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Posted Saturday, January 3, 2009

Christopher Browning and the Testimony of Adolf Eichmann

By Paul Grubach

Christopher R. Browning, 2003. "Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann." In : Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 2003.

Introduction

CHRISTOPHER R BROWNING is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill. The author of numerous books and papers on Nazism and the Jewish experience during World War II, he is widely considered to be a foremost expert on the Final Solution, the alleged Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Browning was the Canadian government's most important expert witness at the 1988 Holocaust trial in Toronto, where Revisionist Ernst Zündel was prosecuted for publishing allegedly false news about the Jewish experience during WWII. He was also one of the historical experts that testified at the David Irving vs. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in London in 2000, the most famous Holocaust court case since the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961.

Considering Professor Browning's current stature among academic historians, one should consider very carefully whatever he writes about evidence in regard to the Holocaust.

Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Karl Eichmann was a SS Lieutenant-Colonel and Head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo. According to the traditional Holocaust story, he is said to have a played a seminal role in the alleged National Socialist plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. At the end of the war he escaped to Argentina, where he was captured by Israeli agents in May 1960. He was transported to Israel, where he was subsequently tried and executed. In the words of Browning, "Adolf Eichmann has remained one of the most enduring symbols of Holocaust evil…[p.3]"

In 2003, our Final Solution expert published this eye-opening essay, "Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann," about the value of the Eichmann testimonials, which we will now discuss. For the sake of brevity, we will divide the Eichmann memoirs into two phases -- those composed before his capture (precapture testimonials), and those composed after his capture while he was in Israeli custody (postcapture testimonials).

The important question is: how reliable are the entire body of memoirs of this "most enduring symbol of Holocaust evil?"

Browning and "Witness to the Holocaust" Adolf Eichmann

In his 2004 tome, The Origins of the Final Solution, Browning used the testimony of Eichmann as an important piece of evidence for his thesis that Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist government ordered the physical extermination of Europe's Jews.

According to Eichmann, sometime in the fall of 1941 he was told by Head of the Security Police Reinhard Heydrich that Hitler had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. Browning offers a direct quote from Eichmann's testimony: "The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. [SS Lieutenant General Odilo] Globocnik (right) has received his relevant instructions from [Chief of German Police and Minister of Interior Heinrich Himmler."1

Some pages later, Browning adds: "I think that it was most probably in late September [1941] that Heydrich informed Eichmann of Hitler's decision for the 'physical destruction' of the European Jews..."2

In this 2004 book, Browning gently offers this cautionary caveat about the value of Eichmann's testimony: "As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann's various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence."3

Nevertheless, it is most important to highlight what Browning wrote in his 2003 essay about the value and trustworthiness of the SS Lieutenant-Colonel's memoirs. "Even more than most memoirs," our Holocaust historian pointed out, "the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise [pp. 8-9]."

The three "monstrous falsehoods" are that Eichmann claimed (1) he was not an anti-Semite; (2) in his early career, from the mid-1930s until 1941, he wanted to help the Jews find a home for themselves; and finally, (3) with the outbreak of war "he was an utterly passive receiver of orders, who took no initiatives and made no decisions. He simply obeyed. He had nothing to do with killing Jews, though admittedly he played a minor role in their evacuation [p. 10]."

Browning added: "In addition to these three colossal lies, Eichmann told innumerable little lies when confronted with a succession of incriminating documents and testimony…Eichmann was not a particularly subtle or skillful liar… [pp.10-11]."

Even Browning's colleagues, the mainstream historians of the Final Solution, are very skeptical about Eichmann's testimonials, for he admitted: "When I [Browning] have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did [pp. 4-5]."

In 2003, Browning concluded: "Clearly, anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann's testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this [p.11]."

Christopher Browning, the Eichmann Testimonies, and the "Nazi Gas Chambers"

Let us get very specific. What other important falsehoods do the Eichmann testimonials contain?

In his precapture statements, Eichmann claimed that he saw the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland. Browning informed his readers in 2003 that these "observations" are not credible: "In both precapture accounts, Eichmann's dating is vague. Furthermore, the claims that gassing was already taking place in this first camp, or that it was Majdanek, are contrary to what we know from other sources. The precapture testimonies, in short, are helpful to neither the historian nor Eichmann's credibility [p.23]." In plain language, Eichmann never saw the "gas chambers" he claimed to have seen at Majdanek.

