Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  We can only guess at what lay behind the fateful letter. Did Alvensleben initiate the route in this way? Did Eichmann and Mengele do the same thing to organize their own escapes, or was Alvensleben looking for a separate route? The answers may be revealed by searching the Bozen city archive for more letters written by concerned wives with masculine handwriting, looking for their husbands with a number of spellings. But it is now certain that Alvensleben used the same papers as Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann for his escape, all of them produced in three consecutive months. In the face of this information, it would take some nerve to continue talking about improvised escapes by a variety of routes. In fact, it suggests there was an even greater degree of organization than previously thought.

  When Ludolf von Alvensleben stumbled across the Sassen circle, he was reunited with at least one man who had not only idolized the same superior officer but had the same people to thank for his new life. This must have been more than just coincidence, even if he subsequently decided that Eichmann was far too common for him. Alvensleben applied for and was granted Argentine citizenship for himself and his family in 1952, which effectively protected him from being prosecuted by the Federal Republic. He made a good life for himself in Argentina, becoming the manager of a fish farm in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, Córdoba. He was the head of the Argentine office for fishing, hunting, and sailing in his district and posed for photos as president of the soccer club Clubo Atletico Union. Juan Maler even said that for a few years, Alvensleben had been mayor of the nearby Nazi enclave of Villa General Belgrano.264 Despite the death sentence the Polish authorities passed on him in absentia for thousands of murders, and attempts by the Federal Republic to prosecute him in 1964, he would die peacefully in Argentina in 1970. In a television interview, a family member from a younger generation defended the possibility that Alvensleben had reformed during his Argentine exile, abandoning his National Socialist convictions as quickly as he had his homeland.265 Obviously in 1957, when Alvensleben sought out Sassen, Fritsch, Langer, and Eichmann and spent days deep in conversation with them about the Nazi era, the extermination of the Jews, and the pure ideas of National Socialism, this conversion had not yet taken place.

  Sassen’s deployment of Alvensleben was effective only for a short time. Eichmann adjusted to this new interviewer very quickly and defended the “sanctity of his struggle,” complete with death camps, against the conspiracy theorists. He refused to be intimidated—once again—even by men of the highest ranks, when he believed he had been fulfilling an order from the Führer. Alvensleben’s entry into the Sassen circle reveals the scale of the group’s ambition for this project. They weren’t just producing the memoirs of an adviser on Jewish affairs (Eichmann wasn’t even the subject of the Alvensleben interview) or hosting a reading group; they were undertaking a wholesale revision of history, targeted at redeeming Hitler and National Socialism. Even Alvensleben wanted to be part of it, despite his genteel reserve and sense of caution. Later, when Sassen dug out the transcripts to sell them, he removed almost the entire transcript of the tape with the Alvensleben interview on it. This suggests that we have the second part of the interview only because Sassen forgot about it. He may well have assured Alvensleben of his discretion, as he did Langer. In any case, he never put the interview up for sale, although the confessions of the man who had been Himmler’s chief adjutant would have been easy to sell. He didn’t even try after Alvensleben’s death. Sassen’s greed reached its limit at personal alliances. Eichmann never betrayed Alvensleben either, inventing the presence of Rudolf Mildner to cover him, though he may well have had Alvensleben’s patronizing Nazi-aristocrat manner in mind when he complained in Israel about the “salon officers in white gloves”—the men who hadn’t understood the core of the National Socialist movement.

  “The Lie of the Six Million”

  I did speak to Höttl very often, that’s true, and probably about the extermination of the Jews, what else would we have been talking about.

  —Eichmann, Sassen discussions266

  No topic provoked the Dürer circle more than the number of Jewish victims. By 1957, no one in Buenos Aires still believed that articles like “The Lie of the Six Million” and the Hester Report could throw the genocide into doubt—mainly because the Dürer circle had been largely responsible for manufacturing these revisionist denials. Once the new body of source material became available, all they could do was try to make the scale of the genocide appear as small as possible. It is difficult to understand why the question of victim numbers continues to occupy old and neo-Nazis, and the New Right, like no other, considering that the legal and moral problem of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews does not depend on an absolute number. The “reparations” negotiations would hardly have had a different outcome if four or eight million, rather than six, had been the figure under discussion. It is as if these men, who had mastered the power of symbols with their cult of the Führer, were always more afraid of their “enemy’s” powerful symbol—the six million—than anything else. But another question has a simpler answer: who was the source named by all the post-1945 witnesses, and who was the first person to mention this unimaginable figure? Der Weg itself heralded the appearance of this witness in 1957. In the July issue, another “reader’s letter” said it was “particularly regrettable that it has not been possible to track down the person who, according to all the Jewish publications and witness statements in the Nuremberg IMT trial, is regarded as the only person qualified to speak on this entire complex: SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. After the deaths of Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Kaltenbrunner, he may be the only credible inside witness to what really took place.”267 The vigilant “reader” then asks whether anyone has any information on this key witness, who has thus far been “impossible to find.”

