What for Hitler, the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war's main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world. For hundreds of years, they had been used to understanding their own history, rightly or wrongly, as a long story of suffering, much as the prosecutor described it in his opening speech at the trial; but behind this attitude there had been, for a long time, the triumphant conviction of “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel shall live; individual Jews, whole Jewish families might die in pogroms, whole communities might be wiped out, but the people would survive. They had never been confronted with genocide. Moreover, the old consolation no longer worked anyhow, at least not in Western Europe. Since Roman antiquity, that is, since the inception of European history, the Jews had belonged, for better or worse, in misery or in splendor, to the European comity of nations; but during the past hundred and fifty years it had been chiefly for better, and the occasions of splendor had become so numerous that in Central and Western Europe they were felt to be the rule. Hence, the confidence that the people would eventually survive no longer held great significance for large sections of the Jewish communities; they could no more imagine Jewish life outside the framework of European civilization than they could have pictured to themselves a Europe that was judenrein.
The end of the world, though carried through with remarkable monotony, took almost as many different shapes and appearances as there existed countries in Europe. This will come as no surprise to the historian familiar with the development of European nations and with the rise of the nation-state system, but it came as a great surprise to the Nazis, who were genuinely convinced that anti-Semitism could become the common denominator that would unite all Europe. This was a huge and costly error. It quickly turned out that in practice, though perhaps not in theory, there existed great differences among anti-Semites in the various countries. What was even more annoying, though it might easily have been predicted, was that the German “radical” variety was fully appreciated only by those peoples in the East—the Ukrainians, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and, to some extent, the Rumanians—whom the Nazis had decided to regard as “subhuman” barbarian hordes. Notably deficient in proper hostility toward the Jews were the Scandinavian nations (Knut Hamsun and Sven Hedin were exceptions), which, according to the Nazis, were Germany's blood brethren.
The end of the world began, of course, in the German Reich, which at the time embraced not only Germany but Austria, Moravia and Bohemia, the Czech Protectorate, and the annexed Polish Western Regions. In the last of these, the so-called Warthegau, Jews, together with Poles, had been deported eastward after the beginning of the war, in the first huge resettlement project in the East—“an organized wandering of nations,” as the judgment of the District Court in Jerusalem called it—while Poles of German origin (Volksdeutsche) were shipped westward “back into the Reich.” Himmler, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom, had entrusted Heydrich with this “emigration and evacuation,” and in January, 1940, Eichmann's first official department in the R.S.H.A., Bureau IV-D-4, was set up. Though this position proved administratively to be the stepping-stone to his later job in Bureau IV-B-4, Eichmann's work here was no more than a kind of apprenticeship, the transition between his old job of making people emigrate and his future task of deporting them. His first deportation jobs did not belong to the Final Solution; they occurred before the official Hitler order. In view of what happened later, they can be regarded as test cases, as an experiment in catastrophe. The first was the deportation of thirteen hundred Jews from Stettin, which was carried out in a single night, on February 13, 1940. This was the first deportation of German Jews, and Heydrich had ordered it under the pretext that “their apartments were urgently required for reasons connected with the war economy.” They were taken, under unusually atrocious conditions, to the Lublin area of Poland. The second deportation took place in the fall of the same year: all the Jews in Baden and the Saarpfalz—about seventy-five hundred men, women, and children—were shipped, as I mentioned earlier, to Unoccupied France, which was at that moment quite a trick, since nothing in the Franco-German Armistice agreement stipulated that Vichy France could become a dumping ground for Jews. Eichmann had to accompany the train himself in order to convince the French stationmaster at the border that this was a German “military transport.”
These two operations entirely lacked the later elaborate “legal” preparations. No laws had yet been passed depriving Jews of their nationality the moment they were deported from the Reich, and instead of the many forms Jews eventually had to fill out in arranging for the confiscation of their property, the Stettin Jews simply signed a general waiver, covering everything they owned. Clearly, it was not the administrative apparatus that these first operations were supposed to test. The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions—whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish “refugees.” As far as the Nazis could see, everything turned out very satisfactorily. In Germany, there were a number of interventions for “special cases”—for the poet Alfred Mombert, for instance, a member of the Stefan George circle, who was permitted to depart to Switzerland—but the population at large obviously could not have cared less. (It was probably at this moment that Heydrich realized how important it would be to separate Jews with connections from the anonymous masses, and decided, with Hitler's agreement, to establish Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.) In France, something even better happened: the Vichy government put all seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden in the notorious concentration camp at Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had originally been built for the Spanish Republican Army and had been used since May of 1940 for the so-called “réfugiés provenant d'Allemagne,” the large majority of whom were, of course, Jewish. (When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.) The Nazis, always eager to generalize, thought they had demonstrated that Jews were “undesirables” everywhere and that every non-Jew was an actual or potential anti-Semite. Why, then, should anybody be bothered if they tackled this problem “radically”? Still under the spell of these generalizations, Eichmann complained over and over in Jerusalem that no country had been ready to accept Jews, that this, and only this, had caused the great catastrophe. (As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes—penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!) However, to the never-ending surprise of the Nazi officials, even the convinced anti-Semites in foreign lands were not willing to be “consistent,” and showed a deplorable tendency to shy away from “radical” measures. Few of them put it as bluntly as a member of the Spanish Embassy in Berlin—“If only one could be sure they wouldn't be liquidated,” he said of some six hundred Jews of Spanish descent who had been given Spanish passports, though they had never been in Spain, and whom the Franco Government wished very much to transfer to German jurisdiction—but most of them thought precisely along these lines.
