The CODOH Revisionist Forum

For those unfamiliar with the "Sassen tapes", here is a short AI summary from an establishment perspective:

The "Sassen Tapes" refer to a series of interviews and discussions with Adolf Eichmann, led by the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen while in Argentina in the late 1950s. Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi bureaucrat and one of the chief coordinators of the Holocaust. These recordings were made while Eichmann was evading capture after World War II, prior to his seizure by Israeli agents in 1960.

The importance of the Sassen Tapes lies in their content. They contain extensive conversations in which Eichmann elaborates on his involvement in the Holocaust, providing insight into his actions and mindset. This was especially notable because, during his trial in Israel, Eichmann characterized himself as merely a minor participant in the Nazi apparatus, simply following instructions. However, the Sassen Tapes imply a more active role and deeper participation in the Holocaust on Eichmann's part.

These recordings were not fully accessible to the public for many years, and their complete contents remain a topic of ongoing historical research and examination. They are now considered an essential source for comprehending the Holocaust and Eichmann's contribution to it.

What is true about the tapes is that they do feature Eichmann, in his own true voice, telling horrific stories about his involvement with an 'extermination plan'. Eichmann's story related to Jews and their mass transports as described, for the most part, ends up aligning with the establishment view of his [Eichmann's] alleged role in the "Holocaust".

But of course, when looked at in full-context, a different story starts to unfold...

For starters, it is known that Eichmann was not considered a "credible source" in his precapture testimony (which is what the Sassen tapes were), even by leading Holocaust historians. Eichmann once claimed he witnessed a 'gassing' at Majdanek. To this, Christopher Browning says:

In both precapture accounts, Eichmann’s dating is vague. Furthermore, the claims that gassing was already taking place in this first camp, or that it was Majdanek, are contrary to what we know from other sources. The precapture testimonies, in short, are helpful to neither the historian nor Eichmann’s credibility.

(Browning, C. (2003). Collected memories: Holocaust history and postwar testimony., p. 23)

Crucial to note, here, is that top-historian Christopher Browning admits that, in his precapture testimony, Eichmann said things that are false (regarding gassing of Jews, of all things), and that these things are a detriment to Eichmann's credibility.

Next, I'll point out that, prior to his interview with Sassen, Eichmann seemed to dispute the claim of 'six million':

So, below is a 1999 interview with Herbert Habel, former secretary to the Gauleiter of Linz. He spoke with Eichmann in 1953 in Buenos Aires, after Eichmann had been in Argentina for about three years:

From his meeting with Adolf Eichmann, he said he had asked him about the Jewish Holocaust: what about the matter of the six million? Habel said that Eichmann answered: It's very simple... we had observed it until 1943. After that there were no more trains, there were no more telephones, nothing. Until that time, 239,000 had been killed, all registered. But Habel asked him about the number of murders up to 1945, to which Eichmann responded I don't know how many more could have died, but half a million at the most. The elderly German also opined that Eichmann did not think he could be kidnapped in Argentina, as happened in May 1960.

(Translated from original Spanish: https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/confesi ... agRtg.html)

Bettina Stangneth makes clear that Eichmann was indeed "the guy" whom you'd talk to if you wanted stories about "extermination". It formed a major part of his identity over time:

The episode has a far more interesting aspect than Eichmann lying about figures: during this period, he was quite clearly using his true identity. He was able to do so because he was surrounded by people who would have recognized him anyway. Men like Hagel [sic] knew Eichmann was the right person to talk to if you wanted to find out about the extermination of the Jews and the number of victims involved. Eichmann’s reputation as the one surviving insider with an overview of the murder quotas preceded him to Argentina.

(Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stagneth, B. (2014)., p. 108)

What we know of this conversation with Eichmann and Habel is the following:

• It took place several years before his conversations with Sassen, at a time where he was developing his identity in a new location
• Habel's impression (based in part on the fact that Eichmann chose to stay in Buenos Aires, where he was more at-risk) is that Eichmann felt he was safe at the time of speaking with him (i.e. that he could not be captured while in Argentina); this suggests he'd be willing to speak freely, especially to a fellow NSDAP member
• As for Jews killed, Eichmann provides a set of figures well-below any of the popular estimates: 239,000 by the beginning of 1943, and that he doesn't know how many could have died after that, but 'maybe half a million at most'
• It isn't clear from this conversation what type of killing is alleged, or if Eichmann even intends to include Jews who died of any number of causes within this estimate (e.g. typhus, hence stating they were "all registered")
• His identity, what he was "known for", socially, in the region and among his peers, was being the guy you talked to if you wanted to learn more about the rumors of "6 million" and the like (remember, propaganda narratives had been flourishing already by this time)
• As time goes on, his social networks expanded, as did inevitably the attention he received as "the guy"

On the third point above (Eichmann's estimates), we can only speculate what he was doing, here:

• Severely downplaying the Holocaust of millions of Jews he knew to be true?
• Conflating Jews dying of natural causes with those whom he knew were killed?
• Inventing his awareness of any actual "killing" operations, altogether?
• "Testing the waters" with some hint of mass murder claims ("239,000"), which he'd later embrace more substantially ("millions")?

