Vera, think of it this way: what would have happened if one of the many bombs had got me during the war. This way, Fate gave us all those extra years. We must be grateful to him for that.
—Adolf Eichmann, farewell letter to his wife, May 31, 1962
1
On July 14, 1950, the Giovanna C reached Buenos Aires harbor with its cargo of Third Reich imports, and Adolf Eichmann set foot on Argentine soil for the first time. Years later he would still have a vivid memory of the moment: “My heart was filled with joy. The fear that someone could denounce me vanished. I was there, and in safety!”1 From his observation, one might almost think he was a prodigal son returning home, not a man stepping out into an unknown land. Where other émigrés—particularly those traveling on false papers—might have been contending with feelings of uncertainty, or at best curiosity and a sense of expectation, Eichmann remembered feeling nothing of the sort. He had it far easier than most, of course: he was not only traveling with old comrades, but was greeted at the harbor by yet more willing helpers and was immediately absorbed into the exile community. At first, he stayed in a guesthouse that was used to accommodate newly arrived Nazis. On August 3 he presented his proof of identity, along with his application for Argentine personal documents. He was now officially seven years younger, and his name (spelled the Hispanic way, with one c) was Ricardo Klement. He had been born in Bolzano on May 23, 1913, was unmarried, Catholic, a technician by trade, and stateless. Before long Horst Carlos Fuldner, the German-Argentine people smuggler who had arranged papers for him in 1948, found him an apartment in Florida, a well-to-do part of the city. Eichmann moved in with another new Argentine, Fernando Eifler. A stopgap job in a metalwork shop provided him with an income. He worked under an engineer who, in an earlier life, had been a specialist adviser to SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler, the leader of the SS’s civil engineering department; he had also been responsible for building concentration camps and extermination facilities.2 The engineer offered to keep Eichmann on, but like many other German fugitives, Eichmann had set his sights on something better. “One day,” as he would later recount, “a formerUntersturmbannführer from the Waffen-SS contacted me to let me know that ‘the organization’ had found a position for me. A new company, headed by Argentines and Germans, was going to build a hydroelectric plant to provide electricity in the city of Tucumán, at the foot of the Andes, in the north of the country. And I was to take up a management position, as a lead organizer.”3 The new company, which had coincidentally been registered a week after Eichmann’s arrival, was called CAPRI—Compañia Argentina para Proyectos y Realizaciones Industriales, Fuldner y Cía. As Uki Goñi reports, the Argentines joked about the “Capri Fisherman,” playing on the lyrics of a contemporary German song. They referred to the firm as the Compañia Alemana para Recièn Immigrados (the German Company for Recent Immigrants).4 The company was, as they suspected, a Perón-sponsored cover organization for Third Reich technocrats, which existed thanks mainly to a large government contract for developing hydroelectric plants. It was a kind of occupational therapy for those who had recently arrived, only very few of whom were qualified for their jobs.5
Eichmann worked for the company’s project office, as part of a surveying team that, over the following years, would employ up to three hundred people in the remote province of Tucumán. Geographically speaking, Tucumán was an ideal location for a plant, and until 1955, it was governed by Fernando Riera and Luis Cruz, members of Perón’s party. During this period, the province had just over seven hundred thousand inhabitants. It lies in the northwest of Argentina and stretches to the eastern mountain range of the Andes. From the savannah-like Sierras Subandinas, the landscape becomes first hilly, then mountainous. Apart from the subtropical climate, with average temperatures ranging from 77 degrees F in the summer to 55 degrees F in the winter, it must have reminded Eichmann a little of Austria. The living conditions, however, were not quite as middle class as his family’s in Linz. Tucumán’s principal industry was sugarcane; hydroelectricity would bring modern technology to the region and take advantage of its high levels of precipitation. It was a simple life but not without comfort. At first Eichmann lived in the south of the region, in La Cocha, where CAPRI’s project office was located and where the company had rented a house and two housekeepers for him.6 This was no solitary existence: trips to the capital city, eight hundred miles away, were also part of his new life. Whenever he stayed in Buenos Aires, he had use of a desk in the firm’s office at 374 Avenida de Córdoba. Hans Fischböck, a former SS Brigadeführerwho had been the Nazis’ finance minister in Austria, overseeing the systematic theft of Jewish property, worked in the same building, one floor up.7 Elsewhere, Eichmann may well have been reunited with many more old acquaintances than we know about. Berthold Heilig, for example, also found work with CAPRI, through Karl Klingenfuß. He had initially sought help from Ludolf von Alvensleben, Himmler’s former chief adjutant and the highest-ranking Nazi in Argentina, and Eduard Roschmann, who a few short years previously had been in charge of the Riga Ghetto.8 In expat circles, finding the right people was easy. Klingenfuß had worked in the German Foreign Office’s “Jewish Department,” and until 1967 he would be the head of the German-Argentine Chamber of Commerce. Within the Sassen circle, Eichmann referred to him succinctly as “[Eberhard von] Thadden’s representative.”9 He was involved in the deportation of ten thousand Jews from Belgium—though after the war, he claimed that he had begged to be given a different position to avoid it. Klingenfuß, who was friends with Johann von Leers, was well aware of who Eichmann was and what he looked like.10
Eichmann would later tell the Sassen circle about meeting Erich Rajakowitsch in Buenos Aires in 1952. He had been a close colleague, whom Eichmann personally recruited for the Vienna Central Office in 1938. A lawyer, he had previously distinguished himself in the commercial exploitation of passports for Jews, and he had seemed like the ideal SS man and legal mind for Eichmann’s department.11 Eichmann was proved right: as his “adviser on Jewish affairs” in Holland, Rajakowitsch had been jointly responsible for the “successful” deportation of around one hundred thousand people. A lot of German was spoken on the streets of Buenos Aires.12
