Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  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 the Reichsführer-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.

  2

  Home Front

  Therefore one cannot say that in 1953 Israel knew Eichmann was in Argentina: only the file knew.

  —Tom Segev1

  In 1953, as the oft-repeated story goes, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal visited an aristocratic gentleman in Innsbruck who wanted to sell him some interesting stamps for his collection. The conversation happened to turn to Nazis: Wiesenthal had started the collection on the advice of his doctor, to distract him a little from his fixation on hunting criminals. At this point, his fellow collector fetched an envelope with some particularly attractive colored stamps, which had been lent to him by a friend. Wiesenthal took a moment to realize that this letter from Argentina contained a remarkable P.S.: “You’ll never guess who I saw here … that miserable swine Eichmann, who was in charge of the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water supply company.” This, of course, quickly put an end to the distraction prescribed by Wiesenthal’s doctor. Wiesenthal tried to purchase the letter, but—alas!—the collector couldn’t sell it, as it belonged to his friend. For Wiesenthal (and here we come to the hard facts), this was final confirmation that the trail Eichmann had laid in the Middle East was a red herring. The organizational force behind the Holocaust, the man he had been searching for since the end of the war, was hiding in Argentina. Wiesenthal hurried home and wrote a letter dated March 24, 1953, to Arie Eschel, the Israeli consul in Vienna, telling him about this incident.2

  Wiesenthal gave a more sober description of the episode a few months later, in a le
tter to Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress in New York—although he claimed there that the incident was more recent: “In June 1953 I met one Baron Mast, who was an intelligence officer in the Austrian Armed Forces, and afterwards worked for the American and German intelligence services. Mast, a monarchist with every fiber of his being, and an anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, … showed me a letter that a former officer from Argentina had written him. The letter was dated May 1953, and it said that the writer had met Eichmann at this time in Buenos Aires. It also said that Eichmann was employed on a building site for a power station somewhere near Buenos Aires.”3 We now know that Simon Wiesenthal was holding the truth in his hands, seven years before the Mossad team took Eichmann prisoner. The only thing that remains unclear is the extent to which he was aware that it was neither a love of stamps, nor pure chance, that had brought him this information.

  Baron Heinrich “Harry” Mast, fifty-six years old in 1953, was not just a man of independent means with a passion for stamps. He was an experienced agent who had worked for the Vienna intelligence service and then for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence organization. After the war, he had secured large parts of the Canaris archive and the state secrets it contained. “Count Bobby” was recruited by the American secret service shortly after the war ended. He and a friend invested in a publishing house in Bad Aussee, and in 1951 he started building up the Austrian branch of the Gehlen Organization, the German intelligence service that would become the BND in 1956. Wiesenthal was aware of this fact: contrary to his story of a serendipitous meeting between two stamp collectors, he had met Heinrich Mast before, and Mast had introduced himself as a Gehlen employee.4