What we do know for certain now is that, if there were any doubt previously about Eichmann's willingness to tell lies while not under pressure and not on trial, such doubts are now vanished...

We know now with certainty: he was either (1) lying on the Sassen tapes, (2) lying to Habel, or (3) lying to both.

CODOH forum user 'bombsaway' at one point mentions that another SS 'confessed' on the Sassen tapes (I responded thereafter):

Then a new interviewer is brought in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludolf_von_Alvensleben , a man who worked closely with Himmler. He too affirms the existence of a genocidal program (so there are confessions from two high ranking SS on these tapes), but he says it was terrible thing to do.

So, it looks like now that we've conceded the Eichmann tapes-case isn't so strong anymore, we are moving onto another "Nazi" for corroborative purposes. Duly noted.

Alvensleben was relatively high-ranking in the hierarchy but its debatable even by establishment standards whether he should have necessarily known whether any global 'extermination plan' was operational:

...he was the highest-ranking Nazi functionary in Argentina: an SS and Police lieutenant general, who by 1944 had become number 147 in the SS250 (with Himmler being number 1), and number 90 in the Waffen-SS251...

https://erenow.net/biographies/eichmann ... rer/10.php

At some point in the conversation with Sassen, his (Alvensleben's) comments make clear that he has no clue what he is talking about regarding actual "extermination" policy, and is simply parroting the propaganda he'd read:

“I am personally resistant to the idea,” he explained to Sassen, “of taking defenseless people, even if it’s my greatest enemy, defenseless people who have done nothing whatever against me personally, only through their birth—and simply hounding them into a gas oven.”

(Ibid.)

As I've heard David Cole ask before, "what in the hell is a 'gas oven'??!".

Alvensleben spent most of his time in the Eastern-occupied territories dealing with partisans. His duties did not overlap with Eichmann's, thus he is unable to 'confirm' any of them. Alvensleben is, simply, one of the many 'Nazis' for whom Eichmann invented stories in order to impress or entertain.

Remember, Eichmann was essentially "middle management". He could not claim the level of importance of someone like Alvensleben... at least, not without an extraordinary story to tell, placing particular importance on himself.

Who, after all, was the "star" of these interviews?

Another interesting bit that came up is an excerpt from Bettina Stangneth's book (she is considered a leading historian on the Sassen tapes):

And in the transcript, when the group reaches the reports of the children’s transports—which Eichmann refers to in all seriousness as the “children story”—even Sassen’s “understanding” deserts him temporarily. Eichmann clearly notices Sassen’s horror and shamelessly denies that any such thing had happened: “But you have found so many documents and papers, and now I am wondering where the documents on the matter of the children are, I mean documents that can be believed. And so I have nothing further to say on this matter for the moment.

(Stangneth, B. (2014). Eichmann Before Jerusalem, p. 280.)

Of course, Stangneth here proves nothing, and her excerpt seems to support a Revisionist interpretation, given that Eichmann seems here to have modified his storytelling to suit Sassen's "cue".

Finally, I will share a much longer excerpt, this one which reads more like a complete article (and was intended as such), providing an in-depth summary of the whole Eichmann-Sassen saga:

Höttl's Huge Honkin' Lies

I have quite a bit to get through but I am going to start with an example of a "Nazi" whom we know has lied for similar reasons to those motives I have suggested here of Eichmann, and which is perhaps insightful for Revisionism in general. From Stangneth, op cit., p. 296-300, in Wilhelm Höttl:

Published at the end of 1955, the collection of documents edited by Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf gave readers access to Wilhelm Höttl’s full three-page declaration under oath, in which he set out his conversation with Eichmann. Document PS-2738 had been one of the most important documents in the Nuremberg Trials.” Here Höttl says that Eichmann had come to his Budapest apartment at the end of August 1944, as usual wanting information on the military situation. Höttl took this opportunity to ask him about the exact number of Jews murdered, and Eichmann answered: “Around four million Jews have been killed in the various extermination camps, while a further two million met their end in other ways, the majority being shot by the Security Police’s Einsatzkommandos during the Russian campaign.”

[...]

Ironically, Höttl’s statement is still regarded as unreliable. Much of what he told American investigators after the German defeat in 1945 was not information he had heard himself: he “borrowed” it from other people’s reports and added the occasional exaggeration of his own.

