The Nazi Hunters (22 page)

Hofstaetter explained about the letter of introduction from Bauer,
holding it out for Hermann. But his host ignored his extended hand. At that moment, Hermann called his wife and asked her to take the letter and read it aloud. It was only then that Hofstaetter realized that Hermann was blind. The wife read the letter and added: “The signature is without doubt Dr. Bauer’s.”

Hermann visibly relaxed and began telling his story. His parents had died at the hands of the Nazis, he said, and he had spent time in the concentration camps. “I have Jewish blood in my veins, but my wife is German and our daughter has been brought up according to her mother’s traditions,” he added. His only motivation for tracking Eichmann was “to even the score with the Nazi criminals who caused me and my family so much agony and suffering.”

The Hermanns had lived in the Olivos suburb of Buenos Aires, until eighteen months earlier, where they were “accepted as German in every way.” Sylvia, the daughter, began dating a young man named Nicolas Eichmann, who had no idea she was partly Jewish. He visited their house on several occasions, and once he remarked that it would have been better if the Germans had completed the extermination of the Jews. He also explained that he did not have a distinct regional accent because his father had served in many different places during the war.

Prompted by a news report about a war crimes trial where Eichmann was mentioned, Hermann concluded that Nicolas was his son. In those days, many Nazis felt so much at home in Argentina that they took only minimal precautions—and, while Adolf had been living under an assumed last name, his sons never bothered to change theirs. But Nicolas did take one precaution when he started seeing Sylvia: he made a point of never revealing his home address. When Nicolas and Sylvia wrote to each other after she moved, he instructed her to mail her letters to a friend’s address. But that only strengthened Hermann’s suspicions, and soon he was corresponding with Bauer.

At that point, Sylvia, “an attractive woman of about twenty,” as Hofstaetter described her to Harel, entered the room. It was clear that, whatever she had once felt for Nicolas, she had decided to help her father in his quest to confirm his theory. When Bauer asked Hermann to go
to Buenos Aires to investigate further, the blind man took his daughter along not just to serve as his eyes but also to exploit her ties with Nicolas. With the help of a friend, she located his house and simply knocked on the door.

When a woman opened the door, Sylvia asked if this was the home of the Eichmann family. “Her reply did not come immediately, and during the pause a middle-aged man wearing glasses came and stood beside her,” she recalled. “I asked him if Nick was at home.” Speaking in an “unpleasant and strident” voice, he told her that Nick was working overtime. Sylvia continued: “I asked if he was Mr. Eichmann. No reply. So I asked if he was Nick’s father. He said he was, but only after long hesitation.”

The family had five children, three born in Germany and two born in Argentina, Sylvia added. Although the ages of the sons born in Germany tallied with what Bauer already knew about Eichmann, Hofstaetter remained cautious. “What you say is pretty convincing but it isn’t a conclusive identification,” he said. He added that Vera may have remarried but allowed her first three children to keep her first husband’s name. Lothar Hermann insisted that there was no doubt that the man she was living with was Adolf Eichmann.

Promising to cover his expenses, the Israeli told Hermann he needed him to get more information about the suspect—what name he was using, where he worked, any official photograph or personal document, and fingerprints. Returning to Tel Aviv, he reported to Harel that he had found Hermann to be “impetuous and overconfident,” indicating he had doubts about his story. But he was favorably impressed by Sylvia, and recommended following up quickly since she was planning to travel abroad soon.

Harel approved additional funds for Hermann’s expenses so he could conduct further research in Buenos Aires, but did not get the results he was hoping for.
Lothar and Sylvia Hermann learned from a property registry that the owner of the house on Chacabuco Street was an Austrian named Francisco Schmidt, and that it had two apartments with separate electric meters, one for someone named Dagoto and the other for someone name Klement. Hermann concluded that Schmidt must be
Eichmann, and that he had undergone plastic surgery to change his appearance.

But when the Israeli researcher in Argentina who had worked on the case earlier followed up, he discovered that Schmidt could not be Eichmann: his family situation was different, and he did not even live in the house he owned. “
These findings damaged Hermann’s trustworthiness irretrievably,” Harel reported. By August 1958, he added, “instructions were given to allow our contact with Hermann to lapse gradually.”

