by Alex Kershaw
Eichmann and his aides quickly set up their operation in the leafy, haute bourgeois neighborhood of Svagheny Hill in Buda. And so, just like Mafiosi with unlimited appetites, financial resources, and power, Eichmann and his most trusted associates settled in for what promised to be a long, hot summer of sending Hungary’s Jews, “spiced with paprika,” to the “Auschwitz mill,” as Eichmann was wont to say.3
Eichmann chose the elegant Hotel Majestic as his headquarters. Eichmann’s aide, Herman Krumey, took an office next to Eichmann’s. A large and detailed map of Hungary, indicating the regions where the Jews were to be deported, was quickly pinned to one wall. Eichmann also secured for his personal retreat a spacious villa on Apostol Street, atop the beautiful Rose Hill. The home had been seized from a Jewish businessman called Aschner. The gardens sloped gently toward the Danube and would soon be full of fragrant spring flowers. The nearby streets were lined with chestnuts that were starting to leaf, bright green buds springing to life.
Eichmann now answered to only two men: his immediate boss, Gestapo Chief Muller, and Reichsfuhrer Himmler, head of the SS. Heydrich, his mentor, was no more; he had died of blood poisoning, caused by the dirty shards of a grenade that had exploded beneath his car and splintered into his spleen, back in May of 1942 in Prague—the victim of Allied-trained assassins.
The morning after his arrival in Budapest, Eichmann dispatched his key henchmen—Wisliceny and Krumey—to begin a dialogue with the leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community. On March 20, 1944, Krumey duly stood before a group of nervous Jewish leaders. A pharmacist before joining the SS, Krumey was known to be a stickler for detail, “meticulous, always punctual, excellent at following instructions.”4 He had known Eichmann since 1938, when they had been in Austria together.
Krumey began by informing the Jews that, from now on, “all the affairs of Hungarian Jewry are transferred to the competence of the SS.”5 Then Krumey told the assembled leaders that Jews were not to leave the city. There was to be no panic. The Jewish press as well as rabbis were to call for calm. Disaster was not imminent. Indeed, the Gestapo was not in Budapest to kill the Jews, stressed Krumey, but to protect them from lawbreakers. In the following days, a senior group of Jewish leaders, the Jewish Council, was to be formed to liaise with the Gestapo. Eichmann would address the first formal meeting of the Jewish Council on March 31.
CRUCIAL TO EICHMANN’S PLANS were Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, two Jew-hating, fiercely nationalistic state secretaries in the Hungarian government. Thanks to their enthusiastic assistance, Eichmann would later recall that the deportation process in Hungary succeeded like a “dream.”6 A week after arriving in Budapest, Eichmann met with the pair; for several hours, they sat and munched on pretzels and drank Hungarian wine in the Majestic’s carefully tended gardens, gazing down on the Danube curling lazily through the city below. From time to time, they examined a large map of Hungary, which Eichmann had brought with him, so they could be sure of the utmost efficiency in cleansing the provinces before emptying Budapest.
The two Hungarians were eager to begin the very next day by deporting one hundred thousand alien Jews (including Vera Herman and her parents). But Eichmann did not want the operation to go off half-cocked and insisted on moving at a more measured pace, not wanting to overload the railway system, nor the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz, which was then ramping up to handle the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews targeted for liquidation.
Eichmann was delighted by the Hungarians’ enthusiasm. He left the meeting assured of their full backing. The Horthy regime had finally agreed to the Nazis’ requests for the delivery of “Jewish workers for German war production purposes.”7
“On that evening,” Eichmann later recalled proudly, “the fate of the Jews of Hungary was sealed.”8
Eichmann was a master at deferring responsibility to others, and so he made sure Baky and Endre agreed to provide him with a formal request from the Hungarian government for the deportation. That way, the Gestapo and SS could claim that they had been invited to carry out the deportations. Baky immediately went to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Laszlo Ferenczy, who headed the largely corrupt, anti-Semitic, and uneducated Hungarian gendarmerie, around five thousand men in all. “[Ferenczy] had a strongly chiseled, attractive face, a thick, muscular neck,” recalled a Jewish contemporary. “I hoped the hangman’s rope would look good on it.” Ferenczy was just as eager as Baky and Endre to get started. He would later tell his men to go ahead and torture Jewish children if they thought it necessary—it was the best way of forcing their parents to say where they had hidden their valuables.
