This brings us to the fourth, and last, question concerning Eichmann's general authority in the Eastern territories—the question of his responsibility for living conditions in the ghettos, for the unspeakable misery endured in them, and for their final liquidation, which had been the subject of testimony by most witnesses. Again, Eichmann had been fully informed, but none of this had anything to do with his job. The prosecution made a laborious effort to prove that it had, on the ground that Eichmann had freely admitted that every once in a while he had to decide, according to ever-changing directives on this matter, what to do with the Jews of foreign nationality who were trapped in Poland. This, he said, was a question of “national importance,” involving the Foreign Office, and was “beyond the horizon” of the local authorities. With respect to such Jews, there existed two different trends in all German offices, the “radical” trend, which would have ignored all distinctions—a Jew was a Jew, period—and the “moderate” trend, which thought it better to put these Jews “on ice” for exchange purposes. (The notion of exchange Jews seems to have been Himmler's idea. After America's entry into the war, he wrote to Müller, in December, 1942, that “all Jews with influential relatives in the United States should be put into a special camp… and stay alive,” adding, “Such Jews are for us precious hostages. I have a figure of ten thousand in mind.”) Needless to say, Eichmann belonged to the “radicals,” he was against making exceptions, for administrative as well as “idealistic” reasons. But when in April, 1942, he wrote to the Foreign Office that “in the future foreign nationals would be included in the measures taken by the Security Police within the Warsaw Ghetto,” where Jews with foreign passports had previously been carefully weeded out, he was hardly acting as “a decision-maker on behalf of the R.S.H.A.” in the East, and he certainly did not possess “executive powers” there. Still less could such powers or authority be derived from his having been used occasionally by Heydrich or Himmler to transmit certain orders to local commanders.
In a sense, the truth of the matter was even worse than the court in Jerusalem assumed. Heydrich, the judgment argued, had been given central authority over the implementation of the Final Solution, without any territorial limitations, hence Eichmann, his chief deputy in this field, was everywhere equally responsible. This was quite true for the framework of the Final Solution, but although Heydrich, for purposes of coordination, had called a representative of Hans Frank's General Government, Undersecretary of State Dr. Josef Bühler, to the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution did not really apply to the Eastern occupied territories, for the simple reason that the fate of the Jews there had never been in the balance. The massacre of Polish Jewry had been decided on by Hitler not in May or June, 1941, the date of the order for the Final Solution, but in September, 1939, as the judges knew from testimony given at Nuremberg by Erwin Lahousen of the German Counterintelligence: “As early as September, 1939, Hitler had decided the murder of Polish Jews.” (Hence, the Jewish star was introduced into the General Government immediately after the occupation of the territory, in November, 1939, while it was introduced into the German Reich only in 1941, at the time of the Final Solution.) The judges had before them also the minutes of two conferences at the beginning of the war, one of which Heydrich had called on September 21, 1939, as a meeting of “department heads and commanders of the mobile killing units” at which Eichmann, then still a mere Hauptsturmführer, had represented the Berlin Center for Jewish Emigration; the other took place on January 30, 1940, and dealt with “questions of evacuation and resettlement.” At both meetings, the fate of the entire native population in the occupied territories was discussed—that is, the “solution” of the Polish as well as the “Jewish question.”
Even at this early date, the “solution of the Polish problem” was well advanced: of the “political leadership,” it was reported, no more than three per cent was left; in order to “render this three per cent harmless,” they would have “to be sent into concentration camps.” The middle strata of the Polish intelligentsia were to be registered and arrested—“teachers, clergy, nobility, legionaries, returning officers, etc.”—while the “primitive Poles” were to be added to German manpower as “migratory laborers” and to be “evacuated” from their homes. “The goal is: The Pole has to become the eternal seasonal and migratory laborer, his permanent residence should be in the region of Cracow.” The Jews were to be gathered into urban centers and “assembled in ghettos where they can be easily controlled and conveniently evacuated later on.” Those Eastern territories that had been incorporated into the Reich—the so-called Warthegau, West Prussia, Danzig, the province of Poznan, and Upper Silesia—had to be immediately cleared of all Jews; together with 30,000 Gypsies they were sent in freight trains into the General Government. Himmler finally, in his capacity as “Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom,” gave orders for the evacuation of large portions of the Polish population from these territories recently annexed to the Reich. The implementation of this “organized migration of peoples,” as the judgment called it, was assigned to Eichmann as chief of Subsection IV-D-4 in the R.S.H.A., whose task consisted in “emigration, evacuation.” (It is important to remember that this “negative demographic policy” was by no means improvised as a result of German victories in the East. It had been outlined, as early as November, 1937, in the secret speech addressed by Hitler to members of the German High Command—see the so-called Hössbach Protocol. Hitler had pointed out that he rejected all notions of conquering foreign nations, that what he demanded was an “empty space” [volkloser Raum] in the East for the settlement of Germans. His audience—Blomberg, Fritsch, and Räder, among others—knew quite well that no such “empty space” existed, hence they must have known that a German victory in the East would automatically result in the “evacuation” of the entire native population. The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews— genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the “P” replaced the Jewish star, and this, as we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction.)