Prison Memoir

Eichmann's plea for a reprieve f 4"^ he Gods I worshiped demanded the I dance of death. I had no choice, and whoever claims otherwise is a liar." So wrote Adolf Eichmann, after his four-month 1961 trial in Israel, as he attempted to justify his role in the wartime deaths of millions of Jews. The onetime SS officer who was chiefly responsible for carrying out the Final Solution of the Third Reich's "Jewish problem" even insisted that he was not antiSemitic. Eichmann had made that claim somewhat obliquely in court and more directly in a lengthy "confession" to a German journalist that was published by LIFE in 1960. He repeated that disavowal in a little-known, long suppressed personal memoir that is now coming to light. Declared Eichmann: "The Holocaust was the greatest crime in history. I was never taken in by the mysticism of Nazi ideology. My views never matched the official line. I could never identify with the objectives of national socialism. I always had doubts."

These statements disavowing Nazism are contained in a rambling account of his life that Eichmann wrote in prison while awaiting the results of an appeal of his conviction. (The appeal was rejected by Israel's Supreme Court, and on May 31, 1962, he was executed by hanging.) The apparent purpose of his memoir was to bolster his chances of a reprieve and to arouse public sympathy. Eichmann asked his defense attorney, Robert Servatius, to seek permission for its publication. The trial prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, refused; then Premier David Ben-Gurion ordered that the manuscript be suppressed for 15 years and placed in the state archives. Its existence was known to only a few people.

Portions of the memoir will be contained in an updated Hebrew edition of Hausner's 1966 book on the trial, Justice in Jerusalem, which will be published in Israel this March. Hausner, who is now chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, feels the entire manuscript should not be published on the grounds that it is rambling, repetitive and stuffed with what he calls the typical Nazi "jargon of violence." Besides, adds Israel's former Attorney General, "I felt that Eichmann had ample opportunity to make his defense during the trial, and did not feel that we owed him any other platform."

Nonetheless, the excerpts that Hausner does include contain some interesting tidbits. Although Eichmann, prior to his arrest, had proudly professed his allegiance to Hitler, he warns in his memoir "against following idols, like the parched bones drying up in the desert." The warning was directed to both the next generation--"The youth of the world should unite. The adults failed"--and to women --"Maybe women should be entrusted with the responsibility for the world because they are led by emotion and not by intellect. Maybe they would do better than we did." Eichmann also discloses that he had been ordered to check out the racial origins of the "Diet Chief," the code name for Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun. It was discovered that Braun was one thirty-second Jewish.

Hausner gives no credibility to Eichmann's prison denials. "I don't believe him when he says he is not antiSemitic. We have evidence of his own acts. And we have other private remarks of his in which he gives vent to his feeling that he would have been happy if all 11.3 million Jews had been exterminated."

Meanwhile, the exposure of Eichmann's co-workers continues. In Cologne, three former Gestapo agents--one the mayor of a Bavarian town--were convicted of deporting 73,000 French Jews and Communists to Nazi concentration camps. The longest sentence given was for twelve years. During the 18-week trial, which was attended by dozens of angry survivors of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the defendants denied knowing at the time the real purpose of the death camps. They were imprisoned last week while a higher court heard their appeals. -

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