The Eichmann Trial (14 page)

Throughout this period, Eichmann kept pushing for faster extermination of the Jews. Himmler saw matters differently and put the decision about restarting the deportations on hold. This did not represent an ideological change regarding the murder of the Jews: the Final Solution could be restarted once the military situation was stabilized. Himmler was also apparently persuaded by his own regime’s propaganda regarding the power of the Jews. He speculated that American and British Jews could convince the Western Allies to make a separate peace with Germany. Eichmann, recognizing that his task was thwarted at this point, returned to Berlin. Then, in mid-October, the Germans engineered a coup by the pro-Nazi Hungarian organization, the Arrow Cross. Within two days, Eichmann returned to Budapest. He summoned Kasztner. The Soviets were already on Hungarian soil, and the Reich was crumbling. Nonetheless, Eichmann greeted Kasztner with noticeable bluster.

So you see I am back here again! You no doubt thought that the story of Romania and Bulgaria would repeat itself here? Apparently you forgot that Hungary still rests in the shadow of the destruction of the Reich! And our hands are long enough to grasp the Jews of Budapest as well.…

He then proposed a deal. Budapest Jews would be deported to the Reich, “this time on foot.” But if the Jews “place at our disposal a suitable number of trucks,” they would go by truck. Behind Eichmann’s “offer” lay Berlin’s desperate need for laborers. The Hungarians agreed to transfer fifty thousand Jews to Germany to “replace worn-out Russian and other POW’s.” In the past, when “offered” a portion of a country’s Jews, Eichmann had refused: for him it was all or nothing. This time, he accepted. In truth, he had not retreated from his all-encompassing approach. According to a German Foreign Office report, he intended to keep asking for groups of fifty thousand until he had “secure[d] the final objective of clearing the Hungarian zone.”
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He began with a vengeance. The court heard how he had rounded up and dispatched tens of thousands of Jews on week-long marches, often with no food, blankets, or water. Conditions were so barbaric that some of the marchers committed suicide. Swiss diplomats, who witnessed the marches, reported that those who became sick “were often shot dead … [or] were left behind … without medical help; only in rare cases were arrangements made for feeding them.” The marchers “received at most 3 to 4 portions of soup throughout the entire duration of the foot march, but usually went several days without receiving any food at all.” The horror of the conditions is best attested to by the reaction of Waffen-SS General Hans Jüttner and Auschwitz Commandant Höss when they passed the marchers on the road. “Shocked” by the “terrifying impression” made by the marchers, they “protested sharply” and ordered the marches halted, because they feared the inmates would be unable to work upon reaching Germany. When Eichmann returned to Budapest, he ordered the marches resumed, arguing that they had been halted on the “mistaken impression of some gentlemen who were not capable of judging whether people who had been on the road for about seven or eight days could be regarded as fit for labor.” During his interrogation with Captain Less, Eichmann painted a markedly different picture of the marchers: “Not many died, apart from … a few [who] died naturally.” Speaking as if he had no direct connection with the marches, he lamented them as a “sad business” and asked Less if he did not think “it was sad when citizens walk in this manner, stagger along in this fashion, is that not so, for the final kilometers?” He also insisted that he “never looked at these wretched scenes on principle, unless I received an order.” He did not elucidate the precise nature of that principle.
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With the Russians approaching, Eichmann had his men ferret out Jews who were being protected by foreign delegations. He told Red Cross workers that, if he could, he would shoot “the Jewish dog Wallenberg” for sheltering Jews. But he was not able to accomplish this goal, or that of ridding Hungary of all its Jews; and in November, after the Hungarians stopped the foot marches, Eichmann, aware that the end was near, left for Berlin. The Germans were gone, but for Jews the horrors continued. The Hungarian Arrow Cross, the National Socialist group that had assumed control of the government in October, barbarically murdered thousands of Jews who had survived the Nazis. Some were tied together and pushed into the Danube. This orgy of torture and murder lasted until the Soviets arrived in February 1945. Lozowick has aptly described it as “a malevolent blood fest.” Eichmann had gone to Hungary intent on organizing “a deportation, surpassing every preceding operation in magnitude.” He succeeded. Over a half-million Hungarian Jews had died from poor conditions or had been murdered. In the space of less than eight weeks, approximately 145 trains had left for Auschwitz carrying about 440,000 Jews. Tens of thousands of others died during the marches to the Reich or from barbaric treatment while still in Hungary. Even though during the trial Hausner attributed to Eichmann parts of the Final Solution for which he bore no responsibility, when it came to describing the murder of Hungarian Jewry the prosecution got it just about right.
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A
fter addressing the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, Hausner attempted to link the Holocaust to contemporary Middle Eastern politics. He argued that Eichmann and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini, were closely connected. The mufti, who had been a guest of the Reich in Berlin during the war, helped organize a Muslim unit of the SS, tried to galvanize other Muslims to fight the Allies, and insisted that the Reich take the harshest actions possible against Jews. In 1943, after learning of the murder of European Jewry, the mufti declared that Germany had “decided to find a final solution to the Jewish danger that would remove their harm from the world.” There is no question about his approval for the Nazi effort to murder Jews. His close relationship with Eichmann, however, was not clear from the evidence. Eichmann had boasted to Kasztner that he was “a personal friend of the Grand Mufti.” An entry from the mufti’s diary appears to praise Eichmann as a “rare diamond.” Eichmann admitted that he had met the mufti. Though the mufti probably deeply appreciated the work in which Eichmann’s office was engaged, there was probably only a slight personal connection between them. There certainly was no evidence to support Hausner’s implication that they had a close relationship and had worked together.
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What was clear, without Hausner’s explicitly saying so, was that this was an expression of Ben-Gurion’s conviction that the Arab nations were the heirs to the Nazi desire to destroy as many Jews as possible.

