Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  None of the people involved seems to have realized that this undertaking was an attempt to square the circle: they were trying to finance a successful defense by selling documents that, by their very existence, would make an already weak defense impossible. But their first problem was something else entirely: Willem Sassen, the guardian of the Argentina Papers, had no intention of leaving the sale of his documents to other people and refused to hand them over. Eichmann’s defense counsel learned of the existence of the Argentina Papers and the Life contract from Fritsch and Eichmann’s brother—though Servatius, like Eichmann’s brother, still didn’t know what his future client had said and written in Argentina.28 When Servatius officially received his brief on July 14, 1960, he had no idea of the danger posed by the Argentine confessions. His client lied to him about them consistently, from their very first meeting in Israel, on October 9, until the end of the trial. Robert Eichmann and Eberhard Fritsch also kept Servatius short of information. Admittedly, Servatius gave the impression that he didn’t actually want to know the details, and anyway, he had more than enough on his plate with the flood of documents involved in the Eichmann case.

  Meanwhile, Sassen was traveling tirelessly around Europe. Journalists in Bonn reported that he had played them one of the original tapes in July. The “Linz common interest group” noted it all with some anxiety.29 At the same time, Sassen was trying to prepare a draft of his own Eichmann texts, in the belief that he was going to write the Life article himself. Eberhard Fritsch and Hans Rechenberg were less discreet than Sassen. Fritsch, in his efforts to find a publisher quickly, acted carelessly and information on the Argentina Papers was given to the BND. This was another incalculable risk, caused by the general panic over the upcoming trial.30

  The BND was alarmed by the information, partly because Fritsch refused to hand over the sample pages to publishers and was making exaggerated claims about the length of the papers. He said there were three thousand pages. The BND in Munich called on Washington for help: friends of Eichmann, they said, were attempting to sell “Eichmann memoirs” for the family’s financial support, and a copy could end up in East Germany.31 The Eichmann case had become dynamite in the war of words between East and West Germany. Fritsch’s chatter about the Life contract motivated the BND and the CIA to make hurried inquiries to Life regarding the documents. They also checked up on Fritsch, whom they took to be an Eastern Bloc spy. Bonn was particularly concerned that Eichmann might have named Globke. The CIA leaped to the BND’s aid, putting pressure on Life to keep Globke out of its article at all costs. Allen W. Dulles, the head of the CIA, was soon able to reassure Munich that the name Globke appeared only once in Eichmann’s statements, and that Life had been persuaded not to print it.32 It hadn’t required too much pressure: Globke didn’t appear in the Argentina Papers at all.33 The occasional reference to “Glo …” in the transcripts clearly referred to Odilo Globocnik, the leader of the deadly Operation Reinhard. In the end, Life printed snippets of Eichmann’s texts along with its own short introductions mainly without commentary, but that doesn’t mean it had planned an allusion to Globke. Whoever was conning whom here, Life was doing nothing that Dulles had to stop. The BND and the Federal Chancellery must have been grateful all the same.

  The CIA found out a little about Life’s copy of the papers: it consisted of six hundred pages of transcript and forty pages of handwritten text. Life told Sassen about the intelligence service inquiries, and he remonstrated with Fritsch: as a consequence, Sassen had been barred from entering the United States. Fritsch’s misstep gave Sassen a reason not to send any more documents to Austria.34 Genoud and Rechenberg can only have welcomed this development, as it meant they could safely cut Sassen out of the profits. And as long as they still had Eberhard Fritsch, the publisher Eichmann admired, then even without Sassen they were assured of the storyteller’s trust.

  In the meantime, François Genoud and the “Linz common interest group” had found an uncomplicated source for Eichmann’s confessions: the prisoner in Israel himself. Immediately after his arrival, Eichmann had begun to compose new texts in response to inquiries by the investigating authorities.35 To the attorney general’s surprise, Eichmann voluntarily produced a wealth of accounts, covering his life (“Meine Memoiren,” May 1961); his escape after the war (“Meine Flucht,” March 1961); and any other topic they put to him. In these texts he presented himself as the unpracticed author who was, “for the first time in 15 years,” making an attempt to write down his thoughts and experiences. He greeted every book supplied to him for this purpose with a show of delight and curiosity, although they were the very same works that he and his friends in Argentina had taken apart sentence by sentence, dismissing them as “Jewish waffle” and a “hodgepodge of lies.”36

  Eichmann assumed that the interrogation would be published in the near future and diligently applied himself to correcting the 3,564 pages of the final text. Much too late he reported to his horrified lawyer that he was “dictating reports daily.”37 Eichmann-in-Jerusalem hid the fact that he was drawing on years of practice in writing, speaking onto tape, and working through literature and was now simply adapting his excuses for a new target audience. From the start, his writing in Israel more or less subtly contradicted his own Argentina Papers.

