Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  In summer 1955, an Israeli mission (the forerunner of an embassy) was established in Cologne, while patriotic German comrades in Argentina were still awaiting a general amnesty. At the start of 1955, Willem Sassen optimistically announced that democracy in Germany was a temporary arrangement with no future, an “interregnum.”94 He was proved wrong. Little remained of the “will to the Reich” and the “indefatigable spirit of the perpetual German,” and prospects for a return to power and to Germany were worse than ever. The only thing the exiles in Argentina could hope for over the coming year was to inspire the few remaining valiant comrades in their homeland with hope of a sort of transcendent racial victory. “Our struggle is a dream,” Sassen wrote, resorting to the slogans of perseverance in which he had become an expert during the previous unsuccessful push for final victory. “And because our blood dreams that dream within us, our physical life is meaningless: our blood will dream on in our children, for centuries to come.”95 Scattered across the globe, all the National Socialists had left was blood. There was no more soil. And if things went on like this, Eichmann’s newborn son wouldn’t even have the right name to go with his blood.

  Things were set to get worse. At the end of 1955, the discussion about crimes against humanity, in which Adolf Eichmann was so substantially involved, shifted. The first books about the National Socialists’ persecution of the Jews appeared in quick succession. The French documentary film Night and Fog was released, showing the systematic incarceration of regime opponents in concentration camps, and those camps’ everyday horrors. It disturbed viewers to the extent that the Federal German government tried to prevent it from being shown—not only in German cinemas but also at the Cannes film festival. While German historians hesitantly began the work into which they should have thrown themselves with full force, public debates about dealing with the past made the headlines for months.96 Even Willem Sassen sounded upset when he spoke to Eichmann about the film.

  The publications on the extermination of the Jews, and the changing discussion in West Germany, also influenced discussions within the Dürer circle. It started at the end of 1955, when Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews) landed like a thunderbolt. Shortly after it was published, Otto Bräutigam from the Foreign Office was temporarily placed on leave, as the book contained a document on the “Jewish question” that bore his signature.97 The book was principally a collection of documents, and its ineluctable strength rankled with Sassen and his colleagues. It contained the Führer’s orders for theft and persecution; jubilant commentaries and notes from Göring; tallies of robbery and murder from Operation Reinhard; reports about gold teeth, Reichsbank deposits, and forced labor; gas chamber plans; extracts from the Gerstein Report; Himmler’s order to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto; Stroop’s final report; and, most notably, statistics on “special treatments” and “extinction.” There was Dieter Wisliceny’s report on the Final Solution; the Wannsee protocol; and an incredible number of memos, on Auschwitz, racial fanaticism, human experiments, and forced sterilizations. The reader was given an insight into the National Socialists’ anti-Jewish “policy” through a combination of excerpts with commentaries, complete documents, photographs, and facsimiles. This was all much more difficult to deny than the previously published memoirs and newspaper articles. Letterheads and signatures were clearly reproduced for all to see. A whole chapter was devoted to the “Grand Inquisitor without magic,” Adolf Eichmann.

  This wealth of detail could not easily be dismissed as enemy propaganda. It could not be refuted by fake experts like Hester and Heimann. Most important, doubt was growing within the Dürer circle’s own ranks. It was slowly dawning on every last National Socialist that the extermination of the Jews really had taken place. Even people who had grown accustomed to looking the other way when they were in power, relativizing and playing everything down, couldn’t get past this evidence. Reviews of the book soon appeared in all the papers, and Eichmann’s name cropped up in every article. Das Dritte Reich und die Juden was also mentioned in the July edition of Der Weg.98 Even a publication run by the most hard-bitten postwar Nazis was starting to feature terms it had always carefully avoided or used sarcastically: Auschwitz; Majdanek; the Final Solution to the Jewish Question; the Wannsee conference; grave mistreatment of the opponents of the Nazi regime; the deportation of forty thousand French Jews.99 It talked of “people who were thoughtlessly driven into the concentration camps, to their death,” the “concentration camp terror” and the “Jewish atrocity.”100 The top names were mentioned: Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, Arthur Nebe, Odilo Globocnik, and Theodor Dannecker,101 the “adviser on Jewish affairs” from Department IV B 4 in France. The facts were so overwhelming that even in Buenos Aires, people started calling a spade a spade. In this 1956 article, the only name noticeable by its absence was Eichmann’s.

