Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Nevertheless, Eichmann started studying the Hebrew alphabet by himself. And, whenever the occasion arose, he would advocate putting ‘some firm ground under the feet of the Jews’; Palestine in preference to crematoria; a political solution rather than a ‘physical solution’; emigration over expulsion over extermination. In the all-consuming crucible of Nazism, these were relatively humane beginnings for a genocidist who would become the ultimate Grand Inquisitor of European Jewry. Looming above all else, however, was his stolid acceptance and relentless expediting of whatever evil was decreed from above.

  Late in 1936, he was joined at the SD’s Jewish Desk by another von Mildenstein protégé: Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing, twenty-nine, a Prussian nobleman who had opened a building supply firm in Palestine in 1933 and spied for von Mildenstein there until the British intercepted his reports. In early 1937, Bolschwing initiated contacts between the SD, which wanted the Jews out of Germany, and the Zionist movement, which wanted German Jews in Palestine. He began by informing Eichmann that ‘a gentleman from Haganah’ – the Jewish defence force in Palestine – was visiting Berlin. Eichmann took Commander Feivel Polkes, a Polish-born accountant, out to lunch twice and went back to the office with an invitation to visit Palestine to discuss the trade-off further.

  Von Mildenstein, a civil engineer by profession, had transferred to the road-building Todt Organization,23 the same enterprise to which Simon Wiesenthal and thirty-three other hostages would be sold in 1944 as ‘non-German forced labour’. His successor, Herbert Hagen, elected to make the trip to Palestine with Eichmann in late 1937. Outfitted with press credentials from the Berliner Tageblatt – once a liberal Jewish newspaper until the Nazis took it over – Hagen and Eichmann set sail on a Romanian steamship in a bizarre and futile pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

  Eichmann and Hagen spent just two days in Palestine. While their ship was in the harbour of Haifa, Eichmann took a taxi to the top of Mount Carmel. Near Tel Aviv, he and Hagen visited a kibbutz and a German colony in Sarona which was a refuge for transplanted freemasons belonging to the forbidden order of Knights Templar. Commander Polkes didn’t catch up with them until they’d moved on to Cairo, and he had nothing concrete to offer them. In Cairo, Eichmann and Hagen did meet with the fanatical Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; already banished from Palestine for fomenting riots, he would spend the war in Berlin broadcasting for Hitler. When the two German ‘journalists’ wanted to return from Egypt to Palestine to pursue their Haganah negotiations, however, the British Consulate, having learned of their contacts and seen through their press credentials, refused them visas.

  Returning home from his Holy Land pilgrimage on an Italian ship, Eichmann caught paratyphoid fever, which he termed ‘the pathetic end of what had looked to be a promising trip.’ Discharged from the ship’s hospital only when the boat landed in Bari, Eichmann wrote ‘a detailed report absolutely negative in substance’ upon reaching Berlin; it purported to quote disgruntled German Jews in Palestine as saying it was better to be in a concentration camp back home. SD chief Heydrich scrawled ‘Good’ at the bottom of it.

  Blundering onward and upward, Eichmann left the enlisted ranks on 30 January 1938, when he was commissioned a lieutenant and commended for his ‘comprehensive knowledge of the methods of organization and ideology of the opponent, Jewry.’ For all his later power, though, he never rose above lieutenant-colonel; no higher hierarchical slot had been designated for coordinating mass extermination.

  When Adolf Hitler annexed his native Austria on 12 March 1938, and German troops received a jubilant welcome, an SD team was dispatched there, too. Adolf Eichmann was certain he’d be chosen to go on that mission to his family’s adopted homeland, but when he wasn’t, he swallowed his disappointment: ‘Orders are orders. You’ve got to obey, and that’s that.’

  As it turned out, Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich and Hagen all had higher hopes for him. A week later, he was sent to Vienna as head of the Centre for Emigration of Austrian Jews.

  While Eichmann had been chafing in Berlin for an Austrian assignment, Baron Louis von Rothschild, head of the international banking family, was taking Sunday dinner in his Viennese palace on the Prinz Eugen-Strasse on 13 March 1938, when six steel-helmeted Gestapo men arrived to arrest him. His buder made them wait in a vestibule until the Baron finished his meal. Then they marched Baron Rothschild off to a prison cell and, later, internment in a Gestapo hotel until a ransom could be negotiated with the House of Rothschild. The Nazis asked for twenty million dollars, but received considerably less. It was still a time when one could do business with Hitler.

