Truth, Lies, and One Man’s Story

An essay on the trial and controversy of Adolf Eichman and the attempts to deny the Holocaust

by D. S.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 1998)

CONTENTS

I...... History, Revision and Denial

II..... Ich Bin Adolf Eichman

III.... The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Paul Rassinier

IV.... Closing Remarks: History and our Responsibility

I. History, Revision and Denial

The revision of history has been a popular mode of reporting throughout the last century. Students are encouraged not to assume that everything they are taught is the only truth, but just one side to a story. In elementary school, my peers and I were fed stories about the "discovery of America", the angelic nature of our founding fathers, the missionaries that brought civilization and culture to the heathen peoples of Africa and other fallacies and half-truths. Consequently, in recent years, many have protested the celebration of Columbus Day, and his "discovery" has come to be accepted to have been nothing more than the imperialistic, ethnocentric conquests of Europeans in a land long inhabited by native civilizations. The impeccable character of our founding fathers was questioned by my classmates and I after reading Barbara Chase-Riboud’s The President’s Daughter, a novel based on facts stipulated about Thomas Jefferson’s illicit affair with one of his slaves and his many illegitimate children. Furthermore, it has since been established that the missionaries who "civilized" the Africans killed thousands of people while effectively destroying several highly developed cultures and ways of life. The void between what was once written and what is now taught stems from the legacy of history being written by those in power, that may or may not have had something to hide; those with the motivation to document events in their own favor.

Books are now written by scholars and academics on the other side of the spectrum. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn rewrote US history from the perspective of the working class labor unions and minorities. He argued, against most previously written texts, that our country and government has always been corrupt in some way, and that the suffering of America’s lower and middle class grew out of the greed for power and financial assets of our governing elite. This theory of economic determinism and government corruption broke away from the "my nation ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty" image and exposed aspects of US history that were hard for many to swallow. Debunking the conspiracies of our history is now a popular pastime. Oliver Stone had a field day in his recounting of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in his film, JFK. Our society has developed an insatiable need to distrust what is commonly believed in exchange for a newer twist, often just for the popularity and "modern thought" that are associated with new theories. To report on an aspect or event in history without introducing some new controversial spin has been considered old news and not worthy of publicity and recognition, whereas new and original ideas, often regardless of content, are reminiscent of our freedom as Americans to speak our truths.

Into this atmosphere of the new school of thought has emerged a group of pseudo-historians that write historical revisionism of World War II . This group of people, including names such as Robert Faurisson, Henry Elmer Barnes, Willis Carto, David Irving, Paul Rassinier, Arthur Butz and Austin J. App (to name just a few) have taken up the task of rewriting much of what has been previously written and believed. Their efforts have fit quite nicely under the umbrella of revisionism. But years before revising history became a popular and accepted pastime of our media and academia, these men had one base motivation, born out of any combination of German-Nationalism, Neo-Nazism, anti-Communism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and their own ideological, racist, subjective intentions: to deny the Holocaust. These efforts are summarized in the statement as quoted in Robert Faurisson’s book La Verite that reads, "Never did Hitler either order or accept that anyone be killed for reason of race or religion". To prove this would be to establish that the Nazis never committed genocide and thus were no more guilty in their role in WWII than any other political or military government has been in any other war. Given the difficulty that this task entails, the deniers go through a system of relativizing and justifying all of the aspects of the war so as to remove the burden of guilt from Germany. They argue that all war breeds death and misery and that there is no justice in the victors of a war prosecuting those whom have been conquered. If this point is accepted, it is enough to get Germany off the hook. If this argument is not accepted and German soldiers and military personnel are to be prosecuted, as was the reality, than the deniers quickly switch to the stance that the guilt, that they had previously argued is not legitimate, should be placed on the Allies, the Soviets and the Jews themselves. They continue relativizing by arguing that despite all the atrocities that did occur against the Jews, none of it was Hitler’s fault and that the Jews that did die at German hands, men, women and children alike, were partisans, spies and revolutionary enemies of the German state. They dispute the total number of Jews that were killed. They claim that the six million figure was inflated in order to gain financial reparations for the nation of Israel. They continue from this point to argue that since it is a "fact" that six million could not have been killed, and that there are now thousands of survivors receiving reparations from the nation of Germany, the one mechanism of mass killings, the gas chambers, ontologically, could not have existed. This is the kind of twisted logic that is used. They use this same logic, in reverse, by arguing that since there were not gas chambers six million could not have died. If there had been gas chambers and a premeditated plot to destroy European Jewry, than by the functionality of the Third Reich’s beaurocracy, there would not have been any survivors. The survivors and Nazi soldiers that have testified that there were in fact gas chambers are either in collaboration with a larger conspiracy, were forced to admit things that were untrue under the threat and stress of Allied torture, or are victims of what Patrick Buchanan has called "the Holocaust Survivor Syndrome... in which survivors are susceptible to group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics". The primary goal of the deniers is to prove that the "genocide was an invention of Allied propaganda, which was largely Jewish, and specifically Zionist, and which may be easily explained by the Jewish propensity to give imaginary statistics, under the influence of the Talmud". It is this Zionist conspiracy that would be the smoking gun for the deniers if its truth could be proven

