Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Selected Cast of Characters
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
“MY NAME BECAME A SYMBOL”
1 The Path into the Public Eye
2 The Postwar Career of a Name
3 Detested Anonymity
INTERLUDE
A False Trail in the Middle East
EICHMANN IN ARGENTINA
1 Life in the “Promised Land”
2 Home Front
3 One Good Turn
THE SO-CALLED SASSEN INTERVIEWS
1 Eichmann the Author
2 Eichmann in Conversation
A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY
A CHANGE OF ROLE
Eichmann in Jerusalem
AFTERMATH
Abbreviations
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
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Copyright © Bettina Stangneth 2014
Bettina Stangneth has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
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ISBN 9781847923233 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781847923257 (Trade Paperback)
For Dieter, the guiding star on my journey through the night.
These are some of the less familiar people associated with Adolf Eichmann (aka Otto Heninger on the Lüneberg Heath and Ricardo Klement in Argentina) in the postwar period.
ALVENSLEBEN, LUDOLF VON: Himmler’s former chief adjutant; higher SS and police leader; after the war, the highest-ranking Nazi in Argentina
FRITSCH, EBERHARD: Head of Dürer Verlag from 1946, publishing Nazi texts and owning a bookstore that became a focal point for Nazis in Argentina; publisher of Der Weg—El Sendero, the most extremist postwar Nazi magazine
LANGER, DR.: Former SD officer from Vienna; other details unknown
SASSEN, WILLEM: Dutch Nazi collaborator and member of SS journalist corps; propagandist, correspondent, author, and ghostwriter for Nazis in Argentina; organizer and host of the interviews and discussion group with Eichmann
EICHMANN, HORST ADOLF; Dieter Helmut; Ricardo Francisco: Younger sons of Adolf and Vera Eichmann
EICHMANN, KARL ADOLF: Adolf Eichmann’s father
EICHMANN, KLAUS: Eldest son of Adolf and Vera Eichmann
EICHMANN, OTTO: Adolf Eichmann’s brother; with Robert, organized and supported the defense in Eichmann’s trial
EICHMANN, ROBERT: Adolf Eichmann’s stepbrother; a lawyer who organized and supported his brother’s defense, 1960–62; large portions of the Argentina Papers were stolen from his office
EICHMANN, VERA: Adolf Eichmann’s wife; postwar, she used her birth surname, Liebl
FREIESLEBEN, HANS: SS member who arranged a hiding place for Eichmann on Lüneberg Heath
FULDNER, HORST CARLOS: German-Argentine SS member; helped Nazis escape on behalf of Juan Perón
HUDAL, BISHOP ALOIS: Roman bishop and Hitler sympathizer who helped falsify identity papers for Nazi fugitives, including Eichmann
KRAWIETZ, NELLY: Sister of SS member Kurt Bauer; hid Eichmann on his escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; later visited him when he was in hiding on Lüneberg Heath
KUHLMANN, HERBERT, AKA PEDRO GELLER: Former member of SS panzer corps; traveled from Europe to Argentina with Eichmann; in 1953, was guarantor for Eichmann’s apartment in Chacabuco Street; worked at CAPRI
SCHINTLHOLZER, LUIS (ALOIS): Austrian SS officer involved in 1938 pogrom in Innsbruck and war crimes in Italy; helped Eichmann escape Germany
HAGEL, HERBERT: SS member; former secretary to the gauleiter of Linz; employed by CAPRI
HEILIG, BERTHOLD: Former NSDAP district leader in Brunswick; worked for CAPRI in Tucumán
KLINGENFUß, KARL: Worked in Nazi Foreign Office’s “Jewish Department”; head of German-Argentine Chamber of Commerce until 1967
KOPPS, REINHARD, AKA JUAN MALER: Prolific writer, fanatical Nazi, and rival of Sassen’s; worked for Dürer Verlag in the early days of Der Weg
LEERS, JOHANN VON: SS officer and prominent ideologue employed in the Ministry of Propaganda; in Argentina 1950–54; wrote for Der Weg
MENGE, DIETER: SS member; Luftwaffe pilot; in Argentina became a scrap-metal magnate; Sassen’s patron
NEURATH, CONSTANTIN VON: Son of Germany’s former foreign minister; with Rudel, founder of Kameradenwerk, a fund to assist fugitive Nazis legally and financially; from 1958, director of Siemens Argentina S.A.
