Osmar Hellmuth, the frustrated Nazi spy who ended up selling insurance in Palermo Chico

“Gordo” Luis was the neighborhood baker. Every morning, seconded by an assistant whom everyone called "Pelusa", he did the home delivery of bread and bills aboard a rickety rancher. In the afternoons he left that job to attend the newsstand located on the corner of Malabia (now the Syrian Arab Republic) and Juan Francisco Seguí, in the Palermo neighborhood.

Both occupations allowed him to solve his passion for motorcycling. So much so that, in those days – it was the spring of 1962 – he had bought a Ducati Sport, whose engine needed some adjustments. So, during the early hours of a Monday, he knew how to wake up the entire neighborhood with the thunderous roars that that machine emitted every time he tried the starter.

This was just below my childhood bedroom.

The truth is that such an auditory scourge was soon overshadowed by another, but emitted by a human throat with an unequivocal martiality and sparing no adjectives; among them, the word “badulaque”, which until then I had never heard. Such a rain of recriminations aroused my curiosity, and I looked out the window.

At that precise moment I could see the unusual figure of a subject who was wearing pajamas and slippers, jumping slightly in the middle of the street. And he punctuated his tirade with furious gestures. He was the neighbor on the third floor. His name: Osmar Hellmuth.

The episode provoked in me a certain animosity towards him. Perhaps for this reason, during the carnivals of the following year, I threw a small water bomb at him from my balcony, which struck the ornate crest of his blazer, also splashing his wife, Mrs. Beba. She glared at me, before she could scurry away. And Mr. Hellmuth filed the corresponding complaint with my parents.

The matter did not go to major. Due to my young age – I was barely five years old – he was very understanding. But, since then, he called me “Der Roter Teufel” (The Red Devil); in part, because my usual clothing included a jacket of that color.

In short, that incident led to a fairly cordial relationship between him and my family. Perhaps an identification with the language had an impact on this, given that the language of my parents was German (they were born in Vienna, although in reality they met in the Bolivian city of La Paz, where they arrived separately, after fleeing Austria, already annexed by Hitler in 1938). Hellmuth, for his part, was an Argentine of German origin. Much more was not known about him.