  Upon arrival in Vienna, Adolf Eichmann was given ‘a small room with nothing in it but a desk’ in the glittering, chandeliered Palais Rothschild: his headquarters for what he would later look back on as the best year of his career. It was here that he discovered his two true talents: he could organize ruthlessly, and he could negotiate from a position of strength, real or illusory.

  ‘I’ve tried to find out exactly when Eichmann turned from a theoretical expert on the Jewish question into an executioner,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘When he came to Vienna, he was still talking politely about “forced emigration”. I’ve talked to Jews who remember Eichmann from those days. All of them say he was different from the rest of the SS hoodlums. His attitude was unyielding, but always icily polite.’

  Eichmann’s mission at the time was economic: to extract as much money and treasure as possible from wealthy Jews who wanted to emigrate and raise additional foreign currency to pay for the emigration of poorer Jews. He set the machinery in motion overnight. When a seventeen-year-old Viennese Jew named Arthur Pier went to the police station to apply for a passport and saw the long line of desperate people, he decided this kind of discomfort wasn’t for him. Instead, he went to the post office and mailed in his application. Forty-eight hours later, a passport arrived by return mail. ‘I took a train to Greece,’ he recalls, ‘and three weeks later I was in Palestine’, where he eventually changed his name to Asher Ben Nathan and came back to Europe after die war as an Eichmann-hunter, a Wiesenthal partner, and, later, Israel’s first ambassador to its erstwhile archenemy, Germany.

  Early in his Viennese tenure, Eichmann sent for the leaders of the Jewish community, all of whom had been locked up in the Nazi takeover. Looking for a Jew he could work with on ‘stepped-up emigration’, he confronted one Dr Josef Löwenherz, who was still so indignant about his arrest that he insulted Eichmann.

  ‘Anger got the better of me,’ Eichmann recalled in 1960. ‘I lost control, which very seldom happened. I don’t know what got into me. I let myself go and slapped him in the face. It wasn’t the kind of slap that hurt, I’m sure of that. I haven’t got that much muscle. But I never concealed that incident. Later on, when I was a commandant, I spoke of it in the presence of my subordinate officers and Dr Löwenherz – and begged his pardon. I did that deliberately . . . because in the department I ran later, I did not tolerate physical violence. That was why I apologized in uniform and in the presence of my staff.’ Nothing is more important to a desk murderer than clean hands. Jolted by his treatment yet tantalized by Eichmann’s offer to aid Jewish emigration, Dr Löwenherz elected to work with him throughout the war: drawing up draft proposals for deporting four million Jews to Palestine instead of Poland . . . negotiating with Eichmann over housing for evicted Jews . . . setting extortionate exit fees and foreign currency exchange rates for Jews able to buy their way out of Austria. . . and even contacting an American Jewish organization, the Joint Distribution Committee, in an effort to raise further foreign funds for ransoming the Jews of Austria. He was, Hannah Arendt wrote, an historic figure, for he became ‘the first Jewish functionary actually to organize a whole Jewish community into an institution at the service of the Nazi authorities.’24 If, as she claims, the Jews co-operated in their own destruction, then the process began when Eichmann slapped Löwenherz.

  In Berlin on the morning of Wednesday, 9 November 1938, Eichman
n’s chief, Reinhard Heydrich, explained to Hermann Göring, the portly, bemedalled Nazi air marshal and military commander, that the expulsion process was going fast in Austria, more slowly in Germany, and not fast enough in either place: ‘The problem is not to make the rich Jews leave, but to get rid of the Jewish mob.’ The death in Paris that afternoon of a wounded German Embassy attaché, Ernst vom Rath – shot two days earlier by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Hirschel Grynszpan – was the signal which triggered the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom in which Jewish shops and synagogues were systematically smashed and torched across the Third Reich.

  Simon Wiesenthal says the big change in Eichmann came with Kristallnacht: ‘Heydrich’s orders to Vienna specifically asked that Eichmann be notified. So people saw him going from one synagogue to another, helping with his own hands while personally supervising total destruction. They say he seemed exhilarated. A few days later, the leaders of the Jewish community in Vienna noticed that, when Eichmann summoned them, he no longer offered them chairs. They had to stand up, three steps away, at attention.’