OVEN, WILFRED VON: Press adjutant to Goebbels in the Ministry of Propaganda; author of a book on Goebbels, published by Dürer Verlag
PFEIFFER, FRANZ WILHELM: Wehrmacht colonel and rumored guardian of Nazi gold; owner of the rabbit farm in Joaquín Gorina managed by Eichmann; friend of Sassen and Rudel
POBIERZYM, PEDRO: Polish Wehrmacht soldier; did business with Nazis in Argentina, including Dieter Menge and Willem Sassen
RUDEL, HANS-ULRICH: Luftwaffe bomber pilot, the most highly decorated serviceman under Hitler; with Neurath, founded Kameradenwerk, a fund to assist Nazis legally and financially; friend of Fritsch and admirer of Sassen, who ghostwrote Rudel’s books, published by Dürer Verlag
SCHWAMMBERGER, JOSEF: SS member and camp commandant in Krakow, 1942–44; employed by Siemens Argentina S.A.
VOLLMER, DIETER: Close colleague of Fritsch who worked on Der Weg; returned to Germany in 1954 but remained in contact with Dürer
VÖTTERL, JOSEF: Member of the criminal and border police with Einsatzkommando 10A of Einsatzgruppe D; fled to Buenos Aires but moved back to Germany in 1955; found employment with BfV; returned to Argentina in 1958
AHARONI, ZVI: Mossad agent who found out Eichmann’s Argentine address and positively identified “Ricardo Klement” as Eichmann
BAUER, FRITZ: Attorney general of Hesse, 1956–68; prosecutor of Nazi war criminals; located Eichmann in Argentina and provided the information to Israeli authorities
FRIEDMAN, TUVIAH: Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered; Nazi hunter; creator of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes
GENOUD, FRANÇOIS: Swiss financier, Hitler admirer, and dedicated Nazi; profited from the commercializing writings of Nazis such as Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels; involved in a deal to sell Eichmann’s writings for profit and to finance Eichmann’s defense
HAREL, ISSER: Head of Mossad, 1952–63; author of a controversial account of Eichmann’s capture
HAUSNER, GIDEON: Israeli attorney general, 1960–63; led the prosecution of Eichmann
HERMANN, LOTHAR: Lawyer; survivor of Dachau whose family died in the Holocaust; legal adviser, first in Buenos Aires, then in the German-Jewish community in Coronel Suárez; alerted Bauer and others that Eichmann was in Argentina
LESS, AVNER W.: Chief inspector in the Israeli police; interrogated Eichmann after his capture
MAST, HEINRICH: German and American intelligence officer; associate of Höttl; said to have informed Wiesenthal in 1953 that Eichmann was in Argentina
SERVATIUS, ROBERT: West German attorney; defended Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and later was Eichmann’s defense counsel
TARRA, VALENTIN: Altaussee criminal investigator who observed Eichmann’s family while Eichmann was in hiding
WIESENTHAL, SIMON: Holocaust survivor and, after the war, the most famous Nazi hunter; found the first photograph of Eichmann; prevented the Eichmann family’s every attempt to have him declared dead
HARLAN, THOMAS: Son of Veit Harlan, the notorious anti-Semitic film director; author, devoted to revealing Nazi war crimes; friend of Fritz Bauer; in 1961, published one of the first articles based on the Argentina Papers (obtained from Langbein) in the Polish weekly Polityka
HÖTTL, WILHELM: Austrian SS officer; postwar, was a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials, quoting Eichmann on the number of six million Holocaust victims; later an “intelligence” agent providing much false information to intelligence services, the press, and historians
KASZTNER, RUDOLF (REZSÖ): Austro-Hungarian Jew; executive vice president of the Budapest Rescue Committee; with Brand, negotiated the 1944 “blood for goods” proposal with Eichmann, an attempt to save Hungarian Jewry; after the war, accused of collaborating with Nazis; assassinated in 1957
LANGBEIN, HERMANN: Concentration camp survivor; first general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee in Vienna; brought criminal charges against Eichmann in Austria in 1959; in 1961, obtained and disseminated the most complete copy of the Argentina Papers
ORMOND, HENRY: Dachau survivor; lawyer for Nazi victims; friend of Bauer and Harlan; helped to make the Argentina Papers available in 1961
PASSENT, DANIEL: Editor of Polish weekly Polityka; in 1961, published a five-part series based on Langbein’s copy of the Argentina Papers, with commentary by Harlan and himself
RAKOWSKI, MIECZYSŁAW F.: Editor-in-chief of Polityka; verified the authenticity of the Argentina Papers
SASSEN, MIEP: Second wife of Willem
SASSEN, SASKIA: Daughter of Willem and Miep
SCHNEIDER, INGE: Family friend of the Sassens; daughter of the captain of the ship on which the Sassens fled Europe
WISLICENY, DIETER: SS officer who was Eichmann’s subordinate, close friend, and acolyte; postwar, a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trials; blamed Eichmann in an attempt to save his own life; tried and hanged in 1948 in Bratislava; his Nuremberg testimony would help the prosecution of Eichmann in 1961
This business is not really clear to me at all.
