Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  The National Socialists’ penchant for publicly burning mountains of books has distorted our view: National Socialism had a great—perhaps too great—respect for the power of the written word. People burn books only when they attribute power to them; in other words, because they fear them. This fear was one of the Nazis’ fundamental motivations. In the early twentieth century, people had enough experience of the book as a mass medium to know that history didn’t just happen; it was an interpretation of events written for the generations to come. This insight was part of Adolf Hitler’s aggressive path, along which the “creative” struggle, and the destruction of what had been created before 1933, steadily advanced.

  The National Socialists didn’t just rewrite history through their actions. From the outset, theirs was also a cultural and literary project: they vilified the culture industry as “Jewish,” and discredited whole branches of academia as “too much under foreign influence.” This orientation made the book one of their enemies’ greatest weapons, particularly in the case of the Jews. Sorting and burning books—as the Nazis went on to do to humans—was just the first step. The second was to care for and cultivate the German race, and to found a Nazi culture and academic tradition. They needed their own books, in both the arts and the sciences, for they believed that in National Socialism, they had finally found the basis on which to build a truly German literary and academic tradition. As a result, the production of books under National Socialism was prodigious—and the reinterpretation of contemporary standards of knowledge was an act of violence.

  This new culture was promoted by the self-proclaimed ideological elite, in particular the SD. The SD strove to be “creative”: the “creative human” was the opposite of the clerks and pencil pushers of the day, and the Nazis believed this creativity would spell their end. Eichmann’s “work” in Berlin was shaped from the very beginning by the production of texts. His first task, he said, was to produce a summary of the Zionist classic The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl. This kind of work was new to Eichmann, but not to many of his colleagues, who were university educated. One of his first commanding officers, Leopold von Mildenstein, was a relatively prominent author. Following his travels in the Orient in 1933, he had published “A Nazi Tells of a Journey to Palestine” in the SS magazine Der Angriff, to great acclaim. The magazine even had a commemorative coin made to accompany the series, which—incredibly—featured a swastika on the front and a Star of David on the back.3 Eichmann admired his superior officer and emulated him (or so he remembered it). Mildenstein’s successor, Herbert Hagen, with whom Eichmann made his trip to the Middle East in 1937, instituted a book group with a demanding reading list. He also commissioned more book reviews, press reviews with commentaries, and sometimes lengthy Leithefte, or “guidance booklets,” for professional and training use. Eichmann was so fascinated by these booklets that he always claimed he had written one himself, and that it had been “printed.”4 “In this report I gave a factual account of the establishment of the Zionist world organization, the goals of Zionism, its sources of aid and its difficulties, and also underlined the challenge, because Zionism complied with our own wishes in this respect, because Zionism was also seeking a solution.” Strictly speaking, Leithefte were not printed but were produced on a typewriter. An SS Leitheft was a secret dossier for use within the SD, not to be confused with the SS magazine of the same name, or a published book.5 The title mentioned by Eichmann has not been found, but his outline sounds suspiciously like the terrible anti-Semitic book Das Weltjudentum: Organisation, Macht und Politik (World Jewry: Organization, Power and Politics), published in 1939 under the pseudonym Dieter Schwarz. Wisliceny claimed that Hagen and Franz Alfred Six compiled this volume. The department was proud of it. Its style doesn’t suggest Eichmann’s authorship, though he obviously would have loved to have been its author. The number of SD Leithefte to which he laid claim increased every time he talked about his activities as a writer.6

  But even during the Nazi period, Eichmann’s ambitions went far beyond internal pamphlets. In May 1942, as he told both Sassen and his interrogator in Israel, he wrote a hundred-page work titled “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” It was to be published “for training purposes” by Nordland Verlag, with a print run of fifty thousand. As well as general explanations of the “Jewish question” and the transportation process, it apparently contained statistical material. He told Sassen he had offered the manuscript to Heydrich for publication under his name—and when Heydrich was assassinated in June, Eichmann decided he would at least dedicate it to him. But nothing came of it, and at the end of the war it had to be burned.

  There are numerous inconsistencies in Eichmann’s stories about this book, which suggest that he was greatly exaggerating.7 The SS’s Nordland Verlag published two prestigious series for RSHA Department VII from 1939 onward: “Books on the Jewish Question” and “Sources and Accounts on the Jewish Question.” A volume of statistics was to be part of it. Franz Alfred Six, the head of Department VII, subsequently discussed the task with Eichmann, in connection with a conference. Six made quite clear, however, that it was to be “a group project, according to our directives” and that, strictly speaking, all he wanted from Eichmann was the raw data.8

  But Eichmann found the very idea of publishing his own volume in this well-known series so flattering that, even years later, he still remembered the date and the publisher and claimed to be one of the authors chosen for this magnificent series of books.

