They knew me wherever I went.
—Adolf Eichmann to Willem Sassen, 1957
To this day, we don’t know exactly when Eichmann decided to live in Argentina, but he once explained why he was drawn there: “I knew that in this ‘promised land’ of South America I had a few good friends, to whom I could say openly, freely and proudly that I am Adolf Eichmann, former SS Obersturmbannführer.”1
Proud to be Adolf Eichmann? What an extraordinary remark! The fact that Eichmann saw this as a realistic possibility was as grotesque then as it seems now. His name had become a byword for the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, as he was all too aware. Nobody goes to great lengths to live under a false name, among strangers, without good reason. And when Adolf Eichmann was planning his escape, he had an excellent reason: he was simply too well known to remain undiscovered for long.
Too many people knew him and knew about his part in the disenfranchisement, expulsion, and mass murder of the Jews. If this fact is not as clear to us today as it was to Eichmann in the late 1940s, it is due to his extraordinary success in presenting himself in Jerusalem. After being kidnapped in 1960, he did his utmost to paint himself as an unimportant head of department, one among many, a “small cog in the machine” of the murderous Third Reich. He was ultimately an anonymous man who had been “made a scapegoat” through error, chance, and the cowardice of others, an unknown SS officer with no influence to speak of. But Eichmann knew very well that this image was a lie. By no means had his name been known only to a very limited circle of people; nor did it become common currency only during the trial. On the contrary, his reputation played a fundamental part in the enormity of the crime for which Eichmann remains notorious to this day.
As his name developed into a symbol of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann kept a close watch on it; indeed, both he and his superiors specifically encouraged the development. He wanted to be anything but the “man in the shadows” that he sometimes claimed to be. Only before the court in Israel did he try to give the impression that he had been a nameless, faceless, disposable minor official—but then, who wouldn’t want to be invisible when threatened with the death penalty? Still, the idea that Eichmann had been a man in the shadows seemed plausible to many people. Some even saw his invisibility as the key to his murderous success.2 Yet obvious clues tell us that by 1938 at the very latest, Eichmann was neither unknown nor interested in operating behind the scenes. As we follow these clues, a far more colorful picture of this shady character will emerge.
1
He was popular and welcomed everywhere.
—Rudolf Höß on Eichmann
In 1932 in Linz, Austria, Adolf Eichmann joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the SS. His family had moved from Germany to Austria when he was a child: his father knew that in Linz, he could make a nice, middle-class career for himself. His son’s career took a very different path: not for him a place on the parish council or a position in his father’s firm. In 1933 the National Socialist movement was outlawed in Austria, and Eichmann seized the opportunity to accompany a senior party functionary back to Germany, the center of this new political power. Whether by intent, good advice, or a sure instinct for gaining power, he found his way into the SS security service in 1934. The Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, was small but already notorious. The organization behind the acronym was already known to have played a significant part in the Night of the Long Knives. Eichmann’s later attempt to explain his transfer to the SD as a “mix-up” is absurd: if that were so, he would have been the only person in Germany unaware of the aura around the SD’s secretive employees and their charismatic leader Reinhard Heydrich.1 People who joined the SD in mid-1934 were well compensated—not with a high salary but with a mixture of respect and dread from their fellow party members. They also gained an impressive office: the majestic palace at 102 Wilhelmstraße in Berlin, the capital and power center of the Reich. For a man of not yet thirty, who two years previously had been a moderately successful gasoline salesman in Upper Austria, this was a big step up in the world. Eichmann felt he had established himself, a fact reflected in his decision to marry and start a family (which, within the SS, was also a good career move). He married Vera Liebl, a woman from Mladé, in Bohemia, four years his junior. She and her two brothers, who worked for the Gestapo, would come to profit from her husband’s social climbing.
The men of the SD held a special position from the beginning. They were the NSDAP’s internal intelligence service, and therefore certain regulations didn’t apply to them. They were not required to participate in military drills, and their SS uniforms mostly stayed in the closet. After April 1935, when off-duty contact with Jews was forbidden to normal party members, the SD’s intelligence function allowed its members to interpret the rules a little more freely: they defined themselves as always being on duty. Incognito investigation was one of the tasks that Eichmann most relished, and he remembered it fondly decades later. He visited Jewish organizations, making contacts who thought him liberal-minded and eager to learn.2 He found a Jewish Hebrew teacher (whom his superior officer then twice forbade him from actually engaging) and immersed himself in Jewish literature, as all his colleagues did, studying everything from six-hundred-page tomes to the daily newspapers. He fostered international relationships, and a Jewish man even invited him on a trip to Palestine. Later Eichmann would speak of a “course of study that took three years.”3 He didn’t mention that his superiors occasionally had to reprimand him for disorganization and tardiness.4 It would be easy to mistake his lifestyle for that of a scientifically inclined aesthete with somewhat crude political views except that, between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo. The SD was both an ideological elite and an instrument of power, a combination that made it highly attractive for the self-declared “new and different” generation.
The first image we have of Eichmann as perceived by a wider (and in this case Jewish) public comes from mid-1937. He was a “smart and brisk” young man who became unfriendly when addressed by his name rather than by his title. “He loved to remain anonymous,” wrote Ernst Marcus, looking back on 1936–37, “and he took the mention of his name next to his official title of ‘Herr Kommissar’ as an insult.”5 It seems Eichmann was unable to resist the cliché of faceless power in a long leather coat—an image formed as much by the SD as by the Gestapo, organizations that their victims found difficult to tell apart. But he did not cling to this anonymity for long. When he traveled to the Middle East with his colleague Herbert Hagen, the British Secret Intelligence Service observed them and prevented them from entering Palestine. Photos of the trip were kept on file.6 By the end of 1937, the name of this “SD Kommissar” was known in Berlin circles. Eichmann was said to be “inexplicably well informed” when it came to topics that Nazis usually preferred to ignore: Zionism, problems with money transfers during forced emigration, discussions among Jews, and a huge variety of interest groups, people, and associations.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when Eichmann began to turn from a silent, discreet observer into the blustering voice of the master race. In Berlin, at least, his reputation for anonymity was conclusively quashed in June 1937, when he almost broke up RabbiJoachim Prinz’s farewell party, creating such a scene that the two thousand guests were unable to ignore the SS man.7 People knew exactly who was meant by “a repulsive, unpleasant fellow, you shake hands with him and you want to wash your hands afterward.” Erring on the side of caution, Eichmann corrected this denunciation for his superiors: “I make sure I never shake hands with these Jews.”8 The time for discreetly acquiring information was evidently over.
This transformation was in line with the SD’s new self-image: it wanted to stop working behind the scenes and stake its claim on implementing anti-Jewish policy. This was a prestigious issue, close to Hitler’s heart, and following the establishment of the Nuremberg race laws, new opportunities opened up.9 Eichmann played a substantial role in helping the SD take advantage of these the very next year. He and his organization were impatient for their new age, impatient to take a stand and to show their “enemy” which way the wind was blowing. As Eichmann’s idiosyncratic phraseology would have it: “They are finally realizing a bomb is beginning to strike.”10 At the start of 1938, Eichmann was known to Berlin’s Jewish community and seemed entirely unconcerned about his growing reputation with “the enemy.”
The Creation of an Elite Unit
With the ascendency of the SD, Eichmann’s reputation also grew within Nazi circles. At first, only the lower ranks knew him, from the lectures he gave on training days, but he quickly made a wider circle of contacts. For a start, he collaborated with other departments, such as the Foreign Office, the Gestapo, and the Reich Department of Commerce—though this didn’t always go smoothly. Forcing the emigration of Jews involved working with numerous different authorities. Then there was Heydrich’s advertising strategy, through which he deftly publicized his SD, and the SD’s Jewish Department, II 112. In January 1937 alone, more than three hundred people visited Department II 112. They were not only officers from the War Academy and the Reich War Ministry but also the future foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the head of the Yugoslav secret police.11 The department’s calendar included lectures to the party’s youth organizations and trips to Upper Silesia12 and the Nuremberg Rally. Eichmann was there as a guest ofJulius Streicher, publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, whose colleague had taken pains to make contact with Eichmann.13 Even though the British had denied him entry to Palestine and the trip had been a failure, in 1937 this still made Eichmann a “recognized expert” on the “Jewish question.”
At this early stage, he already possessed a talent for using even failed projects to build his reputation. Later, in Israel, Eichmann would still claim to know the country: after all, he had visited before. In the mid-1930s his “expert knowledge” made a considerable impression among National Socialists, and his pride was evident: “I was an apprentice in the years 1934/35/36.… But by the time I went to Palestine, I had already become a Bachelor. And when I came back, they made me a Master.”14 Not everyone who met Eichmann in his first years in Berlin, from 1934 to 1938, remembered his name or his face, but a great number of people knew what the SD’s Jewish Department was and what it did. Its staff garnered attention merely for being members of the department. Given Eichmann’s considerable talent for self-promotion, he must have made excellent use of this opportunity.
The Little Prime Minister
In mid-March 1938 Austria was “annexed,” and Eichmann was transferred to Vienna as head of a special unit under Department II 112. This move put him firmly in the public gaze. From the outset, he made no secret of how he viewed his place in history. Before a subpoenaed gathering of all notable representatives of Judaism in Vienna, Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his riding crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. Adolf Böhm, who had just completed the second volume of Die Zionistische Bewegung(The History of the Zionist Movement), learned that Eichmann was one of his most avid readers, who knew whole pages of the first volume from memory. Böhm realized that the SS was going to use the knowledge he had painstaking gathered as its access point to the world of Jewish organizations, and as a weapon against the Jews. Eichmann then explained what he expected from the third volume: a lengthy chapter about himself. Adolf Eichmann as a pioneer of Zionism? The fact that Adolf Böhm couldn’t bear this thought, and never wrote another word, tells us all we need to know, without even thinking about what happened next.15
Eichmann’s self-image no longer seems that of a shy, retiring, and subordinate person. He claimed a place in world history for himself, on the basis of nothing but membership in a fledgling SS organization. It is difficult to overstate the self-confidence of the master race’s “ideological elite.” Here is the impression he made on one eyewitness: “And then Eichmann entered, like a young god; he was very good-looking at that time, tall, black, shining.”16 His behavior, too, was godlike: he was master of arresting and then releasing people, of banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated and censored a Jewish newspaper and eventually even got to decide who could access the Jewish community’s bank accounts.17 The lines of authority among the National Socialists in Vienna were by no means clearly defined—there was wrangling over jurisdiction from the start18—but Eichmann nonetheless proclaimed his power to the outside world. “I have them completely in hand here, they dare not take a step without first consulting me,” he wrote to his superiors in Berlin. His pride is obvious: “I have brought the leaders, at least, up to speed, as you can imagine.” He was similarly proud of what he had done with the Zionistische Rundschau (Zionist Review), which was soon to be launched: “To some extent, it will be ‘my’ newspaper.”19
His fame spread rapidly. From the end of March, Eichmann’s name can be found in letters and reports written by Jews both in Austria and abroad.20 He declared to everyone “that he had been chosen to steer and lead Jewish affairs in Vienna.”21 He was the most senior National Socialist to have contact with the representatives of Jewish communities and organizations. “The Jews,” Tom Segev writes, “looked upon him and Hitler as the two Adolfs who perpetrated the Holocaust.”22 Eichmann was the face of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy—and not only to the Jews. The contacts that he made with international Jewish organizations strengthened this impression: they had to provide cooperation and, more important, money to increase the emigration numbers, and some forced émigrés took the name Eichmann with them into exile. His name appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war.23
When Eichmann officially took up leadership of the newly founded Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, he suddenly achieved fame in Nazi circles as well. Soon Heydrich invited him to Berlin to attend a meeting with Göring, allowing him to dazzle influential men like Goebbels, Frick, Funk, and Stuckart with his “experience … of practical implementation”24 and the impressive accuracy of his emigration figures. His performance gained him a reputation in these circles as a master of “unconventional organization,” one of the era’s key phrases. As an interagency institution, the Central Office caused quite a stir, and numerous ministers and Nazi bigwigs sent their representatives to Vienna to see this experiment for themselves.25 It was a perfect fit for National Socialist ideology, smashing conventional bureaucracy and replacing it with something new, faster, and more effective: “This is how I became the famous Eichmann, all the way up to the RF [Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler] and the other ministries.”26 The idea was so attractive that Göring wanted to adopt it across the Reich, and Eichmann justifiably hoped to have a hand in it. Not even Heydrich passed up the opportunity to visit Vienna. With his characteristically ambiguous combination of praise, irony, and an eye for a slogan, he called Eichmann his “little prime minister.”27
Eichmann was fully aware that a reputation within the National Socialist system equated to direct power: “All this has now given me an enormous boost.”28 The thirty-two-year-old had made it into the Nazi elite: he was invited to the film industry ball in Vienna, took part in the parade on the invasion of Bohemia and Moravia, and received tokens of respect from Nazi leaders.29 His position was so assured that he was granted permission to initiate experiments, such as the first forced-labor camps for Jews in Austria (Doppl and Sandhof), using his own staff.30 His superiors were so pleased with their innovative man in Vienna that they even turned a blind eye to an abuse of power.31
At this point, he would recall in 1957, “I was poised to become Reichskommissar for the control of Jewish affairs.” But envy of his career had “thwarted” this plan.32 The fact that other people’s input and ideas had also gone into the creation of the Viennese institution33 didn’t stop Eichmann from grandstanding, particularly since the people with the ideas were Jews. He would remember them only decades later, when he was called upon in court to answer for his part in the murders and expulsions. In Vienna and in the years afterward, he did an excellent job of painting himself as the man of the moment, and at the end of 1938, his “unique institution” was celebrated in the Sunday picture supplement of the Völkische Beobachter 34 and even in Pester Loyd.35 His name may not have appeared there, but the articles were littered with phrases typical of Eichmann, who worked busily on public relations from the outset.
