Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  The generous Swiss publisher’s donation to the Bundesarchiv Koblenz contains the tapes—the conclusive proof of the transcripts’ authenticity—and all the original transcripts, handwritten texts, and films that Willem Sassen still possessed in 1979. Sassen was anything but meticulous, and he was certainly no archivist. Even this original Argentina version is still not quite complete. The transcript of tape 29 is missing (the tape that Eichmann designated as “for your information only”), as are the page on Rolf Günther and the transcripts of tapes 70 and 71, if these tapes ever in fact existed. But the original material does contain the “missing” transcripts between tapes 5 and 11, namely 6, 8, 9, and 10.145 There are also two further pages for tape 67, tapes 68–69, 72– 73, and another, unnumbered, with the descriptive label: “On a private tape by W.S. filled with music and Flemish drama, there is a section of conversation between E. and W.S.”146 The handwritten texts and typed copies of handwritten texts are incomplete and are divided confusingly, as the structure of the complete draft has been ignored. There is also a typed copy of some notes made by Sassen during one of the discussions.147 The film, which ABC Verlag had sight of in 1992, has yet to be compared with the prints. But the handwritten text and typed copies comprise more than two hundred pages, although a large number of the handwritten pages from the Israeli “File 17” are missing. In contrast to the handwritten papers in the Eichmann Estate in Koblenz, the papers in the Ludwigsburg binder labeled “Miscellaneous” are good, clean copies of pages that allow the “File 17” texts to be reordered into the large manuscript “Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen!” (The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!), to which they originally belonged.

  To simplify this confusing picture: anyone wishing to study the Argentina Papers today first has to reassemble Eichmann’s texts and the Sassen interviews from three separate archive collections, sometimes page by page. That is what I did for this book (and my other work), and I can therefore report that the effort is worthwhile. But it’s quite enough for one person to squander a lifetime on such a puzzle, and as such I am happy to provide a page concordance to people undertaking further research in the Bundesarchiv, with references to where each paper can be found. The same goes for an overview of the tape contents. Not all the tapes are the originals from Argentina, and the contents don’t span the full twenty-nine hours of playing time: some parts are repeated several times. A few of the tapes have been transferred to different tape speeds, evidently to make the speech more comprehensible. But even where the recordings are original, the same cannot be said of the tapes. At least one of the copies has been made only in recent years, although the tape looks old. As is often the case with old tapes that have been recorded over several times, it is possible to hear remnants of what the tape previously contained: a children’s radio play with multifrequency push-button tones and polyphonic sounds, suggesting 1990s technology. But there are also tapes recorded in 1957 on which you can still hear (or guess at) previous Sassen discussions. Analyzing these in a recording studio might offer up a few more surprises.

  Excursus: The BND files; or, Eichmann’s Fourth Career

  The Mossad agents were the first people to publish an account of the events surrounding Eichmann’s abduction. Zvi Aharoni, Peter Z. Malkin, and Isser Harel all wrote detailed books, allowing us an insight into the Mossad operation. Asher Ben Natan’s memoirs and the estate of David Ben-Gurion, meanwhile, help us to better understand the decision-making process that led to the abduction and trial. Disagreements and dislikes also developed among the people involved, so the reports provide a multifaceted and occasionally inconsistent picture. And a trend of increasing transparency is obvious: when Isser Harel, the former head of Mossad, updated his book The House on Garibaldi Street for the 1997 edition, he decided to drop most of the aliases he had used in the early years and replace them with people’s real names.148 Many of the Israeli team also gave interviews, explained their motives and thoughts, and answered questions. Not all the documents connected to the abduction and trial are accessible to researchers, but there has been a substantial step in the right direction.

  When the U.S. National Archives started releasing intelligence service files on National Socialists in 1998, expectations among researchers ran high. Although many of the pages that emerged were banal, and others were censored to an absurd extent, the CIA “Name File Adolf Eichmann” yielded a considerable amount of information. Without these files, it would have been impossible to reconstruct some of the events around the Sassen transcripts. The people who compile intelligence service files are not historians; nor are they concerned with assembling archives for future research. They are carrying out their mission to protect the interests and security of a country. It is thus all the more important to realize that at some point the damage caused by revealing your predecessors’ disinformation strategies, errors, and shortcomings cannot be greater than the damage caused by wild speculations and the suspicion that you have something to hide.

