by Alan Levy
In late August or early September of 1941, Adolf Eichmann had been summoned to Heydrich’s office in Berlin. Heydrich seemed almost ill at ease, Eichmann recalled in his memoirs and his interrogations in Israel. ‘The Führer, well, emigration is. . .’ Heydrich began stumblingly. Then he veered off into what Eichmann called ‘a little speech about emigration’, which had virtually ceased, before coming to the point: ‘The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.’
‘Those were his words,’ Eichmann would recall of Heydrich. ‘Then he remained silent, which was not his way, as if he wanted to test the effect of his words on me. I can still remember that. In the first moment, I didn’t grasp the implications because he chose his words so carefully. When I did understand, I didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say any more. I had never thought of such a thing – of such a solution through violence. I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest. I was, so to speak, blown out’ – though he did recover his zest all too soon.
Christian Wirth, a genocidist known as ‘the savage Christian’ had already been sent east to set up an experimental death camp in Chelmno, a Polish village some 125 miles north-west of the city of Lodz, which once had a large Jewish population. Originally intended to revive the euthanasia programme on the eastern front by ‘treating’ 25,000 tubercular Poles in the castle of Chelmno, Wirth’s project was instead transformed into the testing-ground for Aktion Reinhard, to which Heydrich would ultimately bequeath his own first name. Aktion Reinhard was nothing less than the extermination of the Jews of Poland.
According to Franz Schalhng, a German policeman (not SS) who served as a security guard in Chelmno that first winter, the SS made him and his police colleagues sign a pledge ‘promising to shut up about whatever we’d see.’ After they’d signed, they asked what their top-secret mission was. They were told: ‘The final solution of the Jewish problem.’
At Chelmno, where he took to rattling a can of gold fillings taken from the teeth of his victims, Wirth worked with ‘moving vans’ that met arriving Jews at the freight station and gassed them en route to the camp. Disguised as Red Cross ambulances and known to their operators as ‘Black Ravens’, these mobile gas chambers pumped exhaust fumes from their engines into the backs of the vans as they pulled away from the station. Passengers were delivered directly to the crematorium dead on arrival. Each van’s rear end could be tilted to unload its cargo directly into a pit for burning.
Later, when this system proved impractical because there was too much to clean up before the vans could be used again, Wirth equipped Chelmno’s fixed gas chamber with shower fixtures, as he had at Brandenburg in his German euthanasia days, to disguise it as a bath and lull the suspicions of victims who died wondering when water would start flowing from that hissing faucet.
There is a church in Chelmno – and there the Germans would bring naked Jews whenever the mobile and fixed gas chambers were overtaxed or broken and mow them down with machine-guns in the courtyard before the uncaring eyes of the locals. An uncaring world was given an early warning on 19 January 1942, when Jakub Szulman, the rabbi of Grabow, a dozen miles from Chelmno, wrote to Jewish leaders in Lodz:
My very dear friends:
I waited to write to confirm what I’d heard. Alas, to our great grief, we now know all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything. They’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they’re all buried in Rzuszow forest. The Jews are killed in two ways, by shooting or gas. It’s just happened to thousands of Lodz Jews. Do not think that this is being written by a madman. Alas, it is the tragic, horrible truth.
Though it had been in operation for months, ‘the final solution of the Jewish problem’ wasn’t formalized until the day after Rabbi Szulman wrote this warning. On Tuesday, 20 January 1942, at a villa on the Wannsee – a suburban lake to the west of Berlin – Heydrich convened fifteen State Secretaries: the civil servants in charge of the day-to-day running of ministries and key departments. The Ministries of Justice, Interior, and Foreign and Eastern Territories were represented, as were the Nazi party chancellery and the agency for Göring’s Four-Year Plan for economic self-sufficiency. Also on hand was Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.
‘At least seven of the fifteen people who met at Wannsee had doctorates, mostly PhDs,’ says Simon Wiesenthal with utter scorn. And these educated men – these esteemed Doctors of Philosophy and Medicine and Law – who also had the knowledge of what was happening in Poland, sat around a table in the most civilized surroundings and formulated the greatest genocide, the most barbaric slaughter of innocent civilians in human history.’
