Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Farago’s Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, published in 1974, was one of the first books about the escape routes that took Nazis overseas. Two chapters are devoted to Eichmann.118 Farago did at least stumble over some of the names of Sassen’s associates, like Hans-Ulrich Rudel and the Dürer circle around Eberhard Fritsch,119 although his story suffers from claims that he also spoke to people who never existed, characters dreamed up from the pseudonyms used in Der Weg. He paints Sassen as a politically neutral and historically rather underexposed writer. Sassen didn’t let himself “be confused by the Rudel-Fritsche crowd’s spurious propaganda.… This was to be no whitewash, no apologia.”120 Farago reported his visit to Sassen in detail, claiming he saw the Sassen transcripts and even read them, the “sixty-seven tapes with that many transcripts neatly kept in seventeen ‘Leitz’ document binders,” together with “marginal notes” and “extra pages” that Eichmann (!) had produced on a typewriter.121 In total, Farago said, there were 695 (!) pages. This number tells us what Farago really saw: books about the Eichmann trial, in particular Hausner’s Justice in Jerusalem, from which he skillfully lifted descriptions of the Israel copy, including an incorrect number of pages. In Argentina, there were neither seventeen binders nor only 695 pages.122 The “summary” of “the sixty-two tapes,” in which Farago says Eichmann principally spoke “about the escaped Nazis who had gone underground,” shows he had never read the transcripts. Sassen would certainly not have had to ask Eichmann for this information, since he and Horst Carlos Fuldner knew far more about the escape routes Nazis had taken to Argentina than Eichmann did. The crowning moment of this imaginative eyewitness report comes with the “exclusive information” that Farago shares from his own interview with Sassen: “Today we know that Willem Sassen was holding back … five additional tapes the very existence of which was kept a secret. He also suppressed fifty-one pages.… On those five tapes which Sassen was withholding, Eichmann had recorded the sordid story of his own escape and presented his knowing account of Bormann’s journey to Argentina.” Farago goes on: “[Sassen] readily conceded that Bormann figured prominently both on the tapes and in his decision to withhold them, but refused categorically to surrender any of them or to let me as much as listen to the five mysterious tapes. ‘I know,’ he said ruefully, ‘how far I can stretch my luck.’ He was, he told me quite bluntly, ‘afraid of the long arms of certain people.’ ” Apparently, Sassen would publish “the Eichmann book as a whole … ‘only after the death of either of us, Bormann’s or mine.’ ”123 Let us generously assume that Sassen really was afraid, because other Nazis saw him as a traitor following the Eichmann episode; and let us also assume (with extreme generosity) that Sassen might have repeated rumors about Bormann to a sensation-hungry journalist, as such rumors have always changed hands for a fair amount of money. The fact still remains that there were never “five tapes and fifty-one pages” missing, on which Eichmann recounted the story of Bormann’s part in his escape. Martin Bormann, the man who was head of the party chancellery and Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, didn’t survive beyond May 1945. He had neither the opportunity nor the will to get himself to safety, let alone show one of his comrades the way to Argentina. Tapes 6 to 10 (which are only four tapes, and sixty-two pages) contain not a word of any postwar encounter between Eichmann and Bormann. Nor are there any Bormann references on tapes 68 to 73, or in the discussion fragment on Sassen’s private tape—which, tellingly, none of the people who claimed to have visited Sassen’s house and looked at his original papers said they had seen.

  We have no reason to suppose that Sassen tried to sell a fellow writer a pack of lies. He didn’t share stories of this kind in any properly documented interview but rather provided extremely reliable information.124 Farago’s “Sassen interview” can safely be dismissed as artistic license, part of the dramatic structure of literature written for entertainment—and with it, all the reports that followed about visits to this fictive Sassen with his sixty-seven tapes and seventeen binders. The path that this legend took into the secondary literature does, however, reveal the possible repercussions of citations taken on trust, of which there are many examples in Eichmann research.

