Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

His friend, a former lieutenant-colonel in the German army who had never concealed his dislike for Hitler, had gone to Argentina as an instructor to Juan Perón’s troops. He wrote to the baron:

  There are some people here we both used to know . . . A few more are here whom you’ve never met. Imagine who else I saw – and even had to talk to twice: that awful swine Eichmann who commanded the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company.

  ‘How do you like that?’ the baron remarked. ‘Some of the worst of the lot got away.’

  Wiesenthal played it cool, for the baron could convey some of his excitement to his friend, who might mention it in conversation that could alert ‘that swine Eichmann’. But he memorized that passage and all the other names in the letter as well as the sender’s address. Declining to finish his wine for fear it might blur his memory, he made his excuses early, returned to his hotel, and wrote everything down.

  Upon his return to Linz, Simon phoned the Israeli consul in Vienna, Aryeh Eschel, and then prepared two complete dossiers on Eichmann. ‘By late 1953,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘I had definite knowledge of where Eichmann was in Argentina and where he worked. I had everything but his name, which a trained, trustworthy Jewish investigator could have ferreted out easily from what else I had. So I wrote up a full report on Eichmann, complete with the photograph of him and copies of his letters in his own handwriting.’ Concluding with the passage from (but not the source of) the baron’s letter, Wiesenthal gave one copy to Eschel for forwarding to his government in Jerusalem and sent the other to Nahum Goldmann at the New York headquarters of the World Jewish Congress, an umbrella organization that claims to speak on behalf of Jewish communities in seventy countries.

  A dynamic Polish-born scholar who had founded the WJC in 1936 to warn the world against Nazism and prevent persecution of Jews, Nahum Goldmann (1894 – 1982) was its president as well as head of the World Zionist Organization – a man so powerful that, on one of his frequent visits to the young state of Israel, he cut short a meeting with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion because he was ‘too busy’. A feisty autocrat given to categorical statements that ninety per cent of Israel’s people live outside its borders and (according to Simon Wiesenthal) that ‘only I can decide what is good for the Jews’, Nahum Goldmann had headed the postwar International Claims Conference which negotiated with governments for compensation to be awarded to persecuted Jews. When Austrian Chancellor Julius Raab had greeted him with ‘Jews and Austrians are both the victims of Nazism!’, Goldmann had put Raab in his place with biting sarcasm: ‘Yes, Herr Chancellor, that is why I have come to ask you how much money the Jews owe the Austrians.’

  There was no reply from Israel, but Wiesenthal to this day is angrier at the answer he did receive after two months from New York, where Goldmann had turned his material over to Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, president and dean of the Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute. Writing in German, the rabbi acknowledged receipt and asked for ‘Eichmann’s full address in Buenos Aires’. Politely reiterating that he didn’t yet have that, Wiesenthal replied that he could send a Spanish-speaking investigator there to do the job if the WJC would pay travel expenses plus 500 dollars. Rabbi Kalmanowitz wrote back insisting that Wiesenthal forward Eichmann’s address and enclosing a letter from Nahum Goldmann saying, as Simon puts it, ‘that anyway Eichmann wasn’t in Argentina, but in Damascus.’

  Part of the problem, Wiesenthal won’t quite admit (but won’t deny), was the barrage of false clues given out by Tuviah Friedman (Eichmann was in Syria, Eichmann was in Kuwait) in an effort to smoke out real leads. But he blames Nahum Goldmann more: ‘This man blocked everything. When organizations asked for money, he always said no. Once I asked him why and he said: “I don’t like independent organizations.” But I argued that my kind of work can only be done by independent individuals and small groups. No matter. He wanted to have a monopoly.’

  The antipathy between Wiesenthal and the World Jewish Congress, which exploded in 1986 during the campaign of Kurt Waldheim for the Austrian presidency, had its roots in the Eichmann hunt – which Wiesenthal almost, but not quite, gave up in March 1954 when, in despair at the lack of results, funds, and outside interest, he shut down his Documentation Centre in Linz and sent 532 kilos (1170 pounds) of files to the Yad Vashem Historical Archives in Israel. But, like Friedman when he emigrated, he held on to one dossier: Adolf Eichmann’s.

