Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  As the trial in Israel approached, accompanied by a media storm, nobody in the world wanted to be connected with Adolf Eichmann. Facts were coming to light, and for the first time people discussed them instead of dismissing them. But Eichmann’s appearance before the court also offered an opportunity for one of the most astonishingly successful acts of suppression in European history. This nervous shadow of a man in a glass box, who gradually disappeared behind his little desk, the stacks of files, his unintelligible German—how could this man ever have been someone? Eichmann described himself as the man behind the desk, allowing former colleagues who had never actually entered his office to claim they had never met him. Nobody knows a little cog in the machine—especially people who don’t know anything else, either. The success of this strategy in the 1960s, and the fact that it still appears today in almost every book about the Holocaust, is frightening. But a glance at the daily papers from May 24, 1960, shows the level of knowledge that journalists assumed of their readers when they wrote articles with headlines like “The Manager of the ‘Final Solution.’ ”167 Long before the trial began, Eichmann’s name had become a symbol that required no further explanation. And yet here we are, still explaining to the world why no one knew this man before 1960—a man whose arrest unleashed an outpouring of emotions from New York to Warsaw, from Bonn to Tel Aviv. This was a moment when world history was suddenly brought into focus, and no further explanation was required.

  The saying goes that in a crisis, you find out who your real friends are. But Adolf Eichmann didn’t find the friends he expected. Those who still cleaved undeterred to National Socialist ideals wanted nothing to do with their comrade. Nor did the far-right press step into the breach: unusually, it stood shoulder to shoulder with public opinion in Germany. It wasn’t the Germans—no, it was the Eichmanns who had secretly murdered six million Jews, and it was a terrible business. Ever since then the neo-Nazi movement has run roughshod over reality in the way Willem Sassen and Ludolf von Alvensleben planned to in 1957. Their attempts to redeem Hitler and the Reich are based on claims that Adolf Eichmann and his colleagues had not belonged there. “Das Verbrechen hat kein Vaterland” was the new slogan: the crime has no fatherland; the fatherland recognizes only its heroes.168 The extermination of the Jews in Europe is seldom called that in the country that perpetrated it; Germans prefer the terms Holocaust or Shoah. In Argentina the crime was dismissed as an imported item that someone must have foisted upon the unsuspecting Germans. Like Hitler, the Buenos Aires Nazis had known nothing, and so ultimately the crime had nothing to do with them. With obvious relief, an anonymous writer for the monthly Nation Europa quoted the words Eichmann uttered at the start of his trial: “I never met him [Hitler] personally.” That cleared everything up: Eichmann had never seen the Führer in person, and neither the Jews nor the Germans recognized Eichmann’s name. The statement cast doubt on the “Führer’s order” that he claimed to have been following, and “even Herr Eichmann would never dare appeal to the German people.”169 The writer was wrong about that, too, but the Germans who wrote for far-right magazines took the precaution of not listening to any more of the trial. Still, the number of pseudonyms used increased noticeably: the authors were more frightened than they wanted to admit.

  “Nobody shed a tear for him then,” said the former Wehrmacht soldier Pedro Pobierzym—but that was not entirely true. After Adolf Eichmann’s execution, in far-off Brazil, Josef Mengele wrote a “very heavy-hearted” farewell to his comrade. It wasn’t just an expression of gratitude to Eichmann for not betraying him or any of the other people he had met in Argentina. Eichmann’s execution had a personal as well as a historic dimension for Mengele: “The event of 1 June [Eichmann’s execution], which I only heard about days afterward, did not surprise me, but it made a deep impression. Was there any sense in this killing? One is tempted to draw parallels, but then abandons the idea, horrified by the reality of the course history has taken over the last 2000 years. His people betrayed him despicably. This was probably the heaviest human burden for him. And that is probably the core of the problem in this case! One day the German people will be ashamed of this! Or else they will not be ashamed of anything!”170

