Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  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.

  2

  Eichmann in Conversation

  But that is apparent to you gentlemen, is it not? That must be apparent to everyone.

  —Eichmann in the Sassen circle1

  The Contracted Parties

  In Argentina, Adolf Eichmann knew the magnitude of the horror behind the phrase “the Final Solution of the Jewish question” better than anyone. He was also well aware of how much danger lay in historical research and any kind of investigation. Compared to Eichmann, even Josef Mengele and the former camp commandant Josef Schwammberger had only limited insight. This pair, far away from Berlin, the decision-making process, and the decision makers, had experienced only the end result of the extermination plans. Rudolf Höß’s memoirs reveal an atmosphere in which contempt for human life, torture, and murder had become the norm, and in this atmosphere, facts, figures, and concepts become hazy. But from where Eichmann was stationed, he had both distance and oversight. He was the appointed coordinator, by the grace of Himmler, and many different strands of the operation came together in his office. Even while Hitler was in power, Eichmann was one of the few people who were able, at least in some measure, to gain a real overview of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews. By 1957 all his superiors were dead, and Eichmann’s knowledge was unparalleled. The awareness of his own authority must have allowed him to enter into discussions with the Dürer circle with confidence. Of course he ran the risk that the others’ curiosity might touch upon things that could endanger his ideal version of history, but he would always have the upper hand. Understandably, the last thing he wanted was to open people’s eyes to reality. He was fifty-one years old and had been living in Argentina for almost seven years—long enough to have asked around and got the measure of Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen. When the recordings began, sometime around the end of April 1957, Eichmann certainly thought he knew enough about his partners to take part in the project.

  The Publisher: Eberhard Fritsch

  From Eichmann’s perspective, the least dangerous of those involved was the man who offered the infrastructure to make his book a success: a publishing house, and a range of relationships with National Socialist circles both old and new. Eberhard Ludwig Cäsar Fritsch was born in Buenos Aires on November 21, 1921,2 and thus was fifteen years younger than Eichmann. For this reason alone, he had no insider knowledge. The German Reich, its Führer, its debauched everyday life, war, and extermination were all things he had never experienced. Contrary to rumors that he had worked for Goebbels in Berlin, Fritsch had visited the legendary Third Reich only once, for the international congress of the Hitler Youth, which took place near Berlin in 1935.3 For a Hitler Youth leader who had grown up in Buenos Aires, Hitler’s Germany during an accelerated economic recovery must have appeared an intoxicating prospect—even more so than it did to the international and more adult audience who fell for the facade of the Olympics the following year. In Argentina, which was generally friendly toward Germany, nothing prevented the young Fritsch from immersing himself in his Hitler mania and declaring anything that didn’t fit this high ideal to be malicious propaganda. The news that emerged after the German defeat did nothing to change this enthusiasm, and in Argentina, radical political views didn’t prevent a young man from getting a job teaching German at the Fredericus School. Things were slightly different when it came to his youth work: the camp that Fritsch set up during the school holidays was so overenthusiastically modeled on the Hitler Youth that even the Sassens found it excessive and brought their daughter home after just a short time there. The driving force behind this parental rescue may admittedly have been Sassen’s wife, Miep, who was never able to reconcile herself to her husband’s extremist friends, but this episode still demonstrates the overzealous nature of Fritsch’s work.4 He was more Nazi than the Nazis, Saskia Sassen remembers, without any distance or humor—but then, it was much easier for Fritsch to be an idealist than it was for the exiles. He had never witnessed the horror. For him, National Socialism remained the unsullied dream
that he had dreamed as a boy on the campsite, now enriched by heroic tales from the newcomers in Argentina. His Argentine perspective meant he had both a friendly inclination toward Germany and enough skepticism toward the United States that any Allied explanation of the Hitler regime’s crimes sounded untrustworthy to his ears. And Fritsch was surrounded by National Socialists from Germany, who mentioned wartime atrocities and crimes against humanity only when they were trying to incriminate the people who had actually been their victims. He heard about the “victor’s justice” of Nuremberg and “torture in the CIC camps,” and as his articles in Der Weg show, he dismissed any criticism of the Hitler regime as anti-German propaganda. He dedicated himself to trying to improve the position of his “comrades” who had been incarcerated, got involved in Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Kameradenwerk, and helped spread the National Socialist philosophy. As he wrote to one of his authors in 1948, he wasn’t interested in articles “that defame the past, which is close to many Germans’ hearts.”5 He wanted a “philosophy to heal our people, and with them Europe and the world,” without the “impotence that comes from anti-ethnic perspectives.”6 On his travels through Latin America, he found that these “ethnic perspectives” were essential, especially in the face of “the angry half-negro mob” in Brazil.7 In order for Fritsch to take an interest in the poor and the persecuted, they did, of course, have to be Nazis in exile. He had no time for stories of the other refugees from Germany—Argentina’s Jewish immigrants, for example.

