Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi

Copyright © 2009 by Neal Bascomb

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Bascomb, Neal.

Hunting Eichmann : how a band of survivors and a young spy agency chased down the world’s most notorious Nazi / Neal Bascomb.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-618-85867-5

1. Eichmann, Adolf, 1906–1962. 2. War criminals—Germany—Biography. 3. Fugitives from justice—Argentina—Biography. 4. Secret service—Israel. I. Title.

DD247.E5B37 2009

943.086092—dc22 2008035757

eISBN 978-0-547-34754-7

v7.0618

Diagram by Michael Prendergast

Justice should not only be done, but should

manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

—Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart, 1924

. . . And you have come, our precious enemy,

Forsaken creature, man ringed by death.

What can you say now, before our assembly?

—Primo Levi, For Adolf Eichmann, 1960

Prologue

THE MAN FROM BUS 203 WAS LATE.

For three weeks now the team tracking him had watched their target return from work to his small brick bunker of a house on Garibaldi Street. Every night was the same: At 7:40 P.M., bus 203 stopped at the kiosk on the narrow highway 110 yards from the corner of Garibaldi Street; the man exited the bus; another passenger, a woman, also exited at the same stop. They separated. Sometimes the man stopped at the kiosk for a pack of cigarettes, but this never took more than a minute. Then he crossed the street and walked toward his house. If a car approached, he turned on his flashlight—one end red, the other white—to signal his presence. When he reached his property, he circled the house once before entering, as if checking that all was secure. Inside, he greeted his wife and young son, lit a few additional kerosene lamps, and then sat down for dinner. He was a man of precise routines and schedules. His predictability made him vulnerable.

But on this night, Wednesday, May 11, 1960, 7:40 passed, and neither bus 203 nor the man was in sight. The team waited in two cars. One black Chevrolet sedan was parked on the edge of Route 202, facing toward the bus stop. Once the man showed, if he showed, the driver in the backup car would flick on his headlights to blind him before he turned left toward his house. The capture car, a black Buick limousine, was stationed on Garibaldi Street between the highway and the man’s home. The driver, in a chauffeur’s uniform, had popped the hood to give the impression that the limousine had broken down. Two other men stood outside the car in the cold, windy night, pretending to fiddle with the engine. These two were the strongmen, tasked with grabbing the target and getting him into the car—as quietly and quickly as possible.

At 7:44, a bus finally approached on Route 202, but it drove straight past the kiosk. The team could only wait so long in this isolated neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, without attracting too much attention. There was only a scattering of houses on the flat, nearly treeless plain. Cars foreign to the neighborhood stood out.

The team leader, hidden in the limousine’s back seat, insisted that they stay despite the risks. There was no argument from the team. Not now, not at this critical hour. The man must not be allowed to elude capture.

Exactly fifteen years previously, in the last days of the Third Reich, SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of Department IVB4 of the Reich Security Main Office and the operational manager of the Nazi genocide, had escaped into the Austrian Alps. He had been listed as killed in action by the woman who now impatiently waited for her husband’s return from work. He had been sought by Allied investigators and independent Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal. He had reportedly been executed by Jewish avengers. He had been rumored to be living in West Germany, England, Kuwait, the United States, and even Israel. His trail had gone from hot to cold to hot again.

He had been so successful at hiding his identity that the Mossad agents now in position on Garibaldi Street were still not 100 percent certain that the man they had come to capture was actually Eichmann. A contingency plan, one of many, was in place if it turned out not to be him. Nonetheless, they were sufficiently convinced to stage a dangerous operation on foreign soil involving more than ten agents, including the head of the Israeli secret service himself. They had read Eichmann’s file and been thoroughly briefed on his role in the mass murder of Jews. They were professionals, but it was impossible for them to be impartial about this mission. Since arriving in Argentina, one agent kept seeing the faces of the members of his family who had been killed in the Holocaust.

They could wait a few more minutes for bus 203.

At 8:05, the team saw another faint halo of light in the distance. Moments later, the bus’s headlights shone brightly down the highway, piercing the darkness. Brakes screeched, the bus door clattered open, and the two passengers stepped down onto the street. As the bus pulled away, the woman turned off to the left, moving away from the man. The man headed for Garibaldi Street, bent forward in the wind. His hands were stuffed into his coat. Thunder cracked in the distance, warning of a storm. It was time for Adolf Eichmann to answer for what he had done.

