Nazi Hunter (19 page)

In Berlin on the morning of Wednesday, 9 November 1938, Eichmann’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
Kafka
²⁵
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

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 transition 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.’

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.