Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
desire to save Jews. 326
It is worth mentioning that the major thrust of the prosecution’s crossexamination
of Eichmann did not treat wartime events directly. The prosecution’s
chief effort was to hold Eichmann, in court, to whatever he was supposed to have
said to Israeli interrogators during his year of imprisonment prior to the trial and
also to what he was supposed to have said to one Sassen in Argentina in 1957.
According to Eichmann’s testimony, he encountered Sassen, an ex-SS man, in
Buenos Aires in 1955. At this time Eichmann was, except within tiny circles, a
very much forgotten man. The Eichmann-Sassen relationship eventually led to a
project to write a book on the persecutions of the Jews during the war. The book,
to be completed and promoted by Sassen, was to be based on tape recorded question-and-answer
sessions with Eichmann, but according to Eichmann’s testimony,
the original form of these sessions could not be retained:
“[…] when these questions were put to me, I had to reply from time to
time, that I did not remember and did not know; but, obviously, this was not
the way to write a book […] and then it was agreed that it did not really matter
what I remembered – the main thing was to describe the events as they had
happened; then we spoke about poetic license, about license for journalists
and authors, which would entitle us to describe the events – even if I did not
remember certain details, the essence which would remain would be a description
of the events as they had taken place and this is really what was eventually
taken down.
[Sassen] told me to say something about every point, so that the necessary
quantity be obtained.
[…] it was also agreed that he, Sassen, would then formulate everything in
the form of a book and we would be co-authors in this book.”
Sassen’s material eventually appeared, in the autumn of 1960, in Life magazine,
so it is clear that Sassen’s sessions with Eichmann were designed for the
primary purpose of producing a marketable book, as distinct from a historical one.
Eichmann obviously planned to acquire a share of the profits, but this testimony
does not shed any light onto the specific financial expectations that Eichmann and
Sassen had.
Sassen transcribed some of the tape recorded material into typewritten form,
and Eichmann added comments and corrections in the margins of some of the
pages in his own hand. He also composed 83 full pages of handwritten comments.
After the appearance of the Life articles, the prosecution obtained material from
Sassen, namely a photostat of a 300-page typewritten document with marginal
comments, apparently in Eichmann’s hand, purporting to be a transcript of 62 of
67 tape recorded sessions, and also a photostat of what was said to be the 83 page
document in Eichmann’s hand. Original documents were evidently not procured,
thus raising the possibility of tampering and editing, especially in the case of the
300 page document. In regard to the original tapes, the prosecution commented:
“We do not know about the tapes themselves – I don’t know whether
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Eichmann, session 103, Jj1; session 106, V1.