Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Germany as Eichmann vor Jerusalem: Das unbehelligte Leben eines Massenmörders by Arche Literatur Verlag AG, Zurich–Hamburg in 2001. Copyright © 2011 by Arche Literatur Verlag AG, Zurich–Hamburg. Copyright © 2014 by Bettina Stangneth

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stangneth, Bettina.

  [Eichmann vor Jerusalem. English]

  Eichmann before Jerusalem : the unexamined life of a mass murderer / by Bettina Stangneth ; translated from the German by Ruth Martin.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-95967-6 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-307-95968-3 (eBook).

  1. Eichmann, Adolf, 1906–1962. 2. War criminals—Germany—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945). I. Title.

  DD247.E5S7313 2014

  364.15′1092—dc23

  [B]

  2014001031

  eBook ISBN: 9780307959683

  Jacket photographs: Yad Vashem Archive

  Jacket design by Oliver Munday

  v3.1

  For Dieter, the guiding star on my journey through the night.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Selected Cast of Characters

  Introduction

  “MY NAME BECAME A SYMBOL”

  1 The Path into the Public Eye

  2 The Postwar Career of a Name

  3 Detested Anonymity

  INTERLUDE

  A False Trail in the Middle East

  EICHMANN IN ARGENTINA

  1 Life in the “Promised Land”

  2 Home Front

  3 One Good Turn

  THE SO-CALLED SASSEN INTERVIEWS

  1 Eichmann the Author

  2 Eichmann in Conversation

  A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY

  A CHANGE OF ROLE

  Eichmann in Jerusalem

  AFTERMATH

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Selected Cast of Characters

  These are some of the less familiar people associated with Adolf Eichmann (aka Otto Heninger on the Lüneberg Heath and Ricardo Klement in Argentina) in the postwar period.

  Principal Participants in the Sassen Discussions

  ALVENSLEBEN, LUDOLF VON: Himmler’s former chief adjutant; higher SS and police leader; after the war, the highest-ranking Nazi in Argentina

  FRITSCH, EBERHARD: Head of Dürer Verlag from 1946, publishing Nazi texts and owning a bookstore that became a focal point for Nazis in Argentina; publisher of Der Weg—El Sendero, the most extremist postwar Nazi magazine

  LANGER, DR.: Former SD officer from Vienna; other details unknown

  SASSEN, WILLEM: Dutch Nazi collaborator and member of SS journalist corps; propagandist, correspondent, author, and ghostwriter for Nazis in Argentina; organizer and host of the interviews and discussion group with Eichmann

  Adolf Eichmann’s Family

  EICHMANN, HORST ADOLF; Dieter Helmut; Ricardo Francisco: Younger sons of Adolf and Vera Eichmann

  EICHMANN, KARL ADOLF: Adolf Eichmann’s father

  EICHMANN, KLAUS: Eldest son of Adolf and Vera Eichmann

  EICHMANN, OTTO: Adolf Eichmann’s brother; with Robert, organized and supported the defense in Eichmann’s trial

  EICHMANN, ROBERT: Adolf Eichmann’s stepbrother; a lawyer who organized and supported his brother’s defense, 1960–62; large portions of the Argentina Papers were stolen from his office

  EICHMANN, VERA: Adolf Eichmann’s wife; postwar, she used her birth surname, Liebl

  Involved with Eichmann’s Escape from Justice and Journey to Argentina

  FREIESLEBEN, HANS: SS member who arranged a hiding place for Eichmann on Lüneberg Heath

  FULDNER, HORST CARLOS: German-Argentine SS member; helped Nazis escape on behalf of Juan Perón

  HUDAL, BISHOP ALOIS: Roman bishop and Hitler sympathizer who helped falsify identity papers for Nazi fugitives, including Eichmann

  KRAWIETZ, NELLY: Sister of SS member Kurt Bauer; hid Eichmann on his escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; later visited him when he was in hiding on Lüneberg Heath

