The Eichmann Trial (10 page)

This praise for the speech notwithstanding, there is no doubt that Hausner got much of the history wrong. Depicting Eichmann as the Final Solution’s chief operating officer, he held him responsible for every aspect of it, including shootings in the East, European deportations, ghettos, and death camps. Hausner’s portrait of Eichmann reflected the prevailing historical consensus at this time. Historians tended to think of the Third Reich as a highly organized top-down bureaucracy, where power flowed from higher pinnacles in an easily identifiable and highly regulated fashion. In fact, as historians now recognize, the Third Reich was far more amorphous than that. Different agencies and people within the same agency competed for power and control. Ideas flowed in two or more directions, and even in relation to the Final Solution, subordinates often took the lead. Their actions were then subsequently authorized by those above them. Their actions were in synch with an ideology of Jew hatred which was nurtured by the Nazi leadership. The differences of opinion among the members of the hierarchy were not over whether to persecute the Jews but over how to do so. In contrast to Hausner’s accusation, Eichmann did play a decisive role in aspects of the Final Solution, though he certainly did not control most aspects of it.

But even if Hausner got this wrong, some elements of his depiction of Eichmann were quite accurate. In every instance where his imprint was to be found—volunteering suggestions, giving orders, or interpreting policy—Eichmann always chose the most stringent option. Ordered to deport one trainload of Jews, he pushed for two. Ordered to end deportations on a certain date, he fought to extend the deadline. Ordered to deport Jews from one region, he included those from another. A portrait emerged of a man who was proactive, energetic, and a creative master of deception. This defendant, working with a group of subordinates who were dedicated to their task and to him, arranged the deportations of a great portion of European Jewry.

He pursued individual victims with the same zeal with which he deported multitudes—and sometimes even greater zeal. When the German Foreign Office interceded on behalf of a senior French officer who was a Jew, Eichmann unequivocally rejected its request on “principle.” When the Swiss government tried to free some of its citizens, Eichmann refused: they knew too much. When the Italians learned that an Italian officer’s widow was being held in Riga and asked for her release, Eichmann refused. When the Italians, including the Fascist Party representative, asked again, Eichmann rejected their request and, lest anyone overrule him, ordered her to be held at Riga. When the Italians asked the Germans to locate Bernardo Taubert, an Italian national who had been living in Lvov, Eichmann’s deputy recommended that they be told to desist from such “superfluous requests.” German authorities had “more important duties to carry out than to investigate the fate of a deported Jew.”
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Now came the summoning of witnesses. Hausner had prepared a list of more than one hundred survivors, most of whom had no direct link to Eichmann. Most of them had probably never heard his name during the war. Hausner did not need their testimony to prove Eichmann guilty—the myriad of documents he planned to introduce would have sufficed. But the witnesses would tell the story in an unprecedentedly concentrated fashion. Some had told their stories before, to family, friends, and in public settings. But this time, rather than recollecting, they would be testifying, in the full meaning of the word. Both the retelling and the size and profile of those who would be listening would be entirely different. Never before had they told their stories in front of such a broad international audience. Reporters from Asia, South America, North America, and, of course, Europe packed the courtroom. Even if many reporters would leave after the opening to chase down the next big story—the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba began during the first week of the trial—never before had there been such consistently high level media coverage of this tragedy.

