Eichmann Before Jerusalem

Bettina Stangneth

4 ideas

1. The Sassen tapes in Buenos Aires

   In 1957, living under a false name in Argentina, Eichmann sat for months of recorded conversations with Willem Sassen, a Dutch former SS propagandist, and a circle of Nazi exiles. They hoped he would confirm that the Holocaust was exaggerated or unknown to Hitler. Instead Eichmann affirmed the extermination and said he regretted only that it had not been completed. He stated that if 10.3 million Jews had been killed he would have been satisfied, because an enemy would have been destroyed.

2. The Jerusalem bureaucrat was a performance

   Eichmann's persona at his 1961 trial, the colorless desk functionary who only obeyed orders and had no hatred of Jews, was a deliberate defense strategy. It contradicts what he said and wrote among sympathizers a few years earlier, where he spoke as a proud, ideologically committed architect of the killing. Taking the courtroom image at face value mistakes a tactic of self-preservation for a psychological truth.

3. Read perpetrator testimony against its audience

   A perpetrator's account of himself changes with the listener: boastful and ideological among comrades, dutiful and diminished before judges, self-pitying in private writings. No single statement reveals the true self. The reliable picture comes from lining up the versions and asking what each audience rewarded him for saying.

4. Cultivated notoriety as an instrument of power

   During the war Eichmann built and relished a public reputation as the regime's feared 'Jewish expert', and his name itself helped intimidate victims and secure cooperation. A perpetrator's earlier self-promotion is therefore evidence against his later claims of insignificance.

Save and mark ideas in the app