The Eichmann Trial

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Now came the summoning of witnesses. Hausner had prepared a list of more than one hundred survivors, most of whom had no direct link to Eichmann. Most of them had probably never heard his name during the war. Hausner did not need their testimony to prove Eichmann guilty—the myriad of documents he planned to introduce would have sufficed. But the witnesses would tell the story in an unprecedentedly concentrated fashion. Some had told their stories before, to family, friends, and in public settings. But this time, rather than recollecting, they would be testifying, in the full meaning of the word. Both the retelling and the size and profile of those who would be listening would be entirely different. Never before had they told their stories in front of such a broad international audience. Reporters from Asia, South America, North America, and, of course, Europe packed the courtroom. Even if many reporters would leave after the opening to chase down the next big story—the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba began during the first week of the trial—never before had there been such consistently high level media coverage of this tragedy.

  In addition to the witnesses, Hausner had another source, with the potential to be most damning of Eichmann. While in Buenos Aries, Eichmann had been cajoled by Willem Sassen, a Dutch-German member of the Waffen-SS, to co-write a history of the Final Solution that would present the “other” side of the story. Sassen, a forerunner of current Holocaust deniers, wanted to exonerate Hitler and lower the toll of those murdered. Eichmann, apparently desirous to clear his name and to earn some money, readily agreed. Though Eichmann found it fantastic that anyone could think the Final Solution could occur without Hitler’s imprimatur, the Eichmann who emerged in the sixty-seven tapes and hundreds of pages of transcripts showed no remorse. He bemoaned the fact that the regime had not killed more Jews and expressed great satisfaction about how smoothly the deportation process had run. He declared that if the official Reich statistician had correctly concluded that “we killed 10.3 million, then I would be satisfied.” But Hausner had a problem: he had the page transcripts, but could not access the original tapes. Servatius, knowing how damaging the transcripts could be to his client’s case, objected to their use. But among the pages in Hausner’s possession were those with Eichmann’s handwritten corrections and edits of the tape transcripts. This would end up constituting some of the most incriminating evidence.8

  Hausner began by calling Police Inspector Less, who had spent so many hours interrogating Eichmann. Less played tapes of his interrogation of Eichmann. The court heard Eichmann describe the preparations he witnessed for mass murder. Deep in a forest he had seen the building of an hermetically sealed structure designed to gas Jews. On another occasion he watched Jews being forced to undress and enter a truck to be gassed. On the tape Eichmann described the moment when the doors opened as “the most horrible thing that I had ever seen in my life.” As civilians with pliers moved among them, pulling gold-filled teeth, the bodies seemed still to be “alive—their limbs were so supple.” After witnessing mass shooting in Łódź, he complained to his superior, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller. His concerns were not about the victims but about the shooters: “We were bringing up people to be sadists.” He described visiting Auschwitz and Treblinka. At the latter camp he watched while a “line of naked Jews were entering a house … to be exterminated by gases.” He recounted how Heydrich had told him that “the Führer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.”9 This was probably the most vivid and specific perpetrator-testimony about the murders that had thus far been heard in public.

  Next, in an attempt to paint a portrait of the cultural world that had been destroyed, Hausner called the renowned historian Salo W. Baron of Columbia University. Baron provided a dizzying array of facts and figures about European Jewish life. However, rather than his scholarly discourse, it was a brief personal observation that most vividly captured the scope of the loss. After immigrating to the United States, he twice returned to visit his hometown, Tarnów, in Poland. In 1937, he found a population of twenty thousand Jews, “outstanding institutions, a synagogue that had existed there for about 600 years, and so on.” When he returned in 1958, there were twenty Jews, of whom “only a few … were natives of Tarnów.” This observation encapsulated the tragedy more profoundly than the hours of Baron’s erudite scholarship.10