In addition to the witnesses, Hausner had another source, with the potential to be most damning of Eichmann. While in Buenos Aries, Eichmann had been cajoled by Willem Sassen, a Dutch-German member of the Waffen-SS, to co-write a history of the Final Solution that would present the “other” side of the story. Sassen, a forerunner of current Holocaust deniers, wanted to exonerate Hitler and lower the toll of those murdered. Eichmann, apparently desirous to clear his name and to earn some money, readily agreed. Though Eichmann found it fantastic that anyone could think the Final Solution could occur without Hitler’s imprimatur, the Eichmann who emerged in the sixty-seven tapes and hundreds of pages of transcripts showed no remorse. He bemoaned the fact that the regime had not killed more Jews and expressed great satisfaction about how smoothly the deportation process had run. He declared that if the official Reich statistician had correctly concluded that “we killed 10.3 million, then I would be satisfied.” But Hausner had a problem: he had the page transcripts, but could not access the original tapes. Servatius, knowing how damaging the transcripts could be to his client’s case, objected to their use. But among the pages in Hausner’s possession were those with Eichmann’s handwritten corrections and edits of the tape transcripts. This would end up constituting some of the most incriminating evidence.
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Hausner began by calling Police Inspector Less, who had spent so many hours interrogating Eichmann. Less played tapes of his interrogation of Eichmann. The court heard Eichmann describe the preparations he witnessed for mass murder. Deep in a forest he had seen the building of an hermetically sealed structure designed to gas Jews. On another occasion he watched Jews being forced to undress and enter a truck to be gassed. On the tape Eichmann described the moment when the doors opened as “the most horrible thing that I had ever seen in my life.” As civilians with pliers moved among them, pulling gold-filled teeth, the bodies seemed still to be “alive—their limbs were so supple.” After witnessing mass shooting in Łódź, he complained to his superior, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller. His concerns were not about the victims but about the shooters: “We were bringing up people to be sadists.” He described visiting Auschwitz and Treblinka. At the latter camp he watched while a “line of naked Jews were entering a house … to be exterminated by gases.” He recounted how Heydrich had told him that “the Führer had ordered the physical destruction of the Jews.”
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This was probably the most vivid and specific perpetrator-testimony about the murders that had thus far been heard in public.