—Hannah Arendt1
We cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children without mentioning his name—and yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was: Karl Adolf? Otto? It’s the simplest of questions yet it can still surprise us, long after we thought we’d established who he was. But are there really still such large gaps in our knowledge of a man who has been so thoroughly investigated for so many years, by both academics and the media? Adolf Eichmann’s fame surpasses even that of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. So why write another book? It was the simplest of questions: I wanted to find out who knew Adolf Eichmann before Mossad famously snatched him from Argentina and put him before a court in Israel.
Eichmann’s answer, given in Israel, is not hard to find: “Until 1946, I had next to no public profile, until Dr. Hoettl … branded me the murderer of 5 or 6 million Jews.”fn12 We should not be surprised to hear these words from an accused man—and this one in particular. Eichmann, after all, is famous for saying that he had been “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” What is surprising is that, until now, the secondary literature on Eichmann has dutifully parroted this view. Other great controversies might surround the man behind the genocide, but everyone is agreed that until his trial in Jerusalem, the name Eichmann was known only to a small circle of people.3
The suspicion that something was amiss, both in Eichmann’s story and in the research, arose when I started to read old newspapers. On May 23, 1960, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unexpectedly announced to the world that Adolf Eichmann had been captured and was to stand trial. What followed was not a puzzled silence but pages and pages of detailed articles describing a man about whom, supposedly, very little was known, by very few people. A glance at some even older publications confirmed my suspicion unequivocally. Long before the start of his trial, this “unknown” man already had more nicknames than most other Nazis: Caligula; Czar of the Jews; Manager of the Holocaust; Grand Inquisitor; Engineer of the Jewish Genocide; the Final Solutionist; the Bureaucrat; the Mass Murderer. All these epithets were applied to Eichmann between 1939 and 1960. They didn’t arise after his arrest—they appeared long before that, in newspapers, pamphlets, and books. You have only to read these materials to find out exactly what people knew and thought about Eichmann, and when. During this period, only one group claimed, with equal unanimity, to know nothing about him. They were the postwar Nazis, his former colleagues, who were desperate to play down what they knew. But the evidence raises the questions: How did this knowledge come to be lost? How could a man cause himself to disappear, retrospectively, from the eyes of the world? The answer leads us to the problematic heart of the singular crime against humanity that we call the Holocaust, the Shoah, the extermination of the Jews.
We like to imagine criminals as shady figures, committing their crimes in secret, fearful of public judgment. When they are unmasked, we like to imagine a consistent reaction from the public, an instinctive wish to ostracize them and bring them to justice. The first attempts to consider the perpetrators of the disenfranchisement, expulsion, and murder of the European Jews were wholly in line with this cliché of shady characters, terrorizing their victims while society’s back was turned. But we have long since moved on from this vision of a small group of pathological, asocial freaks within an upstanding population who would have mounted a collective resistance, if only they had known what was going on. We now know a lot about how the National Socialist worldview functioned. We know about the dynamics of collective behavior and the impact of totalitarian regimes. We understand the influence that an atmosphere of violence can have, even on people with no particular inclination toward sadism, and we have explored the disastrous effect of the division of labor on people’s sense of individual responsibility. Of course, huge disagreement remains about where and how we should classify a perpetrator like Adolf Eichmann. Depending on whose account you read, he comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the “Eichmann phenomenon” before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us that in every assumption that leads to injustice, two parties are always involved: the person making the claim, and all the others who believe him.4 We can learn a good deal about the danger inherent in this curious collaboration by looking at the public perception of Adolf Eichmann. The greatest danger arises when someone has as clear an understanding of this collaboration as did the notorious “Adviser for Jewish Affairs.” For this reason, my book tells Eichmann’s story not as a chronological account of his crimes or his actions as they developed, but as a study of the impact he made: who knew Eichmann and when; what people thought of him and when; and how he reacted to what they thought and said. To what extent, I ask, was the Eichmann phenomenon shaped by his talent for self-dramatization? What did this role-playing contribute to his murderous career, and what can it contribute now to our understanding of his story?
Our ability to reconstruct these perspectives today rests on an exceptional body of source material: there are more documents, testimonials and eyewitness reports on Eichmann than on any other leading Nazi. Not even Hitler or Goebbels has occasioned more material. And the reason is not simply Eichmann’s survival for seventeen years after the end of the war, nor the impressive efforts of the Israeli police in collecting evidence for the trial: the reason is primarily his own passion for speaking and writing. Eichmann acted out a new role for every stage of his life, for each new audience and every new aim. As subordinate, superior officer, perpetrator, fugitive, exile, and defendant, Eichmann kept a close eye on the impact he was having at all times, and he tried to make every situation work in his favor. And there was a method to his behavior, as a comparison of the many roles he played will reveal.
