Nothing much happened in Slovakia during these early years, until March, 1942, when Eichmann appeared in Bratislava to negotiate the evacuation of twenty thousand “young and strong labor Jews.” Four weeks later, Heydrich himself came to see the Prime Minister, Vojtek Tuka, and persuaded him to let all Jews be resettled in the East, including the converted Jews who had thus far been exempted. The government, with a priest at its head, did not at all mind correcting the “basic defect” of distinguishing between Christians and Jews on the grounds of religion when it learned that “no claim was put forward by the Germans in regard to the property of these Jews except the payment of five hundred Reichsmarks in exchange for each Jew received”; on the contrary, the government demanded an additional guaranty from the German Foreign Office that “Jews removed from Slovakia and received by [the Germans] would stay in the Eastern areas forever, and would not be given an opportunity of returning to Slovakia.” To follow up these negotiations on the highest level, Eichmann paid a second visit to Bratislava, the one that coincided with Heydrich's assassination, and by June, 1942, fifty-two thousand Jews had been deported by the Slovak police to the killing centers in Poland.
There were still some thirty-five thousand Jews left in the country, and they all belonged to the originally exempted categories—converted Jews and their parents, members of certain professions, young men in forced labor battalions, a few businessmen. It was at this moment, when most of the Jews had already been “resettled,” that the Bratislava Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, a sister body of the Hungarian Zionist group, succeeded in bribing Wisliceny, who promised to help to slow down the pace of the deportations, and who also proposed the so-called Europe Plan, which he was to bring up again later in Budapest. It is very unlikely that Wisliceny ever did anything except read books and listen to music, and, of course, accept whatever he could get. But it was just at this moment that the Vatican informed the Catholic clergy of the true meaning of the word “resettlement.” From then on, as the German Ambassador, Hans Elard Ludin, reported to the Foreign Office in Berlin, the deportations became very unpopular, and the Slovak government began pressing the Germans for permission to visit the “resettlement” centers—which, of course, neither Wisliceny nor Eichmann could grant, since the “resettled” Jews were no longer among the living. In December, 1943, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer came to Bratislava to see Father Tiso himself; he had been sent by Hitler and his orders specified that he should tell Tiso “to come down to earth” (Fraktur mit ihm reden). Tiso promised to put between sixteen and eighteen thousand unconverted Jews in concentration camps and to establish a special camp for about ten thousand baptized Jews, but he did not agree to deportations. In June, 1944, Veesenmayer, now Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, appeared again, and demanded that the remaining Jews in the country be included in the Hungarian operations. Tiso refused again.
In August, 1944, as the Red Army drew near, a full-fledged revolt broke out in Slovakia, and the Germans occupied the country. By this time, Wisliceny was in Hungary, and he probably was no longer trusted anyway. The R.S.H.A. sent Alois Brunner to Bratislava to arrest and deport the remaining Jews. Brunner first arrested and deported the officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and then, this time with the help of German S.S. units, deported another twelve or fourteen thousand people. On April 4, 1945, when the Russians arrived in Bratislava, there were perhaps twenty thousand Jews left who had survived the catastrophe.
XIII: The Killing Centers in the East
When the Nazis spoke of the East, they meant a huge area that embraced Poland, the Baltic States, and occupied Russian territory. It was divided into four administrative units: the Warthegau, consisting of the Polish Western Regions annexed to the Reich, under Gauleiter Artur Greiser; the Ostland, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the rather indefinite area of White Russia, with Riga as the seat of the occupation authorities; the General Government of central Poland, under Hans Frank; and the Ukraine, under Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. These were the first countries on which testimony was presented in the case for the prosecution, and they were the last to be dealt with in the judgment.
No doubt both the prosecution and the judges had excellent reasons for their opposite decisions. The East was the central scene of Jewish suffering, the gruesome terminal of all deportations, the place from which there was hardly ever any escape and where the number of survivors rarely reached more than five per cent. The East, moreover, had been the center of the prewar Jewish population in Europe; more than three million Jews had lived in Poland, two hundred and sixty thousand in the Baltic states, and more than half of the estimated three million Russian Jews in White Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea. Since the prosecution was interested primarily in the suffering of the Jewish people and “the dimensions of the genocide” attempted upon it, it was logical to start here, and then see how much specific responsibility for this unmitigated hell could be blamed upon the accused. The trouble was that the evidence relating Eichmann to the East was and this was blamed on the fact that the Gestapo files, and particularly the files of Eichmann's section, had been destroyed by the Nazis. This scarcity of documentary evidence gave the prosecution a probably welcome pretext for calling an endless procession of witnesses to testify to events in the East, though this was hardly its only reason for doing so. The prosecution—as had been hinted during the trial but was fully described later (in the special Bulletin issued in April, 1962, by Yad Vashem, the Israeli archive on the Nazi period) —had been under considerable pressure from Israeli survivors, who constitute about twenty per cent of the present population of the country. They had flocked spontaneously to the trial authorities and also to Yad Vashem, which had been officially commissioned to prepare some of the documentary evidence, to offer themselves as witnesses. The worst cases of “strong imagination,” people who had “seen Eichmann at various places where he had never been, were weeded out, but fifty-six “sufferings-of-the-Jewish-people witnesses,” as the trial authorities called them, were finally put on the stand, instead of some fifteen or twenty “background witnesses,” as originally planned; twenty-three sessions, out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were entirely devoted to “background,” which meant they had no apparent bearing upon the case. Though the witnesses for the prosecution were hardly ever cross-examined by either the defense or the judges, the judgment did not accept evidence that had bearing on Eichmann unless it was given some other corroboration. (Thus, the judges refused to charge Eichmann with the murder of the Jewish boy in Hungary; or with having instigated the Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, of which he certainly knew nothing at the time and, even in Jerusalem, knew considerably less than the least well-informed student of the period; or with the murder of ninety-three children of Lidice, who, after Heydrich's assassination, were deported to Lódz, since “it has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, according to the evidence before us, that they were murdered”; or with responsibility for the hideous operations of Unit 1005, “amongst the most horrifying parts of all the evidence submitted by the prosecution, which had had the task of opening the mass graves in the East and disposing of the corpses in order to efface all traces of slaughter, and was commanded by Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who, according to his own testimony at Nuremberg, took orders from Müller, the head of Section IV of the R.S.H.A.; or with the dreadful conditions under which Jews left alive in the extermination camps were evacuated to German concentration camps, especially to Bergen-Belsen, during the last months of the war.) The gist of the background witnesses' testimony about conditions in the Polish ghettos, about procedures in the various death camps, about forced labor and, generally, the attempt to exterminate through labor, was never in dispute; on the contrary, there was hardly anything in what they told that had not been known before. If Eichmann's name was mentioned at all, it obviously was hearsay evidence, “rumors testified to,” hence without legal validity. The testimony of all witnesses who had “seen him with their own eyes” collapsed the moment a question was addressed to them, and the judgment found “that the center of gravity of his activities was within the Reich itself, the Protectorate, and in the countries of Europe to the west, north, south, southeast and Central Europe”—that is, everywhere except in the East. Why, then, did the court not waive these hearings, which lasted for weeks and months on end? In discussing this question, the judgment was somewhat apologetic, and finally gave an explanation that was curiously inconsistent: “Since the accused denied all the counts in the indictment,” the judges could not dismiss “evidence on the factual background.” The accused, however, had never denied these facts in the indictment, he had only denied that he was responsible for them “in the sense of the indictment.”