CRAIG BROWN: Adolf Eichmann, His Lost Bonds, and a Study of Evil
There is a fascinating documentary on BBC2 at the moment: The Devil’s Confession – The Lost Eichmann Tapes.
Eichmann was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust and was responsible for the deportation of millions of Jews to their deaths. After the war he managed to escape to Argentina, where he lived under an assumed name.
In 1960 he was tracked down by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, and taken back to Israel, where he was tried for war crimes a year later. He claimed he had simply followed orders, but he was found guilty and hanged.
During the trial, key evidence against Eichmann was inadmissible: transcripts of an interview with him recorded in Buenos Aires in 1957 by a pro-Nazi journalist. The judge rightly ruled that its authenticity could not be guaranteed, because it was only a transcript.
The recordings themselves were thought to be lost, but have now been unearthed after being locked away for decades. They reveal that Eichmann was not just an apparatchik acting on orders, but a passionate anti-Semite, eager to kill as many Jews as possible. “I didn’t care if the Jews I deported to Auschwitz,” he says on the tape, “I didn’t even care if they were alive or dead.”
Eichmann was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust and responsible for the deportation of millions of Jews to their deaths
In 1960 he was tracked down by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, and taken back to Israel, where he was tried for war crimes a year later.
My late father-in-law, Colin Welch, attended Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and kept a diary of the proceedings. It is a masterpiece not only of observation – for example, he notes how Eichmann’s voice under interrogation is ‘gruff, hesitant, as if a man were talking in his sleep at the bottom of a well’ – but also of moral outrage.
Colin couldn’t take his eyes off Eichmann, who was sitting there in the dock, just a few feet away. ‘I can’t look at Eichmann and I can’t stop looking at him, he fascinates and repels, like a snake.
‘Not that he looks strange. It would be more bearable if he did. If he had horns, a tail and eyes that sparkled with devilish malice, we would say, ‘Oh well, these crimes were not committed by a fellow human being, but by a monster. They have nothing to do with us.’
‘But unfortunately he looks very ordinary. He looks, in Nietzsche’s words, human, all too human. He has or had a cold. He coughs and sniffles, sneezes and blows his nose… he runs his tongue around his mouth, as if dentures don’t fit properly.
‘He is one of us, part of humanity… perhaps that is why we feel for him – yes – an overwhelming pity. I think almost everyone in the court must feel this compassion, although some of us may be ashamed to admit it.
‘It’s not sentimental pity. It is not because we forget or can ever forget, and certainly not here and now, those terrible washhouses, in which there was not hot and cold showers, but Zyklon B, the stinking smoking chimneys, those horrible trains filled with suffering, starvation, suffocation, die. people, the exhausted columns of women and children who staggered through the night, the beatings, the cruel whippings, the kicks and blows, the systematic humiliation, not only of guards and prisoners, but of all those who watched without visible remorse.
‘All this was also done to people, to six million of them or to many more. Heaven forbid we forget that, or become indifferent. But how can you not feel sorry for someone who now faces death completely alone and without friends, who may soon encounter a God whose existence he had denied (the SS documents said ‘non-religious’).
He claimed he had simply followed orders, but he was found guilty and hanged
‘That someone goes to his death with such an unbearable burden of guilt is horrible. We weep when we see God’s image so tarnished.’
Finally, he quoted the words of the prosecutor, Israeli Attorney General Dr. Gideon Hausner: “It is terrible to realize that whoever sets foot on this path can no longer find their way back to human values. ..his heart. has been destroyed; he turns into a cold block of ice and marble, shrouded in documents, orders, instructions and proclamations.”
About Eichmann’s one-way journey to evil, Colin wrote: ‘At points along this dark road, Eichmann seems to have extinguished all pity, kindness, conscience and natural feeling.’
And he concluded, “If that is so, how little there is left to die – a mere shell, all that remains of what was once a whole man.”