TIMES LONDON 03.01.00 Irving Was Ally of Neo-Nazis http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/frontpage.html?999 BY MICHAEL HORSNELL DAVID IRVING used Germany as a "playground" for his right-wing extremism, the High Court was told yesterday. For ten years, until he was banned from Germany in 1993, the court was told, the historian was in a political alliance with the German People's Union, an anti-Semitic party. The allegations were made by Hajo Funke, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, who compiled a 137-page report on Mr Irving's alleged extremist connections for the hearing. He said: "Mr Irving committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause of revisionism, and thus neo-Nazism, in Germany." Professor Funke added: "By denying the Holocaust, he wilfully and persistently violated the criminal law in Germany." He was giving evidence in the libel action that Mr Irving has brought against Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and Penguin Books, her publishers. Mr Irving, 62, is suing both for damages for saying that he is a Holocaust denier who has twisted history. The hearing continues. HA'ARETZ 03.01.00 Eichmann diaries are window to his inner world http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=3D14&datee=3D03/01/0= 0&id =3D70672 By Tom Segev Ha'aretz Correspondent Adolph Eichmann's journals, made public yesterday by the Israel State Archives, contain a detailed description of the annihilation of European Jewry, and Eichmann writes that the genocide program was carried out under explicit orders given by Adolph Hitler. After being kept under wraps for 28 years, the Eichmann journals were released yesterday under dramatic circumstances, their public presentation being recorded by half a dozen television film crews from leading world networks. Earlier, a copy of the journals was delivered to the defense in the defamation suit brought in a London court by British historian David Irving against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who has accused Irving of being a Holocaust denier. Among other controversial claims, Irving insists that Hitler was not cognizant of the systematic murder of the Jews. Eichmann describes the Holocaust in his prison memoir as the "worst crime in the history of humanity." The thrust of his journals is to minimize his own role in the atrocities. Describing his response to the use of the first gas chambers, at Lublin, Eichmann claims that he needed large quantities of cigarettes and red wine to steady his nerves. He adds that during this period he "didn't take seriously" the idea of using gas for genocide, believing that the plan would be canceled. Eichmann's prison memoir does not reveal new information about the Holocaust, nor does it contain any data that could be construed as compromising the Zionist movement. Eichmann consciously omits the name of a Jewish resident of mandatory Palestine who met with him in Berlin, and briefed him about the progress of Zionist projects. Despite its self-serving intents and deliberate deletions, the newly released journals provide an unprecedented window into Eichmann's inner world, and thus provide clues important to fathoming the magnitude of his crimes. Awaiting the trial's verdict in his prison cell, Eichmann professes that he is not an anti-Semite, and adds that his step-mother had Jewish relations and that he even once kissed a half-Jewish cousin. His best friend from his schoolboy days, he recalls, was Jewish - Eichmann says that he subsequently had a drink with this old friend while he wore a Nazi uniform, and that "he didn't care that I was a Nazi, and I didn't care that he was a Jew." Eichmann left meticulous instructions as to the fate of these prison journals, covering details such as the color of their jacket cover and the delivery of copies to his wife, in the event of publication. In the event of their non-publication, he asked his attorney to supervise their destruction. Instructions he delivered concerning the fate of the manuscript suggest that at the time he composed it, Eichmann did not expect to receive a death. JERUSALEM POST 03.01.00 http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/03/01/News/News.3383.html Eichmann's memoirs released By Elli Wohlgelernter JERUSALEM (March 1) - Nearly 39 years after it was written, the 1,200-page manuscript of memoirs and notes penned by Adolf Eichmann while in prison was released to the public yesterday, triggering further debate on the document's veracity and its impact on the history of the Shoah. While historians previously, and again yesterday, dismissed the memoir as little more than a self-serving document, it might perhaps serve a purpose this week as evidence in a libel trial taking place in London. Among the contemplative fragments written by Eichmann during the summer of 1961, while he awaited the verdict in his trial in Jerusalem, are: * "I said [in court] that what happened with the Jews, which the government of the German Reich brought about during the last Great War, was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind." * "I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork." * "It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times." The document's release was the subject of much debate, but it was decided to finally go ahead following a request from American scholar Deborah Lipstadt to make the document available as part of her defense in the libel suit. Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, are being sued by Holocaust denier David Irving. He charges Lipstadt libeled him in her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she accused him of distorting historical data. While the statements from Eichmann's memoirs might further prove the absurdity of Irving's views, the document as a whole has little historical significance, a number of experts said yesterday. "Historically, there is a very slight fraction of importance to it, because as a source of evidence, or a source that brings something new to the historical field, there is almost nothing," said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem. Historian Yehuda Bauer said the document has no historical significance "because it repeats things that were said at the trial. It may have some historical significance for psychologists, but I am not a psychologist, and I can't really judge that." As for Irving's contention that Hitler did not know of the "Final Solution" until late in the war, Bauer said Eichmann disputed that outright. "Oh, he says that all the time, he said that at the trial constantly," Bauer said. "There is nothing new in that." Historian Raul Hilberg, on the other hand, contends that there is some worth to the memoirs. "I believe that Eichmann is revealed," Hilberg said from his home in Vermont. "A person's style is like his handwriting - it describes the man. And this is irrespective of what he says. So there is that importance that we have to attach to it. "But I also believe that whatever he might conceivably have left out - and keep in mind the longer the manuscript the less likely it is that he left anything out - but even if he left out one thing or another, or even if he tried to protect himself, which is the most natural thing in the world, even in that case, you could say that what, 99 to 98 percent of what he writes is true." The decision to release the document, Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein said Monday, signified Israel's "historic sense of responsibility" to do "everything possible to fight Holocaust denial." Prior to Monday's decision, the Justice Ministry had been moving forward on releasing Eichmann's manuscript, following a threat of legal action last summer by one of Eichmann's sons, Dieter, who claimed the document as family property. Rubinstein said the request to use the manuscript in the Holocaust-denial suit expedited the process. "This trial speeded up the decision to make it available," Rubinstein said. (AP contributed to this report.) JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY 03.01.00 http://jta.virtualjerusalem.com/index.exe?0002299 BEHIND THE HEADLINES Eichmann again a =91cog,' but to discredit deniers By Douglas Davis LONDON, Feb. 29 (JTA) =97 Five large envelopes containing a 1,105-page= memoir in the archaic Gothic handwriting of Adolf Eichmann may now hold the key to a dramatic libel trial currently being played out in London. The memoir, written while Eichmann, chief engineer of the Holocaust, was in an Israeli jail awaiting execution in 1962 following his landmark trial, has been locked away in Israel's National Archive for more than 35 years. Now this document has been given new life and, unwittingly, new purpose in the hands of lawyers in London who are defending U.S. Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt. Lipstadt is being sued by Holocaust revisionist David Irving, who claims he was libeled by Lipstadt in her 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," published in Britain by Penguin Books. Irving, who denies that Auschwitz was a death camp and insists that the number of Jewish victims has been grossly inflated, maintains that his career was wrecked after allegedly being accused by Lipstadt of distorting historical data to suit his ideological perspective and being labeled a Holocaust denier. Under British libel law, the onus of proof is on Lipstadt to show that her contentions are accurate: She has to prove that Irving possessed information about the Holocaust that he deliberately distorted, selected or suppressed to suit his own purposes. Irving is making full use of this advantage in the courtroom by simply claiming that he is not an expert in the Holocaust, a subject that he told the judge he found boring. By asserting his relative ignorance of the subject, Irving increases the burden of proof on Lipstadt and her defense= team. But the Eichmann memoir =97 which is said to contain a meticulous record of the ghettoes and the cattle trains that took millions of Jews to the death camps of Eastern Europe =97 might change all that. While the memoir has been kept under lock and key in Jerusalem for the past 40 years, it has been available to a handful of scholars. And Irving, crucially, is among the few who are believed to have acquired a detailed knowledge of the memoir. In the past, Irving has claimed to have received two packages containing 426 pages of the document from a member of Eichmann's family while he was in Buenos Aires during a lecture tour of Argentina in 1991. He has used parts of the Eichmann account, presumably confident that they would never be made public, to support his contention that there was no systematic genocide and that Hitler neither gave orders nor had knowledge of any mass killings of Jews. In a 1997 letter to Robert Jan van Pelt, a Holocaust historian who testified for Lipstadt earlier in the trial, Irving also cited the Eichmann memoir to cast doubt on the existence of gas chambers. He claimed that while Eichmann described an "experimental" truck gassing, he was never shown a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Irving's presumption that the Eichmann memoir would remain securely locked away might prove to be the fatal flaw in his case. "There was no denial of the Holocaust there," said Gavriel Bach, a junior prosecution counsel at the Eichmann trial in 1961 who went on to become an Israeli Supreme Court judge and was the first person to read the memoir. "Eichmann tried to show that he was a minor cog in the machine and he had to obey orders, but he describes how terrible it was." Said Bach: "He wanted his family to see it, and to see his role. Maybe he wanted to convince his family he did not take a central part in the Final Solution." Now retired, Bach was Eichmann's main contact with the outside world while he was in jail. At one point, after witnessing the liquidation of a group of Jews, Eichmann's memoirs, perhaps self-servingly, record his shock and his consumption of large quantities of alcohol as a tranquilizer to relieve his tension. "In court," recalled Bach, "he admitted it was the most terrible crime in history. He says how he almost fainted when he saw the geysers of blood coming out of the bodies in the ditches." Bach served on the panel of Israeli scholars and lawyers who decided Sunday night that the memoir should be given immediately to aid Lipstadt's defense. A spokesman for Israel's Justice Ministry said the panel agreed to give Lipstadt's lawyers a copy of the memoir as soon as possible "so she can defend herself in a lawsuit brought by a Holocaust denier." And maybe, too, the final labors of the "Final Solution's" chief logician will also serve, unwittingly, to put to rest the contention that the= Holocaust never happened. GUARDIAN LONDON 03.01.00 http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,142027,00.html 'A monumental dance of death' As he awaited execution by Israel in 1962, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, wrote a 1,300-page diary of his time at the top of the Nazi regime. For 40 years, the manuscript has been kept under lock and key. Now, to help a US academic in a libel suit brought by the author David Irving, it has been released. Suzanne Goldenberg was one of a handful of journalists to see the document. The David Irving libel trial: special report Wednesday March 1, 2000 I will recount the genocide against Jewry, as it occurred, and describe my thinking both yesterday and today about this. For not only the fields of death did I have to see with my own eyes, the battle fields where life itself died, I saw much worse. I saw how, by a few words, through a single, abrupt order of one individual, whom the regime empowered, fields of annihilation were created. I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they rewound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time. "This I saw." The passage, written in blue ink in an even hand, was written by Adolf Eichmann on September 6 1961 as the Nazi officer who masterminded the destruction of Europe's Jews awaited sentencing in an Israeli court on crimes against humanity. Eight months later, Eichmann was hanged and his ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean. His memoirs - which he intended as the basis of a book to be entitled False Gods - were lodged in a locked safe in the Israeli state archives. And there they lay, all but forgotten, until yesterday when the Israeli state archives handed out a limited number of copies of the manuscript on computer disk. Despite misgivings about the surfacing of so self-serving an account of the Nazi holocaust by one of its main perpetrators, the justice ministry felt moved to intervene in a libel trial now under way in London. Lawyers for an American academic and Penguin Books, had requested the document for their defence in a libel suit brought by the writer David Irving. The memoir is a rambling and often repetitive account of Eichmann's life and the Nazi killing machine. Replete with philosophical meanderings and references to the Fatherland, duty and service, it stretches to some 1,300 pages. While Eichmann does not flinch from using the German word for genocide - v=F6lkermord - he never admits to his own guilt or betrays any= sign of personal remorse. Instead, he portrays himself as a man caught up by powers beyond his control. Written in longhand, and in out-moded script in a series of A4-sized notebooks that have barely yellowed with time, the manuscript is divided into chapters and includes footnotes. Each page contains Eichmann's signature along the left margin, the final "n" of his surname trailing into oblivion. It also contains Eichmann's last will and testament with elaborate instructions for the disposal of his mortal remains. Eichmann wanted to be cremated along the Danube, at Linz, and his ashes divided into seven piles - one to be put into his parents' grave in Linz, one to be buried in his garden in Argentina, and one each to go to his wife and four sons. He adds: "Death is no worse than birth, and a thousand times a thousand lives await us after ours." He dates the passage August 15 1961 and notes that is the 30th anniversary of his engagement to his wife, Vera. It is unclear how the memoirs will serve in defending the libel suit brought by Irving. In a book published in 1993, Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, the academic who is being sued, calls him a "Nazi partisan" for denying the systematic slaughter of Europe's Jews; Irving insists he is not a denier of the holocaust. Israeli scholars say the memoirs add little to the volume of evidence accumulated during Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem - which runs to some 3,000 pages. "It restates all the things Eichmann said at the trial, including the statement that the annihilation of the Jews is the worst crime in recorded history," says Professor Yehuda Bauer, director of research at the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. "He says he and Hitler were responsible and he talks about pagan gods whom he, unfortunately, came to believe in." However, Evytar Friesel, Israel's state archivist, says the manuscript is valuable for the insight it offers into Eichmann's psychology. "There is an interesting insight into the personal aspect of the matter. Eichmann has become a kind of symbol and here there is someone who is dealing with him as a very, very ordinary normal man." Throughout the memoir, which begins with Eichmann's birth at Solingen, Germany, in 1906, there are references to his family life. It describes his childhood, and years as a young man, trips to the mountains and beer parlours, and flowers for his girlfriends - an idyll that was interrupted when the "False God" of National Socialism beckoned in 1931. Eichmann was entranced by the symbols of the Fatherland, and the promise of renewal. "I served the gods with my whole being and faith. There was nothing I wouldn't do for them," he writes. Much later the memoir describes in detail the system of ghettoes, cattle trains and death camps that Eichmann devised for the slaughter of the Jews. "In January 42 I was given orders by Mueller to drive to Posen and give him a report on the killing of Jews. Before that, I had read some secret circulations [memos] of shooting of Jews in the East. But it was not real for me, I couldn't imagine it. What I got to see now was horror personified, nothing like last autumn in Lublin. I saw naked Jewish men and women entering an omnibus without windows. The doors closed and the motors started. The exhaust gases did not escape on the outside, they were directed inside. A doctor in a white coat pointed out a little spyhole in the driver's window and asked me to watch through it, but I couldn't. Everything seemed unreal. I couldn't stop the killing in any case. I would not have been able to, physically." And in his foreword, which was appended to his memoir, he admits: that the Nazi ideology was responsible for "the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity." But throughout the diary, details of Eichmann's personality constantly intrude. He talks about coffee houses, and the difficulty of negotiating highly polished floors in heavy boots. He describes his irritation with desk duty, and with initially being assigned to the wrong corps of the SS, and the strange ceremony at which he was inducted into the Nazis' elite unit. During the oath-taking, he describes seeing a human skeleton in a coffin. "Strange, I thought, very strange, all of it, but perhaps this corpse was housed in a museum." The manuscript's value to scholars lies in such details - along with Eichmann's later descriptions of the horror he created. "You have a human being, there is no doubt, you do not have a monster," says Friesel. "You have a man, living and talking like a human being who is beginning to recognise he is part of a terrible crime, but is saying: 'what could I do'." On that crucial point all the scholars who have seen the memoirs agree: it is utterly self-serving. Eichmann repeatedly describes himself as one in a team of horses, driven by a relentless coachman. "Regarding his own role, he lied through his teeth," says Bauer. It is perhaps Eichmann's efforts to minimise his personal guilt in the annihilation of the Jews that guided the decision of David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister at the time of his trial, to order the memoirs to vanish into a locked safe at the state archives. Although Ben-Gurion wanted Eichmann's prosecution to be highly public - it was the world's first televised trial - there was concern that the memoir would confuse the truths established there. And so the mansucript lay in the state archives, stacked up in manila envelopes and a medium-sized cardboard box. The Israeli authorities were reminded of the existence of the memoirs last August, when Dieter Eichmann, one of his four sons, approached the attorney general and requested the manuscript. After much deliberation, the Israeli justice ministry decided to hand it over. But for the urgency of Liptstadt's case, the process would have taken months. Holocaust scholars would also have preferred the text to have appeared in edited form, so that Eichmann's assertions that he was powerless to stop the killing would not have gone unchallenged. But as the copy right of the memoirs rests with Eichmann's survivors, that option was not legally possible. Now, with its reappearance, among the striking aspects of the memoir - excluding of course the mendacity in his denial of his own guilt - is its sheer vanity. In his foreword, Eichmann frets about his abilities as a writer, fearing that his explanation of the horrors that he orchestrated may be "empty and superficial", and that his writing style would be more suitable to humorous, light-hearted stories. He stipulates that he would like his version of the Nazi horrors to be bound in dove grey, or pearl, with a simple typeface on the cover and dictates the inscriptions to be made on the copies to be given to his four sons: "This is the way it was." He does not want the work to be published under a pseudonym and, although he must have known he could be hanged for his crimes, he asks to be consulted in case future editors deviate from his two suggested titles: False Gods, or a Greek maxim meaning Know Thyself. Eichmann turns to the classics again for the quotation to be placed on the frontspiece of his memoir, suggesting a passage from Plato's cave parable: "And he would consider his shadow world as true, but the real world as an illusion." Above all, Eichmann seems to be writing from a sense of mission. Although the text was never admitted as evidence during his appeal, it seems clear that he wanted to set out his version of the hell he helped to create. "I have therefore decided, to use time until the sentence is handed down, rather to make use of it, and to put into action what I declared. It cannot hurt; rather it can make people think what life can throw at a person," he writes in the foreword. "I was inspired by a thousand ideals and like many others I slid into something from which I could not extricate myself. Today, I have a distance of time from the events. Much that was valid then has become invalid. Previous 'philosophical values' I have discarded as obsolete junk and thrown overboard in the course of the years one by one. "Because I saw hell, death and the devil, because I had to witness the insanity of annihilation, because I was reined in as one of the many horses and could not break out either to the right or the left because of the will of the coachman and his orders, I feel called to, and I have the desire to, recount here and to give account of that which transpired." GUARDIAN LONDON 03.01.00 http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,142031,00.html 'I will not try to paint a pretty picture'. The Eichmann diary: further extracts The David Irving libel trial: special report Wednesday March 1, 2000 Acknowledging the horror of the Holocaust: I am in Israel. The giving of evidence is complete and in eight days the prosecutor general and my defence will give their summations. So it will be around three or four months before the court comes to a verdict. Then I will call the child by its name. The president of the court wanted me to call it by its name; I obeyed and said that the events concerning the Jews that the German government in power at the time set in motion during the last great war are the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity . . . Most of the actors, who will now enter into history, I knew. I spoke with some of them and I can venture to assess them. I am going to describe life of that time as it was, as I lived through it and as I saw it. I will try not to paint a pretty picture. What only yesterday I believed I had to worship, today lies in the dust of the wreckage. On the shame of Versailles and the rise of National socialism: Young people were told of the national shame, traitors and the like. And then you hear the propaganda - there is a party that has even written the extinction of national shame on its banner . . . There was nothing about Jews, except the occasional mention, who would take that seriously? Who thought much about things at all. Old people