What for Hitler, the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war's main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world. For hundreds of years, they had been used to understanding their own history, rightly or wrongly, as a long story of suffering, much as the prosecutor described it in his opening speech at the trial; but behind this attitude there had been, for a long time, the triumphant conviction of “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel shall live; individual Jews, whole Jewish families might die in pogroms, whole communities might be wiped out, but the people would survive. They had never been confronted with genocide. Moreover, the old consolation no longer worked anyhow, at least not in Western Europe. Since Roman antiquity, that is, since the inception of European history, the Jews had belonged, for better or worse, in misery or in splendor, to the European comity of nations; but during the past hundred and fifty years it had been chiefly for better, and the occasions of splendor had become so numerous that in Central and Western Europe they were felt to be the rule. Hence, the confidence that the people would eventually survive no longer held great significance for large sections of the Jewish communities; they could no more imagine Jewish life outside the framework of European civilization than they could have pictured to themselves a Europe that was judenrein.
The end of the world, though carried through with remarkable monotony, took almost as many different shapes and appearances as there existed countries in Europe. This will come as no surprise to the historian familiar with the development of European nations and with the rise of the nation-state system, but it came as a great surprise to the Nazis, who were genuinely convinced that anti-Semitism could become the common denominator that would unite all Europe. This was a huge and costly error. It quickly turned out that in practice, though perhaps not in theory, there existed great differences among anti-Semites in the various countries. What was even more annoying, though it might easily have been predicted, was that the German “radical” variety was fully appreciated only by those peoples in the East—the Ukrainians, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and, to some extent, the Rumanians—whom the Nazis had decided to regard as “subhuman” barbarian hordes. Notably deficient in proper hostility toward the Jews were the Scandinavian nations (Knut Hamsun and Sven Hedin were exceptions), which, according to the Nazis, were Germany's blood brethren.
The end of the world began, of course, in the German Reich, which at the time embraced not only Germany but Austria, Moravia and Bohemia, the Czech Protectorate, and the annexed Polish Western Regions. In the last of these, the so-called Warthegau, Jews, together with Poles, had been deported eastward after the beginning of the war, in the first huge resettlement project in the East—“an organized wandering of nations,” as the judgment of the District Court in Jerusalem called it—while Poles of German origin (Volksdeutsche) were shipped westward “back into the Reich.” Himmler, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom, had entrusted Heydrich with this “emigration and evacuation,” and in January, 1940, Eichmann's first official department in the R.S.H.A., Bureau IV-D-4, was set up. Though this position proved administratively to be the stepping-stone to his later job in Bureau IV-B-4, Eichmann's work here was no more than a kind of apprenticeship, the transition between his old job of making people emigrate and his future task of deporting them. His first deportation jobs did not belong to the Final Solution; they occurred before the official Hitler order. In view of what happened later, they can be regarded as test cases, as an experiment in catastrophe. The first was the deportation of thirteen hundred Jews from Stettin, which was carried out in a single night, on February 13, 1940. This was the first deportation of German Jews, and Heydrich had ordered it under the pretext that “their apartments were urgently required for reasons connected with the war economy.” They were taken, under unusually atrocious conditions, to the Lublin area of Poland. The second deportation took place in the fall of the same year: all the Jews in Baden and the Saarpfalz—about seventy-five hundred men, women, and children—were shipped, as I mentioned earlier, to Unoccupied France, which was at that moment quite a trick, since nothing in the Franco-German Armistice agreement stipulated that Vichy France could become a dumping ground for Jews. Eichmann had to accompany the train himself in order to convince the French stationmaster at the border that this was a German “military transport.”
These two operations entirely lacked the later elaborate “legal” preparations. No laws had yet been passed depriving Jews of their nationality the moment they were deported from the Reich, and instead of the many forms Jews eventually had to fill out in arranging for the confiscation of their property, the Stettin Jews simply signed a general waiver, covering everything they owned. Clearly, it was not the administrative apparatus that these first operations were supposed to test. The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions—whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish “refugees.” As far as the Nazis could see, everything turned out very satisfactorily. In Germany, there were a number of interventions for “special cases”—for the poet Alfred Mombert, for instance, a member of the Stefan George circle, who was permitted to depart to Switzerland—but the population at large obviously could not have cared less. (It was probably at this moment that Heydrich realized how important it would be to separate Jews with connections from the anonymous masses, and decided, with Hitler's agreement, to establish Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.) In France, something even better happened: the Vichy government put all seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden in the notorious concentration camp at Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had originally been built for the Spanish Republican Army and had been used since May of 1940 for the so-called “réfugiés provenant d'Allemagne,” the large majority of whom were, of course, Jewish. (When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.) The Nazis, always eager to generalize, thought they had demonstrated that Jews were “undesirables” everywhere and that every non-Jew was an actual or potential anti-Semite. Why, then, should anybody be bothered if they tackled this problem “radically”? Still under the spell of these generalizations, Eichmann complained over and over in Jerusalem that no country had been ready to accept Jews, that this, and only this, had caused the great catastrophe. (As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes—penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!) However, to the never-ending surprise of the Nazi officials, even the convinced anti-Semites in foreign lands were not willing to be “consistent,” and showed a deplorable tendency to shy away from “radical” measures. Few of them put it as bluntly as a member of the Spanish Embassy in Berlin—“If only one could be sure they wouldn't be liquidated,” he said of some six hundred Jews of Spanish descent who had been given Spanish passports, though they had never been in Spain, and whom the Franco Government wished very much to transfer to German jurisdiction—but most of them thought precisely along these lines.