Eichmann, The Man And His Crimes

Comer Clarke

• Editorial: Normanby Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786254900
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia judía

Eichmann's crimes, so monstrous that the first accounts were dismissed as anti-German propaganda, resulted in the death of 6, 000, 000 men, women and children. To maintain secrecy, the Nazis gave him the rank of sergeant at the very time when he was supervising the murder of Austria's Jews. Speaking Yiddish fluently, Eichmann often disguised himself as a Jew and deceived Jewish leaders into giving him the names of his future victims. In his extermination camps, Jews were forced to aid in the slaughter of their people. To those who cooperated he promised "decent burial." Human life meant nothing to Eichmann; instead, he prided himself on the efficient operation of his death camps and spent months searching for a low-cost poison for his gas chambers.Comer Clarke, British correspondent, has spent much of the last two years in Germany and Austria, questioning war criminals and men behind the Nazi plans and terror. He has had access to secret S.S. dossiers and Nazi documents captured after the war. He has met men who knew Eichmann intimately, and traced the Nazi butcher's activities in a blood-stained trail of murder that leads across Europe. Out of his investigations he has written EICHMANN: THE MAN AND HIS CRIMES, a full account of Eichmann's monstrous past, his mysterious disappearance.

1 • • • HOW IT ALL BEGAN

““I shall leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have the death of five million people on my conscience will be for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.””

That was the heinous, twisted prophecy of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the most sadistic and cold-blooded killer of men, women and little children this earth has ever known.

It was made in 1944 to a mass-murderer subordinate, Dieter Wisliceny, and before the wrath and the prayers of most of the human race could stop this disciple of death, Adolf Eichmann had added another million human bodies to his total. For Adolf Eichmann, 5-feet 10-inches tall, effeminate-faced, lankily built and with curious, flickering, steel-blue eyes, was the Nazis’ murderer-in-chief, the human monster who for five years roamed Europe bringing mass death, torture and terror by nearly every means known to man.

On May 23, 1960, sixteen years after that terrible prophecy and boast, a stooped, white-haired man, the leader of his people, walked trembling with emotion to his place in the Knesset to make a brief and simple announcement to the parliament of the people Adolf Eichmann tried to wipe out.

There were tears in his eyes as 74-year-old Mr. David Ben Gurion, Premier of Israel, quietly rose and said:

“I have to inform Parliament that a short time ago one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible together with the Nazi leaders for what they called “the final solution of the Jewish question,” namely the extermination of 6,000,000 of the Jews of Europe, was found by Israeli security services.”

“Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the law for trials of Nazis and their collaborators.”

For a few seconds there was a stunned, unbelieving silence. Then, every member there joined to swell the minutes of triumphant cheering, weeping and embracing each other in relief and joyous thanksgiving that the perpetrator of the most monstrous crime the world has ever known could be brought to face the trial of his fellow humans.

After running for fifteen years and hiding with secret Nazi sympathizers in many parts of the world, Eichmann had been trapped. A fantastic, years-long manhunt had ended. Now he faced trial, charged with the most gigantic crime ever committed by one man. Fifty-four year old Adolf Eichmann was the man who, with the efficiency of a ledger clerk, turned the mad passions of another Adolf, Adolf Hitler, into satanic reality.

“The Jews must be erased from the earth.” That was the edict.

So Eichmann starved them to death, worked them to death, tortured them to death, beat them to death, burnt them alive, shot them, hanged them, killed them in diabolical experiments, and when all those things weren’t wiping them out quickly enough to satisfy his efficient mind, then he gassed them by the millions.

Aged men, pregnant women, youths in their teens, men in their prime, babies a few days old—an average, during those five years of savage fury, of nearly one and one-quarter million human lives a year.

He was Himmler’s trusted friend. He was the exalted chief of the Jewish Extermination Department. He built a dozen gigantic crematoriums into which to throw the sometimes still-twitching bodies to be burned, and the acrid smoke drifted in clouds over the countryside.

But first he took the gold out of their teeth, the rings from their fingers.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that on that day of May 23, 1960, in the city of Jerusalem, in the land where Christ was born, men and women wept tears and one elderly Israeli M.P., Rabbi Nurock, whose wife and children were killed by Eichmann’s men, fainted with emotion.

But let us begin at the beginning and see how an ordinary, little boy who used to play happily with other children in the street became the most terrible killer mankind has ever known.

This, in full, is the story of Karl Adolf Eichmann....

