Whatever doubts there may be about Eichmann's personality change in Vienna, there is no doubt that this appointment marked the real beginning of his career. Between 1937 and 1941, he won four promotions; within fourteen months he advanced from Untersturmführer to Hauptsturmführer (that is, from second lieutenant to captain); and in another year and a half he was made Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel. That happened in October, 1941, shortly after he was assigned the role in the Final Solution that was to land him in the District Court of Jerusalem. And there, to his great grief, he “got stuck”; as he saw it, there was no higher grade obtainable in the section in which he worked. But this he could not know during the four years in which he climbed quicker and higher than he had ever anticipated. In Vienna, he had shown his mettle, and now he was recognized not merely as an expert on “the Jewish question,” the intricacies of Jewish organizations and Zionist parties, but as an “authority” on emigration and evacuation, as the “master” who knew how to make people move. His greatest triumph came shortly after the Kristallnacht, in November, 1938, when German Jews had become frantic in their desire to escape. Göring, probably on the initiative of Heydrich, decided to establish in Berlin a Reich Center for Jewish Emigration, and in the letter containing his directives Eichmann's Viennese office was specifically mentioned as the model to be used in the setting up of a central authority. The head of the Berlin office was not to be Eichmann, however, but his later greatly admired boss Heinrich Müller, another of Heydrich's discoveries. Heydrich had just taken Müller away from his job as a regular Bavarian police officer (he was not even a member of the Party and had been an opponent until 1933), and called him to the Gestapo in Berlin, because he was known to be an authority on the Soviet Russian police system. For Müller, too, this was the beginning of his career, though he had to start with a comparatively small assignment. (Müller, incidentally, not prone to boasting like Eichmann and known for his “sphinxlike conduct,” succeeded in disappearing altogether; nobody knows his whereabouts, though there are rumors that first East Germany and now Albania have engaged the services of the Russian-police expert.)
In March, 1939, Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia and erected a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia. Eichmann was immediately appointed to set up another emigration center for Jews in Prague. “In the beginning I was not too happy to leave Vienna, for if you have installed such an office and if you see everything running smoothly and in good order, you don't like to give it up.” And indeed, Prague was somewhat disappointing, although the system was the same as in Vienna, for “The functionaries of the Czech Jewish organizations went to Vienna and the Viennese people came to Prague, so that I did not have to intervene at all. The model in Vienna was simply copied and carried to Prague. Thus the whole thing got started automatically.” But the Prague center was much smaller, and “I regret to say there were no people of the caliber and the energy of a Dr. Löwenherz.” But these, as it were, personal reasons for discontent were minor compared to mounting difficulties of another, entirely objective nature. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had left their homelands in a matter of a few years, and millions waited behind them, for the Polish and Rumanian governments left no doubt in their official proclamations that they, too, wished to be rid of their Jews. They could not understand why the world should get indignant if they followed in the footsteps of a “great and cultured nation.” (This enormous arsenal of potential refugees had been revealed during the Evian Conference, called in the summer of 1938 to solve the problem of German Jewry through intergovernmental action. It was a resounding fiasco and did great harm to German Jews.) The avenues for emigration overseas now became clogged up, just as the escape possibilities within Europe had been exhausted earlier, and even under the best of circumstances, if war had not interfered with his program, Eichmann would hardly have been able to repeat the Viennese “miracle” in Prague.
He knew this very well, he really had become an expert on matters of emigration, and he could not have been expected to greet his next appointment with any great enthusiasm. War had broken out in September, 1939, and one month later Eichmann was called back to Berlin to succeed Müller as head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration. A year before, this would have been a real promotion, but now was the wrong moment. No one in his senses could possibly think any longer of a solution of the Jewish question in terms of forced emigration; quite apart from the difficulties of getting people from one country to another in wartime, the Reich had acquired, through the conquest of Polish territories, two or two and a half million more Jews. It is true that the Hitler government was still willing to let its Jews go (the order that stopped all Jewish emigration came only two years later, in the fall of 1941), and if any “final solution” had been decided upon, nobody had as yet given orders to that effect, although Jews were already concentrated in ghettos in the East and were also being liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen. It was only natural that emigration, however smartly organized in Berlin in accordance with the “assembly line principle,” should peter out by itself—a process Eichmann described as being “like pulling teeth… listless, I would say, on both sides. On the Jewish side because it was really difficult to obtain any emigration possibilities to speak of, and on our side because there was no bustle and no rush, no coming and going of people. There we were, sitting in a great and mighty building, amid a yawning emptiness.” Evidently, if Jewish matters, his specialty, remained a matter of emigration, he would soon be out of a job.