Eichmann's cleverest trick in these difficult negotiations was to see to it that he and his men acted as though they were corrupt. The president of the Jewish community, Hofrat Samuel Stern, a member of Horthy's Privy Council, was treated with exquisite courtesy and agreed to be head of the Jewish Council. He and the other members of the Council felt reassured when they were asked to supply typewriters and mirrors, women's lingerie and eau de cologne, original Watteaus and eight pianos—even though seven of these were gracefully returned by Hauptsturmführer Novak, who remarked, “But, gentlemen, I don't want to open a piano store. I only want to play the piano.” Eichmann himself visited the Jewish Library and the Jewish Museum, and assured everybody that all measures would be temporary. And corruption, first simulated as a trick, soon turned out to be real enough, though it did not take the form the Jews had hoped. Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatever. In the words of the strange Mr. Kastner, “A Jew who trembles for his life and that of his family loses all sense of money.” (Sic!) This was confirmed during the trial through testimony given by Philip von Freudiger, mentioned above, as well as through the testimony of Joel Brand, who had represented a rival Jewish body in Hungary, the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee. Krumey received no less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Freudiger in April, 1944, and the Rescue Committee paid twenty thousand dollars merely for the privilege of meeting with Wisliceny and some men of the S.S. Counterin service. At this meeting, each of those present received an additional tip of a thousand dollars, and Wisliceny brought up again the so-called Europe Plan, which he had proposed in vain in 1942 and according to which Himmler supposedly would be prepared to spare all Jews except those in Poland for a ransom of two or three million dollars. On the strength of this proposal, which had been shelved long before, the Jews now started paying installments to Wisliceny. Even Eichmann's “idealism” broke down in this land of unheard-of abundance. The prosecution, though it could not prove that Eichmann had profited financially while on the job, stressed rightly his high standard of living in Budapest, where he could afford to stay at one of the best hotels, was driven around by a chauffeur in an amphibious car, an unforgettable gift from his later enemy Kurt Becher, went hunting and horseback riding, and enjoyed all sorts of previously unknown luxuries under the tutelage of his new friends in the Hungarian government.
There existed, however, a sizable group of Jews in the country whose leaders, at least, indulged less in self-deception. The Zionist movement had always been particularly strong in Hungary, and it now had its own representation in the recently formed Relief and Rescue Committee (the Vaadat Ezra va Hazalah), which, maintaining close contact with the Palestine Office, had helped refugees from Poland and Slovakia, from Yugoslavia and Rumania; the committee was in constant communication with the American Joint Distribution Committee, which financed their work, and they had also been able to get a few Jews into Palestine, legally or illegally. Now that catastrophe had come to their own country, they turned to forging “Christian papers,” certificates of baptism, whose bearers found it easier to go underground. Whatever else they might have been, the Zionist leaders knew they were outlaws, and they acted accordingly. Joel Brand, the unlucky emissary who was to present to the Allies, in the midst of the war, Himmler's proposal to give them a million Jewish lives in exchange for ten thousand trucks, was one of the leading officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and he came to Jerusalem to testify about his dealings with Eichmann, as did his former rival in Hungary, Philip von Freudiger. While Freudiger, whom Eichmann, incidentally, did not remember at all, recalled the rudeness with which he had been treated at these interviews, Brand's testimony actually substantiated much of Eichmann's own account of how he had negotiated with the Zionists. Brand had been told that “an idealistic German” was now talking to him, “an idealistic Jew”—two honorable enemies meeting as equals during a lull in the battle. Eichmann had said to him: “Tomorrow perhaps we shall again be on the battlefield.” It was, of course, a horrible comedy, but it did go to show that Eichmann's weakness for uplifting phrases with no real meaning was not a pose fabricated expressly for the Jerusalem trial. What is more interesting, one cannot fail to note that in meeting with the Zionists neither Eichmann nor any other member of the Sondereinsatzkommando employed the tactics of sheer lying that they had used for the benefit of the gentlemen of the Jewish Council. Even “language rules” were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a spade. Moreoever, when it was a question of serious negotiations— over the amount of money that might buy an exit permit, over the Europe Plan, over the exchange of lives for trucks—not only Eichmann but everybody concerned: Wisliceny, Becher, the gentlemen of the Counterintelligence service whom Joel Brand used to meet every morning in a coffee house, turned to the Zionists as a matter of course. The reason for this was that the Relief and Rescue Committee possessed the required international connections and could more easily produce foreign currency, whereas the members of the Jewish Council had nothing behind them but the more than dubious protection of Regent Horthy. It also became clear that the Zionist functionaries in Hungary had received greater privileges than the usual temporary immunity to arrest and deportation granted the members of the Jewish Council. The Zionists were free to come and go practically as they pleased, they were exempt from wearing the yellow star, they received permits to visit concentration camps in Hungary, and, somewhat later, Dr. Kastner, the original founder of the Relief and Rescue Committee, could even travel about Nazi Germany without any identification papers showing he was a Jew.
The organization of a Jewish Council was for Eichmann, with all his experience in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, a routine matter that took no more than two weeks. The question now was whether he himself would be able to enlist the help of Hungarian officials for an operation of this magnitude. For him this was something new. In the ordinary course of events, it would have been handled for him by the Foreign Office and its representatives, in this instance, by the newly appointed Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, to whom Eichmann would have sent a “Jewish adviser.” Eichmann himself clearly had no inclination for playing the role of adviser, a post that had nowhere carried a rank higher than Hauptsturmführer, or captain, whereas he was an Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, two ranks higher. His greatest triumph in Hungary was that he could establish his own contacts. Three men were primarily concerned—Lászlo Endre, who because of an anti-Semitism that even Horthy had called “insane” had recently been appointed State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior; Lászlo Baky, also an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, who was in charge of the Gendarmerie, the Hungarian police; and the police officer Lieutenant Colonel Ferenczy, who was directly in charge of deportations. With their help, Eichmann could be sure that everything, the issuance of the necessary decrees and the concentration of the Jews in the provinces, would proceed with “lightning speed.” In Vienna, a special conference was held with the German State Railroad officials, since this matter involved the transportation of nearly half a million people. Höss, at Auschwitz, was informed of the plans through his own superior, General Richard Glücks of the W.V.H.A., and ordered a new branch line of the railway built, to bring the cars within a few yards of the crematoria; the number of death commandos manning the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, so that everything was ready for killing between six thousand and twelve thousand people a day. When the trains began arriving, in May, 1944, very few “able-bodied men” were selected for labor, and these few worked in Krupp's fuse factory at Auschwitz. (Krupp's newly built factory near Breslau, in Germany, the Berthawerk, collected Jewish manpower wherever it could find it and kept those men in conditions that were unsurpassed even among the labor gangs in the death camps.)