One of the lowest-ranking persons present was SS Major Adolf Eichmann, who, as head of Gestapo bureau IV-B-4, had sent out the invitations and helped prepare statistics (largely inaccurate) for Heydrich’s opening speech. The Final Solution Conference, as it was called, had been previously set for 10 December 1941, but postponed by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor three days earlier and the German and Italian declarations of war upon the United States that week. With the war now global, Nazi Germany had no inhibitions about totally abandoning its initial solutions to the Jewish problem – evacuation and emigration – and moving beyond the interim solution of concentration to the final solution: extermination.
It was Eichmann who kept the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which began at 11 a.m. on the third Tuesday of 1942. It took the dozen doctors, diplomats, and generals – plus a colonel, a captain, and an awestruck Major Eichmann – a litde less than an hour and a half to formulate the fate of eleven million European Jews and seal the doom of six million of them.
Eichmann’s minutes show that Heydrich opened the meeting by announcing that Marshal Göring had given him ‘the responsibility for working out the final solution of the Jewish problem regardless of geographical boundaries. Emigration has now, with the Führer’s approval, been replaced by another solution: the evacuation of the Jews to the East. The present actions, however, must be viewed as mere expedients, but they offer a source of practical experience of the utmost importance with a view to the final solution to come.’
‘What does all this mean?’ Eichmann was asked by his Israeli interrogator almost twenty years later.
Readily, Eichmann translated from the bureaucratese: ‘Since emigration was now prohibited, they were to be deported to the East.’
‘What is meant by “practical experience”?’
Eichmann conceded that this was the systematic rounding up and shooting of jews, which had already begun in Russia and Poland – as Wiesenthal was witnessing and experiencing by then.
‘Within the framework of the final solution,’ Eichmann’s minutes went on, ‘Jews will be conscripted for labour in the eastern territories under appropriate leadership. Large labour gangs of those fit for work will be formed, with the sexes separated. They will be made to build roads as they are led into these territories. A large percentage of them will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural diminution.’
‘What is meant by “natural diminution”?’ Eichmann was asked.
‘That’s perfectly normal dying,’ he replied. ‘Of a heart attack or pneumonia, for instance. If I were to drop dead just now, that would be natural diminution.’
His Israeli interrogator, Captain Avner Less, persisted: ‘If a man is forced to perform heavy physical labour and not given enough to eat, he grows weaker, and if he gets so weak that he has a heart attack . . . ?’
‘That,’ said Eichmann, ‘undoubtedly would have been reported as natural diminution.’
Heydrich’s opening remarks went on: ‘The remainder who survive – and they will certainly be the ones with the greatest physical endurance – will have to be treated accordingly. For, if released, they would, as a natural selection of the fittest, form a germ cell from which the Jewish race could build itself up again. This is the lesson of history.’
‘What does “treated accordingly” mean?’ Less asked Ei
chmann.
‘That – that. . .’ stammered Eichmann the stenographer, seeking to dissociate himself from the minutes he’d taken. ‘That comes from Himmler. Natural selection – that’s – that was his hobby.’
‘Yes, but what does it mean here?’
‘Killed, killed. Undoubtedly.’
Heydrich concluded that, ‘in the course of implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from West to East . . . For the moment, the evacuated Jews will be brought little by little to so-called transit ghettoes from where they will be transported farther to the east.’ These were ghettoes that would be or had been decimated of local Jews to make way for the newcomers who wouldn’t linger there long. Heydrich then went over the specifics country by country: in France, ‘the seizure of Jews for evacuation should in all likelihood proceed without major difficulty.’ Romania would be more of a problem because ‘even today a Jew there can buy for cash appropriate documents officially certifying him as a foreign national.’ In Hungary, ‘it will be necessary before long to impose upon the Hungarian government an adviser on Jewish questions.’ (As it turned out, that adviser would eventually be Eichmann and his principal adversary would be a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg.)
