Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  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.153 Al-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 obvio
usly 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 Mischlinge or “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.