Karl Adolf Eichmann was born in March 1906, in the middle-class district of Solingen, an industrial town in the former Rhine province, 14 miles east of Düsseldorf in northwest Germany.

The family came originally from Elberfeld. Adolf was the eldest of four young brothers, two of them twins, all born within four years.

His father, a skilled engineer, was a deeply religious man and twice each Sunday he and his wife would walk the quarter-mile to make their devotions at the Protestant church.

When Adolf Eichmann first became aware of things, Kaiser Wilhelm was the master of Germany. Solingen was a city prosperous for the times. The smoke-stacks of metal foundries rose like black fingers pointing to the sky. Iron and steel goods of all kinds were trundled along the streets to the railway sidings. The country around was still green. The mighty cities of the Ruhr Valley—Essen, Duisberg, Gelsenkirchen, Mülheim and Düsseldorf—had not yet expanded to form the steel and arms heart of Germany’s industrial and military might, the might which was to help fashion the dreams of Kaiser Wilhelm and Führer Adolf Hitler that they could dominate the world.

Adolf Eichmann was born in the heart of that already-mighty cauldron of hard work, smoke and comparative prosperity that twice helped to launch war upon the world. But he did not grow up in it. When he was four his mother died, after giving birth to his youngest brother.

His father and mourning relations and friends buried her in the cemetery at Solingen. It seemed to Adolf, the only child old enough to comprehend and feel the loss, that life would never be the same again. And so it seemed to his father, too. Heartbroken with grief, and with the thought of Adolf and his three other young sons growing up motherless, he felt he could no longer bear to live in his home of memories; memories which swelled to tears when, at the end of the day, his eyes rested on things his wife held dear.

During the day little Adolf and his brothers were cared for, in turns, by two aunts. They took particular pity on this little boy with the thin, pathetically sad face, with the sharp eyes and the dark, finely cut features. After a few months his father made his decision. There were too many memories here; he would start life anew, in some place where there would be no reminders of the past.

He sold his home and most of his possessions and then, taking Adolf, now nearing five, and his brothers with him, he traveled from the smoke and the grime of Solingen southeast to Linz, in Austria.

It was an immense change for the Eichmanns. For although Papa Eichmann would be joining his married sister who lived in Linz and with whom they would stay as members of the family, Linz was a vastly different town from Solingen and its people were different, too.

In Solingen the people were hard-headed, hard-working, conscious of material things, and true to the Protestant faith. Linz, too, was a manufacturing and commercial city, scarcely smaller than Solingen. But Linz was on the Danube and here the people were of a different kind.

They were gayer, more easy-going. Up and down the Danube sailed gaily painted barges and steamers. Here, the light-hearted people were tanned by the southern sun. Derricks and cranes of shipyards, not black chimneys, pointed into the sky. Cutlery, exquisite glassware were the city’s other main industries.

Around the city were romantic forests, rich with pines. On the sides of the sun-bathed valleys grew endless acres of grapes to make the wine which flowed in the music-filled taverns. And, from Vienna, 95 miles away, the gaiety, the culture which had become a part of Europe’s history, made Linz, with its restaurant tables on the pavements, a city which soon helped the Eichmanns forget their loss.

Mr. Eichmann soon got a good job and rose to become the chief of an electrical construction company. Most of the people here were deeply religious, too, but they were mainly Roman Catholic. There was, though, a Protestant church to which the father regularly took his sons. The Eichmanns settled down in their new home at No. 3 Bischofstrasse with gratitude and the anticipation of pleasant days.

None can say whether the loss, at such an early age, of his mother left a lasting sense of bitterness or loneliness on Adolf Eichmann. In appearance he was a normal, happy boy. His father and his aunt used to take him on picnics in the nearby forests. Other boys remember him playing marbles, yet young Adolf kept often to himself, reading, and the more he read the more aloof he became.

It was during those early boyhood days, Eichmann later told friends, that he looked up and saw a man whom he was later to revere as a hero, a man with whom his life became inexorably entwined.

That man was Adolf Hitler, architect of the years of terror, but at that time an unsuccessful artist. For strangely enough it was in Linz that Adolf Hitler, too, had spent his boyhood days. By the time of the Eichmanns’ arrival, Hitler had gone to Vienna to earn a meager living as a painter of water colors. There he developed a passionate hatred of Jews and a belief in German military and racial supremacy.

But occasionally he returned to see old friends—and also to receive a few presents from people who, since the death of his parents, had seen him dressed in increasingly shabby untidiness.