When Heydrich had finished, the Foreign Office’s Undersecretary of State, a former furniture-mover bearing the proud name of Martin Luther, suggested that the ‘deeply penetrating treatment of this problem’ (to use yet another euphemism) would encounter difficulties in the Scandinavian countries under German occupation. Luther recommended that Norwegian and Danish Jews be ‘treated’ last.
The highest official attending from occupied Poland, Dr Joseph Buhler, warned that Poland’s remaining two and a half million Jews (their number was diminishing daily) constituted a great danger as black marketeers and bearers of disease, most of them unfit to work. ‘I have only one favour to ask,’ Buhler concluded, ’ – that the Jewish problem in my territory be solved as quickly as possible.’
Reviewing the record of Wannsee years later, Israeli interrogator Less asked Eichmann: ‘What is Buhler suggesting?’
‘He is suggesting that they should be killed.’26
As euphemism washed over euphemism on the shore of the Wannsee, the word extermination was never spoken, but so clear was Heydrich’s and Eichmann’s bureaucratese that nobody present harboured any doubt as to their meaning. Thirty copies of Eichmann’s conference record, distributed to high SS headquarters and the ministries and agencies represented at Wannsee, became the blueprint of the Final Solution.
Buders poured brandy as the participants stayed for lunch and, without qualms, toasted a morning’s work well done. When the others were gone, Eichmann and Müller and Heydrich sat around a cosy fireplace and talked with satisfaction of the day’s results. ‘This was the first time I ever saw Heydrich smoke and drink,’ Eichmann recalled. The more they drank, the happier they grew. Soon the three of them – even the stolid Gestapo chief Müller! – were singing and, according to Eichmann, ‘after a while, we climbed on to the chairs and drank a toast; then on to the table and traipsed round and round – on the chairs and on the table again.’
‘There are probably only a handful of people in this world who know that the Wannsee Conference . . . was held at the headquarters of Interpol,’ Simon Wiesenthal confided in his 1988 memoir. The International Criminal Police Commission, to call Interpol by its full name, was a Viennese invention in 1923. After Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and the US, curiously, joined Interpol that May, Heydrich became president of Interpol and had it moved to Berlin, with the villa in Wannsee as its base. After the war, Interpol moved to Paris, but Wiesenthal has accused a couple of its postwar presidents, Florent Louvage of Belgium and Paul Dickopf of West Germany, of having less than honourable wartime records: Louvage for ‘co-operating’ with Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner; Dickopf as an SS officer and member of the security service. Simon says that during Dickopfs 1968–72 tenure as president of Interpol and of the Federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden, co-operation from both sources was ‘as little as one could expect’.
If Wannsee meant the beginning of the end for nearly six million Jews, it also marked the end of Eichmann the Zionist: a commitment no less shallow than his earlier dabblings in education, freemasonry, and soldiering. Singled out by Heydrich for inclusion in 1938’s Kristallnacht orgy in Vienna, he had gone and pillaged synagogues. Dispatched by Müller to Minsk and by Heydrich to Chelmno, he knew first-hand – and at least as well as anyone at the Wannsee Conference – what all the euphemisms he was transcribing were about. Now, having sat in with ‘the most prominent people, the Popes of the Third Reich’, as he termed them, and cavorted with the charismatic Heydrich and ‘that Sphinx, Müller’, he could see for himself that even the elite of the German Civil Service were competing to hammer nails into the crucifixion of the Jewish people.
With its elegantly civilized trappings and convivial camaraderie, Wannsee dispelled all doubt in Eichmann about what he knew to be ‘such a bloody solution through violence’. Testifying in Jerusalem, he waxed biblical: ‘At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt . . . Who was I to judge? Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?’
Barely four months after his danse macabre with Eichmann and Müller at Wannsee, Heydrich was dead. Since the previous September, he had been doubling as Acting Protector of ‘Bohemia-Moravia’, the remains of the Czech Lands dismembered from Slovakia in the betrayals of 1938–9. On 27 May 1942, as Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes rounded a bend in the district of Prague where I now live, two refugee Czechoslovak commandos, parachuted into their homeland by the Royal Air Force, ambushed him with a British Army Sten gun and a high-impact bomb. The gun jammed, but the bomb blew him up. His spine shattered and spleen infected, Heydrich died of blood poisoning on 4 June.
