Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  On the tape, Eichmann also gives a vivid account of his “professional” life. He chats about the room in the office for Jewish affairs where he and his colleagues played music at the end of the murderous working day: “My assessor played the piano, I was the second violin, the noncommissioned officer played first violin, he was a much better musician than me.” He also recounts his heroic deeds at the war’s end, when all his colleagues crowded around the men who were producing forged identity papers: Eichmann didn’t want any, preferring to kill himself in the event of a final defeat. The fact that the man with the death wish is alive to tell this tale in Buenos Aires doesn’t knock Eichmann off his stride. He boasts of the recognition he got from his superiors: “Müller said to me once, if we’d had fifty Eichmanns, we’d have won the war for sure. And I was proud.” This chatter then apparently starts to irritate him: “That should have given you an insight into my interior—since you don’t know me, not from within, and that is important.”75

  The inner life of a mass murderer seems to arouse the ladies’ curiosity, and they want to know more about Eichmann. “And if you are such a fanatical Nationalist [meaning National Socialist],”76 someone asks, is there perhaps also a “mysticism, a doctrine, a worldview of völkisch life that plays into this for you?” At this point the tape cuts out, but the transcript shows how enthusiastically Eichmann answered this question. Yes, his first commanding officer, Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, was a mystic. Schwartz-Bostunitsch stood five foot eleven, with flat feet and a goatee, and he had actually been a kind of comical curiosity, a carnival demagogue with a fake professorship. Once he had launched into one of his endless monologues about the danger of Freemasons, it was difficult to stop him, as his deafness shielded him from objections. He had been an object of suspicion even in Himmler’s circles—and Reichsführer-SS Himmler was someone who had charts drawn up by witches, thought the Externsteine rock formation in northern Germany was “ur-Germanic,” and believed all sorts of other nonsense about grails and fraternities that could only very generously be described as “mysticism.”77 Eichmann had little interest in it. “I don’t see anything in mysticism … we have to ensure that our offspring live a proper life, and that’s that. I have to forge my weapons according to the strength of the resistance.” But he was also no stranger to the tempting idea of a grand mission, which is obvious even in the fragmentory transcripts. “The integration into the whole, because in the whole lies the völkisch, one blood.”

  Eichmann wasn’t lying: he had always believed the ritual-murder horror stories about Jews were propaganda and had recognized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery from the beginning—much to Sassen’s surprise. Eichmann used this stuff when it came to manipulating foreign representatives, but he didn’t need it to persuade himself to commit murder.

  At this point, the person typing up the tape inserts five dashes and picks up again only with what Eichmann says once the ladies have left. Still, it is clear what has happened. “And for this we gave everything,” Eichmann splutters, losing his composure. “Everything, youth, everything, and freedom, and others gave still more, even their lives. And so I can’t stomach somebody saying to me, what could have been worse, worse [than] National Socialism taking the reins on January 30, ’33? I’m going to lose it!”78 One of the “ladies” had dared to touch on something that nobody would follow up in the discussions over the months to come: she had asked about the inherently criminal nature of the totalitarian state, which was revealed when the Nazis “seized power” in Germany in 1933. It doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to work out that the ladies must have been ushered out politely but hurriedly, before Eichmann’s patience wore out. “It was only because I kept myself under control that I was able to say a conventional farewell to the ladies.”79

  The episode is remarkable because it shows how little consideration was given from the very start to who witnessed the discussion and whether the guests held similar beliefs to the principal protagonists. We don’t know who the women with the reasonable views were. One may have been a secretary from Dürer Verlag, who came from Belgium and had a relationship with Sassen.80 Inge Schneider, the schooner captain’s daughter from the Lüneberg Heath, who had crossed the Atlantic with Sassen, remembers her sister Antje telling her she had been present at these recording sessions. Antje Schneider, whose married name was Löns (and whose husband was Bayer’s South American representative), still carried a torch for Sassen and collected his photos and theater reviews. Inge Schneider later married the submarine captain Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock (played by Jürgen Prochnow in the 1981 film Das Boot). She was much more distanced from the Dürer group and insisted she had never attended the meetings herself, meeting Eichmann only at other social events.81 Unlike the man they met, the women who made Eichmann boil with rage were clearly not “fanatical National Socialists.” He was a fanatic, who didn’t hide what he believed and gave them an unsolicited insight into his “attitude of mind” (an important concept in the philosophy of Kant). Eichmann, Sassen, and Fritsch were certainly not afraid of people who thought differently. And who would the women have told about Eichmann’s views, in Buenos Aires? It was no secret that there were unreconstructed Nazis in Argentina, and their names were no secret either. Nobody would have been interested in hearing that “if we’d had fifty Klements, we’d have won the war for sure.”

  The Unknown Helper: Dr. Langer

  Keep drilling!

