Killing the SS

Killing the SS by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard traces the decades-long pursuit of Nazi war criminals who escaped justice after World War II. The book centers on four fugitive members of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the paramilitary organization that operated Nazi Germany's concentration camps and carried out the Holocaust, and the individuals who tracked them down.

The narrative opens on May 7, 1945, as Germany formally surrendered. SS leader Heinrich Himmler, architect of the death camp system, fled toward the Harz Mountains disguised with an eye patch and false papers. His group was detained at a British checkpoint near Bremervörde and brought to an interrogation camp, where Himmler revealed his identity. During a strip search, a physician discovered a cyanide capsule in his mouth; Himmler bit down and died within 15 minutes. Four SS fugitives remained at large: Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary; Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz; Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon"; and Adolf Eichmann, who organized the mass deportation of Jews to death camps.

At the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, 12 top Nazi leaders received death sentences, but only one SS member was among the condemned. The book introduces Benjamin Ferencz, a 25-year-old Romanian-born Jewish attorney educated at Harvard who served in the U.S. Army's War Crimes Section. Ferencz entered concentration camps after liberation to compile evidence of atrocities. After his discharge in late 1945, he vowed never to return to Germany, but the government persuaded him to go back.

In spring 1947, Ferencz discovered secret Gestapo files near Berlin documenting the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that murdered over one million civilians. At 27, he became chief prosecutor, trying 22 Einsatzgruppen officers using only captured German documents. SS Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, whose unit killed over 90,000 people, admitted under cross-examination to ordering the execution of Jewish women and children. Ohlendorf was sentenced to death and hanged in 1951, though only four of the 14 death sentences were ultimately carried out.

The book traces how thousands of war criminals escaped Europe through "ratlines," organized escape routes through Italy and Spain facilitated by the Swiss government, the Red Cross, and elements of the Vatican. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also aided former Nazis in exchange for intelligence on the Soviet Union. Argentine president Juan Perón, who admired Nazi methods, designed a secret program bringing roughly 40,000 German-heritage immigrants to Argentina, including former SS soldiers recruited to locate and transport fugitives.

Josef Mengele, who performed horrific medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, escaped in April 1949 under a false name, crossing the Brenner Pass into Italy, obtaining Red Cross identity papers, and sailing from Genoa to Buenos Aires. Adolf Eichmann followed a similar path, escaping from an American prisoner of war camp in January 1946, hiding in northern Germany for four years, and traveling the same ratline to Argentina in 1950 under the name "Ricardo Klement." He reunited with his wife, Vera, and their sons in 1952.

The hunt for Eichmann gained momentum in 1957, when Fritz Bauer, a Jewish German prosecutor who faced constant death threats, secretly informed Israeli officials that Eichmann had been traced to Argentina. Bauer bypassed the German judiciary, which was infiltrated by former Nazis, and turned to Israel instead. The key breakthrough came from Lothar Hermann, a blind concentration camp survivor in Buenos Aires whose teenage daughter Sylvia had been dating Eichmann's son Nicholas. After reading a newspaper article about Eichmann, Sylvia visited the family's home and confirmed their identity when Nicholas called an older man "Father" in front of her.

Isser Harel, director of the Mossad (Israel's intelligence agency), initially closed the case in 1958 after agents mistakenly concluded Eichmann would never live in a run-down apartment. Bauer returned with corroborating evidence in late 1959, and the investigation reopened. Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni, a German-born Jew who had lost all remaining relatives in the Holocaust, traveled to Buenos Aires in March 1960 and located Eichmann's new home on Garibaldi Street.

On May 11, 1960, a 10-man Mossad team kidnapped Eichmann as he walked home from a bus stop. Agent Peter Malkin tackled him, and after a brief struggle, the team bundled him into a car. Eichmann was held for nine days in a safe house while agents confirmed his identity. The team smuggled him onto a flight operated by El Al, Israel's national airline, which had carried a diplomatic delegation to Argentina's 150th anniversary celebrations. Dressed in a crew uniform and sedated, Eichmann was placed in a first-class seat and cleared the airport despite a brief delay over a missing flight-plan signature.

Eichmann's trial began on April 11, 1961, in Jerusalem. Nearly 100 witnesses delivered testimony about the Holocaust. Eichmann pleaded not guilty, presenting himself as a minor bureaucrat following orders, but his arrogance emerged under cross-examination. On December 15, 1961, he was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Ramleh Prison on May 31, 1962, and his ashes were scattered at sea off the coast of Haifa.

The Mossad attempted to capture Mengele simultaneously with Eichmann but failed. Aharoni tracked Mengele to a property outside São Paulo in 1962, but Harel refused to authorize a kidnapping, having redirected resources to countering German scientists building rockets for Egypt. Mengele spent his final years in isolation, nearly broke. On February 7, 1979, he had a stroke while swimming at Bertioga beach and drowned. His death went unknown until 1985, when a police raid on the home of his contact Hans Sedlmeier uncovered coded records leading to his grave. Scientists confirmed the exhumed remains were Mengele's.

Klaus Barbie, protected for years by the CIA and the Bolivian military, was arrested in 1983 after a change in Bolivia's government. French Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld had spent years compiling testimony about Barbie's atrocities, including his torture of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin in June 1943. Barbie tortured Moulin for a week; Moulin died on July 8 without betraying the Resistance. Extradited to France, Barbie was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to life in prison, and died of leukemia in 1991.

The mystery of Martin Bormann persisted for decades. Skeletal remains found at a Berlin rail yard in 1972 were declared to be his, but doubts lingered after dental investigation revealed work performed using techniques unavailable during the war. DNA testing in 1998 confirmed the remains were Bormann's, and his ashes were scattered in the Baltic Sea in 1999.

The book recounts additional cases. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor and prominent Nazi hunter, tracked Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibór death camps, for three years before Stangl's 1967 arrest in São Paulo. Stangl was convicted in West Germany but died of a heart attack within six months. Elfriede Huth Rinkel, a former dog handler at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, lived in San Francisco for decades, married to Fred Rinkel, a Jewish man who lost both parents in death camps and never knew his wife's past. In 2004, Department of Justice investigator Eli Rosenbaum confronted her; she was deported to Germany in 2006 but never charged.

In a final revelation, the book discloses that SS commando Otto Skorzeny, once called "the most dangerous man in Europe," was secretly recruited by the Mossad in 1962 to help eliminate German scientists working on Egypt's rocket program. Skorzeny personally killed Nazi rocket scientist Heinz Krug on the Mossad's behalf. The book concludes that it was Israel and its supporters who ultimately brought down the SS, a task complicated by the persistence of Nazi money and power after the war.