The offices of the State Archive are generally quiet: a lot
of red tape and very little action. That's the way it was --
until last February 29 when suddenly, with a big bang, the
office came alive. Telephones began to ring and the web site
was flooded with requests from all over the world.
The diaries of the arch-murderer had become a bestseller.
From the moment the diaries of Eichmann yimach shemo
were made available to whoever asked to see them, people from
around the world as well as Israel have been streaming to
those modest headquarters: just to glimpse the diary of that
gray, short and very unimpressive-looking man who was one of
the cruelest monsters humanity has ever known.
Nazi criminal Adolph Eichmann was executed in Israel almost
40 years ago. The only formal execution the State ever
performed. During his trial and prison stay, he wrote diaries
which were only recently released and are being distributed
at no cost to whoever wants them, simply because of the legal
problem liable to arise over the arch-murderer's
inheritance.
Eichmann wrote 670 pages in his small handwriting. The State
Archive reports that there have been many requests for
copies. A copy can be gotten over the Internet. A disc can be
gotten for free, if one takes the trouble to go all the way
to the Archive's office in Jerusalem's Talpiot
neighborhood.
A Personal, Normal-Seeming Perspective
What is so interesting about those diaries? Not the surprises
it contains because, in general, there aren't any. Eichmann
recorded the very same things he had said in his inquests and
throughout his trial.
Director of the State Archive, Professor Evyatar Prizel,
briefly replies to the question, "Who needs it?"
"What makes this diary unique is the personal and seemingly
almost natural perspective from which he describes the Second
World War and the Holocaust."
Historians are interested in them. Some believe that the
publication of the diaries is important as well as essential
now, in light of the new trend of Holocaust denial. (A side
remark: In our opinion, authentic proofs will not convince
Holocaust deniers. Historical truth isn't what they're
after.)
Elie Wiesel says that the publication of the diaries is
important as well as beneficial. Why? Wiesel told the press
that the Irving-Lipstadt trial makes publishing the Eichmann
diaries of educational and legal value. This trial involves
Irving's libel suit against American historian Deborah
Lipstadt, who called him a "Holocaust denier" in a book.
Professor Lipstadt asked to use Eichmann's journals as
evidence in her trial.
The journals have been in Israel's possession since the
execution of the fiend. Why weren't they published until
now?
Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided against
publishing them because Professor Yehuda Bauer, head of the
International Holocaust Studies Institute Yad Vashem, says:
"Ben-Gurion didn't want the Eichmann family to make money on
the memoirs of its father."
The Jewish nation, Bauer stresses, doesn't need Eichmann's
diaries in order to learn about the Holocaust.
Professor Moshe Zimmerman is convinced of the need to publish
the diaries. He is surprised by his fellow historians who say
that the Eichmann diaries have no historical value.
One attempting to probe the inner workings of Nazism, to
describe what was in the head of the mastermind of the
Holocaust, will be greatly assisted by these diaries,
Zimmerman says.
What is important about the diaries is, in essence,
Eichmann's confirmation of the facts. His interpretation
surely holds no water.
Eichmann states clearly: "There certainly was liquidation,
and it was not the initiative of a few individuals, but
rather from orders from above." He admits that there were
transports and gas chambers which his genteel soul abhorred
(as he puts it).
Between the lines, one can read many interesting things, such
as how many knew what was going on. He has his explanations.
Participation in the liquidation process accorded the German
murderers and their cohorts prestige, authority -- not to
mention money, lots of it -- and power: the spine-chilling
power of the Nazi beast.
Retired judge Gavriel Bach is less excited about the whole
affair. "There's nothing new in Eichmann's diaries," he says.
"Throughout his trial he never denied the Holocaust. He made
great efforts to minimize his role in it, and was suddenly
willing to go down in history as a small cog. But there's
nothing very novel in them."
The claim that the diaries can help in the battle against the
Holocaust deniers doesn't make sense to Attorney Amos
Hausner, son of the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial Gideon
Hausner. Does the British court need the memoirs of the
executed criminal when there are live witnesses who can
describe the Holocaust first hand? There are also many
documents and books which have been written on the subject.
Eichmann's diaries merely serve the media.
And that, according to Eichmann's son, Dieter, is simply not
right. How can they take private diaries which belonging to
him and his brother and do with them what they please? That's
illegal. "It is forbidden to publish the diaries without my
permission," Dieter Eichmann says. His brother, Ricardo
doesn't care one way or the other about the publishing of the
material.
