by Isser Harel
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know. If you ask for ‘the German’ everybody will know who you mean.’
Lubinsky went back to the car and repeated the conversation to Kenet. So a surmise had become a certainty: the German living in that house until a few weeks ago was definitely Ricardo Klement. What Lubinsky had heard about the family setup generally fitted what was known about the Eichmann family -except that if Vera Eichmann joined her husband in 1953, they could not have an eight-year-old; the child born to them in Argentina could be no more than six.
This was a Friday, so they had no choice but to postpone checking up on ‘Tito’ until after the weekend. Kenet took advantage of the opportunity to have a rest and to send his first report to Israel.
And we received it as good news that Klement had been living until recently in the house at 4261 Chacabuco Street and that Kenet believed he had found Eichmann’s third son.
This first report was hailed as encouraging news by everybody who was in on the secret. I had really been convinced all along that the Hermann family’s story about Nicolas Eichmann was true in its entirety, but a long time had passed since Hermann’s daughter had been friendly with Eichmann’s son, and it was impossible to be sure that the Eichmann family hadn’t vanished again without trace since then. And now came the good tidings that Eichmann was still living in the vicinity of Buenos Aires, and what’s more his son’s whereabouts were known with near certainty. Without further delay, I intensified the planning of the operational steps we’d have to take immediately upon verification of our assumption that Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann.
I summoned Malka Braverman, an expert in matters pertaining to administration, finance, and manpower. I didn’t tell her what it was about and she asked no questions, but I knew that generally she intuited far more than she had been told. You can’t work with people who are quick-witted and resourceful and expect them not to exercise their talents to figure out all kinds of things. I couldn’t really hide anything from most of my principal assistants, but I could rely on them to keep quiet and not ask superfluous questions.
I assigned Malka to prepare certain details we might need when the time for action came, and I knew that whenever we required them they would be ready. Malka was endowed with a rare talent for organization, and the concept ‘impossible’ didn’t exist for her; she was outstanding for her energy, her resourcefulness, her quick grasp, and her qualities of leadership.
That following Monday, March 7, Kenet and Primo waited again at the same crossing, the one all their data told them the young German would have to pass on his way home. Again he didn’t turn up.
The same evening Lubinsky brought the first results of the inquiries conducted by the private investigation bureau he’d visited a few days earlier. The Argentine investigators told them that Eichmann and the Klements whose names were in the telephone directory had nothing to do with each other. As for the house at 4261 Chacabuco Street, the agency reported that a large garage had been added to it, which judging by its width and height – could also serve as a storeroom. About ten days earlier a German family by the name of Schneider had cleared out the part of the storeroom which they had been renting and had moved to an unknown address. Now there remained one tenant only, a foreigner – apparently Hungarian or Polish -named Francisco Schmidt. He was the owner of the whole house and was now busy having it painted and renovated with a view to selling it. Nobody knew where he would go.
Kenet asked Lubinsky to request further particulars about the people named in their report, since there was the possibility that one of them, Schneider or Schmidt, might be the ‘Klement’ he was looking for. Kenet also wanted him to find out the name of the firm that had handled the removal of Schneider’s furniture. Following his instructions, Lubinsky explained at the bureau that complete secrecy was essential as Klement was liable to disappear if he found out that they were looking for him, then ‘great financial loss would be incurred.’
On March 8, from seven-thirty in the morning until ten, Kenet maintained a surveillance of the Fuldner Company’s offices on Avenida Córdoba. He was lucky – it was raining heavily and he was able to stand for a long time in the doorway of a house without arousing suspicion. During all that time he saw nobody who could be Eichmann.
In the afternoon Kenet and Primo went once more to the same intersection to watch for the young German on his way from the workshop. At five-fifteen they saw a scooter that looked like the one the youngster Pedro had described coming from the direction of the shop. The scooter shot out into the main road and, a little farther on, turned left, in the direction of San Fernando. The driver was a swarthy man between forty and forty-five wearing dark-rimmed glasses, and riding in the seat behind him was a fair-haired lad dressed in mechanic’s clothes who fitted Pedro’s description of ‘Tito’. The scooter’s number plate was so dirty that it was illegible – however, its very filth conformed to Pedro’s identification.
