Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  This was the title Sassen had given the Argentina Papers when he sold them to Life. Eichmann’s abduction had created a demand for details of the life and thought of the mass murderer in exile, and the “memoirs” label gave Sassen an exclusive on it. He achieved three goals at the same time: protecting the participants in the Sassen circle, presenting himself as a journalist without any National Socialist inclinations, and raising the value of his material.93 He didn’t mention the fact that a few years previously, he had instructed the transcriber to leave out all the anecdotes about Eichmann’s life. Still, no one questioned the story that Sassen had been planning a book about Eichmann.

  This piece of disinformation was a great help to Eichmann-in-Jerusalem, despite the fundamental problem of the Argentina Papers’ existence. He was trying to convince people he was a reformed Nazi, who—without Hitler and his orders—could go back to being the completely harmless and entirely apolitical man he had always been. He had been an upright citizen in Argentina, delighted that he no longer had to carry out such terrible orders. In view of this effort, he was hardly about to correct the “memoir” headlines. His participation in a National Socialist political project—the continuation of an anti-Semitic war by other means—didn’t fit the image of the harmless Argentine national. Without any prior agreement, Sassen and Eichmann both told the same lie. They let the world believe that an exile down on his luck had met a journalist greedy for money and had talked about old times over a bottle of whiskey or two. And the world willingly believed the cliché of the drunk, boasting Nazi—not least because everyone else involved stayed silent.

  Only one man from the Dürer circle spoke out in public about the background of the Sassen transcripts. Dieter Vollmer, Eberhard Fritsch’s deputy, had returned to Germany in 1954; he had kept writing for Der Weg until the very end and was apparently involved in the difficult distribution of Dürer publications. In 1961 Vollmer wrote a rather far-fetched article entitled “On the Professional Ethics of Journalists,” for the tendentious West German monthly Nation Europa, in which he cleverly dismantled the embarrassingly clear evidence of the Sassen transcripts.94 Sassen, he said respectfully, had questioned Eichmann “systematically about his past for several months.” “Now, tapes were very difficult to procure in Buenos Aires at that time. So when a tape was full, the contents were briefly [!] jotted down in pencil [!], and the tape was wiped for the next recording. From these brief pencil notes, our diligent journalist compiled a manuscript.” Eichmann gave an “impressive” refutation of the authenticity of this document in Jerusalem, and Vollmer assured his readers with surprising certainty that “the truth about what Eichmann said during these months can certainly no longer be investigated.” Not even, he added as a precaution, “from the pencil notes, photocopies of which two acquaintances of mine have seen.” Vollmer’s story, with its brevity and its thrice-emphasized pencil, was obviously concocted to keep at bay the danger that the transcripts represented to everyone who had been involved in their creation, but also the danger they posed to revisionist history and the Nazi network outside Argentina. He was also feeding the doubt in the minds of people who hadn’t been involved, and who didn’t believe that Eichmann could have provided the material for such a significant piece of documentary evidence.95 And the people who knew better, even those in Germany, didn’t contradict him.96

  The situation of Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner had a tragic aspect: he had seen what Eichmann said in Argentina but was unable to use most of it. Fritz Bauer tried to help his colleague in Israel, attempting—apparently without success—to have Eberhard Fritsch questioned in Vienna, so he could authenticate the transcript.97 Later, he even wrote to Sassen.98 Hausner had hopes of obtaining at least one original recording, but the earth seemed to have swallowed up all traces of them.99 Later, witnesses in Argentina reported that that was exactly what had happened: Willem Sassen had buried them in the garden.100 These few yards of tape could have earned him a lot of money, so this story quashes the theory that he was a profit-hungry journalist, with no sense of responsibility toward Eichmann. Hausner later implied that he had put some considerable effort and expense into the search for the tapes. Because of the trial’s length, he hoped he would eventually be able to refute Eichmann-in-Jerusalem using the recordings of Eichmann-in-Argentina.101 As it was, the evidence against Eichmann was still overwhelming, and even reading the transcripts kept the prosecution from falling for his stories of reformation.102 But still it was a defeat, and we will never know how the public impact of the trial might have been altered if Eichmann’s unpleasantly penetrating voice could have been heard on the news all over the world, giving his “little address to the group.” When Eichmann said, “No, I did not say that,” there was simply no way to argue against him.103 So the Sassen transcript acquired the reputation of being an unreliable source, and anyone who wanted to write about Eichmann, including Hannah Arendt, had to content themselves with the few pages admitted as evidence and the articles in Life—although no one really knew whether the latter were genuine texts or exaggerated tabloid journalism.104 The articles in the Polish paper Polityka, which were a more reliable source, remained unused. The Israeli attorney general was never granted the opportunity to listen to the tapes and to confirm that he had been right about the evidence of the transcripts from the start. Gideon Hausner died in Jerusalem in 1990.

  Evaluations and Old Resources

  The Argentina Papers continued to be labeled “Eichmann’s memoirs.” They had not been admitted as evidence, and Eichmann’s attacks on their authenticity were impossible to refute, so in the context of the trial, a more thorough evaluation wasn’t necessary. This, and the Sassen transcripts’ various foibles, also explains why little attention was given to the Alvensleben interview, the pieces of writing by Eichmann and Sassen, and the Langer lecture. The difficulty of spotting these “foreign bodies” in the papers can be gauged from the fact that the prosecutors weren’t the only people who failed to notice them. Fritz Bauer was also eager to use this source in his investigations. In 1961 the Eichmann trial created more interest in hunting down hidden war criminals. Bauer commissioned a detailed “evaluation of the Sassen interview” from the Baden-Württemberg Landeskriminalamt (LKA), the federal state’s office for criminal investigations. On December 4, 1961, the results were given to the Ludwigsburg Central Office, the office of the attorney general, and the Essen District Court (in connection with a trial that was taking place there). The evaluation was more than seven hundred pages long and included a comprehensive index of names and contents, paragraph by paragraph. I found the first reference to this mammoth work in a covering letter from the LKA,105 and the index of names was also listed in the collection in the Bundesarchiv.106 It comprised 467 entries over five hundred pages, with summaries of where and how each name was mentioned in the transcript—although such an index could never be complete, due to the transcript’s numerous spelling errors and misheard names. Interestingly, the LKA officials had used two Sassen copies for this index: one on photographic paper, which was still the standard way of making copies, and one on microfilm. The paper copy was also indexed in the Bundesarchiv, but there was no sign of a film, and the list of contents seemed also to have vanished. The fact that it has all become accessible again is partly thanks to a handwritten pencil note discovered in the Central Office. But the documents wouldn’t have been found without a curious official from the LKA, and equally curious staff at the Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, who were spurred on by my persistent inquiries. Norbert Kiessling (of the Baden-Württemburg LKA) helped with the reading of his predecessor’s letterhead, which was difficult even for him to decipher, and explained to me the problems of special commissions.107 Tobias Hermann got his Bundesarchiv colleagues interested in searching for the Central Office cabinet mentioned in the old handwritten note. The two binders came to light—and with them an envelope full of films, which turned out to be another copy of the Argentina Papers. There was also another binder
that none of us had expected to find, with the promising title “Sassen Interview Miscellaneous.” At this point, none of us knew that we had found the first extant copy of the handwritten texts stolen from the office in Linz and given to Hermann Langbein half a century ago.

  The LKA’s list of contents runs to just over 250 pages and contains information on every single paragraph of tapes 1–5 and 10–67, including this page of tape 41, which is missing from Hagag’s Israel copy. The list was made not by historians but by civil servants working to bring criminal charges. Such works are produced under time pressure, in this case within the space of a few months. And anyone who has seen a few pages of the Sassen transcript will understand the difficulties of reading it. However, this synopsis is still the only one we have, and it allows the reader to gain a quick overview, although in the details there are numerous incorrect interpretations and abbreviations. Citations in later court transcripts show that this list of contents was put to use. But what the LKA staff failed to notice was the presence of several speakers in the transcript. They read Langer’s lecture as a statement by Eichmann, and they counted the Alvensleben interview as another interview with Eichmann. The latter in particular had strange and frustrating consequences. When the Munich District Court II brought charges against Karl Wolff in 1963, Alvensleben would have made an excellent witness. Instead, tape 56 from the Sassen transcript bore witness against Wolff. The indictment included two lengthy quotes about Wolff from “Eichmann’s” statement.108 If the authorities had known who was really speaking on tape 56, the prosecutor would have been able to use Alvensleben as a witness in absentia. Given Alvensleben and Wolff’s long, close working and personal relationship, it would have been hard to find more credible evidence. Pitting Eichmann against Wolff, however, meant pitting an RSHA head of department against the chief of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. Ludolf von Alvensleben had an office right next door to Himmler’s for years—just as Wolff did. A word from him about the accused would have carried a great deal more weight.