  The hunt for Eichmann would languish for at least five years. ‘The next time I saw Nahum Goldmann, in 1956,’ Simon recalls ruefully, ‘I told him I’d had to close my Centre. He had no reaction, none at all, not even a word of sympathy.’

  Was there no way to track down Eichmann when Wiesenthal came so close? Surely, even then, 500 dollars was not an impossible hurdle for a determined fund-raiser like Simon to clear. But he needed auspices as well as money. ‘I was alone in Linz,’ he explained. ‘Suppose we did find Eichmann living near Buenos Aires and working for a water company, how could we get him? What would I, a private citizen half a world away, do? The Germans were a strong political force in Argentina. German soldiers were training Perón’s army. German experts were running Argentine industries. Millions in German capital was invested in Argentine banks.’

  Simon Wiesenthal estimates the value of the wealth that the Nazis smuggled out of Europe at close to a billion dollars. ‘After the war,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘the Nazis sent experts and money to Argentina. Perón himself, according to an investigation made in Buenos Aires after his downfall, was given around $100 million. Buenos Aires became the south terminal port for ODESSA. The Germans took over hotels and boarding houses, gave new SS immigrants jobs and identity papers, and had excellent connections with the highest government officials. At one time, a group of Argentinian Germans plotted to fly to Germany and set free all the Nazi criminals in Landsberg Prison.’

  Back in 1954, Wiesenthal guessed that ‘Eichmann must feel quite safe in Argentina or he wouldn’t have sent for his family. Maybe he has powerful friends there. Otherwise he wouldn’t dare live in or near a city with more than 200,000 Jews. Even though his victims seldom saw him, who knows? Somebody from the Jewish Councils in Vienna or Prague or Budapest just might recognize him.’

  Actually, Eichmann had hardly been in Buenos Aires during the first three years of his stay in Argentina. ‘Ricardo Klement’ had arrived wearing dark glasses, a Hitler moustache, and a hat pulled low over his eyes, but had been met by SS friends who quickly put him in touch with the head of CAPRI, a firm founded by Germans to provide work for postwar refugees. Some 20,000 of their countrymen had arrived within a few months after the war ended, CAPRI offered ‘Klement’ work in Tucumán, some 600 miles from the capital.

  CAPRI was a contractor to the Argentine government, prospecting for water power and planning hydroelectric plants and dams. ‘Klement’ was put in charge of a crew of native workers and, determined organizer of labour that he was, soon excelled and was given promotions, responsibility, and raises that enabled him to send for his family within two years. Vera Liebl, the ‘ex-Frau Eichmann’, had received a letter – from a ‘stranger’ whose handwriting she recognized – saying that ‘your children’s uncle, whom everybody believed to be dead, is alive and well.’ When she and her sons had joined ‘Uncle Ricardo’ in Tucumán on 15 August 1952, the boys had been told that he was ‘your dead father’s cousin’, and they liked him so much that they rejoiced when their uncle married their mother and she had a fourth son: Ricardo Francisco, the middle name in honour of a Franciscan friar who had helped the proud father escape through Italy.

  With their mother masquerading as a remarried divorcée to some and a widow to others, their father pretending to be their uncle and stepfather, and their half-brother really their brother, family life for the Eichmann boys sounds more complicated than it was. Even when the baby was baptized ‘Ricardo Francisco Klement Eichmann’, his brothers asked no questions. They were dull boys – like their father had been. He once complained that they showed �
�absolutely no interest in being educated’ and didn’t ‘ even try to develop their so-called talents.’

  In retrospect, says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘Adolf Eichmann’s undoing was his family feeling. He wanted to resume relations with his wife, he cherished family celebrations, and he wanted his sons by his side. He fitted into the middle-class mould, just the way Mafiosi do – and it was this loyalty that eventually helped us pick up his traces.’

  Having lost its government contracts when its protector – Perón’s wife, ‘Evita’ – died of cancer at the age of thirty-three in 1952, CAPRI went bankrupt the following year. Thus, by the time Wiesenthal read the letter from the baron’s informant in Buenos Aires, it was obsolete, for Eichmann’s water company had gone down the drain. Still, he was back in Buenos Aires looking for work and might have been easy to trace.

