Herr Sassen—he was the journalist who often visited me at home with the tape, to record the story of my life. I permitted him to publish these reports if I should die, or fall into the hands of the Israelis. As I see, he has now published something people believe is my memoirs.
Everything that has been published in the USA is plain lies. Only a madman could believe I wrote that.
—Eichmann, “Meine Flucht,” March 1961, on the articles in Life
For many years, Willem Sassen was credited with having tracked down the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and persuaded him to talk. Journalists’ natural sympathy for their colleagues goes some way to explaining the success of this story, as does the fact that this former war correspondent for the Dutch Voluntary SS was a charismatic man. To an outsider, Sassen looked like the kind of star author, adventurer, and bon vivant who could have pulled off such a coup, and he did everything in his power to promote this image. Of course, one didn’t have to be particularly charming, sensitive, or convincing to get Adolf Eichmann to talk. The real problem was getting him to stop: once the SS Obersturmbannführer (retired) got started, there was no holding him back. This image still hardly seems credible: we think of a man on the run wanting to stay as unobtrusive as possible, remaining extremely cautious and reticent. But that wasn’t how the National Socialists lived in Argentina. The myth of silence and secrecy merely helped them erect a wall of silence, for various reasons, after Eichmann was kidnapped. How much credence should we give to someone claiming not to know a man who was on trial for mass murder? When Israelis had just kidnapped a former colleague on his way home from work, who in their right mind would admit to having a glass of wine and working on a book about National Socialism with this very colleague? Eichmann’s associates were eager to avoid anything similar happening to them on their own way home. Their most obvious course of action was to describe Eichmann as a recluse who never spoke to anyone but Sassen—and Sassen was a journalist, who had to talk to people “like him.” But the numerous bouquets of flowers and good wishes that Eichmann received in Israel, sent from Argentina, would soon correct the impression that he had led a solitary life.1
In Argentina, Eichmann’s urge to speak had always been greater than his sense of caution. Among men he believed to be trustworthy, as we have seen, he never kept quiet about who he was. But the occasional chat at a social gathering or a conversation in the bar after work was something very different from what Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen were proposing: a systematic discussion of the history books and the current debates. Serious preparations were under way. By the end of 1956, Eichmann was also making plans, for a book he wanted to publish with Dürer Verlag. We may therefore assume that serious discussions had already taken place, to draw up a plan of work and consider who else might participate in the project, for financial reasons. Later, Willem Sassen, Eberhard Fritsch, and Adolf Eichmann all confirmed independently that they had signed a contract with one another at this point, agreeing to divide all proceeds from the work equally among them.2 The dream of making a fast buck played a significant role for them all, even if the “dream of blood” was what united them. Life in Buenos Aires always had its “soldier of fortune” aspect.
Before the official recordings began, in April 1957 at the earliest, something remarkable happened in the Sassen household. Saskia Sassen,3 who was around ten years old, saw men drilling holes in the living room ceiling and hiding microphones there. As Sassen’s daughter remembered in 2005, there was a palpable tension and a nervous bustle in the house. Eichmann arrived, then disappeared into the living room with her father, and a strange man spent the whole time he was there on the floor above, listening in. Saskia Sassen is certain that the man with her father was Adolf Eichmann, and that this was the only time she saw the man in the attic: it was a one-off occurrence.
Children’s memories are known for being a problematic source; at this age they are eager to see “secrets” in what may be a simple case of a cable layer installing a new light fixture. But there is a second source that can be connected to this episode. An old friend of the family, who had come to Argentina from Ireland with them, said that Sassen’s wife, Miep, had complained to her that she was all “wired up.”4 Unfortunately, we do not know whether her annoyance at the wires was related to microphones in the ceiling. Miep Sassen watched her husband take over the living room with his equipment every weekend for months on end. He would set up his tape recorder with several microphones positioned around the room, like trip wires, and spend hours conducting interviews with old comrades. Anyone who is prevented from entering their own living room without knocking, and is told to keep the children quiet,5 has good reason to complain about being “wired up,” even if no one has drilled holes in her ceiling. Still, Saskia Sassen’s recollection brings into play the possibility that one day before the start of the official recordings, Willem Sassen let an eavesdropper into his attic without Eichmann’s knowledge.
Saskia Sassen never forgot the strange surveillance episode, and later she would search for explanations for what she had seen. The most likely scenario she could think of was a connection to one of her father’s acquaintances, Phil Payne, the Latin America correspondent for Life, one of the magazines for which Sassen worked. “Mr. Payne from Time/Life” was someone even the children knew about. It may not have been Payne himself listening in the attic,6 but for Sassen’s daughter this connection was the only reasonable explanation for what she saw. Her interpretation was that, even before the official recordings began, her father was angling for a contract with Time Inc. and had to provide proof that the man he was interviewing really was the former SSObersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. This possibility also fits temptingly well with a report in the French magazine L’Express (large parts of which were admittedly rather imaginative).7 It claimed that Sassen had offered the interviews to Time Inc. “four years” before Eichmann was abducted, without success. The article angered Sassen, who denied having said any such thing.8 Whatever truth it published, L’Express was wrong about the dates: the interviews began considerably later and hadn’t been completed, or even started, at the time it claimed. So let us begin cautiously, with what we know to be true.
Phil Payne was the South America correspondent for Time, Inc. He arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after Perón’s overthrow and lived there in between his long trips reporting on events elsewhere. He left again in 1958. Willem Sassen provided Time Inc. with research material, acting as a source for a big article on Perón and Pedro Aramburu after the putsch in Argentina, which appeared in Life in November 1955.9 However, he was not credited in the magazine until the Eichmann articles in 1960. This suggests that Payne was Sassen’s contact at Time Inc. and a welcome visitor in the Sassen household. Prior to April 1957, if Sassen had wanted to sell the U.S. magazine a story on Eichmann, or a Holocaust exposé, he would certainly have told Phil Payne about it. Payne, in turn, would have had to convince his employer that the investment in Sassen’s information would prove worthwhile, and bugging the house as Saskia Sassen remembers would have been a good way to do it. He could check the authenticity of Sassen’s contact without scaring Eichmann away. Sassen, for his part, would have wanted to prevent a potential competitor10 from making contact with his most important source, which is a sensible precaution on such a delicate story. But Payne had little interest in exploring the past, and he may still not have been convinced by the Eichmann story. Phil Payne specialized in high-risk, up-to-the-minute stories: he had reported on the civil war in Colombia and the arms trade in Nicaragua; he had gone in search of guerrillas in Costa Rica and explored almost every trouble spot in Latin America, from Guatemala to Bolivia. He was interested in the grand narratives of revolutionaries, leaders who had gained power and lost it again, like Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and Juan Domingo Perón. In 1957 he would finish in South America and spend the next few years reporting from Rome. In 1961 he would go to Jerusalem to cover the trial of the man who had organized the Final Solution.11 In 1956 in Buenos Aires he valued Sassen not for his fanciful ideas or his insufferable friends but for his insider knowledge of the city, and for the close relationship he maintained with Perón, even when the ex-president was living in exile in Spain. In Payne’s eyes, old Nazi stories didn’t hold the same attraction—even if Eichmann’s name had found its way into the pages of Time magazine by this point, in an article about Rudolf Kasztner.12 But if Payne really did reject the Eichmann story in 1956–57, he must have been kicking himself later, as he covered the trial.
However, a few things in this story remain unclear. To begin with, why was it neccessary to go to these lengths for Adolf Eichmann? He had been far from reluctant to take up Fritsch and Sassen’s offer and showed no qualms about revealing his identity. In fact, during the first recording, he was asked if he could think of anything “to convince people that the writer of this book is really the Eichmann,” and he answered: “Yes, there is the following: the material cannot be denied, either one is familiar with the details or not.—If these gentlemen have their doubts, they can compare the pieces of handwriting, which have come out in bursts, in the files, and if necessary—though I would prefer not to do this—I could personally give them a photograph … from this period.”13 In light of the lengths to which Eichmann and his family had gone, for so many years, to ensure that not a single photo fell into the hands of his pursuers, his openness toward his new friends is striking. Later, he really did autograph a photo for Willem Sassen: “Adolf Eichmann. SS Obersturmbannführer (retired).” Whatever Fritsch, Sassen, and Eichmann were planning to publish, it was clearly a team effort, and a pseudonym or any sort of cover for Eichmann was not part of the plan. Quite apart from these considerations, we cannot be sure that the microphones were even being set up for Eichmann. Considering who else Sassen invited to join the discussion group, he might well have been testing the listening equipment on Eichmann in case someone refused to be recorded openly.14
Children aren’t the only people who find the idea of people drilling holes in walls and laying wires irresistibly mysterious. The possibility of men eavesdropping in the attic is clearly much too appealing for a prosaic explanation. Could the bugging operation have been carried out by an intelligence service, rather than having a financial motive? The important question here is whether anyone was actually interested in Adolf Eichmann at this time. The National Socialists who were still at large had dropped off the U.S. priority list—apart from those the CIA had recruited for itself.15 Israel’s newly formed intelligence service had other things on its plate: the Suez crisis began in October 1956, and the Israelis had not followed up on Wiesenthal’s clue.
What about Germany? Fritz Bauer, the attorney general of Hesse, was just beginning the difficult and unpopular task of prosecuting Nazi perpetrators. He had requested Adolf Eichmann’s “wanted” file from Vienna.16 On November 24, 1956, the district court inFrankfurt finally issued an arrest warrant for “Adolf Eichmann, whereabouts presently unknown.” It issued the warrant in connection with the case against “Krumey and others,” and according to its wording, it suspected Eichmann of “killing people in numbers that cannot be precisely established, in a cruel and underhand manner, acting from low motives, during the period 1938–1945, in various countries of Europe. As an SS Obersturmbannführer and head of Dept. IV B 4 of the RSHA, Eichmann was responsible for the ‘resettlement of the Jews’ in Germany and in the lands occupied by Germany during the war. In the context of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question, he ordered the transport of several million members of the Jewish faith, and their extermination by gassing in concentration camps.”17 From 1957, Eichmann’s name would appear on the German “wanted” list. But Fritz Bauer’s investigations were unwelcome in Germany, and there is no evidence of any other institutions’ energetic involvement in the hunt for Eichmann. The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, Federal Office for Criminal Investigations) even said that fundamental things about the case prevented an Interpol search for Eichmann.18 At first, Bauer was kept extremely busy with the cases in which the whereabouts of perpetrators was known—for example, Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary. With a judiciary whose ranks had some Nazi history of their own, this work proved extremely difficult. Krumey was arrested on April 1, 1957. As we will see, these events were followed closely in Argentina, but even in this case, criminal proceedings were not brought immediately. Bauer certainly wasn’t in a position to take any action in Argentina at this point. But the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) had begun to take an interest in Rudel and Fritsch quite independently of Bauer’s investigation; more on this later.19
In any case, the possibility that a spy under Sassen’s own roof might have prompted the West German investigation is pure speculation. To begin with, it is highly unlikely that a man who had cursed and sought to destroy “Rumpfdeutschland” (the leftover western half of a divided Germany) and its institutions would allow one of these West German institutions into his attic—he also had far too much to lose. If someone from the German intelligence service had wanted to know what these old comrades were up to in Sassen’s living room, that person would have had to find a way of placing himself among them. It would not have been a particularly difficult task—and certainly easier than going to the trouble of eavesdropping on Sassen.
