Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A Forsaken Bunch in a Forsaken Position

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

  —Willem Sassen, Christmas 195590

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

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