That was the year when West Germany opened the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, a picturesque town just north of Stuttgart.
In August 1959, Tuvia Friedman claimed to have received a letter from Erwin Schüle, the head of the Ludwigsburg office, mentioning a tip that Eichmann was possibly in Kuwait. Excited, Friedman turned to Asher Ben-Natan, his old Israeli contact from Vienna who was now serving in the Defense Ministry. He even imagined that he might be sent with a few men to Kuwait on a mission to seize Eichmann. But Ben-Natan brushed him off, and so did a senior police official he sent him to. Friedman concluded that those officials were no longer interested in hunting Eichmann, and he turned to the Israeli press to publicize the fugitive’s purported presence in Kuwait.

For Bauer, the Mossad’s lack of follow-up with Hermann, combined with the sudden publicity about Kuwait, was intensely frustrating; he was increasingly worried that Eichmann would learn of the efforts to track him and run again.
In December 1959, Bauer went to Israel with more information. According to a new source, he reported, Eichmann had traveled to Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement, which corresponded to the name on one of the electric meters of the house on Chacabuco Street that Hermann had been talking about all along. As Harel pointed out in his defense, Hermann had mistakenly assumed that Eichmann was the owner of the house, not one of its tenants. Realizing what had happened, the Mossad chief assigned a new man, Zvi Aharoni, to follow up. Suddenly, Hermann’s lead looked promising again, but no one knew whether Eichmann was still there.

When Bauer met with Harel, Aharoni, and Israel’s attorney general,
Chaim Cohen, in Jerusalem, he did not disguise his anger. “
This is simply unbelievable!” he declared, pointing out that the name Klement had been mentioned much earlier by Hermann and now again by the new source. “Any second-class policeman would be able to follow such a lead. Just go and ask the nearest butcher or greengrocer and you will learn all there is to know about Klement.”

Aharoni, who related that outburst, became one of the harshest critics of Harel’s handling of the Eichmann investigation. “
The sad truth is that Eichmann was discovered by a blind man and that Mossad needed more than two years to believe that blind man’s story,” he declared afterward.

Harel informed Ben-Gurion of the possible breakthrough. The prime minister told him that, if the lead panned out, he wanted Eichmann brought back for trial in Israel. As Harel related their conversation, Ben-Gurion believed such a trial “would be an achievement of tremendous moral and historical consequence.”

• • •

Harel had chosen Aharoni to go to Argentina this time, checking whether now they finally could identify and locate Eichmann at the original address that Hermann had given them. The Mossad chief considered him to be “
one of the best investigators” in Israel; born in Germany, he had escaped to Palestine in 1938 and later served in the British Army, interrogating German POWs.

Aharoni had to finish up another assignment first, which meant an additional delay of a couple of months that left Harel “
seething with impatience.” But during that time Aharoni prepared for his mission by learning the background of the case and meeting Bauer.
On March 1, 1960, he finally landed in Buenos Aires, armed with an Israeli diplomatic passport under a false name; his cover was that he worked for the Foreign Ministry’s accounts department.

Accompanied by a local student who had agreed to help out, Aharoni drove in a rented car to Chacabuco Street in Olivos on March 3. But when they reached the two-family house and the student walked up to it pretending to be looking for someone else, it turned out that there were no tenants in the two apartments. Instead, the student saw through the
windows that they were empty, and painters were at work inside. Eichmann and his family, if they were there earlier, must have moved.

The next day Aharoni improvised a plan to learn more. Remembering from the Eichmann file that Klaus, the eldest Eichmann son, had a birthday on March 3, he instructed a local young volunteer named Juan to drive back to the empty house carrying a gift and card for him. The cover story was that a friend, who worked as a bellboy in one of the large hotels in Buenos Aires, had asked him to deliver the package, which came from a young woman; if pressed, he could maintain that he knew nothing more about its origins.

Not finding anyone at the front of the house, Juan went around to the back. There, he saw a man talking to a woman who was cleaning something near a hut.

“Excuse me please, but do you know whether Mr. Klement lives here?” he asked. Both of them immediately confirmed the name, and the man responded: “You mean the Germans?”

To avoid arousing suspicion, he claimed to have no knowledge of their nationality. The man added: “Do you mean the one with the three grown sons and the little son?”

