Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  AFTERMATH

  Silence is less obvious. One must be aware of it before it yields its information.

  —Raul Hilberg1

  While the man who had been a Nazi in Argentina was busy becoming Eichmann-in-Jerusalem, producing new piles of texts with a new target audience in mind, his comrades in Buenos Aires turned their attention to the paper trail he had left there: one thousand pages of transcribed conversations with commentaries, a few surviving tapes, and five hundred pages of handwritten texts and notes, sometimes with copies. The path these papers took into the public eye would be complex. The story is still not finished and contains enough material for a novel. Although the so-called Sassen interviews have become one of the most quoted postwar sources on the Holocaust, knowledge of the scope and content of these important documents is surprisingly patchy, and researchers have shown surprisingly little curiosity about what the Argentina Papers actually say. The reasons are partly psychological: the fear of opening Pandora’s box; Golo Mann’s warning that dealing with filthy ideas can leave you with more than just dirty hands. But an overview of what Eichmann left behind from his time in South America is also incredibly difficult to obtain. The papers are strewn across several archives like a giant, cryptic jigsaw puzzle, and missing references and overly hasty ordering make the task even harder. In the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, the greatest find of the last decade boasts the description, “The texts have been available to researchers for years.” The additional note that their ordering is only “provisional,” due to lack of time, doesn’t make this blatant error any less devastating. The crucial clue to the reassembly of a historical puzzle often comes from the story of how it was broken apart in the first place. Solving the puzzle will involve taking the path back to the beginning, before it became a puzzle. So let us start at the point when the Argentina Papers were still as extensive as we know they once were: May 1960.

  The Sassen Material

  When Eichmann was abducted, what he left behind in Argentina was principally distributed between two addresses: his own and Willem Sassen’s. While his notes, private writings, annotated books, a few drafts of Sassen’s texts, and the “Tucumán Novel” were at the Eichmann house, Sassen had most of the material. Rumors still circulate in Buenos Aires today about who may or may not have hidden Eichmann’s papers, but as is usually the case, the truth may be simpler. After the far right’s election failure in the Federal Republic, the abortive book project, and the departure of his publisher to Austria, Sassen had grown bored with the material and set it all aside, turning his attention to new projects. Only when Eichmann was abducted did it suddenly regain its currency and explosive power. But most important, the material in his possession posed an immediate risk to him. Twelve days passed between Eichmann’s abduction and Ben-Gurion’s official announcement that Eichmann was a prisoner in Israel. During that time Eichmann’s family, friends, and acquaintances had no idea what had happened, or what might happen next, fearing that this operation might be the start of something bigger. Sassen’s immediate reaction was to get the material out of his house. Depositing it all in one place would not have been a smart move. Eichmann’s colleague at Mercedes-Benz said that Sassen and Klaus Eichmann left manuscripts with him for a week;2 others reported that a collection of tapes and transcripts was buried in a garden somewhere, possibly on the extensive grounds of Sassen’s patron Dieter Menge.3 The Eichmann family, meanwhile, understandably no longer felt safe in the house on the edge of the suburbs. Friends like Sassen and Fuldner helped them once again, taking some private things to safety. But no further attacks came, and the public announcement of Eichmann’s abduction dramatically altered Sassen’s situation: finally, he had a chance to exploit the old material.

  Adolf Eichmann had agreed that Sassen could publish the interviews “if I should die, or fall into the hands of the Israelis.”4 Sassen stuck to this agreement and acted fast. Typescripts of the tape recordings already existed, but as the Sassen circle’s project had finally died of boredom, a few of Eichmann’s handwritten texts were still lying around. If they were going to be usable, they had to be transcribed: Eichmann’s handwriting was idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult to read even for people used to German script.5 Sassen had some experience with Life and was thinking about the American market, so he employed a secretary to type up the rest right away.6 Sassen also took another, very farsighted step: he had the documents photographed. This was the simplest option, as today’s Xerox machines were not yet in use, and permanent copies could be produced only using photography.7 By June 1960, Sassen had negatives of all the documents he wanted to sell on 35mm film, the format that was used in analog photography for many years. This was a clever move, not just because Sassen was eager to prevent access to the originals. He was planning to travel, and fifteen hundred pages would have made for heavy luggage. (This bundle of typescript was around eight inches thick and weighed over 15.5 pounds.)

