V: The Second Solution: Concentration
It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September 1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal. One of the most important steps in this direction, from an organizational point of view, was a decree, signed by Himmler, that fused the Security Service of the S.S., to which Eichmann had belonged since 1934, and which was a Party organ, with the regular Security Police of the State, in which the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, was included. The result of the merger was the Head Office for Reich Security (R.S.H.A.), whose chief was first Reinhardt Heydrich; after Heydrich's death in 1942, Eichmann's old acquaintance from Linz, Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, took over. All officials of the police, not only of the Gestapo but also of the Criminal Police and the Order Police, received S.S. titles corresponding to their previous ranks, regardless of whether or not they were Party members, and this meant that in the space of a day a most important part of the old civil services was incorporated into the most radical section of the Nazi hierarchy. No one, as far as I know, protested, or resigned his job. (Though Himmler, the head and founder of the S.S., had since 1936 been Chief of the German Police as well, the two apparatuses had remained separate until now.) The R.S.H.A., moreover, was only one of twelve Head Offices in the S.S., the most important of which, in the present context, were the Head Office of the Order Police, under General Kurt Daluege, which was responsible for the rounding up of Jews, and the Head Office for Administration and Economy (the S.S.Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or W.V.H.A.), headed by Oswald Pohl, which was in charge of concentration camps and was later to be in charge of the “economic” side of the extermination.
This “objective” attitude—talking about concentration camps in terms of “administration” and about extermination camps in terms of “economy”—was typical of the S.S. mentality, and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of. By its “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit), the S.S. dissociated itself from such “emotional” types as Streicher, that “unrealistic fool,” and also from certain “Teutonic-Germanic Party bigwigs who behaved as though they were clad in horns and pelts.” Eichmann admired Heydrich greatly because he did not like such nonsense at all, and he was out of sympathy with Himmler because, among other things, the Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police, though boss of all the S.S. Head Offices, had permitted himself “at least for a long time to be influenced by it.” During the trial, however, it was not the accused, S.S. Obersturmbannführer a.D., who was to carry off the prize for “objectivity”; it was Dr. Servatius, a tax and business lawyer from Cologne who had never joined the Nazi Party and who nevertheless was to teach the court a lesson in what it means not to be “emotional” that no one who heard him is likely to forget. The moment, one of the few great ones in the whole trial, occurred during the short oral plaidoyer of the defense, after which the court withdrew for four months to write its judgment. Servatius declared the accused innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for “the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and similar medical matters,” whereupon Judge Halevi interrupted him: “Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter.” To which Servatius replied: “It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter.” And, perhaps to make absolutely sure that the judges in Jerusalem would not forget how Germans—ordinary Germans, not former members of the S.S. or even of the Nazi Party—even today can regard acts that in other countries are called murder, he repeated the phrase in his “Comments on the Judgment of the First Instance,” prepared for the review of the case before the Supreme Court; he said again that not Eichmann, but one of his men, Rolf Günther, “was always engaged in medical matters.” (Dr. Servatius is well acquainted with “medical matters” in the Third Reich. At Nuremberg he defended Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, Plenipotentiary for “Hygiene and Health,” and chief of the euthanasia program.)
Each of the Head Offices of the S.S., in its wartime organization, was divided into sections and subsections, and the R.S.H.A. eventually contained seven main sections. Section IV was the bureau of the Gestapo, and it was headed by Gruppenführer (major general) Heinrich Müller, whose rank was the one he had held in the Bavarian police. His task was to combat “opponents hostile to the State,” of which there were two categories, to be dealt with by two sections: Subsection IV-A handled “opponents” accused of Communism, Sabotage, Liberalism, and Assassinations, and Subsection IV-B dealt with “sects,” that is, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons (the post remained vacant), and Jews. Each of the categories in these subsections received an office of its own, designated by an arabic numeral, so that Eichmann eventually—in 1941—was appointed to the desk of IV-B-4 in the R.S.H.A. Since his immediate superior, the head of IV-B, turned out to be a nonentity, his real superior was always Müller. Müller's superior was Heydrich, and later Kaltenbrunner, each of whom was, in his turn, under the command of Himmler, who received his orders directly from Hitler.
In addition to his twelve Head Offices, Himmler presided over an altogether different organizational setup, which also played an enormous role in the execution of the Final Solution. This was the network of Higher S.S. and Police Leaders who were in command of the regional organizations; their chain of command did not link them with the R.S.H.A., they were directly responsible to Himmler, and they always outranked Eichmann and the men at his disposal. The Einsatzgruppen, on the other hand, were under the command of Heydrich and the R.S.H.A.—which, of course, does not mean that Eichmann necessarily had anything to do with them. The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen also invariably held a higher rank than Eichmann. Technically and organizationally, Eichmann's position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat—from 1943 on—it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but “the opponent, Jewry,” but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy “solving” that problem. Even if we concentrate our attention only upon the police machinery and disregard all the other offices, the picture is absurdly complicated, since we have to add to the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Corps the Commanders and the Inspectors of the Security Police and the Security Service. Each of these groups belonged in a different chain of command that ultimately reached Himmler, but they were equal with respect to each other and no one belonging to one group owed obedience to a superior officer of another group. The prosecution, it must be admitted, was in a most difficult position in finding its way through this labyrinth of parallel institutions, which it had to do each time it wanted to pin some specific responsibility on Eichmann. (If the trial were to take place today, this task would be much easier, since Raul Hilberg in his The Destruction of the European Jews has succeeded in presenting the first clear description of this incredibly complicated machinery of destruction.)