The path which brought Adolf Eichmann to Budapest had begun when he joined the Austrian Nazi Party on 1 April 1932, at the age of twenty-six. The following year he quit his job as a sales representative for the Vacuum Oil Company of Vienna and joined the Austrian SS as a full-time member. His first big opportunity came after Hitler forcibly united his Austrian homeland with the Third Reich in early 1938. Eichmann came to the attention of Dr Hans Globke, one of the authors of the Nuremberg Laws, the series of statutes by which the Nazis gave legal substance to the brutally direct paragraph of their party programme that read: ‘Only a member of the Race can be a German subject. Only a person of Germanic blood can be a member of the Race, regardless of religion. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the Race.’
In 1938 the Nuremberg Laws were also to be effected in Austria, and to expedite this process a ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ was established in Vienna. Eichmann – who by diligent study had turned himself into an ‘expert’ on Jewish affairs – was appointed head of this bureau. A few months later he was promoted to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer, or captain.
It was in this capacity that he set about the task of ridding Austria of its Jewish population – not, as in later years and in other countries, by extermination, but by enforced emigration. The Jews of Austria had already been thoroughly demoralized by a reign of terror. Now, from his office in the commandeered Rothschild family mansion in Prinz Eugen Street, Eichmann offered them a way out. Working through the leadership of the Jewish community, whom he bewildered and frightened with a mixture of crude threats and honeyed words, combined with a disconcerting display of knowledge about Jewish religious and cultural matters, he secured their cooperation in his ingenious emigration programme.
What it came down to was that well-to-do Jews were stripped of all their assets but left with enough to pay their way out of the country. It was up to them to find visas for themselves and their families, genuine or forged. But Eichmann could ‘help’ them with the problem of foreign currency, without which they would not be admitted to foreign countries. He arranged for the Reichsbank to make this currency available to them at exorbitantly high rates of exchange. Only the rich Jews could pay these amounts, and the enormous profits made on the exchange were used to buy foreign currency for their poorer brethren. Thus, the ingenious Eichmann used the rich Jews to finance the departure of the poor Jews without it costing the Reich a pfennig.
Eichmann also ordered the Jewish community leaders to create an emigration fund to help the poor Jews get out and sent Jewish fundraisers abroad to collect for it. They came back with almost $10 million, a very substantial sum in those days, and before long almost one hundred thousand Jews had left Austria ‘voluntarily’. Impressed, SS Chief Reinhard Heydrich came to Vienna to congratulate him personally. Other important officials came from Berlin to study his methods and went away as impressed as Heydrich. Eichmann’s modus operandi was to become a model for use elsewhere. His star was never to shine more brightly than during those days in Vienna.
Eichmann’s next assignment was in Prague, after the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and there he had similar success in terrorizing the Jews and expelling them in large numbers. He was also given overall charge of a similar bureau in Berlin, but there he was not so successful. This was partly because, right at the seat of Nazi power, there were hordes of rival officials and partly because the leaders of the Berlin Jewish community seemed less cooperative* than their counterparts in Prague and Vienna.
With the outbreak of World War II, on Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the enforced emigration programme came to an abrupt end. From now on the fate of the Jews was to be physical destruction, though this would make no difference to Eichmann’s enthusiasm for his work. By their conquest of Poland the Germans eventually ‘acquired’ another three and a half million Jews, whose disposal Eichmann assumed would become his responsibility. When German military units began killing off large numbers of Polish Jews in a series of unconnected, localized atrocities, Eichmann felt, as did Heydrich, that this approach was inefficient and unprofessional. The time had not yet come, however, for the Final Solution and, meanwhile, there was another job to be done.
The triumphant Nazi leadership had decreed that the parts of Poland that bordered on the Reich were to be incorporated into it. Consequently, there would be a vast population exchange; the ethnic Germans of Poland were to be brought into the border regions, while the Jews living there, as well as most of the local Poles and all the Gipsies, would be moved eastwards. Eichmann was put in charge of this operation and soon hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, and Gipsies were moving eastwards under appalling conditions while the Volksdeutsche were transported in considerably more comfort from central Poland and the Baltic states to occupy the homes and farms Eichmann had emptied for them.