1

OUTSIDE MAUTHAUSEN, a concentration camp built beside a granite quarry on the northern edge of the Danube River in upper Austria, Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann stood at the head of a long column of 140 command cars and trucks. It was noon on Sunday, March 19, 1944, and he was thirty-eight years old to the day.

Dressed in his pale gray SS uniform, he looked to be a man with the sympathies and humor of a piece of granite. He had fine, dark blond hair, narrow lips, a long nose, and grayish blue eyes. His skull turned sharply inward at his temples, a feature only accentuated by the peaked cap now drawn over his head. Of medium height, he held his trim frame slightly forward, as if he was a tracker on a fresh trail. As he watched his men prepare to move out, the left corner of his mouth twitched unconsciously, drawing his face into a temporary scowl.

The convoy carrying more than five hundred members of the SS was ready. Down the line of vehicles, engines rumbled to life, and black exhaust spewed out across the road. Eichmann climbed into his Mercedes staff car and signaled for the motorcycle troops leading the column to advance toward Budapest, following the trail blazed by the First Panzer Division.

Twelve hours before, eleven Wehrmacht divisions had stormed across the Hungarian border while paratroopers had dropped into the historic capital city to seize strategic government buildings and positions. Adolf Hitler had ordered the occupation of the country to prevent the Axis partner from pursuing an armistice with the Allies now that the Red Army was advancing from the east.

As the column of vehicles sped away from Mauthausen, Eichmann expected that in a few months, this camp and its satellites would be filled with more Jewish slave laborers to work in the quarries and surrounding munitions, steel, and airplane factories. Send down the Master in person, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered, referring to Eichmann in his instructions to comb Hungary from east to west of its Jews. Those who were physically fit were to be delivered to labor camps for destruction through work; those who were not were to be exterminated immediately. Eichmann’s mission was a secondary, but critical, one in the invasion of Hungary. He inflated with pride at the confidence Himmler had shown in him by charging him to oversee the operation personally. Eichmann would stop at nothing to live up to his new moniker, the Master. He gathered all of his senior, most effective officers from across Europe to aid in his efforts.

With the German army already encircling Budapest, the SS column met little resistance and made easy progress into Hungary. Along the 250-mile route to the capital, Eichmann’s staff felt confident enough to take a break and gather around him to toast his birthday with a bottle of rum. Besides this stop and two for refueling, Eichmann had nothing to do on the journey but chain-smoke and further consider his strategy to eliminate 725,000 Jews from Hungary as rapidly as possible, without any uprisings (as had happened in Poland) or mass escapes (as in Denmark). Those two operations colored his thoughts as the mile-long convoy advanced down the road with a thunderous roar.

In devising his plan for Hungary over the past weeks, Eichmann had been able to draw on his eight years of experience overseeing Jewish affairs for the SS. As chief of Department IVB4, he was responsible for executing Hitler’s policy to annihilate the Jews. Eichmann ran his office as if he was the division head of an international conglomerate. He set ambitious targets; he recruited and delegated to effective subordinates; he traveled frequently to keep tabs on their progress; he studied what worked and failed and adjusted accordingly; he made sure to account to his bosses in charts and figures how effective he had been. His position required navigating frequent policy changes, legal restrictions, and turf wars. And although he wore a uniform, he measured success not in battles won but instead in schedules met, quotas filled, efficiencies realized, guidelines followed, and units moved. Operations he had managed in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Slovakia, Romania, and Poland had revealed to him the best methods to realize this success. Now he intended to bring these to Hungary.

The first stage of his plan focused on isolating the Jews. Orders would be issued to require the wearing of the Yellow Star, to prohibit travel and the use of phones and radios, and to ban Jews from the civil service and scores of other professions. He had more than a hundred such measures aimed at identifying and removing the Jews from Hungarian society. The next stage would secure their wealth for the Third Reich’s coffers. Bank accounts would be frozen. Factories and businesses owned by Jews would be expropriated and the assets of every single individual plundered, down even to their ration cards. Next came ghettoization, uprooting Jews from their homes and concentrating them together until the final, fourth stage could be effected: deportation to the camps. Once they arrived there, another SS department was responsible for their fate.

