Finally, there was the venue. Jerusalem’s courtrooms were small, shabby, and not equipped with press quarters. Teddy Kollek, head of Ben-Gurion’s office, was charged with finding an appropriate place for a trial that was sure to attract an international audience. He selected Beit Ha’am, a cultural center under construction whose name meant, appropriately enough, “House of the People.” Its theater was transformed into a courtroom, replete with a glass booth for the defendant and compartments for hidden television cameras. Miraculously, its construction was completed in time.
Meanwhile, another drama was occurring near Haifa in Yagur Prison. This large complex had become a holding place for one man. Elaborate arrangements had been made to prevent Eichmann from harming himself, and others from harming him. One guard was assigned to watch him. Another guard watched the first guard, and a third watched the second. For added security, none of the guards had lost relatives in the Holocaust or even spoke German. At the same time, a far more onerous job was being conducted by Bureau 06, a special police unit created to do the investigation upon which the indictment would be based. Relying on the few existing books on the Holocaust and a mound of documents, including the entire Nuremberg proceedings, they researched the Final Solution. In order to assemble the details of Eichmann’s activities, they also requested pertinent documents from an array of European countries. Virtually all countries, including those behind the Iron Curtain, were forthcoming. The two exceptions were the USSR, which did not even reply to Israel’s request, and Britain, which adamantly refused to release information on its part in the trucks-for-lives negotiations. Britain had played a direct role when it arrested Joel Brand, the Hungarian Jewish leader who had been negotiating with Eichmann. Eichmann dispatched him to the Middle East where he was to negotiate with the British. British officials, convinced that he was a German spy, arrested him.2
Bureau 06’s chief inspector, Avner Less, a German Jew who had immigrated in 1938, at age twenty-two, was Eichmann’s interrogator. He and his police colleagues anticipated that Eichmann might refuse to cooperate, something he was legally entitled to do. To their surprise, he spoke freely. He inundated them with details about the Final Solution. One morning he arrived with a written statement declaring himself “prepared, unreservedly, to say everything I know of events.” He offered a confession of sorts: “I do not ask for mercy because I am not entitled to it.… I would even be prepared to hang myself in public as a deterrent example for anti-Semites of all the countries on earth.” Despite this acknowledgment of his actions, he refused to acknowledge personal guilt. He told Less that he was just a “little cog” and “exclusively a carrier out of orders.” He was not guilty, he insisted, because his superiors ordered him to do terrible things. Then, at Nuremberg, they implicated him in order to try to save themselves. If he was guilty of anything, it was of being too loyal. Bemoaning his fate, he complained that he was facing a trial while “those who planned, decided, directed, and ordered the thing have escaped responsibility.”
Captain Less, who spent more time in direct exchange with Eichmann than practically anyone else, including possibly Eichmann’s attorney, Servatius, had the same initial reaction to Eichmann as had the men who had grabbed him in Argentina. Instead of encountering “the sort of Nazi type you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutal features and … domineering arrogance,” he found a “thin, balding man … [who] looked utterly ordinary” and who trembled incessantly during the early stages of the interrogation. Less surmised that Eichmann feared receiving the treatment he had meted out. One morning guards arrived to take him from the interrogation room. Anticipating that he was about to be shot—he was, in fact, being brought to a judge so his detention order could be renewed—his knees buckled and he cried out “in a pleading voice”: “But Herr Hauptmann [Captain], I haven’t told you everything yet.” Less, however, soon discovered that this ordinary-looking man with nervous tics was capable of “cold sophistication and cunning.” According to Israeli protocol, Less was supposed to interrogate, not cross-examine, Eichmann. Nonetheless, their exchanges often became an evidentiary duel. On those occasions, Less found Eichmann “sardonic, even aggressive.” He would “lie until defeated by documentary proof.” At that point, unable to claim he had not performed an incriminating act, he would insist that he had just been following orders. Less also discovered that, whenever Eichmann vigorously protested something was not true, it probably was. Eichmann, who endured this extended cross-examination without the benefit of legal counsel, was at a severe legal disadvantage. Less, on the other hand, had an entire police bureau and prosecutorial team backing him up. They carefully prepared the questions in order to elicit the most information from him and to catch any of his lies. This same imbalance would continue through the trial when Servatius and one assistant, who was often in Europe interrogating witnesses, faced the prosecution’s substantial legal team.3
