Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Langer’s identity remains a puzzle. All we have are his stories, his voice, and his name: no aliases were used in Sassen’s house, and as Eichmann and Langer could easily have met through their work, it would have made no sense for Langer to conceal his identity from Eichmann.104 SS lists,105 the records of doctorates awarded in law or politics from the University of Vienna,106 and the expertise of many colleagues107 have thus far yielded no further insights, apart from a long list of people to rule out. The example of “Dr. Langer” shows how much remains to be discovered in the Sassen interview material, and ultimately how little we know about the Nazis in exile.

  The Weapon: Violence by Words

  SASSEN: “Can you just hit the fly with that?”

  VOICE: “Yes!”

  Sounds of slapping and laughter

  SASSEN: “A Jewish-minded fly …”

  A slap

  SASSEN: “A corpse fly.”

  —Sassen discussions108

  What makes the Sassen documents such a powerful source in the first instance is the men’s language, which the text and the recordings bring to us in an unmediated form. Anyone who has heard Adolf Eichmann’s interrogation by Avner W. Less, or listened to the trial recordings, will be familiar with his idiosyncratic speech, by turns whining, cold, and occasionally petulant, as he speaks about himself and his crimes against humanity. His endless sentences are full of twists, turns, and circular thinking as he exhausts listeners with descriptions of opaque hierarchies and responsibilities, and with excuses about a sense of duty and being under orders. The experience of listening to Eichmann-in-Argentina, in a circle of sympathizers, is clearly different (and still more intolerable). It is impossible to hear the material on the tapes without getting at least some impression of how he must have appeared to people in Argentina. If we want to analyze what the Sassen circle produced over those months in 1957, we must take a moment to expose not only their thought but their language. Apart from anything else, this is one of very few sources that give us access to the jargon of these self-proclaimed sages.109

  At first glance, the discussions are dominated by Eichmann’s perfidious phrases. This man had his own way of categorizing his victims. His sole concern had been “Jews of a level that made them important to the Reich”; “a common or garden Jew was of no interest.”110 To his mind, there were “valuable Jews,” and then “old and assimilated” Jews who were no use to anyone. The fanatical racist explained this as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world. The Jews, he argued, also wanted to preserve “biologically valuable Jewish blood.”111 “It is exactly the same as when I have a chicken farm today, and I need one hundred or ten thousand egg-laying hens, in truth I have to let two hundred thousand chickens hatch in the incubators, because half will be cocks and half hens.”112

  Naturally, care was taken with the deportations, “since it wasn’t in our interests for the material to be used for labor in the concentration camps to arrive completely useless and needing repair.”113 Eichmann was proud of the fact that he had frequently been successful: “Look, how can you make 25,000 Jews, or people, or let’s say 25,000 cows, how can you simply let 25,000 animals just disappear en route.… Have you ever seen 25,000 people in a pile? … Have you ever seen 10,000 people in a pile? That’s five transport trains, and if you pack them in the way the Hungarian police planned, then at best you’ll get no more than 3,000 people in one transport train.”114 The people to whom Eichmann is speaking have no idea of the problems faced by someone trying to organize an extermination operation: “Loading a train is a tricky business anyway, whether it’s with cattle or flour sacks … and so much more difficult to load it with people, especially when you have problems to reckon with.”115 It was always the same. To start with, things looked “very hopeful,” the transports “rolled in the beginning, you could say it was glorious.”116 Deportations progressed “splendidly and without any difficulty.”117 Some operations were “particularly nice and neat, with all the bells and whistles,”118 but then the “damned problems” arose.119

  Eichmann’s brainchild was to send people hundreds of miles on foot, in the middle of winter, during the last months of the war. But he didn’t call them “death marches.” “These Jew-treks, as I called them,” were carried out “in the most elegant way.”120 And without hesitation, he adds: “I can tell you today that I saw two bodies on the whole route, they were old Jews—it’s clear, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. And were no eggs broken when much larger contingents of Germans marched from the East after 1945?” Eichmann thought it absolutely fair to deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to their deaths: the transports were “to everyone’s advantage, including the Jews themselves.”121 Men like Kurt Becher wanted to let the Jews live just so they could rob them—but not Eichmann. “While we were working with the Jews to solve the Jewish question, the others used the Jews as a means to an end, to milk them for their own ends.”122 Better a respectable Final Solution than underhanded extortion—Eichmann naturally never stooped to that himself, even though it meant not squirreling anything away for his family: “Thank God I did not become a swine.”123 Regrettably, however, not everyone realized this fact: “And this is why there are still a whole lot of Jews enjoying life today who ought to have been gassed.”124

