AFTERMATH

Silence is less obvious. One must be aware of it before it yields its information.

—Raul Hilberg¹

While the man who had been a Nazi in Argentina was busy becoming Eichmann-in-Jerusalem, producing new piles of texts with a new target audience in mind, his comrades in Buenos Aires turned their attention to the paper trail he had left there: one thousand pages of transcribed conversations with commentaries, a few surviving tapes, and five hundred pages of handwritten texts and notes, sometimes with copies. The path these papers took into the public eye would be complex. The story is still not finished and contains enough material for a novel. Although the so-called Sassen interviews have become one of the most quoted postwar sources on the Holocaust, knowledge of the scope and content of these important documents is surprisingly patchy, and researchers have shown surprisingly little curiosity about what the Argentina Papers actually say. The reasons are partly psychological: the fear of opening Pandora’s box; Golo Mann’s warning that dealing with filthy ideas can leave you with more than just dirty hands. But an overview of what Eichmann left behind from his time in South America is also incredibly difficult to obtain. The papers are strewn across several archives like a giant, cryptic jigsaw puzzle, and missing references and overly hasty ordering make the task even harder. In theBundesarchiv Koblenz, the greatest find of the last decade boasts the description, “The texts have been available to researchers for years.” The additional note that their ordering is only “provisional,” due to lack of time, doesn’t make this blatant error any less devastating. The crucial clue to the reassembly of a historical puzzle often comes from the story of how it was broken apart in the first place. Solving the puzzle will involve taking the path back to the beginning, before it became a puzzle. So let us start at the point when the Argentina Papers were still as extensive as we know they once were: May 1960.

The Sassen Material

When Eichmann was abducted, what he left behind in Argentina was principally distributed between two addresses: his own and Willem Sassen’s. While his notes, private writings, annotated books, a few drafts of Sassen’s texts, and the “Tucumán Novel” were at the Eichmann house, Sassen had most of the material. Rumors still circulate in Buenos Aires today about who may or may not have hidden Eichmann’s papers, but as is usually the case, the truth may be simpler. After the far right’s election failure in the Federal Republic, the abortive book project, and the departure of his publisher to Austria, Sassen had grown bored with the material and set it all aside, turning his attention to new projects. Only when Eichmann was abducted did it suddenly regain its currency and explosive power. But most important, the material in his possession posed an immediate risk to him. Twelve days passed between Eichmann’s abduction and Ben-Gurion’s official announcement that Eichmann was a prisoner in Israel. During that time Eichmann’s family, friends, and acquaintances had no idea what had happened, or what might happen next, fearing that this operation might be the start of something bigger. Sassen’s immediate reaction was to get the material out of his house. Depositing it all in one place would not have been a smart move. Eichmann’s colleague at Mercedes-Benz said that Sassen and Klaus Eichmann left manuscripts with him for a week;² others reported that a collection of tapes and transcripts was buried in a garden somewhere, possibly on the extensive grounds of Sassen’s patron Dieter Menge.³ The Eichmann family, meanwhile, understandably no longer felt safe in the house on the edge of the suburbs. Friends like Sassen and Fuldner helped them once again, taking some private things to safety. But no further attacks came, and the public announcement of Eichmann’s abduction dramatically altered Sassen’s situation: finally, he had a chance to exploit the old material.

Adolf Eichmann had agreed that Sassen could publish the interviews “if I should die, or fall into the hands of the Israelis.”⁴ Sassen stuck to this agreement and acted fast. Typescripts of the tape recordings already existed, but as the Sassen circle’s project had finally died of boredom, a few of Eichmann’s handwritten texts were still lying around. If they were going to be usable, they had to be transcribed: Eichmann’s handwriting was idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult to read even for people used to German script.⁵Sassen had some experience with Life and was thinking about the American market, so he employed a secretary to type up the rest right away.⁶ Sassen also took another, very farsighted step: he had the documents photographed. This was the simplest option, astoday’s Xerox machines were not yet in use, and permanent copies could be produced only using photography.⁷ By June 1960, Sassen had negatives of all the documents he wanted to sell on 35mm film, the format that was used in analog photography for many years. This was a clever move, not just because Sassen was eager to prevent access to the originals. He was planning to travel, and fifteen hundred pages would have made for heavy luggage. (This bundle of typescript was around eight inches thick and weighed over 15.5 pounds.)

Sassen decided not to sell the whole transcript and only a few copies of the handwritten pages. He removed more than one hundred pages from the interviews and left them at home, where most of them remained until 1979. This hasty clean-up operation was, however, anything but thorough: he forgot about the tape with the Alvensleben interview (probably the second tape from that session). After two years, anyone would find it difficult to remember exactly what was in a suitcase full of haphazardly compiled texts.

The Sale

According to the story that is frequently told, Willem Sassen seized his chance and rushed to sell the manuscript to the press, hoping to make the greatest possible profit from the affair. But it wasn’t that simple. Sassen was acting on the agreement he had made with Eichmann, but he was also using the material to pursue the interest that had bound him to Eichmann from the outset. He may have had a good nose for a fast buck, but he was also still a dedicated National Socialist and anti-Semite. Improbable as it may sound to us today, Sassen wanted more than just money: he wanted to use his relationship with Life to publish his interview with the world’s most notorious prisoner. And later events show that he actually believed the publication would benefit Eichmann. Anyone familiar with the Sassen-Fritsch circle’s fanciful conceptions of history will hardly be surprised by this degree of naïveté. Sassen also believed that the Israeli government could not have sanctioned Eichmann’s abduction, and that a few rogue fanatics had done something that would now create huge difficulties for Israel. Sassen was convinced that Eichmann talking was exactly what “the Jews” were afraid of. He wrote to Eichmann’s defense lawyer that the trial would be decided “like the Dreyfuss Affair back in the day, on the level of public opinion.”⁸ Sassen, who had once been so successful as a war correspondent, believed he was well versed in the use of this weapon. What Eichmann had said in Argentina would create difficulties for “the Jews.” His words would expose “Eretz Israel”; the world would recognize that Eichmann—like all Germans—was the real victim of the Jewish world conspiracy, and “the Jews” would finally be seen for what they were. If one thing could save Eichmann, it was that “the Jews” were afraid of this “truth” being “exposed.” There was no doubt about it in Sassen’s mind. If he was smart about how he used what Eichmann had said in the freedom of the pampas, it was bound to accomplish more than the Israelis’ prisoner could on his own. He believed that in Jerusalem, Eichmann would produce a confession only under torture. Sassen (and a few German journalists, including those on Der Spiegel)⁹ believed without question that the trial would be unfair. If the Sassen circle’s conception of history had not been insane, the strategy should have worked. But as it was, it turned out to be the worst thing that could have happened for Eichmann’s defense. He was, in any case, a man for whom there really could be no defense: he had demolished the whole scale of criminality.

Naturally, performing this “favor” would also yield Sassen a profit, and the Eichmann family were sorely in need of money, having lost their breadwinner overnight. Sassen went about the task with a combination of business sense, political ambition, and personal sympathy. It was to be his greatest success, though it also spelled the end of his career as a journalist. He had managed to sell the first interviews with Perón in 1955, and he knew that in journalism, speed was of the essence. He invited a representative from Life to Buenos Aires and pressured Vera Eichmann into signing a contract with the U.S. magazine on June 5.¹⁰ Eichmann’s wife signed as her husband’s legal representative, and Sassen signed as her adviser and the “compiler” of the manuscripts. Publication was to take place only after the trial, and Life was given the right to sell the material—although not, under any circumstances, to Israel. Sassen would hand over “150 handwritten pages and 600 pages of typescript,” in return for $15,000 and a $5,000 fee for Sassen. Sassen may have received a larger sum of money on the side, without Vera Eichmann’s knowledge.¹¹

To prove the material was genuine, Sassen allowed the Life representative to see a few pages of the original, and he played him part of the tapes. The page numbers, and what was eventually published in the magazine, show that this copy was merely a selection, comprising 60 percent of the interviews and 40 percent of the handwritten pages. It included Eichmann’s notorious “conclusion” from tape 67 and the handwritten text about the “anonymous wanderer in a submarine,” which vanished for a long time and is difficult to decipher. As Eichmann’s lawyer later explained, Vera Eichmann actually had no right to conduct these negotiations. The original rights holder was still alive, even if he was sitting in an Israeli prison cell.¹² Sassen, however, had found a legal loophole with the term compiler. In journalism it isn’t the interviewee, but the person who conducts and compiles the interview, who gets the fee and the copyright. In this way, Sassen was clearly hoping to retain control over what was published and, most important, to be named as the author. This part of his plan did not work out.

It was still June when Sassen traveled to Europe and Germany again. Servatius later heard that Sassen had flown across the Atlantic in the company of the Argentine president, Arturo Frondizi. It wasn’t true, but it shows how well connected people considered Sassen to be.¹³ He started negotiations with the German magazine Stern, with which Sassen had a special relationship. He and Stern’s founder, Henri Nannen, had met during their time in the “Kurt Eggers” SS propaganda unit. Nannen’s success rested in part on the courage to employ unusual correspondents, without too much consideration for ethical issues. In 1959 he even included Sassen (“Wilhelm S. von Elsloo”) in Stern’s masthead, with his actual address in Argentina.¹⁴ Sassen was just as fond of telling his family this story as he was of telling them about his work for Der Spiegel.¹⁵ We can only surmise what he must have sold to Stern: although the publisher was kind enough to give me access to their archive, the dedicated archive staff couldn’t find a single page of Sassen’s material. There are two possible explanations for this regrettable loss. Either the archive was cleaned up at some point, or the Stern reporter responsible for the Eichmann coverage sent the originals to Israel, as a CIA agent reported.¹⁶ But we have several clues to what was in the Stern copy. The CIA report mentions eighty handwritten pages, and Robert Pendorf used extracts from Eichmann’s handwritten texts in his book, which was based on his articles in Stern (namely the “wanderer in a submarine” and part of the larger manuscript, as well as part of the transcript). A rumor slowly spread among German newspaper editors that someone in Hamburg had an extensive interview with Eichmann. Stern’s bundle was probably the same as the Life material, and the reticence from Stern’s editors, who mentioned only the handwritten pages, was an attempt to avoid a legal argument over the exploitation rights.¹⁷ As well as the documents, Sassen gave the Stern reporter an insight into Eichmann’s life in Argentina—though he carefully avoided any reference to the Sassen circle. He painted a picture of Eichmann the pariah, whom Sassen had cajoled into sentimental discussions about his obedience to the Reich. There are many indications that Sassen also offered these eighty pages of the Argentina Papers, and parts of the transcript, to Der Spiegel, but the magazine made no discernible use of them. A CIA source suspected that its founder, Rudolf Augstein, was waiting for the right time.¹⁸ Sassen also signed contracts with two Dutch companies: De Sparnetstad, in Haarlem, and De Volkskrant (for photographic material).¹⁹

Airing Eichmann’s Dirty Laundry

At around the same time in Israel, Eichmann began talking about his encounter with Sassen, having been confronted with the name of a former colleague: Rudolf Mildner.²⁰ During the Sassen discussions, Eichmann had been convinced that Rudolf Mildner was “missing,” but now he denounced him as a dedicated participant in the Sassen circle. He quoted Mildner’s Nuremberg statement, which in Buenos Aires he had claimed never existed. “This was the first time I spoke to Mildner again, about three years ago, I think it was, and I picked this issue apart in the presence of a certain Herr Sassen, who was the accredited, as you say here, ‘journalist,’ in the government over there.… Mildner stuck by the position he had taken in his witness statement in Nuremberg, and it is de facto the position that the Gestapo had nothing at all to do with the killing process,” Eichmann admitted to the Argentine recording sessions and the transcripts.²¹ This was a practiced tactic: he would anticipate any difficulty that might arise and mention it, to test how much evidence the Israelis actually had in their hands. At this point, however, the prosecuting authorities had no access to the Sassen interviews, or any more detailed information about them.

