Why or how would it be necessary for me to produce a "narrative" for why a liar has told lies?
It is sufficient that (1) we know this person does lie about a particular topic, (2) we know motives other than telling the truth existed for this same topic, for this person. Both are indisputably true, in Eichmann's case.
Moreover, in addition to Eichmann's own motives (financial or otherwise), Sassen wanted a story that would
sell. More on that later.
bombsaway wrote:Here's what I came up with re surface narrative
Let me try running out a general surface narrative and you tell me where you disagree: Eichmann runs into Sassen, in Stangneth's account a man devoted to National Socialism (at least the popular version). Sassen and his circle are revisionists. They know the few scholarly books about the Holocaust and have picked them apart. Then they hear about Eichmann, famous back then and who they know was intimately involved with everything they've been reading about. They make contact and invite him in to tell the real story.
The conversations begin in an agreeable way with Eichmann tearing apart the Holocaust books the Sassen circle shows him. But as the weeks progress he starts talking about mass killing more and more. Finally it becomes clear to the group that Eichmann is talking about enacting a genocidal plan and he isn't too sorry about it. Sassen is disturbed by these revelations (because they run counter to his revisionist project / he has ethical concerns about genocide) and begins to suspect Eichmann is being used by 'foreign powers' in some way. He screws with Eichmann's head to try to get him to reveal his hand, but his attempt fails, and Eichmann walls up. Their relationship sours, leading to much tension within the group, which lingers into the final sessions.
Sassen does little work on the book after, and publishes nothing about Eichmann for 4 years until Eichmann's arrest, when he sells a few excerpts to Life magazine. No sales or books after this.
From an orthodox perspective everything here is easily explicable. Eichmann was not lying to Sassen about an extermination program. It happened, he was involved in it, and he thought it was a good thing, which accords with perpetrator documents from the period. Eichmann wanted other people to know it was a good thing, and in particular thought he could appeal to people who aligned with him ideologically, like the Sassen group.
Let's not pretend you have personally read through the transcript (which remains publicly unavailable save the mostly-undecipherable photographed copy, and if I recall correctly, you don't speak German). Rather, you read [some of?] Stangneth's book and now attempt to pass off the inferences as your own. Revisionists, on the other hand, have not had the time nor resources to comb through these transcripts in-detail--they are not permitted to view the full written transcript which sits in an Israeli archive, nor the existing audio tapes which exist in a German archive. Once again, the table remains tilted---Revisionists have limited access to source materials and no one is incentivized to be a Revisionist. Rather, they are punished.
bombsaway wrote:On Sassen's end he was not in on anything, merely resistant to Eichmann's views in the same way and for similar reasons as people on this forum. Eventually he was convinced Eichmann was telling the truth but still had ethical qualms. I imagine most people here would feel the same way about the Holocaust, assuming it happened
The listeners’ horror and revulsion are obvious: Sassen the
novelist might have indulged in excesses of violence when it came to the
torture allegedly inflicted on Germans by the “victorious powers,” but the
suffering of the Jews silenced him. And not because he didn’t believe
Eichmann and Langer. While these two had both been involved in
concentration camps and were able to share their experiences and their selfpity with each other, Sassen was quite clearly horrified. But he granted
Eichmann’s wish for recognition, as he then dictated a trenchant sentence
with which Eichmann could doubtless identify: “The battlefields of this war
were called death camps.”
220 Here was the respect that Eichmann was
demanding for his “frontline experience.” However, the long dictation in
which Sassen recorded his thoughts also includes the assertion that the crimes
against humanity in which Eichmann, Höß, and Odilo Globocnik were
involved could “not be forgiven.”
221 Sassen then hurriedly says their actions
could be “understood”: Eichmann, and other people all the way up to Hitler,
had simply been manipulated. Still, Sassen never revised his opinion that
these crimes were unforgivable. And in the transcript, when the group reaches
the reports of the children’s transports—which Eichmann refers to in all
seriousness as the “children story”—even Sassen’s “understanding” deserts
him temporarily.222 Eichmann clearly notices Sassen’s horror and shamelessly
denies that any such thing had happened: “But you have found so many
documents and papers, and now I am wondering where the documents on the
matter of the children are, I mean documents that can be believed. And so I
have nothing further to say on this matter for the moment.”