Eichmann began by describing his “sunny” childhood to Less. Born in 1906 in the Rhineland to middle-class parents, he moved to Austria with his family, where his father had a less than successful career as an entrepreneur. His stepmother, a deeply religious woman, conducted daily family Bible readings. In one of those enduring historical ironies, Eichmann attended the same high school as Hitler, though Eichmann never spoke of the school’s impact on him. Eichmann became friendly with a Jewish student and remained in contact with him even after he joined the Nazi Party. Probably hoping to convince Less he was not a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, Eichmann boasted how they would stroll together in Linz despite the Nazi Party emblem he sported on his lapel. A lackluster student, Eichmann left school and took a series of dead-end jobs until he saw an employment notice from the Vacuum Oil Company. His stepmother had a relative, “Onkel Fritz,” who, as a friend of “Herr Weiss,” the owner, arranged for Eichmann to be interviewed for the job. At the interview he was told by Herr Popper, the senior executive conducting the interview, that normally he would be considered, at age twenty-two, too young for the job. Nonetheless, he was being hired “at the request” of Weiss. Both Weiss and Popper were Jewish. Onkel Fritz had Jewish relatives by marriage. As David Cesarani observes, this demonstrates how the Eichmann family did not allow any anti-Semitic sentiments it might harbor to prevent it from reaching out to Jews who could be helpful. Eichmann succeeded at his job. His responsibilities entailed ensuring the on-time shipping, transportation, and delivery of petroleum products. He supervised the building of gas stations where none had existed before. Eventually these organizational skills would stand him in very good stead.4
In 1932, while still working for Vacuum Oil, he joined the Nazi Party. His decision to join does not seem to have been motivated by a deep—or even a shallow—ideological position. In fact, it seems somewhat happenstance. Someone invited him to attend a Nazi Party meeting. While there, he was warmly greeted by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a family acquaintance and a lawyer from a decidedly higher social class than Eichmann. Wearing a resplendent SS uniform, Kaltenbrunner declared, “You belong to us.” Eichmann joined. Shortly thereafter, Kaltenbrunner gave him an SS membership form. He joined that as well.5
In 1933, he lost his job because of an economic downturn. Company policy was to terminate unmarried employees before terminating those who were married with children. He subsequently told his Nazi superiors that he had been fired because he was a party member—probably to win favor in their eyes by demonstrating the sacrifices he had made for the party. The problem with Eichmann’s assertion, as Cesarani observes, is that he was not fired until a year after joining the party and was even given a generous severance package.6 Ironically, at his trial the prosecution accepted at face value Eichmann’s assertion that he had joined the party despite the jeopardy this posed to his job. It is unlikely that he joined in order to enhance his social and political stature. In 1932, the Austrian Nazi Party was a small, innocuous, often ridiculed organization. Eichmann was probably being honest when he told Less that he was a
ttracted to the party because it offered an explanation for Germany’s defeat in World War I as well as camaraderie and bonhomie. Though there is no evidence of his having been propelled to join because of anti-Semitism, it could hardly have been irrelevant. Anti-Semitism was rife in Austria, and few people were immune from it. For someone raised in this atmosphere, blaming Jews for Germany’s problems made perfect sense. It fit snugly with so much of what they were hearing about Jews. Anti-Semitism may not have been in Austria’s DNA, but it certainly was in the air the population breathed.