perhaps. Young chaps were only interested in heroism, helping to extinguish the shame. Our gods demanded it. It must have been the same in ancient times. Why not trust them? On his army service: Military service was bloody elbows and knees - animal-like subordination - I accepted it all in place of the bohemian coffee houses and wine bars of my home, motorsports, mountain sport and being with my fiancee. I did this of my own free will, indeed, I gave up a lot for them. As long as the Fatherland could be free and the misery of the Germans had an ending." On the creation of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia: During a press conference in Prague, Heydrich [protector of Bohemia and Moravia], in his typically impulsive style, got carried away and named an impossibly imminent date for the de-Jewification of [his lands]. To fulfil his promise, Theresienstadt was cleared of German troops stationed there, and the Czech civil population resettled. At that time, Heydrich asked my opinion as to how I imagined a solution. He asked dozens of persons and offices. I told him he should make available a town with sufficient hinterland. In such a town, Jews from Bohemia and Moravia could be settled. On watching the gassing of Jews in sealed trucks during 1942: The buses were driven to a kind of meadow with a prepared mass grave. The doors of the buses opened and the contents were emptied into the graves. It was horrible. A civilian jumped into the graves and broke the gold teeth off. When you are confronted with a horror of this kind, a sort of unreality comes over you. It is difficult to explain to a non-psychologist. You have to pinch the back of your hand because you don't believe this is real. I pinched myself to see that this was not just a bad dream. That evening in May when I was attacked 30m from my home in Buenos Aires, when my hands and feet were tied, and I was tied to the bed, I had to pinch the backs of my hands, too, to see if it was real. It was the same here. I was not really an executor or even an observer. A kind of non-reality paralysed me . . . I was asked by one of the judges if we had no courage. And I told him, no, we had obedience, faithfulness to the cause, but not courage. GUARDIAN LONDON 03.01.00 http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,142032,00.html by: David Cesarani Words written in blood We've heard all these whining excuses before, says David Cesarani The David Irving libel trial: special report Wednesday March 1, 2000 Eichmann's prison memoir is a darkly fascinating document which contains details that historians will pore over for a long time. But it does not tell us anything of significance that is new about the Final Solution, nor much that is new about Eichmann. It is hard to see how it will have much effect in the Irving v Lipstadt trial. The prison writings repeat, in essence, the "memoir" that Eichmann dictated to Belgian journalist Willem Sassens in the 50s. This was published in truncated form in Life magazine in 1960. They closely resemble the extended memoir, Ich Adolf Eichmann, based on Eichmann's notes for these interviews, which appeared in 1980, edited by a rightwing German lawyer called Rudolf Aschenauer. In both cases the tone is one of whining exculpation and self-justification. Eichmann also took the opportunity to settle a few old scores, too. In 1992, David Irving created a typical sensation by revealing that he had obtained the original tapes and transcript of the Sassen interviews. The following year, writing about the tapes, he claimed that Eichmann never mentioned homicidal gas chambers. Most historians dismissed the extra material served up in 1992 as valueless: more of the same "it wasn't me, guv" tosh that had been served up earlier. Yet Irving had to admit that there were details which posed a problem for those who disputed the central facts of Holocaust history. In particular, Eichmann recalled a meeting with Heydrich at which he was told: "The F=FChre= r has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews." In the latest version of his life left by the wily Eichmann to posterity, there are similar asides. He remembers: "In Treblinka and Belzec, Globocnik [senior SS officer in the Lublin district of occupied Poland] had erected gassing camps on the orders of Himmler and Kruger." However, a question mark looms over the reliability of the memoir. At the start, Eichmann talks about his precarious situation, his relationship with his lawyer, and the conditions under which he was writing. He constantly shifts the blame and wriggles out of awkward questions, presumably in the hope of justifying a final reprieve. He certainly acknowledges the mass murder of Jews and says he saw with his own eyes "the killing fields" and the "machinery of death" but Irving is practised at dismissing prison-house confessions such as these. They are as dubious as his account of his schooldays when he recalls that his best friend was a Jew. They are as unconvincing as his disavowal of anti-Jewish feeling, even when he was in the SS. But as an insight into a poisoned mind, his mordant reflections on life and nature, and his lack of self-criticism, they are priceless. ### Copyright 2000 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service Knight Ridder Washington Bureau March 1, 2000, Wednesday Israel's state archive releases the prison memoirs of Hitler henchman Adolf Eichmann By Nomi Morris JERUSALEM _ After keeping the prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann in a cardboard box for nearly 40 years, Israel's state archive released them Tuesday, providing a rare glimpse into the mind of one of Hitler's top henchmen. "I saw hell, death and the Devil. I had to witness the insanity of annihilation," Eichmann wrote, according to a typed transcript of the 1,200-page handwritten manuscript. "I hereby endeavor to give an account of this, as a warning." Eichmann, who supervised the vast apparatus that carried out the Nazi Holocaust, was captured by Israeli secret agents in Argentina in 1960, tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962 _ the only time Israel has used capital punishment. Israel's attorney general decided this week to release the document to aid American professor Deborah Lipstadt's defense against a libel suit by British revisionist historian David Irving, who has disputed many aspects of Holocaust history, including that Hitler knew the full extent of what was going on in the World War II death camps. Irving says Lipstadt, a historian at Atlanta's Emory University, defamed him and damaged his career when she referred to him as a "Nazi" in her 1994 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Echoing arguments for Eichmann's trial at the time, Israeli authorities now say that the memoir, which was stored in manila envelopes in a Jerusalem safe, will help educate a new generation about the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. The Nazis also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents and people with disabilities. "It's the very opposite of denial of the Holocaust," Israeli state archivist Evyatar Friesel said. "The things Eichmann describes are well-known. But here you have it from one of the major participants." Eichmann, who signed each page in the left margin, writes in the foreword that his missive is a "warning to today's and tomorrow's youth." He terms the "events concerning the Jews" carried out by the Nazis during World War II "the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity." As he did in his 1961 defense, Eichmann confirms in great detail the genocide of European Jewry between 1939 and 1945 _ even using the German word for genocide, "Volkermord." But he tries to diminish his own role, portraying himself as a small cog in a large operation that was the product of its place and time. "I was one of many horses reined in, who could not break out to the right or the left against the will and the orders of the coachman," he wrote. Eichmann never overtly admits guilt or remorse, but the diaries contain a retrospective, almost apologetic tone that acknowledges Jewish suffering. In several places, he says his nationalistic and anti-Semitic views changed during his decade and a half in Argentina after the war. "Much that was valid then has become invalid," Eichmann wrote. "I have discarded previous 'philosophical values' as obsolete junk." Several Israeli Holocaust historians cautioned against taking the memoirs too literally and out of their context as part of Eichmann's legal defense, which they say was a calculated attempt to escape the noose. Noted Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer referred to the documents as "this silly thing of Eichmann's" with greatest interest for psychologists. Bauer cited an interview Eichmann gave five years before his trial in which he expressed regret that he had not managed to kill even more Jews. Bauer said then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion opposed releasing the memoirs in the 1960s because "he didn't want this book to detract from the verdict." Bauer and other officials involved in the trial said Israel also feared that Eichmann's family would profit from publishing his diaries. For many years the memoir, which is part historical record and part philosophical ramblings, was forgotten. Then preparations were made to let a German research institute publish it, but the Eichmann family asked for the manuscript last summer and the copyright is thought to rest with them. In the foreword, Eichmann makes it clear that he hoped the manuscript would be published. He requested a cover of "pearl or dove grey," and asked that the German title "Gotzen" _ "idols" or "false gods" _ be printed in a simple typeface. While striving for literary flourishes and issuing various instructions to potential editors, he makes excuses for not being a "qualified" author and complains he could not write freely, knowing that Israeli censors would read the work. Eichmann suggested that the book open with a quotation from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's classic parable about a man in a cave: "And he would consider his shadow world as true, but the real world as an illusion." The material released by the state archive also contains Eichmann's last will and testament, written in Jerusalem in August 1961 with the sentimental notation that the date marked the 30th anniversary of his engagement to his wife, Vera. Eichmann requests that his ashes be divided into seven parts and that one part be placed at his parents' graves in Linz and another scattered in his garden in Buenos Aires. The remaining five parts were to be buried with his four sons and his wife after they died. Instead, Eichmann's ashes were thrown into the Mediterranean. Haifa University communications professor Gabriel Weinman says the London libel trial against Lipstadt may prove a prime opportunity to educate the public about the Holocaust at a time when survivors are gradually dying off and neo-Nazism has appeal in Europe and America. Weinman's book "Hate on Trial" examined the effect of the 1984-85 trial of Holocaust skeptic Ernst Zundel in Toronto. His public opinion surveys found that people who already held anti-Semitic views did not change their opinions because of the trial, but that most people who had known little about the Holocaust became more sympathetic to Jews than to Holocaust deniers. "Based on the findings in the Zundel case, I think the Israeli government has done the right thing," Weinman said. Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company The New York Times March 1, 2000, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final Eichmann Memoirs Released To Assist a Libel Defendant By JOEL GREENBERG JERUSALEM, Feb. 29 The lined notepaper is covered in tightly spaced script, in blue ink. Meticulous diagrams of the Nazi hierarchy are neatly labeled. And every page of the final draft was signed by the author, Adolf Eichmann. "He was efficient, horrendously efficient," said Prof. Evyatar Friesel, the State Archivist of Israel, as he showed the last memoirs of Eichmann this morning. Locked away for nearly 40 years, the manuscript was made public today by the Israeli government as evidence for a Holocaust denial trial in London. Eichmann, who organized the deportation of millions of Jews to death camps during World War II, wrote the memoirs in an Israeli jail in the summer of 1961 after Israeli agents seized him in Argentina and brought him to trial in Jerusalem. He was hanged in 1962. For hours a day over a period of four months, Eichmann sat at a small table in his jail cell and laboriously penned an autobiographical narrative and philosophical ruminations that he apparently intended to give the court and ultimately publish as a book. The work is titled "The False Gods," a reference to the Nazis, and includes such detailed instructions as a request that the book's jacket cover be pearl-colored or dove gray. The writings, totaling 1,100 pages which include drafts, diagrams and footnotes, recounts at length Eichmann's defense in his trial: that he was no more than a cog in the Nazi machine. Asserting that he was not anti-Semitic but misguidedly drawn to the nationalist ethos of Nazism, he portrays himself as an official with limited authority who was simply following orders. One diagram shows him at the bottom of the pyramid of the Nazi hierarchy. "The man was fighting for his life," Professor Friesel said. In a typical passage, Eichmann writes, "It is normal that I who was not responsible, was not the master planner, the initiator or the one giving orders, should set out to defend myself against these accusations." He added: "My position is the same as that of millions of others who had to obey. The difference is simply that I had a much more difficult task to perform in carrying out my orders." "I was obedient to the leadership of the German state, because we were told and believed that Germany had enemies intent on destroying it," Eichmann wrote in another passage. "The enemy's determination to destroy us, despite the madness of our own leadership at the time, weighed on my conscience." In the end, Eichmann wrote, the Nazis brought on "the greatest and most violent dance of death of all time," ruining Germany. After Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, cautioned that publication of the memoirs could compete with the verdict, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the manuscript locked away for 15 years at which time that decision was to be reconsidered. But the decision was not reviewed and the document continued to remain under lock despite a surge of public interest in the manuscript in the last year. Professor Friesel said legal questions about ownership and copyright prevented publication. Eichmann's son, Dieter Eichmann, demanded that Israel hand over the notes, saying they are his rightful inheritance. There were also concerns about the impact of publication on perceptions of the Holocaust. An Israeli panel decided last summer to release the memoirs, but in an annotated scholarly edition that, it was hoped, would put Eichmann's assertions in perspective and prevent their use to discredit the verdict. That process, which could have taken years, was hampered by technical difficulties. In the end it was decided to make the memoirs public immediately, after a request for the manuscript by defense lawyers in a libel suit brought in London by the historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, an American professor. Mr. Irving sued Professor Lipstadt and Penguin Books for a book she wrote that called him "a dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial." Professor Lipstadt's lawyers plan to submit Eichmann's memoirs, which describe the deportation and mass killing of Jews, as evidence of the Nazi genocide. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said that Israel, as the Jewish state, was obliged to make the material public. A copy of the manuscript has been sent to London, while a photocopy and typed versions of the text in the original German were made available at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem. A copy is also expected to be sent to Dieter Eichmann. Copyright 2000 The Washington Post The Washington Post March 1, 2000, Wednesday, Final Edition Israelis Release Eichmann's Memoirs; Nazi Executed 38 Years Ago Described Shock at Witnessing Mass Killing of Jews Lee Hockstader , Washington Post Foreign Service DATELINE: JERUSALEM, Feb. 29 Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's "technician of death" and an important cog in the Nazi killing machine, insisted in his jailhouse memoirs that he had nothing against Jews. In fact, he wrote, his stepmother even had Jewish relatives. Eichmann's manuscript--1,200 pages of flow charts, revisions, ruminations and self-justifications written in antiquated, nearly illegible longhand--was made public today, nearly four decades after he was abducted, tried and hanged by Israel for his role in the Third Reich's extermination of 6 million European Jews. While the memoirs shine little new light on the history of the Holocaust, they do add some grotesque personal touches: At one point, the senior SS officer who arranged for hundreds of thousands of Jews to be transported to their deaths describes himself as so shocked at witnessing a group being machine gunned that he drank himself into a stupor. Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Israel the next year, wrote that the Holocaust "was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind." He portrayed the logistics of the Nazis' Final Solution as the "gruesome workings of a death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork." He said he felt compelled to give his account "because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver." Despite the passage of time, the disdain of historians and Eichmann's exhaustive testimony at his trial, the testament still touched a nerve in Israel, which kept the manuscript under lock and key for 39 years. The few historians who had access to the memoirs have sneered at their content. The manuscript includes not only Eichmann's denial of his hatred for Jews, but also extensive passages in which he portrays himself as a family man who loved nature and children. "The impression one gets is that he's a liar," said Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian. "There's nothing new in it." Nonetheless, other Holocaust scholars argue that Israel, which has insisted that other countries open their archives of Holocaust materials, should have released the manuscript long ago. "It's immensely important to understand the man," said Tom Segev, a journalist and historian who has written extensively about the Holocaust. Writing in an Israeli jail cell as he awaited the outcome of his trial, Eichmann included intricate instructions for what he evidently imagined would be prompt publication of his work. He asked that the book's cover be pearl-colored and that his editor bear in mind the Bavarian idioms of his German. He left instructions that his wife get 10 copies, which she was to distribute to specified friends and relatives "in the name of my husband, with friendly regards." Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo's Jewish Office, titled the manuscript "False Gods," a reference to his supposed disillusionment with the Nazis. However, in an interview with a Dutch fascist journalist five years before his capture, Eichmann expressed no fondness for Jews or remorse for the Holocaust. Rather, he said he regretted that the Nazis had not been tougher executioners and was sorry the Jews had established a state of their own. At the time of Eichmann's hanging, the memoirs were ordered sealed in the Israeli state archives by then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who feared their publication might blur focus on the former Nazi colonel's conviction and execution. For decades after that, the document was all but forgotten. The government released it today in response to a request by an American professor, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, who is fighting a libel action in England by a British historian she has accused of denying the Holocaust. The historian, David Irving, has drawn attention for writing that the scope of the Holocaust has been somewhat exaggerated and for arguing that there is no documentary evidence that Hitler knew about the liquidation of European Jewry until late in World War II. Lipstadt wrote that Irving is a "dangerous spokesman" for Holocaust denial, and Irving sued her for libel. When Lipstadt's defense team requested the Eichmann manuscript, Israel obliged. The Jewish state is duty-bound "to help those who are fighting the denial of the Holocaust," Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said Monday, explaining his decision. "If the diary of this despicable person is one of the links in this chain, there is no reason that it shouldn't be available to the public." Israeli journalists have pressed for release of the Eichmann document for several years, but until now Israeli officials balked. They worried about a lawsuit from Eichmann's family if it were published in Israel, but were reluctant to hand it over to Eichmann's sons for fear they would profit from it. Last summer, officials said they intended to have the manuscript published as a scholarly text in Germany, complete with footnotes and annotations. But Lipstadt's request hastened the release, and Israeli officials said they hoped it will help her defense against Irving. Copyright 2000 Chicago Tribune Company Chicago Tribune March 1, 2000 Wednesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION 'THE GREATEST AND MOST POWERFUL DANCE OF DEATH . . .' Translated for the Tribune from the original German by Janice Becker. According to Adolf Eichmann, although he usually administered the Holocaust from afar, occasionally he had to witness the killings of Jews: I couldn't quite imagine it as reality since I had not seen it before. I had not spoken to an eyewitness or participant. So, arriving in Warthegau, I was taken by an officer of the local State Police office to Kulm. What I saw there, that was the epitome of horror. . . . I saw naked Jewish men and women boarding a closed bus with no windows. The doors were locked, and the engine started. The exhaust did not flow into the air, however, but into the interior of the bus. A doctor in a white coat drew my attention to a peep hole near the driver's seat through which one could see the interior of the car and told me to watch the procedure. I couldn't do that anymore. I didn't have words to describe my reaction to these things, it was all so unreal. Eichmann reports the genuine enthusiasm with which Nazi officials decided, at the Wannsee conference of 1942, to destroy Europe's Jews: With rare unanimity and happy consent, these state secretaries demanded expedited action. And it was the specialists, the prominent leading people who had gathered here to make these decisions. And their decisions were final because they had been empowered by their ministers and bosses not just to state their binding agreement but even in part to go beyond what (Reinhard) Heydrich (head of SS intelligence) had hoped for. And it was an open, blunt language that was spoken. Eichmann reports on political infighting among the Nazis, right in the midst of the Holocaust: The commander of the Security Police and the Security Service of the Reichsfuehrer in Krakow at that time, with the area of responsibility of the Generalgouvernement (the Nazi administrative designation for Poland), informed me that Frank (the governor) had given the order to arrest me upon entering the Generalgouvernement. Apart from the absurdity of such an order . . . --despite that, Frank was the "sole dictator" in his Generalgouvernement. While Holocaust deniers say Hitler didn't know about the killings, Eichmann makes repeated assertions about what the Fuehrer knew and when: Himmler had already begun the physical destruction of the Jews in the occupied Russian territories for months, pursuant to Hitler's order, which I heard from Heydrich's mouth. At times he reaches for a poetic expression for the deadly business he was in: Because I saw hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of many horses roped into the harness and following the will and the orders of the carriage driver, unable to break out to the left or the right, I feel called upon and I have the desire to report here and give witness to what occurred. I will describe the genocide of the Jewish people, how it occurred, and give my thoughts on it, from yesterday and today. Not only did I have to see the fields of death with my own eyes, the battlefields on which life died, I saw something much worse. I saw how, with a few words, with the single brief short order of an individual, who as commander had been given that power by the leadership of state, such life-extinguishing fields were created. And I saw the strangeness of the course of the machinery of death, gear for gear, like the workings of a clock. And I saw those there who monitored the course and progress of the workings; and they observed the secondhand that hurried along, hurried along like