Hunting Eichmann (11 page)

Several days later, the innkeeper judged that it was safe to leave and brought him along the edge of the pass. This time, Eichmann was not allowed to bring his suitcase; the innkeeper was afraid it would arouse suspicions if they came across a patrol. A mile past the border into Italy, a black-robed priest on a bicycle met the two men on the road. The priest had Eichmann's suitcase; he had crossed the border without difficulty.

After the innkeeper returned to Austria, Eichmann and his new companion shared a glass of wine to celebrate the successful crossing. The priest arranged for a car to take them to Merano, a Tyrolean village in northern Italy. Eichmann spent the night at a castle, another safe house for fleeing Nazis. The next day, he received a new identity card, issued by the town hall of a neighboring village, Termeno.

Everything had been arranged. To travel across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to South America, Eichmann had tapped into a network whose tendrils reached throughout the continent, including the Vatican and the highest levels of the Argentine government. His new name would be Ricardo Klement. The underground agent who brought the ID also had a landing permit for his final destination: Buenos Aires.

In February 1945, Juan Perón had brought together the leading lights of the influential German community in Buenos Aires, most of whom were enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich. The forty-nine-year-old vice president and minister of war of Argentina—a Machiavellian opportunist to his enemies and a graceful, charismatic savior of the masses to his supporters—announced that Argentina was going to end its commitment to neutrality and declare war on Germany. "It was a mere formality," Perón explained apologetically, to save the country from punishment when the fighting ended. There was little secret that Argentina had been a staging area for the Nazis' intelligence-gathering and covert warfare activities in the Western Hemisphere. At the meeting, Perón made it clear that he would not abandon the German community.

Perón came from a long line of nationalistic military officers who were fervently Catholic and who had little taste for democratic principles. From 1939 to 1941, he had lived in Rome as a military attaché and greatly admired Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. Two years after his return to Argentina, he had staged a coup with a handful of other military men. With his courtship of industrial workers, he had earned enough popularity to win the presidential election less than a year after the war. It was more a stamp of approval than an election, since he already ruled the country of 15 million people in everything but name.

After Germany's defeat, Perón wanted to secure the immigration of Nazi scientists and engineers to benefit his country's military research and to promote industrialization. But he also felt that it was his duty to be a friend to the Germans and to others from the Axis states, and he helped any who wanted to come to his country to build a new life, no matter what they had done during the war. He viewed the Nuremberg trials as an "outrage that history will never forgive" and pledged to do whatever he could to help others avoid the fate of their defendants. He was far less welcoming to those who wanted to join the country's large Jewish community, installing a feverish anti-Semite as immigration chief, who published a book saying that Jews "lodge like a cyst in the people where they establish themselves."

Led by the head of the Argentine secret service, Rodolfo Freude, the escape network's agents established bases of operation throughout Europe. Freude was the scion of a wealthy Argentine businessman with significant Nazi connections who had helped finance Perón's presidential campaign.

The network included Carlos Fuldner, an Argentine German and former SS captain close to Himmler; former members of the Waffen-SS and Abwehr (a German intelligence organization); a Croatian ambassador to Berlin during the war; a Spanish journalist; and war criminals from Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Germany, who repaid the debt of their freedom by rescuing fellow fugitives. Receiving orders directly from Freude at the presidential palace Casa Rosada, in the heart of Buenos Aires, these agents facilitated the financing of operations, dispensed bribes to local officials, arranged safe houses and transportation for their charges, maneuvered between the immigration office and Argentine consulates to produce the necessary landing permits and other paperwork, and coordinated with Vatican representatives.

The network would never have been as effective without the aid of the Catholic Church, most notably that of Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome. Once a hospice for the poor, the church had become the center of German-speaking Catholics in Italy in the fifteenth century and still flew the German imperial eagle on its spire. Under Hudal, an Austrian and a devotee of Hitler who proudly brandished his golden Nazi Party membership badge, the church harbored and smuggled war criminals out of Europe, working hand in hand with Perón's agents. In 1948, Hudal personally wrote to Perón to request visas for 5,000 Germans and Austrians who had "bravely fought" against communism. He did not accept the term "war criminal," believing that those he helped were innocent of any crimes because they had only executed orders from their superiors. Hudal was aided in his efforts by cardinals above him and priests below him. A string of monasteries and convents in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy served as refuges along the Nazi ratlines. Pope Pius XII did not officially approve of the Vatican's involvement in the network, but he certainly turned a blind eye to it, primarily because of the church's commitment to act as a bulwark against the spread of communism.

According to a confidential CIC report in 1947, postwar Europe was rife with people on the run. Fake passports, forged identification papers, and willing smugglers were all easy to find. Argentina and the Vatican were not alone in providing sanctuary for former Nazis, many of whom were involved in atrocities during the war. The Allies also smuggled out a number of war criminals, among them former SS officers, who were recruited for intelligence activities against the Soviet Union and its satellites. In fact, the United States and others were using some of the same routes and safe houses to smuggle individuals out of Europe as were Argentina and the Vatican.

However, none of the smuggling operations was run with the same professionalism and on the same scale as the one created by Juan Perón. When Eichmann reached out from the Lüneburg Heath to find a way out of Germany, one of the network's chief operators, Reinhard Kops, who served as a link between Bishop Hudal and the Argentines, instantly picked up his name. Kops was a former anti-Mason expert and Abwehr captain, and he knew Eichmann well from Berlin and Hungary. Eichmann's escape to Argentina would be most welcome. In June 1948, an immigration file was opened for him in Buenos Aires. A landing permit was issued and the Termeno ID arranged. Eichmann needed to be present for the other steps in the process, following a clear path that Kops had helped establish. Eichmann was only one among many whose escapes were fashioned within the same few months, including "the Angel of Death," Josef Mengele; "the Butcher of Riga," Eduard Roschmann; the mass murderer Erich Priebke; the "mercy killer" of the mentally ill and handicapped Gerhard Bohne; and the dreaded SS commandant Josef Schwammberger. Now Eichmann, the last among this group to leave Germany, looked to follow them to the freedom that a country located on the other side of the world and led by a friend of the Nazis would provide.

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.