Sassen transcript, O.65 file 88

Questioner

So then, on a decision of the RSHA which Eichmann passed on by telephone, these 4,051 children were taken from their parents and brought to the camp Dran [not typed]. The camp Dran is known for the fact that the shipments to Auschwitz went out from there. The French then also agreed that 3 to 500 children could be added to every transport to Auschwitz.

Questioner

And most of these children were in fact deported from Dran [not typed].

Eichmann

About matters concerning children I know nothing.

Questioner

No staff of any kind was put with the children in the sealed cattle cars, which at that time were filled with the old and the sick, but somehow they had to get into the trains. A survivor of these transports describes it this way. Sometimes it happened that a room full of hundreds of children, seized by an uncontrollable panic and horror, no longer obeyed the adults calling to them. They were not able to bring the children down, they had to call in [not typed], who carried the screaming children down in their arms.

Questioner

In Roettke's deportation files a note dated 11 November 1942 was found, saying that Belgian railwaymen found 25 bodies of children, aged 2 to 4 years, in the empty cattle cars coming back from Auschwitz, children who never got as far as the gas chamber. Question. You, or rather your office, were responsible for the transports up to the handover at the destination stations. What do you have to say now about these conditions?

Eichmann

That I have only learned of it today, that I know nothing about it.

Questioner

But one is responsible for every kind of ignorance as the head of an office?

Eichmann

Fine, then I am simply responsible, nothing can be done about that. You can see for yourself that I had Dannecker relieved. From that alone one can see that people were not satisfied with his work. How the train was then unloaded at Auschwitz, I cannot help that. Whether the people died on the way out, I do not know, nobody knows that. I was responsible only for the registration and for the transporting.

Questioner

Yes, but here, that was no orderly loading

Eichmann

I have already said once in the Hungarian case that although the Hungarian government the

Eichmann

[off the sheet] the guidelines for registration had been made known, but the authorities often did not keep to these guidelines, which brought me complaints from the WVHA. If the offices charged with it in France did not keep to the guidelines, then I have to say that a supervisory authority can do no more than issue guidelines to be followed. For as far as members of the Sipo and the SD are concerned, every one of them has sworn the service oath, and the service oath also takes in that instructions and demands are to be obeyed. It cannot be my task, sitting in the central office, to inspect every single transport train here in person on the spot. It is the task of the subordinate offices to keep to the instructions of the offices above them. I have to say, because I am speaking for Department IV, that on our side everything was done in a purely bureaucratic way, according to the orders and instructions on hand.

Questioner

But it must surely also strike you in the central office that of the transports from France only 70 percent arrive alive at the destination?

Eichmann

70 percent

Questioner

Of the transports from Holland 80 percent arrived, of those from France only 70 percent.

Eichmann

The figure for Holland I am also hearing for the first time, only 80 percent

Questioner

After the raid the trains left as promptly as if on a timetable. Between 19 and 28 July there were 8 trains, in August 13 transports. The Gestapo statistics have survived. They show an average of 1,000 persons for a transport, with variations down to 149 on the one side and up to 1,089 on the other. It is possible, with the help of a fragment of the Birkenau daily roll call for the men's camp, to trace the tragic end of the great raid.

Questioner

According to which, of the transports from France, only 70 out of 100 came into the camp.

Eichmann

I must consign this matter too to the realm of atrocity stories

Questioner

One more proof. With the transport that arrived on 20 July, the admission of 475, and of 512 to 599 and 370 Jews from France was recorded in the Birkenau men's camp.

Eichmann

The admission or the taking over?

Questioner

The admission

Eichmann

The others were probably killed because they were not fit for labor deployment. I would like to put the weight on the word. Taking over or admission? Into the camp Birkenau, which belonged to Auschwitz, a number X was admitted, that is, admitted. But the transport, the handover of the transport, is not described at all.

Questioner

But the witness Jenny Spritzer, who arrived on 21 July at the [not typed] camp, noticed nothing of a selection

Eichmann

That is exactly where the diabolical thing lies. Where does this Jenny Spritzer live? Then she would be a good witness, they brought her in deliberately. They should not have put that sentence in, for the name says it all. Here they want to paper over their lies for the hasty reader who is not familiar with the details. Here they have a witness. Here it has to read, he speaks of admission figures, the author knows perfectly well that the persons admitted are the ones fit for work, who are attached to a work process. Before that came the decision, fit for work or not fit for work, and the latter were liquidated in accordance with the order of the Reichsführer, through the WVHA. So that the particular atrocity is supposed to have its beginning already in France, and so that the widest possible circles of the SS can be drawn into these matters, he brings on a pseudo witness, Jenny Spritzer, who now expressly claims that she heard nothing of a selection.

Questioner

Between 18 and 16 August one can gather from the fact that only 128 and 140, and 182 and 115 men were admitted to the camp, that the transports contained many children.

Eichmann

There he says again what I have just said. The author gives himself the lie, page 361 of the book, The Final Solution by Reitlinger. He also tries to draw the Sipo into the whole story, in order to bring the SS on in a sweeping way, but he counted on the stupidity or the superficiality of the reader, or he was himself that superficial, and now I have to put up with this revision. But I say the following for general information. Even if it had been so, I would still have had to reject the responsibility of the central authority, because for that we had the Higher SS and Police Leader locally, the commander of the Sipo and SD with his staff. Those men had their instructions and their orders, and with that I close this matter as far as I am concerned.

Speaker not established

By the end of August 25,000 Jews had been deported from France, none from the unoccupied zone, only very few from the provinces, almost all from Paris. On 14 July Roettke had to cancel the transport from Bordeaux, because the French police, which was arresting only stateless Jews, was not able to produce more than 150 Jews. After all the effort Eichmann had put into the transports with the Reich Transport Ministry, he was outraged at this fact. Nothing like it had happened to him before, the affair was disgraceful. He did not want to report it to SS Gruppenfuehrer Mueller straight away, since he would only disgrace himself. One would therefore have to consider whether France should be dropped altogether as a country of removal.

Speaker not established

Here again a number, IMD 7 S [not typed] (?)

Speaker not established

That could be the run of a naval minesweeper on some grid square in the Baltic.

Questioner

Can you not remember your annoyance? Is this matter not known to you?

Eichmann

No, it is not known to me.

Questioner

But [blotted] have admitted that you had a great deal of annoyance in France.

Eichmann

I had annoyance everywhere, in France quite particularly, but with Dannecker

Speaker not established

In August 42 Roettke's efforts to carry out the deportations of Jews from France were then continued on an increased scale.

Eichmann

I said even then, France has always been a rotten egg.

Speaker not established

By the end of August about 7,000 and by the beginning of September roughly 9,000 Jews had been arrested and taken to Dran [not typed].

Speaker not established

Roettke expressed the hope at that time that he would deport 52,000 Jews from France.

Questioner

Have you never heard of the problem of the naturalizations after 33?

Eichmann

Yes, of course, that was also part of my discussions with Knochen and Oberg.

Questioner

This hope of removing 52,000 Jews was surely illusory at the time.

Questioner

Is anything known to you about the removal of Leo Blum?

Eichmann

Where did he go? To Oranienburg. He had a little villa there.

Speaker not established

Here it says: On 23 September [not typed] telegraphed to Eichmann, Gluecks and Rudolf Hoess, the butcher of Auschwitz, that the brother of the former French prime minister has been deported with today's transport.

Eichmann

Nothing of that is known to me. But here people throw telephone calls and telegrams around.

Eichmann

We did not deal with one another by telephone or telegram, we could reach each other with the help of a teleprinter, or when it was really urgent there was a flash teleprinter message, or there was the usual normal business correspondence. Anything else was unknown, and especially not when secret Reich matters were involved.

Questioner

Regarding this matter of the naturalizations, do you know of a visit by Roettke to Laval?

Eichmann

No, nothing of that is known to me. And I believe that Laval would never have received Roettke, just as little as he would have received a Dannecker. He would probably not even have received me straight off, because the German envoy was there for that. Now the German envoy at that time does not deal with a Roettke, he deals with the Higher SS and Police Leader, and in his absence with the commander of the Sipo and SD, but never with a desk officer. Laval would have been lowering himself into the deepest basement.

Questioner

Then he left you very much in the dark, because Roettke was with Laval, a date is even given. He wanted to bring about the revocation of the naturalizations since 33.

Questioner

The commissioner for Jewish affairs in France, the commissar [not typed] prepared the draft of an ordinance and put it to Laval. That then dragged on from 42 into the middle of 43, and Roettke pressed Knochen at regular intervals to start an operation that would bring Laval to the revocation of these naturalizations.

Eichmann

About that nothing is known to me, no.

Questioner

Finally, on 14 August 1943, Roettke succeeded in obtaining a conversation with Laval himself.

Eichmann

I want to put in a safety bolt for myself on the assertion I have just made, because it is an assertion, though one that matches the practice. Whether the French commissioner for Jewish affairs could certainly get access to Laval, that I cannot judge. And now I reckon it this way, that it was either in the interest of the commissioner for Jewish affairs to take Roettke along with him, or that Roettke brought him to the point of taking him along, if the commissioner for Jewish affairs had to report to Laval.

Eichmann

I would not want to deny that. The first is the usual practice, the second would be an exception.

Questioner

Now the conversation took place at a really unfavorable time. By then the German troops had occupied the unoccupied parts of France, but

Questioner

besides, in Laval's eyes Roettke was no man of any importance.

Eichmann

That is exactly what I told you just now, it would have been understandable if Laval had thrown Roettke out.