So what are we to make of this childhood memory of the Sassen house being bugged? From today’s perspective, the likeliest explanation is still that it was a journalistic operation. Phil Payne was often in Argentina between 1955 and 1957, and we have evidence he was in Buenos Aires on May 10, 1957.20 But until further documents or witnesses emerge, or reports are unearthed in the Time Inc. archive, this explanation too is mere speculation. The only certainty is that preparations for the group discussions with Adolf Eichmann appeared to be exciting and mysterious to the Sassen children. Willem Sassen had never taken on a project of this magnitude, and he was probably just as excited as the other participants. If Sassen’s house was bugged, it would have been expressly permitted by Sassen himself. But what purpose it served and who carried it out remains, for the moment at least, a mystery.21 Eichmann’s explanation for how he could be identified shows that, from the beginning, some of the people involved in the project were not part of the core Dürer circle. Eichmann discovered only gradually that Sassen was not always honest with him and was entirely prepared to go over his head—whether there were eavesdroppers in the attic or not. But Eichmann signed up for this new task enthusiastically, throwing all caution to the winds.
1
The binding and dust jacket should be kept to one colour; pearl- or dove-gray perhaps, with clear, linear and attractive lettering. It is clear that I do not want a pseudonym, as it is not in the nature of the thing.
—Eichmann, 19611
We cannot know when Adolf Eichmann first hit upon the idea of writing down his thoughts. He later said he made a first attempt (a work combining murder statistics and descriptions of Nazi institutions) directly after the war—meaning in Altensalzkoth. The document, he said, then became too much of a risk, and he burned it. It may sound strange that he could have begun to write so soon after a defeat, and when he was only in partial safety, but at that point he may well have felt the urge to commit himself to paper. It would not have been a bad idea to practice his defense in preparation for a possible trial. In any case, if Eichmann did compose a manuscript in northern Germany, it wouldn’t have been his first.
Today, we have thousands of pages of Eichmann’s stories, thanks not only to the trial transcripts but to a remarkable tendency he shared with many other National Socialists. Throughout his life, Eichmann was fascinated by writing and fancied himself an author. He was so taken by the idea of publishing a book that in 1961, after the trial had taken its disastrous course and he was awaiting the verdict in Israel, he was enthusiastically talking about jacket colors, potential editors, fonts, and dedicated copies—though it was still unclear whether publication was even a realistic possibility.2 There have been only a few attempts to engage with Eichmann’s texts as such. For one thing, his tireless writing has been seen as a symptom of his drive to justify himself. For another, as authors likeHarry Mulisch and Hannah Arendt have emphasized, his prose has affected, posturing qualities. Someone who has thoroughly analyzed their own compulsion to write cannot ignore the provocation of Eichmann’s claim to be “one of us.” This claim will also be unpleasantly familiar to historians later, when we are confronted with Eichmann posing as a historian. Writers and historians have a strong impulse to make this aspect of Eichmann seem ridiculous, or to discredit his ambitions as a petit-bourgeois fantasy.
The National Socialists’ penchant for publicly burning mountains of books has distorted our view: National Socialism had a great—perhaps too great—respect for the power of the written word. People burn books only when they attribute power to them; in other words, because they fear them. This fear was one of the Nazis’ fundamental motivations. In the early twentieth century, people had enough experience of the book as a mass medium to know that history didn’t just happen; it was an interpretation of events written for the generations to come. This insight was part of Adolf Hitler’s aggressive path, along which the “creative” struggle, and the destruction of what had been created before 1933, steadily advanced.
The National Socialists didn’t just rewrite history through their actions. From the outset, theirs was also a cultural and literary project: they vilified the culture industry as “Jewish,” and discredited whole branches of academia as “too much under foreign influence.” This orientation made the book one of their enemies’ greatest weapons, particularly in the case of the Jews. Sorting and burning books—as the Nazis went on to do to humans—was just the first step. The second was to care for and cultivate the German race, and to found a Nazi culture and academic tradition. They needed their own books, in both the arts and the sciences, for they believed that in National Socialism, they had finally found the basis on which to build a truly German literary and academic tradition. As a result, the production of books under National Socialism was prodigious—and the reinterpretation of contemporary standards of knowledge was an act of violence.
This new culture was promoted by the self-proclaimed ideological elite, in particular the SD. The SD strove to be “creative”: the “creative human” was the opposite of the clerks and pencil pushers of the day, and the Nazis believed this creativity would spell their end. Eichmann’s “work” in Berlin was shaped from the very beginning by the production of texts. His first task, he said, was to produce a summary of the Zionist classic The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl. This kind of work was new to Eichmann, but not to many of his colleagues, who were university educated. One of his first commanding officers, Leopold von Mildenstein, was a relatively prominent author. Following his travels in the Orient in 1933, he had published “A Nazi Tells of a Journey to Palestine” in the SS magazine Der Angriff, to great acclaim. The magazine even had a commemorative coin made to accompany the series, which—incredibly—featured a swastika on the front and a Star of David on the back.3 Eichmann admired his superior officer and emulated him (or so he remembered it). Mildenstein’s successor, Herbert Hagen, with whom Eichmann made his trip to the Middle East in 1937, instituted a book group with a demanding reading list. He also commissioned more book reviews, press reviews with commentaries, and sometimes lengthy Leithefte, or “guidance booklets,” for professional and training use. Eichmann was so fascinated by these booklets that he always claimed he had written one himself, and that it had been “printed.”4 “In this report I gave a factual account of the establishment of the Zionist world organization, the goals of Zionism, its sources of aid and its difficulties, and also underlined the challenge, because Zionism complied with our own wishes in this respect, because Zionism was also seeking a solution.” Strictly speaking, Leithefte were not printed but were produced on a typewriter. An SS Leitheft was a secret dossier for use within the SD, not to be confused with the SS magazine of the same name, or a published book.5 The title mentioned by Eichmann has not been found, but his outline sounds suspiciously like the terrible anti-Semitic book Das Weltjudentum: Organisation, Macht und Politik (World Jewry: Organization, Power and Politics), published in 1939 under the pseudonym Dieter Schwarz. Wisliceny claimed that Hagen and Franz Alfred Six compiled this volume. The department was proud of it. Its style doesn’t suggest Eichmann’s authorship, though he obviously would have loved to have been its author. The number of SD Leithefte to which he laid claim increased every time he talked about his activities as a writer.6
But even during the Nazi period, Eichmann’s ambitions went far beyond internal pamphlets. In May 1942, as he told both Sassen and his interrogator in Israel, he wrote a hundred-page work titled “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” It was to be published “for training purposes” by Nordland Verlag, with a print run of fifty thousand. As well as general explanations of the “Jewish question” and the transportation process, it apparently contained statistical material. He told Sassen he had offered the manuscript to Heydrich for publication under his name—and when Heydrich was assassinated in June, Eichmann decided he would at least dedicate it to him. But nothing came of it, and at the end of the war it had to be burned.
There are numerous inconsistencies in Eichmann’s stories about this book, which suggest that he was greatly exaggerating.7 The SS’s Nordland Verlag published two prestigious series for RSHA Department VII from 1939 onward: “Books on the Jewish Question” and “Sources and Accounts on the Jewish Question.” A volume of statistics was to be part of it. Franz Alfred Six, the head of Department VII, subsequently discussed the task with Eichmann, in connection with a conference. Six made quite clear, however, that it was to be “a group project, according to our directives” and that, strictly speaking, all he wanted from Eichmann was the raw data.8
But Eichmann found the very idea of publishing his own volume in this well-known series so flattering that, even years later, he still remembered the date and the publisher and claimed to be one of the authors chosen for this magnificent series of books.
Eichmann may have said he was never interested in the “limelight,” but his behavior clearly shows he was fascinated by publicity. He gave speeches at internal conferences and was a regular lecturer at the SD school in Bernau,9 to say nothing of his miserable speeches to his victims. His penchant for dramatic public appearances and his desire to leave something for posterity (beyond the history he wrote by committing mass murder) were not just a reaction to exile. But in Argentina, three things happened to increase his motivation even further. First, in 1955 the first books about the extermination of the Jews began to appear. Eichmann viewed them as “enemy literature” and provocation, like the numerous newspaper articles. Second, following the collapse of the Third Reich, the ideological warrior had been left with only one weapon: writing and publicity. And third, this was the first time he had fallen in with people who were actually fighting this battle, pen in hand. They had a publishing house at their disposal and—most important—they seemed to be interested in what he knew. These men were Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch. In reality, the Dürer Verlag was a tiny, makeshift operation with no presence or potential beyond its own readership, but Adolf Eichmann was a newcomer to the book trade, and this fact clearly passed him by. Perhaps he fell into the trap of all inward-looking communities, whose self-referential thinking eventually makes everything outside appear marginal. From his perspective, Der Weg’s role in the far-right publishing scene must have looked incredibly impressive: Sassen knew Perón, he had written a novel, and he had published articles in Nation Europa and Adolf von Thadden’s paper, Reichsruf. Hans-Ulrich Rudel had written his memoirs and other short texts, and he was a candidate for a German political party. Leers sent articles from Cairo, and even the mufti sent his regards. German and Austrian publishers like Druffel placed ads in Der Weg, and Eberhard Fritsch diligently collected responses to his magazine from the German media, ranging from Der Spiegel and Die Zeit to radio programs.10 Even the West German president, Theodor Heuss, had mentioned him. For Eichmann, the idea of becoming part of this feared group must have been irresistible.
The Argentina Papers
Eichmann’s productivity is astonishing—even to someone with their own experience of writing, and even just looking at the extant material to which we have access. Today Eichmann’s Argentina Papers are distributed across three archive collections. They include not only the famous Sassen transcript and Eichmann’s notes on it (which alone comprise around one hundred pages) but also a similar volume of Eichmann’s texts, written for his own purposes before 1957. To date, anyone wanting to read Eichmann’s stories has had to approach the task with a great deal of patience and an excellent memory, in order to piece together the original from the scattered pages, some of which are barely legible. The transcripts are incomplete and sometimes locked away in cupboards. Between the manuscript’s beginning and its end lie the hurdles of Eichmann’s difficult handwriting and 150 miles.11 This may explain why no one has yet made the effort to read it all or even considered the notion that extensive Argentina Papers could exist—let alone that we might be able to completely reconstruct at least one of Eichmann’s large manuscripts. But in reassembling the pieces of this puzzle, it quickly becomes clear that we have more than just the thousand pages of the Sassen interviews. There are also 107 pages of a stand-alone manuscript with the programmatic title “Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen!” (The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!), several introductory essays with accompanying notes, and around one hundred more pages of notes and commentaries on books.
Apparently, another of Eichmann’s manuscripts has also survived, though it is not available to researchers. The “Roman Tucumán” (Tucumán Novel) is still in the possession of the Eichmann family. It is said to be 260 pages, in which Eichmann attempted to give a detailed account of his life and actions, explaining himself first and foremost to his children, his family, and the “generations to come,” on which he placed so much importance. At present, only the Eichmann family has a detailed knowledge of this text.12 The only other clues to its contents come from conversations between Eichmann and his lawyer, Robert Servatius, and Eichmann’s statements during the trial. Servatius announced the submission of this text to the court as the settlement of Eichmann’s account with National Socialism and “proof of the accused’s real attitude.”13 We might suspect that the “novel” is a variation of an appeal he made to his sons, which Klaus Eichmann remembered well: “I don’t want you ever to go into the military, or politics, he said. When I say ‘said,’ I mean he ordered us.”14 But only the release of what is probably Eichmann’s last currently unknown text will clarify this question. And as the pages of the Argentina Papers to which we already have access have not yet been subjected to close scrutiny, historians have plenty of work to fill the time until this point: reading Eichmann is anything but simple. For one thing, his handwriting is extremely idiosyncratic; the typists Sassen employed to make fair copies found it so difficult that this material should not be used without checking the originals.15
Eichmann may have had an usually pronounced sense of order, but it clearly didn’t extend to his writing. His terrible scrawl, and his habit of using every conceivable kind of paper, were anything but orderly. And his expressions and ideas are just as idiosyncratic, revealing a man with no particular feel for words or language. Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classic German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy, and incredible human wretchedness. Shlomo Kulcsár implied that Eichmann’s style was not that of the typical Nazi or bureaucrat.16 His texts demand a twofold feat of concentration: the reader must constantly exercise her judgment, while always keeping in mind who the author is and what he did before he started writing. But as unalterable as our knowledge of the historical facts is, we run the risk of underestimating Adolf Eichmann if we simply present the Argentina Papers as evidence. Men like Eichmann write for quite different reasons from the rest of us, namely to hinder historical research and steer it toward their own goals.