The international distaste for the Germans in the years immediately after the war rendered the Zionist conspiracy theory offensive and far-fetched. The Nuremburg Trials saw all the big names of the Nazi destruction of the Jews sit in the dock at Nuremburg. Goering and Keitel, Ribbentrop and Seyss-Inquart, Kaltenbrunner and Frank and many others stood trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. The course of the trials unveiled all of the inhumane and vulgar crimes of these men, who now sat, not as glamorous warriors of a nation that had fought and lost, but as a sordid gang whose absolute power and authority had enabled them to commit almost every moral and ethical crime known to man. Many of them had hoped, in fact expected, that they would evade prosecution or that there would never be any trials. As was recounted in the Nuremburg court itself, as of 1943, the Germans had taken measures to hide their crimes, disposing of bodies by burning the corpses or crushing the bones into the soil. Incriminating documents of facts and figures had been destroyed, and thus many of these men were shocked that there were to be trials at all. The evidence against them mounted, and they realized that they were set to be convicted not of starting a war or of imperialistic take-over, but for genocide and crimes against humanity. They all knew that the sentence would be death. Each tried to save his own neck, and the majesty and loyalty of the Deuscthe Volkes that had once led them unified down the road of genocide now fell to pieces. Each, in one way or another, claimed ignorance. They either did not know who was responsible, were under specific orders and thus could not refuse, or they knew of what was happening, but it was the responsibility of an office other than their own. When asked what office was responsible almost all stated "Office IV B 4 of the R.S.H.A., Reich Security Head Office, responsible for the disposal of the Jews, headed by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichman". Close to twenty years later, Eichman was kidnapped from Argentina by Israeli volunteers and brought to Israel to stand trial for his part in the Holocaust of the Jews.

The story of Adolf Eichman begins with his birth in Solingen, Germany on March 19th, 1906 to a Protestant family. After his mother died and his father remarried, the family moved to Linz, Austria in 1913 where Adolf attended public high school, although he did not graduate. Under Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss, Eichman was not considered a citizen of Austria, given that he was born in Germany, and thus he could not be employed by the Austrian government. According to Rassinier (p.131), the Eichman family had personal contact with Kaltenbrunner, then leader of Austrian National Socialism at Linz. Kaltenbrunner made Eichman a salaried member of the party at Nassau, where he climbed his way up in rank. Jacob Robinson, in his book And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, does not make any mention of this familial connection with Kaltenbrunner, yet he does go on, in agreement with Rassinier, to explain Eichman’s role in the Nationalist Socialist party. According to Robinson, Eichman joined the party and the Elite Guard (SS) at the same time, in 1932. Eichman received training and served for a time in Dachau until, on October 1, 1934, he was attached to the Main Office of the Security Service where he stayed until the end of the war. By November 1941 he had reached the rank of Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant Colonel), in the department designated by the symbols II-112, IV D 4, IV B 4, and IV A 4(b). This department, of which Eichman was closest connected with IV B 4, was responsible for the principal jurisdiction of Jewish Affairs. As head of this department, he was in charge of all activities against Jews, the end result of which was the destruction of most of European Jewry.

After the war, Eichman was assumed by most to be dead, yet one testimony at Nuremburg claimed differently. Deiter Wisliceny testified, as a former inside member of the R.S.H.A. IV B 4, on the role that Eichman played in destroying the Jewish people. His testimony was informative because he was a Nazi and was one of Eichman’s chief assistants helping him carry out the "final solution" in Slovakia, Greece and Hungary. He told the Nuremburg Tribunal that Eichman had been the principal executive officer in the program to exterminate the Jews. He even quoted Eichman as saying toward the end of the war that he would "leap laughing into the grave" with "extraordinary satisfaction" at the knowledge that he had helped to exterminate five million Jews. He also added, unlike the other men in the dock at Nuremburg, that he was sure that Eichman was alive.

