Few senior Nazis have attracted more interest from journalists and historians than Adolf Eichmann, the senior adviser to the SS leadership on the “Jewish question”. Since his execution, in Israel, in 1962, Eichmann’s image has oscillated between that of a self-confident and ideologically driven young SS officer and that of an accommodating desk perpetrator of genocide.
Eichmann himself cultivated both images during his lifetime: a famous photograph from 1942, the year of the notorious Wannsee conference, shows him in his black SS uniform smirking with affected self-assuredness. A second iconic photograph, taken nearly 20 years later, is that of a balding, bespectacled Eichmann in his glass booth in the Jerusalem District Court, where he stood trial for crimes against humanity.
The trial attracted worldwide attention, not least because it was the first time since the Nuremberg Trials that legal proceedings had explicitly revolved around the Holocaust. Those contemporaries who had expected a human monster in black uniform, defiant in the face of a Jewish judge, were surprised: Eichmann appeared to be the epitome of a subservient and boring bureaucrat, prompting Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum about the “banality of evil”.
For Arendt, Eichmann represented a specific type of Nazi perpetrator: a bureaucratic technocrat of death, an armchair culprit, who carried out the tasks set out by his bosses “correctly” and “conscientiously” without feeling responsible for the outcomes.
The “
real” Eichmann Is it possible to reconcile these two very different images of Eichmann? Which of the two represents the “real” Adolf Eichmann?
The question is at the heart of this new and highly intelligent book by the German philosopher and historian Bettina Stangneth. Eichmann Before Jerusalem provides a connecting thread between the SS "Jewish expert" who disappeared from public view in the final days of the Third Reich and the Eichmann who re-emerged as a captive of the Israelis in 1960.
Trying to link both periods together and to make sense of Eichmann’s entire life, Stangneth suggests that Arendt may have been deceived by Eichmann’s theatrical performance in Jerusalem, his attempt to portray himself as a small and insignificant bureaucrat who simply carried out orders.
On the basis of previously unmined archival sources, Stangneth makes a compelling argument that Eichmann remained, throughout his exile in Argentina and right up to his death, an unrepentant Nazi, proud of his “achievements” in the Second World War. Her most important sources are Eichmann’s copious personal notes, made in exile, and a series of taped conversations known as the Sassen interviews. These were recordings of conversations, held in Buenos Aires in 1957 , between Eichmann and the former Dutch SS man and journalist Wilhelm Sassen.
What emerges from these sources is that Eichmann, in his post-1945 exile, remained a passionate, ideologically convinced SS officer who frequently boasted of his involvement in the Holocaust, and who took great pride in his personal responsibility for the mass deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews at the end of the war. Although Eichmann dismissed the interviews during his trial as pub talk, there can be little doubt that his boasting about being a driving force behind the Holocaust accurately reflected his thinking in the mid 1950s.
In addition to minutely examining unknown aspects of Eichmann’s post-1945 life up to his capture, as “Ricardo Klement”, in Argentina in 1960, Stangneth’s book contains numerous other revelations. Her excellent portrayal of the frighteningly active community of Nazi refugees in postwar Argentina is unmatched.
For some of the men and women who made up this subculture, the war was anything but over. Many of them firmly believed that they still had a role to play in the future of Germany and eagerly awaited the day when anti-communism in Europe would be strong enough for them to be recalled as experts on fighting the Red Army.
Stangneth also exposes the global reach of postwar Nazi networks and the degree of support they received from individual sympathisers in the Vatican and in the International Red Cross. She also documents the almost incredible lack of interest in bringing Eichmann to justice.
Israelis in the dark
She reveals that by 1952 German intelligence services had located Eichmann in Argentina. The CIA was aware of his new existence in Buenos Aires from 1956 onwards. Both agencies, however, were more concerned with the strategic considerations of the cold war than with hunting down aging Nazis. The Israelis were never informed. It was only a few years later that the Mossad received a tip-off from a regional German attorney general.
Until his abduction from Argentina by Mossad agents, in May 1960, Eichmann felt unthreatened by prosecution. Not only did he entertain close relationships with the wider German-exile community in South America, but he also actively sought the limelight and was, in fact, confident enough to send pictures of himself (signed “retired SS-Obersturmbannführer”) to his supporters back in Germany.
And, as Stangneth illustrates, he went even further: in 1956 Eichmann drafted a letter to Konrad Adenauer, the West German chancellor, proposing that he return to Germany to stand trial. The letter was to be accompanied by a 40-page autobiographical essay, one of many self-confident texts that he wrote. Eichmann claimed that he wanted to set the record straight and inform young Germans about what really happened under Hitler.
Stangneth deserves much credit for bringing these remarkable sources to light. Her comprehensive research greatly improves our understanding of Eichmann’s life between 1945 and 1960.
It can be argued that the book somewhat reinforces the trend of exaggerating Eichmann’s centrality in the Holocaust at the expense of a variety of other crucial actors who are absent from her account, from the SS leaders to whom Eichmann reported, and who defined the boundaries of his activities, to the local administrators and SS commanders in the field who often accelerated the genocide on their own initiative.
Still, no future biography of any Nazi perpetrator will be able to ignore the findings presented in this book. Robert Gerwarth is professor of modern history at University College Dublin. His biography of Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann’s boss, was published by Yale University Press