  Eichmann may have said he was never interested in the “limelight,” but his behavior clearly shows he was fascinated by publicity. He gave speeches at internal conferences and was a regular lecturer at the SD school in Bernau,9 to say nothing of his miserable speeches to his victims. His penchant for dramatic public appearances and his desire to leave something for posterity (beyond the history he wrote by committing mass murder) were not just a reaction to exile. But in Argentina, three things happened to increase his motivation even further. First, in 1955 the first books about the extermination of the Jews began to appear. Eichmann viewed them as “enemy literature” and provocation, like the numerous newspaper articles. Second, following the collapse of the Third Reich, the ideological warrior had been left with only one weapon: writing and publicity. And third, this was the first time he had fallen in with people who were actually fighting this battle, pen in hand. They had a publishing house at their disposal and—most important—they seemed to be interested in what he knew. These men were Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch. In reality, the Dürer Verlag was a tiny, makeshift operation with no presence or potential beyond its own readership, but Adolf Eichmann was a newcomer to the book trade, and this fact clearly passed him by. Perhaps he fell into the trap of all inward-looking communities, whose self-referential thinking eventually makes everything outside appear marginal. From his perspective, Der Weg’s role in the far-right publishing scene must have looked incredibly impressive: Sassen knew Perón, he had written a novel, and he had published articles in Nation Europa and Adolf von Thadden’s paper, Reichsruf. Hans-Ulrich Rudel had written his memoirs and other short texts, and he was a candidate for a German political party. Leers sent articles from Cairo, and even the mufti sent his regards. German and Austrian publishers like Druffel placed ads in Der Weg, and Eberhard Fritsch diligently collected responses to his magazine from the German media, ranging from Der Spiegel and Die Zeit to radio programs.10 Even the West German president, Theodor Heuss, had mentioned him. For Eichmann, the idea of becoming part of this feared group must have been irresistible.

  The Argentina Papers

  Eichmann’s productivity is astonishing—even to someone with their own experience of writing, and even just looking at the extant material to which we have access. Today Eichmann’s Argentina Papers are distributed across three archive collections. They include not only the famous Sassen transcript and Eichmann’s notes on it (which alone comprise around one hundred pages) but also a similar volume of Eichmann’s te
xts, written for his own purposes before 1957. To date, anyone wanting to read Eichmann’s stories has had to approach the task with a great deal of patience and an excellent memory, in order to piece together the original from the scattered pages, some of which are barely legible. The transcripts are incomplete and sometimes locked away in cupboards. Between the manuscript’s beginning and its end lie the hurdles of Eichmann’s difficult handwriting and 150 miles.11 This may explain why no one has yet made the effort to read it all or even considered the notion that extensive Argentina Papers could exist—let alone that we might be able to completely reconstruct at least one of Eichmann’s large manuscripts. But in reassembling the pieces of this puzzle, it quickly becomes clear that we have more than just the thousand pages of the Sassen interviews. There are also 107 pages of a stand-alone manuscript with the programmatic title “Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen!” (The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!), several introductory essays with accompanying notes, and around one hundred more pages of notes and commentaries on books.

  Apparently, another of Eichmann’s manuscripts has also survived, though it is not available to researchers. The “Roman Tucumán” (Tucumán Novel) is still in the possession of the Eichmann family. It is said to be 260 pages, in which Eichmann attempted to give a detailed account of his life and actions, explaining himself first and foremost to his children, his family, and the “generations to come,” on which he placed so much importance. At present, only the Eichmann family has a detailed knowledge of this text.12 The only other clues to its contents come from conversations between Eichmann and his lawyer, Robert Servatius, and Eichmann’s statements during the trial. Servatius announced the submission of this text to the court as the settlement of Eichmann’s account with National Socialism and “proof of the accused’s real attitude.”13 We might suspect that the “novel” is a variation of an appeal he made to his sons, which Klaus Eichmann remembered well: “I don’t want you ever to go into the military, or politics, he said. When I say ‘said,’ I mean he ordered us.”14 But only the release of what is probably Eichmann’s last currently unknown text will clarify this question. And as the pages of the Argentina Papers to which we already have access have not yet been subjected to close scrutiny, historians have plenty of work to fill the time until this point: reading Eichmann is anything but simple. For one thing, his handwriting is extremely idiosyncratic; the typists Sassen employed to make fair copies found it so difficult that this material should not be used without checking the originals.15

  Eichmann may have had an usually pronounced sense of order, but it clearly didn’t extend to his writing. His terrible scrawl, and his habit of using every conceivable kind of paper, were anything but orderly. And his expressions and ideas are just as idiosyncratic, revealing a man with no particular feel for words or language. Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classic German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy, and incredible human wretchedness. Shlomo Kulcsár implied that Eichmann’s style was not that of the typical Nazi or bureaucrat.16 His texts demand a twofold feat of concentration: the reader must constantly exercise her judgment, while always keeping in mind who the author is and what he did before he started writing. But as unalterable as our knowledge of the historical facts is, we run the risk of underestimating Adolf Eichmann if we simply present the Argentina Papers as evidence. Men like Eichmann write for quite different reasons from the rest of us, namely to hinder historical research and steer it toward their own goals.