life toward death. The greatest and most powerful dance of death of all time. Eichmann notes that, in the late 1930s, he worked as an intelligence officer for the Nazis gathering information about Jewish affairs: At that time, my main work consisted of reading technical newspapers and magazines and digesting relevant works. . . . I got upset every time I saw the Yiddish newspapers printed in the Hebrew alphabet because no one could read them. So one day I went out to a bookstore and bought myself a textbook to learn the Hebrew language. "Hebrew for Everyone" it was called . . . After a year of self-study I wasn't getting any further, and studying alone was getting too boring. So I officially asked for permission for instruction by a rabbi, at the local rate of 3 reichsmarks per hour. Apparently out of political concerns, permission was not granted to me. Possibly the decision would have been positive if I had said, "Then lock a rabbi up until he has taught me the language." Copyright 2000 Chicago Tribune Company Chicago Tribune March 1, 2000 Wednesday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL EDITION MEMOIRS OF A NAZI; FOUR DECADES AFTER HIS HANGING, THE JAIL WRITINGS OF ADOLF EICHMANN ATTEST TO THE EVILS OF THE HOLOCAUST. By Hugh Dellios, Tribune Foreign Correspondent. Tribune staff writer Ron Grossman contributed to this report. DATELINE: JERUSALEM In an orderly, longhand scrawl of blue ink across 1,300 pages of now-yellowing paper, the man described as the Nazi "technician of death" coldly and painstakingly detailed the blueprint that leaders of Nazi Germany used to carry out the destruction of millions of European Jews. The Holocaust, wrote Adolf Eichmann in prison papers made public Tuesday, was "the most enormous crime in the history of mankind." But he claimed that he was a simple cog in the death machine, one who drank a lot after seeing masses of Jews gassed and shot to death. "Because I saw hell, death and the devil," he wrote, "because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of many horses roped into the harness and following the will and the orders of the carriage driver, unable to break out to the left or to the right, I feel called upon and I have the desire to report here and give witness to what occurred." His denial of guilt or any responsibility is the central theme in the Eichmann memoirs, released nearly 38 years after the man who organized the Holocaust death trains was executed by Israel for his central role in the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II. After four decades in a locked vault, the manuscript was made available on computer disk and via e-mail by Israel's state archivist after the government provided a copy to an American historian defending herself in a libel suit in England brought by another historian whom she accused of denying the Holocaust. Experts say there are no major disclosures in the self-serving memoirs. Most of Eichmann's alibi was heard at his trial in 1961, after he was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents from his hideaway in Argentina and spirited back to Israel for judgment. But the text offers a fascinating window into the mind of one of history's most notorious mass killers and vivid details of the Nazi death machine. Its detailed explanations of how the machine worked and Hitler's knowledge of it could undermine the arguments of those who deny the Holocaust occurred. "The Holocaust deniers will not be happy to read this," said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian who has written extensively about the Holocaust. "Here we have a very senior Nazi official who describes the detailed way they exterminated Jews, and he gives a clear description of another senior official telling him that Hitler gave the order himself. "It's an important insight into the inner personality of a killer, and if you can't understand the killer, then you can't understand the crime," said Segev, who had read half of the German-language manuscript by nightfall Tuesday. Eichmann, head of the Jewish section of the Third Reich's secret police, wrote the memoirs in jail in 1961 as he awaited the verdict in his sensational trial. It had been read by fewer than a dozen people over the years as the Israeli government debated whether to publish it. In the beginning, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion barred its release because he did not want it to diminish the impact of the guilty verdict. The Eichmann trial was a watershed for Israel, proving that the young country could secure justice and allowing many Israelis to acknowledge the Holocaust for the first time without embarrassment. Israeli officials also worried that Eichmann's memoirs, if published, might be misused by Holocaust deniers or that Eichmann's family might profit from them. Last August, after Israeli newspapers demanded access to them, the government agreed to make the memoirs public. But plans to publish the manuscript with explanatory text ran aground over copyright claims by Eichmann's family, which insisted the memoirs belonged to them. Officials say they then planned simply to display the memoirs at the State Archives in Jerusalem. But they announced Sunday that they were altering their plans to assist Emory University history professor Deborah Lipstadt in her legal battle against British historian David Irving in London. Lipstadt's attorneys requested the Eichmann documents to help reject a libel allegation Irving brought against her after a book she published in 1994 labeled him a "dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial." Irving, who has published several books on the Holocaust, says he does not deny it happened but he says that only about 100,000 Jews died in slave labor camps. Recently, he told the Reuters news agency that Auschwitz was a kind of "Disneyland" built for tourists by Polish Communists after the war. An important issue in the case is Irving's contention that Hitler did not know about the exterminations. In the memoirs, Eichmann makes several references to Hitler's direct knowledge of what happened. "The Fuehrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews," Eichmann writes. "(A Nazi officer) has received from the Fuehrer the necessary instructions. He was told to use the trenches dug as tank traps." "I personally had nothing to do with this," Eichmann then claims. "My job was to observe and report on it." Born in Germany in 1906, Eichmann grew up in Austria and included passages in his memoirs on the beautiful mountain scenery there. As a young adult, he worked as a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. He says he was never an anti-Semite and even had a Jewish boyhood friend and Jewish relatives through marriage. Yet, a firm believer in Hitler's promise to wipe out the "shame" of Germany's World War I defeat, he volunteered for the Nazi SS division in 1932. He was assigned to the secret police's Jewish section, where, in an attempt to follow the Jewish press, he tried teaching himself Hebrew with a textbook, "Hebrew for Everyone." Before World War II, Eichmann tried to travel to Palestine, to inform himself further about Jews and Judaism. But the British, who then administered Palestine, denied him a visa. In 1942, Eichmann wrote, he served as the recorder of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials decided to implement the Final Solution, the destruction of European Jewry. Also in 1942, he was put in charge of deporting Jews to Eastern Europe, but in the memoirs he claimed he had no authority and was only following orders. His job, he said, was to coordinate timetables for trains. Eichmann admits being on hand to witness some of the slaughter in the death camps in Eastern Europe. Here is how he described one scene in the town of Minsk in January 1942: "When I arrived at the place of execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms," he writes. "They fired from small machine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat. I got into the car. Berlin, I told the driver. I drank schnapps like it was water. I had to numb myself. I thought about my own children. At the time, I had two." In another passage, he describes watching naked men and women being loaded into an old bus and driven to a pit where they were killed. "Then a civilian jumped into the pit, checked the mouths and pulled out the gold teeth with pliers," he writes. Eichmann said he often resorted to drinking to erase the memories of what he saw--sometimes red wine from a flask and other times hard liquor, though he made sure not to get drunk because, he said, he was in uniform. "My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood," he wrote. Not all his work included extermination. He wrote that he was involved in a secret investigation of Hitler's dietitian, and later mistress, Eva Braun. The conclusion of the investigation, Eichmann says, was that Braun was 1/32nd Jewish. Throughout the manuscript, Eichmann insists he was always a disciplined and duty-bound person with no personal ambition. In Part III of the memoirs, he presents his philosophy of life, and a warning to younger generations not to follow "false gods" as he did. "I was animated by thousands of ideals and I slid, like many others, into a situation from which there was no exit," he wrote. "Former 'philosophical values,' I have thrown overboard as junk over the years." At other points, Eichmann compared himself to Socrates, quotes Plato and said he expected to be reincarnated. Israeli Holocaust scholars said the most striking aspect of Eichmann's memoirs are the extent to which they are filled with lies and distortions. That is because they were written in an attempt to save his own life, they observed. "It's a disguise that he thought would impress the judges and perhaps the rest of the world," said Yehuda Bauer, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem. "It's boring, long-winded and uninteresting. I think only psychologists might find some interest in it, and those who are too lazy to read the transcript from (Eichmann's) trial." Four years before writing the manuscript, Bauer said, a free Eichmann told a Dutch fascist interviewer that he regretted not having killed more Jews. "That was the real Eichmann, " Bauer said. "The man was a very intelligent man, a murdering, extreme anti-Semite who tried to hide his true beliefs during the trial and in these notes. This was no small official." What struck Segev, the historian, is how two-faced Eichmann was: While denying any guilt, he also appeared to relish the role of the evil person who should not be emulated. "There's so much vanity in it," Segev said. The manuscript also reveals how detail-oriented Eichmann was. Kept in a cardboard box in a vault at the state archive, each page of the original is numbered and signed in the margins. Neat footnotes are attached at the end. In instructions to his lawyer, Eichmann ordered that the cover of the published memoirs be either pearl or "dove gray" in color. Ten copies were to be printed for his wife so she could distribute them to their sons and friends. As a title, he suggested, "Know Thyself," the injunction of ancient Greek philosophers. He wanted the dedication to read, "That's the way it was." GRAPHIC: PHOTOS 3PHOTO: Only days before his trial was to begin in April 1961 for complicity in the murder of millions of Jews during World War II, Adolf Eichmann sits in his prison cell behind a stack of books. Tribune file photo.; PHOTO (color): Adolf Eichmann's signature on the memoirs he wrote in his jail cell from 1961 to 1962 and which have been locked up until now. Eichmann was hanged in 1962. AP photo.; PHOTO: Flanked by guards, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands in a bulletproof prisoner's box as his trial opens in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. Tribune file photo. IRISH TIMES 03.01.00 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2000/0301/wor14.htm Eichmann, an unlikely witness to Holocaust truth By David Horovitz In the summer of 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the former vacuum-cleaner salesman who rose through Nazi ranks to oversee the Third Reich's programme of mass killing of Jews, sat down in his Israeli prison cell to write his memoirs. Spread over more than 1,000 pages of orderly handwritten German text, they were designed to curry favour with the Israeli court which would, the following June, sentence him to be hanged. Eichmann insisted he was not personally anti-Semitic, described the Holocaust as the greatest crime in history, and attempted to portray himself as an unwilling accomplice, a cog in the mighty Nazi wheel, "a playball of circumstances". In the process of this effort at self-exculpation, however, Eichmann also described elements of the Nazi killing machine in clearheaded, personal detail. And it is because of those firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, as set down by the man who personally oversaw the transportation of European Jews to the concentration camps, that the memoirs have now taken on a new significance. Almost 40 years after Israel consigned the Eichmann memoirs to its state archive, they were made available to the public yesterday. Most importantly, however, they were also made available to the defence team in a libel action being fought in London's Royal Courts of Justice, where Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is being sued by the maverick British historian David Irving because she characterised him as a Holocaust denier in a 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Mr Irving has in the past described the Auschwitz concentration camp as a kind of "Disneyland", insisting there were no Nazi "factories of death" for the mass killing of Jews. He claims that, far from six million dying, no more than a million Jews were killed in the war. With the release of the Eichmann memoirs, Mr Irving will be doing battle in court with the bureaucrat who ensured those factories of death were supplied with their helpless victims. In his manuscript, which he titled "False Gods", for example, Eichmann recalls his own visit to Auschwitz in 1942 and how the camp commander described a process of killing Jews using sulphuric acid. "Round cotton wool filters were soaked with this poison and thrown into the rooms where the Jews were assembled. The poison was instantly fatal. He burned the corpses on an iron grill in the open air. He led me to a shallow ditch where a large number of corpses had just been burned." In detailing such scenes, and indeed throughout the memoirs, Eichmann professes his own discomfort but consistently avoids admitting any personal responsibility for Nazi crimes. As the Israeli state archivist, Mr Evyatar Friesel, noted yesterday, Eichmann gave an interview to a Dutch journalist years before Israeli secret agents captured him in Argentina in which his tone was utterly different. "In that interview," Mr Friesel said, "he spoke of how much he'd enjoyed destroying Jews, and what a pity it was that he hadn't destroyed them all. Of course (in those prison memoirs), he's lying." Lying about his own role. But not about elements of the Nazi killing machine. INDEPENDENT - LONDON 03.01.00 Foreign News THE NAZI LEGACY: Eichmann : Last words Phil Reeves in Jerusalem 03/01/2000 NEARLY FOUR decades after being buried in Israel's state archives, a rambling manuscript by Adolf Eichmann , the chief transport technician behind the Nazi death machine, was finally released to the public yesterday, reeking of mendacity, self-interest, and delusion. Penned in jail as he awaited his execution, the man who dispatched hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers ended his days trying to convince the world he was a mere Nazi underling, a lickspittle who was only obeying orders and who went to the gallows tortured by regret at having been dazzled and led astray by the Third Reich's leaders. Entitled False Gods, and presented as a warning to future generations, the 1,300-page text was released on a floppy disk by Israel authorities, after they agreed to provide the manuscript to an American university professor, Deborah Lipstadt , to help her fight a libel action brought by the British historian, David Irving. Eichmann , hanged in Israel in 1962 after being abducted by Mossad from his hideaway in Argentina, went to the grave leaving five large envelopes, containing documents carefully written by hand in Gothic German script, presenting himself as an unambitious man who was the victim of a larger evil which controlled his destiny. His writings have been examined before by a few scholars - and there is no doubt he repeated much of what he said in court nearly 40 years ago - but the public has not had access to the manuscript until yesterday. It was an historic moment, held back for so long largely because of Israeli fears that his self-serving words may be exploited as propaganda by neo- Nazis or, for profit, by his relatives. In them - and this is a key part of their relevance to the Irving case - Eichmann acknowledges that the Holocaust happened and declared it to be the biggest crime in history. He also describes how he witnessed the "gruesome workings of the machinery of death" in which "gear meshed with gear, like clockwork". It was, he wrote, "the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times". In one particularly graphic, but self-incriminating passage, he describes how he witnessed the execution of scores of Jews in Minsk, Belarus, in January 1942, after numbing his nerves with alcohol. "As I arrived at the place of execution, the shots were ringing out incessantly in a pit which was the size of several large rooms. They were shooting with machine- pistols. "As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull the child out, but then a bullet hit the child's head. My driver wiped small pieces of brain from my leather coat. I got back into the car. "Berlin," I said to my driver. "I drank schnaps as if it was water. I had to drink. I had to dull my brain. And I thought about my own children. At that time I had two." But time and again, he absolves himself of responsibility for the Nazi regime's horrendous crimes, painting a picture of himself as a nature- loving, simple, practical figure, who was brought up (in Austria, though he was German-born) to believe in discipline. He casts himself as a man who could not understand why his superiors kept embroiling him in death, instead of giving him the desk job he so coveted and clamoured for. A man who was horrified to witness the gassing of Jews in a mobile execution van. A man who loved his family, who made friends before the war with Jews and dissidents. A man who - in his youth - loved landscapes, wrote poems, and compared himself with Socrates. A man who believed his soul would continue to live on earth after his execution. A good man, who now, as he sat, pen in hand, in his cell with the clock ticking down towards his death, was intent on warning others against his "idiotic" mistakes. Almost every chapter contains an explanation of how little authority that he - the head of the Gestapo section in Berlin whose job it was to locate, deport, and exterminate Jews - actually held. In other words, this is not a man who accepts that he ordered the jailers of Auschwitz to kill Jews with Zyklon B gas, let alone one who played a part - as the 15-count indictment against him at his trial stated - in the sterilisation, plunder, murder, extermination, enslavement, starvation and expulsion, of the Jewish people. "I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver," wrote the former SS lieutenant-colonel. The extent to which these documents will be useful to the defence in the Irving trial is unclear. David Irving is suing over a book by Professor Lipstadt which says he denies the Holocaust. The British historian says he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. Eichmann states that the mass gassing of Jews in Auschwitz - one aspect of the Holocaust that has been questioned by David Irving - was underway when he visited the death camp, although he blames it on the commandant. But historians of the Holocaust were yesterday at pains to stress that his words were severely tainted by the fact that they were written in an Israeli prison, when he was hoping for a reprieve and was keen to curry favour with his Jewish captors. "There is nothing to be gained from this document," said Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian. "This is a demon who writes with a pitiful justification that repeats his claims in court." David Cesarani, professor of Jewish history at the University of Southampton, describes the Eichmann manuscripts as "worthless" and parts of them as "babble". In the documents, Eichmann claimed he visited Auschwitz in the spring of 1942, larding his account, as ever, with indications that he was an innocent by-stander. "I received from my direct boss Police Lieut-col Mueller the order to travel to Auschwitz and to report on how the commandant (Rudolf Hoess) was handling the Jews. "Hoess told me he was using carbon monoxide to kill. Round swabs were soaked with the poison and were thrown into the rooms in which Jews were gathered. The poison killed immediately. The corpses were burned on an iron grate outside. He led me to a shallow ditch where a large quantity of bodies were being burned. "It was a ghastly sight that confronted me, only alleviated by the noise and the powerful flames. He used some sort of an oil to burn the bodies." Eichmann also admits he penned the protocol at Wannsee conference outside Berlin in January 1942, infamous as the place where the "Final Solution" was approved. "It was my job, with the aid of a typist, to draw up the protocol, having for weeks beforehand-drawn together the numerous documentary material that Reinhard Heydrich [the head of SS security] would require for his speech. "The state secretary of the Reich interior ministry, Dr Stuckart, that otherwise so- cautious official, approached his work with fervour that morning and declared brusquely that forcible sterilisation [of Jews] and the compulsory ending of mixed marriages was the only solution to the problem of michehen [inter-racial marriages] and the problem of their children. But much of the Eichmann text is devoted to trying to generate pity for his loathsome behaviour. "There is probably no one left whose eyes saw the supreme horror, the infernal apocalyptic tempest, in the entirety with which I saw it. And so no one can stop me raising a finger of warning, for the Gods have silken tongues and their words are beguiling." Eichmann always hoped these words would one day be published. He left instructions to his lawyer to pass the manuscript on to a publisher, saying (true to old form) he preferred an editor familiar with Bavarian idioms who would "respect the nature of the subject". He wanted his wife to get 10 copies of the book, so she could pass them to friends and his four sons. In the end he got his wish, but his work was released to a world who knows far, far better than to believe him. www.independent.co.uk For a selection of sites relating to the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann , go to: www.independent.co.uk/ links/ Caption: Extracts from the self-serving manuscripts left by Adolf Eichmann (centre) as he awaited the hangman, and (right) a few of his Jewish victims awaiting their fate Eichmann , who was hanged for crimes against humanity, on trial in Jerusalem; Eichmann 's signature at the end of his memoir INDEPENDENT - LONDON 03.01.00 Foreign News The Nazi Legacy: EXTRACTS FROM ADOLF EICHMANN 'S MEMOIRS 03/01/2000 Eichmann going to Minsk, Belarus, to witness slaughter of Jews It was bitterly cold and I was wearing a long lined leather coat and I took with me the necessary reserves of alcohol, without which I would not have been able to do the job. But the alcohol clouded my mind. It is obvious that I could never allow myself to get drunk. I was in uniform with a driver in a police vehicle. But it is astonishing how much alcohol a man needs in order to keep his frayed nerves under control. Of course, schnapps would have been better than red wine, but I only drank schnapps when I couldn't get hold of red wine. I arrived in the evening. The following morning I turned up late... As I arrived at the place of execution, the shots were ringing out incessantly in a pit which was the size of several large rooms. They were using machine pistols. As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull the child out, but then a bullet hit the child's head. My driver wiped small pieces of brain from my leather coat. I got back into the car. "Berlin", I said to my driver. I drank schnapps as if it was water... And I thought about my own children. At that time I had two. And I thought about the senselessness of life. I could find no sense any more in the workings of the system. In this chaos it was unspeakably difficult to believe in anything any more, and I thought to myself that this might be what the Christian faith describes as hell, not something in the future with which to warn humanity; rather, we were all already in this hell. Eichmann on a trip to Kulm by Posen: "I saw naked Jews and Jewesses climbing into a locked bus without windows. The