In order to interpret pieces of self-justification like Eichmann’s Argentina Papers, we should not expect them to yield new insights into historical events. A man who writes in order to justify himself is neither a historian nor a chronicler of his age. Furthermore, anyone with such a vested interest behind his public “thought” is not a reliable witness. Every single date and detail could be a lie. These texts bear witness to only one thing with any reliability, and that is the thought process involved in any kind of writing, whether it proclaims truth or lies. A lie still has to be set on a foundation of what the writer believes to be the truth. The new historical fact to be discovered by interpreting Eichmann’s writing—his self-representation and his falsification of history—is his thought itself.
Eichmann said he started to write during his time “on the ranch,” meaning from March 1955. And in the last part of the 107-page text, he makes a clear reference to the Suez crisis, so we can at least be sure that the final three pages were written in October–November 1956. When the interviews finally began in April 1957,17 Eichmann brought one of his manuscripts along.18 The idea of him writing “on the ranch” seems to fit the facts. Separated from his family during the week, he had plenty of time to read the books that made accusations about what he had done and that condemned what he still viewed as his greatest achievement. “Writers began scribbling about me early on, creating the legends,” with “their lies about the six or eight million.” Even “non-Jews are making me their scapegoat.” All this, Eichmann wrote in a separate set of notes under the heading “General,” was at best “a mixture of truth and fiction.” He had been scapegoated without reason, or as he tactlessly phrased it, he had been “branded as one of these halo-wearers.”19 He wanted to explode this “bomb of lies.” Writing seemed like the right way to do it, as he explained to his wife: “This book will be my defense, and I will then go to Germany, and turn myself in in Germany.”20 As absurd as it seems to us today, Adolf Eichmann was aiming to use this book to reclaim not just his name but his life in Germany.
If we consider the reality of criminal prosecutions in West Germany in the early 1950s, we must concede that Eichmann’s plan didn’t look entirely futile. There was no death penalty, and the prosecution of Nazi criminals tended to result in comparatively lenient sentences. The Nuremberg Trials in the Allied and American courts were over, and prosecution had passed into the hands of the new German institutions, which were frequently headed by old staff. Eichmann knew plenty of former colleagues who were now living unchallenged in Germany. War criminals could bank on receiving short sentences, and a statute of limitations might be on the way even for major Nazi criminals. After all, it had been nearly a decade since the fall of the Third Reich. But Eichmann must have been very naïve if he really thought the rest of the world would permit Hitler’s Adviser on Jewish Affairs to spend a few years in jail and then stroll back into Germany a free man. A lot of people had a million reasons to find the thought of a living, breathing Eichmann unbearable. Once he had served his sentence, it would never have been safe for him to live under his own name—at least, not in the democratic Federal Republic. But then, Eichmann was no great defender of democracy: he was among those who could well imagine a return to other political conditions. His attempt to speak out about his past quickly revealed that he was trying to square the circle. On the one hand, he wanted to go back to an ethnic German community, meaning a right-wing community, which had fundamentally changed since May 1945. On the other, he wanted to justify what he had done and was still unable to see there might have been an alternative course of action. It was impossible to achieve both of these aims at once, and this fact seems to have become clear to Eichmann as he was writing.
The “Anonymous Wanderer in a Submarine”
What happens in the perpetrator’s mind—even when he does not speak the truth—is essential to an understanding of this chapter of history.
—Moshe Zimmermann, 199921
The most frequently quoted phrase from the Argentina Papers, which is often taken to be Eichmann’s closing remark, has never been verified.22 The original handwritten version does not entirely correspond to this memorable quote about the “anonymous wanderer,” which can probably be explained by the simple fact that this section is extremely difficult to decipher. Eichmann had neither a bureaucrat’s orderly handwriting nor any feeling for literary formulations. What he did possess was an astonishing talent for nonsensical mixed metaphors. “I am beginning to tire of living between worlds, as an anonymous wanderer in a ‘submarine,’ ” he says in the notes headed “Personal,” which are one of his attempts to formulate a suitable introduction to his book. “The voice of my heart, which no man can escape, constantly whispered the search for peace to me; it may even find peace with my former enemy. Perhaps this too is part of the German character. And I would be the last person not to be willing to turn myself in to the German authorities, if …”23
Eichmann’s “if” did not relate to the fact that no one could remember him and his colleagues ever behaving in a peaceful way, or the German character showing a particularly peaceful side between 1933 and 1945. Nor did it occur to him that “the enemy” in the singular was part of the Nazi vocabulary, an unmistakable synonym for “the Jews.” And anyone still cherishing the hope that Eichmann had realized the insolence of this search for peace in light of his past actions, or that he was about to cast doubt on his own capacity for peace, will be disappointed. Eichmann’s “if” placed the blame elsewhere: “… if I did not have to consider that the interest in the politics of the case might still be too great to bring about a clear, objective outcome to the affair matter.”24 Eichmann then announced this “clear, objective outcome”—the verdict, in other words—as an incontrovertible fact. His conscience was clear: he was “neither a murderer nor a mass-murderer,” and if he could be accused of anything, then it was “abetting the killing during the war” while acting under orders. “I passed on the evacuation and deportation orders I received, and oversaw the compliance with and following of these orders that I received and passed on.” He also claimed not to know which of the people who had been deported were subsequently killed.25
Of course, this was a catalog of lies from a man who played a large role in the development and implementation of the Nazis’ expulsion and extermination policies. Eichmann certainly hadn’t just been “passing on orders.” But more interesting is the reason he could not force himself to make even the most minimal of confessions: “I said I had to accuse myself of abetting the killing of enemies during the war, if I were to pass a severe and unreserved judgment on myself. I just do not yet see clearly whether I also have the right to judge the people who were my direct subordinates at that time, or to make this judgment before there has been a general consideration of others—because so far I have not heard (forgive me the comparison) that my colleagues on the other side, some of whom have been highly decorated and are in senior official positions or are enjoying their pensions, have been prosecuted for abetting killings, or have accused themselves of this.” Eichmann may have sent thousands of Jews on death marches in 1944, and continuted to involve himself in new plans for gassing into 1945, but he had not the slightest pang of conscience in comparing the extermination of the Jews with the expulsion of “many millions” of other people, “the majority of them after the war.” He demanded “the same justice for all.” “And—this one must understand—as someone who was a mere receiver of orders, I cannot be holier than the Pope,” a statement which was not meant “cynically” or “sarcastically.” Of course, Eichmann did not suggest how else it should be taken. Someone who had already been compared to czars and other dignitaries clearly didn’t have a problem assuming the holy throne. Anyway: everything that he had done, he had done “with a clear conscience and a faithful heart.” He had been convinced of “the people’s need,” and as the “leaders of the former German Reich” “preached” the “necessity of total war,” he did his patriotic duty. “The morality of the Fatherland [!] that dwells within me quite simply did not allow me, given these considerations, to declare myself guilty, as I believed I should, of abetting killings during the war. So I may act on the balance of my inner morality, just as the gentlemen receiving the same orders on the other side obviously have.”26
We may doubt whether Eichmann ever “believed” that he should confess anything. He was clearly someone who was out to “create” a verdict rather than to reach one.27
The yardstick against which this “inner morality” was measured was not an idea of justice, a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection. It was quite clear to Eichmann that any verdict on his actions would always rest on the wrong political mind-set—a measure that lay outside the “morality of the Fatherland” and therefore outside an ethnic German perspective. What sounds on a first reading like an invocation of universal justice, an appeal for all men to be judged by a common human law, is revealed on closer inspection to be an entirely different kind of “equal right.” Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which would also apply to him because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which every people has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all. And they had not stopped defending themselves: it had merely been necessary to postpone the final victory, when military supplies ran out. The people, however, had not surrendered their ideological weapons. Eichmann was still convinced that “the people’s need” existed, and his ultimate justification was that one’s own people stood above all other interests. Otherwise, you became a “filthy swine and a traitor.”28 And conscience? Conscience was simply the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within” a person, which Eichmann also termed the “voice of blood.” There is as little universal law within us as there is a right to the starry sky for everyone. For a German, the law is a German law.
Eichmann didn’t see “conscience” as a corrective to all thoughts and actions, something that even allowed people to question the prevailing customs. Nor was it the guiding light in the search for what was right and good. On the contrary, anyone who thought of “conscience” in these terms would be a traitor to the voice of blood. If Eichmann listened to the “voice of his heart,” he would be showing a sentimental weakness, which was a fundamental evil for National Socialists. His heart could whisper the search for peace till it was blue in the face; he would always remain strong enough to ignore these vestiges of an “un-German” education. Eichmann clearly still believed in “victory in this total war, or the downfall of the German people.” There could be no “search for peace” that was not preceded by victory—and the victory was that of ethnicity over a genuine universal right to justice. Without further ado, Eichmann put off his confession of guilt until after the final victory of German morality. “The more often and intensively I … consider these things, the more convinced I am that in truth I have not made myself guilty of any crimes, even according to today’s laws.”29 After all, “the enemy” wasn’t confessing his guilt, either. The only universal element here is “guilt,” not justice: guilt, under which heading all actions in war become equal. The real perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity always welcomed the theory of collective guilt. It allowed them to disappear into a vast guilty crowd and persuade the rest of the population that they had been their accomplices. The declaration of universal guilt also became Eichmann’s get-out clause. First, everyone else had to recognize that they were all just as guilty as Eichmann was, and only then would he do the same—because when everyone is guilty, nobody is, and confessions can be made without legal, or indeed moral, consequences. These evasive acrobatics might be termed justification by accusation. This was the master race making the rules once again. And the train of thought in the short handwritten texts of “General/Personal” provided the framework for the larger manuscript they were intended to introduce.
“The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!”
It is now time for me to step out of my anonymity and introduce myself:
Name: Adolf Otto Eichmann, Nationality: German
Position: SS Obersturmbannführer (retired)
—Eichmann, “The Others Spoke,” 1956
Only the middle section of the original 107-page manuscript called “The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!”30 is really well known, as a fragment of it was contained in the pages that found their way to Israel for the trial.31 The text consists of a ten-page introduction, followed by a segment entitled “Re: My Findings on the Matter of ‘Jewish Questions’ and Measures by the National Socialist German Government to Solve This Complex During the Years 1933 to 1945,” and a twenty-six-page final section containing thoughts on the question of guilt.
Eichmann’s planned reentry into public life comes across as self-assured and even forceful. The author presents himself as the victim of malicious defamation and misrepresentation. His patience, which until now has been almost superhuman, is finally at an end: these vicious attacks have become too much for him. Now it’s his turn—surely people will understand that. “I want to create clarity. I want to name and shame the lie at its source,” the brave hero proclaims.32 And again, he announces that he is ultimately willing to confess his guilt (under certain conditions), but not straight away: “I don’t want to act prematurely,” he says mysteriously.