  But attention and acceptance are very different things. Instead of recognizing that the Nazi extermination of the Jews had been a “dance of death unique in world history,”102 the postwar Nazis dreamed up a new conspiracy theory. If the facts could not be denied, they could at least be reinterpreted. A series of articles entitled “The Role of the Gestapo” painted a picture of the “conspiracy that has been raging since 1933.” Amid all the incomprehensible nonsense of this series, one thing emerges with clarity: the desperation of the men who still dreamed of a National Socialist redemption.103 Briefly, the soothing story they told themselves went like this: it was not the SS but the Gestapo that was to blame for everything. The Gestapo had “never been the pure National Socialist police organization that it was claimed to be in the posters of that time, and today.” From the very beginning, it had practiced “subversion.” It was really a cover for a small group “disguised as upright citizens” that tried to “frustrate, corrupt and compromise the policies of the Third Reich.” It aimed to topple “Hitler’s hated government of the people [!]” and to do permanent damage to Germany’s standing in the world, which Hitler had done so much to advance. The man to blame for all this misery, as the article explained in fantastical detail, was the head of the Abwehr (Germany’s military intelligence organization), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had enthroned the intriguer Reinhard Heydrich. All the violence was chalked up to the accounts of these two men, and “today we may suspect a very specific system designed to compromise and make enemies for the new government.” Apparently, when Heydrich discovered how Canaris was misusing him, Canaris had him summarily killed. Then Heinrich Müller, who in reality was not a National Socialist at all, organized the extermination of the Jews in the east. The “criminal element in the Gestapo leadership” was a group of unscrupulous men “who unthinkingly drove people into concentrations camps, to their deaths, in order finally to strike down a king—Adolf Hitler.” And recognizing that people would want to know why no one else had realized it, the author of the article explained: a lie had been constructed instead. “The victors obviously knew all about the real background of the Gestapo campaigns. They had to help suppress the truth, so that the betrayed world would not one day learn that it was Hitler’s opponents, not Hitler, who organized this.” So it all turns out well in the end, for Hitler and Germany and National Socialism.

  The article was attributed to Paul Beneke, allegedly writing from Madrid. The real Paul Beneke lived in the fifteenth century and was, depending on whose side you were on, either the selfless hero who defeated the English fleet in 1468 and restored the trading rights of the Hanseatic League, or a savage pirate who stole every vessel that crossed his path. Gustav Freytag, an author much loved by the National Socialists for his “images from German history” and his clearly anti-Semitic writing, created a literary memorial to the Danzig admiral, which could be purchased in a splendid edition from the German military’s publishing house. In Danzig itself, Paul Beneke was a particular hero, with streets and civic buildings named after him. Knowing the special relationship the people of Danzig have with their
city,104 we might conclude that the author of these “Gestapo secrets” articles came from East Prussia. However, we still do not know who he was. The content clearly points to a member of the SS. The working method, the style, and the detailed knowledge behind the article also suggest the usual suspects: Sassen, Leers, or Fritsch.105 Eichmann also used the catchy phrase “the greatest and most violent dance of death of all time,” but who “inspired” whom has so far been impossible to discover, particularly as the articles question everything Eichmann held to be true. He cannot have been hugely pleased with them.106