The Jews were concentrated into ghettos in central Poland to await their fate, but Hans Frank, the Reichsprotektor of this region (known as the General Government), did not want the SS meddling in his territory. He had no feelings of warmth for either Poles or Jews, but felt only contempt and dislike for Himmler and Heydrich; nor could he tolerate having their subordinate Eichmann interfering in his fiefdom. It took a long time, but Frank was persistent enough, clever enough, and close enough to Hitler to keep Heydrich and Eichmann at arm’s length and finally to get them off his back altogether. Thus was Eichmann cheated of the opportunity to dispatch the three and a half million Jews of Poland to the death camps when the gas chambers and crematoria were ready to receive them. That task was carried out by others.
But there were compensations for Eichmann. The Germans rapidly overran much of Europe until, taking into account satellites and allies, another three and a half million Jews came under their control. When the time was ripe, Eichmann was confident, his Department IV-B-4 would deliver them to their fate.
Meanwhile, the Nazis had also invaded the Soviet Union, and on the heels of the advancing Wehrmacht went a new instrument of warfare, the special units known as Einsatzgruppen, each of battalion strength, whose duty was to kill unarmed civilians – Jews and Soviet commissars – whom they found in the newly occupied areas. ‘The Jews of the East are the mainstay of Bolshevism and, therefore, according to the Führer’s wish, must be exterminated,’ the four Einsatzgruppen commanders were told.
Eichmann was not one of them. His special talents lay in the field of organization, administration, and logistics and, indeed, it is possible that he had no particular stomach for the actual killing. However, he did go to inspect the Einsatzgruppen at their grisly work, as they machine-gunned naked men, women, and children by the hundreds on the edge of burial pits. He did not make a habit of such visits, though, for he found the mass shooting a messy business. Years later, during his pre-trial interrogation in Jerusalem, he was to recall with real or feigned distaste: ‘I can still see a woman with a child. She was shot and then the baby in her arms. His brains splattered all around, also over my leather overcoat.’
The mass-shooting methods of the Einsatzgruppen had many drawbacks. Hardened and indoctrinated though they were, the troopers involved in this ghastly work had to take more and more alcohol to keep going, and some had even been known to go mad and turn their guns on their officers. ‘Look at the eyes of these men,’ SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky told visiting SS Reichsführer Himmler during one action. ‘Observe how shattered they are. These men’s nerves are ruined for the rest of their lives.’ Above all, this method was inefficient, untidy, and rather too public. ‘A more elegant method’ would have to be found, and again Eichmann was brought in.
He went to the Lublin district of Poland, where experiments were being carried out with gas. Jews were crammed into a sealed bus whose exhaust system emptied the carbon monoxide gas into the vehicle. The bus was driven for several minutes until enough gas had been pumped in, then stopped alongside a ditch. When the doors were opened, the dead and dying were shovelled out into the ditch. Effective,
but not good enough. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, was also busy with experiments to find the best means of mass slaughter. Himmler sent Eichmann to liaise with Hoess, an old friend. Eichmann mentioned the mobile slaughterhouse he had seen at work in Poland, but they agreed it would be inadequate for the vast hordes Auschwitz would later have to cope with. Before Eichmann went back to his headquarters in Berlin, he said he would try to find a suitable gas.
At the end of November 1941 just such a gas was discovered, though not by Eichmann. The almost instantly lethal Zyklon B had been tried out with great effect on Russian prisoners of war. In addition to being quick-working, one of the great advantages of the gas was that it could be stored in dry, solid form in cans, the pellets turning to gas on exposure to the air. Zyklon B was soon being manufactured in great quantities.
More or less coincidentally with the discovery of Zyklon B’s properties, SS Reichsführer Heydrich summoned Eichmann, other SS and Gestapo men, and a number of senior officials of various ministries to a top-secret conference in the smart Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Meeting at Germany’s Interpol headquarters on 20 January 1942, they were told by Heydrich that Hitler had given the go-ahead for the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Responsibility for carrying out this programme of mass extermination, regardless of geographical boundaries, lay with Heydrich himself.
