3

One Good Turn

You must understand that I was reluctant to release a subject expert and specialist like Eichmann from Head Office, and today he seems irreplaceable to me.

—Franz Alfred Six, on his employee, 1938¹

Although Eichmann could have known nothing of the letter sent to his former friend Wilhelm Höttl, he was not oblivious to the Dürer circle’s political ambitions. Rudel was openly making plans to move back to Germany in order to enter politics there, and Sassen had caused such a stir with his open letter to President Eisenhower that nobody who moved in the exiles’ circles could fail to notice the new focus on Germany. Fritsch was celebrating the success of Der Weg and working with German papers on propaganda to promote an unreconstructed Nazi ideology. They all followed the 1953 Bundestag elections closely: after all, they would shape the future. Germany’s “economic miracle” boom must also have been a draw, as Argentina slipped further and further into crisis.

We still don’t know when Eichmann first met Fritsch and Sassen, as none of the three gave much reliable information on the matter, for obvious reasons. An independent witness, a Polish man who was in the German Wehrmacht and occasionally worked for the better-off Germans in Argentina, reported that Sassen had met Eichmann in Tucumán, though the pair began to see each other regularly only once Eichmann returned to Buenos Aires in 1953.² Eichmann claimed he met Fritsch and Sassen at a large society event in honor of Otto Skorzeny but became friends with Sassen only after Fritsch approached Eichmann as a publisher, asking him to collaborate on a book.³ Neither of these scenarios is unlikely: Sassen knew Horst Carlos Fuldner and CAPRI and was also a frequent guest at social events. People were interested in him as a National Socialist, and he cultivated relationships with various groups and individuals, all the way up to President Perón. Otto Skorzeny’s version, in which he introduced Sassen to Eichmann in 1954, is nonsense: by that point all those involved had known one another for some time. Skorzeny was clearly trying to distract the authorities from his own deep involvement in the German-Argentine community.⁴ He probably arrived in Argentina in 1949, long before Eichmann, then spent a few years shuttling between Buenos Aires and Madrid. He bragged about his daring coup in which he had snatched Mussolini from his prison after the Allies invaded Italy. He had been a sabotage specialist under Hitler and enjoyed great respect in far-right circles into his old age. He was thus on familiar terms with all the intelligence services, from the CIC to Mossad. He had met Eichmann at a propaganda event in Berlin and would have been in a position to introduce him to Sassen and Fritsch—but Fritsch and Eichmann already knew each other by June 1952. It’s possible that they met through “the organization” that helped reunite the Eichmann family. But however it happened, anyone who knew Fritsch inevitably knew Willem Sassen as well.

The former war correspondent from the Dutch Voluntary SS must have had a particular appeal for Eichmann: he wrote books, which was something Eichmann was keen to do himself. Sassen also published sensational articles under his pseudonym Willem Sluyse (who everyone knew was really Sassen) and bragged about his success as a journalist in international newspapers. But most important, he wrote the biographies of Rudel and Adolf Galland. The years 1953–54 were particularly busy for Sassen. He was working up Rudel’s reports on Germany, which had been captured on “magnetophone”⁵ right after his return, as well as writing his own novel. Both books appeared in 1954, with the novel being published by the middle of the year.

While Rudel’s book Zwischen Deutschland und Argentinien (Between Germany and Argentina) was full of exciting details about his (partly illegal) travels through Germany and his political work there, Sassen’s novel used metaphor to depict the mentality of the postwar Nazis. It was brought out under his pseudonym, which had been made famous by his open letter. Die Jünger und die Dirnen (The Disciples and the Prostitutes) is a composition made up of seven ideal types. When the final victory fails, each of these characters must decide what and who they really are: disciples of the National Socialist idea, or prostitutes for the enemy, the occupying forces whose goal is to torture, humiliate, convert, or expel Hitler’s poor idealistic devotees. The Allies’ most important aim is “re-education,” by which they hope to extinguish the National Socialist spirit that Sassen felt so strongly about.

The novel’s elements were bound together into a hymn to perseverance and resistance, which far surpassed the usual Nazi literature in its pathetic eloquence. Sassen had mastered the music of the German language as a virtuoso masters his instrument. The range of voices he had at his command makes it all the more tragic that he chose to waste his talent on this intolerable garbage. It was not literature at all but an orgy of pornographic violence, voyeurism, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, defamation of all Nazi “opponents,” and sentimental, theatrical fascist kitsch. Still, we must thank Sassen for affording us a direct insight into the minds of his generation. These men had had their careers cut short and were left stranded in mental or literal exile, together with their broken ideology. Sassen plundered his own biography⁶ and those of his associates for the novel (which was naturally published by Dürer), so it also provides valuable information about his circle. Eichmann recognized himself in a character in the second chapter, and it is hard to believe that the resemblance was mere coincidence.

In chapter 2, Erwin Holz, a former SD Standartenführer and concentration camp commandant, explains his thoughts and actions to the psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Bauer. The doctor has been tasked with ascertaining whether his patient is of sound mind, after he has been “tortured to within an inch of his life” in an American prisoner of war camp. The doctor’s verdict will determine whether Holz remains in the hospital or is condemned to death. He is at first repelled, then disconcerted by the final-solutionist and eventually falls under his spell. In the end, having been handed the death penalty at Landsberg in West Germany, Holz takes his own life. In this chapter, the doctor’s sober voice contrasts with that of the main character, Erwin Holz, to whom Sassen gives a unique speech justifying his actions. His voice is unsettling, “penetrating” like a “scalpel,” and it is everywhere: once you have heard it, you can never escape its “arguments and assertions, which were at times so primitive” but which remain the final word.

Fritsch was so keen on this chapter that he published it as a preview of the book in Der Weg.⁷ Anyone who has heard recordings of Adolf Eichmann’s voice and observed the way he argues a point will find similarities between him and this character, right down to individual phrases.⁸ The character’s physical appearance is more like that of the concentration camp “doctor” Josef Mengele, another of Sassen’s friends, but Mengele’s tirades of self-justification were of an altogether different sort, as his diaries reveal.⁹ In the speeches Sassen puts into Holz’s mouth, Eichmann’s voice literally forces itself upon the reader: “We were simply the bookkeepers of death,” “I have no use for regret,” “We wanted to expel the Jews from our midst, and we failed.”¹⁰ It is highly implausible that Sassen wrote this book before meeting Eichmann.¹¹ But if he did, then Erwin Holz is a frighteningly accurate presentiment of the man with whom Sassen was to spend the most intense period of his working life, and whose thought he already understood so well in 1954 that he was able to imitate him.

Another episode, however, clearly shows that a long-standing, close personal relationship existed among Fritsch, Sassen, and Eichmann in mid-1954. Reading the August issue of Der Weg, Adolf Eichmann would have learned that he and his wife had been dead since May 1945. The untimely death notice appeared in a long reader’s letter from a “well-known American,” with the entirely unknown name Warwick Hester, entitled “On the Streets of Truth.” This long article is devoted to dismantling all the evidence for the systematic extermination of the Jews, and it is the direct sequel to the successful article by Heimann on “The Lie of the Six Million” from July. The author discredits every possible witness as a liar or a dupe, and on the third page, after “refuting” the existence of gas vans, he mentions almost incidentally that Adolf Eichmann is dead:

A junior SS officer claimed he was an acquaintance of a more senior officer named Eichmann, under whose command he had been for a time. Shortly before the end of the war, Eichmann, an expert on Jewish affairs, told him in confidence that around two million Jews had been killed by special commandos. When the Germans capitulated, Eichmann and his wife took poison. This information could not be verified, but I could see no motive for this man giving a false statement.¹²

This is the first and only instance of the story of an Eichmann family suicide. The idea that Adolf Eichmann might have taken his own life never seemed particularly likely, although Wilhelm Höttl apparently attempted to spread it at the start of 1947, with some success where the British Nazi hunters were concerned.¹³ Dieter Wisliceny thought it inconceivable.¹⁴ The “witness” to this exit à la Goebbels was blatantly invented, along with many of the article’s other “facts.” The author was clearly aiming to give Eichmann and his family some peace while they were still alive, by stopping the hunt for him. This method was not without its risks, as Eichmann’s name had never before appeared in Der Weg. The self-evident way the author mentioned his “area of expertise” suddenly made it obvious that his name had been deliberately missing from the magazine’s recent reports on the matter, although it would have had a natural place there. Holger Meding, who made a systematic analysis of Der Weg and spoke to the former Weg employee Dieter Vollmer, concluded that “Der Weg had largely avoided mentioning Eichmann up to this point, in order not to give any indirect clues to his whereabouts.”¹⁵ Nobody seems to have realized that this suicide announcement would be a clue for people like Wiesenthal or Höttl, who knew it to be a lie, having seen Eichmann or his wife at a later date. The people who worked for Dürer, and the magazine’s Argentine readership who knew Ricardo Klement’s true identity, must have had a good laugh about this coup over a glass of wine with the dead man in the ABC Café. But the text held much more—it revealed a great deal about the link between its author and Eichmann.