Yet, how many millions of people were convinced of the "existence" of "homicidal gas chambers" after they read this untrue statement from Eichmann's testimonials that appeared in the November 28, 1960 issue of the immensely influential Life magazine. The Eichmann memoirs falsely declared: "It was the latter part of 1941 that I saw the first preparations for annihilating the Jews. General Heydrich ordered me to visit Maidanek [sic], a Polish village near Lublin. A German police captain showed me how they had managed to build airtight chambers disguised as ordinary Polish farmers' huts, seal them hermetically, then inject the exhaust gas from a Russian U-boat motor. I remember it all very exactly because I never thought that anything like that would be possible, technically speaking."4

In regard to the alleged gas chambers of Belzec, Eichmann claimed to have witnessed the "preparations for killing Jews with carbon monoxide exhaust gas in sealed rooms [p.26]." Browning goes onto argue that we should be skeptical of this account involving the "gas chambers" of Belzec (pp. 26-28).

But here is the real eye-opener! Eichmann insisted in his precapture testimonials that he witnessed homicidal mass gassings of thousands of Jews in "gas busses" near Lodz (Litzmannstadt) in the winter of 1941-42 (p.17). We quote the Eichmann "observations" from Life magazine of November 28, 1960: "Later in that same winter [1941] [General Heinrich] Müller (left, with Heydrich) sent me to watch Jews being gassed in the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] area of central Poland…Arriving in Litzmannstadt, I drove out to the designated place where a thousand Jews were about to board buses. The buses were normal, high-windowed affairs with all their windows closed. During the trip, I was told, the carbon monoxide from the exhaust pipe was conducted into the interior of the buses. It was intended to kill the passengers immediately."

Eichmann continues with his story: "A doctor who was there suggested that I look at the people inside one bus through a peephole in the driver's seat. I refused. I couldn't look. This was the first time that I had seen such a thing and my knees were buckling under me. I had been told that the whole process took only three minutes, but the buses rode along for about a quarter of an hour."

Eichmann concludes his story with some spine-tingling "memories." He insisted that when the doors of the buses were opened, Poles threw the dead bodies into pits. One of the Poles pried the gold teeth out of the mouths of the corpses with a pair of pliers and collected them in a bag. Back in Berlin, General Müller chided Eichmann for not having timed the procedure with a stopwatch.5

In a footnote in the 2003 essay, Browning points out that Eichmann later changed his testimony. He made "corrections." Eichmann subsequently wrote that "he had not seen 'buses' but rather only one 'bus,' and that it was entirely enclosed without windows. He also denied riding on the bus and said he followed the bus in a car [p. 91n55]." One could interpret this to mean that Professor Browning is arguing that Eichmann is not a credible witness to the "Nazi gas vans."

Disclosures as damming as these should nullify any use of the Eichmann testimonies as "evidence" for "Nazi gas chambers." Yet, this does not stop Browning from arguing that some of Eichmann's "observations" in regard to the "Nazi gas chambers" are reliable.

While in Israeli captivity, Eichmann repeated the "gassing-on-buses" story during his pretrial interrogation, but once again he apparently altered his story. The alleged gassing did not take place at Lodz (Litzmannstadt) as stated in Life magazine, but rather at Chelmno concentration camp. Browning insists that we should believe this version of the story, as he argues: "His [Eichmann's] gruesome description of the gassing operation, down to the details of the ramp, peephole, burial pits, and teeth pulling, is confirmed by other sources. There is no reason to doubt the basic account of what he saw and when, even if the description of his personal reaction is clearly self-serving and calculated [p.18]."