Hausner concluded his case with a last-ditch effort to introduce the transcripts of the Sassen tapes. Because the tapes themselves were unavailable and the transcripts could not be matched against them, the court ruled that they did “not have any value as a document.” It did admit into evidence the pages Eichmann had corrected or on which he had added additional comments in his own handwriting. Hausner read a selection of those additions. Eichmann had told Sassen that it “was Hitler himself—neither Heydrich nor Himmler” who initiated the Wannsee Conference. At this gathering the state secretaries of those departments responsible for policies relating to Jews were informed by Heydrich of the details of the Final Solution. They discussed the way in which this murder program would proceed and concluded that it would target approximately eleven million European Jews, including those from England, Ireland, and Spain. After the meeting Eichmann sat with Müller and Heydrich, “not in order to talk shop, but in order to relax after the long hours of strain.” These comments made it plain that Hitler and Nazi Germany stood behind the Final Solution, but Eichmann’s most self-incriminating words came when he recalled his “work” in Hungary. Nazis who tried to stop the mass murders had “sinned against German blood.” He, on the other hand, had reached “deportation figures to be proud of,” something he credited to his “uncompromising fanaticism.” Yet he lamented that he did “not achieve my ultimate aim, which was to free Hungary of all its Jews.”
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It was not an auspicious moment for Eichmann. He had been damned with his own words.

5

O
n June 20, ten weeks after the Jerusalem courtroom was first called to order, Adolf Eichmann “took the stand”—actually, he stayed in his booth—in his own defense. The disembodied voice of the rambling, self-incriminating witness of the Bureau 06 interrogation, and the boastful, unapologetic, slightly inebriated memoirist of the Sassen tapes, were replaced by a disciplined and well-prepared defendant.

During an eight-day recess, he and Servatius had carefully mapped their strategy. Rather than ignore the incriminating evidence Hausner had introduced, they would attack it head-on and attempt to explain it away. Their explanations fell into certain predictable categories. Eichmann was obliged to follow orders. He never acted on his own initiative: “I made absolutely sure to get instructions from my chief on even the most minor matters.” Some of the documents that incriminated him had been altered by other Nazis in an attempt to shift the blame to him. Other documents were simply wrong and resulted from sloppy work by his colleagues. Sometimes one explanation was piled on top of another. Such was the case when Eichmann addressed the memo by the Foreign Office’s Franz Rademacher regarding Belgrade Jews. In it Rademacher noted in the margin: “Eichmann suggests shooting.” Eichmann insisted that Rademacher was wrong. Such a recommendation “would have gone far beyond my area of competence.” Moreover, Eichmann insisted, Rademacher was incompetent and had incorrectly entered his name. On those occasions during his testimony when none of these excuses sufficed, Eichmann fell back on faulty memory. He did not remember the telegram he had sent to the Security Police in France ordering that “the Jew Golub,” who had just received a valid passport for a South American country, thereby making him eligible to emigrate, be immediately arrested and placed on an “evacuation transport” to Auschwitz, to keep him from leaving. Nor did he remember the request from Strasbourg University’s “Institute of Ancestral Heredity” for 115 skeletons for research. Eichmann had arranged for these Jews to be selected by an anthropologist and gassed. He could not deny his involvement, since the letter explicitly referred to his discussions about it. Meshing two excuses, he insisted that he had forgotten, but even if he had participated, he would not have made the decision, because he was not “competent or authorized to deal with these matters.”
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Actually, Eichmann may have been telling the truth in both of these cases. He was consulted on Serbia, but did not in fact have any authority there. By the same token, while he may have lobbied on behalf of Strasbourg University, the request and decision would have gone through a different chain of command and been made at a higher level than Eichmann.