  With the context in place, Hausner began to track Eichmann’s career as a Jewish “specialist.” After the March 1938 Anschluss, the German “invasion” of Austria, an action most Austrians welcomed enthusiastically, Eichmann’s professional status began to rise rapidly. The Austrians, who have until recently claimed that they were the Third Reich’s first victims, enthusiastically looted Jewish property and subjected Jews to multiple humiliations. Elated Viennese jeered as Austrian youth compelled Jews to scrub the street on their hands and knees. These anti-Semitic actions were so extreme that German officials called for order. They did not object to the humiliation and degradations. Rather, they objected to the ad hoc confiscation of Jewish property and the lack of order. About a week after the entry of German troops, Eichmann was dispatched to Vienna by the SD with instructions not to attack Jews physically, but to eject them from Austria. He immediately ordered all Jewish organizations to cease operating and had the communal leaders arrested. He then summoned a few of them to a meeting. Now, twenty-three years later, some of those same leaders took the stand in Jerusalem. Moritz Fleischmann described for the court how Eichmann, seated behind a large desk in his black SS uniform, compelled them to stand before him. After telling a completely fabricated story about being born in Palestine and speaking Yiddish and Hebrew fluently, he announced that he would “administer and direct” all Jewish matters and would “solve the Jewish problem in Austria completely.” Austria would become Judenrein (Jew free). He demanded “unwavering obedience and unfailing cooperation and compliance with all his instructions and directives.” If Eichmann intended to scare these Jews, he succeeded. Fleischmann recalled the “alarm and … fear” Eichmann’s activities aroused in Viennese Jewry. “We sensed it at once.”11

  In order to emigrate, Austrian Jews had to surmount a myriad of hurdles. Bills had to be paid, tax liens settled, and exit visas secured. Desperate Jews raced from office to office to obtain the requisite documents. At each step, officials tormented and taxed them. To rectify this situation, Jewish leaders proposed to Eichmann the creation of a Central Bureau for Emigration, which would bring together under one roof the entire emigration process. Eichmann tweaked their proposal slightly and sent it to his superiors in Berlin, passing it off as his initiative. It was approved, and soon, in a large hall in the Rothschild Palais, Jews were moving “seamlessly” through the process. Emigration rose markedly. Franz Meyer, a Berlin Jew who visited the operation, described it for the court. It was “most terrible, most terrible,” like “a flour mill connected to some bakery. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital and has, let us say, a factory or a shop or an account in a bank, and he passes through the entire building from counter to counter, from office to office—he comes out at the other end, he has no money, he has no rights, only a passport in which is written: You must leave this country within two weeks: if you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp.”12 Eichmann’s goal was not just to get rid of Jews, but to ensure that the Reich would not be left with those Jews too poor to emigrate. He instructed that financial aid being sent from abroad by Jewish organizations be used to support the emigration of poor Jews. This turned out to be a win/win situation for the Nazis. Over the next two years, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee alone sent two million dollars to Vienna. Eichmann exchanged this prized foreign currency at a rate that was highly favorable to the Germans and then used the funds to pay for the emigration of poor Jews.13

  Eichmann reveled in his power. Not long after arriving in Vienna, he wrote a letter to an SS colleague boasting of his power over the Jewish leaders. Hausner entered the letter into evidence. Though twenty-two years had passed since he had written
it, Eichmann’s pleasure at the control he exerted over this august Jewish community was chilling. “I put these gentlemen on the double, believe me,” the thirty-two-year-old high-school dropout gloated. “I have them completely in my hands, they dare not take a step without first consulting me. That is how it should be, because then better control is possible.”14 In Israel, of course, Eichmann put a radically different spin on his interaction with Jewish leaders. He cast it as a “decently businesslike” collaborative effort. It was so good that none of them, he insisted, “would have complained about me.” A strikingly different picture was painted for the court by Aharon Lindenstrauss, who, along with Franz Meyer, was part of a delegation of German Jews the Gestapo sent to Vienna to observe the process. Eichmann’s superiors, delighted that he was simultaneously getting rid of Jews and obtaining foreign currency, wanted these leaders to replicate the process in Berlin. Even before the delegation entered the Rothschild Palais, they were reminded of their status. Already using the language of dehumanizing objectification that would be fully realized during the Final Solution, the steel-helmeted SS guards outside the building phoned Eichmann’s office to announce that “Vier Stück aus Berlin sind angekommen”—four “pieces” had arrived from Berlin. It was with Jewish leaders such as these four “pieces” that he claimed to have had a decent businesslike relationship. Ushered past hundreds of Jews standing in the courtyard in the rain waiting to apply for passports, Lindenstrauss saw not “orderly emigration” but “deportation” pervaded by an aura of debasement and degradation. When the visitors arrived at Eichmann’s office, a group of Viennese Jewish leaders were present. They reminded Lindenstrauss of “disciplined soldiers who stood to attention all the time and dared not utter a word. I had the impression that … they were afraid to move.” The visitors were ushered into a large, beautiful hall, where Eichmann, sitting behind a desk, demanded that they move back to a distance of three to four meters. Once they were properly situated according to Eichmann’s stipulations, Eichmann berated them for the slow emigration rate from the Altreich (pre-Anschluss Germany). One of the visitors, Dr. Hermann Stahl, blamed the slow pace on the emigration taxes, which left most Jews destitute. These moneys, he argued, should be used to finance emigration. Eichmann exploded: “Should we pay for keeping you old bags alive?” He warned the visitors to speed up the emigration, “otherwise you will certainly understand what fate awaits you.”15 Meyer had, as chair of the German Zionist organization, previously interacted with Eichmann. In his testimony he described for the court the marked difference between the man he knew from Berlin and the one he encountered in Vienna.

