BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – In the passport photo he is a balding figure with round spectacles, his bow tie slightly askew, his expression sober, tinged with a trace of irritation, as if this exercise was below one’s dignity.
He seems a man of some refinement, perhaps a professor or concert master. He lists his occupation as “technician,” his nationality as stateless. He gives his name as Riccardo Klement, part of the human flotsam and jetsam displaced by the convulsions of World War II, now seeking a fresh start in the New World.
The Argentine diplomat in Italy evidently saw the matter as routine, despite noting “deficient” documentation, and issued “Klement” an entry visa in June 1950.
And so Adolf Eichmann, the notorious engineer of the Holocaust, the man who kept the trains running on time to the death camps, made his way to Argentina and the serene life of a laborer and family man.
The trajectory of Eichmann’s life – from faceless bureaucrat of genocide to wanted war criminal to prize prisoner of the state of Israel – has been so thoroughly explored that it would seem few surprises remain.
But last week, 45 years after he was hanged in Israel, a new Eichmann artifact came to light in Buenos Aires. The original passport he used to gain entry to Argentina under the Klement alias had remained for decades in a musty court file until a resourceful academic unearthed it among millions of pieces of archived legal papers. A judge with a sense of history made sure it was turned over to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, the city with the largest Jewish population in Latin America.
The well-preserved document, on a single page of cardboard folded into three parts, offers tangible testimony in a country that for years was in denial about its role in harboring Nazi fugitives.
“This provides new evidence of the web that functioned in the service of Nazis and war criminals escaping from Europe,” said Sergio Widder, Latin America representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The passport will be exhibited in a humidity-controlled museum display, one more relic of remembrance at a time when the ranks of camp survivors are dwindling.
The passport was issued June 1, 1950, by an Italian delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Passport No. 100940 states that “Klement” has blue eyes, brown hair and a “regular” nose, and that he was born May 23, 1913, in the northern Italian city of Bolzano. (Eichmann was born in 1906 in Germany.) Eichmann faced the hangman’s noose May 31, 1962, in Israel after being convicted of crimes against humanity and other offenses.