  Intelligence service documents always contain reports from other countries and information from “friendly” intelligence services. In spite of great care taken in this regard, the CIA files that have been declassified still contain some intelligence that obviously comes from the West German BND. No international outcry was heard about the release of the files (at least, none that reached the ears of the public). But anyone with an interest in the matter was reminded that the BND had compiled its own Eichmann file, as had the German Foreign Office and the BfV. And access to the BND files is still restricted. Only a few sections of files, regarding incidents with a marginal bearing on the Eichmann case, have been handed over to the Bundesarchiv (in November 2010).149

  It is only thanks to the journalist Gaby Weber that a wholesale extension of the declassification deadline has been prevented. In 2010 she managed to have a block on the files’ release declared unacceptable by the Federal Administrative Court. Weber was the first to successfully petition for a limited view of the files, and she was able to study at least part of the collection, though in places the pages were heavily censored. Unfortunately, this incident has not led to a general release of these selected files. In other words: anyone wishing to get a glimpse of them can do so only by bringing their own lawsuit. The German tabloid Bild made one of the documents available to the general public in January 2011, after one of the Springer Verlag reporters, Hans-Wilhelm Saure, petitioned for access to the files.150 In February 2013 the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the case for further files to be released. The plaintiff still has the option to take the case before the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice. Other journalists have announced their intention to follow Mr. Saure’s example and bring their own lawsuits for complete declassification of the Eichmann files. It looks as though the German courts will be dealing with the “Eichmann case” for a long time yet.

  This bizarre state of affairs ultimately makes research and public-interest disclosure dependent on having the money for court costs and lawyers. It raises the question of what could be so explosive about these BND files that releasing them after more than fifty years is still not a political option. The most substantial explanation lies in the eleven-page justification of the declassification ban, issued to Gaby Weber by the Federal Chancellery on September 10, 2009, before her challenge was successful. She has generously made it available to the public on her website. The attempt to withhold all files on the Eichmann case, which was declared invalid by the Federal Administrative Court, deserves closer consideration. It gives us an insight into the fears that are still associated with the idea of transparency—and the BND’s refusal reveals more than the files alone ever could. Anyone who denies something is always talking about themselves, in the first instance. And the more we know about Adolf Eichmann as the subject of research, and the extent of the documents available today, the clearer this effect becomes.

  The official statement from the Federal Chancellery, given on September 10,
2009, says that the relevant collection of files comprises around 3,400 pages in five storage units. This is the result of a broad search, it says, including files “with only isolated references to Eichmann in Argentina”—though they were contained in the same five storage units, so another staff member must also have thought they were connected.151 The reason for not releasing the BND files tagged with the search term Eichmann essentially boiled down to three points that had to take priority over the “rather abstract … interest in finding the truth” (p. 9). They were: the common good, the protection of informants, and the general right to privacy of affected third parties.

  The term common good suggests that releasing these files would have a negative impact on the country’s security interests. The collection also contains copies of documents given to the BND by foreign agencies, which apparently are not theirs to release. This argument is immediately illuminating: intelligence services that rely on international cooperation also rely on all parties to treat anything that they are given responsibly. Of course, foreign agencies are also aware that a service in a constitutional state is subject to that state’s law, and that declassification deadlines will also apply to foreign material. But it is entirely inconsistent to uphold one’s government’s discretion regarding “foreign agencies,” yet then point a finger at the State of Israel, saying that “not all the official [!] papers relating to the Eichmann trial have been made public.” Be that as it may, someone requesting access to BND files from the BND wants just that and nothing more: BND files. Which made it all the more surprising that the files handed over to the Federal Administrative Court contained material from Israel.152

  The argument goes a crucial step further: “Evaluation documents produced by the BND [could be] wrongly seen as attempts to discredit specific persons from foreign public agencies. In the case at hand [the files relating to Eichmann] and in general, this could substantially compromise or even endanger friendly relations with foreign public offices” (p. 3). This hint raises fears about what the BND appraisals might contain, if they could potentially threaten current international relations. It is, after all, a perfectly normal procedure to evaluate all information from third parties, whether they are intelligence documents or historical sources. But the thought that appraisals by 1950s BND staff—Federal Republic officials—of “persons from foreign public agencies” (Israel, for example) might still be seen as derogatory is frightening.

