'TO SUM IT ALL UP, I REGRET NOTHING'
Nazi who had millions of Jews killed tells of cruel barter attempt and a fantastic last stand
Last week, in Part I of Eichmann's own story, the unregenerate Nazi told about his rise to power. As specialist for "Jewish affairs," he helped set up Hitler's extermination system. In the second of two installments he tells how, by March, he personally went to Hungary to handle 500,000 Jews there. The weird bargain which Eichmann and Himmler offered Hungarian Jewish leaders is told in detail for the first time.
by Adolf Eichmann
Only Heinrich Himmler could turn off the liquidation machine. In was in 1944, the year of the assassination attempt on Hitler, when Reichsfuhrer Himmler took over as commander of the Reserve Army, that he authorized me to propose an exchange: one million Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers. The world Jewish organization could decide for itself what Jews it wanted to choose. We asked only that they get us 10,000 trucks. Thanks to Himmler’s directive, I could assure them, on my word of honor, that these trucks would be used only on the Eastern front. As I said at the time, “When the 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers are here, then the liquidation machine in Auschwitz will be stopped.”
In obedience to Himmler’s directive I now concentrated on negotiations with the Jewish political officials in Budapest. One man stood out among them, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, authorized representative of the Zionist movement.
AS GESTAPO LEADER, Eichmann sometimes wore civilian clothes, making his dread journeys through occupied Europe in search of Jewish victims.
This Dr. Kastner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews – in the end there may have been more – was not too high for me.
Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarets 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.
Dr. Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel. But the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist party, had grown strong and stubborn. Its inspectors permitted no exceptions to the mass deportations. So the Jewish officials turned to the German occupation authorities. They realized that we were specialists who had learned about Jewish affairs through years of practice.
Immensely Idealistic Zionists
As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their last battle. As I told Kastner: “We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.”
Exposed in the Kastner case, the Israel politicians do not need to disprove any of the facts in order to prove themselves not guilty. They need only to flash into the eyes of their constituents the "ideal" they served. Who attacks them, attacks Zionism. Who attacks Zionism attacks the finest development in two thousand unhappy years of Jewish history. Tyrants, dictators, and all power-drunk leaders operate always behind the screen of some Ideal. The Ideal exempts them of any guilt for what they do. More, it magically converts their connivings and wicked deeds into proof of how valorously they served the Ideal.
"I understand Kastner," Eichmann writes in his autobiography, published in Life magazine. "He is an idealist like I am." [120]
-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht
I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. “You can have the others,” he would say, “but let me have this group here.” And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews.
Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i ]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.
-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain", by Dan Stone
At the same time Kastner was bargaining with another SS official, a Colonel Kurt Becher. Becher was bartering Jews for foreign exchange and goods on direct orders from Himmler. A crafty operator, Becher had come to Hungary originally to salvage a stud farm which the SS wanted. He soon wormed his way into dealings with the Jews. In a way Reichsfuhrer Himmler was Becher’s captive: Becher showed me once a gold necklace he was taking to our chief, a gift for a little lady by whom Himmler had a child. There were other agencies, German and Hungarian, which tapped Kastner for foreign exchange in return for Jews, but I held aloof from money affairs and left the material transactions to Becher.
Men under Becher’s command guarded a special group of 700 Jews whom Kastner had requested from a list. They were mostly young people, although the group also included Kastner’s entire family. I did not care if Kastner took his relatives along; he could take them wherever he wanted to.
The Gentleman’s Agreement
This is how most of the illegal emigrations were arranged: a group of special Jews was taken into custody and brought together in a place designated by Kastner and his men, where they were put under SS guard to keep them from harm. After the Jewish political organizations arranged transportation out of the country, I instructed the border police to let these transports pass unhindered. They traveled generally by night. That was the “gentleman’s agreement” I had with Kastner.
After leaving Hungary, the Jews could then travel through neutral foreign countries or stay hidden, usually in Romania, until the necessary steamships arrived to take them on board. When they reached Israel, the ships waited off shore until a few courageous Jews helped the passengers land against the orders of the British mandate authorities. Since the refugees had no valid papers, the Jewish organization must have spent enormous sums of money to bribe Romanian officials, who did not do these favors for nothing. All this went on with Himmler’s permission. I would never have dared dance to my own waltz. If I demanded rigid obedience from my own subordinates, I had to be just as rigid in carrying out my superiors’ orders. Otherwise I would have been a bad SS commander, and I think I was a good SS commander.