  Eichmann as a German Jesus in Jerusalem? Mengele’s Catholic upbringing isn’t an adequate explanation for this monstrous idea. But two things are obvious: Mengele understood Eichmann better than any of the other National Socialists in Argentina, and he also knew that something united the two of them. The Germans wanted nothing to do with Eichmann, and since an arrest warrant had also been issued for Mengele in 1959, they wanted nothing to do with him either. A quarter of a century earlier, the people of Germany had succumbed to the fever of National Socialism just as Eichmann and Mengele had. Without the German people, neither of these men could have become what they became, but now these people refused to extend them the respect that both were certain they deserved. They had considered themselves the executors of the Führer’s orders and the executive of the entire German population. And now this population no longer wanted to know them. Eichmann’s fears went even further. He advised his family: “Don’t go to Germany too much for the time being. I think it’s better for you to be careful.”171

  In his concluding statement in Israel, Eichmann said he had the feeling he was being tried as a proxy for others. He was unquestionably an ideal proxy, having heaped a degree of guilt upon himself for which no earthly punishment would suffice—but that didn’t change the fact that his feeling was correct. The German people were only too happy to pretend that Eichmann had murdered six million Jews by himself. His offer to hang himself in public, to take the guilt from “German youth,” was grotesque, but it revealed the fundamental problem with the trial. Israel was hoping for catharsis, a collective reflection on collective guilt, and even Eichmann grasped the fact that his warped martyrdom might endow his pitiful situation with pathos and heroism. But the perpetrators, collaborators, and willing sympathizers just wanted to be rid of their scapegoat. “You make things so difficult for so many of your sons, sacred Fatherland! But we will not leave you, and we will always, always love you!” wrote Mengele, attempting to comfort himself.172 “Leave history to create a judgment,” Eichmann wrote in his farewell letter to his family.173 Neither man could expect anything more from the present.

  A CHANGE OF ROLE

  Eichmann in Jerusalem

  He was pleased he was able to make a statement at the trial, and said: “Now the murderer and mass murderer has completely vanished.”

  —Vera Eichmann, following a visit to Eichmann in jail, April 22, 1962

  As soon as Eichmann realized he had fallen into the hands of kidnappers rather than a murder squad, he made a revealing request: “Since I can no longer remember all the details, and mistake or confuse some things, I ask to be helped in this by having documents and statements made available to me.”1 Eichmann wanted the books he had studied so thoroughly, because he knew exactly how to use them to his own advantage. When the captain of the Israeli police, Avner W. Less, began to interrogate him, he soon got an inkling: “After the end of the first hearing, I was convinced that Eichmann wasn’t telling this story for the first time.”2 He went on: “I had the feeling the man had been rehearsing it somewhere.”3 The prisoner was no intellectual, but he was incredibly well read, “very intelligent, very cunning, and there was the way he behaved during the interrogation.” The two men were playing “a sort of chess game,” as they both knew how an interrogation worked.4 Less quickly realized that Eichmann was acquainted with all the books, even when he claimed the opposite, remarking with a sigh how greatly he regretted being able to read these volumes only now, in Israel. It didn’t escape the interrogating officer’s notice that his prisoner was able to find “the passages that appeared favorable to him” with frightening speed. Not for months would Less learn where Eichmann had practiced, and why he was so extremely well prepared for the interrogation.

  By the time Eichmann unexpectedly found him
self imprisoned by his archenemy, he had already decided which of the images of himself that were in circulation would be the most useful for his defense. He gave them the Cautious Bureaucrat—without the incriminating elaborations he had added in Argentina. In this role, he was able to unite two things that he hoped might save him from the gallows: exclusive knowledge about the murder of the Jews, and his own innocence. He might even gain some room for putting across his personal insights. “I knew it, and yet I could not change anything.”5

  The renowned specialist on “Jewish questions,” the interministerial coordinator of the extermination project, the man who celebrated its implementation with his superiors over a glass of cognac by the fire, transformed himself into a helpless minute taker with no power of his own. Even at the Wannsee Conference, he claimed to have been “sharpening pencils at the side table.”6 In Argentina, Eichmann had explained with pride and pedantry exactly why his name had become a symbol even before the war. He knew his collection of press cuttings like the back of his hand, but he now claimed that “until 1946, I had next to no public profile.”7 The approaching trial was really just a misunderstanding, arising from the fact that he had been “accused, slandered and pursued by the whole world for 15 years.”8 “I too,” he would say reproachfully, in his concluding statement before the court, “I too am a victim.”