From the time of that testimony in 1945 until his capture on May 11th of 1960, the search for Adolf Eichman covered tips and leads in Austria, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Palestine and South America. Israeli and Allied volunteers and investigative teams scoured the world for Eichman until he was finally found, under the alias of Ricardo Klement in a small suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. A team of Israelis staked out his home, his work at a Mercedes Benz factory, and the bus stop that he frequented every evening on the way home from work. Three men, referred to by Moshe Pearlman as Gad, Dov and Yigal were the key components of the capture on the evening of May 11th. In a well devised and coordinated plan, the three men and one assistant waited in their car at the bus stop with the hood open, as if they had a breakdown. As Eichman walked by, as he did on every evening, Dov approached him with one word in mind to stop him, momentissimo. Before he could get this word out, the three became aware of Eichman’s hand deep in his right pocket, and in fear of a gun, Dov’s judo training took over and he placed Eichman in his grips. After a struggle and a small shout from Eichman, the three men had him secured and nestled on the floor of the back seat of their vehicle. He was held in a rented apartment until he could be transported back to Israel for trial. Once in the privacy of his temporary holding cell, he was asked a simple question, "Who are you". Eichman answered back in German "Ich bin Adolf Eichman. I know. I am in the hands of the Israelis". He was told that he was to be taken to Israel to stand trial. By the next morning, Eichman notified Yigal that he was prepared to make a statement and had agreed to be taken to Israel for trial. Eichman proceeded to write the following:

"I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichman, state herewith of my own free will: Since my true identity has now been revealed, I realize that there is no point in my continuing to try to evade justice. I declare myself willing to proceed to Israel and to stand trial there before a competent court.

It is understood that I will receive legal counsel and I shall try to give expression, without any embroidery, to the facts relating to my last years of service in Germany, so that a true picture of the events may be transmitted to future generations. I am submitting this declaration of my own free will; I have not been promised anything and I have not been threatened. I want at least to achieve inner peace.

As I am unable to remember all the details and may also mix things up, I request that I am helped by the placing at my disposal of documents and testimonies to assist me in my endeavor to establish the truth."

Adolf Eichman

Buenos Aires, May 1960

On April 11th, 1961, just eleven months after his capture, Adolf Eichman entered the glass-enclosed dock in the court house of the Israeli House of Justice. In the time that had passed since his capture, he was held in an Israeli prison where he spent the better part of each day revealing his story to an Israeli investigator of Bureau 06, Superintendent Avner Less. The months of interrogation resulted in the 3,564 page transcripts that outlined his involvement in the destruction of Europe’s Jews and his opinions of the documents and testimonies put before him. According to Less, he proceeded to defend himself in similar way that the men had defended themselves at Nuremburg. He, like Kaltenbrunner, his former chief, would lie until defeated by documentary proof. His next strategy was to portray himself as a mere cog in Germany’s bureaucratic machine and that he did nothing more than function as he was told under his orders. This was the overall statement as conveyed to Avner Less, and was to be the central aspect of his defense in the formal court proceedings. In the introductory section of Eichman Interrogated, Avner Less reflects on the impression that he developed of Adolf Eichman and his own thoughts on the case as the hearings came to a close. He stated, "Eichman quite obviously had no feeling for the monstrousness of his crimes, and he did not show the slightest twinge of remorse (p. ix)...Two months after the last hearing, Eichman stood trial before his judges in Jerusalem. The State of Israel paid his defense costs. His trial was of exemplary fairness. Not one of his victims received comparable treatment."(p. xxii)

The deniers, having regrouped after their defeat at Nuremburg, watched the trial of Adolf Eichman closely and once again returned back to their previous arguments. The Holocaust was not in any way as extreme as people think. To place anyone on trial for war crimes is contradictory to the evil nature of war and the fact that all war is crime. In truth, the only explanation for such a trial was the powerful Zionist movement that was seeking international sympathy and financial retribution for the nation of Israel, which given the time that had passed since the war, was running out. The trial received international attention and was reported on in almost every language in the modern world. Paul Rassinier, the French pacifist with socialist ties, and one of the founders of modern revisionism, emerged as the central denier seeking to prove the injustice of the trial and Adolf Eichman’s innocence to the charges brought against him in his book, The Real Eichman Trial or The Incorrigible Victors.

