Eichmann in Jerusalem

by Hannah Arendt

  Not that Eichmann, the truth-revealer for generations to come, ever suspected the existence of such sinister plans. What brought the Madagascar enterprise to naught was lack of time, and time was wasted through the never-ending interference from other offices. In Jerusalem, the police as well as the court tried to shake him out of his complacency. They confronted him with two documents concerning the meeting of September 21, 1939, mentioned above; one of them, a teletyped letter written by Heydrich and containing certain directives to the Einsatzgruppen, distinguished for the first time between a “final aim, requiring longer periods of time” and to be treated as “top secret,” and “the stages for achieving this final aim.” The phrase “final solution” did not yet appear, and the document is silent about the meaning of a “final aim.” Hence, Eichmann could have said, all right, the “final aim” was his Madagascar project, which at this time was being kicked around all the German offices; for a mass evacuation, the concentration of all Jews was a necessary preliminary “stage.” But Eichmann, after reading the document carefully, said immediately that he was convinced that “final aim” could only mean “physical extermination,” and concluded that “this basic idea was already rooted in the minds of the higher leaders, or the men at the very top.” This might indeed have been the truth, but then he would have had to admit that the Madagascar project could not have been more than a hoax. Well, he did not; he never changed his Madagascar story, and probably he just could not change it. It was as though this story ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind.

  His memory informed him that there had existed a lull in the activities against Western and Central European Jews between the outbreak of the war (Hitler, in his speech to the Reichstag of January 30, 1939, had “prophesied” that war would bring “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”) and the invasion of Russia. To be sure, even then the various offices in the Reich and in the occupied territories were doing their best to eliminate “the opponent, Jewry,” but there was no unified policy; it seemed as though every office had its own “solution” and might be permitted to apply it or to pit it against the solutions of its competitors. Eichmann's solution was a police state, and for that he needed a sizable territory. All his “efforts failed because of the lack of understanding of the minds concerned,” because of “rivalries,” quarrels, squabbling, because everybody “vied for supremacy.” And then it was too late; the war against Russia “struck suddenly, like a thunderclap.” That was the end of his dreams, as it marked the end of “the era of searching for a solution in the interest of both sides.” It was also, as he recognized in the memoirs he wrote in Argentina, “the end of an era in which there existed laws, ordinances, decrees for the treatment of individual Jews.” And, according to him, it was more than that, it was the end of his career, and though this sounded rather crazy in view of his present “fame,” it could not be denied that he had a point. For his outfit, which either in the actuality of “forced emigration” or in the “dream” of a Nazi-ruled Jewish State had been the final authority in all Jewish matters, now “receded into the second rank so far as the Final Solution of the Jewish question was concerned, for what was now initiated was transferred to different units, and negotiations were conducted by another Head Office, under the command of the former Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police.” The “different units” were the picked groups of killers, who operated in the rear of the Army in the East, and whose special duty consisted of massacring the native civilian population and especially the Jews; and the other Head Office was the W.V.H.A., under Oswald Pohl, to which Eichmann had to apply to find out the ultimate destination of each shipment of Jews. This was calculated according to the “absorptive capacity” of the various killing installations and also according to the requests for slave workers from the numerous industrial enterprises that had found it profitable to establish branches in the neighborhood of some of the death camps. (Apart from the not very important industrial enterprises of the S.S., such famous German firms as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke had established plants in Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps. Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died.) As far as Eichmann was concerned, the point was that evacuation and deportation were no longer the last stages of the “solution.” His department had become merely instrumental. Hence he had every reason to be very “embittered and disappointed” when the Madagascar project was shelved; and the only thing he had to console him was his promotion to Obersturmbannführer, which came in October, 1941.

