Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann,
son of Karl Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection:
medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair,
ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial
keeps craning his scraggly neck toward the bench (not once does he face the
audience), and who desperately and for the most part successfully
maintains his self-control despite the nervous tic to which
his mouth must have become subject long before the trial started.
HANNA HARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM1
OTTO ADOLF EICHMANN, a former obersturmbannführer (lieutenant-colonel) of the German Reich, was captured in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 11, 1960, by Israeli agents. He was transported to Tel Aviv and brought to trial under Israel's Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law in Jerusalem District Court on April 11, 1961. He spent over a month on the stand, testifying about his participation in the Final Solution.
He was still proud of his wartime “idealism.” Unlike the “businessmen” of Kurt Becher's kind, he maintained his full belief in the cause of making Europe free of Jews. In the beginning, his idea had been to help them emigrate. He had, personally, simplified the emigration system for Austrian Jews. Until he arrived, he said, as a mere untersturmführer (second lieutenant) in 1938, there had been nightmarish difficulties with the paperwork. Without his dedication, it would have taken years to “cleanse” the country of its Jews. He, alone, took credit for devising a system that fed people in at the entrance to a building, where they could hand over their property and their citizenship and walk out through the exit the same day, their departure visas and entry permits for Palestine in hand. His successful system would have been extended to the rest of Europe, he claimed, had the Allies and the neutral nations agreed to take more Jews.
When the supply of exits to Palestine dried up—Eichmann said it was the British who caused the difficulties, not the Germans—he pioneered the concept of a homeland for Jews in the Radom district of Poland and, later, in Madagascar. Eichmann himself had visited the Nisko area near the San River in Poland and found it highly suitable, but Hans Frank, Hitler's appointed governor of occupied Poland, destroyed that plan. Madagascar, situated off the east coast of Africa, was difficult to reach when the Allies were interfering with sea routes. Eichmann said it was only after his unappreciative superiors—Himmler, Hitler, Heydrich—had nixed the various “geographic solutions” that he reluctantly agreed to follow Hitler's directive for a “physical solution.”
Eichmann was still disappointed that his ideas had been ignored and bitter that he had not progressed beyond the status of obersturmbannführer while others, less dedicated and less hardworking than he, had been rewarded with higher ranks. Becher, for example, was made full standartenführer (colonel) before the war ended. “Himmler had sent his own man to Budapest,” Eichmann said. “Becher dealt with Jewish emigration.”
It was after Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941 that Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Office, had instructed him to proceed with the implementation of a “Final Solution to the Jewish problem in Europe.” By that time, practically all Jewish emigration had ceased, partly because of Britain's position on its Palestinian protectorate, but also because of Hitler's friendship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Eichmann confirmed Dieter Wisliceny's Nuremberg testimony that the Mufti “constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”2
Eichmann testified that he had been baffled by Heydrich's speech at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. At first he had not understood what “Final Solution” meant. To elucidate the matter, Heydrich explained that “the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.” Eichmann told the Israeli court that he and his fellow officers had sat in silence for a few minutes while they absorbed the meaning of that phrase. Strangely, that may have been the last time those words were spoken openly. Afterward, all discussions and conversations employed euphemisms for mass killings: Final Solution, sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Arbeitsamsatz in Osten (labor in the east). At his trial, Eichmann made no effort to use the softening language.
He recalled with convincing horror how mobile gas trucks had been used in the east, how hundreds of Jews—women and children, young and old—had been ordered to strip before being packed into trucks, where they were killed slowly and agonizingly by gas. He remembered the trucks being opened after the shrieking had died down and the bodies being thrown into ditches. In Minsk he had witnessed a troop of Sonderkommando shoot hundreds of huddling, naked people and throw them into ditches. In Treblinka he had observed a column of naked women and children being marched into a large hall to be gassed. He had refused to watch through the special peephole that made it easy for the shift workers to note when the doors could be opened again and the bodies removed for burning.
Eichmann had been disgusted by what he had seen, he testified at the trial. He was repelled by the dreadful acts that young German recruits were forced to commit, and he felt sorry for the untrained boys who were given such orders. If he felt anything for the dying Jews, he did not say so. Personally, he had never killed a single Jew, he said.