By the same token my relationship with Dr. Kastner was strictly correct. He never saw me or my subordinates ever drink a single glass of wine or Schnaps, and there were certainly never any drunken orgies with Jews. If anything like that had happened, I would have heard of it and I would have punished the offenders the way I punished my chauffeur, who once unscrewed a toilet lid from my office because he needed a new toilet seat for his rented room. He was expelled from the SS. Once, when the same man fell asleep while driving my car, I made him march on foot all the way from Dresden to Berlin. That is how I would have treated any of my men who got drunk or even had a drink with a Jews.
All my own agreements with the Jewish officials were more or less side-transactions to the exchange of the million Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks with trailers. Becher and I were twice ordered to Himmler in Berlin to discuss it. Whether Himmler settled the actual terms of the exchange or whether he left it to me, I do not remember. When I think back, though, it seems to me that Himmler may have authorized the offer “for an appropriate number,” and I set the figure at 10,000 to one million, because I was an idealist and wanted to accomplish as much as possible for the Reich.
It was clear that, for lack of numbers, I would never have squeezed a million Jews out of Hungary. But it was obvious that Jews were piled on Jews in Auschwitz and the various other concentration camps. So I assumed that we could easily produce a million Jews -- Jews from Hungary, supplemented with Jews from Germany, from Austria, from wherever they wanted to take them. It would be a tragedy if the international Jewish community was not able or willing to accept them.
Motorize the Divisions
I do remember Himmler’s specifically saying to me, “Eichmann, motorize the 8th and 22nd Cavalry Divisions". This indicated the personal concern of Himmler, who was soon to take over the Reserve Army, in receiving those trucks. They were far more important than the lives of individual Jews. What did he care about a million Jews? His concern was his divisions. He apparently did not want to motorize these two divisions, but rather to equip them for use as a sort of fast-moving task force. It was for this that he gave instructions to Lieut. General Oswald Pohl, who was in charge of the concentration camp system, to kill no more Jews, to save them up, more or less.
After I received Himmler's authorization, I told my assistant Krumey to bring me Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew whom we had chosen to send to Palestine to take a proposal to the Jewish leaders. Brand left on his trip some time before the grain was high -- as an old country boy I remember the time well. Krumey brought him to Vienna, had him furnished with the proper papers and shipped him by plane to Istanbul, because Turkey was still neutral. When he got as far as Syria, he was arrested by the British, interrogated and imprisoned in Cairo. The Jewish leaders never accepted our proposal [see box page 148].
I knew at the time that Brand was being held by the British, because Kastner was giving me constant reports. But when I let Brand leave the country, I had made sure his family stayed in Budapest so that I could have a guarantee of his return. Then as the weeks went by I said to Kastner, "Kastner, you know what we agreed. Brand's family stays here because he must return. Why doesn't he come back?" And so for the first time I did use family pressure, but I never turned pressure into practice because Dr. Kastner's reports still held out some hope. I never took any steps to keep Brand's family from emigrating illegally. If they had, I would never have known it.
PITIFUL MEMORIAL to Jews executed in Maidanek camp in Poland, this pile of shoes was found by Russian soldiers when they came to camp in 1944.
Meanwhile the deportations had to continue in spite of our pending deal. But the Jews were to a certain extent "put on ice,” held in a camp ready to be moved at any time. Suppose Brand had come back and told me, "Obersturmbannführer, the matter is settled. Five or ten thousand trucks are on their way. Give me a half million or a million Jews. You promised me that if I brought you a positive report, you'd send 100,000 Jews to a neutral country as a deposit." Then it would have been easy for us to ship the Jews off.
GERMAN SOLDIERS LEAD HELPLESS WOMEN CAPTIVES DEEP INTO THE WOODS IN POLAND. MANY WERE EXECUTED
If the deal had succeeded, I believe I could have arranged to ship the first 20,000 Jews in two days via Romania to Palestine or even via France to Spain. If there had been any delay it would have come from the side of the receivers. The plain fact was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews, not even this one million.
We had a hearty, comradely relationship with the Hungarian secret police until they learned that we were letting Jews emigrate behind their backs. Then the gentlemen reacted strongly. They refused to visit or consult with us, and it became my job to smooth things over. Fortunately I had formed a warm friendship with Dr. Lászlo Endre, the second secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. I had even given him my own machine pistol as a gift (naturally with the approval of my superiors). The two of us managed to restore good relations, and I even spent a few weeks on Dr. Endre's country estate. At the time I was virtually out of work for lack of further numbers to deport.