What is your surface narrative of the events in question, and then the underlining motivations of the participants?
I highlighted in bold above the portion about
Eichmann changing his story to suit Sassen's "cue". This better suits a revisionist narrative, for obvious reasons.
Regarding your "surface narrative", which was:
bombsaway wrote:Let me try running out a general surface narrative and you tell me where you disagree: Eichmann runs into Sassen, in Stangneth's account a man devoted to National Socialism (at least the popular version). Sassen and his circle are revisionists. They know the few scholarly books about the Holocaust and have picked them apart. Then they hear about Eichmann, famous back then and who they know was intimately involved with everything they've been reading about. They make contact and invite him in to tell the real story.
The conversations begin in an agreeable way with Eichmann tearing apart the Holocaust books the Sassen circle shows him. But as the weeks progress he starts talking about mass killing more and more. Finally it becomes clear to the group that Eichmann is talking about enacting a genocidal plan and he isn't too sorry about it. Sassen is disturbed by these revelations (because they run counter to his revisionist project / he has ethical concerns about genocide) and begins to suspect Eichmann is being used by 'foreign powers' in some way. He screws with Eichmann's head to try to get him to reveal his hand, but his attempt fails, and Eichmann walls up. Their relationship sours, leading to much tension within the group, which lingers into the final sessions.
Sassen does little work on the book after, and publishes nothing about Eichmann for 4 years until Eichmann's arrest, when he sells a few excerpts to Life magazine. No sales or books after this.
I'll address this further down.
bombsaway wrote:"Resettlement of Jews from the GG occurred more than a year later (in devastating wartime), to places with little administrative structure"
This is you from earlier. Can you provide a single piece of evidence for Jews from the GG being resettled? How do you know this happened?
Rather than quote-post myself from earlier which you seem intent on having me do, I will let it suffice to say that since you have proven not one single Jew to be buried under Treblinka, and since there are some 700,000+ we know were sent toward or through that transit station, they necessarily transited through said station and resettlement, we'd agree, is the most likely outcome beyond that point. I can add more but it isn't necessary, since you won't get past this argument. Anything else I add is "extra", "bonus", etc., but my burden of proof has already been met. Yours is nowhere near.
bombsaway wrote:Butterfangers wrote:Ah, so you "mistakenly" left out the very next sentence in your quote which you claimed to suggest shows Eichmann was in an abundant financial situation, where that next sentence shows clearly and explicitly that he was actually in great need of money at the time.
And you expect any rational person to believe that this isn't lying? Sounds like more lying to justify your lies.
Why do you quote "mistakenly" as if I said it? If I were taking your approach to this conversation I would accuse you of lying. You might be of course, but more likely you are just being careless and overeager in running out your argument. That's ok though, it happens to everyone, and we can move past it.
Sure Eichmann was in need of money, but that doesn't mean he was in poor circumstances. He had a good job. This was my assertion (no evidence he was in poor circumstances financially). You're doing pilpul here.
1) Quotation marks do not necessarily mean it is you who is being quoted. The idea is that you lied, so it wasn't a "mistake"; it was a lie.
2) You are deflecting from the fact that you made an argument and cited a quote to support it, leaving out the very next sentence which made clear that the evidence you cited meant the exact opposite of what you portrayed it as.
Moving right along...
Höttl's Huge Honkin' Lies
I have quite a bit to get through but I am going to start with an example of a "Nazi" whom we know has lied for similar reasons to those motives I have suggested here of Eichmann, and which is perhaps insightful for Revisionism in general. From Stangneth, op cit., p. 296-300, in Wilhelm Höttl:
Published at the end of 1955, the collection of documents edited by Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf gave readers access to Wilhelm Höttl’s full three-page declaration under oath, in which he set out his conversation with Eichmann. Document PS-2738 had been one of the most important documents in the Nuremberg Trials.” Here Höttl says that Eichmann had come to his Budapest apartment at the end of August 1944, as usual wanting information on the military situation. Höttl took this opportunity to ask him about the exact number of Jews murdered, and Eichmann answered: “Around four million Jews have been killed in the various extermination camps, while a further two million met their end in other ways, the majority being shot by the Security Police’s Einsatzkommandos during the Russian campaign.”