Eichmann also met old colleagues and associates in Tucumán. Armin Schoklitsch had been the former director of the Polytechnic in Graz, as well as an SS man and an SD informer. He was now the scientific head of the Tucumán project. A civilian once more, he wasn’t the only fugitive from Styria: several other members of its former Gauleitung were working in Tucumán. The NSDAP district leader in Brunswick, Berthold Heilig, and several regular SS men had also settled down there.13 Heilig’s children still remember Eichmann, with whom their father occasionally had a beer and made plans for the future—though Heilig’s position at CAPRI was never as good as Eichmann’s.14 Herbert Hagel, former secretary to the gauleiter of Linz, was also employed there. In 1944–45, it had been his job to transport valuables stolen from Hungarian Jews to Altaussee. In an interview in 1999, Hagel said quite openly that, in Tucumán, he had asked Eichmann about the real number of Jews killed. Eichmann answered: “I don’t know how many died—half a million maximum.”15
The episode has a far more interesting aspect than Eichmann lying about figures: during this period, he was quite clearly using his true identity. He was able to do so because he was surrounded by people who would have recognized him anyway. Men like Hagel knew Eichmann was the right person to talk to if you wanted to find out about the extermination of the Jews and the number of victims involved. Eichmann’s reputation as the one surviving insider with an overview of the murder quotas preceded him to Argentina. Another CAPRI employee, Heinz Lühr, who seems to have socialized with the major figures of the Third Reich without being initiated into their circles, described the CAPRI community in Tucumán as a place where “everyone was hiding from his own past.” But Eichmann’s reserved manner piqued Lühr’s curiosity, and he asked rather too many questions. Schoklitsch’s wife took him aside and admonished him: “Herr Lühr, leave the past alone, that man has had troubles enough in his life.”16 People in this community weren’t alone in hiding from their pasts; they were sympathetic and provided mutual protection against curious but clueless outsiders. CAPRI was the ideal retreat for oppressed mass murderers.
Eichmann’s traveling companion Herbert Kuhlmann oversaw the equipment for the project and quickly ascended the firm’s hierarchy. Meanwhile Eichmann’s work lay in raising water levels, which meant traveling long distances on horseback with a troop of men. Someone always had a camera, and he stopped shying away from pictures. “Tucumán was a happy time,” he would later recall. “I also had the opportunity to indulge one of my greatest pleasures: riding. I spent many hours in the saddle, on horseback treks.”17Eichmann looks relaxed as he poses in the countryside, in a cable car, and even on his horse. Wearing a poncho, surrounded by colleagues; climbing to a plateau with Argentina’s highest mountain in the background; working in the rain; clad in white and riding a galloping gray horse in the sun—the images could have come from a cigarette ad. Life in Argentina had taken away his horror of being seen and recognized. He liked his new life and the recognition he got from the people around him.
Holding the position of “management expert” didn’t just mean leading a troop of men on a surveying expedition; Eichmann also paid regular visits to Tucumán University. Here he met better-qualified fellow fugitives and new associates, like the professor José Darmanín.18 In 1993 Darmanín would still remember the man who had regularly brought his colleague Schoklitsch the survey results, and had so enjoyed chatting about the country and its people “in good French.” Eichmann clearly hadn’t lost the knack of winning people over and dazzling them with his linguistic abilities. He had last studied French at school and in reality spoke and understood only a few words of the language.19 This talent would doubtless have proved useful in his efforts to learn Spanish as quickly as possible. He was eager to belong in this country, where (with a little more help from “my friends”) he had been issued his first Argentine identity card, and permanent residency, on October 2, 1950.20 Eichmann was deeply impressed by Argentina’s hospitality. As a National Socialist, he wasn’t used to a country treating foreigners this way.
A Christmas Card from Uncle Ricardo
Friends both old and new; a new identity; a job; financial security—the conditions were now in place for Eichmann to take the next step back toward regaining his old life. He found a house in Tucumán and wrote a letter to Austria. “Six years had passed,” he would later recall, “since I said goodbye to my wife and three sons, whom I had to leave behind in the little lakeside town in the Alps of my Fatherland. I had not forgotten that they would be closely watched for any clue as to where I was. But by now it might be possible to risk making contact with them. Using a ring-exchange that had also been built up by ‘the organization,’ my wife and I were able to send letters to each other. In 1952 the leading National Socialists in Buenos Aires arranged for my wife to be issued money by certain contacts in Germany, for the journey to South America.”21
Eichmann wrote these words in Israel, hinting at an extensive network whose operations went beyond mere communication. The large population of German refugees had created not only a courier service but travel agencies, money transfer routes, a kind of welfare system, and services for problems with all kinds of papers.
Providing aid to would-be escapees was a big business in Argentina, and many immigrants derived a large part of their income from it. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was an internationally admired flying ace and the most highly decorated serviceman under Hitler, with medals including the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. He went into the aid business shortly after his arrival in Buenos Aires, in June 1948. He teamed up with Constantin von Neurath, a doctor of law who was named after his father (Germany’s former foreign minister, who had been tried and imprisoned for war crimes in Nuremberg), to found Kameradenwerk (Comrade Work). This was a fund for legal and emergency aid, to help those who had been brought low by the failure of the Reich’s final victory. His services included sending parcels, arranging money transfers, and organizing legal representation. Rudel’s work was made easier by the friendship he cultivated with President Perón and the fact that he could provide expert assistance in building up the Argentine air force, which gave him government contracts and import licenses. Neurath went on to become director of Siemens Argentina S.A. and used this position to continue helping his comrades.22 Others did what they could, taking on courier duties or donating money.