Rassinier, the deniers and the revisionists had a substantially different perspective on the trial and the issues surrounding Adolf Eichman than did Less, Pearlman, Robinson, and most other historians. Paul Rassinier, born in France in 1906, wrote many books and articles on his opinions and reflections on the Holocaust, German responsibility, the alleged Zionist plot and the merits of both the trials at Nuremburg and in Jerusalem. According to the Journal for Historical Review (published by the Institute for Historical Review, the organization formed in Southern California in1980 advocating the revisionist stance and the denier’s views), Rassinier co-founded the "Libe-Nord" underground Resistance organization in France during WWII, which helped smuggle Jews from German-occupied France into Switzerland. As a result, he was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943 and deported to Germany, where he was held prisoner until the end of the war in the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. Rassinier was profoundly distressed by what he perceived to be the many lies and myths about the concentration camps that were being circulated. Accordingly, until his death in July 1967, he sought to set the record straight on the "truth" about WWII, Germany's wartime Jewish policy and the motivations and agendas that he believed were behind the trials that followed. Rassinier, in a letter to a man named Myron Kok, summarized his research and writings.

"It is my intention to wring from public opinion the admission that, in the war of 1939-1945, Englishmen, Russians, Frenchmen and Americans committed crimes just as horrible and in just as great a number as those attributed to the Germans - whose real crimes are, however, very much open to dispute. I also wish to have it conceded that it is immoral to investigate merely German war criminals, especially when the criminal nature of their behavior has been exaggerated, as has indeed been the case. I believe that, after a war, there should be a general amnesty for all combatants because this is the only way to bring about an atmosphere of peace between the nations, and to avoid future wars. There is, of course, the Communist danger, as well, which can only be warded off by a Europe, united in mutual and brotherly goodwill...

That is my point of view: it defines my intentions. And it has, furthermore, the advantage of being based on a search for historic truth, beyond the rancors of outmoded nationalist."

- Paul Rassinier, May 8, 1965

In the context of the Eichman trial, Rassinier sought to further prove his point. In the chapter of his book, The Real Eichman Trial, that was devoted specifically to the Eichman trial itself, he begins by explaining why Eichman was not as responsible as we think. (This chapter, occupies pages 131-154. The references made to Rassinier that follow are taken from this chapter and occur in the same order in which he presented them, unless otherwise stated) He points out that the R.S.H.A. was composed of seven sections, the fourth of which was split into two sections, A and B. Of the sub-offices of the fourth section, Eichman was the head of the fourth, hence the abbreviation, IV B 4. Rassinier goes through a list of all the men that held rank above him. Directly his superior was Muller, who took orders from Roth, the head of the two sections, A and B. Roth answered to Heydrich, head of all seven offices, who answered to the "supreme head", Heinrich Himmler. Kaltenbrunner replaced Heydrich in 1942 after he was killed by the Czech Resistance. Rassinier declares that Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichman was sixth in rank, and acted only on the "functionary level" of decisions taken at a much higher level than Himmler himself (p. 131). He may in fact be quite right in his assertion that Eichman was no more than a functionary of the Nazi hierarchy, given that the word functionary only defines that he was "one who holds an office or trust; an official who has special duties". As a functionary of the organization that successfully completed the destruction of six million Jews, in the office responsible for Jewish affairs and transportation to concentration camps, it only seems obvious that his functionary "special duties" played a significant role in the Holocaust. The title functionary, by definition, does not exonerate him from any of his responsibility inherent in his title as head of the R.S.H.A, the office in charge of the disposal of the Jews. The R.S.H.A exercised direct control, through the Gestapo, over all the police systems of Germany and German occupied territory, including security, criminal and frontier police authorities. Orders could be given, through this office, to "All Higher SS and Police Leaders, Inspectors of the Security Police (SP), and the Security Service (SD); inspectors of the Regular Police; Branch Bureaus of the Security Service; State Police Bureaus; Frontier Police Officers and Frontier Police Posts and Criminal Police Bureaus". So it seems clear that when office IV B 4 began to fail in its efforts to establish a program of Jewish emigration and began sending Jews instead to death camps in Germany and German occupied territories, Eichman could simply tap into the functional hierarchy of the Nazi buearocracy and have his orders followed by soldiers and police across the continent. Rassinier points out that the sole purpose of Eichman’s division was to oversee the transportation of the Jews to concentration camps. In this way, according to Rassinier, Eichman functioned behind a desk, only devising and coordinating the most efficient way to organize and transport the Jews. Yet in his interrogation session with Avner Less, Eichman explains that on several occasions, he visited Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Minsk. He stated: "When I got there [Minsk], I was just in time to see some young riflemen...shooting into a pit...they fired into the pit, I can still see a woman with her arms behind her back, and then her knees crumpled." He goes on to explain that he was disgusted and did not approve of what was happening. He complained to his superior, Muller, that they were turning their own soldiers into sadists and criminals by shooting women and children. Yet he reminds Less that there was nothing he could do to stop it because the order had come down, verbally, from Heydrich, "The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews". Less asked him where the Jews that were being exterminated were from. Eichman responded by saying that he didn’t know where they were from, only that he knew there were trains going to Minsk. Of course he knew; he was the one orchestrating the train transport system. In his visit to Auschwitz, he recalled that he saw "several big buildings. Almost like factories. Enormous chimneys. Hoss says to me, ‘Working to capacity! Ten Thousand!’ A job was under way...I didn’t watch the gassing...But then he drives me to a big trench...and there were corpses burning on it." Having already established that Eichman’s division oversaw the "transportation" of Jews to such camps, it could not have been with great reluctance or guilt of conscience that he organized such trains to be used for the transportation of the Jews to their inevitable death.