Eichmann had a very clear idea of his text’s target audience. These “accounts” are for “my friends and non-friends”—but especially for his friends. To his surprise, he adds, he has discovered that he has “a large circle of friends, many millions of people.” However, anyone curious to know who Eichmann is talking about will have to wait another hundred pages to find out. By the second paragraph, he is explaining that his own judgment of himself is a foregone conclusion: “Now I am neither a murderer nor a mass murderer; to prove this, I now intend officially to sit in judgment on myself.” Eichmannism, as the psychologists who examined him in Israel explained, is essentially monologism. When Eichmann says he doesn’t want “to gloss over anything in this justification” or even “sidestep” what he has done, the words have a hollow, rhetorical ring, even for those who don’t know what the following pages contain—as do the references to his own “average character” and his playful allusions to German literature, where he speaks about “human deeds and striving” and his “trials and tribulations.”33
The arguments Eichmann used as justification are well known: the oh-so-depraved world, and the claim that he “certainly did nothing worse” than the many other people acting under orders. A more interesting aspect of this text is how he dramatizes the return of his real name. Eichmann skillfully builds the tension: “Who am I, in any case,” he asks, before presenting himself as the savior of all his fellow men who find themselves in a moral quandary.34 “You human, who were my superior, you human, who were of equal rank, you human, who were my subordinate, in war you are obviously not guilty, just as I am not.”35 And I shall take away your sins, “just as I” forgive myself. “Evidently,” says Raphael Gross, “theological rhetoric works particularly well for reclaiming a universalized understanding for the Germans, without having to look too closely at past events, or even recognize a specific responsibility toward the victims.”36 This clearly applies even to this perpetrator, in conversation with his peers. Eichmann, in any case, writes himself into a state of euphoria, proclaiming the “logic” and “clarity” that will free the oppressed Germans from the incubus of their own victims. Not that a few words of understanding for the victims would have made matters any better, but the fact that there is not a single one here tips Eichmann’s words of comfort over into accusation. Regret is something this perpetrator feels only for himself and perhaps for his peers. The victims, meanwhile, implicitly remain the real guilty party, as Eichmann had always believed.
The man whose passport said he was Ricardo Klement must have yearned desperately for his return to the public eye. Hence the well-calculated introduction of his real name, at the height of the suspense he has built during this first section: “It is now time for me to step out of my anonymity and introduce myself: Name: Adolf Otto Eichmann.”37 The specialist had returned, to correct the liars who claimed to be his victims. If we imagine the circumstances in which Eichmann produced this text, the sense of triumph that writing it must have given him is tangible, even now. At the end of his working day, the rabbit farmer returns to a time when he was “famous.” Eichmann’s handwriting displays his euphoria as he scales this height: on the first page it is tiny and laboriously legible, but by the second page it is already more expansive and idiosyncratic. The ballpoint pen was clearly flying over the paper, and the author formatted his text in exactly the same way that he spoke on the tapes he recorded later: with pauses for effect (paragraphs) and accentuated punctuation—the familiar attributes of an orator’s manuscript. Eichmann was aiming to create the same effect here as he did elsewhere: decisive, energetic, professional. These sentences were to be published. Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen had big plans, and Eichmann made every effort to rise to the occasion.
A Rounded History
May current and future historians be objective enough not to stray from the path of the truth set down here.
—Eichmann, “The Others Spoke,” 195638
Following his introduction, in which he has steeled himself to tell “the truth” (directing a threatening undertone at all the liars), Eichmann turns his attention to historical events. He calls his “record” “Re: My Findings on the Matter of ‘Jewish Questions’ and Measures by the National Socialist German Government to Solve this Complex in the Years 1933 to 1945.” He wants to depict “the truth” in a “sober and factual” way, “the way things took place,” without personal judgments based on his own experience.39 As he hastens to explain to Sassen, and to the general reader, he is the only true surviving insider; everyone else is already dead. He is the only one who can help “current and future historians” “to get a rounded and truthful picture.”40 As evidence of his preeminent expertise, Eichmann adds that he had had “to steer and lead” “a large part of this complex” during his time in the SD and Department IV B 4. And “where I was not responsible, as for example with the physical extermination of the Jews, I was still obliged to get an overview of the matter.”41 This demonstrates the two-pronged tactic that Eichmann used, both in the Sassen circle and in Israel: he presented himself as an irrefutable key witness, while editing out the final years of the National Socialist regime, when his department was called IV A 4b. Self-promotion and manipulation would return control of written history to him. He alone could establish the path of truth “objectively” and for all time. The presentation of one’s own interpretation as objective truth is traditionally known as “preaching.”
Giving a “factual account,” in this section, means avoiding questions of anyone being “guilty or not guilty.” Instead, Eichmann presents such a “rounded” picture of the Nazi period that it is a wonder we have any questions left. If we are to believe him, it was all quite simple, and surprisingly unspectacular. The responsibility for dealing with the “Jewish question” rested solely with the German government, meaning Adolf Hitler “and his ministers, which is to say his Reich leaders.” The rest was just a question of oaths and obedience. But then, of course, “the former Führer” was also just doing his duty: there was a war on, and all sides lived by the “slogan” “our enemies will be destroyed.” And this meant one enemy in particular: “world Jewry declared open war on the German Reich through its Führers [!], especially Dr. Chaim Waitzmann.” And open war was what they got. Eichmann the historian calmly explains that the peaceful emigration of the Jews from the Reich was the initial goal, but this effort failed due to lack of cooperation from other countries. Then there was Theresienstadt, which had made the “Jewish leaders” happy, because here the recalcitrant, egoistic Jew “was committed for the first time to communal life and work.” The members of the Red Cross, following their visits, were full of enthusiasm for it, even in 1945. Everything was done in strict accordance with the law, and in mutual agreement with “the Jews,” in a controlled, “correct,” and nonviolent manner. But then the war arrived, and emigration was banned. At that moment he, Adolf Eichmann, knew that nothing good could come of it—and yet he was the one who, at the first Nuremberg trial, was called “the most sinister figure of this century.” (Evidently the actual words of the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, hadn’t reached Eichmann inBuenos Aires—he had simply called Eichmann “the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program,” without the hundred years and the superlative.)42 Anyway, Eichmann continues, he certainly wasn’t responsible for the extermination of the Jews. He had preferred to devote his efforts to the Madegascar Plan, until this “dream” too was struck down by the war with Russia. Unfortunately, the Russian campaign didn’t develop “as quickly as people ‘at the top’ expected”; they found themselves fighting a war on two fronts, and then “world Jewry” declared war on them as well. This was why, “as I suspect,” “any last constraints” fell away, and Hitler gave the order for “physical liquidation.” “What I felt at this time,” says the historian, “is hard to put into words, and I shall not do it.” Still, he had sworn an oath to the flag. However, when he saw the air raids, he realized that “my work actually had an uncanny similarity with—indeed, it was the same as the work” of the people transporting the bombs. Sabotage—secretly dispatching trains full of Jews abroad—would have been no use. “Who would have taken them from me?” What else could a person do, Eichmann suggests, but commit murder? He spares himself and his readers the details of the “physical liquidation,” as if it were an episode of little importance. Instead, he focuses on the tall story of his “negotiations” with Kasztner, which would have been a complete success, he says, had not the enemy hindered them once again. Nobody wanted to take on “even these million” Jews,43 and then, of course, the war came to an end. Eichmann spent sixty-five pages mapping out this “path of truth,” as if none of it could be doubted.
Naturally, he knew that one thing in particular might bring his creation crashing down about his ears, and that was the number of victims. He therefore rounded off his account with a statistic that counts among the most perfidious lies he ever told. At the end of 1944, he says, a statistician drew up some figures for Himmler and Hitler, and Eichmann is able to draw on them, “particularly as I had to redraft the ‘Führer report’ twice at that time.”44 Later, he consistently denied having anything to do with this document, which achieved notoriety as the Korherr Report. But the real lie is hidden in the detail: he dates the statistician’s report to the end of 1944, when the figures were actually prepared in March 1943. Eichmann was a master of fudging dates and frequently employed the technique to paint himself in a more favorable light. And if somebody were to rumble his numbers game, he could rely on people’s willingness to believe that, after so many years, a man might accidentally mix things up from time to time. Eichmann gave a detailed explanation of this method during one of his conversations with Sassen, which was as ill advised as a magician explaining his tricks. By presenting figures from early 1943 as a final balance, Eichmann made almost two years, and over a million murders, vanish from the books—if the earlier figures were even correct in the first place.
But the story of Eichmann and Korherr is more than a cynical redating game played in Argentina. The statistician’s name was a synonym for one of the greatest embarrassments of Eichmann’s career. On January 18, 1943, Heinrich Himmler wrote an angry letter to Heinrich Müller, officially relieving Eichmann of the responsibility for providing murder statistics, which he had been doing until that point: “The RSHA … has no further statistical work to do in this area, as the statistical documents produced thus far lack scientific exactitude.” Instead, Himmler appointed Richard Korherr as the sole official statistician, the inspector for statistics in the office of the Reichsführer-SS. Korherr was granted direct access to all the data from Department IV B 4, where he was also given an office—right in the middle of Eichmann’s empire.45 In the period that followed, Eichmann had to help Korherr compile the figures. A career-minded man like Eichmann would not simply forget or mix up such an experience.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that in 1956 Eichmann arrived at a completely different body count: fewer than a million victims. His text inflates the emigration quotas and the number of survivors and stresses that a large proportion of Jews must have died during the Allied air raids. This kind of numbers game is hard to stomach when it comes to murder statistics. And in Eichmann’s case, it is unbelievably shameless. This was the man who took pride in showing visitors the “card room” in his office, the walls of which were plastered with diagrams representing his own “successes” and those of National Socialism as a whole. This was the man whose deputy pinned deportation charts on the wall behind his desk for all to see, the way a hunter displays antlers.46 And this was the man trying to tell us that it wasn’t worth it for his department to expend effort over the murder quotas? Eichmann, of all people, who was looking at numbers of between five and six million in 1944–45 (which, as we now know, were an exact representation of the facts)? And yet here he manages to play down the perverse pride he took in his “work” to such an extent that the National Socialist extermination program becomes a regrettable footnote to history. This piece of denial is so far-fetched, we can only marvel that Eichmann thought for a second that anyone would believe it. Even among the knowledge dodgers in Argentina, this distortion didn’t hold water for long. Eichmann’s figures chimed perfectly with the project that Sassen and his colleagues were working on, but unfortunately, the Korherr Report was one of the documents in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s sourcebook, which the Sassen circle had in front of them. Debates about victim numbers consequently occupied a large part of the discussion group’s time.47
But the greatest barrier to anyone believing Eichmann was actually one he had erected himself, in the image of himself he had presented to his colleagues at the end of the war. He knew that if he wanted to avoid suspicion, he would have to confront this issue, and on the last page of “Re: My Findings” he takes the bull by the horns. “The war was drawing to an end. In that final period—I almost want to say the final hours—I said to a few lower-ranking officers: ‘… and if it must be, I will leap joyfully into the pit, in the knowledge that around48 five million enemies of the Reich have been killed along with us.”49 He made this statement, Eichmann adds by way of explanation, in a mood shaped by the war’s end and the destruction it brought with it. And the “highest number of enemy victims” had been the “standpoint” of the enemy as well. Eichmann firmly denies he said anything about “Jews,” a story he ascribes to Wilhelm Höttl and Dieter Wisliceny. To make sure there is no misunderstanding, he then repeats: “It is not true!” For the life of him, he cannot explain how the two of them could have happened upon such an absurd misrepresentation.50 Although he faced probing questions on this point from the Sassen circle, Eichmann defended his version of events, and it was another five years before he admitted that, of course, he had not said “enemies of the Reich.”