Hell, Death, Satan
"The affair with the Jews," writes Eichmann, who refers to
the Holocaust that way, "is the greatest crime in the annals
of mankind."
How does he explain his enthusiastic involvement in that
"affair with the Jews?"
"I was filled with thousands of ideals," he writes. "I slid
into the affair along with many others, unable to extricate
myself from it."
How did he acclimate to what he himself calls, "Hell, death
and Satan" and the "craze for extermination?"
The following is the explanation Eichmann offers, and it's
worth our attention: "I was one of the many horses hitched to
the cart. I didn't look to the left nor to the right from the
path along which the wagon driver led me . . .
"I saw how it is possible with a few words, a few brief
orders from one man who received the authority for it from
the state, to create fields of death like there were. I saw
the horrors of the system of killing in action, gear against
gear, like a clock."
He was there and he admits it. He knew what happened at the
end of the human transports he so efficiently organized.
But he wasn't antisemitic. Him? How can you say such a
thing?
"No one spoke about Jews or Judaism . . . who thought about
that? The younger people were interested only in heroism. We
wanted to minimize the shame of the Treaty of Versailles."
Eichmann says in simple words that he had never been
antisemitic, nor had his parents, his uncles or his
grandfather. In school he even sat next to a Jew and had been
his friend.
Nonetheless it's still instructive to recall the newspaper
interview he gave in 1956 from his residence in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. The opportunity for the interview arose when
"militant" Israel made war against her "peace loving"
neighbors. The interview was conducted by a fascist Dutch
journalist named Zasan, who also taped it and gave the tape
to Life magazine after Eichmann was caught.
In that interview, the still-at-large Eichmann described the
transports in this manner: "It was wonderful to see those
cattle-cars . . . "
"Aren't you sorry about what you did?" the admiring
journalist asked.
Eichmann responded: "Yes. I am sorry about one thing: that I
was not determined enough, and didn't fight enough against
those cursed ones who interfered in the work. Now you see the
results. A Jewish state has been established, and that race
has been established anew."
This was after the Holocaust; after all that he had believed
in, as he said, lay under the wreckage.
One who leafs through the diaries notices an interesting
point: the special job to which Eichmann specifically was
assigned. Captain Mildenstein of the S.S. Intelligence
Service founded the Jewish Department. He himself dealt with
the Zionists. Eichmann was placed in charge of the Orthodox
Jews (chareidim). A third person was placed in charge of
assimilated Jews.
Eichmann writes that he had no intention of liquidating the
Jews. He merely wanted to spur them to leave Germany en
masse. Forcibly? Heaven forbid. Not him.
Then why was the reality so different? Because the government
offices didn't advance his wonderful plan -- as he says, out
of hatred and pettiness or perhaps merely out of stupidity --
in any case they did not help and even hindered him. What a
pity that Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign affairs minister,
hadn't helped the Jews found their own state outside
Germany.
According to him, this almost-reasonable plan fell through on
Kristallnacht. Eichmann was angry because Kristallnacht hurt
not only the Jews but also Eichmann himself: all that he had
built and devised in order to spur the exit of the Jews was
destroyed in an instant, as he saw it.
Eichmann says that the first time the idea of "physical
extermination" crossed his mind was in the fall of 1941, when
Heidrich informed him that the Hitler yimach shemo had
given orders to physically wipe out the Jews. Eichmann joined
the Nazis official liquidation machine without many
misgivings.
It was then that he began to see what he called the meshing
of the gears, and how those who oversaw the work watched the
secondhand as it separated life from death. He claims that he
is describing what he calls "the greatest and most macabre
death dance of all times," in order to warn against an
additional Holocaust.
A Visit to Palestine
To wade through Eichmann's memoirs is very difficult. In
smooth language and with self-serving self-righteousness, he
adopts the position of a preacher at the gates. He visited
the Middle East and Palestine in 1937, and upon seeing
archaeologists at work he was jealous of them for engaging in
such clean work all the time.
This visit is worthy of our attention. At that time, Zionism
was there as well as Zionists, of course. A man from the
grayest place in the world landed in Palestine. Why had he
come? Who sent him?
The answers to these questions are found in Eichmann's
diaries. The purpose of the trip to Israel was to collect
information.
A Jewish activist had visited Eichmann in Berlin a few months
before his trip to Palestine. Eichmann was ordered to
accommodate that activist. They even dined together in a
restaurant near the zoo. What did Eichmann discuss with the
activist? How the Zionists in Palestine lived. The activist
then invited him to visit Palestine.
