by Neal Bascomb
Traveling as Ricardo Klement, Eichmann left Merano. That evening, he arrived in Genoa. The four-hundred-year-old stone lighthouse there cast its beams across the ancient port, illuminating his escape.
Eichmann went to the Church of San Antonio, situated near the harbor amid a clutch of old pastel-colored houses. He rapped on the door and waited for his next contact, Father Edoardo Dömöter, to answer. The old Franciscan welcomed Eichmann into the presbytery and showed him to his room. Dömöter had been personally recommended by Kops to be in charge of operations in Genoa. He knew that the Hungarian priest was particularly sympathetic to the fleeing Nazis.
The following day, Eichmann presented himself at the city headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He handed the official his landing permit and Termeno ID, along with a letter of reference from Dömöter. This stated that Ricardo Klement was a refugee from the war and could not obtain a travel document from any other source. Without hesitation, the official approved his application for a Red Cross passport. He took Eichmann's fingerprints and photograph, attached one copy to the cardboard passport, and marked it with an ICRC stamp dated June 1, 1950. An elated Eichmann walked out of the office feeling like a real person again. Next he went to the Argentine consulate, where he received his visa, again without hassle. Last, he went to the Argentine immigration office. They checked his papers and subjected him to a standard medical examination. The doctor removed his glasses—perhaps, Eichmann thought, to see if they were part of a disguise. Clearly they were not, and he passed the test.
During his time in Genoa, Eichmann spent his nights playing chess and drinking Chianti with Dömöter. The day before his ship left, Eichmann accepted the priest's invitation to attend Mass and received his blessing. The next day, July 17, 1950, Eichmann walked down to the port with his suitcase. Wearing his new suit, a bow tie, and a black hat, he looked like a traveling salesman. He boarded the passenger ship Giovanna C and deposited his bag in his third-class berth. Afterward, he went to the upper deck to watch the departure. Accompanying him on the passage to Argentina were two other former Nazis whom Perón's network had assisted: Wilhelm Mohnke, an SS brigadier general who had been with Hitler in his bunker, and SS captain Herbert Kuhlmann, a commander of a Hitler Youth Panzer division.
As the ship steamed out of the harbor, Eichmann felt a rush not only of relief but also of triumph at eluding his pursuers. Once he arrived in Argentina, the chances of his discovery by the Allies would be next to nothing, especially if he was careful. However, the knowledge that he had irrevocably broken with his fatherland tempered his joy. He put his hand in his pocket and ran his fingers through some German soil he had collected before crossing over to Austria. He promised himself that he would bring his family over to join him once he had settled in and found a job.
The month-long journey to Argentina passed slowly. More passengers boarded the ship in Naples, Barcelona, and Lisbon before it headed south along the African coast to Dakar. There was no relief from the excruciating heat. Then it crossed the Atlantic, the boredom of the endless seas broken only by two terrific storms that saw all the passengers in life jackets and confined to their quarters.
Eichmann had plenty of time to read about his destination. Eight times the size of Germany, Argentina stretched from the dry, windswept lands of the south, close enough to Antarctica to suffer its icy blasts, all the way to the tropical jungles of the north. To its west, the Andes rose like a leviathan, many of the peaks reaching over 20,000 feet. And to the east was the Atlantic Ocean and 2,500 miles of coastline. The heart of the country, its Pampas, or fertile grasslands, provided sustenance for its 22 million people. In these plains, one travel writer wrote, "the distances from house to house are too great for the barking of dogs even on the stillest night, a country in which the cocks crow only twice because there is no answer ... It is the country in which the green goes on and on like water, and the gulls follow the plows as seagulls follow ships." These empty spaces contrasted sharply with the sprawling, seventy-square-mile metropolis of Buenos Aires, where more than a third of all Argentines lived. In a country such as this, Eichmann could hide among the city's millions on the western bank of the Río de la Plata (the river of silver) or in an isolated outpost, far from human contact.
