Word: memoirs
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...Jewish problem" even insisted that he was not antiSemitic. Eichmann had made that claim somewhat obliquely in court and more directly in a lengthy "confession" to a German journalist that was published by LIFE in 1960. He repeated that disavowal in a little-known, long suppressed personal memoir that is now coming to light. Declared Eichmann: "The Holocaust was the greatest crime in history. I was never taken in by the mysticism of Nazi ideology. My views never matched the official line. I could never identify with the objectives of national socialism. I always had doubts...
...contained in a rambling account of his life that Eichmann wrote in prison while awaiting the results of an appeal of his conviction. (The appeal was rejected by Israel's Supreme Court, and on May 31, 1962, he was executed by hanging.) The apparent purpose of his memoir was to bolster his chances of a reprieve and to arouse public sympathy. Eichmann asked his defense attorney, Robert Servatius, to seek permission for its publication. The trial prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, refused; then Premier David Ben-Gurion ordered that the manuscript be suppressed for 15 years and placed in the state...
Portions of the memoir will be contained in an updated Hebrew edition of Hausner's 1966 book on the trial, Justice in Jerusalem, which will be published in Israel this March. Hausner, who is now chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, feels the entire manuscript should not be published on the grounds that it is rambling, repetitive and stuffed with what he calls the typical Nazi "jargon of violence." Besides, adds Israel's former Attorney General, "I felt that Eichmann had ample opportunity to make his defense during the trial...
...Birds Sang goes a long way to explain why Mowat chose the unpaved road. The book, his 21st, is a memoir of scorching experiences as a combat officer during World War II. It is Mowat's finest work, an autobiography in which a painful past emerges after many years with the figurative power of fiction...
Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell (Seabury, 1977). "We're all bastards but God loves us anyway," Campbell says, and his memoir is a beguiling personal sermon on the same topic...