The only one of Eichmann’s roles to have become really well known is the one he performed in Jerusalem. The intention is obvious: he was doing his best to stay alive and to justify his actions. If we want to discover how Eichmann’s performance in Jerusalem relates to the perpetrator and to his deadly success, we must go back to Eichmann before Jerusalem and take a look behind the interpretations that rely solely on his appearance there.
If we are to believe what Eichmann said in Israel, his real life—the one he had always longed for—began only in 1945, when the madness of the Thousand Year Reich lay in ruins. That was when the Adviser for Jewish Affairs became a harmless rabbit breeder, as he always had been at the bottom of his heart. It was the regime that had been evil, and other people, and his stellar career under Adolf Hitler had really been just a bizarre twist of fate. But because Eichmann was aware that a lot of other people might see things differently, he carefully avoided using the name Adolf Eichmann, even making his wife call him by his first forename, Otto, which had also been his grandfather’s name.5 While the others were capitulating, he disappeared among the prisoners of war, becoming “Adolf Karl Barth.” Before he managed to escape, he was tried as “Otto Eckmann.” Then he was “Otto Heninger,” a forester on the Lüneberg Heath in northern Germany, working alongside other men who had new names. After that, he bred chickens, enchanting the female population of his rural backwater in the evenings with his violin playing. The life of Otto Heninger, which was already so very like that of the Argentine rabbit breeder, had only two distinct disadvantages: he couldn’t contact his family and he was wanted for war crimes. “In the five years I spent underground, living as a ‘mole,’ it became second nature to me, whenever I saw a new face, to ask myself a few questions, like: Do you know this face? Does this person look like he has seen you before? Is he trying to recall when he might have met you? And during these years, the fear never left me that somebody could come up behind me and suddenly cry: ‘Eichmann!’ ”6 His hope that, in time, grass would grow over the National Socialist genocide, just as it does over other graves, remained unfulfilled. Ultimately he could see no solution but to flee the country, and so in 1950 Otto Heninger disappeared as well. Ricardo Klement left Europe from Genoa, receiving a new identity and new papers in Argentina. He was then able to begin the life he had always wanted: he found work on a hydroelectric power station project, and led a troop of surveyors across Tucumán, a subtropical area in the north of Argentina where the mountains and valleys are reminiscent of the Alps. He had plenty of time to make trips on horseback too, exploring the mountains, crossing the pampas, and even twice attempting to climb Aconcagua, the Americas’ highest mountain. Two years later, when his wife and their three sons were finally able to join him, he began taking the boys with him on his expeditions, teaching them to ride and fish and imparting to them his own love of nature. For a while, the collapse of the project’s firm somewhat dampened the family’s blissful existence: Ricardo Klement had to look for work, and he wasn’t always successful, but by 1955 at the latest, his happiness must have been complete. He was handed not only the manager’s job at a rabbit farm but also a fourth son, even though his wife was over forty. Little “Hasi” was the apple of his father’s eye. No wonder Klement then decided to build his own house, to accommodate his lovely wife, his four sons, Fifi the dachshund, Rex the German shepherd, the cuckoo clock, and the paintings of alpine scenes.7 And if he hadn’t been kidnapped by Mossad, he would still be living the harmless life of Ricardo Klement….
This moving tale had just one major flaw: Ricardo Klement might have been the name on his passport, but the reformed Nazi and nature lover, a man who was now entirely apolitical, had never arrived in Argentina. Rural idylls were not Eichmann’s thing. For him, the war—his war—had never ended. The SS Obersturmbannführer might have been retired from service, but the fanatical National Socialist was still on active duty. He might have lost his totalitarian state, in which you could murder millions of people without so much as raising your hand against one of them, but he was still far from defenseless. This man might sit on the veranda of the rabbit farm at the end of his working day, a glass of red wine in his hand, thirty miles away from his family. He might even play the violin. But none of that could convince him that his life was as idyllic as it seemed. On the thirty-fifth parallel, dusk and sunset don’t really exist; it gets dark at a stroke—night falls more suddenly and dramatically than northern Europeans are used to. In the evenings, he read and wrote, and his work was anything but introspective. This was no contented man in his fifties, reading for pleasure: the peaceable rabbit farmer was capable of throwing books against the wall and tearing them to pieces, filling them with aggressive marginalia, insults, and invectives, and covering mountains of paper with his commentaries, writing like a man possessed. Pencils snapped under the force of his scribbling; his fighting spirit was unbroken. The ideological warrior had not been defeated, and he was by no means alone.
