Fear of a Guilty Conscience

The Argentine government has taken up the Eichmann case with striking zeal, demanding that Israel extradite the murderer of millions of Jews, who was previously living in Buenos Aires under an assumed name. Now Argentina, whose relations with Israel were quite normal, is probably less interested in the little company representative Eichmann than certain other circles whose political home is in both Buenos Aires and Bonn. These people can count on one hand all those whom Eichmann could incriminate if he were to stand before an Israeli court.

As for Argentina, it became an Eldorado after the war for everybody who was anybody under Hitler and who managed to escape the war crimes trials. The entanglement of Argentine industry with the West German monopoly firms gave the Nazis every opportunity to save their own skin and disseminate their filthy ideology across the world. Bonn, for its part, laid on support: Ambassador Junker, one-time chief press officer of the Nazi Party for China, was just the man to comfort and stand by escaped Nazis. And if the German embassy found that a war criminal was “no longer in danger,” it facilitated his return to West Germany.

It is therefore hardly a coincidence that Eichmann, who was able to live unmolested in West Germany until 1950, was able to hide out as a representative of the Mercedes-Benz branch in Buenos Aires. Eichmann’s backers now fear not so much for their protégé, but for the exposure of the widespread Nazi underground network in Argentina and revelations about all those Nazis who rose to new positions of influence in Bonn. In order to exert dual pressure on Israel, Argentina is expected to demand Eichmann’s extradition, while Bonn seeks directly to expedite the extradition of the Jew murderer. On Friday the West German press was thus also rather unanimous in calling for Eichmann to be brought before a West German court, which would mean getting off scot-free.

Finally, a third option would be to let Eichmann “die suddenly of natural causes.” Bonn has deployed a whole army of agents to this end. Whatever the outcome of the Eichmann affair, the entire Bonn system is on trial with him, a system that helped criminal Nazis to occupy high positions in government, the military, the judiciary and business.