Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
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Not even expatriate Nazis equipped with an entire media arsenal could fight this flood of information. Sassen might have heard a few rumors after the Russian campaign, and known much more than he wanted to let on even to himself, but his knowledge of the Nazi leadership was nowhere near adequate for him to mount a credible rejoinder. He had never seen the documents, never heard anything about the conference they named, and was simply overwhelmed by the mass of material. For all their bluster about conspiracies, the postwar Nazis, both in exile and in the former German Reich, were rendered speechless and powerless by the books on the murder of the Jews. But unlike readers in West Germany, the men in Buenos Aires knew where to find someone who would have an answer for their questions. And more important, this man was famous enough that when he exposed what they imagined was another step in the ideological war, it would have some public impact. He would blow the Jewish conspiracy wide open. The witness himself was receptive to this request, unlike more cautious candidates, such as Himmler’s former chief adjutant and the “doctor” Josef Mengele. Talking had two great advantages for Eichmann: first, the Dürer circle gave him accesss to the new books, which he could not have afforded himself—books from Germany were expensive in Buenos Aires. And most important, these media-savvy comrades could enable him to regain what he so desperately wanted: control over his place in history. Then his children would be able to say, openly and proudly, that they were Adolf Eichmann’s sons.
THE SO-CALLED SASSEN INTERVIEWS
Herr Sassen—he was the journalist who often visited me at home with the tape, to record the story of my life. I permitted him to publish these reports if I should die, or fall into the hands of the Israelis. As I see, he has now published something people believe is my memoirs.
Everything that has been published in the USA is plain lies. Only a madman could believe I wrote that.
—Eichmann, “Meine Flucht,” March 1961, on the articles in Life
For many years, Willem Sassen was credited with having tracked down the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and persuaded him to talk. Journalists’ natural sympathy for their colleagues goes some way to explaining the success of this story, as does the fact that this former war correspondent for the Dutch Voluntary SS was a charismatic man. To an outsider, Sassen looked like the kind of star author, adventurer, and bon vivant who could have pulled off such a coup, and he did everything in his power to promote this image. Of course, one didn’t have to be particularly charming, sensitive, or convincing to get Adolf Eichmann to talk. The real problem was getting him to stop: once the SS Obersturmbannführer (retired) got started, there was no holding him back. This image still hardly seems credible: we think of a man on the run wanting to stay as unobtrusive as possible, remaining extremely cautious and reticent. But that wasn’t how the National Socialists lived in Argentina. The myth of silence and secrecy merely helped them erect a wall of silence, for various reasons, after Eichmann was kidnapped. How much credence should we give to someone claiming not to know a man who was on trial for mass murder? When Israelis had just kidnapped a former colleague on his way home from work, who in their right mind would admit to having a glass of wine and working on a book about National Socialism with this very colleague? Eichmann’s associates were eager to avoid anything similar happening to them on their own way home. Their most obvious course of action was to describe Eichmann as a recluse who never spoke to anyone but Sassen—and Sassen was a journalist, who had to talk to people “like him.” But the numerous bouquets of flowers and good wishes that Eichmann received in Israel, sent from Argentina, would soon correct the impression that he had led a solitary life.1
In Argentina, Eichmann’s urge to speak had always been greater than his sense of caution. Among men he believed to be trustworthy, as we have seen, he never kept quiet about who he was. But the occasional chat at a social gathering or a conversation in the bar after work was something very different from what Eberhard Fritsch and Willem Sassen were proposing: a systematic discussion of the history books and the current debates. Serious preparations were under way. By the end of 1956, Eichmann was also making plans, for a book he wanted to publish with Dürer Verlag. We may therefore assume that serious discussions had already taken place, to draw up a plan of work and consider who else might participate in the project, for financial reasons. Later, Willem Sassen, Eberhard Fritsch, and Adolf Eichmann all confirmed independently that they had signed a contract with one another at this point, agreeing to divide all proceeds from the work equally among them.2 The dream of making a fast buck played a significant role for them all, even if the “dream of blood” was what united them. Life in Buenos Aires always had its “soldier of fortune” aspect.