The reason we know so much about his life in Argentina today is due to a happy coincidence. Over the last two years, documents have surfaced in several archives and are now available to researchers. For the first time, the Argentina Papers—Eichmann’s own notes made in exile—can be examined in conjunction with the taped and transcribed conversations known (slightly misleadingly) as the Sassen interviews. At a combined total of more than thirteen hundred pages, these sources do more than just present Eichmann’s life and thought before his arrest. This first attempt to summarize and interpret them is also a challenge to others, to engage with these documents as the most important postwar material on National Socialist crimes against humanity. Suddenly we are able to make connections that could never have been made before. And one thing in particular stands out: not once during his escape and exile did Eichmann seek the shadows or try to act in secrecy. He wanted to be visible in Argentina, and he wanted to be viewed as he once had been: as the symbol of a new age.
Those who seek out the light will be seen. Clearly more people had dealings with Eichmann after 1945 than was previously thought. Tracing his route into the underground and into exile, we come across not only Nazi hunters and hit squads, but people who helped and sympathized with him and even became his friends—though for a long time afterward, they denied ever having known him, or said they had met him only briefly. Willem Sassen, a Dutch volunteer in the Waffen-SS and a war propagandist, spent decades claiming only to have been Eichmann’s “ghostwriter.” Like him, most of Eichmann’s friends denied most of their contact with the wanted man. Their denials no longer carry any weight. The Argentina Papers reveal the names of the people who sought Eichmann out to talk about old times and, more important, to discuss political plans for the future. In Argentina, Eichmann was no more a failure and a pariah than Willem Sassen was merely an inquisitive journalist, or Himmler’s chief adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, a reformed Nazi. For in spite of all attempts to ignore them, there they were: the Nazis in Argentina. They had escaped the Allied courts and were regrouping, with much bigger plans than to be left in peace to start new lives. From a safe distance, the men around Eichmann used their freedom in exile to comment on developments in Germany and the rest of the world. They pursued ambitious plans for political overthrow, busily putting together a network of like-minded people. They even started counterfeiting documents designed to defend their view of glorious National Socialism against reality. And in their midst was Adolf Eichmann: self-assured, dedicated, and in demand as a specialist (with millions of murders to prove his expertise)—exactly what a man who had had his own department in the Head Office for Reich Security was used to.
“Eichmann in Argentina” is not a one-man play but a chronicle of the ex-Obersturmbannführer’s astonishing second career—as an expert on history and on the “Jewish question.” As much as he later tried to persuade everyone that the German defeat had altered and reformed him, a study of his thought and his social life in Argentina reveals something else entirely. If Eichmann ever really wanted to be the placid, harmless Ricardo Klement, it was not until he was sitting in an Israeli prison cell. In Argentina, he proudly signed photos for his comrades “Adolf Eichmann—SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired).”
But Eichmann after 1945 is much more than an Argentine affair. In West Germany, his name had been burned into people’s memories, even if later they denied all knowledge of him. A plethora of witness statements, press articles, and publications on Eichmann demonstrates how preoccupied the Germans were with his name and what it stood for, even before 1960. But in our search for the “Eichmann phenomenon,” we can also draw on an indirect source, the importance of which cannot be overestimated: the testimonies of his victims and pursuers and, above all, his former colleagues and confidants. There was no way they could forget him: they must have been afraid he would remember them just as well as they remembered him. Nobody who knew this man, or even just knew who he was, wanted to be caught remembering him. American intelligence service documents, “wanted” lists, and the few files released by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV, or Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), and by the German Foreign Office, allow us to create a preliminary sketch of Adolf Eichmann’s importance in the period immediately after the war, particularly in the new West Germany and Austria. Eichmann—or rather, the image people had of him—gradually became a political problem. The fact that the key witness to the Nazis’ crimes against humanity was still at large undermined the German strategy for overcoming the past, which was to try to forget it had ever happened. And the fact that Eichmann had no desire to live a quiet, low-profile life in Argentina, even writing an open letter to West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, meant that he was becoming a risk. Could anybody really want this man, who knew so much, to speak out in the Federal Republic?
All this made the hunt for Eichmann a much more complex story than previously published tales of love, betrayal, and death would have us believe. The story wasn’t just about the millions of victims and the Nazi hunters determined to track down their murderer, or about one government or another doing a more or less skillful job of it. Plenty of people were determined to prevent the past from returning from exile along with the man. Overcoming their desperate need to stay silent required much more than giving credence to the observant blind man in Argentina who realized that his daughter’s boyfriend was the son of a war criminal. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is a series of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning. This is the story we must investigate if we want to understand the extent to which the structures of that unspeakable age survived beyond the war’s end. They were supposed to have been replaced by a new state, though there were no new people to administer it. Scandalously, the German authorities still hold files on Eichmann that have not been released to the public because their contents are deemed to be a danger to the common good. Acceptance of the fact that Adolf Eichmann, SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired), is a chapter of German history is long overdue.
