by Isser Harel
I could see that a distinction had to be made between the facts themselves (most of which came not from Hermann but from his wife and daughter) and the evaluation of those facts (which came from Hermann alone), which was open to doubt – the reference to Eichmann’s plastic surgery, for example, was totally unsubstantiated. However, the starting point remained the same and was not to be regarded lightly.
There was no reason to presume that Hermann had collaborated with his wife and daughter in concocting an imaginary tale. Why should they do such a thing? What motive could a whole family have in becoming involved in a senseless adventure, and a dangerous one at that? Their story was fairly rational: a young man, even Eichmann’s son, would speak freely to his friends on any subject – including the Jews – according to the way he’d been brought up. At the same time, some things could be taboo and he might not be free to bring people home or to reveal his address to strangers. But what’s wrong with telling a girl friend that his father was an officer in the German army and ‘did his duty for the fatherland’? It would also make sense for Nicolas Eichmann to have her write to him at someone else’s address: he might not want his inquisitive family to read his letters. Mrs. Hermann’s remarks also struck me as being reasonable. What could be more natural than a mother’s desire to know something about the young man her daughter was going out with? The young man’s reply to her question about his accent, and his explanation that his father’s duties had kept the family on the move, would not be suspect to a German woman who had been living in Argentina for ten years or more and who, as far as he knew, would not think ill of them in the first place. And hadn’t there been a great many German officers who kept moving from place to place in the German areas of conquest during World War II?
As for Hermann himself, he could well be rash and overconfident, as Hofstaetter said, but there was no ignoring the fact that he had demonstrated a quick perception and an acute intelligence in correlating all the data about the young man and his family. Therefore, if his primary evaluation was correct, he could indeed be useful in identifying Eichmann. If, however, it should prove that the whole story was a fabrication, the undertaking itself wouldn’t suffer if we let him and his family carry on embroidering their fanciful tale.
These considerations led me to authorize Hofstaetter’s recommendations on general lines. A cable was sent to Ilani informing him that he could now send Hermann the letter with the money. I also made arrangements for Hermann’s correspondence.
Hofstaetter returned to his regular duties in the police force and had no further hand in Operation Eichmann.
Hermann’s first letter to the new address was dated May 19, 1958. He confirmed the receipt of Huppert’s letter with the money and reported on his activities in Buenos Aires and environs between April 8 and 15. He wrote that he examined the property register in the town of La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, and found that on August 14, 1947, a Francisco Schmidt, an Austrian citizen, had purchased a plot of land at 4261 Chacabuco Street, Olivos. Toward the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948 a house was built on the plot, with two separate units, one facing Chacabuco Street and the other facing the yard. The Olivos electric company, Hermann found out, had installed two meters, one in the front apartment in the name of Dagoto, the other in the rear in the name of Clement or Clements (he did not find out any first names). In 1955 Francisco Schmidt sold a portion of the plot that had not been built on, but the house at 4261 Chacabuco Street was still registered in his name.
On the strength of these findings, Hermann unhesitatingly stated:
Francisco Schmidt is the man we want, and the personal description of Adolf Eichmann we got from Frankfurt fits him. From what I can make out, he chose two people at random and registered the meters in their names. Francisco Schmidt and his family live in the front of the house and he has rented the rear apartment to a family whose identity I haven’t yet been able to discover but who apparently know who he really is. From what I was able to find out from people who saw Francisco Schmidt when he bought the land, his appearance matches the description of Adolf Eichmann exactly. Rumor has it that Schmidt was landed from a German submarine on the shore of Argentina in 1945. The same sources report that he claims his face was injured in an accident. These facts and data provide grounds for presuming with certainty that Francisco Schmidt (who is Adolf Eichmann) had his face changed completely by plastic surgery.
After this section of the report, which seemed clear and plausible, the second part came as an unpleasant surprise. Not only was the wording obscure, but it also contained material which gave rise to doubts about the first portion. This is what Hermann wrote in continuation:
After further inquiries into the Eichmann matter, which I carried out in Buenos Aires from May 13 to 18, I can now determine that when Eichmann came to Argentina in 1945 he made his way to the interior of the country. It will therefore be necessary to follow his trail there in order to find out where he lived at that stage. I must point out that the investigation in question will have to cover a wide field and I will have to take numerous journeys to northern Argentina, a distance of thousands of miles – a complicated matter for me, and also very expensive.
Hermann went on to detail his financial requirements and the arrangements for transferring the money to him, and he concluded:
If you, or the authorities, want the material necessary for advancing the matter, you will have to let me hold all the strings. … There’s no need to tell you that the expenses will be enormous or that I won’t be able to defray them from my own pocket. As soon as you reply and carry out my request, you will hear from me again.
It all sounded most peculiar to me: if he’s so sure of his story about Nicolas and what his daughter told him after going to the Eichmann home, and if he states categorically in the first part of his report that Francisco Schmidt is Adolf Eichmann, why on earth does he want to check on Eichmann’s movements after his arrival in Argentina in 1945? It’s like a hunter who finds the fresh spoor of an animal and instead of following it doubles back to see where it came from. If Hermann did in fact establish that Adolf Eichmann is Francisco Schmidt who lives at a known address in the suburbs of Olivos, he should now go all out to obtain the details required for the final identification of the criminal, and that’s that. What’s the point of searching all over Argentina for places Eichmann stayed at in the past? And why is Hermann demanding that he must ‘hold all the strings’?