Rudel was also quick to make contact with the most successful German network in Argentina: the Dürer House. It was the front for a multilayered organization, led by a man of German descent who had been born in Buenos Aires in 1921. Eberhard Ludwig Cäsar Fritsch was a radical National Socialist, though he had never had the opportunity to put his beliefs into criminal practice, having experienced the rise and fall of Nazi Germany only at a distance, from Argentina. He had been allowed into the German Reich only once, for the World Congress of the Hitler Youth, which took place in 1935, on a huge campsite near Berlin, when Hitler-land was still eager to appear fresh and open to the world.23 You can imagine how impressed the fourteen-year-old leader of the Argentine Hitler Youth must have been by this advertisement for the party. But instead of going to war, Fritsch had to go back to school on the other side of the world. Afterward he worked as a German teacher at the Fredericus School. He gained some publishing experience as the editor of a youth magazine before taking over Dürer in 1946.24 With the help of financiers, he bought up the remainder of a German bookstore and opened a business that was simultaneously a lending library, an antiquarian bookstore, and an arts-and-crafts store.25 Most important, it became a focal point for stranded, homesick Nazis.
Fritsch built on this aspect of his business by founding a publishing house. The Dürer Verlag was a contact point for people fresh off the boat, some of whom were even taken on as “editors” until something better turned up. Hans Hefelmann, a doctor of agronomy who was also one of the organizers of child euthanasia, and the head of the committee that classed people as “mentally ill,” found work there. When later put on trial, he would claim that he had ended up at Dürer quite by chance and worked on publications that were “the most pernicious and criminal that existed or were rumored to exist anywhere in the world after the war.” The fact that Gerhard Bohne knocked purposefully on Dürer’s door a short while later and also became an editor there was a similar sort of coincidence. Bohne had been the head of the T4 Central Bureau, which had planned the murder of seventy thousand people in psychiatric hospitals who had been earmarked by the Reichsausschuß under Hefelmann.26
But Fritsch did more than draw in the criminals who had been forced to leave Germany. He also targeted the camp followers, the far-right authors with infamous names who were allowed to remain in Germany but no longer had any way of getting published. Fritsch’s method was simple: he wrote letters. (These letters can now be found in the estates of these outmoded authors, in archives all over Germany.) Fritsch piqued their interest by painting himself as the spokesman for a group with political ambitions. He wanted only the best for his publishing house, with the aim of preserving “German culture.” “The good old names,” he said sycophantically, “are hardly to be heard today. And it is so important to get them back on the agenda.”27 He enclosed recommendations from other authors to whom he had already written,28 making Hitler’s flagship writers curious about this new offer. Werner Beumelburg asked his colleague Hans Grimm (notorious author of Volk ohne Raum— A People Without Space) about Fritsch. Grimm replied: “The people out there, including him, seem not just to be old party members but German expats with some backbone.”29 Fritsch became a promising contact for these writers, and above all, he began to collect addresses. He had something special to offer: the magazine El Sendero—Der Weg (The Path). By the end of the 1940s, the publication had begun to fuel concern in the West German press about an approaching “Fourth Reich” and powerful Nazi circles in Argentina. This pulpy magazine had an irresistible pull for dedicated National Socialists, with its Nazi ideology (including nightmarish racial theory) and fascist nostalgia—a combination of Alpine kitsch, sentimentality, and Teutonic romanticism, like a lace doily with a swastika pattern.30
Far-right authors were desperate to write for Der Weg. Wilfred von Oven, who was taken on as a Dürer author but never made it into Der Weg, spoke wistfully about the “world-renowned quality of this neo-Nazi magazine. Who wouldn’t want to be listed alongside such admired writers as Werner Beumelburg, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Herbert Böhne, Hans Grimm, Sven Hedin, Mirko Jelusich, Hanna Reitsch, Will Vesper, Anton Zischka, to mention … only the most important names. But I was never taken up into this Parnassus of the Third Reich.”31 Eichmann was to be more successful in this regard.
Aside from their fascination with his right-wing nationalist tone, these authors were attracted to Eberhard Fritsch for a far more tangible reason: he offered to pay them. Even his letters to potential authors usually came with a little Knorr packet, as a “small gift.” Dürer’s overseas authors actually welcomed the fact that they were mostly paid in grocery parcels rather than money: these people didn’t know how to write anything other than “blood and soil” literature, and when faced with a ban on teaching and publishing, they had no idea what they were going to live on. For all their uplifting dreams of an all-powerful ODESSA, it was the food parcels from the EROS Liebesgaben-Dienst that actually delivered the goods.32
At first, Fritsch sent parcels via Caritas, Pax (a charity in Basel), and Christian Aid, but then EROS established an office at 680 Reconquista, Buenos Aires. It was no coincidence that the EROS travel service was situated in the same part of town as the offices of CAPRI and Horst Carlos Fuldner’s bank. It had good reason to be there, as it was known as a “Nazi agency.”33 EROS was managed by Heiner Korn, who also headed the Argentine branch of the NSDAP and was the successor to its first leader, Heinrich Volberg, the head of the overseas arm of IG Farben.34 They advertised in Der Weg. Fritsch and Korn knew each other from their Nazi Party work, and they were alternately named as silent partners. Korn, who looked after his business well into his old age,35 built up a firm that was partly a bank and partly a money transfer business, aid organization, travel agency, and courier service. It was improvised and flexible. Its central warehouse for “charitable” aid supplies was in Düsseldorf, but it also had outposts in Switzerland, used for sendingmanuscripts and complementary copies back and forth.36 Fritsch was able to offer his authors a variety of things: as well as scarce and highly prized goods like coffee, cocoa, canned meat, fat, and chocolate (which were also a black-market currency), he could provide leather shoes and tailored suits. He had contacts for money transfers, and subscribers could pay their bills directly into the authors’ accounts. The letters of thanks from Dürer’s freelancers were suitably effusive, though there was also the occasional complaint when unexpected fees were levied at the transport stations. Even in the best Nazi circles, it would seem, people still liked to turn a profit from others’ desperate situations.
