Eichmann's trouble was that he remembered none of the facts that might have supported, however faintly, his incredible story, while the learned counsel for the defense probably did not even know that there was anything to remember. (Dr. Servatius could have called as witnesses for the defense the former agents of Aliyah Beth, as the organization for illegal immigration into Palestine was called; they certainly still remembered Eichmann, and they were now living in Israel.) Eichmann's memory functioned only in respect to things that had had a direct bearing upon his career. Thus, he remembered a visit he had received in Berlin from a Palestinian functionary who told him about life in the collective settlements, and whom he had twice taken out to dinner, because this visit ended with a formal invitation to Palestine, where the Jews would show him the country. He was delighted; no other Nazi official had been able to go “to a distant foreign land,” and he received permission to make the trip. The judgment concluded that he had been sent “on an espionage mission,” which no doubt was true, but this did not contradict the story Eichmann had told the police. (Practically nothing came of the enterprise. Eichmann, together with a journalist from his office, a certain Herbert Hagen, had just enough time to climb Mount Carmel in Haifa before the British authorities deported both of them to Egypt and denied them entry permits for Palestine; according to Eichmann, “the man from the Haganah”—the Jewish military organization which became the nucleus of the Israeli Army—came to see them in Cairo, and what he told them there became the subject of a “thoroughly negative report” Eichmann and Hagen were ordered by their superiors to write for propaganda purposes; this was duly published.)
Apart from such minor triumphs, Eichmann remembered only moods and the catch phrases he made up to go with them; the trip to Egypt had been in 1937, prior to his activity in Vienna, and from Vienna he remembered no more than the general atmosphere and how “elated” he had felt. In view of his astounding virtuosity in never discarding a mood and its catch phrase once and for all when they became incompatible with a new era, which required different moods and different “elating” phrases—a virtuosity that he demonstrated over and over during the police examination—one is tempted to believe in his sincerity when he spoke of the time in Vienna as an idyll. Because of the complete lack of consistency in his thoughts and sentiments, this sincerity is not even undermined by the fact that his year in Vienna, from the spring of 1938 to March, 1939, came at a time when the Nazi regime had abandoned its pro-Zionist attitude. It was in the nature of the Nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month, but one of the outstanding characteristics of its members was that psychologically they tended to be always one step behind the movement—that they had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it, or, as Hitler used to phrase it, that they could not “jump over their own shadow.”
More damning, however, than any objective fact was Eichmann's own faulty memory. There were certain Jews in Vienna whom he recalled very vividly—Dr. Löwenherz and Kommerzialrat Storfer—but they were not those Palestinian emissaries, who might have backed up his story. Josef Löwenherz, who after the war wrote a very interesting memorandum about his negotiations with Eichmann (one of the few new documents produced by the trial, it was shown in part to Eichmann, who found himself in complete agreement with its main statements), was the first Jewish functionary actually to organize a whole Jewish community into an institution at the service of the Nazi authorities. And he was one of the very, very few such functionaries to reap a reward for his services—he was permitted to stay in Vienna until the end of the war, when he emigrated to England and the United States; he died shortly after Eichmann's capture, in 1960. Storfer's fate, as we have seen, was less fortunate, but this certainly was not Eichmann's fault. Storfer had replaced the Palestinian emissaries, who had become too independent, and his task, assigned to him by Eichmann, was to organize some illegal transports of Jews into Palestine without the help of the Zionists. Storfer was no Zionist and had shown no interest in Jewish matters prior to the arrival of the Nazis in Austria. Still, with the help of Eichmann he succeeded in getting some thirty-five hundred Jews out of Europe, in 1940, when half of Europe was occupied by the Nazis, and it seems that he did his best to clear things with the Palestinians. (That is probably what Eichmann had in mind when he added to his story about Storfer in Auschwitz the cryptic remark: “Storfer never betrayed Judaism, not with a single word, not Storfer.”) A third Jew, finally, whom Eichmann never failed to recall in connection with his prewar activities was Dr. Paul Eppstein, in charge of emigration in Berlin during the last years of the Reichsvereinigung—a Nazi-appointed Jewish central organization, not to be confused with the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung, which was dissolved in July, 1939. Dr. Eppstein was appointed by Eichmann to serve as Judenältester (Jewish Elder) in Theresienstadt, where he was shot in 1944.
In other words, the only Jews Eichmann remembered were those who had been completely in his power. He had forgotten not only the Palestinian emissaries but also his earlier Berlin acquaintances, whom he had known well when he was still engaged in intelligence work and had no executive powers. He never mentioned, for instance, Dr. Franz Meyer, a former member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization in Germany, who came to testify for the prosecution about his contacts with the accused from 1936 to 1939. To some extent, Dr. Meyer confirmed Eichmann's own story: in Berlin, the Jewish functionaries could “put forward complaints and requests,” there was a kind of cooperation. Sometimes, Meyer said, “we came to ask for something, and there were times when he demanded something from us”; Eichmann at that time “was genuinely listening to us and was sincerely trying to understand the situation”; his behavior was “quite correct”—“he used to address me as ‘Mister’ and to offer me a seat.” But in February, 1939, all this had changed. Eichmann had summoned the leaders of German Jewry to Vienna to explain to them his new methods of “forced emigration.” And there he was, sitting in a large room on the ground floor of the Rothschild Palais, recognizable, of course, but completely changed: “I immediately told my friends that I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible was the change…. Here I met a man who comported himself as a master of life and death. He received us with insolence and rudeness. He did not let us come near his desk. We had to remain standing.” Prosecution and judges were in agreement that Eichmann underwent a genuine and lasting personality change when he was promoted to a post with executive powers. But the trial showed that here, too, he had “relapses,” and that the matter could never have been as simple as that. There was the witness who testified to an interview with him at Theresienstadt in March, 1945, when Eichmann again showed himself to be very interested in Zionist matters—the witness was a member of a Zionist youth organization and held a certificate of entry for Palestine. The interview was “conducted in very pleasant language and the attitude was kind and respectful.” (Strangely, counsel for the defense never mentioned this witness's testimony in his plaidoyer.)