The Czar of the Jews
In early March 1939, the representatives of the Jewish community in Berlin were called to appear before Eichmann. What happened at this meeting can be surmised from the accounts of the surviving participants. Benno Cohn,36 Paul Eppstein, Heinrich Stahl, Philipp Koczower, and (probably) Arthur Lilienthal met Eichmann, wearing civilian clothes, along with a high-ranking uniformed SS officer. Cohn reported that the meeting was unpleasant, to say the least: Eichmann attacked them energetically, shouting and screaming, and threatened to send them to a concentration camp. He then announced the opening of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin for the following day. Cohn, who would give evidence at the trial in 1961, remembered the start of the conversation: “It began with a forceful attack by Eichmann on the representatives of the German Jews. He had a folder of press cuttings in front of him, foreign of course, in which Eichmann was portrayed as a bloodhound who wanted to kill the Jews. He read us excerpts from the Pariser Tageblatt, asked us if this was correct, and said the information had to come from our circles. ‘Who spoke to Landau from the ITA? It must have been one of you!’ ” Finding his own name in the so-called “emigrant press” seems not to have pleased Eichmann. But at the start of 1939, what article about him in one of his “enemy’s” exile newspapers had prompted such an aggressive reaction?
In Argentina, and even during his imprisonment in Israel, Eichmann would recount the story of the first time he read his name in a newspaper with some pride. It had been “a leading article, with the headline ‘The Czar of the Jews.’ ”37 Eichmann’s memory of this experience tells us how excited he was, since the piece was not, in fact, about him; nor did the headline refer to him; and it wasn’t a leading article but the last line of a side article on the front page of the Pariser Tageszeitung (the successor to the Pariser Tageblatt), a German-language exile paper published in France.38 On February 15, 1939, the column entitled “From the Reich” read:
GESTAPO PUSHES FOR EMIGRATION
Berlin, February 14
The “Ita” reports that in the last week, 300 Jews in Breslau suddenly received the order from the Gestapo to charter a ship immediately, and emigrate to Shanghai within the week. When the Jewish community in Breslau explained that they did not have the money required to hire the ship, the Gestapo told them that “this was now a legal requirement.” On the same day, the Gestapo confiscated the necessary funds from the three wealthiest Jews in Breslau. The forced emigration plan has temporarily foundered because the shipping company demanded a guarantee in foreign currency for the return journey, in case the transport was not admitted to Shanghai.
The Gestapo’s pressure on the Jews released from concentration camps to emigrate quickly has not lessened. Thousands of recently released people are besieging foreign consulates and the offices of Jewish organizations, particularly in Berlin and Vienna, in the hope of being offered an opportunity to emigrate, no matter to where and under what circumstances. They are all threatened with repeated arrest and internment in a concentration camp if they do not succeed in leaving Germany within a set period—which is often extremely short.
It is reported that the Central Emigration Office for Jews being set up in Berlin will open in the coming week. It will be contained in the large building that once housed the Jewish “Brethren Society” and is to be headed by SS Officer Eichmann, known from Vienna by the nickname “Czar of the Jews.”
Current research shows that the “Ita” (JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, founded by Jacob Landau and Meir Grossmann) had been well informed. From Eichmann’s point of view—judging by his reaction in March 1939—it was rather too well informed. At this exact moment at the beginning of 1939, the Nazis were holding discussions with the Japanese and Chinese consulates to ascertain the likelihood of resistance in those countries to mass Jewish immigration. Eichmann had tasked an old acquaintance, Heinrich Schlie,39 with making these inquiries (bypassing the Foreign Office in a most unbureaucratic way). Schlie, who headed the “Hanseatic Travel Agency,” had been cultivating a close working relationship with the Jewish Office since July 1937, in the expectation of getting a considerable amount of business from it. These diplomatic consultations were a delicate matter: it was vital not to lose this newly discovered way of getting rid of Jews before it could be used, and to use it before competing offices got wind of it. The article’s other details are also correct: Jews were released from concentration camps only if they could show they were able to emigrate, and they were immediately rearrested once the time limit had expired. This procedure was no secret in Nazi circles; on the contrary, it was an effective method of expulsion: intimidation, keeping people “on their toes,” was a consciously chosen strategy. During the Nazi period, the only people propounding the view that forced emigration was a humanitarian campaign, with the full agreement of both sides, worked for the Ministry of Propaganda. The article’s reference to Eichmann’s fame in Vienna is also correct: he certainly hadn’t kept a low profile there.
So what did Eichmann find so very troubling about this article? It couldn’t have been the epithet Czar of the Jews: such nicknames were openly coveted in Nazi circles. The term bloodhound, cited by Eichmann at the meeting with the Jewish representatives, was one of the most widely used. Alois Brunner and Josef Weiszl, two of Eichmann’s friends and colleagues from the end of 1938, were also known as “bloodhounds.” In Hungary in 1944, Eichmann even introduced himself this way: “Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!”40 The sobriquet was even attached to Heydrich, and it was a perfect fit for the SS’s image, which was full of hunting metaphors. The Nazis let their imaginations run wild with these nicknames: in Vienna, Brunner also liked to call himself “Jud Süß.”41Josef Weiszl, one of the Eichmann group’s most brutal thugs, was in charge of the first Jewish camp, in Doppl, for the Vienna Central Office: he wrote his wife in amusement that he was now being called the “Jews’ emperor of Doppl,”42 while Camp CommandantAmon Göth was the “Emperor of Krakow.”43 In this context, the “czar” nickname suited the tone of the period much better than the “little prime minister.” In the 1950s, Eichmann would indulge in his own flight of fancy: he told Sassen on several occasions that he had been called the “Jews’ pope,” and he also said: “The men in my command had the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews to effectively set me on a throne.”44 Anyone comparing himself to the king of the Jews has some real issues to work through. To be called the “Czar of the Jews” by the “enemy” was a welcome piece of flattery for Eichmann, not an offense worth getting upset about. Later, Eichmann would admit that he had used the article to preen in front of the Jewish representatives.45
However, the Reich Central Office in Berlin, whose opening Eichmann announced to the representatives that same day, was a different matter. On January 24, 1939, Göring had given Heydrich the task of setting up a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, to be headed by Heydrich. In the quarterly report of the Head Office for Reich Security (RSHA) dated March 1939, February 27 was named as the official founding date, with work beginning there from the start of March. The article in the Pariser Tageszeitungappeared on February 15, giving the correct address: Eichmann’s future workplace would be the large Jewish Brethren Society building at 116 Kurfürstenstraße. In other words, the small article was announcing Eichmann’s appointment to a position originally envisaged for Heydrich—the head of the RSHA—at a time when, apart from those directly involved, hardly anyone knew Eichmann had been transferred to Berlin.
A personnel matter such as this was an exceptionally delicate thing for a Nazi careerist. Eichmann’s superiors doubtless asked him why he had been so reckless as to boast to the enemy about a position he had not yet even been given. An episode like that would have been embarrassing enough to prompt Eichmann’s aggression at the subpoenaed meeting, especially as another of his superiors was present. The pressure he was under made him overreact and focus on the first part of the article (the circumstances of the forced emigration) in his attack on the Jewish representatives, reading into it typical Nazi images like the “bloodhound” and the “Enemy of the Jews, with bloodshot eyes,”46 which the reporter didn’t even mention. It had touched a raw nerve: his reputation within his own camp.
This press affair casts further doubt on Eichmann’s later assertion in Israel that he had not wanted to leave Vienna and had had to be forced into accepting the transfer to Berlin. It also undermines the witnesses who said (based on what Eichmann had told them) that he had thought of Vienna as the most successful period of his life. His reluctance to return to Berlin cannot have been all that great, if pride and ambition overcame his sense of caution and made him boast about his transfer to people in Vienna. The original source of the information may well have been the Jewish Religious Community in Vienna and not the Jewish community in Berlin. True, Landau at the JTA had just returned from Berlin,47 but the Pariser Tageszeitung also had a source based in Vienna, as later articles reveal. Eichmann must have leaked the information there himself: he then accused Heinrich Stahl and the other Jewish representatives in Berlin of having been on unauthorized visits to Vienna and having spoken to members of the Jewish Religious Community there.
A Man of Importance
Eichmann would never tire of talking about his memories, though as is often the case, he recalled only the flattering and the anti-Semitic parts. The “Czar of the Jews” had made it onto the front pages of the international press, achieving the sort of fame that many people still dream of today—even if the “Paris hacks” had “smeared” his “work” rather than celebrating it. And from then on, his file of press cuttings grew steadily: “In this time of peace before 1939, the number of articles about me in the foreign press was so great that Wurm at Der Stürmer (a former teacher) collected them up and gave them to me as a present.”48 We may doubt whether it was really Paul Wurm who compiled the collection, as Eichmann had brought their close working relationship to an end in 1937.49 And Eichmann really had no need of such a source: many departments, including the Jewish Office, collected press articles. Inspecting the “Jewish world press” was one of its daily tasks. Quite likely, Eichmann didn’t want people to suspect that he had created this collection himself, before apparently destroying it in the last months of the war. But you can hear the pride in his voice when he gushes: “Nobody else was such a household name in Jewish political life at home and abroad in Europe as little old me.”50 Among Eichmann’s staff, the prominence of their superior, who was even mentioned in the Reich’s hate sheet, was obviously no secret.51
According to Eichmann, the next newspaper article about him appeared in relation to the Prague Central Office,52 as he would tell Sassen: “When I was detailed to the Protectorate, some other foreign rag wrote about me.”53 This time the “rag” was Aufbau, the monthly publication for the Jews of the German-Jewish Club in New York. The September 1939 issue carried a small announcement on page 8:
Prague: The “Emigration Service” headed by Sturmtruppführer Eichmann has commenced the transfer of all Jews in the Protectorate to Prague. 200 Jews must leave the occupied region every day, by any means necessary.
At this point, Eichmann was an SS Hauptsturmführer. The article’s reference to Sturmtruppführer—which was not a Nazi rank but a military position—was probably one of the mistakes commonly made in other countries in identifying the imaginatively named SS ranks; Eichmann was never deployed as a Sturmtruppführer. Otherwise, this article also comes from a reliable source. After Eichmann finished setting up the Reich Central Office in Berlin, and while still overseeing Vienna, he also became involved with the organization of the Prague Central Office. By this point, Bohemia and Moravia had been incorporated into the German Reich as a “protectorate,” and Eichmann even moved his family to Prague. Adolf and Vera Eichmann, who was heavily pregnant with her second son at the end of 1939, moved into an apartment formerly owned by the Jewish Communist writer Egon Erwin Kisch. Some of her family moved to the same building. Being the wife of a careerist could have unforeseen consequences. There is incontrovertible evidence of Eichmann’s activity in Prague from July 14, 1939, the day he appeared as Walter Stahlecker’s “representative” at negotiations with the protectorate’s government.54 Stahlecker, an SS Gruppenführer and a personal friend of Eichmann’s, introduced Eichmann not only as his representative but as the head of the institutions on which the Prague Central Office was to be modeled: the “Reich paradigm,” based on the examples of Berlin and Vienna. He also invited those present to visit Vienna.55 The representatives of the Jewish community in Prague were aware of who they were dealing with from the outset, and the “exchange” that they were ordered to undertake with their “colleagues” in Vienna would have left no room for doubt.56 In August 1939, barely a month after the founding of the Prague Central Office for Jewish Emigration under Eichmann’s official leadership, the Czechoslovakian intelligence service in London received a detailed and well-informed report on the situation of the Jewish population in the protectorate. It presented a powerful image of Eichmann.
