Eichmann in Jerusalem Read online

  But quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels, it was in those years a fact of everyday life that only Zionists had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities, for the simple reason that their chief Jewish adversary, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, to which ninety-five per cent of organized Jews in Germany then belonged, specified in its bylaws that its chief task was the “fight against anti-Semitism”; it had suddenly become by definition an organization “hostile to the State,” and would indeed have been persecuted—which it was not—if it had ever dared to do what it was supposed to do. During its first few years, Hitler's rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as “the decisive defeat of assimilationism.” Hence, the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that “dissimilation,” combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a “mutually fair solution.” At the time, many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung had been composed of both Zionists and non-Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were “the ‘decent’ Jews since they too thought in ‘national’ terms.” To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as “mere propaganda.” There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a Ha'avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.”

  Of greater importance for Eichmann were the emissaries from Palestine, who would approach the Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist help for the illegal immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S. were helpful. They negotiated with Eichmann in Vienna, and they reported that he was “polite,” “not the shouting type,” and that he even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. (“On one occasion, he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews,” and on another “a special train [was made available] and Nazi officials accompanied” a group of emigrants, ostensibly headed for Zionist training farms in Yugoslavia, to see them safely across the border.) According to the story told by Jon and David Kimche, with “the full and generous cooperation of all the chief actors” (The Secret Roads: The “Illegal” Migration of a People, 1938–1948, London, 1954), these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations: “That was not their job. They wanted to select “suitable material,” and their chief enemy, prior to the extermination program, was not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries, Germany or Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland; that enemy was definitely Britain, not Germany. Indeed, they were in a position to deal with the Nazi authorities on a footing amounting to equality, which native Jews were not, since they enjoyed the protection of the mandatory power; they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual interests and were certainly the first to be given permission “to pick young Jewish pioneers” from among the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, they were unaware of the sinister implications of this deal, which still lay in the future; but they too somehow believed that if it was a question of selecting Jews for survival, the Jews should do the selecting themselves. It was this fundamental error in judgment that eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitablybly found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities. As far as the Viennese episode is concerned, Eichmann's preposterous claim to have saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, which was laughed out of court, finds strange support in the considered judgment of the Jewish historians, the Kimches: “Thus what must have been one of the most paradoxical episodes of the entire period of the Nazi regime began: the man who was to go down in history as one of the arch-murderers of the Jewish people entered the lists as an active worker in the rescue of Jews from Europe.”

  Eichmann's trouble was that he remembered none of the facts that might have supported, however faintly, his incredible story, while the learned counsel for the defense probably did not even know that there was anything to remember. (Dr. Servatius could have called as witnesses for the defense the former agents of Aliyah Beth, as the organization for illegal immigration into Palestine was called; they certainly still remembered Eichmann, and they were now living in Israel.) Eichmann's memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing upon his career. Thus, he remembered a visit he had received in Berlin from a Palestinian functionary who told him about life in the collective settlements, and whom he had twice taken out to dinner, because this visit ended with a formal invitation to Palestine, where the Jews would show him the country. He was delighted; no other Nazi official had been able to go “to a distant foreign land,” and he received permission to make the trip. The judgment concluded that he had been sent “on an espionage mission,” which no doubt was true, but this did not contradict the story Eichmann had told the police. (Practically nothing came of the enterprise. Eichmann, together with a journalist from his office, a certain Herbert Hagen, had just enough time to climb Mount Carmel in Haifa before the British authorities deported both of them to Egypt and denied them entry permits for Palestine; according to Eichmann, “the man from the Haganah”—the Jewish military organization which became the nucleus of the Israeli Army—came to see them in Cairo, and what he told them there became the subject of a “thoroughly negative report” Eichmann and Hagen were ordered by their superiors to write for propaganda purposes; this was duly published.)

  Apart from such minor triumphs, Eichmann remembered only moods and the catch phrases he made up to go with them; the trip to Egypt had been in 1937, prior to his activity in Vienna, and from Vienna he remembered no more than the general atmosphere and how “elated” he had felt. In view of his astounding virtuosity in never discarding a mood and its catch phrase once and for all when they became incompatible with a new era, which required different moods and different “elating” phrases—a virtuosity that he demonstrated over and over during the police examination—one is tempted to believe in his sincerity when he spoke of the time in Vienna as an idyll. Because of the complete lack of consistency in his thoughts and sentiments, this sincerity is not even undermined by the fact that his year in Vienna, from the spring of 1938 to March, 1939, came at a time when the Nazi regime had abandoned its pro-Zionist attitude. It was in the nature of the Nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month, but one of the outstanding characteristics of its members was that psychologically they tended to be always one step behind the movement—that they had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it, or, as Hitler used to phrase it, that they could not “jump over their own shadow.”


