Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  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 Heimholung campaign. “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.105 These 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 the Kindertransporte (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 murder and 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 a Slovakian 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 wrot
e 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.