  The second point relates to the protection of informants: the duty not to endanger, through indiscretion, a person who has given information in the course of an intelligence service operation. The protection of informants is connected to the security interest: if word were to get around that an intelligence service wasn’t protecting the providers of its intelligence, it would soon have none left. In this light, the fact that the BND’s statement provides details about a specific informant is quite surprising. This helpful person, we learn, is “comparatively easy” to discover, as he had exclusive “access to the relevant information.” “The content and scope of the information … allow conclusions to be drawn about the source of the information, as well as the identity of the informant” (p. 5). He has also “asked for … special source protection.” The informant in question was still alive in 2009 and “still active in his [!] professional field.” The “revelation of his identity would threaten the private and professional spheres not only of the informant” but also of “several of his current business associates.” Speculations about his “cooperation with the BND … would probably mean economic disadvantages for his business as well as disadvantages in terms of his reputation” (p. 5). The informant was not only “still active in professional life” but was “mentioned by name and searchable on the Internet” (p. 9). He had also been “reactivated … for another BND operation” in the early 1980s, and any public association with this operation would also pose a threat (p. 5). With all due respect for the willingness of the people making this statement to explain their reasoning in detail, the question must be asked: why would intelligence service personnel give such a detailed description of someone who could be damaged by speculations about his pivotal role in the Eichmann case? Someone who had been of service in that case might not be given a medal in every part of the world (only in most): there are still some cultural spheres that wouldn’t recognize that as an honorable achievement.153 But the danger of Nazi sympathizers attacking the person in question is surely an excellent reason for not “protecting” him through this explanation. The BND gives us a person who is at least in his late sixties and has been “particularly present” as a businessman in these parts of the world for the last fifty years. In half a day, a resourceful researcher154 could narrow down the list of possible informants (using the Internet, as helpfully recommended) to such a dangerously small circle of people that a dozen men are now the subject of these threatening speculations. “Protection of informants” at the cost of endangering people unconnected to the case seems untrustworthy to me and anything but reassuring to present and potential BND informants.

  The privacy rights of third parties, according to the statement, concerns around fifty people named in the files, since a large number of files are involved, although they have only a “marginal” relation to the subject (p. 9). It would be necessary to censor these names, but this would mean a “disproportionate administrative effort,” weighed against the likely gain for research. Of course, any academic would dispute the claim that one or more BND employees could be in a position to judge what might or might not serve research in this field. The usefulness of even a single index card depends so fundamentally on an academic’s education and close reading skills that anyone speculating about it from the outside can only ever be wide of the mark. All academics necessarily overestimate the importance of their own area of research, to give them the stamina for work that takes years to complete—but the significance of Adolf Eichmann, for scholarship and the wider world, cannot be doubted in the slightest. Whether you are arguing against a declassification ban or not, Eichmann is much more than a popular subject for backroom scholars, and Germany’s engagement with it is valued all over the world in anything but an “abstract” way (p. 8). It is one of the criteria by which the Federal Republic is judged internationally. Respect for Germany is rightly coupled to our willingness to learn from the past. If anything is going to damage the “common good,” it is an opinion expressed on Chancellery letterhead that the administrative effort of opening the BND files on Eichmann “for the purposes of finding the truth” (p. 8) is “disproportionate” (p. 11).

  In addition to these three points, the statement warns against the publication of research findings from the files in question. “The documents,” it says, “contain political (and diplomatic) implications for other countries in addition to the Federal Republic of Germany, which, freed from the historical content of the archive documents, have current significance, and could be exploited in the context of foreign policy aims and interests (Middle East policy)” (p. 8). The statement vindicates everyone who has long claimed that studying documents from contemporary history is always about more than reading historical tea leaves. The people who live and breathe this research are convinced that it has an impact in the here and now, and they do it for that reason. The fact that misinterpretations or overinterpretations can crop up in academic writing, as they can in any form of publication, is as clear to any enlightened person as the fact that there are people who can and will use any information for their own ends. Intelligence service dossiers serve this purpose exclusively: the exploitation of knowledge in order to set political goals, particularly in an international context. A glance at the BND files relating to Eichmann is also a glance at the work of the intelligence service and the position of German society in the 1950s and 1960s in relation to the world—but this is not an unfortunate disadvantage of source research, but its declared intention. The exploitation of documents in some kind of political context is nothing new, after all. The history of t
he twentieth century has, however, also shown that propagandists can misuse any information at all, yet the attempt to keep material from them would resemble total censorship.

  The BND’s effort to explain its handling of the Eichmann files has made the release of this statement a public event with an international impact. You only have to speak to scholars from other countries to see how disconcertingly dishonest it appears to the outside world. The withholding of files is a normal process, for which constitutional states have clear rules, but in Germany we are also committed to the principle of transparency. This is why, before a declassification deadline has been reached, there are rules for the partial release of files, with words blacked out where necessary. And when, despite these regulations, people still have to litigate for the right to see files, it damages a country’s image, making any citizen who also happens to be an academic feel uncomfortable in the international research community. In one respect in particular, this behavior has now caused irreparable damage. It has created the impression that the government has a pronounced interest in witholding information on Eichmann. Because the release of the files has been contested, people now suspect that any future release will never really include all the documents in the BND’s possession. One reason for creating laws around the handling of classified documents was to guard against such conspiracy theories.