Rudolf Hoss, the commandant at Auschwitz, later recalled—while under interrogation for war crimes—that he visited Budapest three times that spring of 1944 to “obtain an estimate of the numbers of able-bodied Jews that might be expected.” During these visits, added Hoss, he was able to witness Eichmann’s winning ways with both the Hungarian government and its army. “[Eichmann’s manner of approach] was extremely firm and matter-of-fact, but nevertheless amiable and courteous” recalled Hoss, “and he was liked and made welcome wherever he went. This was confirmed by the innumerable private invitations he received from the chiefs of these departments.”9
Hoss also remembered how fiercely determined Eichmann was to complete his mission to destroy European Jewry. “Eichmann was absolutely convinced that if he could succeed in destroying the biological basis of Jewry in the east by complete extermination, then Jewry as a whole would never recover from the blow. The assimilated Jews of the West, including America, would be in his opinion in no position (and would have no desire) to make up this enormous loss of blood, and there would therefore be no future generation worth mentioning.”10
WHY WAS EICHMANN SO DETERMINED on this course of action? Was he just another zealot, his mind poisoned by decades of anti-Semitism and the virulent hatreds of National Socialism? Or was there something in his past—some scarring encounter or episode perhaps—that had catalyzed his loathing of Judaism? Or was he so inadequate, so brutalized, that sheer envy and the lust for a scapegoat explained his utterly professional dedication to the murder of eleven million people?
Simon Wiesenthal, the celebrated Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, later investigated whether anything in Eichmann’s childhood indicated that he might become a mass murderer. “I didn’t find anything,” Wiesenthal recalled. “Eichmann came from a religious, quiet family. His father, a member of the Presbyterian church, once spoke as the guest of honor at the synagogue in Linz, when the head of the Jewish community there, Benedikt Schwager, was awarded a high Austrian decoration.”11
Wiesenthal elaborated further, telling the journalist Alan Levy in 1985: “Look, I’ve studied the life stories of too many Nazi murderers. Nobody was born a murderer. They’d mostly been farmers, workers, clerks, or bureaucrats—the kind of people you meet every day. Some had good early childhoods; some didn’t. Almost all had religious instruction of some kind; none had a prior criminal record. Yet they became murderers—expert murderers—out of conviction. It was like they put on their SS uniforms and replaced them in the closet by hanging up their consciences with their civilian clothes. In the moment Eichmann put on the swastika, the first casualty he deported was not a Jew, but his own conscience.”12
THE PATTERN OF DECEPTION was by now well established. First, con the Jewish community, through its frightened yet ever hopeful leaders, into believing that nothing fatal was about to happen. Second, quickly and decisively place Jews into holding prisons, camps, and ghettoes. Last, but not least, keep to a strict timetable of deportation, ensuring that as many Jews as could be taken by train were deposited as close to the gas chambers as possible.
Eichmann began his operation by calling Budapest’s Central Jewish Council to a meeting at his office at the Majestic Hotel. The men of the council gathered nervously on March 31, 1944, some of them having packed suitcases in the expectation that they were going to be imprisoned immediately. Eichm
ann entered his office, dressed in his immaculate gray uniform, wearing a cap, a gun holstered at his waist. One of the Jewish leaders present was bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old Hungarian lawyer and journalist Rudolf Kasztner, a committed Zionist, canny negotiator, and leader of the Aid and Rescue Committee, which had helped Jews escape Nazi Europe.
According to Kasztner, who would deal with Eichmann and his lackeys a great deal in the coming months, Eichmann was abusive from the start.13
“Do you know what I am?” he shouted. “I am a bloodhound! All opposition will be broken. If you think of joining the partisans, I will have you slaughtered. I know you Jews. I know all about you. I have been dealing with Jewish affairs since 1934.”
