Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  In addition to the volumes discussed as a group, there were books and articles that Eichmann and the others read independently. Eichmann mentioned Der SS-Staat (The SS State) by Eugen Kogon, and Das Urteil von Nürnberg (The Nuremberg Judgment), an edition with a foreword by the American prosecutor Robert Kempner. We know Eichmann read almost everything there was on the topic.178 He also contributed information on newspaper articles: he received cuttings from the German and Austrian press from his family, and unlike Sassen, he also read the Argentinisches Tageblatt, a traditional German-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, which was considered liberal and, more important, Jewish. Perusing the “enemy press” was evidently one of the professional duties he continued in Argentina—and it was also useful for finding out whether anyone was on his tail. The articles Eichmann chose to bring Sassen show that he was still monitoring “the enemy.” And the book-lined front room of Sassen’s house offered the luxury of current European newspapers and magazines. These periodicals didn’t come just from the right-leaning corner of the market, like Thadden’s Reichsruf (for which Sassen had also written) or the Wiking-Ruf; there was also Stern, Der Spiegel, and the Dutch paper De Volkskrant. The head of the household occasionally translated articles for the others from the current issue of Time.179 By the end of the 1950s, probably no one had made such a detailed study of the literature on the Final Solution, in such a well-informed group, as the men in Buenos Aires—although they understood hardly any of it, as the principal aim of their reading was not to broaden their horizons.

  Three years later in Israel, Adolf Eichmann must have been grateful, on many occasions, for this period of study. One of the most famous photos of him shows him sitting at the table in his cell, before the start of the trial, books piled high in front on him. They are all books he knew well, and the numerous slips of paper marking particular pages show that he knew exactly how to make use of them.180 Avner W. Less, the captain of the Israeli police who interrogated Eichmann, noted it with concern: “As it emerged, the man was so well-versed in this area, it was incredible!”181 Less said how difficult it was for him and his colleagues to get a handle on the literature in such a short space of time, and he neatly summarized: “Reitlinger was our Bible.” Their prisoner knew this Bible backward before the investigating officer had even purchased a copy. Eichmann showed his awareness of the advantage that Sassen had given him by the fact that he tried to hide it. He pretended to be thankful that he was finally allowed to read books again and, in an exceptional display of deceit, expressed his regret that he hadn’t had the opportunity before. Of course, he had not only read the books in Argentina, he had practiced his rejoinders to them. You might say that in battling with the secondary literature, Eichmann had preempted the interrogation that awaited him. Sedate reading had never been how Eichmann engaged with books.

  The Sassen circle agreed on one point: this literature came “from the enemy,”182 “from the opposing side”;183 it was “enemy propaganda,”184 “enemy literature”185 by an “enemy author,”186 “enemy press,” 187 and above all, “enemy reasoning.”188 In short, it had all been written by the “Jewish enemy.”189 They reproached the victims’ side for writing on the topic, while on the perpetrators’ side, nobody had yet been interested enough to write their own book. In labeling the books “Jewish,” they were also making the supposition that they were dealing with propaganda, not proper research. “It’s very simple for these Jews,” Eichmann explained, “to scribble away after the event, writing whatever they like, as it suits them.”190 If he didn’t like the content, Eichmann attested that the author was either “ignorant or malevolent.”191 “Hacks,”192 “bunglers,”193 “jackass,”194 and “swine”195 are Eichmann’s customary titles for authors who we recognize today as pioneers of historical research on the Holocaust, though he and his associates refused to see them as such. The Sassen circle all shared his reservations that the whole body of research was “so-called scientific effusions.”196