Finally, after a brief stop in Rio de Janeiro, the Giovanna C arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, as the sun set on July 13. It would spend the night there, across the river from Buenos Aires, because ships were allowed to dock in Buenos Aires only during the day. Standing on the bow, Eichmann stared across the water toward the blinking lights of his new home. The next day, he would take on his fifth identity in five years. He imagined all five in an internal conversation.
"Listen," Barth said to Eckmann, "was all this slaughter, all this killing, necessary?"
"And what was won anyway?" Heninger asked before turning to Klement. "What do you expect from coming to Argentina?"
Gazing into the distance, Eichmann once again reasoned with himself that he had only ever followed orders, much as any Russian, French, British, or American soldier had done. They had all committed their share of atrocities, he decided. But that was in the past. From tomorrow on, he would once again be able to live without the constant fear of capture, without having to search every face he passed for a sign that he had been recognized.
In the morning, the Giovanna C approached the banks of the toffee-colored Río de la Plata where Buenos Aires spread out along a low, level plain. It passed massive dredging machines that carved out the shallow river and docked in the harbor. Eichmann disembarked, carrying in his suitcase everything he owned, and joined the line to the immigration desk. Running over the details of his new identity in his mind, he prepared himself to answer any of the officer's questions.
Name? Ricardo Klement. Date of birth? May 23, 1913. Mother's name? Anna. Marital status? Single. Profession? Mechanic. Born? Bolzano, Italy. First language? German. Do you read and write? Yes. Reli gion? Catholic. Reason for emigrating? To find work. Where are you staying? Hotel Buenos Aires.
There was no need to rehearse. His passport was stamped without any interrogation, and the officer waved Eichmann into his new country. He had no intentions of ever crossing its borders again.
7
CARLOS FULDNER, the smooth, forty-year-old, multilingual operator of the Argentine ratline, shepherded Eichmann into his new life. He began by finding Eichmann an apartment in Florida, a neighborhood to the north of the city center, and by introducing the newcomer to others whom he had helped escape.
Buenos Aires was awash with refugee German Nazis, Italian Fascists, Spanish Falangists, Belgian Rexists, and expatriate members of the French Vichy government, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustashi, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross. The number of high-level war criminals totaled in the low hundreds, but many thousands more had been members of these groups and, at the very least, complicit in the atrocities of the war. They associated with one another, and some were very close to Perón, working either for his government directly or for state-sponsored businesses.
Eichmann found that Buenos Aires had a firmly rooted German community, with its own neighborhoods, private clubs, schools, and restaurants and even three major newspapers in the mother tongue. This community had predominantly supported Hitler during the war, and many within it shared his antipathy toward the Jews, 300,000 of whom lived in Argentina. The defeat of the Third Reich was seen as a tragedy. As a foreign correspondent wrote in May 1945, "Among all the capitals of the countries at war with Germany, Buenos Aires has distinguished itself by being probably the only one where there were no public manifestations of joy at the fall of Berlin." The blow was softened only by the flood of gold that came from Germany in the days before and after the fall of the Reich.
With Fuldner's introduction, Eichmann felt at ease in his new world. The city itself reminded him much of Europe, thanks in large part to the many immigrants who had come from Spain, Italy, England, and Germany in
the early part of the century. Like Paris or Rome, Buenos Aires boasted broad boulevards shaded by plane trees, lavish gardens, elegant plazas centered on triumphal marble fountains, and grand villas and apartment buildings festooned with cherubs and flowers. There were forty-seven theaters, most notably the Colón, designed after the Paris Opéra. Innumerable fine restaurants, esteemed universities, fashionable shops, exclusive clubs, highbrow publishers, and art nouveau cinemas—Buenos Aires had them all. Such was the residents' pride in the continental air of their city that when they were heading for neighboring Chile or Brazil, they would say that they were "traveling to South America."
