by Isser Harel
When the State of Israel came into being he continued to paint, at the same time working as a representative of Israel’s Security Services. He became renowned – not as a secret agent but as a painter – and some of his paintings still hang in countries hostile toward Israel.
He had a natural flair for intelligence work, so he was able to concentrate on his art, interrupting occasionally for his other assignments. His rich imagination and skill at improvisation, his command of several languages, and his knowledge of the culture and customs of many countries all helped to make him one of the most outstanding professionals in the Service.
At the time of my meeting with Dr. Shinar, Shaul was on a protracted mission in Europe. I wired him to come to Tel Aviv, and a few days later he was sitting in my office.
‘I want to entrust you with certain inquiries relating to Eichmann,’ I said.
Shaken and excited, he took a little while to reply. He looked at me searchingly to see if I was indeed serious. Finally he asked, ‘Is Eichmann alive?’
I told him about Dr. Bauer and the information he had given Shinar.
Shaul’s eyes lit up. He was doubly exhilarated – at the prospect of finding Eichmann and at the thought that he could play a part in the operation.
‘Bauer,’ I continued, ‘is known to be a man of balanced judgment, and he treats the report with great seriousness. Our assignment is to investigate his information with the utmost thoroughness.’
Shaul Darom arrived in Cologne on November 6, 1957, and immediately presented himself to Dr. Shinar. The next day they went to Bauer’s home, where Shinar introduced them and then left them to themselves.
Shaul scrutinized the other man, thinking that an appropriate background for a painting of him would be a book and a sword. Bauer appeared to be an energetic and excitable man. He returned Shaul’s gaze with a penetrating glance from his calm gray eyes.
‘Before we start our talk,’ Shaul began, ‘permit me to tell you that we’re grateful you came to us. I can assure you that we’ll do all within our power to bring Eichmann to trial before a properly constituted court of justice.’
‘I should really be thanking you for your quick response,’ Bauer said. ‘I was sure that you were the only ones who would be ready and willing to act. I really think that this time we’re on Eichmann’s trail. Our information seems to be dependable.’
Shaul said, ‘Actually, that was our first question: Can we rely on the source of your information?’
‘It’s a man who says he is half-Jewish, a German by birth, now living in Argentina. We won’t reveal his name for the time being. I must admit I don’t know him personally, only by letter. He initiated the correspondence when he wrote to the German authorities after reading in the newspapers that Adolf Eichmann’s name was mentioned at the trial of another war criminal and it was reported that Eichmann had disappeared.’ Bauer went on, ‘I suspect that he knows more than he is prepared to divulge at this stage. He sent us Eichmann’s address: 4261 Chacabuco Street, Olivos, Buenos Aires, but he hasn’t told us what name he uses.’
‘Do you know anything about your man?’ Shaul asked. ‘If you do, we may be able to find the key to his behavior.’
‘No, I know nothing beyond what he himself has offered. He may be afraid of reprisals, so perhaps he feels he is taking less of a risk by passing on only part of the information,’ Bauer replied. ‘In any event,’ he continued, ‘some of the items he sent correspond with known facts about Eichmann, such as certain particulars about the sons born before his disappearance, the alleged second marriage of his wife Vera, and so on. We have compared these details with the material available in Germany and found them to be correct.’
Shaul said, ‘If I’m not mistaken, this isn’t the first report of Eichmann’s flight to South America.’
‘That’s correct. Various sources of dubious reliability have stated that in 1947 or 1948 he arrived in Argentina and went to live somewhere in the south. The fact that this latest news tallies with previous reports is precisely what makes it seem encouraging. He probably managed to obtain Argentine papers and later decided to move to Buenos Aires.’
And what about his wife and sons?’ Shaul asked.
All we know about them is that they left Germany after he did. There was a rumor early on that Vera Eichmann met an American in Germany and married him, but since then nothing has been heard about her. Every effort to learn something from her family in Europe has failed, and my guess is that the so-called second husband is Adolf Eichmann himself. But,’ said Dr. Bauer, ‘this is pure conjecture with no verification whatsoever.’