  Whoever was making this attempt to release his comrades’ souls from the nightmare of acknowledgment, he was neither alone nor without successors. The story of a small criminal clique, cheating Hitler and his people of their life’s work and driving the country into war and mass murder, is still being told on websites and in a certain kind of literature today. The perfidious keystone of this story was laid in1956, when Paul Beneke left the answer to who was behind it all hanging in the air. The transcript of a Deutsche Reichspartei meeting in Berlin on November 30, 1956, records a party member getting worked up over it, claiming that Eichmann, the Gestapo’s Adviser on Jewish Affairs, was a “full Jew.” With the help of Himmler and foreign Jews, Eichmann had infiltrated the SS and instilled anti-Semitism there. He was now safely back in Tel Aviv.107 This meeting was the birth of Adolf Eichmann’s tenacious counterbiography,108 and from then on its seemingly unstoppable career saw it providing comfort to anti-Semites in need. Had Eichmann not always said he came from Sarona, and did he not speak fluent Hebrew and Yiddish? No wonder he was able to make a career as a specialist on Jewish affairs, if he was one himself.… Even Johann von Leers, who met Eichmann for the last time in 1954 before moving to Cairo, was completely convinced of this idea in hindsight.109 The classic reality-free story about “Eichmann the Jew” is the final consequence of this falsification of history, which was perpetrated by people who could no longer avoid the fact of the Holocaust but were not prepared to acknowledge it as a “German act.” The only things connecting this nonsense to the truth are Eichmann’s imagined intellectual intimacy with Judaism, and the newspaper articles post-1945, documenting survivors’ fears that Eichmann could be masquerading as a Jew to escape his pursuers. It was no coincidence that the conspiracy theorists liked to quote the old article “The Man We Are Looking For.” People intent on falsifying the facts could easily reinterpret this article as an admission by the Jews that Eichmann was one of them. Still, the Holocaust deniers’ story, which once again painted the Jews as the puppet masters responsible for their own destruction, continues to have a persistent following, and a frightening level of international fame. In Buenos Aires, meanwhile, people were very receptive to the Canaris theory, according to which the Führer was the innocent gull—but SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish heritage was a little harder to swallow. Nevertheless, Sassen and his fellow believers later made a huge effort to tempt their old comrade into confessing he was “un-German.”

  Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s collection of documents even gave Willem Sassen pause. “In recent days,” he told Der Weg’s readers, “I have, with painful self-discipline, worked through a thick tome containing essays and documents on the relationship between the Third Reich and the Jews. Sometimes it choked me, and I struggled as if gripped in a stranglehold, before—completely naïve once more—crying out: ‘It is not true!’ I knew the cry was simplistic; it sprang from my own helplessness. And I believe one should not simply brand everything a lie: neither all that is written in this terrible book, nor every cry of ‘It is not true!’ ”110 But anyone hoping Sassen’s reading might have had a lasting effect on his worldview will be disappointed. The confession of his dismay at the book appears in an accusatory text on nuclear weapons—an invention for which “the Jews” were also to blame. A true Aryan would never split an atom. Sassen applied his rhetorical skill to describing how this “terrible book” had relieved him of a burden: “The truth is probably relative.” Ultimately, the “little” assistant operating the death camp gas chambers was “a puny dwarf next to the Nobel Prize winners and giants of this scientific extermination technology, to which mankind has been helplessly delivered up.” Alluding to the originator of the theory of relativity, Sassen relativizes into a mere nothing the crimes against humanity he had briefly mentioned, by setting them against this true, Jewish, extermination plan—all in the space of a few lines.

