Germany Releases Draft of Eichmann Memoir

Adolf Eichmann, overseer of the Nazi death machine, complains about an unfairly strict upbringing, describes his inability to disobey an order and ponders the meaning of life in an apparent first draft of his prison memoir released Thursday.

The 127 handwritten pages, with the heading “My Memoirs,” were discovered in prosecution files brought to Germany after the Nazi war criminal’s 1962 execution, prosecutor Willi Dressen said.

“Apparently, they fell into oblivion,” he said. Dressen heads the German agency coordinating efforts to pursue Nazi crimes.

Eichmann oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II and promoted the use of gas chambers in death camps. He escaped to South America after the war but was kidnapped in Argentina in 1960 by Israeli agents and brought to Israel.

The pages published Thursday were released two days after Israel said it will hand over a 1,300-page memoir Eichmann wrote while in prison in 1961 and 1962 to a German research institution for publication.

The decision to release that memoir--in which Eichmann tries to portray himself as a midlevel official who only followed Hitler’s orders--came after one of Eichmann’s sons, Dieter, hired a lawyer to claim the book as family property.

Dressen said he came across the earlier version Tuesday. He had decided to take another look through his thousands of files on the Eichmann case after the Berlin-based Die Welt newspaper asked him if he had a copy of the full memoir.

In the first excerpt, Eichmann complains about how his parents treated him much more strictly than his siblings for some unknown reason. “In no way was I a hard-to-raise child,” he insists.

He calls his father an “absolute authority” and describes transferring that relationship to his teachers and later to military officers.