In connection with his negotiations with Stern, Sassen visited Eberhard Fritsch in Salzburg, who organized a meeting with the brothers Otto and Robert Eichmann.²² Sassen was conscious that in the long term, he would need the blessing of both Fritsch and the Eichmann family. Fritsch, after all, had been the intended publisher for the Eichmann project, and according to their agreement, all three of them should profit equally from any publication. Neither the Eichmann brothers nor Fritsch, whom Sassen still trusted and admired, objected to what Sassen told them he was planning. He had, as he repeatedly explained, sold only the U.S. rights. This was a lie, but Fritsch must have welcomed the news: despite the ban that had been placed on him, he would have liked to be a publisher again. Sassen even got away with saying he had mislaid the Life contract and so couldn’t produce it as evidence. Nor did Sassen allow anyone to see the transcript, so the Eichmann brothers still had no idea of the threat these documents could pose to Eichmann’s defense. Sassen’s suggestion of writing a book on Eichmann met with agreement, in particular from Fritsch, who was eager to take care of the publishing contacts himself. For this purpose, Fritsch was given a few pages that Sassen had removed from the Stern copy. This too would prove to be an error.²³

Henri Nannen made good use of this opportunity for Stern, and on June 25, 1960, he printed the first of a four-part series of articles entitled “Last Trace of Eichmann Discovered.” And even without the level of interest with which I was greeted by Stern’s current employees, the series can only be described as a journalistic tour de force. A month after Ben-Gurion’s declaration to the Knesset, Stern published more photos and insider information about Eichmann’s life in the underground than any other magazine did or has to this day. The reporter made good use of every clue Eichmann gave about his biography (which Sassen had found entirely uninteresting in 1957). Interviews were conducted in Altensalzkoth; a reporter spoke to Eichmann’s helper and lover Nelly Krawietz in the United States; there were pictures taken in Eichmann’s house; and quotes from his annotations in books. This headline-grabbing material went far beyond what Life had. While the U.S. magazine’s editors were still despairing over the mass of almost untranslatable, unstructured transcript pages, Stern’s pieces combined north German local color with an Argentine celebrity profile. The articles were full of family photos, ranging from charming children to the violin case beneath the kitschy Alpine panoramas, alongside startling facts about the horrors of Nazi history. From the mass murderer who lived next door to the story of an intelligence service abduction, the series had everything an editor could dream of. Furthermore, the fact that historians still use these pieces today shows that they weren’t good just for increasing circulation—they contain more useful information than errors (and a few pieces of disinformation from Sassen). Publishing so early was a high-risk strategy, which in 1983 Nannen and Stern would adopt to their cost with the supposed “Hitler Diaries.” But in June 1960, it paid off.

Finally, Eichmann’s interrogator made use of the Stern articles, which signaled to Eichmann that Sassen had begun to sell the Argentina Papers. But as the investigators found no reference to Sassen in the articles, or even to the existence of the interviews, Eichmann had the advantage once again.

The Texts Become a Cash Cow

As the prosecuting authorities in Israel were starting to wonder about the origin of Stern’s information, the confessions of a Nazi at liberty began to awaken hopes outside Israel. Like Sassen, other committed National Socialists hoped that the Argentina Papers might help to invalidate, or at least contrast with, the confessions they were expecting to hear from the Israelis’ prisoner. Anti-Semites believe Jews are capable of almost anything, and they were sure that Eichmann would end up telling the Israelis everything they wanted to hear. Wider Nazi circles were convinced that Eichmann-in-Argentina would have told their truth, denying that the extermination of the Jews had taken place. To start with, then, they were therefore highly motivated to assist their imprisoned SS comrade by making the Argentina Papers public—and in the best-case scenario, also earning some money from them.

The man with the most experience in turning Nazi documents into cash was François Genoud. A shady character, he was a fan of Hitler, comforter of heroes fallen on hard times, aide to the intelligence services, publisher of Goebbels and Bormann, and banker to the Arab world.²⁴ By 1960 Genoud’s contacts had ranged from an early encounter with Hitler to intimate friendships with Arab freedom fighters and the leaders of the BKA. He and his close friend Hans Rechenberg, who at this point was living in Bad Tölz inBavaria, immediately got in touch with the Eichmann brothers to organize Eichmann’s defense. The brothers had already decided on a lawyer: Robert Servatius, whom Rechenberg may have known from the Nuremberg Trials.²⁵ It was clear that the costs for the defense would be more than covered by the sale of Eichmann’s papers—leaving aside the money that the State of Israel put at Servatius’s disposal, believing he had no other source of income.²⁶ A “Linz common interest group” met for this purpose several times, starting in fall 1960. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was even seen at one of these meetings in a Salzburg hotel.²⁷ The hotel porter Fritsch provided the location, Rechenberg and Genoud the money; and Servatius the contact with the prisoner in his cell in Israel; the brothers functioned as the authorized agents of Adolf Eichmann. The correspondence, and the reports that reached the BND, show that “common interest” was something of a misnomer: the group was anything but united and argued bitterly over the money Adolf Eichmann was helping to generate.

None of the people involved seems to have realized that this undertaking was an attempt to square the circle: they were trying to finance a successful defense by selling documents that, by their very existence, would make an already weak defense impossible. But their first problem was something else entirely: Willem Sassen, the guardian of the Argentina Papers, had no intention of leaving the sale of his documents to other people and refused to hand them over. Eichmann’s defense counsel learned of the existence of the Argentina Papers and the Life contract from Fritsch and Eichmann’s brother—though Servatius, like Eichmann’s brother, still didn’t know what his future client had said and written in Argentina.²⁸ When Servatius officially received his brief on July 14, 1960, he had no idea of the danger posed by the Argentine confessions. His client lied to him about them consistently, from their very first meeting in Israel, on October 9, until the end of the trial. Robert Eichmann and Eberhard Fritsch also kept Servatius short of information. Admittedly, Servatius gave the impression that he didn’t actually want to know the details, and anyway, he had more than enough on his plate with the flood of documents involved in the Eichmann case.

Meanwhile, Sassen was traveling tirelessly around Europe. Journalists in Bonn reported that he had played them one of the original tapes in July. The “Linz common interest group” noted it all with some anxiety.²⁹ At the same time, Sassen was trying to prepare a draft of his own Eichmann texts, in the belief that he was going to write the Life article himself. Eberhard Fritsch and Hans Rechenberg were less discreet than Sassen. Fritsch, in his efforts to find a publisher quickly, acted carelessly and information on the Argentina Papers was given to the BND. This was another incalculable risk, caused by the general panic over the upcoming trial.³⁰

The BND was alarmed by the information, partly because Fritsch refused to hand over the sample pages to publishers and was making exaggerated claims about the length of the papers. He said there were three thousand pages. The BND in Munich called on Washington for help: friends of Eichmann, they said, were attempting to sell “Eichmann memoirs” for the family’s financial support, and a copy could end up in East Germany.³¹ The Eichmann case had become dynamite in the war of words between East and West Germany. Fritsch’s chatter about the Life contract motivated the BND and the CIA to make hurried inquiries to Life regarding the documents. They also checked up on Fritsch, whom they took to be an Eastern Bloc spy. Bonn was particularly concerned that Eichmann might have named Globke. The CIA leaped to the BND’s aid, putting pressure on Life to keep Globke out of its article at all costs. Allen W. Dulles, the head of the CIA, was soon able to reassure Munich that the name Globke appeared only once in Eichmann’s statements, and that Life had been persuaded not to print it.³² It hadn’t required too much pressure: Globke didn’t appear in the Argentina Papers at all.³³ The occasional reference to “Glo …” in the transcripts clearly referred to Odilo Globocnik, the leader of the deadly Operation Reinhard. In the end, Life printed snippets of Eichmann’s texts along with its own short introductions mainly without commentary, but that doesn’t mean it had planned an allusion to Globke. Whoever was conning whom here, Lifewas doing nothing that Dulles had to stop. The BND and the Federal Chancellery must have been grateful all the same.

The CIA found out a little about Life’s copy of the papers: it consisted of six hundred pages of transcript and forty pages of handwritten text. Life told Sassen about the intelligence service inquiries, and he remonstrated with Fritsch: as a consequence, Sassen had been barred from entering the United States. Fritsch’s misstep gave Sassen a reason not to send any more documents to Austria.³⁴ Genoud and Rechenberg can only have welcomed this development, as it meant they could safely cut Sassen out of the profits. And as long as they still had Eberhard Fritsch, the publisher Eichmann admired, then even without Sassen they were assured of the storyteller’s trust.

In the meantime, François Genoud and the “Linz common interest group” had found an uncomplicated source for Eichmann’s confessions: the prisoner in Israel himself. Immediately after his arrival, Eichmann had begun to compose new texts in response to inquiries by the investigating authorities.³⁵ To the attorney general’s surprise, Eichmann voluntarily produced a wealth of accounts, covering his life (“Meine Memoiren,” May 1961); his escape after the war (“Meine Flucht,” March 1961); and any other topic they put to him. In these texts he presented himself as the unpracticed author who was, “for the first time in 15 years,” making an attempt to write down his thoughts and experiences. He greeted every book supplied to him for this purpose with a show of delight and curiosity, although they were the very same works that he and his friends in Argentina had taken apart sentence by sentence, dismissing them as “Jewish waffle” and a “hodgepodge of lies.”³⁶

Eichmann assumed that the interrogation would be published in the near future and diligently applied himself to correcting the 3,564 pages of the final text. Much too late he reported to his horrified lawyer that he was “dictating reports daily.”³⁷ Eichmann-in-Jerusalem hid the fact that he was drawing on years of practice in writing, speaking onto tape, and working through literature and was now simply adapting his excuses for a new target audience. From the start, his writing in Israel more or less subtly contradicted his own Argentina Papers.

In the end, Eichmann left behind around eight thousand pages from his time in Jerusalem: manuscripts, transcribed statements, letters, personal dossiers, ideological tracts, individual jottings, and thousands of marginal notes on documents. Servatius (without any real hindrance from the Israeli authorities, and under the BND’s observation),³⁸ Genoud, and Rechenberg helped themselves liberally to this flood of papers. They sold a few of the texts, plus some private photos of Eichmann from Argentina and even an exclusive interview with Eichmann’s wife.³⁹ They showed little deference in their enterprise, and they even allowed a photo shoot in which Vera Eichmann held a bunch of flowers in front of a Dachau street sign. These men quite obviously thought Eichmann’s life was forfeit—but this too could be sold at a profit. Their final piece of exploitation was an exclusive interview with the prisoner himself, conducted via questionnaire. It appeared in Paris Match a week after his execution, with the charming title: “Eichmann parle d’outre-tombe” (Eichmann Speaks from Beyond the Grave).⁴⁰

Genoud lost interest in Eichmann’s defense when he realized that the accused was hopeless either as a witness for the collective innocence of the German people or as the savior of Adolf Hitler’s honor.⁴¹ Whether he was in the Third Reich, Argentina, or Israel, Eichmann gave detailed and well-informed accounts of the murder of millions. He simply adjusted the account of his own role, and his attitude toward the murders, to his changing circumstances.

Life and Its Consequences

On October 19, 1960, the Hamburg newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that in the West German newspaper business, rumor had it that Life magazine had bought Eichmann’s “confession” and would soon publish it. The news reminded Servatius of the texts from Argentina that he still hadn’t seen, which necessitated a further discussion with Fritsch and the Eichmann brothers. They decided to summon Sassen back to Austria. He was thought to have returned to South America, and Fritsch even offered to put up the money for his flight. But Sassen refused to let them see any of the material and put off the trip for a month. He told Eichmann’s wife he was planning to publish the material as a book in December.⁴² While Sassen was still convinced he would be writing for Life,the U.S. magazine was stealing a march on him: the story was announced in mid-November, and the articles appeared in the following two issues.⁴³ Servatius learned of the publication on November 25 and tried in vain to take action against it. Life published a few powerful extracts from the interview transcript, and small parts of the handwritten texts, under the headline: “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story.” Each issue featured a phrase of Eichmann’s to great effect: “I transported them … to the butcher” (November 28, 1960) and “To sum it all up, I regret nothing” (December 5, 1960). Everyone connected with the case reacted with shock, albeit in their own ways. Sassen, taken completely by surprise, lamented to Vera Eichmann: “Take a look at what LIFE has done to me.” For her part, Vera Eichmann was unable to comprehend the title “I transported them to the butcher,” so Sassen explained: “That’s what LIFE did. I worked for LIFE for seven years, and this is the thanks I get.”⁴⁴

Servatius went into a fairly serious panic and spoke in dramatic terms of “catastrophic consequences” for the defense. At a press conference, he said he would renounce his brief if the texts turned out to be real; he believed they had been counterfeited.⁴⁵ When Eichmann was confronted with a translation of the Life articles, he had an attack of nerves and suffered a mental breakdown. The doctor whose care he was under quoted him as saying “I am finished. I am broken.”⁴⁶ Servatius made the fastest recovery and, in the initial aftermath of the Life pieces, started taking a systematic approach to the Argentina Papers, determined to discover what danger really lurked within them. He telegraphed Vera Eichmann and asked Fritsch and the Eichmann brothers about the copyright. The answer was unanimous. Vera Eichmann telegraphed back saying the publication had been “at wish and agreement of Sassen Otto Vera.” She thought she had acted according to her husband (Otto)’s wishes.⁴⁷ Fritsch confirmed to Servatius that Eichmann had expressly granted the right to publish the papers if he was arrested, and he provided what Fritsch claimed was an old copy of their contract from Buenos Aires. One slight problem was that it had been typed on a German typewriter, which no one in Argentina owned.⁴⁸

At Servatius’s request, Vera sent her brother-in-law, Robert Eichmann, a copy of her Life contract and—though Servatius wasn’t aware of it—her copy of the Argentina Papers. The Eichmann family must have decided not to tell the lawyer—or Rechenberg, Genoud, or Fritsch—about the arrival of these papers. Servatius continued to demand that Sassen surrender materials that were, in fact, already in Robert Eichmann’s office. Robert Eichmann had probably begun to read the documents and to fear that Servatius really would give up the defense if he got a glimpse of them. As we now know, the Linz copy of the Argentina Papers was more extensive than the Life copy and contained a great many texts handwritten by Eichmann. The defense would have no way on earth to refute these documents: they couldn’t describe them as Life forgeries, or the results of Sassen’s editorial intervention, because they were written in Eichmann’s own hand. While Servatius was making a concerted effort to summon Sassen to Germany and discredit the Life articles, Fritsch, Sassen, and Robert Eichmann now all knew what was really in the Argentina Papers. And of the three, Eichmann’s brother seems to have been the only one to realize that any further publication of them could only be damaging. Still, as it turned out, leaving the papers in his office did his brother more harm than good.