Initially, Eichmann was a weekend Nazi, disrupting the meetings of rival political parties, protecting Nazi gatherings, and engaging in street brawls with anyone who denigrated National Socialism. In short, he was a thug. In 1933, after Hitler became chancellor, the Austrian government began a crackdown on Nazis. Lacking employment and facing anti-Nazi government pressure, Eichmann left for Germany. There he received SS ideological indoctrination and military training, some of it quite grueling. He told Less how the concepts of “comradeship” and “solidarity” were impressed upon him during this period. In 1934, he applied to join the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s intelligence-gathering unit. Established in 1931 by Heinrich Himmler, and headed by Reinhard Heydrich, it was charged with the task of gathering intelligence on Germany’s ideological and racial “foes.” In 1934, it was an anemic group with a few hundred members. The notion that either the SD or Eichmann, who, unlike most other SD members, had little formal education, would play a decisive role in any major operation of the Third Reich, much less the Final Solution, would have seemed utterly far-fetched to a rational observer. Eichmann told Less that when he first joined the SD he thought he would be part of the team that protected Himmler. “One gets around; one sits in the car and merely has to keep a look-out.” Given his SS training, this assertion is implausible.7 Eichmann’s first assignment was to alphabetize a card file of German Freemasons so that the SD could track them. He also worked at the SD’s Freemason exhibit, where he arranged the display of regalia, seals, and organizational paraphernalia. It was mind-numbing work. In 1935, the SD created a desk to monitor Jewish organizations. Its director, Leopold Itz Elder von Mildenstein, encountered Eichmann during a visit to the exhibit and invited him to join the operation. Eichmann accepted happily. “I would have said yes to anything to get away from sticking those seals on.”8 Eichmann had to know, in light of both his ideological training and the anti-Semitic legislation issued during the first years of the Reich, that an SD department dedicated to the Jewish question would not be engaged in benign enterprises.
Mildenstein gave him a number of classic books on Zionism, including Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state, Der Judenstaat, and asked him to write a report on the movement. His summary was published as an SS orientation booklet, which may have helped him win both a promotion to staff sergeant and appointment as head of the Zionist desk. His new assignment was to study the myriad of domestic and foreign Zionist organizations and to develop a network of spies that would inform on them. His first paper on Zionism combined the history of the movement, which he generally got right, with nonsensical racial and conspiratorial theory, most of which any reader whose worldview was not infused with anti-Semitism would have dismissed as phantasmagorical tripe. The latter included his charge that the Zionist defense unit, the Haganah, then a modest organization, had, under the leadership of France’s premier, Léon Blum, a Jew, infiltrated an array of foreign intelligence operations, including those in Britain and France.
Eichmann did more than just decipher the various Zionist organizations. He also developed connections with the leadership of the German Zionist movement. During the early years of the Nazi regime, Zionist leaders thought they might be able to work with the Third Reich, strictly on Jewish emigration. The Zionists wanted Jews to settle in Palestine. The SD wanted them out of the Reich. In an attempt to further these efforts, Eichmann and his immediate superior, Herbert Hagen, won permission from the SS leadership to accept an invitation from Zionist activists to visit Palestine in order to devise plans to encourage Jewish emigration from the Reich. The trip’s primary purpose was meetings with ethnic Germans in the region and with Zionist leaders. Eichmann, who had not traveled beyond Austria and Germany, came to envision a broader plan. He expected to enter into high-level negotiations with Arab “nobility” and “politicians like Emir Abdullah and the Mufti of Jerusalem.” Eager to make the proper impression, Eichmann asked for funds to purchase “one light weight, light colored suit and one dark suit as well as a light overcoat.” His request was rejected, and instead of receiving the new suits, he and Hagen got stern warnings not to speak of their SD connections while in the Middle East. Though Eichmann would spin many fables about his time in Palestine, they were complete fantasies. After a day in Haifa, the British expelled them to Egypt. However, they did not let their aborted visit inhibit them from finding a vast Zionist conspiracy. Their report, which was primarily authored by Hagen, attributed Palestine’s poor economic situation to the absence of Aryans and the presence of Jews. In Germany, Jews made money by cheating Aryans. In Palestine, there were no Aryans, so Jews cheated one another.9