  As part of this masquerade, Eichmann described himself in terms that would previously have sent him into a screaming rage. He was now “small-minded,” a “pencil-pusher,” and a “pedant,” someone who “did not overstep his responsibilities”9—and the last of these lies may even have amused him a little. His former colleagues in the Foreign Office would have to listen to all this without being able to object, though they could have told a very different story about how Eichmann had overstepped his responsibilities. He had always been very proud of his trickery, and his observant interrogator noted that the prisoner grew particularly lively when he was making tactical maneuvers.

  All these labels he applied to himself in Israel actually fit National Socialist conceptions of the enemy, and “the bureaucrat” was almost the antithesis of the SS man.10 Of course, one could use bureaucracy as a weapon, particularly against those who believed in it. During his time in power, Eichmann had used perverse bureaucratic chicaneries to slow down other Reich institutions, as well as his victims, and he was well acquainted with this subtle form of power. But now, in his cell in Israel, a bureaucrat sounded far more harmless than an SS man. This cautious bureaucrat had not been a fanatical National Socialist; he was an ordinary, nature-loving man with an academic bent and a hankering for enlightenment and cosmopolitanism. In the last fifteen years, he had finally managed to leave behind the onerous orders of a criminal government and return to his roots. This was the image of Eichmann that the prisoner in Jerusalem chose to enact for the last year of his life. His ability to inhabit and perfect a role allowed him to keep up this pretense with surprising consistency. He even built on it: the voluble prisoner and the diligent historian were joined by the pacifist, who venerated international law, and finally the philosopher, who grappled with the ultimate questions of morality and existence with the aid of Kant and Spinoza—only this time, without the “voice of blood.”

  A study of the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazi period, however, reveals the anti-Semitic clichés that were involved in these roles, too—Eichmann was still thinking like a dedicated anti-Semite. Jews, as he had preached since the 1930s, were universalists. Their weakness lay in placing universal ideas like knowledge above the language of blood. It was an innate “instinct” of theirs, he believed, and he must have hoped that appealing to it would create a loophole for him. Racial anti-Semites were convinced that Jews, and everyone who had been “infected” by them, couldn’t help but place their weakness for intellectualism and science above the “sacred egoism of blood.” As long as he was satisfying their need to understand the past, they wouldn’t kill him.

  Even in Israel, surrounded by people who knew exactly who he was, Eichmann managed to do what he had done so many times before as a Nazi functionary: arouse the sympathy of his opponents. Everyone who dealt with Eichmann in Israel said they were sure they had been an important attachment figure for him. Interrogator, prison director, doctor, psychologist, theologian, deputy attorney general—they all praised his willingness to cooperate, remarked on how happy he was to talk, and believed he was particularly grateful to them for their conversations. As much as they fought it and condemned him for what he was, all were touched by the impression of the grateful prisoner.11 Even Avner W. Less occasionally struggled with Eichmann’s surprisingly winning ways, despite being an experienced interrogator and possessing the tools to deal with charm offensives.

