The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/i/irving.david/press/irving-vrs-lipstadt/Press_Summary.000301



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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