Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  People really did think like this (and in fact, some still do),55 as we can see from numerous published treatises featuring an ever-changing array of conspiracies. They range from unsophisticated denial to an elaborate outline of a Jewish-infiltrated Gestapo, working behind Hitler’s back to stage a mass murder of Jews by Jews. As the deniers rode roughshod over reality, the perpetrator Adolf Eichmann mutated into a figure of hope, the star witness to this peculiar truth. The frightening extent of these paranoid hopes of redemption would be revealed immediately after Eichmann’s arrest, in media reactions that did not come exclusively from right-wing publications. The articles were full of warnings to Israel about the unwelcome things Eichmann would supposedly reveal. The New York Times prophesied that a public trial would “do Israel more harm than good” and that “reprisals against Israel” would be unavoidable. Der Spiegel quoted the “first unexpected reactions” before they had even happened. The far-right monthly Nation Europa listed all these warnings with relish. Or almost all—Stern’s warning “that the State of Israel is now in danger [of] coming into the Nazis’ inheritance” was apparently not worth repeating to Nation Europa’s National Socialist readers.56

  Willem Sassen, the Dutch SS man, would encapsulate the deniers’ delusions neatly in an interview at the end of 1960. It was, he explained, quite obvious that the Israeli government could have had nothing to do with Eichmann’s capture: the Israelis were the last people who wanted Eichmann to talk, for fear that he would expose the lie upon which their country was founded. A small group of Jews acting independently—elementos fanáticos—must have kidnapped him, and now the truth that people had tried to suppress for so long would finally come to light.57 As late as 1981, Adolf von Thadden, one of the most influential far-right voices in the new Federal Republic, would still hold out hope for the publication of Eichmann’s thoughts from Argentina: “The ‘six million’ would be proved a lie, an untruth consciously disseminated over 35 years.”58 This whole tangled mess, however, had one problem: the mass murder of the Jews was not a Jewish lie but a thoroughly German idea, and Eichmann, as a German, was much too proud of having implemented the murder project to deny it. Any hope that this man could in some way free Germany of its guilt was plainly absurd. In the event, the only thing Eichmann’s statements would reveal was the monstrous scale of this German crime and the immeasurable suffering of the people who had fallen victim to the German mania.

  Now that we have access not only to those statements, but to more than fifty years of documentation and research, it’s hard to imagine that in 1953 many people still believed that Eichmann would bring to light their idea of the truth, or that his very survival could be a threat to Israel’s position and to Adenauer’s reconciliation policies. The Federal Republic and postwar German society were far from stable, and “revelations,” if they had been possible, would have shaken the country. This paranoid belief in Eichmann as a key witness for the far right might have been the hidden motive that made Mast show Wiesenthal the letter from Argentina. It would have allowed people to threaten “the Jews” with Eichmann’s testimony, and it could have unleashed explosive political consequences. Where people’s reasoning runs so far into madness, their actions are not based on reality.

  Wiesenthal was now certain that all the information he had obtained in the hunt for Eichmann would lead to something. The clue to where Eichmann was living, from Wilhelm Höttl and Heinrich Mast, was not the only one he received during this period. A friend of Vera’s sister near Linz told him that Vera had emigrated to South America and that “in July 1953 I was in Vienna and … had a talk with the Director General for Public Security, Min. Rat Dr. Pammer, and the conversation happened to turn to Eichmann. Pammer also told me he had information that Eichmann … was living in Argentina.” Wiesenthal had already been given another, equally portentous hint in a letter from none other than Amin al-Husseini.59 This letter, received by an acquaintance of Wiesenthal’s in Munich named Ahmed Bigi,60 who translated it for him, contained a direct question from the mufti “on Eichmann’s whereabouts.” Wiesenthal received this news with a degree of mistrust. It could, of course, have been “a cunning move on the mufti’s part.” The question to Bigi could have been an attempt to deflect suspicion that Eichmann was living in the Middle East. Wiesenthal spoke no Arabic, but his personal connection with Bigi made him believe that the letter genuinely contained what Bigi had translated for him. When it then emerged that the inquiry had come not from al-Husseini but from another Muslim who had worked for Hitler’s Foreign Ministry, it changed nothing for Wiesenthal. He could “of course not guarantee 100% that Eichmann is in Argentina,” as he wrote to Nahum Goldmann,61 but he was certain that the headlines about the “Reappearance of Eichmann in Tel-Aviv,” the “Mass Murderer as Military Adviser to the Egyptian Army,” the “SS General in the Middle East,” or the “German Adviser” to the mufti were simply wrong.62

  Within a relatively short space of time, Wiesenthal received several hints that Eichmann was to be found in South America and not the Middle East. But surprisingly, although he passed his new information on to all his contacts, from the Israeli consulate in Vienna to Nahum Goldmann—and there is also evidence it also reached the CIA63—nobody stepped up the hunt for Adolf Eichmann. The information was practically everywhere, but it was ignored. The non-German intelligence services showed as little enthusiasm for bringing this war criminal to justice as the Gehlen Organization had the previous year.

  Anyone who had hoped that divulging information about Eichmann’s whereabouts would have an impact was disappointed. Wiesenthal was hardest hit by the lack of interest. In his memoirs, he painted himself as the lone campaigner for a justice in which hardly anyone else was interested: “I feel that, along with a few other like-minded fools, I was quite alone.”64 The politics of the day were more important. A cold war was going on between the world powers, a hot war had broken out in Korea, and “against this background the picture of Adolf Eichmann was fading. If I tried to talk to my American friends about him, they would reply a little wearily: ‘We’ve got other problems.’ ”65 Konrad Adenauer had made his declaration of responsibility, but that didn’t mean he wanted a thorough search for those responsible. Immediately after the Luxembourg Agreement was finalized, people started asking questions about some surprising people working for the Foreign Office. Adenauer announced to the Bundestag: “In my opinion, we should call a halt to trying to sniff out Nazis.”66 For the next few years, the chancellor’s word became law for German institutions.

  3

  One Good Turn

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

  —Franz Alfred Six, on his employee, 19381

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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