  The last time Eichmann recalled having tried something on his own was in September, 1941, three months after the invasion of Russia. This was just after Heydrich, still chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, had become Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. To celebrate the occasion, he had called a press conference and had promised that in eight weeks the Protectorate would be judenrein. After the conference, he discussed the matter with those who would have to make his word good—with Franz Stahlecker, who was then local commander of the Security Police in Prague, and with the Undersecretary of State, Karl Hermann Frank, a former Sudeten leader who soon after Heydrich's death was to succeed him as Reichsprotektor. Frank, in Eichmann's opinion, was a low type, a Jew-hater of the “Streicher kind” who “didn't know a thing about political solutions,” one of those people who, “autocratically and, let me say, in the drunkenness of their power simply gave orders and commands.” But otherwise the conference was enjoyable. For the first time, Heydrich showed “a more human side” and admitted, with beautiful frankness, that he had “allowed his tongue to run away with him”—“no great surprise to those who knew Heydrich,” an “ambitious and impulsive character,” who “often let words slip through the fence of his teeth more quickly than he later might have liked.” So Heydrich himself said: “There is the mess, and what are we going to do now?” Whereupon Eichmann said: “There exists only one possibility, if you cannot retreat from your announcement. Give enough room into which to transfer the Jews of the Protectorate, who now live dispersed.” (A Jewish homeland, a gathering-in of the exiles in the Diaspora.) And then, unfortunately, Frank—the Jew-hater of the Streicher kind—made a concrete proposal, and that was that the room be provided at Theresienstadt. Whereupon Heydrich, perhaps also in the drunkenness of his power, simply ordered the immediate evacuation of the native Czech population from Theresienstadt, to make room for the Jews.

  Eichmann was sent there to look things over. Great disappointment: the Bohemian fortress town on the banks of the Eger was far too small; at best, it could become a transfer camp for a certain percentage of the ninety thousand Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. (For about fifty thousand Czech Jews, Theresienstadt indeed became a transfer camp on the way to Auschwitz, while an estimated twenty thousand more reached the same destination directly.) We know from better sources than Eichmann's faulty memory that Theresienstadt, from the beginning, was designed by Heydrich to serve as a special ghetto for certain privileged categories of Jews, chiefly, but not exclusively, from Germany—Jewish functionaries, prominent people, war veterans with high decorations, invalids, the Jewish partners of mixed marriages, and German Jews over sixty-five years of age (hence the nickname Altersghetto). The town proved too small even for these restricted categories, and in 1943, about a year after its establishment, there began the “thinning out” or “loosening up” (Auflockerung) processes by which overcrowding was regularly relieved—by means of transport to Auschwitz. But in one respect, Eichmann's memory did not deceive him. Theresienstadt was in fact the only concentrat
ion camp that did not fall under the authority of the W.V.H.A. but remained his own responsibility to the end. Its commanders were men from his own staff and always his inferiors in rank; it was the only camp in which he had at least some of the power which the prosecution in Jerusalem ascribed to him.

  Eichmann's memory, jumping with great ease over the years—he was two years ahead of the sequence of events when he told the police examiner the story of Theresienstadt—was certainly not controlled by chronological order, but it was not simply erratic. It was like a storehouse, filled with human-interest stories of the worst type. When he thought back to Prague, there emerged the occasion when he was admitted to the presence of the great Heydrich, who showed himself to have a “more human side.” A few sessions later, he mentioned a trip to Bratislava, in Slovakia, where he happened to be at the time when Heydrich was assassinated. What he remembered was that he was there as the guest of Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior in the German-established Slovakian puppet government. (In that strongly anti-Semitic Catholic government, Mach represented the German version of anti-Semitism; he refused to allow exceptions for baptized Jews and he was one of the persons chiefly responsible for the wholesale deportation of Slovak Jewry.) Eichmann remembered this because it was unusual for him to receive social invitations from members of governments; it was an honor. Mach, as Eichmann recalled, was a nice, easygoing fellow who invited him to bowl with him. Did he really have no other business in Bratislava in the middle of the war than to go bowling with the Minister of the Interior? No, absolutely no other business; he remembered it all very well, how they bowled, and how drinks were served just before the news of the attempt on Heydrich's life arrived. Four months and fifty-five tapes later, Captain Less, the Israeli examiner, came back to this point, and Eichmann told the same story in nearly identical words, adding that this day had been “unforgettable,” because his superior had been assassinated.” This time, however, he was confronted with a document that said he had been sent to Bratislava to talk over “the current evacuation action against Jews from Slovakia.” He admitted his error at once: “Clear, clear, that was an order from Berlin, they did not send me there to go bowling.” Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich. And it was characteristic of his kind of memory that he could absolutely not recall the year in which this memorable day fell, on which “the hangman” was shot by Czech patriots.

  Had his memory served him better, he would never have told the Theresienstadt story at all. For all this happened when the time of “political solutions” had passed and the era of the “physical solution” had begun. It happened when, as he was to admit freely and spontaneously in another context, he had already been informed of the Führer's order for the Final Solution. To make a country judenrein at the date when Heydrich promised to do so for Bohemia and Moravia could mean only concentration and deportation to points from which Jews could easily be shipped to the killing centers. That Theresienstadt actually came to serve another purpose, that of a showplace for the outside world—it was the only ghetto or camp to which representatives of the International Red Cross were admitted—was another matter, one of which Eichmann at that moment was almost certainly ignorant and which, anyhow, was altogether outside the scope of his competence.

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  VI: The Final Solution: Killing

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  On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union, and six or eight weeks later Eichmann was summoned to Heydrich's office in Berlin. On July 31, Heydrich had received a letter from Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, Prime Minister of Prussia, Pleinipotenti-ary for the Four-Year-Plan, and, last but not least, Hitler's Deputy in the State (as distinguished from the Party) hierarchy. The letter commissioned Heydrich to prepare “the general solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe,” and to submit “a general proposal… for the implementation of the desired final solution [Endlosung] of the Jewish question.” At the time Heydrich received these instructions, he had already been—as he was to explain to the High Command of the Army in a letter dated November 6, 1941—“entrusted for years with the task of preparing the final solution of the Jewish problem” (Reitlinger), and since the beginning of the war with Russia, he had been in charge of the mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen in the East.

  Heydrich opened his interview with Eichmann with “a little speech about emigration” (which had practically ceased, though Himmler's formal order prohibiting all Jewish emigration except in special cases, to be passed upon by him personally, was not issued until a few months later), and then said: “The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” After which, “very much against his habits, he remained silent for a long while, as though he wanted to test the impact of his words. I remember it even today. In the first moment, I was unable to grasp the significance of what he had said, because he was so careful in choosing his words, and then I understood, and didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say any more. For I had never thought of such a thing, 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. And then he told me: ‘Eichmann, you go and see Globocnik [one of Himmler's Higher S.S. and Police Leaders in the General Government] in Lublin, the Reichsführer [Himmler] has already given him the necessary orders, have a look at what he has accomplished in the meantime. I think he uses the Russian tank trenches for the liquidation of the Jews.’ I still remember that, for I'll never forget it no matter how long I live, those sentences he said during that interview, which was already at an end.” Actually—as Eichmann still remembered in Argentina but had forgotten in Jerusalem, much to his disadvantage, since it had bearing on the question of his own authority in the actual killing process—Heydrich had said a little more: he had told Eichmann that the whole enterprise had been “put under the authority of the S.S. Head Office for Economy and Administration”—that is, not of his own R.S.H.A. —and also that the official code name for extermination was to be “Final Solution.”

  Eichmann was by no means among the first to be informed of Hitler's intention. We have seen that Heydrich had been working in this direction for years, presumably since the beginning of the war, and Himmler claimed to have been told (and to have protested against) this “solution” immediately after the defeat of France in the summer of 1940. By March, 1941, about six months before Eichmann had his interview with Heydrich, “it was no secret in higher Party circles that the Jews were to be exterminated,” as Viktor Brack, of the Führer's Chancellery, testified at Nuremberg. But Eichmann, as he vainly tried to explain in Jerusalem, had never belonged to the higher Party circles; he had never been told more than he needed to know in order to do a specific, limited job. It is true that he was one of the first men in the lower echelons to be informed of this “top secret” matter, which remained top secret even after the news had spread throughout all the Party and State offices, all business enterprises connected with slave labor, and the entire officer corps (at the very least) of the Armed Forces. Still, the secrecy did have a practical purpose. Those who were told explicitly of the Führer's order were no longer mere “bearers of orders,” but were advanced to “bearers of secrets,” and a special oath was administered to them. (The members of the Security Service, to which Eichmann had belonged since 1934, had in any case taken an oath of secrecy.)