In July, Oberstuf. Eichmann took over the leadership of the Gestapo department for Jewish questions. He had previously been the official responsible for Jewish questions in Vienna and the Eastern March. Eichmann has been granted extraordinary powers, and is said to report directly to Himmler. After Prague, his next aim is to rid the entire Protectorate of Jews.
Herr Eichmann immediately threw himself into the fulfillment of this task. Since, as he says himself, he cannot deal with every individual Jew, he has identified a total of 4 people as speakers for Jewry in the Protectorate: these are the people to whom he gives his orders and grants audiences. They are the head of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague, Dr. Emil Kafka, the Community’s secretary, Dr. František Weidmann, and two representatives of the Palestine Office, Dr. Kahn and Secretary Edelstein. The first thing he did was to send Dr. Weidmann to Vienna for 24 hours, to visit the facilities … there. On his return, Herr Eichmann gave the order to establish immediately the emigration department for the Jewish Religious Community in Prague.57
The “Central Office” was “an office headed by the Gestapo: Herr Eichmann and his colleagues Günther, Bartl, Novak and Fuchs.” Representatives of the individual Czech authorities also worked there, “because Eichmann has decreed that from now on no other office can hand out any sort of permit to the Jews.… The Jewish Religious Community in Prague … vouches to Herr Eichmann that 250 Jews per day will go to the Central Office to apply for permission to emigrate.” This quota was a huge problem, and so, the article continued,
the Jews are threatened with a real catastrophe, as Herr Eichmann is sure that every Jew will find some way to emigrate once he has been arrested two or three times. Herr Eichmann’s aim is to create a feeling among the Jews that their chance of happiness means being allowed to leave the country, even if they’re almost naked. Support is therefore being given to people and “travel agencies” dealing with the export of Jews en gros. Herr Eichmann has allowed a number of suspicious persons who arrange expensive transport … for a living to move their offices to Prague. These are the notorious, sad, illegal transports to Palestine, South America etc. Detailed reports have appeared in the world press.…
As well as organizing emigrations, Herr Eichmann is taking all other steps necessary to rid the Protectorate of Jews. The required mood is being created among the Jews so that they become “inclined to emigrate.” First and foremost, he has decreed that all Jews must move to Prague.… This means that their livelihoods are destroyed. Herr Eichmann works on the principle that what these people live on and where they will live is not his concern. If there are 10 or 15 Jews to a room in Prague, they will make more of an effort to move abroad. Herr Eichmann is using the same strategy here in the Protectorate that he used in the Eastern March.…
Any intervention or explanation is pointless. Whatever verbal order Herr Eichmann gives becomes statutory regulation. And the execution is under way.58
Whoever the author of this report was, he seems to have been personally acquainted with Eichmann. The extent of the description here shows just how important he thought this SS man was. In contrast to Eichmann-in-Jerusalem, this Eichmann had not the slightest difficulty in saying “I” when it came to giving orders and making decisions. He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders, and gave audiences. The report leaves his demeanor in no doubt. The resettlement of all Czech Jews to Prague, also reported in the Aufbau article, was part of the same pattern that Eichmann had already followed so effectively in Vienna: all Jews had to relocate to the capital so that they could emigrate from there as quickly as possible. In Prague, he didn’t even try to conceal the reason for this move: the more straitened their living conditions and the more threatening their situation, the greater the pressure on them to emigrate.
By late summer 1939, Eichmann’s strenuous efforts to expel and disenfranchise the Jews had made him conspicuous to the Jewish communities of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and the so-called “Old Reich.” His steady acquisition of power had not gone unnoticed in his own circles, either: here too he quickly became the man who had “started up the Central Emigration Offices in Vienna and Prague.”59 Eichmann also profited from Heydrich’s career, which was unsurprising in a system built less on rank than on protection. He later gave a memorable description of this “anteroom authority”: “I never had to wait long in Heydrich’s anteroom either. Although it would have been very interesting, because one met all kinds of people there, and once somebody had been seen in Heydrich’s anteroom …, it didn’t matter what his rank was, you knew he was a man of importance.”60 A man like Adolf Eichmann.
Victory from the Jaws of Defeat
On the day the little article appeared in Aufbau, the invasion of Poland began, which not only altered the press’s priorities but also resulted in a significant extension of Eichmann’s field of activity. The much-cited Lebensraum to the east would contribute more than three million Polish Jews to the “Jewish question” and open up new possibilities for the Nazis’ resettlement plans: now the Jews could not only be blackmailed, robbed, and hounded out—they could also be transported from the margins of society to the still more inhospitable margins of the newly enlarged Reich. Thanks to thorough research, we now know a great deal about the first deportation of Jews from Vienna to Ostrava in October 1939, under Eichmann’s leadership. The plan for a “Jewish reservation” in the east attracted international attention. On October 23 and 24 the London Daily Telegraph and the Pariser Tageszeitung reported a planned “Jewish reservation” in Lublin “to which Jews are to be brought from all over Poland.” The papers also followed “Hitler’s plans for a Jewish state” in their next issues.61 The first articles about the deportation of Jews from Vienna to Ostrava appeared on November 18, 1939, long after the campaign had become mired in teething problems and had been abandoned—but surprisingly early for information that would ordinarily be strictly classified.62
Eichmann was involved in spreading the news: he had ordered leading representatives of the Viennese and Prague Jewish communities to accompany the first transports into the marshlands, to Nisko on the river San. Benjamin Murmelstein, Julius Boshan, Berthold Storfer, Jakob Edelstein, and Richard Friedman were not to be deported (yet): they had to watch as the murderous project was carried out.63 They therefore became witnesses to Eichmann’s entry into Ostrava and Nisko, where he delivered at least one “welcome address.” In addition to the postwar descriptions of this self-aggrandizing, arrogant performance, we have an article in the Pariser Tageszeitung from November 25, 1939, under the headline “Reservation Guarded by Death’s Head SS,” which ended with the paragraph:
In Warsaw it is reported that the Gestapo agent Ehrmann [!] has arrived. He was previously the “Expert on Jewish Affairs” in Vienna and later in Prague. He was born in the German colony of Sarona in Palestine, speaks Yiddish and Hebrew, and is an intimate friend of Julius Streicher. In Prague, he threatened the Jews with a massacre if they did not emigrate quickly, though he also created the greatest difficulties for those applying for emigration permits.
Even the typist’s mangling of the name cannot disguise the subject of this article.64 There is only one man (as we will see in more detail over the following chapters) to whom this erroneous description could apply. The reference to a friendship with Streicher is incorrect, and Eichmann must have found it irritating. The rest of the article gives an impression of the press outcry caused by the Nisko campaign, naming Danish, Swiss, and Polish papers. The first deportation attempt attracted such a lot of media attention that it is difficult to see why additional eyewitnesses were invited along. It is unlikely that the National Socialists had simply underestimated the campaign’s public profile, particularly as they believed that every little Jewish community leader possessed more international influence than even the important ones had in reality. Perhaps Eichmann and his superiors were initially trying to reassure the public by sending Jewish authorities to accompany the transports. The presence of prominent people, in their experience, gave the impression of respectability, and respectability was vital here. This was the first attempt to put thousands of the Reich’s inhabitants onto trains whose destinations were unknown, in full view of the public. The National Socialists were particularly concerned about public opinion in this test case and compiled detailed notes on every public reaction to what was going on.65 Conversely, it is entirely possible that the witnesses to this doomed experiment were principally there to increase the pressure to emigrate, which had begun to falter.
Now the alternative to emigration was no longer life in Vienna under straitened circumstances, with violence and harassment; it was life in a swamp, with no contact with the outside world. As Eichmann explained to Jakob Edelstein on his return to Prague, “the daily contingent of emigrants gathering at the Prague Central Office for Jewish Emigration” had to grow, “otherwise the Prague Central Office for Jewish Emigration will be closed.” At the same time, he allowed Edelstein to leave the protectorate for negotiations abroad.66 If the Nazis’ project had really been a complete failure (or as Eichmann phrased it, using one of his awful formulations, a “deadly disgrace”67), then once again Eichmann managed to make the best of it: he used the swamps of the San as the ultimate threat. Edelstein traveled to Trieste and took the opportunity to smuggle his report on Nisko abroad. The resultant article in the London Times ran to nearly three hundred lines. Appearing under the headline “The Nazi Plan: A Stony Road to Extermination,” it made no bones about what had happened, giving a conservative estimate of ten thousand people dead in Poland and hundreds of thousands expelled. It reported that Jewish communities “are forced to cooperate in this gruesome work.” The article gave full details of the deportation process, using the German terms “Judenreservat,” “Lebensraum,” and Polish “Reststaat.”68
We don’t know how the Nazis reacted to this article, but they doubtless read it. It did no harm to Eichmann’s career, which continued to progress rapidly. Not even the rage of Governor General Hans Frank, who tried to stop the transport from entering his jurisdiction, could touch Eichmann. When word got out that Frank had issued an arrest warrant for Eichmann if he should ever set foot in the General Government of occupied Polish territories again, Eichmann took it as an extremely childish joke. “He gave the order,” Eichmann would explain in Argentina, “to arrest a member of the RSHA, an adviser at the highest level. You see how high-handed he was. That was Frank’s manner … he was a megalomaniac, starting to behave like a dictator—imagine, arresting me just like that.” And Eichmann’s reasoning for this flagrant presumption? “He obviously saw me as competition.”69 Eichmann is the one exploding with megalomania here, claiming that Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and the governor general of the occupied eastern territories, stood no chance in a power struggle against Adolf Eichmann. Neither Frank, nor the people who laughed at Frank’s faux pas, could have taken Eichmann for a little man with a bureaucratic soul, acting under orders, with no influence of his own.
The Perfect Hebraist
Three days after the article appeared in the Times, Eichmann was put in charge of Special Department R, in Office IV (otherwise known as the Gestapo) of the Head Office for Reich Security (RSHA). On January 30, 1940, this department was amalgamated with the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration and became Department IV D 4 in the Office for Occupied Territories (Office IV D). The change broadened Eichmann’s remit considerably: in addition to forced Jewish emigration, he was now responsible for coordinating plans to relocate Jews to the east. There was no doubt about Eichmann’s talent for organizing large-scale population displacements, as his subsequent promotion shows. From April 1940, he and one of his colleagues also took over the Central Resettlement Office in Posen, responsible for implementing Himmler’s plan to “evacuate foreigners from the Warthegau.” Poles and Jews were forcibly relocated, to the advantage of ethnic German settlers from Volhynia and Bessarabia. Interestingly, by this time Eichmann’s fame must already have spread to Poland. Frieda Mazia, who lived in Sosnowiec at this time, would testify at the trial in 1961:
By about the start of 1940, we knew that if a senior German functionary or an officer arrived, it was best to stay hidden, and not show your face on the street.… People were saying you should have no contact with them, because there was one among them who was born in a German colony in Palestine, and spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with all the Jewish customs.70
Frau Mazia was not simply projecting what she discovered after the war onto her experience at the time: her memory is corroborated both by the Pariser Tageszeitung article quoted above and by one of the most potent articles ever written about Eichmann. On December 6, 1940, Aufbau in New York ran a small piece on its front page, this time entirely focused on Eichmann:
THE PERFECT HEBRAIST
The Gestapo’s new informer and hangman in Romania is Kommissar Eichmann, who arrived in Bucharest this week. Eichmann comes from Palestine, and was born in the Templar settlement of Sarona, near Tel Aviv. He is fluent in Hebrew and is familiar with the history of Zionism, as well as all the personalities, influences and tendencies of the Zionist movement’s various groups.
