Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb Page B

with border police, obviously on the lookout for fugitives. Eichmann trembled as he filled out the hotel registration form, and he panicked when his contact missed their rendezvous. (He later learned from the man's associates that he was in the hospital.) After he waited a week, his contact arranged for a local hunter to guide Eichmann across the border. He was glad to leave. Eichmann slung his suitcase onto his back, and the two men hiked along well-worn paths through the woods and into the mountains, not stopping until they reached a cabin high on the slopes. As night fell, Eichmann looked down into the German countryside: after tomorrow, he was unlikely to see the country of his birth again.
    As they ate breakfast the next day, the hunter looked out the window and spotted a border guard coming up the path. "Don't worry," the man told Eichmann. "He'll have seen the smoke from the chimney. He probably only wants coffee." Eichmann hid, petrified, in a dusty closet, trying not to sneeze as the hunter and border guard chatted and drank coffee. After the guard left, Eichmann tumbled out of the closet, and the hunter led him along a winding route, away from any patrols, down into Kufstein, Austria. After spending the night in a monastery that was on his list of safe houses, he hired a taxi to Innsbruck. There he had two contacts. The first, a former SS lieutenant, sent him packing, saying huffily, "They really send every damn tramp this way." The second brought Eichmann to an inn near the Brenner Pass, which leads through the Alps between Austria and Italy. French soldiers were active in the area, so Eichmann had to be hidden in the attic, which was full of spider webs and the innkeeper's junk.
    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