  Farago was by no means the only person to place his longings in the missing parts of the Argentina Papers. Like anyone clinging to a shred of hope, he believed he would find his answers in the place to which he had been denied access. Similar expectations arose in a very different context: the anti-Zionist discourse in the Arab cultural world. In the Middle East, people had always assumed that Israel would suppress evidence, both at the Eichmann trial and in historical research in general. At first glance, this discourse looks a lot like the historical phantasms created in (neo-)Nazi circles. Its conspiracy theories said that Eichmann would eventually be revealed as a Jew, who had sacrificed millions of people in order to found the State of Israel. In the Arab world, doubts were also raised about the reasons for and the scale of the Holocaust. But the motives here were quite different. The Arabs weren’t trying to rehabilitate Hitler or the National Socialists; they were trying to undermine Israel’s Holocaust history and challenge the state’s legitimacy. This effort gave rise to a host of different arguments.125 One was based on Eichmann’s tactic of seeking out German Zionists as his points of contact, to let them know that his sole aim was the emigration of the Jews to Palestine. In a culture that felt itself to be the real victim of the Second World War, this piece of information gave rise to a conspiracy theory that said that Zionists and National Socialists had had a contract from the outset, a secret alliance against the Arabs. The Nazis’ extermination of non-Zionist Jews had been a necessary part of it. “As a central figure in some of the most important deals of cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis,” Faris Yahya explains in Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, “Eichmann, while not the most senior surviving Nazi war criminal, was probably the Nazi with the most detailed knowledge of the Zionist movement’s relationship with the Nazi regime.” The Jews executed him too quickly and questioned him too little: “All that knowledge died with him.” Unless, of course, he had already committed it to tape in Argentina.126

  Anyone hoping that the undiscovered Eichmann texts will reveal him as the key witness to a Nazi-Zionist conspiracy will be bitterly disappointed. The Argentina Papers express a different kind of hope: there Eichmann announces his dream of the great National Socialist–Arab alliance. He had seen it foreshadowed in the presence of the grand mufti, Amin al-Husseini, in Berlin, and in the RSHA’s cooperation with his liaison officers. Then after National Socialist plans to wipe out the Jews failed, Eichmann’s hopes rested on the Arab world eventually recognizing his “lifetime achievement” and celebrating—or even completing—his extermination work. Ex oriente lux stood for the insane nightmare of a Final Solution aided by “Arab friends.” Other National Socialists had dreamed the same dream, even drawing up implementation plans for special gas-van commandos in Palestine.127 Eichmann was still speculating about “the desert” as a “Final Solution idea” in Argentina.128 He wanted to be an ally to the Arabs, not a witness to an anti-Arab plot, and certainly not an ally to Israel. The “missing” tapes and handwritten texts make this fact abundantly clear. Even in Israel, Eichmann kept telling his brother and his lawyer that he was happy for the Argentina Papers to be reedited, as long as his Ex oriente lux position remained.129 This caused Western intelligence services to fear the worst. And as if on cue, Eichmann also rose to meet this expectation: in a letter to his brother, the prisoner in Israel excitedly announced his recent conversion to Communism. Communism was the only doctrine against “the root of evil: racial hatred, racial murder, and”—he actually wrote this—“anti-Semitism.”130 Anyone hoping to find his own fears confirmed in Eichmann’s words will not be disappointed.

  Rediscoveries

  No fundamental change in the research landscape occurred until 1979. Up until that time, only those who had access to the collection in the Central Office in Ludwigsburg
were able to read the Sassen transcripts. Now another find emerged, when the Bundesarchiv (at the time, a single archive in Koblenz) bought Robert Servatius’s estate. The trial documents and correspondence, financial statements, collections of notes, and other materials left by Servatius were all deposited there for researchers to access, under the heading Alliierte Prozesse, or All. Proz., 6. These documents include the Israel copy of the Sassen transcript, which now became accessible to people outside legal circles—albeit in the version annotated by Eichmann in Israel.131 We cannot say today that this collection has been sufficiently researched, but it still made a considerable difference to the material available for historians.

