Army of Evil: A History of the SS (25 page)

Eichmann stayed with the regiment until September 1934, but by then he was bored and looking for a way out. He volunteered for the SD in the hope that he would be appointed to one of the security escorts that guarded the NSDAP’s leaders. He was wrong: when he arrived at the SD’s headquarters at 102 Wilhelmstrasse, he was dismayed to find that he would have a desk job under the eccentric, self-styled Freemasonry expert SS-Major Schwarz-Bostunitsch. Eichmann later admitted that he “would have gone in with the devil himself just to get away from that business with the seals,”
¹²
but as it happened he found von Mildenstein “an open-minded, friendly sort.”
¹³

Eichmann was interested in his new work and applied himself assiduously to his specific task of monitoring Zionist groups. Having taught himself the Hebrew alphabet so that he could read Yiddish, he studied their key texts and periodicals and went as far as to visit their offices in plainclothes to make contact with their leaders. He even tried to learn Hebrew itself, but when he sought a grant from SD-Main Office to pay for lessons from a rabbi, he was rebuffed. Nevertheless, his efforts earned him a spurious reputation among the young intellectuals in the SD as a genuine expert on the “Jewish question.”

In the spring of 1936, von Mildenstein moved on. In Eichmann’s version of events, he joined the
Organisation Todt
—the National Socialist civil engineering organisation—and was sent to the United States to study the highways system.
*
Eichmann applied for his job but did not get it. Instead, a brash young SS-NCO, Kuno Schröder, was appointed and Eichmann continued with his work on Zionism. By this time, he had been joined by Theodor Dannecker, a Bavarian lawyer who was a few years younger than Eichmann. Dannecker’s job was to monitor assimilationist Jews.

When describing the SD in this period, historians often highlight its lack of any kind of executive arm and the fact that its role often overlapped with that of the Gestapo. However, this is a fairly common
model for domestic intelligence collection, where political police forces are routinely separated from intelligence agencies. At this stage, Office II 112 was an intelligence staff rather than an executive unit: its role was to receive—and, to some extent, collect—information, process it, but not act upon it. However, as members of the team developed expertise in their field, their recommendations started to carry increasing weight. Therefore, it is far from remarkable that Office II 112 began to exert influence on the issue of the “Jewish question.”

Schröder left Office II 112 in March 1937. Again, Eichmann was overlooked, and Dieter Wisliceny took over leadership of the department. The tubby East Prussian was preferred for the role because he had studied theology at university. However, he and Eichmann got on well—in conversation, they would address each other with the familiar
du
. At this point, most of the office’s energy was being devoted to compiling a card index of all the Jews in Germany. This had initially proved too much for the small team, but then the organisational changes instituted by Himmler came to their aid. First, Heydrich—by now Chief of the Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) and the SD—ordered that Office II 112 should have access to all information gathered during Gestapo raids on Jewish organisations and interrogations of Jewish community leaders. Then, in July 1937, Six (head of Office II), Wisliceny, Eichmann and Herbert Hagen (a young ex-journalist and now a member of Office II 112) attended a meeting with representatives of the Gestapo. The SD men asked for access to the Gestapo’s files on Jews and Jewish organisations, and Werner Best (Heydrich’s deputy) agreed that the entire Gestapo card index should be turned over to them.
¹⁴
This was a clear acknowledgement of Office II 112’s growing significance—it placed the department right at the centre of SS involvement in the formulation of Jewish policy.