Meanwhile Sassen found himself at the center of international interest again, just as he had hoped. Life had, at least, credited him as the interviewer (although the reference was to a “German journalist”). Now everyone was wondering who had landed the coup of interviewing Eichmann in Argentina. The sudden interest in this hitherto largely unknown journalist led to the publication of a rather imaginative “interview with Sassen,” which further strained Sassen’s relationship with Servatius. Each blamed the other for passing false information to the press for this article.⁴⁹ Thereafter Sassen gave a real interview in Argentina, where he appeared self-assured and openly anti-Israeli.⁵⁰ And once again he provided words that would come to shape the trial: he called Eichmann “a cog in the diabolical Nazi machine.” Later Sassen would make an effort to offer Servatius his assistance in the form of insider knowledge, but Servatius saw his offer as a threat and disregarded it.⁵¹ Months later Eichmann was still talking to his lawyer about a possible book by Sassen and the division of any profit from it,⁵² but Sassen never managed to find the time to put together an Eichmann book of his own. He was also starting to feel hunted, as the man who had sold Eichmann to the Israelis.

The Hunt for the Confessions

The articles in Life had proved so useful to the prosecuting authorities in Israel that they now had a growing desire to get hold of the complete Sassen interviews. But the Israeli authorities weren’t the only ones with a burning interest in the material. To the disappointment of many, no one managed to obtain the Life copy. However, on December 21, 1960, a CIA informant in Germany sent pages of the transcript and sections of the handwritten texts to Washington, under the heading: “Subject Eichmann Memoires.”⁵³He (or she) apologized for the poor quality of the “thermofax reproduction of the E memoires Photostat,” which was a result of the originals also being of poor quality and even illegible in places. The copies of the handwritten pages, however, were clearly legible, to one able to decipher German script. The informant also said that he had not yet compared the copies with the Life articles. At this point, he said, there were numerous copies in Germany, but he made an urgent plea for confidentiality on the handover of the materials.In particular, any mention of the sender was to be avoided, as otherwise the source would be revealed: Hamburg. Officially, the only copy in Hamburg was Stern’s, so someone must have gone poaching in Nannen’s office. It wouldn’t have been the first time. If the CIA had been correctly informed, the journalist Zwy Aldouby, Ephraim Katz, and the specially engaged speedwriter Quentin Reynolds had also used material from the Stern’s editorial office. They had allegedly obtained it directly from a secretary there.⁵⁴ They used it for the book Minister of Death, which was on the market by the end of September 1960. The clue from the CIA files also tells us more about the Hamburg version of the Argentina Papers (and therefore also about the copies of it that were in circulation): it contained bad copies of the transcripts and legible copies of the handwritten pages. When the attorney general in the Eichmann trial finally submitted the Israel copy of the Argentina Papers in May 1961, it looked very different, consisting of clearly legible copies of the transcript, and less legible handwritten pages. So the CIA report tells us where the Israeli authorities didn’t get their copy: Hamburg. It is impossible to copy a poor-quality version into legibility.

In February 1961 Robert Pendorf, the Hamburg reporter who had written on Eichmann for Stern, published his book Mörder und Ermordete: Eichmann und die Judenpolitik des Dritten Reichs (The Murderer and the Murdered: Eichmann and the Third Reich’s Anti-Jewish Policy). In this book, Pendorf describes his source (and thus what Stern received from Sassen) as a handwritten document on squared paper, “a manuscript of around 80 pages, reporting on Eichmann’s activities in the German Reich in very general terms, without details.”⁵⁵ He also had access to numerous “books which Eichmann furnished with marginal notes” and “pages of commentary, prepared on loose sheets, on all the publications of note concerning the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish policy.” However, Pendorf had not—and he may have overemphasized this—used the Sassen interviews, the “ ‘memoirs’ [note the quotation marks!] that Eichmann later spoke onto tape, assisted by the former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen van Elsloo, and which, after Eichmann was captured, were printed in a heavily abridged [!] form by the American illustrated paper Life.” Pendorf was clearly aware of the interviews’ scope, and traces of the transcript appear in his book. In all probability, his disclaimer was intended to avoid a conflict over the rights with Life. Pendorf’s description, however, shows how much material Sassen had shown (if not given) to Stern’s reporter in Argentina. It also tells us what was known about the scope of the Argentina Papers in February 1961. In any case, Pendorf had seen material that was not available to the public (or even to researchers) until a few years ago.

At the start of 1961, the Life extracts, sections of the transcript, and around eighty pages of handwritten text were circulating around the offices of newspaper editors and at least two intelligence services. But nothing suggests that the Israeli prosecutors—or theHesse attorney general Fritz Bauer—had copies of the Argentina Papers available to them at this point. That changed in March 1961, though not through the efforts of helpful journalists or, apparently, the German or American intelligence services.

The Security Breach

At the start of March 1961, a notable but little-known meeting took place, in a Frankfurt hotel, between Hermann Langbein from Vienna, Thomas Harlan from Warsaw, and Henry Ormond from Frankfurt. Each of these three men had an unusual biography and a desire to come to terms with Nazi history and see justice done. Had they not, they would surely never have met.

Hermann Langbein, born in 1912, was active in the Austrian Communist Party as a young man. He survived several concentration camps and became the first general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee in Vienna. He later became secretary of the Comité International de Camps and was awarded the honorary title “Righteous Among the Nations.”⁵⁶ After 1945 he devoted his life to the exposure and punishment of Nazi crimes, publicizing the survivors’ misery and demanding systematic prosecution. He also compiled a substantial press archive on the hunt for Nazi fugitives, did educational work, and organized fact-finding trips to Poland. His excellent contacts put him in a position to find witnesses on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He facilitated Fritz Bauer’s contact with Polish jurists, as West Germany and Poland had no diplomatic relations. Eichmann was right at the top of his list: Langbein had conducted a search for photos in Poland at the start of 1959, and in the same year—by agreement with Henry Ormond—he brought official criminal charges against Adolf Eichmann in Austria.⁵⁷

Henry Ormond, born Hans Ludwig Jacobsohn, in Kassel, was a German jurist whose Jewish heritage lost him his position as a judge in the Mannheim District Court in 1933. In 1938 he was arrested during the November pogroms. Three months later he was allowed to leave Dachau concentration camp, after providing evidence that he was able to emigrate. Following his internment, he was almost unable to move one of his hands, which served as a reminder of this period for the rest of his life. He fled to Switzerland, then to Britain and Canada, and finally returned to Europe as a soldier in the British Army. During the occupation, he remained in Hanover and Hamburg as an officer and was responsible for building up a new press sector. Henri Nannen and Rudolf Augstein got their licenses through Henry Ormond, who would cast a critical eye on Stern and Der Spiegel for the rest of his life.⁵⁸ In April 1950 he started work as a lawyer in Frankfurt, where he conducted the first forced-labor trial against IG Farben and championed the recognition of Nazi victims’ rights. In the Auschwitz trial alone, he represented fifteen joint plaintiffs.⁵⁹ He was also one of the first to recognize and denounce the Foreign Office’s revisionist version of history.⁶⁰

Thomas Harlan, born in 1929, was the son of the director Veit Harlan, who became notorious for the anti-Semitic 1940 film Jud Süß. In 1959 he moved to Warsaw, turning his disappointment in his father (and the memory of Goebbels giving him a train set for Christmas) into creativity and historical journalism. He took an unusual path, conducting most of his research in Poland and breaching the general East-West divide in other ways as well. Harlan’s mission was to uncover Nazi criminals and call out perpetrators by name. With this in mind, he was planning a huge publication, to be called Das Vierte Reich (The Fourth Reich), on the postwar lives of influential Nazis. In May 1960 he published one of the first articles about Eichmann in the respected Polish weekly paperPolityka.⁶¹

Ormond and Langbein had known each other since at least 1955 and quickly developed a mutual respect. They issued press releases together; Langbein helped Ormond find documents and witnesses for his trials; and Ormond helped Langbein navigate the German legal system. In 1959 the Hesse attorney general, Fritz Bauer, made contact with Langbein via Henry Ormond, as Langbein had offered to arrange a site visit to Auschwitz for Bauer and his colleagues. Unfortunately, this trip foundered in bureaucracy at the last minute.⁶² Langbein and Harlan knew each other through Harlan’s Polish girlfriend, who had survived Auschwitz, and also because Harlan was active in journalism and the media in Poland. Finally, Ormond and Harlan met in 1960 at the latest, through either Langbein or Fritz Bauer.

On March 3–6, 1961, these men met at a hotel in Frankfurt to work through the most comprehensive copy of the Argentina Papers in existence.⁶³ Langbein had brought it with him from Vienna, directly from the desk of Eichmann’s stepbrother Robert in Linz. A “locksmith,” as Langbein told Thomas Harlan, had gained access to the office at 3 Bischofstraße and had given Langbein the nine-hundred-page copy that Vera Eichmann had sent her brother-in-law. We cannot know for sure, but a locksmith may not have been necessary. At the start of 1960, Simon Wiesenthal made contact with Robert Eichmann’s secretary, who was in her early twenties, via the Austrian secret police. She may have been the person who opened the door to the “locksmith.”⁶⁴

The spoils were, in any case, passed on to Hermann Langbein.⁶⁵ He quickly contacted the people he thought could put the papers to good use. Irmtrud Wojak has found evidence that Fritz Bauer reserved the copying facilities in his office on March 7. All other copying work for his colleagues in Hesse’s Justice Ministry had to be postponed because, as an office memo said, the “Frankfurt copying facilities are not sufficient.” Attorney General Bauer required facilities for copying the transcript of a tape “allegedly dictated by Eichmann himself, when he was still at liberty.”⁶⁶ The documents to be copied, as Harlan’s Polish girlfriend, Krystyna Zywulska, recalled, came directly from Hermann Langbein. This means Bauer also profited substantially from the meeting in Frankfurt. Meanwhile in Linz, Eichmann’s stepbrother evidently kept quiet about the theft from his office. Eichmann’s lawyer was still waiting to get a copy from Willem Sassen, and Hans Rechenberg’s letters show he was still convinced that only Sassen had the transcripts. Robert Eichmann must have been so embarrassed about his lack of security for such sensitive material as the Argentina Papers that he didn’t even tell his stepbrother’s family about it. And so far no evidence has emerged that the theft was reported to the Linz police.⁶⁷ The whole operation went so smoothly that it didn’t even reach the intelligence service files.

The meeting between Ormond, Harlan, and Langbein served another purpose. Langbein needed money to have Robert Eichmann’s copy of the Argentina Papers transferred to microfilm, and to allow Harlan to undertake a detailed analysis of this extensive source. Above all, Langbein wanted this material to be published as quickly as possible. As a financial statement from the end of March reveals, Henry Ormond did in fact manage to finance the microfilm copy. At the same time, the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli promised to finance Harlan’s work.⁶⁸ It seems likely that Fritz Bauer played some kind of role here, but we have no evidence: all the correspondence went through Henry Ormond. Thomas Harlan took the film to Warsaw, started reading immediately, and contacted his friend Daniel Passent, the editor of the weekly newspaper Polityka.⁶⁹ Passent suggested to his editor-in-chief that the material should be used for a series of articles. Mieczysław F. Rakowski must have been a cautious man, as he enlisted the expertise of the criminal investigator Milicja Obywatelska. On May 6 Polityka’s editor-in-chief was presented with the evaluation: the material was genuine, and the handwriting was that of Adolf Eichmann.⁷⁰ Rakowski, Harlan, and Passent agreed on a different course of action from the one taken by Life: starting on May 20, Polityka published a five-part series, which presented the unedited texts for the first time and also provided its readers with images, facsimiles, and a handwriting analysis. The series included historical criticism and potted biographies of the men Eichmann had named as his collaborators. In only this short time, Harlan and Passent had written 350 pages of commentary on the papers.⁷¹ To date, it remains far and away the most thorough attempt to document the Argentina Papers for the general public.