Eichmann’s new home country was a land of opportunity. Der Weg provided pragmatic route maps for people who had been forced to flee Germany, in the form of ads for travel agencies and Kameradenwerk, along with legal aid and people-tracing services. It also printed contact addresses in Buenos Aires, from the ABC Café to the store that specialized in quality German products—and was naturally staffed by “honest German servers.”
Fritsch’s greatest stroke of luck came in 1948, when he met the Dutch war correspondent and SS man Willem “Wim” Sassen. Fritsch not only rented a house to Sassen and his wife and children;37 he immediately signed him up to his publishing house. Sassen, a charismatic man with a remarkable talent for self-promotion, had a skill that the old overseas authors did not: he wrote in a fresh, inspiring, modern style of German. Writing under a number of pseudonyms, and ghostwriting for former Nazi bigwigs, he almost single-handedly raised Dürer’s circulation figures to previously undreamed-of levels. Sassen was also working as a chauffeur for Hans-Ulrich Rudel when Fritsch commissioned him to write Rudel’s first book, Trotzdem (In Spite of Everything). With his addition, the young, ambitious trio was complete.38 Rudel, Fritsch, and Sassen, with their diverse contacts, became sworn companions. They were bound by personal sympathy, a shared National Socialist worldview, and, not least, a common eye for profit. The existence of the trio far outlasted Dürer, and their joint projects would even include the defense of Adolf Eichmann.
Rudel, the flying ace, opened doors to vital contacts all over the world and kept up the connection with Germany through the legal aid he provided to comrades in need. Fritsch’s publishing house offered a refuge and a contact database. Sassen’s seductive language gave voice to Nazi nostalgia and kept the hope of a National Socialist renaissance alive. Backed by the highest Argentine circles, from Horst Carlos Fuldner all the way up to Perón himself, the far-right German immigrants had a powerful organization on their side. It’s no wonder that over the following years, they came to vastly overestimate their political influence.
By 1950 Der Weg’s circulation in West Germany had reached five figures. Distribution had largely been banned the previous year, and Fritsch tasked one of his authors with restructuring the distribution network, using intelligence service methods. The author, Juan (Hans) Maler, was a National Socialist who had been born in Harburg, near Hamburg; his real name was Reinhard Kopps. His methods didn’t rely on the official mail service, meaning that distribution could be neither prevented nor checked—and they were also fast. The two German distribution centers that have come to light also have strangely familiar names: Lüneberg and Berchtesgaden.39 The fact that the magazine was circulated regularly to 16,000 illegal subscribers in Germany, and to a further 2,500 in South Africa, tells us just how efficiently this network must have functioned. Unfortunately, in the 1960s Eberhard Fritsch instructed his wife to use the handwritten card index file of subscribers as fire lighters.40
Rudel hints at a crucial element of what Eichmann called the “ring circle” in his book Zwischen Deutschland und Argentinien. “Contact with the old homeland,” it claims, was “frequent and active” in Argentina, because “almost every week one acquaintance or another takes a trip to Europe, and every week there is someone who has ‘just got back from Germany.’ ”41 Fritsch and Rudel were adept at making people dependent on them, and they easily convinced travelers to carry more than just their own luggage. For men like Eichmann, whose CV prohibited any return to Germany, Nazi-run organizations like EROS, and Fritsch and Rudel’s willing mailmen, were the only sure way of sending letters and money home. Eichmann used this network because it was by far the most established. He worked for CAPRI and Horst Carlos Fuldner, for whom Willem Sassen also did the odd bit of work.42 Over the years that Eichmann spent in Argentina, the circle of people around Eberhard Fritsch would play an important role.43 The mutual trust was so great that in 1952, Eichmann charged Fritsch with taking care of the most valuable thing he had: his family. He didn’t have to improvise a method of making contact with his wife and children—plenty of organizational structures were on hand, and he was clearly aware of how to use them.