Almost nothing in this article is accurate, and Eichmann may have found it flattering for that very reason, since the source of the fairy tales was none other than himself. Eichmann came from Solingen, in the Rhineland, but he had heard of the exotic-sounding Templar settlement (though it wasn’t even in Meyer’s Lexicon). It was probably Leopold von Mildenstein (one of his first commanding officers and an expert on the Middle East) or his acquaintance Otto von Bolschwing who told him about Sarona. A mob of radically anti-Semitic Germans who had settled near Tel Aviv in 1871, the people of Sarona were still clinging to their aim of being the last bastion of Christianity in the Holy Land.71 Alternatively, Eichmann may have stumbled across the name while searching through Jewish newspapers.72 He is known to have used Sarona very early on, both to impress people in his own camp and to intimidate the Jewish representatives and their milieu. In 1940 Heinrich Grüber, the pastor in Berlin who advocated for Jews who no longer practiced their faith, asked Eichmann directly about the place where he was supposed to have been born. It’s not entirely clear what Eichmann told him, but Grüber was certainly convinced of the legend afterward.73
Eichmann even told the Jews in Vienna about it. He chatted with feigned fluency about Vladimir Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann and their differences over Zionism, and he mentioned names that would be of little interest to anyone who wasn’t Jewish.74According to Benjamin Murmelstein’s statement, he also heard this story from Eichmann.75 Dieter Wisliceny (Eichmann’s colleague and friend, bound to him by a complicated, jealous love-hate relationship) gave several different versions, which can all be summarized as: Eichmann told the story and was tickled pink that people believed him. He was well aware of how useful this legend could be: it explained, for example, why he (supposedly) spoke Hebrew and knew so much about the Jews.76
The story is a common thread winding through the public’s perception of Eichmann: in 1943 people were talking about it in Holland;77 in 1944 Eichmann used it offensively in Hungary to underpin his authority. Wisliceny used it to make the Jewish community afraid of his commander, who knew everything, could read everything, and—a masterstroke of caricature—looked so Jewish himself that he could move undetected among the Jews at any time. This terrifying scenario made such a lasting impression that after the war, people were frightened Eichmann might secretly have gone to Palestine, posing as a Jew, and could be hiding there among the survivors.78 Apparently Eichmann also told the Sarona fairy tale in passing to Richard Glücks, the concentration camp inspector from SS Leadership Main Office, who was considerably higher ranking than Eichmann. It helped his reputation in many respects.
A glance at the modest means with which Eichmann managed to present himself as a perfect Hebraist, even to his colleagues, teaches us something about his use of role-playing and image-making.79 Eichmann spoke no Hebrew and only a little Yiddish. He had attempted to learn—probably inspired by his admiration for Mildenstein, who was at home in both languages—but had quickly reached his limits. He dated his first attempts back to his honeymoon, in March 1935.80 In summer 1936 he submitted an application for a Jewish teacher, but Heydrich rejected it, recommending an “Aryan” language teacher who had also applied to his office, but nothing came of the offer.81 Mildenstein left at around the same time, and over the following year the department’s language problem became increasingly apparent, as no one else was able to read Hebrew. In spite of his “self-study,” Eichmann failed to learn—and yet his second application for a teacher in June 1937 was also rejected.82 Eichmann said he then bought a textbook:Hebräisch für Jedermann (Hebrew for Everyone) by Saul Kaléko.83 Contrary to the title—and to Eichmann’s version of the story—this book was not exactly straightforward, even for proficient autodidacts. It must, however, have made an impressive desk ornament in Eichmann’s office.
In 1938 Eichmann paid for a few hours of instruction out of his own pocket, with Benjamin Murmelstein in Vienna. This didn’t get him any further.84 Witnesses in both Austria and Hungary were convinced that Eichmann was just a skilled bluffer, using a few set phrases in both languages.85 In Israel in 1960, he would show himself to be unable to read or understand any Hebrew. But the few nuggets he had gleaned, and the ability to hold a Hebrew book the right way round, proved to be enough for him to play the role of an “insider.”
He achieved this success thanks to his gift for role-playing and his good memory, but also because German Jews were entirely unused to this sort of interest from National Socialists. The fact that Eichmann’s knowledge was so remarked upon must mean that he was already a particularly interesting and well-known character in the Nazi regime—otherwise these legends could not have grown and spread.
Eichmann always kept a close eye on his public image and did his best to influence it. Even his last notes were prompted by other people’s books and depictions of him. In 1961 his anti-Semitic paranoia would make him overestimate what he saw as the closed nature of academia and journalism, just as in 1939 he overestimated the impact of the foreign press in his own country and screamed at the Jewish representatives in Berlin. It was forbidden to bring these newspapers into Germany, and even owning one was dangerous. The unbroken chain of information between “international Jewry,” the “international press,” and “Jewish-infiltrated academia” existed only in the Nazis’ nightmares.
However, the public image of Eichmann in the European and American press was no fantasy, dreamed up at a safe distance. The sources were informants from Nazi-occupied Europe, meaning that even inaccurate articles show us something of the effect this man created.
The Ideal Symbol
Adolf Eichmann was not the first person to realize how useful a public image can be. The use of ideals and symbolism was one of the secrets for the Nazi Party’s success. Hitler’s Mein Kampf also provides a warning never to underestimate the effect of a symbolic figure. Speaking in the 1950s in Argentina, Eichmann would say that wartime was when he had finally become famous: “They knew me wherever I went.”86 He even turned up in a book published by some of his comrades in Vienna,87 though his name was spread largely through his visibility to his victims: “Through the press, the name Eichmann had emerged as a symbol.… In any case, the word Jew … was irreversibly linked with the word Eichmann.”88 And his various official departments with their nondescript and frequently changing names soon just became known as “Eichmann’s office.”89 These concepts were so powerful that they can be found in witness statements from the Nuremberg trials, along with the term “Eichmann’s special commando” for his representatives abroad.90 This usage cannot be wholly explained by the fact that Eichmann, unlike many officials in the RSHA, remained in his post throughout the war. He would never have gained this reputation without the public performance that went with it, and without that reputation, “Eichmann’s office” would not have had the position of power that it achieved over the years. A single person’s influence extends only as far as his arm or his commands can reach. His image, however, can have an impact in places he never goes, provided he finds someone to carry it there—even if that someone is his enemy. “Much more power … was attributed to me than I actually had,” Eichmann explained. And “this fear” of his presumed power meant that “everyone felt he was being watched.”91
The Nazi Party’s concept of power was very personalized, and the rapid success of this concept was repeated further down the organization. Eichmann and his colleagues quickly learned how useful a Führer-like figure can be, as a focal point for gathering power. This was one of his fundamental reasons for not hiding in the shadows or shying away from public displays. The Nazis needed a shop-front sign to which the Jewish question could be “irreversibly linked,” and Eichmann was the name to fulfill that symbolic function. Eichmann would later try to make this choice look like pure chance—a view that surfaces occasionally in books and articles on his role. But what other name could even have been considered for the position?
Eichmann kept a close watch on his growing reputation, and it could not have escaped him that his exploits were becoming increasingly notorious. The international press reported on them, and the Nazis went over the press of “international Jewry” with a fine-tooth comb. Reviewing the press was a reconnaissance mission in a war that was partly being fought with “intellectual weapons.” Eichmann’s significance, both in his own estimation and for his colleagues, grew in direct proportion to the number of plans and campaigns to which he managed to link his name. By this time, many people were also familiar with Eichmann from his appearances at interministry meetings and planning conferences. With all due caution about viewing history through an individual biography, it is surprising how many of the participant lists for important meetings feature Eichmann’s name. He was involved right from the start, leading experiments—like the Vienna Central Office, Doppl, Nisko, the Szczecin deportations, ghettoization, and even the first attempts at mass extermination—which can now be seen as prototypes for practices that later became standard. At the notorious Wannsee Conference, Heydrich officially enthroned Eichmann as the coordinator of all interministerial efforts toward the “final solution of the Jewish question.” It was the logical next step for his career. A lunatic project like this required someone who had experience in unconventional solutions, someone who wouldn’t get caught up in the usual bureaucratic formalities. Eichmann’s leadership of the Vienna Central Office, and everything that came after, proved he could do just that. He had a talent for organization, and for making possible things that had never been done before. When others were at a loss, he was the man they called on. For example, a professor at Strasbourg University was adamant that he wanted the “skulls of Jewish-Bolshevist Commissars” to add to a collection of skeletons, despite the fact they were still alive. With Eichmann on board, this too could be organized.92
Eichmann enjoyed his reputation for being the man for tricky assignments. Even when he was neither the initiator nor the driving force of a project, he still managed to convince others he had originated it. The so-called Madagascar Plan is still linked to his name today, although the original idea was verifiably not his, and he never worked on its details.93 But still he triumphed: in spite of all evidence to the contrary, even today no one can talk about this resettlement plan without mentioning his name. In later years, when circumstances had changed, Eichmann would make an immense effort to divert attention away from himself and play down his role. But that effort only provides further evidence of the position he had really held during the Nazis’ glory years. No one would do that unless they had something to hide, and Eichmann did it surprisingly effectively.
It has therefore taken some time for historians to recognize the significance of the gigantic eviction and resettlement plans in which Eichmann played a substantial part. As head of Special Department IV R, he was responsible for “the central processing of Security Police matters during the implementation of the eviction in the East.” The connections were clearer to Eichmann’s contemporaries, as we can see from a report by the Ministry of the Interior, claiming that in September 1941 Eichmann advocated extending the definition of Jews to include half Jews. He was “strongly in favor of the new ruling, though with no real view on the form it should take.” The biographical note on him read: “Eichmann set up the Central Offices in Vienna and Prague, and led the deportation of Jews from Szczecin etc. to the General Government.”94
The expulsion of the Jews from Szczecin on the night of February 13, 1940, and the deportations from Posen and Schneidemühl that followed, were the overture to the planned reordering of occupied Eastern Europe in its entirety. These events caused worldwide press attention, which was closely monitored by the Reich and made a lot of people nervous.95 But Eichmann used the attention, just as he had the failure of Nisko, to build up pressure in meetings with Jewish representatives in the months afterward, and to threaten them with a similar “resettlement” program if the emigration quotas were not met.96 Eichmann’s public persona made the press inflate his role in the resettlement. He liked to give the impression he was behind everything and everyone. Newspaper coverage of the affair created a threatening picture, which only those watching from a distance could afford to underestimate. At this point in time, reports of excessive violence, and even propagandist exaggeration in the international press, served to help Eichmann rather than hurt him. The more reports went around that “this Eichmann did that,” and the more incidents were “attributed [to him] out of pure habit,” the greater his reputation became.97 Eichmann not only saw through this mechanism; he used it to further his own interests.
Public Relations
As coordinator for the resettlement in Eastern Europe, Eichmann’s self-confidence was apparent to his victims and his fellow officers alike. In January 1941 Himmler ordered an exhibition to be prepared for March of that year, celebrating the Heimholungcampaign. “The Great Homecoming” would be partly a promotional event, and partly Himmler blowing his own trumpet. It was designed to present the success of the resettlement policies, and Eichmann was desperate to be in on it. He fought doggedly and successfully for “the evacuation to be given a special hall in the resettlement exhibition,” fulfilling his desire to present his “achievements” to the German public. The Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans objected, preferring to leave this section out for fear of a negative public reaction.98 Pictures of happy new settlers were one thing; numbers and images of people who had been expelled were another. But Eichmann’s pressure was for nothing. The exhibition was postponed until June 1941, and having viewed it, Himmler canceled it at the last minute, putting off the experts who had provided the content until March 1942. The exhibition never took place, in part because the “success” that was hoped for was never achieved. The plan shows, however, that a life in the shadows was never a Nazi ideal, and that the country’s leaders even had to curtail their subordinates’ compulsion to show off when they thought it wiser to draw a veil over particular events.