Rassinier proceeds to argue that Eichman did not want to do what he did, yet had no choice under the orders he was given. He draws a parallel between Eichman and a certain medical physician named Professor Balachowsky (p.132). Balachowsky, Rassinier contends, was ordered, or "forced" to perform experiments on deportees that he knew amounted to assassination. Eichman followed orders that he knew amounted in the deaths of millions, yet Rassinier argues that the difference between the two was only motivation, and this was, in the end, what gave Balachowsky honors and Eichman the rope. Perhaps their motivations were different. Balachowsky was a doctor from the Pasteur Institute from Paris, and Eichman was a high ranking official of the R.S.H.A. Balachowsky was forced to perform these experiments at Buchenwald, and in the dark environment of the rampant death that surrounded him there, he surely felt that if he refused, he too would lose his life, or maybe worse, be kept alive as a lab rat himself. Eichman sat behind a desk, and although he asked that he not be summoned to the death camps, as described above, he certainly wouldn’t have lost his life had he sent less Jews to their death or masterminded a more humane solution for the "Jewish Problem". I refer to the section in Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he gives several examples of Nazis being transferred after having made the request, and one unique circumstance in which the men of Police Battalion 101 were set to the task of mass killing of Jews by shooting, yet were given another option. They were informed of their duty by their commandant, Papa Trapp. Goldhagen explains that after informing them of their task, one man remembers him making this offer, "As the conclusion of his address, the major put the question to the older battalion members of whether there were among them those who did not feel up to the task. At first no one had the courage to come forward. I was then the first to step forward and stated that I was one of those who was not fit for the task. Only then did others come forward. We were then about ten to twelve men, who were kept at the majors disposal". Goldhagen, in the pages that follow, makes it quite clear that there was sufficient room to disobey orders and receive transfers of duty. In fact, in his chapters on the death marches (p. 327-374), he points out that even after the Reich had ordered that the killing be stopped due to imminent defeat at the hands of the Allies, many Germans ignored these orders and continued their massacre. Surely Eichman, being a specialist on Jewish affairs, could have found some way to avoid sending millions to their death, yet he didn’t. He did not fear that if he disobeyed orders he would be injured or killed, just that his success in the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy would be hampered, and this was something that he cherished with his life. His motivations, as opposed to Professor Balachowsky’s, were born out of his endorsement of the National Socialist program for the destruction of the Jews, and thus it is fitting that he was rightly punished.

Rassinier’s next criticism rests on the conventions of the trial itself. Rassinier, following an admittance that his competence on the matter could be questioned, refers to a statement made by M. Raymond de Geouffre de la Pradelle.

"The proceedings carried on right after the end of the war by the Allies were based on the London Agreement of August 8th, 1945, and the Moscow declaration of October 30th, 1943 to which the London Agreement expressly refers. The principle laid down is that of the return of war criminals to the country in which their crimes were committed. In addition to that, the London statute of August 8th, 1945, created an international tribunal to try criminals whose crimes were without definite geographical localization...

This London Statute was promulgated by the Allies after they had received, May 8th, 1945, from head of the Reich government, Grand Admiral Doenitz, through the unconditional surrender, the mandate of German sovereignty...

There is not international text given that gives the State of Israel the right to judge a foreign national to whom crimes against humanity are imputed, or war crimes, when these crimes were committed in a foreign country. Furthermore, at the time when these crimes were committed, there could be no question of victims of Israelite nationality because the state of Israel did not exist.

