Eichmann in Jerusalem: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Soon after the beginning of the war, Heinrich Himmler combined the S.S. Security Service (S.D.) with the state police (including the Gestapo) into the Head Office for Reich Security (R.S.H.A.), headed by Reinhardt Heydrich (and later Ernst Kaltenbrunner), which became one of the S.S.’s twelve main offices. The Nazis were sure to talk about concentration and extermination “objectively,” in the unemotional terms of “administration” and “economy.” Servatius is the most objective of all: he insists that mass murder was “a medical matter.”

Heinrich Müller headed the R.S.H.A. Gestapo bureau, Section IV. Eichmann worked directly for him in Subsection IV-B, dealing with Jewish matters. Müller answered to Heydrich (later Kaltenbrunner), who answered to Himmler, who directly carried out Hitler’s orders. Himmler also directed the separate regional S.S. and Police Leaders, who also outranked Eichmann—ultimately, Eichmann’s rank was not particularly high, and his importance relied only on his oversight of Jewish affairs. This “absurdly complicated” structure of “parallel institutions” competed over their shared goal: “to kill as many Jews as possible.” After the war, they instead started competing to exonerate themselves and blame the others, which explains high-ranking Nazis’ eagerness to blame Eichmann for crimes that were not his.

When Eichmann took his new post, “forced emigration” was the official policy but clearly no longer possible on a mass scale. So Eichmann came up with three ideas—none of which worked and two of which were certainly not originally his. The one that may have been original was to create a Jewish state in Poland; he found some land and began deporting Jews there, but his deportees started escaping across the border to the Russian-occupied half of Poland and the Governor General of (German) Poland, Hans Frank, put a stop to the plan and sent them back. This was clearly also a way for Eichmann to gain power in the Nazi regime—presumably by overseeing the new Jewish state—and its failure probably convinced him to set aside his private motives.

Eichmann’s second idea was his plan to move Jews to Madagascar, which was occupied by the French, and which Eichmann tended to confuse with Uganda. He quickly discovered that it would be impossible to ship millions of people there, and his serious work on the Madagascar plan was actually a front for other Nazi officials to start preparing for the policy everyone knew would come next: mass murder. (This was already happening in Poland.) Eichmann did not realize at the time that the Madagascar idea was a farce, but he jeopardizes himself at trial by claiming to have known all along.

Before the invasion of Russia, different offices had different policies and proposals for addressing “the Jewish question,” but Eichmann believed his efforts to unify them all by creating a Jewish state failed because of infighting among the various Nazi agencies. As killing squads took over responsibility for dealing with Europe’s Jews, Eichmann’s job became the coordination of shipments to various camps depending on their killing capacity and need for labor. He was frustrated, since his former expertise became obsolete.

Three months after the invasion, in September 1941, Eichmann tried his third plan: to create a homeland for German Jews inside Nazi territory. Someone proposed Theresienstadt, and Eichmann went to investigate. It was much too small and instead became “a special ghetto for certain privileged categories of Jews,” as well as the only camp under Eichmann’s jurisdiction.

In telling his story, Eichmann disregards the chronological order of events and instead jumps around among “human-interest stories of the worst type,” like the time he first saw Heydrich’s “more human side” and the time the Slovakian government invited him to Bratislava, where he bowled and learned about Heydrich’s assassination. He does not remember even the year of this latter story, nor does he remember that Theresienstadt was opened after “the era of the ‘physical solution’ had begun.” He also could not have anticipated that Theresienstadt would become “a showpiece for the outside world” and host International Red Cross visitors.