict orders had been issued in that regard also—but I could not take my eyes off that blindfolded face. It was impossible to imagine anyone less at peace. His expression kept changing, his lips, jaw, brow continually working, apparently beyond his control. Fear seemed to give way to defiance, then to rage, and then, just as quickly, melt into helpless submission. Every so often he would shudder spasmodically, his leg jerking, rattling the chain. Somewhat rested, more my old self than I’d been since my arrival in Argentina, I was seized by powerful feelings of deep loathing and contempt. I had expected more of this most honored representative of the master race. At the very least I thought there would be bearing, dignity, pride. Stripped of power, Eichmann seemed a classic weakling, lacking the character even to accept his fate. But, oddly, for the same reason, he engaged my curiosity far more than I expected. After all, Adolf Eichmann was a human being, someone who walked and talked and breathed exactly as I did. After seeing him with his child, I even thought it likely he felt some of the things I did. For years the question had plagued me, a challenge to my very worldview: How had it happened? How had supposedly civilized people descended to such depths of barbarism? The great frustration, of course, was that I couldn’t speak.

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“Will they go to the police?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” “What is your connection with the parties of the Right here in Argentina?” “Wir sind Deutsche. Wir verkehren mit Deutschen.” (We are Germans. We keep company with Germans.) “Do you know who we are?” There was a long silence. “Do you know who we are?” he asked again. “You are Israelis. I knew immediately.”

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“Unten, oben. Unten, oben.” Now Uzi appeared at the veranda, smiling broadly. I ordered Eichmann to stop. He did so instantly. “Now,” I said, “I want you to use the toilet.” He nodded crisply. “Jawohl, mein Herr. Danke schön.” Leading him to the toilet, perhaps twenty feet away, I pulled down his pajama bottoms and helped him to sit down. I left the door ajar and walked a few feet away. A minute passed. Then another. “Darf Ich anfangen?” called Eichmann. (May I begin?) I caught Uzi’s eye and had to make a physical effort to keep from breaking up. “Jawohl!” I commanded. “Sie können anfangen!” (Begin!) The man’s system must have been in desperate straits. There followed a collection of bathroom noises that defied imagination. And after every fart and protracted gurgle, every grunt and torturous wheeze, he would say he was sorry, the apologies growing ever louder to match the noises, until he sounded as if he were addressing a full battalion. “Entschuldigen Sie.” (Excuse me.) Watching it unfold—fart, “Entschuldigen Sie”; fart, “Entschuldigen Sie”; fart, “Entschuldigen Sie”—Uzi and I could restrain ourselves no longer. My friend, doubled over, the tears streaming down his face, staggered backward into the living room. I, trying to be discreet if I could not be polite, actually gnawed a gash in my lower lip in a failed effort to keep from exploding in laughter. But if Eichmann was aware of it, if he even understood that anyone might have reason to find the scene amusing, he never let on. For another ten minutes he continued, until he at last announced he was finished and requested permission to wipe.

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“Der Führer war unfehlbar,” he answered instantly. (The Führer was infallible.) “My oath as an SS officer was to Adolf Hitler personally. And I was not released from that oath until May 1945.” “You both came from Austria,” I observed. “In fact, I understand you attended the same high school.” He allowed himself a small smile. “Ja. That is true.” “You even shared the same first name.” “Ja.” He paused. “But he was the leader of the Reich. I was only a functionary.” “Tell me, did you come from a political family? Tell me about your father.” He shook his head. “He was a very strong personality, my father. But his energies went toward religion.” “And you?” I had meant the question to be about the strength of his own religious conviction (later I would learn it was limited), but he took it entirely otherwise. “I was a good son. It was not my place to question him.” He went on to note that for a time he worked for his father in a mining enterprise. “I was treated no better or worse than the others.” “Did that bother you?” I asked. Momentarily he seemed genuinely baffled by this. “I was a young man. I was accustomed to being led.”

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the years after, I would more than occasionally think back on that response. And, by extension, to the larger question of what it is that molds an individual’s sense of moral responsibility. Why is it that one person comes of age profoundly humane while someone else, of the same culture and social background, is seemingly impervious to the needs of others? The conclusion I reached, though hardly original, nonetheless still seems far too little appreciated. It has everything to do with how one is regarded as a child. Those who as children are valued and nurtured, loved without expectation and listened to and heard, are likely to become compassionate adults who think for themselves and make moral choices. Those many others around whom regimentation is the norm and unconventionality is taken as aberrant are quickly made to understand—by parents, by teachers, by almost everyone in their universe—that they are of worth only as part of the larger whole. As second nature they learn passivity and obedience, not conscience.

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I told her I was very much confused on the subject myself. He was a paradox, apparently reasonable one moment, a man capable of normal give-and-take, yet a stone wall the next. He was pitiless, seemingly unaware anything wrong had been done at all, certainly taking no responsibility for it. I had never been through anything more frustrating, more infuriating … “How can you even do it?” she interrupted. “Such a monster!” “Look, it’s all in the hands of God anyway.” “Don’t you dare link Eichmann and God! You disgust me!” “If God hadn’t allowed it, it wouldn’t have happened.” I did not say this just to irritate her, nor even only to win the point. I also more or less believed it. The Holocaust had much to do with why I, like so many others, had moved away from religion. “But you do believe in God, then,” she observed. “You believe He exists.” “When I’m in a jam, I believe. But if He does exist, He has a logic all his own. Haven’t you ever questioned how He could let it happen?” “God is not like us, flesh and blood. You can’t relate to Him that way. He was testing us as a people, as He tested Abraham and Job.” For a long time I said nothing. “Let me ask you a question,” I said at last. “What are you doing in the Mossad?” “It isn’t difficult. At the beginning I went to my rabbi and asked him about the work. He gave me a release. He said, ‘Whatever is done out of love can only cause pleasure.’ ” “Would you eat pork if the assignment demanded it?” I asked. “No. Of course not. Jews have been burned alive rather than eat the flesh of a pig.” “Would you sleep with a strange man?” There was another silence. “I don’t know. It would depend …” “You would?” She laughed. “I don’t recall that any Jew was ever burned at the stake for that.” Then I heard her roll over heavily in bed, signaling an end to the discussion. “Good night, Peter.”

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was no exaggeration about Rosa’s cooking. The woman was more inept in the kitchen than anyone I had ever encountered. She couldn’t even fry an egg. When she tried, she would emerge from the kitchen bearing a plate with a large yellow stain. Yet, because of her adherence to Orthodox dietary rules, she refused to hear of anyone taking her place, even for one meal.

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