Eichmann Rationalizes His Nazi Role in Jail Notebooks

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.”

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Petra Falkenberg and Christian Retzlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau and Reane Oppl in Bonn contributed to this report.