  Sassen decided not to sell the whole transcript and only a few copies of the handwritten pages. He removed more than one hundred pages from the interviews and left them at home, where most of them remained until 1979. This hasty clean-up operation was, however, anything but thorough: he forgot about the tape with the Alvensleben interview (probably the second tape from that session). After two years, anyone would find it difficult to remember exactly what was in a suitcase full of haphazardly compiled texts.

  The Sale

  According to the story that is frequently told, Willem Sassen seized his chance and rushed to sell the manuscript to the press, hoping to make the greatest possible profit from the affair. But it wasn’t that simple. Sassen was acting on the agreement he had made with Eichmann, but he was also using the material to pursue the interest that had bound him to Eichmann from the outset. He may have had a good nose for a fast buck, but he was also still a dedicated National Socialist and anti-Semite. Improbable as it may sound to us today, Sassen wanted more than just money: he wanted to use his relationship with Life to publish his interview with the world’s most notorious prisoner. And later events show that he actually believed the publication would benefit Eichmann. Anyone familiar with the Sassen-Fritsch circle’s fanciful conceptions of history will hardly be surprised by this degree of naïveté. Sassen also believed that the Israeli government could not have sanctioned Eichmann’s abduction, and that a few rogue fanatics had done something that would now create huge difficulties for Israel. Sassen was convinced that Eichmann talking was exactly what “the Jews” were afraid of. He wrote to Eichmann’s defense lawyer that the trial would be decided “like the Dreyfuss Affair back in the day, on the level of public opinion.”8 Sassen, who had once been so successful as a war correspondent, believed he was well versed in the use of this weapon. What Eichmann had said in Argentina would create difficulties for “the Jews.” His words would expose “Eretz Israel”; the world would recognize that Eichmann—like all Germans—was the real victim of the Jewish world conspiracy, and “the Jews” would finally be seen for what they were. If one thing could save Eichmann, it was that “the Jews” were afraid of this “truth” being “exposed.” There was no doubt about it in Sassen’s mind. If he was smart about how he used what Eichmann had said in the freedom of the pampas, it was bound to accomplish more than the Israelis’ prisoner could on his own. He believed that in Jerusalem, Eichmann would produce a confession only under torture. Sassen (and a few German journalists, including those on Der Spiegel)9 believed without question that the trial would be unfair. If the Sassen circle’s conception of history had not been insane, the strategy should have worked. But as it was, it turned out to be the worst thing that could have happened for Eichmann’s defense. He was, in any case, a man for whom there really could be no defense: he had demolished the whole scale of criminality.

  Naturally, performing this “favor” would also yield Sassen a profit, and the Eichmann family were sorely in need of money, having lost their breadwinner overnight. Sassen went about the task with a combination o
f business sense, political ambition, and personal sympathy. It was to be his greatest success, though it also spelled the end of his career as a journalist. He had managed to sell the first interviews with Perón in 1955, and he knew that in journalism, speed was of the essence. He invited a representative from Life to Buenos Aires and pressured Vera Eichmann into signing a contract with the U.S. magazine on June 5.10 Eichmann’s wife signed as her husband’s legal representative, and Sassen signed as her adviser and the “compiler” of the manuscripts. Publication was to take place only after the trial, and Life was given the right to sell the material—although not, under any circumstances, to Israel. Sassen would hand over “150 handwritten pages and 600 pages of typescript,” in return for $15,000 and a $5,000 fee for Sassen. Sassen may have received a larger sum of money on the side, without Vera Eichmann’s knowledge.11

  To prove the material was genuine, Sassen allowed the Life representative to see a few pages of the original, and he played him part of the tapes. The page numbers, and what was eventually published in the magazine, show that this copy was merely a selection, comprising 60 percent of the interviews and 40 percent of the handwritten pages. It included Eichmann’s notorious “conclusion” from tape 67 and the handwritten text about the “anonymous wanderer in a submarine,” which vanished for a long time and is difficult to decipher. As Eichmann’s lawyer later explained, Vera Eichmann actually had no right to conduct these negotiations. The original rights holder was still alive, even if he was sitting in an Israeli prison cell.12 Sassen, however, had found a legal loophole with the term compiler. In journalism it isn’t the interviewee, but the person who conducts and compiles the interview, who gets the fee and the copyright. In this way, Sassen was clearly hoping to retain control over what was published and, most important, to be named as the author. This part of his plan did not work out.

