Last update - 00:00 30/05/2007
Eichmann's fake passport goes on display in Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum
By DPA
The false passport used by high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1950 to escape to Argentina, which was accidentally discovered in an old court record in Buenos Aires, went on display Tuesday at the city's Holocaust Museum.
The supervisor of the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during the war, Eichmann fled to Argentina under the alias of Ricardo Klement.
The well-preserved passport, issued in 1948 by an Italian delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, was presented Tuesday at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum. It also bears the stamp and the signature of the Argentine vice-counsel in Genova, Italy at that time, Pedro Solari Capurro.
Federal Judge Maria Servini de Cubria recently opened the Eichmann file and found the well-preserved passport, museum head Graciela Jinich told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA).
Eichmann's wife had presented the passport to authorities in 1960 after he had been captured by Israeli secret service agents in the Buenos Aires suburb where he lived a normal life working at the Mercedes Benz factory.
He was taken to Israel, tried for crimes against humanity and hanged in 1962.
"This document leaves no room for doubts on how easy it was for not only Eichmann, but also other war criminals, to attain fake identification documents, change their names and enter our country," said Jinich.