  Published at the end of 1955, the collection of documents edited by Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf gave readers access to Wilhelm Höttl’s full three-page declaration under oath, in which he set out his conversation with Eichmann. Document PS-2738 had been one of the most important documents in the Nuremberg Trials.268 Here Höttl says that Eichmann had come to his Budapest apartment at the end of August 1944, as usual wanting information on the military situation. Höttl took this opportunity to ask him about the exact number of Jews murdered, and Eichmann answered: “Around four million Jews have been killed in the various extermination camps, while a further two million met their end in other ways, the majority being shot by the Security Police’s Einsatzkommandos during the Russian campaign.” Höttl emphasized Eichmann’s credibility as a source in some detail: “I have to assume that this information I had from Eichmann was correct: of all the relevant people, he was definitely the one with the best overview of the number of Jews murdered. Firstly, he ‘provided’ the Jews to the extermination camps, so to speak, using his special commandos, so he knew this number precisely. Secondly, as departmental head in Office IV of the RSHA, which was also responsible for Jewish affairs, he definitely had the best knowledge of how many Jews had died in other ways.” Eichmann had even written a report for Himmler, who thought his figures too low.

  Naturally, everyone in the Dürer circle was familiar with Höttl’s statement. Der Weg had polemicized against it, but reading the occasional newspaper article was a very different matter from undertaking a close reading of the text itself. Sassen recognized immediately that Höttl’s declaration had to be discredited if his group were to have any possibility of denying the Germans’ systematic extermination of the Jews. He questioned Eichmann directly, at the very start of the discussion, about “the theory of the six million” and his conversation with Höttl, then returned to it again and again.269 The group tried to find out as much as they could about this witness, and to discover his every personal weakness, by asking Dr. Langer to give a lecture on him. The crucial question for Sassen was “how to make a mockery … of this explanation?”270

  The problem was compounded by the fact that Dieter Wislicen
y had quoted numbers of a similar magnitude from his former superior. In Nuremberg he reported several conversations with Eichmann on the topic, in which the figure had always been at least four million. And he repeated Eichmann’s notorious farewell speech in Berlin, with the words: “He would leap laughing into the grave, because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience gave him an extraordinary sense of satisfaction.”271 Unlike Eichmann, who knew exactly who had been present when he made these claims, Sassen had no idea how many other witnesses might remember this sort of statement. During Eichmann’s trial, Theodor Grell, adviser on Jewish affairs at the mission in Budapest and Eichmann’s ally, would testify that in late fall 1944, Eichmann had proudly told him he was responsible for the deaths of “six million people.”272 Sassen became aware of the greatest hindrance to his efforts much too late—namely, the fact that a high body count really did give Eichmann an extraordinary sense of satisfaction. Still, Eichmann took great pains to tell Sassen and his associates what they wanted to hear. No, of course he had never talked about millions of murdered Jews, only “enemies of the Reich.” No, he had not said “people,” either: he had definitely said “enemies of the Reich.” Only during his trial in Israel would Eichmann be forced to admit that he had said “Jews” after all. In a momentary lapse, he had actually written it down himself.273

  In Argentina, Eichmann said it was inexplicable that he, of all people, should have “this explanation falsely attributed” to him.274 Höttl had just “happened upon the same lie as Wisliceny.”275 Eichmann even said the statistics he had prepared for Heydrich before the Wannsee Conference were a forgery, made at a later date.276 He “did not know [the] extermination figure at all,”277 as he had never prepared any statistics—and here his vanity proved treacherous, as he added that in any case, Himmler would never have been dissatisfied with his statistics.278 Eichmann sometimes overdid his reticence to the extent that Sassen had to remind him why he was there in the first place, namely as a guarantor for the figures. “We have to throw all our weight against the theory that Eichmann’s office had no overview of the numbers,” he complains to Eichmann on one tape, “all our weight!” Eichmann can only answer: “Of course, if it helps.”279 If it all weren’t so cynical, it might be comical: Eichmann denied what he knew to please Sassen’s circle, while they were consulting him precisely because he was the only one with that knowledge—except that they imagined what he knew was something very different. In this charade, Sassen is the impatient beau, using honeyed words to convince the beauty he adores to remove her mask at long last, not imagining in his wildest dreams that behind it lurks a snake-headed Medusa.