  Naturally, these things were considered only on a large scale. There was no interest in individual cases: “Whether one bellyacher or another … somehow played a role” carried no weight.125 It wasn’t worth making a fuss over “a few little remainders or groups”—the Jews who couldn’t be murdered. Still, you always had to take care not to make any exceptions: “The single individual no longer plays a role in such a crowd, but I couldn’t do it in front of my lawyers, who had to keep a close watch on these regulations.”126 In a systematic extermination, people who have been overlooked are called “folks,” who “have been kept alive and did not suffer typhus or a physical extermination.”127 But his colleagues occasionally “took care of these left-overs.”128 Wisliceny, for example, “then also finished off the Jews in Slovakia.”129

  If the Jewish representatives entertained hopes of being able to achieve something through discussion with Eichmann, it meant they had already lost: he saw these encounters as nothing more than an intellectual challenge: “I loved playing an open hand against all the Jewish political functionaries.”130 “For me, ‘open hand’ is a winged word.”131 As he freely admitted, this “game,” which he played in Hungary with Rudolf Kasztner, was really just about “him continuing to play his role as appeasement councilor [!] with his Jewish community.”132 Eichmann was clearly proud of the tricks and lies he used to achieve his aims: “Over the years I learned which hooks to use to catch which fish.”133 Unscrupulous blackmail was part of the “game”: “Naturally I used the Brandt family to pressurize Kasztner, well, that’s a game the Abwehr played, it’s understandable”134—or at least, Sassen and the others understood it.

  In Eichmann’s world, people who risked their lives for the sake of humanity were worthy only of verbal assaults. Raoul Wallenberg did everything in his power to provide refuge and Swedish papers for people who were being persecuted in Hungary. To Eichmann, he was just a “pseudo-diplomat” who “made himself at home” there.135 Anyone acting for the Jews and holding up the “extermination machine”136 was an “interventionist,” who didn’t understand what was at stake. Many of them “had very limited horizons, from going to church every Sunday.”137 Anyone who spoke to the enemy about the extermination program, like Kurt Gerstein, “is an a … with ears.”138 The transcriber makes a polite omission here as he felt the expletive was improper (unlike detailed descriptions of torture and murder). Talking about a subordinate who did not meet the deportation quotas, Eichmann insinuates that “it is humanitarian intentions here, allowing him to hide comfortably behind decrees, acts and laws”—for what was human fellow-feeling if not an “excuse”?139

  The language becomes entirely perverted where Eic
hmann turns metaphors on their heads, talking about expulsion and murder using gentle images of life. An institution for forced emigration was his “first child,”140 where he was able to “be creative in my work.”141 All the individual acts of robbery and expulsion that took place in Austria were committed to “provide [the country] with injections of Jewish solutions.”142 Even exterminations and deportations were “born.”143 This was why he felt so superfluous in Budapest, when he was forced to stop deporting people to Auschwitz: “As far as I know, I couldn’t have done anything fruitful anymore.”144 When the fruits of your labor lie in the rising columns of murder charts, you need a rather different understanding of growth and life. In Eichmann’s language, he didn’t send people to the death camps; the camps were “fed with material.”145

  Resistance was not anticipated in this “business of the Final Solution,” and when it happened, Eichmann found it completely incomprehensible—for example, when concentration camp officials were “beaten to death by some Jew who had gone crazy.”146 Anyone who survived the inferno had “absconded.”147