Questioner

For that reason he was anything but accommodating to Roettke. He told him that he was over

Questioner

that is, the commissioners for Jewish affairs, that he was furious because they had drawn up the drafts in which women and children were to be stripped of their citizenship. Laval then mentioned to Roettke more or less in passing that he had lost his own copy of the draft. Before a new draft could be put to the council of ministers, three months would have to pass so that the Jews could make their changes, even if 30 Jews should have the right to do so. Without all these conditions being met, Laval said, the French police could in no way support Knochen. Besides, the Italians would have to be asked.

Questioner

After this very embarrassing conversation Roettke did then have to report that he would need more German police.

Eichmann

So it is true after all, the commissioner for Jewish affairs took him along.

Eichmann

Roettke had no authorization for that whatever. That is a lapse which is not to be laid at the door of the RSHA. It falls in the first place on the commander [not typed]

Eichmann

What is typical of this book is the unclear [blotted] here it says, undated record, translated by Poliakoff (?), who is the author of the other book.

Questioner

In my opinion Roettke should have reported the conversation with Laval to you.

Eichmann

He did not do that. If that were so, it would also be a lapse by Knochen and a lapse by the Higher SS and Police Leader. For how, as commander of the Sipo and SD, can I allow some desk officer, a subordinate, to go to the highest authority in the country, the one I have to negotiate with? No. When for instance I was in Slovakia and spoke with Tiso (?), Tiso had asked to speak with me, with me who came from Berlin,

Eichmann

But there I first went to the envoy and discussed everything with the envoy, and then, once I had settled it with the envoy, I went to the Slovak interior minister, and after I had been with him I went with him together to the head of state. That is how it goes.

Questioner

But you did not inform Berlin of it beforehand?

Eichmann

I do not know that. Perhaps it was written to me through the Foreign Office that the head of state wished to speak to me.

Eichmann

It cannot be done any other way, they could have locked me up, for what harm might I have done. That has to be settled first at the central offices. What a stink it would have caused in Berlin at the Foreign Office if they had learned that a desk officer of the RSHA was holding a conversation with the head of state of a friendly nation.

Eichmann

So in answer to your question, whether I would have notified Berlin, I must tell you that I am convinced it had been prepared long in advance. Besides, a head of state cannot simply receive whoever he likes whenever he feels like it. A protocol has to be observed in one way or another.

Speaker not established

Of course.

Questioner

But the conclusions drawn from it are interesting. The author presents Laval as a main factor who plays a part in the failure of the final solution of the Jewish question in France.

Eichmann

This author probably wants to tell the reader from what a lofty vantage point he views the matter. He is not even in a position to state one side of the truth accurately.

Questioner

But we see from the conversation between Roettke and Laval, fact or not, that the measures against the Jews in France did fail.

Eichmann

Yes, I always said so.

Questioner

Now a very important matter in France is the Italian intervention.

Eichmann

About that I am not in the picture at all.

Questioner

Is it not known to you that people have already spoken of the Italian military authorities in Croatia, Tunis and Greece, who protect the Jews wherever it is possible?

Eichmann

Yes, I even believe that Italian officers married Jewish women.

Questioner

Has it not been reported to you that the Italian military administration [off the sheet] the French police

Questioner

…when they wanted to take measures against the Jews in the [blotted] Italian-occupied zone, stepped in and protected the Jews? Were you not told about it? In Nice [not typed]

Eichmann

I can no longer remember it today.

Questioner

Were you also not told that the Italians did not keep their promise to take measures against the Jews, that they did the opposite?

Eichmann

But how many Jews can there have been there? That region can't hold all that many.

Questioner

Yes, but the Jews fled there, because they knew the Italians would protect them.

Eichmann

In any case it hasn't stayed with me in any lasting way.

Questioner

It even says here that the Gestapo assumed most of the Jews had fled into the territory occupied by Italy. The Gestapo, who is that in this case, Eichmann?

Eichmann

It could just as well be Knochen.

Questioner

Does the name Los [not typed], the head of the Italian police in the occupied territories, mean anything to you?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

Then you are badly informed about the cases that occurred there.

Questioner

General Bastanini [too faint] orders issued to General Ambrosius, clear and sharp [not typed]

Questioner

This last maneuver put Himmler into such a state that he [too faint] sent Heinrich Mueller to Rome. On 27 March 43 Mueller learned that Los [not typed], the Italian police chief in the occupied zone in southern France, had driven into the occupied zone some days earlier, but Knochen's inquiry about [not typed] came to nothing.

Questioner

On 6 April Knochen was so desperate that he turned by telegram not only to Eichmann but also to Schellenberg. He had heard from the Gestapo in Marseille that the Jews were positively streaming into the [blotted] zone.

Eichmann

If he did that by telegram, I can't know about it either, since I never received telegrams.

Questioner

But someone must surely have reported to you that the Jews were fleeing into the [blotted] Italian zone, because they were protected there from the reach of the French and German police.

Questioner

This flight of the Jews was evidently financed by the director of the French-Italian bank. Los [not typed] surfaced and disappeared again. Mueller demanded that he be brought to Berlin. But Los [not typed] could not be found until May, when Roettke learned from the Gestapo in Marseille that the former police chief of Bari, which is what Los [not typed] had been earlier, was living in the uniform of a general in the villa in [not typed]. He was the head of a commissariat for Jewish affairs, and his assistant was Donardi, that bank director, a half-Jew, living at such and such an address [not typed]

Questioner

[not typed] that about 50,000 Jews were living in the Italian-occupied zone [not typed] That is why it surprises me very much that you were of the opinion that only very few Jews lived there.

Eichmann

How large was this zone, then?

Questioner

The whole of the Alpes-Maritimes, the city of Nice with half a million inhabitants, with its surroundings, and Renopel [too faint]

Questioner

Then when the Italian army capitulated, those Jews must have been within our reach again.

Questioner

Do you remember nothing else about the matter?

Eichmann

No, but I think this is being considerably exaggerated. Embellished with a certain poetic license. Whatever may be true about it is certainly, seen from the horizon of the Reich, so slight that it was not at all important to the Reich, and I no longer remember it today either. By that I don't mean to say that I still remember everything of importance to the Reich.

Questioner

You then also sent Anton Brunner to Marseille, to carry out big raids on the Jews.

Eichmann

When?

Questioner

Although the German army only occupied Nice on 1 November, the plan to bring the Jews back from M [not typed] had made no great progress. Only 2,000 had been taken there, and the rest were able to scatter into the mountain villages.

Questioner

On Roettke's character. Roettke's declarations mostly proved to be empty threats. Brunner did not manage to get a raid going without the help of the French police. The whole Jewish registry was destroyed when the Italians pulled out, so that the good Brunner was reduced to hunting for Jews in the street.

Eichmann

Yes, I know that, that's right, I still recall it.

Questioner

When Eichmann turned up in Nice with the German army soon afterwards, he was very disappointed at how small the haul was, but he soon recognized where the explanation lay.

Eichmann

They were in the mountains.

Questioner

He learned that 15,000 Jews were staying in the mountains, in the mountains of the principality of Monaco.

Eichmann

Yes, that's right, I drove through Monaco myself.

Questioner

And what did you arrange there?

Eichmann

In Monaco itself I could do nothing. Taboo.

Questioner

But on 23 September the German consul in Monaco received from the Foreign Office the instruction to get the Sipo access to the principality.

Eichmann

Yes, that's right, but it came to nothing.

Questioner

But the consul was only able to find 1,000 Jews, who had been resident there for years [blotted], yet Eichmann would not give way and kept pointing out that there must be 10,000 to 15,000 Jews there.

Eichmann

Yes, that's right.

Questioner

In July 44 the consul informed the Foreign Office, von Thadden, that most of the 1,000 Jews, after Eichmann had come on the scene, had escaped to Switzerland, to Spain. There remained 45 Jews, who were all under special protection.

Eichmann

Yes, that is all correct, word had got around and all the Jews left Monaco at once.

Questioner

What do you take to be the reasons that the planned final solution of the Jews in France failed so badly?

Eichmann

Two reasons. First, Dannecker's lack of stature. Knochen being taken up with other official duties. Second, the resistance of the Laval government, which slackened after an initial burst, and perhaps grew more cautious and trod more quietly because of the reverses suffered by our arms. Those are my reasons.

Questioner

Do you remember anything in figures, how many Jews were deported?

Eichmann

By feel I would put the number at around 40,000.

Questioner

A list was found in Roettke's office, and according to that list 45 trains departed. The author estimates the number at 65,000.

Eichmann

So if 75 trains are supposed to have departed and the author arrives at 65,000, then that means there were trains carrying under 1,000. And that there are supposed to have been trains under 1,000, that doesn't really make sense to me. From the standpoint of timetabling I wouldn't want to endorse that. So he says 65,000, I say 40,000, so let's say roughly 50,000.

Questioner

What was the Gestapo's program in France for the resettlement? The point of it?

Eichmann

What I am saying now applies not only to France but also to the other countries, insofar as Germany had an interest for reasons of security. The Jew had been proclaimed an enemy of the state by the lawful German government of the Reich. The government must have had its reasons why it sought to eliminate this enemy as a matter of priority. Once the order to eliminate an enemy of the Reich had been given, that order had to be carried out too. What grounds the government of the Reich had for seeing in this enemy a threat to the people and the state had been the government's business. We, as the police, had to act accordingly.

Questioner

We have spoken about that so often already. France is what interests me. Can you give nothing more definite in figures?

Eichmann

When I told you earlier that the fault also lay on our side, that the result was not achieved, but named the resistance as a second point, let me explain that further. The further you come from the middle of Europe towards the west, the greater is the influence of the Jew of assimilated outlook, as against the other Jewish political tendencies. The French citizen sees in the Jew, who had at least outwardly renounced all Jewish ties and now lived and worked as a citizen of the republic, no Jew, no menace, no danger, no enemy. He sees him as one of his own kind. It is very hard, in such a country, to make the assimilated part of the people, the Jews we recognized as an enemy, credible to him as his own worst enemy, because the practice of life tells him the contrary. So from Petain onwards, by way of Laval, down to the last French peasant, or as far as the mountains of [not typed], it made it a sort of duty for him that he should keep these [too faint] French citizens out of the reach of the [not typed].

Eichmann

There lay another difficulty

Eichmann

That the French police took part only hesitantly and [too faint] lies along the same line. The further east you go, seen from the middle of the Reich, the more willing the people were as a rule, that is what practice says, to throw out this parasite here, as people used to say, because the opportunity was favorable to rid themselves of it. There was one single exception, in the southeastern part, and that was Hungary. In Hungary the proportion of assimilated Jews had been disproportionately large compared with the other eastern countries. So the German Reich government also feared that something similar could happen in Hungary as had happened across the whole West. France is not the only example. The fight in Holland over the Jews was just as hard and stubborn, even if not quite so [not typed] but on the whole it did not carry through. In Belgium the same. When they began in Hungary they still had the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto as a warning signal. So the RF said to himself, and I thought about it myself when after years of work [blotted] behind the desk I came into the rough reality of practice, that now he had to go out himself to scoop out Hungary. Hungary was very hard, because the assimilated Jew there was grown together with the host people, intermarried with it, related to it by marriage [not typed] and because at such a stage it is really very hard first to hammer through the legal foundation and then to climb over from there into executive implementation. You always have to bear in mind that these are sovereign or half-sovereign countries with their own executive, which will not be talked into even the slightest executive step by the occupying power, or only with great difficulty. And so it only goes with drive in the first seconds, hours or weeks, and once those first seconds are missed you have to reckon with a growing resistance that takes a great deal of the strength you should have been concentrating on getting your own business done.

Questioner

How many Jews in France did you reckon with?

Eichmann

I can no longer remember exactly today, but a multiple of what was not only registered but also calculated in a verifiable way. A multiple, in any case never ever 40 to 50,000.

Questioner

What do you say to the figure of 300,000?

Eichmann

Yes, I would well accept that. Because however many Jews were shipped out of France, at least in the years from 1939 to 1940

Eichmann

Jews [blotted] out of the German Reich and emigrated

Questioner

It is said that the Gestapo was completely in the dark about the programme. Did the people arrive there with records, or were they really groping in the dark and had to get their records only once they were there? How was it?

Eichmann

Essentially yes, without records. The run-up time was far too short, in every country. As a rule we had to go by the Jewish yearbooks, and then they added a small percentage who were not entered in the Jewish books but who counted as Jews under our laws, and then you had roughly a figure. Our reference point was the statistical Jewish yearbooks.

Questioner

So the claim that the Gestapo was completely in the dark is correct

Eichmann

Yes, in France at any rate, yes.

Questioner

So once more about the Jews who were deported and destroyed. So there were fewer than 65,000, and of those 2,800 came back after the war.

Questioner

The list found in Roettke's office dated 1 July 1944, they say there were 75 deportation trains. Normally a train of 20 wagons carried 1,000 Jews, but many later transports were much smaller. The figure given above is not final, but it should be corrected downward rather than upward.

Eichmann

I told you I have 40,000 in my memory, so I am not entirely wrong after all.

Questioner

Is it correct that because of the difficulties in numerically recording, registering and concentrating the Jews with the help of the French police, they simply took Jewish orphanages and so on to meet the quota figures?

Eichmann

That did not happen.

Questioner

On the basis of an order for a big raid, 10,000 Jews are to be recorded [not typed] raid

Eichmann

No, no, what kind of an order is that, are to be recorded, only an inadequate mind can have given that.

Questioner

You have admitted that Dannecker was an inadequate mind.

Eichmann

Under the later labor-service obligations you got all sorts of people, but they did not exist yet at that time.

Questioner

The children's matters again. Dr. Hoellers writes here, who lived through it all in Drans [not typed] and in Auschwitz, that in July 1944 the Paris orphanage and the Rothschild old people's home were emptied. Roettke's files contain a report that something similar had happened earlier, on 6 April 44.

Questioner

[not typed] deportation procedure. Nothing known?

Questioner

So the operation in France failed.

Eichmann

Yes, failed.

Questioner

In this connection the author brings out the [not typed] of Laval.

Eichmann

Rightly so.

Questioner

He writes: In France [not typed]

Questioner

whom his countrymen shot as a traitor after the war.

Eichmann

In other words, assimilated Jews. Here the man has of course steered it into a different channel. I said it soberly and matter-of-factly.

Questioner

He writes that only a quarter of the Jews living in France were taken to the Final Solution.

Eichmann

He was no longer a Jew at all, he was a Frenchman.

Eichmann

But the important thing is that Laval is the grand master in the victory of the Allies over the Germans. Laval threw sand in the Fuehrer's eyes, he did this and that, and Laval was a very shrewd French peasant who thought only of France. The whole European idea meant nothing to him. We lost the war when the Fuehrer shook Petain's hand.

Questioner

When the parade took place on the Champs [not typed]

Eichmann

Not that alone. This desperate seeking by Germany for a friendship with this swinish France.

Questioner

Wooing, not seeking. And second, Dunkirk. That was one of the nails that closed the coffin.

Questioner

In all the measures you took on the Jewish question, did you never think about the effect on opinion abroad, in enemy countries and above all in neutral countries?

Eichmann

I can think of nothing other than how I can carry out the order I received well and as quickly as possible

Questioner

That is not what I mean. Did you never think about it or have doubts when you received an order?

Eichmann

All right, you receive an order and you follow it on the strength of the oath.

Questioner

But you do think about it, surely?

Eichmann

He was an enemy of the Reich.

Questioner

No, I mean the effect of the measures on the mood in enemy and neutral countries abroad. Did you never think about that?

Eichmann

You cannot put yourself in my skin there, you never can, because you were in the SD to the end. But if you are in the executive today then it does not interest you at all.

Questioner

So you gave it no thought?

Eichmann

No, in no case, it was completely a matter of indifference to me. I had been in the executive, I received an order and had to carry it out, and I told you once before, if I had had to arrest my own father, well, I was inside the executive.

Questioner

I think you are misunderstanding the question. In intelligence terms, or as SD, you were somewhat predisposed to it.

Eichmann

Yes, I am

Questioner

Now that becomes second nature in a person, so that when he takes such executive measures

Eichmann

On that I must also say that we practically had to report how the measures affected the mood of the Jews. But presumably Amt VI reported in just the same way on what the enemy countries were saying, what the neutral countries were saying, how it affected the population.

Questioner

And these matters were at least brought to you through the intelligence service, so you must have thought about them.

Eichmann

For information.

Questioner

So you did think about it after all.

Eichmann

Personally, nothing at all. Solution.

Questioner

But if it was like that, in Sweden they are talking about this and that matter, in Auschwitz the Jewish transports end in this and that way, then you must have thought something about it

Eichmann

It's really nonsense, what I'm doing here now, whether on orders or on my own account, if the effect is that the neutral countries can be stirred up against us, again and again, precisely because of these measures. We're in a neutral war, and it matters that the few countries still neutral either stay genuinely neutral or come over to us and help us. And through the foreign news I have to hear over and over that precisely because of these measures, the ones being carried out by me, opinion is turning more and more against us, and that the enemy propaganda takes exactly these measures as its occasion to run the Third Reich down in the eyes of the world that is still neutral.

Eichmann

Now if I had been sitting in a position where I could have decided freely, such views of world opinion would have had to interest me, obviously. But since I didn't have the privilege of sitting in such a post, and since I was a receiver of orders in the truest sense of the word, it wasn't for me to ask. And I say it again today, where would we have ended up if every receiver of orders had asked himself whether what he'd been ordered to do made any sense and how far it might work out for Germany. Then it would have been a [not typed], and we might not have had to hold out six years against an enemy. We'd have had to capitulate after one or two years. I was in the executive branch, and I received orders, and I obeyed.

Questioner

But it isn't a question now of thinking or not thinking. You got your order, you also carried it out, and if that hadn't been so, we'd simply have landed in a [not typed].

Questioner

But the question is a different one. Whether, through your prior grounding in the SD, you didn't arrive at trains of thought whose reconstruction interests us at this moment. In other words, whether precisely through your SD training, without it affecting the execution of the orders you received, you didn't after all turn things over one way or another, that this and that is the operation, abroad they say such and such, right, not right, no, it has to be done differently, and so on.

Questioner

You did think, after all, in your work, without orders [off the sheet]

Eichmann

For that I have to switch back to the year 1941. Only then did I think. But not for my own sake, that has to be said expressly, because it would be enormously easy for me today to distance myself by telling you a fairy tale about all the pious wishes I had. I don't do that, I have no right to it, because later I no longer thought. I thought in 1941.