  More damning, however, than any objective fact was Eichmann's own faulty memory. There were certain Jews in Vienna whom he recalled very vividly—Dr. Löwenherz and Kommerzialrat Storfer—but they were not those Palestinian emissaries, who might have backed up his story. Josef Löwenherz, who after the war wrote a very interesting memorandum about his negotiations with Eichmann (one of the few new documents produced by the trial, it was shown in part to Eichmann, who found himself in complete agreement with its main statements), was the first Jewish functionary actually to organize a whole Jewish community into an institution at the service of the Nazi authorities. And he was one of the very, very few such functionaries to reap a reward for his services—he was permitted to stay in Vienna until the end of the war, when he emigrated to England and the United States; he died shortly after Eichmann's capture, in 1960. Storfer's fate, as we have seen, was less fortunate, but this certainly was not Eichmann's fault. Storfer had replaced the Palestinian emissaries, who had become too independent, and his task, assigned to him by Eichmann, was to organize some illegal transports of Jews into Palestine without the help of the Zionists. Storfer was no Zionist and had shown no interest in Jewish matters prior to the arrival of the Nazis in Austria. Still, with the help of Eichmann he succeeded in getting some thirty-five hundred Jews out of Europe, in 1940, when half of Europe was occupied by the Nazis, and it seems that he did his best to clear things with the Palestinians. (That is probably what Eichmann had in mind when he added to his story about Storfer in Auschwitz the cryptic remark: “Storfer never betrayed Judaism, not with a single word, not Storfer.”) A third Jew, finally, whom Eichmann never failed to recall in connection with his prewar activities was Dr. Paul Eppstein, in charge of emigration in Berlin during the last years of the Reichsvereinigung—a Nazi-appointed Jewish central organization, not to be confused with the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung, which was dissolved in July, 1939. Dr. Eppstein was appointed by Eichmann to serve as Judenältester (Jewish Elder) in Theresienstadt, where he was shot in 1944.

  In other words, the only Jews Eichmann remembered were those who had been completely in his power. He had forgotten not only the Palestinian emissaries but also his earlier Berlin acquaintances, whom he had known well when he was still engaged in intelligence work and had no executive powers. He never mentioned, for instance, Dr. Franz Meyer, a former member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization in Germany, who came to testify for the prosecution about his contacts with the accused from 1936 to 1939. To some extent, Dr. Meyer confirmed Eichmann's own story: in Berlin, the Jewish functionaries could “put forward complaints and requests,” there was a kind of cooperation. Sometimes, Meyer said, “we came to ask for something, and there were times when he demanded something from us”; Eichmann at that time “was genuinely listening to us and was sincerely trying to understand the situation”; his behavior was “quite correct”—“he used to address me as ‘Mister’ and to offer me a seat.” But in February, 1939, all this had changed. Eichmann had summoned the leaders of German Jewry to Vienna to explain to them his new methods of “forced emigration.” And there he was, sitting in a large room on the ground floor of the Rothschild Palais, recognizable, of course, but completely changed: “I immediately told my friends that I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible was the change…. Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He received us with insolence and rudeness. He did not let us come near his desk. We had to remain standing.” Prosecution and judges were in agreement that Eichmann underwent a genuine and lasting personality change when he was promoted to a post with executive powers. But the trial showed that here, too, he had “relapses,” and that the matter could never have been as simple as that. There was the witness who testified to an interview with him at Theresienstadt in March, 1945, when Eichmann again showed himself to be very interested in Zionist matters—the witness was a member of a Zionist youth organization and held a certificate of entry for Palestine. The interview was “conducted in very pleasant language and the attitude was kind and respectful.” (Strangely, counsel for the defense never mentioned this witness's testimony in his plaidoyer.)

