THE EICHMANN DIARIES
by Stan Lauryssens
 
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 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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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 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. 
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.
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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(Photo © Stan Lauryssens)
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 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.
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“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.
Italian cover
Dutch cover
Polish cover
Dutch cover
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.
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, 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.
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 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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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. 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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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.|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.
"Brilliantly tantalizing, puzzling and revealing, yet dangerous." --- To order from Amazon.com, click here ...
Foreign rights sold to France, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.
Historical Notes: Hitler's theft of the Third Reich
As published in The Independent (London), Mar 29, 1999 by Stan Lauryssens
A PRE-WAR German school text advertises Hitler's Mein Kampf as "a classic masterpiece" and "the new Bible of the People". Booksellers were only allowed to deal in new copies since the literary work of the Führer could not be described as "second-hand".
Already in 1925, the literary agency of Curtis Brown in London, with offices in Berlin, entered into copyright negotiations. Hitler's text - 560 pages of close print - was set up in type and printed in four working days. The translator worked night and day during that period, sending proofs back and forth in batches by taxi. The English edition, rendered as My Struggle, included the unabridged text of the Nazi Party programme. Copies of My Struggle (as well as of Karl Marx's Das Kapital) were among the books officially recommended as gifts to British troops at the Second World War front.
In 1974, in a small apartment in Munich, I interviewed Otto Strasser who by then was the last surviving member of the original band of Nazi Party leaders. When Hitler became German Chancellor, Otto Strasser fled the country and escaped into exile. Under an assumed name he first lived in Prague, then in Switzerland and Canada where he became an informant to the Intelligence Service. Goebbels proclaimed that Strasser was "Hitler's enemy No 1". Strasser alleged that Hitler killed his brother, and stole the "revolutionary idea equal to Das Kapital and On the Origin of Species from under the nose of one of his best friends: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. According to Strasser, without Hitler, Moeller van den Bruck would have became a household name, on a par with Marx and Charles Darwin. But Moeller van den Bruck took his life on the day he realised that Hitler was betraying his ideals.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was an enigmatic figure. As a young poet in Berlin and a quintessential Bohemian fin-de-siecle artist in Paris, he befriended Munch, Strindberg and Max Beckmann; he translated Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-eater, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, E.A. Poe and Guy de Maupassant into German. Then the Great War came. Against the advice of his doctors Moeller van den Bruck, who had entered a private clinic to cure his alcoholic hallucinations and nervous breakdowns, enlisted as a war volunteer and was sent to the Eastern Front. Immediately he collapsed. To relieve his distress and mental pain, he was administered large quantities of opium. Trying to cope with life in post-war Berlin, he set out to write his magnum opus in praise of a Thousand Year Reich. On 24 August 1923 that book, entitled The Third Reich was published by Ring-Verlag in Berlin with a first printing of 20,000 copies. But like his literary precursors Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant and E.A. Poe befor e him, Moeller van den Bruck succumbed to the horrors of syphilis and was admitted to a mental asylum, where he took his own life. He was laid to rest in the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde cemetery in Berlin, among a long row of ordinary graves. None of the Berlin newspapers published the customary obituary.
Otto Strasser was adamant that Hitler borrowed the title of Moeller van den Bruck's book for his own use and copied his ideas in Mein Kampf, written in 1924, a year after The Third Reich was published. He went on to claim that up to 1930 The Third Reich was widely read and discussed in Germany, much more so than Mein Kampf, and that in reality The Third Reich, not Mein Kampf, was the original Bible of Nazi ideology. Apparently this got on Hitler's nerves. Storm Troopers stepped in, raided Moeller van den Bruck's home and plundered his library. His private papers and all of his letters and manuscripts were confiscated and stored in the Nazi Archive. With The Third Reich out of the way, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was promoted as the highest form of literary art.
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