To prevent any escapes or uprisings, Eichmann intended to launch a campaign of deception in all four stages. He planned on meeting face-to-face with Jewish leaders to reassure them that the measures restricting their community were only temporary necessities of war. As long as these leaders, organized in a council, saw to their implementation, he would promise that no harm would come to their community. Bribes would be taken from the Jews on the promise of better treatment, a move that not only extorted more Jewish wealth but also gave the impression that individuals could be saved if they met German demands. Eichmann also thought it best to initiate stages three and four in the most remote districts, leaving Budapest, where there was the greatest chance of an organized resistance, until last. Even when the Jews were forced onto the trains, they were to be told that they were being relocated for their own safety or to supply labor for Germany. These deceptions might be seen for what they were, but they would buy enough time and acquiescence that brute force could do the rest.

For all these plans, Eichmann knew he needed the assistance and manpower of the Hungarian authorities. Given his limited staff of 150, winning their cooperation was going to be his first order of business once he arrived in Budapest. Otherwise, his shipment schedules for Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other camps would run late.

When they reached Budapest, the German army was in the midst of taking positions throughout the streets while squadrons of fighter planes with black crosses on their wings buzzed low over the Danube. Gestapo agents fanned out across the city to arrest prominent Hungarians who might resist the occupation. There were hundreds of Jews on their lists. Eichmann established his command at the grand Hotel Majestic, which stood on a forested hill west of the old city of Buda. Sentry posts and three rings of barbed wire were placed around the hotel, while guards with German shepherds were brought in to patrol the grounds.

Fearing assassination by Jewish partisans and Allied commandos, Eichmann was very careful with his security. He preferred to remain in the background, exercising his authority through his subordinates, and he rarely allowed his photograph to be taken. As a precaution, he always carried with him in his staff car an arsenal of submachine guns and grenades.

In his new headquarters, the Master spent the first of many sleepless nights putting together all the elements of the machine that would, stage by stage, systematically exploit and then remove every single Jew in Hungary. In his mind, they were the enemies of the Reich, and like a cancer, they needed to be rooted out and destroyed.

At the crack of dawn on April 15, the last day of Passover, this machine came to the door of the family of Zeev Sapir. Zeev was twenty years old and lived with his parents and five younger siblings in the village of Dobradovo, located ten miles outside Munkács, a city in the mountainous Carpatho-Ruthenia district of northeastern Hungary.

Gendarmes roused the family and ordered them to pack. They could bring food, clothes, and bedding, but no more than fifty kilograms per person. The few valuable family heirlooms they owned were confiscated before they were driven into the streets. Gendarmes then bullied and whipped the community of 103 people to Munkács on foot. The very young and old were carried in horse-drawn hay carts.

In the month since the Germans had occupied Hungary, Sapir had endured with dignity the many strictures placed on the Jews. There had always been anti-Jewish fervor among the people of Carpatho-Ruthenia. Born into a strongly Orthodox family, Sapir grew up being called Jew-boy by other children and had lived through the various regimes that had controlled his corner of the world during his short life. Whether Czech, Hungarian, or Ukrainian, they had all oppressed his people. The Hungarians had taken his elder brother away to a forced labor camp a few years before. At first the Germans proved no worse. Zeev wore his Star of David along with the rest of his community. He maneuvered around the curfews and travel restrictions to continue his black-market trade in flour that supported his family. The other measures imposed by the new government, such as press restrictions, job expulsions, prohibitions from public places, and seizures of Jewish property, among many others, had not had much immediate effect on the poor, rural village that was his home.

Now, however, he was scared. His family reached Munkács in the evening, exhausted from carrying their baggage during the long march. The streets were packed with men, women, and children, all moving in the same direction. They arrived at the brickyards of a former brick factory, their new home. Over the next several days, 14,000 Jews from the city and surrounding regions were crammed into the ghetto. They were told that they had been removed from the military operational zone to protect them from the advancing Russians.

