Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

by Bettina Stangneth

  Most Wanted No. 14 … 9 … 1

  Eichmann was aware of the increasingly unpleasant effect his name had on people. When Himmler temporarily pulled him out of Budapest, he saw it as a reaction to his reputation—if he had stayed, there would have been “difficulties because of my name.”183 But to some extent, Eichmann viewed the hopelessness of his situation as a mark of distinction, as we can tell from the way he started flaunting a new rank: his position on the list of most-wanted war criminals. And Eichmann was not alone. Nazi perpetrators openly vied with one another over their positions on the list. Ever since the Allies first threatened to start collecting names, speculations had been circulating about who would be on the most-wanted list. People were named on illegal radio stations in the occupied territories and were warned against any further involvement in mass murder. Wilhelm Höttl described both Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner talking about their “war-criminal rank.”184 Even if Höttl is among the least trustworthy of all witnesses, in this case his version of events is corroborated by others. Eichmann didn’t deny the showboating, and in Argentina he said: “I found the war criminals in a press review once, I was no. 9, and I had a bit of a laugh about it all.”185 In his interrogation in Israel, he claimed he was number 14. Horst Theodor Grell, the adviser on Jewish affairs in the Budapest embassy, was Eichmann’s go-between; in the fall of 1944, he remembered Eichmann proudly telling him that the enemy considered him “war criminal number 1,” because he had six million people on his conscience. Grell didn’t take it seriously and thought Eichmann was exaggerating his own importance: as the saying goes, “viel Feind, viel Ehr” (“many enemies, much honor”).186 Although Grell’s disbelief and surprise at the mass extermination is a brazen lie, the implication about Eichmann is clear: his pride in his “career” and his penchant for exaggeration remained undefeated, even in the face of the war’s approaching conclusion. Grell’s testimony even seems prophetic: by 1947 Eichmann really was being sought as the “No.1 Enemy of the Jews,” by David Ben-Gurion and Simon Wiesenthal.187

  As the war’s end grew ever closer, Eichmann’s colleagues increasingly avoided appearing in public with him. The “Czar of the Jews” was the last person they wanted to be seen having lunch with, even though the canteen in Eichmann’s office building was one of the few to have remained untouched by the air raids. The man of the house at 116 Kurfürstenstraße was to be shunned wherever possible. The careerist of the glory years had become a nonperson, and Eichmann was not oblivious to the insult. As he complained in 1957, at first “people couldn’t do enough [to] invite me to ministers’ meetings, or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and suchlike,” but afterward everyone pretended they hadn’t known him.188 Over the following years, Eichmann managed to spread the story that during these last months of 1945, he did nothing more than oversee the food supplies and the defensive measures for his department’s building. The numerous people who knew better wisely refrained from correcting him, but during the last chapter of the Nazi regime, Eichmann was certainly not engaged in a rearguard action.

  Historians are only just starting to reconstruct these final months of the war without relying on Eichmann’s fairy tale, but the little we do know shows how hard the murderers of the Jews worked to keep their extermination factories operating right up to the end. On Heinrich Himmler’s orders, Eichmann traveled through what was left of the Reich, collecting prominent Jews and taking them hostage. Himmler promised, in all seriousness, that they would function as a life insurance policy in negotiations with the Allies. The evidence also suggests Eichmann was involved in the very last extermination campaign: the gassing at Ravensbrück concentration camp. On January 26, 1945, Otto Moll’s notorious special commando was sent to the camp with its gas vans, and gas chambers were also erected there.189 Women who had been transferred from Ravensbrück to Theresienstadt at the start of February that year, and survived the war there, remembered being interrogated by Eichmann. He asked what they knew about these murders and threatened to punish them if they spoke of what they had seen to anyone in Theresienstadt.190

  According to Charlotte Salzberger, who had been deported from Holland in January 1943, she, her sister, and three other women were interrogated by Eichmann, Günther, Ernst Moes, and Karl Rahm. They were questioned “in a very polite manner,” in order “to find out what we knew about the extermination.” All the women realized at once who was conducting the interrogation, and why: “We knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions—and there was also a rumor he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. This was very clear from the way he spoke. He was interested in our history, our background, our life in Holland. He asked very specific questions about synagogues, Zionist matters, certificates, our membership of youth movements.” The women recognized this as a diversion from the real issue. “He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto, but if we said anything there about our experiences in Ravensbrück, or about anything we knew, ‘then you will’—this was the phrase he used—‘be going up the chimney.’ ”