  But this lack of respect for the research was more than just an attempt to defend themselves against accusations by striking out at anything within range. As a result of its crude racial theories, National Socialism rejected any “international” or nonracial system of thought. Ultimately, this meant that nonracial sciences could not exist either. There was a “German physics” and a “Jewish physics”—indeed, even the science commonly accepted as the epitome of universality was not spared this division: for National Socialists, there was also a Jewish mathematics.197 Even science was a racial battle for final victory, bringing all scientific and scholarly endeavor down to the level of simple tactics. In other words, the search for truth had to weaken the “enemy’s ideological struggle.” Naturally, they assumed their “enemies” were also behaving in this way. Ultimately, everyone was playing a tactical game, the Jews most of all: “As the author of his book, why should the Jew Brandt lie any less than accords to the Jewish mentality?” After all, proclaims the specialist Eichmann, Joel Brand is “the son of a half rabbi.”198

  Really, who had written the books was irrelevant: Eichmann discredited the volume by Wilhelm Höttl with the same consistency. Höttl’s text “is ridiculous, is stupid claptrap, is fibs from people taking any opportunity to try and make themselves interesting, or even wanting to carve out personal advantages after ’45.”199

  The Sassen circle read these books principally in order to discover how the authors manipulated the facts to bring out their truth. They wanted to learn how to blow open these alleged tactics and, where necessary, put them to better use themselves. They were convinced that everyone in this war for interpretational sovereignty was manipulating the truth. At least, they did everything they could to convince themselves. They weren’t always successful: even the readers in Buenos Aires weren’t immune to the persuasive power of this wealth of information.

  The more Sassen and Langer immersed themselves in this literature, the more frequently they found themselves worrying that what they read might actually be true. So many of the details were impossible to doubt. Even the things Eichmann actually admitted to were more than the men wanted to hear. Eichmann, who could see that this was problematic, borrowed the most Germanic of phrases from Goethe to describe the books: “It’s like I said already, the whole library that has appeared from the calamitous days of ’45 to the present is a hodgepodge of Dichtung und Wahrheit [truth and fiction].”200 It didn’t occur to him that some people found days other than those at the end of the war “calamitous.” Anyone who talks as much as Eichmann did will occasionally give the game away: in a fit of exuberance, he revealed the criteria by which he separated “truth” from “fiction”: “Everything … in the book that speaks against me leaves a bad taste in the mouth—I take it to be lies.”201

  His self-declared war on enemy literature saw Eichmann fighting on two fronts. While the others concentrated on defending their fantasy version of history against the research, Eichmann was also attempting to tell the Sassen circle what they wanted to hear. He knew his interlocutors would not be fellow soldiers but enemies. He had to put a slant on his interpretations, diverting the group away from facts that he knew only too well. Sassen and Fritsch may have been refusing to acknowledge historical facts, but Eichmann had to conceal knowledge that went far beyond the literature. This must have cost him a huge effort: knowing the magnitude of the crime, he first had to find out what was written about it, then consider how to distract the others from the books’ threatening content, while simultaneously appearing to share their perspective, which was one of denial. And then the specialist consultant had to add “new” information to the discussion—though without exposing himself too much. Most important, he had to avoid getting caught doing any of it. It’s no wonder Eichmann was in peak condition for his police interrogation in 1960.

  The additional difficulty in this already complex situation was that, when the Sassen conversations began, most of the books were new to Eichmann. Generally speaking, he was familiar only w
ith the reviews, not with the books themselves. Sassen frequently used this advantage to try to offset Eichmann’s huge head start on the information. He would confront Eichmann with historical details without revealing his source. Of course, Sassen’s alliance with the books didn’t go unnoticed by Eichmann, and he kept asking specific questions about the books’ contents. But above all, Sassen aroused Eichmann’s curiosity about what might actually have been written about him and his crimes. The process was always the same, starting with the first book that Sassen lent him, Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand. In one of the early discussions (tapes 6, 8, 9, and 10), Eichmann mentions that he isn’t familiar with it: “I have not read the book either, unfortunately I have not had access to it, it was published only a few months ago, but I have read several reviews in various newspapers.”202 Sassen deliberately ignores his hints, reassuring Eichmann that he knows the book well. Eichmann doesn’t dare ask straight out to borrow the book. But he does make frequent, pointed remarks about how reading it would be sure to jog his memory, if he were able to “study” it at some point:203 “I might be able to say more if I had the stimulus, through one of the explanations in his book, or if some other tome makes reference to something he says.”204 But Sassen held out for weeks, and the books were read only communally, during the discussion sessions. Only on tape 24 is Eichmann allowed to look at the book for himself and read out his own notes on it without interruption from the others.205 Sassen, as Eichmann quickly realized, wasn’t naïve, and at bottom, he wasn’t really a friend.