[...]

Later, Höttl would unintentionally strengthen people’s doubts about his credibility. In his autobiography, he claimed to have been aware that this statement would make him a sought-after (and well-paid) witness to the Nazi period. In his final years he managed to start a television career based solely on this statement, then hinted several times that he had never really believed the scale of the Holocaust was so vast. This suggestion, like many things in his last book, proves how easy Höttl found it to spend a lifetime saying things he didn't believe. In one of his last interviews, he said: "As is so often the case, something I lied about came true."

Money, fame, popularity, notoriety. All of these are real motives held by some prominent "Nazis" after the war.

Eichmann was a Lonely Boy

After the war, Eichmann's life was a shadow of what it once was. He spent years in his hideaway on his own:

He was probably bored to death.

--Hannah Arendt, on Eichmann in his North German hideout

(p. 70)

In a chapter titled "Detested Anonymity" (chapter 3), Bettina Stangneth writes her impression of Eichmann's experience in rural isolation:

Instead of a uniform and gleaming boots, an office and an orderly, he was left with a secondhand Wehrmacht coat and a hut in the forest. No plenipotentiary powers, no carte blanche, no trips in his own official car around half of Europe. [...] In the space of a few months, Eichmann’s existence had become entirely unremarkable—you might even call it tranquil.

(p. 70)

He spent some of this time reading the famous "Holocaust" tales, including those about himself:

Eichmann had always claimed that from the very beginning, he read everything that was written about the Nazis' extermination of the Jews. "In the forested heathland," he explained somewhat incautiously to Willem Sassen, "I was given a whole pile of old newspapers with articles about me. The headlines were Mass Murderer Eichmann, where is the mass murderer, where is Eichmann and similar." His later conversations and statements show that he really was familiar with the major texts and events of the time, although it isn't entirely clear when he first read them.

(p. 71)

Big Motives at Play

It is clear that money was at least one major incentive for Sassen as it pertained to the Eichmann interviews:

Sassen sought “to earn money” with his Eichmann interview, according to Wojak. He sold his material to the German magazine Stern and the American Life.

https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewi ... ranscripts

After realizing the controversy of what he had recorded, however, Sassen ultimately came to hit a crossroads between profit and loyalty. Both were important to him:

Sassen's greed reached its limits at personal alliances.

(p. 295)

Presumably, he also did want Eichmann to confirm a revisionist interpretation of the alleged "Holocaust". What is quite clear, however, is that Eichmann preferred to stay in control of the interview.

More on that later.

As for Eichmann's motives in all of this, let's start by looking at a summary of Eichmann's own explanation at trial, which we would agree is at the very least a mixture between truth and lies:

Eichmann worked tirelessly to disqualify as evidence what little of the text remained. He disputed “the famous Sassen Document” by stressing the influence of alcohol, claiming that most of his corrections had been lost, and lying that he had given up on correcting the transcripts because they were so bad. Unlike the handwriting expert (and anyone who had eyes), Eichmann couldn't recognize a few of the handwritten comments as his own. The handwritten pages were pretty much unusable, he said, as they were incomplete, which was bound to create a false impression. He also claimed there had been an agreement with Sassen that every page should be authorized by hand before being released for publication—a process he had become familiar with in Israel, where his interrogator had him sign off on each individual page of the interrogation.” But the most incredible of his lies was that Sassen had spoken very bad German (July 13). [...] Recklessly, Eichmann kept demanding the submission of the original tapes, though he also took the precaution of saying that Sassen had goaded him into making false statements to produce good headlines (July 19). He painted the discussions as “tavern conversations.” Hours of studying historical theories and Nazi history suddenly became a lot of casual boasting and booze-fueled sentimentality (July 20). Sassen, he said, had occasionally tempted him to “relapse” into National Socialist ways of thinking. Naturally, he didn’t mention that the entire Sassen circle was one big relapse. Eichmann also told his lawyer that what he had really written in Argentina was something very different. As Servatius then explained to the court, Eichmann would present these writings “as evidence of the real attitude of the accused.” Eichmann cleverly defused and dodged any question about why these discussions had taken place, by adopting the rumor that Sassen and Life had brought into the world: the legend of the “Eichmann memoirs."