  Nonetheless the fear quickly spread through Theresienstadt that gas chambers might be erected there, too, and everyone who lived to talk about it cited Eichmann as the driving force behind these plans.191 Eichmann was in Theresienstadt at this point, preparing for the next visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and could not afford any talk of gassing. At the start of April, however, when he accompanied Hans G. P. Dunant through Theresienstadt, along with Foreign Office representatives and other Nazi functionaries, he made his position clear. At the closing reception in Prague, he introduced himself as “the direct agent of the Reichsführer SS for all Jewish questions.” “In the course of the evening,” Otto Lehner from the International Committee of the Red Cross remembers, “Eichmann expounded his theories on the Jewish problem.” In front of the gathering of international diplomats, he rambled on about plans for a Jewish reservation. And “as regards the overall problem of the Jews, Eichmann maintained that Himmler was in favor of humane methods. He himself was not completely in agreement with these methods, but as a good soldier he of course followed the commands of the Reichsführer with total obedience.”192 However, in his report Lehner noted hopefully that Eichmann had promised him that nothing would happen to the Jews in Theresienstadt.

  On Eichmann’s frequent visits to Schloss Ziethen, near Berlin, Heinrich Himmler’s official residence, Rudolf Höß remembers him being similarly up-front about his plans. Eichmann was not even able to take pleasure in the prospect of a promotion to SS Standartenführer and chief of police.193 This had less to do with Germany’s looming defeat, as he often said later, than with the fact that he now trusted the people offering to promote him as little as he did his immediate colleagues. The extent of this mistrust became clear from his well-planned, dramatic exit. Eichmann gave various triumphal accounts of his own actions in this period. Partly because his office at 116 Kurfürstenstraße still had a roof and a well-stocked kitchen, it became a meeting place for senior Nazi functionaries. It also offered them a chance to create new identities: by this point counterfeiters were based there, churning out false papers on demand. Eichmann liked to pose in front of his superiors with his service revolver. He needed no papers: his gun was his new identity. Heinrich Müller responded just as Eichmann hoped: “If we had 50 Eichmanns, we would have won the war.”194 An Eichmann would follow his Führer anywhere, even into death. He expressed this idea to his colleagues as well, giving a final address that remains his most famous quote to this day: he would leap laughing into the pit, because millions of Jews would be lying there with him.

  This ghoulish show-off told no one in Berlin of the preparations he was really making for life after the Führer. He had long since made sure that new papers, bearing a new identity, would be deposited for him in a safe place. He had also lied to Dieter Wisliceny and Wilhelm Höttl, saying that he had broken off contact with his family, and described a differe
nt escape plan to them. Both men promptly started spreading the lie.195 His caution was well founded: his fellow officers had made their own plans for emerging into the new era as cleanly as possible, at Eichmann’s expense. Even Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a superior with whom Eichmann was on first-name terms, and who had brought Eichmann into the party back in Austria, did everything he could to rid himself of this undesirable company prior to his arrest. He sent Eichmann off to the nonexistent “Alpine Fortress” national redoubt, to defend Germany with his life from a little hut on a mountaintop. Eichmann’s supervisor undoubtedly hoped he would give his life for the Fatherland by falling into a crevasse. In the end, even his long-standing colleagues begged him to leave, because their proximity to a “wanted war criminal” put them in too much danger.196 And when people started removing pictures of Hitler from walls all over the Reich, burying copies of Mein Kampf in their gardens, and chiseling swastikas from the facades of all the buildings that were still standing, the symbol of the Nazis’ greatest scandal was left with no option but to disappear as quickly as he could.

  2

  The Postwar Career of a Name

  Adolf was always the black sheep of the family.

