Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  EICHMANN IN ARGENTINA

  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

  Life in the “Promised Land”

  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 former Untersturmbannführer 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 Brigadeführer who 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 manne
r 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.”17 Eichmann 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 W
eg (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.