Adolf Eichmann was the chief organizer behind the Nazi mass murder of Europe's Jews. Following the end of the war, he found refuge in a village in northern Germany before ultimately escaping to Argentina. Documents unknown until now show that he could have been captured earlier than he was -- if West Germany had been interested.
Spiegel Online: On the Trail of Holocaust Organizer Adolf Eichmann
Hannah Arendt coined the expression "banality of evil" to explain Adolph Eichmann, writing of "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.)
According to Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, U.K., "Arendt's main thought was not in fact the banality of the evil, but rather the banality of the perpetrators of it. With reference to Eichmann, she spoke of the 'ludicrousness of the man'; she said that, like most others implicated in the crimes, he was 'neither perverted nor sadistic… [but] terribly and terrifyingly normal', and without 'any diabolical or demonic profundity'; what characterized him was 'sheer thoughtlessness' - or, as she put it in another piece ('Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Social Research 38, 1971), 'extraordinary shallowness' and a 'quite authentic inability to think'.
"SPIEGEL has now gained access to thousands of pages offormerly confidential, secret and top-secret documents from the political archives of the German Foreign Ministry, the State Archive in Berlin, the Federal Archive in the western city of Koblenz, the estates of Adenauer and his chief of the Chancellery, Hans Globke, at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation, the US National Archives in Washington, DC, and the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem."
These documents reportedly show Eichmann to have been more than a mere cog in a machine. In one of two articles so far published, Eichmann is quoted (from a tape recording made in Argentina) as calling himself an "idealist," someone who "was part of the thought process" of the Shoah.
Spiegel so far has published two articles about Eichmann and the documents. The first article notes:
Eichmann, an Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) in the SS, had been the head of the "Jewish Section" at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office), the SS organization charged with fighting "enemies of the Reich," a position in which he was responsible for the deportation of Jews from Western Europe, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Greece to the extermination camps. He was the prototypical behind-the-scenes mastermind, an unscrupulous bureaucrat who never killed anyone with his own hands.
Beginning in 1941, men like Eichmann ensured that the Holocaust, as an act of industrialized mass murder, could acquire a position of grisly historic exclusivity. He and his staff developed the method by which the authorities and the police robbed the victims before deportation. Eichmann determined who was to board the trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka immediately and who would be deported later. He ensured that his men coordinated the transports. Figures showing the current status of the genocide were displayed in the offices of his section on Kurfürstenstrasse in Berlin.
In 1960, when Israel captured Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial, the West German (Federal Republic of Germany) government was deeply concerned:
What if Eichmann decided to talk? What would the former SS leader reveal about his accomplices and confidants? What would he say about the Nazi past of some of the leaders of the young republic? How would the trial affect the reputation of West Germans around the world?
The proceedings against Eichmann contained "so many risks of adverse effects, both domestically and abroad, that we cannot fully assess all of the difficulties that could be coming our way," a senior official with the Office of the Federal President noted. An anxious state secretary at the Foreign Ministry wrote that it was "quite possible that incriminating material against employees of the federal and state governments will come to light."
The second article, reports that, in Argentina, Eichmann met regularly with two other Nazis: Willem Sassen, a native of the Netherlands who volunteered for the Waffen-SS, and the German-born Argentine Eberhard Fritsch, who, in Argentina, published Der Weg (The Way), a monthly magazine that advocated giving national socialism a second chance in Germany.
With a tape recorder running, Eichmann talked about his crimes and boasted about his importance. "I was no ordinary recipient of orders," he said. "If I had been one, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thought process. I was an idealist."
There is not a single word of regret on the tapes, which are now in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. In fact, Eichmann's only regret, he said, was having made the mistake of not having murdered all the Jews. "We didn't do our work correctly," he said. "There was more that could have been done."
From the early 1950s, German intelligence, and. not long after that, the CIA, knew that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement.
Did the West German intelligence agencies fail in their search for Eichmann? Or could it be that they simply didn't want to find him? The truth is more complicated. The Gehlen Organization and, later, the BND did not consider it part of their mission to help track down Nazi criminals. More importantly, there was not even a warrant for Eichmann's arrest until November 1956.
When the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office finally took the initiative and, as a result, a warrant for Eichmann's arrest was issued in 1956, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) declined to launch an international manhunt through Interpol. BKA officials claimed that the Interpol statutes prohibited the prosecution of "crimes of a political and racist nature.
More articles are promised.