Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Leaving aside the news of Eichmann’s death, “On the Streets of Truth” was also a textbook example of the falsification of history known as revisionism. Proponents of Nazi revisionism work with the intention of debunking the whole of written history since 1945 as propaganda and thoroughly revising it. But the article is more than that: it became the principal source text for Holocaust revisionists, a fact that has long been overlooked. In the space of a few months, Hester’s report, and the article written by “Guido Heimann,” who claimed to be from Salzburg, were woven together and spread right across Germany. In his pamphlet Volk ohne Führung (People Without Leadership, which also appeared under a pseudonym), the far-right author Herbert Grabert mentioned the “American journalist Warwick Hester” and introduced the figure of 365,000 victims of the Nazi regime, only some of whom were Jews.18 An article also appeared in the neo-Nazi sheet Die Anklage: Organ der entrechteten Kriegsgeschädigten in Bad Wörishofen (The Indictment: Voice of the Disenfranchised, War-Damaged People of Bad Wörishofen), which attempted to refute what it called “the basest falsification of history.” It was able to cite a new expert—a “universally renowned North American”—none other than Warwick Hester.19 There was also a notoriously fake Red Cross report, stating that the number of regime opponents killed was—coincidentally—365,000. With clever cooperation between far-right books and magazines, and carefully aimed readers’ letters in serious journals, these texts created one of the main “sources” for Holocaust denial, which remains the core of revisionist history even today.20 An invented American expert, an “insider” from Salzburg (both writing for an Argentine Nazi paper), and a fake Red Cross report supposedly emanating from Germany were cleverly linked so that they all cited one another. It was enough to unleash a barrage of press coverage.

  The Hester article was reprinted in 1990, with the note that the name Warwick Hester was a cover for the equally famous “American jurist Stephen F. Pinter.” This sorry effort has haunted right-wing publications and the Internet ever since, under the name of “The Dr. Pinter Report.”21 Pinter, it was claimed, had all this information because he had been a prosecutor in the Dachau trial. He was from St. Louis, and for good measure he was sometimes said to be a Jew himself. And no one could doubt a Jewish-American jurist bearing witness against the Holocaust—at least, no one who thought like a Nazi. Would it surprise anyone to learn that there never was an American prosecutor named Stephen F. Pinter? The name first appeared around New Year 1959–60, attached to two readers’ letters that reiterated the Hester-Heimann nonsense almost word for word. One of them appeared in the popular U.S. magazine Our Sunday Visitor and was then picked up by Nation Europa—the monthly that had printed Sluyse’s open letter and had a long history of cooperation with Der Weg.22

  An analysis of this concentrated campaign reveals the power that small groups can wield and that gave Fritsch and his circle the self-confidence to dream of seizing political power again. Deniers of the systematic extermination of the Jews have the forgers’ workshop in Buenos Aires to thank for their most often-cited sources. Argentina had a freedom of the press that did not exist in other countries, and it was fully utilized. The transatlantic exchange between old comrades’ publications was frighteningly effective, and following the “reparations” agreement, it seems these were the depths to which people were prepared to stoop.

  The question of who really penned the article by “Warwick Hester” remains unanswered. Its use of metaphor and its theatrical aspect are reminiscent of Sassen, but it could also have been Johann von Leers, who wrote for Der Weg under a number of pseudonyms and later reluctantly admitted asking Eichmann about the number of victims when he was in Argentina. We know that Dürer Verlag had no problem publishing made-up letters to the publisher and fantastical-sounding biographies by invented authors. And we know the “renowned American” stemmed from within the Dürer circle—not just because the article is riddled with phrases typical of Der Weg’s style, but also because this is the only explanation for the bizarre news of Eichmann’s death. In 1954 Adolf Eichmann, who had been trying to have himself declared dead since the end of the war, was finally able to see himself vanish without a trace, in black and white. This was also the proof he needed that Fritsch and Dürer Verlag wielded enough influence to have a political impact. Once again, or so it must have appeared to him, he was at the center of a new movement.23 An added bonus was the character assassination of Wilhelm Höttl, the man who had taken such delight in making life difficult for Eichmann. It was one more good turn among comrades of the death’s head order.