Meanwhile, as the Russians advanced and the first symptoms of the coming chaos were noticeable, the transports were halted. A series of Allied air raids had torn up the Budapest-Vienna railroad track so that for a time no trains could get through. This made Dr. Endre impatient. He wanted to get on with the solution of the Jewish problem. So I resolved to teach our opponents a lesson, to say, “Look, it does you no good when you bomb out our railroads, because your allies, the Jews, have to endure the consequences." I proposed a forced march of the Jews to the Reich's border. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the new chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, gave me orders to that effect.
To Preserve Appearances
As it turned out, the march cost more trouble than if I had sent 100, no, 500 trains to Auschwitz. Hungary was the window that showed the Reich to the neutral foreign countries, and we Germans had accordingly to preserve appearances. "You smashed our transportation routes but we will carry on in the most elegant manner." That was what the trek was for. The actual number of marchers was so unimportant that I have forgotten it. In any case it was less than 20,000.
The plan was for the Jews to march to the border at Burgenland, about 180 kilometers away. Every day a unit of 2,000 Jews began the march, and in ten or twelve days the first of the marchers must have reached the border. Everything possible was done to make the trip hygienic and safe. I drove the route once myself, and on the whole distance I saw only two corpses. They were old people. It is clear, as they say, that where planning goes on, chips will fall. The over-all natural decrease on the trek, however, was only one per cent. When the groups arrived on the border, they were put to work helping German women, children and old people digging tank traps to defend the Reich.
THE AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY
The two leading figures in Eichmann’s attempt to trade Jews for trucks were Rudolf Kastner (left) and Joel Brand (right). Brand, now living in Israel, has said that desperate Germans might have spared “hundreds of thousands” if even token supplies had been offered them. British refused to bargain, imprisoned Brain in Cairo. In 1955 Kastner, then a candidate for the Israeli parliament, was accused of wartime collaboration because of his contacts with Eichmann. Ultimately, the Israeli supreme court found Kastner innocent. Ten months before its decision, he was killed by a fanatic in Tel Aviv.
RUDOLF KASTNER
JOEL BRAND
So Dr. Kastner is not too disturbed on this March night of the Gaza retreat. His editorial work finished, he straightens his desk, smooths his hair with a pocket comb, and walks into the Tel Aviv night.
A year ago, when the Kluj business and the Kurt Becher business and the parachutist business were first called to the attention of Israel, he might have felt a bit nervous about entering a dark, lonely street. But not on this night. There may be trouble later. Hotheads will start stewing about Kastner again. But this night the hotheads are off on other topics -- the Gaza retreat, the Ben-Gurion salaam to the Americans, the business of Amos Ben- Gurion. This is a night of trouble for David Ben-Gurion, not Rudolf Kastner.
There is also another reassuring fact. After Judge Halevi's verdict, the government had assigned secret police to guard Kastner's life, day and night. They had remained on duty, protecting him for a year and a half. Two months ago the secret police had been relieved on their task. This added to Dr. Kastner's sense of safety. Nobody was after him any longer.
An unruffled Dr. Kastner steps into his parked gray automobile and starts for his home.
I imagine him full of memories. Who had ever more violent and exotic things to remember? The hundred hells of Hungary through which he moved like a favored tourist; the world travels; Nazis, doomed Jews, Hanna Senesh, Becher, Krumey, Himmler, Hoess, Eichmann; plots, perils, conferences, accusations, Kenyermeze, Nuremberg, Kluj, Death Marches, sealed trains -- he had survived them all. A man who can survive German devils and Hungarian ones, and climb to greatness on a million Jewish corpses; who can wriggle out of constant disaster with his hair perfectly combed, must feel a pride in himself, must smile a little smugly at any more enemies to come.
My imaginings end here. The rest is fact.
At midnight, Dr. Kastner steps out of his car in front of his home, 6 Emmanuel Street, Tel Aviv. The air is balmy. The night glows with starlight and history. Dr. Kastner starts across the pavement for his front door.
A young man steps out of the shadows and asks, "Are you Dr. Kastner?"
Kastner answers politely, "Yes, I am."
The young man pulls a gun out of his pocket. Kastner sees the weapon and runs. The young man fires a bullet into Dr. Kastner.
Kastner yells and keeps running. Two more bullets from the young man's gun hit him in his head and body. He drops and lies groaning in the street.
There is a witness to the event. A high ex-Haganah officer happens to be in the neighborhood. He has been calling on his girl and is just leaving on his motorcycle when the shooting starts. He sees the assassin jump into a waiting jeep and go riding off.