However, those outside Office II 112 were not always comfortable with its activities, particularly in respect to its cultivation of contacts within the Zionist movement. Eichmann was especially active in developing the links that von Mildenstein had forged with Zionists who
sought German support for mass Jewish emigration to Palestine. For instance, his interest was piqued after reading an article in
Haint
, a Yiddish newspaper published in Warsaw, about the Haganah, an underground Zionist self-defence and intelligence organisation that was based in Palestine. Eichmann summoned Dr. Paul Eppstein, one of the leaders of the National Socialist–controlled
Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden
(Reich Representatives of German Jews) and a regular source of information on Jewish matters, for questioning on Haganah. Eppstein claimed to know nothing about the organisation, but Eichmann remained interested. Then, in February 1937, Otto von Bolschwingh—a friend of von Mildenstein and a part-time SD spy—told Eichmann that a Haganah officer, a Polish Jew named Feivel Polkes, was coming to Berlin. Having sought permission from Six and Heydrich, Eichmann arranged to meet him.

The two men had lunch at a restaurant near Berlin Zoo on 26 February. Eichmann’s account of the meeting and what followed, given under interrogation before his trial in Israel, was somewhat anodyne:

In effect, Polkes was offering information in return for the SD’s help in promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine. He might also have been seeking weapons, although there is no evidence that any were handed over. Eichmann’s report of the meeting noted that Polkes “was prepared among other things to give powerful support to German foreign policy interests in the Middle East…on condition that German currency regulations were relaxed for Jews emigrating to Palestine.”
¹⁶

Eichmann and Hagen, undercover as a journalist and a student, finally set off for Palestine at the end of September. Their trip took them by train through Poland and Romania to the port of Constanza, where they boarded a steamer. They reached the port of Haifa on 2 October. Then chance stepped in: an Arab uprising in September had forced the British authorities to close Palestine’s borders. Eichmann and Hagen were given permission to disembark from their ship for twenty-four hours but were told not to journey elsewhere in Palestine. After doing a little sightseeing the next morning, they continued on to Alexandria and from there took a train to Cairo.

They stayed in the Egyptian capital for twelve days, met Polkes again, and persuaded him to become a paid SD agent (he was given a salary of £15 per month). They also applied to the British authorities for permission to enter Palestine. According to Eichmann, “We were told: ‘I’m sorry, nothing doing.’ I seem to remember that there had been some kind of disorders in Palestine at the time, maybe bombings. It’s also possible that British Intelligence had caught on to us.”
¹⁷
This was quite likely. During this period, British embassies’ and consulates’ “passport control offices” were usually staffed by MI6 operatives; and even if the British had no knowledge of Eichmann and Hagen’s mission, suspicions would have been aroused by the two men’s arrival.

Eichmann and Hagen returned from the Middle East with the former resigned to the fact that their mission had been a failure. But this view was not shared by his superiors, particularly Heydrich, who was now convinced that Office II 112’s Zionist contacts could be used to further the SD’s influence. Before long, the department was hosting
a “Jewish Day,” a seminar outlining the SD’s position on the “Jewish question.” Records of this event reveal that, despite its supposed expertise on Jewish matters and its rejection of the crude extremism of many party members, Office II 112’s thinking was still broadly in line with typical National Socialist attitudes. In Eichmann’s closing address—on the connections between world Jewry and the Jews of Germany—he painted a ludicrous picture of Haganah and other Zionist conspiracies being perpetrated by foreign-born Jews in Germany. But, as his biographer points out: “This fantasy was not simply driven by ideology: the SD needed to find conspiracies in order to justify its operations and its budget.”
¹⁸

Eichmann’s work gave him a thorough grounding in the “Jewish question,” and he certainly saw emigration to Palestine as the best solution to it. At this point, neither he nor any of the other experts on Jewry in the SD considered the mass extermination of the Jewish population as a feasible “final solution,” and it would be several years before they became involved in it. In the meantime, the Austrian
Anschluss
gave them an opportunity to put some of Office II 112’s ideas into practice.