Next, in an attempt to paint a portrait of the cultural world that had been destroyed, Hausner called the renowned historian Salo W. Baron of Columbia University. Baron provided a dizzying array of facts and figures about European Jewish life. However, rather than his scholarly discourse, it was a brief personal observation that most vividly captured the scope of the loss. After immigrating to the United States, he twice returned to visit his hometown, Tarnów, in Poland. In 1937, he found a population of twenty thousand Jews, “outstanding institutions, a synagogue that had existed there for about 600 years, and so on.” When he returned in 1958, there were twenty Jews, of whom “only a few … were natives of Tarnów.” This observation encapsulated the tragedy more profoundly than the hours of Baron’s erudite scholarship.
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With the context in place, Hausner began to track Eichmann’s career as a Jewish “specialist.” After the March 1938
Anschluss
, the German “invasion” of Austria, an action most Austrians welcomed enthusiastically, Eichmann’s professional status began to rise rapidly. The Austrians, who have until recently claimed that they were the Third Reich’s first victims, enthusiastically looted Jewish property and subjected Jews to multiple humiliations. Elated Viennese jeered as Austrian youth compelled Jews to scrub the street on their hands and knees. These anti-Semitic actions were so extreme that German officials called for order. They did not object to the humiliation and degradations. Rather, they objected to the ad hoc confiscation of Jewish property and the lack of order. About a week after the entry of German troops, Eichmann was dispatched to Vienna by the SD with instructions not to attack Jews physically, but to eject them from Austria. He immediately ordered all Jewish organizations to cease operating and had the communal leaders arrested. He then summoned a few of them to a meeting. Now, twenty-three years later, some of those same leaders took the stand in Jerusalem. Moritz Fleischmann described for the court how Eichmann, seated behind a large desk in his black SS uniform, compelled them to stand before him. After telling a completely fabricated story about being born in Palestine and speaking Yiddish and Hebrew fluently, he announced that he would “administer and direct” all Jewish matters and would “solve the Jewish problem in Austria completely.” Austria would become
Judenrein
(Jew free). He demanded “unwavering obedience and unfailing cooperation and compliance with all his instructions and directives.” If Eichmann intended to scare these Jews, he succeeded. Fleischmann recalled the “alarm and … fear” Eichmann’s activities aroused in Viennese Jewry. “We sensed it at once.”
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In order to emigrate, Austrian Jews had to surmount a myriad of hurdles. Bills had to be paid, tax liens settled, and exit visas secured. Desperate Jews raced from office to office to obtain the requisite documents. At each step, officials tormented and taxed them. To rectify this situation, Jewish leaders proposed to Eichmann the creation of a Central Bureau for Emigration, which would bring together under one roof the entire emigration process. Eichmann tweaked their proposal slightly and sent it to his superiors in Berlin, passing it off as his initiative. It was approved, and soon, in a large hall in the Rothschild Palais, Jews were moving “seamlessly” through the process. Emigration rose markedly. Franz Meyer, a Berlin Jew who visited the operation, described it for the court. It was “most terrible, most terrible,” like “a flour mill connected to some bakery. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital and has, let us say, a factory or a shop or an account in a bank, and he passes through the entire building from counter to counter, from office to office—he comes out at the other end, he has no money, he has no rights, only a passport in which is written: You must leave this country within two weeks: if you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp.”
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Eichmann’s goal was not just to get rid of Jews, but to ensure that the Reich would not be left with those Jews too poor to emigrate. He instructed that financial aid being sent from abroad by Jewish organizations be used to support the emigration of poor Jews. This turned out to be a win/win situation for the Nazis. Over the next two years, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee alone sent two million dollars to Vienna. Eichmann exchanged this prized foreign currency at a rate that was highly favorable to the Germans and then used the funds to pay for the emigration of poor Jews.
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Eichmann reveled in his power. Not long after arriving in Vienna, he wrote a letter to an SS colleague boasting of his power over the Jewish leaders. Hausner entered the letter into evidence. Though twenty-two years had passed since he had written it, Eichmann’s pleasure at the control he exerted over this august Jewish community was chilling. “I put these gentlemen on the double, believe me,” the thirty-two-year-old high-school dropout gloated. “I have them completely in my hands, they dare not take a step without first consulting me. That is how it should be, because then better control is possible.”
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In Israel, of course, Eichmann put a radically different spin on his interaction with Jewish leaders. He cast it as a “decently businesslike” collaborative effort. It was so good that none of them, he insisted, “would have complained about me.” A strikingly different picture was painted for the court by Aharon Lindenstrauss, who, along with Franz Meyer, was part of a delegation of German Jews the Gestapo sent to Vienna to observe the process. Eichmann’s superiors, delighted that he was simultaneously getting rid of Jews and obtaining foreign currency, wanted these leaders to replicate the process in Berlin. Even before the delegation entered the Rothschild Palais, they were reminded of their status. Already using the language of dehumanizing objectification that would be fully realized during the Final Solution, the steel-helmeted SS guards outside the building phoned Eichmann’s office to announce that
“Vier Stück aus Berlin sind angekommen”
—four “pieces” had arrived from Berlin. It was with Jewish leaders such as these four “pieces” that he claimed to have had a decent businesslike relationship. Ushered past hundreds of Jews standing in the courtyard in the rain waiting to apply for passports, Lindenstrauss saw not “orderly emigration” but “deportation” pervaded by an aura of debasement and degradation. When the visitors arrived at Eichmann’s office, a group of Viennese Jewish leaders were present. They reminded Lindenstrauss of “disciplined soldiers who stood to attention all the time and dared not utter a word. I had the impression that … they were afraid to move.” The visitors were ushered into a large, beautiful hall, where Eichmann, sitting behind a desk, demanded that they move back to a distance of three to four meters. Once they were properly situated according to Eichmann’s stipulations, Eichmann berated them for the slow emigration rate from the Altreich (pre-Anschluss Germany). One of the visitors, Dr. Hermann Stahl, blamed the slow pace on the emigration taxes, which left most Jews destitute. These moneys, he argued, should be used to finance emigration. Eichmann exploded: “Should we pay for keeping you old bags alive?” He warned the visitors to speed up the emigration, “otherwise you will certainly understand what fate awaits you.”
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Meyer had, as chair of the German Zionist organization, previously interacted with Eichmann. In his testimony he described for the court the marked difference between the man he knew from Berlin and the one he encountered in Vienna.