  Another interesting death notice appeared in 1954, this time in Austria. At the start of June, the Linz and Vienna papers printed information that supposedly came from Reuters in London, to the effect that SS Oberscharführer Wolfgang Bauer had been shot dead in mid-1946. He had been killed in the Salzkammergut Mountains (at Traunauen, near Linz), by a Jewish vengeance squad that had mistaken him for Eichmann. The corpse had been buried hastily in the woods, and the error was realized only weeks later. Perversely, this report made people suspect it really had been Eichmann who was shot after all. Eichmann received these articles in Argentina (or at least, the one from the Oberösterreichische Zeitung), probably from his father. In typical fashion, he promptly wove the story into a legend that he trotted out to Sassen. He started claiming he had heard about the execution when he was still on the Lüneberg Heath, and he proudly quoted the articles, which according to him said that “Eichmann died with remarkable decorum.” “That amused me greatly.” And Eichmann cheerfully lied: “I kept the cutting for a long time, but then I burned it.”24 He had to forestall anyone who might want to see the article for himself. When Sassen inquired about when exactly he had read it, he responded vaguely: “It must have been four to five years after the war.”25

  Simon Wiesenthal, who was still on the alert for anything to do with Eichmann, made a concerted effort to expose this canard for what it was, before the idea that Eichmann was dead took hold. However, it continued to appear until September, even making it into Israeli newspapers.26 Wiesenthal sent a press release through Austria’s Jewish Religious Community to counter the story, but he couldn’t prevent Eichmann’s version of this affair from finding its way into the research literature. The story of the chicken farmer in Altensalzkoth reading about his own assassination in an Austrian newspaper was simply too tempting.27

  Valentin Tarra, the Altaussee criminal investigator, also had his ear to the ground. In 1960 he told Fritz Bauer about the newspaper articles and expressed his suspicion that “Nazi circles in London” had spread the information to end the search for Eichmann. The original source of the news is still unknown.

  Undeterred, the Gehlen Organization sent out a completely different message: it had received new details about Eichmann’s career in the Middle East. The source was Saida Ortner, the new wife of the former SS man Felix Ortner. She said Eichmann had escaped from an American prisoner of war camp in Italy in 1947 and had traveled to Syria and converted to Islam in 1948. In 1951 he had tried to make contact with the notorious grand mufti al-Husseini in Cairo, who refused to help him, and he was forced to leave Egypt the same year.28 To give her the benefit of the doubt, this woman, who was used to Arabic names, may have confused Eichmann with Alois Brunner, who was often introduced as “Eichmann’s right-hand man.” Brunner, who had killed more than 128,000 people, was now representing a number of German interests in Damascus, under the name Dr. Georg Fischer, and he was also an unofficial employee of the West German intelligence service. Despite knowing this fact, Gehlen still passed the news on to its American friends, which suggests some internal communication problems among the BND’s data gatherers.

  In 1954 a remarkable number of people started speculating about Eichmann’s death. Eager to be declared dead, he relayed the news to his family, as Klaus Eichmann remembered vividly in 1966: his father “was constantly being brought newspaper articles” about how he had been shot in Linz.29 A father wh
o reads descriptions of his own execution, to children who spent seven years of their young lives coming to terms with the fact they might never see him again, is not exactly the image of a sensitive parent. It’s no wonder this episode remained in the children’s memories.

  During the same month that Der Weg announced the Eichmann family’s suicide, the German embassy in Buenos Aires renewed the passports of two young German nationals. They were accompanied by their mother and provided identity papers from Cologne and Vienna, in the names of Klaus and Horst Eichmann.30 As the legal guardian of the two boys, the “late” Veronika Katharina Eichmann, née Liebl, signed the documents, giving her address as Chacabuco 4261, Olivos. On being questioned, the boys were able to name their father’s SS rank at the time of their births.31 The record does not state whether anyone told them to wish their daddy all the best as they left. But given the behavior of the German embassy’s staff over the years that followed, we can’t rule it out.

