The last time Eichmann recalled having tried something on his own was in September, 1941, three months after the invasion of Russia. This was just after Heydrich, still chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, had become Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. To celebrate the occasion, he had called a press conference and had promised that in eight weeks the Protectorate would be judenrein. After the conference, he discussed the matter with those who would have to make his word good—with Franz Stahlecker, who was then local commander of the Security Police in Prague, and with the Undersecretary of State, Karl Hermann Frank, a former Sudeten leader who soon after Heydrich's death was to succeed him as Reichsprotektor. Frank, in Eichmann's opinion, was a low type, a Jew-hater of the “Streicher kind” who “didn't know a thing about political solutions,” one of those people who, “autocratically and, let me say, in the drunkenness of their power simply gave orders and commands.” But otherwise the conference was enjoyable. For the first time, Heydrich showed “a more human side” and admitted, with beautiful frankness, that he had “allowed his tongue to run away with him”—“no great surprise to those who knew Heydrich,” an “ambitious and impulsive character,” who “often let words slip through the fence of his teeth more quickly than he later might have liked.” So Heydrich himself said: “There is the mess, and what are we going to do now?” Whereupon Eichmann said: “There exists only one possibility, if you cannot retreat from your announcement. Give enough room into which to transfer the Jews of the Protectorate, who now live dispersed.” (A Jewish homeland, a gathering-in of the exiles in the Diaspora.) And then, unfortunately, Frank—the Jew-hater of the Streicher kind—made a concrete proposal, and that was that the room be provided at Theresienstadt. Whereupon Heydrich, perhaps also in the drunkenness of his power, simply ordered the immediate evacuation of the native Czech population from Theresienstadt, to make room for the Jews.
Eichmann was sent there to look things over. Great disappointment: the Bohemian fortress town on the banks of the Eger was far too small; at best, it could become a transfer camp for a certain percentage of the ninety thousand Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. (For about fifty thousand Czech Jews, Theresienstadt indeed became a transfer camp on the way to Auschwitz, while an estimated twenty thousand more reached the same destination directly.) We know from better sources than Eichmann's faulty memory that Theresienstadt, from the beginning, was designed by Heydrich to serve as a special ghetto for certain privileged categories of Jews, chiefly, but not exclusively, from Germany—Jewish functionaries, prominent people, war veterans with high decorations, invalids, the Jewish partners of mixed marriages, and German Jews over sixty-five years of age (hence the nickname Altersghetto). The town proved too small even for these restricted categories, and in 1943, about a year after its establishment, there began the “thinning out” or “loosening up” (Auflockerung) processes by which overcrowding was regularly relieved—by means of transport to Auschwitz. But in one respect, Eichmann's memory did not deceive him. Theresienstadt was in fact the only concentration camp that did not fall under the authority of the W.V.H.A. but remained his own responsibility to the end. Its commanders were men from his own staff and always his inferiors in rank; it was the only camp in which he had at least some of the power which the prosecution in Jerusalem ascribed to him.
Eichmann's memory, jumping with great ease over the years—he was two years ahead of the sequence of events when he told the police examiner the story of Theresienstadt—was certainly not controlled by chronological order, but it was not simply erratic. It was like a storehouse, filled with human-interest stories of the worst type. When he thought back to Prague, there emerged the occasion when he was admitted to the presence of the great Heydrich, who showed himself to have a “more human side.” A few sessions later, he mentioned a trip to Bratislava, in Slovakia, where he happened to be at the time when Heydrich was assassinated. What he remembered was that he was there as the guest of Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior in the German-established Slovakian puppet government. (In that strongly anti-Semitic Catholic government, Mach represented the German version of anti-Semitism; he refused to allow exceptions for baptized Jews and he was one of the persons chiefly responsible for the wholesale deportation of Slovak Jewry.) Eichmann remembered this because it was unusual for him to receive social invitations from members of governments; it was an honor. Mach, as Eichmann recalled, was a nice, easygoing fellow who invited him to bowl with him. Did he really have no other business in Bratislava in the middle of the war than to go bowling with the Minister of the Interior? No, absolutely no other business; he remembered it all very well, how they bowled, and how drinks were served just before the news of the attempt on Heydrich's life arrived. Four months and fifty-five tapes later, Captain Less, the Israeli examiner, came back to this point, and Eichmann told the same story in nearly identical words, adding that this day had been “unforgettable,” because his superior had been assassinated.” This time, however, he was confronted with a document that said he had been sent to Bratislava to talk over “the current evacuation action against Jews from Slovakia.” He admitted his error at once: “Clear, clear, that was an order from Berlin, they did not send me there to go bowling.” Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich. And it was characteristic of his kind of memory that he could absolutely not recall the year in which this memorable day fell, on which “the hangman” was shot by Czech patriots.