  It was still June when Sassen traveled to Europe and Germany again. Servatius later heard that Sassen had flown across the Atlantic in the company of the Argentine president, Arturo Frondizi. It wasn’t true, but it shows how well connected people considered Sassen to be.13 He started negotiations with the German magazine Stern, with which Sassen had a special relationship. He and Stern’s founder, Henri Nannen, had met during their time in the “Kurt Eggers” SS propaganda unit. Nannen’s success rested in part on the courage to employ unusual correspondents, without too much consideration for ethical issues. In 1959 he even included Sassen (“Wilhelm S. von Elsloo”) in Stern’s masthead, with his actual address in Argentina.14 Sassen was just as fond of telling his family this story as he was of telling them about his work for Der Spiegel.15 We can only surmise what he must have sold to Stern: although the publisher was kind enough to give me access to their archive, the dedicated archive staff couldn’t find a single page of Sassen’s material. There are two possible explanations for this regrettable loss. Either the archive was cleaned up at some point, or the Stern reporter responsible for the Eichmann coverage sent the originals to Israel, as a CIA agent reported.16 But we have several clues to what was in the Stern copy. The CIA report mentions eighty handwritten pages, and Robert Pendorf used extracts from Eichmann’s handwritten texts in his book, which was based on his articles in Stern (namely the “wanderer in a submarine” and part of the larger manuscript, as well as part of the transcript). A rumor slowly spread among German newspaper editors that someone in Hamburg had an extensive interview with Eichmann. Stern’s bundle was probably the same as the Life material, and the reticence from Stern’s editors, who mentioned only the handwritten pages, was an attempt to avoid a legal argument over the exploitation rights.17 As well as the documents, Sassen gave the Stern reporter an insight into Eichmann’s life in Argentina—though he carefully avoided any reference to the Sassen circle. He painted a picture of Eichmann the pariah, whom Sassen had cajoled into sentimental discussions about his obedience to the Reich. There are many indications that Sassen also offered these eighty pages of the Argentina Papers, and parts of the transcript, to Der Spiegel, but the magazine made no discernible use of them. A CIA source suspected that its founder, Rudolf Augstein, was waiting for the right time.18 Sassen also signed contracts with two Dutch companies: De Sparnetstad, in Haarlem, and De Volkskrant (for photographic material).19

  Airing Eichmann’s Dirty Laundry

  At around the same time in Israel, Eichmann began talking about his encounter with Sassen, having been confronted with the name of a former colleague: Rudolf Mildner.20 During the Sassen discussions, Eichmann had been convinced that Rudolf Mildner was “missing,” but now he denounced him as a dedicated participant in the Sassen circle. He quoted Mildner’s Nuremberg statement, which in Buenos Aires he had claimed never existed. “This was the first time I spoke to Mildner again, about three years ago, I think it was, and I picked this issue apart in the presence of a certain Herr Sassen, who was the accredited, as you say here, ‘journalist,’ in the government over there.… Mildner stuck by the position he had taken in his witness statement in Nuremberg, and it is de facto the position that the Gestapo had nothing at all to do with the killing process,” Eichmann admitted to the Argentine recording sessions and the transcripts.21 This was a practiced tactic: he would anticipate any difficulty that might arise and mention it, to test how much evidence the Israelis actually had in their hands. At this point, however, the prosecuting authorities had no access to the Sassen interviews, or any more detailed information about them.

  In connection with his negotiations with Stern, Sassen visited Eberhard Fritsch in Salzburg, who organized a meeting with the brothers Otto and Robert Eichmann.22 Sassen was conscious that in the long term, he would need the blessing of both Fritsch and the Eichmann family. Fritsch, after all, had been the intended publisher for the Eichmann project, and according to their agreement, all three of them should profit equally from any publication. Neither the Eichmann brothers nor Fritsch, whom Sassen still trusted and admired, objected to what Sassen told them he was planning. He had, as he repeatedly explained, sold only the U.S. rights. This was a lie, but Fritsch must have welcomed the news: despite the ban that had been placed on him, he would have liked to be a publisher again. Sassen even got away with saying he had mislaid the Life contract and so couldn’t produce it as evidence. Nor did Sassen allow anyone to see the transcript, so the Eichmann brothers still had no idea of the threat these documents could pose to Eichmann’s defense. Sassen’s suggestion of writing a book on Eichmann met with agreement, in particular from Fritsch, who was eager to take care of the publishing contacts himself. For this purpose, Fritsch was given a few pages that Sassen had removed from the Stern copy. This too would prove to be an error.23