Over Christmas 1950, news reached Vera Eichmann in Altaussee that “the uncle of your children, whom everyone presumed dead, is alive and well.”44 From then on, she began telling her sons her very own Christmas story, about a far-off uncle they were going to visit, who had a horse named El Bravo. The letters were presumably sent via Vera’s father-in-law in Linz, for as Adolf Eichmann rightly suspected, various people were still keeping a close eye on his wife and children. Ever since Dieter Wisliceny and Wilhelm Höttl, under interrogation at the end of 1945, had told the CIC that Eichmann’s family was in Altaussee, Vera Eichmann had grown accustomed to house searches and constant surveillance. At first it was just the Allies’ representatives, but other hunters were soon sniffing around. Henryk “Manus” Diamant, the Romeo agent dispatched by Asher Ben Natan, had not only managed to find the first photo of the wanted man in the house of one of Eichmann’s lovers; he was also getting closer to Eichmann’s wife and children in his search for clues. Surveillance recommenced in 1947 at the latest, after Simon Wiesenthal prevented Vera Eichmann from having her husband declared dead. In July 1948 the family moved to an even smaller fishing village in the Altaussee commune, which did nothing to make discreet observation easier.45 The Christmas attempts to capture Eichmann in the late 1940s had not gone unnoticed; this little community was clearly too tight-knit for anything to remain a secret.46 Sending letters direct to the little village from Argentina would have been careless, particularly since the criminal investigator Valentin Tarra regularly questioned the mailman.47 And in Altaussee any visit from a stranger would be spotted. Linz, however, was an ideal place for a covert exchange of information, particularly as the Eichmanns still had an electronics store on one of the main shopping streets. Eichmann’s father relayed the happy news of his son’s safe arrival in Argentina to his brother in the Rhineland, making it all the more certain that the Christmas greeting had originally arrived in Linz.48
Once again Vera Eichmann was extremely circumspect. She took care not to tell the children the whole truth, so they would be in no danger of accidentally letting it slip. They had already mentioned “nice men” to her on several occasions. “They gave us chocolate and chewing gum,” Klaus Eichmann remembered many years later. “They wanted to know where Father was.”49 When Valentin Tarra questioned nine-year-old Dieter, the boy unwittingly gave out a cunning piece of disinformation: “He told me they were going to a big house in northern Germany, and he would have a father again. His uncle in northern Germany was going to give each of the boys a riding crop, and they would be very rich.”50 Vera Eichmann had to make preparations for their trip, and her husband made sure she received the necessary money and support for their travel documents. She was able to count on the support of her husband’s family. Tarra observed: “Eichmann’s brother who had the electrical store in Linz began to visit more often.”51
On February 12, 1952, the German embassy in Vienna issued Vera Eichmann temporary passports for herself and her sons. She had been able to show them a Heimatschein (certificate of family origin). This document had been used in Germany and Austria up to the mid-1930s as proof of nationality, giving people citizen’s rights in a particular commune; Heimatscheine are still recognized today as proof of German citizenship.52 Through her marriage in 1935, Vera Eichmann had Heimat rights to her husband’s place of birth, in Solingen, and the children of that marriage inherited the same rights. The Heimatscheine she showed the German embassy were produced on January 2, 1952, by the regional authority in Cologne. She hadn’t been to Cologne herself, so this must have been one of the services provided by the “organization.” The family disappeared in summer 1952, as inconspicuously as they could. “Frau Eichmann did not register her departure with the police, hand in her ration books, or request a leaving certificate for Klaus Eichmann from the school in Bad Aussee, not wanting to advise anyone of her new address. The rent continued to be paid,” as the observant Valentin Tarra later reported. By January 1, 1953, Tarra had more detailed information. “As I learned an hour ago,” he wrote to Simon Wiesenthal, “Veronika Liebl-Eichmann seems to have emigrated to South America in July 1952.”53 Disappearing from Altaussee was no easy matter. Still, the family accomplished their escape just as Adolf Eichmann had done two years previously, with flying colors. Vera Liebl and her sons, Klaus, Horst, and Dieter Eichmann, traveled from Vienna to Genoa and on to Argentina, with a visa from the Argentine embassy in Rome issued in their real names.54
We have known since the start of 2011 that the Eichmann family’s travel preparations did not go entirely unnoticed. On July 24, 1952, shortly before they boarded a ship in Italy, someone informed the Gehlen Organization (the precursor of the BND) that “Standartenführer EICHMANN is not in Egypt, but is using the alias CLEMENS in Argentina. E’s address is known to the editor-in-chief of the German newspaper Der Weg in Argentina.”55 In contrast to intelligence that claimed Eichmann was in Damascus or Egypt, the Argentine information is incredibly precise. Even with the knowledge we have today, it still provides a couple of remarkable insights. The news clearly didn’t come from an informant in Argentina, as we can deduce from the incorrect rank it attributes to Eichmann. Eichmann had been promised a promotion to Standartenführer at the end of 1944—a fact that had been celebrated by his department—but he had not actually received it. The judgments from the trials of leading Nazis were the only places where he was referred to as Standartenführer, although the judgment from the Nuremberg Trials was so well known that this information had spread throughout Europe.56 But in Argentina, Eichmann introduced himself using the rank under which he had become notorious: he was SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann from the Jewish Department, and this was how he signed dedications to comrades old and new. He chose to stick with the rank he had made into a symbol of terror for four years. In Argentina, at least, this wasn’t an attempt to make himself seem less important; as we will see, he used it ostentatiously, like a trademark. In Argentina, no one would have thought to pass on information about a Standartenführer. The misheard name Clemens also suggests this is secondhand intelligence. But the card from the intelligence service file reveals much more.
With help from his Argentine contacts, Eichmann had ensured that his wife received money and information for her escape, but Vera Eichmann also needed an address in Buenos Aires that she would be able to find in case of emergency. During the four-week trip, something unforeseen might happen, and a shack in a distant province would have been a tricky place for her to locate on her own, with no knowledge of the local language. A smarter idea was to give her Eichmann’s alias and the name of that reliable Buenos Aires host for German refugees, Eberhard Fritsch. It was this message that an informant, someone close to the “ring circle,” conveyed to the Gehlen Organization.57
There could hardly have been a more precise clue as to where Eichmann was. The name of the editor-in-chief of the German newspaper in Argentina could be found in every issue of 1952: “Editor-in-chief: Eberhard Fritsch” was plainly printed in the masthead, together with his address and telephone number.58 We could give the Gehlen Organization the benefit of the doubt here and accept that the misheard name and the incorrect rank made the information too vague for a successful search, so that “in 1952, even a thorough check would not have turned up a match,” especially as Eichmann didn’t even live in Buenos Aires.59 But this assumption is an insult to the German intelligence service, whose employees should at least have been able to manage a job one might assign to a newspaper intern. The rank was no reason to be “skeptical”; this was how Eichmann was described at the Nuremberg Trials. And a “double misspelling” of the name is also nonsense: anyone operating in the Spanish-speaking world knows that C and K can be interchangeable, meaning the residents’ register should be searched for both variations.60 But most important, Gehlen now had a contact address. No special training was necessary to read Der Weg’s masthead: if someone had made a call to colleagues in the BfV, which collected issues of Der Weg, they wouldn’t even have needed to purchase a copy.
