David Prashker's Book Of Days: September 6

1961

Publication of the Eichmann Diaries.

"I will recount the genocide against Jewry, as it occurred, and describe my thinking both yesterday and today about this. For not only the fields of death did I have to see with my own eyes…"

"Have to…" – note the detachment of the Self from the confession. I should like to see the German version of this.

"…the battle-fields where life itself died, I saw much worse…"

"I saw…" infers another person's actions, and he the mere observer of, even after, the event.

"I saw how, by a few words, through a single, abrupt order of one individual…"

As though Hitler had acted entirely alone, without a Cabinet or a military staff to share the decision-making and the responsibility. As though you, Herr Adolf Eichmann, were not that individual, or one of those individuals.

"…whom the regime empowered, fields of annihilation were created. I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they rewound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time. And I saw it."

What is so devastating about these lines is not just the admission, but the tone of celebration, the poetry of killing, the total absence of remorse, indeed the delight in what was done.

Eichmann began the diary on September 6th 1961, in blue ink, in gaol in Israel, where he had been taken after being kidnapped, quite illegally and morally reprehensibly, in Argentina (May 11). It ended eight months later with his hanging (May 31): thirteen hundred pages, in an A4 notebook, intended to become his memoir. His intended title was "False Gods".

The German word for genocide is Völkermord.

And after Eichmann, there are the historians, the ones like David Irving who deny the Holocaust ever happened. I imagine that they will claim:

a) that the diary is the fabrication of the International Zionist Conspiracy

b) inadmissible as evidence because the ravings of a proven lunatic

c) inadmissable as evidence because of the "quite illegal and morally reprehensible" kidnapping of the defendant

In this way (and I recognise the paradox that this is one of the central tenets of this blog) do the deniers always claim the final victory, when they declare that History is no longer History, because even the documented facts cannot be proven to be documented facts.

See January 11 for Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann trial.

Amber pages

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, French hero of the American Revolution, born today in 1757. I wouldn't mention him, but I lived in a town named for him for several months, in East Bay San Francisco, and with a lady who had taken her degree at a college in Pennsylvania named for him, so this is personal interest, to find out who he was, more than its historical significance. So far I have learned his full name; more when the lights go green.

Hendrik Verwoerd, South African Prime Minister, stabbed to death today in 1966. GER