  Neither Eichmann nor his interlocutors had a problem calling things by their names: Jews were “gassed”; “idiots sent to the slaughter”; those who were deported were “killed nonstop in concentration camps like on a conveyor belt.”148 As Himmler had hoped, people seemed to feel more strongly when they didn’t beat about the bush. “It made no difference to me,” Eichmann casually declares on one recording, “where the Jews went, as far as I was concerned they could have marched to Madegascar, or gone to Globocnik to be gassed, as far as I was concerned they could have gone to Auschwitz, or to Riga.”149 But even tastelessness is individual, and all the particpants have their own particular preferences: Sassen favors sexual innuendos about the “technical implementation of the reproductive urge” and “men’s desires,” when faced with the atrocities in the camps.150 Anyone who seems suspect is a “jackass” or a “chump.” Alvensleben likes to bluster about “the way crowds of Jews can be incredibly rowdy”151 and a “responsibility” that “is in the blood.”152 Dr. Langer, meanwhile, enjoys giving detailed accounts of the torture methods used in Mauthausen.153

  But let no one say that these men didn’t also have delicate feelings. Eichmann, as he tells his comrades here, feels “genuinely heartsore for the Reich.” “I trembled for the Reich,”154 he says, from which people could see “how fully I was committed to this struggle, with my whole being.”155 He was shocked to hear about the extermination plans for the first time and comforted himself using Himmler’s words: “The word is easy to say, but it is monstrously difficult.”156 “The whole business of the Final Solution”157 was a “killer of a job”—words Eichmann spoke without any sense of irony.158 Only Himmler’s calls not to murder with “unnecessary cruelty” were “music to my ears.”159 This was the reason some Jews were allowed into the “Theresienstadt old people’s home,”160 because “there they received the lightest work, work for the elderly who through some oversight were not yet dead.”161

  Eichmann still had plenty to be proud of in Argentina in 1957. Deaths had been necessary: “The only good enemy of the Reich is a dead one. In particular I have to add, when I received an order, I always carried out this order with the executioner, and I am proud of that to this day.”162 “If I had not done this, they would not have gone to the butcher.”163 Hungary, and the mass deportation of more than four hundred thousand people in a few weeks, had been his masterwork: “It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since.”164 If only there had not been all those problems before that point! The thing that pained Eichmann most was when the trains weren’t full. It was “a very poor business in Belgium.”165 And it was even worse in Denmark, when he wasn’t allowed to transport people to their deaths as he wished. “I had to recall my transports, for me it was a deadly disgrace.”166

  Cynical, pitiless, misanthropic, morally corrupt, with no understanding of tact or limits—these are all inadequate descriptors for the words Eichmann, Sassen, and their group came out with in 1957. There is nothing here to remind us of the future prisoner in Jerusalem, about whom Shlomo Kulcsár noted: “The examiner is well acquainted with the style of Nazi literature. E.’s style was quite different, more dry, lacking the Kraftausdrücke [strong words]. It was not made to provoke emotions.”167 And although Hannah Arendt may have been right to point out the “macabre humor” with which horror sometimes tips over into comedy, in light of the Argentine documents, her characterization of Eichmann’s “inability to speak” and “inability to think” seems insupportable.168 Eichmann’s words in Argentina, like those of the other participants, weren’t thoughtless drivel but consistent speech based on a complete system of thought. They were, we might say, judgments in excess. It isn’t the foundations of the argument that are missing here, but the group’s willingness to criticize the structures of totalitarian thought and to change their dogmatic approach. These men valued consistency for the violence that it allowed them to wield over themselves and others. It became an end in itself. Twelve years after the war, they still hadn’t obtained any degree of distance from it: Fritsch, Sassen, and Eichmann were still ideological warriors, in the midst of the battle, who had lost all weapons but language and magniloquence. For this reason, confronting their language can open up these documents in ways that knowledge of historical facts and the power of imagination alone cannot. This language reflects the disconnection from civilized society that allowed the National Socialists to commit monstrous crimes against their fellow man. Systematic mass murder is not just the sum of isolated instances of sadism but the result of a political thinking that is perverted from the ground up. In the same way, the discussions in Sassen’s living room were radically alienated from any measure of morality. If the term worthless is ever justified, then it is in relation to the system of thought upon which these men’s speech was based. This is what makes reading the Sassen transcript so taxing in comparison to Eichmann’s words in Jerusalem. In his interrogation and trial, we see an Eichmann who is clearly more withdrawn. The voices of those addressing him in Jerusalem are oriented toward reason and justice: the interrogating officer, the judge, and the prosecutors—and not least, the press, commenting on it all. They allow us to retain a sense of moral values and to feel that we and they are in the majority. In the Argentine discussions, however, we are on our own.