  Fritsch’s aid was not entirely selfless: offering his many services to Nazi fugitives was how he made his living. He was what we would today call a successful networker. He had no direct connection to the government or (unlike Horst Carlos Fuldner and Rudolfo Freude) any way of rescuing Nazis from Europe and helping them start over in Argentina; but he still managed to offer stranded Nazis a place to start in Buenos Aires, and he obtained support from all sides.8 The Dürer House was a meeting place where people fresh off the boat could exchange addresses, have innocuous reunions, and buy German-language books. Through placing ads, providing courier and travel services, and, not least, furnishing the German fugitives with fascist kitsch from the Fatherland, Fritsch had established what you might call a lucrative one-stop store for Nazis in exile. American intelligence service files indicate that Fritsch received support from the highest circles: Horst Carlos Fuldner was named as one of the Dürer House’s financiers.9 In practice, this support may not actually have been financial, but the enterprise would have been untenable without the right political backing. While the Argentinisches Tageblatt, the liberal paper read by many Jewish immigrants, repeatedly had to battle publication bans or allocation limits on imported paper, Fritsch carried on publishing, unhindered.10 We know very little about the business’s financial background, but Fritsch must have been a man of some means, at least part of the time. He managed to keep the publishing house above water in difficult circumstances, and he owned real estate: the first house that Willem Sassen rented in Buenos Aires belonged to none other than his publisher.11

  Eberhard Fritsch had an unconventional combination of characteristics. On the one hand, he was an eccentric Nazi enthusiast, standing at a safe distance in South America, who liked to prattle on about the “Fourth Reich” and whose admiration for National Socialists knew no bounds. On the other, he was a shrewd exploiter of those who still felt a sentimental longing for what they had lost when the Third Reich collapsed. Later events also reveal him as a gullible man who admired Willem Sassen and was almost in thrall to him.12 Admittedly, Fritsch wasn’t alone in this respect: Hans-Ulrich Rudel stuck by Sassen with a faithfulness that his associates didn’t always understand.13

  Two details illustrate Adolf Eichmann’s attitude toward Fritsch. Eichmann called him “Comrade Fritsch”—a form of address he usually reserved for people he looked on as fellow soldiers (SS men) and the contacts who had helped him during his escape and in Argentina. These naturally included “my dear Comrade Sassen.” If Eichmann didn’t regard someone as being of equal rank to him, he simply called them by their last name. During his trial in Israel, Eichmann would make a great effort to downplay Fritsch’s role in the Argentine publishing project,14 although the Dürer circle no longer existed by this point, at least in Buenos Aires. Much suggests that Eichmann even put Fritsch in touch with his family in Linz, when Fritsch emigrated to Austria with his wife and children in 1958.15

  The “Co-author”: Willem Sassen

  None of the National Socialists who fled to Argentina fulfilled the cliché of the vivo as much as Willem Sassen. He was a multifaceted bon vivant, a man of many talents (which didn’t include any form of self-restraint). He liked to party and was always on the lookout for the big coup, the fast buck—but he had no staying power, either in his private or his professional life. If there was one constant in Sassen’s life, it was his fascination with National Socialism, which, unlike Fritsch, he had experienced firsthand. Wilhelmus Antonius Maria Sassen16 was born into a Catholic family on April 16, 1918, in Geertruidenberg (North Brabant, Netherlands). After leaving school, he considered studying theology before deciding on law, and at university he became closely acquainted with National Socialism. As an eighteen-year-old, his trip to the Olympic Games sparked his fascination with Adolf Hitler to such an extent that when he returned home, he made an emphatically pro-German speech that got him thrown out of Ghent and lost him his place at the university. Sassen’s first journalistic experience was on newspapers, and he started to write for the military when he was drafted in 1938. He didn’t spend long in the Utrecht Artillery: when the Germans marched in, Sassen was briefly taken as a prisoner of war, then demilitarized. He returned to journalism. He also married for the first time in 1940 and became a father, then started to look around for a second wife. During the Russian campaign, Sassen signed up for the Dutch Voluntary SS and joined the “Kurt Eggers” SS squadron. This was a reservoir of propaganda assistants, where writers and broadcasters like Henri Nannen and Vitus de Vries spurred the troops on to final victory. Sassen knew them both. According to Stan Lauryssens, he was also a witness to war crimes: he once watched as the SS forced twenty-seven Jews to beat one another to death.17 Sassen’s path led him across Poland to Russia, into the middle of the Caucasus offensive of 1942. On July 26, Sassen was so severely wounded that he had to spend the next eight months being patched up in military hospitals in Kraków, Munich, and Berlin. This got him a promotion to SS Unterscharführer and made him a war hero to his fellow Nazis. Sassen had belonged to the Waffen-SS and had the frontline experience and the scars to show for it, while Eichmann was in the General SS, which the frontline soldiers looked upon with disdain. His only scar was from a motorcycle accident, and his broken hand had been caused by a slippery parquet floor. This lack of combat experience was still an obvious stigma among ex-SS comrades in exile, and Eichmann was painfully aware of it.18

  After Sassen’s recovery in April 1943, his career really took off. He was allowed to make live broadcasts, in contravention of the censorship laws, which became so successful and popular that even Radio Sender Bremen broadcast his reports. Until mid-1944, Sassen worked for Sender Brüssel, setting a new benchmark for extreme anti-Allied radio with his heavy-handed, hair-raising, tear-jerking style. This same mix of pornographic violence, pathos, and sentimentality would characterize his writing in Argentina. He was skilled in catering to mainstream tastes, producing vast numbers of reports, and earning a commensurate amount of money. The personal high point of his career as a war correspondent was a live frontline broadcast from Normandy on June 6, 1944 (D-day), when at times he found himself behind enemy lines as the Allies landed. When the evacuation order came for troops to return to Germany, Sassen started working for mobile war broadcasters, propaganda sheets, and radio stations. However, he increasingly became a gossip-column character himself, plundering supply depots and disobeying orders. Only his good contacts repeatedly prevented him from suffering serious consequences. In March 1945 Sassen f
led to Utrecht and continued to broadcast his miserable slogans about perseverance there until the power failure on April 7. At that point Sassen seems to have realized it was time to look elsewhere. He made contact with his brother, who had also been in the Waffen-SS since 1944 and had built up a network to help Dutch Nazis go underground. It was a systematic counterfeiting operation to support the creation of new identities that used mobile radio broadcasters as contact media. After Hitler’s death, the brothers fled to Alkmaar and went underground themselves.