  In the end, Eichmann left behind around eight thousand pages from his time in Jerusalem: manuscripts, transcribed statements, letters, personal dossiers, ideological tracts, individual jottings, and thousands of marginal notes on documents. Servatius (without any real hindrance from the Israeli authorities, and under the BND’s observation),38 Genoud, and Rechenberg helped themselves liberally to this flood of papers. They sold a few of the texts, plus some private photos of Eichmann from Argentina and even an exclusive interview with Eichmann’s wife.39 They showed little deference in their enterprise, and they even allowed a photo shoot in which Vera Eichmann held a bunch of flowers in front of a Dachau street sign. These men quite obviously thought Eichmann’s life was forfeit—but this too could be sold at a profit. Their final piece of exploitation was an exclusive interview with the prisoner himself, conducted via questionnaire. It appeared in Paris Match a week after his execution, with the charming title: “Eichmann parle d’outre-tombe” (Eichmann Speaks from Beyond the Grave).40

  Genoud lost interest in Eichmann’s defense when he realized that the accused was hopeless either as a witness for the collective innocence of the German people or as the savior of Adolf Hitler’s honor.41 Whether he was in the Third Reich, Argentina, or Israel, Eichmann gave detailed and well-informed accounts of the murder of millions. He simply adjusted the account of his own role, and his attitude toward the murders, to his changing circumstances.

  Life and Its Consequences

  On October 19, 1960, the Hamburg newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that in the West German newspaper business, rumor had it that Life magazine had bought Eichmann’s “confession” and would soon publish it. The news reminded Servatius of the texts from Argentina that he still hadn’t seen, which necessitated a further discussion with Fritsch and the Eichmann brothers. They decided to summon Sassen back to Austria. He was thought to have returned to South America, and Fritsch even offered to put up the money for his flight. But Sassen refused to let them see any of the material and put off the trip for a month. He told Eichmann’s wife he was planning to publish the material as a book in December.42 While Sassen was still convinced he would be writing for Life, the U.S. magazine was stealing a march on him: the story was announced in mid-November, and the articles appeared in the following two issues.43 Servatius learned of the publication on November 25 and tried in vain to take action against it. Life published a few powerful extracts from the interview transcript, and small parts of the handwritten texts, under the headline: “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story.” Each issue featured a phrase of Eichmann’s to great effect: “I transported them … to the butcher” (November 28, 1960) and “To sum it all up, I regret nothing” (December 5, 1960)
. Everyone connected with the case reacted with shock, albeit in their own ways. Sassen, taken completely by surprise, lamented to Vera Eichmann: “Take a look at what LIFE has done to me.” For her part, Vera Eichmann was unable to comprehend the title “I transported them to the butcher,” so Sassen explained: “That’s what LIFE did. I worked for LIFE for seven years, and this is the thanks I get.”44

  Servatius went into a fairly serious panic and spoke in dramatic terms of “catastrophic consequences” for the defense. At a press conference, he said he would renounce his brief if the texts turned out to be real; he believed they had been counterfeited.45 When Eichmann was confronted with a translation of the Life articles, he had an attack of nerves and suffered a mental breakdown. The doctor whose care he was under quoted him as saying “I am finished. I am broken.”46 Servatius made the fastest recovery and, in the initial aftermath of the Life pieces, started taking a systematic approach to the Argentina Papers, determined to discover what danger really lurked within them. He telegraphed Vera Eichmann and asked Fritsch and the Eichmann brothers about the copyright. The answer was unanimous. Vera Eichmann telegraphed back saying the publication had been “at wish and agreement of Sassen Otto Vera.” She thought she had acted according to her husband (Otto)’s wishes.47 Fritsch confirmed to Servatius that Eichmann had expressly granted the right to publish the papers if he was arrested, and he provided what Fritsch claimed was an old copy of their contract from Buenos Aires. One slight problem was that it had been typed on a German typewriter, which no one in Argentina owned.48

  At Servatius’s request, Vera sent her brother-in-law, Robert Eichmann, a copy of her Life contract and—though Servatius wasn’t aware of it—her copy of the Argentina Papers. The Eichmann family must have decided not to tell the lawyer—or Rechenberg, Genoud, or Fritsch—about the arrival of these papers. Servatius continued to demand that Sassen surrender materials that were, in fact, already in Robert Eichmann’s office. Robert Eichmann had probably begun to read the documents and to fear that Servatius really would give up the defense if he got a glimpse of them. As we now know, the Linz copy of the Argentina Papers was more extensive than the Life copy and contained a great many texts handwritten by Eichmann. The defense would have no way on earth to refute these documents: they couldn’t describe them as Life forgeries, or the results of Sassen’s editorial intervention, because they were written in Eichmann’s own hand. While Servatius was making a concerted effort to summon Sassen to Germany and discredit the Life articles, Fritsch, Sassen, and Robert Eichmann now all knew what was really in the Argentina Papers. And of the three, Eichmann’s brother seems to have been the only one to realize that any further publication of them could only be damaging. Still, as it turned out, leaving the papers in his office did his brother more harm than good.