doors were shut and the motor was started but the exhaust gas did not escape into the air, but went inside the vehicle. A doctor in a white coat pointed out to me a peephole through which one could see into the interior of the vehicle and encouraged me to watch... I couldn't go on. I didn't have the words to express my reaction to these things, for it was all too unreal... I was taken to a kind of clearing in the forest and as I was arriving the bus also arrived and drove up to a dug-out pit. The doors were opened and corpses tumbled out into the pit. One over the other. It was a horrifying inferno. No, it was a super-inferno. Then I saw that some of them were still alive. Eventually they were still and dead. Then a civilian [official] leapt into the pit, checked all the mouths, and removed with pliers the gold teeth ... I had to pinch my hand to check that I was awake and that what I was seeing was real, and that I was not dreaming. Article 4 Previous ArticleNext ArticleReturn to Headlines Foreign News The Nazi Legacy: `This was the man who killed my father and twelve of my family...' Eric Silver in Jerusalem 03/01/2000 The Independent - London FOREIGN Page 13...13 (Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC) NOW A member of the Israeli parliament, Tommy Lapid was one of the Hungarian Jews whom Adolf Eichmann missed in 1944, when the SS colonel rounded up 450,000 people in three weeks and dispatched them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The 12-year-old Lapid and his mother were among thousands of others snatched from the transports and given a fragile refuge by the maverick Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg. Mr Lapid caught up with Eichmann in 1961, covering his trial in a Jerusalem theatre as a reporter for the Hebrew daily paper Ma'ariv. "It was the most devastating experience of my life since I came to Israel in 1948," he recalled yesterday. "This was the man who killed my father and more than a dozen members of my family." If he had expected to see the devil incarnate or a cringing penitent, Mr Lapid was disappointed. Eichmann , who fled to Argentina after the Nazi defeat in 1945, was kidnapped byMossad secret agents in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, and flown to Israel for trial. In his dock, a bullet- proof glass box, he personified what the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, branded in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem as the "banality of evil". To Mr Lapid, he looked and sounded like a typical German civil servant. "He played by the court's rules. He didn't use the trial as a Nazi's last stand. He presented himself as a small cog in the wheel of the Third Reich. You wouldn't notice him in a crowd. He made no distinct impression, intellectually or in his demeanour." Yet this "ordinary" manboasted to two friends, who repeated the story to the Nuremberg war crimes trials, that he would "leap into his grave laughing, because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be extraordinarily satisfying". In truth, Gerald Reitlinger estimated in his pioneering Holocaust history, The Final Solution, that "the number of Jews who died in killing factories and concentration camps, having been collected and forwarded through Eichmann 's Berlin office, could not have greatly exceeded a million". The rest owed their fate to others. Eichmann 's tally was enough to send him to the gallows on 31 May 1962. Rather than leap laughing, he asked for a bottle of red wine, drank half of it and mounted the scaffold. "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men," he told his executioners. Eichmann , born into a middle-class family in Rhine-land in 1906 and brought up in Austria, was not so much the architect of Hitler's Final Solution as its logistics officer. Reitlinger called him "the inquisitor of the Jews". His first job, in 1938, was to facilitate the emigration of Austrian Jews (to Britain or Palestine), but soon he was commanding the bureau that hunted Jews throughout the Reich and occupied Europe, sealed them in cattle trucks and sent them to the death camps. He kept a low profile until the Hungarian deportations began in March 1944, when he was frequently seen at the railhead making sure the trains ran fully laden and on time. On one occasion, Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian working for the Spanish embassy, tried to save two children waiting to board. When an SS officer stopped him, Eichmann intervened. "Leave the youngsters," he said. "Their turn will come." After Eichmann was brought to Jerusalem, Mr Perlasca was pressed to testify in his defence. He refused. When asked how he pleaded to 15 counts of war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, Eichmann told his judges: "Not guilty in the sense of the indictment." His court- appointed German lawyer, Robert Servatius, said: " Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law." Eichmann never denied the enormity of the Nazi genocide. It was, he acknowledged in court and in the testament released for publication yesterday, "one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind". Unlike David Irving, he disputed neither the numbers nor the technology. He proposed to "hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth". But when he was asked whether he regretted anything, he snapped: "Repentance is for little children." Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann "would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done as ordered - toship millions of men, women and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care". DAILY TELEGRAPH - LONDON 03.01.00 Weasel words that expose the banality behind Nazis: Daniel Johnson says Eichmann 's memoirs are still of vast interest nearly 40 years on DANIEL JOHNSON 03/01/2000 The Daily Telegraph Copyright (C) 2000 THE abduction, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann was the most sensational chapter in one of the most dramatic news stories of the 20th century: the story of how the Nazi leaders responsible for the extermination of the European Jews were brought to justice. For that reason alone, his memoirs are still of vast interest nearly 40 years after he wrote them. But Eichmann looms large in our post-war collective memory for another reason. His case was the first time since the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946 that the world's attention was focused on what then became known as the Holocaust. For the state of Israel, Eichmann 's public condemnation was a symbolic act of posthumous retribution on behalf of European Jewry. For the German-born American-Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt, dispatched to cover the trial for the New Yorker, "this long course in human wickedness" was the occasion for perhaps the first major attempt to deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, in a thesis summed up in a phrase that still resonates today: "the banality of evil". Her articles, republished in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem, sought to comprehend the genocidal mentality of the Nazis in a manner that many found offensive, though the last thing Arendt intended was to write an apologia for the man who had helped organise the murder of millions. She wanted to debunk the popular notion of the Nazis, encouraged by wartime propaganda, as demonic, sadistic monsters, and depicted Eichmann instead as a very ordinary, all too human bureaucrat. This unglamorous, "banal" evil was far more chilling, because such people could be found in every society. It could happen again. Everybody was a potential Eichmann . So does the Arendt thesis stand up now that Eichmann can tell his own story? In this rambling, lachrymose but by no means inarticulate testament he seeks, not surprisingly, to prove that he has grasped the enormity of the "Final Solution", while shifting the blame for his own actions on to others. Realising that he cannot hope to justify what he calls "the most capital crime in the history of humanity", Eichmann devotes hundreds of pages to justifying himself, denying that he was ever a Nazi or an anti-Semite, weeping crocodile tears over his victims. Over and over again he repeats: "I had to obey and to do what I was ordered." In so doing, he spoke for his generation: the thousands, perhaps millions, who by never questioning their orders became "Hitler's willing executioners", and who stubbornly refused to acknowledge their culpability throughout the post-war era. The great majority, even of the most senior Nazis such as Albert Speer, denied knowledge of the death camps. The first and noblest German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, knew how few of his countrymen had, like him, resisted the Third Reich; hence he did little to break the deafening silence about the past. Not until the Eichmann trial, followed by those of Auschwitz and other camp officials in the early Sixties, was the silence gradually broken. Germany was still a nation in denial. A perfect example of Eichmann 's self-exculpatory strategy is his description of how he, too, was so shocked by the mass shooting of Jews, which he saw at Minsk in January 1942, that he tried to blot out the reality of what he had just witnessed. "As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a little child in her arms in the ditch. I wanted to rescue the child, but a bullet smashed its head. My chauffeur wiped little pieces of brain from my leather coat. I got into my car. `Berlin,' I told my driver. "I, though, drank schnapps, as if it were water. I had to drink. I needed to intoxicate myself. And I thought of my own children; at that time I had two. And I pondered the meaninglessness of life." This short passage shows precisely what Arendt meant by the banality of evil. Eichmann 's response to genocide echoes many similar accounts by other "ordinary Germans". He feels an impulse to help the stricken child, but immediately suppresses it, turning his back on the horror. Spurious, self-pitying identification with the victims is followed by pretentious rumination on his fate. The nation of poets and philosophers had come to this. What does the work add to our knowledge of the history, as opposed to the psychology, of the Holocaust? Eichmann 's protests of innocence are largely amplifications of his evidence during the trial, which the court rejected. His claims to have worked tirelessly to ameliorate the living conditions of the Jews and to have enjoyed the trust of Jewish representatives could be verified only by meticulous comparison with contemporary documents; until then, the utmost scepticism is necessary. He minimises his own importance throughout, very much as Kurt Waldheim and countless other functionaries have done since. But Eichmann was by no means an insignificant cog in the murder machine. From his appointment in 1936 as head of the Jewish Section of the SD, under Reinhard Heydrich, he was a key executive. He dismisses as a forgery the note by a certain Dr Wetzel that identified him as the person who proposed Vergasung der Juden (gassing of the Jews). But he cannot deny that he prepared the protocol of the notorious Wannsee Conference on Jan 20, 1942, at which the creation of the death camps was announced to the relevant officials. "For some months Himmler had already been engaged in the physical annihilation of the Jews in the occupied Russian territories, which I heard about from Heydrich." Much of the manuscript describes Eichmann 's role in the deportation of the Jews from occupied Europe during the last two years of the war, which was his principal contribution to the Holocaust. The devil here is - literally - in the detail, and it will take careful research to distinguish between genuine new information and self-serving lies. The destruction of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, in particular, deserves close study. Eichmann says that it was Hitler personally who insisted that the deportations should continue after the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, had tried to stop them. But he fails utterly to acknowledge his own decisive role as chief of the Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann , which he pursued with fanatical efficiency, without which most of the Jews would probably have survived. As Hannah Arendt concluded: "This new type of criminal . . . commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong." Memories of the killing machine These are excerpts from Eichmann 's prison journal: Kulm, near Posen (now Poznan, Poland), January 1942: I saw naked Jews and Jewesses climbing into a locked bus without windows. The doors were shut and the motor was started, but the exhaust gas did not escape into the air, but went inside the vehicle. A doctor in a white coat pointed out to me a peephole through which one could see into the interior. He encouraged me to watch, but I couldn't. I didn't have the words to express my reaction to these things, it was all too unreal. I was taken to a kind of clearing in the forest and, as I was arriving, the bus drove up to a pit in the ground. The doors were opened and corpses tumbled out into the pit. It was a horrifying inferno. No, it was a super-inferno. Then I saw that some were still alive. Eventually they became still, and all were dead. Then a civilian [non-SS official] leapt into the pit, checked all the mouths, and pulled out the gold teeth with pliers. I had to pinch the back of my hand to check I was awake. In the spring of 1942 I received from my superior, police Lt-Col Muller, the order to travel to Auschwitz and to report on how the commandant was handling the Jews. Hoss [the commandant] told me that he was using carbon monoxide to kill the Jews. Round swabs were soaked with the poison and were thrown into the rooms in which Jews were gathered. The poison killed immediately. The corpses were burned on an iron grate outside. He led me to a shallow ditch where a large quantity of bodies was being burned. I was confronted with a ghastly sight, only alleviated by the noise and the powerful flames. Hoss used some sort of an oil to burn the bodies. Auschwitz, Poland, spring 1942: I must rebuke myself for my extreme idiocy and inadequacy in having let myself be gripped by the fixed notion of serving false gods and demi-gods loyally and dutifully, and for gullibly accepting their speeches about obedience and serving the Reich. There is probably no one left whose eyes saw the supreme horror, the infernal apocalyptic tempest as completely as I myself saw it. Just as I warn my own sons against such gilt-edged preachers of obedience, with their unctuous phrases about nationalism, holy war, and whatever the buzz words of the moment might be, so I warn the youth of today and tomorrow, on the basis of my own experience, against these dancing false gods. DAILY TELEGRAPH - LONDON 03.01.00 Israel opens Eichmann 's diary of evil Alan Philps in Jerusalem 03/01/2000 The Daily Telegraph ISRAEL opened its archives yesterday to release the prison journal of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann , which had lain unpublished for almost 40 years. The 670-page journal was dismissed by Israeli officials as the "memoirs of a scoundrel". The journal may assist lawyers for Deborah Lipstadt , an American writer who is defending a libel action brought by the British historian David Irving, whom she described as a "dangerous spokesman in the service of Holocaust deniers". A former vacuum cleaner salesman, Eichmann became an SS lieutenant colonel and the chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo during the Second World War. He was kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service, and taken to Israel where he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1962. The record shows that he was the logistical mastermind behind the policy to exterminate Jews, and was responsible for millions of deaths and deportations. But his prison journal, written while he was awaiting the trial verdict, tells a different story. He portrays himself as a "cog in the machine", forced to witness the killing of Jews which, he says, disgusted him. However, he never seeks to minimise the extent of the Holocaust, describing it as "the most enormous crime in the history of mankind" and "the biggest dance of death of all times". His own role, however, is that of witness or messenger in what he called "the gruesome machinery of death: gear meshed with gear, like clockwork". The Israeli attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, said that it was part of Israel's "moral obligation and commitment as a Jewish state" to make the journal available. Historians said there was little in the text that was not said at Eichmann 's trial, but it was a powerful confirmation of the fact of the Holocaust at a time when people were trying to deny it. "In this journal all the Nazi leaders are to blame for the Holocaust. No one can say now that it was Himmler's idea," said Moshe Zimmermann, a professor of modern German history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof Zimmermann said it was normal that Eichmann , who knew that he was facing the gallows, should have presented himself in a minor role. Prof Yehuda Bauer, the head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, said the journal was the work of "a very intelligent man, a murdering, extreme anti-Semite who tried to hide his true beliefs during the trial and in these notes". The chief archivist, Evyatar Friesel, said the journal was interesting as an example of the "banality of evil" - how one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century portrayed himself as a good family man, always quarrelling with his superiors. The journal had been kept secret at the orders of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who did not want a record published which contradicted the verdict of the court. More recently, Israel has wanted to avoid the Eichmann family from "making a fortune from the memoirs of a scoundrel", Prof Bauer said. But it was forced to prepare for publication after the Eichmann family claimed ownership of the journal. It was to be edited and published by a German institute to avoid a partial version favourable to Eichmann appearing. The archivists were preparing a typescript when the request came from London, so it was ready for release. Neil Tweedie writes: The Lipstadt -Irving case focuses upon Hitler's role in the Holocaust and the existence of the gas chambers as a means of mass extermination. Irving is suing Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, for branding him a "Holocaust denier" in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Lipstadt contends that Irving has systematically falsified and distorted information from Nazi documents to advance his claim that Hitler was not the originating mind behind the Final Solution. Irving has also disputed the widespread use of gas chambers, arguing that they could not have been used for the mass murder of Jews. How Lipstadt 's lawyers will use Eichmann 's account is unclear. GUARDIAN - LONDON 03.01.00 Irving 'committed to neo-Nazism in Germany' By 03/01/2000 The Guardian Copyright The historian David Irving had 'committed himself wholeheartedly' to the cause of neo-Nazism in Germany, the high court was told yesterday. The claim was made by Hajo Funke, of the Free University of Berlin, during Mr Irving's libel action against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books over allegations that he is a 'Holocaust denier'. Professor Funke told the court that Mr Irving's unconditional expulsion in 1993 'indicated the authorities' unwillingness to further tolerate his use of Germany as a 'playground' for his rightwing extremism'. Mr Irving, of Mayfair, London, is seeking damages over Professor Lipstadt 's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him. Prof Funke, an expert witness called on behalf of the defendants, who deny libel, compiled a lengthy report for the hearing relating to Mr Irving's alleged connections with rightwing extremists and neo-Nazism in Germany. He claimed Mr Irving had, from the early 1980s, been one of the 'main speakers and agitators' for the 'rightwing extremist' DVU party until he was banned from entering Germany in 1993. The party was extremist, anti-Semitic and 'propagates racial hatred', he said. The court saw video footage of a meeting in Germany in the early 1990s, at which Mr Irving was a speaker, showing skinheads demonstrating and chanting sieg heil. Mr Irving said he had put up his hand to tell them to stop and said it was not impossible that 'the skinheads had been bribed to come along and shout these slogans'. He denies having had connections with any extremist German group. His case is that the DVU (German People's Union) is a long-standing democratic and lawfully constituted German political organisation which has competed in the national and municipal elections. The 62-year-old author of Hitler's War is representing himself in the hearing before Mr Justice Gray, sitting without a jury. Mr Irving said he accepted invitations from 'whichever body invites me', provided he could fit it into his timetable. The hearing continues. GUARDIAN - LONDON 03.01.00 The history men: Nazism today The Holocaust is just an uneasy memory to us. But in old Vienna, does anti-semitism live on? By 03/01/2000 The Guardian It is 60 years away, but feels closer than ever. The Holocaust is on the front page, at the cinema and in the bookshop. It busies governments and divides nations. It is all around us. Take a single day: yesterday. In Vienna Austrians chewed on the resignation of the ultra-right Freedom party leader Jorg Haider, the fruit of worldwide condemnation of his views on Hitler and the Third Reich. In Jerusalem state archivists released the 1,300-page prison memoir of Adolf Eichmann , the pen-pusher who plotted the destruction of European Jewry from his desk. The document had been requested by lawyers for Penguin Books and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt who yesterday stepped up their libel battle with the rightwing historian and Holocaust 'revisionist' David Irving. Just down the road from the high court, a panel of Britain's leading curators were naming more than 300 artworks kept here which may have been looted from Jewish victims of the Nazis. All that, in a single day. Not that yesterday was anything special. It goes on like this all the time. Last week saw the publication of Chasing Shadows, the posthumous autobiography of Britain's best-known survivor of the Shoah, the much-loved rabbi and broadcaster Hugo Gryn. Next week it's the turn of The Holocaust and Collective Memory by Peter Novick. In between comes the British premiere of The Specialist, a (now very timely) two-hour documentary made up solely of footage of Eichmann 's 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Open up the latest edition of the Jewish Chronicle and you will find an item on the Holocaust on 12 of the 17 news pages. The Shoah is, says one great historian of the period, like a black mountain: the further away from it you stand, the larger it looms. There was a time when it seemed as if the Holocaust would soon fade from view. Even a few months ago assorted millennial retrospectives imagined the Holocaust would be quietly put away, along with the second world war and the rest of the darkest hours of the 20th century. It would become something of the past, something that happened in the last century. Yet what was one of the earliest gestures of the new millennium? The government announced that January 27 would become an annual Holocaust memorial day. The remembering would keep on, part of our national routine. Two questions nag, one straightforward, the other much more awkward: why is this happening - and can it be good for us? The why has a quick answer. An urgency has appeared born of mortality: survivors are pressed to tell their stories before they die. They are in a race against time, as the Shoah moves from living memory into history. That is why Steven Spielberg is spending Dollars 100m videotaping the testimony of every last survivor on the planet. He wants to catch the memory while it is still alive. But this is not the complete answer. The sad fact is that Spielberg and others are stirred by a more defensive motive: they want to refute those who deny the Holocaust ever happened. Enter the Irving trial, now in its final stages. He is suing Ms Lipstadt for branding him 'one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial'. He could have been ignored. The decision to take him on instead, at enormous cost, is typical of a strong current in contemporary Holocaust thinking: the desire to defeat 'revisionism' once and for all. The sentiment is keenest in America. Indeed, it's telling that it was US Jewry which wanted to do battle with Irving in a London court: British Jews were wary of handing him a free platform. But the Americans prevailed, as they nearly always do when it comes to the Shoah. As Novick's intensely controversial book explains with brilliant clarity, it is American needs which have shaped the way the Holocaust is seen - and which explain its current prominence in the public mind. Novick charts the way the Shoah