Today, it’s easy to recognize Eichmann’s lies: fifty years of research have given us the arguments we need to resist him, and we can see the facts behind the fiction. We can spot his intentions before his words can have any influence on us. But in 1956 the danger of falling into his traps was incomparably greater. All the more interesting, then, to take a closer look at the methods of obfuscation and manipulation that this man employed. After all, this text is Eichmann’s first postwar statement, and his first attempt to claim the sovereign right to interpret history. A few telltale details in this first draft reveal how he developed and refined his methods.
The text of “Re: My Findings” quivers with an inner tension that stems from several dilemmas in his falsification of history. The first relates to Eichmann’s image of Hitler. On the one hand, he claims that the Führer expressly ordered the complete extermination of the Jews in the German-occupied territories; on the other, he claims a very low murder rate. In order to do both at once, he has to explain how the head of a totalitarian state could give an order that had so little effect. Either the Führer’s word was not as binding as Eichmann suggests (which weakens his “just obeying orders” argument as a justification for his own actions), or his figures are too low (meaning his own crime was greater than he is trying to claim). Eichmann simply says that Himmler was “not in too much of a hurry to carry out the Führer’s order,” because he still believed in “a halfway favorable outcome for the war.”51 And at least to start with, Germany’s reliance on forced labor (“the workforce”) was so great that the Economic and Adminstrative Head Office had not complied with the Führer’s extermination order. But this explanation reveals a conspicuous weakness in Eichmann’s “rounded” picture of history. He would go on to use the Sassen circle discussions, and the books, to come up with a better design.
The second structural flaw in Eichmann’s argument had to do with the people he was addressing, and his own self-image. The Dürer circle had sought him out because they wanted a man with as much knowledge as possible and a fundamentally National Socialist outlook. Consequently, the Adolf Eichmann of 1956 had far fewer problems saying “I” than the Eichmann who appeared in Jerusalem. In “The Others Spoke,” with a combination of vanity and sporadic bursts of honesty, he provides his readers with evidence of his qualifications as an indispensable witness and a legitimate member of the Sassen group. His text reads a little like a job application. It might overemphasize things he believed would show him in a positive light, but this is still Eichmann presenting himself as the successful and respected National Socialist he had really been. He includes explanatory notes for any negative aspects with which he does not wish to be associated. Eichmann was proud of his “lifetime achievements for Führer and people,” but he also knew he had to defend himself, and this tension would make him vulnerable later on.
The third basic problem he faced in giving this version of history was gauging the extent of his potential readers’ prior knowledge. Anyone setting out to manipulate and deceive needs not only superior knowledge but also an intimate acquaintance with the actual and hypothetical knowledge of his audience. In a historical context, we would call such knowledge the body of source material. But in 1956 the only thing Eichmann knew about the recently published books was their titles. Unlike Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen, he had to rely on the book reviews in the press to help him parry critical questions. Having “been there,” Eichmann’s knowledge of events may have been superior, but he also had one worry that the others didn’t: in contrast to them, he knew exactly what horrors might come to light. Authors of fantasy literature have free rein when they create their narratives, but a liar does not: he has to make sure people will believe what he says. And this becomes more difficult when his audience’s background knowledge might expand at any moment, without warning. Sassen recognized the small advantage this fact gave him and tried to play it out against Eichmann.
The fourth dilemma Eichmann faced in this draft was founded in the fundamental evil behind his crimes: his radical anti-Semitism. In order to exonerate himself, and the Nazi regime as a whole, he stresses that he had an excellent relationship with his Jewish “negotiating partners.” Their dealings were harmonious on both sides, as they worked toward a mutually agreeable solution. But this emphasis stands in irreconcilable opposition to Eichmann’s belief in the necessity of a “final victory” of one race over another. The goal of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies had ultimately been the “Final Solution of the Jewish question,” and Hitler’s plans for world domination would not even have allowed space for Jews on the moon. There was no middle ground between the gentlemanly diplomat negotiating with “world Jewry,” and the fundamentalist taking on the “enemy race” in the struggle for world domination. This disparity causes Eichmann some difficulties when he attempts to reconcile the two. Not wanting to confess to the criminal extermination plans, he has to talk about his political, nonviolent negotiations with the “Jewish representatives.” But this tactic made him an object of suspicion to other, dedicated racial anti-Semites like Sassen and Fritsch.
If Adolf Eichmann really wanted to create a “rounded picture of history,” he had to obliterate the tensions contained in his first draft of 1956: they were the weak spots in his ideal vision. By the time he reached Israel in 1960, he would have a wealth of experience to fall back on, gained during intensive discussions over the months following the writing of this draft. The basic problems may have been insurmountable, but by then he would have had a frightening amount of practice in addressing them. With this “clear and factual” account of events, and the hours he then spent in discussions, Adolf Eichmann would be much better prepared for his return to the public eye than the defendants at Nuremberg or any of the other people who were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As always, Eichmann seized the chance to profit from a difficult situation. This time it may also have had something to do with the fact that in Buenos Aires in 1956, the limelight of publicity was becoming an increasingly realistic option for Eichmann once more.
An Open Letter to the Chancellor
I do not wish to court the limelight of publicity in any way. I have no ambition.
—Eichmann, Sassen discussions52
The original manuscript of “The Others Spoke” reveals something that the poor-quality copy from File 17 at Eichmann’s trial obliterates. Eichmann’s “findings” were planned as an open letter to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Above the title, Eichmann’s handwritten note (which was later crossed out) reads: “The pencil additions apply only to the ‘open letter’ to the Chancellor.”53
In the 1950s, open letters were a popular genre among far-right publications. They were usually published under a pseudonym, the content being more “open” than the authors’ willingness to be called to account for it. Anyone believing that this sort of self-promotion in the name of free speech is a present-day phenomenon will be set straight by a glance through the publications in question. As with “reader’s letters,” the advantage of “open letters” was that an editor could publish them in the name of freedom of expression, while at the same time distancing himself from them by declaring that their content was the author’s personal opinion and not necessarily endorsed by the magazine. This trick allowed publications like Der Weg, Nation Europa, Der Standpunkt,andReichsruf—which for obvious reasons were under constant threat of being banned and having their stock confiscated—to write whatever they wanted without fear of prosecution: officially, these words were someone else’s. The inclusion of letters from “Jewish” readers was particularly perfidious, and the most crudely anti-Semitic hate speech was labeled as “readers’ opinions.” Eichmann had seen Sassen use one of these reader’s letters to cause President Eisenhower some considerable trouble. And now Eichmann was writing an open letter himself. This casts the work that the Dürer circle and Adolf Eichmann were planning in an interesting light. On the one hand, Eichmann could never have published such a text by himself without recklessly endangering his cover; he needed middlemen with the right connections. On the other, this plan demonstrates that the project he was undertaking with Willem Sassen was not simply meant for posterity. The first opportunity to have an impact with an open letter to Konrad Adenauer would have been the upcoming elections, in the fall of 1957. It seems particularly likely that the men taking a timeout in Argentina planned to take this opportunity, as they were still dreaming of toppling Adenauer’s government. Eichmann clearly wasn’t satisfied with the idea of writing a book that would be published after his death—and he was prepared to take a huge risk in order to have his say. Even published anonymously, the content of this letter would inevitably lay a trail to the door of the Adviser on Jewish Affairs, and it was provocative enough that someone might consider calling its author to account. Eichmann was too certain that he had unique insider knowledge to believe that a pseudonym would afford him any kind of protection, and placing this piece in Der Weg would have led the Nazi hunters directly to where he was hiding. The only conclusion to be drawn is that Eichmann accepted the risk as part of the deal. It is even conceivable that he had a more or less conscious desire to be discovered.
In 1952 Eichmann had told his wife he wanted to stand trial in Germany, and he repeated this intention to his family over the years that followed. “He considered handing himself over to an international tribunal in Europe,” his son remembered later. “He was pretty clear that he wouldn’t get off without punishment, but he didn’t think he would get a harsh sentence. He thought he might even be released in four to six years.”54 Considering how the law was applied in West Germany in the mid-1950s, Eichmann’s expectation wasn’t all that far from reality. A man of fifty, he must have told himself, would still be able to spend his twilight years with his family, under his real name, in the country of his birth. But this action would also have brought him closer to another dream: achieving prosperity for his family. The project with Sassen was partly a moneymaking scheme, and he was well aware that the market value of a book by Adolf Eichmann would go up rapidly if there were a trial.55 Being arrested and going before a court would be a service to his family, whose future he was always trying to safeguard. What would a few years matter? Eichmann’s son recalled: “He told Mother: ‘you can live without me for that long, it will be ok.’ ” And afterward everything would be right with the world once more—at least, it would have been, if Eichmann’s name had not been too inextricably linked with millions of murders for him to simply return to normality in West Germany.
But however Eichmann managed to shield himself from this reality, his plan to write an “open letter to the Chancellor” shows without doubt that he and his associates weren’t just fooling around with these ideas to fill the dull weekends of their Argentine exile. All of them, Eichmann included, had concrete political ambitions. They weren’t working quietly for the benefit of the history books, or to have their efforts consigned to the desk drawer; they wanted to make a difference, to get back to Europe and involve themselves in West German politics. From a distance, this plan looks insane, but it was based on Eichmann’s empirical experience. Fifteen years previously, his plans and suggestions had been passed on to Reichsführer-SS Himmler and, above him, all the way to Hitler. Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich had made speeches and given lectures from Eichmann’s drafts,56 and the things he initiated—the central offices, re-education camps, and death marches—had allowed him to put his stamp on world history. All these murderous projects, beyond anything the civilized world could imagine, were schemes Eichmann pushed through with his superiors. Small wonder then that the Obersturmbannführer (retired) had the self-confidence to believe that, using this historical sketch, he could accomplish something similar with Konrad Adenauer’s office. His version of events would put an end to these tiresome questions of guilt, which was something a lot of people in Germany desperately wanted. In theory, a simple explanation of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, from a professional source, would have been an interesting offer. Argentina wasn’t the only country that was home to old comrades with familiar dispositions. Eichmann’s pen could well have been driven by a desire to provoke an opportunity for his return to Germany; people of a similar persuasion might even have welcomed him back to his homeland. He knew there were still one or two people in the German government who would have found his ideas just as familiar and seductive as the former Adviser on Jewish Affairs did.
What About Morality?
The drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.
—Eichmann, “The Others Spoke,” 195657
Once Eichmann had laid out his “factual and clear,” “rounded” conception of history in the second part of “The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!” with all its relativization and misdirection, he turned, as promised, to a question pertinent “today” (i.e., post-1945). Apparently, this was a question nobody had ever asked before: “Guilty or not guilty?”58 Anyone familiar with Eichmann’s self-portrayal in Jerusalem might expect this Argentine chapter to display a similar mixture of lachrymose self-pity and grim disillusionment with his former superiors. In Jerusalem, the defendant’s explanation followed an endless loop as he tried to convince the world (and apparently himself) that although he had been obliged to witness and involve himself in all this misery, he had been against it from the start. But in Argentina, surprisingly, Eichmann said something fundamentally different. Even in this chapter of “The Others Spoke,” he presents us with his irrefutable truth in an accusatory tone, with the self-assurance of a demagogue.