The only hurdle then would be getting Fritsch to talk. But that would not have required extreme measures, as the behavior of the expats around Eichmann demonstrated—just a little cunning and a good story, the tools of the intelligence service trade. The Dürer office was like Grand Central Station; it was not a secret organization carefully concealed down a back alley. The publishing house was the place to go to find old friends in Argentina, no matter where they had moved, and the names Clemens and Eichmannwould have meant something to people there, even if an erroneous “s” had crept into the alias. Misheard names were a common phenomenon in Argentina, as people so rarely used their aliases in their own circles. It may be an uncomfortable insight for the German authorities, but a single check carried out in Buenos Aires would have sufficed to find Eichmann in 1952. We don’t know whether it was done, but we know only too well that neither the information nor the intelligence service’s response to it had any consequences.
Some might object that other, similar leads pointed to Eichmann being in the Middle East, and with such a confused mass of material, it was difficult to act on any one piece of information. Leaving aside the fact that imprecision was a common basic feature in these tip-offs, not one of the Middle East sources provided anything that was simultaneously as precise and as easy to check out as the Argentine lead, which was given to the Gehlen Organization before Vera Eichmann left Austria. Reports back from Syria and Egypt, where investigators soon reached a dead end, for obvious reasons, prove that in all those years, the German intelligence service assiduously checked out even the most fantastic of rumors. So there is no reason to suspect that the Gehlen Organization was less thorough in the case of the Argentine tip-off. On closer inspection of the index card, one detail jumps out: Clemens is not only quoted in the informant’s report of June 24, 1952; the name also appears in the card index and the file itself.61 Until the start of Eichmann’s trial, the former Obersturmbannführer was suspected of having used a number of other aliases in the Middle East. However, on this index card, Eichmann’s “DN” (for Deckname, or alias) is not Rudolfo Spee, Eckermann, Hirth, Alfred Eichenwald, Ernst Radinger, Smoel, Veres, Azar, Karl Brinkmann, or Eric.62 The entry is simple and almost correct: “Eichmann, Adolf DN Clemens.”
The tip-off and the alias remained hidden away in the Gehlen Organization’s card index. It took until 1957 for the people who were openly searching for Eichmann to piece together this puzzle, using information that had been available to the German intelligence service since 1952. In 1958 the CIA noted that the BND had an old report of Eichmann living in Argentina under the name Clemens. Nonetheless at the end of 1959, when the Rhineland-Pfalz State Office for the Protection of the Constitution put some specific queries to the BND, it replied that unfortunately, nothing more was known on Eichmann’s whereabouts than that he had been rumored to be in Egypt in 1952 and later in Argentina.63
During the shooting of his film Eichmanns Ende in 2009, the director Raymond Ley asked Rafael Eitan, the leader of the Israeli kidnap team, why it had taken Mossad two years to recognize the accuracy of a tip-off and put it to use. Eitan answered, with some embarrassment, that the clue had remained unheeded for two years: “We did nothing! It was only after two years that we started doing anything about it.” It is about time the heads of the German authorities summoned up the courage to be this candid about the failures of their long-dead predecessors and opened their archives to the public. Instead, they leave it to a tabloid newspaper to finally make these shaming documents available to all. In the best-case scenario, West Germany simply did nothing for eight years. It was only the Israelis, and a courageous German attorney general, who stopped Germany from being guilty of inaction for even longer.
The Salta64 docked in Buenos Aires on July 28, 1952, when the country was in mourning: Evita Perón, the first lady who had been held up as a saint, had died two days previously. Eichmann’s helpers in Argentina took their task seriously, making sure the family wasn’t being tailed by someone trying to find Adolf Eichmann. “There were several gentlemen down on the quay,” Klaus Eichmann remembered. “They were nice to us. I didn’t know any of them. Later in the hotel, there was another man. Mother said: children, this is Uncle Ricardo. He gave us 100 pesos, a lot of money at that time. We bought ice cream, sweets, and I bought my first cigarettes.”65 This allowed the married couple some time alone together. Eichmann had pulled it off: after seven years apart, living in the underground and working to finance their escape, he had a new life, and his family had been returned to him. Years later he would be uncharacteristically reticent about this subject, but his feelings were obvious all the same: “The reunion was indescribable.”66 As a prisoner in Jerusalem, he would be more verbose, explaining that he had been unable to tell his children who he was: “I was not allowed to be the father of my own sons. For Klaus, Horst, and Dieter, I was ‘Uncle Ricardo.’ ” But this was only for a short time, except on paper (as his documents were still in a false name), and in the company of strangers. The legend that no one knew Ricardo Klement’s true identity was part of Eichmann’s effort to shield his friends and helpers in Argentina. The reunited family ate dinner together and spent the night in the hotel, then took the Pullman Express to Tucumán, and from there they continued to Rio Potrero, where Eichmann had rented a house. When they were settled, he revealed his identity to his children, as Klaus Eichmann remembered: “He just said: ‘I am your father.’ Nothing more.”67
For Better, for Worse
After so many years apart, family life may not have been as harmonious as everyone involved later claimed. A house in the wilderness, with no electric lights, was a far cry from the standard of living Vera Eichmann had been used to in the early years of her married life. But this gaucho existence must have been incredibly exciting for the boys, who were sixteen, twelve, and ten—even if their strict father was also pushing them to learn Spanish as quickly as possible. They had to learn one hundred words a day—exactly one hundred. Eichmann’s wife brought old memories, photo albums,68 and greetings from the family with her from Europe, but she carried new information as well. “I brought him newspaper clippings,” Vera Eichmann recalled, “ ‘Murderer, Mass Murderer Eichmann,’ and when he saw that, he said: ‘They’ve gone mad, I’m no murderer, I won’t stand for it, I’m going to go back to Germany.’ ” But his wife argued convincingly against it: “ ‘That’s out of the question, I’m here with the children now, what will we do. Wait a while until the children are older,’ and he said, ‘Very well, I’ll wait.’ ”69
Still, the press clippings clearly reawakened the feeling of powerlessness that had tormented Eichmann in the northern German underground (though it had not made him any more peaceable). The rumor quickly spread among Austrian Nazis that Eichmann had sworn to kill Wilhelm Höttl for his testimony in Nuremberg.70 His name had been leading a life of its own for some time. But now Eichmann had to think up an explanation of these headlines for his wife (and later his children). Nobody knew better than he that it would be no easy task.
