50 Years After Trial, Eichmann Secrets Live On

BERLIN — Germany is famous for confronting its Nazi past. But confronting the years after the war is another matter. The latest proof comes as the country’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, refuses to declassify several thousand secret files detailing what Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi who helped orchestrate the Holocaust, was doing between 1945 and his capture by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in 1960. More than a few Germans have been speculating that the refusal has as much to do with tarnishing a cherished era as with betraying potential sources.

The 50th anniversary of Eichmann’s trial this spring has cast the early days of the postwar Federal Republic in a fresh historical light. Those were the years when the new West Germany held itself up as the cure for what ailed a humiliated and broken nation, and as an alternative to the Communist East.

That era was also the populist heyday of the organization man. And the classic portrait of Eichmann as a soulless cog in the machinery of totalitarianism, a petty bureaucrat acting out of “blind obedience,” in the incredulous description by Moshe Landau, the presiding judge at the trial — who, as it happens, died just the other day, at 99 — has also come to seem a sacred but dubious shibboleth of the time.

A different picture of the man, and the period, has begun to circulate. Bild, the German tabloid, having recently forced the BND through the courts to release a few files, uncovered an index card from 1952 that made clear that West German intelligence officials already knew Eichmann was living in Argentina. The card listed his alias there, or something close to it, and a contact who edited a well-known Nazi magazine in Buenos Aires, Der Weg.

West German authorities had claimed they had no clue where Eichmann went until the Israelis found him. Then in 2006 declassified C.I.A. documents showed they knew as early as 1956. Now it turns out they knew even earlier. Considering that Eichmann’s wife and children settled in Argentina in 1952 — living openly with Eichmann under their own names, in a house that was under his name — it seems remarkable today that authorities got away with claiming ignorance for so long.

Germans reacted to the Bild article with a familiar shake of the head that, here, implies not a lack of concern but stoic resignation. The bigger kerfuffle, though, has been around the more than 4,000 pages of undisclosed intelligence about Eichmann.

“The postwar period remains sensitive,” explained Bettina Stangneth, the author of a new German book on Eichmann, “because many Germans want to preserve the positive image they have of that time.”

She meant the postwar years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship and the so-called economic miracle. Few West German officials, or for that matter American ones, had any interest in hunting for Eichmann during the 1950s, Ms. Stangneth noted. Both countries employed ex-Nazis in government jobs. Eichmann had beans to spill. Better to leave him in obscurity, they figured.

That Adenauer’s close adviser, Hans Globke, helped strip Jews of their rights under the Nazis was a widely publicized scandal, but it only distracted from the larger shame that countless lesser-known Nazis lived and worked under the radar throughout West German society, including in the ranks of the BND.

A new exhibition about the trial at the Topography of Terror Museum here devotes a section to reappraising the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, pointing out that she failed to attend much of the trial, never saw Eichmann cross-examined and thus didn’t witness his “just following orders” defense crumble.

“Neither perverted nor sadistic,” is how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In Argentina Eichmann had been interviewed by an ex-Nazi, Willem Sassen, who, along with some other ex-Nazis there, dreamed about exonerating Hitler and inaugurating a Fourth Reich. Confronted with some of the Sassen material at the trial, Eichmann was exposed. He had told Sassen that he only regretted not having murdered more Jews. “I could have done more and should have done more,” he said.

The German historian Ulrich Herbert, during a recent interview with a German newspaper, described Eichmann as typical of many high-ranking Nazis, priding himself on being “an anti-Semite without anti-Semitic emotions.” Historians like Mr. Herbert have increasingly been questioning Arendt’s iconic concept of the “banality of evil.” As an underling to ultimate Nazi policy makers like Himmler and Heydrich, Eichmann was following orders, but was also “convinced of his actions,” Mr. Herbert insisted.

He added that Arendt’s catchphrase caught on in the popular imagination not because it accurately described Eichmann but because it expressed a widespread “disappointment in the lack of magnitude, even if diabolical, which one would somehow expect from one of the most important organizers of the mass murders.”

There is surely even more to it than that. The phrase dovetailed with the Willy Loman ethos of the day. Arendt built a philosophy of totalitarianism around what had become a postwar cultural commonplace. Other journalists covering the trial portrayed Eichmann the same way, as a hapless nobody in a glass booth. It was in the air.

It just didn’t suit Eichmann. Combing through the papers his family turned over to a Swiss publishing house years ago, now in the German state archives, Ms. Stangneth recently found a draft Eichmann prepared of an open letter to Adenauer, written from Argentina. “It’s about how to explain away the past, how to idealize National Socialism and downplay the crimes, so that Germany could regain its moral reputation and become strong again,” Ms. Stangneth said. “Eichmann hated being anonymous. He missed power. He wanted to matter again. On some level I think he even enjoyed his trial.”

The exhibition at the Topography of Terror Museum ends with the trial’s aftermath. Eichmann’s conviction upped the pressure on reluctant West Germans to repeal their 20-year statute of limitations on crimes, which many Nazis living in hiding banked on. But by 1968 little had really changed. West German youth took to the streets, as others did elsewhere.

Of all things it was the 1978 broadcast of an American melodrama, a four-part NBC mini-series called “The Holocaust,” that finally did what even Eichmann’s trial and the upheavals of 1968 could not. Young Germans weaned on television, Vietnam and civil rights, as the American historian Deborah Lipstadt notes in her well-done new book, “The Eichmann Trial,” were finally ready to glorify stories of the oppressed.

As the Eichmann trial gave a face to the Nazi extermination process, so the docudrama made the incomprehensible vastness of six million dead legible through testimonials of individual suffering. Survivors thereafter came to shape accountings of the Holocaust at precisely the point when a public born well after the war suddenly wanted to overturn the old historical narrative.

Today the question is whether a new generation of Germans wants to exorcise the postwar ghosts. A pending court case initiated by two journalists here demands the BND make public those classified pages of Eichmann material. Fifty years ago most Germans clearly preferred not to know.

Perhaps now it is time for a reckoning.