  I immediately said to my colleagues that I do not know whether I was meeting the same man. The change was so awful.… I previously had thought that this was a minor official, the type they call a “clerk” or a “bureaucrat” who fulfills duties, writes reports, and so on. Now, here was this man with the attitude of an autocrat controlling life and death, he received us impudently and crudely.16

  When the delegation returned to Berlin, word of their experience spread. A reporter for a Yiddish-language French paper picked up the story and wrote an article in which members of the delegation described Eichmann as a Bluthund and Judenfiend, a bloodhound and an enemy of the Jews. An irate Eichmann summoned the leaders to Gestapo headquarters. Benno Cohn told the court how they stood behind a rope separating them from his desk while Eichmann subjected them to a barrage of “rude, barrack room language.” When one of the leaders again complained that the Reich’s taxation policy made it hard to get entry visas to other countries, Eichmann exploded, calling him an alter Scheissack, an old shit bag, and adding the ominous observation: “It seems it is a long time since you have been to a [concentration] camp.”17 Such was his decent relationship.

  Jews were not alone in fearing Eichmann’s newfound power. Bernhard Lösener, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s Jewish Desk, visited the Viennese emigration operation. After the war, he recalled that he wanted to talk with the Jews there but decided against it because he “felt himself under Eichmann’s surveillance.” He witnessed how “women pulled their children aside in horror as soon as they saw Eichmann, who casually passed by as though along an empty street, shoving aside the waiting human unfortunates.” Jewish leaders who had been waiting for hours “immediately jumped up.… Eichmann rapidly pointed each out by name, told me with equal rapidity which area they would report on; they then immediately droned through their information like trained animals. The expression of justifiable mortal fear could be read in each face.” If a Nazi official felt personally afraid, one can imagine the terror Eichmann evoked in the Jews. Eichmann was soon boasting of having facilitated the emigration of fifty thousand Jews. Though this was an inflated figure, his superiors in Berlin credited him with designing a system that increased emigration, retained Jews’ assets, and brought foreign currency into the Reich’s coffers.18 These skills would become even more prized by his superiors as the Final Solution entered its more dire stages.

  With the start of the war in 1939, the number of Jews under German control increased exponentially. It did not take long for German officials to recognize that emigration was no longer a viable solution. Rather than push the Jews out of the Reich, their goal became finding some Reich controlled territory appropriate for resettling Jews. When Heydrich convened a meeting a few days after the beginning of the war to discuss moving the Jews to the farthest corner of German-controlled territory, Eichmann was the most junior officer present, an indication that he was now considered a central player. Shortly thereafter, in October 1939, Eichmann was instructed to deport the Jews of Katowice, a Polish city destined to be incorporated into the Reich. Eichmann rushed to make the arrangements and, despite his relatively low SS rank, managed to have Jews from both Vienna and Ostrava, a town near Katowice, included among those to be deported. He raced from city to city to organize matters. It is telling that he left finding a destination to be the final step. Getting Jews out of the Reich was far more important than figuring out where they might go. Shortly before the trains were scheduled to roll, he flew to Poland. He had instructed that he was to be met by a Mercedes and a Lancia. They were to convey him and his party to a region “suitable” for depositing the Jews. He quickly decided on Nisko, a small wetland area conveniently located near a railroad. When the first group of Jews arrived, he was there.