  Henri Nannen made good use of this opportunity for Stern, and on June 25, 1960, he printed the first of a four-part series of articles entitled “Last Trace of Eichmann Discovered.” And even without the level of interest with which I was greeted by Stern’s current employees, the series can only be described as a journalistic tour de force. A month after Ben-Gurion’s declaration to the Knesset, Stern published more photos and insider information about Eichmann’s life in the underground than any other magazine did or has to this day. The reporter made good use of every clue Eichmann gave about his biography (which Sassen had found entirely uninteresting in 1957). Interviews were conducted in Altensalzkoth; a reporter spoke to Eichmann’s helper and lover Nelly Krawietz in the United States; there were pictures taken in Eichmann’s house; and quotes from his annotations in books. This headline-grabbing material went far beyond what Life had. While the U.S. magazine’s editors were still despairing over the mass of almost untranslatable, unstructured transcript pages, Stern’s pieces combined north German local color with an Argentine celebrity profile. The articles were full of family photos, ranging from charming children to the violin case beneath the kitschy Alpine panoramas, alongside startling facts about the horrors of Nazi history. From the mass murderer who lived next door to the story of an intelligence service abduction, the serie
s had everything an editor could dream of. Furthermore, the fact that historians still use these pieces today shows that they weren’t good just for increasing circulation—they contain more useful information than errors (and a few pieces of disinformation from Sassen). Publishing so early was a high-risk strategy, which in 1983 Nannen and Stern would adopt to their cost with the supposed “Hitler Diaries.” But in June 1960, it paid off.

  Finally, Eichmann’s interrogator made use of the Stern articles, which signaled to Eichmann that Sassen had begun to sell the Argentina Papers. But as the investigators found no reference to Sassen in the articles, or even to the existence of the interviews, Eichmann had the advantage once again.

  The Texts Become a Cash Cow

  As the prosecuting authorities in Israel were starting to wonder about the origin of Stern’s information, the confessions of a Nazi at liberty began to awaken hopes outside Israel. Like Sassen, other committed National Socialists hoped that the Argentina Papers might help to invalidate, or at least contrast with, the confessions they were expecting to hear from the Israelis’ prisoner. Anti-Semites believe Jews are capable of almost anything, and they were sure that Eichmann would end up telling the Israelis everything they wanted to hear. Wider Nazi circles were convinced that Eichmann-in-Argentina would have told their truth, denying that the extermination of the Jews had taken place. To start with, then, they were therefore highly motivated to assist their imprisoned SS comrade by making the Argentina Papers public—and in the best-case scenario, also earning some money from them.

  The man with the most experience in turning Nazi documents into cash was François Genoud. A shady character, he was a fan of Hitler, comforter of heroes fallen on hard times, aide to the intelligence services, publisher of Goebbels and Bormann, and banker to the Arab world.24 By 1960 Genoud’s contacts had ranged from an early encounter with Hitler to intimate friendships with Arab freedom fighters and the leaders of the BKA. He and his close friend Hans Rechenberg, who at this point was living in Bad Tölz in Bavaria, immediately got in touch with the Eichmann brothers to organize Eichmann’s defense. The brothers had already decided on a lawyer: Robert Servatius, whom Rechenberg may have known from the Nuremberg Trials.25 It was clear that the costs for the defense would be more than covered by the sale of Eichmann’s papers—leaving aside the money that the State of Israel put at Servatius’s disposal, believing he had no other source of income.26 A “Linz common interest group” met for this purpose several times, starting in fall 1960. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was even seen at one of these meetings in a Salzburg hotel.27 The hotel porter Fritsch provided the location, Rechenberg and Genoud the money; and Servatius the contact with the prisoner in his cell in Israel; the brothers functioned as the authorized agents of Adolf Eichmann. The correspondence, and the reports that reached the BND, show that “common interest” was something of a misnomer: the group was anything but united and argued bitterly over the money Adolf Eichmann was helping to generate.