The article in Der Weg was an attempt to discredit all the witness statements relating to the extermination of the Jews. The same piece contained a character assassination of “Dr. Höttl.” He offered the CIC his services, sold himself to the Jews, spied for the Soviet Union at the same time, extorted “large sums of money,” lied systematically, and was now playing all these parties off against one another with his “intelligence service stretching over West Germany, Austria, and the South East.” His knowledge of the “lie of the six million” had made him untouchable.¹⁶ Astonishingly, the author had calculated that a mass extermination would have been impossible, due to the demographic of “the Jews,” and for good measure, he quoted a confidential conversation with a “North American of Jewish descent whom I greatly respect” and who was evidently also a psychologist. According to Warwick Hester, this man had confessed openly that the figure of six million was a scam: “We thought that six million wasn’t too many to seem improbable, but enough to give people the shudders for a century to come. Hitler gave us this opportunity, and we are just making use of it, with great success, as you can see.”¹⁷ And because Warwick Hester had nothing but good intentions toward the Jews, he finished by warning them not to take these games too far. It was only a matter of time before the “inner rebellion against the lies” became an outer rebellion, as soon as the lies were exposed. “I fear,” he concluded, “they may take retrospective revenge on the people who originated the lies, which will then, in a turn of events both tragic and cynical, [!] become truth.” In other words: if millions of Jews are murdered once again, they will only have themselves to blame. Whoever Warwick Hester was in reality, he was a master cynic himself.

Leaving aside the news of Eichmann’s death, “On the Streets of Truth” was also a textbook example of the falsification of history known as revisionism. Proponents of Nazi revisionism work with the intention of debunking the whole of written history since 1945 as propaganda and thoroughly revising it. But the article is more than that: it became the principal source text for Holocaust revisionists, a fact that has long been overlooked. In the space of a few months, Hester’s report, and the article written by “Guido Heimann,” who claimed to be from Salzburg, were woven together and spread right across Germany. In his pamphlet Volk ohne Führung (People Without Leadership, which also appeared under a pseudonym), the far-right author Herbert Grabert mentioned the “American journalist Warwick Hester” and introduced the figure of 365,000 victims of the Nazi regime, only some of whom were Jews.¹⁸ An article also appeared in the neo-Nazi sheet Die Anklage: Organ der entrechteten Kriegsgeschädigten in Bad Wörishofen (The Indictment: Voice of the Disenfranchised, War-Damaged People of Bad Wörishofen), which attempted to refute what it called “the basest falsification of history.” It was able to cite a new expert—a “universally renowned North American”—none other than Warwick Hester.¹⁹ There was also a notoriously fake Red Cross report, stating that the number of regime opponents killed was—coincidentally—365,000. With clever cooperation between far-right books and magazines, and carefully aimed readers’ letters in serious journals, these texts created one of the main “sources” for Holocaust denial, which remains the core of revisionist history even today.²⁰ An invented American expert, an “insider” from Salzburg (both writing for an Argentine Nazi paper), and a fake Red Cross report supposedly emanating from Germany were cleverly linked so that they all cited one another. It was enough to unleash a barrage of press coverage.

The Hester article was reprinted in 1990, with the note that the name Warwick Hester was a cover for the equally famous “American jurist Stephen F. Pinter.” This sorry effort has haunted right-wing publications and the Internet ever since, under the name of “The Dr. Pinter Report.”²¹ Pinter, it was claimed, had all this information because he had been a prosecutor in the Dachau trial. He was from St. Louis, and for good measure he was sometimes said to be a Jew himself. And no one could doubt a Jewish-American jurist bearing witness against the Holocaust—at least, no one who thought like a Nazi. Would it surprise anyone to learn that there never was an American prosecutor named Stephen F. Pinter? The name first appeared around New Year 1959–60, attached to two readers’ letters that reiterated the Hester-Heimann nonsense almost word for word. One of them appeared in the popular U.S. magazine Our Sunday Visitor and was then picked up by Nation Europa—the monthly that had printed Sluyse’s open letter and had a long history of cooperation with Der Weg.²²

An analysis of this concentrated campaign reveals the power that small groups can wield and that gave Fritsch and his circle the self-confidence to dream of seizing political power again. Deniers of the systematic extermination of the Jews have the forgers’ workshop in Buenos Aires to thank for their most often-cited sources. Argentina had a freedom of the press that did not exist in other countries, and it was fully utilized. The transatlantic exchange between old comrades’ publications was frighteningly effective, and following the “reparations” agreement, it seems these were the depths to which people were prepared to stoop.

The question of who really penned the article by “Warwick Hester” remains unanswered. Its use of metaphor and its theatrical aspect are reminiscent of Sassen, but it could also have been Johann von Leers, who wrote for Der Weg under a number of pseudonyms and later reluctantly admitted asking Eichmann about the number of victims when he was in Argentina. We know that Dürer Verlag had no problem publishing made-up letters to the publisher and fantastical-sounding biographies by invented authors. And we know the “renowned American” stemmed from within the Dürer circle—not just because the article is riddled with phrases typical of Der Weg’s style, but also because this is the only explanation for the bizarre news of Eichmann’s death. In 1954 Adolf Eichmann, who had been trying to have himself declared dead since the end of the war, was finally able to see himself vanish without a trace, in black and white. This was also the proof he needed that Fritsch and Dürer Verlag wielded enough influence to have a political impact.Once again, or so it must have appeared to him, he was at the center of a new movement.²³ An added bonus was the character assassination of Wilhelm Höttl, the man who had taken such delight in making life difficult for Eichmann. It was one more good turn among comrades of the death’s head order.

Another interesting death notice appeared in 1954, this time in Austria. At the start of June, the Linz and Vienna papers printed information that supposedly came from Reuters in London, to the effect that SS Oberscharführer Wolfgang Bauer had been shot dead in mid-1946. He had been killed in the Salzkammergut Mountains (at Traunauen, near Linz), by a Jewish vengeance squad that had mistaken him for Eichmann. The corpse had been buried hastily in the woods, and the error was realized only weeks later. Perversely, this report made people suspect it really had been Eichmann who was shot after all. Eichmann received these articles in Argentina (or at least, the one from the Oberösterreichische Zeitung), probably from his father. In typical fashion, he promptly wove the story into a legend that he trotted out to Sassen. He started claiming he had heard about the execution when he was still on the Lüneberg Heath, and he proudly quoted the articles, which according to him said that “Eichmann died with remarkable decorum.” “That amused me greatly.” And Eichmann cheerfully lied: “I kept the cutting for a long time, but then I burned it.”²⁴ He had to forestall anyone who might want to see the article for himself. When Sassen inquired about when exactly he had read it, he responded vaguely: “It must have been four to five years after the war.”²⁵

Simon Wiesenthal, who was still on the alert for anything to do with Eichmann, made a concerted effort to expose this canard for what it was, before the idea that Eichmann was dead took hold. However, it continued to appear until September, even making it intoIsraeli newspapers.²⁶ Wiesenthal sent a press release through Austria’s Jewish Religious Community to counter the story, but he couldn’t prevent Eichmann’s version of this affair from finding its way into the research literature. The story of the chicken farmer inAltensalzkoth reading about his own assassination in an Austrian newspaper was simply too tempting.²⁷

Valentin Tarra, the Altaussee criminal investigator, also had his ear to the ground. In 1960 he told Fritz Bauer about the newspaper articles and expressed his suspicion that “Nazi circles in London” had spread the information to end the search for Eichmann. The original source of the news is still unknown.

Undeterred, the Gehlen Organization sent out a completely different message: it had received new details about Eichmann’s career in the Middle East. The source was Saida Ortner, the new wife of the former SS man Felix Ortner. She said Eichmann had escaped from an American prisoner of war camp in Italy in 1947 and had traveled to Syria and converted to Islam in 1948. In 1951 he had tried to make contact with the notorious grand mufti al-Husseini in Cairo, who refused to help him, and he was forced to leave Egypt the same year.²⁸ To give her the benefit of the doubt, this woman, who was used to Arabic names, may have confused Eichmann with Alois Brunner, who was often introduced as “Eichmann’s right-hand man.” Brunner, who had killed more than 128,000 people, was now representing a number of German interests in Damascus, under the name Dr. Georg Fischer, and he was also an unofficial employee of the West German intelligence service. Despite knowing this fact, Gehlen still passed the news on to its American friends, which suggests some internal communication problems among the BND’s data gatherers.

In 1954 a remarkable number of people started speculating about Eichmann’s death. Eager to be declared dead, he relayed the news to his family, as Klaus Eichmann remembered vividly in 1966: his father “was constantly being brought newspaper articles” about how he had been shot in Linz.²⁹ A father who reads descriptions of his own execution, to children who spent seven years of their young lives coming to terms with the fact they might never see him again, is not exactly the image of a sensitive parent. It’s no wonder this episode remained in the children’s memories.

During the same month that Der Weg announced the Eichmann family’s suicide, the German embassy in Buenos Aires renewed the passports of two young German nationals. They were accompanied by their mother and provided identity papers from Cologne and Vienna, in the names of Klaus and Horst Eichmann.³⁰ As the legal guardian of the two boys, the “late” Veronika Katharina Eichmann, née Liebl, signed the documents, giving her address as Chacabuco 4261, Olivos. On being questioned, the boys were able to name their father’s SS rank at the time of their births.³¹ The record does not state whether anyone told them to wish their daddy all the best as they left. But given the behavior of the German embassy’s staff over the years that followed, we can’t rule it out.