Again, Juan pleaded ignorance, saying he was there only to deliver a small package to him. The man volunteered that the family had moved out fifteen to twenty days earlier, but he didn’t know where they had gone.

This could have been devastating news, suggesting that if Aharoni had arrived just a bit earlier he would have found them at the house. But the man clearly accepted Juan’s cover story and took him to one of the painters who was working in a back room. The painter was equally forthcoming, saying that the Klements had moved to San Fernando, another suburb of Buenos Aires. He didn’t know the address, but suggested that they could talk to one of Klement’s sons who worked in an auto repair shop nearby.

Dressed like a mechanic, the young German confirmed that he was one of Klement’s sons, and Juan heard others calling him something that sounded to him like Tito or Dito. As Aharoni put it later, this was clearly Dieter, the third of the Eichmann sons. Dieter was more suspicious than
the Argentine workers. He questioned Juan about his story and who had sent the package. When Juan repeated his story, Dieter said that the street where they now lived had no name or numbers. Realizing that he wouldn’t learn anything more directly and to avoid further questioning, he handed the small package to Dieter, asking him to give it to his brother.

Staking out the auto repair shop, Aharoni and his small team decided to track Dieter’s movements after work. The first night they never spotted him leaving; later, they saw two people on a moped, and assumed that the passenger on the back was Dieter. The moped traveled in the direction of San Fernando, and the driver dropped off the passenger near a kiosk. This turned out to be about a hundred yards from a newly built small house on Garibaldi Street, which they would soon learn was where the Eichmann family had just moved.

Aharoni was convinced that “Klement” was really Eichmann, but he kept looking for additional confirmation. He had Juan return to see Dieter at the auto repair shop and spin a story that the sender of the package had complained to him that it never was delivered. In the ensuing conversation, Dieter insisted that he had passed along the package and also revealed that it should have been addressed to Nicolas “Aitchmann,” as Juan noted the name later, not “Klement.” Juan believed this was bad news, indicating they had not found their man. But Aharoni, who didn’t want to let him in on who they were really looking for, assured him he had done “a fantastic job.”

Aharoni made repeated trips to San Fernando, initially talking to neighbors using a variety of pretexts. He confirmed that the German family had moved in recently, and an architect obtained the document showing that plot 14 on Garibaldi Street, where the new house was situated, was registered under the name of Veronica Catarina Liebl de Eichmann, listing both her maiden and married names. After repeated passes to observe the house, Aharoni caught his first glimpse of “a man of medium size and build, about fifty years old, with a high forehead and partially bald” on March 19. The man collected the wash from the clothesline and went back into the house.

Excited, Aharoni cabled his superiors that he had spotted a man at
Vera Eichmann’s house “who definitely resembled Eichmann,” and that there was no longer any doubt about his identity. He also recommended that he return to Israel right away to help in the planning of the operation to kidnap him. Before he did so, however, he was intent on getting a photo of their quarry.

Sitting in the back of a small truck that was covered with a tarpaulin, Aharoni had the driver park next to the kiosk and go get something to eat. In the meantime, he observed the house and pointed a camera through a hole in the tarp. He photographed the house and the surroundings. But he had to delegate the job of photographing Eichmann with a camera hidden in a briefcase to another local helper with native Spanish. Intercepting Eichmann and his son Dieter when they were outside, the helper engaged them briefly in conversation, just long enough to trigger his camera.

Aharoni left Argentina on April 9. Harel joined him on the flight from Paris to Tel Aviv. “Are you absolutely sure that he is our man?” he asked. Aharoni showed him the photo that was taken with the briefcase camera. “I have not the slightest doubt,” he replied.

• • •

It wasn’t just Vera Eichmann’s use of her real name on the property registration that indicated the family’s increasingly relaxed attitude. Wiesenthal, who kept monitoring the rest of the Eichmann family back in Austria, had spotted other telltale evidence that the purported widow was living with her infamous fugitive husband. Eichmann’s stepmother had died, and a death notice in the
Oberösterreichische Nachrichten
, the Linz daily, was signed by Vera Eichmann, using her married name. “
People don’t lie in these notices,” Wiesenthal pointed out in his memoir. She also signed a similar notice in the same newspaper when Eichmann’s father died in February 1960. “The Eichmanns’ family feeling evidently made them blind to danger,” Wiesenthal added.