  Even without assuming the worst, the Eichmanns’ visit to the German embassy gives rise to the suspicion that its staff had no particular interest in coming to terms with Germany’s past. In 1954 Adolf Eichmann came to the welcome realization that he was surrounded by willing helpers who found him important enough to write about. He also became aware that life in Buenos Aires posed as little threat as life in the remote province of Tucumán, even from the legal representatives of West Germany. Only two months previously, they had issued a new passport to an old acquaintance of his, the mass murderer and former ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger—in his real name.32

  Different Headlines

  While these attempts were being made to create confusion about Eichmann’s life after the end of the war, there had been another, less favorable development: Eichmann’s deeds were inexorably coming to light. In 1953 Gerald Reitlinger’s book The Final Solution was published in London, the first attempt at an overview of the German crimes against the Jews. The thick volume contained not only statistics, maps, and a wealth of detail but also a whole chapter on Adolf Eichmann. Initially, it did not find a publisher in Germany. The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich turned down first a translation, then even a review for the journal Vierteljahrsheft für Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History Quarterly).33 But Reitlinger’s book still changed the debate on a fundamental level, even before a German translation was finally published in 1956. His attempt to calculate the scale of the genocide set a benchmark for future research. In 1954 Helmut Krausnick wrote a remarkable article on the likely number of Holocaust victims in a supplement to the magazine Das Parlament, edited by the Federal Homeland Service, which of course also gave details about Eichmann.34

  But from Eichmann’s point of view, another event was a more immediate cause for concern: a court case that went down in history under the misleading name of the Kasztner Trial and that began on January 1, 1954, in Jerusalem.35 It was actually a libel case against the author Malchiel Grünwald, who had described Rudolf “Reszö” Kasztner as a Nazi collaborator in Budapest. The case quickly became a bizarre trial against Kasztner himself, partly due to an error by the judge, Benjamin Halevi, which was later acknowledged. Kasztner found himself having to justify his attempts to save Jews in Hungary by entering into “negotiations” with Eichmann.36 A lack of knowledge about the circumstances, and the fact that Kasztner’s work for the Israeli government made the trial a political issue, turned the proceedings into a global news story focusing on what Kasztner had done. Particular emphasis was placed on the dramatic duel over human lives between Kasztner and Eichmann. Over the following years, the world’s major newspapers carried detailed reports on the trial and its consequences.37 The Argentinisches Tageblatt, Buenos Aires’s liberal newspaper (or “Jewish” paper, as the Dürer circle would say),38 also wrote about it. Eichmann, who made a point of reading this paper, would have come across familiar phrases like “blood for goods” and names like Joel Brand, Kasztner, and most frequently, Adolf Eichmann. The rest of the world was struggling to comprehend these new facts: the unequal negotiations between Jews and their murderers; the deportation of more than four hundred thousand people in the space of a few weeks; and the chaos of the war’s final years. Eichmann, however, always knew what would be coming. He kept a close eye on the public reaction to each new revelation and recognized early on that his advance knowledge would allow him to turn Kasztner’s downfall to his advantage and put his own spin on events. “Eichmann was a master of turning people into traitors,” the judge said in the announcement of his verdict. “Kasztner sold his soul to the devil.” The press headlines aided Eichmann’s line of defense: Kasztner had been Eichmann’s partner. When the intensive work in the Sassen circle began three years later, this was the first topic to be addressed. Eichmann was well prepared, explaining to his astonished listeners: “Kasztner and I, we had a sovereign command over the situation in the Hungarian territory—forgive my use of this word, ‘sovereign,’ but it may serve as clarification.”39

