Nazi Hunter (24 page)

The matching up of Ricardo Klement with Adolf Eichmann was as painstaking a process as the mounting of a Penny Black or Twopenny Blue in a stamp album. And the breakthrough, though it
wasn’t recognized at the time, came from Wiesenthal’s hobby. At a philately exhibition in Innsbruck in late 1953, he met an old baron who invited him home to his villa in the Tyrol to
look at his collection. Over a bottle of wine, the baron – a lifelong Catholic and ardent monarchist who had suffered for his views under Hitler – told his Jewish guest how dismayed he
was to see prominent Nazis regaining high positions in the Tyrol ‘as if nothing had changed. And it’s not only here.’ Rummaging in a drawer for a recent letter from a friend in
Argentina, he handed it, still in its envelope, to Wiesenthal. ‘Beautiful stamps, aren’t they?’ the baron remarked. ‘But read what’s inside.’

His friend, a former lieutenant-colonel in the German army who had never concealed his dislike for Hitler, had gone to Argentina as an instructor to Juan Perón’s troops. He wrote to
the baron:

‘How do you like that?’ the baron remarked. ‘Some of the worst of the lot got away.’

Wiesenthal played it cool, for the baron could convey some of his excitement to his friend, who might mention it in conversation that could alert ‘that swine Eichmann’. But he
memorized that passage and all the other names in the letter as well as the sender’s address. Declining to finish his wine for fear it might blur his memory, he made his excuses early,
returned to his hotel, and wrote everything down.

Upon his return to Linz, Simon phoned the Israeli consul in Vienna, Aryeh Eschel, and then prepared two complete dossiers on Eichmann. ‘By late 1953,’ says
Wiesenthal, ‘I had definite knowledge of where Eichmann was in Argentina and where he worked. I had everything but his name, which a trained, trustworthy Jewish investigator could have
ferreted out easily from what else I had. So I wrote up a full report on Eichmann, complete with the photograph of him and copies of his letters in his own handwriting.’ Concluding with the
passage from (but not the source of) the baron’s letter, Wiesenthal gave one copy to Eschel for forwarding to his government in Jerusalem and sent the other to Nahum Goldmann at the New York
headquarters of the World Jewish Congress, an umbrella organization that claims to speak on behalf of Jewish communities in seventy countries.

A dynamic Polish-born scholar who had founded the WJC in 1936 to warn the world against Nazism and prevent persecution of Jews, Nahum Goldmann (1894 – 1982) was its president as well as
head of the World Zionist Organization – a man so powerful that, on one of his frequent visits to the young state of Israel, he cut short a meeting with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion
because he was ‘too busy’. A feisty autocrat given to categorical statements that ninety per cent of Israel’s people live outside its borders and (according to Simon Wiesenthal)
that ‘only I can decide what is good for the Jews’, Nahum Goldmann had headed the postwar International Claims Conference which negotiated with governments for compensation to be
awarded to persecuted Jews. When Austrian Chancellor Julius Raab had greeted him with ‘Jews and Austrians are both the victims of Nazism!’, Goldmann had put Raab in his place with
biting sarcasm: ‘Yes, Herr Chancellor, that is why I have come to ask you how much money the Jews owe the Austrians.’

There was no reply from Israel, but Wiesenthal to this day is angrier at the answer he did receive after two months from New York, where Goldmann had turned his material over to Rabbi Abraham
Kalmanowitz, president and dean of the Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute. Writing in German, the rabbi acknowledged receipt and asked for ‘Eichmann’s full address in Buenos Aires’.
Politely reiterating that he didn’t yet have that, Wiesenthal replied that he could send a Spanish-speaking investigator there to do the job if the
WJC would pay travel
expenses plus 500 dollars. Rabbi Kalmanowitz wrote back insisting that Wiesenthal forward Eichmann’s address and enclosing a letter from Nahum Goldmann saying, as Simon puts it, ‘that
anyway Eichmann wasn’t in Argentina, but in Damascus.’

Part of the problem, Wiesenthal won’t quite admit (but won’t deny), was the barrage of false clues given out by Tuviah Friedman (Eichmann was in Syria, Eichmann was in Kuwait) in an
effort to smoke out real leads. But he blames Nahum Goldmann more: ‘This man blocked everything. When organizations asked for money, he always said no. Once I asked him why and he said:
“I don’t like independent organizations.” But I argued that my kind of work can only be done by independent individuals and small groups. No matter. He wanted to have a
monopoly.’

