The Weiss affair was only the beginning, and things were to get considerably worse, from Eichmann's point of view. Becher was a born businessman, and where Eichmann saw only enormous tasks of organization and administration, he saw almost unlimited possibilities for making money. The one thing that stood in his way was the narrow-mindedness of subordinate creatures like Eichmann, who took their jobs seriously. Obersturmbannführer Becher's projects soon led him to cooperate closely in the rescue efforts of Dr. Rudolf Kastner. (It was to Kastner's testimony on his behalf that Becher later, at Nuremberg, owed his freedom. Being an old Zionist, Kastner had moved to Israel after the war, where he held a high position until a journalist published a story about his collaboration with the S.S.—whereupon Kastner sued him for libel. His testimony at Nuremberg weighed heavily against him, and when the case came before the Jerusalem District Court, Judge Halevi, one of the three judges in the Eichmann trial, told Kastner that he “had sold his soul to the devil.” In March, 1957, shortly before his case was to be appealed before the Israeli Supreme Court, Kastner was murdered; none of the murderers, it seems, came from Hungary. In the hearing that followed the verdict of the lower court was repealed and Kastner was fully rehabilitated.) The deals Becher made through Kastner were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew—not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to thinking big. The price finally arrived at was a thousand dollars, and one group, consisting of 1,684 Jews, and including Dr. Kastner's family, actually left Hungary for the exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen, from which they eventually reached Switzerland. A similar deal, through which Becher and Himmler hoped to obtain twenty million Swiss francs from the American Joint Distribution Committee, for the purchase of merchandise of all sorts, kept everybody busy until the Russians liberated Hungary, but nothing came of it.
There is no doubt that Becher's activities had the full approval of Himmler and stood in the sharpest possible opposition to the old “radical” orders, which still reached Eichmann through Müller and Kaltenbrunner, his immediatee superiors in the R.S.H.A. In Eichmann's view, people like Becher were corrupt, but corruption could not very well have caused his crisis of conscience, for although he was apparently not susceptible to this kind of temptation, he must by this time have been surrounded by corruption for many years. It is difficult to imagine that he did not know that his friend and subordinate Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny had, as early as 1942, accepted fifty thousand dollars from the Jewish Relief Committee in Bratislava for delaying the deportations from Slovakia, though it is not altogether impossible; but he cannot have been ignorant of the fact that Himmler, in the fall of 1942, had tried to sell exit permits to the Slovakian Jews in exchange for enough foreign currency to pay for the recruitment of a new S.S. division. Now, however, in 1944, in Hungary, it was different, not because Himmler was involved in “business,” but because business had now become official policy; it was no longer mere corruption.
At the beginning, Eichmann tried to enter the game and play it according to the new rules; that was when he got involved in the fantastic “blood-for-wares” negotiations—one million Jews for ten thousand trucks for the crumbling German Army— which certainly were not initiated by him. The way he explained his role in this matter, in Jerusalem, showed clearly how he had once justified it to himself: as a military necessity that would bring him the additional benefit of an important new role in the emigration business. What he probably never admitted to himself was that the mounting difficulties on all sides made it every day more likely that he would soon be without a job (indeed, this happened, a few months later) unless he succeeded in finding some foothold amid the new jockeying for power that was going on all around him. When the exchange project met with its predictable failure, it was already common knowledge that Himmler, despite his constant vacillations, chiefly due to his justified physical fear of Hitler, had decided to put an end to the whole Final Solution—regardless of business, regardless of military necessity, and without anything to show for it except the illusions he had concocted about his future role as the bringer of peace to Germany. It was at this time that a “moderate wing” of the S.S. came into existence, consisting of those who were stupid enough to believe that a murderer who could prove he had not killed as many people as he could have killed would have a marvelous alibi, and those who were clever enough to foresee a return to “normal conditions,” when money and good connections would again be of paramount importance.
Eichmann never joined this “moderate wing,” and it is questionable whether he would have been admitted if he had tried to. Not only was he too deeply compromised and, because of his constant contact with Jewish functionaries, too well known; he was too primitive for these well-educated upper-middle-class “gentlemen,” against whom he harbored the most violent resentment up to the very end. He was quite capable of sending millions of people to their death, but he was not capable of talking about it in the appropriate manner without being given his “language rule.” In Jerusalem, without any rules, he spoke freely of “killing” and of “murder,” of “crimes legalized by the state”; he called a spade a spade, in contrast to counsel for the defense, whose feeling of social superiority to Eichmann was more than once in evidence. (Servatius' assistant Dr. Dieter Wechtenbruch—a disciple of Carl Schmitt who attended the first few weeks of the trial, then was sent to Germany to question witnesses for the defense, and reappeared for the last week in August—was readily available to reporters out of court; he seemed to be shocked less by Eichmann's crimes than by his lack of taste and education. “Small fry,” he said; “we must see how we get him over the hurdles”—wie wir das Würstchen über die Runden bringen. Servatius himself had declared, even prior to the trial, that his client's personality was that of “a common mailman.”)
When Himmler became “moderate,” Eichmann sabotaged his orders as much as he dared, to the extent at least that he felt he was “covered” by his immediate superiors. “How does Eichmann dare to sabotage Himmler's orders?”— in this case, to stop the foot marches, in the fall of 1944—Kastner once asked Wisliceny. And the answer was: “He can probably show some telegram. Müller and Kaltenbrunner must have covered him.” It is quite possible that Eichmann had some confused plan for liquidating Theresienstadt before the arrival of the Red Army, although we know this only through the dubious testimony of Dieter Wisliceny (who months, and perhaps years, before the end began carefully preparing an alibi for himself at the expense of Eichmann, to which he then treated the court at Nuremberg, where he was a witness for the prosecution; it did him no good, for he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, prosecuted and executed in Prague, where he had no connections and where money was of no help to him). Other witnesses claimed that it was Rolf Günther, one of Eichmann's men, who planned this, and that there existed, on the contrary, a written order from Eichmann that the ghetto be left intact. In any event, there is no doubt that even in April, 1945, when practically everybody had become quite “moderate,” Eichmann took advantage of a visit that M. Paul Dunand, of the Swiss Red Cross, paid to Theresienstadt to put it on record that he himself did not approve of Himmler's new line in regard to the Jews.