The ex-Haganah officer rushes to Kastner, bends over him, hears him gasp a few words. The ex-officer mounts his motorcycle and speeds after the jeep. But he fails to pick up its trail. The assassin escapes.
An ambulance arrives in Emmanuel Street, and Kastner is taken to the hospital. In the hospital, after he is operated on, the bullet-riddled Kastner starts regaining his health. It begins to look as if the assassin's work was in vain.
But after ten days of continued improvement in the municipal hospital, a sudden change takes place. A bulletin announces that Rudolf Kastner has taken a "sudden turn for the worse." Dr. Kastner corroborates the bulletin. He dies on St. Patrick's Day, 1957.
And with his death, Tamir loses his greatest weapon against Ben-Gurion and his clique. Of all who mourn Dr. Kastner's death, Tamir is among the sincerest. All the new evidence -- worthless. All the planned onslaughts on the defenders and colleagues of Kastner -- to be filed away as unfought battles. [181]
There is an impressive funeral for the one-time rescuer of Jews. The government clique is well represented. A proper grief is exhibited.
Also, a number of headaches are cured, although not permanently. The dead Kastner will continue to haunt Israeli politics. The government of Israel and its train-bearing press will work constantly to restore Dr. Kastner's good name, and its own. It will cause the facts of the trial to become vague, to vanish, and even to change from bad into good.
But with all this legerdemain, the truth of Kastner will stay alive. And that sad, foolish and tormented penny-Napoleon from Kluj will become the nation's leading ghost.
I have one more paragraph about Kastner. As a journalist working among Hungarians in Kluj, his name was Dr. Rezo Kastner. When he came to Budapest to work among the Germans, he called himself Dr. Rudolf Kastner. Arrived in Israel and embraced by the government clique as one of their own, he became Dr. Israel Kastner.
Vale, Rezo, Rudolf, Israel --
Three men were arrested, tried, and convicted for Dr. Kastner's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of them were named accessories. [182]
The actual confessed killer was Zeev Eckstein, age twenty-four. [183]
Until a few months before shooting down Kastner, Zeev Eckstein was a paid undercover agent of the Israeli government's Intelligence Service. [184]
-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht
With the march over, Dr. Endre congratulated me on the splendid fulfillment of the mission, and I must admit, we had a drink to celebrate, a kind of Schnaps called "mare's milk" which I had never drunk before. It was excellent.
With the Russian advance moving closer, conditions in Hungary became more and more chaotic. In Budapest the situation was tense. My old friend and comrade, Major General August Zehender, commander of the 22nd SS Cavalry Division, which we had hoped to motorize, was defending Budapest as the Russians drew near it. Then his artillery ran out of shells. Zehender's position was near a streetcar station on the east side of the city, but his ammunition depot was several kilometers beyond the last streetcar stop to the west. He told me in despair that the Russians were about to attack his division and he had no ammunition for his hundred guns.
A Living Chain For Shells
I proposed a living chain of Jews to carry shells from the depot and load them on streetcars at the west end station. The streetcars could carry them through the center of Budapest to the eastern end of the line where his own units could move them to the front line. My idea worked. We made a living chain of them, six or eight kilometers long, to carry the shells from the depot to the station. Then dozens of streetcars, one after the other, sped across Budapest to meet Zehender's men in the east. The guns blazed away.
As Christmas approached, I had nothing more to do in Hungary but no orders to withdraw. I was having a drink with Zehender one day when he told me that many of his officers had been killed and a whole company had gone over to the Russians.
"Give me a squadron," I told my friend, "and I'll stay here through New Year’s Day." Then, in the presence of my aide, Zehender telephoned Kaltenbrunner, who had replaced Heydrich as Himmler's deputy. I put my head close to his ear to hear what my chief said, but Zehender broke the news: "Kaltenbrunner tells me it's impossible. You are too valuable. Himmler would have his head." And so my last attempt to see some action was reduced to absurdity.
One or two days before Christmas Eve, 1944, all the German police units were ordered to withdraw, except for one Gestapo group which stayed behind as a gesture to the Hungarians. They were all killed. So was my comrade Zehender, shot as he fought off the enemy with his machine pistol. I left Budapest at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the last member of the German police to leave the city. As my Mercedes raced westward, the road was already under Russian artillery fire. A great flood of refugees streaming toward Vienna had choked the highway for days, but now it was suddenly empty. It was as though the road had died.