Hitler was born at Braunau on the Inn, a little Austrian town directly across from the German (Bavarian) border. His parents, like those of Adolf Eichmann, were respectable middle-class people. His father was a civil servant and his mother a hard-working housewife. (There is, as a matter of accuracy, no truth in the often-repeated assertion that Hitler was born Adolf Schikklegruber and decided later to change his name. It is believed that generations before, the family name was changed from Schikklegruber to Huetter or Hutter, but by the time Adolf was born the family name was firmly established as Hitler.)

Both fathers were men of the utmost respectability. They suffered the same misfortune: that, in their early teens, their sons were restless and hard to handle. Hitler’s father was a minor figure in the Austrian Customs Service and he often had to move his home from post to post. His last move was to Linz, and there it was that Adolf Hitler, like Adolf Eichmann a few years later, grew up.

It was there that Adolf Hitler studied under Dr. Leopold Potsch at the Realschule. It was there that Adolf Eichmann went to school.

Adolf Hitler, who later scorned the church and religion—though he was always ready to call eloquently upon the Deity to bless the Nazi cause—regularly attended church. He recalled later in Mein Kampf that while receiving singing lessons in the cloister, “I had an excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant Church festivals.” That intoxication was to play its part in the dazzling, emotion-packed Nazi rallies which were later to rock the nation. Adolf Eichmann also went regularly to church, with his father, but neither the young Hitler nor the young Eichmann could have paid much attention to the words of Christianity which were spoken during the time they stood in the House of God.

During their early years they both found an emotional interest in war, with its exaltation of nationalism, race and might.

When he was ten, Adolf Hitler found in his home a pile of books about the Franco-German war of 1870-1871. They became, he later confessed, his favorite reading matter. In 1914, when Adolf Eichmann was eight, the Kaiser’s army, bloated with the guns and steel forged in his birthplace of the Ruhr, marched to war.

At the same ages the two Adolfs, the later master and his chief executioner, wandered around the gentle, ancient and mellowed walls of the city of their boyhood: there were hardly any Jews in Linz. For both, the trigger-flick of fury was yet to come.

Meanwhile Adolf Eichmann’s father married again; two children were born of the second marriage.

Unlike Hitler’s father, the elder Eichmann became a rich man. The massive requirements of the first war brought money rolling into his electrical construction company, and when the war ended, it looked as if there was a rosy future for Adolf, his eldest son, now aged 12.

There was enough money, even during the war, to let him go horse-riding, and young Adolf certainly did not share Adolf Hitler’s dislike of the recreation (or, rather, his inability to take part in it, which Hitler rather ingeniously excused by saying that he thought the horse was too beautiful an animal to be made to look foolish by a man, “like a monkey” astride his back). Indeed, Adolf Eichmann’s passion for riding was so great that by his late teens he was slightly bandy-legged. He had also acquired another deformity, this time mental. Like Hitler, he too spent much time in Vienna, and there for the first time he came across Jews who fell into the popular image of people with dark skins and dark hair. In the old inner city was a large Jewish quarter. For centuries its friendly inhabitants had enriched the culture and the beauty and the international flavor of Vienna. And here they often wore their black caftans and their hair in long black locks.

As in many other places, they were the subject of malice and envy. Even before the days of Hitler, Vienna had a number of savagely anti-Semitic publications, which never lost a chance to blame the Jews for all the problems of the day. These colorful people, with their olive skins and the gestures and some of the customs of the Middle East, intrigued Adolf Eichmann.

Many times in the warmth and friendliness of old Vienna he was invited as an educated and honored guest into the humble Jewish homes he was later to turn into a ghetto, and there share rollmops and cheese-cake. He was happy among his new-found friends, and they would drink wine and talk together long into the night. Indeed, he liked their warm ways, enjoyed their light-hearted family squabbles, their voluble way of life. Along the boulevards and in the coffee houses he picked up a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish. Many Jews mistook his thin face and sharp nose for the features of their own race. They often chatted together, and often, good-humoredly, they would pull his leg about his refined Austrian accent and obviously well-to-do background. It may well be that these strangers with their facile speech and their quick minds occasionally put the rather stolidly minded Ruhr German ill at ease. But subtly, and perhaps unconsciously, the virulent, twisted words of the anti-Semitic papers were retained in his mind.

“These Jews are trying to rob the German people of their heritage.... Beware of their craftiness; they are parasite...