The antipathy between Wiesenthal and the World Jewish Congress, which exploded in 1986 during the campaign of Kurt Waldheim for the Austrian presidency, had its roots in the Eichmann hunt
– which Wiesenthal almost, but not quite, gave up in March 1954 when, in despair at the lack of results, funds, and outside interest, he shut down his Documentation Centre in Linz and sent
532 kilos (1170 pounds) of files to the Yad Vashem Historical Archives in Israel. But, like Friedman when he emigrated, he held on to one dossier: Adolf Eichmann’s.

The hunt for Eichmann would languish for at least five years. ‘The next time I saw Nahum Goldmann, in 1956,’ Simon recalls ruefully, ‘I told him I’d had to close my
Centre. He had no reaction, none at all, not even a word of sympathy.’

Was there no way to track down Eichmann when Wiesenthal came so close? Surely, even then, 500 dollars was not an impossible hurdle for a determined fund-raiser like Simon to clear. But he needed
auspices as well as money. ‘I was alone in Linz,’ he explained. ‘Suppose we did find Eichmann living near Buenos Aires and working for a water company, how could we get him? What
would I, a private citizen half a world away, do? The Germans were a strong political force in Argentina. German soldiers were training Perón’s army. German experts were running
Argentine industries. Millions in German capital was invested in Argentine banks.’

Simon Wiesenthal estimates the value of the wealth that the Nazis smuggled out of Europe at close to a billion dollars. ‘After the war,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘the Nazis sent
experts and money to Argentina.
Perón himself, according to an investigation made in Buenos Aires after his downfall, was given around $100 million. Buenos Aires
became the south terminal port for
ODESSA
. The Germans took over hotels and boarding houses, gave new SS immigrants jobs and identity papers, and had excellent connections
with the highest government officials. At one time, a group of Argentinian Germans plotted to fly to Germany and set free all the Nazi criminals in Landsberg Prison.’

Back in 1954, Wiesenthal guessed that ‘Eichmann must feel quite safe in Argentina or he wouldn’t have sent for his family. Maybe he has powerful friends there. Otherwise he
wouldn’t dare live in or near a city with more than 200,000 Jews. Even though his victims seldom saw him, who knows? Somebody from the Jewish Councils in Vienna or Prague or Budapest just
might recognize him.’

Actually, Eichmann had hardly been in Buenos Aires during the first three years of his stay in Argentina. ‘Ricardo Klement’ had arrived wearing dark glasses, a Hitler moustache, and
a hat pulled low over his eyes, but had been met by SS friends who quickly put him in touch with the head of
CAPRI
, a firm founded by Germans to provide work for postwar
refugees. Some 20,000 of their countrymen had arrived within a few months after the war ended,
CAPRI
offered ‘Klement’ work in Tucumán, some 600 miles
from the capital.

CAPRI
was a contractor to the Argentine government, prospecting for water power and planning hydroelectric plants and dams. ‘Klement’ was put in charge of a
crew of native workers and, determined organizer of labour that he was, soon excelled and was given promotions, responsibility, and raises that enabled him to send for his family within two years.
Vera Liebl, the ‘ex-Frau Eichmann’, had received a letter – from a ‘stranger’ whose handwriting she recognized – saying that ‘your children’s uncle,
whom everybody believed to be dead, is alive and well.’ When she and her sons had joined ‘Uncle Ricardo’ in Tucumán on 15 August 1952, the boys had been told that he was
‘your dead father’s cousin’, and they liked him so much that they rejoiced when their uncle married their mother and she had a fourth son: Ricardo Francisco, the middle name in
honour of a Franciscan friar who had helped the proud father escape through Italy.

With their mother masquerading as a remarried divorcée to some and a widow to others, their father pretending to be their uncle and stepfather, and their half-brother really their
brother, family life for
the Eichmann boys sounds more complicated than it was. Even when the baby was baptized ‘Ricardo Francisco Klement
Eichmann
’, his
brothers asked no questions. They were dull boys – like their father had been. He once complained that they showed ‘absolutely no interest in being educated’ and didn’t
‘ even try to develop their so-called talents.’