‘Some other war criminal may have married Vera after her husband left her, and this may be the man living with her at the address you were given,’ Shaul mused aloud.
‘That’s also a possibility we can’t ignore,’ Bauer said. ‘But as far as I can see, the prospects are that we’ll find Eichmann himself filling the role of Vera’s second husband.’
As the conversation continued, Shaul gathered that Bauer’s plan was for us to take all necessary steps, using our own ways and means, to find out the name and true identity of the man living at the address he’d been given. If we succeeded, he would then send a man to Argentina who knew Eichmann and would be able to identify him. If this man confirmed the identification, Bauer would press West Germany to demand that the Argentine authorities extradite Eichmann. But he had few illusions about the prospects of extradition. It was his opinion that simultaneous pressure would have to be brought by Israel and West Germany, and public opinion would have to be mobilized -principally in the United States – to persuade Argentina to extradite the criminal.
The problem of extradition worried me as well, and I had instructed Shaul to attempt to probe into Bauer’s attitude – but very carefully.
‘It’s quite likely,’ he said to Bauer, ‘that if we manage to prove that the man really is Eichmann we may run into insurmountable difficulties in trying to get him extradited, and in the end, instead of putting Eichmann on trial we may be giving him the opportunity of vanishing again and covering his tracks even more efficiently than before.’
‘I too am worried about that,’ Bauer replied thoughtfully, ‘and I won’t reject the idea of your getting him to Israel in your own way.’
Darom was struck by the courage implicit in these words. Had he needed any further proof of Bauer’s integrity, here it was. To hide his own emotions, he spoke crisply. ‘Well then, to begin with,’ he said, ‘we’ll investigate the identity of the man in Argentina – not an easy matter. Only when that’s done can we tackle the clarification of the legal position and the possibility of extradition. If we run into problems, we’ll do all we can to make certain that Eichmann will be brought to trial. But the overriding consideration in everything we do is the sure knowledge that the minute he finds out he has been located -he’ll run away again.’
‘I agree with you absolutely,’ Bauer said.
Shaul asked for copies of documents that might help him in the location and identification of Eichmann, and Bauer promised to let him have the material within two hours. He gave Shaul photostats of documents containing information about Eichmann’s life; copies of rather blurred photographs of him and his wife taken in the late thirties or early forties; personal details about both of them, the date of their marriage and the dates of birth of the three sons born in Germany; and details of his career in the SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazi military security police) up to 1944. The last document was accompanied by a slightly clearer photograph than the others. Bauer’s final bit of information for Shaul was that Eichmann had a strident voice and was known to be a lover of strong drink and women.
At the end of the conversation Shaul asked who else knew about their contact in this matter. Bauer replied that he had told only one man about his appeal to the Israelis, a man of standing and of high integrity.
Shaul remained in Europe after this meeting and reported to me in writing. About the personality of his h
ost he wrote:
As for Fritz Bauer himself, all I can do is confirm Dr. Shinar’s opinion and impression that he is an honest man with a warm Jewish heart, whose object in coming to us was that the matter not be set aside or put off because the means or the desire were lacking to become involved in a problem both difficult and delicate, even unpleasant under prevailing political conditions in Germany. I gather he is disappointed with present developments in Germany, and I have the feeling that he is not at peace with himself for having decided to resume his public activities in such a Germany.
2
IT WAS NOW necessary to send an operator to Argentina. Bauer’s refusal to disclose his informant’s name severely hampered our investigation. If it were possible to meet the man and form an impression of his good faith, to learn from him personally what he knew, and to test his conclusions, the prospects of success would be appreciably greater. But in the circumstances, all we could do was inspect 4261 Chacabuco Street, Olivos, Buenos Aires.
