Voice From a Vicious Past

Forty years ago Israeli agents tracked Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to his hiding place in Argentina and abducted him to Israel, where he was tried and convicted of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity. He was executed in 1962, leaving behind a 1,300-page manuscript in which he sought to minimize his role in the Holocaust while portraying himself as an idealist who had “slid, like many others, into a situation from which there was no exit.” In fact, Eichmann had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, and a few years after that he joined the SS, which operated Hitler’s concentration camps and carried out mass killings in Eastern Europe. By 1942 Eichmann was directing deportations of Jews to the death camps.

Israel has now made public Eichmann’s self-excusing memoir. In it he describes the Holocaust as “the most enormous crime in the history of mankind.” Yet just five years before his capture Eichmann had told a Dutch journalist, a fascist, that he was sorry the Nazis had not been tougher executioners. In his manuscript, as in his trial testimony, Eichmann portrays himself as simply someone following orders and doing his duty. “I was never an anti-Semite.” And though his job required him to visit death camps and witness executions, “My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood.”

Israel released the Eichmann papers at the request of an American scholar, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University. She and her English publisher are facing a libel lawsuit filed in a British court by writer David Irving, whom, on the basis of his own writings and public comments, Lipstadt has labeled a Holocaust denier. Irving says he doesn’t deny that Nazis killed Jews. But he disputes the number of victims and the manner of their killing. He has also offered the incredible thesis that Hitler himself knew nothing about the Final Solution.

The Eichmann manuscript describes in meticulous detail how the deportations of Europe’s Jews were organized and how the mass killings were carried out. Lipstadt wants to use these insider’s descriptions to rebut Irving’s claims. Recently, in an interview with the Reuters news agency, Irving described the Auschwitz concentration camp, where millions died, as a kind of “Disneyland” constructed by Polish Communists after World War II to attract tourists. Even an Eichmann would not have dared to posit such a fantasy.