  —Karl Adolf Eichmann,

  U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) statement1

  When a person discards his name, he ultimately loses control over it. This might be one of the ground rules of modern marketing, but it came as a surprise to Eichmann, who was usually such a master of self-promotion. Eichmann had long since given up on the idea of the “final victory” that people were still promising and had considered his escape options in good time. Even so, he failed to foresee just how quickly everyone around him would manage to repurpose their “Heil Hitler” salute, pointing their outstretched arms right at him and using the “famous name Eichmann” to open some rather different doors.

  By 1944 at the latest, Eichmann knew he was a wanted war criminal. Very few of these wanted lists have been investigated—but the name Eichmann appears on every list that has surfaced. In the Jewish Agency for Palestine’s “wanted” card file of June 8, 1945, Eichmann is 6/94: the highest-ranking name in the file.2 On June 27, 1945, the World Jewish Congress asked the American prosecutor in the first Nuremberg trial to find Adolf Eichmann and try him as one of the principal war criminals.3 In August, Wisliceny gave detailed reports on Eichmann during his interrogation by the Americans.4 The police authority in Vienna had also put Eichmann on their wanted list, which led to an arrest warrant being issued the following year.5 In September 1945 Eichmann appeared on the “Black List of German Police, SS and Miscellaneous Party and Paramilitary Personalities” created by the British intelligence division MI4. On June 17, 1946, a three-page report on Eichmann was produced by the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which relied largely on Höttl, Becher, and statements by Eichmann’s family (which were clearly intended to cause confusion). This report corrected the Sarona legend. By 1960, Eichmann’s CIA file contained well over one hundred reports and documents.6 The organization that would later become the UN War Crimes Commission had been collecting the names of perpetrators since fall 1943, and of course Eichmann’s name could also be found in the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) lists, which became famous as the Nazi Hunter’s Bible.7

  Nevertheless, after the German capitulation it was not the omnipresent Allied military units that caused him the greatest concern. The Americans arrested him, but all they had were names—and following a total defeat, names could easily be changed. At first Eichmann became the low-ranking Adolf Karl Barth (in the prisoner of war camps in Ulm and Weiden/Oberpfalz), but he swiftly turned into SS Untersturmführer Otto Eckmann, from Breslau. This sounded enough like his real name that if someone were to recognize him and call out to him, no one would notice. Otto Eckmann was also an officer and therefore exempt from the work details. His choice was well thought through: all the records in Breslau had been destroyed, and he had moved his date of birth “forward by 1 year … it was easier to remember these numbers, my signature had become natural, so that even in a moment of absent-mindedness if I had to sign something, I would not fall victim to any kind of frasaco [fiasco].”8 He kept this name and rank even when he was transferred to Oberdachstetten in Bavaria.9

  Eichmann, who of course had experience in conducting interrogations, had no concerns about the interrogators seeing through his disguise. The prisoner of war camp was huge, and proving anyone’s identity was nearly impossible. The men who might recognize his face, however, posed a much greater threat: the concentration camp survivors and the Jews Eichmann had encountered in his role as an “emigration expert.” These people occasionally visited the prison camps, searching for their tormentors and the people who had murdered their families. “Jewish commissions came to the camps,” Eichmann would later boast, “and we had to line up. They sized me up, yes, seeing if they could spot any mugs they recognized.… We had to line up by company, and … there was a commission of maybe 15 of these Hymies.… They went carefully up and down the rows, staring each of us right in the kisser, yes, me too, right in the mug, all smiles. We weren’t allowed to speak, or we’d have called them all kinds of names, and when they were done—two steps forward, and on to the next line.”10

  Eichmann did, however, say that it was quite easy to avoid these searches, as long as the prisoners stuck together and were not particularly eager for anyone to be found out. It was a difficult task to spot the smooth face of a uniformed SS officer among thousands of scruffy, unshaven men, especially when this group of inmates was united in defeat. But their unity rapidly began to crumble as more and more details of the Nazi war crimes became known, shocking and shaking the faith of even devoted National Socialists. There is a limit to the burden that can be borne by even the closest of comradeships. They tend to collapse when people start worrying about their individual futures—when they are confronted with interrogators from the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, for example, or placed on trial in Nuremberg. At that point, it became impossible to vanish into the crowd. Eichmann quickly realized he was under threat from people he counted as friends as well as from enemies. The National Socialists’ fear of the gallows suddenly made them tell the authorities they would know Eichmann’s face anywhere, keen as they were for people to forget exactly why this was.

