98 pages • 3 hours read
The Nazi Hunters
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Symbols & Motifs
Concentration Camp Tattoos
When Zeev Sapir is brought to Auschwitz, he receives a tattoo on his left forearm—A3800. Shortly after, his family is murdered, and Sapir spends his time at the concentration camp in constant fear, before escaping his own execution. Eighteen years later, in Jerusalem for Adolf Eichmann's trial, Sapir shows the court his tattoo. The tattoo is not only the physical mark of the violence of the Holocaust on its survivors, it is a symbol for the permanence of history, irrespective of the attempts to efface it.
The tattoo was not the first measure given to ostracize, segregate, and humiliate the Jewish populations of Europe during the Second World War. Jews were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing, and were forcibly moved into ghettos well before they were given the tattoo. However, the tattoo was not just a literal sign of Nazi Germany's efforts to set Jewish people apart, but rather the penultimate stage of their plan to erase them forever. No one who received a tattoo was expected to survive; all were destined to be killed, either immediately in the gas chambers, or slowly, through forced labor. The tattoo then, is a kind of paradoxical symbol—the proof of the genocide, made permanent, to be carried by its survivors as long as they live.
One of the major themes of the book is the attempt to suppress and rewrite history. The tattoo fits into this reading as a marker of this intention, a marker which was intended to be erased. For Zeev Sapir and others, displaying the tattoo was more than a symbol of resilience and defiance; it was a gesture which would, in Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's words, "remind the world of its responsibilities," with respect to history. In a time where the focus was moving on, and building the future, the opportunity was created to imbue this future with lessons of the past.
The House on Chacabuco Street
In Buenos Aires, Eichmann's residence is a "wretched little house" at 4621 Chacabucostreet. Chacabuco Street was remote and isolated, with no running water or electricity. Few in the intelligence services believe this is where Adolf Eichmann actually lives. They cannot reconcile the power and authority he once had during the war with the living situation he has after the war. Because of this prejudice, when Sylvia Hermann meets Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Isser Harel's own agent does not believe her when she says she’s located Eichmann. Three years later, Fritz Bauer is finally able to convince Israeli agents that Eichmann does indeed live at the house. By then, however, he has moved, and nearly escaped entirely. The house on Chacabuco Street comes across as a symbol of how wrong the Israeli agents were, and illustrates the lengths Eichmann was willing to go to reinvent himself as "Ricardo Klement."
The immediate significance of Eichmann's house has to do with the manner in which prejudice and expectations shape our perception. For the intelligence professionals, with years of experience, an image of Adolf Eichmann had been created, one of influence, power, and prestige. This image was not illogical, as it corresponded with the facts of his wartime persona. As the accounts of Eichmann's years describe, he lived extravagantly, having stolen an immense amount of wealth and property from Europe's Jewish populations. It was inconceivable to these investigators and spies that Eichmann would just as soon abandon these riches; it did not fit the conception they created of him. Moreover, Eichmann was associated, in their minds, with visible and tangible power: someone in command of thousands of men, with the ability to uproot and destroy literally millions of lives, had to have retained some vestige of that former power. The investigation and hunt for Eichmann was derailed and nearly lost by these expectations.
What these missteps amounted to then, was a gross underestimation of Eichmann's own resolve, and his determination to separate himself from his past crimes and identity. As Eichmann's flight from his position in Nazi Germany is reconstructed in the narrative, we learn more details of his life, and the long and complicated process leading him to Buenos Aires. Working solely off his flamboyant behavior in wartime, the Israelis underestimated Eichmann's ability to shed those parts of his identity, when the need arose.
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