  KUHLMANN, HERBERT, AKA PEDRO GELLER: Former member of SS panzer corps; traveled from Europe to Argentina with Eichmann; in 1953, was guarantor for Eichmann’s apartment in Chacabuco Street; worked at CAPRI

  SCHINTLHOLZER, LUIS (ALOIS): Austrian SS officer involved in 1938 pogrom in Innsbruck and war crimes in Italy; helped Eichmann escape Germany

  Members of the Dürer Circle and Other Associated Nazis in Argentina

  HAGEL, HERBERT: SS member; former secretary to the gauleiter of Linz; employed by CAPRI

  HEILIG, BERTHOLD: Former NSDAP district leader in Brunswick; worked for CAPRI in Tucumán

  KLINGENFUß, KARL: Worked in Nazi Foreign Office’s “Jewish Department”; head of German-Argentine Chamber of Commerce until 1967

  KOPPS, REINHARD, AKA JUAN MALER: Prolific writer, fanatical Nazi, and rival of Sassen’s; worked for Dürer Verlag in the early days of Der Weg

  LEERS, JOHANN VON: SS officer and prominent ideologue employed in the Ministry of Propaganda; in Argentina 1950–54; wrote for Der Weg

  MENGE, DIETER: SS member; Luftwaffe pilot; in Argentina became a scrap-metal magnate; Sassen’s patron

  NEURATH, CONSTANTIN VON: Son of Germany’s former foreign minister; with Rudel, founder of Kameradenwerk, a fund to assist fugitive Nazis legally and financially; from 1958, director of Siemens Argentina S.A.

  OVEN, WILFRED VON: Press adjutant to Goebbels in the Ministry of Propaganda; author of a book on Goebbels, published by Dürer Verlag

  PFEIFFER, FRANZ WILHELM: Wehrmacht colonel and rumored guardian of Nazi gold; owner of the rabbit farm in Joaquín Gorina managed by Eichmann; friend of Sassen and Rudel

  POBIERZYM, PEDRO: Polish Wehrmacht soldier; did business with Nazis in Argentina, including Dieter Menge and Willem Sassen

  RUDEL, HANS-ULRICH: Luftwaffe bomber pilot, the most highly decorated serviceman under Hitler; with Neurath, founded Kameradenwerk, a fund to assist Nazis legally and financially; friend of Fritsch and admirer of Sassen, who ghostwrote Rudel’s books, published by Dürer Verlag

  SCHWAMMBERGER, JOSEF: SS member and camp commandant in Krakow, 1942–44; employed by Siemens Argentina S.A.

  VOLLMER, DIETER: Close colleague of Fritsch who worked on Der Weg; returned to Germany in 1954 but remained in contact with Dürer

  VÖTTERL, JOSEF: Member of the criminal and border police with Einsatzkommando 10A of Einsatzgruppe D; fled to Buenos Aires but moved back to Germany in 1955; found employment with BfV; returned to Argentina in 1958

  Connected to Eichmann’s Pursuit, Arrest, and Trial

  AHARONI, ZVI: Mossad agent who found out Eichmann’s Argentine address and positively identified “Ricardo Klement” as Eichmann

  BAUER, FRITZ: Attorney general of He
sse, 1956–68; prosecutor of Nazi war criminals; located Eichmann in Argentina and provided the information to Israeli authorities

  FRIEDMAN, TUVIAH: Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered; Nazi hunter; creator of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes

  GENOUD, FRANÇOIS: Swiss financier, Hitler admirer, and dedicated Nazi; profited from the commercializing writings of Nazis such as Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels; involved in a deal to sell Eichmann’s writings for profit and to finance Eichmann’s defense

  HAREL, ISSER: Head of Mossad, 1952–63; author of a controversial account of Eichmann’s capture

  HAUSNER, GIDEON: Israeli attorney general, 1960–63; led the prosecution of Eichmann