  The ‘Klement’ ménage rented a small house on the Calle Chacabuco in Vicente Lopez, a suburb of the capital. With two other Nazis as partners, Eichmann started a laundry business that failed. Then he left his family behind while he worked on a rabbit farm for a few months and, after that, he found an office job in a fruit-canning factory, but it, too, was short-lived. In and out of town, in and out of work, even down and out in Buenos Aires, he barely managed to provide – but he always did. His landlord, Francisco Schmidt, a Jew, had only good words to say about his tenant.

  In his first five years in Argentina, only a handful of trusted SS friends knew that ‘Klement’ was Eichmann. Anybody could guess that he was a Nazi fugitive, but there were thousands of those. Such Germans as the baron’s friend who recognized him as ‘that swine Eichmann’ usually didn’t learn – or want to learn – too much about his Argentine identity. Now, however, in financial distress, he turned to a couple of the Nazi help organizations in Argentina, even though they might be infiltrated by informers.

  Call them arms of ODESSA, if you will, but these groups were too far above ground to resemble, in any way, an underground railway for escaping Nazis. More of an ‘old boys’ network’, they quickly recognized Eichmann’s growing notoriety and rewarded his past work with a job at the Mercedes Benz factory in Suarez, near Buenos Aires. Starting as a mechanic, he was quickly promoted to foreman and then department head.

  Scarcely bothering to conceal his identity any more, Eichmann started cutting a celebrity’s swath through Argentina’s ample Nazi colony. In 1955, he even gave an interview to a Dutch SS man named Willem S. Sassen, who had been dabbling in journalism ever since his arrival in South America in 1948, around the time that Belgium condemned him in absentia to death as a war criminal. In his session with Sassen, Eichmann explained his dedication to ‘the Final Solution’ by saying that Hitler ‘may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance-corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.’

  Having given up his Documentation Centre in Linz, Simon Wiesenthal had gone into refugee work, first with persons still displaced by the war and then, starting in 1956, from anti-communist upheavals in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. ‘For a while, after the Hungarian revolution,’ he recalls, ‘I was director of eight schools for vocational re-training of refugees: teaching them jobs that would be necessary in the West, like TV repairmen and automobile mechanics; I trained 8000 workers for Opel. And we tried to find work that would tide over professional people who had to learn languages and pass examinations before they could practise in their new countries. So a lawyer became a notary public, a doctor a laboratory technician . . .’

  Simon also represented various Jewish agencies in Austria, though being in Linz, a provincial capital, instead of Vienna, two hours away, was a handicap. Still, he was unwilling to leave Linz because he wanted to keep an eye on Adolf Eichmann’s family. The Eichmanns lived only two blocks away from the Wiesenthals. And every day, at least twice, Simon had to pass their electric store with its sign proudly proclaiming ADOLF EICHMANN, the name he could not let go of.

  In the evening hours, he freelanced as a journalist, writing for such survivor publications as Die Mahnung (The Warning) in West Berlin and La Voix Internationale de la Résistance in Brussels as well as any Austrian newspaper (more often in Linz than in Vienna and Salzburg) that would print his unsolicited contributions. After a while, ‘the editors would come to me if they had to have something on such subjects as Nazi crimes because I had a monopoly: I was the only person writing about it in Austria. But it wasn’t a career and certainly not a living.’

  Like 1938 and 1939, 1968 and 1989, the year 1956 was one of those watershed years in history whose effects are still being felt in various parts of the world – not just in Eastern Europe. A 1956 Middle Eastern event that looked like a disaster to Simon Wiesenthal and everybody else proved to be quite the reverse: the great Suez Canal fiasco turned the tide for Nazi-hunters. That July, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, inciting Israel to invade the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula in late October and prompting France and England to attack Egypt a week later. Though US and UN pressure forced all three to withdraw, its initial military success made Israel feel secure that its Arab neighbours were not going to ‘sweep it into the sea’, as they repeatedly said they would. Now the security services could spare some time, however belatedly, for the other enemy: Nazi criminals still at large.