In early 1938, the SD was told to prepare for an upcoming action in Austria. Its offices immediately set to work drawing up lists of organisations and individuals that they intended to target. The German Army crossed the border on 12 March, and before long they were joined by the full panoply of the National Socialist security apparatus. Hagen moved to Vienna to establish a “special unit” of Office II 112, while Eichmann—who had finally been made an officer on 30 January—followed him on 16 March, bearing lists of prominent Jews to be arrested and organisations to be raided. At his trial, more than twenty years later, he tried to give the impression that he acted as the Jews’ protector in Vienna. In reality, he personally took part in many of the raids and arrests, and only when this first wave of terror had left Austrian Jews cowering and intimidated did he move on to the next phase. Having consulted with the local Sipo leadership as well as Berlin,
he decided that he needed a degree of cooperation from the Jewish community in order to begin the forced emigration process. So, from his headquarters in the Hotel Metropol, he summoned Jewish community leaders to a series of meetings.

Ultimately, he chose a Viennese lawyer, Josef Löwenherz—a vice-president of the main Jewish community group—to be his chief enforced collaborator. Eichmann sent Löwenherz back to his cell and ordered that he should be held there “until he produced a plan for the mass emigration of Austrian Jews.”
¹⁹
The plan that was eventually formulated was effectively a system of expropriation: “The majority of Austria’s 300,000 Jews were destitute and could not produce the minimum capital demanded by the receiving countries; the National Socialist regime, on the other hand, was short of foreign currency and could provide no funds. The richer Jews were accordingly compelled to subsidize the exodus from their own resources.”
²⁰
The SD knew that these wealthy Jews would need little persuading to leave. The problem lay with getting them to take the poorer ones with them.

Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in a former Rothschild family palace on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse in Vienna. Here he set up a “conveyor-belt” system to handle the bureaucracy, with representatives of all the interested departments located in the building to speed up the process. Within the first eight months of the
Anschluss
, this office had organised the emigration of 45,000 Austrian Jews; within eighteen months, 150,000 had been forced from their homes.
²¹

But even as the SD’s pro-emigrationists were driving out the Austrian Jews, the anti-Semitic hard core of the NSDAP was gearing up to wrest Jewish policy-making away from them. In March 1938, the government of Poland, under pressure from the nationalist, anti-Semitic right, announced that all Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years were to be deprived of their citizenship. This measure was explicitly designed to rid the country of the seventy thousand Polish Jews who were residing in Germany and Austria. A further decree
on 6 October announced that all Polish passports would be cancelled unless they received a validation stamp—available only in Poland—before the 31st of the month. The German government quite rightly concluded that this was simply another attempt by its eastern neighbour to dump Polish Jews on Germany. In response, Heydrich arrested some twelve thousand Polish Jews living in Germany and transported them to the border. On the night of 28–29 October, they were driven across the frontier and marched two kilometres to the Polish town of Zbaszyn. But the Polish frontier guards refused to accept them into the country, so they remained stuck in no-man’s-land as winter drew in. They were fed only intermittently by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish aid organisations.
*

Among the twelve thousand were Sendel and Rivka Grynszpan, a couple who had emigrated to Hannover in 1911. Thereafter, Sendel ran a tailoring business in the town. They took Polish nationality at the end of the First World War but remained in Hannover. Like most Jews in Germany after the National Socialists came to power, they were frightened for themselves and their children, and in 1936 they arranged for their youngest son, fifteen-year-old Herschel, to travel to Belgium. They hoped he would be able to emigrate to Palestine from there, but instead he entered France illegally and went to live with an uncle in a small Jewish enclave in Paris.

Two years later, Rivka sent Herschel a postcard from Zbaszyn, begging him to try to organise emigration for her and Sendel to the United States. On 7 November, Herschel asked his uncle for some money to pursue this, but he refused and a furious row erupted. Still fuming, Herschel stormed out of the house, went to a gun shop and bought a pistol and some ammunition. Then he walked to the German Embassy
and asked to see a diplomat. He was shown into the office of Ernst vom Rath, a young National Socialist Party member, whereupon he drew his pistol and shot vom Rath three times. The diplomat died two days later—the fifteenth anniversary of the Munich
Putsch
.