They followed the scooter, keeping a good distance behind. They had traveled just over half a mile along the main road, Avenida Santa Fe, when they saw the scooter turn left near the Beccar railway station. Kenet drew closer at that point and saw it stop in front of a house near the corner of Juan B. Justo. The driver waited while the young man went into the house for a minute or two; it was twenty-five minutes past five. The young man came out and they returned to the main road and continued on toward San Fernando, where they turned left into Sarmiento Street.
Here Kenet and Primo lost them when a funeral cortege making its way through the center of San Fernando came between them, alongside the square, at the corner of Tres de Febrero and Sarmiento. They drove all around the neighborhood looking for the scooter but didn’t find it. From a distance they could make out a young man in mecIlanic’s overalls going into a house on Tres de Febrero, number 461, but they had no way of knowing whether this was the youth they had tailed from Olivos. Luck continued to frown on them – on the return journey the car’s electrical system acted up and it was only with a great deal of difficulty that they managed to limp back to Buenos Aires.
Having failed to shadow their quarry to his destination, they began to question whether they had trailed the right man. True, the scooter riders did go to San Fernando, the area mentioned by the man in Chacabuco Street as the home of the Klement family, but how could they know if it was the young man from the workshop they’d been following? After all, Pedro had said that the scooter belonged to the young man himself, but this scooter had been driven by an older man, with the young one on the rear seat. Neither Kenet nor Primo had ever seen young Klement, so how could they be sure they had shadowed the right person?
It was raining the morning of March 9 when Kenet sent Primo to the workshop in Monteagudo Street to look for the scooter and get its number. The weather was likely to make their tailing activity harder, and they also had to take into account the possibility that because of the rain young Klement would travel to work by train or bus.
In the afternoon Primo came back with the information that the scooter was there, after all, and its number was 84099.
This time Kenet organized three shadowing parties. He waited with Lubinsky at the intersection where the scooter had first been seen the day before. Primo waited at the square in San Fernando, at the spot where they had lost sight of the scooter because of the funeral. David and Hedda Kornfeld wandered around near the workshop, prepared to follow the young man if he got on a bus.
Kenet and Lubinsky waited until six o’clock, but the scooter didn’t appear. They drove past the workshop but didn’t see the Kornfelds. Parked on the pavement next to the workshop was a black scooter, its number: 160934. They drove to San Fernando to pick up Primo, who had not seen the young man.
Kenet didn’t hear from the Kornfelds until the next day. They said they had waited opposite the workshop until five-twenty, when a fair-haired young man who seemed to fit Pedro’s description came out and walked to the corner of Monteagudo Str
eet, where he boarded a bus. They got on after him and followed him off at the Martinez railway station. From there the young man could have taken a train to San Fernando or to Don Torcuato. But he didn’t even go into the station; he walked away and turned into a side lane. In accordance with their instructions, they broke off their shadowing at this stage.
The afternoon of March 10 Kenet again divided his people into three parties: Primo waited at the center of San Fernando as before; Kenet sat in the car on Monteagudo Street about a hundred yards from the workshop; and the Kornfelds waited on Paraná Street not far from the comer of Monteagudo Street, leaving their car nearby.
They waited from four-thirty until almost ten minutes to six, when a scooter similar to the one belonging to the young man they were after was seen driving out of the workshop yard. Again two men were riding on it, the older man and the fair-haired youth. Kenet drove quickly to the Kornfelds’ observation point, picked them up, and dashed after the scooter. Fortunately for them, the scooter was pulling a small tender, a kind of cart, which slowed it down considerably and made it easy for them to catch up. The scooter took the same route as two days before, and this time too the riders stopped for a few minutes at the house near the Beccar railway station and then continued on to San Fernando. In the central square of San Fernando, next to Sarmiento Street, Kenet saw Primo sitting on a bench and picked him up.