  But then, the books were not just the enemy, either. One of Eichmann’s most dangerous talents was for making effective use of all kinds of interpretations, even if that meant misusing them. As a trained ideological warrior, he naturally feared an attack from the “enemy” on every page. He saw the manipulation of history as the political aim of “the Jews.” But perhaps more surprisingly, he also sought help from these same volumes. Even the review of Weissberg and Brand’s publication fueled Eichmann’s hope that the books could support his claims, as he explained to Sassen: “If I now speak of a discussion with Dr. K[asztner], I can do this because today, after Joel Brand brought out his book, people will believe me, I doubt that they would ever have believed me before the book by the Jew JB came out.”206 At first glance, this hope may seem reckless, but it isn’t as crazily naïve as it appears: Eichmann had had years of practice in using books to support his theories, counter to the authors’ intentions. In 1938 he had exploited a seminal work on the history of Zionism to such an extent that the author never wrote another word. Eichmann learned early on that books could be his allies, provided that the focus of his interpretive technique was not to learn anything. Even Sassen thoroughly underestimated this ability of Eichmann’s; time after time he failed to put him off his stride by quoting from books. Sassen did not realize—nor would anyone who reads books in order to learn from them—that he would never catch up with Eichmann by using books or producing documents. For someone who has been “there,” books are an aide-mémoire, whereas for someone with no firsthand experience, they only tell him things he doesn’t already know. While Sassen was trying to formulate a rough idea of Eichmann’s activities from the books, Eichmann was reading them from a different perspective: knowing more than the authors, seeing their misunderstandings and the gaps in their knowledge, and making unfair use of their scholarly fairness. But this is how war works: you use your enemy’s weaknesses to every possible advantage. Consequently, Eichmann often referenced books that were actually denouncing him, as part of his strategy of lies and self-justification. “I believe one of the authors said that in a book,”207 he liked to say. When someone raised grave doubts about some of his observations, he replied with the advice: “I would ask you to look it up in the relevant literature that has been published since the war.”208 It is possible to make anything set out in black and white look as if it supports quite different theories from the author’s own.

  If Eichmann genuinely wanted to learn one thing from these books, it was battle tactics. He seemed to be constantly on the lookout for tricks to use in constructing his own version of events. The introduction to Advocate for the Dead advises the reader, in a spirit of honesty, that the dialogues it contains have been reconstructed by Weissberg and Brand, and while they are an approximation of the truth, they are not reliable sources. Eichmann sees “Jewish artfulness” here rather than the desire for transparency. And he was obviously very impressed by this “artistic license,” as he started to explore its possibilities for himself. “It is clearly very difficult,” he noted for Sassen on the transcript of this tape, “to work up the memories of a lot of things after so much time has passed. And if we are sticking to the truth, this has to be expressed in the book as well. Joel Brand and his author did something similar, of course.”209 Four years later, when drafting “Götzen,” his last great piece of self-justification, Eichmann would use this argument as if it were self-evident, to render himself immune to attacks at the outset: “This writerly endeavour cannot be weighed in the scales of the articles of law.”210

