13: Eichmann

As the full-scale program of annihilation got under way, it brought to the fore a 35-year-old SS lieutenant colonel who had attended the Wannsee conference but who, with deference appropriate to his position as recording secretary for the meeting, had spoken not a word. He was an industrious functionary named Adolf Eichmann, and he was lucky enough to have as his mentor Reinhard Heydrich himself.

Eichamann had joined the SS in 1932 while pursuing an indifferent career as an Austria-based traveling salesman. In 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, he had moved to Germany and begun a year of training in two SS camps in Bavaria. He applied for a job in the counterintelligence branch of the SS, which Heydrich had recently set up.

Eichmann's first assignment was to collect information on the Freemasons and other groups the Nazis considered potentially subversive. But he soon became fascinated by the Jews, and to study them in depth he went so far as to learn a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish. Eichmann liked to claim that he was not an anti-Semite; he actually conversed with Jews and took a Jewish mistress. He objected to the Jews only because they were a threat to the health of the Greater German Reich.

Eichmann's colleagues came to consider him a "Jewish expert," and after the German take-over of Austria in 1938 he was put in charge of the "forced emigration" of Austrian Jews. This, his first important job, turned out to be a stunning success. He "cleansed" Austria of 45,000 Jews in the same eight-month period that saw only 19,000 Jews evicted from Germany. In 18 months, he reduced Austria's Jewish population by about one half, to 150,000 people. What is more, he showed a tidy profit.

His tactic, as Heydrich explained it, was the soul of simplicity: "Through the Jewish community, we extracted a certain amount of money from rich Jews who wanted to emigrate."

In recognition of his excellent performance in Austria, Eichmann was prepped for greater things with a series of broadening assignments, some for Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller, some for Heydrich himself. In 1941 and 1942, for example, Eichmann helped organize the Theresienstadt ghetto north of Prague to accommodate prominent Jews whose disappearance would prompt embarrassing questions. This was part of an interim program of concentrating and isolating all Jews in convenient ghettos and labor camps. In the summer of 1941, Eichmann, now a major, learned the reason for the program.

Heydrich, who had just received Hitler's instructions to draft a master plan for the Final Solution, summoned Eichmann to Berlin and told him, "The Fuehrer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews." Years later, during his war-crimes trial, Eichmann said that he was stunned by Heydrich's announcement. But the shock passed. As he later said, the "Popes of the Third Reich" had spoken and "who am I to have my own thoughts in this matter?"

Heydrich soon gave Eichmann another shock: He put him in charge of organizing and coordinating the transportation of Jews from all over Europe to the death camps that were then being built in Poland. Eichmann, promoted to lieutenant colonel in October 1941, began briefing himself on the problems he would face and looking for ways to assist the camp commandants.

Eichmann was awed and gratified by this momentous opportunity to serve the Reich, and in the next few months he made several study trips to the Soviet Union and Poland. He traveled to Minsk on orders from Mueller, who wanted him to observe the shooting of some Jews and to report on how it was done. Eichmann arrived late at the killing site.

"They had already started, so I could see only the finish," he reported. "Although I was wearing a leather coat that reached almost to my ankles, it was very cold. I watched the last group of Jews undress, down to their shirts. They walked the last 100 or 200 yards -- they were not driven -- then they jumped into the pit. Then the men of the squad banged away into the pit with their rifles and machine pistols. I saw a woman hold a child of a year or two, pleading. Then the child was hit. I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat. My chauffer helped me remove them."

During a visit to Lodz, Eichmann witnessed the gassing of 1,000 Jews in sealed buses. He found the spectacle so disconcerting that he forgot to time the gassing procedure. For this he was later chided by Mueller. To explain his undue sensitivity, Eichmann said, "I simply cannot look at any suffering without trembling myself."

Of his visit to the Majdanek death camp near Lublin he said: "A German police captain there showed me how they had managed to build airtight chambers disguised as ordinary Polish farmers' huts, seal them hermetically, then inject the exhaust from a Russian U-boat motor. I never thought that anything like that would be possible, technically speaking."