The scooter parked for a minute or two in San Fernando -from a distance it looked as if they were buying something at an outdoor candy stand – and then nearly disappeared in a maze of alleys, emerging onto Route 202 and driving in the direction of Bancalari-Don Torcuato. After about a mile and a half the built-up area of San Fernando was behind them, and in the open country stretching ahead Kenet was obliged to increase the distance between his car and the quarry to about half a mile because of the lack of traffic on Route 202. Kenet looked at his watch. It was close to six o’clock.
The scooter stopped about a hundred and fifty yards before the railway bridge over Route 202, five hundred yards before Bancalari station. The shadowing party turned into a side street some five hundred yards before the bridge and Kenet parked the car behind a deserted house at the crossroads. In the distance they saw one of the scooter riders – it was impossible to make out which one – get off at a kiosk on the left side of the road, while the other drove on for fifty yards. There he parked next to a cottage and went inside. Meanwhile they had lost sight of the first man. Kenet drove away but returned half an hour later, when it was dark. This time they left the car a considerable distance from the kiosk and approached it on foot. They went past the cottage and asked some workmen walking by if they knew a family by the name of Rodriguez in the neighborhood. One of the men pointed toward a distant compound that looked like a refugee camp and said he thought a family by that name lived over there. When asked who lived in the cottage, the workman said a young man and his mother lived there and, yes, the young man had a scooter. Kenet decided to call it a day and leave the rest of the inquiry for another time.
A hundred yards or so from the cottage, and about the same distance from the kiosk, stood a brick house that looked unfinished. No one in the party gave it a second thought.
8
THE NEXT morning Kenet reckoned it was time to change his rented car; it may have been seen too often wandering in the neighborhood of Chacabuco and Monteagudo streets.
Then he met Lubinsky, who told him that the investigation bureau had found nothing in the official records to indicate that in 1953 a woman by the name of Vera Liebl had arrived in Argentina with her three children. Kenet asked Lubinsky to put pressure on the second bureau to hurry its investigation of the Fuldner and C.A.P.R.I. companies.
In the afternoon, surveillance of the workshop was renewed. Sitting in the new car, Kenet and Primo saw a fair-haired young man drive past on a black motorcycle, number 118111. They followed it in the direction of the Martinez railway station. The young man stopped in front of a house at 186 Ladislav Martinez Street, secured the motorcycle to a tree, and went inside. Kenet parked across the street and walked to the house. It was a dentist’s office.
Nearly twenty minutes later the young man came out, and they realized they’d made a mistake: beyond the blond hair, he bore no resemblance to the ‘Dito’ or ‘Tito’ Pedro had described.
Kenet concluded that he didn’t have enough facts or enough aides to continue the shadowing. And they still didn’t even know if this ‘Dito’ or ‘Tito’ was really Eichmann’s son. So Kenet decided that, rather than risk being caught lurking around, he’d better first clarify this key point.
Kenet felt that it would be safe to send Pedro back to 4261 Chacabuco Street, in another attempt to learn the Klements’ new address and also to get further particulars about the young German in the workshop.
So the next day Hedda Kornfeld did her act again. She sat down in the hotel lobby and ordered coffee. Pedro noticed her immediately and was very pleased to see her. He started to walk slowly toward her table, but at the first sign from her he came hurrying up. She looked worried, and he thought she must be in trouble. She asked him if he’d go back to the house in Chacabuco Street and have another shot at getting Nicolas Klement’s address. He was to say, she explained, that the sender of the letter and parcel had complained to his friend that the things hadn’t been delivered, so the friend was demanding five hundred pesos’ compensation from him because that’s what the parcel was worth. She also told him to go see the young man at the workshop again and to fix an exact description of the fellow indelibly in his memory, as well as every single word that came out of his mouth. Pedro set off without delay.