has moved from the invisible status of the post-war years to its almost constant presence now. He eschews psychological explanations for the post-war silence - survivors were too traumatised, or guilt-ridden, to speak - in favour of hard-headed analysis. He explains that American Jews feared stirring anti-semitism if they complained of their wounds under Nazism: fears, writes Novick, which were amply justified. But there was also the cold war to think about. In the 50s, America had switched sides: Germans were now with the good guys, pitted against communism. To have been a victim of the Germans put Jews on the wrong side of that line, associating them instantly with the Soviet Union and with communism. The word from the Jews' own leaders was clear: keep quiet about the Holocaust. That changed, argues Novick, as America changed. In the 60s and afterwards, it became cool to be ethnic, so Jews stopped hiding their difference. More importantly, a 'victim culture' began to evolve in which historical suffering became a kind of certificate of legitimacy. African- Americans had slavery, Jews had the Holocaust, explains Novick in typically bald terms. For a community where religious observance was in decline, and assimilation was on the rise, the Holocaust became not just a rallying point, but a central focus of identity. As one Jewish benefactor put it, Israel and cultural education may not have much appeal any more but 'The Holocaust works every time'. Is this healthy? It cannot be. When suffering becomes the defining fact of a people's existence it leaves too little room for anything else. The pessimistic thought prompted by Chasing Shadows is that too many readers will skim the chapters recalling Hugo Gryn's childhood in the tight, warm Jewish community of Berehovo and jump to the horror of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We risk becoming fascinated not by Jewish life, but by Jewish death. As Novick writes: Hitler would win a posthumous victory 'were we to tacitly endorse his definition of ourselves as despised pariahs by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience.' And yet I cannot say we should simply let it go. For there are lessons to be learned from the Shoah, no matter how trite it may sound to say so. By studying it, we can see how close we come every day to the line that separates civilization from barbarity. Watch Eichmann defend himself in The Specialist and you soon understand how a bureaucratic sense of duty can fast collapse into indifference and then evil. Studying the Holocaust can reveal the telltale signs that lead to horror and, armed with that knowledge, we might devise an early-warning system to make sure it is not easily repeated. We have not always used this knowledge: witness Cambodia, Rwanda and now Chechnya. But it was surely the vigilance learnt from the Holocaust which enabled us to spot the danger in Jorg Haider. Novick is right: we should not wallow in it, we should not be defined by it. But we must remember it. Find a special report on the Irving libel trial on the Guardian network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving ASSOCIATED PRESS 03.01.00 by: Karin Laub International News Eichmann played down his role in Holocaust Forced to obey Hitler, Nazi wrote in memoirs KARIN LAUB 03/01/2000 The Globe and Mail Metro (AP) Jerusalem -- Nazi death-camp overseer Adolf Eichmann described the Holocaust as the biggest crime in history, but portrayed himself as only a small cog who had no choice but to follow orders, according to his prison memoirs released yesterday by Israel. The Nazi bureaucrat, who historians say played a key role in the genocide of six million Jews, penned the 1,300-page manuscript in the months leading up to his 1962 execution by Israel. It was titled False Gods, an apparent reference to his claims that he had been blinded and led astray by Nazi ideology. Although long reluctant to release the document, Israel relented so it could be used as evidence in a libel suit against U.S. history professor Deborah Lipstadt . British historian David Irving said a book by Prof. Lipstadt maintains that he has denied the Holocaust and distorted statistics. Mr. Irving said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration-camp deaths. The case is being tried in a British court. Leading Holocaust scholars in Israel have argued the document has no historic value because Eichmann distorted events to diminish his own role. The manuscript had been locked up for nearly four decades in Israel's State Archives because Israeli leaders feared the writings could be misused by Holocaust deniers or that Eichmann 's family could profit from its publication. Several months ago, Israeli Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein agreed to give the manuscript to a German research institute, which was to eventually publish it with footnotes. Mr. Rubinstein changed his mind and agreed to an immediate publication without restrictions after he was asked to help Prof. Lipstadt . The document has already been forwarded to Prof. Lipstadt , and Israeli Justice Ministry spokesman Ido Baum said yesterday that he expected the memoirs to be entered as evidence in the case. Israel hopes the memoirs will help bolster legal arguments about the killing process at the death camps. Mr. Baum said Prof. Lipstadt 's lawyers were especially interested in passages where Eichmann is more forthcoming than in his trial on the workings of the camps. In his introduction, Eichmann wrote that he witnessed the "gruesome workings of the machinery of the death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork." The Nazi leader, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Israel the next year, said the Holocaust "was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind," but immediately diminished his own role. He said he felt a need to give his own account "because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver." The publication of the document (the State Archives handed out computer disks with the material) was met with some criticism. Amos Hausner, whose father, Gideon, prosecuted Eichmann , questioned the wisdom of using the memoirs in court. "We still have many Holocaust survivors with us. They can testify on the gas chambers," said Mr. Hausner. "But instead of believing those people, we take the document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed." Yehuda Bauer, head of the Holocaust research institute at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, said Eichmann changed his tune to win favour with his Israeli captors. Mr. Bauer said that in an interview Eichmann granted five years before the trial, while still a free man, the Nazi leader said he regretted he hadn't taken harsher measures against the Jews, and that the creation of the state of Israel was a catastrophe. "There is nothing to be learned from this" document, Mr. Bauer told Israeli army radio. "This is a demon who writes with a pitiful justification that repeats his claims in court." FROM THE MEMOIR About the Holocaust: I said [in court] that what happened with the Jews, which the government of the German Reich brought about during the last great war, was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind. And I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork. It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times. About his beliefs: I had thousands of ideals and I slid, like many others, into a situation from which there was no exit. Time has given me distance to the events. . . . Many things that were valid then, are no longer valid now. Things I considered to be basic values, I have thrown overboard over the years. About his involvement in the Holocaust: Because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver, I now feel called upon and have the desire, to tell what happened. About his relationship with Jews: I was never an anti-Semite. LOS ANGELES TIMES 03.01.00 Foreign Desk: Eichmann Rationalizes His Nazi Role in Jail Notebooks REBECCA TROUNSON 03/01/2000 Los Angeles Times The Times Mirror Company JERUSALEM -- He wrote with chilling, meticulous care, signing and numbering nearly every page, filling his bound notebooks with detailed diagrams and an angular, almost Gothic script as he described the Holocaust as humanity's greatest crime. But Adolf Eichmann , who oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II, also sought to diminish his own role in the genocide, portraying himself in his prison memoirs as a helpless functionary, a cog in the Nazi killing machine. Nearly 40 years after the former Nazi officer was kidnapped, tried and hanged by Israel for his role in the Holocaust, the Jewish state on Tuesday released the 1,300-page manuscript Eichmann wrote in his cell over a five-month period leading up to his execution in 1962. The account, by turns evasive, self-serving and coldly rational, provides grim insights into what Eichmann calls "the greatest and most powerful dance of death of all time," the camps where Jews and other victims of the Nazis were systematically exterminated. "I am on the point of describing it, as a warning," he writes in the preface to the document, titled "Idols" in apparent reference to his claims that he was led astray by Nazi leaders. But he takes no personal responsibility for the Holocaust, describing himself at one point as like a horse harnessed to a wagon driven by others. His situation, he writes, is "the same as millions of others who had to obey." The manuscript, which the Israeli government ordered sealed after Eichmann 's death--apparently for fear it could be misused by Holocaust deniers--was finally released for use as evidence, ironically, in a British libel case over the issue of Holocaust denial. It was made available to the public at the same time, with archive officials reporting that more than 200 callers from Israel and around the world had requested e-mailed copies by Tuesday afternoon. Historians, Holocaust scholars and survivors here generally applauded the decision to release the document, with many arguing that Israel has a moral obligation to become involved in the British lawsuit, a case that some view as putting the Holocaust itself on trial. The Eichmann account will be used by lawyers fighting a lawsuit brought by controversial British historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt , a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and her publisher, Penguin UK. Irving has rejected Lipstadt 's claim that he is a Holocaust denier. Israeli officials say they hope the memoirs, released only in the original German, will bolster legal arguments by Lipstadt 's lawyers about the workings of the Nazi death camps. In his introduction, Eichmann writes of witnessing the "sinister functioning of the machinery of death, cog by cog, like a clockwork mechanism," and details some of the methods used by the Nazis. Some scholars said that although the document offers new insights into Eichmann 's own thinking, it has little historical value, repeating much of his extensive testimony at his trial. But others called it an important personal history by a key participant in the Holocaust, a man who rose through the ranks of the Nazi Party to direct the transportation of European Jews to the camps where they died. After the war, Eichmann escaped to Argentina, where Israeli Mossad agents located and captured him in 1960 and brought him to Israel to stand trial. "We don't have many memoirs by active participants in the Nazi extermination process," said state archivist and historian Evyatar Friesel, who argued for opening the document to public scrutiny. "It is an important addition to Holocaust literature." At his office Tuesday, Friesel displayed the handwritten original, along with Eichmann 's carefully drawn charts of the Nazi command hierarchy. They showed Eichmann 's official position, near the bottom of the Gestapo rankings in the Internal Affairs Ministry, but not his real responsibilities, the archivist said. The detailed manuscript reveals "a highly orderly man," Friesel said, "horrendously efficient, even in his writing." But the long debate over whether to release the document or keep it locked away in a temperature-controlled vault in the state archives illustrates the continuing sensitivity that the Holocaust holds for Israelis, nearly a third of whom are estimated to be Holocaust survivors or their descendants. "The government of Israel was always afraid that the Eichmann book would compete with the verdict of the court after his trial," said Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist and historian who has written extensively on the Holocaust. "But as Israel rightfully demands that all Holocaust material should be opened, how could it continue to conceal this document?" The manuscript's release stirred painful memories for survivors such as Shevah Weiss, a former speaker of the Israeli parliament, who remembers what he calls the "satanic phenomenon" of the Nazis as they wiped out most of the 16,000-strong Jewish community in his hometown in present-day Ukraine. But he said the discomfort he and others feel is worth it, to help them learn about Nazi ideology and methods and prevent any recurrence of such a genocide. "I know Eichmann had eyes, a head, a brain," Weiss said. "Now I will read this to understand what kind of heart he had." * Petra Falkenberg and Christian Retzlaff of The Times' Berlin Bureau and Reane Oppl in Bonn contributed to this report. PHOTO: Adolf Eichmann as he appeared in 1960.; ; PHOTOGRAPHER: Agence France-Presse ### Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company The Boston Globe March 1, 2000, Wednesday ,THIRD EDITION FROM EICHMANN'S PEN, HOLOCAUST DETAILS NAZI MEMOIR CALLED GRIM,= SELF-SERVING By Charles M. Sennott, GLOBE STAFF JERUSALEM - The prison memoir of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was= released by Israel yesterday, providing a chilling first-person account of "the gruesome workings of the death machine" of the Holocaust and a fresh glimpse into the vain and self-absorbed man who refused to admit his guilt before he was executed in 1962. Israel had refused to release the 1,300-page document for 40 years and kept it locked in the national archive, seeing it as a self-serving justification by the man known as the "technician of death" that would be misused by deniers of the Holocaust. Authorities also wanted to ensure that Eichmann's family could not profit from its publication. The Israeli government reversed its position so that the memoir could be used as evidence in a libel case being tried in London that has become a landmark battle against efforts to deny or minimize the Holocaust. The decision to release Eichmann's work - until now available only in excerpts to a handful of scholars - was made in August, but the government had planned to release it only after completing extensive footnotes to challenge Eichmann's denials of personal responsibility. But that process was taking too too long to help defense attorneys for American university professor Deborah Lipstadt, who has been sued for libel by British historian David Irving. Irving claimed that Lipstadt, a history professor at Emory Univerity in Atlanta, wrongly branded him a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: A Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Irving has said he does not deny that Jews were killed in the Holocaust, but he has challenged the number of deaths and the manner in which Nazi death camps worked. He said his reputation was destroyed by Lipstadt and is seeking financial damages. Irving's central claim - that the estimate of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust is a gross exaggeration and that the Nazis never used gas chambers to carry out mass murder - has been rejected as outrageous by many historians and scholars. In a statement cited repeatedly at the trial, Irving said during a 1991 speech in Canada that "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz" - a reference to the 1969 accident that helped derail the Massachusetts senator's presidential ambitions. The Eichmann memoir - which depicts in gruesome detail what Eichmann calls "the greatest dance of death of all time" - is expected to be a devastating piece of evidence in a case that has, in effect, put the Holocaust itself on trial. The account, in places clinically autobiographical and at other times a rambling discourse, contains grim details on precisely how the Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust. In describing the killing at the Auschwitz death camp, for example, Eichmann wrote of watching as a commander "burned the corpses on an iron grill, in the open air. He led me to a shallow ditch where a large number of corpses had just been burned." In the same section, he described how he drank alcohol to numb himself after witnessing scenes like this one: "As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a small child in her arms in the ditch. I wanted to snatch out the child but a bullet smashed into the child's skull. My driver wiped small pieces of brain from my leather coat." The 1,300-page document was penned by Eichmann during the months of his trial, which ended with his execution for crimes against the Jewish people and humanity. It is handwritten in meticulous German script, the lines straight on white notebook paper as they relate a jarring juxtaposition of the mundane and the unspeakable, what author Hanna Arendt referred to as the "banality of evil." Eichmann included precise instructions as to how his own ashes should be "divided into portions of one-seventh" and to whom and where they should be dispersed after he was cremated. From this self-absorbed focus on his own death he shifted easily to explaining in graphic detail how, in the death camps, "round cotton wool filters were soaked with this poison and thrown into the rooms where the Jews were assembled. The poison was instantly fatal." Many historians have objected to the self-serving aspects of the document, in which Eichmann painted himself as "a cog in the giant wheel of the Third Reich." "My position is the same as that of million of others who had to obey," he wrote. "The difference is simply that I had a much more difficult task to perform in carrying out my orders." Eichmann was a door-to-door salesman peddling vacuum cleaners before he rose through the ranks of the Nazi party. Ultimately he became head of the Department of Jewish Affairs, charged with the deportation of Jews from across Europe into the death camps. Tom Segev, one of Israel's top historians and author of "The Seventh Million: the Israelis and the Holocaust," said, "This is a very important document, a senior official of the Nazi government describing in great detail the extermination of the Jews. His own role, he tries to diminish. And that of course is not that interesting. But what is interesting is to read from someone who knew it from within." Segev said the Eichmann memoir is one of perhaps only three documents that spell out the Nazi "Final Solution" in such detail by one who helped carry it out. "It will be very significant at the trial because the detail is there," said Segev, who fought with the Israeli government for three years to try to force the release of the memoir. "The impression it leaves is a senior Nazi official telling you in his own words, 'This is what we did.' " Observers have feared that a verdict for Irving in the libel trial would undercut the worldwide effort to ensure that the Holocaust never happens again by documenting its horrors and educating the public through somber memorials, museums, academic conferences, films, and books. The movement for awareness and remembrance has taken deep root in America and parts of Europe, but not without challenges. If Irving were to prevail, noted the cover story in this week's Jerusalem Report magazine, "the fear is that he and people like him would try to brandish the verdict as 'proof,' confirmed by a British court of law, that the Holocaust did not unfold as it did." Segev and other analysts said Eichmann's memoir is being released amid a resurgence of a virulent strain of Holocaust denial in Europe and throughout the Arab world. They cite the highly publicized rise to power in Austria of Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, who has spoken admiringly of some policies of Hitler's Germany, as part of the emergence of a far-right political culture in Europe that tends to gloss over the evils of the Holocaust. In many corners of the Arab world, Holocaust denial is pervasive and can be heard from the Palestinian pulpits of Hamas's militant Islamic sheiks and in the Egyptian cafes of secular university professors. The most recent glaring example was a scathing front-page attack on Israel in Tishrin, the state-run Syrian daily newspaper. The article, published in January as peace talks between Israel and Syria stalled, branded the Holocaust a Zionist "myth" and said Israeli policies toward Palestinians were "far worse." =0C Copyright 2000 Southam Inc. Calgary Herald March 1, 2000, Wednesday, FINAL Israel releases Nazi diary Alan Philps, The Telegraph JERUSALEM Israel opened its archives Tuesday to release the prison journal of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which had lain unpublished for almost 40= years. The 670-page journal was dismissed by Israeli officials as the ''memoirs of a scoundrel.'' A former vacuum cleaner salesman, Eichmann became an SS lieutenant colonel and the chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo during the Second World War. He was kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service, and taken to Israel where he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1962. The record shows that he was the logistical mastermind behind the policy to exterminate Jews, and was responsible for millions of deaths and= deportations. But his prison journal, written while he was awaiting the trial verdict, tells a different story. He portrays himself as a ''cog in the machine,'' forced to witness the killing of Jews which, he says, disgusted him. However, he never seeks to minimize the extent of the Holocaust, describing it as ''the most enormous crime in the history of mankind'' and ''the biggest dance of death of all times.'' His own role, however, is that of witness or messenger in what he called ''the gruesome machinery of death: gear meshed with gear, like clockwork.'' The Israeli attorney-general, Elyakim Rubinstein, said that it was part of Israel's ''moral obligation and commitment as a Jewish state'' to make the journal available. Historians said there was little in the text that was not said at Eichmann's trial, but it was a powerful confirmation of the fact of the Holocaust at= a time when people were trying to deny it. ''In this journal all the Nazi leaders are to blame for the Holocaust. No one can say now that it was Himmler's idea,'' said Moshe Zimmermann, a professor of modern German history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zimmermann said it was normal that Eichmann, who knew that he was facing the gallows, should have presented himself in a minor role. Prof. Yehuda Bauer, the head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, said the journal was the work of ''a very intelligent man, a murdering, extreme anti-Semite who tried to hide his true beliefs during the trial and in these notes.'' The chief archivist, Evyatar Friesel, said the journal was interesting as an example of the ''banality of evil'' -- how one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century portrayed himself as a good family man, always quarreling with his superiors. The journal had been kept secret at the orders of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who did not want a record published which contradicted the verdict of the court. More recently, Israel has wanted to avoid the Eichmann family from ''making a fortune from the memoirs of a scoundrel,'' Bauer said. =0C Copyright 2000 Southam Inc. Calgary Herald March 1, 2000, Wednesday, FINAL Adolf Eichmann: Diary gives a look at the most capital crime of human= history Daniel Johnson, The Telegraph LONDON The abduction, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann was the most sensational chapter in one of the most dramatic news stories of the 20th century: the story of how the Nazi leaders responsible for the extermination of the European Jews were brought to justice. For that reason alone, his memoirs are still of vast interest nearly 40 years after he wrote them. But Eichmann looms large in our post-war collective memory for another reason. His case was the first time since the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946 that the world's attention was focused on what then became known as the Holocaust. For the state of Israel, Eichmann's public condemnation was a symbolic act of posthumous retribution on behalf of European Jewry. For the German-born American-Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt, dispatched to cover the trial for The New Yorker, ''this long course in human wickedness'' was the occasion for perhaps the first major attempt to deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, in a thesis summed up in a phrase that still resonates