Henry Ormond, born Hans Ludwig Jacobsohn, in Kassel, was a German jurist whose Jewish heritage lost him his position as a judge in the Mannheim District Court in 1933. In 1938 he was arrested during the November pogroms. Three months later he was allowed to leave Dachau concentration camp, after providing evidence that he was able to emigrate. Following his internment, he was almost unable to move one of his hands, which served as a reminder of this period for the rest of his life. He fled to Switzerland, then to Britain and Canada, and finally returned to Europe as a soldier in the British Army. During the occupation, he remained in Hanover and Hamburg as an officer and was responsible for building up a new press sector. Henri Nannen and Rudolf Augstein got their licenses through Henry Ormond, who would cast a critical eye on Stern and Der Spiegel for the rest of his life.58 In April 1950 he started work as a lawyer in Frankfurt, where he conducted the first forced-labor trial against IG Farben and championed the recognition of Nazi victims’ rights. In the Auschwitz trial alone, he represented fifteen joint plaintiffs.59 He was also one of the first to recognize and denounce the Foreign Office’s revisionist version of history.60
Thomas Harlan, born in 1929, was the son of the director Veit Harlan, who became notorious for the anti-Semitic 1940 film Jud Süß. In 1959 he moved to Warsaw, turning his disappointment in his father (and the memory of Goebbels giving him a train set for Christmas) into creativity and historical journalism. He took an unusual path, conducting most of his research in Poland and breaching the general East-West divide in other ways as well. Harlan’s mission was to uncover Nazi criminals and call out perpetrators by name. With this in mind, he was planning a huge publication, to be called Das Vierte Reich (The Fourth Reich), on the postwar lives of influential Nazis. In May 1960 he published one of the first articles about Eichmann in the respected Polish weekly paper Polityka.61
Ormond and Langbein had known each other since at least 1955 and quickly developed a mutual respect. They issued press releases together; Langbein helped Ormond find documents and witnesses for his trials; and Ormond helped Langbein navigate the German legal system. In 1959 the Hesse attorney general, Fritz Bauer, made contact with Langbein via Henry Ormond, as Langbein had offered to arrange a site visit to Auschwitz for Bauer and his colleagues. Unfortunately, this trip foundered in bureaucracy at the last minute.62 Langbein and Harlan knew each other through Harlan’s Polish girlfriend, who had survived Auschwitz, and also because Harlan was active in journalism and the media in Poland. Finally, Ormond and Harlan met in 1960 at the latest, through either Langbein or Fritz Bauer.
On March 3–6, 1961, these men met at a hotel in Frankfurt to work through the most comprehensive copy of the Argentina Papers in existence.63 Langbein had brought it with him from Vienna, directly from the desk of Eichmann’s stepbrother Robert in Linz. A “locksmith,” as Langbein told Thomas Harlan, had gained access to the office at 3 Bischofstraße and had given Langbein the nine-hundred-page copy that Vera Eichmann had sent her brother-in-law. We cannot know for sure, but a locksmith may not have been necessary. At the start of 1960, Simon Wiesenthal made contact with Robert Eichmann’s secretary, who was in her early twenties, via the Austrian secret police. She may have been the person who opened the door to the “locksmith.”64
The spoils were, in any case, passed on to Hermann Langbein.65 He quickly contacted the people he thought could put the papers to good use. Irmtrud Wojak has found evidence that Fritz Bauer reserved the copying facilities in his office on March 7. All other copying work for his colleagues in Hesse’s Justice Ministry had to be postponed because, as an office memo said, the “Frankfurt copying facilities are not sufficient.” Attorney General Bauer required facilities for copying the transcript of a tape “allegedly dictated by Eichmann himself, when he was still at liberty.”66 The documents to be copied, as Harlan’s Polish girlfriend, Krystyna Zywulska, recalled, came directly from Hermann Langbein. This means Bauer also profited substantially from the meeting in Frankfurt. Meanwhile in Linz, Eichmann’s stepbrother evidently kept quiet about the theft from his office. Eichmann’s lawyer was still waiting to get a copy from Willem Sassen, and Hans Rechenberg’s letters show he was still convinced that only Sassen had the transcripts. Robert Eichmann must have been so embarrassed about his lack of security for such sensitive material as the Argentina Papers that he didn’t even tell his stepbrother’s family about it. And so far no evidence has emerged that the theft was reported to the Linz police.67 The whole operation went so smoothly that it didn’t even reach the intelligence service files.
