In any event, the year marked a turning point of his life. In court, Eichmann gave the impression that he was a typical member of the lower middle classes, and this impression was more than borne out by every sentence he spoke or wrote while he was in prison. Before Eichmann entered the Party and the S. When Kaltenbrunner suggested that he enter the S. The choice between the S.
And he had replied, Why not? That was how it had happened, and that was about all there was to it. Of course, that was not all there was to it. What Eichmann failed to tell the presiding judge in cross-examination was that he had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as travelling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company became fed up with him, and that from a humdrum life without significance or consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it; namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and make a career.
Not only in Argentina, leading the unhappy existence of a refugee, but also in the courtroom of Jerusalem, with his life as good as forfeited, he might still have expressed a preference—if anybody had asked him—for being hanged as an S. But even without this new calamity a career in the Austrian Nazi Party would then have been out of the question; those who enlisted in the S. Eichmann therefore decided to go to Germany—a decision that was all the more natural because his family had never given up its German citizenship.
This fact was of some relevance to the trial. Servatius had asked the West German government to demand extradition of the accused and, failing this, to pay the expenses of the defense, and Bonn had refused, on the ground that Eichmann was not a German national—which was not true.
Thus he did become an Austrian after a fashion, despite his German passport. His application was approved. In , the S. Then it had taken on some additional duties, becoming the information and research center for the Geheime Staatspolizei Secret State Police, or Gestapo. This was the first step toward the merger of the S. Eichmann, of course, could not at that time have known anything of this, but he seems to have known nothing even of the nature of the S. According to what he told Captain Less, he joined the S.
His disappointment consisted chiefly in the fact that he was back at the bottom and had to start all over again; his only consolation was that other members of the S.
He was put into the research division, in Berlin, where his first job was to file all information concerning Freemasonry—which in the early Nazi ideological muddle was somehow lumped with Judaism, Catholicism, and Communism—and to help in the establishment of an Anti-Freemasonry Museum. He now had ample opportunity to learn what this strange word meant that Kaltenbrunner had thrown at him in their discussion of the Schlaraffia.
Incidentally, an eagerness to establish museums to be used as propaganda against their enemies was characteristic of the Nazis. During the war, several German bureaus competed bitterly for the honor of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries. We owe to this strange craze the preservation of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry. Unfortunately, things were again very, very boring, so Eichmann was greatly relieved when, after four or five months of Freemasonry, he was put into a brand-new department, concerned with Jews.
This was the real beginning of the career that was to end in the Jerusalem court. It was the year , when Germany, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, introduced general conscription and publicly announced plans for rearmament, including the building of an air force and a navy.
This was also the year when Germany, having left the League of Nations in , prepared, far from secretly, the occupation of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. In Germany itself, this was a time of transition. Because of the enormous rearmament program, unemployment had ceased to exist, and the initial resistance of the working class was thereby broken. To be sure, one of the first steps taken by the Nazi government, back in , had been the exclusion of Jews from the civil service which in Germany included all teaching positions, from grammar school to university, and most branches of the entertainment industry; namely, the theatre, the opera, concerts, and radio and, in general, their removal from public office, but private business and the legal and medical professions were not touched until , though Jews were no longer permitted to take the state examinations leading to these professions.
The emigration of Jews in these years proceeded, on the whole, in an orderly and not unduly accelerated fashion, and the currency restrictions that made it difficult, but not impossible, for Jews to take their money—or, at least, the greater part of it—out of the country were the same for non-Jews; they dated back to the days of the Weimar Republic. The Jewish emigrants, unless they were political refugees, were mostly young people who realized that there was no future for them in Germany—and since they soon found out that there was hardly any future for them in other European countries either, some of them actually returned during this period.
It took the organized pogroms of November, —the so-called Kristallnacht , or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop-windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps—to expel them from it.
One frequently forgotten point of the matter is that the famous Nuremberg Laws, issued in the fall of , had failed to do the trick. At the trial, the testimony of three witnesses from Germany—former high-ranking officials of the Zionist Organization who left Germany shortly before the outbreak of the war—gave only the barest glimpse into the true state of affairs during the first five years of the Nazi regime.
Sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans and the contraction of mixed marriages were forbidden, and no German woman under the age of forty-five could be employed in a Jewish household. Of these provisions, only the last was of practical significance; the others merely legalized a de-facto situation. They had been second-class citizens, to put it mildly, since January 30, ; their almost complete separation from the rest of the population had been achieved in a matter of weeks, through terror but also through the more than ordinary connivance of those around them.
Benno Cohn, from Berlin, testified at the trial. However, in complete ignorance of what is permitted and what is not one cannot live. One can also be a useful and respected citizen as a member of a minority in the midst of a great people. He then acquired a smattering of Hebrew, which enabled him to read, haltingly, a Yiddish newspaper—not a very difficult accomplishment, since Yiddish is basically an old German dialect written in Hebrew letters, and can be understood by any German-speaking person who has mastered a few dozen Hebrew words.
It is worth noting that his schooling in Jewish affairs was almost entirely concerned with Zionism. Eichmann was given his first opportunity to apply in practice what he had learned during his apprenticeship when, after the Anschluss , or incorporation of Austria into the Reich, in March, , he was sent to Vienna to organize a kind of emigration that had thus far been utterly unknown in Germany, where up to the fall of the fiction was maintained that Jews were permitted to leave the country if they wished but were not forced to do so.
Whenever Eichmann thought back to the twelve years that were the core of his life, he declared this year in Vienna to have been its happiest and most successful period. He must have been frantic to make good, and certainly his success was spectacular. The basic idea that made all this possible was not his but, almost certainly, was contained in a specific directive from Heydrich, who had sent him to Vienna in the first place.
