Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  But something else is at work in these descriptions. Heinrich Himmler had told the Auschwitz commandant that he must carry out the slaughter so that the generations to come wouldn’t have to. This imperative turned the extermination of the Jews into something that men like Höß and Eichmann had missed out on: fighting on the front lines. Not that any of Eichmann’s staff, or men with comparable positions in “reserved occupations,” would have traded places with soldiers in Stalingrad. We have no evidence that anyone from Eichmann’s department actually requested a transfer to the front lines. But they still felt they were missing out on the much-lauded experience of camaraderie, proving oneself in battle, gallantry, and heroic deeds, and the frontline troops never really acknowledged the office staff as comrades. The Waffen-SS disliked and mocked the Allgemeine-SS (the “general” SS). Understandably, anyone who had been promoted while surviving the conditions at the front didn’t take kindly to someone earning the same reward behind a desk in Berlin. This distinction was still being brought home to Eichmann in Argentina.216 And so it pleased him not only to recall this recognition that Himmler had given them but to demonstrate to the others that during his visits to the extermination camp, he had proved himself. Fountains of blood and splintering bones, willpower and acts of violence: Eichmann had come through it all as well. He too had known comradeship and supported his fellow soldiers. On the tape, he leaps to the defense of Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz, saying he was so very different from how you might imagine a man in his position. “And if I had had to take up the post of commandant of a concentration camp,” he says in defense of his dead comrade, “I would not have acted any differently. And if I had received the order to gas Jews or to shoot Jews, I would have carried out that order. And I have already said I am neither grateful nor ungrateful to fate that I did not receive that order. Because, you know, there’s no point peeing against the wind.”217 But by the time he screams at someone in Sassen’s living room, “You ridiculous pipsqueak! Did you fight at the front?,”218 he has obviously come to believe in his own frontline experience. “Just take a moment to think,” he continues, “about how I told you that we had a total war, and the front and the hinterland had become completely blurred, and today I have to expressly oppose and fight against obstinate intellects, including Germans, who are of the opinion that the last war was fought only on the front lines.… There is no difference between the annihilation of enemy powers when a total war has been declared.”219 Eichmann really had seen some terrible things, but he had clearly forgotten that his “enemy powers” had been defenseless, frightened humans, and that he had been chauffeur-driven to their annihilation in a warm winter coat. He wanted to prove that he too had suffered for Germany. This desire goes a long way to explaining why Eichmann describes the horror so frankly.

  His listeners react in different ways. Dr. Langer starts talking about the torture and extermination he heard about in Mauthausen, but the confrontation with reality renders Sassen and Fritsch speechless. They make no queries, in the main: they have already heard more than enough. Sassen instructs the transcriber to leave out repeated accounts of extermination campaigns. The listeners’ horror and revulsion are obvious: Sassen the novelist might have indulged in excesses of violence when it came to the torture allegedly inflicted on Germans by the “victorious powers,” but the suffering of the Jews silenced him. And not because he didn’t believe Eichmann and Langer. While these two had both been involved in concentration camps and were able to share their experiences and their self-pity with each other, Sassen was quite clearly horrified. But he granted Eichmann’s wish for recognition, as he then dictated a trenchant sentence with which Eichmann could doubtless identify: “The battlefields of this war were called death camps.”220 Here was the respect that Eichmann was demanding for his “frontline experience.” However, the long dictation in which Sassen recorded his thoughts also includes the assertion that the crimes against humanity in which Eichmann, Höß, and Odilo Globocnik were involved could “not be forgiven.”221 Sassen then hurriedly says their actions could be “understood”: Eichmann, and other people all the way up to Hitler, had simply been manipulated. Still, Sassen never revised his opinion that these crimes were unforgivable. And in the transcript, when the group reaches the reports of the children’s transports—which Eichmann refers to in all seriousness as the “children story”—even Sassen’s “understanding” deserts him temporarily.222 Eichmann clearly notices Sassen’s horror and shamelessly denies that any such thing had happened: “But you have found so many documents and papers, and now I am wondering where the documents on the matter of the children are, I mean documents that can be believed. And so I have nothing further to say on this matter for the moment.”223 We cannot know if Sassen was reassured. He couldn’t prove Eichmann wrong, and he didn’t want to. Eichmann would finally get to see the documents on these crimes in Israel. But he obviously always knew they existed and that he had been the one who set the “children’s transports rolling.”224

  What separated Sassen and Fritsch, as well as Alvensleben, from Langer and Eichmann, was the latter’s personal experience of the camps’ reality. Langer, so the transcripts suggest, had admittedly witnessed only a fraction of the crimes Eichmann had, learning most of what he knew from conversations with the commandant of Mauthausen. However, Langer and Eichmann were noticeably united in their conviction that they had been the victims here. Langer, who had seen such abominations as the “stairs of death” with his own eyes, bemoaned the fact that he had been shown this sort of thing, displaying a sensitivity that neither he nor Eichmann had been able to muster for the real victims. Both gave the impression that they had looked on powerlessly—as things were enacted that they had helped bring about. The same self-centered attitude can be found in the accounts of many other perpetrators, all the way up to Himmler, whose Posen speech was full of sympathetic words for the poor, suffering murderers.