  Meanwhile Sassen found himself at the center of international interest again, just as he had hoped. Life had, at least, credited him as the interviewer (although the reference was to a “German journalist”). Now everyone was wondering who had landed the coup of interviewing Eichmann in Argentina. The sudden interest in this hitherto largely unknown journalist led to the publication of a rather imaginative “interview with Sassen,” which further strained Sassen’s relationship with Servatius. Each blamed the other for passing false information to the press for this article.49 Thereafter Sassen gave a real interview in Argentina, where he appeared self-assured and openly anti-Israeli.50 And once again he provided words that would come to shape the trial: he called Eichmann “a cog in the diabolical Nazi machine.” Later Sassen would make an effort to offer Servatius his assistance in the form of insider knowledge, but Servatius saw his offer as a threat and disregarded it.51 Months later Eichmann was still talking to his lawyer about a possible book by Sassen and the division of any profit from it,52 but Sassen never managed to find the time to put together an Eichmann book of his own. He was also starting to feel hunted, as the man who had sold Eichmann to the Israelis.

  The Hunt for the Confessions

  The articles in Life had proved so useful to the prosecuting authorities in Israel that they now had a growing desire to get hold of the complete Sassen interviews. But the Israeli authorities weren’t the only ones with a burning interest in the material. To the disappointment of many, no one managed to obtain the Life copy. However, on December 21, 1960, a CIA informant in Germany sent pages of the transcript and sections of the handwritten texts to Washington, under the heading: “Subject Eichmann Memoires.”53 He (or she) apologized for the poor quality of the “thermofax reproduction of the E memoires Photostat,” which was a result of the originals also being of poor quality and even illegible in places. The copies of the handwritten pages, however, were clearly legible, to one able to decipher German script. The informant also said that he had not yet compared the copies with the Life articles. At this point, he said, there were numerous copies in Germany, but he made an urgent plea for confidentiality on the handover of the materials. In particular, any mention of the sender was to be avoided, as otherwise the source would be revealed: Hamburg. Officially, the only copy in Hamburg was Stern’s, so someone must have gone poaching in Nannen’s office. It wouldn’t have been the first time. If the CIA had been correctly informed, the journalist Zwy Aldouby, Ephraim Katz, and the specially engaged speedwriter Quentin Reynolds had also used material from the Stern’s editorial office. They had allegedly obtained it directly from a secretary there.54 They used it for the book Minister of Death, which was on the market by the end of September 1960. The clue from the CIA files also tells us more about the Hamburg version of the Argentina Papers (and therefore also about the copies of it that were in circulation): it contained bad copies of the transcripts and legible copies of the handwritten pages. When the attorney general in the Eichmann trial finally submitted the Israel copy of the Argentina Papers in May 1961, it looked very different, consisting of clearly legible copies of the transcript, and less legible handwritten pages. So the CIA report tells us where the Israeli authorities didn’t get their copy: Hamburg. It is impossible to copy a poor-quality version into legibility.

  In February 1961 Robert Pendorf, the Hamburg reporter who had written on Eichmann for Stern, published his book Mörder und Ermordete: Eichmann und die Judenpolitik des Dritten Reichs (The Murderer and the Murdered: Eichmann and the Third Reich’s Anti-Jewish Policy). In this book, Pendorf describes his source (and thus what Stern received from Sassen) as a handwritten document on squared paper, “a manuscript of around 80 pages, reporting on Eichmann’s activities in the German Reich in very general terms, without details.”55 He also had access to numerous “books which Eichmann furnished with marginal notes” and “pages of commentary, prepared on loose sheets, on all the publications of note concerning the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish policy.” However, Pendorf had not—and he may have overemphasized this—used the Sassen interviews, the “ ‘memoirs’ [note the quotation marks!] that Eichmann later spoke onto tape, assisted by the former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen van Elsloo, and which, after Eichmann was captured, were printed in a heavily abridged [!] form by the American illustrated paper Life.” Pendorf was clearly aware of the interviews’ scope, and traces of the transcript appear in his book. In all probability, his disclaimer was intended to avoid a conflict over the rights with Life. Pendorf’s description, however, shows how much material Sassen had shown (if not given) to Stern’s reporter in Argentina. It also tells us what was known about the scope of the Argentina Papers in February 1961. In any case, Pendorf had seen material that was not available to the public (or even to researchers) until a few years ago.

  At the start of 1961, the Life extracts, sections of the transcript, and around eighty pages of handwritten text were circulating around the offices of newspaper editors and at least two intelligence services. But nothing suggests that the Israeli prosecutors—or the Hesse attorney general Fritz Bauer—had copies of the Argentina Papers available to them at this point. That changed in March 1961, though not
through the efforts of helpful journalists or, apparently, the German or American intelligence services.

  The Security Breach

  At the start of March 1961, a notable but little-known meeting took place, in a Frankfurt hotel, between Hermann Langbein from Vienna, Thomas Harlan from Warsaw, and Henry Ormond from Frankfurt. Each of these three men had an unusual biography and a desire to come to terms with Nazi history and see justice done. Had they not, they would surely never have met.