Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb Read Free Book Online Page B

castle and looked out at the surrounding countryside. He was convinced that he did not deserve to be on the run: he had only abided by his SS oath of "My honor is my loyalty" and executed the orders given to him. He considered whether he had changed from the man who had brought his bride to this very place a decade earlier. No, he decided, he had not changed. He knew he was not some murderer or villain.
    The truth was it had been a long, convoluted road for Eichmann to reach the level of hate-fueled fanaticism that had characterized him in Hungary. Born in an industrial town in Germany, he had been raised in Linz, Austria, by a father who was a middle-class manager, a strict Protestant, and fervently nationalistic. In Linz, also Hitler's hometown, as in Austria and Germany as a whole, the majority of the population saw Jews as racially inferior intruders who represented the twin threats of international capitalism and Bolshevism. But anti-Semitism was not Eichmann's motivation to become a Nazi. The disaster at Versailles following World War I, Germany's need for stability, and, more personally, a desire to wear the same smart brown uniform as others his age were reasons enough.
    Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in 1932. He went to Germany, received some military training, read more about National Socialism, and enlisted in the SD, which was headed by Reinhard Heydrich. As a member of the party's intelligence operation, Eichmann was charged with compiling a list of German Freemasons, whom the Nazis considered enemies. Diligent, attentive to detail, and respectful of authority, he caught the eye of Edler von Mildenstein, who was in charge of creating a Jewish affairs office. Given the degree of revulsion Hitler felt toward the Jewish people—as evidenced in 1935 by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship—it was a good career move for Eichmann.
    At the time, Mildenstein had a far less virulent attitude toward Jews than did many others in the SS, believing that sending them to Palestine was the answer to the Jewish problem. Mildenstein charged Eichmann with studying Zionism. Over the next three years, working in the changing landscape of the SS, Eichmann spent his days writing reports on the Jews, monitoring their organizations, trying to learn Hebrew (a failure), investigating emigration plans, and even traveling to Palestine in 1937, while posing as a journalist for Berliner Tageblatt. He soon became the SD "expert" on Jewish affairs. Although his opinion of the Jews had hardened—he wrote in one paper that they were "the most dangerous enemy" of the Third Reich—he still thought that emigration was the best way to deal with them.
    In 1938, Eichmann won his first chance to put this idea into practice when Germany occupied Austria. Second Lieutenant Eichmann arrived in Vienna to represent the SD in dealing with the 200,000 Austrian Jews. After arresting the Jewish community's key leaders, he used many of them to organize and finance the emigration of the Jewish population. In his office in the Palais Rothschild, Eichmann felt his first rush of power, writing to a friend, "They are in my hands; they dare not take one step without me." For his success and "requisite hardness," he won a promotion to first lieutenant. He also gained the ability to view Jews not as human beings but as stock to be moved from one place to another. After a year in Vienna, he was sent to Czechoslovakia to set up a similar operation there.
    The more territory the Nazis occupied, the more Jews came under their control, which meant career opportunities for Eichmann. When Germany seized Poland in September 1939, Heinrich Müller, the new Gestapo chief, assigned Eichmann to run the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the department responsible for forced deportations of Jews to the edges of German-occupied territory. Emigration was out; deportation was in. After the invasion of Poland, the act that precipitated