(p. 394)

A. Eichmann's Personal Motives

Stangneth provides some valuable insight as to one of the motives which Eichmann clearly demonstrates:

But something else is at work in these descriptions. Heinrich Himmler had told the Auschwitz commandant that he must carry out the slaughter so that the generations to come wouldn't have to. This imperative turned the extermination of the Jews into something that men like Hoess and Eichmann had missed out on: fighting on the front lines. Not that any of Eichmann’s staff, or men with comparable positions in “reserved occupations,” would have traded places with soldiers in Stalingrad. We have no evidence that anyone from Eichmann’s department actually requested a transfer to the front lines. But they still felt they were missing out on the much-lauded experience of camaraderie, proving oneself in battle, gallantry, and heroic deeds, and the front-line troops never really acknowledged the office staff as comrades. The Waffen-SS disliked and mocked the Allgemeine-SS (the “general” SS). Understandably, anyone who had been promoted while surviving the conditions at the front didn’t take kindly to someone earning the same reward behind a desk in Berlin. This distinction was still being brought home to Eichmann in Argentina.” And so it pleased him not only to recall this recognition that Himmler had given them but to demonstrate to the others that during his visits to the extermination camp, he had proved himself. Fountains of blood and splintering bones, willpower and acts of violence: Eichmann had come through it all as well. He too had known comradeship and supported his fellow soldiers. [...]

He wanted to prove that he too had suffered for Germany. This desire goes a long way to explaining why Eichmann describes the horror so frankly.

p. 278

As already shown, Eichmann had previously held an interest in the claims and narratives ascribed by propagandists about him and his peers. Although Eichmann had done some reading on his own, the Sassen group brought along new works he had not yet seen (note for later that this is also where Stangneth's bizarre theory begins, which I'll explain):

The additional difficulty in this already complex situation was that, when the Sassen conversations began, most of the books were new to Eichmann. Generally speaking, he was familiar only with the reviews, not with the books themselves. Sassen frequently used this advantage to try to offset Eichmann’s huge head start on the information. He would confront Eichmann with historical details without revealing his source. Of course, Sassen’s alliance with the books didn’t go unnoticed by Eichmann, and he kept asking specific questions about the books’ contents. But above all, Sassen aroused Eichmann’s curiosity about what might actually have been written about him and his crimes. The process was always the same, starting with the first book that Sassen lent him, Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand. In one of the early discussions (tapes 6, 8, 9, and 10), Eichmann mentions that he isn’t familiar with it: “I have not read the book either, unfortunately I have not had access to it, it was published only a few months ago, but I have read several reviews in various newspapers.” Sassen deliberately ignores his hints, reassuring Eichmann that he knows the book well. Eichmann doesn’t dare ask straight out to borrow the book. But he does make frequent, pointed remarks about how reading it would be sure to jog his memory, if he were able to “study” it at some point:” “I might be able to say more if I had the stimulus, through one of the explanations in his book, or if some other tome makes reference to something he says.”? But Sassen held out for weeks, and the books were read only communally, during the discussion sessions. Only on tape 24 is Eichmann allowed to look at the book for himself and read out his own notes on it without interruption from the others.” Sassen, as Eichmann quickly realized, wasn’t naive, and at bottom, he wasn’t really a friend.

p. 274

And don't forget that finances were indisputably an important factor for Eichmann, who would have sought some form of compensation for his time:

The family urgently needed the money, as an unexpected event had taken place: Vera Eichmann was pregnant again.

p. 167

B. Eichmann's Popularity and Fame Motives

The Sassen interviews were not some quiet, fireside event which no one took notice of. Quite the contrary, they were the "talk of the town", often having strange visitors attend and listening to sensitive details of conversation:

Word of the meetings at Sassen’s house obviously got around quickly, and they became a social event. Much was expected of this project, which was certainly no secret and attracted a great deal of attention. Eichmann, undaunted, spoke quite frankly -- even when he didn’t know some of the guests. [...]
On the tape of another session, he can be heard whispering that he doesn’t like a listener who has just departed, whose name he doesn’t know. Nobody who was worried about their safety and anonymity would be this relaxed.

p. 251

"The rather unprofessionally produced transcripts reveal that Sassen and Eichmann were not the only people involved in the discussions. The surviving tapes provide audio evidence not only of other participants but of passive listeners as well. Nobody can listen to a conversation for hours at a time without making some kind of noise: throat clearing, coughing, paper rustling, footsteps, murmured excuses, hurried farewells, banging doors, jammed windows, the noises of drinks and cigarette lighters. In places it is possible to discern six separate people making these noises in the room. Contemporaries in Buenos Aires always implied that a lot of people knew about these sessions with Eichmann, and one took a certain pride in being able to say one had been there. Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that some people who met Eichmann elsewhere confused their experience with the Sassen circle, or that people said they had been at the discussions to make themselves look important. But the documents and tapes prove that they really were a big event."

p 246

Surely, Eichmann could have requested these visitors not be allowed and that these conversations be strictly private. Stangneth admits that Eichmann consciously enabled (or perhaps even sought after) becoming a "public attraction":