Even without assuming the worst, the Eichmanns’ visit to the German embassy gives rise to the suspicion that its staff had no particular interest in coming to terms with Germany’s past. In 1954 Adolf Eichmann came to the welcome realization that he was surrounded by willing helpers who found him important enough to write about. He also became aware that life in Buenos Aires posed as little threat as life in the remote province of Tucumán, even from the legal representatives of West Germany. Only two months previously, they had issued a new passport to an old acquaintance of his, the mass murderer and former ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger—in his real name.³²

Different Headlines

While these attempts were being made to create confusion about Eichmann’s life after the end of the war, there had been another, less favorable development: Eichmann’s deeds were inexorably coming to light. In 1953 Gerald Reitlinger’s book The Final Solutionwas published in London, the first attempt at an overview of the German crimes against the Jews. The thick volume contained not only statistics, maps, and a wealth of detail but also a whole chapter on Adolf Eichmann. Initially, it did not find a publisher in Germany. The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich turned down first a translation, then even a review for the journal Vierteljahrsheft für Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History Quarterly).³³ But Reitlinger’s book still changed the debate on a fundamental level, even before a German translation was finally published in 1956. His attempt to calculate the scale of the genocide set a benchmark for future research. In 1954 Helmut Krausnick wrote a remarkable article on the likely number of Holocaust victims in a supplement to the magazine Das Parlament, edited by the Federal Homeland Service, which of course also gave details about Eichmann.³⁴

But from Eichmann’s point of view, another event was a more immediate cause for concern: a court case that went down in history under the misleading name of the Kasztner Trial and that began on January 1, 1954, in Jerusalem.³⁵ It was actually a libel case against the author Malchiel Grünwald, who had described Rudolf “Reszö” Kasztner as a Nazi collaborator in Budapest. The case quickly became a bizarre trial against Kasztner himself, partly due to an error by the judge, Benjamin Halevi, which was later acknowledged. Kasztner found himself having to justify his attempts to save Jews in Hungary by entering into “negotiations” with Eichmann.³⁶ A lack of knowledge about the circumstances, and the fact that Kasztner’s work for the Israeli government made the trial a political issue, turned the proceedings into a global news story focusing on what Kasztner had done. Particular emphasis was placed on the dramatic duel over human lives between Kasztner and Eichmann. Over the following years, the world’s major newspapers carried detailed reports on the trial and its consequences.³⁷ The Argentinisches Tageblatt, Buenos Aires’s liberal newspaper (or “Jewish” paper, as the Dürer circle would say),³⁸ also wrote about it. Eichmann, who made a point of reading this paper, would have come across familiar phrases like “blood for goods” and names like Joel Brand, Kasztner, and most frequently, Adolf Eichmann. The rest of the world was struggling to comprehend these new facts: the unequal negotiations between Jews and their murderers; the deportation of more than four hundred thousand people in the space of a few weeks; and the chaos of the war’s final years. Eichmann, however, always knew what would be coming. He kept a close eye on the public reaction to each new revelation and recognized early on that his advance knowledge would allow him to turn Kasztner’s downfall to his advantage and put his own spin on events. “Eichmann was a master of turning people into traitors,” the judge said in the announcement of his verdict. “Kasztner sold his soul to the devil.” The press headlines aided Eichmann’s line of defense: Kasztner had been Eichmann’s partner. When the intensive work in the Sassen circle began three years later, this was the first topic to be addressed. Eichmann was well prepared, explaining to his astonished listeners: “Kasztner and I, we had a sovereign command over the situation in the Hungarian territory—forgive my use of this word, ‘sovereign,’ but it may serve as clarification.”³⁹

Nazi Gold

In fall 1954 Eichmann’s name was all over the Austrian newspapers again, this time in a very different context. A rumor was going around that he’d had something to do with the disappearance of Nazi treasure—the stolen goods that had been gathered in Berlin and had last been seen in packing crates, on their way to the “Alpine Fortress.” People therefore suspected the treasure was now somewhere in Styria. It was probably the speculations about Eichmann’s death that sparked investigations in Austria. Journalists soon became convinced that he was alive and living under a false name in Upper Austria. On October 1, 1954, the tabloid paper Der Abend published rumors from the Altaussee region about the wanted man hiding in the Austrian mountains, under the headline “Where Is the SS Mass Murderer Eichmann?” It raised the possibility that “former SS General Adolf Eichmann, who slaughtered the Jews of Eastern Europe, is alive, is held to be an established fact in Altausseerland.” He was said to have paid several visits to his wife in Altaussee, around the time she was trying to have him declared dead. In summer 1954, the report went on, he had been seen in his wife’s apartment, although his wife had vanished in 1953 and her whereabouts were unknown. Yet the rent for the empty property was still being paid. The people the reporter interviewed had probably mistaken Eichmann’s half brother for Eichmann himself. After a suitable period of time had elapsed, the brother had quietly cleared out Vera Eichmann’s apartment (a fact that had not escaped the observant investigator Valentin Tarra).⁴⁰

The National Criminal Court in Vienna was alerted to this coverage and commissioned a report at the end of the year. A field investigation took place, which also uncovered neighborhood gossip about Eichmann’s alleged wealth, and a secret life he was leading now that he had changed his appearance.⁴¹ The rumors were stubbornly persistent. On January 10, 1955, the Austrian edition of Die Welt am Montag carried an article entitled “Mysterious Events: A Ghost Is Abroad in Alt Aussee.” Adolf Eichmann, it said, had returned to claim his gold.

There are plenty of legends about missing Nazi treasure, with tales of chests sunk in mountain lakes and lavish exports to foreign countries. The stories excited people’s greed and fueled the myth of a Nazi conspiracy continuing to operate underground. They fed into the far right’s hope that the war had not managed to defeat National Socialism entirely. The speculations of 1954 also sparked an interest in Eichmann from people who otherwise wanted nothing to do with the “slaughter of the Jews.” The stories reassured Eichmann that people were looking for him in the wrong place and that he was safe in Perón’s country. Even treasure-hunting Nazis, hungry for gold, posed no threat to him: anyone could see from his standard of living that he wasn’t a wealthy man. But when people saw him in the ABC Café, or at a gathering of newly Argentine old associates, they could still ask him about it. And the fact that Eichmann sometimes worked for the man who was suspected of being the real guardian of the Nazi gold, Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer, lent the rumors an extra weight in Argentina.

A Specialist Once More

Throughout his murderous career, Eichmann knew how to use his public profile to further his own interests. In Argentine exile in the mid-1950s, he recognized the prospect that even his postwar image might have its advantages. The more witness statements, newspaper articles, and rumors made the rounds, the more interesting the Obersturmbannführer (retired) became to men like Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen. This was particularly true of the publisher, who had had no experience of Nazi Germany beyond his visit to the Hitler Youth Congress. Fritsch believed every exile had been an insider. But Sassen too had seen a different side of the war, through his role as an SS war correspondent, and he had moved in completely different circles from Eichmann. He had never met Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, or even Reinhard Heydrich. Eichmann, however, had known them all and knew a good deal about the various Nazi offices and institutions. He had been the one coordinating these offices, like a lot of little cogs, to set in motion the extermination machine. In the mid-1950s the exiled Nazis were beginning to put out feelers toward sympathizers in West Germany again. They wanted to know who their contacts really were, and there was no better way to find out than to inquire about who knew whom. Wilhelm Höttl’s book made them nervous, and the Dürer circle was on the lookout for people who could tell them more about the author and give them a better idea of the potential danger he represented. Rudel and Sassen, as well as men like Ludolf von Alvensleben, Johann von Leers, and Josef Mengele, had never met him. The changing times demanded a pooling of knowledge—and suddenly the specialists were back in business.

A specialist was even required when it came to the most repressed and feared topic of all: the Jewish question. The media activity, and the demand for articles, show that even the Nazis in exile felt a growing need for information. And they wanted it from sources that these great lovers of conspiracy trusted: other National Socialists. Those who were too deeply mired in stereotypical National Socialist thought to trust “enemy literature,” as the Sassen circle called it, needed answers from within their own ranks. Most of them had no trouble dismissing every new revelation about concentration camps and mass murder as atrocity propaganda from their opponents. But over the years, all the little stories and details from their own memories had coalesced to form an unsettling picture. And now their children were asking questions. While these men clearly had no right to claim they “didn’t know about any of it,” there were also large gaps in their knowledge, because they had only ever wanted to know about “it” to a limited extent. They may have stood by their lies and their own polemic, but eventually even devoted National Socialists had to face the uncomfortable question: between their own suspicions and the stories in the news, what was truth and what lies? What had Hitler really known? Had gas chambers existed? Gas vans? Had partisans really been shot? How many people had actually been killed?

Each of them had a different viewpoint and a different set of questions, but at long last, they all wanted to know the details. The “Final Solution” had become an issue they could no longer avoid, now that it was affecting global politics. Germany’s status on the world stage depended on its taking a clear position on the Holocaust, paying “reparations,” and committing itself to a pro-Israeli foreign policy. The events in the Middle East were significant, and if you wanted to understand the new alliances, you needed knowledge, or you wouldn’t get far without harming your own cause. This was even more the case if you continued to suspect that “the Jews” were behind everything and that they were one of the principal forces in the United States, a country that Der Weg’s editorial named as an enemy power.