I could see two possibilities: either Hermann’s story was a figment of his imagination from start to finish and he made it up for a purpose I couldn’t fathom, or his first story did have a sound basis but he got muddled up as he carried on with his search.
I gave instructions to approach him for an explanation of the contradictions in his report. All the money he had been promised was transferred to him, and at the same time Ilani was asked to find out, but not through Hermann, if there was any foundation for the supposition that Francisco Schmidt was Adolf Eichmann.
A wearisome round of inquiries proved to Ilani that Francisco Schmidt could not possibly be Eichmann; neither his appearance nor the data about his family fitted in with what we knew about the criminal. And furthermore, while Schmidt was in fact the owner of the house at 4261 Chacabuco Street, he didn’t live there.
These findings damaged Hermann’s trustworthiness irretrievably. The man continued to maintain obstinately that Schmidt was Eichmann. He didn’t use the term ‘supposition’ and never even mentioned the possibility that it was one of the tenants of the house – either Dagoto or Klement – who could be Eichmann. Once all our checking showed us that he’d made a mistake, we began to doubt his claim that Eichmann lived at 4261 Chacabuco Street.
In August 1958 instructions were given to allow our contact with Hermann to lapse gradually. However, Lothar Hermann didn’t give up easily. At the end of that year he sent Huppert further news of his efforts to find Francisco Schmidt or ‘a man living in Argentina using the name Eichmann.’ He had appa
rently found out that nobody by the name of Schmidt or Eichmann lived at 4261 Chacabuco Street. Posing as a research worker for an alleged economic survey, he went to the registry office for temporary residents in Argentina and asked for information about Adolf or Adolfo Eichmann, born in Germany, and Francisco Schmidt, a native of Austria. He said in his application that they both used to live at 4261 Chacabuco Street on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Hermann explained that he had been asked for the information by a client in Germany in connection with a real-estate transaction.
Some more money Hermann requested was sent to him at the beginning of 1959, and after that the correspondence petered out. Nothing remained of the high hopes we had pinned on him at the beginning.
Somehow I couldn’t reconcile myself to the thought that Hermann’s information was totally unfounded. From time to time I went through the file we’d prepared on Eichmann, and I believed that in spite of everything there must be a grain of truth in Hermann’s words. It was the daughter’s story particularly that I wanted to check – it sounded very convincing. The whole Hermann family agreed on one detail: they knew a young man named Nick Eichmann whose age and description conformed to what we knew about Eichmann’s eldest son, Klaus. ‘Klaus’ and ‘Nick’ are both diminutives of Nicolas. And Nick Eichmann’s unwillingness to give his girl friend his address was enough to point to some sort of family skeleton.
Apart from Hermann’s evidence, we had quite a bit of information – unchecked, it’s true – about Eichmann’s presence in South America. Some of the items even mentioned Argentina specifically. Bauer too, in spite of his disappointment in Hermann, continued to believe that Eichmann was in Argentina.
The disappearance of Vera Eichmann and her children from Austria and Germany was also not without significance. If there were any grounds for the theory that she had married again, why did she have to conceal where she was living? Why were the relatives, both her’s and Eichmann’s, so careful not to give any information about her or her children?
I came to the conclusion that we must renew our attempts to ascertain whatever we could from both sides of the family. I worked on the assumption that Vera Eichmann most likely kept up some sort of correspondence with her mother and her sisters and brothers. I thought that Eichmann might even be maintaining some sort of link with his father in Linz, or with one or more of his brothers in Austria and Germany. And if there was in fact an exchange of letters between him and his relatives, then there was hope of uncovering a lead, any sort of lead, to the family we were looking for.
With a view to advancing the investigation, I decided to appoint a special unit to deal solely with the most important war criminals – first and foremost, Eichmann. Moshe Drori, a veteran agent, was placed at the head of the unit. All the material in the hands of the various institutions was passed on to this group, which in turn assigned agents in Israel and abroad to uncover new material on Eichmann and locate persons who might be able to identify him.
Our efforts did not bring the desired results.
Information we received in September 1959, claiming that Adolf Eichmann was seen in Bad Aussee or Alt Aussee in 1955, 1956, and 1959, was checked and found to be baseless. I had made up my mind, however, not to abandon the search. I considered it desirable to strengthen our ties with Dr. Bauer and to urge him not to spare any effort likely to lead us on a fresh trail.
And indeed, in the middle of 1959 Bauer reported that he had a new clue, leading again to Argentina. The information and its source, he stated, could be regarded as extremely reliable, but he considered it necessary to inquire further before he could pass it along. These inquiries would take some time, but he was hoping that by the time he planned to visit Israel, early in December 1959, he would be able to bring the results with him.