In Kasztner’s memoirs, Eichmann then lied brazenly. “If you behave quietly and work,” promised Eichmann, “you’ll be able to keep your community and your institutions. But—and I am being frank with you here—where Jews opposed us, there were executions.” Once the war was won, the Jews could return to their former lives. “We Germans will again become good-natured,” vowed Eichmann, “as we were in the past.”
Then Eichmann made an announcement. Starting April 5, all Jews would have to wear the yellow Star of David badge. “Not just your membership,” stressed Eichmann. “I will make no distinction between religious Jews and converts. As far as I’m concerned, a Jew is a Jew, whatever he calls himself.”
Making the badges would be good for Jewish businesses, sneered Eichmann. “[But] to be fair, you can’t keep it an exclusive business for Jews,” he added. “Of course, we have to open up the bidding to gentiles.” Eichmann chuckled. He told Kasztner and the others before him that no one was going to be killed. The Hungarian Jews would be put to work to help the German war effort. Then came the same lie Eichmann had used so successfully to deport communities throughout Europe: families would be sent away together, “out of consideration for the close family life of the Jews.”
Eichmann knew that the leaders before him desperately wanted to believe him. And according to one of them, Samuel Stern, he was a convincing operator, a skilled charmer. “I will visit your museum soon,” Eichmann promised, “because I am interested in Jewish cultural affairs. You can trust me and talk freely to me—as you see, I am quite frank with you. If the Jews behave quietly and work, you will be able to keep all of your community institutions.”14
Eichmann was finished. He stood up and marched out.15
ANTI-JEWISH DECREES FOLLOWED FAST. All Jews now had to wear six-inch-wide cadmium-yellow stars. They could not travel freely; Eichmann alone would decide who would receive a travel permit.16 All synagogues were closed and turned over to the Gestapo.
On April 5, as these and other decrees took effect, Marianne Lowy was married in a civil ceremony. The following day, she had a religious service in secret. “There were not synagogues available,” she recalled. “The one I belonged to became a stable for the Germans. We had an upstairs neighbor who had an open-roofed terrace. We used my grandfather’s tallis for the canopy. There were four men, two cousins and two neighbors, who held it up. It was not a wedding that an eighteen-year-old girl visualizes, but we did it.”
An hour after the ceremony, Marianne removed the yellow star she had sewn onto her coat and threw it away. “If they get me,” Marianne told herself, “they get me. I’ll take a chance.”17
THE FIRST DEPORTATIONS to Auschwitz would begin in just a matter of weeks, on May 15, 1944, and then proceed at such a startling pace that by July all but those living in Budapest would have been removed, the vast majority ending up in the ovens of Auschwitz. As many as three hundred thousand would be shot or gassed, their bodies thrown into hastily dug pits and burned, in just forty-six days.18
First the Jews in the provinces were to be taken from their homes to special encampments, ghettoes, and containment areas such as brickyards and disused factories. Helping Eichmann’s deportation would be thousands of Hungarian gendarmes, arguably the most enthusiastic of all foreign collaborators with the Final Solution. In their black, cock-plumed hats, they looked like faintly ridiculous throwbacks to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there would be nothing picaresque about their treatment of their fellow Hungarians.
With intentional cruelty, if not irony, the first day of the round up was scheduled for the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Jews’ escape from Egyptian oppression.19
That morning, around 7 a.m., Marianne Lowy was spending Passover with her parents in Pest. She heard the doorbell ring. Her parents were still asleep, so she went to open the door. Three Gestapo men stood outside. They said they wanted to talk to her father.
“What for?”
“He was listening to the BBC.”20
This was a common justification. By this stage of the war, everyone had access to a radio, and most listened if they dared to the BBC, its broadcasts signaled by the famous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.21
Marianne’s mother emerged from her bedroom in a negligee, followed by Marianne’s father. The men began to ask him questions. Then they told him to pack—they were taking him away for questioning.
Marianne began to pack a bag for her father.