  This reversal of perpetrator and victim is a psychodynamic shift that does more than just ease the perpetrator’s burdensome memory of what he has done; it is more than an act of retrospective repression. It is the suppression of the very consciousness that allowed these perpetrators to commit their deeds in the first place. Eichmann was clearly aware of the need to shield himself as much as possible. “But there is one good thing nature gave me,” he explains. “I can switch off and forget very quickly, without trying to.”225 He had some effective methods for helping this process along, the primary strategy being the consumption of alcohol. His knowledge of the mechanisms of repression, however, like his self-awareness, went far beyond the use of this simple drug.226 The conscious mind can be deliberately distracted, and not only by escaping into nature, as he described in “The Others Spoke.” “I still have a very devout saying from my youth,” Eichmann explains to the Sassen circle, “and I always do it when I find something horribly unpleasant and I can’t stop thinking about it. And in order to forcibly distract myself, do you know what I say? You’ll laugh! I believe in God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, died under Pontius Pilate, suffered and so on and so on, was raised from the dead, and so on.”227

  Father Anton Weber, one of the people who helped Nazi fugitives obtain new identities in Rome, said there was a trick he used to check that they had really found their way back to the Faith. “I made them say the Our Father. Then it quickly emerged who was genuine and who wasn’t.”228 Eichmann would certainly have impressed him with the pace of his creed, managing it in five seconds: “I somehow realized early on, as a child—still a devout believer at that time, of course—that once I’d said that, I didn’t think about anything else.”229

  Breaches of Trust

  I can read only one single motive in this report, a single impetus: he hates you like sin.

  —Sassen on Wisliceny, Sassen discussions230

  Over time Sassen must have come to recognize that these discussions weren’t bringing him close enough to Eichmann. His interlocutor was
always a little faster, always a little more agile in his engagement with documents and information, and it seemed impossible to catch up with his head start on the facts. Neither the additional listeners, nor Dr. Langer’s critically framed legal questions, managed to unsettle him. However, Sassen’s growing frustration was also due in part to his reluctance to hear the truth about the Nazis’ crimes against humanity; he therefore assumed that this truth had to be a lie. He wrongly imagined that the truth was hidden, and he wanted to get at it. By tape 41, Eichmann had become so self-assured that he gave a short address to the group, and at the end of August Sassen decided to change tack: he laid a trap for Eichmann.231

  The conversation began as it usually did. Sassen picked up the book by Poliakov and Wulf, but he didn’t tell Eichmann that the document they were about to discuss was not written by an “enemy”; nor was it “Jewish scribblings.” Rather, these were the words of a man Eichmann believed to be one of his best friends: Dieter Wisliceny.232

  Eichmann had first met Wisliceny, who was five years younger, in the fall of 1934, though it isn’t clear from Eichmann’s statements whether it was in Munich or Berlin. At first their contact was rather infrequent, but once Wisliceny was transferred to Department II 112 in February 1937, they worked more closely and saw each other on a daily basis. For a short while, Wisliceny was Eichmann’s superior officer, but when Wisliceny failed to get a promotion, he left Berlin and worked in the SD in Danzig until August 1940. When he returned to work for Eichmann in his department, their contact again became more regular, but then Wisliceny was deployed as an “adviser on Jewish affairs” in the Balkans, and they had few opportunities to meet in person. Only in March 1944, when Wisliceny joined Eichmann’s special operations commando in Hungary, did the two form a close relationship once again. This connection allegedly suffered at the end of 1944, as a result of Wisliceny’s futile attempts to create a better image of himself for the postwar world. Eichmann later refuted the claim that they had fallen out, and he may have been telling the truth: Wisliceny stayed with Eichmann until April 1945, though he did his best to deny it afterward.233

  Eichmann and Wisliceny had a complex personal relationship. Eichmann clearly felt that he and Wisliceny, after whom he named his third son, were true friends. He openly admired the younger man’s education and intelligence. (Wisliceny had studied theology but had broken off his study because his family was in need of money.) Decades later Eichmann would still remember their discussions. But for Wisliceny, the relationship had another dimension. In 1946, when he was in jail in Bratislava and the authorities asked him to write about Eichmann, Wisliceny came up with a dossier containing twenty-two densely written pages about this one man. Reports on “The Final Solution,” the “Grand Mufti,” “The Fiala Affair,” and numerous other topics fill more than one hundred additional pages, in which ever more details about Eichmann emerge.234 For all his attempts to degrade Eichmann, Wisliceny’s texts still show signs of admiration and attachment: over the years, he seems to have observed everything and everyone around Eichmann, and he continued to proclaim his intimate knowledge of his boss even where it harmed his own line of defense. He also knew what had happened during the period when he and Eichmann had worked in different places—he had kept himself well informed while he was away. This attentiveness has all the hallmarks of obsession. Wisliceny knew the color of Eichmann’s eyes, his scars, the sound of his breathing, and the way he moved; he even remembered his teeth. He would recognize Eichmann’s “gold crowns even on his corpse.”235

