The Eichmann Trial (15 page)

This was not the only time Eichmann seemed oblivious to how strange his explanations sounded. Servatius asked him about a directive he had issued ordering that trains deporting Jews carry a minimum of one thousand people, even though their capacity was for only seven hundred. Eichmann claimed that the seven-hundred figure was calculated on the basis of soldiers with baggage. Since Jews’ luggage was sent separately, there was room for an additional three hundred people. The gallery erupted in laughter. Servatius also asked him about his superiors’ refusal to allow him to hire a rabbi to teach him Hebrew. They rejected his request, Eichmann claimed, because they feared a rabbi might influence him. They were also reluctant to pay the paltry hourly fee of three marks. Eichmann may have thought this incident would establish for the court that, had he been as important as the prosecution asserted, his superiors would have neither feared the rabbi’s influence nor objected to such a meager expenditure. Had he stopped there, the anecdote would have done him no harm. But, inexplicably, he continued, and wistfully observed, “It would have been best had I proposed that a rabbi be arrested so that he could give me instruction from the prison. But I had not thought of this.” One can imagine how the German Jews present, some of whom might have been candidates for arrest, reacted to his lament. He had shown similar obtuseness during his interrogation by Police Inspector Less. Eichmann had inquired about the fate of Less’s family. When Less told him that his father had been on the last deportation from Berlin and had eventually been murdered in Auschwitz, Eichmann responded in a manner suggesting that this was something with which he was unconnected: “But that’s horrible, Herr Hauptmann! That’s horrible!”
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When he turned to Hungary, Servatius faced a special challenge. Elsewhere in Europe, Eichmann had operated from afar and was generally not present during deportations. In Hungary, not only was he there but, lest there be any doubt about his role, he headed an SS unit dubbed “Sonderkommando Eichmann.” Eichmann’s version of events there differed dramatically from Hausner’s. Rather than playing a pivotal role, he claimed he was only “marginally involved,” did not conduct confiscations, make arrests, or even establish deportation timetables. After Eichmann delineated all he did
not
do, Servatius asked the obvious: “What was left for you?” Acknowledging that it sounded “incredible,” Eichmann insisted he was “simply an observer” assigned to keep his Berlin bosses informed about Hungarian matters. Why, then, Servatius asked, did German ambassador Veesenmayer write Foreign Minister Ribbentrop that “Head of Special Jewish Operations Unit Security Service, SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann,” opposed letting some Jews immigrate to Palestine even though he had been told that Hitler favored this. If Eichmann’s role was so inconsequential, why did his opinion matter? Eichmann insisted he was simply relaying Himmler’s orders. If he played such a menial role, why, Servatius asked, did Dr. Theodor Horst Grell, the head of the Foreign Office’s Jewish Affairs Section in Hungary, describe him as “exclusively responsible for the technical implementation of transport of Jews”? Why did Grell say that Eichmann had told him sometime in late 1944 that “he had some six million people on his conscience”? Eichmann insisted he could not have said this, because he did not have “anyone’s death on his conscience.”
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How, Servatius asked, could he explain his role in the “blood for goods” negotiations? A savvy defendant, Eichmann knew that, after repeatedly insisting that he had only followed orders, he could not now contend that in 1944 he had initiated a massive plan to save Jews. Instead, he claimed it was his attempt to even the score with an SS rival, who had encroached on his territory by trying to exchange Jews for military goods. “Furious,” he decided to conduct the negotiations himself and to expand the offer to a million Jews. He denied having told Brand that if he did not receive a positive reply to his ransom offer he would restart the gas chambers, because controlling the killings was not within his “competence.” Ironically, at least a portion of his testimony was probably true. He could not start or halt the killings at will. However, he might have told Brand precisely what was reported. It would not have been the first time that he inflated claims about his powers. In France in 1942, when an official canceled a few deportations, an irate Eichmann threatened that if this happened again, he would halt the deportation of French Jews. This decision, too, was beyond his authority. He probably made the threat in order to ensure that the official would henceforth comply with his orders. In short, when it served his purposes, he painted himself as all-powerful. Now that he was on trial for his life, he offered a very different image. When he yelled and ranted at Brand, it was not because he wish to exert his power. He yelled because he was “hurt” and filled with “anger” that others were sabotaging his attempts to organize the emigration of Jews.
