Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
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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 Atom by Fritz 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.”85 A 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 th
e 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 for Egypt’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 st
ores, 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.