The claim that he wanted to go back to Germany and turn himself in was not just pathetic posturing to support his “innocence.” He had worked hard to create his dubious fame, but he had not acted alone and he knew his accomplices had got off relatively lightly in Germany by exaggerating Eichmann’s role. Being happily united with his family in the mountains of Tucumán was one thing, but knowing that his former colleagues were able to go on with their lives, drawing their pensions in Germany as if nothing had happened, dampened his newfound happiness a good deal. His forgetful comrades still had a few years to go before the thought of Eichmann would start robbing them of their sleep. Eichmann, however, could not shake off the worries about his reputation and how he would be perceived by history, even in the early 1950s. If he had been able to forget all about it, he could have lived quite happily as Ricardo Klement, a harmless German immigrant, and he would probably have died a natural death in Buenos Aires at a ripe old age.
But before he set about defending his “honor,” Eichmann used his time in Tucumán to show his children this newly conquered world. He impressed them with his new job: not every child had a father who led men through the mountains, was in charge of the dynamite, and built dams for the president.71 They listened to the stories of his expedition to the tallest mountain in the Andes, where he had made it all the way to the high plateau. (Hans-Ulrich Rudel actually reached the summit of Aconcagua despite his prosthetic leg, as mentioned in his books.)72 The children also met their father’s new friends and colleagues, among them Herbert Kuhlmann, who seemed to lead an exciting life close to the Argentine presidential palace. Berthold Heilig’s daughter remembers her whole family “going to the Eichmanns’ to make orange marmalade.”73 If people had had any doubt that Klement was Eichmann, the arrival of his wife and children, who lived under their real names, would have quelled it.
“I taught the boys to ride,” Eichmann said proudly, “and a few times we went to the magnificent Buenos Aires together, where I made the acquaintance of President Perón, who always had a lot of time for us Germans.”74 Once he had had direct access to theReichsführer-SS, and now he was an acquaintance of the Argentine president. The idea might sound fantastical, but in fact it was not. Perón’s support of the German immigrants didn’t end with the generous government contracts he awarded to CAPRI. He liked to rally his new citizens around him at official receptions and on occasions when he honored the CAPRI troops with a visit. He had conversations with the concentration camp “doctor” Josef Mengele (though the latter went by his new name, Helmut Gregor), and it is entirely possible that Perón also met Ricardo Klement.
But the idyll of Tucumán didn’t last long. In 1953, barely a year after Eichmann’s family arrived, CAPRI went bust, and Eichmann and his colleagues lost their secure jobs. But the CAPRI troops didn’t disband overnight.75 The firm remained their point of reference for some time. Berthold Heilig and Hans Fischböck claimed they continued working “for CAPRI” until 1955. In 1960 Horst Carlos Fuldner would tell the police he was the managing director of CAPRI, a firm that was still in bankruptcy discussions and that was now called Fuldner & Hansen.76 The actual scope of Fuldner’s companies and activities is still not known.
Eichmann must have stayed in the CAPRI milieu for a while as well: Berthold Heilig’s oldest daughter was in the same school class as Eichmann’s son Horst.77 Heilig’s daughters lived in Argentina only from March to December 1953, which roughly corresponded to the Argentine school year. They lived with their father in Tucumán, before moving to Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, 185 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Another large group of German immigrants had settled in Rosario, which was known for its educational establishments. According to Heilig, CAPRI also had an office there. But something else also made this area interesting for the men from Tucumán. In 1952 the German firm Siemens had started planning a similar project there: the San Nicolás power plant.78 The construction phase held the promise of work, especially for men with a CAPRI background. Constantin von Neurath was officially on the Siemens payroll from 1953; one of the founders of Kameradenwerk, he continued to support people in his new role. Josef Schwammberger (a former ghetto commandant who had committed multiple murders) was one of his protégés and worked for Siemens Argentina S.A. for many years. Neurath said he had hired Schwammberger in 1950.79 Eichmann sent at least one of his children to school in Rosario, which suggests he may have thought about finding work there before he moved the family to Buenos Aires.
