Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  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 Eichma
nn 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

  a In all quotations, old or incorrect spellings of names remain uncorrected. The customary note [sic] is omitted.

  “MY NAME BECAME A SYMBOL”

  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