Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  But that is how it goes. Those who would have been able to explain what happened are either dead or have passed the matter on in an attempt to exonerate themselves. And now they are stamping my name on everything that refers to what was done to the people of the victims. So it was, and so it will probably remain. I maintain today that the entire human coexistence, at least in the last two thousand years—but surely before that, too—is one big and violent symphony of lies and betrayal. People want someone to blame, not an explanation; they found their culprit, they kidnapped me, sneaked me into this country, the country of the victims, where they prosecuted me and sentenced me. Complicity, responsibility as one of the main perpetrators, the public heard the sentence, the cameras sent this fallacy out into the world. It is the greatest consolation for me: The dogs always bite those who come last.

  I am not stupid enough to believe that I could fight it. The die is long since cast. But one day it will be history that will judge, not the people of the victims. Historians from all faiths and peoples will study the trial down to the very smallest detail, for the next fifty years and more. And depending on the spirit of the times it will be seen in different ways. Perhaps students will discuss it for more than fifty years. After all, it is complicated and confusing. There is so much material, I would be interested to read all the dissertations and theses written about my trial over the next hundred years. The truth about me will only be revealed some decades from now. A library of books will first spin legends about me. Until the web becomes weak and the spider shrivels up from a lack of fresh sustenance. But life is eternal; a new spider will start spinning the web of truth.

  They cannot kill me in this country. There is no end for me, just as there is no nothingness.

  I wrote all through the night, hounded and beaten by this voice, which grew louder and louder as I wrote, which separated each sentence as if it were an entity meant to quiver, sound, and shatter, a cacophony—and yet, with the last word complete, it was a composition after all.

  There is no end for me,

  just as there is

  no nothingness.

  I had fallen asleep at my desk, completely exhausted, and only woke up when Ben knocked on the door. My limbs ached. He frowned when he saw me, headed into the kitchen, made coffee, got me something to eat. I ate although I didn’t feel like it and drank the coffee which was too strong.

  Ben went to my desk, placed his large hands on the surface, stared at the pages I had filled with writing. Then he took one of them, went to the window, and started to read. At first, he mumbled to himself, then he started to read aloud, like an eager schoolboy, in his typical flat-sounding Ben-voice; wrong, it sounded all wrong, I couldn’t stand it. Give that back! I demanded. Give it to me. I’ll read! Astonished and baffled, he gave me the page. And I read.

  Barked the sentences the way they have to be barked, hardened the beginning of each word, rolled my r’s like Hitler, added the pauses after each conjunction so typical of Eichmann’s speech, made periods sound like exclamation marks, kept time with the palm of my hand on the table.

  It was ordered and—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!

  Ben paced around the room while I read. Suddenly he stopped and leaned over me, looking angry. What are you writing, Moshe? What are you writing?

  I didn’t understand the question.

  You are writing like Eichmann!

  That is Eichmann, Ben! His words! I didn’t invent them, I wrote them down.

  Groaning, Ben straightened up, lashed out, sent the coffee mug flying. What?

  Yes, Ben. That’s Eichmann’s voice. Listen:

  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.

  Again and again!

  Again and again and again, it happened that way!

  I was always in favor of the political solution—

  Stop it! I don’t recognize you, Moshe. I don’t recognize you anymore.

  I had nothing to do with the gas!

  If—a camp commander says—

  Stop it, Moshe, stop it! You’re a Jew, how can you give that monster a voice! I’m a Jew, how can you read to me like him!

  Because he is a voice! Eichmann is a voice, Ben. I want all voices to have their say.

  Ben doesn’t understand. How could he, anyway? Like a stranger, he pushed me to the meeting place, pushed a stranger in front of him. The tension between us was palpable. Nagar, who was already there waiting, noticed it at once. Instead of greeting us, he started to hum, looked from one of us to the other and hummed more loudly when Ben avoided his gaze, leapt up and walked over to the fire.

  Have you been arguing? he asked, when Ben came back.

  Moshe is making Eichmann speak!

  So am I, Ben. I’m telling you what Eichmann said, too.

  I know, but Moshe makes him—he makes him appear. Lets him tell his lies! Eichmann is dead. We are Jews. We don’t need to hear him anymore!

  Did you know that Eichmann recited the Shema Yisrael?

  What? What did he do?

  He said our prayer, Ben. When they caught him, outside his house in Argentina—they’d been waiting for him, you know, he took the bus home from work every evening, they waited until the bus was gone, drew up beside him, one of them threw open the door while the other one dragged him into the car. They tied him up and gagged him and put on a sleeping mask—

  What?

  If you want to sleep and it’s too light outside—

  I know what a sleeping mask is, Shalom. Why, is what I’m asking.

  So he couldn’t see where they were going!

  But it was dark!

  They drove through town, it was light enough!

  Okay, okay. A sleeping mask. Eichmann was wearing a mask.

  The men from Mossad drove him through town to their hideout. In the hideout, it was a house they’d rented, he was put on a bed and they tied his feet to the bed frame. Then they undressed him and put him in a pair of pajamas—

  How could they do that? Weren’t his feet tied to the frame?