After these first experiments, there followed a lull in deportations, and we have seen how Eichmannn used his enforced inactivity to play around with Madagascar. But in March, 1941, during the preparation for the war against Russia, Eichmann was suddenly put in charge of a new subsection, or rather, the name of his subsection was changed from E
migration and Evacuation to Jewish Affairs, Evacuation. From then on, though he was not yet informed of the Final Solution, he should have been aware not only that emigration had definitely come to an end, but that deportation was to take its place. But Eichmann was not a man to take hints, and since no one had yet told him differently, he continued to think in terms of emigration. Thus at a meeting with representatives of the Foreign Office in October, 1940, during which it had been proposed that the citizenship of all German Jews abroad be canceled, Eichmann protested vigorously that “such a step light influence other countries which to date were still ready to open their gates to Jewish immigrants and to grant entry permits.” He always thought within the narrow limits of whatever laws and decrees were valid at a given moment, and the shower of new anti-Jewish legislation descended upon the Reich's Jews only after Hitler's order for the Final Solution had been officially handed down to those who were to implement it. At the same time, it had been decided that the Reich was to be given top priority, its territories made judenrein with all speed; it is surprising that it still took almost two years to do the job. The preparatory regulations, which were soon to serve as models for all other countries, consisted, first, of the introduction of the yellow badge (September 1, 1941); second, of a change in the nationality law, providing that a Jew could not be considered a German national if he lived outside the borders of the Reich (whence, of course, he was to be deported); third, of a decree that all property of German Jews who had lost their nationality was to be confiscated by the Reich (November 25, 1941). The preparations culminated in an agreement between Otto Thierack, the Minister of Justice, and Himmler whereby the former relinquished jurisdiction over “Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies” in favor of the S.S., since “the Ministry of Justice can make only a small contribution to the extermination [sic] of these peoples.” (This open language, in a letter dated October, 1942, from the Minister of Justice to Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, is noteworthy.) Slightly different directives had to be issued to cover those who were deported to Theresienstadt because, Theresienstadt being on Reich territory, the Jews deported there did not automatically become stateless. In the case of these “privileged categories,” an old law of 1933 permitted the government to confiscate property that had been used for activities “hostile to the nation and the State.” This kind of confiscation had been customary in the case of political prisoners in the concentration camps, and though Jews did not belong in this category—all concentration camps in Germany and Austria had become judenrein by the fall of 1942—it took only one more regulation, issued in March, 1942, to establish that all deported Jews were “hostile to the nation and the State.” The Nazis took their own legislation quite seriously, and though they talked among themselves of “the Theresienstadt ghetto” or “the ghetto for old people,” Theresienstadt was officially classified as a concentration camp, and the only people who did not know this—one did not want to hurt their feelings, since this “place of residence” was reserved for “special cases”—were the inmates. And to make sure that the Jews sent there would not become suspicious, the Jewish Association in Berlin (the Reichsvereinigung) was directed to draw up an agreement with each deportee for “the acquisition of residence” in Theresienstadt. The candidate transferred all his property to the Jewish Association, in consideration whereof the Association guaranteed him housing, food, clothing, and medical care for life. When, finally, the last officials of the Reichsvereinigung were themselves sent to Theresienstadt, the Reich simply confiscated the considerable amount of money then in the Association's treasury.