Despite all of what Browning wrote in 2003 about the falsehoods and "story-changing" in Eichmann's testimony about the "Nazi gas chambers," this does not stop him from using Eichmann as an "eyewitness" to the "homicidal gas vans" of concentration camp Chelmno in 2004. In The Origins of the Final Solution, Browning writes: "Sometime during this earliest phase [December 1941-January 1942], the peripatetic Eichmann inspected the killing procedures in Chelmno. Most probably this visit came in January, for the gas van he saw in operation already used exhaust gas, not bottled carbon monoxide. In his postwar testimony, he claimed to have been so sickened that he forgot to time the operation of the stopwatch. Nor could he accept the invitation of the gas van driver to peer through the peek hole into the rear compartment to witness the death agonies of the victims."6

The reader who is unaware of all of what Browning has written about the Eichmann memoirs is left with the totally false impression that Eichmann is a "credible witness" to mass gassings in homicidal gas vans. To Browning's credit, however, buried in a footnote he made the more discerning reader aware that that "the testimonies of especially Höss [Rudolf Höss, right, former commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp] and to some extent Eichmann are confused, contradictory, self-serving, and not credible."7

How Does Browning Justify the Use of the Eichmann Testimonies?

So, after pointing out how notoriously unreliable the Eichmann memoirs really are, how does Browning justify his use of these same memoirs as evidence for his theories? Among a group of reasons he offers, he says, for one, we should disregard what Eichmann says that is demonstrably false, but we should accept what he says that is supported by other credible sources (pp. 11, 30).

A thorough discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this short essay, but the reader should consider this. How can Browning use the unreliable Eichmann testimonials as "evidence" for the claim -- "The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews." -- when there are no genuine war time documents that show that Hitler ever made such an order? Indeed, Browning's colleague, Holocaust historian Ian Kershaw, admitted that a written order from Hitler ordering the physical destruction of the Jews was never found.8 Browning himself admitted that no comprehensive draft for the alleged Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews is among the surviving German documents found after the war.9

Closing Statement

My short essay here is not meant to be a thorough analysis of Dr. Browning's 33-page discussion of the Eichmann testimonials. I have only briefly touched upon what I consider to be the most salient issues raised by Professor Browning in his largely unseen essay.

The testimonials of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, along with the memoirs of Eichmann are an important portion of the evidence for the traditional view of the Final Solution, the alleged Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. What we have shown here is how weak and flimsy the Eichmann memoirs really are. To Browning's credit he implicitly admitted that dubious evidence like this is basically all the traditional historians of the Final Solution have to make their case (p.36).

Furthermore, again to Browning's credit, buried in a footnote in The Origins of the Final Solution he made the more discerning reader aware that "the testimonies of especially Höss and to some extent Eichmann are confused, contradictory, self-serving, and not credible."10

Browning has said that Eichmann is presently looked upon as the most enduring symbol of Holocaust evil (p. 3). At the dawn of a new age of reason, we may see a revised view of Adolf Karl Eichmann. He may be looked upon as the most enduring symbol of Holocaust falsehood.

Footnotes

  1. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), p. 362.
  2. Ibid., p. 371.
  3. Ibid., p. 363.
  4. "Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story, " Life, 28 November 1960. Reprinted in full in Lenni Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (Barricade Books, 2002), p. 271.
  5. Life, 28 November 1960; Brenner, pp. 272-273.
  6. Browning, p. 419.
  7. Ibid., p.544n169.
  8. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale University Press, 2008), p. 96.
  9. Christopher Browning, "Irving v. Lipstadt: Defense Documents: Evidence for the Implemenation of the Final Solution: Electronic Edition. A. Documentary Evidence for the emergence of a program to kill the Jews of Europe." Online: http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/trial/defense/browning/500.
  10. Browning, p.544n169.

 


DAVID IRVING COMMENTS:

I POST this essay without amendments. I disagree mildly with its content. Having read not only the pre- and post-capture memoirs by Adolf Eichmann (which Israel was forced to release after Mr Justice Gray agreed that I was entitled under the Rules of the Supreme Court to a copy the moment the document came intothe possession, cusody and power of Lipstadt's defence team), but also the sheaf of some 500 pages of stuff Eichmann wrote in 1956 or so, which was given to me by one of his friends in Buenos Aires in 1991, my view is that he is broadly speaking reliable on events and episodes, but (a) gets dates wrong (b) confuses places (c) allows his memory to warp to provide data (like the "Hitler order") which may conceivably be of use to him if he is ever captured and put on trial, a procedure that I call alibi-ing.

It is a pity that Paul Grubach has not incorporated comments on the verbatim testimony Browning gave in the Lipstadt Trial. He was very good. Find it at http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/transcripts/

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