Eichmann

Yes, when I was sent by Heydrich there, I didn't think quietly then, I thought out loud. Thought out loud in front of Mueller, in front of Guenter, and probably in front of my Regierungsraete as well. Namely I thought, and I said it repeatedly, that this whole problem should be solved in a political way. And I don't know whether you can picture the right thing by that, by what I understand as a political solution. By it I understand a separation without violence, through a legal ordinance that leads to the parting of the guest from the host people, or clarifies it. That had been my whole endeavor, and that's also why, out of this idea, the notion of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration came to me. Out of this idea I then gave birth to the business in Lublin. I wanted the whole district. Out of this idea I then gave birth to Theresienstadt, because a piece of advice was abruptly demanded of me, a possible solution was hoped for, when Heydrich overreached himself here in front of the press hacks. And out of that idea I warmed up the old Herzl egg again with Madagascar, in such a way that I kept several German central authorities intensely occupied with these matters for several months. That long I fought there, I wrestled, and there I wasn't even a National Socialist, if you like. There the relationship between the Jews and me was so watered down and so blurred that in the end they couldn't say any more whether it was a Jew or an SS officer. Because we squatted next to each other at the same work bench in the central offices. That was what I wanted. Then I still thought, then I could still develop a certain initiative, then I could still give birth to ideas that could then really be put into practice. But when the course of the war took on such dimensions that this ordinary civilian obstinacy could no longer be indulged, they decided otherwise from [off the sheet]

Eichmann

on high. From then on I only drew the orders which, whether they suited me or not, were to be carried out in line with my duty. I no longer had any thinking to do. Had I wanted to think, or had I wanted to look at the whole business in detail first, above all at those matters for which the Sipo and the SD, or better said for which the central authorities, weren't competent at all, perhaps other thoughts would have come to me out of purely human considerations. That's possible.

Questioner

That's a different matter, that you carried the order out.

Eichmann

I've said it, I divided the business into two parts, and beyond that I can't take a position. I had to obey blindly.

Questioner

But you did get the reports on how the measures were working out.

Eichmann

That didn't interest me at all.

Questioner

But you got the reports, you read them and you thought something about them [blotted] and that's what we want to know now.

Eichmann

All I can say to that is that I probably thought to myself that the German Reich government was right.

Questioner

That's what you thought?

Eichmann

Of course I will have thought that to myself.

Questioner

I don't claim to know you through and through, but I know your thinking machine, that is, how you let a thing come at you, how you process it and how you put it out again. I do believe, to a certain percentage, but the belief is there, that it's possible for you, through a kind of, prompted also by the egocentric, simply to let a curtain down and to say, no thinking here, a pure act of will, nada mas. Only a small percentage.

Questioner

But the greater part of what I suppose myself to know of you tells me it's out of the question that in the course of the war, especially as illustrated material not at all to your taste was occasionally put in front of you, very little of it (a journey on Mueller's instructions), that in your work, I won't say every hour, but at least once a day, you were suddenly away with your thoughts, not on carrying out an order received, but on the effect of it, whether that was in a human respect or a political one and so on. I can't tell those apart at all, but I'm sure of it, that you did what we're calling here now thinking about it.

Eichmann

If by that you mean thinking about it, if you remind me of the journey from Mueller, that I was an opponent of the killing, then that's right, I told him so.

Questioner

But that isn't the only instance. These images you saw at the time, or these thoughts you had at the time, or these images that stand so vividly before your eyes even today, they stayed with you at the time as well.

Eichmann

I made no secret of it either.

Questioner

Yes, but precisely because these images made such an impression on you, I'm sure that in all the war years, in the exercise of your duty, in the carrying out of your orders, you more than once connected some thought or other with the business.

Eichmann

Yes, my inner feeling, not my thoughts.

Questioner

Yes, but I call that thoughts too.

Eichmann

Yes, my inner feeling. That was quite the opposite of my permanent deputy, for instance. Guenter was a man of ice-cold. In all the seven years of working together I never had even a fraction of a human relationship with him. He was so cold that in my absence he simply had my own people killed.

Questioner

But how could you have such a man at your side? All right, he was assigned to you, but you can push such a man off in the course of time.

Eichmann

He was an outstanding administrative worker.

Questioner

Fine, then I send him into the administration and let him do nothing but administrative work.

Questioner

Why, the man did his work, only as a human being he was cold.

Speaker not established

[not typed] when one causes suffering, that one feels suffering oneself, then it is justified.

Eichmann

But I said that already, it was so terrible for me when I saw it the first time that I then went to Mueller and told him word for word, this won't do. I was appalled.

Eichmann

At the inspection of those anti-tank ditches, I still remember how I was told, hermetically sealed off, how an uneasy feeling came over me [off the sheet]

Eichmann

And when I then saw how the young men of the Waffen SS were shooting at these Jews in the pit, I only caught the last volleys, something changed in me. My knees shook exactly the way they did when Hoess once showed me a thing where corpses were being burned. I trembled in the knees. I have said this before. I had to gather all my strength then, in front of Hoess's escort detail that was buzzing along behind us, because I had no escort of my own, so that I would not somehow keel over.

Questioner

So that is a further confirmation that it is out of the question, with your mental disposition, that you simply carried everything out straight through without having given it any thought.

Questioner

I am completely convinced that the first time you were in Auschwitz, that you were a

Eichmann

That I was an unhappy man, yes, that is true.

Questioner

So there you saw the final destination station, after all that long time of efforts to solve the Jewish problem

Eichmann

Yes, yes, that is true. My only comfort in all the deportations was that I simply did not know whether he dies or not. That was my only support, that I was not responsible for it, that I simply did not know what happened to the people.

Questioner

From these things you have now told us it does follow that you did give it thought

Eichmann

Those were my inner feelings.

Questioner

And now you read the newspaper every day, you will have received still more reports, foreign periodicals, extracts from enemy papers and so on, and there you did give thought to how the measures I carried out are taking effect in enemy and in neutral countries abroad.

Eichmann

But that is secondary.

Questioner

[blotted], it makes no difference whether secondary or primary, we want to know what you thought.

Eichmann

I said once already, weeks ago, that I once said to [not typed] that I took the position that National Socialism would never in a thousand years last a thousand years, that [blotted] was my position, that if AH were dead the Reich would break apart into the interests of the warlords and would collapse in itself exactly as every great empire in history fell apart shortly after the death of its founder.

Eichmann

By that I mean to say that such thoughts occupied me while I was burdened, so to speak, with work for the Sipo and the SD. And I tried to peel out the sense of it, why the harshness, when nothing lasts forever. And I said to myself, because I was still dragging along a remnant of Christian upbringing from my youth, what is this harshness for. And no order was ever more welcome to me, one I must have dictated dozens of times, than that avoidable harshness was to be avoided. Wherever I came anywhere near excesses, I stepped in. Those were my thoughts, those were my feelings. What effects the orders of our highest leadership had or could have for the German people was not for me to take an interest in. Because as a pessimist from the start I said, primarily, it is all for nothing anyway. We want to try to build the house for our children as firm and as solid as we can, so they will not have it as hard as we did. We cannot do more, and the more generations follow after us and the longer, the calmer and the better it should be.

Questioner

But I believe that you did think about it at some point, on the basis of the reports you received from Office VI and from Office III, about what the effects of the measures I carried out were on the public mood. There you did give it thought.

Eichmann

Let us assume now that we are in total war, everyone takes part in it in the place where he happens to sit, whether that is the front soldier or the civilian at home, and so on. That everyone gave thought, in the work assigned to him, to whether what I am doing now serves the winning of victory or what it is good for.

Questioner

What influence did your operations have on the neutral nations, since it was important to keep them neutral or to draw them over to us? It was precisely the measures taken by you that got enemy propaganda running at full speed. Against us.

Eichmann

You keep confusing the matter, which falls into two parts. I had nothing to do with the extermination, only with the deportation, and that was the least of the evils.

Questioner

Yes, but the thing ran on a conveyor belt

Eichmann

No, here there was one main office and there was another

Questioner

Yes, but the thing was put together by foreign countries.

Eichmann

That is no concern of mine

Questioner

Yes, but you must have given it some thought?

Eichmann

No. Who talked about the deportation during the war? People only talked about the gassing

Questioner

No, people also talked about the measures in France and Holland.

Eichmann

Those are trifles

Questioner

And then they were carried off, and propaganda was made about that abroad as well

Eichmann

I know what you want. What foreign countries may have thought about the physical extermination, and that I would have given thought to it. But it is no concern of mine, physical extermination. It was not my task, and not the task of Office IV either, and not of IV B 4.

Questioner

What did you think the other day, when a murderer butchered [too faint] children and packed them into tin cans, what did you think then.

Eichmann

Well, I thought the fellow should be hanged and the parents of the children should do with him whatever they want.

Questioner

Good, and by the same turn of your thinking, I will probably have thought, the whole filthy business is no concern of mine, I am only glad that fate spared me from being camp commandant of Auschwitz.

Eichmann

And I said that I am neither grateful nor ungrateful to fate, because if it had been so, I would have carried out the order as well. My task did not weigh on me. One has to distinguish very sharply here between the physical extermination and the registration in the individual countries.

Questioner

Let us put it crudely for once, you were in fact the handyman for the concentration camps, you had the people brought to where they were killed.

Eichmann

Of course. But who was killed?

Questioner

The old ones.

Eichmann

Not all the old ones, not if he was a specialist worker.

Questioner

Let us say a higher percentage.

Eichmann

That does not interest me, I did not give the order. You can also call Reichsbahnrat Stange to account,

Eichmann

He did after all put the trains at our disposal. He was much worse, he was the one who first gave me the possibility of transporting the people.

Questioner

No, no. You said that you were responsible up to the handing over of the people to the concentration camps. Let us leave these people out of it.

Eichmann

No, why? If you put such questions to me, then I have to point out that you are being inconsistent.