Not everyone in 1957 was as publicity shy as Mengele. During his extensive investigations, the Argentine author Uki Goni met a surprising number of people who claimed to have witnessed the discussions between Eichmann and Sassen. The fact that people with no access to the Durer circle made such claims is only human nature. Goebbels’s acolyte Wilfred von Oven even said he introduced Fritsch and Sassen, despite having only arrived in Argentina in 1951, long after Sassen. All this boasting just shows how attractive these ghoulish gatherings and their protagonists must have been. Anyone who thought they were anyone claimed to have been there. In one of the first recording sessions, Eichmann hints at the reason he allowed himself to become a public attraction in far-right circles: “They stopped looking for me a long time ago, that much is clear.”

p. 253

We recall that Eichmann was quite comfortable speaking freely ever since his first moment of arrival in Argentina:

On July 14, 1950, the Giovanna C reached Buenos Aires harbor with its cargo of Third Reich imports, and Adolf Eichmann set foot on Argentine soil for the first time. Years later he would still have a vivid memory of the moment: “My heart was filled with joy. The fear that someone could denounce me vanished. I was there, and in safety!”! From his observation, one might almost think he was a prodigal son returning home, not a man stepping out into an unknown land. Where other émigrés—particularly those traveling on false papers—might have been contending with feelings of uncertainty, or at best curiosity and a sense of expectation, Eichmann remembered feeling nothing of the sort.

p. 105

This arrival took place three years before he met Habel, whom he met before his fame and notoriety in Argentina had reached its peak, and perhaps before he'd begun to appreciate the value of embracing the false storylines associated to his name:

From his meeting with Adolf Eichmann, he said he had asked him about the Jewish Holocaust: what about the matter of the six million? Habel said that Eichmann answered: It's very simple... we had observed it until 1943. After that there were no more trains, there were no more telephones, nothing. Until that time, 239,000 had been killed, all registered. But Habel asked him about the number of murders up to 1945, to which Eichmann responded I don't know how many more could have died, but half a million at the most. The elderly German also opined that Eichmann did not think he could be kidnapped in Argentina, as happened in May 1960.

https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/confesi ... agRtg.html

And Then It All Went Wrong

As mentioned earlier, Stangneth's interpretation is that Eichmann preferred to stay in control of the interviews, both in terms of overall talking time and with regard to perceived level of knowledge or wisdom in the group. At one point, Eichmann failed to maintain control as such, due to a deliberate "trap" set by Sassen, who provides Eichmann a document to criticize without first telling him it was written by Wisliceny (who had been a close friend/associate of Eichmann's). Eichmann had until that time been picking apart what other authors got wrong (according to Eichmann) about the administrative structures involved in the SS areas he was involved in or aware of. After Eichmann does his usual routine as such for part of this document, which contains a detailed description (or "confession") about the "Final Solution" and its administrative outline, in-depth, Eichmann gradually seems to concede that this author is well-informed in some areas (Stangneth infers that Eichmann seems 'troubled' by this). But while Eichmann offers some additional criticism, Sassen finally admits that it was Wisliceny who wrote the document, a fact which Eichmann is overwhelmed by. He'd seen the record of Wisliceny testifying against him at Nuremberg, which he was understanding of, but this more recent document had much more detail than he'd seen before. It was felt as a true and thorough betrayal (whether true statements or not) by a close friend.

Stangneth explains how it was this moment in which the tone of the interviews changed, from that point forward:

This is exactly what happened in Argentina: Eichmann recognized that Sassen had been playing on his emotions and had entrapped him. In the discussions that followed, his contributions became more halting, filled with latent or open aggression. The convivial tone of the previous sessions vanished at a stroke.

[...]

And he realized that the man he thought of as his new friend in Argentina wasn’t afraid to manipulate him. Eichmann learned that he had been betrayed by two so-called friends, one old and one new.

[...]

Over the sessions that followed, the discussion lurched from one dispute to the next. Eichmann put his own opinions across quite forcefully, even when Sassen didn’t want to hear them. No, of course he been acting on Hitler’s orders, and no, the extermination of the Jews had not been “un-Germanic”: it had been a fundamentally German operation, which they had to keep on justifying, and he was the German officer who had carried it out. Eichmann, the specialist on Jewish questions, had implemented exactly what Hitler wanted. [...] Sassen, Fritsch, and Langer could do little in retaliation; the discussion sometimes veered off course, and the project threatened to collapse."

p. 285

In brief, Eichmann's cynicism increased dramatically, almost overnight, for obvious reasons. He had named his third son after Wisliceny, so this was a deeply personal matter. Of course, Stangneth insists that Eichmann was offended because Wisliceny exposed the "truth" about Eichmann's actions against Jews (and that Sassen "threw it into his face", so to speak, for his own [Sassen's] motives). But all of this behavior is just as easy (or easier) to explain if we assume that Wisliceny had simply written down guided falsehoods, willing to do so either out of spite or hatred toward Eichmann or simply to save his own skin (or other coercion) as the probability of his execution further approached.