  HERMANN, LOTHAR: Lawyer; survivor of Dachau whose family died in the Holocaust; legal adviser, first in Buenos Aires, then in the German-Jewish community in Coronel Suárez; alerted Bauer and others that Eichmann was in Argentina

  LESS, AVNER W.: Chief inspector in the Israeli police; interrogated Eichmann after his capture

  MAST, HEINRICH: German and American intelligence officer; associate of Höttl; said to have informed Wiesenthal in 1953 that Eichmann was in Argentina

  SERVATIUS, ROBERT: West German attorney; defended Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and later was Eichmann’s defense counsel

  TARRA, VALENTIN: Altaussee criminal investigator who observed Eichmann’s family while Eichmann was in hiding

  WIESENTHAL, SIMON: Holocaust survivor and, after the war, the most famous Nazi hunter; found the first photograph of Eichmann; prevented the Eichmann family’s every attempt to have him declared dead

  Others

  HARLAN, THOMAS: Son of Veit Harlan, the notorious anti-Semitic film director; author, devoted to revealing Nazi war crimes; friend of Fritz Bauer; in 1961, published one of the first articles based on the Argentina Papers (obtained from Langbein) in the Polish weekly Polityka

  HÖTTL, WILHELM: Austrian SS officer; postwar, was a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials, quoting Eichmann on the number of six million Holocaust victims; later an “intelligence” agent providing much false information to intelligence services, the press, and historians

  KASZTNER, RUDOLF (REZSÖ): Austro-Hungarian Jew; executive vice president of the Budapest Rescue Committee; with Brand, negotiated the 1944 “blood for goods” proposal with Eichmann, an attempt to save Hungarian Jewry; after the war, accused of collaborating with Nazis; assassinated in 1957

  LANGBEIN, HERMANN: Concentration camp survivor; first general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee in Vienna; brought criminal charges against Eichmann in Austria in 1959; in 1961, obtained and disseminated the most complete copy of the Argentina Papers

  ORMOND, HENRY: Dachau survivor; lawyer for Nazi victims; friend of Bauer and Harlan; helped to make the Argentina Papers available in 1961

  PASSENT, DANIEL: Editor of Polish weekly Polityka; in 1961, published a five-part series based on Langbein’s copy of the Argentina Papers, with commentary by Harlan and himself

  RAKOWSKI, MIECZYSŁAW F.: Editor-in-chief of Polityka; verified the authenticity of the Argentina Papers

  SASSEN, MIEP: Second wife of Willem

  SASSEN, SASKIA: Daughter of Willem and Miep

  SCHNEIDER, INGE: Family friend of the Sassens; daughter of the captain of the ship on which the Sassens fled Europe

  WISLICENY, DIETER: SS officer who was Eichmann’s subordinate, close friend, and acolyte; postwar, a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials; blamed Eichmann in an attempt to save his own life; tried and hanged in 1948 in Bratislava; his Nuremberg testimony would help the prosecution of Eichmann in 1961

  Introduction

  This business is not really clear to me at all.

  —Hannah Arendt1

  We cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children without mentioning his name—and yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was: Karl Adolf? Otto? It’s the simplest of questions yet it can still surprise us, long after we thought we’d established who he was. But are there really still such large gaps in our knowledge of a man who has been so thoroughly investigated for so many years, by both academics and the media? Adolf Eichmann’s fame surpasses even that of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. So why write another book? It was the simplest of questions: I wanted to find out who knew Adolf Eichmann before Mossad famously snatched him from Argentina and put him before a court in Israel.