Tellingly, once Fuldner’s business was gone, Eichmann didn’t consider staying on in Tucumán and opening a café or leading some other kind of ordinary life. Even then this northern province was one of the most populous in Argentina, and he could easily have made a living there. But the prospect doesn’t seem to have tempted him, which may also have had something to do with the comparatively good salary he had been earning. He spoke of getting a raise after a short time; his son would remember Eichmann’s final salary at CAPRI as being 4,000 pesos per month. At around 800 Deutschmarks or US$190, it was far above the gross average income in West Germany.80 Understandably, Eichmann was keen to continue at this level. In July 1953 he moved the family to Buenos Aires, where Ricardo Klement duly registered as a resident and received a new identity card (no. 1378538).81 With a guarantee provided by Herbert Kuhlmann, who had quickly found another income and had fewer financial worries, the family was able to rent a little house with a garden in a northern part of the city called Olivos. The house belonged to an Austrian, Francisco Schmitt. Chacabuco 4261, the Eichmanns’ new address, was certainly not a step down in the world. Olivos was one of the better quarters of Buenos Aires, and the family could make use of the city’s infrastructure and its good schools. The house also had electricity. Nearby were places like the ABC Café-Restaurant and Die Eiche, where Eichmann could meet old comrades and new friends over a glass of wine. He was a sociable man; people would claim he was shy and retiring only later on, when it would seem risky to have been friends with someone kidnapped by Israelis on his way home.82
In 1953 the glory years of the Perón era were drawing to a close. Argentina’s economy, dependent on the price of raw materials on the world market, suffered from the slump that followed the Korean War. Economic conditions were generally deteriorating. Eichmann attempted to open a laundry with two of his ex-CAPRI colleagues, but the sector was dominated by the Chinese, and the venture soon failed. Attempts to get into the textile business proved to be an equally bad investment.83 But Eichmann was not alone, and when these projects failed, his comrades stepped in once again. At the start of 1954, he got a job as head of transport for Efeve, a large sanitary products firm with offices in the well-to-do Florida quarter of Buenos Aires. Among its investors was another German refugee, Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer. He had an entrepreneurial spirit and a reputation for having been involved in the transport of German gold during the last months of the war, but most important, he was a friend of Sassen’s and Rudel’s.84
Eichmann’s starting salary, 2,500 pesos, according to his son, was far below what he had been earning, but it was hardly a pittance.85 He may have had some financial difficulties in the second half of 1953, but they passed before long and certainly weren’t typical of his life in Argentina. Eichmann had more opportunities available to him than his modest living conditions suggest. Even as an SS careerist, he had not embraced a lavish lifestyle. He may have made use of the well-stocked pantries and cellars of the confiscated houses that were his official accommodation and accepted invitations to social events or use of an armored service vehicle—but as a private individual, he was never tempted to live the high life. In contrast to others of his ilk, he didn’t abuse his position for personal enrichment. He would reproach himself for it later, as he thought out loud about this period: his family would have been much better off if he had filled his pockets. But he was proud that, even at the height of his power, he still made his peppermint tea every morning and cleaned his own boots. He embraced the frugality of a field bed and a locker.86 Even his colleague Dieter Wisliceny, who in 1946 hadn’t missed a single opportunity to place blame on his former boss, reported: “Eichmann’s lifestyle was inherently modest. He had few needs.” And Wisliceny had even added: “Financially speaking, I am convinced Eichmann was clean.”87
Adolf Eichmann may have been a mass murderer, but his greed was for death tolls, not for luxury and riches. The widespread cliché of the Nazi criminal, who lost his sense of social norms along with his inhibitions about committing mass murder didn’t apply to Eichmann: a life of secure prosperity had never been one of his ambitions. If it had, then it was an ambition he had every opportunity to fulfill. He had had control of bank accounts chock full of extorted money, and repeated opportunities to personally extract money from his victims. After 1945 he lived in austere conditions, to an extent that Mossad agents marveled at his threadbare clothing and baggy underwear.88 But one fact cannot be ignored: Eichmann succeeded in bringing his family to Argentina and managed to finance food, school, and training for three children. He also took a few trips, enjoyed a vacation in the Plata del Mar, and finally bought a plot of land and built his own house. He was no failure. The myth of “a life of privation and solitude” was a lie he told in Israel to gain sympathy. It was easily spread: it corroborated the stories told by Eichmann’s contemporaries who, following his arrest, naturally claimed not to have known him—and certainly not to have been on vacation with him.89
Financially speaking, Eichmann never had any difficulty living up to Himmler’s expectation of “reputability.” He only ever stole, extorted, plundered, and flaunted money on behalf of the Reich. Eichmann-in-Argentina was by no means a rich man, but neither was he badly off. He never had to be self-reliant, either in the provinces or in the capital: he benefited from being part of a community whose members all knew and helped one another. If he lacked one thing, it was the power that had come with his position in the Nazi regime, and the exciting, fast-paced life that had been filled with audiences with Himmler and visits to Auschwitz, traveling in his official car and having jovial conversations with underlings, who knew what the Obersturmbannführer was like when he was angry.
“I was an idealist,” Eichmann liked to remind people—and an idealist works for honor and the cause, not for money and splendor. At least in theory. In practice, Eichmann could have been a silent, conscientious servant of the German Reich, attracting no attention, but that wouldn’t have been enough for him: he wanted to be a man of importance. What he lacked in Argentina was a great task that would make his name in history, and the fact that he had not been entirely successful in the last one made this present lack all the more painful. There were still Jews alive in the world. Ricardo Klement got along just fine in Argentina, but Adolf Eichmann still had an old score to settle. Without that discontent, the events that followed would otherwise be difficult to explain. For when Ricardo Klement returned to Buenos Aires, a rumor spread among the ex-CAPRI workers who had moved there, one that could no longer be kept locked away in the files of Europe’s intelligence services: Eichmann was alive and well and living on the Rio de la Plata.