I gave the assignment to Yoel Goren, an experienced operations man who, before joining the Service, had spent quite a lot of time in the Latin American countries as the representative of a private company and still spoke some Spanish. In January 1958 he left for Buenos Aires. I had no illusions about the prospects of a lone man working in a strange place, with a limited knowledge of the language. Before he left I had to warn him not to make any move likely to attract attention to our interest in the house and its tenants. I knew that any careless step, any unwarranted activity around the house or its tenants, was liable to act as a warning signal to the wanted man.
To make Goren’s difficult task a little easier, I told him he could try to enlist the help of Efraim Ilani, an Israeli who was doing research into the history of Jewish settlement in Argentina. Ilani had been born in one of the oldest settlements in Israel and for years had dreamed of doing this kind of study; he earned a scholarship, which enabled him to take an extended leave from the public institution where he was employed. A skilled linguist, fluent in more than ten languages, Ilani was completely at home in Spanish. He was familiar with the customs of the country and, being very sociable, had made good connections in Buenos Aires. I did, however, warn Goren that, while Ilani loved holding long conversations and had an excellent sense of humor, he was not the most practical of men. He unhesitatingly placed himself at Goren’s disposal.
Olivos is a suburb just north of the city limits of Buenos Aires. The way the area has developed, holiday homes and luxury residences fill the area closest to the Río de la Plata, and the farther from the river bank the humbler the dwellings, mostly single-story houses with small gardens. The quarter is linked to the center of the city by the General Bartolomé Mitre railway line. Most of the residents – many of whom are Germans, including some who came to Argentina after the war – are workers who get up early in the morning to go to work in Buenos Aires and come home late in the evening, so perpetual quiet prevails in the streets. Relations among the tenants are extremely close and neighborly, practically everybody knows everybody else, and they all know each other’s business.
Goren and Ilani reconnoitered several times in the vicinity of 4261 Chacabuco Street, even photographing it secretly. The house was surrounded by a low fence, and several leafy trees in the yard cast their shade over a wide area. The entrance to both house and grounds was at the front right-hand corner, though they were unable to determine if the place had any other entrances. The street wasn’t paved, and in general the impression was one of shabbiness.
It somehow didn’t make sense. At that time people still thought that the Nazi criminals who had succeeded in escaping from Germany had considerable financial means. According to rumors which had been widely circulating for many years, when the Third Reich began to totter the leaders secreted valuables and large sums of money in various hiding places both inside and outside of Germany, and this treasure was being used to support them and to finance the activities of the Nazis who went underground. As for Eichmann, it was presumed that at the time of his flight he had managed to take with him a mint of money looted from the Jews of Europe. We knew that he was arrogant, boastful, and pleasure-loving. The poverty-stricken suburb of Olivos, the unpaved street, and the wretched little house could in no way be reconciled with our picture of the life of an SS officer of Eichmann’s rank.
From his impressions of the place, Goren came to the conclusion that it was impossible for Adolf Eichmann to be living there, so he started making inquiries about the members of the German colony in Argentina in the hope that he might thus find out something about Eichmann. He and Ilani collected a great deal of important information on the subject, but there was nothing to help bring us nearer to our goal.
The report Goren made when he returned from Argentina was a great disappointment to me. The obvious conclusion was that the information passed on to us by Bauer was unfounded, but it was my belief that this wasn’t so. Goren had seen a stout, slovenly woman in the yard, and although she was European-looking both he and Ilani refused to believe that this untidy female could be Eichmann’s wife.
I still wasn’t totally convinced that it was impossible for Eichmann and his family to be living in that Chacabuco Street house. I did feel, however, that without direct contact with Bauer’s source we couldn’t judge its validity. I hoped that when Bauer heard about the negative results of Goren’s mission he would change his stand and yield to our request for a personal meeting with this informant.
Shaul Darom had almost completed his mission in Europe and was about to return to Israel, so I conveyed to him Goren’s findings and my opinions and asked him to have another talk with Bauer.