Buenos Aires was also a modern commercial city that served as the hub of Argentina's vast agricultural and natural resources, as well as its industrial center. Highways and great railway lines radiated out in every direction, bringing in goods from the countryside, and the port, one of South America's largest, sent those goods abroad. Subways ran underneath the towering white skylines, and cars and buses had largely replaced the horse-drawn cabs that had once dominated the streets (although these could still be found in some narrow lanes delivering milk or beef). Many banks thrived downtown, and the stock market bustled with trade.
But Buenos Aires also had poor outlying slums, called villa miserias, where hundreds of thousands of people lived in tin or cardboard shacks, a single tap providing water for fifty families. Their plight was made worse by an economy that funneled most of the country's riches to a few hundred families and suffered from rampant unemployment, an exploding budget deficit, and a vigorous black market.
Eichmann had 485 pesos in his pocket when he entered Buenos Aires. With limited money and no work papers, Eichmann might have fallen into the squalor of the villa miserias if not for the help of those who had brought him there. Fuldner secured him a job in a metal shop and facilitated the approval of his Argentine ID card from the Buenos Aires police. In October 1950, with these papers in hand, Eichmann was now wholly and completely Ricardo Klement, a permanent resident and legally able to work. Fuldner then hired him as an engineer at his new company CAPRI, which was funded by the government to build dams and hydroelectric power plants in Tucumán. The company was staffed by more than three hundred Germans, including Herbert Kuhlmann, who had traveled with Eichmann on the Giovanna C, and dozens of other former Nazis, among them several high-ranking party officials.
On June 30, 1952, Eichmann sipped maté outside his cottage in the remote village of La Cocha in the isolated province of Tucumán, seven hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires. Surrounded by rugged mountains on several sides and a wide, flat plain to the south, he lived alone, without electricity, running water, or even a nearby grocer or post office. The wintry winds sweeping down from the Andes brought little relief from the hot, dry air.
Eichmann saddled his horse, pulled on a poncho and a leather cowboy hat, and rode down to one of the several rivers that coursed through the area. At the water's edge, he tested the depth of the river and the strength of the current, then noted both in a small notebook. At the end of the week, he would report his measurements to his bosses and collect his salary. Eichmann earned 2,500 pesos a month as a topographical engineer with CAPRI, the company some joked stood for "German Company for Recent Immigrants."
Even when among his countrymen, Eichmann kept to himself and refused to answer any questions about his past. When his supervisor Heinz Lühr, displeased with his sloppy work and haughty attitude, attempted to find out more about Ricardo Klement from his superiors, he was told to drop the matter and learned only that Klement had "gone through difficult things in his past."
After two years of isolation, bitterly brooding over Germany's defeat and having to remain in hiding, Eichmann longed for his wife and three sons to join him. Fuldner had assisted Eichmann in secretly contacting Vera. He first wrote to her from Argentina at Christmas 1950, saying that "the uncle of your children, whom everybody presumed dead, is alive and well—Ricardo Klement," and since then he had sent her money and instructions for travel.
So on the day in 1952 Eichmann was at the river, his family was boarding the ship Salta in Genoa. He hated that his wife had to use her maiden name and that his three sons had to claim that their father was dead and they were going to Argentina to join their uncle, but he could not be sure that the hunt for him had ended. Precautions were still necessary.
Three weeks later, Eichmann took the train to Buenos Aires. Soon after he arrived, the country was plunged into mourning with the death on July 26 of Eva Perón, Juan Perón's wife and the people's beloved first lady. Flags were flown at half-mast. Factories and government offices were closed. Under a gray, stormy sky in the capital, people hung portraits of the "spiritual chief" of Argentina at intersections and on billboards, and candlelit processions coursed through the streets.