  As Sigmund Freud says, you can judge an author by the way he treats his readers. Eichmann shows that this maxim also works the other way around. He treated books the way he treated the people he made into his victims: violently, without respect or scruples, and with the end result of annihilation. His reading habits may teach us something about his great success as the “Adviser on Jewish Affairs.” The agility with which Eichmann—who hadn’t finished school and was certainly no intellectual—made use of texts is every bit as surprising as the career that saw this former salesman become a master of unprecedented and terrible improvisation, in the business of exterminating human beings. At least one cause of this deadly effectiveness is plain: Eichmann had determined his own course of action long before involving himself in books or discussions, and this course was war and annihilation. The fatal mistake the Jewish representatives made in dealing with him was to believe they could still exert an influence on his decisions. He, meanwhile, had already set his sights on murder and was unreceptive to any doubt. He did the same with texts, which was what made his use of them so fast and effective. He went through a book the way a burglar goes through an apartment: he took whatever he could use, judging everything purely on its functional interest. He cared little for what was broken in the process, or for what he left behind. What Eichmann looked for between the covers of a book was not confirmation of his thinking but material to back up his lies. This difference is crucial, because the latter excludes the possibility of doubt. A real reader remains open to doubt, even if it means questioning himself. This openness to doubt, this distance from one’s own thought, takes time, if the author’s interests and the text’s inner coherence are to come into their own. To put it simply: a reader is usually looking for a conversation with an author. But Eichmann was interested only in neutralizing this enemy, disguising his intent under an apparent interest in the literature, and feigning openness to other theories and respect for the people proposing them. This made him a faster reader than anyone who was interested in a serious discussion. In particular, it makes him a threat to historians: academic study is oriented toward integrity and solidity, and it is vulnerable to no enemy more than one who views scholarship as just another tactic. In turning to books, Eichmann once again revealed his desire to destroy anything that upset his conception of reality and threatened his self-image. Whether in his office at 116 Kurfürstenstraße or in Sassen’s living room, anyone believing he could influence Eichmann using fact or argument had lost before he even began. For someone waging a total war, discussion is a weapon just like any other. Eichmann’s problem in Argentina was that he couldn’t decide whether to use this weapon against Sassen or explain it to him.

  The Realization: Extermination

  I am by nature a very sensitive person, it’s not easy for me to just see something like that, it gives me the shudders.

  —Eichmann, Sassen discuss
ions211

  For men like Sassen and Fritsch, the Eichmann experience must have been a radical one. They had hoped to learn from the discussions, but they hadn’t reckoned with anything like the major insight they received into the National Socialists’ extermination operation. Adolf Eichmann confronted them with the magnitude and, above all, the face of the horror. Just as he would do at his trial in 1961, he spoke about the inhuman murder campaigns he had seen with his own eyes: the mass shooting of men, women, and children; people being rounded up and deported; murder by gas vans; extermination camps; selections; the burning of corpses. His words confirmed and gave substance to everything that Der Weg had dismissed as enemy propaganda. He knew enough about it, even though—as at Auschwitz—he hadn’t wanted to see this industrial mass murder close up and had kept his distance, preferring to let the commandant describe it to him “in the most colorful way.” “But I never saw the whole extermination process right from the beginning, I was not the man for that.”212 The open incinerations at the end of the process had been enough for him. Eichmann thought it had been right to exterminate the Jews, but he had taken no delight in confronting the victims’ fears, torment, and death in person. “When I went to the camp, it was for matters that did not stem from my personal curiosity,” he asserts in the transcript, and we can believe him. He tells how the camp commandant “took pleasure in showing a pencil-pusher the situations here that he was burdened with day after day.”213 A few of Eichmann’s descriptions convey the impression that as he told his listeners what he had seen and experienced, he was doing to the Sassen circle something like what Höß had done to him. His reports are frank and detailed, and they don’t sugarcoat. There is no talk of smoothly functioning killing machines, quick deaths, or German efficiency when it came to murder. Instead, Eichmann describes how awful mass murder was—awful for him, naturally: he was ordered to observe, he felt sick, and his “kneecaps trembled.” The problem wasn’t that children had been put to death; it was that he had been forced to watch—when, at that time, he had two children of his own. “I am one of those people who can’t stand to see corpses,” he confessed to the Sassen circle.214 His stories are full of horrendous self-pity, for the burden of having to watch other people suffer fates that he had set in motion. But Eichmann manages to play the witness in these accounts, a mere historian of the horror, persuading himself and the others that he had nothing to do with the extermination. He couldn’t have changed anything, and these “business trips” made him “an unhappy man.”215