The news was no comfort to Sapir, whose family lived in a makeshift hut with little food other than spoonfuls of potato soup served from bathtubs. There was even less water, the ghetto having access to only two water faucets. As the days and nights passed, the crying of children from hunger and thirst almost became too much for Sapir. Then came the torrential rains. Exposed under the open sky, there was no escaping the downpour that turned the brickyards into a mud pit and fostered an epidemic of typhoid and pneumonia. Somehow Sapir, his parents, and his four younger brothers (ages fifteen, eleven, six, and three) and sister (age eight) avoided getting sick.

By day, the Hungarian gendarmes played their cruel games, forcing work gangs to transfer piles of bricks from one end of the ghetto to the other for no reason other than to exercise their power.

By his third week in the ghetto, Sapir had no idea how long they were to stay there or where they would be sent afterward. One ventured such questions at the risk of a severe beating. Sapir read in a local newspaper he was passed that a high-ranking SS officer would soon inspect their ghetto. Perhaps this German officer, whose name was Eichmann, would provide an answer.

On Eichmann’s arrival, the entire population of the ghetto was ordered to gather in a semicircle in the main yard. Surrounded by an entourage of thirty Hungarian and SS officers, Eichmann strode into the yard wearing square riding pants and black boots and cap. In a strong, clear voice, he announced to the prisoners: Jews: You have nothing to worry about. We want only the best for you. You’ll leave here shortly and be sent to very fine places indeed. You will work there, your wives will stay at home, and your children will go to school. You will have wonderful lives. Sapir had no choice other than to believe him.

Soon after Eichmann’s visit, on May 22, the trains arrived on the tracks that led to the former brick factory. Brandishing whips, blackjacks, and Tommy guns, guards forced them from the ghetto to the train tracks. Every last man, woman, and child was stripped, their clothes and few belongings searched for any remaining valuables. Those who hesitated to follow orders were beaten miserably. The terror and confusion were profound.

A guard shredded Sapir’s personal documents and then returned his clothes. After dressing, he stayed with his family and the others from his village as they were hustled into a cattle car. All 103 Jews from his village were crammed into a single car that would have fit 8 cows. They were provided with a bucket of water and an empty bucket for a toilet. The guards slammed the door shut, casting them into darkness, and then padlocked the door.

The train rattled to a start. Nobody knew where they were headed. As the train passed small railway stations along the way, someone attempted to read the platform signs to get some idea of their direction, but it was too difficult to see through the car’s single small window, which was strung with barbed wire to prevent escape. By the end of the first day, the heat, stench, hunger, and thirst became unbearable. Sapir’s young siblings wept for water and something to eat; his mother soothed them with whispers of Go to sleep, my child. Sapir stood most of the time. There was little room to sit, and what room there was, was reserved for the weakest. Villagers of all ages fainted from exhaustion; several died from suffocation. At one point, the train stopped. The door was opened, and the guard asked if they wanted any water. Sapir scrambled out to fill the bucket at the station. Just as he came back, the guard knocked the bucket brimming with water from his hands. They would have to do without.

Four days after leaving Munkács, the train came to a screeching stop. It was late at night, and when the cattle car door crashed open, the surrounding searchlights burned the passengers’ eyes. SS guards shouted, Out! Get out! Quick! Dogs barked as the Jews poured from the train, emaciated copies of their former selves. A shop owner from Sapir’s village turned back toward the car: he had left behind his prayer shawl. A man in a striped uniform, who was carrying away their baggage, pointed toward a chimney belching smoke. What do you need your prayer shawl for? You’ll soon be in there.

At that moment, Sapir caught the stink of burning flesh. He now understood what awaited them in this place called Auschwitz. An SS officer divided the arrivals into two lines with a flick of his hand or a sharply spoken Left or Right. When Sapir and his family reached the officer, Sapir was directed to the left, his parents and siblings to the right. He struggled to stay with them but was beaten by the guards. Sapir never saw his family again. As he was led down a dusty road bordered by a barbed-wire fence, his battle for survival had only just begun.

Six weeks later, at 8:30 on the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1944, air raid sirens rang throughout Budapest, the Queen of the Danube. Soon after, the first of 750 Allied heavy bombers led by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force released their explosives onto the city. Antiaircraft guns and German fighter planes attempted to thwart the surprise attack, but they were overwhelmed by wave after wave of bombers and their escorts. Eichmann hunkered down in his two-story hilltop villa, formerly owned by a Jewish industrialist, as Budapest was set ablaze. Four hours later, the last of the bombers disappeared on the horizon. Columns of smoke rose throughout Budapest. The saturated bombing flattened whole neighborhoods. Refineries, factories, fuel storage tanks, railway yards, and scores of other sites were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died.

Emerging unscathed from his villa, Eichmann saw Allied leaflets drifting down from the sky and landing on his lawn. The enemy propaganda revealed how the Soviets were pushing east through Romania, while in the west, the Allies had landed in France and Italy and were driving toward Germany. The Third Reich was facing defeat, the leaflets promised, and all resistance should be stopped. Further, President Franklin Roosevelt had declared that the persecution of Hungarian Jews and other minorities was being followed with extreme gravity and must be halted. Those responsible would be hunted down and punished. Neither an Allied bombing nor a threat by an American president nor even Hitler himself was going to divert Eichmann from completing his masterpiece, the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, which had begun in earnest with the deportations from Munkács.

Eichmann left his villa to assess any damage to his headquarters at the Hotel Majestic. His achievements to date were fresh in his mind. By the first week of July, the plan that he had crafted had shown itself to be monumentally effective. Five of the six operational zones where Jews were slated for deportation, totaling 437,402 units, had been cleared by the Hungarian authorities, who had proved to be more than willing accomplices in his designs. Every day, an average of four trains carrying a load of 3,500 were received at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 10 percent of arrivals were deemed fit enough for the labor camps. The balance earned special treatment in the gas chambers. Eichmann’s early coordination with the camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss, ensured that the extermination camp was ready for the numbers to be processed. The staff had been increased, the ramps expanded, a new three-track railway system built, and the crematoriums updated.

Only the Jews of Budapest remained in Hungary. They had already been relocated into designated houses marked with a yellow star, and a curfew prohibited them from leaving these abodes except between 2:00 and 5:00 P.M. Police and gendarmes from the outlying provinces were in place to assist in the upcoming deportation, and the trains were being scheduled.

Still, there were forces gathering against Eichmann’s plans, and with the Allied advance on both fronts and now the attack on Budapest, these forces had some teeth. Over the past few weeks, international protests—from Roosevelt to Pope Pius XII to the king of Sweden—had urged Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary (whom Hitler had kept in a figurehead position), to end the actions against the Jews. Horthy was receptive to these calls, not only because of what he had recently learned about the extermination camps from a report by two Auschwitz escapees but also because of the recent coup attempt by Hungarian state secretary László Baky, a key ally of Eichmann’s in the Interior Ministry. Five days after the Allied bombing, on July 7, Horthy suspended the deportations and dismissed Baky and his cronies from their positions.

Incensed at the interruption, Eichmann nonetheless ordered his deputies to send 7,500 Jews held in a brick factory north of the city to Auschwitz. He met no resistance. A week later, he attempted the same with 1,500 Jews at the internment camp Kistarcsa, eleven miles outside Budapest. After the city’s Jewish Council learned of the train’s departure, they convinced Horthy to halt it en route to the extermination camp and return to Kistarcsa. Berlin had yet to respond to Horthy’s suspension of the deportations, but Eichmann did not care. He was not about to allow the regent to block his plans. On July 19, he summoned the Jewish Council to his office. While one of his underlings kept the members of the council occupied, Eichmann sent SS troops to Kistarcsa and brutally forced the Jews back onto the train. Only when it crossed the border into Poland did Eichmann release the council.

That same week, Hitler weighed in on the conflict with Horthy. Wanting to keep him in alliance with Germany, Hitler offered to allow 40,000 Budapest Jews to immigrate to Palestine, but the rest were to be deported to the camps as planned. This did not please Eichmann, who did not want one single Jew to escape his hands. He strode into the office of the German plenipotentiary in Hungary.

Under no circumstances does the SS Reichsführer Himmler agree to the immigration of Hungarian Jews to Palestine, Eichmann raged. The Jews in question are without exception important biological material, many of them veteran Zionists, whose emigration is most undesirable. I will submit the matter to the SS Reichsführer and, if necessary, seek a new decision from the Führer.

