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Abandoned Mistress. The Russians closed in on Budapest, and it became obvious that Germany's capitulation was only a matter of weeks. Eichmann's response was to step up his shipments to the slaughterhouses. "We must hurry," he said. Then he decamped, leaving behind him his aristocratic mistress, Baroness Ingrid von Ihme. He assured other SS men he would commit suicide, that he would "leap into my grave happy because we will at least have wiped out Europe's Jews."
But when the end came, Eichmann meekly surrendered to U.S. troops, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal and calling himself Adolf Earth. When questioning began to get intensive, he escaped from the P.W. camp and hid out as a lumberjack in northern Germany. The mysterious attraction Eichmann held for some women smoothed the way: unanimously, they found him polite, considerate, and filled with a romantic melancholy. After three years' concealment, he made contact with the still existent Nazi underground and was smuggled through Switzerland to Italy. There, posing as an anti-Communist refugee, he got a Red Cross D.P. travel document and sailed for Argentina.
How had Eichmann slipped through everyone's hands? Partly, it was his very physical greyness, his ability in any room or group to fade into the background. Besides, he had learned all the bureaucratic tricks. "The important thing," he assured an aide, "is to be covered by your superiors at all times." In his years in power, after every conference with his bosses, Eichmann made full notes of all that was said. He was meticulous in memos to indicate just who had ordered him to do what. Orders that might prove damaging, he sent out over the name of a superior or inferior. When an SS man in Yugoslavia wired that he had 8,000 Jews but no transport to send them to the death camps, the reply came back, "Eichmann proposes shooting," but it was signed by one Rademacher—it would be Eichmann's word against his.
As a result, his name barely appears in the 190 pages of the Nürnberg trial judgment. Only after the trial, during the painstaking sifting of the voluminous Nazi archives, did it become clear how Eichmann, as chief of Bureau IV A 4 b, had had total charge of rounding up all Jews in Nazi-held Europe. It was 14 more years before Israeli agents found their man in Argentina and spirited him to Jerusalem, where he stood last week in a glass cage for all to see.