Eichmann

After I wanted to bring the matter to a solution on a purely political basis, and then saw the whole business being run onto a different track, for me, as my final piece of wisdom, a certain Jesuitical line of thought took hold, which put a blinker on my right side and left my view clear only to the left. I had to see to the transports, to the legal underpinning in the individual countries under our influence, so that they would hand the Jews over to us. And everything that happened to the right of that blinker I did not want to see, did not wish to look at, wanted to have nothing at all to do with. That is my picture of my own thinking.

Eichmann

On the matter of the deportation of children that was brought up yesterday, I have a few further scattered thoughts to express. One. Whatever SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker may have played down in his reporting, with regard to improprieties of every kind, the author has surely blown up. If it had really been as the author describes it and as it was read out to me yesterday, then I would have to be able to remember such a matter at least dimly. Because something like that does stay in the memory, or else, when one deals with it again, it is suddenly pulled out of the dark again and comes at least into half light, so that one can remember something. But I can remember absolutely nothing. I would say so if I could remember, because it would do me no good to deny something that my own people could under certain circumstances refute.

Eichmann

But by that I do not mean to deny it and say it never happened at all, because far too much has been described for that.

Eichmann

I mean by that that something must have happened there, but it cannot have been so terrible, otherwise I would have remembered it

Eichmann

2. But if it really is supposed to have gone as gruesomely as the author describes, then I have to conclude that Dannecker, and likewise the Commander of the SIPO and SD in Paris, and the Higher SS and Police Leader, let themselves be made fools of by the French. Who, as the author says, even cleared out the orphanages for them, and touted the children like sour beer. And these three had now fallen for this touting and had, to the malicious satisfaction, so to speak, of the French police, evacuated and deported a large part of them here, where from the outset they could count on the very greatest sympathy of world opinion, and that with skillful exploitation this must have led to the torpedoing of further deportation possibilities, and where they also got the French, who up to then had been in favor of a deportation, automatically turned against it.

Eichmann

3. That the reception camp, in this case, as is established, Auschitz, sent the wagons rolling back, so that in the Belgian area Jewish children's corpses were found in the wagons, that I have to consign to the realm of the usual atrocity tales about children that we know from the First World War, which also come from just this area. What is also interesting in this connection is that the witness can name nobody as a witness apart from one Jewess. On top of that, it would have to be established. I do not believe at all that the trains went off directly and directly to the destination, they were loaded to capacity along the way, because as far as I can remember, the escort personnel always came back on regular trains. I would not want to claim it 100 percent, but 99 percent, that on the long stretches the trains never went back empty, that the [blotted] were in circulation somewhere and were pulled out of circulation again. That would have to be established, though, since I am not entirely sure.

Eichmann

4. You have found so many documents and papers, and now I ask myself, where have the documents gone that concern the children's matters, credible documents, of course. With that I have nothing more to say on this matter at the moment.

Questioner

Can you tell me whether it's true that the responsibility for the gas chambers and crematorium buildings lay with Amtsgruppe C, after such buildings were requested by Amtsgruppe D

Eichmann

Inside the VWHA, that I don't know, I'm not informed about that

Eichmann

I'm seeing that for the first time. The RSHA had nothing to do with it.

Questioner

Have you ever heard of an SS Ustf. Becker?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

He was assigned to a detachment for gassing vans?

Eichmann

In which area?

Questioner

Kiev.

Eichmann

No.

Eichmann

I'm also hearing here for the first time that gassing was done up in the Russian-occupied territory, I always thought they had only shot people.

Questioner

Isn't it stated who all these things were subordinate to?

Questioner

He writes that to the SS Ostbf. Rauf

Questioner

Rauf, Prinz Albrecht Str. 8

Eichmann

I know the name.

Questioner

Teletype from Riga to the RSHA II D 3 a. GRS. concerning S-goods.

Eichmann

Now, I don't know this matter, but if this letter, this document, weren't there, then of course all the world would assume that this business was done by the section that handled Jewish affairs too. But you can see from it that it isn't true at all. And there were, or rather there still are, other things that I actually know nothing about. We had nothing at all to do with the whole technical business. We only ever had, as I've said so often, the political solution in view. When that wasn't the case, we were of course brought in as well, IV B 4, but only for transport, for registration. The rest didn't concern us, and our work was in fact finished once we had the timetables drawn up, which were drawn up jointly with the Reich Transport Ministry, after I could tell the Reich Transport Ministry how many trains I needed, and that once named to me the office that

Eichmann

carried out the registration. That wasn't carried out by me, I never had the personnel for it, never, and for another thing when the reception stations were named to me by the VWHA. Yes, if my section had consisted of 2,000 people, then it would certainly be impossible for me to show that I had nothing to do with the registration. But I only had officials, and in Hungary a few men as a transport escort detachment. How the transports were put together, how they were fed, that was no concern of mine, although I gave guidelines here as reference points for the Hungarian gendarmerie. Whether they went by them I can't judge, I couldn't do anything, it wasn't within my authority to command. And I'll tell you something further, on your questions about why IV B 4 keeps turning up. I've already explained that to you. But here you have in truth one more example, here is a completely new section that has never turned up before, which again is the one in charge, and it really is as I told you. It really wasn't any brushing off of responsibility on my part. No, everybody, every single one of them, meddled and got mixed up in these things, and everybody thinks he has to contribute something to the work wanted by the high leadership. They pushed their way right in. But today none of them want to know anything about it any more. Today the section IV B 4, that is, the Gestapo of Amt IV, is what's left over. Everybody else dodges away and tips the slop buckets on us, so to speak.

Questioner

On closer reflection, does the name Rauf mean nothing?

Eichmann

No, I know that I heard the name very often. In the Prinz-Albrecht Str. that was the Gestapa and probably Amt II as well. The traffic dispatch office and the Chief of the SIPO and SD with his adjutant's staff. House prison. House administration.

Questioner

From the Baltic states, did reports actually reach you, or did you at some point get to see summary activity reports.

Eichmann

As far as I can still remember today, it was said that the matter in the Baltic states was solved on the spot. I never had anything to do with it either.

Questioner

Of Latvia it's said, for instance, that in 1935 there were 93,000 Jews there. When the Germans marched in there were still 70,000 Jews in Latvia, the rest had fled with the Bolshevists. The Jewish Bolshevist rule had deported 33,000 Latvians, and up to Oct. 41 the special detachments, which consisted mainly of Latvians, executed 30,000 Jews

Eichmann

Yes, up there they settled their business themselves.

Questioner

In Lithuania [blotted] in the year 1923 there were 153,000 Jews. 40,000 Lithuanians were sent to Siberia and that is said to go back to the preparatory work of the Jews, and 40,000 Jews were then killed by the Lithuanians

Speaker not established

The revenge

Questioner

In individual actions a total of 136,000 Jews were liquidated.

Questioner

The leader of Einsatzgruppe A, SS Brigadefuehrer Stahllecker, mentions among other things that already in the first hours after the march-in, local antisemitic forces were induced to [not typed] against the Jews. As ordered

Questioner

took the first measures on their own initiative.

Questioner

Stahllecker never told you about this?

Eichmann

No, I never met him again. When he went off as head of the Einsatzgruppe I saw him for the last time. I had nothing more to do with him.

Questioner

Then Stahllecker speaks about the [not typed] area, says that well over 400,000 Jews were counted at the time, this figure certainly set too low. Minsk had 100,000 Jews out of a population of 238,000. 19,000 were shot as partisans and criminals, the majority of them Jews. Estimated figures from the Wehrmacht up to Dec. 41. Then from Dec. 40 onwards Jewish transports were run from the Reich to Riga, Minsk and so on at short intervals.

Eichmann

Yes, to Riga, that is right.

Questioner

20,000 to Riga and 7,000 to Minsk.

Eichmann

Minsk is new to me. That certainly happened on Heydrich's orders. The heads of the Einsatzgruppen certainly came to Berlin from time to time to report. They will have spoken with Heydrich, he will have had it presented to him, and Heydrich will then probably have told the Einsatzgruppen chiefs on his own initiative, [blotted] we will send you further trains as well, and so on. And so I then received instructions to let trains run not to Auschwitz but to Riga. After all, I had no railway stations to designate. An Einsatzgruppe chief or the commandant of a concentration camp would certainly not have put up with a desk officer simply unloading thousands of people on him.

Eichmann

No, I never saw that map. I received no reports at all about these matters. I heard of it for the first time when the statistician was collecting these things at my office.

Eichmann

IV A 1 is not me at all, that is an entirely different section. There you have another example, yet another section. I told you that I had nothing to do with the reporting by the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, and I never received any reports either. I believe that section IV A 1 was the section that collected all the reporting and was the liaison office between the chiefs of Offices IV, V, III and VII and the Einsatzgruppen chiefs.

Questioner

Was that also under Mueller?

Eichmann

Yes. It is also an entirely different group, IV A, and I was IV B. I have said so often that there were so many offices that pushed their way into Jewish affairs.

Questioner

From that one can really conclude that it was a muddle.