“Oh, he’ll be back,” said one of the men. “It’s just for questioning.”
Marianne watched aghast as her mother dropped to her knees and began to beg the men not to take her father. “She held onto the coat of one of the men,” Marianne recalled, “trying to hold him back, but it didn’t help. The men said that if my father hadn’t done anything, he’d be released after the interrogation.”22
They were lying. That morning, Marianne’s father was taken to a prison in Budapest to await deportation to Auschwitz.23
PERHAPS THE MOST MOVING testimony from this period comes from Eva Heyman, a thirteen-year-old girl not unlike Vera Herman. Eva scribbled her last entry in a secret diary on May 30, 1944: “Yet, my little Diary, I don’t want to die, I still want to live . . . I would wait for the end of the war in a cellar, or in the attic, or any hole, I would, my little Diary, I would even allow that cross-eyed gendarme who took the flour from us to kiss me, only not to be killed, only to be left alive!”
Eva Heyman and her grandparents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz on June 2, 1944. Her mother, Agnes Zsolt, would be liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and return to Hungary to search in vain for her daughter. Eventually, she learned that Josef Mengele had sent her to be gassed at Auschwitz: “A good-hearted female doctor was trying to hide my child, but Mengele found her without effort. Eva’s feet were full of sore wounds. ‘Now look at you,’ Mengele shouted, ‘you frog, your feet are foul, reeking with pus! Up with you on the truck!’ He transported his human material to the crematorium in yellow-colored trucks. Eyewitnesses told me that he himself had pushed her onto the truck.”
Eva Heyman was gassed on October 17, 1944, according to her mother, who would later commit suicide after securing publication of her daughter’s diary.24
Among others who were deported was Elie Wiesel, who famously recounted his experiences in Night and other works, and the writer Imre Kertesz, whose book, Fateless, paints an equally haunting picture of Hungary’s darkest summer. When sixteen-year-old Wiesel arrived with his family in Auschwitz that May, he was separated on the ramp from his mother and sister. He and his father were marched toward a crossroads in the camp. “Standing in the middle of it was, though I didn’t know it then, Dr. Mengele, the notorious Dr. Mengele,” recalled Wiesel. “He looked like the typical SS officer: a cruel, though not unintelligent, face, complete with monocle. He was holding a conductor’s baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving constantly, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.”25
Wiesel and his father were waved to the left.
Mengele had deemed them fit enough to work.
Nearby, someone among the weeping men and boys began to recite the Jewish prayer for the dead, Kaddish.
“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey r
aba . . . May His name be celebrated and sanctified,” whispered Wiesel’s father.26
Wiesel would be the only one of his family to survive the camps.
GAINING ENTRY TO the heavily guarded SS and Gestapo compounds in the leafy streets and hills of Buda, where the rich had built impressive villas and mansions, was dangerous that spring for any Hungarian civilian without the correct papers and a valid reason to be on the streets. But it was madness for Alice Breuer, an eighteen-year-old Jewish medical student with bright eyes and raven-black hair.
Alice looked through the windows of a rattling streetcar, passing across the fast-flowing Danube and heading toward the hills of Buda. She wore a yellow star on her coat. At any moment, she knew she could be arrested. Thousands of other Jews had already been dragged from their beds, from offices, from bars, and randomly off the streets, then sent to a Gestapo prison to be tortured or to a holding camp such as Kistarcsa—the last stop for many before the ramps at Auschwitz. But Alice, nicknamed Lici, was undeterred as she got off the street car and took the cogwheel railway up toward the Majestic Hotel, Adolf Eichmann’s headquarters. At all costs, she had to get back to the town of Kormend in the provinces to see her family. If that meant asking Eichmann himself for a travel pass, that was clearly what she had to do. He had decreed that only he could authorize such a pass.27
Alice had left the home of her husband’s parents early that morning, knowing it would take several hours to get to the Majestic and back. She hadn’t told her husband, Erwin, of her plan to get authorization to travel from Eichmann himself. Had Erwin known, he would probably have barred her from even leaving the house. It was a crazy idea, sheer madness.
