The Eichmann Diaries
You are, of course, familiar with Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann who escaped Europe and justice after World War II. It may be of interest to you that, after twenty-five years of meticulous investigation, I wrote an 80,000 word typescript detailing the full story—never told before—of the three Adolf Eichmann sets of diaries that exist: 1) Adolf Eichmann’s atrocious and gruesome original memoirs taperecorded and subsequently transcribed while he was in hiding in Argentina, 2) Eichmann’s Israeli diaries written during the 1961 Eichmann trial, and
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3) his 1,300 page confession, handwritten in between the war criminal’s conviction and his execution.
“The Eichmann Diaries” is much more than a biography. The book deals with Eichmann’s life in hiding in Argentina, including an almost day-by-day account of the recording, on tape, of the most horrible memoirs in living history.
 It is against my conviction to say even now that we were wrong at the time,’ Adolf Eichmann said. ‘I was only an accountant of death. I had nothing to do with the killings. 
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Sassen [Dutch former SS officer Willem Sassen, who found refuge in Argentina via Dublin] taperecorded and edited Eichmann’s rambling confessions into more or less readable copy, on thin, legal size white paper. On his secondhand typewriter, he made up to five carbon copies at a time. There were no second or third drafts; only the original typewritten text and four or five carbon copies that, in a sense, also were originals. If Sassen made mistakes, he neglected to correct them.
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On reel 47, Sassen is heard saying: ‘Bueno, let us go back to, say, fifteen years ago. Someone said to you: “Jews—men, women, children—we will get rid of them.”’
Eichmann’s reply is instant: ‘Jawohl.’
On that same reel, Sassen angrily snaps: ‘What did our war amount to? We shot and gassed innocent people!’ Eichmann replies: ‘What did the Allies do? They let us starve to death. In my view, gassing is a more humane death than starvation.’
What follows is Eichmann's kidnapping through a secret Mossad team, his subsequent police interrogation in Israel and, finally, the famous 1961 Eichmann trial followed by a detailed verbatim account never published before of Adolf Eichmann’s last days and execution.
In “The Eichmann Diaries” I have faithfully reproduced the most catching fragments of all three sets of diaries—also of those secret diary pages the Israel Ministry of Justice only released a couple of years ago. (A copy was given to me in as early as 1975 by Dr Servatius, Eichmann’s German lawyer.)
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The main character in “The Eichmann Diaries”, apart from Adolf Eichmann (and his family), is Dutch SS-officer Willem Sassen, himself a fugitive from justice. Between 1955 and 1960, Sassen taperecorded and transcribed Eichmann’s memoirs in Argentina and—as
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(Photo © Stan Lauryssens)
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he was a secret Mossad informer himself—sold Eichmann to the Israeli Secret Service for $ 5,000 a month over a two-year period. I stayed at Sassen’s house in Argentina and listened to the 67 tapes on which Eichmann recorded his war memoirs and concentration camp recollections.
Press reports over the years have stated that I am the only writer ever to have had access to the full set of Eichmann tapes.
Other characters in “The Eichmann Diaries” are Eichmann’s sons Klaus and Dieter, Dr Robert Servatius (Eichmann’s lawyer), Mossad chief officer Isser Harel and Wilhelm Höttl who was Eichmann’s superior Gestapo officer in Vienna. I had interviews with all of the above. A rather unlikely character in “The Eichmann Diaries” is British film director Alfred Hitchcock.
“Stan Lauryssens writes so well that you can almost smell the dust blowing through the window.”
---The Bulletin
What reviewers in Italy said about The Eichmann Diaries:
"I was thoroughly impressed. Very well written, moving, thought- provoking and extremely well-researched. A truly fascinating read."
From Polish press reports:
"Dziennik Nazisty" is addictive.
I'll advise everyone to read the book.
Fascinating and frightening."
This is what The New York Times wrote about the Eichmann kidnapping back in 1961: " ... the long manhunt that ended in Eichmann's Argentine capture by Israeli agents. Here, indeed, was—and still is—a golden opportunity for the chase thriller of all time." That was witten almost fifty years ago. It is still true today.
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Translated
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Italian cover
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Dutch cover
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Polish cover
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Dutch cover
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Now available from Amazon.com: Stan Lauryssens: The Man Who Invented the Third Reich
A prolific writer, historian, critic, translator and publisher, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was the quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist.
In the turbulent years which followed the end of World War I, he became politically active and was soon considered to be the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany.
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Van den Bruck expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work "Das Dritte Reich" (The Third Reich), first published in 1923. Adolf Hitler, the charismatic leader of the then litle-known National Socialist German Workers' Party, whom van den Bruck had met the same year, was profoundly influenced by these ideas and regarded himself as the activist who could implement them. When Hitler and the Nazis swept to power in 1933, van den Bruck realized Hitler had become the personification of the violent dynamism recommended in "Das Dritte Reich" and he foresaw the horrors to come. Van den Bruck saw no way out other than suicide.
In this biography, the author offers an insight into the life of van den Bruck and of the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which he lived.
Foreign rights sold to France, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.
Historical Notes: Hitler's theft of the Third Reich...read more
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My "Forgotten" Interviews
A couple of years ago, living in a mews house in Chelsea, London, I came across a set of "forgotten" interviews I had conducted in Buenos Aires twenty years earlier
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with Adolf Eichmann's family and friends. Around that time, the Israeli government revealed that the Nazi war criminal had written a "secret" diary while awaiting his execution. Strange, I thought, since I had an old and dog-eared copy of this "secret" diary in my possession. As I had all the material in hand, I decided to write a non-fiction book about Eichmann's diaries that would be a real-life adventure story, the stuff movies are made from—and so much more than a biography.