Eichmann soon had a reputation for being the only surviving Nazi with any reliable information on the scale of the Holocaust, and on how the extermination process had worked, which made him increasingly sought after. He had actually met “the enemy,” having spoken to representatives of Jewish organizations and communities. Names like Joel Brand and Rudolf Kasztner were familiar to him, and not only from the newspapers. And his talent for promoting himself as a “respected specialist” achieved one more thing: after he was abducted, no one voluntarily admitted to so much as having heard his name, yet the number of people who could be proved to have spoken to him about the extermination of the Jews was remarkably high. In Tucumán, the Schoklitsches and Herbert Hagel had asked him directly how many Jews had been murdered, and even if Eichmann’s answer was as evasive as their reports suggest, the fact remains that people knew Ricardo Klement was really Adolf Eichmann, and that Adolf Eichmann was a specialist on these matters. Nobody who found themselves in a northern province of Argentina would strike up a dinner-table conversation with the first German immigrant they came across by asking what he had to say about the Nazis’ murder of the Jews.

Another exile known to have approached Eichmann directly was Johann von Leers. Four years older than Eichmann, he was a legal expert who had written books with titles like Blut und Rasse in der Gesetzgebung (Blood and Race in Legislation, 1936), which had earned him a professorship at the University of Jena. There he had lectured on “Legal, Economic and Political History on a Racial Basis” and described “The Criminal Nature of the Jew” (1944), when he wasn’t busy advising the Reich Ministry for Propaganda on racial issues. He fled to Argentina via Italy in 1950.⁴² There he remained what we might most accurately call a professional anti-Semite, busying himself by writing horrific articles for Der Weg. He left Buenos Aires again, in the mid-1950s, for Cairo. In Egypt, much to the amazement of his old comrades in Germany, he made a different name for himself as an advocate of Islam (his new name being Amin Omar von Leers). But before he left Argentina, he found the time to have a conversation with Eichmann, asking him about the exact number of Jewish victims, among other things. This episode, which Leers described in order to defend himself against the accusation of having been “Eichmann’s best friend in Argentina,” speaks for itself: “I never knew Eichmann, I heard his name for the first time in 1955, in Buenos Aires, where I had a short conversation with him and tried to get the historical truth from him about the number of Jews who died in the concentration camps. But he didn’t give me any information.”⁴³

Despite Leers’s claim not to have heard the name before, he knew exactly who Eichmann was: the expert on victim numbers. And the fact that he postdated their conversation underlines his intent. Leers left Argentina in 1954, so he must have already known exactly who he was questioning by this point and had a strong enough sense of guilt to know what it meant.⁴⁴ The incident can be interpreted in two ways: either Leers was lying when he claimed never to have heard the name before, or someone had introduced Eichmann to him using the description that had been linked to Eichmann’s name since the Nuremberg Trials. Leers confessed his acquaintance with Eichmann in self-defense, which leads us to conclude that their conversation lasted rather longer than Leers’s description suggests. Of course, it could not have escaped a man who had been one of Der Weg’s major contributors that his publisher cared so much about Eichmann. When Leers moved to Cairo in 1954, he took the memory of his encounter with him. His obvious postdating of the conversation throws an interesting light on Eichmann’s public life in Argentina prior to the start of the project with Willem Sassen.

Admittedly, not all the Nazi exiles needed to question Eichmann in order to learn about the scale of the Holocaust. Men like Erich Müller, Josef Vötterl, and Curt Christmann had their own experience in this field. They had been in the Einsatzgruppen that shot people en masse behind the front lines from 1941 and that later murdered them in gas vans. Gerhard Bohne and Hans Hefelmann were specialists in “euthanasia” murders, and former ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger had a pretty good idea of what extermination through labor meant. Most of them had the opportunity to meet—and not only because the immigrant world is usually a small one. Like Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Dieter Menge was a former Luftwaffe pilot. He had an imposing estate near Buenos Aires and a lucrative scrap metal business. He also had the unpleasant habit of surrounding himself with his ghoulish contemporaries. To this day, people still speak of the social events at his house as cultish gatherings of the dregs from the Nazi regime. At these events, no one held back or used an alias, and men like Eichmann and Josef Schwammberger became attractions. One of the running jokes there was a play on the names of the host and his favorite guest: Menge particularly liked to play host to Mengele.⁴⁵

Later, Sassen claimed he had introduced Eichmann to the concentration camp “doctor,” who had his own special interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. Many Jewish survivors were unable to forget him: he was the man who had conducted the “selections” in Auschwitz. And how could you forget a man who decided the fates of hundreds of people with a wave of his hand?⁴⁶ The two men did not necessarily get to know each other over the course of their murderous careers, although they may well have met briefly during one of Eichmann’s frequent visits to Auschwitz in 1944. However, they took the same route to Argentina, and the false identity papers they both had received from Termeno were produced in fairly quick succession. Mengele arrived in Argentina the year before Eichmann—though unlike Eichmann, he had the advantage of his father’s generous financial support. Still, the two men’s paths crossed repeatedly in Argentina. Sassen, who was a close friend of Mengele’s and still had a high regard for the latter’s “experiments” in 1991, was convinced that Eichmann and Mengele had little to say to each other: “They embodied two completely different types.”⁴⁷ As far as their financial prospects and their educational background went, this was true. Mengele had plenty of money and two doctorates, one in medicine and another in philosophy (the latter with a thesis entitled Racial-Morphological Investigation of the Lower Jaw Segment in Four Racial Groups). But Sassen was not entirely correct. When Eichmann was hanged in 1962, of all the acquaintances from his old circle, it was only the “Auschwitz Angel of Death” who acknowledged the organizer of the genocide and dedicated some surprisingly sensitive words to him. They must have found some common ground after all.

Long before the start of Sassen’s recording sessions, Eichmann had once again become part of a society that interested him and, more important, that was interested in him. And contrary to later claims, their curiosity was probably not the result merely of horrified fascination. People’s general forgetfulness and discreet silence would become a direct consequence of Eichmann’s abduction. But in the mid-1950s, Eichmann was recognized as a specialist who was much too interesting to be forgotten, and it is only human nature to talk about unforgettable things. This interest posed a threat to Eichmann, because at this point, ten years after the war’s end, many of his fellow Nazis were starting to lose their fear of prosecution and were making contact with West Germany and Austria more frequently. While some were placing advertisements in Germany to find a wife,⁴⁸ many even dared to move back there. The father of the “economic miracle,” Ludwig Erhard himself, paid a visit to Argentina in December 1954, and Otto Skorzeny, who had been working for the intelligence services for some time, traveled to see Perón as the official representative of Krupp’s industrial empire. Mengele even managed to get divorced in Germany in 1954.⁴⁹ Former comrades with Nazi pasts were making surprising new careers. Josef Vötterl, who came from Salzburg and was four years younger than Eichmann, had also fled the country on a Red Cross passport. As a member of the criminal and border police with Einsatzkommando 10A of Einsatzgruppe D, his role had involved reconnaissance, and then carrying out “border protection” and “partisan control.” Nonetheless, in 1955 he moved back to Germany for three years. He found employment with the BfV; we will meet him again later on.⁵⁰

When he went off to meet his comrades, both old and new, Eichmann left his family at home. He was probably eager to avoid questions from his wife, who was naturally convinced that her husband was an innocent man. Admittedly, he couldn’t entirely prevent his wife and children from meeting these people, because the world of Buenos Aires was a small one: “One day, Father said: last week you shook hands with Josef Mengele.” But according to Klaus Eichmann, disclosures like this were the exception rather than the rule: “Father was very serious about keeping secrets. If someone came to visit, he would give us boys a clip round the ear to remind us not to blab about it the next day at school.” When the journalist asked what sort of visitors these were, Klaus Eichmann answered, “I only remember the slaps.” Looking at the interviews and witness statements from later years, Eichmann’s abduction must have had a similar effect on the memories of all the people in Argentina who knew who Ricardo Klement really was.

The Triumph of Life

Marriage: A union between two different sexes for the reproduction of their kind.

—Eichmann’s psychological evaluation, early 1961⁵¹

The year 1955 opened a period of great unrest. The president of Argentina, who had had so much time for the Germans, was deposed; on June 16, Argentine naval officers began a series of attempted putsches that soon led to Perón’s fall. In 1960 Life reporters heard rumors that Eichmann had worked as a gaucho under the name Ernst Radinger; spent time in Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru; and gone to Bolivia for several months after Perón was ousted.⁵² It was clearly a case of mistaken identity, but the legend provides a vivid reflection of the German immigrants’ situation. Nobody was sure what the political change would mean for them, particularly as the new regime was taking action against the corruption of the Perón dictatorship and, in the process, closed seven German firms that were under suspicion.

In December 1955 the police called at Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s house in Córdoba province, as he had been an intimate friend of Perón’s. On searching the house, they discovered numerous documents, three passports in different names, and proof of his political activities and contacts.⁵³ Although it had been known that Perón’s protégé had been attempting to create an international network of fascist movements for years, the extent of his connections still came as a surprise, particularly as Rudel had clearly burned numerous other documents prior to his hasty departure. Unfortunately, the documents confiscated by the police have not resurfaced. However, the investigating commission’s report contained some initial findings, including notes on the Red Cross passport that, together with various entry and exit stamps in the false passports, proved that Rudel had been hard at work peddling his far-right dreams. Among his papers were found begging letters to Kameradenwerk, some from eager networkers in West Germany like Hans Rechenberg, who was collecting money for Hitler’s sister. Both Rechenberg and Rudel would later work on Adolf Eichmann’s defense. The greatest sensation in this affair was understandably caused by the news that Rudel had succeeded in bringing the British fascist Oswald Mosley into the country and arranging a personal audience for him with President Perón. The German embassy was so alarmed that it took the precaution of sending newspaper articles from Buenos Aires to Bonn.⁵⁴ But after the initial excitement, it came to the conclusion that “Peronazism” was just a “charade” and that Rudel represented “the typical postwar course taken by so many ‘heroes’ … who refused to surrender even though their roles had long been played out.”⁵⁵ The media told Rudel’s allies that their figurehead was a “fairly laughable and arrogant” character. Their political ambitions and their connections were now out in the open. Rudel took temporary refuge in Paraguay. Argentina obviously no longer held the same attraction it had in Perón’s era—especially for those who, unlike Rudel, had no means of escape.

The fear of currency inflation had been in the air for some time in Argentina, and the putsch against Perón had partly been a reaction to the worsening conditions. The economic situation may also have prompted Eichmann’s change of job. In uncertain times, the best policy is to invest in natural resources, and in March Eichmann took over management of the Siete Palmas rabbit farm in Joaquín Gorina, twenty-eight miles from Buenos Aires. The business belonged to Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer, who wanted to return to Europe and leave a reliable deputy in his place.⁵⁶ Klaus Eichmann spoke of “two uncles, who are now [1966] back in Europe,” with whom his father ran the farm. “They had around 5,000 hens and 1,000 rabbits.” The rabbits were Angora.

The cuddly white animals provided both expensive wool and a coveted fertilizer. Rabbit dung contains high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash, a very useful mixture that was highly sought after in Argentina (a country that remains a major exporter of citrus fruits). Day-to-day life on the farm consisted, quite prosaically, of feeding the rabbits, mucking out their cages, and collecting the dung. They were sheared three or four times a year. It was an economically sound route to independence and success. During the war, Eichmann liked to tell his fellow murderers, he had put in a request to the Reichsführer-SS for an estate in Bohemia after the final victory so he could become a farmer.⁵⁷ The disciples of the Black Sun allegedly revered the simple life, but when they had been in power, none of them would have traded in their careers to work the soil. And so it was no real comfort to Eichmann that he had once been successful with chickens and could now have told Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that he was a rabbit farmer. This also meant a major change for his family. Life “on the ranch,” as Eichmann liked to call it, was rural, and although he did occasionally take his family with him, they were still separated for much of the time. His three sons, who were now between thirteen and nineteen, had to carry on going to school. His writing, and his children’s recollections, show that he was concerned about their willingness to learn. Eichmann deplored his three sons’ “intellectual arrogance” and “ignorance,” as they were unable to summon any enthusiasm for identifying the differences between the Nazi Gottgläubigkeit and Marxism.⁵⁸

It was like being back in Altensalzkoth. Eichmann didn’t have to worry about his family; he could just earn his money and dwell on his thoughts. The only difference was that the rabbit farm was a little more remote than the village on the Lüneburg Heath, meaning that on balmy evenings, Eichmann was unable to make the local women swoon with his Schubert and his gypsy airs. On those long evenings, the former master of deportation now played to thousands of hens and fluffy white rabbits. But the income was pretty good—Eichmann put it at 4,500 pesos a month, which was just over 1,000 Deutschmarks.⁵⁹ The family urgently needed the money, as an unexpected event had taken place: Vera Eichmann was pregnant again. Five years later Eichmann would come up with some bizarre words to describe his feelings about it: “Our happiness found its zenith through the birth of our fourth son. This meant more to me than just becoming a proud father. For me this was a symbol of freedom, and life triumphing over the powers that sought to destroy me. Even now, thinking about it in my cell, the birth of my son fills me with triumphant satisfaction.”⁶⁰

The birth of a child as a triumphal victory? Considering Eichmann’s circumstances in 1955, other concerns must have occupied his mind at first. The pregnancy had numerous risk factors: this was the 1950s, and at forty-six, Vera Eichmann was very old to be having a child. She was also not in the best of health, having suffered from a severe bilious complaint for years. She was in a foreign country, with an unfamiliar health care system and a language she had not mastered. The father-to-be would have had good reason to be worried for his wife, quite apart from the additional expenditure a new baby would involve.

We cannot overlook the fact that Eichmann’s wife and children were genuinely important to him. He couldn’t imagine escaping to live in exile without his family. He shared this absolute resolve with his wife, who had fought with equal persistence for their life together and had supported his escape from Europe. Admittedly, it was not only outward circumstances that made the marriage difficult. But there is much to suggest that in 1935 they had married for love. Eichmann met Vera Liebl, three years his junior, on a trip to Bohemia, where her mother owned a farm. Dieter Wisliceny, who would later become Eichmann’s friend and colleague, described Vera as “small and very fat, with smooth black hair, dark eyes and a round face of the Slavic type.” But Wisliceny, next to whom anyone would look svelte, clearly envied Eichmann, and he was generally not a fan of women. A full-length photo of the young Vera shows a decidedly attractive woman with a fashionable pageboy haircut, large, expressive eyes, and full lips. She is elegantly dressed, with a fur stole. In terms of appearance, she was entirely Eichmann’s type: he told Sassen he had never warmed to the National Socialist ideal of the tall, slim, blond lady, as embodied by Lina Heydrich and Magda Goebbels, finding it “too cold, too distant as a woman.”⁶¹ The stories Wilhelm Höttl told about Eichmann being ashamed of his wife’s farming background are nonsense: for one thing, in the Nazi ideology of blood and soil, there was no better heritage, and for another, Eichmann always wrote and spoke of his wife with respect and admiration. She was the “proud farmer’s daughter from Mladé.” His wedding underlines the fact that his choice of wife was personal, not career-driven: he fiddled the documents required for an SS wedding, as his fiancée could not provide all the necessary papers. He also agreed to go through with a church ceremony at the request of his deeply religious bride, even though the SS frowned upon it.

The Eichmanns lived first in Berlin, then in Vienna, and finally in Prague, where Vera’s sisters moved into the same apartment building, thanks to the progress of her husband’s career. Eichmann accepted that his wife was not comfortable in Berlin and allowed the family home to remain in Prague. He shuttled between Berlin and Prague at the weekends. Of course, his work also continued to take him through or near Prague, as he often had to visit Vienna and Theresienstadt, and his office soon established its own outpost in Prague, at 25 Belgische Gasse. In spite of the happy start to his marriage, by the time he was posted to Vienna in 1938, Eichmann’s staff knew their boss had a lover. The affair caused some gossip when Eichmann hurried through the sale of Maria Mösenbacher’s real estate to the Vienna Central Office. Eichmann was suspected of paying too high a price for it, for the sake of his girlfriend.⁶² And his staff clearly had a few other things to gossip about: people tended to confuse Maria with Mitzi, the manager of a little guesthouse nearby, with whom Eichmann also allegedly had an affair.⁶³

Vera Eichmann must have heard rumors about it, at the very least, but it obviously didn’t dent the marriage. On her birthday, over Easter 1939, the couple vacationed in Italy.⁶⁴ Weekends, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, and Mother’s Day were all important to Eichmann (although the story that he was finally caught out while buying a bunch of flowers for his wedding anniversary in 1960 is untrue).⁶⁵ The couple’s three children were the center of both their lives. After they were born, Eichmann was said to have had other women in his life, for varying amounts of time. We should not take Wisliceny’s reference to Eichmann’s “womanizing” too seriously, but there is evidence that he was anything but faithful to his wife. The women who worked in his department, and his lovers, all described him as “attractive,” very “charming,” an entertaining man who enjoyed parlor games and making music. He was “a lovely man.”⁶⁶ Men too remember that “Eichie” was “popular and welcomed everywhere,” at least if we believe Camp Commandant Höß.⁶⁷ One of the tapes from Argentina sheds some light on Eichmann’s behavior toward women: it documents an encounter between Eichmann and his “comrade” Sassen’s wife. She brings him tobacco, saying apologetically that the store was out of his favorite brand. His sharp, scratchy voice momentarily becomes deep and soft, and his “Thank you for your trouble … my dear lady” sounds unmistakably submissive.⁶⁸ We know about his relationships with at least three women during the Nazi era. And in Altensalzkoth, there were rumors that in addition to Nelly, the dainty blonde from Prien am Chiemsee, he had relationships with a young widowed mother and with his landlady. Whatever credit we give to this village gossip, it reveals the incredible truth: even in a shabby Wehrmacht coat, without his position of power, Eichmann was seen as sufficiently desirable for people to make these assumptions.