The plenipotentiary and Berlin were unmoved. With the war going poorly for Germany, many in the Reich leadership, including Himmler, viewed the Jews as much-needed bargaining chips. Eichmann thought this was weakness, even though he was worried about his own future, admitting to an SS colleague that he feared that his name would top the war criminal lists announced by the Allies because of the unusually public role he was playing in Hungary.

In August, when the Russians conquered Romania, Himmler shelved the plans for the deportations completely. Eichmann was ordered to disband his unit in Hungary, but still he did not relent. Except for a short mission to Romania, he lingered in Budapest for the next two months, waiting for his chance to return to his plans.

He rode horses and took his all-terrain vehicle out to the countryside. He spent long weekends at a castle owned by one of his Hungarian counterparts or stayed at his two-story villa, with its lavish gardens and retinue of servants. He dined at fashionable Budapest restaurants and drank himself into a stupor at cabarets. With his wife and three sons in Prague, he kept two steady mistresses, one a rich, thirty-year-old divorcée, the other a Hungarian count’s consort. Eichmann had enjoyed some of these pursuits since first coming to Budapest, but now he had more time than ever to indulge in them. Even so, he was increasingly edgy at the progress of the war. He smoked heavily and often barked at his underlings for no reason.

In late October, with the Russians driving only a hundred miles from Budapest and Horthy recently deposed as regent, Eichmann made one last bid to finish what he had started in Hungary. You see, I’m back again, he declared to the capital’s Jewish leaders. He secured permission from the German plenipotentiary to send 50,000 Jews to labor camps in Austria. The fact that there were no available trains to take them on the 125-mile journey, because of Allied bombing raids, did not deter him. As winter settled in, he sent the first 27,000 Jews, including children and the infirm, on a forced march. With few provisions and no shelter, scores began falling behind within a few days. They were either shot or left to die in roadside ditches. Even the Auschwitz commandant Höss, who witnessed the scene while driving between Budapest and Vienna, balked at the conditions the Jews endured. It was intended slaughter, something that Himmler had decreed must stop. When Eichmann was ordered by a superior officer to cease the march, he ignored the order. At last, in early December, Himmler summoned Eichmann to his headquarters in the Black Forest. Before they met, Eichmann cleaned his nicotine-stained fingers with a pumice stone and lemon, knowing well the Reichsführer-SS’s aversion to cigarettes.

If until now you have exterminated Jews, Himmler said in a tone laced with anger, from now on, I order you, as I do now, you must be a fosterer of Jews . . . If you are not able to do that, you must tell me so!

Yes, Reichsführer, Eichmann answered, knowing that any other answer or action on his part was suicide.

On a late December morning in 1944, the winter wind cut through a wooden hut at Jaworzno, an Auschwitz satellite camp. On his bunk, Zeev Sapir shivered constantly. He had swapped his extra shirt for a loaf of bread, and his scant remaining clothes hung loosely on his emaciated body.

At 4:30 A.M., a siren sounded. Sapir jumped out of bed to avoid the rain of blows he would endure if he delayed. He hurried outside with the hundred other prisoners from his hut, exposed now to the bitter wind and the cold as they awaited roll call. Then he began his twelve-hour shift at the Dachsgrube coal mines. He was required to fill forty-five wagons of coal per shift or receive twenty-five lashes. This would have been difficult if he had been in the best of health, but after a breakfast of only one cup of coffee and one-sixteenth portion of a loaf of bread, every shift was a Herculean effort. Sapir often fell short.

That evening, when Sapir returned to the camp, exhausted and with his skin coated with coal dust, he and the other 3,000 prisoners were ordered to start walking. The Red Army was advancing into Poland, the SS guards told them. Sapir did not much care. He was told to walk; he walked. This attitude—and the hand of fate—had kept him alive for the past eight months.

Once Sapir had arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary and been separated from his family, he had been beaten, herded off to a barracks, stripped, inspected, deloused, shaved, and tattooed on his left forearm with the sequence A3800. The next morning, he had been forced to work in the gas chambers where he suspected his family had been killed during the night. Sapir dragged the dead from the chambers and placed them on their backs in the yard, where a barber cut off their hair and a dental mechanic ripped out any gold teeth. Then he carried the corpses to large pits, where they were stacked like logs and burned to ashes. A channel running through the middle of the pit drained the fat exuding from the bodies. That fat was used to stoke the crematorium fires. The thick smoke, dark red flames, and acrid fumes poisoned his soul.