[...]
Ironically, Höttl’s statement is still regarded as unreliable. Much of what he told American investigators after the German defeat in 1945 was not information he had heard himself: he “borrowed” it from other people’s reports and added the occasional exaggeration of his own.
[...]
Later, Höttl would unintentionally strengthen people’s doubts about his credibility. In his autobiography, he claimed to have been aware that this statement would make him a sought-after (and well-paid) witness to the Nazi period. In his final years he managed to start a television career based solely on this statement, then hinted several times that he had never really believed the scale of the Holocaust was so vast. This suggestion, like many things in his last book, proves how easy Höttl found it to spend a lifetime saying things he didn't believe. In one of his last interviews, he said: "As is so often the case, something I lied about came true."
Money, fame, popularity, notoriety. All of these are real motives held by some prominent "Nazis" after the war.
Eichmann was a Lonely Boy
After the war, Eichmann's life was a shadow of what it once was. He spent years in his hideaway on his own:
He was probably bored to death.
--Hannah Arendt, on Eichmann in his North German hideout
p. 70
In a chapter titled "
Detested Anonymity" (chapter 3), Bettina Stangneth writes her impression of Eichmann's experience in rural isolation:
Instead of a uniform and gleaming boots, an office and an orderly, he was left with a secondhand Wehrmacht coat and a hut in the forest. No plenipotentiary powers, no carte blanche, no trips in his own official car around half of Europe. [...] In the space of a few months, Eichmann’s existence had become entirely unremarkable—you might even call it tranquil.
p. 70
He spent some of this time reading the famous "Holocaust" tales, including those about himself:
Eichmann had always claimed that from the very beginning, he read everything that was written about the Nazis' extermination of the Jews. "In the forested heathland," he explained somewhat incautiously to Willem Sassen, "I was given a whole pile of old newspapers with articles about me. The headlines were Mass Murderer Eichmann, where is the mass murderer, where is Eichmann and similar." His later conversations and statements show that he really was familiar with the major texts and events of the time, although it isn't entirely clear when he first read them.
p. 71
Big Motives at Play
It is clear that money was at least one major incentive for Sassen as it pertained to the Eichmann interviews:
After realizing the controversy of what he had recorded, however, Sassen ultimately came to hit a crossroads between profit and loyalty. Both were important to him:
Sassen's greed reached its limits at personal alliances.
p. 295
Presumably, he also did want Eichmann to confirm a revisionist interpretation of the alleged "Holocaust". What is quite clear, however, is that Eichmann preferred to stay in control of the interview. More on that later.
As for Eichmann's motives in all of this, let's start by looking at a summary of Eichmann's own explanation at trial, which we would agree is at the very least a mixture between truth and lies:
Eichmann worked tirelessly to disqualify as evidence what little of the text remained. He disputed “the famous Sassen Document” by stressing the influence of alcohol, claiming that most of his corrections had been lost, and lying that he had given up on correcting the transcripts because they were so bad. Unlike the handwriting expert (and anyone who had eyes), Eichmann couldn't recognize a few of the handwritten comments as his own. The handwritten pages were pretty much unusable, he said, as they were incomplete, which was bound to create a false impression. He also claimed there had been an agreement with Sassen that every page should be authorized by hand before being released for publication—a process he had become familiar with in Israel, where his interrogator had him sign off on each individual page of the interrogation.” But the most incredible of his lies was that Sassen had spoken very bad German (July 13). [...] Recklessly, Eichmann kept demanding the submission of the original tapes, though he also took the precaution of saying that Sassen had goaded him into making false statements to produce good headlines (July 19). He painted the discussions as “tavern conversations.” Hours of studying historical theories and Nazi history suddenly became a lot of casual boasting and booze-fueled sentimentality (July 20). Sassen, he said, had occasionally tempted him to “relapse” into National Socialist ways of thinking. Naturally, he didn’t mention that the entire Sassen circle was one big relapse. Eichmann also told his lawyer that what he had really written in Argentina was something very different. As Servatius then explained to the court, Eichmann would present these writings “as evidence of the real attitude of the accused.” Eichmann cleverly defused and dodged any question about why these discussions had taken place, by adopting the rumor that Sassen and Life had brought into the world: the legend of the “Eichmann memoirs."