Polityka was therefore disappointed by the series’ impact—or rather, the lack thereof. Even in the Eastern Bloc, it generated no reactions worth mentioning. After the series concluded, Rakowski noted with resignation that neither Soviet Russian nor other Eastern Bloc media had shown an interest in the pieces. Radio Berlin in East Germany had been the only organization to ask for a copy of the first issue.⁷² In the West, the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden and Die Welt mentioned the series in side columns, but Politykadidn’t hear about it.⁷³ Everyone seemed to think the series was just a reprint of the Life articles: a few other magazines had reprinted them, including the French illustrated paper Paris Match (at the start of May).⁷⁴ But Rakowski also couldn’t understand why Gideon Hausner, the Israeli attorney general, claimed he had received a copy of the Argentina Papers only after Polityka got its copy—and why Hausner didn’t present all the documents. Hausner was talking about sixty-seven tape transcripts and eighty-three handwritten pages. What Rakowski (and Gideon Hausner) could not have known was that the copy in Poland was more complete, with more than one hundred additional pages. Rakowski simply couldn’t imagine that a newspaper editor in Warsaw could be using documents that the prosecution in Israel had no idea existed—Eichmann’s trial was, after all, one of the most important of the twentieth century. And Rakowski was in good company—not only with the Israeli prosecutors but also with people researching Eichmann.

The Israel Copy

Where Gideon Hausner obtained his copy of the Argentina Papers, and when it became available to his team, has always been a puzzle. But having traced the story of how the papers were divided up to this point, we have at least taken a few more steps. Hermann Langbein could have offered his great find to Gideon Hausner (or at least ensured that Fritz Bauer did so on his behalf). And we can safely assume that Fritz Bauer would have helped his colleagues in Israel in this regard: it would make no sense for him to assist in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, only to then hold back important documents that had been put into his hands through a useful relationship. But the material that the Israeli prosecutors submitted as evidence didn’t come from Bauer. The Israel copy is not only less extensive but of a much lesser quality: the handwritten fragments are difficult (and in some places impossible) to read, and the copy of the transcript comes from a version that was dirty and damaged in places. Robert Eichmann’s copy is occasionally a little blurred, and in places the text veers very close to the edges, but there is no evidence of dirt on the transcript or the handwritten passages. This suggests that Bauer (and perhaps Langbein) offered Hausner the documents but Bureau 06, the special unit set up to interrogate Eichmann and collect evidence against him, politely declined them, assuming that it already had everything Fritz Bauer had. It certainly couldn’t have been a lack of interest: handwritten texts cannot be surpassed as evidence. Not even Eichmann would have been able to claim they were a misrepresentation of his true thoughts in Argentina.

By the time Fritz Bauer obtained his copy, at the start of March, then, the Israelis seem already to have had their own—though it was unconnected to the burglary in Linz. Eichmann’s interrogator, Avner W. Less, remembered discussing whether the prosecution should confront Eichmann with the Sassen transcript it had just received, but Servatius had prohibited any further questioning.⁷⁵ Less was confident he could still get Eichmann to cooperate and could persuade him to authorize the documents before the start of the trial. He feared Eichmann would be less responsive in the courtroom. This narrows down the time frame for the papers’ arrival to February or early March 1961. But whenever the copy arrived, Henry Ormond and Hermann Langbein both agreed that it must have come from a risky and illegal operation.⁷⁶ When Gideon Hausner told the court on April 26 that he did not yet have access to the documents on which the Life articles were based, that certainly wasn’t the truth—unlike the same declaration by Eichmann’s lawyer Servatius, who by this point had set eyes on only a fragment of the Argentina Papers.⁷⁷ The people involved in the acquisition of the copies remained silent for many years. Only in 2007 did Gabriel Bach, who had been Hausner’s deputy, make a vague statement about the Sassen transcript. After Eichmann had been abducted, he said, “this journalist gave it to Life magazine, and we got it from there.”⁷⁸ However, judging from the appearance of the Israel copy, this explanation seems unlikely. One thing is obvious: these pages were not copied carefully and methodically, as you might expect if their source were the magazine to which Sassen gave his first copy. Gabriel Bach, like most other people, seems to have assumed that the “Life material” and the “Sassen document” were the same thing. The truth is a little more complicated.

During his extensive exploration of Simon Wiesenthal’s papers, Tom Segev found a letter to Attorney General Hausner, written decades later, reminding him that it had been he—Wiesenthal—who had given him access to the Sassen transcripts.⁷⁹ We should exercise due caution when dealing with quotes from Wiesenthal, but in this case it’s hardly likely that he would lie to the one person who definitely knew the truth. It must therefore have been the enterprising man from Linz who tracked the papers down. The help that Wiesenthal provided during preparations for the trial was not generally known until very recently. Emphasizing the role he played was not in the interests of those involved, and so no one remembered it. Isser Harel in particular twisted the truth and told tall stories to diminish Wiesenthal’s part in his prestigious Eichmann case. It is thanks to Tom Segev that we now have a more balanced view. Wiesenthal’s letter does, however, show that he had found only a part of the transcript: “As You will remember, I brought for the Eichmann trial 28 transcripts from tapes with Eichmann’s handwritten notes.”⁸⁰ The letter also reveals that Wiesenthal had no official source.

A page-by page comparison shows that the Israeli prosecutors had to do some work in piecing together their Sassen copy. It is fundamentally different from Hermann Langbein’s excellent version, which points to it being a copy made from what Sassen originally sold to the press.⁸¹ The question of whether Wiesenthal got the papers from a journalist or an intelligence service colleague will be answered only when the archives are opened, and we can discover when the BND actually got hold of them. One BND worker claimed that they first received “the diary of the Jew-murderer” from Mossad, but this is clearly nonsense. The pertinent question is why the BND office didn’t send the Israeli prosecutors the papers they already had at the end of 1960.⁸²

Hausner kept the existence of the material a secret from the court for as long as he possibly could. The attorney general was probably trying not only to lull Eichmann into a sense of security but also to buy time. Even without the Sassen transcripts, the prosecution had to wade through mountains of documents, and this new material was difficult to decipher. In April 1961, it therefore announced that it was asking Life to hand over its material (which the Israelis, of course, already had). Even Gideon Hausner wanted an evaluation of the papers before they were used, and he gave his copy to the Israeli police’s handwriting expert, Avraham Hagag.⁸³

We have Avraham Hagag to thank for the first ordering and complete description of a copy of the Sassen transcript. He sorted the pages and put the mountain of paper into manageable folders, with several tape transcripts in each, ordered according to their numbers. This is how the famous “two binders with 17 files” came into being: sixteen for the transcripts, and “File 17” for the eighty-three pages of handwritten text.⁸⁴ The ordering wasn’t completely accurate—Hagag allowed a few pages of Sassen’s own dictations and a fragment of a separate text by Eichmann to slip in unnoticed among the transcripts—but given the time pressure, it was an impressive achievement.⁸⁵ Officially, Inspector Hagag counted 716 pages of transcription and 83 pages of handwriting. If we discount three accidental double paginations,⁸⁶ the Israel copy contains 713 typed and 83 handwritten pages or partial pages. Transcripts of some tapes were obviously missing, as a gap yawned between tapes 5 and 11; the third page of tape 41 was missing;⁸⁷ and tape 55 consisted of only two pages. The transcript in Israel ended—to great effect—with Eichmann’s “little address to the group” from tape 67. Nobody in Israel had any idea that there might be more recordings, or that there had originally been more than seventy tapes. Mieczysław F. Rakowski (of Polityka) immediately noted that he, at least, knew there was a tape 68, though he didn’t draw the right conclusions from that fact. But the gap between tapes 5 and 11, and the missing pages from tape 55, were the same in Robert Eichmann’s copy and all the other copies in circulation. Sassen had removed these sections in 1960, as well as the first part of the Alvensleben interview, before distributing the copies across the world. Even he realized that a trial would be the wrong moment for the sort of rampant anti-Semitism regarding the “Jewish world conspiracy” and the “robber-state of Israel” that appeared in the first conversations.⁸⁸

Dismantling the Evidence

When new evidence comes to light at short notice during a trial, time is always the crucial problem. Even the Israel copy, at a mere 796 pages, was more than enough of a challenge for Hausner’s colleagues to process. But when Polityka started publishing extracts and facsimiles of sample pages on May 20, and even made a public offer to send the material to Israel for the prosecution, Gideon Hausner couldn’t wait any longer without looking foolish. On May 22, 1961, he announced that he now had photostats of the manuscript. He responded to the judge’s inquiry about them with a half-truth, saying that he and his team had had access to these documents for three weeks and had not received them directly from Life.

From then on, the papers were referred to as the “Sassen Document.” The defense was given a copy, which—complete with the annotations made by Eichmann in his cell—is now held in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Servatius Estate). German jurists were granted access to it on request. Dietrich Zeug, the trial observer from Ludwigsburg, sent a copy to Fritz Bauer, saying he could compare it with his own.⁸⁹ But what had started out as a success for Hausner ended with unexpected misery: when he tried to submit the papers as evidence in court, the attorney general was faced with the problem Avner W. Less had foreseen: Robert Servatius raised an objection. Even though Hagag’s evaluation proved that the handwriting was Eichmann’s (also submitted on June 9), Eichmann vehemently denied the material was authentic. And how does one prove that a typed transcript actually corresponds to what was said, when there are no tapes to prove it? Hausner was forced to fight over every page, and on June 12 it was agreed that only the pages Eichmann had corrected by hand, or had written by hand himself, could be used. The prosecutors watched helplessly as the most powerfully revealing postwar source on Eichmann and the Holocaust shrank from 796 pages down to the marginal notes on 83 pages, and another 83 pages of barely legible handwriting.⁹⁰ Powerful texts like the “little address to the group” couldn’t be quoted. Over the days that followed, Eichmann worked tirelessly to disqualify as evidence what little of the text remained. He disputed “the famous Sassen Document” by stressing the influence of alcohol, claiming that most of his corrections had been lost, and lying that he had given up on correcting the transcripts because they were so bad. Unlike the handwriting expert (and anyone who had eyes), Eichmann couldn’t recognize a few of the handwritten comments as his own. The handwritten pages were pretty much unusable, he said, as they were incomplete, which was bound to create a false impression. He also claimed there had been an agreement with Sassen that every page should be authorized by hand before being released for publication—a process he had become familiar with in Israel, where his interrogator had him sign off on each individual page of the interrogation.⁹¹ But the most incredible of his lies was that Sassen had spoken very bad German (July 13). The man whose melodious, assured language had warmed the fascist hearts of nostalgic German Nazis; the man whom Eichmann had idolized for this very reason—this man was suddenly supposed to have blundered along, hardly understanding a word! Recklessly, Eichmann kept demanding the submission of the original tapes, though he also took the precaution of saying that Sassen had goaded him into making false statements to produce good headlines (July 19). He painted the discussions as “tavern conversations.” Hours of studying historical theories and Nazi history suddenly became a lot of casual boasting and booze-fueled sentimentality (July 20). Sassen, he said, had occasionally tempted him to “relapse” into National Socialist ways of thinking. Naturally, he didn’t mention that the entire Sassen circle was one big relapse. Eichmann also told his lawyer that what he had really written in Argentina was something very different. As Servatius then explained to the court, Eichmann would present these writings “as evidence of the real attitude of the accused.”⁹² Eichmann cleverly defused and dodged any question about why these discussions had taken place, by adopting the rumor that Sassen and Life had brought into the world: the legend of the “Eichmann memoirs.”

This was the title Sassen had given the Argentina Papers when he sold them to Life. Eichmann’s abduction had created a demand for details of the life and thought of the mass murderer in exile, and the “memoirs” label gave Sassen an exclusive on it. He achieved three goals at the same time: protecting the participants in the Sassen circle, presenting himself as a journalist without any National Socialist inclinations, and raising the value of his material.⁹³ He didn’t mention the fact that a few years previously, he had instructed the transcriber to leave out all the anecdotes about Eichmann’s life. Still, no one questioned the story that Sassen had been planning a book about Eichmann.

This piece of disinformation was a great help to Eichmann-in-Jerusalem, despite the fundamental problem of the Argentina Papers’ existence. He was trying to convince people he was a reformed Nazi, who—without Hitler and his orders—could go back to being the completely harmless and entirely apolitical man he had always been. He had been an upright citizen in Argentina, delighted that he no longer had to carry out such terrible orders. In view of this effort, he was hardly about to correct the “memoir” headlines. His participation in a National Socialist political project—the continuation of an anti-Semitic war by other means—didn’t fit the image of the harmless Argentine national. Without any prior agreement, Sassen and Eichmann both told the same lie. They let the world believe that an exile down on his luck had met a journalist greedy for money and had talked about old times over a bottle of whiskey or two. And the world willingly believed the cliché of the drunk, boasting Nazi—not least because everyone else involved stayed silent.

