Postscript
This book contains a trial report, and its main source is the transcript of the trial proceedings which was distributed to the press in Jerusalem. Save for the opening speech of the prosecution, and the general plea of the defense, the record of the trial has not been published and is not easily accessible. The language of the courtroom was Hebrew; the materials handed to the press were stated to be “an unedited and unrevised transcript of the simultaneous translation” that “should not be regarded as stylistically perfect or devoid of linguistic errors.” I have used the English version throughout except in those instances when the proceedings were conducted in German; when the German transcript contained the original wording I felt free to use my own translation.
Except for the prosecutor's introductory speech and for the final verdict, the translations of which were prepared outside the courtroom, independently of the simultaneous translation, none of these records can be regarded as absolutely reliable. The only authoritative version is the official record in Hebrew, which I have not used. Nevertheless, all this material was officially given to the reporters for their use, and, so far as I know, no significant discrepancies between the official Hebrew record and the translation have yet been pointed out. The German simultaneous translation was very poor, but it may be assumed that the English and French translations are trustworthy.
No such doubts about the dependability of the sources arise in connection with the following courtroom materials, which— with one exception—were also given to the press by the Jerusalem authorities:
1) The transcript in German of Eichmann's interrogation by the police, recorded on tape, then typed, and the typescript presented to Eichmann, who corrected it in his own hand. Along with the transcript of the courtroom proceedings, this is the most important of the documents.
2) The documents submitted by the prosecution, and the “legal material” made available by the prosecution.
3) The sixteen sworn affidavits by witnesses originally called by the defense, although part of their testimony was subsequently used by the prosecution. These witnesses were: Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Richard Baer, Kurt Becher, Horst Grell, Dr. Wilhelm Höttl, Walter Huppenkothen, Hans Jüttner, Herbert Kappler, Hermann Krumey, Franz Novak, Alfred Josef Slawik, Dr. Max Merten, Professor Alfred Six, Dr. Eberhard von Thadden, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, Otto Winkelmann.
4) Finally, I also had at my disposal a manuscript of seventy typewritten pages written by Eichmann himself. It was submitted as evidence by the prosecution and accepted by the court, but not made available to the press. Its heading reads in translation: “Re: My comments on the matter of ‘Jewish questions and measures of the National Socialist Government of the German Reich with regard to solution of this matter during the years 1933 to 1945.’” This manuscript contains notes made by Eichmann in Argentina in preparation for the Sassen interview (see Bibliography).
The Bibliography lists only the material I actually used, not the innumerable books, articles, and newspaper stories I read and collected during the two years between Eichmann's kidnaping and his execution. I regret this incompleteness only in regard to the reports of correspondents in the German, Swiss, French, English, and American press, since these were often on a far higher level than the more pretentious treatments of the subject in books and magazines, but it would have been a disproportionately large task to fill this gap. I have therefore contented myself with adding to the Bibliography of this revised edition a selected number of books and magazine articles which appeared after the publication of my book, if they contained more than a rehashed version of the case for the prosecution. Among them are two accounts of the trial that often come to conclusions astonishingly similar to my own, and a study of the prominent figures in the Third Reich, which I have now added to my sources for background material. These are Robert Pendorf's Möder und Ermordete. Eichmann und die Judenpolitik des Dritten Reiches, which also takes into account the role of the Jewish Councils in the Final Solution; Strafsache 40/61 by the Dutch correspondent Harry Mulisch (I used the German translation), who is almost the only writer on the subject to put the person of the defendant at the center of his report and whose evaluation of Eichmann coincides with my own on some essential points; and finally the excellent, recently published portraits of leading Nazis by T. C. Fest in his Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches; Fest is very knowledgeable and his judgments are on a remarkably high level.
The problems faced by the writer or a report may best be compared with those attendant on the writing of a historical monograph. In either case, the nature of the work requires a deliberate distinction between the use of primary and secondary material. Primary sources only may be used in the treatment of the special subject—in this case the trial itself—while secondary material is drawn upon for everything that constitutes the historical background. Thus, even the documents I have quoted were with very few exceptions presented in evidence at the trial (in which case they constituted my primary sources) or are drawn from authoritative books dealing with the period in question. As can be seen from the text, I have used Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution, and I have relied even more on Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, which appeared after the trial and constitutes the most exhaustive and the most soundly documented account of the Third Reich's Jewish policies.
Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology—as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)—was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.