The meeting between Ormond, Harlan, and Langbein served another purpose. Langbein needed money to have Robert Eichmann’s copy of the Argentina Papers transferred to microfilm, and to allow Harlan to undertake a detailed analysis of this extensive source. Above all, Langbein wanted this material to be published as quickly as possible. As a financial statement from the end of March reveals, Henry Ormond did in fact manage to finance the microfilm copy. At the same time, the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli promised to finance Harlan’s work.68 It seems likely that Fritz Bauer played some kind of role here, but we have no evidence: all the correspondence went through Henry Ormond. Thomas Harlan took the film to Warsaw, started reading immediately, and contacted his friend Daniel Passent, the editor of the weekly newspaper Polityka.69 Passent suggested to his editor-in-chief that the material should be used for a series of articles. Mieczysław F. Rakowski must have been a cautious man, as he enlisted the expertise of the criminal investigator Milicja Obywatelska. On May 6 Polityka’s editor-in-chief was presented with the evaluation: the material was genuine, and the handwriting was that of Adolf Eichmann.70 Rakowski, Harlan, and Passent agreed on a different course of action from the one taken by Life: starting on May 20, Polityka published a five-part series, which presented the unedited texts for the first time and also provided its readers with images, facsimiles, and a handwriting analysis. The series included historical criticism and potted biographies of the men Eichmann had named as his collaborators. In only this short time, Harlan and Passent had written 350 pages of commentary on the papers.71 To date, it remains far and away the most thorough attempt to document the Argentina Papers for the general public.
Polityka was therefore disappointed by the series’ impact—or rather, the lack thereof. Even in the Eastern Bloc, it generated no reactions worth mentioning. After the series concluded, Rakowski noted with resignation that neither Soviet Russian nor other Eastern Bloc media had shown an interest in the pieces. Radio Berlin in East Germany had been the only organization to ask for a copy of the first issue.72 In the West, the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden and Die Welt mentioned the series in side columns, but Polityka didn’t hear about it.73 Everyone seemed to think the series was just a reprint of the Life articles: a few other magazines had reprinted them, including the French illustrated paper Paris Match (at the start of May).74 But Rakowski also couldn’t understand why Gideon Hausner, the Israeli attorney general, claimed he had received a copy of the Argentina Papers only after Polityka got its copy—and why Hausner didn’t present all the documents. Hausner was talking about sixty-seven tape transcripts and eighty-three handwritten pages. What Rakowski (and Gideon Hausner) could not have known was that the copy in Poland was more complete, with more than one hundred additional pages. Rakowski simply couldn’t imagine that a newspaper editor in Warsaw could be using documents that the prosecution in Israel had no idea existed—Eichmann’s trial was, after all, one of the most important of the twentieth century. And Rakowski was in good company—not only with the Israeli prosecutors but also with people researching Eichmann.
The Israel Copy
Where Gideon Hausner obtained his copy of the Argentina Papers, and when it became available to his team, has always been a puzzle. But having traced the story of how the papers were divided up to this point, we have at least taken a few more steps. Hermann Langbein could have offered his great find to Gideon Hausner (or at least ensured that
Fritz Bauer did so on his behalf). And we can safely assume that Fritz Bauer would have helped his colleagues in Israel in this regard: it would make no sense for him to assist in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, only to then hold back important documents that had been put into his hands through a useful relationship. But the material that the Israeli prosecutors submitted as evidence didn’t come from Bauer. The Israel copy is not only less extensive but of a much lesser quality: the handwritten fragments are difficult (and in some places impossible) to read, and the copy of the transcript comes from a version that was dirty and damaged in places. Robert Eichmann’s copy is occasionally a little blurred, and in places the text veers very close to the edges, but there is no evidence of dirt on the transcript or the handwritten passages. This suggests that Bauer (and perhaps Langbein) offered Hausner the documents but Bureau 06, the special unit set up to interrogate Eichmann and collect evidence against him, politely declined them, assuming that it already had everything Fritz Bauer had. It certainly couldn’t have been a lack of interest: handwritten texts cannot be surpassed as evidence. Not even Eichmann would have been able to claim they were a misrepresentation of his true thoughts in Argentina.