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As the examination drew to a close, Eichmann tried to impress upon the court his honesty and willingness to confront the truth. He knew that “some of the people” whom he deported would be “killed in the camps.” Yet he had no choice: “I had to carry out the transports in accordance with my orders.” Stressing his sincerity, he added, “That I must admit according to the truth.” Eichmann concluded by lamenting his fate. He was “unlucky.” Generals could “evad[e] service,” whereas a person such as himself who held “an inferior position cannot shirk his duty.” If he was guilty of anything, it was in the “ethical,” not the legal context. His guilt was, he told the judges, a personal matter, which he had to address with his “innermost self.” Obliterating the Jews whose deaths he facilitated, he declared himself to be the victim, “a tool in the hands of stronger powers and stronger forces, and of an inexorable fate.”

Time
believed Eichmann had been “a good witness.”
The Observer
, though convinced that “he would do it all again,” believed he proved himself a “cleverer man” than the Israelis had assumed. Haim Gouri reacted to Eichmann’s testimony with astonishment: “Not anger. Not pain. Not hatred. Just amazement.” In his testimony, Eichmann had gone from a “logistics officer … to sergeant … to clerk, a mere secretary who passed on letters and telegrams from his superiors to his subordinates and from his subordinates to his superiors, up, down and sideways.”
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Gouri was unconvinced by this transformation. Others, foremost among them Hannah Arendt, saw things quite differently. She saw an automaton who was just passing on information and who failed to understand that what he had done was wrong.

Eichmann’s loquaciousness infuriated the judges. Landau had to admonish him repeatedly to keep his answers short. “It is clear to us that, in German, the predicate comes at the end of the sentence, but it takes too long to reach the predicate.” Matters did not improve. The judges complained about his tendency to give incomprehensible answers, deliver “speeches” rather than answers, and include irrelevant material. Even from a distance of nearly fifty years, Eichmann’s testimony remains maddening. In response to Servatius’s question about his insistence that foreign Jews wear the yellow star, Eichmann began a discourse on police regulations for official correspondence and interministerial rivalries. Exasperated, Landau interrupted and instructed him, “You were not asked to give a general lecture.… You were asked a specific question.” Ignoring Landau’s reprimand, Eichmann continued with a discourse on the procedure for drafting letters for the department chief’s signature, including what the different-colored inks signified. Using German to ensure that Eichmann understood, an exasperated Landau lectured him: “You are asked specific questions and you must give specific answers.… Do you understand?”
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Eichmann may have assumed that, by larding his answers with bureaucratic detail, he would project the image of an operations officer accused of acts well beyond his ken. If this was his plan, he enjoyed some success.
The New York Times
was struck that Eichmann did not appear “sullen or defiant,” just “dull.” Their coverage described him as a man who “reveled in bureaucratic phrases” and was not even “worth hating.”
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Yet some observers saw another side. As the examination proceeded, Servatius often stumbled, mixed up documents, and could not locate the proper reference. On occasion, Eichmann corrected him or passed him a document from his booth so he could make a particular point. When this happened, one observer noted, “Eichmann’s voice sharpened: the cold snarl, the bark that many of the witnesses remembered was there, one tone beneath what we heard.” The prominent French journalist Joseph Kessel described Eichmann’s reaction when the prosecution read from depositions by his former SS colleagues that implicated him. Kessel felt the “passion and rage” emerging from beneath the “hollow mask.” This, he declared, was the “true Eichmann.”