As a result of this "entrapment" from Sassen, Eichmann became dramatically more obstinate, recognizing that Sassen preferred a more Revisionist-friendly narrative and deliberately violating that preference.

Stangneth simply assumes that Eichmann had some kind of epiphany the night before and decided to 'come 100% clean' with Sassen at the next meetings, and finally tell the 'full truth' about extermination. In reality, it looks far more like he simply felt motivated to produce even more nonsense.

What We're Left With

From all of this, Stangneth summarizes her winding, delusional hypothesis as follows:

His self-declared war on enemy literature saw Eichmann fighting on two fronts. While the others concentrated on defending their fantasy version of history against the research, Eichmann was also attempting to tell the Sassen circle what they wanted to hear. He knew his interlocutors would not be fellow soldiers but enemies. He had to put a slant on his interpretations, diverting the group away from facts that he knew only too well. Sassen and Fritsch may have been refusing to acknowledge historical facts, but Eichmann had to conceal knowledge that went far beyond the literature. This must have cost him a huge effort: knowing the magnitude of the crime, he first had to find out what was written about it, then consider how to distract the others from the books’ threatening content, while simultaneously appearing to share their perspective, which was one of denial. And then the specialist consultant had to add “new” information to the discussion—though without exposing himself too much. Most important, he had to avoid getting caught doing any of it. It’s no wonder Eichmann was in peak condition for his police interrogation in 1960.

p.273

Notice that little of what Stangneth claims here is actually supported by the statements, themselves. She simply infers most of this where it isn't necessary to do so, yet this is her over-arching takeaway and the key theme of her entire narrative.

I will add all of this a reminder that:

• The legible, complete transcripts are still unavailable to the general public or to Revisionists
• The existing audio is still unavailable to the general public or to Revisionists

We know why.

Based on some of the reading above, there are a few key points I really want to emphasize:

• It's admitted by Christopher Browning that Eichmann's precapture testimony is unreliable. Eichmann lied about having witnessed a 'gassing' at Majdanek, when no such gassing could have occurred (per Browning).
• A few years prior to the Sassen interviews, Eichmann did not claim to have killed millions of Jews, even in a conversation with a trusted associate (Habel) and despite having zero fear of being captured at the time. He says that a couple hundred thousand were killed (at least, that's how Habel remembers it) but he also said that these ones were "all registered", which suggests they were not killed. Either way, this figure is drastically at odds with his later claim of having killed the infamous 'six million', which means we count at least two confirmed lies from Eichmann about 'extermination' in his precapture testimony.
• The 'Nazi' motivation for fame and monetary incentives that come with telling exaggerated or fabricated stories about 'extermination' is made absolutely clear in examples like that of Hottl.
• Eichmann's own unique circumstances make clear that he was positioned to be driven by these same and similar motives (boredom and fallen status, obsession with 'Holocaust' literature about himself, yearning to prove himself as a heroic German, and urgent financial needs with his wife's fourth pregnancy).
• These motives are further apparent in the fact that the conversations recorded on the tapes were a town spectacle, much like a circus attraction, to which even unknown locals could attend in a revolving-door fashion.
• Eichmann specifically and frequently requested at the interview to be able to read the unique "Holocaust" literature possessed by Sassen, promising that he (Eichmann), "might be able to say more if [he] had the stimulus", that it "would be sure to jog his memory". In other words, "wink-wink".
• In his later trial, Eichmann states that "Sassen had goaded him into making false statements to produce good headlines" and that, "[h]ours of studying historical theories and Nazi history suddenly became a lot of casual boasting...", which is supported by the other observations described here.
• Prior to Sassen offending him, Eichmann only partly endorsed or confirmed a true 'extermination' narrative, or at least minimized it. After the offense (the Wiscliceny document), Eichmann clearly changed his storytelling, so as to be as offensive as possible toward Sassen. This is where most of the 'incriminating' statements come from.

Also, here is some more on this topic from my earlier CODOH work, regarding the archives (it may answer your question, Nessie):

Remember:

• The photographed transcript is blurry, some half or more of the pages are totally illegible.
• The complete (legible) transcript is in an Israeli archive, no Revisionist can see it (this transcript also originated from an "anonymous source" and is, hence, dubious)
• The available audio (which is a small fraction of the original total) is in a German archive, and no Revisionist can see it

Stangneth was able to view/listen to the whole transcript/audio in writing her book. No Revisionist is able to do the same. That is clear, undeniable evidence that the debate is substantially affected by manipulation and control tactics such as censorship and a disparity in access to information.