At the start of 1941, “Eichmann’s office” expanded again, and for the next three years it would be known as Department IV B 4, a designation whose fame would last well beyond the war years. The extent to which Eichmann’s reputation must have grown over the subsequent months can be judged from an article that appeared in the London exile newspaper Die Zeitung on October 24, 1941, in reference to an article in a Swedish paper:
MASS MURDER OF BERLIN JEWS
The Stockholm paper Social Democraten reports the following details regarding the transport of over 5,000 Berlin Jews to the east:
The campaign began on the night of October 17. People were pulled from their beds by the SS and ordered to get dressed and pack a suitcase. Then they were immediately taken away, their apartments sealed, and everything in them confiscated. Those who had been arrested were taken to railroad freight depots and ruined synagogues and transported east on October 19. They were all old men between 50 and 80, women and children. They will be “used for useful work” in the east, which means drying out the Rokitno Marshes. The work will be done during the Russian winter, by old men, women, and children, in the clothes in which they were arrested. There can now be no doubt that this campaign is premeditated mass murder. The campaign leader is SS Gruppenführer Eichmann.99
A Gruppenführer in the SS was equivalent to a lieutenant general in the Wehrmacht, a rank to which Eichmann never even came close. At this point, he was an SS Sturmbannführer. In court, Eichmann would try to claim that he had been just a petty official in the RSHA, but twenty years earlier this was clearly not how he was seen, and it seemed logical that he should hold a higher rank.100 Documents from the time show that Eichmann played a significant part in the deportation of the Berlin Jews: in summer 1941 Goebbels requested “the transfer of all 62,000 Jews still living in Berlin to Poland within a maximum of eight weeks,” following the end of the war, which he expected shortly.101 In a meeting at the Ministry of Propaganda on March 20, 1941, Eichmann announced that it would be possible to deport 15,000 Jews from Berlin, if they were joined up with the 60,000 Jews that Hitler had approved for deportation from Vienna. According to the minutes, “the result of the statement was that Party comrade Eichmann was asked to work up a suggestion for the evacuation of the Jews for Gauleiter Dr. Goebbels.”102 Originally, the evacuation was envisaged as a long-term plan, because it was still thought “that current manufacturing requires every Jew capable of working,” but Eichmann was involved in the deliberations from the beginning. The Russian campaign put things in a different light, and the violent atmosphere of a “war of extermination” made options that few would have dared even to consider previously seem like acceptable “solutions.” Goebbels recognized the opportunity right away, and as early as August 18, 1941, he began to discuss the issue of the Berlin Jews again, both with Hitler and in the weeks-long anti-Semitic press campaign that followed. The first wave of deportations from the Reich territories began on October 15, 1941, and the first transport from Berlin took 1,013 Jews to Lodz on October 18.
News spread immediately, making the front page of Aufbau once again. The article made such a deep impression on Max Horkheimer that he cut it out, showed it to his friend Theodor W. Adorno, and filed it away.103 And the events found such widespread attention from the press over the next few days that on October 28 Goebbels noted in his diary: “The modestly-sized preliminary evacuations of Jews from Berlin are still a major theme in enemy propaganda.”104 The Stockholm paper Social Democraten was well informed, even if the figure of five thousand deportees was not the number from the Berlin transports, but the approximate total of all those deported between October 18 and the date of the article, including Jews from Vienna, Frankfurt, Prague, and Cologne.105These events were so unprecedented that the person charged with organizing them was assumed to be high-ranking, and Eichmann’s public demeanor did nothing to contradict that assumption. When he later protested that he had only been in charge of “purely technical transport matters,” he was clearly just trying to protect himself. Technical matters would have been far too small a role for the Eichmann of 1941.
The Devil Himself
In the winter of 1941–42, the meaning of the term Final Solution moved inexorably toward “extermination.” Eichmann claimed to have “coined” the term Final Solution himself106 and even bragged about Göring’s orders allowing him to “brush aside all objections and influences from other ministries and authorities,” so the change of meaning was also associated with his name.107 Eichmann traveled east early on, to see the methods of extermination for himself, and his presence was of course recorded. The picture he would later paint, of a pen pusher’s secret, lonely business trips, bore little relation to the truth. In an incautious moment, he caricatured this idea himself. In Argentina he said he had always been afraid of losing his composure when faced with this horror, “because there would be some low-ranking little prick standing behind us, who would have interpreted it as a sign of weakness, and it would have spread like wildfire.” Lowly subordinates could falter, but Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? “That couldn’t happen!”108 To be or not to be—a symbol.
And his own people were not the only ones watching him. Although the rest of the world’s initial reaction to the mass murders was one of disbelief and was therefore muted, that didn’t mean his activities weren’t reflected in the newspapers. The international press was already reporting accurately on the plans for Theresienstadt by March 1942,109 and on the mass murders from May onward. That spring the papers warned that the perpetrators’ names were being collected.110 The exile press documented the large number of death sentences visited on the Baum resistance group, a decision in which Eichmann has been proven to have had a hand.111 The papers pilloried conditions in Warsaw,112 and the terrible circumstances surrounding the deportations from France, including theKindertransporte (transports of children), which we now know Eichmann ordered to “roll” to their deaths.113 The first reports on Chelmno, and the gas vans that Eichmann saw there, appeared in November 1942.114 The numbers that were quoted in relation to the Nazis’ murder plans were so frightening (and in retrospect so accurate)115 that the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations of December 17, 1942, threatened all the people responsible with retribution.
This development in anti-Jewish policy meant the press had lost its usefulness for Eichmann: as long as he was still negotiating with Jews on emigration quotas and financing, and thus required cooperation from international organizations, a threatening image was advantageous. Now that murder had become the aim, negotiation was no longer required, and the image that had once aided discussions was preventing the Nazis from concealing their lethal intentions. They no longer needed to threaten; they needed to reassure, soothe, distract, and appease. Otherwise mass deportations would be impossible to organize. People who have to be taken somewhere so they can be killed as discreetly as possible must have at least a little faith in the people transporting them or they won’t get on a train. Without the grain of hope that, in the end, it might not be so bad, all motivation vanishes. Hannah Arendt called it “the logic of the lesser evil.”
Eichmann continually managed to inveigle his Jewish negotiating partners into making concessions and cooperating, using nothing but their hope that by “negotiating” with him, they could prevent something worse from happening. How terrible their realization must have been that they were caught in a trap. On the transports, in the camps, and in direct sight of the apparatus of extermination, the Nazis’ involuntary collaborators realized what they had been involved in. If they did not feel then, in this moment of realization, that they had fallen victim to a diabolical perpetrator, Satan in human form, then when? The terrible visions that emerged later of “Caligula” and “Grand Inquisitor Eichmann,” the heartless monster, were rooted in these moments of unavoidable insight into the true aims of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies.116 But the roots of these visions also lay in the victim’s insight into the psychological mechanisms by which they had been manipulated, and which play just as significant a part in making people into victims as the actual threat of violence.
When a person is acting from a secure position of power, the question of whether he really is the thing you take him for is largely irrelevant: his reputation will determine your expectations and also your behavior. If you are made to view an SS man as the master over life and death, you have little room for doubt. Your expectation will turn him into the thing you are most afraid of, and everything you see will confirm the rumor and make the legend into reality. Encountering someone who can utilize this dynamic, consciously reflecting your expectations back to you, will render your human powers of judgment useless. For his part, playing out this cycle of dependency, fear, and expectation with his victims can take a man from head of department to Czar of the Jews. Eichmann and those like him were well aware that this form of manipulation could give them “an enormous boost.”
“Eichmann” became the embodiment of this mechanism: it was the name the Jewish community representatives knew, and people trusted them. So the name walked abroad among the Nazis’ victims, though the man himself was nowhere to be seen and was not immediately responsible for their suffering. This explains the memories of many Holocaust survivors of encounters with Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, when in all likelihood they never met him. It seems to be part of our instinct for self-preservation that we cannot and will not imagine the person largely responsible for our fate as a lame, puny figure.
People who have experienced suffering, humiliation, and loss do not want to have been the victims of someone mediocre: that a mere nobody has power over us is even more unbearable than the idea that someone has power over us. This mechanism blocks our view of the perpetrator. It gives more power to the dynamic of symbol creation and strengthens the sphere of power by limiting our capacity for making clear judgments. In the end, a desperate desire at least to have sight of their tormentor leads people to create false memories. Eichmann was “seen” in meetings, institutions, and concentration camps where he is proven never to have been, or to have been only at a different time. But the value of these memories lies in the element of projection involved: the victims were able to see Eichmann in every jackbooted Nazi or arrogant inspector who screamed at them only because “Eichmann” had become much more than just a person. The name was the symbol and the guarantor of the power that was crushing people, and it no longer mattered who actually embodied and exploited it. The threat inherent in that name went far beyond what a faceless, nameless bureaucracy could ever have achieved.
Good Press, Bad Press
Eichmann’s part in what came to be known as the Fiala press affair proves how concerned the Germans now were about unwanted publicity, and how very aware Eichmann was of international opinion. The Nazis might have kept telling themselves that the extermination of the Jews was the only means for their own survival, but they lacked sufficient faith in this view to share it with the rest of the world. The Nazi police state was born of the fear that not even its own population would understand its campaign of murder. Himmler guessed early on that this “glorious chapter of our history” could never be written, and he prevented Odilo Globocnik from sinking a memorial plaque into the earth for the heroes of Operation Reinhard. This plan to get rid of the Polish Jews in the General Government had seen the start of large-scale murder in concentration camps, and Himmler already had enough on his plate with evidence that had been sunk into the earth. In summer 1942 he ordered his commanders to find a way to avoid digging any more mass graves and to clear up the old ones.117 Any form of publicity would be harmful.
The threshold between the German population and the rest of the world was where the press posed the greatest threat, in the nations that were bound to Germany by occupation or affinity but that still had a semi-intact government. When terms like mass murderand extermination were bandied about, Eichmann’s colleagues increasingly encountered unpleasant questions, even resistance. This gave rise to the idea of using press reports to counteract these concerns. According to Wisliceny, Eichmann recommended aSlovakian journalist named Fritz Fiala, who had taken over as editor-in-chief of the German-language newspaper Der Grenzbote when it had been expropriated from the German-Jewish owner. Fiala was also the Slovakian correspondent for several other newspapers in Europe.118 As an investigative journalist, Fiala had offered to look into the “true conditions” in the camps and set the murky picture straight in the public eye.
In summer 1942, as Himmler’s concern was growing about world opinion in the international press, Eichmann remembered Fiala’s offer. On Himmler’s orders (Eichmann later claimed), he arranged a tour of visits for Fiala in high summer. Wisliceny traveled with him to a Slovakian concentration camp, then on to Katowice the following morning, where a criminal commissar from the State Police Authority joined them. He accompanied them to Sosnowiec-Bedzin. There he led them through the ghetto to the forced-labor factories and, after lunch and a conversation with the Jewish elders, on to Auschwitz, where they arrived at two p.m. In Auschwitz they were personally received by Commandant Rudolf Höß. He showed Fiala the commandant’s office and some select sections of the camp, then drove on with them to a laundry staffed by female forced laborers from Slovakia and France, whom Fiala was allowed to question and photograph. It seems Wisliceny managed to politely decline an invitation to dine with Höß, though afterward he wrote of scheduling issues. They left the camp at around four p.m., “or perhaps even earlier,” according to Wisliceny’s recollections.
Fiala wrote several reports including photos on the German camps and the Jews deported from Slovakia, in full knowledge that Eichmann and Himmler would censor these texts. Why the articles appeared only in November is difficult to establish.119 Perhaps Himmler wanted to time the good press for his visit to Prague;120 perhaps the Nazis were waiting to see how public opinion developed; or perhaps they lost faith in the plan—the articles did, after all, contain names of places that people usually avoided mentioning. The fact is that on November 7, 8, and 10, 1942, three long articles appeared in Der Grenzbote, illustrated with photos of laughing, white-clad girls, in clean surroundings, singing hymns of praise to conditions in the German camps.121 Fiala mentioned names that could be verified in Slovakia, while the quotes attributed to the women reveal the whole cruel circus for what it was. One apparently not only laughed at the reporter when he told her about the “atrocity propaganda” that had appeared in other countries; she also told him that life in Auschwitz was considerably better than that in Palestine. The part Fiala (who was also an SD informant) played in this perfidious game remains unclear, and we still don’t know whether he was really shown “only smiling faces in Auschwitz,” or if he just painted them that way. Abbreviated versions of the articles appeared in other newspapers,122 and they later served Eichmann as grounds for refusing all attempts by officials to view a concentration camp for themselves. He was fighting the ideological war with the weapons of the unfree press, where propaganda was countered with propaganda.