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From Areté to the Israeli President
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My name has cropped up in a debate about a new book Israeli President Shimon Peres published recently about former Israeli prime-minister David Ben-Gurion.
As Tom Segev reports in Haaretz, on page 182 of the English edition of Shimon Peres' book, there is a stunning piece of information regarding the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the hanged Nazi mass murderer: "The Argentinian government had some advance knowledge of what Israel was up to, and indeed, Argentinian police agents observed the abduction."
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 Israeli President Peres
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Let me quote Tom Segev: "Peres is not the first source for this version of the story: it also appears in a book about the Eichmann trial published a few months ago by the American historian Deborah E. Lipstadt.
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But her source was not, for example, a dossier from Argentina's secret service, but rather an article that appeared three years ago in Areté, a literary journal published in England. The author of the article is Stan Lauryssens, a Belgian crime writer who also pens biographies. Lauryssens wrote a book about Dutch-born Willem Sassen, a journalist who served in the Waffen-S.S. and was among Eichmann's associates in Argentina, and recorded Sassen's recollections of Eichmann's life story. Lauryssens has a rather colorful website on which he also claims that Sassen worked for the Mossad, being paid $5,000 a month. He reports that he has adapted the material about Eichmann into a play, with a cast of characters that includes the film director Alfred Hitchcock."
So far, so good, with one proviso only: the Areté piece was not an article but a 40 page excerpt of the book I was working on, "The Eichmann Diaries", still unpublished in English--though it was published in Polish, Dutch and Italian.
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Alfred Hitchcock and
The Eichmann Diaries
What did he know? Why didn't he tell?
Interviewing Eichmann in Argentina, Sassen faced a serious problem. Hardly any documentation on the history of the concentration camps was available in Buenos Aires at that time, so Sassen turned to the one friend who could ask questions about the genocide of the Jewish population in Europe without arousing suspicion: Anthony Mertens,
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a newspaper man in Amsterdam who could benefit of the truly Jewish maiden name of his wife Valentine—Conijn.
Of course, Mertens had his own agenda.
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Early in the evening of 9 November 1955, a SAS plane flying in from Stockholm landed at Schiphol Airport and a horde of photographers and reporters rushed to the plane. Alfred Hitchcock was in Holland to promote the European release of three of four films he had made in the previous two years: Dial M for Murder starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland, To Catch a Thief starring the ageless Cary Grant and Grace Kelly again
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and his latest film, The Trouble with Harry starring Shirley MacLaine and John Forsythe.
Would you be interested, sir, in making a semi-documentary suspense thriller about the hunt for the number one mass murderer of the century?” Mertens said.
A film in which the real murderer—a Nazi mass murderer—plays the leading part.”
“I like your idea very much,” Hitch said. ‘Very much yes.” He pursed his lips. “Put it in writing. Give your story a structure." Back in his editorial office, Mertens took out his fountain pen and wrote HITCHCOCK on an empty blue folder. For six months, between 10 November 1955 and 20 March the following year, he worked on his Eichmann screenplay.
On 20 March 1956, he wrote the following certified letter to Hitchcock.
Confidential
Dear Mr Hitchcock,
One man, one murderer, has survived the war and its aftermath: an Austrian Gestapo officer who is listed as the exterminator of a few million Jews in German-occupied Europe. He lives a quiet life ‘somewhere in the world’ and earns his daily bread in a very respectable manner. I am in contact with some people very close to him who have agreed to help me in bringing the Austrian mass murderer to justice. Would you be interested in directing—in Austria, Poland, Israel and Latin America—a real-life movie about the hunt for and eventually the capture of mass murderer Number 1 and the most evil war criminal of the twentieth century?
Signed: Anthony Mertens
On Monday 26 October 1956, Mertens picked up the phone. Hollywood on the line, long-distance. Joan Harrison, assistant to Mr Hitchcock, thanked him for his storyline and said that unless he could deliver the very last shot of the war criminal on the run, in a barber chair or waiting at a bus stop, Mr Hitchcock would not be able to tackle the project in the foreseeable future.
Mertens went home.
"Hitchcock has missed a chance to write History," he said to his wife and angrily threw the blue HITCHCOCK folder in the dustbin.
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 Joan Harrison
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Epilogue
Thirty years later, it was revealed that in 1945, “Hitch” had a minor connection to a documentary on the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a project that was supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the U.S. Office of War Information: though he’s listed as “director” on screen, Hitchcock merely served for two months as a treatment advisor to the film’s editors in London.
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On the soundtrack, over grainy black and white images of unspeakable horror, famed British movie actor Trevor Howard (Brief Encounter, The Third Man, Mutiny on the Bounty) is heard saying: “A smell came from a concentration camp, a waste ringed with barbed wire and overlooked by watchtowers. Huts were almost impossible to go near; they were full of tangled masses of people who had died slowly and painfully of starvation and disease, writhing in agony, helpless in puddles of excrement. The dead which lay there were not numbered in hundreds, but in thousands; not one or two thousand but 30,000. Lack of soap and water brought lice to the inmates and lice carry typhus. Every day the dead were taken from the huts. The gas chamber was conveniently placed next to the mortuary, and next to that was the crematorium. These great ovens were constructed exclusively for the burning of large numbers of corpses.”
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