p. 394
A. Eichmann's Personal MotivesStangneth provides some valuable insight as to one of the motives which Eichmann clearly demonstrates:
But something else is at work in these descriptions. Heinrich Himmler had told the Auschwitz commandant that he must carry out the slaughter so that the generations to come wouldn't have to. This imperative turned the extermination of the Jews into something that men like Hoess and Eichmann had missed out on: fighting on the front lines. Not that any of Eichmann’s staff, or men with comparable positions in “reserved occupations,” would have traded places with soldiers in Stalingrad. We have no evidence that anyone from Eichmann’s department actually requested a transfer to the front lines. But they still felt they were missing out on the much-lauded experience of camaraderie, proving oneself in battle, gallantry, and heroic deeds, and the front-line troops never really acknowledged the office staff as comrades. The Waffen-SS disliked and mocked the Allgemeine-SS (the “general” SS). Understandably, anyone who had been promoted while surviving the conditions at the front didn’t take kindly to someone earning the same reward behind a desk in Berlin. This distinction was still being brought home to Eichmann in Argentina.” And so it pleased him not only to recall this recognition that Himmler had given them but to demonstrate to the others that during his visits to the extermination camp, he had proved himself. Fountains of blood and splintering bones, willpower and acts of violence: Eichmann had come through it all as well. He too had known comradeship and supported his fellow soldiers. [...]
He wanted to prove that he too had suffered for Germany. This desire goes a long way to explaining why Eichmann describes the horror so frankly.
p. 278
As already shown, Eichmann had previously held an interest in the claims and narratives ascribed by propagandists about him and his peers. Although Eichmann had done some reading on his own, the Sassen group brought along new works he had not yet seen (note for later that this is also where Stangneth's bizarre theory begins, which I'll explain):
The additional difficulty in this already complex situation was that, when the Sassen conversations began, most of the books were new to Eichmann. Generally speaking, he was familiar only with the reviews, not with the books themselves. Sassen frequently used this advantage to try to offset Eichmann’s huge head start on the information. He would confront Eichmann with historical details without revealing his source. Of course, Sassen’s alliance with the books didn’t go unnoticed by Eichmann, and he kept asking specific questions about the books’ contents. But above all, Sassen aroused Eichmann’s curiosity about what might actually have been written about him and his crimes. The process was always the same, starting with the first book that Sassen lent him, Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand. In one of the early discussions (tapes 6, 8, 9, and 10), Eichmann mentions that he isn’t familiar with it: “I have not read the book either, unfortunately I have not had access to it, it was published only a few months ago, but I have read several reviews in various newspapers.” Sassen deliberately ignores his hints, reassuring Eichmann that he knows the book well. Eichmann doesn’t dare ask straight out to borrow the book. But he does make frequent, pointed remarks about how reading it would be sure to jog his memory, if he were able to “study” it at some point:” “I might be able to say more if I had the stimulus, through one of the explanations in his book, or if some other tome makes reference to something he says.”? But Sassen held out for weeks, and the books were read only communally, during the discussion sessions. Only on tape 24 is Eichmann allowed to look at the book for himself and read out his own notes on it without interruption from the others.” Sassen, as Eichmann quickly realized, wasn’t naive, and at bottom, he wasn’t really a friend.
p. 274
And don't forget that finances were indisputably an important factor for for Eichmann, who would have sought some form of compensation for his time:
The family urgently needed the money, as an unexpected event had taken place: Vera Eichmann was pregnant again.
p. 167
B. Eichmann's Popularity and Fame MotivesThe Sassen interviews were not some quiet, fireside event which no one took notice of. Quite the contrary, they were the "talk of the town", often having strange visitors attend and listening to sensitive details of conversation:
Word of the meetings at Sassen’s house obviously got around quickly, and they became a social event. Much was expected of this project, which was certainly no secret and attracted a great deal of attention. Eichmann, undaunted, spoke quite frankly ~ even when he didn’t know some of the guests. [...]