  At the same time, Willem Sassen decided to hand all his papers over to Adolf Eichmann’s family. We have two clues to Sassen’s possible motives: first, he and his new, young wife were expecting a baby,132 and such an event often sparks a desire to clean up the past. And in 1979 the Sassen house became a meeting place once again. Karl Wolff, the former chief of Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and one of the highest-ranking Nazis still alive, came to visit old “comrades” in South America, along with a reporter from Stern. Sassen was therefore expecting two “colleagues” and, as Gerd Heidemann remembers, was feeling nervous: he was still being accused of having betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis. A National Socialist in Peru even claimed that Sassen had never been in the SS and had deceived and used Eichmann from the beginning: he “betrayed Eichmann’s hiding place.”133 Sassen never managed to shake off this suspicion, and it lost him his position as an important contact point for the South American Nazi network, which he had taken up when Fritsch moved to Austria. “When he was supposed to pass on important information, he sold it to two sides,” Friedrich Schwend claimed. “Letters were opened as they passed through his hands.” Sassen was “a traitor.”134 Forced to flee Buenos Aires for a while, he was for many years disadvantaged by people’s lack of faith in him. In the meantime, Sassen really had done some work for Mossad: over a discussion lasting several hours, Zvi Aharoni had persuaded him that that would be a smart decision. This fact can’t have improved Sassen’s self-confidence.135 No wonder Gerd Heidemann, who also thought Sassen a traitor, got the impression that he was making a special effort to be helpful to his guests.136 Sassen probably wouldn’t have wanted the notorious papers in his house, if there was a chance the Stern reporter and the former SS Obergruppenführer could start asking about them.

  Eichmann’s heirs made what turned out to be a less-than-shrewd decision, signing a contract with a publisher that had knowingly fostered a reputation for its right-wing bias. The publisher commissioned an editor, Rudolf Aschenauer, who had a similar reputation. In 1980 Druffel Verlag published Ich, Adolf Eichmann. It was a collage of Willem Sassen’s Argentina Papers, some of which had been compiled incorrectly, with a revisionist commentary. Even right-wing circles had their doubts about the book’s shoddy editing. Adolf von Thadden was one of the most active postwar right-wingers in West Germany: a friend to Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a member of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP), and a founder of the NPD—and even he criticized the volume, in the monthly magazine that was now called Nation und Europa. Against the intentions of the Aschenauer edition, Thadden read Eichmann’s recollections as clear proof of the extermination of the Jews, even if he did stick to the “lie of the six million.” In letters to the publisher, Thadden also stressed that this edition did not completely correspond to the real collection of texts.137

  Right-wing extremists like David Irving, however, still praise Aschenauer today for “pointing out that a number of Eichmann’s statements were incorrect.” These “errors” correspond surprisingly often to the historical denials with which Irving created a reputation for himself.138 However, the biggest problem with the Druffel edition was not Aschenauer’s overpowering commentary but the decision to change the order of the texts, and to make the dialogic structure of the interview unrecognizable. The result is that, even with the best will in the world, it is impossible to tell who is really speaking. The editor obviously didn’t know and attributed everything—Sassen’s dictations, Langer’s remarks and lecture, Alvensleben’s answers, and so on—to Eichmann. “Unfortunately,” as Dr. Sudholt from Druffel Verlag helpfully told me, the publisher got rid of the manuscript in 2000 during an office move. Nor could Dr. Sudholt find Vera Eichmann’s sworn statement, published as part of the introduction. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that the Aschenauer edition can only be analyzed through a meticulous, sentence-by-sentence comparison. The Aschenauer manuscript, together with all the Argentina Papers and the tapes, has now reappeared. And since for several years now researchers have had access to all the papers in the original, they no longer have any reason to draw on such a problematic edition.139

