Dear Robert!

First of all, I appreciate it very much that you managed to get a look at the case Dr. Servatius is preparing for me. I would also like to tell you about some of the fundamental principles which need to be raised, apart from some details which I will mention at the beginning. For I know that you, as my brothers and sisters, will be interested in this, especially as already whole libraries have been occupied with my career and, who knows, will continue to be occupied.

I begin with the current lawsuits which are being brought against me. The contents of these suits are so prodigious that even my anger would be useless. But I must on no account surrender in consideration of the numerous calumnies and defamations and give up the cause without a fight. It is obvious that 15 years of propaganda is against me, which grew like an avalanche and keeps growing and has been leading the minds here to allegations which are quite incomprehensible.

You will hear from Dr. Servatius that more than 1,400 documents are here under consideration (I examined nearly 300 of them during the investigation, the rest was transferred to my defence counsel after the investigation). Among the approximately 300 documents alone which were submitted to me appear approximately 240 different names.

Well, the investigation has caused the collapse of the great sensational build-up that certain groups of journalists had set up out of pure greed for profit; and I hope - naturally enough - that the coming trial will reduce my actual position back to the real level which I held at that time, i.e. recipient of orders; a bureaucratic occupation, not the slightest trace of killing and atrocity.

To be sure, all this has happened, one cannot deny it. But I was not in charge of such things and I kept my hands clean in this matter. This also includes the officers, non-commissioned officers and men, who were under my command at that time. Should the one or the other have overstepped their orders it was not with my authority in this respect.

Now to look at Sassen. He is either secretive or stupid. I do not know myself where I am. I am only asking myself, how can someone contrary to all arrangements commit such a breach of confidence and publish in rough the events which happened in the distant past and throw them to the international press as a kind of raw material which is undoubtedly full of mistakes and incorrectnesses that need to be put right and then say: "There you have the stuff, do with it whatever you like to do. How many dollars do I get?" Contrary to the arrangement which had been made he published the matter to the public without having given me the chance of correcting all the mistakes.

In this respect I have to praise the mode of procedure of the Israeli police; after the tape recording interrogation I had the possibility of hearing it all again and reading the transcript at the same time which had been made in the meantime and could make eventual corrections without being influenced by anyone. Although the transcripts had been made by honest police officers and there were more than 3,500 typed pages altogether - there were even so quite a large number of hearing mistakes, which partly distorted the sense in the first transcription. Well, thanks to the procedure of the Israeli police all these mistakes could be eliminated by me. Sassen has given me no chance to do the same. I have no guarantee that the person who then copied it, heard and transcribed it correctly and I have no chance to control what certain interested parties might have added to it. At that time I got part of it for the first correction - and I corrected it superficially - but as the transcription was so deficient that there would have been no time left for other work besides the correction, I gave the whole stuff back to Sassen and told him that this matter had to be discussed more thoroughly because of the amount of mistakes. Some parts of the transcriptions were never submitted to me. What is more, this transcription having been controlled by me never should have been published; due to our arrangement and written contract it should represent only the raw material which Sassen could use in order to make a book out of it which could be published. And even there I put in one more security codicil by ordering a written statement that no page of this eventual manuscript should come to be printed without my having sort of legalised and released every page by my full signature. And even after that I should have got the proofs as a last control whereby I agreed here to the fact that after the proofs had been finished no large changes in principle should be allowed.

But such procedures which Sassen has followed are unworthy of an honest journalist and I think this is typical of the fellow. How does this man dare to publish this article under the title: "Adolf Eichmann tells his own story - I conveyed them to the butcher - by Adolf Eichmann"? Sassen is lucky that I am in close confinement. It is a consolation for me to know that even a reader who is only partially attentive to the reading can draw conclusions from the title to the authenticity of the contents of the article. But unfortunately such an article will be read by dull-heads of all kinds, of whom one cannot expect objective, intelligent study.

Now I would like to ask a favour of you. You are a lawyer, I am sure you will discuss this matter with my defence; keep a close eye on Sassen and only with the consent of my defence should he be allowed to publish anything at all. For, all he is going to publish forces him to fall back upon the treasure of the tape recordings of that time and there are solid arrangements which he has to observe.

Surely, there are legal restraints and possibilities? Besides this, I leave it completely to my defence to prepare the next steps which he considers necessary as far as my cause is concerned.

Dear Robert, I do not know what will come out of this trial; in respect to my person I must tell you that I am only of secondary importance. With the help of my defence I will naturally take pains to bring out the truth about the 15 years' calumnies and imputations, up to the very last days, which have prejudiced public opinion around the world against me to a degree which is not to be outdone. Here, too, I do not think of surrender. As far as only my own ego is concerned, the danger of resignation is great in respect to my almost overstrained fatalism. But I must not leave the matter as it is; not when I think about my children and you as my brothers and sisters and, last but not least, the memory of our dead father.

Dear brothers and sisters, I wish you each and all happy Easter, I wish you health and send you my kindest regards.

Your Adolf.

I have asked lawyer Wechtenbruch to certify the correctness of this statement by signature, because I, separated by a glass wall, cannot sign it personally.

Given in a prison of the State of Israel on the 22nd February, 1961.

Spectators at the Trial	The Prosecution lawyers. Left to right, Hausner, Jacob Baror, Gabriel Bach, Jacob Robinson

5. The Last Word

If the reader has been harbouring any doubt about the political significance of the trial, as described above, and the anti-Semitism it bred on the pretext of combating it, it will suffice to say that many good people thought the same way. Over the French radio itself, the first press review of the reports of the first day of the trial gave the impression that in the minds of all the journalists there, without exception, the dominant idea was that the performance was not a matter of justice but of pure and simple vengeance, and that in any case, it was politically a mistake.

Eight days later, already sure of what to expect from the hearings, all the great newspapers of the world recalled the best legal reporters they had sent to Jerusalem, in order to despatch them to more important trials.

On April 10th, under the title "This trial is a mistake," and over M. Alain Guinay's signature, France-Soir did not hesitate to say:

There are a certain number of people who think that this whole trial has been a mistake. That far from eradicating anti-Semitism in the world it will only fan the flames, that far from instructing Israeli youth in the tragic fate of their elders, it will keep that aggressive youth from feeling any solidarity with those six millions who for the most part died without defending themselves.

They are also afraid that it will have a detrimental effect on Israeli-British, perhaps even United States-Israeli relations, by revealing, as Ben Gurion has just done, that neither London nor Washington did a thing to save millions of people whom they could have saved.

We have seen how Ben Gurion failed in his attempt to involve Britain and the United States in his attempt to blackmail Germany.

With the trial over and Eichmann condemned, "the uneasiness" which everyone talked about remains. The anti-Semitic campaigns feared by France-Soir are taking steps and grow.

A boomerang? Perhaps.

Perhaps Tel Aviv needs a little wave of anti-Semitism from time to time to realise its objectives, if only to bring to Israel those millions of Jews who persist in preferring the comforts of western life to the rigours of Kibbutzim.

In any case, if the stirring of anti-Semitic feeling should trouble Israel and international Zionism, it is not the reasons adduced for the sentence that condemned Eichmann to death which will prevent them from assuming greater proportion, as they have been revived for us by M. Poliakov (Le Procès de Jerusalem, Paris, 1963) ('The Jerusalem Trial'). Assuredly not.

A strange fellow this M. Poliakov. An Israelite, born at St. Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1910, M. Léon Poliakov is directly descended from that generation of Russians chased from their homes by a Revolution which made Russia what we know it to be today and who, since 1920, have given Paris so many picturesque - and sometimes so encumbering - taxi drivers; people of all social levels., (But, to hear them talk, all of noble extraction!) Having arrived with the very first wave of refugees at the age of six, therefore too young to learn to drive, his parents sent him to a primary school in the 10th Arrondissement. He developed a taste for studies, went to the Lycée, then for several years to law school. His biographers tell us that this led him, not to the bar, as it does so many others, but... into journalism! And so one does not meet this 52-year-old man today at the wheel of a taxi in the streets of Paris, but at the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, with the title of historian. To him we owe already: Le III^eme Reich et les Juifs, Histoire de l'antisémitisme ('The Third Reich and the Jews, History of Anti-Semitism'), and the celebrated Bréviaire de la Haine ('Breviary of Hatred'). This Procès de Jerusalem ('Jerusalem Trial') is the fourth feather in his historian's cap.