In retrospect, says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘Adolf Eichmann’s undoing was his family feeling. He wanted to resume relations with his wife, he cherished family celebrations, and he wanted
his sons by his side. He fitted into the middle-class mould, just the way Mafiosi do – and it was this loyalty that eventually helped us pick up his traces.’

Having lost its government contracts when its protector – Perón’s wife, ‘Evita’ – died of cancer at the age of thirty-three in 1952,
CAPRI
went bankrupt the following year. Thus, by the time Wiesenthal read the letter from the baron’s informant in Buenos Aires, it was obsolete, for Eichmann’s water
company had gone down the drain. Still, he was back in Buenos Aires looking for work and might have been easy to trace.

The ‘Klement’ ménage rented a small house on the Calle Chacabuco in Vicente Lopez, a suburb of the capital. With two other Nazis as partners, Eichmann started a laundry
business that failed. Then he left his family behind while he worked on a rabbit farm for a few months and, after that, he found an office job in a fruit-canning factory, but it, too, was
short-lived. In and out of town, in and out of work, even down and out in Buenos Aires, he barely managed to provide – but he always did. His landlord, Francisco Schmidt, a Jew, had only good
words to say about his tenant.

In his first five years in Argentina, only a handful of trusted SS friends knew that ‘Klement’ was Eichmann. Anybody could guess that he was a Nazi fugitive, but there were thousands
of those. Such Germans as the baron’s friend who recognized him as ‘that swine Eichmann’ usually didn’t learn – or want to learn – too much about his Argentine
identity. Now, however, in financial distress, he turned to a couple of the Nazi help organizations in Argentina, even though they might be infiltrated by informers.

Call them arms of
ODESSA
, if you will, but these groups were too far above ground to resemble, in any way, an underground railway for escaping Nazis. More of an
‘old boys’ network’, they quickly recognized Eichmann’s growing notoriety and rewarded his past
work with a job at the Mercedes Benz factory in
Suarez, near Buenos Aires. Starting as a mechanic, he was quickly promoted to foreman and then department head.

Scarcely bothering to conceal his identity any more, Eichmann started cutting a celebrity’s swath through Argentina’s ample Nazi colony. In 1955, he even gave an interview to a Dutch
SS man named Willem S. Sassen, who had been dabbling in journalism ever since his arrival in South America in 1948, around the time that Belgium condemned him in
absentia
to death as a war
criminal. In his session with Sassen, Eichmann explained his dedication to ‘the Final Solution’ by saying that Hitler ‘may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is
beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance-corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million . . . His success alone proved to me that I should
subordinate myself to this man.’

Having given up his Documentation Centre in Linz, Simon Wiesenthal had gone into refugee work, first with persons still displaced by the war and then, starting in 1956, from
anti-communist upheavals in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. ‘For a while, after the Hungarian revolution,’ he recalls, ‘I was director of eight schools for vocational
re-training of refugees: teaching them jobs that would be necessary in the West, like TV repairmen and automobile mechanics; I trained 8000 workers for Opel. And we tried to find work that would
tide over professional people who had to learn languages and pass examinations before they could practise in their new countries. So a lawyer became a notary public, a doctor a laboratory
technician . . .’

Simon also represented various Jewish agencies in Austria, though being in Linz, a provincial capital, instead of Vienna, two hours away, was a handicap. Still, he was unwilling to leave Linz
because he wanted to keep an eye on Adolf Eichmann’s family. The Eichmanns lived only two blocks away from the Wiesenthals. And every day, at least twice, Simon had to pass their electric
store with its sign proudly proclaiming
ADOLF EICHMANN
, the name he could not let go of.

In the evening hours, he freelanced as a journalist, writing for such survivor publications as
Die Mahnung
(The Warning) in West Berlin and
La Voix Internationale de la
Résistance
in Brussels as well as any Austrian newspaper (more often in Linz than in Vienna and
Salzburg) that would print his unsolicited contributions. After a
while, ‘the editors would come to me if they had to have something on such subjects as Nazi crimes because I had a monopoly: I was the only person writing about it in Austria. But it
wasn’t a career and certainly not a living.’