Shortly after returning to Germany, Eichmann participated in an SD day-long seminar on Jewish affairs. His presentation, “World Jewry: Its Political Activity and the Implications of the Activity on the Jews Residing in Germany,” detailed a variety of Jewish conspiracies, including a plan supposedly hatched by the head of the venerated French Jewish educational organization, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for the assassination of Hitler and Julius Streicher, publisher of the notoriously anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer. A Dutch Jewish organization joined the supposed conspiracy and enlisted the aid of the multinational margarine factory, Unilever. Eichmann told his audience that the Haganah had an array of heavy weapons, including aircraft. In his talk, Eichmann diagrammed Jewish organizations’ complex and entangled relationship. Rather than see the reality of Jewish organizational life, which was then—and remains today—an unwieldy conglomerate of groups that duplicate one another, Eichmann found a giant conspiracy. This conspiratorial idée fixe had its roots in centuries of anti-Semitic hatred that had been nurtured by the church and in more recent centuries had blossomed within an enlightened secular Europe. It could be seen in France’s treatment of Alfred Dreyfus and in Germany’s intellectual circles. Nazi leaders had made this notion a linchpin of their ideology. Eichmann, however, had wholeheartedly adopted it, adding depth and detail. He and his SD colleagues subjected the spectrum of Jewish organizations to this kind of fantasy analysis. Saul Friedländer has posited that since “the organized enemy they were fighting was nonexistent … their own enterprise had to create it ex nihilo.” Yaacov Lozowick argues quite persuasively that Eichmann and his colleagues, all of whom saw Jewish conspiracies wherever they looked, undoubtedly qualify as anti-Semites. Though this may seem obvious, it would become a matter of debate in the wake of the trial. “Not only were they indoctrinated. They were indoctrinators.”10 Adolf Eichmann found a comfortable home in the SD.
There remained one major issue—probably the most important of them all—to be resolved before a trial could proceed. What would be the scope of the crimes with which Eichmann would be charged? Bureau 06, adhering to standard police operating procedures, prepared files on those aspects of the Holocaust with which Eichmann could be directly connected. If Eichmann could not be directly linked to an event or action, they did not include it. Their list of proposed witnesses consisted only of people who had personally encountered Eichmann. Hausner found this completely unsatisfactory, told them to expand their perspective on Eichmann’s crimes, and turned for help elsewhere. In Justice in Jerusalem, he acknowledged Rachel Auerbach of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, for “placing at our disposal her department’s huge collection of [survivor] statements.”11 She did far more than that; she became one of his most important resources. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Auerbach ha
d been part of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archival group, which documented and recorded all aspects of ghetto life. Her one-hundred-page interview with escapees from Treblinka, which was smuggled out of the ghetto, was critical in alerting the world to the destruction process.12
She believed that the trial promised a “unique opportunity” to demonstrate the “full extent and unique nature of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.” Rather than a small criminal trial that focused specifically on Eichmann’s wrongs, she conceived of—and Hausner fully shared her view—a “large historical one.” She helped provide the historical framework Hausner used in structuring much of his prosecution. She stressed for Hausner that, although the Final Solution had unfolded differently in each country, there was also a “characteristic uniformity” in the way in which it was organized and carried out. This “support[ed] the supposition that one hand ruled over them.” Though her conclusion that “one hand”—Eichmann’s—ruled was incorrect, her ability to see both the nuances and systemic nature of the destruction process is noteworthy.
While Hausner may have come to this effort intent on shining the spotlight on the witnesses, he found the perfect partner in Auerbach. It was she who, in great measure, enabled him to find the witnesses. She shared his view that the survivors had the perfect right to be “irrelevant” regarding Eichmann’s specific crimes. Their testimony did not have to directly relate to what he did but should help paint the broad picture of the entire destruction process. Some observers considered this evidence highly prejudicial, while others believe that it is what gave this trial its place in history. Auerbach not only prepared lists of possible witnesses, many of whom Hausner selected, but also accompanied those lists with “suggestions and quotations” from the testimonies themselves. Hausner wove many of these into his examinations. It was Auerbach who urged him to call witnesses who could testify about German efforts to erase the evidence. Long before Eichmann’s capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort. Both testified. Despite her devotion to her fellow survivors, Auerbach recognized that just because they said they had seen something did not ensure its reliability. She observed that many of those who volunteered to testify were people who claimed to have “seen Eichmann” at places where he had never been or where “no one could have identified him in those days.” There were also those she described as “morbid publicity seekers.” However, she considered most of those who came forward to be “highly responsible people.”13
The Eichmann Trial Page 6