  Eichmann’s answer, given in Israel, is not hard to find: “Until 1946, I had next to no public profile, until Dr. Hoettl … branded me the murderer of 5 or 6 million Jews.”a 2 We should not be surprised to hear these words from an accused man—and this one in particular. Eichmann, after all, is famous for saying that he had been “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” What is surprising is that, until now, the secondary literature on Eichmann has dutifully parroted this view. Other great controversies might surround the man behind the genocide, but everyone is agreed that until his trial in Jerusalem, the name Eichmann was known only to a small circle of people.3

  The suspicion that something was amiss, both in Eichmann’s story and in the research, arose when I started to read old newspapers. On May 23, 1960, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unexpectedly announced to the world that Adolf Eichmann had been captured and was to stand trial. What followed was not a puzzled silence but pages and pages of detailed articles describing a man about whom, supposedly, very little was known, by very few people. A glance at some even older publications confirmed my suspicion unequivocally. Long before the start of his trial, this “unknown” man already had more nicknames than most other Nazis: Caligula; Czar of the Jews; Manager of the Holocaust; Grand Inquisitor; Engineer of the Jewish Genocide; the Final Solutionist; the Bureaucrat; the Mass Murderer. All these epithets were applied to Eichmann between 1939 and 1960. They didn’t arise after his arrest—they appeared long before that, in newspapers, pamphlets, and books. You have only to read these materials to find out exactly what people knew and thought about Eichmann, and when. During this period, only one group claimed, with equal unanimity, to know nothing about him. They were the postwar Nazis, his former colleagues, who were desperate to play down what they knew. But the evidence raises the questions: How did this knowledge come to be lost? How could a man cause himself to disappear, retrospectively, from the eyes of the world? The answer leads us to the problematic heart of the singular crime against humanity that we call the Holocaust, the Shoah, the extermination of the Jews.

  We like to imagine criminals as shady figures, committing their crimes in secret, fearful of public judgment. When they are unmasked, we like to imagine a consistent reaction from the public, an instinctive wish to ostracize them and bring them to justice. The first attempts to consider the perpetrators of the disenfranchisement, expulsion, and murder of the European Jews were wholly in line with this cliché of shady characters, terrorizing their victims while society’s back was turned. But we have long since moved on from this vision of a small group of pathological, asocial freaks within an upstanding population who would have mounted a collective resistance, if only they had known what was going on. We now know a lot about how the National Socialist worldview functioned. We know about the dynamics of collective behavior and the impact of totalitarian regimes. We understand the influence that an atmosphere of violence can have, even on people with no particular inclination toward sadism, and we have explored the disastrous effect of the division of labor on people’s sense of individual responsibility. Of course, huge disagreement remains about where and how we should classify a perpetrator like Adolf Eichmann. Depending on whose account you read, he comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, ma
de even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the “Eichmann phenomenon” before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us that in every assumption that leads to injustice, two parties are always involved: the person making the claim, and all the others who believe him.4 We can learn a good deal about the danger inherent in this curious collaboration by looking at the public perception of Adolf Eichmann. The greatest danger arises when someone has as clear an understanding of this collaboration as did the notorious “Adviser for Jewish Affairs.” For this reason, my book tells Eichmann’s story not as a chronological account of his crimes or his actions as they developed, but as a study of the impact he made: who knew Eichmann and when; what people thought of him and when; and how he reacted to what they thought and said. To what extent, I ask, was the Eichmann phenomenon shaped by his talent for self-dramatization? What did this role-playing contribute to his murderous career, and what can it contribute now to our understanding of his story?

  Our ability to reconstruct these perspectives today rests on an exceptional body of source material: there are more documents, testimonials and eyewitness reports on Eichmann than on any other leading Nazi. Not even Hitler or Goebbels has occasioned more material. And the reason is not simply Eichmann’s survival for seventeen years after the end of the war, nor the impressive efforts of the Israeli police in collecting evidence for the trial: the reason is primarily his own passion for speaking and writing. Eichmann acted out a new role for every stage of his life, for each new audience and every new aim. As subordinate, superior officer, perpetrator, fugitive, exile, and defendant, Eichmann kept a close eye on the impact he was having at all times, and he tried to make every situation work in his favor. And there was a method to his behavior, as a comparison of the many roles he played will reveal.