The State of Israel is sovereign. Within the limits of its territory Israel may, if it wishes, by special law, give itself whatever jurisdictional right it chooses. But this right violates the general principles of law, and of international rule of competence established for crimes having an essentially international character, since having been carried out in Germany at a time when German law considered them licit, they are crimes only with regard to international law." (p. 132 and 138)

I will concede to Rassinier and Pradelle that given the conventions of international law, Eichman should have been tried by an international tribunal. It was the feverish enthusiasm with which the Israelis viewed the man that made them feel that he was theirs to place on trial. This was, perhaps, a grave mistake by the Israelis, and it inevitably added ammunition to the criticisms of the deniers cause. But this in no way changes the nature of the crimes that he committed, and the Israelis proceeded to do everything in their power to give him a fair trial. In terms of his interrogation, he was told that the sessions would be recorded and transcribed. He was given the opportunity, after each session, to check the transcriptions and make whatever corrections, amendments and additions that he felt necessary. He was told by the Israelis that, consistent with the conventions of a democratic state, he would be allowed legal representation. Under Israeli law, as in any country, only lawyers that have passed the bar exam of, and are practicing in, that specific country are allowed to appear before its courts. Realizing that Israeli representation for his defense would be hard to come by, and would likely be viewed by the international community as biased and unconscientious, the Israelis gave him an offer unheard of in the procedure of law. They allowed him a defense council of his choice, from any country, even Germany, as long as the lawyer had not been a member of the Nazi Party. Eichman chose a German, Dr. Servatius, as his legal counsel. Dr. Servatius requested that he bring legal assistants from Germany, and this was granted. He also requested that he present his defense in German, and that the prosecution’s arguments be translated from Hebrew into German for the benefit of his legal team and Eichman himself. This was also granted. Dr. Servatius then pointed out that neither Eichman nor his family was able to foot the bill for his defense, and he asked if Israel would cover the cost. This greatly disturbed the Israeli public. Many could not believe that between Eichman’s brother, a lawyer in Germany, and Eichman’s family in Argentina, who had received substantial funds for the publishing of his memoirs, the money could not be raised. Yet Servatius maintained that none of these funds were available, and that if he wasn’t guaranteed compensation, he would promptly leave Israel and return to Germany. Israel agreed to pay the $30,000 that Servatius requested and he proceeded to build a case in Eichman’s defense.

Despite all these concessions that were made by the State of Israel, the trial of a German national, having been kidnapped from his home in Argentina and placed on trial by a tribunal of all-Israeli judges for crimes committed in Europe approximately 15 years earlier does seem, even to those of us most passionately informed of the Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, to be suspect. Would it be possible for the judges to remain perfectly objective, suppressing emotions inevitably stirred up in the [PHDN's note: scrambled in the original file!] unfair in another way. He claimed that Eichman’s defense was not able to supoena to court all the witnesses that it would have liked to. He claims that "all the Germans living at liberty and in harmony with the international law and the laws of their country, were threatened with arrest for suspicion of guilt of crimes leading to a death sentence, if they so much as set foot on the soil of Israel."(p. 138) This statement by Rassinier holds no validity or truth. Gideon Hausner, in his opening statement and in direct response to the seriousness of the problem of German defense witnesses in Israel, introduced a solution. He offered that the defense witnesses could make sworn statements in Germany that could be submitted to the court in Israel, if the court agreed. This would obviously be damaging to the prosecution due to their inability to cross-examine, yet Hausner was willing to make the concession in an effort to provide the defense with a fair trial. The procedure that was actually used went as follows. The Israeli court would use the mutual-legal aid service between Israel and Germany, whereby witnesses would testify before a German judge and be questioned by representatives of both the prosecution and the defense. In this way, Hausner would be able to support any request made by Servatius to submit such material as evidence to the court. Thus, once again, Rassinier’s argument, presented with no footnotes or references, has no merit beyond sounding believable to an uninformed reader.

Rassinier (p.139) goes on to attack the six million figure and the existence of gas chambers. This is a strategy used often by the deniers. Just a page after he makes the reasonable claim that an International Tribunal might have been more appropriate than an Israeli Tribunal, and has possibly convinced some of his readers of his legitimacy, he reverts back to issues which he cannot and does not support with evidence, issues that, even if academically debated, have nothing to do with the guilt of Adolf Eichman and are motivated more by racially corrupt historiography than by hard facts. If the figure had been four million or two million, Eichman would still have been a war criminal. If the Jews had been massacred with clubs and machetes, as was the documented case of genocide in Rwanda, Eichman still would have been, given his "functionary role", responsible.