The problem was not to make the rich Jews leave but to get rid of the Jewish mob. There were two things he could do well, or better than many other people: he could organize and he could negotiate. Having undergone such imprisonment, the Jewish functionaries did not need Eichmann to convince them of the desirability of emigration.
Rather, their concern was to inform him of the enormous difficulties that lay ahead. Each of the papers was valid only for a limited time, and this meant that the validity of the first had usually expired long before the last could be obtained.
They were appalled. Otherwise, you will go to a concentration camp! They needed, and were given, their Vorzeigegeld —the amount they had to show in order to obtain their visas and to pass the immigration inspection of the recipient country.
For this amount, they needed foreign currency, which the Reich had no intention of wasting on its Jews. These needs were not covered by Jewish accounts in foreign countries, which, in any event, were difficult to get at, because they had been illegal for many years. Eichmann therefore sent a number of Jewish functionaries abroad to solicit funds from the great Jewish organizations, and these funds were then sold by the Jewish Community to the prospective emigrants for a considerable profit.
One dollar, for instance, was sold for ten or twenty marks when its market value was 4. It was chiefly in this way that the Community acquired not only the money necessary for the poor Jews and people without accounts abroad but also the funds it needed for its own, hugely expanded activities. Eichmann had not arranged the deal without encountering considerable opposition from the German financial authorities, who, after all, could not remain unaware of the fact that these transactions amounted to a devaluation of the mark.
He had apologized in front of his staff at the time, but this incident kept bothering him. The claim that he was responsible for the death of five million Jews—the approximate total of the losses suffered from the combined efforts of all Nazi bureaus and authorities—was preposterous, as he knew very well, but he had kept repeating the damning sentence ad nauseam to everyone who would listen, even long after the war, when he was in Argentina.
Former Consular Official Horst Grell, who had known Eichmann in Hungary and had heard him make the claim there, testified in a court, in Berchtesgaden, in , that in his opinion Eichmann was boasting. That must have been obvious to everyone who heard him utter his absurd claim. But bragging is a common vice. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of his good year in Vienna.
The German text of the taped police examination, which was conducted by Captain Less between May 29, , and January 17, , and each page of which was corrected and approved by Eichmann, demonstrates that the horrible can sometimes be not only ludicrous but downright funny.
Whether he wrote his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether he talked to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words.
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think ; that is, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.
No communication with him was possible, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words of others, or even the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. Thus, confronted for eight months with the reality of being examined by a Jewish policeman, Eichmann did not have the slightest hesitation in explaining to him at considerable length, and repeatedly, how he had been unable to attain a higher grade in the S.
He had done everything; he had even asked to be sent to active military duty. He did not insist much on this, though, and, strangely, he was not confronted with his statements to the police examiner, to whom he had said that he had hoped to be nominated for the Einsatzgruppen , the S.
There was, finally, his greatest ambition—to be promoted to the job of police chief in some German town. Again, nothing doing. I was frustrated in everything, no matter what. That surprises me very much indeed. It is altogether, altogether unthinkable. Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and the result is stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention.
Such was the story that Eichmann told during the police examination about the unlucky Commercial Councillor Bertold Storfer, one of the representatives of the Viennese Jewish Community.
Nothing could be done; neither Dr. Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. He told me all his grief and sorrow. Eichmann testified from behind a glass booth in order to protect him from possible assassination. In his last day of testimony, he admitted that while he was guilty of arranging the transport of millions of Jews to their deaths, he did not feel guilty of the consequences.
Eichmann followed the common plea of Nazi perpetrators that he was only following the orders of others. On December 11—12, , Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization.
He was sentenced to death on December On June 1, , Eichmann was executed by hanging. His body was cremated and the ashes were spread at sea, beyond Israel's territorial waters. The execution of Adolf Eichmann remains the only time that Israel has enacted a death sentence. The Eichmann Trial aroused international interest in the events of the Holocaust.
The proceedings were one of the first trials widely televised, and brought Nazi atrocities to a worldwide audience. Unlike the International Military Tribunal Trial at Nuremberg and the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings , which relied extensively on written documents, the Eichmann Trial put survivors at center stage.
Testimonies of Holocaust survivors, especially those of ghetto fighters such as Zivia Lubetkin, generated interest in Jewish resistance. The trial prompted a new openness in Israel; many Holocaust survivors who had heretofore remained silent about their experiences felt able to share their experiences as the country confronted this traumatic chapter in the lives of many of its citizens. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Featured Content. Close to 2 million were executed elsewhere. Following the war, Eichmann was captured by U. Eichmann traveled under an assumed identity between Europe and the Middle East and in arrived in Argentina, which maintained lax immigration policies and was a safe haven for many Nazi war criminals.
In , a German prosecutor secretly informed Israel that Eichmann was living in Argentina. In May , Argentina was celebrating the th anniversary of its revolution against Spain, and many tourists were traveling to Argentina from abroad to attend the festivities.
The Mossad used the opportunity to smuggle more agents into the country. Israel, knowing that Argentina might never extradite Eichmann for trial, had decided to abduct him and take him to Israel illegally. On May 11, Mossad operatives descended on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando and snatched Eichmann away as he was walking from the bus to his home.
His family called local hospitals but not the police, and Argentina knew nothing of the operation. On May 20, a drugged Eichmann was flown out of Argentina disguised as an Israeli airline worker who had suffered head trauma in an accident. It was the first trial to be televised in history. Eichmann faced 15 charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes. He claimed he was just following orders, but the judges disagreed, finding him guilty on all counts on December 15 and sentencing him to die.
On May 31, , he was hanged near Tel Aviv. His body was subsequently cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On May 23, thousands of LGBTQ activists celebrated as Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through referendum.
0コメント