Two days after her passing, the passengers of the Salta disembarked in the midst of a torrential downpour. Eichmann sent two friends to the port to collect his family, a precaution in case they had been detected leaving Genoa. They were taken to a nondescript hotel. When Eichmann appeared in the doorway, his wife cried with joy. Despite her delight, she couldn't help but notice that her husband had aged dramatically. His stoop was more pronounced, his face looked drawn and gray, and his hair had thinned.
"I am your Uncle Ricardo," Eichmann said to his sons, Klaus now sixteen, Horst twelve, and Dieter ten.
Thinking that their father had been dead for years, his two younger sons did not question the statement that the man in front of them was their uncle. But Klaus knew that this was his father. Still, he said nothing. Eichmann gave them 100 pesos each, and the boys ran off to explore. The two youngest bought ice cream and candy, and Klaus, taking after his father, bought his first pack of cigarettes. Later, the family went out to dinner. Eichmann was pleased to be with his boys once again.
Once Eichmann and Vera were alone, she brought out the pile of newspaper clippings she had collected over the past seven years about the terrible crimes he had committed. She wanted an explanation. Eichmann grew frighteningly angry, his face turning into a hard mask. "Veronika," he said bitingly, "I have not done a single Jew to death, nor given a single order to kill a Jew." She never asked him about the past again.
As soon as the railways began running again after Eva Perón's state funeral, they took the Pullman Express to Tucumán, then a truck to Eichmann's remote house. There he revealed the truth about his identity to his sons and told them that they must never tell anyone who their "Uncle Ricardo" truly was. He refused, however, to ask his sons to live under any name other than Eichmann.
Over the next months, the boys rode their horses in the countryside and studied their required one hundred new words (no more, no less, they were instructed) of Spanish every day. They took to calling their father Der Alte, "the old man." Vera cooked the meals, cleaned the small house, kept a tight budget to help with their savings, and read her Bible every morning. For the first time since the war began, Eichmann shared a home with his family for more than a few days or weeks at a time. He felt now that he could start his life over.
"Mrs. Eichmann and her sons have disappeared."
Wiesenthal hung up the receiver and immediately made his way from Linz to Altaussee, from which his informant had called, to investigate. This was July 1952. With the aid of the Austrian police, he visited the house at 8 Fischerdorf and interviewed Vera Eichmann's neighbors and relatives still in the area.
The circumstances of their departure convinced Wiesenthal that they had left to join Eichmann. The house was emptied of furnishings, and a hole had been dug in the yard, as if someone had retrieved buried material, perhaps money or documents. The landlord claimed that Vera Eichmann had moved out without alerting him or canceling the lease. He had no idea where she and her three sons had gone. The boys had left school in the middle of the year, neither giving the headmaster an explanation nor asking for copies of their records, which would be needed to apply to another school. A nearby resid
ent claimed that Vera had left for Brazil to marry a wealthy rancher. Her sister offered a conflicting report that Vera had remarried and moved to Germany, but she claimed that she had never met her sister's husband. Soon after, Wiesenthal discovered a file in the German consulate in Graz revealing that Vera had recently received a German passport under her maiden name. Her sons Horst and Dieter could travel under her passport, as they were minors. Klaus had obtained his own passport.
Wiesenthal knew that the family was his last chance to trace Eichmann. Now they were gone, with no way for him to find out where. He had heard rumors that Eichmann was in South America, Germany, or the Middle East, but that was all they were, rumors.
Wiesenthal collapsed into a depression. He barely ate or drank. He suffered insomnia, spending his waking nights with the dead—his friends and family and strangers he would never know. When his wife asked him what was troubling him, he answered, "The Nazis lost the war, but we are losing the postwar." Wiesenthal saw his doctor, who told him that his work was "prolonging the concentration camp" for him. The doctor advised Wiesenthal to find a hobby; at the very least, this would reduce his stress. Wiesenthal agreed to think about it but denied any suggestion that he stop pursuing war criminals. In the end, he did turn to collecting stamps and found that he enjoyed it.