His assassins took sanctuary in the crypt of the Orthodox Church of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Prague, where they shot themselves to death when the Gestapo closed in. In retaliation, the church’s bishop, two ministers, the chaplain, and the chairman of its parish council, as well as more than a hundred Czechs accused of aiding the assassins and another 1357 accused of ‘approving of the assassination’ were massacred by the SS. Less than a week after Heydrich died, the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed in his memory.
Though Lidice still lives in the world’s memory of Nazi atrocities, it was just the visible tip of Operation Reinhard, which Hitler and Himmler dedicated to the memory of their martyred murderer whose ‘final solution’ oudived his life and outdid his death. Another 3000 Czech Jews were uprooted from Eichmann’s ‘privileged ghetto’ of Theresienstadt and ‘deported to the east’, never to be seen again. In Berlin, 152 imprisoned Jews were killed in homage to Heydrich, who was replaced as head of the SD by Kaltenbrunner. Throughout the Third Reich, the tempo of the Final Solution accelerated.
13
Eichmann the genocidist
With the extinction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the only large Jewish community left in the Third Reich was in Axis-allied Hungary, where territorial acquisition and an influx of refugees had doubled the Jewish population to more than three-quarters of a million. Half-heartedly but effectively, Admiral Miklos von Horthy, an ageing anti-Semitic, but not genocidal, regent had protected his Jews from deportation. On 19 March 1944, however, Hitler forced Horthy to appoint a more militantly anti-Semitic government which immediately stripped all Jews of their jobs, property, civil rights, and citizenship, ordered them to wear the Star of David, and herded them into ghettoes where they were systematically starved. German troops occupied friendly Hungary for the first time and Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to expedite the Final Solution. As the Axis war machine wore down, the German machinery of genocide sped up to fulfil at least one of Hitler’s missions on earth.
‘I wanted to send the Master personally,’ Heinrich Himmler said when he ordered Eichmann to Budapest. The final step of the Final
Solution, the martyrdom of the Hungarian Jews, was to be the culmination of Eichmann’s career: the blaze of glory in which the Third Reich would crumble into ashes.
Whether Germany won or lost the war, Eichmann was convinced that if he could ‘succeed in destroying the biological basis of Jewry in the East by complete extermination, then Jewry as a whole would never recover from the blow. The assimilated Jews of the West, including America, would . . . be in no position (and would have no desire) to make up this enormous loss of blood and there would therefore be no future generation worth mentioning.’ So fanatical was Eichmann by the end of 1944, says Simon Wiesenthal, that ‘when even Himmler ordered Eichmann to stop the killing in Hungary, he no longer understood the word “Stop!” any more.’
In April, the Germans started a systematic sweep of the provinces, uprooting Jews from the land for deportation to Poland in sealed boxcars holding as many as seventy people and two buckets: one for water, one for human waste. Heat and suffocation took their toll – and, in Hungary at least, there could be no ‘good Germans’ contending they had no idea what was going on, for the Hungarian press reported the deportations and one newspaper boldly described the deaths of three Jewish women in a cattle car. Their ages were given as 104, 102, and ninety-two.
Up to four freight trains a day, ferrying up to 12,000 Jews to the death camps, crawled through the Hungarian countryside and paused at city stations. The cries and moans of men, women, and children were audible to all. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr Josef Mengele and his colleagues had their hands full at selections as gas chambers and ovens went on round-the-clock duty to roast the new shipments of what they called ‘Hungarian kosher salami’. An extra railway siding was built at Birkenau to deliver the deportees directly to death’s door and, when crematorium capacity was overtaxed, Commandant Rudolf Höss ordered new burning-pits dug. The cadre of Jewish death commandos manning the gas chambers was quadrupled. Between May and July of 1944, some 600,000 Jews were deported from Hungary as Eichmann tightened the vise around the 200,000 remaining in the capital.