  They untied him, and then they tied him up again.

  And the sleeping mask?

  Will you let me tell you, Ben! You know I’m telling the truth. Something that really happened. One of them, he was called Kenet, stood in front of Eichmann with a list. He read out loud: How tall are you? What size clothes? What size shoes?

  Shalom—

  They wanted to know if it was him, Ben! Imagine if they’d got the wrong man! Eichmann gave all the right answers. What’s your party membership number? Eichmann told them the number. What’s your name? Ricardo Klement, Eichmann said. Are the scars on your chest from an accident during the war? He said yes. What’s your name? Kenet asks for the second time. Otto Henninger, Eichmann says. Kenet looks at the list and reads out two numbers. Are these your SS numbers? Jawohl. So, what is your name? My name is Adolf Eichmann, he says. Then everything was clear.

  So? What’s with the Shema Yisrael?

  Hang on, Ben. So they knew they’d caught the right man. Everyone could relax a bit. Eichmann, too. He asked for a glass of red wine and they gave him one. He drank it and looked at them all one after the other. There were four agents. I knew who you were right away, he told them. I can speak Hebrew, you see: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad. Baruch shem—

  I’d have grabbed him by the neck, I’d have shoved the words down his filthy German throat so that he choked on them! Miserable bastard!

  You can’t stop Eichmann, Ben! Nobody can. When they took him to the hideout he didn’t say anything at first—

  You just
told us that he answered their questions and recited the Shema Yisrael!

  They dragged him to the hideout, tied him to the bed, stripped him, then they took off the mask—he was in shock, you see? When you are shocked—

  You start to pray? Your victims’ prayer?

  You can’t control yourself! But then—he’d had some wine, he was Eichmann once more. And he didn’t say anything else. Not a word. He turned over and stared at the wall and refused to respond to anything. There was just one of them, someone called Aharoni, he liked him somehow. When Aharoni came, Eichmann turned around and looked at him. Perhaps he reminded him of someone. Aharoni would start to ask him questions. Wanted to know this and that. Aharoni asked him a question and Eichmann looked at him and said nothing. And it went on like that, quietly. Because Aharoni stayed calm, Eichmann trusted him. And suddenly he started to speak and didn’t stop. Aharoni wrote down every word, whole notebooks filled with notes.

  When Eichmann got to Israel, in the prison in Yagur, he was questioned some more, by a captain, a very polite man: Please, Herr Eichmann, he’d say, do have a cigarette, Herr Eichmann, may I repeat my question, Herr Eichmann. So Eichmann trusted him, too. And was willing to talk, for months on end. Everything was recorded on tape and copied out, thousands of pages. He had no one to talk to in his cell in Ramla. None of us guards could speak German, but he’d been given pencils and paper so that he could write. And he wrote. Wouldn’t stop writing. The lights were never turned off, they were left on night and day, that’s what the rules said. If they hadn’t ordered him to go to bed, he would never have stopped writing. Then the trial started and he talked even more. And when he had to listen, to the witnesses talking, or when the prosecutor spoke, he filled his notebooks with writing. When they took him back to his cell in the evenings, what do you think? He sat down and wrote some more! Before the verdict: He wrote! After the verdict: He wrote! He’d often grimace when they came to take him to the visiting room, if his lawyer or someone else was waiting to see him. Because he had to put down the pencil then, you see, he didn’t like that. He didn’t want any visitors, he wanted to write.

  Why?

  I don’t know. Maybe he thought that was how he could stay alive. That they can’t kill him if he writes.

  Why not?

  Because whatever he wrote would be read, Ben. He knew things that no one else knew. And everything he wrote was kept, too! Every page landed on the prison director’s desk, and he locked them all in his safe.

  Oh, yes. Eichmann wrote. Six, seven, eight thousand pages. And Moshe allowed him to write, copied his words, spoke in his voice. I hope I didn’t write off a friendship. A friendship based on the premise of shared beliefs and ideas about what it means to be Jewish, or to live in this country and deal with our past. Ben trusted me without knowing my circumstances. My background, my burden—he has no more idea than Nagar does. This has to stop. I’ve got to tell them.

  But where? Where is there room for Moshe’s story? The compound is Nagar’s territory: I know his Eichmann will not tolerate anyone else. No, they have to sit here, facing me; this is where I can and should tell my story. But will Nagar come? He keeps to four or five familiar paths, and can hardly manage those, he tackles them, scared, driven, hounded by Eichmann, who’s on his tail.

  I need to tell you a story, Ben, I said, when he came to pick me up. You and Nagar. An Eichmann story you’ve not heard before. One no one has ever heard. Bring Nagar here. Take him by the hand, blindfold him if need be, let him sing and hum all the way, but bring him to me.

  Now here they are, sitting on my small sofa while I sit opposite in my wheelchair. They are like brothers jostling one another, wearing the same clothes—black jacket, black trousers, white shirt, black kippah—both equally ill at ease. Everything is different here; no grubby wooden table in front of us, no folding chairs that will fit one of them like a glove and always be too small for the other, no earthen floor to keep us grounded. No pens, no chickens, geese, or sheep, no nail to hang up an apron or smock. No one has made tea, no one has cut up any pears. Only the first sentence is familiar. Just this once I say it myself.