As a fellow idealist, he said he had no difficulty in understanding Rezső Kasztner and Joel Brand, but he never had his heart in the “trucks for lives” or the “blood for wares” deal he had instructed Brand to take to Istanbul. It had been Himmler's idea. As an idealist, he justified it to himself with the belief that the German army needed whatever was on the list, even if it turned out to be fewer trucks and more coffee. In a small way, the exchange had worked; in a larger sense, though, he said bitterly, it had guaranteed the safety of some of the “gentlemen” soldiers, men such as Kurt Becher. Eichmann did not hide behind any pretense of humanity.
Eichmann talked of Kasztner as a like-minded person. “Kasztner smoked cigarettes as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked, he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter… With his great polish and reserve, he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.” Eichmann claimed that Kasztner had “agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate to Palestine… He wanted only biologically valuable material. It was a good bargain.”
When Hansi Brand heard this part of Eichmann's statement, she said that the prosecutors could discount everything that Eichmann had said. The facts were that only a very small proportion of those the Va’ada saved were young. As for Eichmann's contention that Kasztner had been keenly interested in “biologically valuable material,” that was language used only by the Nazis. In her own testimony, she detailed how Eichmann had frequently talked about “positive biological material.” He viewed Jews from the Carpathians as “positive” because “they were Jews in body and soul.” How could one tell the difference between a biologically valuable Jew and an intellectually valuable one? And how could Kasztner have kept order in the ghettos? Who asked him? His only trip outside Budapest had been to his hometown, she said, and even there no one believed him about the death camps. In a later interview with Randolph Braham, she said most of the Jews in Kolozsvár knew what the deportations meant. They had heard about Auschwitz from Polish refugees.
Eichmann remembered Hansi and smiled at the memory. “She was the smart young woman who was there with Kasztner,” he said. Eichmann thought she was smarter than Kasztner—at least, she knew more than he did.
Throughout the Eichmann trial, the prosecution made every effort to avoid letting the Kasztner trial proceedings seep back into the courtroom and thence into the headlines. In this objective they were largely successful, despite Shmuel Tamir's insistence that the matter of Malchiel Grünwald's conviction be re-examined in light of Eichmann's testimony and that Eichmann be asked more questions about his dealings with Kasztner.
André Biss, who had worked with Kasztner in Budapest and therefore knew Eichmann, was not called to testify, because chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner discovered that he was going to use the opportunity to defend Kasztner's actions. As Biss later recalled of Eichmann's trial, “102 witnesses for the prosecution were heard, [and] at least 90 of them had not only never met Eichmann but, until the end of the war, had never even heard his name.” Biss had traveled to Israel fully expecting to be called, but after he told the prosecutor that he would not give evidence unless he was free to tell the truth and that the truth involved testimony on behalf of Kasztner, Hausner dispensed with him as a witness.3
In an interview he gave Life magazine, Eichmann described Kasztner as “an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist.” He claimed that they had “negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement and we trusted each other perfectly.”
The difference was, as Hansi remarked when she saw the article, that only one of them could have sent the other to the gas chambers. How could this murderous criminal compare himself with Kasztner, whose sole interest in those meetings had been to save lives? And why would the media repeat these ravings? Nevertheless, the portrait of Kasztner that Eichmann presented was a testimonial of its kind. It demonstrated how well Kasztner had played the life-and-death roulette game, and how well he had fooled this notorious architect of the Holocaust into believing that they had been equal partners.
In his concluding statement, Eichmann said: “I am not the monster I am made out to be. I am the victim of a fallacy.” He did not elaborate on the meaning of “fallacy,” but it can be assumed that he meant the murder of Europe's Jews had been based on some fallacious beliefs, though he never articulated which ones. Four years before the trial, in an interview with Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist, he had said without reservation: “There is nothing I have to regret. Had we killed eleven million Jews as contemplated, however, I would have been happier.” The eleven million referred to all the Jews of Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, and Switzer-land—a number that Eichmann had calculated would fall into his hands once the war was won.4
On December 15, 1961, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death. On March 29, 1962, after one week of deliberation, the Court of Appeal confirmed the judgment.
On May 31, 1962, after all appeals had been exhausted, Adolf Eichmann was hanged. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered outside the borders of Israel.