Before the official recordings began, in April 1957 at the earliest, something remarkable happened in the Sassen household. Saskia Sassen,3 who was around ten years old, saw men drilling holes in the living room ceiling and hiding microphones there. As Sassen’s daughter remembered in 2005, there was a palpable tension and a nervous bustle in the house. Eichmann arrived, then disappeared into the living room with her father, and a strange man spent the whole time he was there on the floor above, listening in. Saskia Sassen is certain that the man with her father was Adolf Eichmann, and that this was the only time she saw the man in the attic: it was a one-off occurrence.
Children’s memories are known for being a problematic source; at this age they are eager to see “secrets” in what may be a simple case of a cable layer installing a new light fixture. But there is a second source that can be connected to this episode. An old friend of the family, who had come to Argentina from Ireland with them, said that Sassen’s wife, Miep, had complained to her that she was all “wired up.”4 Unfortunately, we do not know whether her annoyance at the wires was related to microphones in the ceiling. Miep Sassen watched her husband take over the living room with his equipment every weekend for months on end. He would set up his tape recorder with several microphones positioned around the room, like trip wires, and spend hours conducting interviews with old comrades. Anyone who is prevented from entering their own living room without knocking, and is told to keep the children quiet,5 has good reason to complain about being “wired up,” even if no one has drilled holes in her ceiling. Still, Saskia Sassen’s recollection brings into play the possibility that one day before the start of the official recordings, Willem Sassen let an eavesdropper into his attic without Eichmann’s knowledge.
Saskia Sassen never forgot the strange surveillance episode, and later she would search for explanations for what she had seen. The most likely scenario she could think of was a connection to one of her father’s acquaintances, Phil Payne, the Latin America correspondent for Life, one of the magazines for which Sassen worked. “Mr. Payne from Time/Life” was someone even the children knew about. It may not have been Payne himself listening in the attic,6 but for Sassen’s daughter this connection was the only reasonable explanation for what she saw. Her interpretation was that, even before the official recordings began, her father was angling for a contract with Time Inc. and had to provide proof that the man he was interviewing really was the former SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. This possibility also fits temptingly well with a report in the French magazine L’Express (large parts of which were admittedly rather imaginative).7 It claimed that Sassen had offered the interviews to Time Inc. “four years” before Eichmann was abducted, without success. The article angered Sassen, who denied having said any such thing.8 Whatever truth it published, L’Express was wrong about the dates: the interviews began considerably later and hadn’t been completed, or even started, at the time it claimed. So let us begin cautiously, with what we know to be true.
Phil Payne was the South America correspondent for Time, Inc. He arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after Perón’s overthrow and lived there in between his long trips reporting on events elsewhere. He left again in 1958. Willem Sassen provided Time Inc. with research material, acting as a source for a big article on Perón and
Pedro Aramburu after the putsch in Argentina, which appeared in Life in November 1955.9 However, he was not credited in the magazine until the Eichmann articles in 1960. This suggests that Payne was Sassen’s contact at Time Inc. and a welcome visitor in the Sassen household. Prior to April 1957, if Sassen had wanted to sell the U.S. magazine a story on Eichmann, or a Holocaust exposé, he would certainly have told Phil Payne about it. Payne, in turn, would have had to convince his employer that the investment in Sassen’s information would prove worthwhile, and bugging the house as Saskia Sassen remembers would have been a good way to do it. He could check the authenticity of Sassen’s contact without scaring Eichmann away. Sassen, for his part, would have wanted to prevent a potential competitor10 from making contact with his most important source, which is a sensible precaution on such a delicate story. But Payne had little interest in exploring the past, and he may still not have been convinced by the Eichmann story. Phil Payne specialized in high-risk, up-to-the-minute stories: he had reported on the civil war in Colombia and the arms trade in Nicaragua; he had gone in search of guerrillas in Costa Rica and explored almost every trouble spot in Latin America, from Guatemala to Bolivia. He was interested in the grand narratives of revolutionaries, leaders who had gained power and lost it again, like Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and Juan Domingo Perón. In 1957 he would finish in South America and spend the next few years reporting from Rome. In 1961 he would go to Jerusalem to cover the trial of the man who had organized the Final Solution.11 In 1956 in Buenos Aires he valued Sassen not for his fanciful ideas or his insufferable friends but for his insider knowledge of the city, and for the close relationship he maintained with Perón, even when the ex-president was living in exile in Spain. In Payne’s eyes, old Nazi stories didn’t hold the same attraction—even if Eichmann’s name had found its way into the pages of Time magazine by this point, in an article about Rudolf Kasztner.12 But if Payne really did reject the Eichmann story in 1956–57, he must have been kicking himself later, as he covered the trial.