In disguise as an editor of a Berlin newspaper, Eichmann came
to Israel, accompanied by his superior, who disguised himself
as a student of international affairs. Did the activist who
had invited Eichmann to Palestine know who he really was?
"They knew who I was," he writes. And not only they. British
Intelligence was not fooled and had no illusions that an
editor of a newspaper and an innocent student of
international affairs had come to Palestine. But no one
disturbed that peaceful visit. However, when the two sought
to return to Palestine at the end of a tour of Egypt the
British decided not to let them back in."
What would be with the developing ties with the anonymous
Jewish activist? He and the representative of the German news
agency -- the official one in Jerusalem -- Dr. Reichert, were
invited to Egypt. They met and once more dined together. What
about the Nuremberg Laws? Eichmann, in his great courtesy
announced that those laws were "far removed from him." The
Nuremberg Laws forbade Aryan Germans and Jews to sit together
at one table.
The visit to Palestine ended without significant results.
This chapter raises interesting questions. Who was that
unnamed activist? What was his reason for traveling to Egypt
to meet with Eichmann? How did the Zionists in Israel regard
the incipient Holocaust which was about to befall the Jews of
the Diaspora? Eichmann doesn't answer these questions in his
diary.
Two years later, the Nazi divisions rolled toward Poland and
Eichmann began to make order in the emigration offices. He
had to coordinate the transports. It was a very cold winter,
he admits, but no one thought of stopping the expulsions or
postponing them.
Eichmann is the man who carried out the transports:
efficiently, cold-bloodedly and cruelly. He was responsible
for the well-oiled operation of the terrible system.
"It's easy, after the fact, to open one's mouth and to make
objections," the sensitive man complains. "Had we won, those
who today don't want to know anything would very happily have
cheered us all over the world for `obeying the Fuhrer's
orders.' I can only recommend to all those who do not know
what it was like to try to stand up like Hauptman -- a
lieutenant-colonel -- against a dozen generals and senior
officials . . . "
The House in the Forest Clearing
The great destruction began in 1941. Eichmann received orders
to travel and to see how much Golovenchik -- the brigade-
fuhrer of the S.S. (like an army general) and chief of
the police -- had accomplished. Golovenchik took Eichmann to
the house in the forest clearing and showed him how the gas
chambers worked.
At the time Eichmann went to visit Golovenchik, he already
knew what his job would be. He didn't jump off the train. "I
consoled myself on the ride with the liter of red wine in my
canteen," he writes.
We won't go into his description of the Jews who were choked
to death in that house in the forest clearing near Lublin.
The genteel Eichmann was very tense, and therefore he smoked
and drank wine all the way back to Berlin where he reported
to Miller about the trip.
Such descriptions, together with an account of his feelings,
repeat themselves many times in Eichmann's diaries. "I had to
pinch the skin of my hands in order to make sure that I was
awake."
Was he trying to search for an excuse for his silence, for
his supposed obedience?
He had an opportunity to transfer information about what was
occurring to a Red Cross delegation which visited the "model
camp of Theresienstadt. "Everyone knew that they were killing
Jews," he wrote. "If I would have spoken with the Red Cross,
they would have put me up against the nearest wall and shot
me. How would that have helped the situation? There were too
many order-givers around."
Besides this, was such a sacrifice worth it for the Jews?
Were all of the orders given openly? Apparently not. Himmler,
Eichmann relates, gave covert orders all of the time, and
constantly inserted different words and concepts, such as
"special treatment," or "expulsion to the east," and
"vacating to the east" and much more. The word "to kill" was
hardly ever used. Apparently it wasn't such a nice word.
We doubt that any of our readers will lend credence to
Eichmann's words, certainly not as far as his feelings are
concerned. "I also danced the dance of death around those
idols which I served," he writes with a burst of candor but
immediately adds. "They all danced that dance, in all of the
countries of Europe."
He closes with a warning: "From my experience, I warn
everyone. I warn today's and tomorrow's youth against the
dancing idols. The youth must believe that my words of
warning stem from genuine concern. . . "
A Personal Note
To sit and read Eichmann's diaries is really hard. To report
on them objectively is even harder.
Every words reeks with evil, falsehood, hypocrisy, self-
justification, self-righteousness, phony tears. A person
reads and wants to scream. The descriptions coming from that
side are even harder to stomach than those of the victims:
from our side. He tells the truth -- half of it -- and he
lies. He lies. He lies!
I saw Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem. I sat beside a
relative of mine who did not raise his eyes, and adamantly
refused to look at the gray, unbelievable man who sat in the
glass box.
"Why?"
"It is forbidden to look in the face of a rosho."