Rassinier boils the trial of Adolf Eichman down to a blackmail scandal orchestrated by Israel (p.141-143). He claims that the motivations for the case were not to punish Eichman but to gain financially. He points out that the annual payment of 200 million marks was to come to an end on January 1st, 1962. He also notes that the German government, under Adenauer, was still highly stocked with members who themselves were ex-Nazis. The Eichman trial brought these men into the public’s eye, and the capture and prosecution of party members that had never even gone into hiding began to occur in Germany. Rassinier would claim that The Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi crimes, founded in 1958 in West Germany, began to seek out these men and bring them to trial in order to appease the Israeli state and keep the Eichman trial from destroying Germany. These efforts were inevitably not enough, because the annual reparations were running dry, and no amount of indictments could have kept them coming. To him it was quite simple, "either Germany would accept the proposed blackmail, or no German government was possible."(p.141,142) He goes on to state, "In consideration for that sum [the 500 million marks allegedly given to David Ben-Gurion by Adenauer] assurances must have been given to the Chancellor that certain things would not be said [about the Nazis still working in the German Government]. And in fact they were not."(p.142) In Rassinier’s mind, the fact that the Eichman trial did not turn into a prosecution of most of Germany’s standing government is evidence that there was in fact a blackmail plot and that Germany complied.

Hannah Arendt, in her book, Eichman in Jerusalem, also tries to explain the motivations of the Israeli state. Although a Jew and a Zionist herself, she is skeptical of the Israeli court and of the motivations of the trial. She, like the Rassiner, also sees Eichman as relatively free from guilt. In her mind he was nothing more than a bureauocrat following orders. She goes on to argue that the Israelis, particularly Ben-Gurion, did not care what actually happened to Eichman. They were only looking to inform the world of the endless struggle that the Jews have had to endure, and that it was not until the creation of the State of Israel that the Jewish people were able to strike back with force. This trial, to Arendt, was nothing more than a show of that force and the extension of Israeli efforts to obtain international sympathy. She also hints at the theory of an Israeli monetary motivation, yet offers very little proof, aside from circumstantial evidence, that would support her theory. Although embraced by some to have broken the mold of western mainstream reporting, her book, not by her own intention, has fueled the fire of many revisionists and deniers.

Rassinier does not refer to Arendt, but he takes his blackmail theory beyond the scope of what she stipulates. Since he does not support his blackmail theory with substantial evidence or proof, I too wish to speak along a more conceptual and logical vein as opposed to just the hard facts. The story that Rassinier tells of the Israeli blackmail conspiracy makes it seem both possible and plausible. Yet he introduces no evidence that is decisive, that is, evidence that confirms one view while disproving its rival. Often truth, in the mind of people lacking solid evidence in their favor, is derived from the probability of a theory. My assertion is that the only context in which Israeli financial motivations seem to be true is the long-standing anti-Semitic notion that Jews have an insatiable desire to attain financial wealth. This is the motivation of Rassinier. In the racist and ideological environment of his bad history, Rassinier has no problem assuming that the Jews of Israel had no aim at leveling justice, that Eichman was just a mere casualty in their quest to accumulate cash. The problem for Rassinier would arise if he were to actually seek to prove his theory. Since the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews defines them as greedy and self-serving, money must then have been the only explanation for the trial in Jerusalem. Once that statement takes on a logical, or shall we say, ideological form in one’s head, the explanation of the theory itself becomes no more valid or reliable than a novel of fiction.

In a final note in my digression from factual references to that of conceptual logic, let’s for a moment, assume that Rassinier’s blackmail theory did occur, and that the only motivation of the trial was, in fact, financial gain. Has not the course of modern man, especially since the industrial revolution, been financially motivated. Have countries not gone to war, starved their people, and created laws for the specific purpose of gaining monetarily. Many of the policies of the Third Reich itself sought to streamline the German economy for the benefit of the Volkes and the detriment of the persecuted (Jews, Gypsies, disabled). Furthermore, if we continue to assume that the Israelis were financially motivated, does that in any way change the responsibility that Adolf Eichman had in the destruction of the Jews of Europe. The evidence brought before the court was substantial enough to find him guilty, and even if Rassinier’s blackmail deal between Adenauer and Ben-Gurion was a fact, that in itself, is all the more reason for the court to have been fair.