Only one man from the Dürer circle spoke out in public about the background of the Sassen transcripts. Dieter Vollmer, Eberhard Fritsch’s deputy, had returned to Germany in 1954; he had kept writing for Der Weg until the very end and was apparently involved in the difficult distribution of Dürer publications. In 1961 Vollmer wrote a rather far-fetched article entitled “On the Professional Ethics of Journalists,” for the tendentious West German monthly Nation Europa, in which he cleverly dismantled the embarrassingly clear evidence of the Sassen transcripts.⁹⁴ Sassen, he said respectfully, had questioned Eichmann “systematically about his past for several months.” “Now, tapes were very difficult to procure in Buenos Aires at that time. So when a tape was full, the contents were briefly [!] jotted down in pencil [!], and the tape was wiped for the next recording. From these brief pencil notes, our diligent journalist compiled a manuscript.” Eichmann gave an “impressive” refutation of the authenticity of this document in Jerusalem, and Vollmer assured his readers with surprising certainty that “the truth about what Eichmann said during these months can certainly no longer be investigated.” Not even, he added as a precaution, “from the pencil notes, photocopies of which two acquaintances of mine have seen.” Vollmer’s story, with its brevity and its thrice-emphasized pencil, was obviously concocted to keep at bay the danger that the transcripts represented to everyone who had been involved in their creation, but also the danger they posed to revisionist history and the Nazi network outside Argentina. He was also feeding the doubt in the minds of people who hadn’t been involved, and who didn’t believe that Eichmann could have provided the material for such a significant piece of documentary evidence.⁹⁵ And the people who knew better, even those in Germany, didn’t contradict him.⁹⁶

The situation of Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner had a tragic aspect: he had seen what Eichmann said in Argentina but was unable to use most of it. Fritz Bauer tried to help his colleague in Israel, attempting—apparently without success—to have Eberhard Fritsch questioned in Vienna, so he could authenticate the transcript.⁹⁷ Later, he even wrote to Sassen.⁹⁸ Hausner had hopes of obtaining at least one original recording, but the earth seemed to have swallowed up all traces of them.⁹⁹ Later, witnesses in Argentina reported that that was exactly what had happened: Willem Sassen had buried them in the garden.¹⁰⁰ These few yards of tape could have earned him a lot of money, so this story quashes the theory that he was a profit-hungry journalist, with no sense of responsibility toward Eichmann. Hausner later implied that he had put some considerable effort and expense into the search for the tapes. Because of the trial’s length, he hoped he would eventually be able to refute Eichmann-in-Jerusalem using the recordings of Eichmann-in-Argentina.¹⁰¹ As it was, the evidence against Eichmann was still overwhelming, and even reading the transcripts kept the prosecution from falling for his stories of reformation.¹⁰² But still it was a defeat, and we will never know how the public impact of the trial might have been altered if Eichmann’s unpleasantly penetrating voice could have been heard on the news all over the world, giving his “little address to the group.” When Eichmann said, “No, I did not say that,” there was simply no way to argue against him.¹⁰³ So the Sassen transcript acquired the reputation of being an unreliable source, and anyone who wanted to write about Eichmann, including Hannah Arendt, had to content themselves with the few pages admitted as evidence and the articles in Life—although no one really knew whether the latter were genuine texts or exaggerated tabloid journalism.¹⁰⁴ The articles in the Polish paper Polityka, which were a more reliable source, remained unused. The Israeli attorney general was never granted the opportunity to listen to the tapes and to confirm that he had been right about the evidence of the transcripts from the start. Gideon Hausner died in Jerusalem in 1990.

Evaluations and Old Resources

The Argentina Papers continued to be labeled “Eichmann’s memoirs.” They had not been admitted as evidence, and Eichmann’s attacks on their authenticity were impossible to refute, so in the context of the trial, a more thorough evaluation wasn’t necessary. This, and the Sassen transcripts’ various foibles, also explains why little attention was given to the Alvensleben interview, the pieces of writing by Eichmann and Sassen, and the Langer lecture. The difficulty of spotting these “foreign bodies” in the papers can be gauged from the fact that the prosecutors weren’t the only people who failed to notice them. Fritz Bauer was also eager to use this source in his investigations. In 1961 the Eichmann trial created more interest in hunting down hidden war criminals. Bauer commissioned a detailed “evaluation of the Sassen interview” from the Baden-Württemberg Landeskriminalamt (LKA), the federal state’s office for criminal investigations. On December 4, 1961, the results were given to the Ludwigsburg Central Office, the office of the attorney general, and the Essen District Court (in connection with a trial that was taking place there). The evaluation was more than seven hundred pages long and included a comprehensive index of names and contents, paragraph by paragraph. I found the first reference to this mammoth work in a covering letter from the LKA,¹⁰⁵ and the index of names was also listed in the collection in the Bundesarchiv.¹⁰⁶ It comprised 467 entries over five hundred pages, with summaries of where and how each name was mentioned in the transcript—although such an index could never be complete, due to the transcript’s numerous spelling errors and misheard names. Interestingly, the LKA officials had used two Sassen copies for this index: one on photographic paper, which was still the standard way of making copies, and one on microfilm. The paper copy was also indexed in the Bundesarchiv, but there was no sign of a film, and the list of contents seemed also to have vanished. The fact that it has all become accessible again is partly thanks to a handwritten pencil note discovered in the Central Office. But the documents wouldn’t have been found without a curious official from the LKA, and equally curious staff at the Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, who were spurred on by my persistent inquiries. Norbert Kiessling (of the Baden-Württemburg LKA) helped with the reading of his predecessor’s letterhead, which was difficult even for him to decipher, and explained to me the problems of special commissions.¹⁰⁷ Tobias Hermann got his Bundesarchiv colleagues interested in searching for the Central Office cabinet mentioned in the old handwritten note. The two binders came to light—and with them an envelope full of films, which turned out to be another copy of the Argentina Papers. There was also another binder that none of us had expected to find, with the promising title “Sassen Interview Miscellaneous.” At this point, none of us knew that we had found the first extant copy of the handwritten texts stolen from the office in Linz and given to Hermann Langbein half a century ago.

The LKA’s list of contents runs to just over 250 pages and contains information on every single paragraph of tapes 1–5 and 10–67, including this page of tape 41, which is missing from Hagag’s Israel copy. The list was made not by historians but by civil servants working to bring criminal charges. Such works are produced under time pressure, in this case within the space of a few months. And anyone who has seen a few pages of the Sassen transcript will understand the difficulties of reading it. However, this synopsis is still the only one we have, and it allows the reader to gain a quick overview, although in the details there are numerous incorrect interpretations and abbreviations. Citations in later court transcripts show that this list of contents was put to use. But what the LKA staff failed to notice was the presence of several speakers in the transcript. They read Langer’s lecture as a statement by Eichmann, and they counted the Alvensleben interview as another interview with Eichmann. The latter in particular had strange and frustrating consequences. When the Munich District Court II brought charges against Karl Wolff in 1963, Alvensleben would have made an excellent witness. Instead, tape 56 from the Sassen transcript bore witness against Wolff. The indictment included two lengthy quotes about Wolff from “Eichmann’s” statement.¹⁰⁸ If the authorities had known who was really speaking on tape 56, the prosecutor would have been able to use Alvensleben as a witness in absentia. Given Alvensleben and Wolff’s long, close working and personal relationship, it would have been hard to find more credible evidence. Pitting Eichmann against Wolff, however, meant pitting an RSHA head of department against the chief of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. Ludolf von Alvensleben had an office right next door to Himmler’s for years—just as Wolff did. A word from him about the accused would have carried a great deal more weight.

After Eichmann

On May 31, 1962, after the failed appeal, Eichmann was also denied a stay of execution. The hanging brought to an end Eichmann’s ability to influence his public image. He was no longer able to make people forget his confessions in Argentina—or his attitude toward his own crimes. The Sassen transcripts remained veiled in mystery: thanks to Eichmann’s baseless lies, the people who had them didn’t quite trust them as a source, and hardly anyone else had an opportunity to study them. One exception was Gideon Hausner, who published his account of the Eichmann trial in 1963–64 under the title Justice in Jerusalem. He quoted the Sassen transcripts—though confusingly, he gave the number of pages as 659 rather than the 713 of the Israel copy. Thomas Harlan, meanwhile, faced increasing problems in Poland in the early 1960s and was not allowed to return to Warsaw. His intention of publishing the Argentina Papers ran aground, first in Poland and then in Italy, where the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli feared there would be rightsissues. Eichmann and his heirs were probably the copyright holders, or possibly Sassen—and then there was Time Inc. and all the other people to whom Sassen had sold exploitation rights. Feltrinelli had likely at least heard of François Genoud, who was in Rome in 1961–62. He confidently claimed to be the owner of the exploitation rights to Eichmann’s writing and had gotten himself a reputation across half of Europe for being an unpleasant opponent in copyright matters.¹⁰⁹ Henry Ormond and Hermann Langbein searched for arguments to reassure Feltrinelli. “In my opinion,” Langbein wrote to Ormond, “Eichmann is not the legal owner of these tape transcriptions. Sassen sold them … to LIFE. So Sassen is no longer the owner either. Copyright could possibly be claimed by LIFE, if anyone. But since we obtained the text of the recording neither from LIFE nor from Sassen, but in the same [!] way as the court in Jerusalem, this also seems problematic to me.” Langbein even wondered whether they should officially reverse the route the papers had taken and claim that their copy had come from Israel or Poland, to reassure Feltrinelli.¹¹⁰

But the main problem lay with Thomas Harlan, or rather with the job as a whole. Reading the 3,564 pages of the interrogation transcript was a monstrous task, and even the people who had done it thoroughly, like Hannah Arendt,¹¹¹ had to admit that the interrogation alone—or indeed the trial transcripts—were not reliable enough to function as the basis of an incontrovertible historical text. The detailed examination of the Nazi period really only started with the Eichmann trial. Today we have recourse to decades of research, excellent document collections, and statistical data, but the authors of 1961 were practically alone, gazing at the mountains of Eichmann’s Jerusalem stories.

Compared with other authors, Thomas Harlan was facing a whole mountain range: Fritz Bauer had given him all the trial documents and, most important, exclusive access to the Argentina Papers. He still wanted to write his book about the “Fourth Reich,” the unpunished war criminals still living in Germany. And he also intended to support Fritz Bauer, Hermann Langbein, and Henry Ormond in their preparations for the Auschwitz trial. Such a task might overwhelm even someone with no additional personal problems. Harlan struggled with a terrible guilt about disappointing his friends and supporters.¹¹² In later years he would find other, more artistic ways of dealing with the recent past, and a few years ago he gave his remaining Eichmann papers to Irmtrud Wojak for further research; she still has them.¹¹³ Unfortunately, so far I have been able to see only the small remnant of this collection still held in Harlan’s archive.¹¹⁴ So all I can do is refer to the promise Frau Wojak made me some time ago that we would definitely get a viewing of these papers organized, maybe, at some point. We therefore still have no real appreciation of what Thomas Harlan achieved—a man who was prepared to offer me crucial advice in spite of his illness, which eventually killed him in 2011.

The Missing Tapes

In the years after the trial, research on Eichmann and National Socialist anti-Jewish policy increased dramatically, largely based on the transcripts of the interrogation and trial in Jerursalem and the growing collections of historical documents. But curiosity remained about Eichmann in Argentina: nothing piques the imagination like inaccessible or missing documents. Nobody had any idea how extensive the Argentina Papers were (and no one read old Polish magazines), so researchers’ curiosity concentrated on the missing tapes, numbered 5 to 10.¹¹⁵ What could have been so secret that Sassen removed them before selling the transcript?

Academics often refrain from even touching questions of this sort, preferring to let journalists lead the way. They want to avoid getting a reputation for courting popularity with sensational research topics (or to call it by its real name: they don’t want to stick their necks out and risk making fools of themselves). The disastrous thing about this division of labor is that both parties are then blinded: one to the old world, and the other to the newly discovered country, so that in the worst-case scenario, one is paralyzed with shock, while the other sinks helplessly in the morass.

Ladislas Farago has become one of the most successful distributors of dubious secrets about the Sassen interviews, which he trenchantly dubs “horror stories.” His book about the war criminals who fled to South America is a sad combination of journalistic flair and historical naïveté: very few authors have managed to present highly explosive information and complete nonsense so close together.¹¹⁶ Farago, who was born in the same year as Eichmann, was a screenwriter by trade and also wrote a wealth of popular books about espionage and the Second World War. This sort of book is meant to entertain (and his books serve that purpose extremely well). We shouldn’t have to judge them by the standards of academic research—except that their content has entered academic literature by the back door. Other authors copied from them, forgetting—a simple oversight, naturally!—to use quotation marks and cite their source. Occasionally there is even an “I” where it should say “Farago.”¹¹⁷ Farago’s wonderfully entertaining stories were thus transformed into actual witness statements, which have now been quoted in some otherwise very serious works. This makes it difficult to get away from the Farago story without closer consideration.

