Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann ran the deportations. As head of Section IV-B-4 of the Reich Security Main Office, the Jewish desk, he organised the transport of around three million Jews from across Europe to the killing sites in occupied Poland. He was not a senior decision-maker. He was the operational manager who took the policy decided above him and turned it into train timetables, station assignments, escort details, and arrival schedules. Without him or someone like him the Holocaust could not have happened logistically. He was the one who got the trains to run.

What he did before the war

From 1938 Eichmann ran the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, the model that would later become the model for forced emigration across the Reich. He extorted the Austrian Jewish community into rapid emigration through a combination of property confiscation, threats, and bureaucratic harassment. Around 100,000 Austrian Jews were forced out in eighteen months. The operation impressed Heydrich and Himmler. Eichmann was given expanded responsibilities and the brief to run similar operations across the Reich. By 1941 his focus had shifted from emigration to deportation, and his desk had become the central administrative point for the killing programme.

Wannsee

Eichmann took the minutes at the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 at Heydrich’s instruction. The Wannsee Protocol that he produced is the central documentary record of the meeting at which the Holocaust was communicated through the Reich civil service. The protocol uses bureaucratic euphemism throughout, but its meaning was clear to the men in the room. Eichmann sat next to Heydrich. He understood what was being decided. He testified at his Israeli trial in 1961 that the post-meeting discussion, which the protocol does not record, had been an open conversation about which killing methods were most efficient. He had drafted the protocol carefully to leave the substance unrecorded while making the policy clear to readers who needed to know.

The deportation machine

Eichmann’s office coordinated the deportations from every German-controlled territory. Train scheduling went through the Reichsbahn, but the booking, the routing, the categorisation of deportees, the distribution of confiscated property, the cooperation with each occupied country’s administrative apparatus, ran through Eichmann’s desk. He travelled regularly to occupied countries to negotiate with local authorities. He met with Vichy French officials in 1942 to arrange the deportations from France. He met with Slovak officials in 1942 to arrange the deportations from Slovakia. He met with Greek and Bulgarian officials in 1943. He coordinated with the Dutch and Belgian transit camp administrations. By the end of 1943 he had organised the deportation of around two million Jews to the killing sites.

Hungary, 1944

The Hungarian operation of May to July 1944 is the case where Eichmann moved from his desk into direct field command. He arrived in Budapest on 19 March 1944 with a Sondereinsatzkommando of around 100 SS men. He had eight weeks before the deportations were due to begin. He met with Hungarian Interior Ministry officials, the Hungarian gendarmerie commanders, and the Hungarian railway administration. He set up the transit camps. He scheduled the trains. The deportations began on 15 May 1944. By 9 July 1944, when Horthy ordered them halted under international pressure, Eichmann’s operation had deported 437,402 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, of whom around three quarters were murdered on arrival. The figures came from his own daily reports.

During the same period he met repeatedly with Joel Brand, the Hungarian Jewish negotiator, and proposed the trade of one million Hungarian Jews for ten thousand trucks for use against the Soviet Union. The proposal was a transparent attempt to split the Allied alliance and was rejected. Eichmann had personal authority to make it. The Brand mission, conducted entirely through Eichmann’s office, is documented in detail in the Israeli trial transcripts.

The Sassen tapes

In 1957 in Buenos Aires, where Eichmann was living under the false name Ricardo Klement, he gave a series of taped interviews to the Dutch fascist journalist Willem Sassen. The tapes were intended for an admiring book that was never published. They survived. They contain Eichmann, in his own voice, openly proud of his work, dismissive of any moral framework that would condemn him, regretful only that more Jews had not been killed, and explicit about what he had known and what he had done. The tapes were used as evidence at his Israeli trial. They are the document that disposes of the defence Eichmann attempted to mount in court that he had been a small and reluctant cog in someone else’s machine. The tapes record the man on his own terms, before he was caught. He was not reluctant.

The trial

Mossad agents kidnapped Eichmann from outside his home in Garibaldi Street, Buenos Aires, on 11 May 1960 and flew him to Israel nine days later. His trial opened in Jerusalem on 11 April 1961 and ran for eight months. Around 100 Holocaust survivors gave evidence, in many cases for the first time in any public setting. Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth throughout. He was found guilty on all fifteen counts on 11 December 1961. He was hanged on 1 June 1962 at Ramla Prison shortly after midnight. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea outside Israeli territorial waters. He is the only person ever executed under Israeli civilian law.

What he was

Hannah Arendt, covering the trial for The New Yorker, called Eichmann the case of the banality of evil. The phrase has been argued about ever since. Arendt’s point was that Eichmann’s evil came not from monstrousness but from a banal failure to think about what he was doing. The Sassen tapes complicated that picture. Eichmann was perfectly able to think about what he was doing. He had thought about it carefully. He was proud of it. The argument continues, but the documentary record of his work makes the basic case clear. He had organised the deportations. He had known they led to gas chambers. He had done it efficiently. He had wanted to do more. The deportations were, on the documentary record, the most operationally consequential single piece of administrative work in the Holocaust. They were his.

See also

Sources

  • Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Knopf, 2014
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, 1963
  • The Sassen tapes, partial transcripts in Stangneth and in Der Spiegel, 1979
  • Eichmann trial transcripts, State of Israel, 1961
  • Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
  • USHMM: Adolf Eichmann