  —Sassen whispering to Dr. Langer82

  These occasional visitors were not the only guests: Sassen made very few recordings of himself and Eichmann alone. In most cases, a man whom everyone called “Dr. Langer” was also present.83 This man played a large part in shaping the Sassen interviews, and it is a mystery why his role has been overlooked. We have not only a wealth of his questions and opinions but also a long lecture, which has been preserved both on tape and in the transcripts. With palpable excitement in his slightly hesitant voice, Dr. Langer describes the character of Wilhelm Höttl, whom he knew very well from his work in Vienna. He also gets into some heated exchanges with Eichmann. And to forestall any questions: we don’t know who this man was, though he obviously had a remarkable Nazi career behind him.

  Langer, as Eichmann often remarked smugly, had been with the SD in Vienna and had done no military service. During a heated discussion, Eichmann asks him why he is getting involved in things he clearly has no idea about; or as he phrases it: “You ridiculous pipsqueak! Did you fight at the front?”84 But Langer knew about law, and when Eichmann speaks about his time in Austria following the annexation, he emphasizes his experience: “At this time I worked in another part of the SD in Austria, and within the framework of this law we had the task of assessing civil servants, i.e., determining whether or not they were Jews.”85 In other words, Langer was one of the men who implemented the Civil Service Restoration Act of 1933 in Austria. He had decided who was allowed to remain a civil servant and who was not.

  This Dr. Langer from the Vienna SD was clearly a man of no small importance, having held at least one position that still made Eichmann envious in 1957. When Eichmann explains that his commanding officer, Heydrich, was so busy in Prague that he had little time for RSHA problems in Berlin, Langer firmly contradicts him: “I don’t believe that, he at least took time to sign things.” Eichmann bristles and replies: “You don’t believe that, then I must say, then you were lucky you were in the SD, … everything else, in Department IV, was signed by Müller at that time.” But Langer doesn’t give up easily. “In Department IV—but I remember very well, we got a lot of things with his signature on them.” He then adds, rubbing salt into the wound, “and he certainly took the time for it when I was with him in Prague.” This leads Eichmann to say, awkwardly: “I was with him in Prague as well”86—as if anyone in the group would have doubted that. This silly game of My-Heydrich-Your-Heydrich reveals Eichmann’s attacks as an attempt to downplay Langer’s obvious importance. Heydrich was one of the mo
st ambitious men in the Reich, and he didn’t grant an audience to just anybody. Langer emerges as an expert on the percentage of Jews in the SS: “It was small, though there were a few more after the Aryan Certificate, it wasn’t possible to establish a percentage, there were probably more in Austria than in the Old Reich.”87 He is able to give personal impressions of prominent Nazis like Hans Rauter and Arthur Seyss-Inquart,88 and even Eichmann occasionally defers to his superior knowledge, when it serves his purposes. “We’d have to make specific inquiries to Dr. Langer on whether H[eydrich] was also the president of the International Criminal Police Commission in 1939.”89

  We may not know who Dr. Langer was, but his position cannot have been lowly. “I had an Ustf. [Untersturmführer] in my office, who found out he was a quarter Jew, he wanted to kill himself, I stopped him, then he went into the Luftwaffe, and was a great hit there … and I was told he played a large role in Austria again after the war, in the new national movement.”90 His obvious pride in his men also has another significance. In reply to a question about his staff, Langer complains to Eichmann that he kept losing his best men: “I was disadvantaged by the RSHA department heads always taking the good people away from me [!].”91

  In spite of their rivalry, Dr. Langer had information that Eichmann was keen to hear. In one session, Eichmann presses Sassen to question Dr. Langer on a topic that had caused him particular headaches: the witnesses to his boastful speech at the end of the war. Eichmann points out that “Dr. Langer … knows Höttl professionally.”92 He should therefore be asked to talk about it. For around twenty minutes, Langer gives a sort of lecture on Wilhelm Höttl: he can be heard using prepared notes, which include interpretations of the Höttl book. Despite his aloof, fussy style, over time Langer loosens up and speaks with a degree of humor about Höttl’s terrible reputation and scheming ways. But now too much attention is being given to Eichmann’s rival, and he gets impatient and interrupts. With an irritable interjection (“Is that everything, then?”) he embarks on a long-winded explanation of his own, which is so lacking in content that you cannot help but get the impression that he was just making sure the other man didn’t take up any more of the session.

  Langer puts some critical questions to Eichmann, which at times suggest he may have a sense of guilt. Still, it would be wrong for us to imagine that the former SD man from Vienna represented the last vestiges of morality within the Sassen group. The original tapes betray something the transcriber in Argentina chose to leave out: Dr. Langer had access to the Mauthausen concentration camp. “During one of my frequent visits there, the Dutch Jews were paraded in front of me.”93 Through his close relationship with Commandant Franz Ziereis, Langer also heard about an order to exterminate the Dutch Jews through labor. He recalls “a personal experience, when the camp commandant explained to me: this group of Jews, they were assigned to this work that, in practice, was work that a person could only manage for a few days.”94 The Sassen circle discusses the horrific methods of extermination through labor openly and with interest.

  Nor is Langer out of place in the Sassen circle in other regards. He shares their belief in the Jewish world conspiracy and, like Sassen, keeps a keen eye out for stray facts that might serve the “Jewish” academic community. When Eichmann talks with comparative candor about his superior officer’s capricious tendencies, Langer points out the danger: “You are, of course, giving the enemy even more arguments that will allow him to claim capriciousness ruled.”95

  Hardly any of the stories about Langer’s own involvement in the Holocaust were reproduced in the transcript, suggesting that Sassen had guaranteed him a level of discretion. Sassen certainly doesn’t seem to have brought him into the circle because he was interested in hearing specifics from him. Langer had something very different to offer. Unlike Sassen and Fritsch, he was in a position to be able to evaluate at least some of what Eichmann said. It is inconceivable that Langer and Eichmann didn’t have at least a fleeting acquaintance from their time in power. If nothing else, then in the final months of 1944, Eichmann’s appalling death marches would surely have brought his name to the attention of an SD man of Langer’s rank. Langer was able to judge and to ask questions where Sassen foundered. He was there to run Eichmann through the mill on Sassen’s behalf. A former employee of Der Weg stressed that Eichmann was literally interrogated in the Sassen circle.96 During a concentrated discussion between Eichmann and Langer, Sassen can be heard on the recording whispering “keep drilling!” But Eichmann quickly discovered how to handle Langer—by turning his own weapons against him: laws and regulations. He liked to cite one of the books that the Sassen circle discussed page by page and put his superior knowledge to good use, backing up his partly dishonest theories by saying: “Lange[r] also saw it for the first time when he saw Dr. Blau’s collection of statutes.”97

  Eichmann also relied on a skill he had used to promote his interests during interministerial negotiations in Berlin: playing the petty-minded bureaucrat. For example, on one tape, a text is put before him where his department is referred to as “IV A 4.” Eichmann at first becomes nervous, and then nitpicking: “IV A 4—just a moment. What?? Can I see that please? Look at this, you can see this jackass of an author, you know. These authors believe they sucked wisdom at the teat. And if you ever see a collection of Roman numerals and upper and lower case letters, these morons will have mixed them up. That’s IV A. IV A is a completely different group!” And then Eichmann gives a long-winded, self-assured, overbearing, and ultimately convincing explanation of why this departmental designation could not have existed.98 But the fact of the matter is that from March 1944, Eichmann’s department really was IV A 4. His office had four different designations over the years: IV R; IV D 4; IV B 4; and finally IV A 4.99 He knew very well that these numbers were all that linked a file to a particular department, and that if you removed the labels, you could deny those dossiers had anything to do with you, and make whole mountains of documents vanish. The Israeli interrogating officer Avner W. Less was almost amused at “the incredible doggedness and vehemence” with which Eichmann denied every department name except IV B 4. Eichmann carried on batting official terms and internal designations back and forth until documents were submitted to remind him that all his attempts to baffle the authorities were in vain.100 Things had been very different when the Nazis were in power. When your job is murder, you don’t have to win anyone over, you just have to play for time. Numerous documents prove that Eichmann used tricks to create precedents for things he wanted to do. Bureaucratic chicanery is different from bureaucracy itself, and no one knew this better than Eichmann, who found all bureaucracy by definition tiresome. This was what staff were for. “These matters to do with bureaucracy,” he explained to Sassen, “I just relied on my civil servants for them.” He deployed these “living articles,” like Ernst Moes and Fritz Wöhrn, as “bureaucratic brakes.”101 With Langer, he took up the position of “living article” himself, for as long as it served his needs. And if a question still made him too uncomfortable, he quickly changed tack: “You can’t put [yourself] in my shoes, you can never do that, because you were in the SD until the very end.”102

  Who was Dr. Langer? Whose was the voice with the slight Viennese accent, who said a polite “God bless you” when someone handed him a drink, but whose reminiscences about the horrors of Mauthausen never stuck in his throat? Once again Eichmann-in-Jerusalem is no help to us. There he claimed he had briefly met a man named “Lange,” the former head of an Oberabschnitt division in Austria, around the time of his conversations with Sassen in his kitchen. He said this man’s real name was “Dr. Klan.”103 Significantly, there was only one person Eichmann knew with this exotic-sounding name: the doctor in the Mossad team who cared for Eichmann immediately after he was abducted. None of these names have yet been discovered in Argentina. In contrast to the way the SS was divided, there were no SD Oberabschnitte in Austria, since the whole of Austria came under a single division, SD Oberabschnitt Donau.r />