However, a few things in this story remain unclear. To begin with, why was it neccessary to go to these lengths for Adolf Eichmann? He had been far from reluctant to take up Fritsch and Sassen’s offer and showed no qualms about revealing his identity. In fact, during the first recording, he was asked if he could think of anything “to convince people that the writer of this book is really the Eichmann,” and he answered: “Yes, there is the following: the material cannot be denied, either one is familiar with the details or not.—If these gentlemen have their doubts, they can compare the pieces of handwriting, which have come out in bursts, in the files, and if necessary—though I would prefer not to do this—I could personally give them a photograph … from this period.”13 In light of the lengths to which Eichmann and his family had gone, for so many years, to ensure that not a single photo fell into the hands of his pursuers, his openness toward his new friends is striking. Later, he really did autograph a photo for Willem Sassen: “Adolf Eichmann. SS Obersturmbannführer (retired).” Whatever Fritsch, Sassen, and Eichmann were planning to publish, it was clearly a team effort, and a pseudonym or any sort of cover for Eichmann was not part of the plan. Quite apart from these considerations, we cannot be sure that the microphones were even being set up for Eichmann. Considering who else Sassen invited to join the discussion group, he might well have been testing the listening equipment on Eichmann in case someone refused to be recorded openly.14
Children aren’t the only people who find the idea of people drilling holes in walls and laying wires irresistibly mysterious. The possibility of men eavesdropping in the attic is clearly much too appealing for a prosaic explanation. Could the bugging operation have been carried out by an intelligence service, rather than having a financial motive? The important question here is whether anyone was actually interested in Adolf Eichmann at this time. The National Socialists who were still at large had dropped off the U.S. priority list—apart from those the CIA had recruited for itself.15 Israel’s newly formed intelligence service had other things on its plate: the Suez crisis began in October 1956, and the Israelis had not followed up on Wiesenthal’s clue.
What about Germany? Fritz Bauer, the attorney general of Hesse, was just beginning the difficult and unpopular task of prosecuting Nazi perpetrators. He had requested Adolf Eichmann’s “wanted” file from Vienna.16 On November 24, 1956, the district court in Frankfurt finally issued an arrest warrant for “Adolf Eichmann, whereabouts presently unknown.” It issued the warrant in connection with the case against “Krumey and others,” and according to its wording, it suspected Eichmann of “killing people in numbers that cannot be precisely established, in a cruel and underhand manner, acting from low motives, during the period 1938–1945, in various countries of Europe. As an SS Obersturmbannführer and head of Dept. IV B 4 of the RSHA, Eichmann was responsible for the ‘resettlement of the Jews’ in Germany and in the lands occupied by Germany during the war. In the context of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question, he ordered the transport of several million members of the Jewish faith, and their extermination by gassing in concentration camps.”17 From 1957, Eichmann’s name would appear on the German “wanted” list. But Fritz Bauer’s investigations were unwelcome in Germany, and there is no evidence of any other institutions’ energetic involvement in the hunt for Eichmann. The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, Federal Office for Criminal Investigations) even said that fundamental things about the case prevented an Interpol search for Eichmann.18 At first, Bauer was kept extremely busy with the cases in which the whereabouts of perpetrators was known—for example, Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary. With a judiciary whose ranks had some Nazi history of their own, this work proved extremely difficult. Krumey was arrested on April 1, 1957. As we will see, these events were followed closely in Argentina, but even in this case, criminal proceedings were not brought immediately. Bauer certainly wasn’t in a position to take any action in Argentina at this point. But the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) had begun to take an interest in Rudel and Fritsch quite independently of Bauer’s investigation; more on this later.19
In any case, the possibility that a spy under Sassen’s own roof might have prompted the West German investigation is pure speculation. To begin with, it is highly unlikely that a man who had cursed and sought to destroy “Rumpfdeutschland” (the leftover western half of a divided Germany) and its institutions would allow one of these West German institutions into his attic—he also had far too much to lose. If someone from the German intelligence service had wanted to know what these old comrades were up to in Sassen’s living room, that person would have had to find a way of placing himself among them. It would not have been a particularly difficult task—and certainly easier than going to the trouble of eavesdropping on Sassen.
So what are we to make of this childhood memory of the Sassen house being bugged? From today’s perspective, the likeliest explanation is still that it was a journalistic operation. Phil Payne was often in Argentina between 1955 and 1957, and we have evidence he was in Buenos Aires on May 10, 1957.20 But until further documents or witnesses emerge, or reports are unearthed in the Time Inc. archive, this explanation too is mere speculation. The only certainty is that preparations for the group discussions with Adolf Eichmann appeared to be exciting and mysterious to the Sassen children. Willem Sassen had never taken on a project of this magnitude, and he was probably just as excited as the other participants. If Sassen’s house was bugged, it would have been expressly permitted by Sassen himself. But what purpose it served and who carried it out remains, for the moment at least, a mystery.21 Eichmann’s explanation for how he could be identified shows that, from the beginning, some of the people involved in the project were not part of the core Dürer circle. Eichmann discovered only gradually that Sassen was not always honest with him and was entirely prepared to go over his head—whether there were eavesdroppers in the attic or not. But Eichmann signed up for th
is new task enthusiastically, throwing all caution to the winds.
1
Eichmann the Author
The binding and dust jacket should be kept to one colour; pearl- or dove-gray perhaps, with clear, linear and attractive lettering. It is clear that I do not want a pseudonym, as it is not in the nature of the thing.
—Eichmann, 19611
We cannot know when Adolf Eichmann first hit upon the idea of writing down his thoughts. He later said he made a first attempt (a work combining murder statistics and descriptions of Nazi institutions) directly after the war—meaning in Altensalzkoth. The document, he said, then became too much of a risk, and he burned it. It may sound strange that he could have begun to write so soon after a defeat, and when he was only in partial safety, but at that point he may well have felt the urge to commit himself to paper. It would not have been a bad idea to practice his defense in preparation for a possible trial. In any case, if Eichmann did compose a manuscript in northern Germany, it wouldn’t have been his first.
Today, we have thousands of pages of Eichmann’s stories, thanks not only to the trial transcripts but to a remarkable tendency he shared with many other National Socialists. Throughout his life, Eichmann was fascinated by writing and fancied himself an author. He was so taken by the idea of publishing a book that in 1961, after the trial had taken its disastrous course and he was awaiting the verdict in Israel, he was enthusiastically talking about jacket colors, potential editors, fonts, and dedicated copies—though it was still unclear whether publication was even a realistic possibility.2 There have been only a few attempts to engage with Eichmann’s texts as such. For one thing, his tireless writing has been seen as a symptom of his drive to justify himself. For another, as authors like Harry Mulisch and Hannah Arendt have emphasized, his prose has affected, posturing qualities. Someone who has thoroughly analyzed their own compulsion to write cannot ignore the provocation of Eichmann’s claim to be “one of us.” This claim will also be unpleasantly familiar to historians later, when we are confronted with Eichmann posing as a historian. Writers and historians have a strong impulse to make this aspect of Eichmann seem ridiculous, or to discredit his ambitions as a petit-bourgeois fantasy.