  In October 1991 David Irving managed to get hold of the remaining papers in Argentina, which Vera Eichmann had deposited with her husband’s best friend. Irving claims that Hugo Byttebier, a compatriot of Sassen’s who had taken over the documents from the “industrialist friend,” gave Irving the “426 type-written pages” in a garden in Buenos Aires. Irving’s evaluation of the material, and the sample pages he released, reveal to anyone familiar with the Argentina Papers what these documents were. Irving had received typed versions of a few pieces originally handwritten by Eichmann, and a few pages of the Sassen transcript, all of which were also held in the Bundesarchiv.140 There was also at least one chapter of Sassen’s draft for the planned book.141 All that had previously been seen of it was Eichmann’s disparaging remarks about it. He had told the Sassen circle he refused to authorize this compilation, in which his words had been heavily edited and sometimes misinterpreted. David Irving, who incidentally received only sixty-two tape transcripts, announced he was going to publish all the papers he had been given on his website. The “Chapter IV” already released gives a good impression of Sassen’s idea of the project, which even Eichmann was justified in arguing against.142 Eichmann’s statements were moderated and embedded into Sassen’s conspiracy theory. These rediscovered papers would be especially useful for an exploration of Willem Sassen’s thought and work.

  In 1992 ABC Verlag in Switzerland bought the Sassen material from the Eichmann family, together with a few tapes, the microfilm negatives, and the Aschenauer manuscript. They prepared an overview, and new prints of some of the transcript pages from the film, but failed to agree on how to use the material. What happened over the years that followed was essentially determined by changing economic circumstances. The publishing house changed hands, and word slowly got around that after more than forty years, the original tapes had been rediscovered. Guido Knopp was the first to use well-judged snippets of them, in his 1998 documentary Hitler’s Henchmen II: Adolf Eichmann, the Exterminator. This film allowed an audience of millions, including astonished modern historians, to hear for themselves parts of Eichmann’s “little address to the group” and the story of his grotesque “credo” ritual during mass shootings. Shortly afterward, cultural broadcasters spread the news that an editor from the publishing house (which in future does not want to be named) had given the Sassen material to the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, to be made available to researchers. Irmtrud Wojak was the first to pluck up the courage to gain an initial impression of the tape collection, and her 2001 book Eichmanns Memoiren conveys an idea of the task posed for researchers by the audio material alone. It has admittedly taken some time for the true significance of the Swiss owner’s generous and farsighted decision to be recognized, which is due in part to a critical error made in cataloging the documents. The introductory text for the collection reads: “The documents in the ‘Adolf Eichmann Estate’ collection are Adolf Eichmann’s drafts for his autobiography, which offer no fundamentally new information beyond what is already known. Copies of the texts are already held in the collection Allied Trials (All. Proz.) 6: Eichmann Trial, in the Bundesarchiv, and have been available to researchers for many years.” The last statement, at the very least, is simply incorrect. More
than a third of the papers taken into the Eichmann Estate collection had never been available to researchers before. By comparison, the fact that the Argentina Papers can be viewed as an Eichmann “autobiography” only to a limited extent is a harmless misunderstanding. A shortage of time and manpower has made the job of Bundesarchiv staff difficult for many years, which was doubtless also to blame for the false evaluation. The consequences, however, were far-reaching, and researchers have continued to rely on the documents in the Servatius Estate, even in recent years—a collection containing only 60 percent of the full Argentina Papers. The highly problematic Druffel edition has also been quoted frequently, resulting in the misunderstandings of Eichmann’s life and thought in Argentina that such a fragmentary and inexpertly edited source is bound to yield.143

  My mistrust of the label “no new information” was aroused by the discovery of the index of names and paragraphs in the Budesarchiv Ludwigsburg. It referenced a page I had searched for in vain in the Servatius Estate: the infamous third page of tape 41, which mentions Eichmann’s deputy, Rolf Günther. This clue made me take another look at the Ludwigsburg copies of the Sassen transcripts, which until then I had thought were identical to the copies from Israel. But even at first glance, it is obvious that the Ludwigsburg paper copy144 is fundamentally different from the Israel version. Having realized that several copies from different sources existed in 1961, I saw that it was worth looking at a further copy—even if it had the same label—to find out if there was a third version. At this point, I couldn’t even have hoped to discover that the Bundesarchiv Koblenz’s Eichmann collection was, for the most part, the long-vanished original transcripts and handwritten texts.