I made my last report to Himmler less than a month before the final surrender of Germany. The Reichsführer had been for some time negotiating with Count Bernadotte about the Jews. He wanted to make sure that at least 100 of the most prominent Jews we could lay our hands on would be held in a safe place. Thus he hoped to strengthen our hand, for almost to the end Himmler was optimistic about making separate peace terms. "We'll get a treaty," he said to me, slapping his thigh. "We'll lose a few feathers, but it will be a good one." It was then mid-April 1945.
Himmler went on to say that he had made some mistakes. "I'll tell you one thing, Eichmann," he said, "if I have to do it over again, I will set up the concentration camps the way the British do. I made a big mistake there." I didn't know exactly what he meant by that, but he said it in such a pleasant, soft way that I understood him to mean the concentration camps should have been more elegant, more artful, more polite.
During those last days I called my men into my Berlin office in the Kurfürsten Strasse and formally took leave of them. "If it has to be," I told them, "I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals." ("Enemies of the Reich," I said, not "Jews.") I spoke these words harshly and with emphasis. In fact, it gave me an extraordinary sense of elation to think I was exiting from the stage in this way.
My immediate superior, General Müller, had just said to me: "If we had had 50 Eichmanns, then we would have won the war." This made me proud even though, ironically, he spoke on the same day that I learned all was finally lost. By that time my department was one of the few offices which were not burned out from the bombing. I had set my subordinates like bloodhounds on the trail of every falling incendiary bomb. I helped them myself. So the office was in good condition. Later the whole Gestapo head office moved in and squeezed me out.
AUSCHWITZ SURVIVORS shown here in camp uniforms, released by Soviet troops in 1945, bear marks of malnutrition and brutality. Eichmann in his story exaggerates number of survivors, whom he called “Auschwitzers.”
Each one of the Gestapo officials was now out to select a civilian firm for which he could say he had worked during the last few years. He could receive employment certificates, "instructions" or correspondence from the company -- in a word, anything that would permit him to hide his real job from postwar investigators. There were hundreds of civilian letterheads on file in that office, and if a particular one was not available, we could always have it printed.
You could see how closely they crowded around the official in charge, who made detailed notes on how each man wanted his faked papers to read. The press was so thick that Müller and I had a large space in the back of the room to stand by ourselves. It was the same room where I used to play music with my subordinates. (I had played second violin; my sergeant played first violin -- he was a far better musician than I.) "Well, Eichmann," Müller said, "what's the matter with you?" Since my return from Hungary I had carried a Steyr army pistol. I said to Müller, indicating the gun: "Gruppenführer, I don't need these papers. Look here, this is my certificate. When I see no other way out, it is my last medicine. I have no need for anything else."
This is the truth: of all the Gestapo department heads in Berlin, I was the only one who spat on these false certificates. Müller must have known I was a regular guy.
Resistance in the Alps
My last journey was to Prague, where I visited Karl Hermann Frank, the SS commander there. He told me I could not go back to Berlin. "Nothing is left in Berlin," he said, "the Russians have broken through somewhere."
I was finally able to get through to Kaltenbrunner. He ordered me to proceed to the resort town of Altaussee in the Austrian Alps. I arrived there, accordingly, at about the beginning of May and went directly to the slopes of the Loser, the mountain above the village. In one of the tidy summer villas on the Loser's slope, the chief of the Security Service was quartered.
I was received by his aide, an old and trusted friend of mine, Major Scheidler. I walked into the next room to report and found Kaltenbrunner himself sitting behind a table, clothed in the uniform blouse of an SS general and some wedge-shaped ski pants tucked into some wonderful ski boots. It was an odd costume for the "Last Days of Pompeii" feeling that then oppressed us all -- at least it did me. It was after lunch and he was playing solitaire, with a small cognac on the table. I asked him how things had come out. "It's bad," he said, "the solitaire, I mean."
He had Scheidler bring me a cognac -- the usual orderly was not around. The white snow of the Loser slope gleamed through the window. It had snowed heavily in the region, which would not be clear of snow until the end of May. The room was comfortably warm. The cognac tasted awfully good despite my gloomy mood.
"What are you going to do now?" Kaltenbrunner said. You must realize that this was not like those occasions when I had been ordered to report in the line of duty. Now the die had been cast and all these matters had become of secondary importance. One's brain was in a sense only half present. It was hard to concentrate on what was happening at the moment. This was the beginning of that nervous shock which a few days later hit me like a hammer. For it was now a fact that the Reich, for which we had feared and cared so much, was smashed in pieces.