Farago’s Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, published in 1974, was one of the first books about the escape routes that took Nazis overseas. Two chapters are devoted to Eichmann.¹¹⁸ Farago did at least stumble over some of the names of Sassen’s associates, like Hans-Ulrich Rudel and the Dürer circle around Eberhard Fritsch,¹¹⁹ although his story suffers from claims that he also spoke to people who never existed, characters dreamed up from the pseudonyms used in Der Weg. He paints Sassen as a politically neutral and historically rather underexposed writer. Sassen didn’t let himself “be confused by the Rudel-Fritsche crowd’s spurious propaganda.… This was to be no whitewash, no apologia.”¹²⁰ Farago reported his visit to Sassen in detail, claiming he saw the Sassen transcripts and even read them, the “sixty-seven tapes with that many transcripts neatly kept in seventeen ‘Leitz’ document binders,” together with “marginal notes” and “extra pages” that Eichmann (!) had produced on a typewriter.¹²¹ In total, Farago said, there were 695 (!) pages. This number tells us what Farago really saw: books about the Eichmann trial, in particular Hausner’s Justice in Jerusalem, from which he skillfully lifted descriptions of the Israel copy, including an incorrect number of pages. In Argentina, there were neither seventeen binders nor only 695 pages.¹²² The “summary” of “the sixty-two tapes,” in which Farago says Eichmann principally spoke “about the escaped Nazis who had gone underground,” shows he had never read the transcripts. Sassen would certainly not have had to ask Eichmann for this information, since he and Horst Carlos Fuldner knew far more about the escape routes Nazis had taken to Argentina than Eichmann did. The crowning moment of this imaginative eyewitness report comes with the “exclusive information” that Farago shares from his own interview with Sassen: “Today we know that Willem Sassen was holding back … five additional tapes the very existence of which was kept a secret. He also suppressed fifty-one pages.… On those five tapes which Sassen was withholding, Eichmann had recorded the sordid story of his own escape and presented his knowing account of Bormann’s journey to Argentina.” Farago goes on: “[Sassen] readily conceded that Bormann figured prominently both on the tapes and in his decision to withhold them, but refused categorically to surrender any of them or to let me as much as listen to the five mysterious tapes. ‘I know,’ he said ruefully, ‘how far I can stretch my luck.’ He was, he told me quite bluntly, ‘afraid of the long arms of certain people.’ ” Apparently, Sassen would publish “the Eichmann book as a whole … ‘only after the death of either of us, Bormann’s or mine.’ ”¹²³ Let us generously assume that Sassen really was afraid, because other Nazis saw him as a traitor following the Eichmann episode; and let us also assume (with extreme generosity) that Sassen might have repeated rumors about Bormann to a sensation-hungry journalist, as such rumors have always changed hands for a fair amount of money. The fact still remains that there were never “five tapes and fifty-one pages” missing, on which Eichmann recounted the story of Bormann’s part in his escape. Martin Bormann, the man who was head of the party chancellery and Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, didn’t survive beyond May 1945. He had neither the opportunity nor the will to get himself to safety, let alone show one of his comrades the way to Argentina. Tapes 6 to 10 (which are only four tapes, and sixty-two pages) contain not a word of any postwar encounter between Eichmann and Bormann. Nor are there any Bormann references on tapes 68 to 73, or in the discussion fragment on Sassen’s private tape—which, tellingly, none of the people who claimed to have visited Sassen’s house and looked at his original papers said they had seen.

We have no reason to suppose that Sassen tried to sell a fellow writer a pack of lies. He didn’t share stories of this kind in any properly documented interview but rather provided extremely reliable information.¹²⁴ Farago’s “Sassen interview” can safely be dismissed as artistic license, part of the dramatic structure of literature written for entertainment—and with it, all the reports that followed about visits to this fictive Sassen with his sixty-seven tapes and seventeen binders. The path that this legend took into the secondary literature does, however, reveal the possible repercussions of citations taken on trust, of which there are many examples in Eichmann research.

Farago was by no means the only person to place his longings in the missing parts of the Argentina Papers. Like anyone clinging to a shred of hope, he believed he would find his answers in the place to which he had been denied access. Similar expectations arose in a very different context: the anti-Zionist discourse in the Arab cultural world. In the Middle East, people had always assumed that Israel would suppress evidence, both at the Eichmann trial and in historical research in general. At first glance, this discourse looks a lot like the historical phantasms created in (neo-)Nazi circles. Its conspiracy theories said that Eichmann would eventually be revealed as a Jew, who had sacrificed millions of people in order to found the State of Israel. In the Arab world, doubts were also raised about the reasons for and the scale of the Holocaust. But the motives here were quite different. The Arabs weren’t trying to rehabilitate Hitler or the National Socialists; they were trying to undermine Israel’s Holocaust history and challenge the state’s legitimacy. This effort gave rise to a host of different arguments.¹²⁵ One was based on Eichmann’s tactic of seeking out German Zionists as his points of contact, to let them know that his sole aim was the emigration of the Jews to Palestine. In a culture that felt itself to be the real victim of the Second World War, this piece of information gave rise to a conspiracy theory that said that Zionists and National Socialists had had a contract from the outset, a secret alliance against the Arabs. The Nazis’ extermination of non-Zionist Jews had been a necessary part of it. “As a central figure in some of the most important deals of cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis,” Faris Yahya explains in Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, “Eichmann, while not the most senior surviving Nazi war criminal, was probably the Nazi with the most detailed knowledge of the Zionist movement’s relationship with the Nazi regime.” The Jews executed him too quickly and questioned him too little: “All that knowledge died with him.” Unless, of course, he had already committed it to tape in Argentina.¹²⁶

Anyone hoping that the undiscovered Eichmann texts will reveal him as the key witness to a Nazi-Zionist conspiracy will be bitterly disappointed. The Argentina Papers express a different kind of hope: there Eichmann announces his dream of the great National Socialist–Arab alliance. He had seen it foreshadowed in the presence of the grand mufti, Amin al-Husseini, in Berlin, and in the RSHA’s cooperation with his liaison officers. Then after National Socialist plans to wipe out the Jews failed, Eichmann’s hopes rested on the Arab world eventually recognizing his “lifetime achievement” and celebrating—or even completing—his extermination work. Ex oriente lux stood for the insane nightmare of a Final Solution aided by “Arab friends.” Other National Socialists had dreamed the same dream, even drawing up implementation plans for special gas-van commandos in Palestine.¹²⁷ Eichmann was still speculating about “the desert” as a “Final Solution idea” in Argentina.¹²⁸ He wanted to be an ally to the Arabs, not a witness to an anti-Arab plot, and certainly not an ally to Israel. The “missing” tapes and handwritten texts make this fact abundantly clear. Even in Israel, Eichmann kept telling his brother and his lawyer that he was happy for the Argentina Papers to be reedited, as long as his Ex oriente luxposition remained.¹²⁹ This caused Western intelligence services to fear the worst. And as if on cue, Eichmann also rose to meet this expectation: in a letter to his brother, the prisoner in Israel excitedly announced his recent conversion to Communism. Communism was the only doctrine against “the root of evil: racial hatred, racial murder, and”—he actually wrote this—“anti-Semitism.”¹³⁰ Anyone hoping to find his own fears confirmed in Eichmann’s words will not be disappointed.

Rediscoveries

No fundamental change in the research landscape occurred until 1979. Up until that time, only those who had access to the collection in the Central Office in Ludwigsburg were able to read the Sassen transcripts. Now another find emerged, when the Bundesarchiv (at the time, a single archive in Koblenz) bought Robert Servatius’s estate. The trial documents and correspondence, financial statements, collections of notes, and other materials left by Servatius were all deposited there for researchers to access, under the heading Alliierte Prozesse, or All. Proz., 6. These documents include the Israel copy of the Sassen transcript, which now became accessible to people outside legal circles—albeit in the version annotated by Eichmann in Israel.¹³¹ We cannot say today that this collection has been sufficiently researched, but it still made a considerable difference to the material available for historians.

At the same time, Willem Sassen decided to hand all his papers over to Adolf Eichmann’s family. We have two clues to Sassen’s possible motives: first, he and his new, young wife were expecting a baby,¹³² and such an event often sparks a desire to clean up the past. And in 1979 the Sassen house became a meeting place once again. Karl Wolff, the former chief of Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and one of the highest-ranking Nazis still alive, came to visit old “comrades” in South America, along with a reporter fromStern. Sassen was therefore expecting two “colleagues” and, as Gerd Heidemann remembers, was feeling nervous: he was still being accused of having betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis. A National Socialist in Peru even claimed that Sassen had never been in the SS and had deceived and used Eichmann from the beginning: he “betrayed Eichmann’s hiding place.”¹³³ Sassen never managed to shake off this suspicion, and it lost him his position as an important contact point for the South American Nazi network, which he had taken up when Fritsch moved to Austria. “When he was supposed to pass on important information, he sold it to two sides,” Friedrich Schwend claimed. “Letters were opened as they passed through his hands.” Sassen was “a traitor.”¹³⁴ Forced to flee Buenos Aires for a while, he was for many years disadvantaged by people’s lack of faith in him. In the meantime, Sassen really had done some work for Mossad: over a discussion lasting several hours, Zvi Aharoni had persuaded him that that would be a smart decision. This fact can’t have improved Sassen’s self-confidence.¹³⁵ No wonder Gerd Heidemann, who also thought Sassen a traitor, got the impression that he was making a special effort to be helpful to his guests.¹³⁶ Sassen probably wouldn’t have wanted the notorious papers in his house, if there was a chance the Stern reporter and the former SS Obergruppenführer could start asking about them.

Eichmann’s heirs made what turned out to be a less-than-shrewd decision, signing a contract with a publisher that had knowingly fostered a reputation for its right-wing bias. The publisher commissioned an editor, Rudolf Aschenauer, who had a similar reputation. In 1980 Druffel Verlag published Ich, Adolf Eichmann. It was a collage of Willem Sassen’s Argentina Papers, some of which had been compiled incorrectly, with a revisionist commentary. Even right-wing circles had their doubts about the book’s shoddy editing.Adolf von Thadden was one of the most active postwar right-wingers in West Germany: a friend to Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a member of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP), and a founder of the NPD—and even he criticized the volume, in the monthly magazine that was now called Nation und Europa. Against the intentions of the Aschenauer edition, Thadden read Eichmann’s recollections as clear proof of the extermination of the Jews, even if he did stick to the “lie of the six million.” In letters to the publisher, Thadden also stressed that this edition did not completely correspond to the real collection of texts.¹³⁷

Right-wing extremists like David Irving, however, still praise Aschenauer today for “pointing out that a number of Eichmann’s statements were incorrect.” These “errors” correspond surprisingly often to the historical denials with which Irving created a reputation for himself.¹³⁸ However, the biggest problem with the Druffel edition was not Aschenauer’s overpowering commentary but the decision to change the order of the texts, and to make the dialogic structure of the interview unrecognizable. The result is that, even with the best will in the world, it is impossible to tell who is really speaking. The editor obviously didn’t know and attributed everything—Sassen’s dictations, Langer’s remarks and lecture, Alvensleben’s answers, and so on—to Eichmann. “Unfortunately,” as Dr. Sudholt from Druffel Verlag helpfully told me, the publisher got rid of the manuscript in 2000 during an office move. Nor could Dr. Sudholt find Vera Eichmann’s sworn statement, published as part of the introduction. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that the Aschenauer edition can only be analyzed through a meticulous, sentence-by-sentence comparison. The Aschenauer manuscript, together with all the Argentina Papers and the tapes, has now reappeared. And since for several years now researchers have had access to all the papers in the original, they no longer have any reason to draw on such a problematic edition.¹³⁹

In October 1991 David Irving managed to get hold of the remaining papers in Argentina, which Vera Eichmann had deposited with her husband’s best friend. Irving claims that Hugo Byttebier, a compatriot of Sassen’s who had taken over the documents from the “industrialist friend,” gave Irving the “426 type-written pages” in a garden in Buenos Aires. Irving’s evaluation of the material, and the sample pages he released, reveal to anyone familiar with the Argentina Papers what these documents were. Irving had received typed versions of a few pieces originally handwritten by Eichmann, and a few pages of the Sassen transcript, all of which were also held in the Bundesarchiv.¹⁴⁰ There was also at least one chapter of Sassen’s draft for the planned book.¹⁴¹ All that had previously been seen of it was Eichmann’s disparaging remarks about it. He had told the Sassen circle he refused to authorize this compilation, in which his words had been heavily edited and sometimes misinterpreted. David Irving, who incidentally received only sixty-two tape transcripts, announced he was going to publish all the papers he had been given on his website. The “Chapter IV” already released gives a good impression of Sassen’s idea of the project, which even Eichmann was justified in arguing against.¹⁴² Eichmann’s statements were moderated and embedded into Sassen’s conspiracy theory. These rediscovered papers would be especially useful for an exploration of Willem Sassen’s thought and work.

