The German who was the key to Mossad’s capture of Eichmann finally revealed

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A German geologist who worked with Adolf Eichmann at a construction company in Argentina was the person who provided the key information that allowed the Mossad to capture Eichmann, the German paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Friday.

The man’s identity had remained a secret throughout the 60 years since Eichmann was abducted to Israel, tried and executed. Now, 32 years after the man died, his family has agreed to reveal his name and his story, which has earned him a place of honor in Israeli history.

Gerhard Klammer studied geology, philosophy and history in Germany. In 1950, he emigrated to Argentina to seek work. As fate would have it, Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution, arrived in Argentina at about the same time, under a false name.

Klammer found work at the Capri construction company in Tucuman Province, in northern Argentina. Not long afterward, Eichmann joined the company under the name Ricardo Klement.

Some years later, the company developed financial problems. Eichmann moved to Buenos Aires, while Klammer returned to Germany.

Klammer knew quite well the true identity of the man who called himself Ricardo Klement. Eichmann was well known in Argentina’s Nazi community, which sought to help and protect him, and quite a few former Nazis were employed at Capri.

According to his family, Klammer, who opposed the Nazis, contacted the German authorities in the early 1950s in an effort to inform them of Eichmann’s whereabouts. He never received a response.

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In 1959, after his return to Germany, Klammer told a close friend, a priest who had served in the German army, about Eichmann. The priest passed the information to his bishop, who passed it to Fritz Bauer, a German Jewish prosecutor who was hunting for Eichmann at that time.

Bauer, who had fled Germany during World War II but returned after the war ended, was the highest-ranking Jew in the German legal establishment at that time, serving as district attorney of the state of Hesse. At a time when the rest of the German establishment wasn’t lifting a finger to nab Eichmann, even though he was known to be hiding in South America, Bauer was the only one making an effort to track down the wanted war criminal.

The information that had originated with Klammer was very valuable. It included Eichmann’s home address and a photograph from the early 1950s, during the time that he and Klammer worked together at the construction company, showing the two men standing next to each other.

Bauer had already obtained some information about Eichmann from Lothar Hermann, a half-Jewish man born in Germany who had moved to Argentina. Hermann’s daughter had gone on a date with Eichmann’s son, who boasted about his father’s identity.

Hermann sent this information to Bauer in 1957. Bauer then passed it on to the Mossad, which sent agents to try to locate Eichmann. But the agents returned empty-handed.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung report said the information Klammer provided two years later was more detailed and valuable than Hermann’s information, which was partial and somewhat confused. Consequently, it said, Klammer’s information is what finally enabled the Mossad to capture Eichmann.

The rest of the story is well known. Bauer met in Israel with Isser Harel, then head of the Mossad, and Haim Cohn, then the attorney general, and gave them his information. Based on this information, the Mossad managed to locate Eichmann in 1960.

It turned out that while Eichmann had indeed lived at the address Klammer provided, he moved to a different location soon afterward. But the Mossad found his new address, and a group of agents headed by Rafi Eitan abducted him and put on a plane to Israel. Once there, he was tried, convicted and finally hanged in 1962.

Bauer kept his promise not to reveal the source of the information that led to Eichmann’s capture. The Mossad also kept mum on this issue, and none of the people involved in the affair are still alive. But now, another piece of the puzzle has been revealed.