On the tape of another session, he can be heard whispering that he doesn’t like a listener who has just departed, whose name he doesn’t know. Nobody who was worried about their safety and anonymity would be this relaxed.
p. 251
"The rather unprofessionally produced transcripts reveal that Sassen and Eichmann were not the only people involved in the discussions. The surviving tapes provide audio evidence not only of other participants but of passive listeners as well. Nobody can listen to a conversation for hours at a time without making some kind of noise: throat clearing, coughing, paper rustling, footsteps, murmured excuses, hurried farewells, banging doors, jammed windows, the noises of drinks and cigarette lighters. In places it is possible to discern six separate people making these noises in the room. Contemporaries in Buenos Aires always implied that a lot of people knew about these sessions with Eichmann, and one took a certain pride in being able to say one had been there. Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that some people who met Eichmann elsewhere confused their experience with the Sassen circle, or that people said they had been at the discussions to make themselves look important. But the documents and tapes prove that they really were a big event."
p 246
Surely, Eichmann could have requested these visitors not be allowed and that these conversations be strictly private. Stangneth admits that Eichmann consciously enabled (or perhaps even sought after) becoming a "public attraction":
Not everyone in 1957 was as publicity shy as Mengele. During his extensive investigations, the Argentine author Uki Goni met a surprising number of people who claimed to have witnessed the discussions between Eichmann and Sassen. The fact that people with no access to the Durer circle made such claims is only human nature. Goebbels’s acolyte Wilfred von Oven even said he introduced Fritsch and Sassen, despite having only arrived in Argentina in 1951, long after Sassen. All this boasting just shows how attractive these ghoulish gatherings and their protagonists must have been. Anyone who thought they were anyone claimed to have been there. In one of the first recording sessions, Eichmann hints at the reason he allowed himself to become a public attraction in far-right circles: “They stopped looking for me a long time ago, that much is clear.”
p. 253
We recall that Eichmann was quite comfortable speaking freely ever since his first moment of arrival in Argentina:
On July 14, 1950, the Giovanna C reached Buenos Aires harbor with its cargo of Third Reich imports, and Adolf Eichmann set foot on Argentine soil for the first time. Years later he would still have a vivid memory of the moment: “My heart was filled with joy. The fear that someone could denounce me vanished. I was there, and in safety!”! From his observation, one might almost think he was a prodigal son returning home, not a man stepping out into an unknown land. Where other émigrés—particularly those traveling on false papers—might have been contending with feelings of uncertainty, or at best curiosity and a sense of expectation, Eichmann remembered feeling nothing of the sort.
p. 105
This arrival took place three years before he met Habel, whom he met before his fame and notoriety in Argentina had reached its peak, and perhaps before he'd begun to appreciate the value of embracing the false storylines associated to his name:
From his meeting with Adolf Eichmann, he said he had asked him about the Jewish Holocaust: what about the matter of the six million? Habel said that Eichmann answered: It's very simple... we had observed it until 1943. After that there were no more trains, there were no more telephones, nothing. Until that time, 239,000 had been killed, all registered. But Habel asked him about the number of murders up to 1945, to which Eichmann responded I don't know how many more could have died, but half a million at the most. The elderly German also opined that Eichmann did not think he could be kidnapped in Argentina, as happened in May 1960.
https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/confesi ... agRtg.htmlAnd Then It All Went Wrong
As mentioned earlier, Stangneth's interpretation is that Eichmann preferred to stay in control of the interviews, both in terms of overall talking time and with regard to perceived level of knowledge or wisdom in the group. At one point, Eichmann failed to maintain control as such, due to a deliberate "trap" set by Sassen, who provides Eichmann a document to criticize without first telling him it was written by Wisliceny (who had been a close friend/associate of Eichmann's). Eichmann had until that time been picking apart what other authors got wrong (according to Eichmann) about the administrative structures involved in the SS areas he was involved in or aware of. After Eichmann does his usual routine as such for part of this document, which contains a detailed description (or "confession") about the "Final Solution" and its administrative outline, in-depth, Eichmann gradually seems to concede that this author is well-informed in some areas (Stangneth infers that Eichmann seems 'troubled' by this). But while Eichmann offers some additional criticism, Sassen finally admits that it was Wisliceny who wrote the document, a fact which Eichmann is overwhelmed by. He'd seen the record of Wisliceny testifying against him at Nuremberg, which he was understanding of, but this more recent document had much more detail than he'd seen before. It was felt as a true and thorough betrayal (whether true statements or not) by a close friend.