Adolf Eichmann came from a good middle-class home, and although National Socialist thought had taken hold even there, he had still learned enough about traditional bourgeois morality and general moral concepts to realize that most people would condemn what he had done. Even he knew that ideas like morality, conscience, justice, and so on existed, and he didn’t want to ignore fundamental questions pertaining to them. He had lofty aspirations for his worldview, and the set of ideological building blocks of National Socialism were never going to provide everything he needed. The court-appointed psychologist Shlomo Kulscár later said that Eichmann’s personality probably made him incapable of subordinating himself completely to any system he was presented with. Eichmann’s texts also demonstrate that he had reflected on National Socialist concepts and adapted them to his own ideas. In 1956, as a free man, he was above merely parroting the popular phrase about the “shame of Versailles.” Recently, the far right had begun to claim that the 1919 peace treaty was to blame for everything: it had been so unfair that it had driven the masses toward National Socialism. Eichmann’s use of the phrase is more differentiated: “Perhaps I was already an adherent of National Socialist thought before I properly grasped and understood the dishonor of Versailles.” He had other reasons for choosing his political direction, and in hindsight, National Socialism gave him an understanding of it: “To a certain extent, it molded into super-nationalism.”59 This was not the only way Eichmann remolded the National Socialist worldview to make it his own.
Eichmann presents his answer to the question of his own personal guilt right at the start of this section. “Without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture, I find that I am not guilty before the law, and before my own conscience; and with me the people who were my subordinates during the war. For we were all … little cogs in the machine of the Head Office for Reich Security, and thus, during the war, little cogs in the great drivetrain of the murdering motor: war.” The oath of allegiance that bound everyone, “friend and foe,” was the “highest obligation that a person can enter into,” and everyone had to obey it. Across the world, leaders had really only given a single order: “the destruction of the enemy.”60 For Eichmann, the idea that the war had been a total, global one, in which the goal was to eliminate the enemy, was a simple statement of fact. His radical biologism led to the belief that a “final victory” was imperative: the unavoidable war between the races would leave only one remaining.
The question Eichmann puts to himself in this section—“What about morality?”—is one for which he has a surprisingly provocative answer. “There are a number of moralities: a Christian morality, a morality of ethical values, a morality of war, a morality of battle. Which will it be?” Eichmann then applies his rhetorical skills to a complete demolition of the philosophical approach (even though he invokes philosophers to support his argument). What is the relative importance of morality versus power? Did not Socrates himself submit to law and order when he accepted his death sentence? “Socratic wisdom bows down before the law of the state. This is what the humanists teach us.” (In National Socialist thought, of course, humanists were effeminate fellows, with whom it would be impossible to win a war, as they refused to recognize that war was inevitable.) The leadership of the nation, Eichmann goes on to explain, has always stood above the thought of individuals. To illustrate, he brings in the Old Testament and also modern science: the church, too, recognizes the power of the state as the highest guiding principle on earth, and hierarchies exist even in an anthill. Eichmann founders only on the question of whether thinkers like Nietzsche and Kant could be useful to his argument. Did these two have “a clear German orientation”? “I doubt it,” he concludes, then encapsulates National Socialism’s basic mistrust of all scholarship in a single sentence: “I mean that philosophy is international,” and as such, he prefers to seek his answers without it.61 His own “inner morality” is all well and good, but the most important thing is always the will of the nation’s leaders—not simply because they have the power to force people to obey, but because they act only on behalf of the people. Therefore a person should not allow his inner morality to conflict with his orders; he should see that these orders are for the good of the people and carry them out with conviction. He, Eichmann, found an easy way to overcome this problem: “I found my parallels quite plainly and simply in nature. For the allegiance to the flag did not forbid self-willed [!] thought, even if the result of my thought and searching was somewhat negative for the will and the goals of the government, to which it was naturally subordinated. But the more I listened to the natural world, whether microcosm or macrocosm, the less injustice I found, not only in the demands made by the government of my people, to which I belong, but … also in the goals of our enemies’ governments and leaders. Everyone was in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.”62 In other words: everyone wanted total war, and that fact provided the legitimation for everyone to wage it, using every means necessary, both “conventional and unconventional.”63 A universal war of extermination also frees people to use unscrupulous violence. Even the use of death camps suddenly becomes an inventive battle tactic, made necessary by the “eternal fate of all organic beings, for which there is no consolation. It has always existed, and will always exist.” Eichmann has no trouble identifying with this notion or seeing the ideal parameters for his behavior within it. Thinking and morality are no longer international—only war. But it is völkisch alone that will be victorious, and only those who understand that fact will survive.
In Israel, Eichmann told his astonished listeners that all his life he had oriented himself by Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. “I believe in Kant,” he said earnestly64—it was just that his orders had sometimes prevented him from acting according to his own beliefs. On being questioned further, he even managed to provide a passable definition of Kant’s categorical imperative, the wisdom of which he attempted to praise wholeheartedly.65 In 1956, as a free man, things were a little different.66 “The drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement,” he wrote.67 Who would choose to rely on an international approach like Kant’s, with his exhortations to individual responsibility and universal human categories, once you had realized it was all sophistry and levity? “From the tellurian worldview of Copernicus and Galileo, to the hyper-galactic worldview of Homo sapiens today: the law creates and expects order. The sick and the degenerate are the only exceptions.”68 This law, which creates order and destroys the sick and the “degenerate,” has nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. “I must obey it, so that a greater community, and I within it, can live. It was this thought that made me subordinate myself and obey.”69 A few weeks later, in the Sassen circle, Eichmann said that anyone claiming they had suffered a crisis of conscience during the war was lying: telling oneself in hindsight that one had only been acting on orders “is cheap hokum, it’s an excuse.” And “humanitarian views” only helped people “hide comfortably behind regulations, decrees and laws.”70
Eichmann completely rejected traditional ideas of morality, in favor of the no-holds-barred struggle for survival that nature demanded. He identified entirely with a way of thinking that said any form of contemplation without clear reference to blood and soil was outdated and, most of all, dangerous. Here, reason, justice, and freedom were not permissable central concepts of human society. The very idea of a common understanding among all people was a betrayal—to the minds of both Eichmann and his Führer. For one thing, the Germans’ superior might came from their ethnicity, and for another, the world didn’t have room for everyone. The struggle among the races was in essence a struggle for resources—a basic idea familiar to many people concerned about future wars over oil and drinking water today. However, Eichmann refused to countenance the idea that there might be room for a mutually agreeable solution. The only thing that mattered was one’s own people. “What is right, is what aids the people,”71 and no one apart from one’s own people had any rights. Philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories and a global orientation, was an error, because it sought universals and did not accept dependence on ethnicity. Its outlook (and here Eichmann is quite correct) was fundamentally “international.” As such, philosophy has no homeland, but—and it is crucial to realize this connection—to the purveyors of Nazi ideology, philosophy had a people. According to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s tirades, there was one “race” that, having no homeland, had an international bent and revered the unbounded freedom of the mind: the Jews. “The Jewish intellect,” says a typical Nazi publication, “breaks away from the soil in which it is rooted and makes a rootless existence for itself.” Furthermore, the Jewish attitude of mind “breaks apart the German human and undermines the German way of life,” because it is not an “ethnically based thought.”72 Only an ethnic thought makes it possible to build a national character, and humanitarian talk only allows this character to become confused and weakened. In an ideology that sees reconnecting with “blood and soil” as the only means of survival, any international outlook mutates into the ultimate threat. This threat must be destroyed before a global morality destroys concepts of the German ethnic morality and undermines German defenses. Or as the head of the NSDAP Head Office for Racial Politics clearly stated in 1939: “There can be no possible agreement with systems of thoughts of an international nature, because at bottom these are not true and not honest, but based on a monstrous lie, namely the lie of the equality of all human beings.”73 In the Argentina Papers, Eichmann leaves us in no doubt about his own orientation toward these categories of thinking.
In Jerusalem, Eichmann spoke rather differently of philosophy and philosophers, in particular Kant, who he said had always provided the guiding principle of his thought. This statement was a bit much to swallow coming from a mass murderer, and even if Eichmann did manage to demonstrate considerable knowledge of Kant’s fundamental moral concepts, his views on philosophy and National Socialism drew sneers from the trial observers. Hannah Arendt wrote of Eichmann’s “rather modest mental gifts” and his “vague notion” of the philosophical dimension of the obedience issue.74 The historians followed her lead, dismissing Eichmann’s words as paradoxical drivel and pseudophilosophy, rendering them a mere curiosity for the footnotes. But this was both overly hasty and dangerous. Arendt judged him on the basis of the few statements he made during his interrogation and trial. She was unaware of Eichmann’s lengthy essays. She didn’t know about the pieces he wrote in Israel, in which he elaborated on his supposed love of Kant, or about his debate on religious philosophy with the radical theologist William L. Hull. These texts, along with other sources, were withheld from the trial observers, so Arendt couldn’t know that Eichmann planned to base his closing statement almost entirely on Immanuel Kant, before his lawyer talked him out of the idea.75 What Arendt did correctly observe was that Eichmann was deliberately posturing as a student of philosophy. She just drew the wrong conclusion, imagining that the main reason for this pose was foppish vanity and a lack of rhetorical skill and philosophical knowledge. A person who does philosophy herself is often reluctant to accept that someone could be familiar with the basics of philosophy but not willing to embrace its guidance, and this must have played a role in Arendt’s assumption that hers was the only possible conclusion. But Eichmann, as the records from Israel reveal, was capable of powerful arguments. Avner W. Less, who spent almost three hundred hours interrogating him, described him as a “self-made man, with good knowledge, very intelligent, very skillful.… He tends to listen for the form my question will take, and adjust himself to it accordingly.”76 Eichmann was familiar with philosophical ideas that were by no means part of a general education: in addition to Kant, Nietzsche, and Plato, he also mentioned Schopenhauer and—in all seriousness—Spinoza, the greatest Jewish philosopher. From his cell, he conducted a debate on the principles of religious philosophy with a fundamentalist Christian. He was desperate to win him over to the far-right cause, and some of his arguments were so masterfully constructed that the theologian exclaimed in exasperation: “If you had stuck to your childish beliefs and not gotten involved in the philosophical ideas of Spinoza and Kant, you could now be living a normal, happy life.”77 Religion is seen as a private matter in enlightened nations, so even Eichmann-in-Jerusalem didn’t have to hide what he thought—especially as this religious debate began only after the trial was over. In contrast to his writing on the question of guilt, Eichmann didn’t have to think tactically to avoid incriminating himself. If he seems far more cautious and wooden in his other texts, that is because everything he said in Israel was an attempt to disguise his own systematic thinking. Such thought obviously existed, as a comparison with the Argentina Papers shows, but in Israel he took pains to paint himself as precisely the type of benevolent humanist and admirer of philosophy that he had sought to destroy while the Nazis were in power. He just hadn’t had much of a chance to practice this role.