Ever since Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published in 1963, every essay on Adolf Eichmann has also been a dialogue with Hannah Arendt.8 A Jew from Königsberg who had studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger until National Socialism drove her out of Germany, Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 for Eichmann’s trial. Like all philosophers, she wanted to understand. But our understanding is always mediated by our context: we bring to the task our own thoughts and experiences and our own images of the past. Hannah Arendt read about Adolf Eichmann in the newspapers for the first time in 1943 at the latest, and eighteen years later she was familiar with all the research on him. What she expected to find in Jerusalem was something she had already described in detail: a diabolical, highly intelligent mass murderer who commanded a kind of horrified fascination, the kind of murderer seen in great works of literature. “He was one of the most intelligent of the lot,” she wrote in 1960. Anyone who dared to understand him would be taking a great leap toward understanding the Nazis’ crimes. “Am very tempted.”9
Arendt, a philosopher with a gift for acute observation, was not the only person who was puzzled by Eichmann in the flesh. Regardless of where they came from, almost all the trial observers received the same impression: Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was a wretched creature, with none of the scintillating, satanic charisma they had expected. The SS Obersturmbannführer who had spread fear and terror and death for millions exhausted the observers’ attention with his endless sentences, and his talk of acting on orders and taking oaths of allegiance. Shouldn’t the fact that he was so astoundingly good at doing so have aroused suspicions, even in 1961? Voices of doubt were present, but they were very quiet and not at all popular. The crucial difference between these voices and the trial observers was that the doubters all had access to at least part of the Argentina Papers.
In 1960 Holocaust research was in its infancy, documentary evidence was scarce, and the desire to extract information from perpetrators who were brought to trial made people incautious. Hannah Arendt chose the method of understanding that she was familiar with: repeatedly reading Eichmann’s words and conducting a detailed analysis of the person speaking and writing, on the assumption that someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood. She read the transcripts of his hearing and the trial more thoroughly than almost anyone else. And for this very reason, she fell into his trap: Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask. She didn’t recognize it, although she was acutely aware that she had not understood the phenomenon as well as she had hoped.
No other book on Adolf Eichmann—and probably on National Socialism as a whole—has occasioned more debate than Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book achieved the primary goal of philosophers since Socrates: controversy for the sake of understanding. However, since at least the end of the 1970s, reference to Hannah Arendt has served to distract us from the matter at hand. One cannot help but feel that the story of the trial has stopped being about Eichmann, and that we would rather talk about the debate and various theories of evil than try to discover more about the man himself than a thinker in 1961 could possibly have known. And yet a major development has given us access to other sources entirely—at least in theory.
Since 1979 large parts of the so-called Sassen interviews have become available, and we can now see what Hannah Arendt and all the other trial observers were not allowed to see: Eichmann before Jerusalem, chatting in his friend’s front room, surrounded by former comrades—Nazis in Argentina, just like him. Historians’ engagement with this wealth of information has, however, remained worryingly brief. They have displayed some reluctance and a notable lack of curiosity regarding this source, even after some of the original tapes surfaced in 1998. A thorough reading of the transcripts alone confirms that more happened in Argentina than just a journalist on the lookout for a story meeting up with a washed-up Nazi on the lookout for a bottle of whiskey, and reveling in their memories. If anyone was of a mind to actually argue against Hannah Arendt, rather than continue to lament the success of her book, they could have found plenty of ammunition here. Instead, we go on retelling Eichmann’s stories from Israel, referring to the dates he gave, quoting from an insupportable pseudoedition of the transcripts from a tendentious publisher, and leaving unexamined material on Eichmann sitting in archives, wrongly labeled—material that could put even the legendarily reactionary stance of historians to the test. And so there is at least one thing we should learn from Hannah Arendt: when faced with the unknown, we should let ourselves be tempted.
My book is, first, an attempt to present all the available material, as well as the challenges that come with it. Even the story of how the Argentina Papers came to be distributed among several archives, like pieces of a monstrous jigsaw puzzle, gives us an unexpected insight into the “Eichmann phenomenon.” And any controversy about this phenomenon is worthwhile. My book presents these sources in detail for the first time, and the route they have taken through history, in the hope that it will enable further research and prompt more questions.
Eichmann Before Jerusalem is also a dialogue with Hannah Arendt, and not simply because I first came to this topic many years ago through Eichmann in Jerusalem. Our understanding of history is so dependent on our own time and circumstances that we cannot ignore a perspective like Arendt’s. She had the courage to form a clear judgment, even at the risk of knowing too little in spite of all her meticulous work. And one of the most significant insights to be gained from studying Adolf Eichmann is reflected in Arendt: even someone of average intelligence can induce a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon: her desire to see her expectations fulfilled. We will be able to recognize this mechanism only if thinkers deal bravely enough with their expectations and judgments to see their own failure.