Answering Kaltenbrunner's question, I told him that I was going into the mountains. "That's good," he said. "Good for Reichsführer Himmler, too. Now he can talk to Eisenhower differently in his negotiations, for he will know that if Eichmann is in the mountains he will never surrender, because he can't."
So we concluded our official business and I went off to become a partisan chief in Austria. I took my leave formally without any personal overtones, as did Kaltenbrunner. He remained sitting at his solitaire, only his expression revealing a certain friendliness to me. Just before I left I heard him say quietly, "It's all a lot of crap. The game is up." These were the last words I ever heard from my good friend Kaltenbrunner.
LAST BOSS of Eichmann was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler aide who was executed after trial in 1946.
I had quartered my people at one of the large resort hotels in Altaussee. The hotel proprietor years afterward kept railing against "that dog Eichmann" who requisitioned his hotel and let his gang run it, inflicting all sorts of fancied damages. The complaint was merely something rooted in his wretched shopkeeper's mind. By no means did we wreck everything in his hotel. On the contrary, I finally yielded to the pressure of the doctor in charge of the neighboring field hospital, who had tearfully begged me to take my combat troops out of Altaussee so that he might declare it an open city. So we evacuated. Before my troops left, I personally saw the Red Cross nurses scrubbing and cleaning up, room by room, since the overcrowded hospital had to expand into this pig's hotel. It was set up as a hospital annex. The beneficiary of all this clean-up operation was thus enabled to feather his own nest.
Since Kaltenbrunner had given his orders, I collected all the heavy equipment we had there and set out to organize a resistance movement in the Totes Gebirge, above the town. The whole thing had now been dumped in my lap. Besides, the regularly assigned people in my department, I had some groups of Waffen SS soldiers and a wild bunch from Schellenberg's Intelligence Section of the SS. Schellenberg's crowd had been burned out of the Kremsmünster monastery. I think they set it on fire themselves, but they managed to get a few truckloads out with them. In the trucks were scattered piles of uniforms, all kinds of uniforms except winter equipment and ski gear. Instead they had down sleeping bags and emergency rations -- chocolate, hard sausage, etc. -- of the sort we hadn't seen for a long time. They also bought a small chest full of dollars, pounds and gold coins.
Snow on the Mountain
I decided to head for the Blaa-Alm, a stretch of mountain pastureland about an hour’s march from Altaussee. Suddenly it began to snow heavily. I had the Burgermeister order out 150 of the Hitler Youth – they were all we had – to shovel the snow out of our path. It was already one or two meters deep in spots. At least we could get through with the vehicles.
There was only one inn on the Blaa-Alm, and I requisitioned a room from the innkeeper to store the weapons and the uniforms. An old Party man in the town had warned me about the innkeeper. He said I would do well to have the traitorous anti-Nazi clerical done in, and I decided to do so. (It was the time when everybody was doing everybody else in.) But when I saw him, a little sausage of a man, I said to myself: “No, you don’t need to do away with him.” And so we didn’t.
The SS boys had brought a barrel of wine with them from the Kremsmunster storehouse. I set it up on the street so that all the soldiers coming up to the mountain could stop for a few glasses before going on. I allowed each man only a five-minute stop. The barrel was soon empty.
At sun-up on the first day after we reached the mountain, one of the officers from the Intelligence Section came up to get some emergency rations “by order of Obergruppenfuhrer Kaltenbrunner.” He was a fresh, arrogant fellow, and my Captain Burger said to me, “Shall I rub him out?” I told the man he could have half a case and no more. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’ll have you done in.” So he took off somewhere with a half suitcase full of chocolate and hard sausage, perhaps to Switzerland.
LAST STRONGHOLD of Nazis was in these mountains of Austrian Alps near Altaussee, where Eichmann led troops in frantic, foolish attempt to keep up resistance against the Allies. Then SS boss Himmler ordered general cease-fire.
Another SS man came four or five times with a note saying that we should deliver a quantity of gold to him. The signature was always Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s. I knew the writing and it seemed genuine to me, although I had no reason to test its authenticity. In any case gold or money meant nothing to us in the mountains, while bread and emergency rations were everything. Although I was harsh to this fellow at first, I finally had Hunsche, who was acting as our paymaster, pay out the gold that he requested, thus translating Kaltenbrunner’s wish into fact.