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A
fter Servatius concluded his examination came the long-awaited confrontation—“the battle of wits”—which the spectators who packed the courtroom had been anticipating: Hausner’s cross-examination. The exchange—described by one observer as a “duel”—turned ugly from the outset. Hausner wanted yes or no replies to his questions. Instead, he got labyrinthine, expansive nonresponses. The attorney general’s attempts to cut Eichmann off were to no avail. As the answers grew maddeningly more evasive, Hausner became increasingly frustrated. “The Accused was asked a question and he must answer it.… But he must not give replies in the form of lectures.” When that did not help, Hausner began to hector and shout. At one point, just as Eichmann uttered the word “because,” which was usually a precursor to one of his convoluted discourses, Hausner emphatically cut him off: “I don’t want to hear any ‘because.’ I want an answer.” Eichmann, seemingly oblivious to the attorney general’s demand, plowed on. An exasperated Hausner exploded: “Without ‘but,’ I want an answer!” Landau immediately admonished Hausner that Eichmann must be allowed to finish. Though Hausner’s combative style seemed beneath the dignity of both his office and this case, his frustrations were understandable. His plan was to build an evidentiary web around Eichmann and to box him in with one of two choices: either acknowledge what the evidence indicates you did, or deny it. If Eichmann did the former, he would be admitting his guilt. If he did the latter, particularly in light of evidence that so clearly implicated him, he would be exposing himself to the judges as a liar rather than the “honest defendant” he insisted he was.
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If Hausner was annoyed by Eichmann’s evasive style and meandering nonanswers, he was incensed by Eichmann’s assertion that he sought to help, not persecute, Jews. What documents, Hausner sneered, proved that “Jewish functionaries asked you to send Jews naked and penniless to Nisko?” Eichmann painted an idyllic portrait, one that was in stark contrast to the testimony offered by Nisko survivors. First Eichmann claimed that the Nisko plan had a benevolent motivation. He wanted to enable Jews to live “among themselves and not under the conditions of stress to which they were subjected in their previous localities.” He spoke as if the “stress” was an inherent condition in which he had no role. He had done the same thing when he expressed his “horror” that Captain Less’s father had been deported from Berlin and murdered in Auschwitz. His description of Nisko bore little relationship to reality: “Rivers, villages, markets, small towns … It would benefit all concerned.” Hausner challenged Eichmann’s bucolic description by observing that “even Polish farmers were unable to cultivate” land there, and no one drank the water because of fear of toxins. Eichmann, defending it as “not the worst,” contended that it was “not that certain” that the waters were poisoned. At the most they “might cause typhoid.” Eichmann described himself as being “enthusiastic” about finding an area to “be allocated for these Jewish needs.” Had Hausner stopped at this point, the absurdity of Eichmann’s claim would have stood on its own. Instead, he pushed further. “All you have related here … is a pack of lies.… You knew that the Jews in the Generalgouvern[e]ment were facing extermination.”
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Now it was Hausner who had gone too far. He was wrong: At the time of the Nisko plan, Jews were not facing systematic extermination. Many of those brought to Nisko died from the harsh conditions. If more would have been sent, they, too, would have died. But this was not yet the Final Solution, the deliberate destruction of European Jewry. Hausner made the same mistake when he insisted that 1939 meetings regarding the Final Solution constituted planning sessions for genocide. At that point, the Final Solution did not yet mean purposeful murder.

Sometimes Eichmann scored small but direct hits. Hausner contended that, according to the Nuremberg documents, Julius Streicher had devised the Madagascar plan. Eichmann countered that Hausner had it wrong: the Nuremberg documents indicated that the Madagascar idea had been mentioned in Streicher’s paper,
Der Stürmer
, but not that he had devised it. A small matter, but Hausner could not have been happy to be corrected by Eichmann on a document’s factual content. A few seconds later, Hausner suffered a more significant blow. When Eichmann claimed that reading Herzl’s
The Jewish State
inspired him to propose creating a Jewish territory, an overwrought Hausner exploded: “You do not mention names of persons whom you are not fit or worthy of mentioning.” Landau admonished Hausner for his inappropriate remark. Then Hausner continued to sink deeper into a morass of his own making. For some inexplicable reason, he again insisted that Eichmann had gotten the idea for Madagascar from
Der Stürmer
. Eichmann protested: “I was not a reader of the
Stürmer.
” Hausner, his voice laced with cynicism, responded: “You did not read the
Stürmer
? Your Führer used to read it every week.” This kind of comment prompted the
Washington Post
to note, “The more Eichmann was needled by Hausner, the more dignity Eichmann displayed.” Eichmann was hardly on trial for reading this anti-Semitic newspaper. And here, too, Eichmann may have been truthful. Eichmann’s SD superiors considered Streicher’s propaganda undignified, vulgar, and unproductive.
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