  In order to interpret pieces of self-justification like Eichmann’s Argentina Papers, we should not expect them to yield new insights into historical events. A man who writes in order to justify himself is neither a historian nor a chronicler of his age. Furthermore, anyone with such a vested interest behind his public “thought” is not a reliable witness. Every single date and detail could be a lie. These texts bear witness to only one thing with any reliability, and that is the thought process involved in any kind of writing, whether it proclaims truth or lies. A lie still has to be set on a foundation of what the writer believes to be the truth. The new historical fact to be discovered by interpreting Eichmann’s writing—his self-representation and his falsification of history—is his thought itself.

  Eichmann said he started to write during his time “on the ranch,” meaning from March 1955. And in the last part of the 107-page text, he makes a clear reference to the Suez crisis, so we can at least be sure that the final three pages were written in October–November 1956. When the interviews finally began in April 1957,17 Eichmann brought one of his manuscripts along.18 The idea of him writing “on the ranch” seems to fit the facts. Separated from his family during the week, he had plenty of time to read the books that made accusations about what he had done and that condemned what he still viewed as his greatest achievement. “Writers began scribbling about me early on, creating the legends,” with “their lies about the six or eight million.” Even “non-Jews are making me their scapegoat.” All this, Eichmann wrote in a separate set of notes under the heading “General,” was at best “a mixture of truth and fiction.” He had been scapegoated without reason, or as he tactlessly phrased it, he had been “branded as one of these halo-wearers.”19 He wanted to explode this “bomb of lies.” Writing seemed like the right way to do it, as he explained to his wife: “This book will be my defense, and I will then go to Germany, and turn myself in in Germany.”20 As absurd as it seems to us today, Adolf Eichmann was aiming to use this book to reclaim not just his name but his life in Germany.

  If we consider the reality of criminal prosecutions in West Germany in the early 1950s, we must concede that Eichmann’s plan didn’t look entirely futile. There was no death penalty, and the prosecution of Nazi criminals tended to result in comparatively lenient sentences. The Nuremberg Trials in the Allied and American courts were over, and prosecution had passed into the hands of the new German institutions, which were frequently headed by old staff. Eichmann knew plenty of former colleagues who were now living unchallenged in Germany. War criminals could bank on receiving short sentences, and a statute of limitations might be on the way even for major Nazi criminals. After all, it had been nearly a decade since the fall of the Third Reich. But Eichmann must have been very naïve if he really thought the rest of the world would permit Hitler’s Adviser on Jewish Affairs to spend a few years in jail and then stroll back into Germany a free man. A lot of people had a million reasons to find the thought of a living, breathing Eichmann unbearable. Once he had served his sentence, it would never have been safe for him to live under his own name—at least, not in the democratic Federal Republic. But then, Eichmann was no great defender of democracy: he was among those who could well imagine a return to other political conditions. His attempt to speak out about his past quickly revealed that he was trying to square the circle. On the one hand, he wanted to go back to an ethnic German community, meaning a right-wing community, which had fundamentally changed since May 1945. On the other, he wanted to justify what he had done and was still unable to see there might have been an alternative course of action. It was impossible to achieve both of these aims at once, and this fact seems to have become clear to Eichmann as he was writing.

  The “Anonymous Wanderer in a Submarine”

  What happens in the perpetrator’s mind—even when he does not speak the truth—is essential to an understanding of this chapter of history.

  —Moshe Zimmermann, 199921

  The most frequently quoted phrase from the Argentina Papers, which is often taken to be Eichmann’s closing remark, has never been verified.22 The original handwritten version does not entirely correspond to this memorable quote about the “anonymous wanderer,” which can probably be explained by the simple fact that this section is extremely difficult to decipher. Eichmann had neither a bureaucrat’s orderly handwriting nor any feeling for literary formu
lations. What he did possess was an astonishing talent for nonsensical mixed metaphors. “I am beginning to tire of living between worlds, as an anonymous wanderer in a ‘submarine,’ ” he says in the notes headed “Personal,” which are one of his attempts to formulate a suitable introduction to his book. “The voice of my heart, which no man can escape, constantly whispered the search for peace to me; it may even find peace with my former enemy. Perhaps this too is part of the German character. And I would be the last person not to be willing to turn myself in to the German authorities, if …”23

  Eichmann’s “if” did not relate to the fact that no one could remember him and his colleagues ever behaving in a peaceful way, or the German character showing a particularly peaceful side between 1933 and 1945. Nor did it occur to him that “the enemy” in the singular was part of the Nazi vocabulary, an unmistakable synonym for “the Jews.” And anyone still cherishing the hope that Eichmann had realized the insolence of this search for peace in light of his past actions, or that he was about to cast doubt on his own capacity for peace, will be disappointed. Eichmann’s “if” placed the blame elsewhere: “… if I did not have to consider that the interest in the politics of the case might still be too great to bring about a clear, objective outcome to the affair matter.”24 Eichmann then announced this “clear, objective outcome”—the verdict, in other words—as an incontrovertible fact. His conscience was clear: he was “neither a murderer nor a mass-murderer,” and if he could be accused of anything, then it was “abetting the killing during the war” while acting under orders. “I passed on the evacuation and deportation orders I received, and oversaw the compliance with and following of these orders that I received and passed on.” He also claimed not to know which of the people who had been deported were subsequently killed.25