The attempts to influence public opinion by launching an alternative image of the camps were not without success, but live “demonstrations” still had more of an effect than Fiala’s pseudoreportage. Given the tightly state-controlled press in the German sphere of influence, this could only have come as a surprise to a Nazi who was certain that the foreign press was controlled by that great enemy, the Jewish world conspiracy. From the racial theorists’ point of view, the possibility that freedom of the press might actually function was unimaginable. Eichmann found other ways to sell Theresienstadt as a model ghetto, in spite of people’s initial mistrust. The first media reports from March 1942 saw what was happening there as “the martyrdom of the Jews in the protectorate,” the next step in a “diabolical scheme” that would end in extermination.123 However, a visit to Theresienstadt arranged for the German Red Cross in June 1943 managed to sway public opinion. In a masterful piece of theater, Eichmann and his colleagues managed to present an entirely different, spruced-up camp to the visitors, where conditions were peaceful and no one was being deported. The visitors’ criticisms about overcrowding and malnourishment took a backseat, and the fact that the visit had been allowed spoke strongly in the camp’s favor.124 Even if this performance wasn’t enough to offset the growing accusations of extermination and mass murder in other camps, Theresienstadt inspired sufficient doubt that even critical journalists, who were aware of the camp’s token status, allowed themselves to be seduced. As planned, they saw Theresienstadt in a more positive light than it deserved: as a “terminus” camp in relatively good condition, with standards acceptable for wartime. The detailed front-page story in the New York Aufbau of August 27, 1943, “Theresienstadt: A ‘Model Ghetto,’ ” ended with this paragraph:
When Theresienstadt was “created,” the Nazis’ power was already in decline. Some Nazi leaders were haunted by the fear of the unavoidable retribution that the future holds for them. They started searching for alibis. Eichmann, the Hebrew and Yiddish-speaking Gestapo Kommissar who terrorized the Jewish community in Prague, must have gotten nervous. The atmosphere in Theresienstadt is in sharp contrast to the pogrom mentality of Goebbels and Rosenberg. When the day of retribution comes for the Nazi “protectors,” they will use it in their defense: “in a time of extreme despotism, we were as humane as possible. Theresienstadt is our alibi.”125
Instead of questioning the facts with which they were presented, people doubted the Germans’ motives, thereby fundamentally underestimating the extent of their violence and lies. The idea that Eichmann and his colleagues could go to such lengths to make an entire town look presentable for just one day, only to return to gruesome normality the next, lay far beyond the outside world’s powers of imagination. It was Hannah Arendt, incidentally, who argued against the interpretation of Theresienstadt as an alibi, in a reader’s letter to Aufbau in September 1943 (the latest date at which she might have heard Eichmann’s name for the first time). However, even Arendt did not guess at the true magnitude of the crime.126 “The real reasons for Theresienstadt,” she tried to explain, lay somewhere else entirely, because even this so-called model ghetto was part of the deportation policy.127 It belonged to “a unified political line”: Jews were tolerated, and even quite well treated, only where they could either be used to stir up anti-Semitism, or where they had to be spared because there were too many witnesses around. “In Czechoslovakia and Germany, the Nazis have just tried to reassure the population once again that they intend to segregate the Jews, not annihilate them. This is the purpose Theresienstadt serves, in the middle of the protectorate, an area that the civilian population can check up on. Massacres are only undertaken in areas that are either empty of people, like the Russian steppes, or where at least some of the indigenous population can be persuaded to participate, at least to some extent.” Arendt saw this situation with astonishing clarity, even from exile. A plausible description of what was really going on in Hitler’s domain required one thing above all: “an explanation of the relationship between the persecution of the Jews and the Nazi state apparatus.” The idea of an “alibi” had no place there.
Hannah Arendt’s voice remained an exception, however. The report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, following its next official visit to Theresienstadt in 1944, sounds so starry-eyed that it’s hard not to admire Eichmann’s PR work. The delegate from the German Red Cross claimed: “The settlement made a very good overall impression on everybody.”128 Theresienstadt’s overseers learned from the grievances raised by the first delegation, such as overcrowding. These had been resolved in time for the second visit, by the most brutal means, so that this time nothing spoiled the camp’s good impression. Eichmann and his colleagues created an illusion that rendered the horror almost invisible—and it is easier to deceive someone who doesn’t expect hell than someone who fears the worst. In 1943 and at the start of 1944, public attention was drawn to other issues, largely due to the way the war was going, but the strategy of drawing attention from the extermination of the Jews through targeted deployment of the press was hugely successful. Eichmann’s skill in this regard exceeded anything that Goebbels’s clumsy propaganda could have achieved with its rabble-rousing articles. He was even able to inveigle the “enemy press” into spreading his lies for him.
“I Was Here, There and Everywhere”
But even the most skilled PR work could prevent the facade from slipping only for a little while. The Nazis were slowly starting to doubt the certainty of final victory; and only their faith in victory had stopped them worrying about covering their tracks. The hope that they would have time to tidy up later gradually vanished, and those involved started to fear for their postwar reputations and their personal futures in the event of a German defeat.129
While others were turning their thoughts to the postwar period, Eichmann’s reputation was spreading across the whole of occupied Europe and the countries adjacent to it. This was thanks not only to the “advisers on Jewish affairs” from “Eichmann’s office,” but also to the boss himself, who traveled tirelessly among them. “I was here, there and everywhere, you never knew when I was going to show up,” Eichmann would say later.130 His official travel itinerary was impressive: conferences in Amsterdam; receptions inBratislava; negotiations on diamond trading in The Hague; diplomatic receptions in Nice and trips to Monaco; interministry meetings in Paris and flying visits to Copenhagen, alongside visits to the ghettoes, Theresienstadt, the extermination camps, and offices in the east, all the way to Kiev and Königsberg.131 “I was a traveler,”132 Eichmann always emphasized. “I was able to creep into every territory of our corner of Europe.”133 “The famous name Eichmann”134 opened doors everywhere. It was better than his red official passport—even if many of the countless people whose doorbells he and his colleagues rang came to wish later that they hadn’t been in when he called.
But by this point, Eichmann’s career was no longer progressing as smoothly as it once had. In 1943 two incidents in particular hampered it: the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, which went completely against Eichmann’s notion of Jewry, and the successful resistance to deportations from Denmark, the failure of which he took as a personal defeat.135 The Nazis simply had no plan in place for opposition: for physical violence from Jews, who had not been thought of as willing to fight, and for sabotage by nations whose Jewish problem the Nazis were trying to solve. This turn of events posed a real threat to someone whose entire arsenal consisted of tricks, deceit, and pitting institutions against one another. Eichmann had to respond to a change in behavior from both sides: his fellow perpetrators and confidants, and their opponents. He had to maintain control on the one side and authority on the other. During this period, he fostered and spread another self-image, with help from his colleagues: this Eichmann was not only an influential man; he also had many influential friends.
Heydrich’s sudden death in June 1942 lost Eichmann one of his most important backers, both in administrative and emotional terms. The assassination of his superior was something he also had to take as a personal threat. Fearing for his own safety, Eichmann surrounded himself with bulletproof glass, traveled with a mobile arsenal in the trunk of his car, and began ensuring that no one took his photograph.136 His family’s personal security detail was increased, and his children had a bodyguard on their way to school.137Retaining his former power proved more problematic. At first, Himmler tried to take over Heydrich’s responsibilities, but Himmler was a busy man and famously fickle, which caused some difficulties. From an outsider’s perspective, Eichmann became closer to Himmler, but in practice he was not always able to rely on Himmler’s backing. Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, the head of RSHA’s Department IV, was not a careerist who forced himself into the public eye, which didn’t make it any easier for Eichmann to orient himself.
Nonetheless Eichmann’s close contact with Himmler became something that he and his colleagues could parade in front of their enemies, and competitors in their own camp. The “advisers on Jewish affairs” that Eichmann sent into every occupied territory came from “Eichmann’s office” and called themselves “Eichmann’s special commando.” And as Eichmann traveled among them and negotiated with offices all over the Reich, he invoked the Reichsführer-SS. Eichmann’s real legitimation was actually much higher, since he was ultimately deployed “on the Führer’s special mission”; but in a regime governed by relationships, only personal access to someone in power carried any real influence. The backing of the Reich Chancellery might have made an impression in negotiations with the Ministry of the Interior,138 but the implication that you could report an incident to Himmler in person evidently had a greater impact. Seen from the outside, the threat Eichmann constantly repeated from 1943 onward—to fly off to see Himmler every time negotiations stalled—looks a little like a child’s “I’ll tell my mom on you.” But the National Socialist leadership was a system dependent on personalities, and the potential of this threat should not be underestimated.
In more than one case, a single decision by Hitler or Himmler unexpectedly threw everything into confusion and ended careers that had previously appeared untouchable. In Argentina, Eichmann would claim to Sassen that in 1943 he once gave SSObergruppenführer Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff, a dressing-down on the telephone. This claim could just be the fantasy of a notorious show-off, but it shows how hierarchies were founded in National Socialism and how they functioned.139 Anyone with real access to Himmler had the potential to completely destabilize other people’s plans, and was therefore a powerful man. It’s important to recognize exactly what Eichmann was claiming when he said he would fly off to see Himmler about something: in the middle of the war’s final phase, with the Red Army already within earshot, and in spite of fuel and material shortages, Eichmann thought it plausible that he, an Obersturmbannführer (and even the lower-ranking Wisliceny), might have a plane at his disposal at all times and would be allowed in to see Himmler without an appointment.
If the people around Eichmann, including close colleagues, imagined he wielded this kind of power, then all his grandstanding must have paid off. Which is by no means to say that he actually had this power, or that his conduct was in keeping with his position, but this was clearly the impression he managed to give. Eichmann was aware of the connection: it was only his colleagues treating him “with such respect” that allowed him to appear more than he was.
Gustaf Gründgens, one of the greatest stage actors and most astute observers of that period in which SD officers, too, made a show of themselves, explained this mechanism to the actors in his company with potent simplicity: “The king is always played by others.” The powerful king himself doesn’t need to be an exceptional actor: well-played subjects can turn a shadow on the stage into a monarch through their behavior toward him. Power is a phenomenon created by group dynamics, never solely by the “powerful man.” It calls him into being. Once you have seen through this phenomenon, you can use the helpless behavior of your victims to increase the effect. Eichmann’s colleagues certainly had a talent for doing so, and he himself was very well cast for his role. He gave an impressive performance as a powerful man among the most powerful of men. Toward the end, Wisliceny (and also Eichmann, if we believe what Wisliceny said) even started claiming to be personally related to Himmler, in a final escalation of their attempts to find a foothold in this slippery network.140 And people were willing to swallow it: such claims had an impact on their victims as well as their colleagues, and finally also on postwar historians.
The Grand Mufti’s Friend
Eichmann also managed to claim a relationship of an altogether different sort, one that appealed to his pride as much as to his weakness for fantastical stories: his close personal friendship with the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.”141 The idea’s public appeal can be gauged by how the story developed, even helping Eichmann to cover up his escape after the war. The way Eichmann rendered credible the lie of this friendship reveals the interplay between his boasting, his skillful handling of information, and the public’s response.
During the 1930s Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, opened doors to all kinds of negotiations in the Middle East. A former soldier, he was granted his religious position by the British in 1921. He was a sought-after contact for trading partners, from an economic as well as a political perspective, and so he had more than one connection with the German Reich. One of these connections was via Reichert from the German intelligence service in Jerusalem to the SD’s Jewish office. Otto von Bolschwing, an undercover agent who was friends with Leopold von Mildenstein, Eichmann’s commanding officer from his early years in the SS, also played a role here. There is speculation that Eichmann and Hagen were supposed to meet al-Husseini, or at least people close to him, on their trip to the Middle East in 1937. This speculation is partly founded on Eichmann’s application for a clothing allowance. He wanted new suits and a light coat, based on the fact that “my trip [will involve] negotiations with Arab princes, among others.”142
Shortly before the SD men arrived, al-Husseini made a hurried exit from Palestine, having incited an Arab uprising against the British occupying forces. Later people reasoned that the meeting was prevented only by this coincidence. Regardless of whether that was true, al-Husseini had sent Hitler his congratulations when Hitler gained power in 1933, and he had intensified the contact in 1937. After making his escape through Ankara and Rome, the mufti found asylum in Berlin on November 6, 1941. He remained there until the end of the war, causing a few colorful headlines and running up a vast expense account. Hitler granted him an audience on November 28, 1941, and again on December 9.143 The mufti was also active elsewhere in the Nazi Reich: on December 18, 1942, he gave a speech to open the Central Islamic Institute in Berlin; he founded the Croatian “13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar,” a multiethnic SS unit of Muslim and other soldiers; and he took a particular interest in the “Jewish question.” Hitler’s radical anti-Semitism fell on friendly ears with the mufti. He broadcast his flaming diatribes over the German radio, spreading his hatred from Cairo to Tehran and Bombay: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and the Faith.”144
His presence in Germany brought with it exotic pictures for the press and, for the book trade, a colorful biography of a man with a henna-red beard and blue eyes.145 Al-Husseini had his own liaison officer in Department IV of the RSHA (Hans-Joachim Weise), who accompanied him on his trips around Germany, Italy, and the occupied territories and was responsible for his personal security. Werner Otto von Hentig in the Foreign Office was also responsible for his well-being. Al-Husseini’s staff took part in at least one SD training conference in summer 1942,146 and in the first half of 1942, there was at least one long discussion between al-Husseini and Friedrich Suhr, head of Subdepartment IV B 4b (Jewish and Property Affairs, Foreign Affairs) under Eichmann.147 Like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Eichmann was deeply impressed by the foreign guest. Wisliceny (who once again was not there) would recall the enthusiastic account Eichmann gave of al-Husseini’s visit to his office, dating it to the start of 1942. According to Wisliceny’s statement, made in prison in 1946, Eichmann told him that the grand mufti had first been to see Himmler.