Stangneth explains how it was this moment in which the tone of the interviews changed, from that point forward:
This is exactly what happened in Argentina: Eichmann recognized that Sassen had been playing on his emotions and had entrapped him. In the discussions that followed, his contributions became more halting, filled with latent or open aggression. The convivial tone of the previous sessions vanished at a stroke.
[...]
And he realized that the man he thought of as his new friend in Argentina wasn’t afraid to manipulate him. Eichmann learned that he had been betrayed by two so-called friends, one old and one new.
[...]
Over the sessions that followed, the discussion lurched from one dispute to the next. Eichmann put his own opinions across quite forcefully, even when Sassen didn’t want to hear them. No, of course he been acting on Hitler’s orders, and no, the extermination of the Jews had not been “un-Germanic”: it had been a fundamentally German operation, which they had to keep on justifying, and he was the German officer who had carried it out. Eichmann, the specialist on Jewish questions, had implemented exactly what Hitler wanted. [...] Sassen, Fritsch, and Langer could do little in retaliation; the discussion sometimes veered off course, and the project threatened to collapse."
p. 285
In brief, Eichmann's cynicism increased dramatically, almost overnight, for obvious reasons. He had named his third son after Wisliceny, so this was a deeply personal matter. Of course, Stangneth insists that Eichmann was offended because Wisliceny exposed the "truth" about Eichmann's actions against Jews (and that Sassen "threw it into his face", so to speak, for his own [Sassen's] motives). But all of this behavior is just as easy (or easier) to explain if we assume that Wisliceny had simply written down guided falsehoods, willing to do so either out of spite or hatred toward Eichmann or simply to save his own skin (or other coercion) as the probability of his execution further approached.
As a result of this "entrapment" from Sassen, Eichmann became dramatically more obstinate,
recognizing that Sassen preferred a more Revisionist-friendly narrative and deliberately violating that preference.
Stangneth simply assumes that Eichmann had some kind of epiphany the night before and decided to 'come 100% clean' with Eichmann at the next meetings, and finally tell the 'full truth' about extermination. In reality, it looks far more like he simply felt motivated to produce even more bullshit.
What We're Left With
From all of this, Stangneth summarizes her winding, delusional hypothesis as follows:
His self-declared war on enemy literature saw Eichmann fighting on two fronts. While the others concentrated on defending their fantasy version of history against the research, Eichmann was also attempting to tell the Sassen circle what they wanted to hear. He knew his interlocutors would not be fellow soldiers but enemies. He had to put a slant on his interpretations, diverting the group away from facts that he knew only too well. Sassen and Fritsch may have been refusing to acknowledge historical facts, but Eichmann had to conceal knowledge that went far beyond the literature. This must have cost him a huge effort: knowing the magnitude of the crime, he first had to find out what was written about it, then consider how to distract the others from the books’ threatening content, while simultaneously appearing to share their perspective, which was one of denial. And then the specialist consultant had to add “new” information to the discussion—though without exposing himself too much. Most important, he had to avoid getting caught doing any of it. It’s no wonder Eichmann was in peak condition for his police interrogation in 1960.
p.273
Notice that little of what Stangneth claims here is actually supported by the statements, themselves. She simply infers most of this where it isn't necessary to do so, yet this is her over-arching takeaway and the key theme of her entire narrative.
I will add all of this a reminder that:
- The legible, complete transcripts are still unavailable to the general public or to Revisionists
- The existing audio is still unavailable to the general public or to Revisionists
We know why.
For obvious reasons, I decided to check your reference. Here is the quote you cite but expanded just slightly to include the appropriate context which you strangely left out:
