After World War II
At the end of World War II, Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army, which was not aware of Eichmann's true identity as he presented himself as "Otto Eckmann." Early in 1946, he escaped from U.S. custody and hid in Altensalzkoth, an obscure hamlet on the Lüneburg Heath, for a few years. In 1948 he obtained a landing permit for Argentina, but did not use it immediately.
At the beginning of 1950, Eichmann went to Italy, where he posed as a refugee named Riccardo Klement. With the help of Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian cleric who organized one of the first postwar escape routes for Axis personnel, Eichmann obtained an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport, issued in Genoa, and an Argentine visa. Both of these issued to "Ricardo Klement, technician." However, Hannah Arendt claims that Eichmann was assisted in his escape by ODESSA, "a clandestine organization of SS veterans". In May 2007, this passport was discovered in court archives in Argentina by a student doing research on Eichmann's capture. Eichmann boarded a ship heading for Argentina on July 14, 1950. Eichmann brought his family to Argentina in 1952. For the next 10 years, he worked a succession of jobs including metal factory worker, junior water engineer, rabbit farmer and finally welder and mechanic at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Buenos Aires.
Read more about this topic: Adolf Eichmann
Famous quotes containing the words war ii, world and/or war:
“Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920s and 1930s when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brothers keeper.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (19111978)
“He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.”
—Wallace Stevens (18791955)
“There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation alter nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)