Eichmann had yet one other explanation, which courtroom spectators invariably greeted with derisive laughter: He was no anti-Semite. He had “worked
with
Jews” to extricate them from the problems they faced. His work in Vienna did not oppress Austrian Jews but was “beneficial” to them, because, he explained using Nazi-like terminology, “two thirds of the Jews domiciled in Austria could be brought to emigrate.” He conveniently ignored the reason Austrian Jews wished to leave, which was what he and his colleagues were doing to them. His decision that Jews who were to be “evacuated”—his euphemism for “deported”—had to place almost all their resources in a special fund was in the “interests of both parties,” Germans and Jews. These “donations” sustained those who remained behind. He was an ally of the Jews and, as such, “facilitate[d] and promote[d]” Zionism by striving to “put the Jews on their feet in their own land.” Breaking with his repeated claim that he had never taken any initiative on his own, he claimed—falsely—that he had conceived of the idea for a Madagascar settlement. He drew his inspiration, he told the court, from Herzl’s Zionist classic,
The Jewish State
. His “sole” objective was that “land be placed under the feet of the Jews.” He did more, he told the court, than try to resettle the Jews in a homeland. He saved their lives. In September 1941, he deported twenty thousand Jews to the Łodź Ghetto instead of to the “East,” despite the intense objections of the German officials there. He did so because he had seen the “preparations for extermination” in the East, knew the fate awaiting them there, and wanted to save them.
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Servatius then turned to Eichmann’s role at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which Heydrich had convened to brief other ministries on the Final Solution. Eichmann had previously claimed that he wrote Heydrich’s speech, and that after the meeting Heydrich and Gestapo Chief Müller had accorded him the honor of inviting him to join them for a fireside celebratory Cognac. Now he spun things differently, claiming that, as secretary, he had simply prepared the statistical information for the meeting and compiled the minutes afterward. Regarding the fireside Cognac, he “was allowed to be present” while they celebrated. If he had played such a minor role, Servatius asked, why had he told Sassen how pleased he was with the conference? He was pleased, he explained, because he recognized that the awful “solution” that had been discussed at the meeting was not his plan, in that he was not “personally connected” with it. In contrast to the murder program, he had always sought “peaceful solutions,” which did “not require such a violent and drastic solution of bloodshed.” He turned to the bench and added a bizarre addendum. Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, despite having convicted Jesus, believed himself to be “entirely innocent of any guilt” because he had been ordered to do something and did it. So, too, Eichmann declared, his superiors, whom Eichmann called the “Popes,” had ordered him, and it “was up to me to obey.” It is entirely fanciful to imagine that he contemplated issues of guilt and innocence in 1942. Moreover, he seemed oblivious that he was making this historical comparison but a stone’s throw from where Pilate’s sentencing of Jesus had been carried out, and that he was doing so before a court composed of Jews, whom the New Testament held accountable for Jesus’ fate. The dense nature of his observation was compounded by the fact that church leaders had consistently used this event to generate the very Jew hatred that was at the heart of what was being adjudicated at this trial. Without the legacy of contempt nurtured by the church, the Final Solution would never have been realized. Was Eichmann completely deaf and blind to the identity of those before whom he was testifying or was this an attempt—conscious or unconscious—by him, who grew up with daily Bible readings, to cast the Jews as once again being the crucifiers? Irrespective of Eichmann’s motivations, with this comment the historical narrative of the trial seemed to come full circle.
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