 First edition (German) | |
| Author | Jochen von Lang |
|---|---|
| Original title | Das Eichmann-Protokoll |
| Translator | Ralph Manheim |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Severin und Siedler (Germany) Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 1982 |
Published in English | 1983 |
| Media type | Print hardcover |
| Pages | 293 |
| ISBN | 0-88619-017-7 |
| OCLC | 11619460 |
Eichmann Interrogated is a 1982 non-fiction book containing selections from the pre-trial interrogation of high-ranking former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann was a German World War II war criminal who was living in Argentina under a false identity when he was captured by Israeli forces in 1960. Upon being brought to Israel, he was interrogated for 275 hours before his trial. This book contains testimony where Eichmann speaks of his life, from childhood to his years in hiding, though the focus is on his role in organizing the mass executions of civilians, particularly Jews, by the Nazi regime.
Eichmann Interrogated reads mostly as Eichmann denying any personal responsibility for Germany's mass executions. He repeatedly claims he was only in charge of transportation of Jewish and enemy civilians, he was only following orders, and that disobeying such orders would have result in his own execution. He also claims that other, previously tried German war criminals, deliberately implicated him to mitigate their personal responsibility. Eichmann also denies any feelings of antisemitism; indeed, he claims to have attempted to create a homeland for Jews, once in Madagascar and later in Eastern Europe.
These claims are challenged by his interrogator, Avner W. Less, a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel. Less, who is also quoted in the book, often asks Eichmann about a particular event; after Eichmann denied knowledge of or culpability for it, Less would produce a signed document or other evidence to show Eichmann was responsible. Eichmann referred to Less as "Herr Hauptmann," German for "Mr. Captain."
From page 141. (All ellipses are in the original)
Reading from a memo from Rudolf Höss, another high-ranking German war criminal, who had been captured in 1946 and tried and executed in Poland in 1947:
The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps (Todeslager), or killing centers (Tötungszentren), in Central Europe during the Holocaust in World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people—mostly Jews—during the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily killed by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps also used extreme work under starvation conditions in order to kill their prisoners.
Alois Brunner was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) officer who worked as Adolf Eichmann's assistant. Brunner is held responsible for sending over 100,000 European Jews to ghettos and concentration camps in eastern Europe. He was commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, from which nearly 24,000 people were deported.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution. On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers, where more than a million people were killed.
Hans Aumeier was an SS commander during the Nazi era who was the deputy commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. One of the most important criminals at Auschwitz, he was extradited to Poland where he was convicted and sentenced to death. Aumeier was executed in 1948.
Maria Mandl was an Austrian SS-Helferin known for her role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp where she is believed to have been directly complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 female prisoners. She was executed for war crimes.
Heinrich Müller was a high-ranking German Schutzstaffel (SS) and police official during the Nazi era. For the majority of World War II in Europe, he was the chief of the Gestapo, the secret state police of Nazi Germany. Müller was central in the planning and execution of the Holocaust and attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe—The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". He was known as "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller.
The Holocaust – the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945 – is the best-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million were killed. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Georg Konrad Morgen was an SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. He rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major). After the war, Morgen served as witness at several anti-Nazi trials and continued his legal career in Frankfurt.
The Gerstein Report was written in 1945 by Kurt Gerstein, Obersturmführer of the Waffen-SS, who served as Head of Technical Disinfection Services of the SS in World War II, and in that capacity supplied the hydrogen cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B from Degesch to Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, and conducted the negotiations with the owners. On 18 August 1942, along with Rolf Günther and Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Gerstein witnessed the gassing of some 3,000 Jews in the extermination camp of Belzec in occupied Poland. The report features his eyewitness testimony. It was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Sonderaktion 1005, also called Aktion 1005, or Enterdungsaktion, began in May 1942 during World War II to hide any evidence that people had been murdered by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland and Soviet Union. The project, which was conducted in secrecy from 1942 to 1944, focused on concealing evidence of mass murder at the Operation Reinhard killing centres, as well as at other sites. Prisoner groups used to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies were officially called Leichenkommandos and were part of Sonderkommando 1005; inmates were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
Martin Sandberger was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era and a convicted Holocaust perpetrator. He commanded Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A, as well as the Sicherheitspolizei and SD in Estonia. Sandberger perpetrated mass murder of the Jews in the Baltic states. He was also responsible for the arrest of Jews in Italy, and their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp. Sandberger was the second-highest official of the Einsatzgruppe A to be tried and convicted.
Karl-Friedrich Höcker was a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944. In 2006, a photo album created by Höcker, with some 116 pictures from his time at Auschwitz, was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sparking new interest in his activities as a concentration camp administrator.
Death Is My Trade is a 1952 French fictionalized biographical novel by Robert Merle. The protagonist, Rudolf Lang, was closely based on the real Rudolf Höß, commandant of the concentration camp Auschwitz.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust—the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi terminology. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in Argentina on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicised trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Waldemar Klingelhöfer was an SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) and convicted war criminal.
Rudolf Mildner was an Austrian-German SS-Standartenführer who served as the chief of the Gestapo at Katowice and who was the head of the political department at Auschwitz concentration camp, conducting "third degree" methods of interrogation from March 1941 until September 1943. As such, he frequently sent prisoners to Auschwitz for incarceration or execution. He visited Auschwitz on several occasions. In December 1944, he was appointed chief of the SiPo, Gestapo and SD in Vienna. After the war, Mildner testified at the Nuremberg Trials and remained in custody until 1949.
Death is My Trade is a 1977 German film, which is based on the script of director Theodor Kotulla starring Götz George in the leading role. The realisation of the script is based on the French novel La mort est mon métier by Robert Merle, which was published in 1952.