He is very much at ease in this role, and Mr. Ben Gurion, President of the Council of State of Israel, has overlooked nothing in making his task easier. Indeed, we know that on December 21st, 1962, Mr. Ben Gurion decided that the memoirs (2,700 pages) which Eichmann wrote during his period of detention in Israel between the trial which condemned him to death and his execution, were to be turned over to the State Archives of Israel instead of being given to his widow which, if not the rule, is at least customary usage in all the courts of the free world. This decision ensures that for a long time to come all the Poliakovs of the world will be able to say whatever comes into their heads about the Eichmann affair, without risk of being contradicted by the contrary version of the historical facts of the matter. It also ensures that the judgement itself can never be questioned on grounds of any documents other than those very carefully selected ones used by the prosecution. The real historians who followed the trial will, of course, some day be given consideration, but thanks to this procedure, only by a posterity whose grasp of history becomes less firm as time goes on. Meanwhile, to public opinion, the judgement of the Jerusalem Tribunal has all the force of revealed truth.

And what truth!

M. Poliakov does not, in the first place, give us the whole text of the judgement. Of the 243 arguments in evidence which it contains, more than half do not figure in his book. He does not tell us why this is so, but one can be sure that they are the most questionable ones. As for those which he does give, one or two examples will be enough to give the reader an idea of their worth.

First example: the one based on the function of the Einsatzgruppen (units protecting the rear of the German armies as they advanced into Russia). These units were created, the Nuremberg court said, in the middle of May 1941 in anticipation of the Russian campaign. In the Bréiaire de la Haine, M. Poliakov proves to us with brilliance, with documents and testimonies to support him, that these units could only have been created at that date. Today, no less brilliantly and with no fewer documents and testimonies to support him, he proves to us that they already existed on September 12th, 1939. M. Chaim Wiezmann, President of the Jewish Agency in 1939, who was then living in London and whose personal papers are collected at Rehowoth (Israel), decided it.³ The Jerusalem Tribunal followed suit, and M. Poliakov too, of course. If, some day, Israel decides that Einsatzgruppen were created by Ramses II and that Hitler only returned to a very old practice, M. Poliakov will be ready to prove that it could not be otherwise, with documents and testimonies to support him; that goes without saying. Since 1945, the industry of document and testimony production has been exceedingly prosperous, and Israel challenges Russia for first place in the world.

Is another example needed? Take the document called "Gerstein" which has been referred to. In the Bréiaire de la Haine, M. Poliakov gave us a version which he said was authentic and, moreover, he had corrected it. The Tribunal of Jerusalem brought forth yet another version which is different from the two already known. The latter was written in a kind of pidgin language and does not agree in any respect with the other two, doubtless so that it could not be said that it had been rejected at Nuremberg as had been the case with the first one. The reader is strongly urged to read the two principal versions of this document, in the last chapter of The Drama of the European Jews. There he will see of what prowess a Frenchman born in Russia is capable, who was driven to become a historian because he failed to become a taxi driver.

There is no end to the list of documents of this kind on which the Jerusalem Tribunal based its conviction, and M. Poliakov corrects his own contentions by first correcting the documents, whose origin is, furthermore, more than dubious. The court itself is not free from contradictions of this kind. Take exhibit No. 63, for example, which declares Eichmann guilty of having forced the German Jews to emigrate, and No. 155, of having prevented them from emigrating, in terms as scathing and disapproving in one as in the other. The cynical and cruel giants who, according to the philosophy professors of my generation, only gave one the choice between dying on the altar of Truth or the altar of Lies, with sincerity in the choice the only chance to escape the trial, were no more cynical and cruel than the Judges of Jerusalem.

We will have no more to say about this book and the judgement after this, which will be our conclusion:

1) Exhibit No. 79 says, among other things, "We will describe the activities against the Jews within the Reich and the European countries under German influence, exclusive of what took place in eastern Europe. In general, no extermination activity took place in those countries or in Germany..."

After the Declaration of August 19th, 1960, which was taken up in another connection by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte at Munich, here is one that authenticates in a masterly manner the thesis which I have maintained for so long on gas chambers in German concentration camps. Carelessness, no doubt.

2) Exhibit No. 161, after stating that the number of victims cannot be designated except by the term "millions", which is that of the indictment, nevertheless declares that "it is beyond doubt that the number of victims was about 6 million."