The next morning I heard loud noises and confusion outside my window. There was Burger boxing a civilian’s ears. Through an orderly I ordered Burger to report to me in my room. He told me the man was a teacher from one of the villages in the valley who was trying to make off with the supply of lard in one of the trucks. Burger was giving him a tangible answer for his conduct. I told Burger that an officer never hits anybody. If the man was looting, he should be hauled before a court martial and shot but never beaten up.
Fighting a War on the Blaa-Alm
What a bunch of good-for-nothings you have here, I said to myself. There were guys from the Waffen SS, who probably were just out of the hospital and at the disposal of almost any unit, rounded up and turned over to me by the Security Police; this absolutely insubordinate gang from the Intelligence Section, a few women, my own men. And add to this 150 of the Hitler Youth. Then there were some Romanians on my neck, too. With this I was supposed to fight a war.
I had plenty of the most modern weapons, however, I had never before seen assault rifles, and now I had piles of them. I had never seen as much ammunition as I had up here -- bazookas lying in heaps. Nevertheless I gave the order to evacuate the Blaa-Alm and go farther away to the Rettenbachalm, which lies even higher.
Burger, who was my best skier, I sent on patrol ahead of us to investigate snow conditions and the chances for finding lodging. Meanwhile I had all the weapons we were not using thrown in a stream. I had decided the release the majority of the men. Discipline had suffered irreparably. I had 5,000 Reichsmark paid out to each one against his signature. I was hard and brusque with them. Each man, on hearing he was no longer needed, gladly took off down the mountain without further formalities. I was even hard on a little SS girl, an office worker, who had begged and implored me to take her along. Scorning all her feminine wiles, I said, "Pay out 5,000 marks. Dismissed."
While we were moving, an orderly arrived from Kalternbrunner with a directive from Reichsführer Himmler ordering us not to shoot at Americans or Englishmen. I countersigned it and the boy rushed off back to the valley. I later conveyed this order to the men. It looked like the end. The Americans were now sitting in Bad Ischl, not very far away, and we heard that our girls were already dancing with the Americans in the marketplace. Even the huntsmen were hostile to us. Gangs of them -- home guardists they called themselves -- were crawling around us in the hills, all of them punks. They were probably people who had shouted themselves hoarse yelling Heil Hitler in 1938. Now they prowled about us, with weapons of course. Whether or not my men shot at them I did not know, nor do I know now if they ever did. There was shooting everywhere at that confused time.
My driver Polanski asked me if I would give him a car and a truck or two so that he might go off and set up a peacetime trucking concern on his own. It occurred to me that I no longer needed any cars, so I decided to fulfill his wish. After all, he had served me loyally for many years. "Take a truck for yourself," I told him, "or whatever you need from the Blaa-Alm, and make off with my Fiat Topolino."
I later heard that he abandoned the Fiat in a ditch, but he did succeed in taking off with one truck. I wish him success in his trucking business.
Ultimately, even my trusty Burger sought me out for a private conversation. "Obersturmbannführer," he said, "you are being sought as a war criminal. The rest of us are not. We have thoroughly discussed this matter. We feel that you would be doing your comrades a great service if you would leave us and appoint another commander."
I had already decided the answer myself. "Men," I said, "I will leave you alone on the Rettenbachalm. The war is over. You are not allowed to shoot at the enemy any longer. So take care of yourselves."
Lieutenant Jaenisch, my aide for many years, asked if he might accompany me. We drank a last Schnaps together.
There was only one thing I regretted. If I had not been in a state of shock at this time, I would have done more for my wife and children. Unfortunately I did not make provision for them ahead of time, unlike the gentlemen from the Intelligence Section of Schellenberg's, the so-called kid-glove boys of the SS. I, too, could have had my family securely wrapped in a very comfortable cocoon of foreign exchange and gold. In fact, I could easily have sent them on to the farthest, the most neutral of foreign countries. Long before the end, any of the Jews I dealt with would have set up foreign exchange for me in any country I had named, if I had promised any special privileges for them.
As it was, I was able to give my wife only a briefcase full of grapes and a sack of flour before going into the mountains from Altaussee. I had also given them poison capsules, one for my wife and one for each child, to be swallowed if they fell into the hands of the Russians.
A corporal named Barth
I gave myself up to the Americans under an assumed name. I knew the Allied investigators were searching for Eichmann, but luckily I was always just a shade more clever than the CIC officer who interrogated me. I started off in one small American prison camp, posing as a Luftwaffe corporal named Barth.
After studying the psychology of the American CIC, however, I changed my rank from corporal to second lieutenant in the SS. Lieutenant Eckmann, Otto Eckmann, became my name. I moved my birthdate back one year to March 19, 1905, and the place to Breslau. I did this so I could remember the figures more easily, avoiding the fiasco of a momentary lapse of memory when I was filling out their forms.