Eichmann also visited what was to become the biggest and most efficient death camp, Auschwitz. He found Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the camp, in a quandary over design of the gas chambers, which depended on the kind of gas to be used. Eichmann, Hoess later said, was extremely helpful.

"He told me about the method of killing people with exhaust gases in trucks," recalled Hoess, "but there was no question of being able to use this for these mass transports that were due to arrive at Auschwitz. Killing with showers of carbon monoxide while bathing, as was done with mental patients in some places in the Reich, would necessitate too many buildings. We left the matter unresolved. Eichmann decided to try and find a gas that was in ready supply and that would not entail special installations for its use."

One possibility was Zyklon B. To be sure, both carbon monoxide and Zyklon B had been proved effective in the T-4 program. But Zyklon B worked faster and was easier to handle, since it came in the form of pellets that dispensed the poison into the air when the canisters were opened. Its only drawback was a limited shelf life, which was not a serious problem considering the massive extermination program now getting underway.

On a return trip to Auschwitz, Eichmann was pleased to learn that Hoess had found a quantity of Zyklon B on hand for fumigation, and that one of his assistants had tried it out with satisfactory results on a few prisoners of war. Following a short discussion, Hoess and Eichmann agreed that Zyklon B would be employed for the mass extermination operation at Auschwitz.

The pace of Eichmann's work sped up after the Wansee conference. The business of organizing the country-by-country deportation of Jews proved hectic and full of imponderables. The hardest part of Eichmann's job was to find enough rolling stock anywhere. In some countries, the railroads were left in the hands of the local administrators, and Eichmann's subordinates had to negotiate with officials who were reluctant to cooperate in the deportation of citizens even though the Jews' announced destination was only "labor camps."

Eichmann also had to contend with Army supply officers who considered it more important to provide for the fighting fronts than to liquidate the Jews. Such obstructionists fought hard for the limited rolling stock available -- a supply that grew even more limited as Allied bombers took their toll. But some officers recognized the import of his work and cooperated with him.

Eichmann later claimed that he had no desire to see his Jewish charges suffer unnecessarily. He said that "the Jews were always shipped in covered, not open cars, and always by the quickest possible routes." It annoyed him to hear accusations that he and his staff tolerated the maltreatment of his Jews. When one of his assistants informed him that local Hungarian "police were driving the Jews into the cars like cattle to a slaughterhouse," Eichmann "several times reminded that Hungarian government in writing that we did not want to punish individual Jews." The point was, he said, that the deportation of the Jews was neither personal nor punishment but "work toward a political solution."

In any event, the long rail journeys to the death camps were ghastly. Each boxcar held 60 to 90 Jews, and they would have to stay locked in for as long as 10 days while the train moved along routes that avoided population centers. A small number of armed guards rode on each train and dismounted at stops to make sure that no Jews tried to escape and to prevent civilians from passing food or water into the cars.

The Jews in transit were quick to discover, as one survivor recounted, that "the simplest details of existence would be extremely complicated. Sanitary disposal was out of the question. As the journey stretched on endlessly, the car jerking and jolting, all the forces of nature conspired against us. The torrid sun heated the walls until the air became suffocating. The travelers were mostly persons of culture and position from our community. But as the hours slipped away, the veneers cracked. Soon there were incidents and, later, serious quarrels. The children cried; the sick groaned; the old people lamented. As night fell we lost all concept of human behavior and the wrangling increased until the car was bedlam."

Once a train disgorged its cargo of Jews at a camp, Eichmann had to make sure that the railroaders returned swiftly to the next pickup point. Nothing was more frustrating than to have one of his trains delayed because its passengers had arrived at a camp that was too crowded to handle them immediately. So Eichmann assembled statistics on the "absorptive capacity" of each camp and tried to see to it that Jews were not deposited at any camp faster than they could be conveniently killed there.