They met in Frankfurt on January 21, 1958. Bauer understood our situation perfectly and agreed to divulge his source. He also wrote a letter of introduction to be handed over by the person we sent. On a separate sheet he wrote the name and address of his informant: Lothar Hermann, Coronel Suárez, Province of Buenos Aires.
It was my opinion that we could avoid risk and save ourselves anxiety if our representative introduced himself not as an Israeli but as a messenger from Dr. Bauer. The candidate would have to be German-speaking and an expert in the technique of identification, as he would have to determine whether the man Lothar Hermann indicated was indeed Adolf Eichmann.
As luck would have it, I was told that the police were sending one of their crack investigators, Efraim Hofstaetter, to South America to conduct a criminal inquiry with Israeli connections. With the consent of the Inspector-General of the Israeli Police Force, I contacted Hofstaetter, explained what it was all about, and asked him if, at the end of his official investigation, he would undertake an assignment on my behalf. He agreed without hesitation. Hofstaetter was not particularly well versed in the history of the holocaust even though his parents and sister had been murdered by the Nazis, but he had heard of Eichmann and knew that this man was among those in charge of the extermination of European Jewry and one of the most wanted war criminals.
I provided him with all the material we had on Eichmann and gave him detailed instructions on the execution of his assignment. I told him that, first of all, his personal impressions of Lothar Hermann were of decisive importance. Is he an earnest man? Does he inspire confidence? Where did his information on Eichmann come from? What’s his motive? And what else does he know? I stressed the necessity of obtaining any item likely to help in the identification of Eichmann: personal data on him and his family, recent photographs, and so on. I added that fingerprints of the Eichmann-suspect would be an extremely valuable means of identification (I didn’t know yet that there were no fingerprints of Eichmann on record, neither in Germany nor anywhere else).
Hofstaetter himself emphasized the need to proceed with extreme caution, since if the information was correct, and if Eichmann became aware that the hunt was on, he was liable to vanish without a trace. We assumed that after so many trouble-free years he was not liable to be particularly on the alert; all the same, nothing m
ust be done to rouse him out of his complacency.
Hofstaetter took Dr. Bauer’s letter of introduction to Hermann, and I reminded him to introduce himself as a representative of the German authorities who had been living abroad for some time – which would also account for his accent.
As I did not want Hofstaetter’s family to know the nature of his mission, we arranged for his personal correspondence to go through a third country. Ilani was asked to assist Hofstaetter as he had assisted Goren. Before his departure I told Efraim that if he succeeded in making a positive identification of Eichmann he might get a second trip to Argentina.
3
EVEN IN THE most detailed briefing some important item may occasionally be forgotten. Hofstaetter found this out the moment he reached Buenos Aires after completing his official mission wearing winter clothes. Nobody had thought to warn him that he might be arriving at the height of the Argentine summer. In a bath of perspiration he went to meet Ilani, and it was only after the latter told him some of the jokes he kept in stock for new acquaintances that Efraim began to get over his bad temper.
Ilani told him that Coronel Suárez was a remote township situated a few hundred miles to the southwest of the capital, and any stranger turning up there would inevitably attract general attention. It would be better, therefore, if Hofstaetter were to invite Hermann to Buenos Aires. He sent Hermann a telegram in German, mentioning Bauer’s name and explaining that he was on a short visit to Argentina and would like very much to see him. He suggested that Hermann come to the capital or any large town in the vicinity.
The reply came without delay: ‘I don’t know you. If you want to speak to me you’ll have to come to me.’ Hofstaetter wired back that he would come.
But now misgivings crept into his mind. Here he was, on the point of traveling to a strange and remote region of the country, to meet a man he knew nothing about. How could he know it wasn’t a trap? Ilani shared his suspicions, and also believed it would be difficult for Efraim to find his destination in such an out-of-the-way spot without knowing Spanish. They would go together to Coronel Suárez.