  On Wednesday morning, 22 April 1959, Simon Wiesenthal picked up the Linz newspaper Oberösterreichische Nachrichten (Upper Austrian News). On the back page was word that Frau Maria Eichmann, stepmother of his quarry, had died. The obituary listed survivors: Adolf Eichmann was not among them, but his wife Vera was. ‘People usually don’t lie when they write obituary notices’ says Wiesenthal. ‘It said “Vera Eichmann”. Apparently Frau Eichmann had neither divorced nor remarried.’ He cut out the article, put it atop his Eichmann file, and sent word to the Israeli consul in Vienna as well as to Tuviah Friedman, Asher Ben Nathan, Yad Vashem, and a few others in Israel who might care.

  Somebody high up in Israel did care. That summer, Wiesenthal’s information went to Isser Harel, the head of Israel’s secret services. Wiesenthal’s information corroborated reports Harel was receiving from West Germany. He went to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and told him: ‘We have proof that Eichmann is in Argentina. Can I give orders for my men to get on his track?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben-Gurion, ‘bring back Eichmann dead or alive. But I’d rather you brought him back alive. It would have great meaning for young people.’

  Two young Israeli agents visited Wiesenthal in Linz and asked him to pick up where he’d left off in 1954. Knowing he would have no luck with the bereaved Eichmanns in Linz, Simon sent a man around to visit Maria Liebl in Germany in quest of the whereabouts of her daughter, Vera Eichmann. Frau Liebl shut the door in the man’s face, but not before telling him Vera had married some man named ‘Klemt’ or ‘Klems’ in South America.

  Wiesenthal reported this to Israel. Again, it corroborated a German source which said Vera Eichmann was living ‘in fictitious marriage’ with a German named Ricardo Klement.

  ‘I was sure it was a real marriage – that Frau Eichmann was living with her husband Adolf Eichmann,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘Otherwise the Eichmann family in Linz wouldn’t have listed her as Vera Eichmann in the obituary notices. The Eichmann boys lived in Buenos Aires with their parents. It occurred to me that they would probably be registered there at the German embassy, since they would soon reach military age. I asked a friend to make a cautious inquiry. He notified me yes, the Eichmann boys were registered there, under their real name.’

  This was enough for the Israelis to move a team of three secret agents into a house on the Calle Chacabuco, opposite ‘Ricardo Klement’s’ residence. With telescopic lenses from their windows and attaché cases that were really hand cameras, they photographed ‘Klement’ on the street, on buses to and from work, on his lunch hour, and every tim
e he went into or out of his house or appeared at a window. In early 1960, when ‘Klement’ and his family moved into a primitive brick house – with no electricity or running water – which he and his older sons had been building themselves, the Israelis moved with them and continued the surveillance. The house was on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando, one of the more run-down suburbs of Buenos Aires.

  Because its agents were operating illegally on foreign soil, Israel needed to take every precaution before abducting Eichmann. They had to net the right man. A misfire or an embarrassing case of mistaken identity could rupture diplomatic relations with Argentina, an important trading partner and home of many thousands of Jewish refugees as well as Nazi fugitives. Despite the fact that they had photographed ‘Klement’ up, down, and sideways, the Israelis were handicapped by the scarcity of early photos of Eichmann and by the fact that he had aged badly and lost weight. ‘Klement’ had the same thin-lipped, cruel mouth, but none of the dapper arrogance of the high-living officer who had romanced Maria Masenbacher and Margit Kutschera. Even those who had known him personally in the past were reluctant to swear that this meek, shabby family man with the pallid, lined face was what had become of Adolf Eichmann. Until they were sure that Eichmann and ‘Klement’ were one and the same, the Israehs would not move to seize him.

  On Saturday, 6 February 1960, Wiesenthal read in the paper that Eichmann’s father had died the day before – following his wife to the grave (as is more often the case than we read about) by less than a year. Learning that the funeral would not take place for another five days because the family was ‘expecting relatives from abroad’, Wiesenthal notified the Israelis, though he warned them that this might refer to one of Adolf Eichmann’s four brothers, Emil, who lived in West Germany. His two young contacts came to see him. Though someone would monitor the funeral for them, they told Wiesenthal their bosses were almost as hungry for a current photo of Eichmann as they were for the man himself.