Eichmann

I would not call it a muddle. It would surely have been considerably more elegant and better if, for example, an office had been created by a Fuehrer order, a "Reich Commissioner for Jewish Affairs". Something like that was in my mind in Austria. There, after the Central Office was set up, I was aiming to obtain the practical authority and also the legal powers of a Reich Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in

Eichmann

the reunified Austria. From there the next step would have been Jewish affairs generally. I would have pulled this Jewish sector out of all the central authorities and set up an office of its own, a "Reich Commissariat for the Solution of the Jewish Question". Everything, everything, everything would have gone out from that office, and who knows whether it would not then have come to an elegant, political solution. Because today, with this solution, far too many offices had a hand in the game. They were loud in argument, took the most radical position and pushed it through. A position of that kind I could never have adopted, on the strength of my many years of preparatory work in the field of the Jewish question, because it would have been ideologically quite alien to me. Perhaps Heydrich and Mueller did not put the harsh side of these matters under me in the first place, but put those things under others here. And you know, once that starts, it spreads in circles, exactly as when I throw a stone into a pond. Here every office really did, as I have already said, take the thing over for itself when it held the lead and the little sector "Jews" was involved. Lange saw it that way too, the first time, when he saw Dr. Blau's collection of statutes.

Eichmann

To be handled as a classified matter only. Telegram (G), cipher machine, Budapest, 4.5.44, 17:45. Received 5.5.44, 13:30. No. 1179, 4.5.44 (Secret), also for Ambassador Ritter. Following on from wire report No. 1052 of 23.4.44.

Eichmann

Ghettoization work in the Carpathian region, Zone 1, concluded in the last few days. Some 200,000 Jews have been registered in 10 camps and ghettos. In Transylvania, Zone 2, the concentration of the roughly 110,000 Jews living in this area was begun today. The removal of the 310,000 Jews from Zones 1 and 2 to Germany is to begin in mid-May, and 4 transports a day with 3,000 Jews each are planned. On 4 May a timetable conference for these transports is being held in Vienna, attended by representatives of the Reichsbahn, the Sipo and the Hungarian gendarmerie. Since it is assumed that foreign Jews were also registered during the concentration, the legation's liaison man at Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann will visit camps in eastern Hungary in the course of next week. Jews of neutral and enemy states are to be separated out and placed in special quarters. Fesemeier.

Eichmann

The letter is stamped with an incoming stamp of the Foreign Office, Domestic Department II, 1870 G. A distribution stamp has long since been printed on it, according to which the letter is to be circulated. That would be the text of a cipher-machine letter from the Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary, Dr. Fesemeier, to the Foreign Office.

Eichmann

This letter proves, first, that I pressed for Jews of foreign nationality not to be caught up in the deportation but to be exempted. It is clear that Fesemeier, who after all sat behind his desk, or shuttled back and forth between his desk and the offices of the Hungarian government, was never in a camp and would never have known anything about it, had I not reported this fact to the Higher SS and Police Leader in Hungary, [blotted] so that he for his part approached Fesemeier, so that the Foreign Office here in a sense authorized a liaison man of the German legation to visit my command in eastern Hungary and, in these camps, together with the advisers I had placed at the disposal of the Hungarian gendarmerie, in these camps, Jews

Eichmann

to separate out Jews of enemy and neutral nationality and to house them in special quarters, and that Jews of foreign nationality are in general to be exempted. This letter shows quite clearly how sharply the Sonderkommando Eichmann distinguished here, and how hard we tried to exempt Jews of foreign nationality from it. Second, this letter proves that the deportation from Hungary only got under way in May, because it speaks here of Zone 1 and 2, and logically nobody would have started with Zone 4 and 5, but rather with Zone 1 and 2. It goes on to say that a timetable conference takes place on 4 May with representatives of the Reichsbahn, the Sipo and the Hungarian gendarmerie, and that four transports with 3,000 Jews each were to run daily. Now I ask myself, it has always been claimed that trains ran as early as April, and I always took the view that this struck me as much too early. Now it is proved here that trains only ran in May, if they ran in May at all, because the timetable conference only took place on 4 May, and from the timetable conference, which always lasted three to four days, until the trains were actually made available, at least ten to fourteen days went by, if not more, so that at best one could reckon on after the middle of May. Something like that was still dimly in my memory too. I was misled by the book of J. Brandt.

Questioner

So it is also proof that there really were trains with 3,000, which at four trains would then be 12,000.

Eichmann

That may well be, if I had the necessary wagons.

Questioner

So four trains there and four trains back makes eight, with 40 men of guard personnel.

Eichmann

Yes, but I did not have those. The Chief of the Ordnungspolizei provided them.

Questioner

So altogether you had about 300 at your disposal?

Eichmann

Yes, I would estimate roughly that.

Questioner

How could one sum up Heydrich's character, what in your opinion is the essential picture?

Eichmann

So people would like to know what I think of Heydrich? I will try to say it in a few words. Cold, hard, brutal, a great organizer, very hardworking, extremely mistrustful, a friend only when it suited him, very shrewd, a man who walked over corpses. Character traits that in themselves are extremely un-Germanic. I have one thing in common with him, that I too was born in Halle an der Saale, and his father was my violin teacher. Admittedly I only got as far as "O Tannenbaum", and for that I got slaps from old Heydrich. I can in no way claim that he had Jewish blood, but one thing I do know, from my own knowledge from youth onward, that it was always said, the Heydrichs are not Aryan or have Jewish blood. That is roughly the whole of it.

Questioner

Would you like to know anything more precise?

Eichmann

Yes, out of the experience, or the character portrait of this man, a great number of events or perhaps non-events are recounted, for instance the Bürgerbräukeller attack of 1939, which is supposed to have been organized by Heydrich.

Eichmann

I consider Heydrich, him above all, capable of any deed. He is such a calculating and ambitious man. But to believe is not to know.

Eichmann

Those are purely matters of feeling, but one thing I do know, that he always backed the man he knew to be a counterweight against his own opponents. Outrageously intelligent.

Questioner

In your view, was it easy for him to outplay the RF?

Eichmann

I consider that absolutely possible, because he was so adroit and had such an absolute instinct for the moment. Certain things he wanted to achieve he served up to the RF at the right moment, and anyone who knew the RF knows it. If you wanted to tell the RF something that would stick, you had to whisper it behind a third person's back, and then he would turn round and say, "What did you say?" And then you had to defend yourself and say, no, I am not saying that. And then you were asked a second time, and then came the spontaneous decisions that often, precisely because they were spontaneous, would have been better not taken. A tactic that Obergruppenführer Wolff understood outstandingly, and it is really he whom I would crown as the intriguer.

Questioner

Can one say now that Heydrich had a loyalty complex toward the RF, or had any loyalty at all?

Eichmann

I do not believe that the idea of loyalty existed for him at all, because for loyalty you must have a soul, and Heydrich was a soulless man. He did of course work together with the RF, but he certainly let that cooperation double his strength and his power and his position and the plans for the future that he undoubtedly had.

Questioner

Was it his ambition to become the successor to the RF?

Eichmann

That I cannot know. It would also have depended on how he in turn stood with the Führer.

Questioner

Is anything known about that?

Eichmann

No, I do not know. In that area he was very jealous and watchful, and I hardly believe he would have dared to work on the Führer behind the RF's back, because if that had come out it would have caused difficulties, and he probably did not want to expose himself to that.

Questioner

Can one say that Heydrich was inspired by the SS idea as such? Or was he a pure policeman?

Eichmann

I consider him an entirely pure policeman.

Questioner

Is that story known about the Navy, the daughter of a Navy uncle to whom he was engaged and whom he was supposed to marry, and whom he then did not want to marry, and where he is supposed to have said to the father, laughing,

Questioner

Yes, you see, it cost me so little, practically, to bump off this girl, she cannot become my wife after all. And that he was expelled from the Navy for it, the old shipowner even got involved. And afterwards it was interpreted as if he had been thrown out of the Navy for Nazi activity.

Eichmann

[blotted] not known to me.

Questioner

Is it known whether Heydrich maneuvered Mueller into the SS?

Eichmann

From my own knowledge of the matter I do not know that, but it was always said that if Mueller had not enjoyed Heydrich's absolute confidence, then Heydrich would have thrown Mueller out. That is quite beyond question.

Questioner

Was Heydrich what the two of us understand by a [blotted] SS man?

Speaker not established

No.

Eichmann

No, because his marked character traits have nothing to do with the picture we set up as our ideal.

Questioner

That is clear, but on the other hand it was his task to take over the protection of the Reich against its enemies from within, and that was of course a terribly hard task, which of course could only be solved harshly.

Eichmann

What I cannot stand is that I collect material about people in order to get them cheaply into my hand, and that is quite beyond question from a certain rank upward.

Eichmann

until the man was finally in hand.

Questioner

Yes, but that is a police task, one that is carried out even in a democracy.

Eichmann

Yes, but that it is done by blackmail. My dear friend, we know this and that about you, you are a swine, but we will not remove you, if you go along my line, then…

Eichmann

Is it not so? And that surely must not be. He is supposed to be a clean man, an untouchable one.

Questioner

It depends on whether Heydrich really did that, on the basis of information he obtained and then by way of blackmail, including with his own SS comrades. Surely one would have to be able to check that?

Eichmann

That I cannot say.

Questioner

How would you characterize the RF?

Eichmann

In itself that cannot be said at all in the short conversation I had.

Eichmann

But I would say: "Ah, two souls dwell, alas, in my breast." You really have to know first where he comes from.

Eichmann

He came from Bavaria, he was a teacher, hence the constant craving to be a pedagogue. He had enormous ambition. He could be unusually kind-hearted and helpful, but just as easily he could [blotted] decide things all of a sudden that went against any sense of justice. Uncommonly hard-working, a very great organizer, a very poor judge of men, and unfortunately an easy mark for anyone who told him what he wanted to hear.