We had managed to conduct all our activities in secret until then, and there was nothing about them that could be construed by Eichmann as a warning or alert him to the fact that attempts to discover his hiding place were in progress. But on October 11, 1959, a sensational piece of news was published in the Israeli press: Eichmann was in Kuwait, working for an oil company. The item was attributed to Dr. Erwin Schule, one of the heads of the Bureau for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, in Ludwigsburg.
The newspapers got their teeth into the subject and didn’t let go for weeks. There were reports about teams of investigators in various countries working to find Eichmann. In the wake of the shattering news came criticism for lack of action in the past and a demand for efforts to capture Eichmann. This in spite of the fact that Dr. Erwin Schule soon dissociated himself from the statement attributed to him and said that he had received unsubstantiated news that Eichmann had apparently been in Kuwait a few years ago. There was never any question of his being there now.
But that didn’t stop the flood of publicity and demands for action. I was in no position to put a stop to all this without stirring up undesired attention. The newspaper publicity could very well put Eichmann on the alert. I decided that the best thing to do in the circumstances was to encourage the rumors about his being in Kuwait and even to make up a lot of extra details, so as to give him – and his friends – the impression that this was no serious investigation. Nothing could be done about the harsh criticisms leveled against the government. Silence was the only expedient in this respect.
Silence was not always possible. On December 25, 1959, Knesset Member Peretz Bernstein put a question in the House, asking whether the Prime Minister was prepared to take suitable steps in order to assist in the capture and legal punishment of Eichmann. I was asked how the question should be answered. I said I was confident that a man like Peretz Bernstein would not insist on a reply if the efforts being made were explained to him.
My advice was accepted. Knesset Member Bernstein willingly withdrew his question.
The reverberations of the rumor that Eichmann was in Kuwait had not yet died down when a turbid wave of anti-Semitic filth swelled in Germany and overflowed into dozens of countries all over the world. At daybreak on December 26, 1959, swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans were daubed on the walls of the new synagogue in Cologne. This did not remain an isolated incident. Within a few days swastikas and anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi slogans appeared in other cities in Germany and all over Western Europe. Similar incidents, including smearing of Jewish institutions and threatening of Jewish leaders, occurred in places as far away as Melbourne, New York, and Buenos Aires.
The worldwide scope of these paintings of swastikas and vilifications aroused grave anxiety in Israel. Admittedly, various governments had publicized their revulsion at the acts and increased the number of police guards at Jewish institutions; however, the general feeling was that these measures were not vigorous enough to stem the murky torrent. Newspapers in Israel expressed the fear that an international anti-Semitic organization was planning and directing the hostile demonstrations in every country.
As the epidemic showed no signs of abating, the name of Eichmann eventually floated to the surface in the newspapers. He was said to be one of those Nazi leaders who had smuggled abroad considerable funds from the treasury of the Third Reich and were now in constant touch with an anti-Semitic center in Europe and were financing its activities.
On January 20, speaking in the Knesset about the wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the world, the Prime Minister said that ‘one of our services, which has the facilities for it’ had been entrusted to make inquiries in various countries about the possible existence of an international organization that had a hand in these outbreaks.
The inquiry entrusted to us was not inconsistent with our efforts to catch Eichmann. On the contrary, the new wave of Nazism made our operation a matter of paramount importance. It was clear to me that Eichmann’s capture and his judgment in Israel would constitute a crushing counteraction to the Nazi monster’s attempt to rear its head once more.
5
THE NEW information Dr. Bauer brought to Israel in December 1959 was of tremendous importance. Accordi
ng to Bauer’s new source, Eichmann went into hiding after the war in a German monastery, under the aegis of Catholic monks from Croatia. He apparently visited his wife in Austria in 1950, by which time he was already equipped with papers in his new name, Ricardo Klement. He then went by boat to Argentina with an International Red Cross passport – in the name of Ricardo Klement. In Buenos Aires he obtained an identity card in his new name, and a Ricardo Klement was listed in the Buenos Aires telephone directory for 1952. For a while Klement ran a laundry in the Olivos quarter, but he went bankrupt.
Some time in 1952 or 1953, Klement had business connections with a banking firm called Fuldner y Compañía, whose address in Buenos Aires was 374 Avenida Córdoba, telephone 328785. This company, headed by a German emigrant settled in Argentina, was interested in the exploitation of water sources for electricity and set up a subsidiary called C.A.P.R.I. for the purpose; Ricardo Klement was on the staff. In the early fifties, 1952 it seems, he worked for the company in the vicinity of the city of Tucumán. In 1958, according to the same source, somebody asked about Ricardo Klement at the Fuldner company, and the reply was: ‘He is still with us.’
Once, during an attempted Bolivian uprising, one of Klement’s friends who knew his real identity was said to have suggested that he work for the state security services there. Klement responded: ‘When I hear those words, “state security services”, my appetite for killing is whetted all over again.’ It was absolutely impossible to make Bauer reveal any details whatsoever about the new source. But I realized immediately that this was the turning point and we were now steering toward the open road. Only one question bothered me, and I asked for clarification: How can I be sure that there is no connection, either direct or indirect, between the new source and Hermann? Bauer’s reply was unequivocal: There is not, and there never could be, any connection between the two.