  Nazi Gold

  In fall 1954 Eichmann’s name was all over the Austrian newspapers again, this time in a very different context. A rumor was going around that he’d had something to do with the disappearance of Nazi treasure—the stolen goods that had been gathered in Berlin and had last been seen in packing crates, on their way to the “Alpine Fortress.” People therefore suspected the treasure was now somewhere in Styria. It was probably the speculations about Eichmann’s death that sparked investigations in Austria. Journalists soon became convinced that he was alive and living under a false name in Upper Austria. On October 1, 1954, the tabloid paper Der Abend published rumors from the Altaussee region about the wanted man hiding in the Austrian mountains, under the headline “Where Is the SS Mass Murderer Eichmann?” It raised the possibility that “former SS General Adolf Eichmann, who slaughtered the Jews of Eastern Europe, is alive, is held to be an established fact in Altausseerland.” He was said to have paid several visits to his wife in Altaussee, around the time she was trying to have him declared dead. In summer 1954, the report went on, he had been seen in his wife’s apartment, although his wife had vanished in 1953 and her whereabouts were unknown. Yet the rent for the empty property was still being paid. The people the reporter interviewed had probably mistaken Eichmann’s half brother for Eichmann himself. After a suitable period of time had elapsed, the brother had quietly cleared out Vera Eichmann’s apartment (a fact that had not escaped the observant investigator Valentin Tarra).40

  The National Criminal Court in Vienna was alerted to this coverage and commissioned a report at the end of the year. A field investigation took place, which also uncovered neighborhood gossip about Eichmann’s alleged wealth, and a secret life he was leading now that he had changed his appearance.41 The rumors were stubbornly persistent. On January 10, 1955, the Austrian edition of Die Welt am Montag carried an article entitled “Mysterious Events: A Ghost Is Abroad in Alt Aussee.” Adolf Eichmann, it said, had returned to claim his gold.

  There are plenty of legends about missing Nazi treasure, with tales of chests sunk in mountain lakes and lavish exports to foreign countries. The stories excited people’s greed and fueled the myth of a Nazi conspiracy continuing to operate underground. They fed into the far right’s hope that the war had not managed to defeat National Socialism entirely. The speculations of 1954 also sparked an interest in Eichmann from people who otherwise wanted nothing to do with the “slaughter of the Jews.” The stories reassured Eichmann that people were looking for him in the wrong place and that he was safe in Perón’s country. Even treasure-hunting Nazis, hungry for gold, posed no threat to him: anyone could see from his standard of living that he wasn’t a wealthy man. But when people saw him in the ABC Café, or at a gathering of newly Argentine old associates, they could still ask him about it. And the fact that Eichmann sometimes worked for the man who was suspected of being the real guardian of the Nazi gold, Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer, lent the rumors an extra weight in Argentina.

  A Specialist O
nce More

  Throughout his murderous career, Eichmann knew how to use his public profile to further his own interests. In Argentine exile in the mid-1950s, he recognized the prospect that even his postwar image might have its advantages. The more witness statements, newspaper articles, and rumors made the rounds, the more interesting the Obersturmbannführer (retired) became to men like Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen. This was particularly true of the publisher, who had had no experience of Nazi Germany beyond his visit to the Hitler Youth Congress. Fritsch believed every exile had been an insider. But Sassen too had seen a different side of the war, through his role as an SS war correspondent, and he had moved in completely different circles from Eichmann. He had never met Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, or even Reinhard Heydrich. Eichmann, however, had known them all and knew a good deal about the various Nazi offices and institutions. He had been the one coordinating these offices, like a lot of little cogs, to set in motion the extermination machine. In the mid-1950s the exiled Nazis were beginning to put out feelers toward sympathizers in West Germany again. They wanted to know who their contacts really were, and there was no better way to find out than to inquire about who knew whom. Wilhelm Höttl’s book made them nervous, and the Dürer circle was on the lookout for people who could tell them more about the author and give them a better idea of the potential danger he represented. Rudel and Sassen, as well as men like Ludolf von Alvensleben, Johann von Leers, and Josef Mengele, had never met him. The changing times demanded a pooling of knowledge—and suddenly the specialists were back in business.