Having written this book, it remains for me to preface it with a warning, in the same words that Hannah Arendt wrote to a good friend before flying to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial: “It could be interesting—apart from being horrible.”10
fn1In all quotations, old or incorrect spellings of names remain uncorrected. The customary note [sic] is omitted.
They knew me wherever I went.
—Adolf Eichmann to Willem Sassen, 1957
To this day, we don’t know exactly when Eichmann decided to live in Argentina, but he once explained why he was drawn there: “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann, former SS Obersturmbannführer.”1
Proud to be Adolf Eichmann? What an extraordinary remark! The fact that Eichmann saw this as a realistic possibility was as grotesque then as it seems now. His name had become a byword for the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, as he was all too aware. Nobody goes to great lengths to live under a false name, among strangers, without good reason. And when Adolf Eichmann was planning his escape, he had an excellent reason: he was simply too well known to remain undiscovered for long.
Too many people knew him and knew about his part in the disenfranchisement, expulsion, and mass murder of the Jews. If this fact is not as clear to us today as it was to Eichmann in the late 1940s, it is due to his extraordinary success in presenting himself in Jerusalem. After being kidnapped in 1960, he did his utmost to paint himself as an unimportant head of department, one among many, a “small cog in the machine” of the murderous Third Reich. He was ultimately an anonymous man who had been “made a scapegoat” through error, chance, and the cowardice of others, an unknown SS officer with no influence to speak of. But Eichmann knew very well that this image was a lie. By no means had his name been known only to a very limited circle of people; nor did it become common currency only during the trial. On the contrary, his reputation played a fundamental part in the enormity of the crime for which Eichmann remains notorious to this day.
As his name developed into a symbol of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann kept a close watch on it; indeed, both he and his superiors specifically encouraged the development. He wanted to be anything but the “man in the shadows” that he sometimes claimed to be. Only before the court in Israel did he try to give the impression that he had been a nameless, faceless, disposable minor official—but then, who wouldn’t want to be invisible when threatened with the death penalty? Still, the idea that Eichmann had been a man in the shadows seemed plausible to many people. Some even saw his invisibility as the key to his murderous success.2 Yet obvious clues tell us that by 1938 at the very latest, Eichmann was neither unknown nor interested in operating behind the scenes. As we follow these clues, a far more colorful picture of this shady character will emerge.
He was popular and welcomed everywhere.
—Rudolf Höß on Eichmann
In 1932 in Linz, Austria, Adolf Eichmann joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the SS. His family had moved from Germany to Austria when he was a child: his father knew that in Linz, he could make a nice, middle-class career for himself. His son’s career took a very different path: not for him a place on the parish council or a position in his father’s firm. In 1933 the National Socialist movement was outlawed in Austria, and Eichmann seized the opportunity to accompany a senior party functionary back to Germany, the center of this new political power. Whether by intent, good advice, or a sure instinct for gaining power, he found his way into the SS security service in 1934. The Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, was small but already notorious. The organization behind the acronym was already known to have played a significant part in the Night of the Long Knives. Eichmann’s later attempt to explain his transfer to the SD as a “mix-up” is absurd: if that were so, he would have been the only person in Germany unaware of the aura around the SD’s secretive employees and their charismatic leader Reinhard Heydrich.1 People who joined the SD in mid-1934 were well compensated—not with a high salary but with a mixture of respect and dread from their fellow party members. They also gained an impressive office: the majestic palace at 102 Wilhelmstraße in Berlin, the capital and power center of the Reich. For a man of not yet thirty, who two years previously had been a moderately successful gasoline salesman in Upper Austria, this was a big step up in the world. Eichmann felt he had established himself, a fact reflected in his decision to marry and start a family (which, within the SS, was also a good career move). He married Vera Liebl, a woman from Mladé, in Bohemia, four years his junior. She and her two brothers, who worked for the Gestapo, would come to profit from her husband’s social climbing.
The men of the SD held a special position from the beginning. They were the NSDAP’s internal intelligence service, and therefore certain regulations didn’t apply to them. They were not required to participate in military drills, and their SS uniforms mostly stayed in the closet. After April 1935, when off-duty contact with Jews was forbidden to normal party members, the SD’s intelligence function allowed its members to interpret the rules a little more freely: they defined themselves as always being on duty. Incognito investigation was one of the tasks that Eichmann most relished, and he remembered it fondly decades later. He visited Jewish organizations, making contacts who thought him liberal-minded and eager to learn.2 He found a Jewish Hebrew teacher (whom his superior officer then twice forbade him from actually engaging) and immersed himself in Jewish literature, as all his colleagues did, studying everything from six-hundred-page tomes to the daily newspapers. He fostered international relationships, and a Jewish man even invited him on a trip to Palestine. Later Eichmann would speak of a “course of study that took three years.”3 He didn’t mention that his superiors occasionally had to reprimand him for disorganization and tardiness.4 It would be easy to mistake his lifestyle for that of a scientifically inclined aesthete with somewhat crude political views except that, between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo. The SD was both an ideological elite and an instrument of power, a combination that made it highly attractive for the self-declared “new and different” generation.