Questioner

There is a document, that is, a report from Pohl to the Reichsführer. And it was a very honorable matter to receive the Reichsführer's watch. Now, on 29 November 1944, Pohl writes on the subject of "distribution of watches to members of the Waffen-SS." To the Reichsführer, Amtsgruppe D, Oranienburg. Twenty thousand pocket watches [not typed]. Last year I placed the stated quota at the disposal of the Waffen-SS. The issuing of these gifts takes place in your name, to the most valued and most worthy members of this division. Then it goes indistinct again. I request your confirmation. Altogether there are at present with Arbeitsgruppe D under repair [not typed].

Questioner

Now is that German, or SS-like, to take a watch off an enemy of the Reich, have it repaired, and then hand that watch to a man who has earned it?

Eichmann

To that I can say, the Old Testament is a very shrewd and instructive book. You will find a passage in it: Woe to a people in which a servant is made into a leader, or a maid is made a queen. And unfortunately our leadership lacked [not typed]. A sergeant is still not a commander, and it was on that fact that this crystal-clear nationalist outlook finally degenerated. The struggle of the individual Reichsleiter, Reich ministers and office chiefs, one against the other. And so they squandered their strength against each other instead of working together on real nationalism, on the old idea of the struggle, and furthering it, as they finally once did before 1933. And of course it is against the SS idea to hand out used watches from the concentration camps again as a gift of honor. Simply impossible. That is the only way I can explain it.

Questioner

Now how is it possible that the Reichsführer, who could be finicky down to the smallest detail, who on the other hand was filled with the ethos of the soldier-farmer, filled with the ethos of the racially healthy and sensitive man, who put everything into it, including his schoolmasterly pedagogy, somehow to get the ideas

Questioner

of purity and loyalty and so on into his head. Now how can it be squared in his mind that he tells himself, fine, we cannot throw the watches away, I will distribute them to my most proven officers. How could he, as a mystic, commit such an absolute baseness? How is that to be understood? And in the same month he gives Becher the order to bring him a gold chain, which was then given as a present to his girlfriend, who had just had a child. How is that to be put together?

Eichmann

Probably simply that inner greatness of soul was missing there too, or a lack of feeling.

Eichmann

Anyone can assume that he told himself, under the influence of the war, that you simply cannot throw such material away. But on the other hand I have to say, it is simply proletarian.

Questioner

Isn't that also bound up with the petty schoolmaster's streak, to throw nothing away at all, to use everything, to waste nothing? Couldn't that be it?

Eichmann

Yes, naturally. In any case it puts the Reichsführer in an entirely different light, and it is almost impossible, at least for outsiders, to make clear to them in spite of such things how great the Reichsführer was. It is very hard.

Questioner

The letter is from Pohl to the Reichsführer? Is it initialed?

Eichmann

Yes, it is reproduced here only as wording.

Questioner

Yes, and now Glo [not typed]?

Eichmann

Glo [not typed] was Gauleiter in Vienna. He was removed because he went into the shoe shops himself and checked the prices, that sort of thing. I know him only because I later saw him in the Reichstag. He was a Reichstag deputy as well. Otherwise I don't know him any further.

Questioner

Yes, but he claims the Reichsführer was in Auschwitz once or twice. And that he looked over the whole camp from the back and then said, those are slaughters our children will no longer have to carry out. In the year 1943. Is it even possible that the Reichsführer looked at it from A to Z?

Eichmann

Yes, I hold that to be absolutely possible, and the remark he made as well.

Questioner

So it is after all possible to assume that the Reichsführer intervened in the solution of the Jewish question very largely on his own initiative. But what interests me is whether these were his own ideas, or whether they could also have come from Heydrich.

Eichmann

Yes, I believe that too, that it could have been suggested to him. But whether the watch business was suggested to him? I assume of a leader

Eichmann

that he does not let such a thing be suggested to him, that he throws anyone out who comes with such an idea.

Questioner

What in your view would have been a solution for the Jewish problem?

Eichmann

Well, in any case not the solution that was adopted. I am very sorry that I have to say this. It displeases me and it also does not match my inner conviction that anyone is entitled simply to remove masses of people from the world in this form, because he holds the conviction that these masses are harmful.

Questioner

But which solution then?

Eichmann

First of all I would probably have done what was originally demanded before 1933. All the Jews who [blotted] had immigrated from the East after 1918, under strict and firm control, and their property too, which they had grabbed for themselves in the meantime, whatever source it came from, I would then have put out of Germany and taken from them what they had acquired dishonestly. That would have been the first thing. Second, I would not have permitted the small percentage that the Jews made up in relation to the German non-Jews, I would not have permitted that small percentage to hold such a high position of power, namely in film, in the press, in the banks, everywhere in the key positions. I would have allowed it only in proportion to their numbers.

Eichmann

Yes, Jewish emigration was promoted, and only laughable numbers came of it, partly because the foreign states demanded very high advance payments, and there were very difficult emigration rules for North America.

Questioner

The measures proposed above may hold for the time before the war, but in the course of the whole war the Jews from the other countries came in on top of that, and it is surely beyond question that the Jews were the driving force behind the whole resistance, not of a military kind, political resistance.

Questioner

Now a completely open question. If the Germans have the right to annihilate a Jewish people because in their view the Jews are their enemies, then conversely the Jews also have the right to kill the non-Jews. That is clear. So in my view, if one man regards the other as an enemy, he has the right to fight him too. That is a primitive solution.

Eichmann

That is my view as well. But I also hold the opinion that a Morgenthau Plan, the plan was not carried out but it was on the

Eichmann

best way to being carried out, so people said to themselves, if we lose the war then the Jews will fall upon us. So let us begin to get rid of the Jews, to render the Jews who are in the Reich harmless somehow, and then on top of that the whole war. The Jews were touted around like sour beer at every corner and turn, and nobody would take them. In the very last months of the war Sweden and Switzerland did something. So what kind of solution was there then?

Eichmann

It goes against me personally, defenseless people, and even if it is my greatest enemy, defenseless people who have done nothing to me personally, only by their birth, simply to drive them into a gas oven. If someone has committed an assassination or the like, then I understand it when a man fires into the middle of it in the first rush of feeling. The Americans in Dachau too, since they found nothing else, took my picture and hung it on a tree and shot at it. Those are all first acts of reaction, understandable ones. But if I am now asked for a solution?

Questioner

Yes, but it can hardly be regarded as a solution to let the Jews just be Jews and leave everything as it was, only keeping them under control. That would have taken an expenditure of manpower which in numbers [not typed].

Eichmann

I once talked with a Jew and with his non-Jewish wife. And his wife had said to me beforehand, yes, the Jews are wonderfully settled here in Argentina, because here they are Vivos too, and here a Jew does not stand out at all. But the Nordic countries, who had no feeling for this business sense and this worship of money, were of course outstripped by these intelligent, industrious people who pushed themselves forward at school, outstripped in business. In part the means made no difference, lending money to anyone, then later forcing the farms to auction, in order to get possession of the farms, which were then taken over again by the family's own private [blotted] bank, so that [blotted] farmers carried thoughts of suicide and in part the farmers' wives took their own lives, because they were driven off their old soil in the postwar years of 1928 and 1929. That hardness, that craving for money, does not lie in the Nordic man.

Eichmann

Out of that came the hatred of course, and then the manner of it, when the Jew appears in masses he can be enormously insolent. Of course a great deal can be said in excuse of the measures. But I personally find the manner of it downright brutal, in that they were simply gassed like that. That is not chivalrous either, even toward my enemy.

Speaker not established

It really is always the same single thing we are reproached with, the extermination of X million Jews in this manner. So we don't want to argue about law, that has been lifted clean off its hinges.

Questioner

What can one say about the moment when Heydrich was shot and Kaltenbrunner took his place? Who was in the running then to step into Heydrich's position?

Eichmann

I'm not informed about the personnel situation at that time. I was in Russia then and so I couldn't take note of anything personally. But since I knew most of the gentlemen very well who played in that orchestra, I fully believe it was proposed by certain people to put an incompetent man in there and not another Heydrich, who after all was capable of anything, a political policeman. So [blotted] only after Heydrich, as the man Kaltenbrunner presents, that leaves only Wolff.

Eichmann

Wolff's intention in this was to have a willing instrument. No competition, because under Heydrich he had, and that was the only real competition for him

Speaker not established

Perhaps this can also be connected with the fact that Wolff is a dark figure anyway

Speaker not established

It would interest me very much why he was never brought into any Nuremberg trial. I keep coming to the same conclusion, and I hope I don't fall under suspicion of being a reactionary for it, but complete power demands an inner modesty, a crystal-clear cleanliness, and I would almost say a humility. And when I look at the leadership stratum as such, let's say the Gauleiter, Herr Ru [not typed] for example, it's impossible to put a man like that at the head of such a large Gau as the province of Saxony. He may have been a good brassiere manufacturer, but no Reichsstatthalter. There, for example, the conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic went to him and said, Herr Reichsstatthalter, I need as always such and such a subsidy from the state treasury for my orchestra. Answer, why a subsidy, pay for it out of your own receipts. Thereupon Kemp said to him, but Herr Reichsstatthalter, we are propaganda after all, a great representation for Germany, we play abroad. Answer, stop it with the fairy tale, whoever orders music should

Eichmann

pay for it too. And those were the Dresden Philharmonic. And there are many more examples like that. The women alone, the way they threw themselves into the cars like a sparrow into horse droppings. I have nothing against a good cook, but as Frau Reichsstatthalter I do turn her down. Oddly enough, men in an elevated position cope faster than the women do.