Ultimately I was transferred to the large POW collection center at Weiden. By coincidence, my former aide, Lieutenant Jaenisch, had been sent to the same place. I volunteered to head a work detail and in this capacity I was moved to Oberdachstetten in Franconia. It was then August, 1945. I remained there until the beginning of January, 1946.
In these months we were being interrogated by the CIC office in Ansbach. I knew that if the interrogations continued I might come under suspicion. So I decided to escape. Due to the fear of reprisals, there existed an unwritten code of honor that no officer could escape from a camp without his fellow officers' approval. Since there were about ten officers in the camp, I asked the camp leader, a major, to call an officers' meeting.
I had revealed to the major my real name, rank, and official position. “My dear comrade Eckmann," he said, “I have known that for a long time. Your Lieutenant Jaenish told me about it in confidence. As long as you said nothing to me, I kept the information locked in my heart."
At the officers' meeting I explained merely that I was probably wanted by the Americans because I had been politically active. Nobody asked many questions in those days, and the major, as camp leader, gave his approval. It was simply a matter of form. After all, I could hardly imagine that any group of SS officers would have withheld their approval, knowing that one of their leaders found it necessary to get away.
After leaving the prison camp, I managed to procure papers which gave my name as Otto Henninger. I lived on one of the wooded heaths in the Celle area, and it was there that I was shown a pile of newspapers with articles about me. They were under headlines like “Mass-murderer Eichmann" or “Where is ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ hiding out?" The articles noted that I had escaped from the camp.
I started to think about who could have given the name Eckmann to the CIC. There seemed to be only two possible sources for the information. One was my Lieutenant Jaenisch. The other possibility, which seemed highly unlikely, was that the CIC had interrogated the major, who probably reasoned that I was far enough away by then to be safe. I rather think it was Jaenisch who told them. He had a type of pigheadedness peculiar to Lower Saxons.
Through the intervening years since then people searched for me in vain. I would like to find peace with my former opponents. And I would be the first to surrender myself to the German authorities if I did not always feel that the political interest in my case would be too great to lead to a clear, objective way out.
If there had been a trial in 1945, I would have had all my subordinates with me. Today I am not so sure. Some of them may be serving with the new police. Others may have had a hard life through these years, each damning the stupidity that led him to become a Nazi in the first place. And prosperity and democratic re-education have borne their fruit in Germany, so I would not know today what witnesses an attorney for the defense might properly call. I believe, in fact, that if I brought on Jews as witnesses for the defense, I would come out almost better with them than with my own men as witnesses, sad though it may sound. Dr. Kastner, Dr. Epstein, Dr. Rottenberg, Dr. Baeck, the entire Council of Elders in Theresienstadt ghetto -- all of them I would have to summon. After all, there were also relatively harmless actions which took place under the general heading “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem."
But to sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing. Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. I never met him personally, but his success alone proves to me that I should subordinate myself to this man. He was somehow so supremely capable that the people recognized him. And so with that justification I recognized him joyfully, and I still defend him.
TODAY, A PRISONER IN ISRAEL
Adolf Eichmann, captured by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires on May 12, 1960, is closely guarded prisoner in Israel. In spring, 1961 he will stand trial in Jerusalem, charged with “crimes against the Jewish people,” a statute written into Israeli law to cover such crimes as his. The penalty is death.
I will not humble myself or repent in any way. I could do it too cheaply in today's climate of opinion. It would be too easy to pretend that I had turned suddenly from a Saul to a Paul. No, I must say truthfully that if we had killed all the 10 million Jews that Himmler's statisticians originally listed in 1933, I would say, "Good, we have destroyed an enemy." But here I do not mean wiping them out entirely. That would not be proper -- and we carried on a proper war.
Now, however, when through the malice of fate a large part of these Jews whom we fought against are alive, I must concede that fate must have wanted it so. I always claimed that we were fighting against a foe who through thousands of years of learning and development had become superior to us.
I no longer remember exactly when, but it was even before Rome itself had been founded that the Jews could already write. It is very depressing for me to think of that people writing laws over 6,000 years of written history. But it tells me that they must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great.
MEMORIAL WITH NAMES OF JEWISH DEAD FROM NAZI VIOLENCE, ONE OF MANY SUCH IN EUROPE, COVERS WALL OF PRAGUE’S PINKAS SYNAGOGUE