By the time Fritz Bauer obtained his copy, at the start of March, then, the Israelis seem already to have had their own—though it was unconnected to the burglary in Linz. Eichmann’s interrogator, Avner W. Less, remembered discussing whether the prosecution should confront Eichmann with the Sassen transcript it had just received, but Servatius had prohibited any further questioning.75 Less was confident he could still get Eichmann to cooperate and could persuade him to authorize the documents before the start of the trial. He feared Eichmann would be less responsive in the courtroom. This narrows down the time frame for the papers’ arrival to February or early March 1961. But whenever the copy arrived, Henry Ormond and Hermann Langbein both agreed that it must have come from a risky and illegal operation.76 When Gideon Hausner told the court on April 26 that he did not yet have access to the documents on which the Life articles were based, that certainly wasn’t the truth—unlike the same declaration by Eichmann’s lawyer Servatius, who by this point had set eyes on only a fragment of the Argentina Papers.77 The people involved in the acquisition of the copies remained silent for many years. Only in 2007 did Gabriel Bach, who had been Hausner’s deputy, make a vague statement about the Sassen transcript. After Eichmann had been abducted, he said, “this journalist gave it to Life magazine, and we got it from there.”78 However, judging from the appearance of the Israel copy, this explanation seems unlikely. One thing is obvious: these pages were not copied carefully and methodically, as you might expect if their source were the magazine to which Sassen gave his first copy. Gabriel Bach, like most other people, seems to have assumed that the “Life material” and the “Sassen document” were the same thing. The truth is a little more complicated.
During his extensive exploration of Simon Wiesenthal’s papers, Tom Segev found a letter to Attorney General Hausner, written decades later, reminding him that it had been he—Wiesenthal—who had given him access to the Sassen transcripts.79 We should exercise due caution when dealing with quotes from Wiesenthal, but in this case it’s hardly likely that he would lie to the one person who definitely knew the truth. It must therefore have been the enterprising man from Linz who tracked the papers down. The help that Wiesenthal provided during preparations for the trial was not generally known until very recently. Emphasizing the role he played was not in the interests of those involved, and so no one remembered it. Isser Harel in particular twisted the truth and told tall stories to diminish Wiesenthal’s part in his prestigious Eichmann case. It is thanks to Tom Segev that we now have a more balanced view. Wiesenthal’s letter does, however, show that he had found only a part of the transcript: “As You will remember, I brought for the Eichmann trial 28 transcripts from tapes with Eichmann’s handwritten notes.”80 The letter also reveals that Wiesenthal had no official source.
A page-by page comparison shows that the Israeli prosecutors had to do some work in piecing together their Sassen copy. It is fundamentally different from Hermann Langbein’s excellent version, which points to it being a copy made from what Sassen originally sold to the press.81 The question of whether Wiesenthal got the papers from a journalist or an intelligence service colleague will be answered only when the archives are opened, and we can discover when the BND actually got hold of them. One BND worker claimed that they first received “the diary of the Jew-murderer” from Mossad, but this is clearly nonsense. The pertinent question is why the BND office didn’t send the Israeli prosecutors the papers they already had at the end of 1960.82
Hausner kept the existence of the material a secret from the court for as long as he possibly could. The attorney general was probably trying not only to lull Eichmann into a sense of security but also to buy time. Even without the Sassen transcripts, the prosecution had to wade through mountains of documents, and this new material was difficult to decipher. In April 1961, it therefore announced that it was asking Life to hand over its material (which the Israelis, of course, already had). Even Gideon Hausner wanted an evaluation of the papers before they were used, and he gave his copy to the Israeli police’s handwriting expert, Avraham Hagag.83
We have Avraham Hagag to thank for the first ordering and complete description of a copy of the Sassen transcript. He sorted the pages and put the mountain of paper into manageable folders, with several tape transcripts in each, ordered according to their numbers. This is how the famous “two binders with 17 files” came into being: sixteen for the transcripts, and “File 17” for the eighty-three pages of handwritten text.84 The ordering wasn’t completely accurate—Hagag allowed a few pages of Sassen’s own dictations and a fragment of a separate text by Eichmann to slip in unnoticed among the transcripts—but given the time pressure, it was an impressive achievement.85 Officially, Inspector Hagag counted 716 pages of transcription and 83 pages of handwriting. If we discount three accidental double paginations,86 the Israel copy contains 713 typed and 83 handwritten pages or partial pages. Transcripts of some tapes were obviously missing, as a gap yawned between tapes 5 and 