Somewhat optimistically, Heydrich presented an estimate showing that the overall operation would involve 11 million Jews, including those of Britain and of neutral Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey – not to mention those in the unconquered parts of the Soviet Union. Europe was ‘to be combed from east to west’ for Jews, and in the execution of this vast operation Eichmann was to play an absolutely key role, answerable only to Heydrich himself. It was another of the peaks of his career, one of those times of great elation that he experienced whenever his formidable organizational skills were to be put to the test.
In the lively debate on ways and means to bring about the Final Solution, Eichmann played a prominent role. The delegates were especially interested in the fate of the part-Jews, or Mischlinge. What proportion of Jewish blood should properly qualify a person for extermination? The experts tried to devise means of calculating this with some precision. Eichmann was one of the hard-liners who thought it all foolishness: all Mischlinge should be dispatched as though they were full-blooded Jews, he argued. Eichmann was obviously not aware of the rumour, current only in the highest Nazi circles, that Heydrich himself had one Jewish grandmother. In any event, the matter was finally deferred for consideration at a later date.
The conference broke up in a good mood after drinks and dinner. Heydrich, Gestapo chief Müller, and Eichmann stayed behind for a fireside chat at which Heydrich confirmed that all organizational, technical, and material requirements for the Final Solution were to be Eichmann’s responsibility. Soon afterwards, Eichmann launched concentration and deportation actions throughout occupied and satellite Europe – though not in Poland, which had almost as many Jews as all the other countries put together. Despite Heydrich’s claim to complete responsibility, regardless of geography, Reichsprotektor Frank remained determined to keep him and his minions out of his bailiwick. Heydrich’s assassination in Prague, in June 1942, inadvertently set the seal on Frank’s victory in his private war with the SS and finally confirmed Eichmann’s exclusion from dealing with the Polish Jews.
He bore his disappointment as best he could, and despite his regret at Heydrich’s death (‘I never knew a cooler dog,’ he said admiringly), he was no doubt gratified that after the demise of his boss he became responsible directly to Himmler himself for his work on the Final Solution. He was like the head of some grotesque pan-European travel agency, dealing in one-way package tours to oblivion. From his office in Gestapo headquarters on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, Eichmann kept an overview of the work of the Kommando leaders he dispatched to the four corners of the Continent. From time to time he dashed off on an inspection visit to one of the capitals concerned and wherever and whenever he went, the pace of concentration and deportation quickened.
Despite his zeal and undoubted efficiency, the total of Eichmann’s deportations between the Wannsee Conference and March 1944 – in the region of three-quarters of a million – was not impressive compared with the targets the conference had set. Terrible though the figure seems, it was only a fraction of a total Eichmann was later to boast of to a friend: ‘I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the deaths of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.’ Eichmann’s victims numbered as follows:
• Belgium – 25,000. ‘It was a very meagre affair,’ Eichmann told a confidant after the war. The reason was partly the significant resistance of the Belgian population, which enabled many Jews to escape the dragnet, and partly the slackness of the German military authorities in registering Jews.
• Bulgaria – 12,000. An increasingly reluctant ally of the Nazis and with a strong liberal tradition, Bulgaria, stubbornly resisting the mass deportation of its Jews, proved to be another disappointment for Eichmann.
• Czechoslovakia – 120,000. The Nazi grip was almost total, especially in the savage repression which followed Heydrich’s murder in Prague.
• France – 65,000. Some 200,000 French Jews escaped the net. Some of the reasons for this were: the refusal of Vichy leader Marshal Henri Pétain to sign a deportation decree; the refusal of the authorities in the Italian zone of occupation to take part in the Final Solution; the rescue activities of the French maquis; and the growing disgust, even of French anti-Semites, with Nazi extermination methods.
• The Greater Reich: Germany – 180,000; Austria – 60,000. On his home ground Eichmann encountered no significant resistance to the deportation of the remnants of the two Jewish communities.
• Greece – 60,000. Most of the Jews were already concentrated in the port city of Salonika, where there had been a community for some 2500 years, and thus were easy to round up and deport.
• Holland – 120,000. The German hold on the Netherlands was total; virtually all Dutch Jews were deported.