  At no point in the material from the Sassen circle does anyone object to the tone of the discussion. For these gentlemen, the language is evidently suited to the topic, and no one thinks to call for respect for human rights and humanity, or to bring things to an end, or at least to leave in protest. Nobody is sickened; no one is horrified. The only arguments are over exactly what it means to be German, and anyone leaving the circle expresses his regret at having to go.169 Arrangements for other projects and day-to-day business follow on effortlessly from confessions of murder.170 When Sassen leaves the tape running as he tidies up after a meeting, in order to dictate a few instructions for the transcript or to make scurrilous remarks about the recently departed guests, he can be heard whistling cheerful tunes and talking to his family, like anyone else returning home, satisfied with a good day’s work.171 The “business of the Final Solution” is as routine here as it was when murder was more than just a discussion topic. Examining the language used by the group gives us an idea of the violence that met people whom the National Socialists declared to be non-German: they could then be denied all rights, ultimately including the right to exist. Our norms have no voice within the Sassen group, whose speech comes from a spiritual abyss—though that doesn’t seem to worry anyone. There is no better argument for the need to listen to language: there the possibility of a moral universe finally dies. Once thought has arrived at categories of this sort, no argument will prevent it giving rise to murderous deeds.

  The Enemy: Books

  Authors lie left and right, left and right, I say. Whether it’s Poliakov or this clown, what’s he called? Re
itlinger! Well, he lies even more than Poliakov. Or Kogon—or whatever they’re called, the brothers.

  —Eichmann, Sassen discussions172

  Reading and evaluating books together played a crucial role in the Sassen circle from the outset. In 1957 the secondary literature on the National Socialists’ extermination of the Jews was still negligible, so it is striking that the group in Buenos Aires managed to obtain a copy of every German-language book on the subject—particularly as some of them had been brought out by small publishers. Sassen and his colleagues had done their research thoroughly, and at some expense, since German books didn’t come cheap in Buenos Aires. Der Weg had its own reviews section, but Dürer Verlag wasn’t able to rely on being given review copies. Banned from distributing so many of its products in West Germany, the publishing house had a terrible reputation, and it was unlikely anyone would value a review from that corner of the world or send a book on a costly journey there at their own expense. For this reason, Eberhard Fritsch repeatedly used his editorials in Der Weg to implore his faithful readers for help, asking them to send in books or newspaper articles on relevant themes. Of course, for individual requests, Fritsch also had recourse to his authors and his former colleague Dieter Vollmer. In any case, the group made an effort to hunt down every available publication. The list of books they discussed at Sassen’s is a further indication of the systematic approach he and his associates took to the emerging historical research.

  Eichmann and Sassen quote from texts on the very first recording. Eichmann reads from the transcript of the Nuremberg Trials;173 Sassen asks about key phrases in Alex Weissberg’s Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand174 and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution.175 They discuss these two books over the course of almost thirty tapes, and the discussion of Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf’s document collection Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews) lasts just as long. From tape 39, the conversation also covers Nazi lawmaking, following the first attempt that had been made to summarize it: Das Ausnahmerecht für Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945 (1954) by Bruno Blau.176 Blau was someone Eichmann might have remembered: he had been an involuntary inmate of the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, where Jews who could not immediately be deported were interned. There is evidence that Eichmann visited the hospital, which fell under his department’s jurisdiction. Wilhelm Höttl’s The Secret Front took on a special significance, though this was largely to do with Höttl himself and his role as chief witness to the mass murder, as well as the fact that Langer and Eichmann knew the author personally. But the group devoted the most attention to the German translation of Reitlinger’s Final Solution, returning to it again and again. Even the final recordings were spent arguing with this mammoth work.177 Sometimes parts of the books were copied so that participants could read them at home, but Langer, at least, also had his own books, as we can see from the preparations he made for his Höttl lecture.