  After the regime change, someone who had spent many years proclaiming his special role would inevitably become the surface onto which others tried to project their own guilt. Eichmann was no innocent scapegoat, but testimonies made during war crimes trials ascribed power to him that he never possessed: of course Eichmann hadn’t murdered six million Jews by himself. People knew exactly who Eichmann was, and for this very reason they started claiming they never knew him, had never met him, and had at best a rudimentary understanding of what he had done. They claimed the extermination of the Jews had been so top secret that no one even knew the names of the people involved. But when Eichmann’s name was mentioned, they didn’t say, “Who? Never heard of him!” Defendants and witnesses instead replied: “Him? Never met him!” They explained at length why they couldn’t have known exactly who and what he was, let alone encountered him in person. And so this surprising fact—the sheer number of people who knew Eichmann’s name, whether Nazis, regime opponents, or victims—vanished from sight.

  “I Would Leap Laughing into the Pit …”

  At the Nuremberg Trials, perpetrating the Holocaust was just one of many charges to be answered, and not even one of the more prominent ones. The authorities’ underestimation of the crime is apparent from the preparations the American prosecutor made for this section. In the end, only one man was assigned to it, and he was so overstretched that he relied almost entirely on Kasztner’s report.11 Given the monstrous scale of this crime against humanity, the endless list of those responsible, and the incredible task of trying to comprehend how things worked within a Reich that was under attack from all sides—something today’s researc
hers are still attempting to reconstruct—this can come as no surprise. The prosecution was also cautious about placing too much emphasis on Jewish affairs, for fear of being criticized by their own countries, and this too played its part in ensuring that the genocide did not become the International Military Tribunal’s most important theme. Images were shown of the piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, but the true magnitude of the horror emerged only at the end of 1945, in the testimonies of Rudolf Höß, Wilhelm Höttl, and Dieter Wisliceny. The first trial had been running for three months by this point (though it should be noted that all these statements had been available to the investigating authorities for months). If you run a computer search on the transcripts of the first Nuremberg trial for Eichmann’s name, you quickly get the impression that very little was said about him.12 This impression is strengthened by the fact that the name was incorrectly spelled (as Aichmann) in the edition of the Kasztner Report that was used as evidence. But if you look at how often the name occurs within the limited space granted to the topic, and count the sworn statements, only snippets of which were read out in court, things look rather different: when discussion turns to the extermination of the Jews, Eichmann is one of the most important names.13

  In July 1945, Eichmann was still stuck in an American prisoner of war camp in Oberpfalz, living under the name Adolf Karl Barth. Meanwhile at Nuremberg, Rudolf Mildner, who until recently had been the commander of the Security Police and the SD in Vienna, was hiding behind the picture he had painted of the chain of command there: “Gruppenführer Müller discussed the implementation verbally with Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, the head of Department IV A 4 and a member of the Security Service (SD) from Office III, who had been seconded to Office IV for these purposes.”14 The strategy is plain: with no documents and no witnesses, an outsider has no way of discovering the truth—and unfortunately, no one asked exactly how Mildner knew about the chain of command. In the lead-up to the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, and in many of the Nazis’ crime scenes, a multitude of reports and statements about Eichmann was produced. They stemmed from former opponents (Roswell McClelland, Switzerland, August 2, 1945), allies (Vajna Gabór, minister of the interior under Ferenc Szálasi in Hungary, August 28, 1945), and colleagues or friends. A month or so after the start of the first Nuremberg trial, the prosecution produced Wilhelm Höttl’s notorious testimony, which spoke of the six million victims that Eichmann had mentioned to him (November 26, 1945). In mid-December there were readings from Kasztner’s affidavit, and shortly afterward from Höttl’s sworn statement, which unleashed a flood of press articles with headlines like “Murder of Six Million Jews.” The numbers—four million dead in the concentration camps, and another two million killed by the Einsatzkommandos (special operations units)—were suddenly known all over the world, and their author was named in the same breath: Adolf Eichmann.