For his part, Eichmann always made an effort to keep his affairs secret: his middle-class facade was important to him. Hungary was the only place he was less discreet about this double life. He had an affair with Margrit Kutschera, from Vienna (who Wisliceny scornfully implied was a professional mistress) and with Ingrid von Ihne, a divorced society lady who was the epitome of National Socialist womanhood: tall, blond, and slim, with a cold beauty. This made her the perfect companion for social occasions. “Eichmann was not the sadistic, lustful beast that the press later made him out to be,” David Cesarani summarizes, “but he was certainly not a dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat, either. Power, the power of life and death, corrupted Eichmann. By 1944 he was rotten from the inside out.”⁶⁹

We may doubt whether his sexual escapades were a result of this thorough corruption. They look more like the result of lowered inhibitions, in which alcohol played a decisive role. “During the final years,” Wisliceny wrote, “Eichmann was completely unscrupulous when it came to women, for in Budapest, too, he got drunk every night.”⁷⁰ The intoxication of power alone was not enough to make the son of a good middle-class household into a decadent rake with no sense of “propriety.” The striking thing here is that Eichmann had no problem recounting his “dynamic” actions in Hungary (where he was “the master,” organizing the most efficient deportations of the Nazi period). He talked about it in his memoirs, and in the discussion sessions in Argentina, proudly telling stories of the horrific transport conditions and terrible death marches. But his affairs made him so uncomfortable that he tried to explain them away. The aristocratic society lady had been merely a “dinner companion”—and that had been only on one occasion, when he gave a dinner party. “I had no hostess,” he explained, “and it was necessary to have a hostess, after all. And so I asked Frau von Ihne.… That was all.” To be on the safe side, Eichmann reiterated, “I had no hostess … I had no concubine, like someone says somewhere here [referring to a book], you know? And I’m not going to count a nice little friendship with someone I may have gone out to dinner with, but with whom I never once had intimate relations.” And when the need for a lady of the house arose once more: “I asked another lady, with whom I certainly had no intimate relations,” namely “Fräulein von Kutschera,” who at the time had apparently been engaged. “And so she played hostess for the evening.”⁷¹

Eichmann only ever had friendships with women—in Altensalzkoth, as he did elsewhere. He mounted a moralistic defense against any insinuations about affairs and refused to rise to Sassen’s teasing. Sassen had a predilection for obvious innuendo and a love of detail that can only be described as pornographic.⁷² But Eichmann’s success with women was not something he was proud of. When rumors about his love life (most of them complete fabrications) caught the press’s attention soon after his arrest, and after he had read Wisliceny’s denouncement, he once again began to stress that he had never taken a lover. All relationships with women apart from his wife had been “purely platonic.”⁷³ But he wasn’t entirely happy with this image, either, and he added the “assurance” that “nature was kind enough to bestow upon me, too, that resource with which certain bearers of organic life generally seek to be endowed by the aforementioned nature. I was certainly no sexless common horsetail.”⁷⁴

This stilted, awkward declaration is not just a confession of male vanity, but the expression of a profoundly National Socialist belief: potency and a “natural” sexuality were part of Nazi race biology’s definition of the SS man. The SS, as Himmler understood it, was the nucleus of a new, racially pure elite. This was the sole aim behind the ideal of careful selection.⁷⁵ Future SS wives—and the men themselves—had to submit to thorough medical examinations before the Office for Race and Resettlement would allow the marriage. Impotence, or any kind of deviant sexual tendency, barred men from entering the ranks of the SS.

For Adolf Eichmann, taking a relaxed attitude to his own sexuality was more a challenge than an opportunity. When Himmler wanted to give his lover an expensive present on the birth of their baby, Eichmann saw the necklace that had been stolen to order and reacted with horror on two grounds. It wasn’t just the corruption that disgusted him but the fact that his Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, was not even keeping his second family a secret from his underlings. “Such a senior superior officer” could not allow himself to grant others an insight “into the most difficult of matters.” People would “see through” him, and he would become “a prisoner” of those who knew his secret.⁷⁶ Himmler believed that his SS men were the very people who should overcome “the prevailing moral outlook,” because it was founded on “supposedly moral laws built up by Christianity.” The “falsehood” of these laws needed to be brought to an end. Eichmann evidently shared neither this opinion⁷⁷ nor Sassen’s lightheartedness about sexual matters. Even in all-male gatherings like the Sassen circle, he did not approve of ribaldry. Sassen’s predilection for very obvious innuendo regularly caused Eichmann to fall silent. Much as he liked to keep pace, and had no difficulty making intolerably cynical remarks about the conditions in concentration camps, he stonewalled Sassen on topics like the camp bordellos, just as he did on his own extramarital affairs. He took no pleasure in this kind of macho talk. During his psychological examination in Israel, prisoner Eichmann, who was usually so cooperative, displayed the same attitude he had in Buenos Aires. “The first and only time that he refused to cooperate during the interviews was when we questioned him regarding his sexual experiences,” said the investigating psychologist, Shlomo Kulcsár. “The sexuality in the case of E. is so repressed, concealed and disguised that its reconstruction is … difficult.”⁷⁸ The experienced team of psychologists (which also included Kulcsár’s wife) evaluated the various tests they had carried out and came to the conclusion that Eichmann had “very strong inhibitions in sexual subjects.” All three psychologists suspected a “sadomasochist complex.”⁷⁹ They were certain that there was something more to Eichmann than the self-consciousness typical of that generation when it came to intimacy. Unfortunately, the examinations they carried out were not enough to discover any more about his unanimously diagnosed “latent aggression.”

The emphasis Eichmann placed on his own potency is particularly striking when seen in this context. He made several such insinuations even to the prison staff. Eichmann, who had been provided with Nabokov’s Lolita as reading matter for his cell, declined further novels, claiming they were too erotic—a thought bound to strike someone in his position, imprisoned in a brightly lit cell, with guards present at all times. On other occasions, Eichmann emphasized quite pointedly how difficult it was for him to get by without a woman for so long.⁸⁰ If we consider these statements, and the fact of his affairs, in isolation, we are in danger of giving in to the comforting notion of the “Holocaust monster,” as portrayed in a few novels and even some more recent films. Here Eichmann is cast as the orgiast who, having become intoxicated by murder and lost his moral compass, satisfies his sexual urges over the graves of his victims.⁸¹ But Eichmann’s character was far removed from this sort of pornographic Nazi kitsch. His concept of propriety allowed for the murder of Jews but restricted his personal life to strictly bourgeois mores. He could only abandon them where Nazi ideology provided him with the support, the categories, and, above all, the vocabulary. Hypocrisy and embarrassment made him fall silent when it came to his own physical needs, but reproduction was a topic of conversation about which he had no inhibitions. This was the “fight for survival” against the Jewish race, until final victory. Reproduction was crudely politicized, with talk of “the drive to preserve the race.”⁸² Eichmann was too prudish to admit to even one of his affairs in conversation with a notorious Don Juan like Sassen, but this language made it possible for him to boast about his enduring potency and about becoming a father for a fourth time at an advanced age.

Heinrich Himmler expected his SS men to each have at least four children. Adolf Eichmann may not have succeeded in killing all the Jews, but by November 1955 he had his four children, all of them sons; this was one duty, at least, he had more than fulfilled. It would have been difficult for him not to brag. In this respect, he knew he was united with National Socialists like Willem Sassen, who had also called the birth of a child following his escape from Europe “a challenge to the world of [his] enemies, his fierce assertion of life, of values that had been trampled and spat upon by his enemies.”⁸³ Only committed anti-Semites of a racial-biological disposition could see children as a triumph “over the forces that tried to destroy me.” Only where the race war is so total that it must be continued after the military defeat could the birth of a son give one a “triumphal satisfaction.” In the war of the races, potency was an unbeatable long-range weapon, and even in retirement the SS Obersturmbannführer had shown his commitment and done his duty.

Vera Liebl gave birth to her son in November 1955, in the Pequeña Compañía Maria, a Catholic hospital in Buenos Aires.⁸⁴ “I was not officially allowed to claim my son as my own, since I was not officially married to my wife,”⁸⁵ Eichmann explained later, as if it were not clear to everyone that the missing marriage certificate could never have been the reason. Astonishingly, the nurses referred to the child quite openly as “Baby Eichmann,”⁸⁶ but it would still have been careless to register the birth under this well-known name. Eichmann’s son was registered as Vera Liebl’s illegitimate child and was given his father’s pseudonym, plus a middle name that was a tribute to the priest in Genoa who had made this “triumph” possible: Ricardo Francisco.⁸⁷ The enforced discretion threw Eichmann into a quandary. “It pained me to have to do this,” he wrote later.⁸⁸ And it was perfectly clear to him who was responsible for this personal offense: “Political circumstances are to blame for the complication that our legitimate son, born inside marriage, has been registered as illegitimate.”⁸⁹

A Forsaken Bunch in a Forsaken Position

Yes indeed, my dear friend, we are a forsaken bunch in a forsaken position. This is our strength, and this is why we have no worse enemy than our own despair.

—Willem Sassen, Christmas 1955⁹⁰

Eichmann should have been satisfied with the way things were going. He had a new job, his wife was doing well after the birth, the child was healthy, and he had a round-number birthday coming up. Ordinarily, all this would be cause to celebrate. But for Eichmann, it was a nightmare, and not just because births and fiftieth birthdays have a tendency to precipitate crises in a lot of men. Even men without mass murder on their conscience start to question themselves after the birth of a baby, wondering what their child will think of its father. And Eichmann knew his children could read all about the fact that he was a war criminal and a mass murderer. He had a good, faithful wife, but he had to pass her off as his lover, thereby denying her the respect she deserved. He had a healthy child, but officially the baby was not his. And his fiftieth birthday was approaching in March 1956, but Ricardo Klement’s birthday was not until May, and in any case he was seven years younger. And all that was left of his glittering career was a name he could no longer control. Eichmann wanted a change, and both his associates and the world beyond were happy to oblige. “It’s my own fault that the Jews were able to catch me,” he would say later, and looking at his life after 1955, we must conclude that he was right.⁹¹

It wasn’t just Eichmann’s personal circumstances that changed in 1955. Over the course of the year, several pieces of bad news arrived for all those still dreaming of National Socialism, whether in the former Reich or in exile. Austria signed the Independence Treaty; occupation came to an end in the West German Federal Republic; West Germany was allowed to form its own armed services and to join NATO; and the Hallstein Doctrine gave West Germany the sole right to represent German interests abroad. For those who were still of a National Socialist bent, it meant the renunciation of all interests for Germany as a whole and an orientation toward the victor, the detested United States. Their election hopes had also come to nothing: in 1954 Hans-Ulrich Rudel had fantasized about a “small minority of clear-sighted people” convincing the stupid majority over time, but he achieved a meager 3.8 percent of the vote when he stood for the Deutsche Reichspartei in the Lower Saxony state elections, where right-wing parties had previously had most success. The German people had clearly not yet realized there was a “web of lies over Germany” or “what wicked games those circles who seek to rule the world have been playing with us.”⁹² They were delighted with their prosperity and with ChancellorKonrad Adenauer, who had succeeded in negotiating the release of German prisoners of war in Moscow. The West German president, Theodor Heuss, came straight to the point, addressing the men of the Dürer circle directly in one of his speeches: Der Weg“remains embarrassing reading,” but “as voters, the population has shown quite plainly in the elections of recent years that in spite of the great slogans, or perhaps even because of the great slogans, there are some things to which they are immune.” The “group … warming itself in the sun of Peron” could carry on spreading “its ridiculous polemical notions about a future Germany, using the old vocabulary.” The Germans, said Heuss, had chosen a different path.⁹³

In summer 1955, an Israeli mission (the forerunner of an embassy) was established in Cologne, while patriotic German comrades in Argentina were still awaiting a general amnesty. At the start of 1955, Willem Sassen optimistically announced that democracy in Germany was a temporary arrangement with no future, an “interregnum.”⁹⁴ He was proved wrong. Little remained of the “will to the Reich” and the “indefatigable spirit of the perpetual German,” and prospects for a return to power and to Germany were worse than ever. The only thing the exiles in Argentina could hope for over the coming year was to inspire the few remaining valiant comrades in their homeland with hope of a sort of transcendent racial victory. “Our struggle is a dream,” Sassen wrote, resorting to the slogans of perseverance in which he had become an expert during the previous unsuccessful push for final victory. “And because our blood dreams that dream within us, our physical life is meaningless: our blood will dream on in our children, for centuries to come.”⁹⁵Scattered across the globe, all the National Socialists had left was blood. There was no more soil. And if things went on like this, Eichmann’s newborn son wouldn’t even have the right name to go with his blood.

Things were set to get worse. At the end of 1955, the discussion about crimes against humanity, in which Adolf Eichmann was so substantially involved, shifted. The first books about the National Socialists’ persecution of the Jews appeared in quick succession. The French documentary film Night and Fog was released, showing the systematic incarceration of regime opponents in concentration camps, and those camps’ everyday horrors. It disturbed viewers to the extent that the Federal German government tried to prevent it from being shown—not only in German cinemas but also at the Cannes film festival. While German historians hesitantly began the work into which they should have thrown themselves with full force, public debates about dealing with the past made the headlines for months.⁹⁶ Even Willem Sassen sounded upset when he spoke to Eichmann about the film.

The publications on the extermination of the Jews, and the changing discussion in West Germany, also influenced discussions within the Dürer circle. It started at the end of 1955, when Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews) landed like a thunderbolt. Shortly after it was published, Otto Bräutigam from the Foreign Office was temporarily placed on leave, as the book contained a document on the “Jewish question” that bore his signature.⁹⁷ The book was principally a collection of documents, and its ineluctable strength rankled with Sassen and his colleagues. It contained the Führer’s orders for theft and persecution; jubilant commentaries and notes from Göring; tallies of robbery and murder from Operation Reinhard; reports about gold teeth, Reichsbank deposits, and forced labor; gas chamber plans; extracts from the Gerstein Report; Himmler’s order to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto; Stroop’s final report; and, most notably, statistics on “special treatments” and “extinction.” There wasDieter Wisliceny’s report on the Final Solution; the Wannsee protocol; and an incredible number of memos, on Auschwitz, racial fanaticism, human experiments, and forced sterilizations. The reader was given an insight into the National Socialists’ anti-Jewish “policy” through a combination of excerpts with commentaries, complete documents, photographs, and facsimiles. This was all much more difficult to deny than the previously published memoirs and newspaper articles. Letterheads and signatures were clearly reproduced for all to see. A whole chapter was devoted to the “Grand Inquisitor without magic,” Adolf Eichmann.

This wealth of detail could not easily be dismissed as enemy propaganda. It could not be refuted by fake experts like Hester and Heimann. Most important, doubt was growing within the Dürer circle’s own ranks. It was slowly dawning on every last National Socialist that the extermination of the Jews really had taken place. Even people who had grown accustomed to looking the other way when they were in power, relativizing and playing everything down, couldn’t get past this evidence. Reviews of the book soon appeared in all the papers, and Eichmann’s name cropped up in every article. Das Dritte Reich und die Juden was also mentioned in the July edition of Der Weg.⁹⁸ Even a publication run by the most hard-bitten postwar Nazis was starting to feature terms it had always carefully avoided or used sarcastically: Auschwitz; Majdanek; the Final Solution to the Jewish Question; the Wannsee conference; grave mistreatment of the opponents of the Nazi regime; the deportation of forty thousand French Jews.⁹⁹ It talked of “people who were thoughtlessly driven into the concentration camps, to their death,” the “concentration camp terror” and the “Jewish atrocity.”¹⁰⁰ The top names were mentioned: Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, Arthur Nebe, Odilo Globocnik, and Theodor Dannecker,¹⁰¹ the “adviser on Jewish affairs” from Department IV B 4 in France. The facts were so overwhelming that even in Buenos Aires, people started calling a spade a spade. In this 1956 article, the only name noticeable by its absence was Eichmann’s.

But attention and acceptance are very different things. Instead of recognizing that the Nazi extermination of the Jews had been a “dance of death unique in world history,”¹⁰² the postwar Nazis dreamed up a new conspiracy theory. If the facts could not be denied, they could at least be reinterpreted. A series of articles entitled “The Role of the Gestapo” painted a picture of the “conspiracy that has been raging since 1933.” Amid all the incomprehensible nonsense of this series, one thing emerges with clarity: the desperation of the men who still dreamed of a National Socialist redemption.¹⁰³ Briefly, the soothing story they told themselves went like this: it was not the SS but the Gestapo that was to blame for everything. The Gestapo had “never been the pure National Socialist police organization that it was claimed to be in the posters of that time, and today.” From the very beginning, it had practiced “subversion.” It was really a cover for a small group “disguised as upright citizens” that tried to “frustrate, corrupt and compromise the policies of the Third Reich.” It aimed to topple “Hitler’s hated government of the people [!]” and to do permanent damage to Germany’s standing in the world, which Hitler had done so much to advance. The man to blame for all this misery, as the article explained in fantastical detail, was the head of the Abwehr (Germany’s military intelligence organization), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had enthroned the intriguer Reinhard Heydrich. All the violence was chalked up to the accounts of these two men, and “today we may suspect a very specific system designed to compromise and make enemies for the new government.” Apparently, when Heydrich discovered how Canaris was misusing him, Canaris had him summarily killed. Then Heinrich Müller, who in reality was not a National Socialist at all, organized the extermination of the Jews in the east. The “criminal element in the Gestapo leadership” was a group of unscrupulous men “who unthinkingly drove people into concentrations camps, to their deaths, in order finally to strike down a king—Adolf Hitler.” And recognizing that people would want to know why no one else had realized it, the author of the article explained: a lie had been constructed instead. “The victors obviously knew all about the real background of the Gestapo campaigns. They had to help suppress the truth, so that the betrayed world would not one day learn that it was Hitler’s opponents, not Hitler, who organized this.” So it all turns out well in the end, for Hitler and Germany and National Socialism.