  In this complex constellation, the attempt to refute the Jewish “lie of the six million” became a farce in two senses. The group read one murder statistic after another—tellingly, leaving out those they themselves had falsified over the preceding years.280 In 1953 Gerald Reitlinger arrived at 4.2 to 4.7 million; the report to the World Jewish Congress from June 1946 put it at six million; Léon Poliakov thought eight million was possible. The Sassen circle tried to analyze each figure in the Wannsee transcript and in Korherr’s report to Hitler from 1943. They read the statement by Camp Commandant Höß about the extermination capacity of Auschwitz. Sassen rounded the numbers down; Eichmann rounded them up. Eichmann exaggerated the number of survivors; Sassen cast doubt on this, and together they tried to extrapolate a figure. Reading this discussion sometimes feels like being in a bazaar: once again only numbers, not people, exist for Eichmann: “So, he [Reitlinger] says 65,000, I say 40,000, so let’s call it around 50,000.”281 Another instance: “381,000 is a little high, but it may have been around 300,000.”282 And whenever Sassen starts to be even slightly optimistic, Eichmann’s words invariably throw everything into confusion again. “Half of them always lived,” Eichmann claims on the selections in Auschwitz, and although this is an incredible underestimation of the murder rate for the transports from Hungary, Sassen’s reaction is almost panicked: “No, no, we worked out that the absorption capacity was around 250,000, but if two million went there in total …,” then a million Jews would have been gassed in Auschwitz alone.283 As we now know, this is close to the truth, but it certainly wasn’t what Sassen wanted to hear in 1957.

  The Sassen circle’s grotesque tug-of-war over the numbers reveals a cynical misanthropy that is almost as unbearable as the thought of the National Socialist genocide itself. The only emotions displayed during this discussion are impatience or annoyance at the slow progress being made. The participants make hardly a single allusion to the victims, let alone express sympathy, shame, or guilt. And still, the researcher who is listening to these men conduct their investigations in Sassen’s living room, and struggling through the transcript, notices that despite their will to deceive and to deny everything, they were unable to make any headway against the might of the facts. However hard they tried, they still heaped up number after number, even without meaning to. As the total grew under their sharpened pencils, the magnitude of this crime against humanity started to look like the writing on the wall. All the participants, apart from Eichmann, had clearly been so convinced that the systematic mass murder of the Jews was a propaganda lie that they really expected that a closer inspection would only confirm their view. Sassen figured that if “the Jews” were forced to provide lists of names, to prove exactly who had been killed, then it would emerge that the dead would be only a tiny proportion.284 The fact that this very method would prove the opposite over the following decades was something he began to sense only gradually. Ultimately, no one can examine something this closely without also reexamining their own views. For his part, Eichmann learned that the first “final balance” he had given in “The Others Spoke” was indefensible, and he grasped the fundamental problem of using statistics to back his lies. In Israel he would be more cautious, implying that the number of Jews murdered would never be known for certain.

  Paradoxically, the men in Argentina were moving closer to reality, precisely because they had imagined a very different reality. They delved into an area of research that had only just begun, with all its beginners’ mistakes. In the first decade after the war, all the historians who tried to work to high academic standards, using only figures that could be proved, arrived at totals that we can now see were much too low. But the beginnings of this research were incredibly difficult: contrary to the idea of a systematic murder operation carried out with Germanic efficiency, the extermination of the Jews was an improvised and sometimes chaotic crime. The Germans then tried to burn their records—but even they had no real overview of what they had done. What went on in the death camps bore no resemblance to the clinical, “humane” killing of Himmler’s plans for extinction, which were modeled on pest control. In the camps, where the sole aim was to produce mountains of corpses, it was probably inevitable that all sense of structure and procedure would collapse over time. To imagine that historical research could ever yield an exact number of victims is to idealize the circumstances of this gigantic crime. And anyone trying to gain an accurate picture of these processes would require access to many more documents than were available in the mid-1950s. At that point, only the perpetrators had any real details, even if some of the survivors had some idea of the scale of what had happened. Raul Hilberg estimated 5.1 million in 1961. Martin Gilbert’s estimate of 5.7 million in 1982 was not sufficiently backed by evidence. Only since the 1990s, and the opening of the Russian archives, have we understood that the true magnitude of the crime is close to the figure that Theodor Grell heard (and that Höttl claimed to have heard) from Eichmann in 1944.

  Ironically, Höttl’s statement is still regarded as unreliable. Much of what he told American investigators after the German defeat in 1945 was not information he had heard himself: he “borrowed” it from other people’s reports and added the occasional exaggeration of his own. It was a perverse attempt to make himself indispensable as a witness and to show his worth as a potential spy for the U.S. i
ntelligence service. At that point, he was in contact with Theodor Grell and Dieter Wisliceny and would have been able to avail himself of their recollections as well. Höttl’s biggest problem was distracting people from his own role in the Nazi regime. His meeting with Eichmann in Hungary clearly had had nothing to do with historical research; he was sounding out his own position as the regime collapsed. Eichmann was in touch with Heinrich Himmler, who was one of the greatest unknown quantities in the plans that Höttl and his superiors were making to save themselves. Through Eichmann, he could also discover what the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, was planning. Höttl was no small cog in the machine either, but being a man of importance would do him no favors with the Allies. Instead, he managed to dodge any probing questions, loudly proclaiming a different story to distract people from his own. This is exactly what he did with his conversation with Eichmann in Budapest in August 1944. And we can’t rule out the possibility that this detailed story was a macabre attempt by Höttl to outdo his competition.