Sapir lost track of time, unaware of the day of the week or the hour of the day. He knew only night and day. Somehow he escaped execution, the fate of most workers tasked to operate the gas chambers and crematoriums. The Germans regularly killed these workers to keep their activities secret. Sapir, however, was sent to Jaworzno, where he would endure a different set of savageries.

Now, filing out of the satellite camp, Sapir and the other prisoners trudged through deep snow. They walked for two days, not knowing where they were going. Anyone who slowed down or stopped for a rest was shot. As night fell on the second day, they reached Bethune, a town in Upper Silesia, and were told to sit by the side of the road.

The commanding SS officer strode down the line, saying, Whoever is unable to continue may remain here, and he will be transferred by truck. Sapir had long since learned not to believe any such promises, but he was too tired, too cold, and too indifferent to care. Two hundred of the prisoners stayed put, while the others marched away. Sapir slept where he fell in the snow. In the morning, the group was ordered out to a field with shovels and pickaxes and told to dig. The earth was frozen, but they dug and dug, even though they knew they were digging their own graves.

That evening, they were taken to the dining hall at a nearby mine. All the windows had been blown out by air raids. A number of SS officers followed them inside, led by a deputy officer named Lausmann. Yes, I know you are so hungry, he said in a sympathetic tone as a large pot was brought into the hall.

Sapir gathered with the other prisoners, starved and almost too weary to stand. The most desperate pushed to the front, hoping for food. They were killed first. Lausmann grabbed one prisoner after the next, leaned him over the pot, and shot him in the neck. He fired and fired. In the middle of the massacre, a young prisoner began making a speech to whoever would listen. The German people will answer to history for this, he declared before receiving a bullet as well.

Lausmann continued to fire until there were only eleven prisoners left, Sapir among them. Before Sapir could be summoned forward, Lausmann’s superior called him out of the hall. The SS guards took the remaining prisoners by train to the Gleiwitz concentration camp, where they were thrown into a cellar filled with potatoes. Ravenous, they ate the frozen potatoes. In the morning, they were marched out to the forest with thousands of others. Suddenly, machine guns opened fire, mowing down the prisoners. Sapir ran through the trees until his legs gave out. He was knocked out by the fall. He awakened alone, with a bloody foot and only one shoe. When the Red Army found him, he weighed sixty-four pounds. His skin was as yellow and dry as parchment. It was January 1945. He would not regain anything close to physical health until April.

Sapir would never forget the promise Eichmann had made in the Munkács ghetto or the call to justice by his fellow prisoner the moment before his execution. But many, many years would pass before he was brought forward to remember these things.

2

AS THE WAR DREW to a close, the world was about to come face-to-face with the vestiges of the horror that Sapir had survived. On April 12, 1945, the Allies opened a road to Berlin. The Rhine River had been crossed weeks earlier, and the British and Canadian armies stormed east across northern Germany in their Sherman tanks. The American armies had encircled the Ruhr Valley, cutting off Hitler’s industrial complex and opening up a huge hole in the western front. Only a handful of ragtag German divisions stood between eighty-five Allied divisions and Berlin. A spearhead of the U.S. Ninth Army was already establishing bridgeheads on the Elbe River, just sixty miles from the capital of the Third Reich. To the east of Berlin, 1.25 million Russian soldiers with 22,000 pieces of artillery were on the banks of the Oder River, a mere thirty-five miles away from the capital.

While these forces mustered for the final defeat of Germany, two Wehrmacht colonels flying a white flag from their Mercedes approached the forward headquarters of the British 159th Battalion. They came with an offer of a local cease-fire in order to hand over control of Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp plagued with typhus located a few miles from the advancing British tanks. That same day, General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, entered the work camp near the village of Ohrdurf. He shuddered at what he saw.