today: ''the banality of evil.'' Her articles, republished in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem, sought to comprehend the genocidal mentality of the Nazis in a manner that many found offensive, though the last thing Arendt intended was to write an apologia for the man who had helped organize the murder of millions. She wanted to debunk the popular notion of the Nazis, encouraged by wartime propaganda, as demonic, sadistic monsters, and depicted Eichmann instead as a very ordinary, all too human bureaucrat. This unglamorous, ''banal'' evil was far more chilling, because such people could be found in every society. It could happen again. Everybody was a potential Eichmann. So does the Arendt thesis stand up now that Eichmann can tell his own story? In this rambling, lachrymose but by no means inarticulate testament he seeks, not surprisingly, to prove that he has grasped the enormity of the ''Final Solution,'' while shifting the blame for his own actions on to= others. Realizing that he cannot hope to justify what he calls ''the most capital crime in the history of humanity,'' Eichmann devotes hundreds of pages to justifying himself, denying that he was ever a Nazi or an anti-Semite, weeping crocodile tears over his victims. Over and over again he repeats: ''I had to obey and to do what I was ordered.'' In so doing, he spoke for his generation: the thousands, perhaps millions, who by never questioning their orders became ''Hitler's willing executioners,'' and who stubbornly refused to acknowledge their culpability throughout the post-war era. The great majority, even of the most senior Nazis such as Albert Speer, denied knowledge of the death camps. The first and noblest German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, knew how few of his countrymen had, like him, resisted the Third Reich; hence he did little to break the deafening silence about the past. Not until the Eichmann trial, followed by those of Auschwitz and other camp officials in the early 1960s, was the silence gradually broken. Germany was still a nation in denial. A perfect example of Eichmann's self- exculpatory strategy is his description of how he, too, was so shocked by the mass shooting of Jews, which he saw at Minsk in January 1942, that he tried to blot out the reality of what he had just witnessed. ''As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a little child in her arms in the ditch. I wanted to rescue the child, but a bullet smashed its head. My chauffeur wiped little pieces of brain from my leather coat. I got into my car. Berlin, I told my driver. ''I, though, drank schnapps, as if it were water. I had to drink. I needed to intoxicate myself. And I thought of my own children; at that time I had two. And I pondered the meaninglessness of life.'' This short passage shows precisely what Arendt meant by the banality of evil. Eichmann's response to genocide echoes many similar accounts by other ''ordinary Germans. '' He feels an impulse to help the stricken child, but immediately suppresses it, turning his back on the horror. Spurious, self-pitying identification with the victims is followed by pretentious rumination on his fate. The nation of poets and philosophers had come to this. What does the work add to our knowledge of the history, as opposed to the psychology, of the Holocaust? Eichmann's protests of innocence are largely amplifications of his evidence during the trial, which the court rejected. His claims to have worked tirelessly to ameliorate the living conditions of the Jews and to have enjoyed the trust of Jewish representatives could only be verified by meticulous comparison with contemporary documents; until then, the utmost skepticism is necessary. He minimizes his own importance throughout, very much as Kurt Waldheim and countless other functionaries have done since. But Eichmann was by no means an insignificant cog in the murder machine. From his appointment in 1936 as head of the Jewish Section of the SD, under Reinhard Heydrich, he was a key executive. He dismisses as a forgery the note by a certain Dr. Wetzel that identified him as the person who proposed Vergasung der Juden (gassing of the Jews). But he cannot deny that he prepared the protocol of the notorious Wannsee Conference on Jan 20, 1942, at which the creation of the death camps was announced to the relevant officials. ''For some months Himmler had already been engaged in the physical annihilation of the Jews in the occupied Russian territories, which I heard about from Heydrich.'' Much of the manuscript describes Eichmann's role in the deportation of the Jews from occupied Europe during the last two years of the war, which was his principal contribution to the Holocaust. The devil here is -- literally -- in the detail, and it will take careful research to distinguish between genuine new information and self-serving= lies. The destruction of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, in particular, deserves close study. Eichmann says that it was Hitler personally who insisted that the deportations should continue after the Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, had tried to stop them. But he fails utterly to acknowledge his own decisive role as chief of the Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann, which he pursued with fanatical efficiency, without which most of the Jews would probably have survived. As Hannah Arendt concluded, ''this new type of criminal . . . commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.'' Copyright 2000 Alef Publishing Ltd. Mideast Mirror March 1, 2000 "Read and judge" Eichmann's prison diaries HIGHLIGHT: Eli Weisel in Yediot Aharanot "Adolf Eichmann wrote a diary? Of course he did. Anyone who saw him sitting and taking notes in his glass box, deep in thoughts, could imagine that a man like him would want his opinions of the trial and himself to be heard in the world. He may have seen his writing as some kind of answer to his accusers -- and even some sort of vengeance on the Jews, who dared to sentence him to death." (Eichmann, who rose in the Nazi ranks to direct the deportations of European Jews to death camps as head of the Department of Jewish Affairs at Gestapo headquarters, was abducted by Mossad agents in May 1960 in Buenos Aires and went on trial in Jerusalem in April the following year. He was hanged on June 1, 1962 after being found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity.) Eli Weisel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, writing in Wednesday's Yediot Aharanot after the Israeli authorities released Eichmann's prison diaries for publication, recalls the long days he spent in the Jerusalem court with hundreds of journalists who came to see a trial he believes should be remembered as the most important of the 20th century. "I listened to the witnesses, I was moved by the simple and painful things they said, by their pent-up tears. One spoke of what he saw in Berlin, another of what he heard in Vienna, a third of what happened in Auschwitz or Treblinka -- and each of them looked at the accused with concealed amazement: did this pathetic creature manage to inflict so much suffering on his victims? Where did he get such strength, such power, to send tens of thousands of them to the death camps? "I also looked at him steadfastly. Somehow I wanted to see in him a human monster, with three ears, five eyes and 10 arms -- a composite scarecrow and primitive god. I so much wanted to believe he didn't belong to the human species, that there was no connection, that there could be no existential connection whatsoever between him and me." Weisel thought that Thomas Mann, the great writer, was wrong when he wrote of "Hitler, my brother," at the end of the 1930s. "Eichmann is not my brother, Eichmann cannot be the brother of anyone born in God's image. "In the intellectual debates held at that time in Europe and the United States, I heard the so-called humanistic thesis that in every man, in every woman's child, a small potential Eichmann is hidden, who could break out and become big and terrible and cruel. I didn't agree then and I still don't agree. I am not prepared to believe that in each of us there exists a potential killer like him. Only those who engage in genocide are considered enemies of humanity of his kind." Eichmann did not symbolize the "banality of evil" -- his actions and crimes placed him on a level that was far from banal. "His technical-strategic assistance in the extermination of millions of people, because they were Jews, was not a banal act. And what should we say about his writing? We'll read it and judge. "Will we know something new about him? I don't expect sensational revelations. I am sure he said everything he had to say at the trial. "Will we now have a better understanding of the process that turned him into the Angel of Death's emissary? Will we find in his diaries something of the fear he instilled in his victims? "Something of the fear stayed with me when I looked at him in his glass= box in Jerusalem -- and perhaps when I read his diaries." Copyright 2000 Mideast Mirror =0C Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) March 1, 2000, Wednesday Horror of Holocaust, by Eichmann Sam Kiley in Jerusalem and Michael Binyon The diaries of the man charged with organising the Holocaust were released by Israel yesterday, 40 years after his execution. Adolf Eichmann's prison writings detail his involvement in the gassing and shooting of millions of Jews during the Second World War, including his reflections on having to brush the brains of a murdered baby off his leather coat. Eichmann's diaries were written in the months between his conviction and execution in Israel in 1962. They reveal a man desperate to prove that he had been an innocent cog in Hitler's killing machine, and not the Fuhrer's "transport officer of death". The diaries have been released by the Israeli Justice Ministry with a view to their use in the libel trial between David Irving and Penguin Books. Eichmann blamed Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, for issuing the orders for the "final solution" and sending the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis' mobile killing squads, into the field. But, as Heydrich's deputy in charge of "Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Affairs", Eichmann was responsible for the mass deportations that fed the ovens of the Holocaust. The diaries lay bare the full extent of Eichmann's complicity in the enormity of the Holocaust. They record his own visit to see the Einsatzgruppen operating in Minsk.= "It was bitterly cold and I was wearing a long-lined leather coat, and I took with me the necessary reserves of alcohol, without which I would not have been able to do the job. "But the alcohol clouded my mind. It's obvious that I could never allow myself to get drunk. But it is astonishing how much alcohol a man needs to keep frayed nerves under control. As I arrived at the place of execution the shots were ringing out incessantly in a pit which was the size of several large rooms. They were shooting with machine pistols. As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull the child out, but then the bullet hit the child's head. My driver wiped small pieces of brain from my leather coat. "I got back into the car. 'Berlin', I said to my driver. I drank schnapps as if it was water. I had to drink, I had to dull my brain." The diaries cast particular light on the origins of the Holocaust.= Eichmann was present at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, at which the "final solution" to "the Jewish question" was developed. He was in charge of writing the Wannsee protocol, and notes that the matter was discussed in "unflowery language". Eichmann additionally reveals the reality of life and death in the Auschwitz extermination camp. He witnessed the mass gassing of Jewish prisoners who were killed, according to him, using "carbon monoxide". Eichmann avoids any mention of Zyklon-B, the gas which historians believe he introduced to speed up the rate of killing in the death camps. He records that the Auschwitz commandant, Hoess, used "round wads of cotton" which were, "soaked in a poison and thrown into a room". Eichmann allegedly intended his diaries to be a warning against others= who might be tempted to follow "false gods" such as Hitler and Heydrich. He was executed on May 31, 1962, and cremated. His ashes were thrown into the Mediterranean. Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Holocaust historian, who has read the diaries in full, said that successive Israeli Governments had sealed the diaries to prevent the Eichmann family from making money by publishing them. Later, he said, they were simply forgotten until late last year, when scholars decided that they should be released. JANUARY 1942: WITNESS TO GENOCIDE At Kulm, near Posnan in Poland, in January 1942 Eichmann watched Jews being gassed by lorry fumes. "I saw naked Jews and Jewesses climbing into a locked bus without windows. The doors were shut and the engine was started, but the exhaust didn't escape into the air but inside the vehicle. A doctor in a white coat pointed out to me a peephole through which one could see into the vehicle ... and encouraged me to watch what took place. I couldn't do it for long ... I think that at that moment I was not in full control of myself ... "Then the bus drew away. I was taken to a kind of clearing in the forest and as I arrived the bus came and drew up to a pit. The doors were opened and corpses tumbled out into the pit, one over the other. It was an inferno. Then I saw that some of them were still alive. Eventually they were still and dead. "Then an official leapt into the pit, checked all the mouths and removed the gold teeth with pliers. I had to pinch the back of my hand to check that I was awake and that what I was seeing was real and that I was not dreaming." =0C Copyright 2000 Agence France Presse Agence France Presse February 29, 2000, Tuesday Israel opens Eichmman diaries after nearly 40 years Israel opened to the public on Tuesday the prison diaries of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann after keeping them under lock and key since his trial and execution almost 40 years ago. "We think as part of Israel's obligation and commitment as a Jewish state, all of us being survivors in fact of the Holocaust, we felt that we should enable the public to have access to what was written," Attorney General Eliyakim Rubinstein told reporters. Rubinstein decided to make public the 1,300-page document, handwritten in German, after a request from lawyers in a defamation case in London involving controversial British historian David Irving. The memoirs, written by Eichmann while on trial for crimes against humanity, went on display at the State Archives in Jerusalem, where they had been locked up since his hanging in 1962, the only execution in the Jewish state's history. Eichmann was one of the principal architects of the final solution, the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, in charge of organizing and coordinating the deportation of millions of Jews to the death camps of eastern Europe. He was abducted from Argentina by Israeli agents in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem for trial. Lawyers for Deborah Lipstadst had sought copies of the diaries for her defence in a defamation trial over her 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust." Irving, banned from several countries because of his views on the Holocaust, is suing Lipstadst and the book's publishers Penguin for branding him a "dangerous spokesman in the service of the Holocaust deniers." JERUSALEM, Feb 29 (AFP) - Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann thought the Holocaust the worst crime in history but he himself guilt-free, according to his prison memoirs made public by Israel Tuesday after 40 years under lock and key. "It's not an apology," Israel's state archivist Professor Evyatar Friesel told AFP. "He thinks that a terrible crime has been committed but the crime is not his responsibility and therefore he has nothing to apologise for, that he was a public servant who had to obey orders." Attorney General Eliyakim Rubinstein agreed to open up the 1,300-page document after a request from lawyers in a Holocaust libel case in London involving controversial British historian David Irving. "We think as part of Israel's obligation and commitment as a Jewish state, all of us being survivors in fact of the Holocaust, we felt that we should enable the public to have access to what was written," Rubinstein said. The memoirs were handwritten in German on ruled, now slightly yellowing paper, over the summer of 1961 while Eichmann was in a jail cell awaiting the verdict in his trial for crimes against humanity. Eichmann was one of the principal architects of the final solution, the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, in charge of organizing and coordinating the deportation of millions of Jews to the death camps of eastern Europe. The manuscript has been kept in a safe at the state archives since Eichmann was hanged in 1962, the only execution in the Jewish state's history, following his abduction from Argentina by Israeli agents and trial in Jerusalem. "The document was kept in our archives for 40 years and nobody asked for it," said Friesel, 69, who keeps his office computer perched on a black-bound copy of "The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. " Freisel says Eichmann was not penning a personal diary as it was clearly written for public consumption, contained little private or spontaneous thoughts and was organised in three parts, a biography, an account of events during the Holocaust, and "philosophical remarks." The manuscript, now in a cardboard box in Friesel's office, reveals an intelligent, if not well-educated man, and a highly organised bureaucrat, he said. "He was very efficient, I would say horribly efficient. It comes through all the way through the manuscript. Every page is signed." The manuscript has been made available by Israel on computer disk for perusal only, because of uncertainty over the copyright. The attorney general's office has also despatched a copy to lawyers in London who are fighting the libel suit by Irving against author Deborah Lipstadst for her 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust." Irving, banned from several countries because of his views on the Holocaust, is suing Lipstadst and the book's publishers Penguin for branding him a "dangerous spokesman in the service of the Holocaust deniers." Yeduda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian who had pushed for publication of the document, described Eichmann's attempt to downplay his role in the slaughter of millions of Jews as a "pack of lies. "He says that the murder of Jews was the worst crime in history. But he presents himself as a small cog in the machine," she told AFP. "I think he probably hoped it would be published as a counter to the verdict he knew was coming." Israel Gutman, chief historian at Yad Vashem, the memorial to the six million Jews massacred by the Nazis, said he welcomed the disclosure of the Eichmann documents although he considered they added little to the world's knowledge of events. "It is more important for people who ask themselves what kind of human beings were these murderers, these executioners," said Gutman, a Holocaust surviovor whose family was wiped out at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The head of Germany's Jews, Paul Spiegel, has warned against publishing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann's memoirs without critical commentaries, in an interview to be published Wednesday by the BZ daily. "I hope that the same bad use that was made of Hitler's Mein Kampf is not made" of the memoirs, said Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He also questioned whether the prison writings should be published without commentaries on the Internet. Israel made the memoirs public Tuesday. They were written by Eichmann in an Israeli jail while waiting for a verdict in his trial in 1961. Eichmann was later sentenced to death, and hanged in 1962. Eichmann was found guilt of organising the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps in Eastern Europe, though he stood by the defence that he was only obeying orders. He was captured by an Israeli secret service unit in Buenos Aires in 1960, and secretly stolen away to Israel. =0C Copyright 2000 Burrelle's Information Services CBS News Transcripts SHOW: THE EARLY SHOW (7:00 AM ET) February 29, 2000, Tuesday SECRET MEMOIRS OF ADOLPH EICHMANN RELEASED ANCHORS: JULIE CHEN REPORTERS: JESSE SCHULMAN Adolph Eichmann was executed in 1962 for his role in the Nazi extermination of six million Jews during World War II. Now his secret memoirs have been released in which Eichmann seeks to portray himself as someone who was only following orders. Jesse Schulman reports. JESSE SCHULMAN reporting: Under lock and key for almost 40 years, a firsthand account of the Nazi murder machine by one who kept it running. The prison memoir of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann was released for the first time today by the keeper of the archives of the state of Israel. Unidentified Man: Here I have the original manuscript of Adolph Eichmann. SCHULMAN: Eichmann wrote the story of his life and crimes, hundreds of handwritten pages long, as he awaited trial and later execution in an Israeli jail. Unidentified Man: Signed Adolph Eichmann. Mr. TOM SEGEV (Israeli Historian): I think it is very important that Israel releases these papers, because it is inconceivable that the state of Israel would conceal any material relating to the Holocaust. SCHULMAN: Historians will need time to wade through the material. They don't expect major surprises. Eichmann testified extensively at his trial, admitting the scale of the Nazi's crimes while playing down his own role. What may be new here is a glimpse into the mind of the man, a first-person account from the heart of darkness. Jesse Schulman, CBS News, Jerusalem. =0C SHOW: CNN MORNING NEWS 09:00 February 29, 2000; Tuesday Transcript # 00022911V09 Israel Government Releases Diary of Executed Nazi War Criminal Adolf= Eichmann Donna Kelley, Walter Rodgers Today, Israel made public the diary of executed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The diary was penned while Eichmann was awaiting a death sentence, and it has been under lock and key for nearly 40 years. A look at why the diary is being released now. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Well, today, Israel made public the diary of executed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The diary was penned while Eichmann was awaiting a death sentence, and it has been under lock and key for nearly 40 years. CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief Walter Rodgers has details on why the diary is being released now. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) WALTER RODGERS, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubenstein, said he decided to release Adolph Eichmann's hand-written memoirs because Israel has a moral obligation to help defeat those trying to minimize or deny the Holocaust. Israel's archivist suggested there were few surprises in the memoirs written while Eichmann was in jail. EVYATAR FRIESEL, ISRAELI STATE ARCHIVIST: The document is a clear indication that there was a Holocaust and that Eichmann participated in the Holocaust. RODGERS: It is libel suit brought by this man, British historian David Irving, which prompted release of Eichmann's memoirs. Irving has contended the Holocaust was an exaggerated event. He is suing this woman, Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who accused Irving of denying Nazi genocide. The Israeli government released the document to help her defend herself in the libel= suit. ELYAKIM RUBENSTEIN, ISRAELI ATTORNEY GENERAL: We also see it as our obligation to help in fight Holocaust denial. RODGERS: But it is not that simple, because the Israeli court which convicted Eichmann said he was a liar and his word was unreliable. Israeli Holocaust experts, like Tom Segev, says release of Eichman's memoirs cuts both ways, because for years authors like him faced staunch opposition from Israeli governments that refused to release the Eichmann memoirs. TOM SEGEV, HISTORIAN: We were always told that we cannot use them, we cannot publish them because it will help the Holocaust deniers. Now, suddenly, these papers are being released in order to fight the Holocaust deniers. RODGERS: Israeli historians say there are enough living witnesses to the Holocaust to prove it happened without Eichmann's memoirs. Eichmann, himself, called the Holocaust the biggest crime in history, maintaining he was but a small cog. YEHUDA BAUER, HOLOCAUST EXPERT: He did what he did out of conviction and with great energy. He was not a cog in a machine; he was a major perpetrator. He was a very intelligent man. RODGERS (on camera): Eichmann was convicted of organizing transportation for millions of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Israel hanged him, cremated the body, and dumped the ashes into the Mediterranean. Walter Rodgers, CNN, Jerusalem. (END VIDEOTAPE) =0C Copyright 2000 The Press Association Limited Press Association Newsfile February 29, 2000, Tuesday IRVING 'COMMITTED WHOLEHEARTEDLY TO NEO-NAZISM IN GERMANY' Cathy Gordon, PA News. British historian David Irving had "committed himself wholeheartedly" to the cause of neo-Nazism in Germany, the High Court was told today. The claim was made by Professor Hajo Funke, of the Free University of Berlin, during Mr Irving's long-running libel action against US academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books over allegations that he is a "Holocaust denier". Prof Funke also told the packed London court that Mr Irving's unconditional expulsion in 1993 "indicated the authorities' unwillingness to further tolerate his use of Germany as a 'playground' for his right-wing extremism." Mr Irving, of Duke Street, Mayfair, central London, is seeking damages over Prof Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him. Prof Funke, an expert witness called on behalf of the defendants, who deny libel, compiled a lengthy report for the hearing relating to Mr Irving's alleged connections with right-wing extremists and neo-Nazism in Germany. He claimed Mr Irving had been one of the "main speakers and agitators" for the "right-wing extremist" DVU party from the early 1980s until he was banned from entering Germany in 1993. The party was extremist, anti-Semitic and "propagates racial hatred", he= said. Prof Funke concluded: "Albeit not a member of the DVU, Irving enjoyed a position of political prominence within the party. "With his lecture tours and 'star' status at the DVU's annual rallies, Irving not only publicly identified himself with the main aims of the party, but actively propagated them." Prof Funke claimed that a chronology of Mr Irving's movements in Germany from 1989 to 1993 demonstrated his "close and enduring connection" to neo-Nazi groups. The court saw video footage of a meeting in Germany in the early 1990s, at which Mr Irving was a speaker, showing "bovver" booted skinheads demonstrating and chanting seig heil. Mr Irving said he had put up his hand to tell them to stop and said it was not impossible that "the skinheads had been bribed to come along and shout these slogans". He denies having had connections with any extremist German group. His case is that the DVU (German People's Union) is a long-standing democratic and lawfully constituted German political organisation which has competed in the national and municipal elections. The 62-year-old author of Hitler's War, who is representing himself in the hearing before Mr Justice Gray, sitting without a jury, strongly rejected Prof Funke's claims. Mr Irving, who points out he has addressed universities such as Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Bonn, says his policy is to accept invitations from "whichever body invites me", provided he can fit it into his timetable. The defence case, put to the court by their counsel Richard Rampton QC, is that Mr Irving's audiences often consisted of radical right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi groups of people - "in truth largely Holocaust= deniers". Mr Rampton has accused him of "prostituting" his considerable skills and talents in the service of "a restoration of a kind of Nazi, anti-Semitic ideology". The hearing was adjourned until tomorrow. =0C Copyright 2000 The Scotsman Publications Ltd. The Scotsman February 29, 2000, Tuesday EICHMANN PUT BLAME ON HITLER FOR HOLOCAUST Matt Rees In Jerusalem IN THE days before his execution, Adolf Eichmann mused about Immanuel Kant's philosophy and waxed poetic about his childhood. But the chief bureaucrat of the Nazi concentration camps also pinned responsibility for the Holocaust squarely on Adolf Hitler. The memoir written by Eichmann in his Israeli jail cell in 1962 is= finally to be released this week, so that it can be used to defend a scholar from the United States against libel charges brought by David Irving, the British historian who has played down the Nazis' genocidal scheme to destroy the= Jews. Israel kept it secret until now because officials here did not want its self -exculpatory passages to be used by neo-Nazis to make Eichmann into a martyr. People who have read the long memoir say it contains little material not previously recorded in the 3,000 pages of testimony that Eichmann gave to Israeli investigators before his trial and execution. But, in his efforts to minimise his role in the Holocaust, the man who was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires and brought to trial in Israel makes it clear he was following orders right from the top. Gabriel Bach, one of Eichmann's prosecutors in the trial, took part in= the official panel which decided to release the memoir. Mr Bach says the memoir clearly says that Reinhardt Heydrich had told Eichmann that the Fuhrer had ordered the extermination of the Jews. "There is no Holocaust denial in this memoir," says Mr Bach, who is= retired and lives in Jerusalem. "He describes everything in a most vivid and terrible way. He even talks about how he watched the trains taking people to the death camps and that they looked lovely to him." Mr Bach and several other Israeli judicial officials decided late on Sunday to send a copy of the memoir to lawyers defending Deborah Lipstadt, a professor from the US, who is being sued by Mr Irving in London. Mr Irving claims that Ms Lipstadt damaged his reputation by calling him a "dangerous denier of the Holocaust". The Israeli justice ministry's announcement referred to Mr Irving not as a historian but simply by a Hebrew term meaning "Holocaust denier". Mr Irving was convicted in a German court for publicly describing= Auschwitz as nothing more than a labour camp and denying that there were gas chambers there. He recently called Auschwitz a "Disneyland" created by Polish communists to attract tourists. "That Irving is a completely impossible person," says Emil Fackenheim, Israel's leading philosopher of the Holocaust. "He is not just a denier, but he is a defender of Hitler." Eichmann's memoirs were kept hidden in Israel's national archives after the trial. Rumours circulated that the memoir contained spicy or shocking details, that Eichmann confessed he had a Jewish mother or that he denied that the Holocaust took place. But a more sober reason for the secrecy is likely. The prime minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion, wanted attention to= focus on the testimony and judgment made at the trial, rather than on Eichmann's own words. Only recently have Israeli journalists tried to have the papers published, because as neo-Nazi groups gain strength in Europe it is seen to be more important to draw attention to the horror of the death camps. "Now we are in the age of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. The Zeitgeist has changed since Ben-Gurion's time, which was much closer= to the Holocaust," said Yechiam Weitz, a Haifa University historian. Last year, the government said it was preparing to send the document to a Berlin research institute for publication in a scholarly, annotated form. But that plan foundered when one of Eichmann's sons, Dieter, said he= might consider legal action to reclaim his father's memoir. Israel was not keen to see a second trial under the title "State of Israel versus Eichmann" , and certainly not in a German court. The memoir, which those few who have read it describe as quite well written, ruminates about the meaning of life and the philosophy of Mr Eichmann's compatriot, Kant. Eichmann reminisces about the good times of his childhood, but also laments that his sometimes stern family life made him unable to disobey an order. He also repeated what he said at his trial, that the Holocaust was the worst crime committed in the history of mankind. That apparent remorse convinced none of the judges. After all, in 1956, Eichmann told a Dutch journalist that he regretted nothing, except that he had allowed enough Jews to survive to found the Israeli state. In a similar jailroom memoir to Eichmann's, the last commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, also provided evidence that Eichmann was more committed to the "final solution" than his memoir would have us believe. Hoess, who was hanged in Poland in 1951, wrote that he had once confided in Eichmann that the killing of a quota of 1,000 children a day at Auschwitz upset him. Hoess wrote that Eichmann reprimanded him, saying that it was even more important to kill children, because young survivors might allow the Jewish race to be reborn. =0C Copyright 2000 Scripps Howard, Inc. Scripps Howard News Service February 29, 2000, Tuesday Eichmann's confession Editorial/Dale McFeatters Although historical scholarship dictated otherwise, Israel's decision to keep Adolf Eichmann's prison memoirs locked up in the state archives for 38 years is wholly understandable. Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, had intended his 1,300 pages of obsessive musings to be published after his death. The title was to be "False Gods," the implication being that the Nazi creed had been a false one. However, it was an ideology he hewed to from the time he joined the Nazi Party in 1932 right up until the Israelis bagged him in Argentina in= 1960. The Israelis finally agreed to the release of the Eichmann papers in connection with a libel suit in a British court involving two historians and addressing the questions of whether the Holocaust actually took place and, if so, in the manner and magnitude that is now widely accepted as historical fact. If further evidence were needed on top of the already voluminous evidence of that crime, Eichmann's appalling reminiscences are the final refutation to deniers of the Holocaust. In excerpts made public, Eichmann, approaches the slimy in simultaneously trying to evade responsibility - "just one of the many horses pulling the wagon" - while making sure the world knew he had participated in no small crime - "the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all time." He asked that his wife distribute copies of his book with the inscription "best= wishes." Alas for Eichmann and sadly for mankind, the extermination of 6 million Jews was not the biggest dance of death of the 20th century. Chairman Mao and Stalin and Lenin killed far more people than Hitler. But for sheer, methodical, murderous malevolence Eichmann was their equal and his memoirs ensure he will be remembered with special loathing. =0C Copyright 2000 U.P.I. United Press International February 29, 2000, Tuesday Israel releases Eichmann papers By JOSHUA BRILLIANT TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- Israel Tuesday released papers giving a rare insight into the psyche of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who played a key role in what he himself eventually described as the greatest crime in the history of mankind. More than 1,200 pages, written in blue ink on legal-pad sized white-lined sheets were revealed in Jerusalem, some 40 years after Eichmann had written them in solitary confinement in the Ramla prison, while waiting for his verdict. The then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion did not want them published at the time because he did not want Eichmann's version of events to come out at the same time as the court's verdict, holocaust historian Yehuda Baueur said. The authorities later wanted to publish the book as a scientific document, but did not have the copyright. So, they decided to allow access to it and transcribed it to make reading easier. A desire to help the defense in a law suit by what Israel's justice ministry termed a "Holocaust denier," hastened the process. The papers, which Eichmann had meticulously singed in longhand on the margins, aroused a mixed reaction. Prof. Baueur, a member of the panel that decided in favor of the publication, said Eichmann was merely repeating information he had given at his trial in Jerusalem. "Whoever is too lazy to read 3,000 pages of court proceedings can read 600 pages in Eichmann's bad German," he said. "In those notes there is the same thing, that Hitler is to blame, that this was the most heinous crime in the history of mankind, that he is sorry he was involved in it, and that he was just a very small cog in the machine." But historian and journalist Tom Segev, who Tuesday got his first glimpse into a diskette with copies of those memories, told United Press International he found them fascinating. "It makes it easier for us to understand the criminal and then, maybe, understand the crime," he said. Eichmann was responsible for sending millions of Jews to their deaths. Segev said he sensed in the papers a very strong desire to satisfy his readers and judges. Eichmann talked about his youth and love for the snow-covered scenery. "I had the romantic idealism of a primitive person," he reportedly wrote. Eichmann claimed he was not an anti-Semite, had Jewish friends and even Jewish relatives, Segev said. He was attracted to Nazism not because of anti-Semitism, but because of the atmosphere it created, and the hope it offered to extricate Germany and Austria from the degradations they had suffered after World War I. After visiting one of the six main death camps, Chelmno in Poland, he wrote, according to a translation: "It was super-hell. I pinched myself to verify whether it was reality or a dream. I even forgot to check how long it took to kill people, the thing for which I was sent!" Segev was impressed by the very explicit details Eichmann had left his wife. Eichmann wanted the material published as a book and said he wanted the color of the cover to be pearl. His wife was to obtain 10 copies and send them to select people. The copies for their children should be inscribed with the words, "Dear." He followed that with brackets telling her to insert the son's name, then add, "With dedication, Your father." Eichmann asked to be cremated in Austria with a seventh of the ashes spread over his parents' grave and a seventh over his garden outside his home in Argentina. Translated excerpts quoted him as blaming Nazi Germany's leadership as sinning in lack of tolerance, lack of wisdom and a quest for power. "There was no civil courage among the officers. They talked of duty, of fulfilling orders, discipline and loyalty....It is very sad," he wrote. However, he added, no country would have behaved differently in war time. Eichmann also suggested that women take over. "Women are governed by feelings, not the brain, but anyway policies were senseless," he wrote. "That is why, perhaps, it would be better that women, who are so excellently sensitive, will replace the men. It couldn't be= worse." Segev said there was no tinge of irony or humor there. The Israelis hanged Eichmann after he lost the trial before a District Court, an appeal to the Supreme Court, and the president refused clemency in 1962. They cremated him and a vessel sailed out to the eastern Mediterranean dumping his ashes in the open sea so that no one could use those ashes for a shrine for the man who played a key role in massacring a third of the Jewish people. =0C National Public Radio (NPR) SHOW: MORNING EDITION (11:00 AM on ET) February 28, 2000, Monday LAWSUIT BROUGHT AGAINST US AUTHOR DEBORAH LIPSTADT BY BRITISH HISTORIAN DAVID IRVING ANCHORS: BOB EDWARDS REPORTERS: JENNIFER LUDDEN Israel is to release to the public the long-hidden diaries of convicted Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann who was executed in 1962. The publication of the diaries occurs earlier than expected. Israeli officials hope the Eichmann papers will help the case of an American professor facing a libel suit. She has accused a British writer of denying the Holocaust ever took place. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports from Jerusalem. JENNIFER LUDDEN reporting: Eichmann penned the diaries from an Israeli prison in 1961 and '62 as he awaited trial for masterminding Hitler's final solution. The few historians who've read the papers say Eichmann calls the mass killing of Jews 'the worst crime in history.' He describes himself as simply a cog in the wheel of the Nazi war machine. Such statements could boost the defense case of American Professor Deborah Lipstadt. She faces liable charges based on a 1994 book in which she calls British writer David Irving a dangerous spokesman in the service of Holocaust deniers. Irving challenges the number of Jews who died and the methods of killing. He contends Hitler didn't know about the final solution until the last stages of the war. An Israeli Justice Ministry spokesman says providing the Eichmann papers to refute such claims is Israel's historic duty. It's not clear the diaries will help Lipstadt's case. Under British liable law, truth is not necessarily a defense. The claimant must prove only that his reputation has been damaged. Israeli officials say they'll also make typed versions of the diaries available to the public and place the 1,300 hand-written pages in the state archives. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News, Jerusalem. Copyright 2000 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. The New York Post February 28, 2000, Monday ISRAEL OKS NAZI'S MEMOIRS FOR HOLOCAUST DENIAL' TRIAL Uri Dan JERUSALEM -- Israel said yesterday it's handing over unpublished memoirs of executed Nazi official Adolf Eichmann for use as evidence in a British libel suit seen by many Jews as putting the Holocaust itself on trial. British historian David Irving brought the suit against U.S. author Deborah Lipstadt, who in a 1995 book called him "a dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial." Lipstadt's book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," is a study of arguments that the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews never took place. The defense team in the libel case had asked for the memoirs to be released. A decision to hand them over was made yesterday by Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein. Eichman's sons have asked Israel for the memoirs -- written from a prison cell before he was hanged in 1962 -- but Israel has refused to hand them= over. It was Eichmann who drew up the plans that made feasible Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" -- the wartime annihilation of millions of Jews. =0C Copyright 2000 Scottish Media Newspapers Limited The Sunday Herald February 27, 2000 The single shot which could have prevented the Holocaust David Sexton Diary Of A Man In Despair by Friedrich Reck (Duck Editions, =A312.99) Review by David Sexton ONE of the many regrets nursed by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen is that he= did not shoot Hitler when he had the chance. In one of the earliest entries in this savage diary, dating from August 1936, he remembers how, four years previously, in the autumn of 1932, he had been dining in the Osteria Bavaria in Munich with a friend when in came Hitler, alone, without a bodyguard. "There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismarck who would certainly have had to go to bed for four weeks if he had even tried to eat just one of Bismarck's breakfasts " Reck scoffs. With the streets already unsafe, Reck carried a loaded revolver and he could easily have assassinated Hitler in the almost deserted restaurant. "If I had had an inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play and= of the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip and did not shoot." That is, if his judgments had been less snobbish, he might have changed= the course of history. As it turned out, Reck played no significant part in the opposition to Nazism and he does not even merit a mention in Joachim Fest's Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933-1945. He simply kept this diary and dissented in private. In October 1944 he was, however, arrested, having ignored a call-up, and charged with "undermining the morale of the armed forces". On 16 February 1945, he was murdered, in Dachau. Reck was an aristocrat from Eastern Prussia, an extreme conservative and pessimist, influenced by Nietzsche, Spengler and Dostoevsky. He despised Hitler and Nazism as an emanation of "mass man" and he believed the defeat of the Nazis would also bring an end to the power of the masses too. There he was wrong - but his belief lends his diary such hope as it has. Diary of a Man in Despair is certainly an extraordinary document - published here in full for the first time in the UK, despite having been printed in Germany in 1947, and referred to by Hannah Arendt in her report on Eichmann and "the banality of evil''. Here are the Nazi years described with bitter sarcasm, by a highly cultivated reactionary. In Reck's opinion, Germany had started to go wrong ever since Bismarck, "when the Prussian oligarchy took industrial capital for its concubine". He had never come to terms with the internal combustion engine for that matter, either. Reck had first met Hitler, at the home of friends, in 1920. He viewed him then as "the stereotype of a head waiter" who preached at them "like a division chaplain in the army". The experience was, Reck says, like sharing a train carriage with a psychotic. When he left, his host opened the windows to dispel "the unclean essence of a monstrosity". In the years after Hitler's rise to power and his military victories, Reck maintains this tone of superior contempt. Reck did not believe there was a profound ideology at work in Nazism. "In actual fact, what we have here are irremediably sick and futureless mass -men, whose ideal is amorphousness, whose ethos is formlessness and who hate nothing so much as discipline, form, definition." He is simply baffled by Nazi anti-Semitism. None the less, Reck's actual descriptions of Nazism, for all their de haut en bas tone, are coruscating and prophetic. Looking at the young men in SS uniform in a Berlin nightclub in April 1939, he realises that "they would not hesitate to send cathedrals tumbling into the air, using the hellish arts of IG Farben Oh, they will perpetrate still worse things, and worst, most dreadful of all, they will be totally incapable of even sensing the deep degradation of their existence." The next day Reck observed Hitler in front of the Reich Chancellery. "I examined his face through my binoculars. The whole of it waggled with unhealthy cushions of fat; it all hung, it was all slack and without structure - slaggy, gelatinous, sick. There was no light in it, none of the shimmer and shining of a man sent by God. "Instead, the face bore the stigma of sexual inadequacy, the rancour of a half -man who had turned his fury at his impotence into brutalising others. And through it all this bovine and finally moronic roar of "Heil!" hysterical females, adolescents in a trance, an entire people in the spiritual state of howling dervishes." For all his love of Germany, in August 1939 Reck welcomed the declaration of war as "the certainty that today the great monster signed his own death warrant". In June 1941, his response to the invasion of the Soviet Union was "wild jubilation in their immense vanity, Satan's own have over-reached themselves and now they are in the net, and they will never free themselves again." In his final entry, he says he plans to become a pacifist. But the final value of Diary of a Man in Despair is that it compels the reader to see that recognising and even condemning evil is not enough. It is sometimes necessary also to act. Reck, the cynic, could not. == PRESS ASSOCIATION NEWS UK 03.01.00 Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Europe Limited Press Association Newsfile March 1, 2000 LIBEL CASE HISTORIAN DENIES TOASTING HITLER'S BIRTHDAY Cathy Gordon, PA News Historian David Irving today denied toasting Hitler's birthday at a dinner attended by right-wing extremists in Germany. The 62-year-old author of Hitler's War told the High Court in London that he had not joined in "this very tasteless toast". Mr Irving, who is seeking libel damages against academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books over claims that he is a Holocaust denier, raised the topic during his cross-examination of Professor Hajo Funke, of the Free University of Berlin. Prof Funke has compiled a report on behalf of the defence on the historian's alleged connections with right-wing extremists and neo-Nazism in Germany. In his lengthy report, Prof Funke says that in April 1990 Mr Irving "attended the first revisionist conference in Munich as its star speaker". Prof Funke states that on the evening before the planned conference Mr Irving arrived in Munich where he was met by Ewald Althans - described by the defence as a leading neo-Nazi. Prof Funke refers to Mr Irving's private diary in which the author described going to a dinner organised by Althans on April 20 and wrote: "It ended with a Trinkspruch (toast) spoken by him to a certain statesman whose 101st birthday falls today. "All rose, toasted; I had no glass, as I don't drink." Mr Irving suggested to Prof Funke: "If one has no glass and doesn't drink, how can one toast someone?" Prof Funke, who claims Mr Irving had "committed himself wholeheartedly" to the cause of neo-Nazism in Germany, replied: "I really can't say." Mr Irving, who is representing himself during the lengthy case before Mr Justice Gray, sitting without a jury, argued that this was evidence that he did not join in the toast, which he found "distasteful". The author, of Duke Street, Mayfair, central London, is seeking damages over Prof Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him. He denies having had connections with any extremist German group. The defence case, put to the court by their counsel Richard Rampton QC, is that Mr Irving's audiences often consisted of radical right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi groups of people - "in truth largely Holocaust deniers". Mr Rampton has accused him of "prostituting" his considerable skills and talents in the service of "a restoration of a kind of Nazi, anti-semitic ideology". The defence further claims Mr Irving has distorted history in a bid to exonerate Hitler. Mr Irving rejects their allegations and claims he has been the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy him. The hearing continues tomorrow. ### WASHINGTON POST 03.01.00 Israelis Release Eichmann's Memoirs; Nazi Executed 38 Years Ago Described Shock at Witnessing Mass Killing of Jews Lee Hockstader 03/01/2000 The Washington Post JERUSALEM, Feb. 29 -- Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's "technician of death" and an important cog in the Nazi killing machine, insisted in his jailhouse memoirs that he had nothing against Jews. In fact, he wrote, his stepmother even had Jewish relatives. Eichmann's manuscript--1,200 pages of flow charts, revisions, ruminations and self-justifications written in antiquated, nearly illegible longhand--was made public today, nearly four decades after he was abducted, tried and hanged by Israel for his role in the Third Reich's extermination of 6 million European Jews. While the memoirs shine little new light on the history of the Holocaust, they do add some grotesque personal touches: At one point, the senior SS officer who arranged for hundreds of thousands of Jews to be transported to their deaths describes himself as so shocked at witnessing a group being machine gunned that he drank himself into a stupor. Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to trial in Israel the next year, wrote that the Holocaust "was the most enormous crime in the history of mankind." He portrayed the logistics of the Nazis' Final Solution as the "gruesome workings of a death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork." He said he felt compelled to give his account "because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver." Despite the passage of time, the disdain of historians and Eichmann's exhaustive testimony at his trial, the testament still touched a nerve in Israel, which kept the manuscript under lock and key for 39 years. The few historians who had access to the memoirs have sneered at their content. The manuscript includes not only Eichmann's denial of his hatred for Jews, but also extensive passages in which he portrays himself as a family man who loved nature and children. "The impression one gets is that he's a liar," said Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian. "There's nothing new in it." Nonetheless, other Holocaust scholars argue that Israel, which has insisted that other countries open their archives of Holocaust materials, should have released the manuscript long ago. "It's immensely important to understand the man," said Tom Segev, a journalist and historian who has written extensively about the Holocaust. Writing in an Israeli jail cell as he awaited the outcome of his trial, Eichmann included intricate instructions for what he evidently imagined would be prompt publication of his work. He asked that the book's cover be pearl-colored and that his editor bear in mind the Bavarian idioms of his German. He left instructions that his wife get 10 copies, which she was to distribute to specified friends and relatives "in the name of my husband, with friendly regards." Eichmann, who headed the Gestapo's Jewish Office, titled the manuscript "False Gods," a reference to his supposed disillusionment with the Nazis. However, in an interview with a Dutch fascist journalist five years before his capture, Eichmann expressed no fondness for Jews or remorse for the Holocaust. Rather, he said he regretted that the Nazis had not been tougher executioners and was sorry the Jews had established a state of their own. At the time of Eichmann's hanging, the memoirs were ordered sealed in the Israeli state archives by then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who feared their publication might blur focus on the former Nazi colonel's conviction and execution. For decades after that, the document was all but forgotten. The government released it today in response to a request by an American professor, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, who is fighting a libel action in England by a British historian she has accused of denying the Holocaust. The historian, David Irving, has drawn attention for writing that the scope of the Holocaust has been somewhat exaggerated and for arguing that there is no documentary evidence that Hitler knew about the liquidation of European Jewry until late in World War II. Lipstadt wrote that Irving is a "dangerous spokesman" for Holocaust denial, and Irving sued her for libel. When Lipstadt 's defense team requested the Eichmann manuscript, Israel obliged. The Jewish state is duty-bound "to help those who are fighting the denial of the Holocaust," Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said Monday, explaining his decision. "If the diary of this despicable person is one of the links in this chain, there is no reason that it shouldn't be available to the public." Israeli journalists have pressed for release of the Eichmann document for several years, but until now Israeli officials balked. They worried about a lawsuit from Eichmann's family if it were published in Israel, but were reluctant to hand it over to Eichmann's sons for fear they would profit from it. Last summer, officials said they intended to have the manuscript published as a scholarly text in Germany, complete with footnotes and annotations. But Lipstadt 's request hastened the release, and Israeli officials said they hoped it will help her defense against Irving. == JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY 03.01.00 http://jta.virtualjerusalem.com/index.exe?0003018 Magazine assigns anti-Semitic writer to cover Holocaust revision libel trial By Jeremy Jones SYDNEY, Australia, March 1 (JTA) =97 Australia's Jewish community is= outraged by a magazine's decision to have a Holocaust revisionist cover a libel suit brought by another Holocaust revisionist. Helen Darville has been assigned to cover the case in London of revisionist David Irving's suit against American academic Deborah Lipstadt. Darville, using the name "Helen Demidenko," authored a 1994 novel, "The Hand That Signed the Paper," which purported to be a fictionalized oral history of how Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves due to their mistreatment of Ukrainians. Despite an almost universal view in academic and Jewish circles that the book promoted anti-Semitism, it received Australia's most prestigious literary award, with special recognition given to the "ethnic" author. After an inquiry into the writer's background, it was discovered that Darville had taken the "Demidenko" from a real perpetrator of one of the most notorious incidents of the Holocaust, the massacre at Babi Yar. The inquiry also found that Darville had a record of supporting right-wing political causes. Later, Darville had a short-lived career as a newspaper columnist, which ended after she submitted a column plagiarized from an Internet site. Jack Marx, the editor of Australian Style magazine, defended his choice of Darville, claiming that she "does know a lot about World War II." His comment came despite the debunking on historical grounds of much of "The Hand That Signed the Paper." Irving is suing Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, who are alleged to have libeled Irving in Lipstadt's 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Irving, 62, who denies that Jews were systematically exterminated at Auschwitz, is claiming that Lipstadt ruined his career by labeling him a Holocaust denier and accusing him of distorting historical data to suit his ideological predilections. Irving has been refused a visa to visit Australia by a succession of governments, which have declared him a person not of "good character." Robert Klarnet, public affairs director of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, said the "decision to have Helen Darville report on David Irving was media sensationalism of the worst kind." "To have a person whose reputation is based entirely on perpetrating a literary fraud, with an anti-Semitic novel, interview and write on a person who is an icon amongst the far right could only have been done with the intention of selling magazines rather than illuminating any issue," he said. Mark Leibler, national chairman of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said Darville and Irving "do have one thing in common: their integrity and reliability =97 or should I say the lack of them." ### PIONEER PLANET, ST. PAUL, MN 03.01.00 http://www.pioneerplanet.com:80/seven-days/1/news/docs/004537.htm Israel releases Eichmann's memoirs Nazi's diary to be used in lawsuit involving doubts about Holocaust NOMI MORRIS KNIGHT RIDDER FOREIGN SERVICE JERUSALEM After keeping the prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann in a cardboard box for nearly 40 years, Israel's state archive released them Tuesday, providing a rare glimpse into the mind of one of Hitler's top henchmen. ``I saw hell, death and the Devil. I had to witness the insanity of annihilation,'' Eichmann wrote, according to a typed transcript of the 1,200-page handwritten manuscript. ``I hereby endeavor to give an account of this, as a warning.'' Eichmann, who supervised the vast apparatus that carried out the Nazi Holocaust, was captured by Israeli secret agents in Argentina in 1960, tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962. Israel's attorney general decided this week to release the document to aid American professor Deborah Lipstadt's defense against a libel suit by British historian David Irving, who has disputed some aspects of Holocaust history, including that Hitler knew the full extent of what was going on in the World War II death camps. Irving says Lipstadt, a historian at Atlanta's Emory University, defamed him and damaged his career when she referred to him as a ``Nazi'' in her 1994 book, ``Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.'' Echoing arguments for Eichmann's trial at the time, Israeli authorities now say that the memoir will help educate a new generation about the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. The Nazis also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents and people with disabilities. Eichmann, who signed each page in the left margin, writes in the foreword that his missive is a ``warning to today's and tomorrow's youth.'' He terms the ``events concerning the Jews'' carried out by the Nazis during World War II ``the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity.'' As he did in his 1961 defense, Eichmann confirms in great detail the genocide of European Jewry between 1939 and 1945. But he diminishes his own role, portraying himself as a small cog in a large operation that was the product of its place and time. ``I was one of many horses reined in, who could not break out to the right or the left against the will and the orders of the coachman,'' he wrote. Eichmann never admits guilt or remorse, but the diaries contain a retrospective, almost apologetic tone that acknowledges Jewish suffering. In several places, he says his nationalistic and anti-Semitic views changed while hiding in Argentina after the war. ``Much that was valid then has become invalid,'' Eichmann wrote. ``I have discarded previous `philosophical values' as obsolete junk.'' Several Israeli Holocaust historians cautioned against taking the memoirs too literally and out of their context as part of Eichmann's legal defense, which they say was a calculated attempt to escape the noose. Noted Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer referred to the documents as ``this silly thing of Eichmann's'' with greatest interest for psychologists. Bauer cited an interview Eichmann gave five years before his trial in which he expressed regret that he had not managed to kill even more Jews. Bauer said then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion opposed releasing the memoirs in the 1960s because ``he didn't want this book to detract from the verdict.'' Bauer and other officials involved in the trial said Israel also feared that Eichmann's family would profit from publishing his diaries. In the foreword, Eichmann makes it clear that he hoped the manuscript would be published. BALTIMORE SUN 03.01.00 http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?section=cover &pagename=story&storyid=1150270202124 Holocaust memoirs offer few revelations Israel opens writings by Eichmann to public to help scholar in trial By Mark Matthews Sun Foreign Staff JERUSALEM -- Four decades after they were written in prison, the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who oversaw Hitler's drive to exterminate Europe's Jews, were made public yesterday. The document, handwritten in German on 1,300 lined pages, provides horrid first-hand descriptions of the mass murder Eichmann directed as head of the Gestapo's Department of Jewish Affairs. It also minimizes his role in what he calls "humanity's biggest crime". Several Israelis who had gained previous access to the memoirs said yesterday that they offered little that was new to historians, because much of what Eichmann wrote could be found in evidence offered at his 1961 trial after Israeli agents tracked him down in Argentina. "I didn't see anything in this manuscript," said Yehuda Bauer, director of the International Institute of Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem,Israel's Holocaust museum, describing the prose as "turgid" and "not very enlightening." But a columnist for the newspaper Ha'aretz, Tom Seleg, who has written a book about the Holocaust, told Israel Radio, "It will help us understand the criminal himself -- his life, childhood and the route he took to the crimes." Eichmann wanted the book published. But the Israeli government kept it under wraps because officials didn't want his version to compete with the mass of evidence produced at the trial and the verdict. They also feared that Eichmann's family would try to profit from it. Suit sparks release The memoirs were all but forgotten until two years ago, when state archivist Evyatar Friezel discovered them and began the process of making them public. Attorney General Eliyakim Rubinstein made the decision to release them in computer diskette form to help American professor Deborah Lipstadt, who is being sued by British historian David Irving for accusing him of denying the Holocaust. Irving says he doesn't dispute the killings, but questions the number and manner of the deaths. Eichmann certainly offers no help to deniers of the Holocaust, according to people who have read the memoirs. His introduction tells of "gruesome workings of the machinery of the death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork." Claims no responsibility "I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it," he wrote. But he did observe some killings. Recounting a visit to the German-run Chelmno death camp in Poland, he said he lacked words to describe it. "It was superhell." "I pinched myself to see whether it was reality or a dream. I even forgot to check how long it took to kill people, something for which I had been sent." He writes of the Auschwitz commander's descriptions of how Jews were poisoned, and describes sites where bodies were burnt. Readers of his court testimony can encounter similar horrors. He described there how victims were killed in ditches and covered with earth and the geysers of blood spurting from the ground. Values `thrown overboard' He writes that he was a small cog in a campaign dominated by others, chiefly Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler, both of whom he worshiped at the time but who he later realized were idols and not gods. "I had thousands of ideals and I slid, like many others, into a situation from which there was no exit. Time has given me distance to the events. Many things that were valid then, are no longer valid now. Things I considered to be basic values, I have thrown overboard over the years," he wrote. He attributes the drive to wipe out the Jews to the Nazis' overwhelming sense of their power and a lack of "civil courage" among officers who followed orders, but also blamed it on the behavior of states in wartime. In one passage, he accuses Israel of committing horrors in Egypt during the Mideast wars. `Lip service' Gabriel Bach, one of Eichmann's prosecutors who later served as a Supreme Court justice, maintains that Eichmann's confession and apparent change of heart were mere "lip-service." In an interview with a Dutch journalist four years before he was captured, Eichmann described the death trains that carried prisoners to camps in Poland "in almost lyrical terms," Bach said. Eichmann faulted himself for not doing more to prevent a German defeat that allowed for the creation of Israel and a revival of the Jewish "race" there. At his trial, prosecutors were successful in demolishing Eichmann's claim that he played a minimal role, Bach said. In pursuing the "final solution" -- the aim to rid Europe of Jews forever -- Eichmann maneuvered to keep trains hauling people to the death camps even as commanders of Germany's collapsing eastern front were clamoring for the same trains be used for war materiel. Eichmann betrayed no regret when he was hanged in 1962. "Long live Germany, long live Argentina [where he lived after the war], long live Austria [where he grew up]. I had to obey the laws of the war and my flag," he said. His body was cremated and its ashes scattered on the Mediterranean because Israeli officials feared a burial plot could become a shrine for neo-Nazis. Amos Hausner, son of another prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, questioned why the memoirs would be useful in a court case. "We still have many Holocaust survivors with us. They can testify on the gas chambers," the Associated Press quoted him as saying Monday. "But instead of believing those people, we take the document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed." Despite the controversy over the documents' value, few thought they should be kept out of public view. "Any document that confirms the Holocaust must not be hidden by the Israeli government," Bauer said. MIAMI HERALD 03.01.00 http://www.herald.com/content/today/docs/061437.htm Eichmann's memoirs send a chilling lesson Israel releases Nazi's prison writings BY NOMI MORRIS Herald World Staff JERUSALEM -- After keeping the prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann in a cardboard box for nearly 40 years, Israel's state archive released them Tuesday, providing a rare glimpse into the mind of one of Hitler's top henchmen. ``I saw hell, death and the devil. I had to witness the insanity of annihilation,'' Eichmann wrote, according to a typed transcript of the 1,200-page handwritten manuscript. ``I hereby endeavor to give an account of this, as a warning.'' Eichmann, who supervised the vast apparatus that carried out the Nazi Holocaust, was captured by Israeli secret agents in Argentina in 1960, tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962 -- the only time Israel has used capital punishment. Israel's attorney general decided this week to release the document to aid American professor Deborah Lipstadt's defense against a libel suit by British revisionist historian David Irving, who has disputed many aspects of Holocaust history, including that Hitler knew the full extent of what was going on in the World War II death camps. Irving says Lipstadt, a historian at Atlanta's Emory University, defamed him and damaged his career when she referred to him as a Nazi in her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Echoing arguments for Eichmann's trial at the time, Israeli authorities now say that the memoir, which was stored in manila envelopes in a Jerusalem safe, will help educate a new generation about the systematic extermination of six million Jews. The Nazis also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents and people with disabilities. ``It's the very opposite of denial of the Holocaust,'' Israeli state archivist Evyatar Friesel said. ``The things Eichmann describes are well-known. But here you have it from one of the major participants.'' Eichmann, who signed each page in the left margin, writes in the foreword that his missive is a ``warning to today's and tomorrow's youth.'' He terms the ``events concerning the Jews'' carried out by the Nazis during World War II ``the greatest crime committed in the history of humanity.'' As he did in his 1961 defense, Eichmann confirms in great detail the genocide of European Jewry between 1939 and 1945 -- even using the German word for genocide, Voelkermord. But he tries to diminish his own role, portraying himself as a small cog in a large operation that was the product of its place and time. ``I was one of many horses reined in, who could not break out to the right or the left against the will and the orders of the coachman,'' he wrote. Eichmann never overtly admits guilt or remorse, but the diaries contain a retrospective, almost apologetic tone that acknowledges Jewish suffering. In several places, he says his nationalistic and anti-Semitic views changed during his decade and a half in Argentina after the war. ``Much that was valid then has become invalid,'' Eichmann wrote. ``I have discarded previous `philosophical values' as obsolete junk.'' PART OF DEFENSE Several Israeli Holocaust historians cautioned against taking the memoirs too literally and out of their context as part of Eichmann's legal defense, which they say was a calculated attempt to escape the noose. Noted Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer referred to the documents as ``this silly thing of Eichmann's'' with greatest interest for psychologists. Bauer cited an interview Eichmann gave five years before his trial in which he expressed regret that he had not managed to kill even more Jews. Bauer said then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion opposed releasing the memoirs in the 1960s because ``he didn't want this book to detract from the verdict.'' FORGOTTEN FOR YEARS Bauer and other officials involved in the trial said Israel also feared that Eichmann's family would profit from publishing his diaries. For many years the memoir, which is part historical record and part philosophical ramblings, was forgotten. Then preparations were made to let a German research institute publish it, but the Eichmann family asked for the manuscript last summer and the copyright is thought to rest with them. In the foreword, Eichmann makes it clear that he hoped the manuscript would be published. He requested a cover of ``pearl or dove gray,'' and asked that the German title Goetzen -- ``idols'' or ``false gods'' -- be printed in a simple typeface. While striving for literary flourishes and issuing various instructions to potential editors, he makes excuses for not being a ``qualified'' author and complains he could not write freely, knowing that Israeli censors would read the work. Eichmann suggested that the book open with a quotation from Plato's classic parable about a man in a cave: ``And he would consider his shadow world as true, but the real world as an illusion.'' NAZI'S LAST WILL The material released by the state archive also contains Eichmann's last will and testament, written in Jerusalem in August 1961 with the sentimental notation that the date marked the 30th anniversary of his engagement to his wife, Vera. Eichmann requests that his ashes be divided into seven parts and that one part be placed at his parents' graves in Linz and another scattered in his garden in Buenos Aires. The remaining five parts were to be buried with his four sons and his wife after they died. Instead, Eichmann's ashes were thrown into the Mediterranean. Haifa University communications professor Gabriel Weinman says the London libel trial against Lipstadt may prove a prime opportunity to educate the public about the Holocaust at a time when survivors are gradually dying off and neo-Nazism has appeal in Europe and America. Weinman's book Hate on Trial examined the effect of the 1984-85 trial of Holocaust skeptic Ernst Zundel in Toronto. His public opinion surveys found that people who already held anti-Semitic views did not change their opinions because of the trial, but that most people who had known little about the Holocaust became more sympathetic to Jews than to Holocaust deniers. ``Based on the findings in the Zundel case, I think the Israeli government has done the right thing,'' Weinman said.
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