The One From the Other by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t thought of that,” said Eichmann, whose sense of career was as developed as Hagen’s.
    “Heydrich may be a bastard,” I said. “But he’s a clever bastard. Too clever to read that letter and not know the Mufti is a complete spinner.”
    “Maybe,” said Eichmann. “Maybe, yes. Fortunately the letter isn’t addressed to Heydrich, is it? Fortunately the letter’s addressed to the Führer. He’ll know best how to respond to what—”
    “From one madman to another,” I said. “Is that what you’re suggesting, Eichmann?”
    Eichmann almost choked with horror. “Not for one moment,” he spluttered. “I wouldn’t dream—” Blushing to the roots of his hair, he glanced uncomfortably at Hagen and Reichert. “Gentlemen, please believe me. That’s not what I meant at all. I have the greatest admiration for the Führer.”
    “Of course you do, Eichmann,” I said.
    Finally, Eichmann looked at me. “You won’t tell Flesch about this, will you, Gunther? Please say you won’t tell the Gestapo.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it. Look, forget about that. What are you going to do about Fievel Polkes? And Haganah?”
     
     
    Eliahu Golomb joined Polkes in Cairo for the meeting with Eichmann and Hagen. He only just made it before the British closed the border after a number of bomb attacks in Palestine by Arabs and Jews. Before the meeting, I met with Golomb and Polkes at their hotel and told them everything that had been said at the meeting with Haj Amin. For a while Golomb called down plagues from heaven on the Mufti’s head. Then he asked for my advice on how to handle Eichmann and Hagen.
    “I think you should make them believe that in any civil war with the Arabs, it’s Haganah that will win,” I said. “Germans admire strength. And they like winners. It’s only the British who like the underdog.”
    “We will win,” insisted Golomb.
    “They don’t know that,” I said. “I think it would be a mistake to ask them for military aid. It would look like a sign of weakness. You must convince them that, if anything, you’re actually much better armed than you are. Tell them you have artillery. Tell them you have tanks. Tell them you have planes. They’ve no way of finding out if that’s true or not.”
    “How does that help us?”
    “If they think you will win,” I said, “then they’ll believe that their continued support of Zionism is the right policy. If they think you’ll lose, then frankly there’s no telling where they might send Germany’s Jews. I’ve heard Madagascar mentioned.”
    “Madagascar?” said Golomb. “Ridiculous.”
    “Look, all that matters is that you convince them that a Jewish state can exist and that it would be no threat to Germany. You don’t want them going back to Germany thinking the Grand Mufti is right, do you? That all the Jews in Palestine should be massacred?”
    When it eventually took place, the meeting went well enough. To my ears, Golomb and Polkes sounded like fanatics. But as they had pointed out earlier, they didn’t sound like crazy, religious fanatics. After the Grand Mufti, anyone would have sounded reasonable.
    A few days later, we sailed from Alexandria, on the Italian steamer Palestrina, for Brindisi, stopping at Rhodes and Piraeus on the way. From Brindisi, we caught a train and were back in Berlin by October 26.
     
     
    I hadn’t seen Eichmann for nine months when, while working on a case that took me to Vienna, I bumped into him on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, in the Eleventh District, just south of what later became Stalin Platz. He was coming out of the Rothschild Palais, which (after the Wehrmacht’s popular invasion of Austria in March 1938) had been seized from the eponymous Jewish family that owned it, and was now the headquarters of the SD in Austria. Eichmann was no longer a lowly noncommissioned officer, but a second lieutenant—an Untersturmführer. There seemed to be a spring in his step. Jews were already fleeing the country.