  Let me tell you a story. It begins in Germany.

  Did I say it begins in Germany? It begins German, is what I should have said. My story is decisively German in the beginning, and ends helplessly so. No, it doesn’t even end—there isn’t an ending, yet.

  It begins in Germany, in 1935, when the Nazis passed their socalled race laws. The Reich citizenship law. The law to protect German blood and honor. The law to protect the pure bloodline of the German people. Decrees written to supplement these laws determined what it meant to be German.

  A history lesson! If Ben were not wedged in next to Nagar, who is unsure what to do with his hands, who tugs at his beard as I speak and plays with his fingers, this outburst would surely come. You’re giving us a history lesson, Moshe! Why do we have to listen to this? Why do we have to know how German the Nazis wanted to be?

  What do you say, Ben? Should I start like this: Oberscharführer Schneider was bent on killing himself? Would that make sense? You see! You have to know Schneider’s reasons, have to understand how things suddenly came crashing down around this man.

  But Ben isn’t protesting! He’s sitting quietly, staring at the floor. He even copes with my pauses.

  So back to the race laws: Decrees defined what it meant to be German. For the Nazis, being German was a consequence of not being Jewish. People who are German, the decrees said, have neither Jewish parents nor Jewish grandparents. This had to be proved. To be a citizen of the Reich you had to produce seven birth certificates; your own, and those of your parents and your four grandparents. And all their marriage certificates. If one of the grandparents was Jewish, the person was classed as a quarter Jew or a Mischling of the second degree, with two Jewish grandparents they were a half Jew or a Mischling of the first degree, with three Jewish grandparents they were a full Jew. That’s how it was.

  Members of the SS, like Eichmann, were required to be even more German than ordinary citizens of the Reich. They had to trace their family tree back to the early eighteenth century. Not a single ancestor was allowed to be a Jew. When this requirement came into force, two or three years after the race laws, the SS had already been around for a while. And until then, no one had asked for a pedigree. The men took the oath, swore allegiance to the Führer and to the people, and joined the black league. Now, suddenly, there were divides here, too. Many SS men discovered that they weren’t as German as required. As they compiled their ancestries, they stumbled across Jewish ancestors they’d known nothing about, or who hadn’t concerned them because it had never mattered before. But it did now. Suddenly, a faded birth or marriage certificate decided everything.

  One of Eichmann’s men, Oberscharführer Giselher Schneider, was found to have Jewish ancestors. In fact, Schneider was a full Jew, non-German from tip to toe. In these cases, the men who failed to prove their own ancestry could expect no more than a final handshake from their old comrades. They were left in a void. They were no longer what they wanted to be and had always believed themselves to be, and they neither wanted, nor were they allowed to be what they were. Many of them fled, disappeared without a trace, for others the only way out was to shoot themselves. Schneider was one of these. But that’s not what happened.

  Eichmann liked Schneider, he valued him as an employee and as a person. They had also played music together, in the Rothschild Quartet, named after the Palais where Eichmann’s department was based. Eichmann had even allowed Schneider to play first violin, as the Oberscharführer was a far better musician than he was. And now this man was a Jew. A full Jew. Could they ignore this, cross it out? Eichmann couldn’t do that, it went against his honor. He summoned Schneider, to talk about his future. Schneider stood to attention. It’s hard luck, Sturmbannführer! he said. We had a good time, but now it’s over, no one can change that. What will you do now? Eichmann asked. My heart is German, Schneider replie
d, but my blood belies that. I’m going to kill myself.

  Eichmann looked at him, calmly, searchingly. He liked the man, even now. Our honor means loyalty, comrade Schneider. To the people and the Führer. You can keep this honor. How, Sturmbannführer? Schneider asked. You must leave the Reich, that is clear, Eichmann said. Go to a country where this—these matters, are of no importance. Marry a German woman, father sons, who will in turn marry German women. In just a few generations the Schneiders’ blood will be pure. And your descendants can return to the Reich, as Germans.

  Schneider listened without moving, growing increasingly pale with every word. To be thrown from heaven to hell and then shown a way back, that was too much for him. Eichmann urged him to sit down, gave him a Cognac, offered him a cigarette. Schneider drank, Schneider smoked, and gradually he calmed down. Will you do it, comrade? Eichmann asked. Jawohl, Sturmbannführer, Schneider said. They drank another Cognac, to loyalty, and discussed what Schneider was going to do. I could go to Switzerland, Schneider said. He had friends there. How will you support yourself? Eichmann asked. I could be a musician, form a dance band. Eichmann liked the idea. He gave Schneider money, he gave him a passport, he promised that Schneider would be able to cross the Swiss border without any trouble. As they were saying goodbye, Eichmann shook his former Oberscharführer’s hand for a long time, refusing to let go. Father a son, comrade Schneider, he said. Father a son!