Nazi Hunter (18 page)

At Dachau in 1933–4, the concentration camp was guarded by Bavarian SS men wearing a skull on their collar patch. ‘We called them Death’s-headers,’ Eichmann recalled. His
unit, commanded by Prussians, wore the lightning SS symbol with the number 1. They were foot-troops. Given regular German Army training and strict military discipline, Eichmann preferred this diet
to ‘the shock-troop nonsense we’d had in Lechfeld’, but chafed at the ‘crushing monotony’ of military life – ‘day after day always the same, over and over
again the same’ – and schemed to escape the routine.

When he heard that the SS’s own intelligence service, the SD, was recruiting from the ranks, he applied. In the fall of 1934, Eichmann received orders to travel immediately to Berlin.

SD headquarters in the Hohenzollern Palace on the Wilhelm-strasse proved doubly disappointing to Eichmann: ‘I expected to see what I’d seen in the illustrated magazines: SS commandos
riding in cars behind high party leaders; men standing on running boards.’ He had confused the SD (
Sicherheitsdienst
) with the bodyguard branch of the Reich Security service, but,
never having learned the right bureaucratic word,
Begleitkommando
, he couldn’t complain. It is typical of Adolf Eichmann’s career that the aimless, boyish mishmash of
misinformation and mistaken identity that brought him to Berlin
landed him in the information department of the SD as his first step up the ladder of extermination.

He was put to work on a file of suspected freemasons – classifying their cards in alphabetical order. Masonic lodges, with their mystic rites and secret signs, had long perturbed the Roman
Catholic Church and the Habsburgs; almost two and a half centuries earlier, the libretto for Mozart’s opera
The Magic Flute
was written in code to conceal its parallels to masonic
initiation. The Nazis were quick to lump masons into their early witches’ stew of enemies along with Jews, communists, and gypsies.

Though he tried to wriggle out of the work by claiming he knew nothing about freemasonry and had never even heard of it, he didn’t persist, for he had tracks to cover. A born joiner who
had belonged to the Young Men’s Christian Association in elementary school and a couple of German youth movements in high school on his way to the Nazi Party and the SS, he’d been on
the verge of joining the Schlaraffia lodge of freemasons in Linz in 1932 when Kaltenbrunner had warned him this was incompatible with Nazism. No wonder the new work in Berlin gave him ‘the
creeps’.

To make matters worse for Eichmann, his section was inspected every second or third day by either Heinrich Himmler, the failed chicken-farmer who headed the SS, or Kaltenbrunner. Knowing that
Kaltenbrunner was aware of his flirtation with freemasonry, the inconsequential Eichmann was quick to endorse (or at least pay lip-service to) his mentor’s eugenics: compulsory child-bearing
for all Aryan women under thirty-five; if their husbands couldn’t or wouldn’t father their children, or if women weren’t married, then fathers of families with more than four
children should be made available for stud duty. On the other hand, Jews should be exterminated and Slavs extinguished via sterilization and the annihilation of their leaders.

After three weeks in this uneasy seat in the information department, however, Eichmann was made an assistant to a curator creating a freemasonry museum made up of materials seized from lodges
across Germany: aprons, medallions, seals, photos, whole libraries: ‘One room was supposed to represent a St John’s Temple and another a St Andrew’s Temple. My work was to
classify, catalogue, and label thousands of “ritual objects”. It must have kept me busy for five months.’

One day in 1935, an Austrian Nazi aristocrat named Leopold von Mildenstein stopped by Eichmann’s desk in the St John’s Room and asked him to explain his work.
Impressed by Eichmann’s capability as a custodian of cults that would soon be extinct if Hitler had his way, von Mildenstein said he had just organized a Jewish department at SD headquarters
and asked the young clerk to come to work for him. Eichmann didn’t hesitate: ‘I’d have gone in with the devil himself just to get away from those seals!’

One can wonder now who would have become the senior partner in such a union. At the time, Eichmann impressed his superiors only with his diligence in doing whatever was asked of him. Though one
of his colleagues described him as ‘a most colourless creature – the typical subordinate: pedantic, punctilious [and] devoid of any thorough knowledge’, he did have an
ingratiatingly subservient manner, springing to attention and clicking his heels whenever an officer passed in the hall.

As part of Eichmann’s on-the-job training, von Mildenstein, who had served as the SD chief of intelligence in Palestine, gave him Theodor Herzl’s seminal work,
The Jewish
State
(1896), to read and report back on. In doing so, he inadvertently converted Eichmann to Zionism.

Yes, Zionism! ‘The book interested me very much,’ Eichmann would recall later. ‘Up until then, I had no knowledge of such things. Somehow . . . this book touched a chord in me
and I took it all in . . .

‘When I’d finished reading, I was told to make an abstract of it to serve as an orientation booklet for the SS general staff and also for the specific use of the SD. . .

‘In it, I described the structure of the Zionist world organization, the aims of Zionism, its sources and the difficulties standing in its way. I also stressed the need to encourage it,
because it fell in with our own desire for a political solution: the Zionists wanted a territory where the Jewish people could finally settle in peace. And that was pretty much what the Nazis
wanted.’ Perhaps, under the relatively benign (compared to Kaltenbrunner) influence of von Mildenstein, Eichmann sincerely believed for a time that there was a political solution to the
Jewish problem.

By 1936, Eichmann had become the SD’s leading expert on Jewish problems. Citing Herzl and reading further – starting with the
Encyclopedia Judaica
and
Adolf Böhm’s
History of Zionism
– he gave lectures and wrote pamphlets. Among the documents Simon Wiesenthal came across in his postwar manhunt was a mid-1930s application
by Eichmann for ‘special funds’ to enable him to study Hebrew with a rabbi. Though Eichmann noted that the lessons would cost only three marks – ‘a real bargain’,
Wiesenthal insists – his Nazi chiefs turned him down for fear of further contamination.

Nevertheless, Eichmann started studying the Hebrew alphabet by himself. And, whenever the occasion arose, he would advocate putting ‘some firm ground under the feet of the Jews’;
Palestine in preference to crematoria; a political solution rather than a ‘physical solution’; emigration over expulsion over extermination. In the all-consuming crucible of Nazism,
these were relatively humane beginnings for a genocidist who would become the ultimate Grand Inquisitor of European Jewry. Looming above all else, however, was his stolid acceptance and relentless
expediting of whatever evil was decreed from above.

Late in 1936, he was joined at the SD’s Jewish Desk by another von Mildenstein protégé: Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing, twenty-nine, a Prussian nobleman who had opened a
building supply firm in Palestine in 1933 and spied for von Mildenstein there until the British intercepted his reports. In early 1937, Bolschwing initiated contacts between the SD, which wanted
the Jews out of Germany, and the Zionist movement, which wanted German Jews in Palestine. He began by informing Eichmann that ‘a gentleman from Haganah’ – the Jewish defence force
in Palestine – was visiting Berlin. Eichmann took Commander Feivel Polkes, a Polish-born accountant, out to lunch twice and went back to the office with an invitation to visit Palestine to
discuss the trade-off further.

Von Mildenstein, a civil engineer by profession, had transferred to the road-building Todt Organization,
²³
the same enterprise to which Simon
Wiesenthal and thirty-three other hostages would be sold in 1944 as ‘non-German forced labour’. His successor, Herbert Hagen, elected to make the trip to Palestine with Eichmann in late
1937. Outfitted with press credentials from the
Berliner Tageblatt
– once a liberal Jewish newspaper until the Nazis took it over – Hagen and Eichmann
set sail on a Romanian steamship in a bizarre and futile pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Eichmann and Hagen spent just two days in Palestine. While their ship was in the harbour of Haifa, Eichmann took a taxi to the top of Mount Carmel. Near Tel Aviv, he and Hagen visited a kibbutz
and a German colony in Sarona which was a refuge for transplanted freemasons belonging to the forbidden order of Knights Templar. Commander Polkes didn’t catch up with them until they’d
moved on to Cairo, and he had nothing concrete to offer them. In Cairo, Eichmann and Hagen did meet with the fanatical Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; already banished from Palestine for fomenting riots,
he would spend the war in Berlin broadcasting for Hitler. When the two German ‘journalists’ wanted to return from Egypt to Palestine to pursue their Haganah negotiations, however, the
British Consulate, having learned of their contacts and seen through their press credentials, refused them visas.

Returning home from his Holy Land pilgrimage on an Italian ship, Eichmann caught paratyphoid fever, which he termed ‘the pathetic end of what had looked to be a promising trip.’
Discharged from the ship’s hospital only when the boat landed in Bari, Eichmann wrote ‘a detailed report absolutely negative in substance’ upon reaching Berlin; it purported to
quote disgruntled German Jews in Palestine as saying it was better to be in a concentration camp back home. SD chief Heydrich scrawled ‘Good’ at the bottom of it.

Blundering onward and upward, Eichmann left the enlisted ranks on 30 January 1938, when he was commissioned a lieutenant and commended for his ‘comprehensive knowledge of the methods of
organization and ideology of the opponent, Jewry.’ For all his later power, though, he never rose above lieutenant-colonel; no higher hierarchical slot had been designated for coordinating
mass extermination.

When Adolf Hitler annexed his native Austria on 12 March 1938, and German troops received a jubilant welcome, an SD team was dispatched there, too. Adolf Eichmann was certain he’d be
chosen to go on that mission to his family’s adopted homeland, but when he wasn’t, he swallowed his disappointment: ‘Orders are orders. You’ve got to obey, and that’s
that.’

As it turned out, Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich and Hagen all had higher hopes for him. A week later, he was sent to Vienna as head of the Centre for Emigration of
Austrian Jews.

While Eichmann had been chafing in Berlin for an Austrian assignment, Baron Louis von Rothschild, head of the international banking family, was taking Sunday dinner in his
Viennese palace on the Prinz Eugen-Strasse on 13 March 1938, when six steel-helmeted Gestapo men arrived to arrest him. His buder made them wait in a vestibule until the Baron finished his meal.
Then they marched Baron Rothschild off to a prison cell and, later, internment in a Gestapo hotel until a ransom could be negotiated with the House of Rothschild. The Nazis asked for twenty million
dollars, but received considerably less. It was still a time when one could do business with Hitler.

Upon arrival in Vienna, Adolf Eichmann was given ‘a small room with nothing in it but a desk’ in the glittering, chandeliered Palais Rothschild: his headquarters for what he would
later look back on as the best year of his career. It was here that he discovered his two true talents: he could organize ruthlessly, and he could negotiate from a position of strength, real or
illusory.

‘I’ve tried to find out exactly when Eichmann turned from a theoretical expert on the Jewish question into an executioner,’ says Simon Wiesenthal.
‘When he came to Vienna, he was still talking politely about “forced emigration”. I’ve talked to Jews who remember Eichmann from those days. All of them say he was different
from the rest of the SS hoodlums. His attitude was unyielding, but always icily polite.’

Eichmann’s mission at the time was economic: to extract as much money and treasure as possible from wealthy Jews who wanted to emigrate and raise additional foreign
currency to pay for the emigration of poorer Jews. He set the machinery in motion overnight. When a seventeen-year-old Viennese Jew named Arthur Pier went to the police station to apply for a
passport and saw the long line of desperate people, he decided this kind of discomfort wasn’t for him. Instead, he went to the post office and mailed in his application. Forty-eight hours
later, a passport arrived by return mail. ‘I took a train to Greece,’ he recalls, ‘and three weeks later I was in Palestine’,
where he eventually
changed his name to Asher Ben Nathan and came back to Europe after die war as an Eichmann-hunter, a Wiesenthal partner, and, later, Israel’s first ambassador to its erstwhile archenemy,
Germany.

Early in his Viennese tenure, Eichmann sent for the leaders of the Jewish community, all of whom had been locked up in the Nazi takeover. Looking for a Jew he could work with on
‘stepped-up emigration’, he confronted one Dr Josef Löwenherz, who was still so indignant about his arrest that he insulted Eichmann.

‘Anger got the better of me,’ Eichmann recalled in 1960. ‘I lost control, which very seldom happened. I don’t know what got into me. I let myself go and slapped him in
the face. It wasn’t the kind of slap that hurt, I’m sure of that. I haven’t got that much muscle. But I never concealed that incident. Later on, when I was a commandant, I spoke
of it in the presence of my subordinate officers
and
Dr Löwenherz – and begged his pardon. I did that deliberately . . . because in the department I ran later, I did not
tolerate physical violence. That was why I apologized in uniform and in the presence of my staff.’ Nothing is more important to a desk murderer than clean hands. Jolted by his treatment yet
tantalized by Eichmann’s offer to aid Jewish emigration, Dr Löwenherz elected to work with him throughout the war: drawing up draft proposals for deporting four million Jews to Palestine
instead of Poland . . . negotiating with Eichmann over housing for evicted Jews . . . setting extortionate exit fees and foreign currency exchange rates for Jews able to buy their way out of
Austria. . . and even contacting an American Jewish organization, the Joint Distribution Committee, in an effort to raise further foreign funds for ransoming the Jews of Austria. He was, Hannah
Arendt wrote, an historic figure, for he became ‘the first Jewish functionary actually to organize a whole Jewish community into an institution at the service of the Nazi
authorities.’
²⁴
If, as she claims, the Jews co-operated in their own destruction, then the process began when Eichmann slapped
Löwenherz.