The case of the conscience of Adolf Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, “How was it possible that all you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?,” replied that it was “not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in heaven.” (Thus General Alfred Jodl, hanged at Nuremberg.) Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Fiihrer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry or thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.
And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: “Thou shalt kill,” although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
IX: Deportations from the Reich—Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate
Between the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942, when Eichmann felt like Pontius Pilate and washed his hands in innocence, and Himmler's orders in the summer and fall of 1944, when behind Hitler's back the Final Solution was abandoned as though the massacres had been nothing but a regrettable mistake, Eichmann was troubled by no questions of conscience. His thoughts were entirely taken up with the staggering job of organization and administration in the midst not only of a world war but, more important for him, of innumerable intrigues and fights over spheres of authority among the various State and Party offices that were busy “solving the Jewish question.” His chief competitors were the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, who were under the direct command of Himmler, had easy access to him, and always outranked Eichmann. There was also the Foreign Office, which, under its new Undersecretary of State, Dr. Martin Luther, a protégé of Ribbentrop, had become very active in Jewish affairs. (Luther tried to oust Ribbentrop, in an elaborate intrigue in 1943, failed, and was put into a concentration camp; under his successor, Legationsrat Eberhard von Thadden, a witness for the defense at the trial in Jerusalem, became Referent in Jewish affairs.) It occasionally issued deportation orders to be carried out by its representatives abroad, who for reasons of prestige preferred to work through the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders. There were, furthermore, the Army commanders in the Eastern occupied territories, who liked to solve problems “on the spot,” which meant shooting; the military men in Western countries were, on the other hand, always reluctant to cooperate and to lend their troops for the rounding up and seizure of Jews. Finally, there were the Gauleiters, the regional leaders, each of whom wanted to be the first to declare his territory judenrein, and who occasionally started deportation procedures on their own.
Eichmann had to coordinate all these “efforts,” to bring some order out of what he described as “complete chaos,” in which “everyone issued his own orders” and “did as he pleased.” And indeed he succeeded, though never completely, in acquiring a key position in the whole process, because his office organized the means of transportation. According to Dr. Rudolf Mildner, Gestapo head in Upper Silesia (where Auschwitz was located) and later chief of the Security Police in Denmark, who testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, orders for deportations were given by Himmler in writing to Kaltenbrunner, head of the R.S.H.A., who notified Müller, head of the Gestapo, or Section IV of R.S.H.A., who in turn transmitted the orders orally to his referent in IV-B-4—that is, to Eichmann. Himmler also issued orders to the local Higher S.S. and Police Leaders and informed Kaltenbrunner accordingly. Questions of what should be done with the Jewish deportees, how many should be exterminated and how many spared for hard labor, were also decided by Himmler, and his orders concerning these matters went to Pohl's W.V.H.A., which communicated them to Richard Glücks, inspector of the concentration and extermination camps, who in turn passed them along to the commanders of the camps. The prosecution ignored these documents from the Nuremberg Trials, since they contradicted its theory of the extraordinary power held by Eichmann; the defense mentioned Mildner's affidavits, but not to much purpose. Eichmann himself, after “consulting Poliakoff and Reitlinger,” produced seventeen multi-colored charts, which contributed little to a better understanding of the intricate bureaucratic machinery of the Third Reich, although his general description was always in a state of continuous flux, a steady stream”—sounded plausible to the student of totalitarianism, who knows that the monolithic quality of this form of government is a myth. He still remembered vaguely how his men, his advisers on Jewish matters in all occupied and semi-independent countries, had reported back to him “what action was at all practicable,” how he had then prepared “reports which were later either approved or rejected,” and how Miller then had issued his directives; “in practice this could mean that a proposal that came in from Paris or The Hague went out a fortnight later to Paris or The Hague in the form of a directive approved by the R.S.H.A.” Eichmann's position was that of the most important conveyor belt in the whole operation, because it was always up to him and his men how many Jews could or should be transported from any given area, and it was through his office that the ultimate destination of the shipment was cleared, though that destination was not determined by him. But the difficulty in synchronizing departures and arrivals, the endless worry over wrangling enough rolling stock from the railroad authorities and the Ministry of Transport, over fixing timetables and directing trains to centers with sufficient “absorptive capacity,” over having enough Jews on hand at the proper time so that no trains would be “wasted,” over enlisting the help of the authorities in occupied or allied countries to carry out arrests, over following the rules and directives with respect to the various categories of Jews, which were laid down separately for each country and constantly changing—all this became a routine whose details he had forgotten long before he was brought to Jerusalem.