A short time later the Grand Mufti visited the Head of the Jewish Department, … Adolf Eichmann, in his offices in Berlin at 116 Kurfürstenstraße.… I happened to see Eichmann in Berlin a few days later, and he told me about this visit in detail. Eichmann had given the Grand Mufti a detailed presentation on the “solution to the Jewish question in Europe” in his “Card Room,” where he had collected statistics on the Jewish populations of the various European countries. The Grand Mufti was apparently very impressed. He told Eichmann he had already asked Himmler—who had agreed—to send one of Eichmann’s people to Jerusalem as his personal adviser, when he, the Grand Mufti, returned there after the victory of the Axis powers. During this conversation, Eichmann asked me whether I might want to do this, but I declined an “oriental adventure” of this sort unequivocally. Eichmann was very much impressed by the Grand Mufti. He told me then, and repeated it later, that the Grand Mufti had also made a strong impression on Himmler, and had an influence in Jewish-Arab matters. Eichmann saw and spoke to the Grand Mufti often, as far as I know. At least, he mentioned this in conversation in Budapest, in summer 1944.148
The more Wisliceny tried to offload onto Eichmann in order to exonerate himself, the more colorful his stories about Eichmann and the grand mufti became. The two of them had been best friends, he said; Eichmann had told him that al-Husseini watched Jews being exterminated in Auschwitz “incognito” (which, given al-Husseini’s appearance, is rather unlikely). Wisliceny’s final statements have an obvious air of desperation. He told Moshe Pearlman, who was hunting for Eichmann on behalf of the Israeli intelligence service: “The Mufti was also reported to have told Himmler, at the height of Germany’s military successes, that after the Nazi victory he hoped Himmler would lend him Eichmann, so that his methods for ‘solving the Jewish question’ could be implemented in Palestine.”149
The source of all these stories was a man sitting in jail in Bratislava, who would have sold anyone down the river in order to escape the hangman’s noose. They carry little weight. Wisliceny and Eichmann said similar things during the war to intimidate and pressure their Jewish negotiating partners. When Wisliceny needed to take a hard line with Jewish representatives or politicians from occupied countries, he would assure them that “the mufti is very closely connected to Eichmann, and works with him.”150 During a negotiation over the possibility of allowing Slovakian children to emigrate, Wisliceny explained that “the mufti was a merciless arch-enemy of the Jews.… He constantly aired these thoughts in his meetings with Eichmann, who was famously a Palestinian-born German. The mufti also helped initiate the Germans’ systematic extermination of European Jewry, and he was a constant collaborator with and adviser to Eichmann and Himmler in the implementation of these plans.” Confronted with this statement after the war, Wisliceny argued he had never said “that Eichmann was born in Palestine, or that the mufti was a ‘constant collaborator’ of Himmler’s.” In other words, he didn’t take back the claim that the mufti had collaborated with Eichmann—a claim that would serve only to imply his international commitments in anti-Jewish policy.
Eichmann was by no means cautious about this story; in fact, he used press articles and office gossip to support it. Al-Husseini’s escape to the German Reich, and his popular public appearances with Hitler, were closely observed by the Wochenschau and the other major newspapers. Numerous public offices also noted Amin al-Husseini’s attempts to involve himself in the Jewish question. As soon as the grand mufti heard that an emigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine was even being considered, he wrote piles of protest letters and made personal appearances at the ministries responsible. These actions did not go unreported and became a topic of conversation within the government offices.151 Eichmann reacted by claiming he had informed his friend personally.152 Even his colleagues in other institutions thought this was possible, and they heeded the warning that he could do the same again. In Hungary in 1944, when negotiations stalled over yet more deportations, he claimed several times that he was meeting al-Husseini in Linz.153Al-Husseini really was in Linz at the end of 1944, and Eichmann did go there on occasion; but then, it was also where his family lived. It was, of course, possible to discover that such an illustrious guest was visiting without having a personal invitation from him. Official-sounding duties were also a good excuse for Eichmann to absent himself from Budapest for a few days, where by this point the Red Army could be heard in the distance. During this period at the latest, Eichmann must have begun to talk to his wife, and his father in Linz, about what they would do if the Axis powers were defeated and he had to go underground. A series of highly discreet visits to the grand mufti provided the perfect cover.
In Argentina, when Eichmann would mention al-Husseini, he did not talk of these visits—though he was hardly reticent about his contact with other powerful people, inflating the most fleeting of encounters into full-scale working relationships.154 Within Sassen’s group, however, he would stress that he had only ever met the mufti once, and it had not been during the visit to his department. Three of the grand mufti’s officers had come instead, asking for explanations of everything the department did. Eichmann met al-Husseini once, at a reception, and otherwise always dealt with his entourage, whom he called “my Arab friends.” Eichmann’s notable reserve within the Sassen circle had a simple reason: the publisher Eberhard Fritsch, who was Sassen’s friend, was in contact with al-Husseini himself. And al-Husseini was a reader of Fritsch’s magazine Der Weg—El Sendero, which sometimes printed his explicitly anti-Semitic messages and, once, even a facsimile of his autograph.
Eichmann was as little able to gauge the true nature of this relationship as he was the real remuneration of the Middle Eastern businesses that men like Otto Skorzeny (a fellow exile and former SS officer) boasted about. So when speaking to members of the Sassen group, he had good reason to hedge his bets and hold back on stories of his colorful friendship. In Israel in 1960, Eichmann finally recognized the great danger posed by his own fabrications and tried to understate the contact even more:
I believe the grand mufti came to Berlin in 1942 or 1943, with an entourage. Department IV held an evening reception in the RSHA’s guesthouse on the Wannsee to mark his stay in Berlin, to which I was invited. Three gentlemen from the entourage—they were introduced as “Iraqi majors,” and I have long forgotten the names, or rather did not retain them in the first place—came to the Head Office for Reich Security for information. One of the majors, so I was told (by Department IV, no doubt, since where else would I have heard it from) was later to function as the “Heydrich of the Middle East.” He was—so they said, at least—the grand mufti’s nephew. The grand mufti himself neither visited Department IV B 4, nor did I ever speak to him, apart from a brief formal introduction by one of the Department IV hosts, on the occasion of the aforementioned evening in Wannsee.155
In his interrogation, Eichmann claimed he had been nowhere near the office when al-Husseini visited his department. He had, admittedly, encountered al-Husseini at the reception, but they had not spoken to each other there, the difference in rank between the state guest and the departmental head being too great.156 We cannot rule out the possibility that this was the truth, and everything else the fabrications of a talented con man. But this doesn’t change the fact that the relationship Eichmann claimed to have with al-Husseini was very convincing during the Nazi period. It’s easy to imagine Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office, being friends with al-Husseini, the Middle Eastern prince. They both wanted the same thing from an anti-Semitic war, though this wasn’t why people believed the stories. Their effect was achieved purely through the skillful shaping of public opinion and through the self-confidence with which Eichmann cultivated his image. A subservient, eager officer, who made sure his back was covered every time he had to make a decision, would never have gotten away with this story. Eichmann was well served by clichés, both in his stories and his posturing.
The success of this story can be gauged from what happened immediately after the war. When he announced to his fellow inmates in the prisoner of war camp that he was going to escape to the Middle East, to seek refuge with the grand mufti, people believed him right away. A short time later rumors began to circulate of Eichmann’s new career in the Middle East, and not even his arrest managed to quash them. His “personal friendship” with the grand mufti developed a life of its own, and when Eichmann’s life was almost over, it proved stronger even than Eichmann himself. At the trial, the prosecution suddenly produced a pocket diary, apparently taken from the possession of Amin al-Husseini, in which the name Eichmann was clearly written under November 9, 1944. The liar was inextricably trapped in his own lie.157 Nobody will believe anything a person says after he has declared the perfect evidence of his lie to be a forgery.
The Madman
During the final years of the Nazi regime, Eichmann was already starting to sense the dangerous repercussions of his image making. If he had been largely unknown at this time, he would not have needed to worry about his postwar reputation. But any hopes Eichmann might have had of being forgotten or overlooked were obviously unrealistic, for two reasons: first, his reputation was far from unfounded—he had not become a symbol of anti-Jewish policy by chance; and second, this reputation made him the perfect surface onto which other people could project their own guilt. Eichmann had always pushed himself forward, and now it was all too easy to hide behind him. This tendency showed itself even in 1944. His department had expanded again, in spite of all the staffing problems caused by fighting a war on several fronts. It was now called IV A 4 and included what had originally been the most prestigious area of responsibility: “sects and churches.” By this time, Eichmann was far from unknown in church circles. His cocky approach had even earned him a mention in a report to the representatives of both Christian denominations. Gerhard Lehfeldt, a lawyer and a Protestant, had made contact with Eichmann in 1942–43 and was convinced that the planned law on Mischlingeor “half Jews” was “a suggestion from Ob. Sturmbannführer Eichmann,” as was the Nazis’ reaction to the protests in Rosenstraße. When Aryan women demonstrated outside the Berlin community center where their Jewish husbands were being detained, the regime eventually gave in and released the men rather than deporting them to Auschwitz. It was better to let a handful of Jews go free than risk the negative publicity of continuing dissent. The Lehfeldt Report was passed on to the head of the Fulda bishops’ conference,Adolf Bertram, and was expressly disclosed to the pope.158 Word got out that Eichmann was now officially responsible for churches, and his reputation spread even further. From March 1944, there were for all intents and purposes two Eichmanns: Eichmann himself, who now visited Berlin only occasionally, and his fanatically loyal deputy Rolf Günther, who ran “Eichmann’s office” entirely in accordance with his boss’s wishes. “Eichmann” could therefore be in two places at once.159
But during this period, an enemy was emerging in his own house. Eichmann was away in Hungary, personally overseeing a deportation for the first time with terrifying efficiency and taking his dubious fame to another level at the head of “Eichmann’s special commando.” Meanwhile his colleagues and staff (including those who had been closest to him) were beginning to put out feelers in another direction. Dieter Wisliceny, Hermann Krumey, Kurt Becher, and even Heinrich Himmler were seeking contact with people they had avoided for ten years, people whom they had wanted to wipe off the face of the earth. Wisliceny and Krumey held long conversations with influential Jews, in which they portrayed Eichmann as an evil monster. They, meanwhile, had just been helplessly following orders and had really wanted to stop it all. Himmler attempted to negotiate with international representatives; and Ernst Kaltenbrunner sounded out the possibilities for a separate Austrian peace agreement or at least a special position for himself after the war. Wilhelm Höttl, the Austrian SS officer whose Nuremberg testimony first mentioned the figure of six million dead, was recruited as a spy for the other side. Above all, people were building brand-new cliques, equipping themselves for future lines of questioning, and spreading the name Eichmann for very different reasons.160
Eichmann’s special place in the public eye proved useful to all these efforts. Since people already believed that the SS Obersturmbannführer had more power than other men of his rank, it was logical for his colleagues to emphasize his influence even more, while understating their own. It didn’t always work: for someone like Kaltenbrunner to claim he had been constantly overruled by Eichmann sounded ridiculous. But this too is an indication of Eichmann’s elevated position: even Kaltenbrunner saw the sliver of a chance that someone might believe him. And for many people who held posts less influential than the leader of the RSHA, the strategy actually worked. In 1944–45, Eichmann’s image was determined by several factors. First was his own behavior, which appeared more and more self-confident as his independence increased, as his position in Budapest was strengthened, and as the war began to take a catastrophic course. Second was the behavior of his coworkers, who began to take a different tone in their dealings with Jewish victims, distancing themselves from their boss and stressing his power over them. Finally, the Jewish representatives were once more being sent abroad for negotiations, and they talked about Eichmann there, writing letters or reports about their contact with him.