  By early 1939, the personality change in Eichmann was visible to all. Dr Franz Meyer, a German Zionist who had dealt with him in Berlin, was summoned to Vienna for a session on ‘forced emigration’ with several other Jewish leaders. At Eichmann’s trial, Meyer testified: ‘So terrible was the change that I didn’t know whether I was meeting the same man. Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He received us with insolence and rudeness.’

  In the spring of 1939 – when Adolf Hitler invaded an already dismembered Czechoslovakia and re-formed the Czech Lands into a Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia adjoining a puppet Slovak fascist state – Adolf Eichmann, thirty-three, was transferred to Prague. In the greying golden city on the Vltava River (which reverted to its Habsburg name of Moldau), he was sorry to say that the Jews he dealt with ‘were calmer and more easy-going and, for that reason, neither side registered the same success as in Vienna . . . Maybe it was their Czech accent that kept us from – how shall I say? – making contact.’ This despite the fame enjoyed by the German-language Jews of Prague – whose numbers once included Kafka25 and Rilke – for speaking the purest German heard anywhere in the world! And this from a high-school drop-out whose own atrocious German, overlaid by a thick Upper Austrian dialect acquired during his years in Linz, made him difficult for both Berliners and Viennese, let alone Praguers, to comprehend.

  Nor did he show any respect for history or tradition. When he informed the president of Prague’s Jewish community that ‘the Jews must go – and fast!’, the man remonstrated that, after all, the Jews had lived in Prague for 1100 years and couldn’t vanish overnight, for they were indigenous. Eichmann shrieked: ‘Indigenous?! I’ll show you what’s indigenous!’ The first shipment of Jews was deported the next day.

  During his six-month stint in Prague, Eichmann was a driving force in reorganizing the Empress Maria Theresa’s old fortress town of Theresienstadt (Terezín) on the banks of the Elbe River as a prison camp purporting to be a ‘privileged ghetto’. Half-Jews, Jewish civil servants, and Jews who’d served on the German side in World War I or married Aryans would be eligible, as would wealthy Jews willing to buy their way into ‘protective custody’ there by voluntarily relinquishing their fortunes. Though Theresienstadt didn’t open until 1941, by which time Eichmann had left Prague, he claimed ‘paternity’ of it and took credit for its ‘success’ as a ‘humane’ showcase to reassure International Red Cross inspectors alarmed by reports of atrocities in the camps. Replete with family housing and its own Jewish mayor and orchestra, Theresienstadt had only one ‘defect’, as Eichmann would conclude later with regret: it was too small for its purpose, so, by 1943, to make room for new arrivals, surplus Jews were either transported to extermination camps or shot on the spot. Some 33,500 would perish in Theresienstadt; for another 84,500, it would be an anteroom to extermination.

  The Final Solution, however, had not yet been invented when the ‘phoney war’ that Hitler had been winning by annexation and acquiescence in Austria, partition and subversion in Czechoslovakia, exploded into violent combat and World War II with his blitzkrieg of Poland in September 1939. Eichmann – by then a captain – was transferred back to Berlin as head of the Reich Centre for Jewish Emigration.

  Early in his pursuit of Eichmann, Simon Wiesenthal sought to ascertain not only what his quarry had done, but why he did it. He tried to talk to schoolmates from Linz and comrades from his SS days in the early 1930s, but they had little to say to him. One of the Eichmann family’s good friends, who had not been a Nazi, simply refused to believe the accusations against ‘that oafish, lacklustre Adolf who never spoke up and often seemed to get stupidly stuck on just one idea.’ Wiesenthal said later: ‘The man didn’t realize how well he’d characterized Eichmann – how right he was and, at the same time, how wrong.’

  In 1985, Wiesenthal told me: ‘I made a mistake in looking for a motive in his early life. There was no motive, no hatred, no anti-Semitism. When I said some of this in my memoir, people think I’m crazy. But I say no. He was such a product of Nazi indoctrination that if they had given him a direct order to take the telephone directory and kill all the people whose names began with K, no matter if Jewish or not, he would have done it– including the Kaiser. Or all people with red hair. During his interrogation in Israel, he acknowledged that, if his bosses had ordered him to kill his father, he would have. And, if Hitler had ordered him to ship the Jews to Palestine, instead of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and let them start a Jewish state, he would have done so.