In 1992 ABC Verlag in Switzerland bought the Sassen material from the Eichmann family, together with a few tapes, the microfilm negatives, and the Aschenauer manuscript. They prepared an overview, and new prints of some of the transcript pages from the film, but failed to agree on how to use the material. What happened over the years that followed was essentially determined by changing economic circumstances. The publishing house changed hands, and word slowly got around that after more than forty years, the original tapes had been rediscovered. Guido Knopp was the first to use well-judged snippets of them, in his 1998 documentary Hitler’s Henchmen II: Adolf Eichmann, the Exterminator. This film allowed an audience of millions, including astonished modern historians, to hear for themselves parts of Eichmann’s “little address to the group” and the story of his grotesque “credo” ritual during mass shootings. Shortly afterward, cultural broadcasters spread the news that an editor from the publishing house (which in future does not want to be named) had given the Sassen material to the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, to be made available to researchers. Irmtrud Wojak was the first to pluck up the courage to gain an initial impression of the tape collection, and her 2001 bookEichmanns Memoiren conveys an idea of the task posed for researchers by the audio material alone. It has admittedly taken some time for the true significance of the Swiss owner’s generous and farsighted decision to be recognized, which is due in part to a critical error made in cataloging the documents. The introductory text for the collection reads: “The documents in the ‘Adolf Eichmann Estate’ collection are Adolf Eichmann’s drafts for his autobiography, which offer no fundamentally new information beyond what is already known. Copies of the texts are already held in the collection Allied Trials (All. Proz.) 6: Eichmann Trial, in the Bundesarchiv, and have been available to researchers for many years.” The last statement, at the very least, is simply incorrect. More than a third of the papers taken into the Eichmann Estate collection had never been available to researchers before. By comparison, the fact that the Argentina Papers can be viewed as an Eichmann “autobiography” only to a limited extent is a harmless misunderstanding. A shortage of time and manpower has made the job of Bundesarchiv staff difficult for many years, which was doubtless also to blame for the false evaluation. The consequences, however, were far-reaching, and researchers have continued to rely on the documents in the Servatius Estate, even in recent years—a collection containing only 60 percent of the full Argentina Papers. The highly problematic Druffel edition has also been quoted frequently, resulting in the misunderstandings of Eichmann’s life and thought in Argentina that such a fragmentary and inexpertly edited source is bound to yield.¹⁴³

My mistrust of the label “no new information” was aroused by the discovery of the index of names and paragraphs in the Budesarchiv Ludwigsburg. It referenced a page I had searched for in vain in the Servatius Estate: the infamous third page of tape 41, which mentions Eichmann’s deputy, Rolf Günther. This clue made me take another look at the Ludwigsburg copies of the Sassen transcripts, which until then I had thought were identical to the copies from Israel. But even at first glance, it is obvious that the Ludwigsburg paper copy¹⁴⁴ is fundamentally different from the Israel version. Having realized that several copies from different sources existed in 1961, I saw that it was worth looking at a further copy—even if it had the same label—to find out if there was a third version. At this point, I couldn’t even have hoped to discover that the Bundesarchiv Koblenz’s Eichmann collection was, for the most part, the long-vanished original transcripts and handwritten texts.

The generous Swiss publisher’s donation to the Bundesarchiv Koblenz contains the tapes—the conclusive proof of the transcripts’ authenticity—and all the original transcripts, handwritten texts, and films that Willem Sassen still possessed in 1979. Sassen was anything but meticulous, and he was certainly no archivist. Even this original Argentina version is still not quite complete. The transcript of tape 29 is missing (the tape that Eichmann designated as “for your information only”), as are the page on Rolf Günther and the transcripts of tapes 70 and 71, if these tapes ever in fact existed. But the original material does contain the “missing” transcripts between tapes 5 and 11, namely 6, 8, 9, and 10.¹⁴⁵ There are also two further pages for tape 67, tapes 68–69, 72– 73, and another, unnumbered, with the descriptive label: “On a private tape by W.S. filled with music and Flemish drama, there is a section of conversation between E. and W.S.”¹⁴⁶ The handwritten texts and typed copies of handwritten texts are incomplete and are divided confusingly, as the structure of the complete draft has been ignored. There is also a typed copy of some notes made by Sassen during one of the discussions.¹⁴⁷ The film, which ABC Verlag had sight of in 1992, has yet to be compared with the prints. But the handwritten text and typed copies comprise more than two hundred pages, although a large number of the handwritten pages from the Israeli “File 17” are missing. In contrast to the handwritten papers in the Eichmann Estate in Koblenz, the papers in the Ludwigsburg binder labeled “Miscellaneous” are good, clean copies of pages that allow the “File 17” texts to be reordered into the large manuscript “Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen!” (The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!), to which they originally belonged.

To simplify this confusing picture: anyone wishing to study the Argentina Papers today first has to reassemble Eichmann’s texts and the Sassen interviews from three separate archive collections, sometimes page by page. That is what I did for this book (and my other work), and I can therefore report that the effort is worthwhile. But it’s quite enough for one person to squander a lifetime on such a puzzle, and as such I am happy to provide a page concordance to people undertaking further research in the Bundesarchiv, with references to where each paper can be found. The same goes for an overview of the tape contents. Not all the tapes are the originals from Argentina, and the contents don’t span the full twenty-nine hours of playing time: some parts are repeated several times. A few of the tapes have been transferred to different tape speeds, evidently to make the speech more comprehensible. But even where the recordings are original, the same cannot be said of the tapes. At least one of the copies has been made only in recent years, although the tape looks old. As is often the case with old tapes that have been recorded over several times, it is possible to hear remnants of what the tape previously contained: a children’s radio play with multifrequency push-button tones and polyphonic sounds, suggesting 1990s technology. But there are also tapes recorded in 1957 on which you can still hear (or guess at) previous Sassen discussions. Analyzing these in a recording studio might offer up a few more surprises.

Excursus: The BND files; or, Eichmann’s Fourth Career

The Mossad agents were the first people to publish an account of the events surrounding Eichmann’s abduction. Zvi Aharoni, Peter Z. Malkin, and Isser Harel all wrote detailed books, allowing us an insight into the Mossad operation. Asher Ben Natan’s memoirs and the estate of David Ben-Gurion, meanwhile, help us to better understand the decision-making process that led to the abduction and trial. Disagreements and dislikes also developed among the people involved, so the reports provide a multifaceted and occasionally inconsistent picture. And a trend of increasing transparency is obvious: when Isser Harel, the former head of Mossad, updated his book The House on Garibaldi Street for the 1997 edition, he decided to drop most of the aliases he had used in the early years and replace them with people’s real names.¹⁴⁸ Many of the Israeli team also gave interviews, explained their motives and thoughts, and answered questions. Not all the documents connected to the abduction and trial are accessible to researchers, but there has been a substantial step in the right direction.

When the U.S. National Archives started releasing intelligence service files on National Socialists in 1998, expectations among researchers ran high. Although many of the pages that emerged were banal, and others were censored to an absurd extent, the CIA “Name File Adolf Eichmann” yielded a considerable amount of information. Without these files, it would have been impossible to reconstruct some of the events around the Sassen transcripts. The people who compile intelligence service files are not historians; nor are they concerned with assembling archives for future research. They are carrying out their mission to protect the interests and security of a country. It is thus all the more important to realize that at some point the damage caused by revealing your predecessors’disinformation strategies, errors, and shortcomings cannot be greater than the damage caused by wild speculations and the suspicion that you have something to hide.

Intelligence service documents always contain reports from other countries and information from “friendly” intelligence services. In spite of great care taken in this regard, the CIA files that have been declassified still contain some intelligence that obviously comes from the West German BND. No international outcry was heard about the release of the files (at least, none that reached the ears of the public). But anyone with an interest in the matter was reminded that the BND had compiled its own Eichmann file, as had the German Foreign Office and the BfV. And access to the BND files is still restricted. Only a few sections of files, regarding incidents with a marginal bearing on the Eichmann case, have been handed over to the Bundesarchiv (in November 2010).¹⁴⁹

It is only thanks to the journalist Gaby Weber that a wholesale extension of the declassification deadline has been prevented. In 2010 she managed to have a block on the files’ release declared unacceptable by the Federal Administrative Court. Weber was the first to successfully petition for a limited view of the files, and she was able to study at least part of the collection, though in places the pages were heavily censored. Unfortunately, this incident has not led to a general release of these selected files. In other words: anyone wishing to get a glimpse of them can do so only by bringing their own lawsuit. The German tabloid Bild made one of the documents available to the general public in January 2011, after one of the Springer Verlag reporters, Hans-Wilhelm Saure, petitioned for access to the files.¹⁵⁰ In February 2013 the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the case for further files to be released. The plaintiff still has the option to take the case before the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice. Other journalists have announced their intention to follow Mr. Saure’s example and bring their own lawsuits for complete declassification of the Eichmann files. It looks as though the German courts will be dealing with the “Eichmann case” for a long time yet.

This bizarre state of affairs ultimately makes research and public-interest disclosure dependent on having the money for court costs and lawyers. It raises the question of what could be so explosive about these BND files that releasing them after more than fifty years is still not a political option. The most substantial explanation lies in the eleven-page justification of the declassification ban, issued to Gaby Weber by the Federal Chancellery on September 10, 2009, before her challenge was successful. She has generously made it available to the public on her website. The attempt to withhold all files on the Eichmann case, which was declared invalid by the Federal Administrative Court, deserves closer consideration. It gives us an insight into the fears that are still associated with the idea of transparency—and the BND’s refusal reveals more than the files alone ever could. Anyone who denies something is always talking about themselves, in the first instance. And the more we know about Adolf Eichmann as the subject of research, and the extent of the documents available today, the clearer this effect becomes.

The official statement from the Federal Chancellery, given on September 10, 2009, says that the relevant collection of files comprises around 3,400 pages in five storage units. This is the result of a broad search, it says, including files “with only isolated references to Eichmann in Argentina”—though they were contained in the same five storage units, so another staff member must also have thought they were connected.¹⁵¹ The reason for not releasing the BND files tagged with the search term Eichmannessentially boiled down to three points that had to take priority over the “rather abstract … interest in finding the truth” (p. 9). They were: the common good, the protection of informants, and the general right to privacy of affected third parties.

The term common good suggests that releasing these files would have a negative impact on the country’s security interests. The collection also contains copies of documents given to the BND by foreign agencies, which apparently are not theirs to release. This argument is immediately illuminating: intelligence services that rely on international cooperation also rely on all parties to treat anything that they are given responsibly. Of course, foreign agencies are also aware that a service in a constitutional state is subject to that state’s law, and that declassification deadlines will also apply to foreign material. But it is entirely inconsistent to uphold one’s government’s discretion regarding “foreign agencies,” yet then point a finger at the State of Israel, saying that “not all the official [!] papers relating to the Eichmann trial have been made public.” Be that as it may, someone requesting access to BND files from the BND wants just that and nothing more: BND files. Which made it all the more surprising that the files handed over to the Federal Administrative Court contained material from Israel.¹⁵²

The argument goes a crucial step further: “Evaluation documents produced by the BND [could be] wrongly seen as attempts to discredit specific persons from foreign public agencies. In the case at hand [the files relating to Eichmann] and in general, this could substantially compromise or even endanger friendly relations with foreign public offices” (p. 3). This hint raises fears about what the BND appraisals might contain, if they could potentially threaten current international relations. It is, after all, a perfectly normal procedure to evaluate all information from third parties, whether they are intelligence documents or historical sources. But the thought that appraisals by 1950s BND staff—Federal Republic officials—of “persons from foreign public agencies” (Israel, for example) might still be seen as derogatory is frightening.

The second point relates to the protection of informants: the duty not to endanger, through indiscretion, a person who has given information in the course of an intelligence service operation. The protection of informants is connected to the security interest: if word were to get around that an intelligence service wasn’t protecting the providers of its intelligence, it would soon have none left. In this light, the fact that the BND’s statement provides details about a specific informant is quite surprising. This helpful person, we learn, is “comparatively easy” to discover, as he had exclusive “access to the relevant information.” “The content and scope of the information … allow conclusions to be drawn about the source of the information, as well as the identity of the informant” (p. 5). He has also “asked for … special source protection.” The informant in question was still alive in 2009 and “still active in his [!] professional field.” The “revelation of his identity would threaten the private and professional spheres not only of the informant” but also of “several of his current business associates.” Speculations about his “cooperation with the BND … would probably mean economic disadvantages for his business as well as disadvantages in terms of his reputation” (p. 5). The informant was not only “still active in professional life” but was “mentioned by name and searchable on the Internet” (p. 9). He had also been “reactivated … for another BND operation” in the early 1980s, and any public association with this operation would also pose a threat (p. 5). With all due respect for the willingness of the people making this statement to explain their reasoning in detail, the question must be asked: why would intelligence service personnel give such a detailed description of someone who could be damaged by speculations about his pivotal role in the Eichmann case? Someone who had been of service in that case might not be given a medal in every part of the world (only in most): there are still some cultural spheres that wouldn’t recognize that as an honorable achievement.¹⁵³ But the danger of Nazi sympathizers attacking the person in question is surely an excellent reason for not “protecting” him through this explanation. The BND gives us a person who is at least in his late sixties and has been “particularly present” as a businessman in these parts of the world for the last fifty years. In half a day, a resourceful researcher¹⁵⁴ could narrow down the list of possible informants (using the Internet, as helpfully recommended) to such a dangerously small circle of people that a dozen men are now the subject of these threatening speculations. “Protection of informants” at the cost of endangering people unconnected to the case seems untrustworthy to me and anything but reassuring to present and potential BND informants.