• Italy – 10,000. Germany’s principal ally was uncooperative where the Jews were concerned, declining to let them be deported either from Italian soil or from those parts of France, Yugoslavia and Greece which Italy occupied. Things ‘improved’ only after the Nazis occupied northern Italy, following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini.
• Poland. In the German zone, two big ghettos, Litzmannstadt (the German name of Lódź during World War II) and Bialystok, were not under the control of Hans Frank, Eichmann’s bête noire. But even here Eichmann was frustrated. With great effort, he deported no more than 10,000 Jews from Bialystok to Auschwitz because the local administration protested that they were needed for war-work. At Litzmannstadt, Eichmann ran up against even more powerful opposition from local officials who were making a vast profit out of the slave labour of the ghetto. Eventually, it was agreed that the ghetto would be ‘gradually reduced.’
• Rumania – 75,000. Of the large Jewish community, about half, 400,000, survived the war. Despite its earlier barbarities, even the rabidly anti-Semitic régime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s ally, balked at the Final Solution, in which tens of thousands of Jews were driven across the border and shot.
• Scandinavia: Denmark – 425; Norway – 700. The Jewish communities in these two countries were small and, in both, the non-Jewish population helped their Jewish compatriots to get away to neutral Sweden.
• Yugoslavia – 10,000. For ‘technical’ reasons, most of the Jews of Serbia and Croatia (the two main zones of a dismembered Yugoslavia) were shot or gassed on the spot rather than deported. However, many thousands managed to escape to the zone held by Tito and to join his partisans, and thousands more were given sanctuary by Hitler’s Italian allies.
If Eichmann fell far short of the quotas, he also fell short of his own exacting standards
. As he told his friend Hoess during one of their boozy evening chats, he felt obliged to destroy every Jew he could lay his hands on. ‘Any compromise, even the slightest, will have to be paid for bitterly at a later date,’ said Eichmann.
Many top Nazis had ‘favourite’ Jews whom they helped to escape or for whom they secured better-than-average treatment. Many others allowed themselves to be bribed, or entered without qualms into official negotiations to sell Jews their freedom. Not so Eichmann. He was determined that there should be no exception for any reason, whether of sentiment, personal gain, or high policy. As Heinrich Karl Gruber, a German Protestant clergyman, recalled at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, whenever he went to plead with him for an individual Jew, the answer was always negative. ‘He was like a piece of ice or marble,’ said Gruber. ‘Nothing ever touched his heart.’ Or his common sense, it would seem. Once one of his assistants urged that an exception be made for a Jew named Abraham Weiss. Weiss had invented an electric light that was invisible from the air and thus of great value during night-time bombing raids; such a fertile mind might be employed to produce more useful gadgets for the Reich; Weiss would be useful to the Nazi war effort. But Eichmann ruled that ‘as the patent has already been transferred to the Reich Patent Office, there is no further interest in the affair.’
Although disposing of the lives of hundreds of thousands, the omnipotent Eichmann’s eye was ‘on the sparrow.’ Thus when he heard that a French Jew named Max Gollub was about to obtain a South American passport, he ordered a special action to have Gollub picked up individually and sent to Auschwitz on the next transport.
Nothing better illustrates this meticulous attention to detail and determination to allow no individual to escape than the case of Jenni Cozzi, the Latvian-born Jewish widow of a senior Italian officer, who was caught in the net when the Nazis overran her native country. In Rome, comrades of her late husband urged the Italian Foreign Ministry to secure her release. The Italian Foreign Ministry referred the matter to the German Foreign Ministry, which passed the request on to Eichmann’s headquarters. They were rebuffed. The Italians tried again; it was, after all, a debt of honour to the memory of a distinguished officer to save his widow, herself an Italian citizen. Again, Eichmann refused. The request was ‘unjustifiable,’ he told his Foreign Ministry, asking them to urge the Italian ambassador to abandon his efforts on behalf of ‘the Jewess Cozzi.’ Still the Italians persisted and eventually Fascist Party headquarters in Rome wrote to Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin on behalf of the signora. Again Eichmann said No and the Italian officer’s widow never did emerge from the Riga concentration camp. As Eichmann once explained to a colleague, ‘Any exception will create a precedent which would impede the de-Judaization measures.’
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 2