  After Eichmann

  On May 31, 1962, after the failed appeal, Eichmann was also denied a stay of execution. The hanging brought to an end Eichmann’s ability to influence his public image. He was no longer able to make people forget his confessions in Argentina—or his attitude toward his own crimes. The Sassen transcripts remained veiled in mystery: thanks to Eichmann’s baseless lies, the people who had them didn’t quite trust them as a source, and hardly anyone else had an opportunity to study them. One exception was Gideon Hausner, who published his account of the Eichmann trial in 1963–64 under the title Justice in Jerusalem. He quoted the Sassen transcripts—though confusingly, he gave the number of pages as 659 rather than the 713 of the Israel copy. Thomas Harlan, meanwhile, faced increasing problems in Poland in the early 1960s and was not allowed to return to Warsaw. His intention of publishing the Argentina Papers ran aground, first in Poland and then in Italy, where the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli feared there would be rights issues. Eichmann and his heirs were probably the copyright holders, or possibly Sassen—and then there was Time Inc. and all the other people to whom Sassen had sold exploitation rights. Feltrinelli had likely at least heard of François Genoud, who was in Rome in 1961–62. He confidently claimed to be the owner of the exploitation rights to Eichmann’s writing and had gotten himself a reputation across half of Europe for being an unpleasant opponent in copyright matters.109 Henry Ormond and Hermann Langbein searched for arguments to reassure Feltrinelli. “In my opinion,” Langbein wrote to Ormond, “Eichmann is not the legal owner of these tape transcriptions. Sassen sold them … to LIFE. So Sassen is no longer the owner either. Copyright could possibly be claimed by LIFE, if anyone. But since we obtained the text of the recording neither from LIFE nor from Sassen, but in the same [!] way as the court in Jerusalem, this also seems problematic to me.” Langbein even wondered whether they should officially reverse the route the papers had taken and claim that their copy had come from Israel or Poland, to reassure Feltrinelli.110

  But the main problem lay with Thomas Harlan, or rather with the job as a whole. Reading the 3,564 pages of the interrogation transcript was a monstrous task, and even the people who had done it thoroughly, like Hannah Arendt,111 had to admit that the interrogation alone—or indeed the trial transcripts—were not reliable enough to function as the basis of an incontrovertible historical text. The detailed examination of the Nazi period really only started with the Eichmann trial. Today we have recourse to decades of research, excellent document collections, and statistical data, but the authors of 1961 were practically alone, gazing at the mountains of Eichmann’s Jerusalem stories.

  Compared with other authors, Thomas Harlan was facing a whole mountain range: Fritz Bauer had given him all the trial documents and, most important, exclusive access to the Argentina Papers. He still wanted to write his book about the “Fourth Reich,” the unpunished war criminals still living in Germany. And he also intended to support Fritz Bauer, Hermann Langbein, and Henry Ormond in their preparations for the Auschwitz trial. Such a task might overwhelm even someone with no additional personal problems. Harlan struggled with a terrible guilt about disappointing his friends and supporters.112 In later years he would find other, more artistic ways of dealing with the recent past, and a few years ago he gave his remaining Eichmann papers to Irmtrud Wojak for further research; she still has them.113 Unfortunately, so far I have been able to see only the small remnant of this collection still held in Harlan’s archive.114 So all I can do is refer to the promise Frau Wojak made me some time ago that we would definitely get a viewing of these papers organized, maybe, at some point. We therefore still have no real appreciation of what Thomas Harlan achieved—a man who was prepared to offer me crucial advice in spite of his illness, which eventually killed him in 2011.

  The Missing Tapes

  In the years after the trial, research on Eichmann and National Socialist anti-Jewish policy increased dramatically, largely based on the transcripts of the interrogation and trial in Jerursalem and the growing collections of historical documents. But curiosity remained about Eichmann in Argentina: nothing piques the imagination like inaccessible or missing documents. Nobody had any idea how extensive the Argentina Papers were (and no one read old Polish magazines), so researchers’ curiosity concentrated on the missing tapes, numbered 5 to 10.115 What could have been so secret that Sassen removed them before selling the transcript?

  Academics often refrain from even touching questions of this sort, preferring to let journalists lead the way. They want to avoid getting a reputation for courting popularity with sensational research topics (or to call it by its real name: they don’t want to stick their necks out and risk making fools of themselves). The disastrous thing about this division of labor is that both parties are then blinded: one to the old world, and the other to the newly discovered country, so that in the worst-case scenario, one is paralyzed with shock, while the other sinks helplessly in the morass.

  Ladislas Farago has become one of the most successful distributors of dubious secrets about the Sassen interviews, which he trenchantly dubs “horror stories.” His book about the war criminals who fled to South America is a sad combination of journalistic flair and historical naïveté: very few authors have managed to present highly explosive information and complete nonsense so close together.116 Farago, who was born in the same year as Eichmann, was a screenwriter by trade and also wrote a wealth of popular books about espionage and the Second World War. This sort of book is meant to entertain (and his books serve that purpose extremely well). We shouldn’t have to judge them by the standards of academic research—except that their content has entered academic literature by the back door. Other authors copied from them, forgetting—a simple oversight, naturally!—to use quotation marks and cite their source. Occasionally there is even an “I” where it should say “Farago.”117 Farago’s wonderfully entertaining stories were thus transformed into actual witness statements
, which have now been quoted in some otherwise very serious works. This makes it difficult to get away from the Farago story without closer consideration.