The privacy rights of third parties, according to the statement, concerns around fifty people named in the files, since a large number of files are involved, although they have only a “marginal” relation to the subject (p. 9). It would be necessary to censor these names, but this would mean a “disproportionate administrative effort,” weighed against the likely gain for research. Of course, any academic would dispute the claim that one or more BND employees could be in a position to judge what might or might not serve research in this field. The usefulness of even a single index card depends so fundamentally on an academic’s education and close reading skills that anyone speculating about it from the outside can only ever be wide of the mark. All academics necessarily overestimate the importance of their own area of research, to give them the stamina for work that takes years to complete—but the significance of Adolf Eichmann, for scholarship and the wider world, cannot be doubted in the slightest. Whether you are arguing against a declassification ban or not, Eichmann is much more than a popular subject for backroom scholars, and Germany’s engagement with it is valued all over the world in anything but an “abstract” way (p. 8). It is one of the criteria by which the Federal Republic is judged internationally. Respect for Germany is rightly coupled to our willingness to learn from the past. If anything is going to damage the “common good,” it is an opinion expressed on Chancellery letterhead that the administrative effort of opening the BND files on Eichmann “for the purposes of finding the truth” (p. 8) is “disproportionate” (p. 11).

In addition to these three points, the statement warns against the publication of research findings from the files in question. “The documents,” it says, “contain political (and diplomatic) implications for other countries in addition to the Federal Republic of Germany, which, freed from the historical content of the archive documents, have current significance, and could be exploited in the context of foreign policy aims and interests (Middle East policy)” (p. 8). The statement vindicates everyone who has long claimed that studying documents from contemporary history is always about more than reading historical tea leaves. The people who live and breathe this research are convinced that it has an impact in the here and now, and they do it for that reason. The fact that misinterpretations or overinterpretations can crop up in academic writing, as they can in any form of publication, is as clear to any enlightened person as the fact that there are people who can and will use any information for their own ends. Intelligence service dossiers serve this purpose exclusively: the exploitation of knowledge in order to set political goals, particularly in an international context. A glance at the BND files relating to Eichmann is also a glance at the work of the intelligence service and the position of German society in the 1950s and 1960s in relation to the world—but this is not an unfortunate disadvantage of source research, but its declared intention. The exploitation of documents in some kind of political context is nothing new, after all. The history of the twentieth century has, however, also shown that propagandists can misuse any information at all, yet the attempt to keep material from them would resemble total censorship.

The BND’s effort to explain its handling of the Eichmann files has made the release of this statement a public event with an international impact. You only have to speak to scholars from other countries to see how disconcertingly dishonest it appears to the outside world. The withholding of files is a normal process, for which constitutional states have clear rules, but in Germany we are also committed to the principle of transparency. This is why, before a declassification deadline has been reached, there are rules for the partial release of files, with words blacked out where necessary. And when, despite these regulations, people still have to litigate for the right to see files, it damages a country’s image, making any citizen who also happens to be an academic feel uncomfortable in the international research community. In one respect in particular, this behavior has now caused irreparable damage. It has created the impression that the government has a pronounced interest in witholding information on Eichmann. Because the release of the files has been contested, people now suspect that any future release will never really include all the documents in the BND’s possession. One reason for creating laws around the handling of classified documents was to guard against such conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to be a fan of conspiracy theories to suspect that the collection of files now presented to litigants is incomplete. You don’t even need to see the files yourself to spot it: for anyone who has studied Eichmann before Jerusalem, a single piece of information is sufficient. The files contain fewer than thirty pages covering the period before Eichmann’s arrest in May 1960, and four of them relate to Willem Sassen’s travels and his passport applications. They were probably added to the Eichmann files only after the Sassen interviews had come to light. Neither Simon Wiesenthal’s information nor the arrest warrants from Austria and Germany are there. There are no notes on the information exchanged with the CIA in 1958, or on Fritz Bauer’s large-scale diversionary strategy from summer 1959, to name just a few key points. Apart from the index card with Eichmann’s cover name and contact address from 1952, nothing suggests even those events and pieces of information with which we are now very familiar from other sources. If we compare the available pages with the five documents that the BfV released several years ago, it becomes clear how glaring this gap is, even against a backdrop of general reticence. A single index card may reveal a great deal to someone who has done their homework and is able to interpret it, but the real problem cannot be overlooked: whatever the reason for the current slender size of the Eichmann file, it was certainly not always the case. We have no reason to suppose that the way the BND carried out its duties was as inadequate and unsystematic as these papers suggest. Unfortunately, this observation holds true for more files than those up to May 1960.

Where does the fear of transparency come from in the Eichmann case? If we don’t want to assume that that is a general principle when it comes to the release of intelligence service files, we should perhaps consider further. What differentiates the Eichmann case from other Nazi legacies is everything that became connected with his name. Even before his abduction in 1960 people were gripped by a fear of what he might say. And the coordinator of the National Socialists’ persecution of the Jews had touched so many areas of political and economic life that the abduction unsettled not only Nazi fugitives but also economic and industrial representatives, and people working in justice, medicine, government, and the diplomatic services. From the outset, Eichmann’s name had an impact in places that Adolf Eichmann himself had never been. This was part of the mechanism of power that governed the National Socialist system to perfection. In the network of the criminal state from which so many had profited, a lot of people must have felt they had been accomplices, even if the period after 1945 had not been a time of embarrassing questions for them. The reappearance of a name that had become a symbol disrupted their collective silence. And after Ben-Gurion announced the Eichmann trial, a tremendous unrest spread to all the corners of the world where people knew this name. In 1960 no one knew that Eichmann would take the old loyalty among comrades seriously, or that he would refuse to betray them despite his garrulous nature.¹⁵⁵ In summer 1960, as he had in the Third Reich, Eichmann was once again making an impact in places he had never been. Anyone observing the global reactions to Eichmann’s capture, as an intelligence service was bound to do, would also have been confronted with reactions even from regions Eichmann had had nothing to do with. For years, people had suspected that he was in Syria or Egypt, so investigations also had to consider the largely unexamined network of Nazis in the Middle East. This network, as we know from individual cases, quickly built important economic relationships, some of which are still revelant today. They are, of course, also relevant to the Israel-Palestine conflict (“Middle East policy”). Individuals may have thought they saw Eichmann in the Middle East, or as Erich Schmidt-Eenboom suggested, someone there may have been cavalier enough to give himself the alias “Eichmann”¹⁵⁶—in any case, these rumors provide a key to a piece of very current postwar history. No thorough investigation by the intelligence service at the start of the 1960s could have been carried out without hearing stories of this sort. Whether in Argentina, Germany, Austria, Spain, or the Middle East, the general unrest was a reaction less to Eichmann than to the memories of people’s own involvement in the Third Reich, which were not so easily done away with. Just as a book that looks at Eichmann before 1945 is necessarily also a book about the Nazi period, the intelligence service files cannot avoid painting a picture of the postwar period, in the attempt to find Eichmann after 1945. The publication of the Eichmann files would unveil this picture. It might well also provide some uncomfortable insights.

But it would be a mistake to hold the actions of one institution and its inadequate handling of fifty-year-old files against this institution alone. The BND wasn’t a small-scale, secret unit, pursuing dubious aims behind the backs of the new Federal Republic and its representatives. If our engagement with National Socialist crimes has taught us anything, it is that small groups are able to act only when society and its representatives instruct and allow them to. One-sided accusations of guilt, as when people style the organization as a “state within a state,” cloud our judgment as much as the assumption of broad responsibility. The intelligence service was unable to operate outside Germany’s political interests in the 1950s, and its staff cannot be blamed today if the Federal Chancellery wants to block access to historical files or delay declassification by setting up commissions with working plans that stretch over years—especially when there has been no public outcry to speak of.

There is something grotesque about the attempt to keep files secret by hinting at their explosive content: we are once more allowing a lack of resolve, and the desire to avoid necessary decisions, to become inescapably linked with the name Adolf Eichmann. Half a century after his execution, the danger is very real that his name could become a symbol once more, this time for the temptation to look the other way, when we should be looking straight at this issue. This is the only way to avoid future mistakes. And it really has nothing to do with what might be contained in the historical files, or what a federal German institution neglected to do or prevented from happening in the 1950s. In the German Bundestag’s 2011 debate on the BND Eichmann files, Jerzy Montag urged a radical rethink of how we handle these unpleasant legacies: “We have to change direction.… If we discover something through the executive supplying us with new material three or four times, rather than hearing it from investigative journalists, or by chance, then something will have changed.”¹⁵⁷

I had already finished writing this book when, unexpectedly, a journalist allowed me to get a look at the BND files. As much as it pleases an author not to have to completely rewrite her book, as a German academic I must confess that this experience left behind a lasting unease. I would have preferred to learn more than would fit into a few pages of additional comments. Among the 2,425 pages of File 121 099 in the BND archive, there is one that provides grounds for hope. It contains a single instruction, in capital letters: “Please collect everything on Eichmann carefully—we still need it.”¹⁵⁸

Not the Last Word

Anyone wishing to study the thinking of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina now has more material at their disposal than ever before: most of the original transcripts; several different copies of them; a number of handwritten texts and typed copies; and Eichmann’s notes and commentaries on the most important publications of the day. We also have an advantage over the people who witnessed the trial, in the form of a body of research on contemporary history, and an excellent edition of the interrogation and trial transcripts.

But the task is still huge: Eichmann has always managed to browbeat and transfix people. Willem Sassen, even after the Eichmann trial and his failure with Life, continued to tell people he was going to write about Eichmann. Even when he decided to hand over the papers and the tapes to the Eichmann family in 1979, he was eager to retain the right to quote the Argentina Papers in an essay of his own. He never revealed details about the Sassen circle, keeping the knowledge to himself even after most of the people involved, like Ludolf von Alvensleben, were dead. But his encounter with Eichmann would not let him be. In his last interview, which shows him to be a broken alcoholic, barely able to utter a coherent sentence, his thoughts still circle around the Eichmann book that he would never write.¹⁵⁹ In the end, he seems to have suffered a fate similar to a character he created for the novel Die Jünger und die Dirnen, just when he was starting his discussions with Eichmann.¹⁶⁰

When he came home, he did not enjoy his dinner. He went into his study, where the walls were lined to the ceiling with books, took a bottle and a glass out of the small mobile bar, and settled back in the armchair. He took up a newspaper, then a book, and finally a specialist journal with a glowing review of his latest publication, but he could not concentrate his mind for a single moment. He drank quickly and without much enjoyment; intoxication came just as quickly, and brought no comfort. It started up again—this hammering in his temples, the unease in his heart—and again he heard the penetrating voice of Erwin Holz, in snatches from the many conversations he had conducted with him in recent days. For Erwin Holz, these were the scalpel with which he had ruthlessly gone to work on himself and his generation. The doctor had tried to defend himself against Holz’s arguments and assertions, which were at times so primitive—to dismantle them with analysis or sarcasm. And afterward, he had always been dissatisfied with his destructive effort. It had been an exciting adventure for his calm, methodical mind, letting Holz light his way into the labyrinth of the modern world’s spiritual privations, and the catacombs of the self-sacrificing idealists. It had been an exciting adventure, but it had also become a burden. For now Holz’s voice was everywhere, round about him, inside him, and it even spoke in places where Dr. Dr. Thomas Bauer believed he himself had the last word. He pulled up his outstretched legs, folded his arms across his knees, and drew in his head as if to protect himself. He closed his eyes and let the voice attack him.

Sassen really did lose his own voice. The encounter with a mass murderer and his thinking paralyzed forever his most impressive talent—his skill with language, his writing. Sassen died in 2001, without ever being published again.¹⁶¹

When Eichmann found himself in Jerusalem in 1960, it was his Argentine past as well as his crimes that caught up with him. He couldn’t have been surprised—unlike the people around him, including his lawyer. He had told Sassen and Fritsch several times to publish the material as soon as he was dead or had been taken prisoner. And once again Eichmann had a distinct advantage over everyone else: he knew exactly what he had left behind in Argentina. He was well prepared to give his supposedly spontaneous reaction. Denying the authenticity of the papers was as risky as it was effective. In so doing, he not only managed to protect everyone involved in the Argentine interlude, and to make the Sassen circle largely invisible; he also ensured that the worth of the invaluableArgentina Papers was questioned for decades afterward. What he hoped to gain by playing this risky hand was the ability to determine his own place in history once more, in this final battle of the ideological war. But this strategy also caught him in the snare of a National Socialist error: his place in history was never a matter of his free choice, let alone a diktat to posterity. Now the age of his ability to manipulate and distract people with his lies is over. Now it is our job to create transparency and put Eichmann where he belongs, rather than be struck dumb by his torrent of words. Nearly thirteen hundred pages of the Argentina Papers, and over twenty-five hours of tape, have survived many years and numerous games of hide-and-seek. The curse of a man who was desperate to write and to explain himself is that this urge has put others in a position to read his every word, more thoroughly than he could ever have imagined.