Reports of the genocidal acts committed by the Germans had reached the Allies over the course of the war. As early as the summer of 1941, code breakers at Britain’s Bletchley Park had intercepted transmissions that described in detail the mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1942, Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish resistance movement, had put himself in a position to be thrown into Auschwitz, from which he periodically sent out reports that reached Western governments. Two Slovakian Jews had escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau at the cusp of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, and they had provided detailed reports on the number of transports coming to the camp, the nationalities of the arrivals, and their fate in the gas chambers. It was their account that had led to the spate of protests to Admiral Horthy against the Hungarian deportations in 1944, including one from President Roosevelt that stated, To the Hitlerites, subordinates, functionaries, and satellites, to the German people and all other peoples under the Nazi yoke, we have made clear our determination to punish all participation in these acts of savagery.

Roosevelt had made a similar declaration as early as October 1942. Two months later, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden had announced to the House of Commons that Hitler’s aim was to exterminate the Jewish people. The British view at that time, penned by Winston Churchill in a note to his cabinet in 1943, was that after arrest, the German leaders should have a brief trial to ensure their identity and, six hours later, be shot to death . . . without reference to higher authority. Curiously, it was Joseph Stalin, no stranger to kangaroo courts, who had reined in Churchill with the help of Roosevelt. On a visit by Churchill to Moscow in October 1944, Stalin had insisted that no executions should occur without a fair trial, otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them. Still, as the war neared its close, Allied leaders continued to jostle over how best to bring the Nazis to justice.

Plans to capture these criminals were barely in preparation. First, the Allies were having difficulty settling on who should be targeted as a war criminal. The British held the narrow view that the Allies should go after only those major German figures whose notorious offenses . . . have no special geographical location. The Americans and Russians wanted a much broader definition. This resulted in a confusing number of war criminal lists. Not only did the Allies lack one definitive list, but more important, by April 1945 they had organized only seven investigative teams, numbering roughly five officers and seven enlisted men each, to find these war criminals. In contrast, an Anglo-American operation code-named Paperclip recruited 3,000 investigators to spread throughout the Third Reich to arrest top German scientists and to collect technological information before the Russians got their hands on both. Those charged with tracking down the war criminals did not have so much as an operational code name. Such were the priorities of Washington and London as the war in Europe drew to a close.

Despite the intelligence reports General Eisenhower had read on the German atrocities, he found himself completely unprepared for Ohrdurf. Guided by former inmates, he and his staff saw men in the hospital who had been brutally tortured and were starving, lying shoulder to shoulder, expecting nothing more than death to arrive. In a basement, he saw a gallows where prisoners had been hung by piano wire long enough that their toes touched the floor, delaying death but prolonging the agony that preceded it. In one of the yards, he saw some 40 corpses, riddled with lice, stacked in rows. In an adjoining field, he saw 3,200 more corpses, many with gunshot wounds to the back of the head, next to a pyre of wood clearly intended to destroy all traces of their existence. General Omar Bradley, who accompanied Eisenhower, could not even speak; the hard-nosed General George Patton vomited against a wall. As he left Ohrdurf, Eisenhower told his officers, "I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against." Once back at headquarters, the shaken supreme commander sent messages to Washington and London demanding that legislators and newspaper reporters come to Ohrdurf. He wanted these crimes documented.

Over the next several days, the Americans liberated larger camps such as Nordhausen and Buchenwald. On April 15, the British finally entered Bergen-Belsen, bringing reporters and cameramen with them to document the 60,000 living skeletons who staggered toward their jeeps. An Evening Standard journalist wrote, The indignity of death above ground—the bared teeth, the revealed frame that should be sacred, and once was sacred to some loved one, the piled bodies in their ghastly grayness, the pitiable little thing with claws instead of a hand that was a baby, still within the protecting grasp of an emaciated bone that was once a mother’s arm—all on the Nazi death heap. The photographs and newsreels from Bergen-Belsen and the camps that Eisenhower opened to reporters all made a huge impression on the public. The Jewish Chronicle, which had published details on Auschwitz after its liberation by the Russians months before, now asked, Why have we had to wait till now for this widespread revulsion?

Finally, the flesh-and-blood horror of the Final Solution was revealed, and vividly so, to the public and its leaders. With every day, more monstrous evidence was discovered and documented, and the pursuit of those responsible increased in importance.

By April 13, the once great capital of Germany was in ruins. Frequent air raids had devastated the