Having first made a brief (and astonishingly dishonest) show of diplomacy,161 Eichmann’s actions in Hungary were driven by a combination of megalomania and desperation: “As my chief, Gruppenführer Mueller, expressed it, they were sending in the master himself, so I wanted to behave like a master.”162 And so “an SS [Obersturmbannführer] Eichmann came to Hungary.”163 The result was a terrible burst of activity, with no trace of restraint or caution. Again, Eichmann boasted about anything that seemed at all plausible to him: his genuinely close ties to the highest powers in Hungary; his somewhat indirect contact with the powers of the Third Reich; his access to everything from a “personal aircraft” to direct control of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “I am a bloodhound!,” “I’ll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding!,”164 “I’ll give you the Jews you want,” “Blood for goods,” “I’ll inform Himmler,” “I’ll do away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest.”165 He was not always calm and businesslike: he argued with foreign diplomats; he threatened to have “friends of the Jews,” like the “Jewish dog [Raoul] Wallenberg,” assassinated;166 he claimed he was going to see the grand mufti (who then really did interfere in Nazi policies); he went to Auschwitz to deal with problems personally; he received visits from the Foreign Office and from Camp Commandant Höß; he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Eichmann talked so much and for so long that the people around him—ignorant of what was really going on—believed he might actually have been involved in the overthrow of the Hungarian Reich administrator Miklós Horthy.167 They thought he was being held personally responsible for leaking pictures of the Majdanek extermination camp being liberated,168 and that he would eventually have a public showdown with Himmler. His showing-off in front of his subordinates reached new heights—at least, if we believe Wisliceny’s later testimony. Wisliceny claimed that in Hungary, Eichmann boasted that he and Otto Globocnik were behind the whole idea of exterminating the Jews.169 Eichmann inflated his murderous lifetime achievement to crazy proportions and believed there was “certain to be a monument erected to me in Budapest.”170 He threatened his victims with the prospect that after the “final victory,” Hitler would make him “World Commissar of the Jews.”171 If Eichmann’s record of terror in Hungary were not so sobering, we might be tempted to mistake the show he put on there for theater of the absurd. But his performance was effective, ultimately garnering him a reputation for hunting Jews with the “obsession of a madman.”172 The official number of deportees—437,402 men, women, and children—makes even this phrase sound like an understatement.
While Eichmann was screaming at his Jewish negotiating partners Joel Brand and Rezsö Kasztner, his colleagues were taking a more measured approach to their conversations. Good cop, bad cop acts were nothing new; but this time Eichmann’s colleagues were playing the good guys in earnest. Wisliceny didn’t hesitate to lie about the extermination of Jews being “Eichmann’s dream,”173 and he bragged about his own influence to prove how much he had been helping the victims.174 With Kasztner, he even started styling himself as the victim of Eichmann’s threats, intimidation, and blackmail—someone worthy of Kasztner’s pity. Wisliceny claimed he had always done what he could to combat his all-powerful superior, with no thought for himself.175 Krumey tried to present himself as a reliable informant on the horror, who just wanted the truth to be known. Kurt Becher, Eichmann’s rival for Himmler’s favor, who was deployed on another special operation, used Eichmann as a threat when his own negotiations over Jewish assets stalled. “Every department,” Eichmann explained later, was “trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Eichmann.”176 Kurt Becher used this tactic both to arrange one of the Holocaust’s biggest thefts and to construct a successful alibi for Nuremberg.177 The Hungarian perpetrators started using the same strategy and tried to befriend the Jewish representatives.178 Their overestimation of the Jews’ importance was shaped by the same crazed anti-Semitism that had made them persecute the Jews in the first place. In any case, the hope that a single Jewish advocate would make people forget a decade of persecution was fulfilled in only a few, isolated cases. In the end, all Wisliceny’s discussions with Kasztner were of no benefit: not even a good word from Kasztner was enough to save him. However, these conversations did lay the groundwork for a highly influential image of Eichmann. Kurt Becher had more luck: changing sides proved to be his salvation. Moreover, despite the millions of thefts chalked up to his account, he was able to obliterate all traces of his involvement in murder. In the final months of the war, many others followed his example, taking every chance they could to distance themselves from the Holocaust in public and, in the process, defining Eichmann’s special role. This precaution was to prove extremely useful for their defense once the war was over.
Rezsö Kasztner and Joel Brand also spread the image of “the monster Adolf Eichmann”179 beyond the Reich’s borders. Before and after his arrest in Turkey, and while he was being held in Cairo, Brand reported on Eichmann and his role in the extermination of the Jews to Ira Hirschmann and the British intelligence service.180 This indirectly precipitated reports of the notorious “blood for goods” offer in the world press.181 Kasztner’s wartime diary formed the basis of the Kasztner Report, which appeared immediately after the war. This, together with his other statements (all strongly influenced by Wisliceny and Becher) formed a substantial part of the material the British and American authorities used to prepare for the Nuremberg Trials.182 Eichmann’s earlier public image, which he had so proudly helped to construct, was developing into something over which he no longer had control. Ultimately, he was left with no choice but to use this reputation to further his murderous ends for as long as he could—and then to change his name.
Most Wanted No. 14 … 9 … 1
Eichmann was aware of the increasingly unpleasant effect his name had on people. When Himmler temporarily pulled him out of Budapest, he saw it as a reaction to his reputation—if he had stayed, there would have been “difficulties because of my name.”183 But to some extent, Eichmann viewed the hopelessness of his situation as a mark of distinction, as we can tell from the way he started flaunting a new rank: his position on the list of most-wanted war criminals. And Eichmann was not alone. Nazi perpetrators openly vied with one another over their positions on the list. Ever since the Allies first threatened to start collecting names, speculations had been circulating about who would be on the most-wanted list. People were named on illegal radio stations in the occupied territories and were warned against any further involvement in mass murder. Wilhelm Höttl described both Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner talking about their “war-criminal rank.”184 Even if Höttl is among the least trustworthy of all witnesses, in this case his version of events is corroborated by others. Eichmann didn’t deny the showboating, and in Argentina he said: “I found the war criminals in a press review once, I was no. 9, and I had a bit of a laugh about it all.”185 In his interrogation in Israel, he claimed he was number 14. Horst Theodor Grell, the adviser on Jewish affairs in the Budapest embassy, was Eichmann’s go-between; in the fall of 1944, he remembered Eichmann proudly telling him that the enemy considered him “war criminal number 1,” because he had six million people on his conscience. Grell didn’t take it seriously and thought Eichmann was exaggerating his own importance: as the saying goes, “viel Feind, viel Ehr” (“many enemies, much honor”).186 Although Grell’s disbelief and surprise at the mass extermination is a brazen lie, the implication about Eichmann is clear: his pride in his “career” and his penchant for exaggeration remained undefeated, even in the face of the war’s approaching conclusion. Grell’s testimony even seems prophetic: by 1947 Eichmann really was being sought as the “No.1 Enemy of the Jews,” by David Ben-Gurion and Simon Wiesenthal.187
As the war’s end grew ever closer, Eichmann’s colleagues increasingly avoided appearing in public with him. The “Czar of the Jews” was the last person they wanted to be seen having lunch with, even though the canteen in Eichmann’s office building was one of the few to have remained untouched by the air raids. The man of the house at 116 Kurfürstenstraße was to be shunned wherever possible. The careerist of the glory years had become a nonperson, and Eichmann was not oblivious to the insult. As he complained in 1957, at first “people couldn’t do enough [to] invite me to ministers’ meetings, or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and suchlike,” but afterward everyone pretended they hadn’t known him.188 Over the following years, Eichmann managed to spread the story that during these last months of 1945, he did nothing more than oversee the food supplies and the defensive measures for his department’s building. The numerous people who knew better wisely refrained from correcting him, but during the last chapter of the Nazi regime, Eichmann was certainly not engaged in a rearguard action.
Historians are only just starting to reconstruct these final months of the war without relying on Eichmann’s fairy tale, but the little we do know shows how hard the murderers of the Jews worked to keep their extermination factories operating right up to the end. On Heinrich Himmler’s orders, Eichmann traveled through what was left of the Reich, collecting prominent Jews and taking them hostage. Himmler promised, in all seriousness, that they would function as a life insurance policy in negotiations with the Allies. The evidence also suggests Eichmann was involved in the very last extermination campaign: the gassing at Ravensbrück concentration camp. On January 26, 1945, Otto Moll’s notorious special commando was sent to the camp with its gas vans, and gas chambers were also erected there.189 Women who had been transferred from Ravensbrück to Theresienstadt at the start of February that year, and survived the war there, remembered being interrogated by Eichmann. He asked what they knew about these murders and threatened to punish them if they spoke of what they had seen to anyone in Theresienstadt.190
According to Charlotte Salzberger, who had been deported from Holland in January 1943, she, her sister, and three other women were interrogated by Eichmann, Günther, Ernst Moes, and Karl Rahm. They were questioned “in a very polite manner,” in order “to find out what we knew about the extermination.” All the women realized at once who was conducting the interrogation, and why: “We knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions—and there was also a rumor he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. This was very clear from the way he spoke. He was interested in our history, our background, our life in Holland. He asked very specific questions about synagogues, Zionist matters, certificates, our membership of youth movements.” The women recognized this as a diversion from the real issue. “He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto, but if we said anything there about our experiences in Ravensbrück, or about anything we knew, ‘then you will’—this was the phrase he used—‘be going up the chimney.’ ”
Nonetheless the fear quickly spread through Theresienstadt that gas chambers might be erected there, too, and everyone who lived to talk about it cited Eichmann as the driving force behind these plans.191 Eichmann was in Theresienstadt at this point, preparing for the next visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and could not afford any talk of gassing. At the start of April, however, when he accompanied Hans G. P. Dunant through Theresienstadt, along with Foreign Office representatives and other Nazi functionaries, he made his position clear. At the closing reception in Prague, he introduced himself as “the direct agent of the Reichsführer SS for all Jewish questions.” “In the course of the evening,” Otto Lehner from the International Committee of the Red Cross remembers, “Eichmann expounded his theories on the Jewish problem.” In front of the gathering of international diplomats, he rambled on about plans for a Jewish reservation. And “as regards the overall problem of the Jews, Eichmann maintained that Himmler was in favor of humane methods. He himself was not completely in agreement with these methods, but as a good soldier he of course followed the commands of the Reichsführer with total obedience.”192 However, in his report Lehner noted hopefully that Eichmann had promised him that nothing would happen to the Jews in Theresienstadt.
On Eichmann’s frequent visits to Schloss Ziethen, near Berlin, Heinrich Himmler’s official residence, Rudolf Höß remembers him being similarly up-front about his plans. Eichmann was not even able to take pleasure in the prospect of a promotion to SSStandartenführer and chief of police.193 This had less to do with Germany’s looming defeat, as he often said later, than with the fact that he now trusted the people offering to promote him as little as he did his immediate colleagues. The extent of this mistrust became clear from his well-planned, dramatic exit. Eichmann gave various triumphal accounts of his own actions in this period. Partly because his office at 116 Kurfürstenstraße still had a roof and a well-stocked kitchen, it became a meeting place for senior Nazi functionaries. It also offered them a chance to create new identities: by this point counterfeiters were based there, churning out false papers on demand. Eichmann liked to pose in front of his superiors with his service revolver. He needed no papers: his gun was his new identity. Heinrich Müller responded just as Eichmann hoped: “If we had 50 Eichmanns, we would have won the war.”194 An Eichmann would follow his Führer anywhere, even into death. He expressed this idea to his colleagues as well, giving a final address that remains his most famous quote to this day: he would leap laughing into the pit, because millions of Jews would be lying there with him.
This ghoulish show-off told no one in Berlin of the preparations he was really making for life after the Führer. He had long since made sure that new papers, bearing a new identity, would be deposited for him in a safe place. He had also lied to Dieter Wisliceny and Wilhelm Höttl, saying that he had broken off contact with his family, and described a different escape plan to them. Both men promptly started spreading the lie.195 His caution was well founded: his fellow officers had made their own plans for emerging into the new era as cleanly as possible, at Eichmann’s expense. Even Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a superior with whom Eichmann was on first-name terms, and who had brought Eichmann into the party back in Austria, did everything he could to rid himself of this undesirable company prior to his arrest. He sent Eichmann off to the nonexistent “Alpine Fortress” national redoubt, to defend Germany with his life from a little hut on a mountaintop. Eichmann’s supervisor undoubtedly hoped he would give his life for the Fatherland by falling into a crevasse. In the end, even his long-standing colleagues begged him to leave, because their proximity to a “wanted war criminal” put them in too much danger.196 And when people started removing pictures of Hitler from walls all over the Reich, burying copies of Mein Kampf in their gardens, and chiseling swastikas from the facades of all the buildings that were still standing, the symbol of the Nazis’ greatest scandal was left with no option but to disappear as quickly as he could.