Furthermore, it must be remembered that all these organs, wielding enormous power, were in fierce competition with one another—which was no help to their victims, since their ambition was always the same: to kill as many Jews as possible. This competitive spirit, which, of course, inspired in each man a great loyalty to his own outfit, has survived the war, only now it works in reverse: it has become each man's desire “to exonerate his own outfit” at the expense of all the others. This was the explanation Eichmann gave when he was confronted with the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commander of Auschwitz, in which Eichmann is accused of certain things that he claimed he never did and was in no position to do. He admitted easily enough that Hoss had no personal reasons for saddling him with acts of which he was innocent, since their relations had been quite friendly; but he insisted, in vain, that Hösss wanted to exculpate his own outfit, the Head Office for Administration and Economy, and to put all the blame on the R.S.H.A. Something of the same sort happened at Nuremberg, where the various accused presented a nauseating spectacle by accusing each other— none of them blamed Hitler! Still, no one did this merely to save his own neck at the expense of somebody else's; the men on trial there represented altogether different organizations, with long-standing, deeply ingrained hostility to one another. Dr. Hans Globke, whom we met before, tried to exonerate his own Ministry of the Interior at the expense of the Foreign Office, when he testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Eichmann, on the other hand, always tried to shield Müller, Heydrich, and Kaltenbrunner, although the latter had treated him quite badly. No doubt one of the chief objective mistakes of the prosecution at Jerusalem was that its case relied too heavily on sworn or unsworn affidavits of former high-ranking Nazis, dead or alive; it did not see, and perhaps could not be expected to see, how dubious these documents were as sources for the establishment of facts. Even the judgment, in its evaluation of the damning testimonies of other Nazi criminals, took into account that (in the words of one of the defense witnesses) “it was customary at the time of the war-crime trials to put as much blame as possible on those who were absent or believed to be dead.”
When Eichmann entered his new office in Section IV of the R.S.H.A., he was still confronted with the uncomfortable dilemma that on the one hand “forced emigration” was the official formula for the solution of the Jewish question, and, on the other hand, emigration was no longer possible. For the first (and almost the last) time in his life in the S.S., he was compelled by circumstances to take the initiative, to see if he could not “give birth to an idea.” According to the version he gave at the police examination, he was blessed with three ideas. All three of them, he had to admit, came to naught; everything he tried on his own invariably went wrong—the final blow came when he had “to abandon” his private fortress in Berlin before he could try it out against Russian tanks. Nothing but frustration; a hard luck story if there ever was one. The inexhaustible source of trouble, as he saw it, was that he and his men were never left alone, that all these other State and Party offices wanted their share in the “solution,” with the result that a veritable army of “Jewish experts” had cropped up everywhere and were falling over themselves in their efforts to be first in a field of which they knew nothing. For these people, Eichmann had the greatest contempt, partly because they were Johnnies-come-lately, partly because they tried to enrich themselves, and often succeeded in getting quite rich in the course of their work, and partly because they were ignorant, they had not read the one or two “basic books.”
His three dreams turned out to have been inspired by the “basic books,” it was also revealed that two of the three were definitely not his ideas at all, and with respect to the third—well, “I do not know any longer whether it was Stahlecker [his superior in Vienna and Prague] or myself who gave birth to the idea, anyhow the idea was born.” This last idea was the first, chronologically; it was the “idea of Nisko,” and its failure was for Eichmann the clearest possible proof of the evil of interference. (The guilty person in this case was Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland.) In order to understand the plan, we must remember that after the conquest of Poland and prior to the German attack on Russia, the Polish territories were divided between Germany and Russia; the German part consisted of the Western Regions, which were incorporated into the Reich, and the so-called Eastern Area, including Warsaw, which was known as the General Government. For the time being, the Eastern Area was treated as occupied territory. As the solution of the Jewish question at this time was still “forced emigration,” with the goal of making Germany judenrein, it was natural that Polish Jews in the annexed territories, together with the remaining Jews in other parts of the Reich, should be shoved into the General Government, which, whatever it may have been, was not considered to be part of the Reich. By December, 1939, evacuations eastward had started and roughly one million Jews—six hundred thousand from the incorporated area and four hundred thousand from the Reich—began to arrive in the General Government.
If Eichmann's version of the Nisko adventure is true—and there is no reason not to believe him—he or, more likely, his Prague and Vienna superior, Brigadeführer (brigadier general) Franz Stahlecker must have anticipated these developments by several months. This Dr. Stahlecker, as Eichmann was careful to call him, was in his opinion a very fine man, educated, full of reason, and “free of hatred and chauvinism of any kind” —in Vienna, he used to shake hands with the Jewish functionaries. A year and a half later, in the spring of 1941, this educated gentleman was appointed Commander of Einsatzgruppe A, and managed to kill by shooting, in little more than a year (he himself was killed in action in 1942), two hundred and fifty thousand Jews—as he proudly reported to Himmler himself, although the chief of the Einsatzgruppen, which were police units, was the head of the Security Police and the S.D., that is, Reinhardt Heydrich. But that came later, and now, in September, 1939, while the German Army was still busy occupying the Polish territories, Eichmann and Dr. Stahlecker began to think “privately” about how the Security Service might get its share of influence in the East. What they needed was “an area as large as possible in Poland, to be carved off for the erection of an autonomous Jewish state in the form of a protectorate… This could be the solution.” And off they went, on their own initiative, without orders from anybody, to reconnoiter. They went to the Radom District, on the San River, not far from the Russian border, and they “saw a huge territory, villages, market places, small towns,” and “we said to ourselves: that is what we need and why should one not resettle Poles for a change, since people are being resettled everywhere”; this will be “the solution of the Jewish question”—firm soil under their feet—at least for some time.
Everything seemed to go very well at first. They went to Heydrich, and Heydrich agreed and told them to go ahead. It so happened—though Eichmann, in Jerusalem, had completely forgotten it—that their project fitted very well in Heydrich's over-all plan at this stage for the solution of the Jewish question. On September 21, 1939, he had called a meeting of the “heads of departments” of the R.S.H.A. and the Einsatzgruppen (operating already in Poland), at which general directives for the immediate future had been given: concentration of Jews in ghettos, establishment of Councils of Jewish Elders, and the deportation of all Jews to the General Government area. Eichmann had attended this meeting setting up the “Jewish Center of Emigration”—as was proved at the trial through the minutes, which Bureau 06 of the Israeli police had discovered in the National Archives in Washington. Hence, Eichmann‘s, or Stahlecker‘s, initiative amounted to no more than a concrete plan for carrying out Heydrich's directives. And now thousands of people, chiefly from Austria, were deported helter-skelter into this God-forsaken place which, an S.S. officer —Erich Rajakowitsch, who later was in charge of the deportation of Dutch Jews—explained to them, “the Führer has promised the Jews as a new homeland. There are no dwellings, there are no houses. If you build, there will be a roof over your heads. There is no water, the wells all around carry disease, there is cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. If you bore and find water, you will have water.” As one can see, “everything looked marvelous,” except that the S.S. expelled some of the Jews from this paradise, driving them across the Russian border, and others had the good sense to escape of their own volition. But then, Eichmann complained, “the obstructions began on the part of Hans Frank,” whom they had forgotten to inform, although this was “his” territory. “Frank complained in Berlin and a great tug of war started. Frank wanted to solve his Jewish question all by himself. He did not want to receive any more Jews in his General Government. Those who had arrived should disappear immediately.” And they did disappear; some were even repatriated, which had never happened before and never happened again, and those who returned to Vienna were registered in the police records as “returning from vocational training”—a curious relapse into the ro-Zionist stage of the movement.