The article was attributed to Paul Beneke, allegedly writing from Madrid. The real Paul Beneke lived in the fifteenth century and was, depending on whose side you were on, either the selfless hero who defeated the English fleet in 1468 and restored the trading rights of the Hanseatic League, or a savage pirate who stole every vessel that crossed his path. Gustav Freytag, an author much loved by the National Socialists for his “images from German history” and his clearly anti-Semitic writing, created a literary memorial to the Danzig admiral, which could be purchased in a splendid edition from the German military’s publishing house. In Danzig itself, Paul Beneke was a particular hero, with streets and civic buildings named after him. Knowing the special relationship the people of Danzig have with their city,¹⁰⁴ we might conclude that the author of these “Gestapo secrets” articles came from East Prussia. However, we still do not know who he was. The content clearly points to a member of the SS. The working method, the style, and the detailed knowledge behind the article also suggest the usual suspects: Sassen, Leers, or Fritsch.¹⁰⁵ Eichmann also used the catchy phrase “the greatest and most violent dance of death of all time,” but who “inspired” whom has so far been impossible to discover, particularly as the articles question everything Eichmann held to be true. He cannot have been hugely pleased with them.¹⁰⁶

Whoever was making this attempt to release his comrades’ souls from the nightmare of acknowledgment, he was neither alone nor without successors. The story of a small criminal clique, cheating Hitler and his people of their life’s work and driving the country into war and mass murder, is still being told on websites and in a certain kind of literature today. The perfidious keystone of this story was laid in1956, when Paul Beneke left the answer to who was behind it all hanging in the air. The transcript of a Deutsche Reichspartei meeting in Berlin on November 30, 1956, records a party member getting worked up over it, claiming that Eichmann, the Gestapo’s Adviser on Jewish Affairs, was a “full Jew.” With the help of Himmler and foreign Jews, Eichmann had infiltrated the SS and instilled anti-Semitism there. He was now safely back in Tel Aviv.¹⁰⁷ This meeting was the birth of Adolf Eichmann’s tenacious counterbiography,¹⁰⁸ and from then on its seemingly unstoppable career saw it providing comfort to anti-Semites in need. Had Eichmann not always said he came from Sarona, and did he not speak fluent Hebrew and Yiddish? No wonder he was able to make a career as a specialist on Jewish affairs, if he was one himself.… Even Johann von Leers, who met Eichmann for the last time in 1954 before moving to Cairo, was completely convinced of this idea in hindsight.¹⁰⁹ The classic reality-free story about “Eichmann the Jew” is the final consequence of this falsification of history, which was perpetrated by people who could no longer avoid the fact of the Holocaust but were not prepared to acknowledge it as a “German act.” The only things connecting this nonsense to the truth are Eichmann’s imagined intellectual intimacy with Judaism, and the newspaper articles post-1945, documenting survivors’ fears that Eichmann could be masquerading as a Jew to escape his pursuers. It was no coincidence that the conspiracy theorists liked to quote the old article “The Man We Are Looking For.” People intent on falsifying the facts could easily reinterpret this article as an admission by the Jews that Eichmann was one of them. Still, the Holocaust deniers’ story, which once again painted the Jews as the puppet masters responsible for their own destruction, continues to have a persistent following, and a frightening level of international fame. In Buenos Aires, meanwhile, people were very receptive to the Canaris theory, according to which the Führer was the innocent gull—but SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish heritage was a little harder to swallow. Nevertheless, Sassen and his fellow believers later made a huge effort to tempt their old comrade into confessing he was “un-German.”

Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s collection of documents even gave Willem Sassen pause. “In recent days,” he told Der Weg’s readers, “I have, with painful self-discipline, worked through a thick tome containing essays and documents on the relationship between the Third Reich and the Jews. Sometimes it choked me, and I struggled as if gripped in a stranglehold, before—completely naïve once more—crying out: ‘It is not true!’ I knew the cry was simplistic; it sprang from my own helplessness. And I believe one should not simply brand everything a lie: neither all that is written in this terrible book, nor every cry of ‘It is not true!’ ”¹¹⁰ But anyone hoping Sassen’s reading might have had a lasting effect on his worldview will be disappointed. The confession of his dismay at the book appears in an accusatory text on nuclear weapons—an invention for which “the Jews” were also to blame. A true Aryan would never split an atom. Sassen applied his rhetorical skill to describing how this “terrible book” had relieved him of a burden: “The truth is probably relative.” Ultimately, the “little” assistant operating the death camp gas chambers was “a puny dwarf next to the Nobel Prize winners and giants of this scientific extermination technology, to which mankind has been helplessly delivered up.” Alluding to the originator of the theory of relativity, Sassen relativizes into a mere nothing the crimes against humanity he had briefly mentioned, by setting them against this true, Jewish, extermination plan—all in the space of a few lines.

In spite of the way this review was packaged, with the aim of lessening the book’s effect, something had clearly happened to Der Weg’s editorial policy. Only a few months previously, the likes of Heimann and Hester were telling readers that “there were no gas chambers, gas vans or incinerators for exterminating humans in any of the concentration or internment camps inside or outside Germany.”¹¹¹ And now here were the names Belzec, Hockenholt, and Wirth—the extermination camp, the gas-van diesel technician, and the man who oversaw operations on the ground. For a moment, reality arrived in Buenos Aires, and in spite of all his reassurances, it refused to leave Sassen in peace. He didn’t restrict himself to penning platitudes about blood-soaked dreams; he went to Germany and registered as a resident there. Willem Antonius Maria Sassen van Elsloo, a journalist and author by profession, of German nationality. Official emigration from Argentina to Konstanz am Bodensee: August 25, 1956. Forsaken positions were obviously easier to deal with when you had other temporary quarters available.¹¹²

Poliakov and Wulf upped the ante with a second volume of documents, Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener (The Third Reich and Its Servants), also published in 1956. It focused on the Foreign Office, the Nazi judiciary, and the Wehrmacht. Two more influential books were also published in quick succession. First, Gerald Reitlinger’s comprehensive The Final Solution, the first ambitious study of all aspects of the Holocaust, had finally found a German publisher. The second book sprang from the extensive discussion of the so-called Kasztner Trial in Jerusalem: Die Geschichte des Joel Brand aufgeschrieben von Alex Weissberg. (An English edition, Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand, appeared in 1958.) Most of the numerous reviews mentioned Eichmann, the Adviser on Jewish Affairs from the RSHA, who had sent Joel Brand abroad to buy trucks to trade for Jewish blood. Reviewers occasionally accused the Jewish authors of a lack of objectivity,¹¹³ but set against the backdrop of Poliakov and Wulf’s documents, their books were more than unsettling.

The Dürer circle read them closely, and with every page the question of what had really happened became more insistent. They were desperate to believe that it wasn’t true. The last article on the topic in Der Weg before the start of the Sassen interviews was headed “The ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish Question.” It claimed that the real aim behind the extermination of the Jews had been the founding of the State of Israel, and that the blame for this crime had been “laid at Hitler’s door using sophisticated means.”¹¹⁴ Adolf Hitler had never ordered a “program of murdering Jews.” And thanks to the small group of conspirators who met at Wannsee—and here Eichmann was mentioned for the first and only time¹¹⁵—Hitler had never even got word of it. The Führer’s headquarters was (and one has to admire the tactful choice of words here) a “concentration cloister,” and he was cut off from what was really happening. “The conspiracy group started in the police, betraying the fact that these were the same Jewish secret agents who perverted the formally National Socialist Gestapo.” The line was that Zionists had murdered the “assimilators” they hated, in order to force the international community to give them their own state. This made the extermination of the Jews look like an internal Jewish matter, against which the poor Führer in his bunker could do nothing.

This intolerable nonsense appeared under the name Wolf Sievers, a pseudonym that was also used for other articles in Der Weg. The name is significant even at face value: Wolfram Sievers was one of the war criminals who had been hanged in Landsberg, and the Dürer circle looked on him as a martyr. When Hans-Ulrich Rudel visited Germany in 1953, he made a special pilgrimage to the gallows in the Landsberg prison and wrote emotionally, “Since my return home, I never felt so close to Germany as I did here.”¹¹⁶Wolfram Sievers was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, for his management of the “research team” known as Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), which had been responsible for human experiments and murders. He made contact with Adolf Eichmann for projects that showed total contempt for humanity, like the infamous “skeleton collection”—someone had to organize the transportation of the people destined to become exhibits. We still don’t know who was behind this pseudonym, though the style, content, and examples given in this article suggest it was one of Sassen’s pieces. He proclaimed the basic principles of the argument again in an interview in 1960, when he told a reporter from La Razón that someone else was to blame for the extermination of the Jews. Even “Eichmann was doubtless just an instrument in the hands of the people who initiated this diabolical plan,” and it had certainly never been Hitler’s idea.¹¹⁷ The pseudonym also suggests his authorship, as Sassen had already chosen two other aliases with the initials W.S.¹¹⁸ In any case, the article “The ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish Question” dealt with the very same topics and theories that formed the focus of the interviews with Eichmann: the Führer’s orders; a “Zionist conspiracy”; the attempt to preserve Hitler’s honor; the search for conspirators within the Gestapo; the surviving documents; and the books.

Not even expatriate Nazis equipped with an entire media arsenal could fight this flood of information. Sassen might have heard a few rumors after the Russian campaign, and known much more than he wanted to let on even to himself, but his knowledge of the Nazi leadership was nowhere near adequate for him to mount a credible rejoinder. He had never seen the documents, never heard anything about the conference they named, and was simply overwhelmed by the mass of material. For all their bluster about conspiracies, the postwar Nazis, both in exile and in the former German Reich, were rendered speechless and powerless by the books on the murder of the Jews. But unlike readers in West Germany, the men in Buenos Aires knew where to find someone who would have an answer for their questions. And more important, this man was famous enough that when he exposed what they imagined was another step in the ideological war, it would have some public impact. He would blow the Jewish conspiracy wide open. The witness himself was receptive to this request, unlike more cautious candidates, such as Himmler’s former chief adjutant and the “doctor” Josef Mengele. Talking had two great advantages for Eichmann: first, the Dürer circle gave him accesss to the new books, which he could not have afforded himself—books from Germany were expensive in Buenos Aires. And most important, these media-savvy comrades could enable him to regain what he so desperately wanted: control over his place in history. Then his children would be able to say, openly and proudly, that they were Adolf Eichmann’s sons.