  ‘In this respect, he was a typical product of not only the Nazi years, but of any dictatorship. Eichmann could have been a communist taking orders from Stalin or a mafioso from his godfather. In every dictatorship, the appeal to such people is the same: you let the Führer think for you.’

  Wiesenthal says that many of his ‘clients’ were good neighbours and even pillars of their prewar and postwar communities.

  ‘Look, I’ve studied the life stories of too many Nazi murderers. Nobody was born a murderer. They’d mostly been farmers, workers, clerks or bureaucrats – the kind of people you meet every day. Some had good early childhoods; some didn’t. Almost all had religious instruction of some kind; none had a prior criminal record. Yet they became murderers – expert murderers! – out of conviction. I can’t possibly know their reactions to their first crimes and they might not even remember, but I do know that every one of them later murdered wholesale. It was like they put on their SS uniforms and replaced them in the closet by hanging up their consciences with their civilian clothes. In the moment Eichmann put on the swastika, the first casualty he deported was not a Jew, but his own conscience.’

  12

  Wannsee: the final solution

  Safe in Berlin during the first two years of the war, Adolf Eichmann saw his somewhat passive efforts to expedite Jewish emigration grind to a standstill as the widening conflict closed off frontiers and communications. With Hitler’s rapid conquest of Europe and with expansion of the war to Asia and perhaps even the US imminent, there were no havens left for Eichmann to seek on behalf of his Reich Centre for Jewish Emigration.

  Much of his time was spent plotting a nebulous programme to transplant four million Jews to the French island of Madagascar on Africa’s south-east coast. Eichmann called this ‘a dream once dreamed by the protagonist of the Jewish state idea’, his idol Theodor Herzl, but here (as was often the case) he didn’t have his facts straight: Herzl had considered Uganda, not Madagascar. In any event, the proposal was never taken seriously by his higher-ups, so the in-house Zionist was available for other chores, such as scouting Polish farmland for extermination sites and even ordering–in October 1941, three months before the Final Solution was formalized – the experimental gassing of eighty Jews in Riga, Latvia, while they were travelling in mobile vans. Eichmann’s participation marked another milestone along his road to hell: the transiti
on from conspirator to mass murderer.

  In mid-1941, Eichmann was promoted to major and named head of Section IV-B-4: the ‘Jewish desk’ at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Section IV was the Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Müller; sub-section B handled ‘Sects’, and then there were four ‘decks’: 1: Catholics; 2: Protestants; 3: freemasons; and 4: Jews.

  With genocide as with Germany, Hitler had been expanding eastward, dodging and feinting whenever thwarted, and, when threatened by a warning finger, backing off, but gobbling the arm the next time. Having conquered Poland and absorbed much of Eastern Europe through such tactics, he could now practise genocide on a grander scale unfettered by the prying eyes of his citizens and churchmen whose revulsion at his early experiments at gassing mental and physical ‘defectives’ as’ useless mouths’ to feed had forced Hitler to beat a tactical retreat. When he decided to extend his extermination programme to the Jews in a place where protest would be minimal, Poland, with its long history of anti-Semitism, seemed an ideal setting, for there would be plenty of willing hands to stoke the ovens of hatred.

  Though Hitler had publicly advocated ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race’, it was his heir apparent, the blimpy Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, who, on 31 July 1941, first entrusted SD head Rcinhard Heydrich with ‘making all necessary organizational, practical, and financial preparations for bringing about the final solution of the Jewish problem in the territories within the German sphere of influence in Europe.’

  Nowhere in Göring’s three-paragraph memo to Heydrich was anything specific spelled out. Nowhere was there a concrete blueprint or outline saying, ‘Now the Jews will be killed.’ All was left to inference from words like ‘final solution’ or ’ total solution’ or ‘territorial solution’. But, as Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg points out, these euphemisms were nonetheless a clear authorization to invent: to initiate action that could not yet be articulated. In every aspect of this operation, invention became the partner of necessity. For every agency involved, says Hilberg, ‘every problem was unprecedented. Not just how to kill the Jews, but what to do with their property thereafter. And not only that, but how to deal with the problem of not letting the world know what had happened.’