When he got to the house, he related later, he first looked for the man who had told him the German’s son worked nearby; he found him in one of the rooms and greeted him like an old friend. The man recognized him, remembered that he had asked for the German tenant’s address, and this time had precise directions. First, he said, you’ve got to get to the San Fernando station, and from there you go by the San Fernando colectivo (a small bus) number 203, and ask the driver to put you off at Avellaneda. The fare is four and a half pesos. When you get off the colectivo and cross the street you’ll see a kiosk, and there you can ask for the German’s house. And if Pedro didn’t want to ask at the kiosk, he just had to turn his head to the right and he’d see an unplastered brick house with a flat roof. That’s the German’s house.
The man had evidently traveled there himself, but to make sure Pedro asked him if he was quite certain about the way. The man said he’d done some work on the German’s house and the German still owed him money.
Pedro then asked about the son who worked nearby. The man said ‘Tito’ wasn’t exactly the German’s son, the German lived with the fellow’s mother and had a son of about four by her.
Pedro noticed that he wasn’t very keen on talking about the German’s family affairs, but he did say that ‘Tito’ had two brothers, one married and one in the navy. And he added that the young man didn’t have a scooter but traveled every day with a next-door neighbor.
At the end of the conversation Pedro asked the man’s name in case he should need him again.
The man answered, ‘What do you need to know my name for? When you need me come here and ask, “Where’s the carpenter?” I live here, in this room.’
The carpenter, Pedro made a mental note, was a man of about fifty and spoke with a marked European accent. They were still talking when a fat man who looked about the same age came in. Pedro wondered if he was the owner of the house.
When the fat man heard Pedro’s questions he said, That must be the son who works at the workshop half a block from here. Why don’t you go there?’
Pedro thanked the man and walked over to the workshop. A scooter, a ‘Siam’ model 099 with a sidecar, was parked at the door.
In the office he saw the young German, who asked him jocularly, And what do you want this time? Have you come about the letter? I’ll tell you the truth. Wh
en you gave me the envelope I opened it and read the letter inside. It said ‘happy birthday,’ and since it was my brother’s birthday, not my father’s, I gave my brother the present.’
‘Yes, but the name …’
‘‘Nicolas Klement’ could be either my father or my brother.’
‘But I’m in trouble now,’ Pedro said. ‘The letter and the parcel were given to me by a friend who works at another hotel. A lady guest at his hotel has asked him to make the delivery. Now he claims that the things weren’t delivered and he’s demanding that I pay him five hundred pesos.’
‘The lady should have been more exact when she wrote the name on the envelope, and then we’d have no problems. Why did she write “Nicolas Klement” and not “Nicolas Eichmann”?’
Pedro shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give me your brother’s address.’
‘Tito’ handed him a piece of paper and said, ‘Write “3030 Avenida General Paz.”’
‘Thanks,’ said Pedro. And could you tell me where to find Mr. Klement? The lady may want to know his address.’
‘He’s in Tucumán now, on business, and we don’t know when he’ll be back.’
A man of about thirty who had apparently heard part of the conversation came over and asked ‘Tito,’ ‘Where did you say your father is?’
‘In Tucumán,’ ‘Tito’ repeated. ‘He went on business and we have no idea when he’ll be back.’
Pedro went back to the hotel and Hedda questioned him over and over again, writing down every fact he could remember. He told her how sorry he was that he hadn’t succeeded in his errand – he hadn’t managed to find the Klement family because the young German said that his name and his brother’s name wasn’t ‘Klement’ but ‘Eichmann.’ And to his surprise, she paid him generously once more.
Late that night, Hedda gave Kenet her report on Pedro’s errand, referring to the notes she had made. Even she had no notion of the decisive importance of what she was telling him. Kenet was the only one who immediately realized the significance of what the youngster had found out. He had learned that Eichmann’s eldest son, Nicolas, was living in Buenos Aires and calling himself by his real name. Furthermore, it was positively established that the Eichmann family was in Argentina and living at a new address, someplace between San Fernando and Don Torcuato. And above all, it now seemed possible to state categorically that Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann, husband of Vera Eichmann and father of her four children, the three older ones born in Europe, and the little one born in Argentina. True, it still might be that Klement was not Eichmann but another man who had married Vera Eichmann after the war and was now accepted as the father of her sons, but there were sufficient arguments to quash this theory.