All deportations from West to East were organized and coordinated by Eichmann and his associates in Section IV-B-4 of the R.S.H.A.—a fact that was never disputed during the trial. But to put the Jews on the trains he needed the help of ordinary police units; in Germany the Order Police guarded the trains and posted escorts, and in the East the Security Police (not to be confused with Himmler's Security Service, or S.D.) stood ready at the places of destination to receive the trains and hand their inmates over to the authorities in the killing centers. The Jerusalem court followed the definitions of “criminal organizations” established at Nuremberg; this meant that neither the Order Police nor the Security Police were ever mentioned, although their active involvement in the implementation of the Final Solution had by this time been amply substantiated. But even if all the police units had been added to the four organizations recognized as “criminal”—the leadership corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the S.D., and the S.S.—the Nuremberg distinctions would have remained inadequate and inapplicable to the reality of the Third Reich. For the truth of the matter is that there existed not a single organization or public institution in Germany, at least during the war years, that did not become involved in criminal actions and transactions.
After the troublesome issue of personal interventions had been resolved through the establishment of Theresienstadt, two things still stood in the way of a “radical” and “final” solution. One was the problem of half-Jews, whom the “radicals” wanted to deport along with the full Jews and whom the “moderates” wished to sterilize—because if you permitted the half-Jews to be killed, it meant that you abandoned “that half of their blood which is German,” as Stuckart of the Ministry of the Interior phrased it at the Wannsee Conference. (Actually, nothing was ever done about the Mischlinge, or about Jews who had made mixed marriages; a forest of difficulties, in Eichmann's words, surrounded and protected them—their non-Jewish relatives, for one, and, for another, the disappointing fact that the Nazi physicians, despite all their promises, never discovered a quick means of mass sterilization.) The second problem was the presence in Germany of a few thousand foreign Jews, whom Germany could not deprive of their nationality through deportation. A few hundred American and English Jews were interned and held for exchange purposes, but the methods devised for dealing with nationals of neutral countries or those allied with Germany are interesting enough to be recorded, especially since they played a certain role in the trial. It was in reference to these people that Eichmann was accused of having shown inordinate zeal lest a single Jew escape him. This zeal he shared, as Reitlinger says, with the “professional bureaucrats of the Foreign Office, [to whom] the flight of a few Jews from torture and slow death was a matter of the gravest concern, and whom he had to consult on all such cases. As far as Eichmann was concerned, the simplest and most logical solution was to deport all Jews regardless of their nationality. According to the directives of the Wannsee Conference, which was held in the heyday of Hitler's victories, the Final Solution was to be applied to all European Jews, whose number was estimated at eleven million, and such things as nationality or the rights of allied or neutral countries with respect to their citizens were not even mentioned. But since Germany, even in the brightest days of the war, depended upon local good will and cooperation everywhere, these little formalities could not be sneezed at. It was the task of the experienced diplomats of the Foreign Service to find ways out of this particular “forest of difficulties,” and the most ingenious of these consisted in the use of foreign Jews in German territory to test the general atmosphere in their home countries. The method by which this was done, though simple, was somewhat subtle, and was certainly quite beyond Eichmann's mental grasp and political apprehension. (This was borne out by the documentary evidence; letters that his department addressed to the Foreign Office in these matters were signed by Kaltenbrunner or Müller.) The Foreign Office wrote to the authorities in other countries, saying that the German Reich was in the process of becoming judenrein and that it was therefore imperative that foreign Jews be called home if they were not to be included in the anti-Jewish measures. There was more in this ultimatum than meets the eye. These foreign Jews, as a rule, either were naturalized citizens of their respective countries, or, worse, were in fact stateless but had obtained passports by some highly dubious method that worked well enough as long as their bearers stayed abroad. This was e
specially true of Latin American countries, whose consuls abroad sold passports to Jews quite openly; the fortunate holders of such passports had every right, including some consular protection, except the right ever to enter their “homeland.” Hence, the ultimatum of the Foreign Office was aimed at getting foreign governments to agree to the application of the Final Solution at least to those Jews who were only nominally their nationals. Was it not logical to believe that a government that had shown itself unwilling to offer asylum to a few hundred or a few thousand Jews, who in any case were in no position to establish permanent residence there, would be unlikely to raise many objections on the day when its whole Jewish population was to be expelled and exterminated? Perhaps it was logical, but it was not reasonable, as we shall see shortly.
On June 30, 1943, considerably later than Hitler had hoped, the Reich—Germany, Austria, and the Protektorat—was declared judenrein. There are no definite figures as to how many Jews were actually deported from this area, but we know that of the two hundred and sixty-five thousand people who, according to German statistics, were either deported or were eligible for deportation by January, 1942, very few escaped; perhaps a few hundred, at the most a few thousand, succeeded in hiding and surviving the war. How easy it was to set the conscience of the Jews’ neighbors at rest is best illustrated by the official explanation of the deportations given in a circular issued by the Party Chancellery in the fall of 1942: “It is the nature of things that these, in some respects, very difficult problems can be solved in the interests of the permanent security of our people only with ruthless toughness” —rücksichtsloser Härte (my italics).
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Page 21