The first image we have of Eichmann as perceived by a wider (and in this case Jewish) public comes from mid-1937. He was a “smart and brisk” young man who became unfriendly when addressed by his name rather than by his title. “He loved to remain anonymous,” wrote Ernst Marcus, looking back on 1936–37, “and he took the mention of his name next to his official title of ‘Herr Kommissar’ as an insult.”5 It seems Eichmann was unable to resist the cliché of faceless power in a long leather coat—an image formed as much by the SD as by the Gestapo, organizations that their victims found difficult to tell apart. But he did not cling to this anonymity for long. When he traveled to the Middle East with his colleague Herbert Hagen, the British Secret Intelligence Service observed them and prevented them from entering Palestine. Photos of the trip were kept on file.6 By the end of 1937, the name of this “SD Kommissar” was known in Berlin circles. Eichmann was said to be “inexplicably well informed” when it came to topics that Nazis usually preferred to ignore: Zionism, problems with money transfers during forced emigration, discussions among Jews, and a huge variety of interest groups, people, and associations.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when Eichmann began to turn from a silent, discreet observer into the blustering voice of the master race. In Berlin, at least, his reputation for anonymity was conclusively quashed in June 1937, when he almost broke up Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s farewell party, creating such a scene that the two thousand guests were unable to ignore the SS man.7 People knew exactly who was meant by “a repulsive, unpleasant fellow, you shake hands with him and you want to wash your hands afterward.” Erring on the side of caution, Eichmann corrected this denunciation for his superiors: “I make sure I never shake hands with these Jews.”8 The time for discreetly acquiring information was evidently over.
This transformation was in line with the SD’s new self-image: it wanted to stop working behind the scenes and stake its claim on implementing anti-Jewish policy. This was a prestigious issue, close to Hitler’s heart, and following the establishment of the Nuremberg race laws, new opportunities opened up.9 Eichmann played a substantial role in helping the SD take advantage of these the very next year. He and his organization were impatient for their new age, impatient to take a stand and to show their “enemy” which way the wind was blowing. As Eichmann’s idiosyncratic phraseology would have it: “They are finally realizing a bomb is beginning to strike.”10 At the start of 1938, Eichmann was known to Berlin’s Jewish community and seemed entirely unconcerned about his growing reputation with “the enemy.”
With the ascendency of the SD, Eichmann’s reputation also grew within Nazi circles. At first, only the lower ranks knew him, from the lectures he gave on training days, but he quickly made a wider circle of contacts. For a start, he collaborated with other departments, such as the Foreign Office, the Gestapo, and the Reich Department of Commerce—though this didn’t always go smoothly. Forcing the emigration of Jews involved working with numerous different authorities. Then there was Heydrich’s advertising strategy, through which he deftly publicized his SD, and the SD’s Jewish Department, II 112. In January 1937 alone, more than three hundred people visited Department II 112. They were not only officers from the War Academy and the Reich War Ministry but also the future foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the head of the Yugoslav secret police.11 The department’s calendar included lectures to the party’s youth organizations and trips to Upper Silesia12 and the Nuremberg Rally. Eichmann was there as a guest of Julius Streicher, publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, whose colleague had taken pains to make contact with Eichmann.13 Even though the British had denied him entry to Palestine and the trip had been a failure, in 1937 this still made Eichmann a “recognized expert” on the “Jewish question.”
At this early stage, he already possessed a talent for using even failed projects to build his reputation. Later, in Israel, Eichmann would still claim to know the country: after all, he had visited before. In the mid-1930s his “expert knowledge” made a considerable impression among National Socialists, and his pride was evident: “I was an apprentice in the years 1934/35/36…. But by the time I went to Palestine, I had already become a Bachelor. And when I came back, they made me a Master.”14 Not everyone who met Eichmann in his first years in Berlin, from 1934 to 1938, remembered his name or his face, but a great number of people knew what the SD’s Jewish Department was and what it did. Its staff garnered attention merely for being members of the department. Given Eichmann’s considerable talent for self-promotion, he must have made excellent use of this opportunity.
In mid-March 1938 Austria was “annexed,” and Eichmann was transferred to Vienna as head of a special unit under Department II 112. This move put him firmly in the public gaze. From the outset, he made no secret of how he viewed his place in history. Before a subpoenaed gathering of all notable representatives of Judaism in Vienna, Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his riding crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. Adolf Böhm, who had just completed the second volume of Die Zionistische Bewegung15