  Wisliceny made several offers to track Eichmann down, so he could be brought before a court. The authorities refused to release him for this purpose, but he still took pains to list everywhere he could think of that Eichmann might be hiding, which also demonstrates how well Wisliceny knew him. All his suggestions turned out to be wrong, but only because Eichmann wasn’t as predictable as everyone thought. Wisliceny’s testimonies were obviously shaped by two motives: self-defense and a strong emotional connection to Eichmann. This attachment was sometimes expressed positively through idealization, and sometimes negatively, in a sort of impulse for revenge. In Bratislava, as Wisliceny attempted to distance himself, his strong emotional connection became a blind hatred. It unleashed a huge number of lies and attempts to libel Eichmann, which went far beyond what others had done, and for which there seems to have been no rational cause. His behavior cannot be explained purely as an attempt at self-defense.

  By 1957 Eichmann knew that Wisliceny had testified against him in Nuremberg—it had been in all the papers—and that he had been executed in Bratislava.236 Eichmann may have told Sassen the testimony was an exaggeration, but he knew Wisliceny had been telling the truth. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was understandable. However, Eichmann hadn’t reckoned on what Wisliceny wrote afterward. He thought of his friend as a victim of the Allies’ “victor’s justice” and maybe even of “torture” at their hands—and Eichmann knew very well what you could achieve by that means, having made frequent use of it himself.237 In Argentina, Eichmann enjoyed talking about Wisliceny and did so at length. Wisliceny had specifically applied to be part of the Hungary commando and had always been one of his most dependable men. Eichmann would dearly have liked to promote him, but unfortunately there was one SS norm that Wisliceny didn’t conform to: he refused point-blank to get married. Eichmann had tried and failed to talk him into it in Hungary. He could never figure out why.

  In the transcript, Sassen begins to read from Wisliceny’s text on “The Final Solution” (which had been published as part of Das Dritte Reich und die Juden). Eichmann does not know who the author is. As usual, he tries to contradict this so-called “author,” exposing his lies and “childish inexperience”238 to protect himself and his colleagues. He even ends up defending Wisliceny against what was, unknown to him, Wisliceny’s own testimony. Sassen plays this bizarre game over two tapes on this particular day,239 watching for hours as Eichmann gets his teeth into the text and works himself into a rage, using flimsy arguments to attack every sentence this author has written. The author seems to pose a real threat, and, continually spurred on by Sassen, Eichmann finally claims that “there is a lot of truth in this, but the author has also not gone into the matter thoroughly.” Sassen then reveals just how thoroughly the author was acquainted with the facts: “This report is by Wisliceny.” Eichmann is shaken by this news, as the transcript shows: “What is truth? Do you know what truth is? I know it, you don’t. How was he interrogated?” Sassen listens to this stammering for a while, then ups the ante: “I can only tell you my personal feeling, that in my opinion this report was absolutely not obtained under any direct, immediate force, torture or similar, and I can read only one single motive in this report, a single impetus—not redemption in general, this doesn’t play too large a role with intellectual people, which I am starting to realize that W[isliceny] is—he has a basic motive and it is a very primitive motive: he hates you like sin.” “Envy[…] became a pure hatred, particularly as he had been caught, and Eichmann hadn’t.” To cap it all, Sassen then gives a detailed account of how eager Wisliceny was to help the Allies find Eichmann. Eichmann, apparently exhausted, replies: “That is groveling.” Perhaps he is referring in part to himself. The day’s discussion ends with one of the very few moments that give us a glimpse of Eichmann without his mask—tired, disappointed, perturbed, and wounded: “I don’t understand all this … I don’t understand it all.”240

  Sassen had deliberately put Eichmann in an awkward situation, which obviously overwhelmed him. But Sassen didn’t know enough about interrogation techniques to realize that this method leads to success only when there is enough time to carry on the discussion afterward. It works in lengthy interrogations, when someone is under arrest. But when the person you have just shaken to his core then has the option of going home, he’ll realize what has taken place, and the result will be reversed. This is exactly what happened in Argentina: Eichmann recognized that Sassen had been playing
on his emotions and had entrapped him. In the discussions that followed, his contributions became more halting, filled with latent or open aggression. The convivial tone of the previous sessions vanished at a stroke.241