Now, why on Earth would they need to keep this information from the public? Here's an answer:

They were told that many filmmakers had tried over the years to get their hands on the cassettes, but that the owner – who has remained anonymous – refused to authorize this. They would allow access to the recordings only for research purposes, Mozer was told. Later, when the German researcher was asked to undergo security clearance before being given access to the materials, to ensure that he was not a neo-Nazi who could make wrongful use of them, Mozer understood the sensitivity the archive attributed to the tapes.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... fb96ff0000
https://archive.is/NBghG

How would a "neo-Nazi" make "harmful use" of Eichmann simply confessing to his role in 'extermination'? Even if he said a few things which could be cherry-picked to mendaciously promote Revisionism, would these few items capable of being 'picked' as such outweigh the overall value of an explicit, genocidal confession?

One has to wonder, then, if there is something more to these statements than just those elements which those with an establishment bias would like to present.

- [Eichmann] is a confirmed liar in his precapture years about both 'extermination' figures and a '[Majdanek] gassing' (which he completely invented/imagined),
- He was obsessed with the [fantasy] narratives about himself as some elite murderer of his national enemy,
- He craved the attention he got for these narratives (hence the strange visitors permitted throughout the recordings),
- He desperately needed money, and
- Sassen eventually pissed him off to the point that he wanted to offend him with increasingly horrifying claims (against Sassen's desire for a more Revisionist-friendly narrative).

1. Eichmann was inconsistent and lied — especially in the Sassen Tapes.
He allegedly gave different death toll estimates in different contexts.
Claimed to witness events (e.g., gassings at Majdanek) that don’t match other records.
Later “confessed” in detail during Sassen interviews, possibly out of ego, manipulation, or need for attention.

2. Historians like Christopher Browning note Eichmann’s inaccuracies.
Browning acknowledges Eichmann’s precapture testimony is vague or inaccurate in parts.
Thus, some argue, Eichmann is not a reliable source at all.

3. The Sassen tapes may reflect manipulation, revisionism, or show Eichmann performing.
Eichmann may have exaggerated to seem important, impress peers, or spite others.
Sassen and his circle had financial or ideological motives.
Excerpts are selectively public; full transcripts and recordings are restricted.

4. The credibility of other Nazis (like Wilhelm Höttl and Ludolf von Alvensleben) is also questionable.
Similar claims: they lied for gain, or their testimony was coerced or self-serving.

5. This all shows that key Holocaust testimonies are untrustworthy and should be treated skeptically.

ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 3:00 am I'm seeing a common theme come up on this forum where people will find a small inconsistency with a piece of evidence, a single testimony, or part of a testimony, and then use that to try and discredit the remaining body of evidence which is overwhelmingly consistent in the opposite direction.

Do you think that identifying some inconsistencies or flaws in evidence disproves the credibility of the whole thing?

If you take that argument, you would not believe in basically all of recorded history which is riddled with inconsistencies and errors. Do you apply this kind of thinking to other historical narratives?

At some point, I might also go through the Sonderkommando testimonies and I'm sure you will find inconsistencies there like any handful of testimonies. But why don't you look at the entire body of information? If 98% of multiple testimonies points in one direction and 2%, is weak or contradictory evidence, do you write off the whole thing as non credible?

Stubble wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 3:11 am Address the content or make a new thread.

What you have just posted is obfuscation, pure and simple.

None of the problems with mr geysers of blood here are small, eichmann and his 'confession' have huge problems, not the least of which is the inability for the records to be reviewed.

Eichmann confirmed that the records of Höss, Wisliceny, Höttl, and other SS leaders have little historical evidential value. [...] "This makes everything I learned about these people after 1945 all the more unbelievable to me; in repeated cases, I was able to establish the opposite of their statements, extracted through coercion and pressure."

[...]

["]One can certainly believe all this nonsense from the authors; they're all lying to themselves, whether it's [Leon] Poliakov or [Gerald] Reitlinger, who lies even more than the first, or Kogan [Eugen Kogon] and whatever their names are."

[...]

"In general, I must state," said Eichmann after reading The Story of Joel Brand, which he dismissed as a "novel with a historical background," "that, according to Brand, I am also supposed to have said the thing about the five million Jews. From the former German Reich of seventy or eighty million Germans, no other witness for this five-million story could be found. Perhaps they didn't want to find anyone else. So I am the only German to whom this explanation has now been falsely attributed. As a result, international Jewry must now present me as best as possible, so that the credibility of this thesis is all the greater, both to the public and to history." And again, clearly: "The five million Jews killed is a lie." "But that's not all, other authors have increased this number to eight million!"

ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 2:57 am I appreciate the response but I am busy with many things and this is way too long to read.

Is it not possible for you to simplify the main argument into 3 to 5 paragraphs?

This is how ChatGPT summarizes your post. Feel free to point out if it missed anything.

Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 5:26 am Irving makes it abundantly clear that Eichmann at that time considered major parts of the story to be wrong, as he repeatedly used words like "lie" and "nonsense", and he denied explicitly his supposed role as it was told of. I think this has more evidentiary value than statements that came later after continued exposure to postwar materials. One explanation for his diverging testimony is that he was pliable to what he read. As he puts it at one point: "I accept it as a lie, but if the cases keep piling up, then it could be that there's a dog buried somewhere."

Regardless, it must be admitted that the testimony does diverge. No honest person can cherrypick quotes from Eichmann in support of the Holocaust without also admitting that he can equally be quoted from in support of revisionism. Yet the authorities aren't forthcoming at all about that.

Published at the end of 1955, the collection of documents edited by Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf gave readers access to Wilhelm Höttl’s full three-page declaration under oath, in which he set out his conversation with Eichmann. Document PS-2738 had been one of the most important documents in the Nuremberg Trials.” Here Höttl says that Eichmann had come to his Budapest apartment at the end of August 1944, as usual wanting information on the military situation. Höttl took this opportunity to ask him about the exact number of Jews murdered, and Eichmann answered: “Around four million Jews have been killed in the various extermination camps, while a further two million met their end in other ways, the majority being shot by the Security Police’s Einsatzkommandos during the Russian campaign.”

[...]

Ironically, Höttl’s statement is still regarded as unreliable. Much of what he told American investigators after the German defeat in 1945 was not information he had heard himself: he “borrowed” it from other people’s reports and added the occasional exaggeration of his own.

[...]

Later, Höttl would unintentionally strengthen people’s doubts about his credibility. In his autobiography, he claimed to have been aware that this statement would make him a sought-after (and well-paid) witness to the Nazi period. In his final years he managed to start a television career based solely on this statement, then hinted several times that he had never really believed the scale of the Holocaust was so vast. This suggestion, like many things in his last book, proves how easy Höttl found it to spend a lifetime saying things he didn't believe. In one of his last interviews, he said: "As is so often the case, something I lied about came true."

Nessie wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 6:47 am Where does Eichmann evidence what did happen, rather than mass murders?

ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 3:28 am

Stubble wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 3:11 am Address the content or make a new thread.

What you have just posted is obfuscation, pure and simple.

None of the problems with mr geysers of blood here are small, eichmann and his 'confession' have huge problems, not the least of which is the inability for the records to be reviewed.

I did address the content. I see that you are raising concerns about inconsistencies in testimony and evidence which is fair to mention. But I still don't get the sense that you are looking at the evidence holistically and from different perspectives. You can nitpick a few of his claims but then you are ignoring everything else. To make sure that you are engaging in good faith, before I go further on this path, I want to make sure that you are open to weighing the full body of evidence fairly. I’m open to an honest discussion if that’s the goal but I don't want to waste time zooming in on individual inconsistencies.

For example, the “geysers of blood” line from Wiernik’s Treblinka testimony is often taken out of context. He was describing the horrific exhumation of mass graves, where decomposing bodies produced gases and fluids. It’s likely a metaphorical description of a real, gruesome scene but not meant to be a literal scientific claim. Survivors often describe trauma in intense, imprecise ways but that one factor doesn't invalidate the entire testimony.

How do you differentiate between a claim that's metaphorical or euphemistic or meant to be taken literally? That seems to be a common conflict here on this forum where somebody argues something literally and it's not meant to be or vice versa.

Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 7:12 am

Nessie wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 6:47 am Where does Eichmann evidence what did happen, rather than mass murders?

Where were you to ask him this?

ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 5:29 pm I uploaded CF's rubric to ChatGPT - "Toward a More Objective Framework for Evaluating Historical Documents" - from the thread below and asked it to rate Eichmann's testimonies.

https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=350

At the very end, I asked it to make the best argument that it could that the Holocaust did not exist, based on the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of Eichmann's testimonies and it gave me and the answer you can see might surprise you!

https://chatgpt.com/share/682cad1b-6800 ... 602113ac8b

I look forward to debating this out with you, in good faith of course. Feel free to use AI to save time and mental energy.

Nessie wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 12:52 pm

Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 7:12 am

Nessie wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 6:47 am Where does Eichmann evidence what did happen, rather than mass murders?

Where were you to ask him this?

Anyone interested in finding out what happened would have asked. I take it Eichmann provides no revised history of what happened to the Jews the Nazis arrested? In that case, he is no help to your so-called revisionism.