  Again and again—even with experienced interpreters—Eichmann and his texts led people to false conclusions. A person who takes luggage with them “to the East,” and who is asked to take note of where they put their clothes before the “delousing,” naturally expects there must be a reason. Anyone who receives a postcard from a relative in the Black Forest naturally assumes that their relative is in the Black Forest and has not already been gassed in Auschwitz. In the same way, we always search texts and testimonies for their relation to our own knowledge and experience. In other words: we reason. We want to understand. The National Socialist “ideological elite” grasped our susceptibility to this desire to understand. They used it to confuse people and render them incapable of making judgments or taking action. People who want to understand will never give up their search for understanding, even where others have burned all the bridges out of a belief that not everyone has the right to exist. Eichmann’s “Götzen” is a paean to philosophy and moral values, to ideals of peace and international law. It expresses disillusionment with Nazism and a supposed change of heart. It is Eichmann’s attempt to build a bridge for someone who is desperate to understand but cannot understand a crime like the extermination of the Jews.

  Eichmann, by talking like the people who condemned his deeds, in progressive terms of morality and justice, was implying the possibility of a connection, a chance to find out what he meant. Ultimately, whether Eichmann managed to sell himself as a bureaucrat, a schizophrenic, or an amnesiac didn’t matter, as long as no one sniffed out his convictions, asked questions, or, above all, listened to him closely enough to see him as he was. Even in excellent publications and documentaries, photos of Eichmann are often laterally reversed.12 It’s no coincidence: our desire to get a picture of him, without looking at him too closely, was one of the fundamental reasons for Eichmann’s power. He did a good job of letting people see what they wanted to see. Eichmann-in-Jerusalem made a huge effort to lead the people who wanted to understand over the bridges into his worldview. We can avoid falling into Eichmann’s “Götzen” trap only by keeping a wary eye fixed on the perfidious philosophical swamp of the Argentina Papers.

  Interrogation officer Avner W. Less and Judge Yitzhak Raveh showed how to get beneath Eichmann’s surface, by taking him at his word and observing his role-playing in order to learn about it. You learn nothing about a mirror by gazing in fascination at your own reflection; the trick is to concentrate on the reflective surface itself.

  Eichmann’s writings in Israel offer insight into injustice, express disappointment in his superiors, and appeal to reason and world peace, but the writings and discussions from Argentina are conclusive proof of their insincerity. These earlier texts allow us to analyze the mechanics of Eichmann’s manipulation and the extent to which he had reflected on the methods of lying and disinformation. Thousands of pages of self-stylizing and historical revisionism don’t just happen—they are no mere accident or memory lapse, especially not two such different accounts from the same person. The Argentina Papers allow us to see behind the mirror. They reveal a man who was practiced in the art of manufacturing and conveying stories with an inner coherence, solely to distract people from their fundamental weakness: the fact they had little to do with re
ality. In power, Eichmann played treacherous games with his victims’ hopes of finding a way out of their situation, in order to drive them to their deaths without resistance. In Argentina, in order to gain the respect and assistance of his old comrades, he confirmed their expectations that National Socialism could be separated from the imperative to exterminate. In Israel, he tried to serve what he saw as a “Jewish instinct,” the desire to understand and gather knowledge. Like a mirror, he reflected people’s fears and expectations, whether they were fearing for their own lives or hoping he would confirm a theory of evil. Behind all the mirror images lay Eichmann’s will to power and desire to control people’s thoughts, disguised as diligence. One thing unfailingly made Eichmann incautious and therefore vulnerable: his pronounced need for recognition. A man who wears so many masks is always tempted to reveal who he really is. But the desire to control and manipulate ultimately requires what Eichmann thought of as his greatest mental burden: “personal anonymity.”

  In Israel, Eichmann was trying to “howl with the wolves” once again, trying to draw the gaze of powerful people and make the world see him as an indispensible specialist, a historian, a philosopher, and finally a prophet, preaching peace and international understanding. He was playing for the highest stakes. But this time he lost. Otto Adolf Eichmann was hanged on the night between May and June 1962, and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean. The traces of his diversionary tactics, however, are still in evidence today.

  AFTERMATH

  Silence is less obvious. One must be aware of it before it yields its information.

  —Raul Hilberg1