Of course, the task of listening carefully to a man like Adolf Eichmann as he expounds his philosophical thoughts is far from easy, but the fact that he wrote about them gives us a rare chance to take a peek behind the front he presented in Jerusalem. His real convictions are to be found in the Argentina Papers, which describe a nonvitalist philosophy of inescapable natural laws. Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things. But if we call this thought “pseudo-philosophy,” we run the risk of underestimating a dangerous dogma of pure natural causality that does not allow for freedom. We are also wasting the opportunity to fight this revocation of the Enlightenment and the proclamation of a science with no moral requirement. Instead of countering this declaration of war on philosophy with something better, we expose ourselves to the suspicion that we are idealizing philosophy in and of itself. But philosophy is not automatically good. There, too, we find dangerous wrong turns, for which dilettantes in SS uniforms like Eichmann are not the only ones to blame. “We have freed ourselves from the idealization of a groundless and powerless thought. We are seeing the end of a philosophy that is subservient to it.” These words were spoken in 1933 by a man who not only called for an “ethnic science,” but was also convinced that the “mental world of a people” was “the power of preserving the strength that lies in its blood and soil,” understood as “the power that excites the deepest feeling and shakes the furthest reaches of existence.” This man was Martin Heidegger.78 His name was also known to Adolf Eichmann. Shortly before his execution, Eichmann asked his brother to find out what this German philosopher thought about the last rites. “Not that I would presume to liken myself to this great thinker in anything, but it would be important to me with regard to my relationship with Christianity.”79 It is not known whether Heidegger replied.
For Eichmann, ideology was not a pastime or a theoretical superfluity but the fundamental authorization for his actions. Explaining, disseminating, and implementing it was therefore also a means of gaining power. Eichmann wanted power but not via capricious acts, ruthless aggression, a uniform, or an order; it had to be legitimated by a system of thought and values that allowed his actions to seem “right.” He wanted his authorization to come from within. He was seeking self-authorization, to act according to his own convictions. He didn’t make things easy for himself, as his theory of legitimation didn’t conform to the usual Nazi slogans. What Eichmann presents in his 1956 draft is a National Socialist worldview that deviates from the worldview of other National Socialists on crucial points. Unlike Alfred Rosenberg and the official propaganda (which attempted to co-opt every famous German for the Nazi cause), he didn’t think Kant could simply be incorporated into the new “German thought.” Eichmann didn’t subscribe to the notion that the categorical imperative actually meant “live according to your nature and defend the values of your race,” as the self-appointed mastermind of the Third Reich proclaimed.80 He obviously realized that neither Kantian teaching nor any other philosophy could be reconciled with the racial-biological struggle. For him, Kant represented the same “so-called” morality that made life difficult when you were trying to implement an extermination policy. Kant’s thinking was not “ethnic” but “international.” This position is evidence of Eichmann’s consistently National Socialist attitude but also the consistency in his desire for total power. The power of fundamentalist thought is much greater than the power of an order given by a superior. That authority would still hold when all his superiors were dead and he was sitting on a rabbit farm in Argentina. With this in mind, Simon Wiesenthal was wrong to suggest that Eichmann would have persecuted red-haired or blue-eyed people with the same commitment if someone had ordered him to. The reason Eichmann was so receptive to the totalitarian system was that he was already in thrall to totalitarian thought. An ideology that scorns human life can be very appealing if you happen to be a member of the master race that proclaims it, and if it legitimates behavior that would be condemned by any traditional concept of justice and morality. Eichmann wanted to do what he did, but above all, he wanted respect for having done the right thing. And he wanted to proselytize. That is what makes his writings so sickening.
Eichmann consistently placed his hope in “generations to come”—a phrase he never tired of repeating. He wanted to change the way they thought, if only so that they would acquit him of this charge of mass murder. That charge could be made only by people who had not yet grasped true National Socialism, and who were still being spoon-fed by foreign powers. If you believed in the final battle of the races, the battle could never be over as long as a single enemy was still alive. On his farm, surrounded by thousands of rabbits and chickens, Eichmann no longer had much chance to exterminate the enemy, so all that remained to him was to argue against what he saw as the “intellectual schooling” of Judaism. In 1956 he arrived back where he had started in the early 1930s: waging “ideological warfare.” He wanted to win this battle for interpretational sovereignty “using conventional and unconventional means.” The immense quantity of text he produced expresses his need to justify his actions, but even more his desire to become a demagogue, forcing his vision upon people with the power of his persuasive rhetoric. This desire also came from inside the hermetic seal of racial theory: having a strong argument in a closed system means having power, and power over people was something Eichmann missed terribly, now that he was anonymous.
Before 1960, Eichmann viewed “so-called” moral requirements as the sand the enemy threw in your eyes to undermine your fighting strength. This sand started to become useful only when Eichmann was sitting in an Israeli prison cell. In an attempt to avoid being called to account for the crimes of his people, he was now searching for something to obscure other people’s vision. He didn’t hesitate to pose as a devotee of Kant or to tell other unscrupulous lies. When the court psychologist mentioned Pontius Pilate, Eichmann (who in 1956 had judged himself not guilty, “without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture”) thanked him kindly, because he never would have thought to compare himself to this historical figure. He exclaimed enthusiastically: “That’s exactly my position! When he washed his hands, Pilate was signifying that he didn’t identify himself with that course of action. He was forced to do it. If I am entitled to compare myself with such a great historical figure, then his situation was the same as mine.”81 When Eichmann wanted something from people, he was always very good at telling them what they wanted to hear, and talking them into submission, until it was too late. We would do well not to underestimate Eichmann’s will to power: even in his writing, he used all the tools of manipulation at his disposal to serve it.
In “The Others Spoke,” written in 1956, Eichmann is openly proud of the willpower he showed in enduring the “icy cold legality” of the struggle: he “resigned [to it], trembling,”82 and not only accepted it but also grasped its quite unique “warmth.” Das AtombyFritz Kahn contains the same concepts of macrocosm and microcosm that Eichmann used for the draft of his own book. In his copy of Das Atom, Eichmann wrote: “I have spiritually ‘absorbed’ this book, like others on the topic, and found a wonderful confirmation of the National Socialist ‘belief in God,’ ‘Gottgläubigkeit.’ ” This is “hearty, natural and always alive.”83 “Hearty Gottgläubigkeit” is a doctrine in the inevitable final war of the races. It provides the intellectual basis for genocide and for carrying out “screening” even on ethnic Germans, in the “euthanasia” project to which Eichmann also gave his wholehearted support.84 Anyone looking to segregate and exterminate people requires thinking that is hostile to life, to prevent himself from becoming conscious of how abysmal his actions are, and this was certainly the case with Eichmann.
Having an ideology wasn’t all about power; it was also a religion that brought comfort when even the murderer was horror-struck by his own crimes. According to Eichmann, the only hope lay in “finding the path that may provide comfort in the natural world.”85A glance at the writings of Rudolf Höß shows that Eichmann was not alone in this belief. “In the spring of 1942,” the former commandant of Auschwitz remembered, “hundreds of blossoming people walked beneath the blossoming fruit trees of the farmstead, most of them never guessing they were on their way to the gas chambers, and to death. I can still see this image of growth and decay quite clearly.”86 Thinking about the eternal cycle of growth and decay made the extermination of millions of people into a natural occurrence, and the murderers into a force of nature, the right hand of natural law. According to this principle, the murderers’ actions didn’t catapult them forever out of a morally upright community; on the contrary, they proved that they were part of the German racial corpus. Any doubts on this score were the hangover from a sentimental concept of morality, which could be overcome by orienting oneself toward natural laws. In later writings, especially “Götzen” (Idols), the longest thing he wrote in Israel, Eichmann gave a specific example of how he comforted himself in this way. Visiting Auschwitz by day was made bearable for him by the orderly’s punctual appearance in the evening to collect the brave Adviser on Jewish Affairs. He would drive him straight to his own private religious service, which filled the business of murder with a sense of immutability: “Herr Obersturmbannführer, the sun sets in 15 minutes!”87
Against all our hopes, Eichmann was perfectly comfortable in his own company. In Altensalzkoth, in Tucumán, and in the pampas of Argentina, he enjoyed the open space, a bottle of wine on the veranda, and solitary rides through the countryside. For him there was no link between the aesthetics of nature and the contemplation—or even-fleeting consideration—of morality. Quite the reverse: although we can only call his actions an affront to all forms of civilization, he saw them reflected and acknowledged in the beauty of nature. This man could have stayed locked away, talking to himself, for decades without experiencing even a hint of the irritation he causes to readers today. It is temptingly easy to dismiss his endless ramblings: like all dogma, his is ultimately just bad philosophy. But it is a disturbing fact: for Eichmann the logic of these terrible constructs provided stability and inner fortitude. To unbalance one of the most effective mass murderers in history, the ability to think in itself was not enough.
Old Culprits and New Soldiers
I will simply not do penance.
—Eichmann, 195688
By May 1945, Eichmann was well aware that many people didn’t share his way of thinking and would be horrified by the details of the Holocaust. And by then, his name was so closely associated with the subject that even his family demanded an explanation of who was really to blame for everything. In an interview in 1962, Vera Eichmann recalled her husband’s parting words before he went underground: “ ‘Vera, I just want to say one thing. My conscience and my hands are clean. I have not killed any Jews, or given a single order to kill. I want to tell you that.’ And he swore it on his children’s lives, and that was all.”89 He went on to repeat this assurance like an incantation. But for the book he was planning in 1956, it wasn’t enough to declare his “clean conscience,” and he added two further points: “Secondly, the other sides were not as meek as lambs, and you could not say it was only the Germans who were bad people, and thirdly was I the originator of this very bloody Final Solution?”90 Eichmann went on to enlighten his readers as to the true originators, the people who were really guilty of this mass murder, and to suggest who might execute these criminals.
The answer to the question of who was guilty will come as no surprise. From the outset, Eichmann explains, one man had been the warmonger behind the invasion of Poland. “The war waged by the German Reich against Poland would not have been necessary if special people, envying the economy of the German people, had not set their mind on it.”91 After all, “Poland certainly did not want the war, and Germany did not want it either.” Both nations had been innocent victims of these jealous people, who “further prepared for war” and “caused it to break out.” And if anyone is in doubt as to whom we talk about, Eichmann explains: the “spokesman for the Jews who are scattered across the world, the leader of the world Zionist organization in London, Dr. Chaim Weizmann” set himself against any “German-Polish agreement,” in order to “declare war on the German people in the name of Jewry.” This was the sole reason (and here, Eichmann repeats one of the Nazis’ greatest propaganda lies) that Hitler then announced that the approaching war would be the downfall of the Jewish race. “Well,” Eichmann continues, “today we know he was wrong about this.”92 The Jews, the former Adviser on Jewish Affairs informs us, suffered relatively few losses, which then gave them “national independence.” The Germans were the real victims, with seven million fallen, and millions of murders committed as Germans were expelled from their former territories after the war. “The victims were Germans,” Eichmann says three times, and no one was bringing the people who had murdered the Germans to justice. Eichmann writes himself into a frenzy: “Yes, where, where in damnation are the gallows now, for these war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity?”93 After all, you could see that the Nuremberg Trials had done nothing to promote peace: the old aggressors would just keep starting new wars.
The dedicated anti-Semite Adolf Eichmann wasn’t content with his theory of international collective guilt. It wasn’t enough for him to relativize his own murder statistics and offset deaths in the extermination camps against fallen soldiers. Once again he had to paint Jewry as the guiltiest of all guilty parties, the driving force behind everything. With the obvious triumph of one who sees himself vindicated, he points to the Suez crisis:
And while we are considering all this—we, who are still searching for clarity on whether (and if yes, how far) we assisted in what were in fact damnable events during the war—current events knock us down and take our breath away. For Israeli bayonets are now overrunning the Egyptian people, who have been startled from their peaceful sleep. Israeli tanks and armored cars are tearing through Sinai, firing and burning, and Israeli air squadrons are bombing peaceful Egyptian villages and towns. For the second time since 1945, they are invading.… Who are the aggressors here? Who are the war criminals?94
With a pathos he never managed to summon up for his victims, the specialist on Jewish affairs forges a new alliance: “The victims are Egyptians, Arabs, Mohammedans. Amon and Allah, I fear that, following what was exercised on the Germans in 1945, Your Egyptian people will have to do penance, to all the people of Israel, to the main aggressor and main perpetrator of war crimes against Arab peoples, to the main perpetrator against humanity in the Middle East, to those responsible for the murdered Muslims, as I said, Your Egyptian people will have to do penance for having the temerity to want to live on their ancestral soil.” The Germans had good reason to see the Jews as their greatest enemy—a race that had to be annihilated. Germans had always been in the right: “We all know the reasons why, beginning in the Middle Ages and from then on in an unbroken sequence, a lasting discord arose between the Jews and their host nation, Germany.”95 He, Adolf Eichmann, had therefore done nothing wrong. From the very beginning, the Jews had been to blame, as Adolf Hitler had recognized.
