Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb Read Free Book Online Page A

occupation. Every day, more than seven hundred individuals on the automatic arrest list were imprisoned and held for further interrogation in order to discover the nature of their actions during the war for a potential trial. Many of their brethren were dealt with more swiftly.
    Although the Russians took several top Nazis into custody for Allied trials, their revenge was often exacted on the spot—contrary to Stalin's earlier admonishment to Churchill about the need for fair trials. With the help of local Communists and camp survivors, the Russian secret service, the NKVD, rounded up many suspected Nazi criminals and shipped them to prisons in the Soviet Union, where they were never heard from again. Others were executed, their backs crisscrossed with machine gun bullets.
    The Russians were not the only ones to administer rough justice. After the war was over, groups of Jewish avengers—made up of camp survivors, resistance fighters, and soldiers from the Jewish Brigade (settlers in Palestine who had joined a special British army group in 1944)—hunted down and summarily killed Gestapo and other SS men who had committed crimes against Jews. The Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force based in Palestine, directed some of these squads. Others operated completely on their own. Often masquerading as British military police, the squads seized their victims at night, drove them to a secluded spot in the woods or by a lake, and then shot or drowned them. One group even carried out a plan to kill 15,000 German POWs held in an American camp near Nuremberg by sprinkling their bread with white arsenic powder. More than 2,000 prisoners became sick, but none died.
    With so many hell-bent on rooting out the Nazis, Adolf Eichmann had one advantage: he had not yet been identified as a major war criminal. His name was on the Allied lists, specifically for his "activities" in Czechoslovakia, but at this point he was a mere lieutenant colonel among tens of thousands of entries. The Allies had yet to learn the degree of his involvement in the Final Solution. If Colonel Matteson had been aware of the activities of the chief of Department IVB 4 when he had captured Kaltenbrunner, perhaps Eichmann also would have been captured within days. But given the late start of the Allied investigation into Nazi war crimes, he had escaped.
     
     
    Eichmann and Jänisch walked and hitchhiked west from Altaussee toward Salzburg. They evaded Allied troops, hiding in fields when they heard soldiers approach, and slept in abandoned barns at night. The fifty-mile journey took several days, but just when they had the city in their sights, an American patrol spotted them, and they were forced to surrender. Eichmann introduced himself as Luftwaffe corporal Adolf Barth, using the surname of his Berlin grocer, but there was little further interrogation. The patrol brought Eichmann and Jänisch to a hastily erected camp, which had a single strand of barbed wire as a fence and no searchlights. It was crowded with German soldiers who had been found wandering around the area, all of them worn-out and hungry and still wearing their uniforms for lack of other clothes. Most wanted some food and a place to sleep, much like the 9 million POWs already held by the Allies throughout northwestern Europe, and there was not much need for security.
    As soon as night fell, Eichmann and Jänisch sneaked out of the camp and walked to Salzburg. The dome of the city's main cathedral had collapsed, and many of the buildings and houses by the train station had been razed, but for the most part, Salzburg was one of the few cities in Germany and Austria whose historic center had survived the war. Eichmann knew its prewar beauty well; he had spent his honeymoon there ten years before. For the next few days, the two SS officers hid in the winding cobblestone alleys of the old city, away from the Allied patrols.
    One afternoon, Eichmann hiked up to Salzburg's famed eleventh-century