Interesting news item to share with DU friends in the LA forum:

[Judi Lynn]

Eichmann's letter home uncovered Berlin
April 11, 2011

Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann wrote to Germany's first postwar chancellor from his hiding place in Argentina asking for permission to return to his homeland, it emerged yesterday.

''The time has come for me to step out of the cloak of anonymity and present myself,'' Eichmann, then living under the alias Ricardo Klement, wrote. ''Name: Adolf Eichmann. Occupation: SS Obersturmbannfuehrer.''

The astonishing letter from the small town of Joaquin Gorina came in 1956 - four years before Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents.

Advertisement: Story continues below Declassified intelligence files show chancellor Konrad Adenauer was ''on the verge of hysteria'', because his administration was riddled with Nazis and he feared Eichmann would name them.

http://www.watoday.com.au/world/eichmanns-letter-home-uncovered-20110411-1dazj.html

Wierd! How many Nazis went to the Americas, anyway?

[EFerrari]

1. So, the official story about the manhunt for Eichmann is bs to a degree.

Holy cow.

[struggle4progress]

2. Arendt's book remains informative:

Eichmann is concerned about his career; his conscience largely follows whatever he thought everyone thought; he has no particular animosity towards Jewish people, but everyone else seems to think the Jews must go, and so Eichmann concludes the Jews must go; he does not particularly care whether they emigrate or whether they are exterminated; if the Jews are to be exterminated, Eichmann takes a certain pride in organizing this mass murder as efficiently as he can and tells himself his efficiency is a work of mercy; he plays his role in the machinery of death while simultaneously believing he admires some of the Jewish people he encounters; he cannot imagine refusing to cooperate with the extermination machinery because ... well, because nobody does that. When captured, he knows he will be executed, but he wants everyone to understand his view: he set aside whatever personal feelings he may or may not have had, in order to do as well as he could whatever he was asked to do; since he heard nobody else object, he put any possible objections out of his mind and did not think more about such matters. The letter is entirely consistent with Arendt's portrait



Adolf Eichmann wanted to return to Germany, historian claims
SS architect of final solution hated life in hiding and wrote letter to West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1956, book reveals
Helen Pidd in Berlin
guardian.co.uk
Monday 11 April 2011 16.03 BST
... The letter was supposed to be published by an Argentinian company with Nazi sympathies, although it never saw the light of day. It was unearthed from German state archives by historian Dr Bettina Stangneth in Hamburg, whose book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, is published in Germany this week ... "How long fate will allow me to live, I don't know, but I know that someone has to be the one to tell future generations about these events," he says, neglecting to mention that "these events" involved the mass murder of millions of people. "I had a big role in leading and directing these programmes," he adds ... Stangneth said Eichmann was unhappy with his lowly life in Argentina, where he was a rabbit farmer. He craved the power and recognition he enjoyed in the Third Reich. "That's why he wrote the letter to Adenauer – because he wanted to be famous," said Strangneth ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/eichmann-sought-trial-germany-1956