In 1956 the man who would later claim he had acted only reluctantly, and under orders, authored a text that fulfilled all the criteria for the most evil sort of rabble-rousing literature. Eleven years after a total defeat, and despite having experienced the horrific reality of genocide in all its detail, the same hatred still burned within him, and the same merciless theory of perpetual war. And because most people still failed to grasp this theory, he rationalized, men like him were forced to live under false names on the other side of the world, instead of collecting their pensions in Germany and being lauded as heroes—to say nothing of those who had died for their beliefs.
Explaining his decision to “step out from his anonymity,” Eichmann is once more seized by the fervor of the redeemer: “I, who unlike my former comrades can still speak and must now speak, cry out to the world: we Germans were also just doing our duty and are not guilty!”96 Behind the cry for justice lies the typical National Socialist interpretation of “to each his own”: the dogma of a Jewish world conspiracy and the only imaginable final solution to the Jewish question, complete annihilation. Eichmann-in-Argentina wasn’t about to do penance, and not because regret was useless (“something for little children,” as he claimed under cross-examination), but because he wanted his own children to see something entirely different from their father’s guilt.97
But his crowing over current events in the Middle East was more than just the affirmation of an old resentment. As always, Eichmann immediately saw a personal advantage in the political events of the day. If he was going to give himself up to be put on trial, it would only be in certain knowledge that the punishment would be lenient. Eichmann believed he would be declared guilty only “for political reasons”; the facts of the case would make a guilty verdict “an impossibility in international law.” And for this reason, a guilty verdict, “which I would never accept,” would simply be “nonsensical” and “presumptuous.” However, Eichmann reveals he is playing a tactical game when he says there is some doubt whether he will obtain justice “in the so-called Western culture. The true reason may be that in the Christian Bible, this time in the New Testament (Joh.…),98 to which a large part of Western thought clings, it is expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” No, it would do no good to give himself up to a German or an international court. The Western world still didn’t understand; for Eichmann, Christianity was corrupted by Jews from the bottom up. And so he looks to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people”99 to whom his whole manuscript is directed, hoping they will give him justice, at least in a symbolic sense. “But you, you 360 million Mohammedans, to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, you, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me. You children of Allah have known the Jews longer and better than the West has. Your noble Muftis and scholars of law may sit in judgment upon me and, at least in a symbolic way, give your verdict.”100 In 1956, the man who many people still thought was in the Middle East was seeking a symbolic salvation in the Arab cultural sphere, which he saw as a monolithic whole, the same way he saw Judaism. He believed that there, at least, he would not have to feign a change of heart, as he later did in Israel. He could be Obersturmbannführer Eichmann openly and proudly—and a ruthless anti-Semite to boot. Eichmann must have been quite open about his supposed friendship with the Arabs. After he had been abducted, his family became concerned about his second son. “As Horst was easily excitable,” the police report stated, “the Eichmann family was afraid that when he heard about his father’s fate, he might volunteer to fight for the Arab countries in campaigns against Israel.”101 Eichmann had obviously told his children where his new troops were to be found.
Eichmann was not the only person in Argentina to place his hopes in the Arabs. The final year of Der Weg’s existence saw its focus turning toward the Middle East: in 1956–57, it adopted an overtly pro-Islamic tone and made no secret of its sympathies forEgypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Admittedly, this looked more like clutching at straws than a deliberate political stance. But concrete connections did exist between Buenos Aires and the Middle East: Johann von Leers had been living in Cairo for a year or more, had converted to Islam, and was writing fiery pro-Islamic texts. These were admittedly starting to alienate West Germany’s far-right circles, including the editors of Nation Europa, an effect that wasn’t confined to Germany. Still, the rumors about the new careers that former SS and SD men were making in Egypt had not escaped the diaspora Nazis in Argentina. Their names had even started to appear in the newspapers: there was Leopold von Mildenstein, for example, who had brought Eichmann into the Jewish Department before becoming an adviser in the Ministry of Propaganda. On one of the Arabic radio stations, Mildenstein was now broadcasting speeches, of a sort that made the CIA finally develop an interest in him.102 And from time to time, the Argentine Nazis had the opportunity to meet up with former comrades who had been in the Middle East. Walter Rauff, the RSHA specialist who had helped create the notorious gas vans, spent a few months in Buenos Aires in 1950, after making a guest appearance in Syria, then settled down in Chile (as Eichmann seems to have known).103 And the irrepressible sabotage hero, Otto Skorzeny, may also have bragged about his assignments in the Middle East. Eichmann himself suspected that some of his former associates were there, in particular Alois Brunner, whom Eichmann had liked to call his “best man.” In Damascus, Brunner made a name for himself in commerce. What Eichmann said about him implies that he knew Brunner was still alive—though he would have been less overjoyed if he had known that his best man was now working for the West German intelligence service. So was a former colleague of Eichmann’s from the Foreign Office, who quite openly fled to the Middle East before the start of his trial in 1952. But Eichmann was anything but well intentioned toward Franz Rademacher, who at Nuremberg had submitted an old telephone note on which was written the incriminating sentence: “Eichmann suggests shooting them!”104
In spite of these personal connections, we have no indication that Adolf Eichmann, Eberhard Fritsch, or Willem Sassen ever seriously contemplated moving to the Middle East. At least in Buenos Aires there was a large community of German immigrants, with its own restaurants and stores, and life in Argentina was by no means uncomfortable. Such thoughts were attractive only because political developments in the Federal Republic hadn’t turned out as the Dürer circle had hoped—and probably also because crude ideologies require a sounding board, whereas the Dürer circle were sitting on the other side of the world with a doctrine that no one was interested in anymore. Eichmann refused to do penance and longed for applause. But first and foremost, of course, he hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews, who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.
The Apologist and the Demagogue
Eichmannism is a monologue.
—Shlomo Kulcsár105
When the discussions at Willem Sassen’s house began in 1957, Eichmann brought along the finished version of his manuscript, and Sassen at least gave him the feeling that something could be done with it. Sassen had the handwritten version transcribed, as far as this was possible, and the course of the discussion shows that Eichmann’s text was repeatedly used and circulated among the other participants in the Sassen circle. Their reactions suggest that everyone was impressed by the flood of thought it contained, and they posed numerous questions to him about it. Eichmann had managed to formulate clear, trenchant, effective points (presumably much to the surprise of anyone who had heard him speak before), which he had successfully incorporated into a grand design. True, submarine dwellers might have wandered the earth and people might have been branded with halos, but metaphor was not one of his strong points. In any case, Eichmann took the reaction to his writing as an encouragement and prepared more, shorter manuscripts, still searching for the right words to form the introduction to his planned book. Vera Eichmann often saw her husband writing, but she later gave an assurance that she never read these texts. Since Eichmann kept most of his writing at Sassen’s house, this is perfectly plausible. Anyway, conversations about the head of the family’s previous area of work were clearly unwelcome. “He always said: children, there was a war on, and we want to forget all that. War is war,” his son recalled. “He often said: we live in peace, and we don’t want to worry now about what happened in the war.”106 Eichmann himself forgot nothing; he just changed his version of history depending on whom he was addressing, honing the art of deception. Every book that Sassen made available to him spurred him on to write more, and to his interviewer’s displeasure, Eichmann would come to the Sassen circle with lengthy speech texts. As the transcripts reveal, it was even more difficult to stop Eichmann in midflow when he was reading than when he was speaking off the cuff.
Eichmann’s preferred form was clearly the monologue, a speech with no interruptions. In a monologue, he could lay out his hermetic interpretation of the world and abandon himself to the pathos of his own language. Avner W. Less observed the effect of a short Eichmann speech during his interrogation: “In the end, the man was literally moved to tears by his own words.”107 The speed at which Eichmann was able to fill hundreds of pages may have its origin in the monologic structure of his thought. Eichmann didn’t write in order to develop or refine an intellectual construct, his thoughts taking shape as he went; he was laying out a fully formed, rigid train of thought, and—as his handwriting and the tone of his voice reveal—giving free rein to his aggression toward “the enemy.” In his writing, he was permanently covering his back.
When he reached Israel, this training would stand Eichmann in good stead. On the one hand, he could keep the investigating authorities and the state prosecutor busy with all the information he seemed so willing to provide; on the other, his writing gave him stability, especially when he had to pretend to thoughts very different from the ones that really motivated him. In Jerusalem, of course, he wrote nothing about the eternal guilt of the “principal aggressor,” the race that had made the Germans into its victims by enticing an unsuspecting Hitler into its trap. His thoughts on the inherently subversive nature of the Jewish intellect were revealed only in his despicable attempt to ingratiate himself with the court. Eichmann was just filling out another application form, this time for the role of exemplary, voluble prisoner, and although he was not quite as successful as he had been in the Sassen circle, his new texts did more than enough to cause confusion.
Eichmann wrote incessantly in Israel. As soon as he arrived, he began “Meine Memoiren,” a 128-page story of his life. Mountains of commentaries followed, regarding papers, books, people, and every question that was put to him. As the precisely documented interrogation shows, Eichmann-in-Jerusalem had no difficulties filling as many as eighty pages between one interrogation session and the next, despite his enforced early bedtime and a day filled with examinations. He produced extensive dossiers on every imaginable topic for his defense, as well as popular texts for the press. When the trial was adjourned between cross-examination and verdict, Eichmann compiled more than one thousand pages for the large book that was designed to defend him once again, though this time aimed at those who had declared they were not his friends. “Götzen” (Idols) reads like a counterargument to “The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!” and he had also considered the philosophers’ creed Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself) as a title. Even when the verdict was announced, he didn’t remain paralyzed with shock for long. He quickly began to fill more pages: “Mein Sein und Tun” (My Being and Actions); his thoughts “Even here, facing the gallows”; letters; interview answers; and texts on religious philosophy. He wrote and wrote, literally until the end: he was still composing his last lines when they came to take him to the gallows.108 It is certainly correct to see Eichmann as an apologist, his writing driven by the need for self-justification, but anyone reading this flood of words cannot overlook another motive. Eichmann reveled in the play of arguments, the power of words, and his own power to manipulate. A desire for effect is ever present in his writing, a desire to lead the reader on and force him to accept Eichmann’s own thought constructs. There had once been a time when Eichmann’s suggestions, input, and plans—which fell outside all the rules of civilized society—were able to influence policy. His thoughts made their impact on the development of anti-Jewish policy as it headed toward the idea of extermination. If ever there was anyone who recognized the power of the written word, it was Eichmann. It could become the power over life and death, and in Israel, he hoped it would give him nothing less than his own life. From Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch, by contrast, he simply wanted a return ticket out of his anonymity. Sassen and Fritsch would come to realize the difficulties of trying to conduct a dialogue with a monologist.