It is one of the most celebrated operations in the history of Mossad: the capture of Adolf Eichmann, leading to the Nazi official standing trial in Israel for his part in the Holocaust.
But now, after more than sixty years, a German geologist has been revealed to have played a crucial role in ensuring that the German war criminal was caught and brought to justice.
Gerhard Klammer had moved to South America in 1949 in search of his fortune and had eventually found employment with an Argentine construction company, Capri.
Among his colleagues was one ‘Ricardo Klement’ – the false name under which Eichmann had been living, having fled Europe to escape prosecution for crimes against humanity.
During the war, he had played a leading role as a bureaucrat organising the transportation and mass murder of Jews.
Eichmann was one of a group of Nazi war criminals who were hiding out in Argentina, having been provided with false documents and passage to South America by the notorious ‘rat line’.
Klammer had been horrified by the atrocities of the Nazis as a young man, and after he became aware of the true identity of ‘Klement’, he informed the German authorities in the hope that Eichmann would be brought to justice. However, no action was taken at a time when the
West German government was extremely keen to put the past behind it and many former Nazis held official positions.
A determined Klammer then told a pastor and old friend of his, Giselher Pohl, about Eichmann. The priest in turn confided in a bishop, Hermann Kunst, who passed on the information to a German Jewish prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, meeting with him in 1959.
Bauer already had some knowledge of Eichmann’s location. He had been contacted by a German Jew whose daughter had dated Eichmannn’s son and had learnt about his true identity.
However, many details about Eichmann’s life in South America had been missing from this earlier account.
Armed with the new information that originally came from Klammer, Bauer was able to tell the Israeli authorities that Eichmman was indeed alive and well in Argentina.
The following year, Eithcmann was taken captive by undercover Mossad agents just outside Buenos Aires and brought back to Israel.
After being tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, he was hanged in 1962.
Klammer’s previously untold story has been revealed in an investigation by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
He died in 1982, having wished for his role as an informant to remain undisclosed. His family have now given permission for it to be revealed.
