Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  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

  The Path into the Public Eye

  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 Rabbi Joachim 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 phraseo
logy 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 of Julius 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 supplemen
t 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: