Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  The Nagar in my head protests: Another Nagar, Moshe, someone else; the Ben in my head still isn’t happy. Neither of them wants to listen to me. Nagar rocks in his chair, he’s started to hum, Ben stands up and looks away. I write against their humming and contention.

  Gas chambers were erected at the destination stations, beside them crematoria. The transports were organized and overseen by the accused.

  The accused does not deny this: After the intended purpose of IV B 4, the political solution, had failed, naturally we were recruited for the next stage of the final solution. My orders were to oversee the transports, and I knew that some of these people would be killed in the camps, I must admit that. But I had nothing to do with the killing. My responsibility ended when the transports were delivered to the destination stations according to the timetable.

  A clear distinction must be made between transportation and killing, he says. I delivered the transports, but I did not kill any of the victims. I have never killed a single person. IV B 4 was responsible for transportation and in some cases registration, but we were not involved in the rest of the matter; our part was over once we had created the timetables. We had nothing to do with any atrocities, we simply carried out our duties in a decent manner.

  The spectators, among them victims who had survived and countless relatives of victims, had to bear these words for hours on end. Everyone here in the room would later be able to quote them, distraught, disgusted, nauseated by the fanaticism of this separation, which is embodied by the accused. In his lost Reich he separated people, in line with his orders, obediently; now he severs these crimes, cuts a part out from them, his part.

  IV B 4 was responsible for obtaining the train materials and creating the train timetables. Period. As if this were all just about objects, about iron and steel, timings and routes, not about people. The accused in fact consistently avoids this word, talking instead about contingents, numbers transported, numbers killed. Terms so far removed from living languages that for their own sakes the interpreters attempting to translate the accused’s German into English and Hebrew have to paraphrase, reducing the stark coldness of his words. And yet still they remain unbearable.

  As if the victims were being exterminated for a second time. In the accused’s world they exist only in trains, as goods to be transported, as numbers to add up. Only the matters that fall under your responsibility are real. IV B 4 was responsible for transports; the rest did not concern us. That the victims were ripped from their homes, robbed of their possessions, driven through streets, did not concern him. That they were taken from the carriages at the destination stations, forced into the gas, burned to ashes that were blown back by the wind, did not concern him. He saw trains, not death, heard carriages rattling on the rails, not the cries of the dying. The boundaries of his responsibility were the boundaries of his world. And the boundaries of his world are, he says, the boundaries of his guilt.

  The judges reject these statements, undeterred and decisive. To them this is all bureaucratic hair-splitting, lies told for self-protection. Something that is whole, they say, cannot be divided.

  What do you mean, whole? The Ben in my head won’t quiet down.

  The judges mean the extermination of the victims.

  The Nagar in my head rallies against me, stubborn, unequivocal. It’s not right to say extermination of the victims. You must say the extermination of the Jews.

  No, I won’t say Jews.

  The extermination—whose idea was it?

  Hitler’s.

  Did he say: Exterminate the Jews?

  I think so, yes. The order was never written down. But it existed in their minds.

  In Eichmann’s mind.

  Yes. Eichmann didn’t organize the transports because he loved watching trains roll.

  Did you know that Eichmann never traveled by train? Never! He always went by car, a black Mercedes—

  How could Eichmann ever travel by train? Trains went to the front or to the camps, full of soldiers, full of victims. There were no carriages for Eichmann. You can tell us what you like, Nagar, but not here at my desk. Tell your stories in your own space; tell them when I’m sat beside you. I am writing now. By myself.

  A black Mercedes! A fast car with bright headlights, black leather seats, everything in black. Eichmann had his own driver. He sat in the back, with a gun cabinet to his right and a bar on the left he’d had built in, stocked with bottles of schnapps and red wine. The driver drove while Eichmann drank. They never stopped to rest, always looked sharp. They had so little time, the Germans! One day Eichmann had been somewhere, I don’t know where, maybe where that project was being run—

  In Nisko?

  Nisko, yes.

  No, Shalom. Nisko was before the war. You know that.

  A camp! He’d been to a camp, Ben. Inspecting the ovens, making sure they were in working order and that everything was running smoothly. Things like that. So they drove back, late at night, they’d been on their feet all day, and then the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The car swerved and came off the road. Nothing else happened. But Eichmann still ordered his driver to get out and walk the rest of the way. Many, many kilometers—

  How many, a hundred?

  Not a hundred. But it was dark, it was winter, everything was covered in snow. The man nearly froze marching home. Eichmann didn’t care. In the end the driver got sacked, not because he’d fallen asleep but because he stole a toilet seat from Eichmann’s building. Dismantled it and took it away.

  Why would he do that?

  I don’t know, Ben. Eichmann just said he dismantled it and took it away.

  The physical extermination of the victims was a single, all-encompassing action, based on a single, all-encompassing order. It cannot be divided up into individual acts based on responsibilities. Regardless of where a person entered the black river, they were carried along to the mouth. The main task of the accused, say the judges, was not to procure railway carriages but to procure victims to fill the carriages. Each railway train filled with a thousand people whom the accused sent to a place of extermination, means he took part in a thousand murders. Because this murderous act forms a whole, the responsibility of the co-perpetrators is equal to that of the main perpetrators, that of those who carried out the crimes equal to that of those who gave the orders. The accused is guilty on all counts.

  After the verdict is read, the accused is permitted to give his closing statement. He rises. Now, perhaps for the first time, people notice his broad shoulders.

  His tone is sharp, his sentences, unusually for him, are short. In my hope for justice I am disappointed, he says. I cannot accept this guilty verdict. He understands that the people of the victims demand atonement for everything that was done to them. But the crimes were not committed on his will. My wrongdoing is my obedience, he says. I am not the monster I am made out to be. I am the victim of a fallacy.

  On the following day, the court pronounces the sentence. The accused stands to attention. The accused is sentenced to death.

  Demons

  Death remains strangely far away. The condemned man spends as little time considering his own end as the millions of deaths that cling to him, that should mar his body, his face, beyond recognition. Nothing. Just a man, medium height, mid-fifties. Dark blue suit, white shirt, blue striped tie.

  The sentence does not touch him either; it is as though somehow it were lost between the judges’ chairs and the glass box.

  If the sentence had not been spoken, but had been presented in writing, Nagar would have had to hand it over to the accused; he is an extension of his arm within the courtroom. Stand up, climb the steps up to the judges’ table, take the note from the chair, climb down the steps, walk to the glass box, hand the note to the accused, sit down. Nagar would not have been able to do this, he can feel it. Each step toward the glass box would have taken him further away from the accused. There is a gap that has not closed. No one has penetrated the innermost depths of this person. P
eople stand before the wall of his castle, take aim from there, even fire, but the space behind those walls—the yards, the chambers, the last room—remains unconquered.

  Something is waiting there still.

  The accused is guilty on all counts.

  I am the victim of a fallacy.

  The accused is sentenced to death.

  This is a juristic death, a mere possibility—no one knows if the sentence can be carried out. Will the condemned man be hanged, like the other German perpetrators in Nuremberg? A rumor passes around the guards that he will be sold abroad. Exorbitant sums are named; he is worth these sums because he is the only one who knows where the alleged treasure of the fallen Reich is located. As soon as the war ended, he singlehandedly moved it across the Alps in an armored snow plow. The name Blaa-Alm is heard, there was a cabin there, the sentenced man was going to shoot the landlord but he did not take his pistol out of its holster; instead, he placed a bottle of schnapps on the table and drank with the landlord until he passed out. Nagar’s colleagues crack their jokes, but he does not join in their laughter.

  The commander told him that every company for which the accused has worked since the war has declared bankruptcy. Nagar cannot shake this thought from his mind, it makes him feel uneasy. He sees the accused working—apparently, he had started off as a lumberjack—he sees the trees falling, sees the axe, the sweat on his forehead, feels the drive, the commitment this man takes to work. That is not disconcerting. What is disconcerting is the chain of bankruptcies. Like an infection that spreads through contact. No one is immune.

  The day after the sentence is given is Nagar’s day off. The breakfast table is covered with newspapers, Nagar pushes them aside, he does not want to read anything. His wife, Ora, on the other hand, is eager to read them; from the very first day she has followed the trial in the media. All the newspapers she has bought are piling up in the shed.

  Nagar is going to burn them, he does not want an archive, does not need any commentary or printed pictures. He already has too many in his head. He pushes his scrambled egg around his plate morosely. Picks an olive out of the salad in front of Ora. And then another.

  Listen, says Ora, who has opened the evening newspaper. Immediately after the sentence there was a telephone survey. What should they do with the condemned man? Execute him, not execute him? A third of the participants are in favor of carrying out the sentence, either here in this country or there where the camps are that the condemned man supplied with his transports. The vast majority, however, want to keep the condemned man alive; if it were up to them, he would be damned to a life of forced labor. The same was said by an Italian poet and chemist, himself a victim, in verse:

  Oh son of death, we do not wish you death.

  May you live longer than anyone ever lived.

  May you live sleepless five million nights.

  Nagar is happy that no one asked him. He would not have known how to respond. Neither does he know how to respond to the gloomy prophecy that Ora finds in the editorial of the second newspaper: Now, only now our demon dance begins. He simply shrugs his shoulders.

  Ora continues reading aloud, Nagar listens with only half an ear. They had expected the death sentence . . . there was no other choice . . . the defense will start an appeal . . . Supreme Court . . . three to four months . . . legal options exhausted . . . state president. People expect an appeal for mercy, but also that the condemned man could be prepared to die. Then he must be killed. But by whom? There are no executioners in the country of the victims.

  Nagar stands up, they are expecting friends for lunch; he goes into the yard where he keeps chickens in a small coop, reaches for one of the hens, takes it into the shed, lays it on the stained workbench, takes a knife with a nicked blade, and cuts off its head.

  I wait for protest at this point, but the Nagar in my head simply raises his hands, to explain, to apologize. I wasn’t a shochet back then, you see. What did I know about knives? I grew up with chickens; we even kept chickens in Sanaa, when my parents were alive. You feed chickens, slaughter them, pluck them, I knew all that. We’d use any old knife, cut off their heads. I was such a fool. You are permitted to kill, so it is written, but only in accordance with the law.

  The animal twitches, its legs kick out, dig into Nagar’s lower arm. Now, only now the demon dance begins? Nagar shakes his head, waits for the twitching to stop. Then he begins to pluck the chicken.

  Whoever Rides the Tiger

  The prisoner writes. He wrote while waiting for his sentence, and now that it has been delivered he carries on writing. So much to say. So much still to explain.

  He is happy that the guard, this strange, small man, leaves him in peace. There are already enough interruptions. The medical exams are particularly arduous. The doctor now comes twice a day, as though they are all afraid that his heart could fail at any minute. Absurdity. Death does not frighten him. It is only time he is lacking, he needs time to tell it how it really is, he barely got to talk in court, they always had to wait for the translations and they always cut him off, for sixty days of proceedings he just had to sit there and listen to the prosecution’s witnesses. The victims, the victims. Yes, yes. Was that it now?

  The victims had been given enough time to talk, to give vague recollections, to lie brazenly, protected by their suffering. They suffered, sure. Suffered terribly. But he, too, is a victim! A victim of his obedience, of his loyalty to his oath, a victim of the speed at which his superiors and employees changed their stories, those who pinned everything on him after the war to save their own soft skins. As though he had run the Reich, as though he alone had dealt with five or six or however many million enemies of the Reich. Absurdity, insanity, against which he had to defend himself—I had to follow orders, I would never have had the authority to act on my own initiative, even when carrying out the evictions. I had to present all matters to the head of department IV for a decision and ask for instructions. I could only do what my department head ordered me to do.

  The documents provided by the prosecution prove this. I had to learn during the trial that there are countless documents that bear the seal of my department and my signature, but always and everywhere before my name come the words “representative” or “on behalf of.” And when it says I, I instruct and so on, that is just official German language, the use of the first person does not mean anything. “I” means only the competent authority, the one giving the order.

  Of course, when someone takes out a single document and plays it as the trump card, as the attorney general did, then the whole matter is turned on its head. You must consider the whole page in your hand. Then things look very different. If you read all the documents in chronological order, everything looks different. Then it is clear that IV B 4 was not involved at all in these matters, I want to call them the leading command processes. It was ordered and so it was carried out. I had to obey.

  And I did obey; I always carried out every order I received, and I am still proud of that today, because I fulfilled my oath. The oath of allegiance is the highest duty that can be given to a person, higher than any so-called morals. Whoever fulfils this duty ties themselves to their ancestral people and blood and must defend this to enable the entire community to live. These thoughts led me to subordinate myself and to obey. Not as a stubborn receiver of orders—that would have made me an idiot—I shared these thoughts, I was an idealist. I came up with ideas, felt the joy in creating something, and privately dedicated myself further to this outside of my working hours. But when I presented these ideas to my department head he just smiled thinly, as if to say: Yes, very good, but I can’t do anything with that. And then I was dismissed. I might as well have explained it to his wastepaper basket. It was the same throughout the years I spent trying to procure territory and land for the victims. I wanted a humane separation, but all my ideas were burned and smashed to pieces, whether it was the project in Nisko on the river San or the planned relocation to Madagascar. It was as though ever
ything was jinxed. Whatever I planned and wanted and did and wanted to do, fate somehow got in the way and put a wrench in the works.

  It was no different with the transports. In general, the whole matter proceeded with a great deal of hope; in the beginning the trains ran and people could say it was a matter of glory, but then there were stoppages that often lasted for several weeks. We faced problem after problem, everyone possible got in the way, so many people stuck their oars in from outside or from within that I had no idea what was happening anymore. Every authority felt they needed to get involved, and in the end it all went wrong.

  IV B 4 battles with the Reich Transport Ministry for transport materials, wins the battle, the transport is approved despite all the resistance, and then the bureaucratic machine stalls, there are no victims because there is too much red tape. A thousand victims are needed for the transport to run, there are only one hundred and fifty in total, the local commander does not feel able to come up with replacements at such short notice, the train is canceled. Again and again, it happened that way.

  I was always in favor of the political solution, that was my field from the very start, which I plowed together with leading representatives of the victims. When the chief of the security police summoned me to him one day, said a few words, and then announced: The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the victims, everything started to sway. I was done. I had never thought it would come to such a violent solution. But whoever rides the tiger is no longer able to climb down; he grabs hold of the fur, like a small child, and presses his head into the beast’s neck.

  I had nothing to do with the gas. If a camp commander says he spoke to me about the gas trials and we chose the method together, that is a blatant lie. I played absolutely no part in this matter, I had no role at all, and I also had no power. I knew the cardboard circles were being used to kill, I cannot deny that, the camp commander showed them to me during a visit, but IV B 4 was not part of this in any way. When I discovered that my permanent representative had become involved with the gas affairs, that he had somehow found a different way to get hold of the gas, we had a big disagreement. Why are you getting mixed up with the gas, I asked him, it’s got nothing to do with me. IV B 4 was not involved with the gas, we could not give any orders, we could not stop anything. We had to deliver the transports in accordance with our timetable, and that is where our responsibilities ended.