  In spite of the way this review was packaged, with the aim of lessening the book’s effect, something had clearly happened to Der Weg’s editorial policy. Only a few months previously, the likes of Heimann and Hester were telling readers that “there were no gas chambers, gas vans or incinerators for exterminating humans in any of the concentration or internment camps inside or outside Germany.”111 And now here were the names Belzec, Hockenholt, and Wirth—the extermination camp, the gas-van diesel technician, and the man who oversaw operations on the ground. For a moment, reality arrived in Buenos Aires, and in spite of all his reassurances, it refused to leave Sassen in peace. He didn’t restrict himself to penning platitudes about blood-soaked dreams; he went to Germany and registered as a resident there. Willem Antonius Maria Sassen van Elsloo, a journalist and author by profession, of German nationality. Official emigration from Argentina to Konstanz am Bodensee: August 25, 1956. Forsaken positions were obviously easier to deal with when you had other temporary quarters available.112

  Poliakov and Wulf upped the ante with a second volume of documents, Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener (The Third Reich and Its Servants), also published in 1956. It focused on the Foreign Office, the Nazi judiciary, and the Wehrmacht. Two more influential books were also published in quick succession. First, Gerald Reitlinger’s comprehensive The Final Solution, the first ambitious study of all aspects of the Holocaust, had finally found a German publisher. The second book sprang from the extensive discussion of the so-called Kasztner Trial in Jerusalem: Die Geschichte des Joel Brand aufgeschrieben von Alex Weissberg. (An English edition, Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand, appeared in 1958.) Most of the numerous reviews mentioned Eichmann, the Adviser on Jewish Affairs from the RSHA, who had sent Joel Brand abroad to buy trucks to trade for Jewish blood. Reviewers occasionally accused the Jewish authors of a lack of objectivity,113 but set against the backdrop of Poliakov and Wulf’s documents, their books were more than unsettling.

  The Dürer circle read them closely, and with every page the question of what had really happened became more insistent. They were desperate to believe that it wasn’t true. The last article on the topic in Der Weg before the start of the Sassen interviews was headed “The ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish Question.” It claimed that the real aim behind the extermination of the Jews had been the founding of the State of Israel, and that the blame for this crime had been “laid at Hitler’s door using sophisticated means.”114 Adolf Hitler had never ordered a “program of murdering Jews.” And thanks to the small group of conspirators who met at Wannsee—and here Eichmann was mentioned for the first and only time115—Hitler had never even got word of it. The Führer’s headquarters was (and one has to admire the tactful choice of words here) a “concentration cloister,” and he was cut off from what was really happening. “The conspiracy group started in the police, betraying the fact that these were the same Jewish secret agents who perverted the formally National Socialist Gestapo.” The line was that Zionists had murdered the “assimilators” they hated, in order to force the international community to give them their own state. This made the extermination of the Jews look like an internal Jewish matter, against which the poor Führer in his bunker could do nothing.

  This intolerable nonsense appeared under the name Wolf Sievers, a pseudonym that was also used for other articles in Der Weg. The name is significant even at face value: Wolfram Sievers was one of the war criminals who had been hanged in Landsberg, and the Dürer circle looked on him as a martyr. When Hans-Ulrich Ru
del visited Germany in 1953, he made a special pilgrimage to the gallows in the Landsberg prison and wrote emotionally, “Since my return home, I never felt so close to Germany as I did here.”116 Wolfram Sievers was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, for his management of the “research team” known as Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), which had been responsible for human experiments and murders. He made contact with Adolf Eichmann for projects that showed total contempt for humanity, like the infamous “skeleton collection”—someone had to organize the transportation of the people destined to become exhibits. We still don’t know who was behind this pseudonym, though the style, content, and examples given in this article suggest it was one of Sassen’s pieces. He proclaimed the basic principles of the argument again in an interview in 1960, when he told a reporter from La Razón that someone else was to blame for the extermination of the Jews. Even “Eichmann was doubtless just an instrument in the hands of the people who initiated this diabolical plan,” and it had certainly never been Hitler’s idea.117 The pseudonym also suggests his authorship, as Sassen had already chosen two other aliases with the initials W.S.118 In any case, the article “The ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish Question” dealt with the very same topics and theories that formed the focus of the interviews with Eichmann: the Führer’s orders; a “Zionist conspiracy”; the attempt to preserve Hitler’s honor; the search for conspirators within the Gestapo; the surviving documents; and the books.