In the remaining paragraphs of Rassinier’s Eichman chapter, he persistently reminds us that there was no good reason to have the trial, that the prosecution, the Allies and the Zionists invented the evidence against Eichman, and that the true victim of the whole ordeal was Eichman himself. Much of what remains seems to be nothing more than the opinions of Rassinier, given that he continues to give no foot notes, and interjects his own subjective interpretations and assumptions in almost every paragraph. He allows Eichman himself to conclude the chapter, by recounting what his last words were before death. Eichman reiterates the points made by his defense, Rassinier and the deniers in general. He claims that he was "unfortunate enough to have been mixed up in these horrors. But these misdeeds were not of my own doing. It was not my desire to kill people. These mass murders are solely the consequence of the Fuhrer’s policy." (p. 152) He claims that his obedience was required, yet he was often the one giving the orders and devising, by his own inventions, the most efficient way to send Jews to their death. He claims that he had no ability to refuse, yet he makes no statement that he feared for his life if he hadn’t obeyed. His obedience, in his own words, was considered a virtue, and he had every intention of climbing the Nazi ladder of success. He claims that he could not refuse his orders, and that no one in his position would have. Goldhagen made it quite clear that refusal of orders was common, and loss of life was not a factor for those that did refuse. He argues that he never gave orders, yet by the very nature of the hierarchy of the Third Reich, he had almost every one of the police and security divisions at his disposal. He goes on to state that he knew, in his heart, that he was not guilty. Yet in the very next sentence he asks the Jews for their forgiveness for the injustices committed against them. Of what he wishes to be forgiven we can only assume to be that which he has just claimed innocence, and it is all too obvious that the millions that did not survive the Nazi terror cannot, and most likely would not, grant him their forgiveness. He concludes by stating, "It is my deep conviction that I am paying for what others have done". Certainly he was not the only one involved in the Holocaust of WWII. Certainly their were thousands of soldiers and policemen that pulled triggers and swung clubs. Yet there were millions that died at the hands of nobody in particular, in concentration camps, death camps and gas chambers. These people, men, women and children, were forced from their homes, stripped of their possessions, their humanity, and their dignity and crammed onto cattle cars to meet their death. This process was devised and overseen by one particular division of the Third Reich, IV B 4, and at the helm was Oberstambannfuhrer Adolf Eichman.

What if we, in this day and age, were to forget about the six million Jews ushered to their execution. What if we were to preserve the national socialism of Nazi Germany as just another military-political regime, desperate to reinvigorate the economy, unify its people and grow imperialistically. What if we never asked the question, "Why did the Holocaust happen, and how did the world sit and watch while so many people suffered?" If the answers to these questions are not detailed in history, than the legacy of the inhumanity that plagued Europe in WWII will be forgotten. For once an event is no longer the present, we have the obligation to preserve it in the past. That is what we do, as historians. Yet some seek to write history in a different vein. As Lucy Dawidowicz stated, "history has traditionally been a partisan or an accessory of national policy". Some use history as a means to accomplish their own ideological ends. We see this clearly when books and articles are written that relativize and marginalize the Holocaust, even deny that it ever happened, by people that have no national partisanship with Germany. By gaining acceptance on any small detail of the Holocaust as having been minor, typical, or fabricated, one effectively destroys the memory of those that died, while removing the guilt of those that sinned. Such is the case for Paul Rassinier. He believed that if he could prove that Germany was no more criminal than any other nation at war, and that thus the prosecution of Nazi soldiers and military officials deems no merit, than he could introduce into our minds the fallacious theory that nothing out of the ordinary happened between 1939 and 1945. Yet genocide is not a fact of war, and it’s perpetrators, if not for morality alone, but to preserve the record of history, need to be punished. Thus the writings of Rassinier and other deniers, in their contemptible lack of historical truth, are less reporting an interpretation of WWII, than they are preaching a belief. For them, as is the case with those that devoutly believe in any scripture or faith, the sheer fact that they have faith in what they believe, makes what they preach, their very own truth. So as we raise our children to be educated and to learn objectively and without bias, we must also teach them to ponder what the motivations were behind what they are being taught. Historiography of WWII that perpetuates nothing more than the notion of race superiority, anti-Semitism, and racial hatred is not history at all, but the ideology of a cult seeking to preach the pernicious world view that lead to the genocide of millions at the hands of men like Adolf Eichman.

1) Arendt, Hannah. Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Viking Press, New York, 1964

2) Chase-Riboud, Barbara. The Presidents Daughter: A Novel, Ballantine Books, New York, 1994

3) Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The Holocaust and the Historians, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981

4) Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Vintage Books, New York, 1996

5) Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume Books, New York, 1993

6) Pearlman, Moshe. The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichman, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1963

7) Rassinier, Paul. The Real Eichman Trials or The Incorrigible Victors, Steppingstones Publications, Silver Springs, M.D., 1979

8) Robinson, Jacob. And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1965

9) Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Assasins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, New York, 1992

10) von Lang, Jochen & Sibyll, Claus. Eichman Interrogated, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1983

11) Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, Harper Perennial, New York, 1995

1) http://www.isrp.org/histrev.html -key word seach: Eichman, Rassinier