  Whatever doubts there may be about Eichmann's personality change in Vienna, there is no doubt that this appointment marked the real beginning of his career. Between 1937 and 1941, he won four promotions; within fourteen months he advanced from Untersturmführer to Hauptsturmführer (that is, from second lieutenant to captain); and in another year and a half he was made Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel. That happened in October, 1941, shortly after he was assigned the role in the Final Solution that was to land him in the District Court of Jerusalem. And there, to his great grief, he “got stuck”; as he saw it, there was no higher grade obtainable in the section in which he worked. But this he could not know during the four years in which he climbed quicker and higher than he had ever anticipated. In Vienna, he had shown his mettle, and now he was recognized not merely as an expert on “the Jewish question,” the intricacies of Jewish organizations and Zionist parties, but as an “authority” on emigration and evacuation, as the “master” who knew how to make people move. His greatest triumph came shortly after the Kristallnacht, in November, 1938, when German Jews had become frantic in their desire to escape. Göring, probably on the initiative of Heydrich, decided to establish in Berlin a Reich Center for Jewish Emigration, and in the letter containing his directives Eichmann's Viennese office was specifically mentioned as the model to be used in the setting up of a central authority. The head of the Berlin office was not to be Eichmann, however, but his later greatly admired boss Heinrich Müller, another of Heydrich's discoveries. Heydrich had just taken Müller away from his job as a regular Bavarian police officer (he was not even a member of the Party and had been an opponent until 1933), and called him to the Gestapo in Berlin, because he was known to be an authority on the Soviet Russian police system. For Müller, too, this was the beginning of his career, though he had to start with a comparatively small assignment. (Müller, incidentally, not prone to boasting like Eichmann and known for his “sphinxlike conduct,” succeeded in disappearing altogether; nobody knows his whereabouts, though there are rumors that first East Germany and now Albania have engaged the services of the Russian-police expert.)

  In March, 1939, Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia and erected a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia. Eichmann was immediately appointed to set up another emigration center for Jews in Prague. “In the beginning I was not too happy to leave Vienna, for if you have installed such an office and if you see everything running smoothly and in good order, you don't like to give it up.” And indeed, Prague was somewhat disappointing, although the system was the same as in Vienna, for “The functionaries of the Czech Jewish organizations went to Vienna and the Viennese people came to Prague, so that I did not have to intervene at all. The model in Vienna was simply copied and carried to Prague. Thus the whole thing got started automatically.” But the Prague center was much smaller, and “I regret to say there were no people of the caliber and the energy of a Dr. Löwenherz.” But these, as it were, personal reasons for discontent were minor compared to mounting difficulties of another, entirely objective nature. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had left their homelands in a matter of a few years, and millions waited behind them, for the Polish and Rumanian governments left no doubt in their official proclamations that they, too, wished to be rid of their Jews. They could not understand why the world should get indignant if they followed in the footsteps of a “great and cultured nation.” (This enormous arsenal of potential refugees had been revealed during the Evian Conference, called in the summer of 1938 to solve the problem of German Jewry through intergovernmental action. It was a resounding fiasco and did great harm to German Jews.) The avenues for emigration overseas now became clogged up, just as the escape possibilities within Europe had been exhausted earlier, and even under the best of circumstances, if war had not interfered with his program, Eichmann w
ould hardly have been able to repeat the Viennese “miracle” in Prague.

  He knew this very well, he really had become an expert on matters of emigration, and he could not have been expected to greet his next appointment with any great enthusiasm. War had broken out in September, 1939, and one month later Eichmann was called back to Berlin to succeed Müller as head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration. A year before, this would have been a real promotion, but now was the wrong moment. No one in his senses could possibly think any longer of a solution of the Jewish question in terms of forced emigration; quite apart from the difficulties of getting people from one country to another in wartime, the Reich had acquired, through the conquest of Polish territories, two or two and a half million more Jews. It is true that the Hitler government was still willing to let its Jews go (the order that stopped all Jewish emigration came only two years later, in the fall of 1941), and if any “final solution” had been decided upon, nobody had as yet given orders to that effect, although Jews were already concentrated in ghettos in the East and were also being liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen. It was only natural that emigration, however smartly organized in Berlin in accordance with the “assembly line principle,” should peter out by itself—a process Eichmann described as being “like pulling teeth… listless, I would say, on both sides. On the Jewish side because it was really difficult to obtain any emigration possibilities to speak of, and on our side because there was no bustle and no rush, no coming and going of people. There we were, sitting in a great and mighty building, amid a yawning emptiness.” Evidently, if Jewish matters, his specialty, remained a matter of emigration, he would soon be out of a job.