  Witness Max Burger told the court what the Nazi officer who greeted them—he later learned it was Eichmann—had said: “The Führer has promised the Jews a new homeland. There are no flats and no houses; if you carry out the construction you will have a roof over your head. There is no water. Wells in the whole area are infested; cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are rampant. If you start digging and find water, then you will have water.” After walking a number of kilometers, they were told to leave their luggage and climb up to the site of the proposed settlement. Horse-drawn carts brought the luggage to the foot of the site. The horses were then released. The men were harnessed to the carts and instructed to pull them up the hill. Eventually, those who could not work or were considered too old—over forty—were driven off in the direction of Soviet territory.19

  Complications soon arose. The army needed the trains that were being used to deport these Jews. Moreover, Hitler decided to conduct a far more massive transfer of ethnic Germans living in Polish territories back to the Reich. Since the two programs could not be conducted simultaneously, Eichmann was told to halt his operation. Having predicted “flawless execution,” Eichmann fought to dispatch another series of transports to Nisko. Even after receiving a telegram from the Gestapo to stop, he continued, arguing that since the communiqué was not from his superior he could ignore it. When subsequently told to suspend the transports, he dispatched yet one more train, in order to maintain “prestige.” The couple of thousand Jews remaining in Nisko were left without shelter or support. Some were chased by the SS toward the river that abutted the Soviet border. The survivors returned to t
heir homes. They paid their own fare.

  The program’s failure did not impede Eichmann’s career. These, the first organized transports of Jews to Poland, became the prototype for subsequent transfers of multitudes of European Jews. By the end of 1939 he had demonstrated that tens of thousands could be removed from their communities without their or their neighbors’ opposition. The victims, plied with promises about the opportunities awaiting them, cooperated. Despite the failure at Nisko, his superiors must have been satisfied with Eichmann’s performance. Shortly thereafter, he was named “special officer” for the “clearing of the Eastern provinces.” Ultimately the section of the RSHA, the Reich’s main security office, that he led would be responsible for coordinating the deportation of approximately one and a half million European Jews to killing centers.

  Hausner next began to call those who had witnessed the murderous aspects of the Final Solution. He had sought people with a “good story,” who could bring the tragedy alive.20 Among his initial witnesses were two women who did exactly that. Ada Lichtmann was called to testify about the “small-scale” terror in Poland. Speaking in Yiddish, the language that evoked the voices of so many victims, she described how the Germans conducted a mass shooting, killing adults and children: “I saw everything.” An equally harrowing scene was described by Rivka Yoselewska. She told the court how a German shooter debated whom to shoot first, her or the child she was holding. After the child was shot, she fell into the pit that already held the bodies of most of her family. Miraculously, she was later able to crawl out. When she did, she saw a fountain of blood spurting from the ground, an observation that evoked Eichmann’s recollection in his interrogation of having also seen such a fountain.21 Equally troubling was Professor Georges Wellers’s description of the Jewish children in France who were rounded up in July 1942 and brought to Drancy, the camp outside of Paris, without their parents. They slept over a hundred to a room on “straw mattresses on the ground—mattresses which were filthy, disgusting, and full of vermin,” many with no adult allowed nearby. It was not uncommon for them to awake during the night screaming for their parents. Some were too young to know their own names. Since they had already been interned in other camps, their state of cleanliness was “frightful.” This was compounded by the waves of diarrhea that affected many of them. Wellers told of taking a fellow camp inmate, René Blum, brother of French premier Léon Blum, to see the children. They spoke with one boy who was “remarkably handsome, with a face which was very intelligent.… He wore clothes which must have been of very good quality, rather stylish, but in a pitiful condition. One foot was bare.” When asked about his parents, the boy said, “My father goes to the office and Mummy plays the piano.” They reassured him that he would soon rejoin his parents, though both Wellers and Blum knew the child was headed for Auschwitz. The boy happily showed them a biscuit he was saving for his mother. Blum “bent over the little boy who looked very happy, very engaging. He took his face in his hands and wanted to stroke his head, and at that moment the child, who only a moment ago had been so happy, burst into tears.” The four thousand children, rounded up by the French police, were all deported to Auschwitz a few weeks later on Eichmann’s orders. When the time came for that deportation, many of the children fought and had to be brought to the roundup place “struggling and screaming.”22