11; the third page of tape 41 was missing;87 and tape 55 consisted of only two pages. The transcript in Israel ended—to great effect—with Eichmann’s “little address to the group” from tape 67. Nobody in Israel had any idea that there might be more recordings, or that there had originally been more than seventy tapes. Mieczysław F. Rakowski (of Polityka) immediately noted that he, at least, knew there was a tape 68, though he didn’t draw the right conclusions from that fact. But the gap between tapes 5 and 11, and the missing pages from tape 55, were the same in Robert Eichmann’s copy and all the other copies in circulation. Sassen had removed these sections in 1960, as well as the first part of the Alvensleben interview, before distributing the copies across the world. Even he realized that a trial would be the wrong moment for the sort of rampant anti-Semitism regarding the “Jewish world conspiracy” and the “robber-state of Israel” that appeared in the first conversations.88
Dismantling the Evidence
When new evidence comes to light at short notice during a trial, time is always the crucial problem. Even the Israel copy, at a mere 796 pages, was more than enough of a challenge for Hausner’s colleagues to process. But when Polityka started publishing extracts and facsimiles of sample pages on May 20, and even made a public offer to send the material to Israel for the prosecution, Gideon Hausner couldn’t wait any longer without looking foolish. On May 22, 1961, he announced that he now had photostats of the manuscript. He responded to the judge’s inquiry about them with a half-truth, saying that he and his team had had access to these documents for three weeks and had not received them directly from Life.
From then on, the papers were referred to as the “Sassen Document.” The defense was given a copy, which—complete with the annotations made by Eichmann in his cell—is now held in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Servatius Estate). German jurists were
granted access to it on request. Dietrich Zeug, the trial observer from Ludwigsburg, sent a copy to Fritz Bauer, saying he could compare it with his own.89 But what had started out as a success for Hausner ended with unexpected misery: when he tried to submit the papers as evidence in court, the attorney general was faced with the problem Avner W. Less had foreseen: Robert Servatius raised an objection. Even though Hagag’s evaluation proved that the handwriting was Eichmann’s (also submitted on June 9), Eichmann vehemently denied the material was authentic. And how does one prove that a typed transcript actually corresponds to what was said, when there are no tapes to prove it? Hausner was forced to fight over every page, and on June 12 it was agreed that only the pages Eichmann had corrected by hand, or had written by hand himself, could be used. The prosecutors watched helplessly as the most powerfully revealing postwar source on Eichmann and the Holocaust shrank from 796 pages down to the marginal notes on 83 pages, and another 83 pages of barely legible handwriting.90 Powerful texts like the “little address to the group” couldn’t be quoted. Over the days that followed, Eichmann worked tirelessly to disqualify as evidence what little of the text remained. He disputed “the famous Sassen Document” by stressing the influence of alcohol, claiming that most of his corrections had been lost, and lying that he had given up on correcting the transcripts because they were so bad. Unlike the handwriting expert (and anyone who had eyes), Eichmann couldn’t recognize a few of the handwritten comments as his own. The handwritten pages were pretty much unusable, he said, as they were incomplete, which was bound to create a false impression. He also claimed there had been an agreement with Sassen that every page should be authorized by hand before being released for publication—a process he had become familiar with in Israel, where his interrogator had him sign off on each individual page of the interrogation.91 But the most incredible of his lies was that Sassen had spoken very bad German (July 13). The man whose melodious, assured language had warmed the fascist hearts of nostalgic German Nazis; the man whom Eichmann had idolized for this very reason—this man was suddenly supposed to have blundered along, hardly understanding a word! Recklessly, Eichmann kept demanding the submission of the original tapes, though he also took the precaution of saying that Sassen had goaded him into making false statements to produce good headlines (July 19). He painted the discussions as “tavern conversations.” Hours of studying historical theories and Nazi history suddenly became a lot of casual boasting and booze-fueled sentimentality (July 20). Sassen, he said, had occasionally tempted him to “relapse” into National Socialist ways of thinking. Naturally, he didn’t mention that the entire Sassen circle was one big relapse. Eichmann also told his lawyer that what he had really written in Argentina was something very different. As Servatius then explained to the court, Eichmann would present these writings “as evidence of the real attitude of the accused.”92 Eichmann cleverly defused and dodged any question about why these discussions had taken place, by adopting the rumor that Sassen and Life had brought into the world: the legend of the “Eichmann memoirs.”
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