Eichmann

And so, on everything you asked me, on how this or that could have been possible, all I can answer you is that the class was simply missing. Leading and carrying great responsibility has to be in the blood somehow. You can't simply say, from tomorrow you are this and that. He can be as diligent as you like, as capable, as brilliant, but one day he'll be thrown off the rails anyway. This Wehrbauerntum, wonderful, Darre's peasant law, wonderful, but then afterwards everything was overdone, everything suddenly began to swim. Suddenly in some district in Russia some commissar or other forbade people to kiss the dead. It has been an old custom for centuries. He forbade it because he thought it unhygienic. Another example.

Eichmann

Herr Frauenfeld and Herr Reichsschulungsleiter Schmidt, the torchlight procession of soldiers, 100 km from the front, only because Herr Schulungsleiter Schmidt wanted to drive to the town hall with Herr Frauenfeld like that. I broke in by radio, with the threat of making a report to higher authorities if the whole show was not dissolved within 10 minutes, and they obeyed my order, small and ugly.

Eichmann

Another example. Herr Koch arrived with a special train. 14 carriages, 8 of them Rosenberg's, the rest Herr Koch's. Rosenberg was Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Koch was for the Ukraine. They quarreled, they insulted each other, neither would go where the other was. Herr Koch, who as everyone knows used to punch railway tickets. I have nothing against that, but again the necessary class was missing. Nothing against ticket conductors, but don't make them Reich Commissioners.

Eichmann

Example. Herr von Karajan with the Reichsleiter. K. was in Aachen, a conductor. The Reichsleiter rings him up and says, Herr von Karajan, be so kind, your orchestra is looking for a trumpeter, do take on so-and-so, you would be doing me

Eichmann

a personal favor. Good, von Karajan has him sent over to audition. The trumpeter comes, blows so hard the flies fall off the wall, and so von Karajan can't use him. A short time later another telephone call from the Reichsleiter. Please, Herr von Karajan, take this man on. To which von Karajan says, I can't take this man on, he can't play at all. Whereupon the Reichsleiter says, but he's an old fighter. Whereupon von Karajan again, but he isn't supposed to fight at all, he's supposed to blow.

Eichmann

I tell these stories because somewhere in them I see the thread running through, I see the guilt. But if one wants to speak of guilt at all, then perhaps it can be put this way. Before 33, a man became a National Socialist only if he wanted to out of inner conviction. After 33 they all pushed themselves to the front. But then it was said again, those were [blotted] loyal old fighters, see the blowing and the fighting. As a result they were made this and that, Gauleiter and so on, and then they could fight all right, but they could no longer blow. They could blow in the fight against communism [off the sheet], Marxism, brave in the hall battles, in the streets, some of them let themselves be beaten into cripples, anything you like, but that doesn't make them capable afterwards of taking up this or that post, and that runs right through the whole line. Otherwise it would basically have looked different. If they had not basically been small people, there would not have been this dualism either, between the Reichsleiter and the Reich ministers and so on. Example, Herr von Ribbentrop.

Eichmann

Now you might be entitled to put the question to me whether I always held this conviction, even back then, and if so, why I took part at all. But we were probably convinced that this water would settle one day and become clear. Unfortunately it went too fast, 33 into the leadership, 6 years later war, that probably says everything. But the hope that this would die out one day, settle or change, that was what kept us old National Socialists to the mark in our outlook, the bridging of the class spirit, the bridging of the caste spirit and so on. Apart from that, in the war there was no time at all to think about any of it.

Questioner

Now another question. Do you believe that the solution of the Jewish question, or rather the physical extermination order as such, suited the Reichsfuehrer, so to speak? Or that it was inwardly repugnant to him after all?

Questioner

Yes, it is strange that something like this was kept so secret. Did you know anything about it? About this gassing and extermination.

Eichmann

No. But then again, if you read the literature, it really wasn't so secret at all, because the Jews knew about it, for instance. The Jews spoke to prominent German officials, for instance, about the extermination mills in Auschwitz. In part, when something was running at full tilt in Auschwitz, you could pick up an identifying stench at 5 to 6 kilometers, and it was constantly being announced in the foreign press. Only it had also been announced beforehand, before there was any question of it at all, and that is why it is logical that people didn't attach so much importance to it. I know, for instance, that the Einsatzkommandos in the East, which were partly manned by Waffen SS, in part carried out mass executions. But what I still remember from back then, from Kiev and from Lemberg, is that Hauptscharfuehrer Soffner told atrocity stories like that in the casino at Lemberg, where I still thought to myself, well, he's boasting mightily. And at Kiev I believe three or four thousand were reported, but back then all of that somehow ran under the heading of fighting partisans and so on. But at that time I absolutely did not know either that children were being killed there too. Still, it must be assumed that most of these people knew nothing.

Eichmann

But the thing is, these Einsatzkommandos, [blotted] Ohlendorf for instance, were subordinate to Heydrich after all, and I consider it absolutely possible, because I know the Reichsfuehrer could be very warm-hearted, very ready to help, that the main driving force was Heydrich. I consider it possible, I can't prove it.

Eichmann

Something else I don't understand on the Reichsfuehrer's part is that he put these concentration camp guards into SS uniforms, for instance. How can one blur an order like the SS. He simply put the men into the uniforms and then they belonged to the Totenkopfstandarte or otherwise to the SS. The same with the officials at the Stapo and the Kripo. They were police officials. Today they were nothing, tomorrow they had a rank, perhaps Obersturmfuehrer, because they were Oberregierungsraete. But all of that lies in the ambition within the sphere of power. Take the SS court, the SS jurisdiction, in order to kick them right in the [not typed]. But properly speaking these people don't belong to the SS at all.

Eichmann

But that was Heydrich, his order was the men who stood in the service of the Reich.

Eichmann

He was an idealist. On the military side that was the SS, and the idealistic side beyond that was the General SS, and then came the general [not typed] services. Those services were done by people who also came from the SS, and with that he gave every single man the possibility of falling back. People also stood very well in the service of the Reich who had a hunchback and squinted and were 1.54 tall, and those were not taken into the SS.

Questioner

Do you believe now that this extermination order came at a convenient moment for the Reichsführer? Or do you think he gave himself no headache about it?

Eichmann

Yes, but one should not tear something down before one has something better. And if one now wants to replace a religion with a fat-bellied local group leader [not typed] that is what the chickens do in the farmyard.

Questioner

What would have interested me in the whole story was to know, out of your personal view, to get the figure of Heydrich outlined in such a way that the operation with regard to enemies of the Reich, first of all the Jews, was solved in just this manner, cleverly, with force used in part. But that does seem to me very difficult. On the other hand I do not believe that Heydrich undertook anything without being covered on the whole by the Reichsführer.

Eichmann

No, that is clear. He was too clever for that, and he could not push himself forward either. It did have to be agreed somewhere.

Questioner

Heydrich was, guided by the right hand, a very suitable and capable police chief. Nothing is known about any conflicts he had with Canaris?

Eichmann

Yes, the gods may know whether they were together earlier, or whether he was even managed by Canaris earlier and then brushed off when he became inconvenient, the way he in turn wanted to brush Canaris off because he knew too much. All that was interesting but never cleared up.

Questioner

There is no evidence for it?

Eichmann

This subject we are discussing here is so broad. To exhaust it one would have to have many people who were in the picture, because it was divided up very cleverly. What the one did not know, the other knew.

Eichmann

And the playing off of one against the other was also a great factor. It really was a bit too strong a [not typed] economy. There is nothing to be changed about that.

Questioner

In general, on the particular appointments of Higher SS and Police Leaders in the various countries, Heydrich had no say?

Eichmann

Hardly. Well, he could raise an objection, he could bring counter-material, he could shoot against it. If the man had been very disagreeable to him, then he would probably have done it. But in general, as SS and Higher Police Leader, he was the highest in rank. He did not go to the commander of the Sipo, he went to him personally. But basically everyone, the commander of the Sipo too, the commander of the Order Police, the Stapo and the SD, had their own official channel. The Higher SS and Police Leader could well put in a word, make a proposal, but he had no command authority of any kind. He also took no part in the proceedings, because those came directly from Heydrich to the commander of the Sipo. They did not go through his office. It is like this, that people believed the Higher SS and Police Leader had been a little Reichsführer in his own office. Not a trace of it. Only the General SS went through the chief of staff of the two senior district leaders [not typed] but none of the others.

Questioner

And who made the proposal for the appointment of a Higher SS and Police Leader?

Eichmann

The Reichsführer did that, and in doing so he took care to take men who were skilled in dealing with the respective Reich governors and Gauleiters, who caused him no difficulties by making a stink in the individual territories, but who were also presentable, who were diligent and so on. But basically they were not professional policemen. Without exception they were also General SS.

Questioner

Was that the case afterwards in the occupied territories too?

Eichmann

Yes, that was the case there too, naturally.

Questioner

And they became Waffen SS generals after the 20th of July, because after that date the army's prisoner camps and in part other functions that the army and the Wehrmacht united were placed under the Higher SS and Police Leader, that is to say, for example, a Gruppenführer and lieutenant general of the Waffen SS and Police, and now they became Waffen SS lieutenant generals in order to hold a rank appointed by the Führer, so as to be able to carry out certain defined military tasks.

Eichmann

I, for example, am a lieutenant general of the Waffen SS, but seen purely militarily my highest rank was captain, perhaps major, that is in Wehrmacht terms.

Eichmann

A man like Hausser, for example, he was a real lieutenant general, or Steiner, whichever you want to name. Seen militarily, those were real soldier-officers who simply rose through the ranks.

Questioner

Did you know Jungklaus?

Eichmann

Yes, what about him?

Questioner

He was shot for cowardice before the enemy, first demoted and shot. He was Higher SS and Police Leader in Belgium.

Questioner

And Rauter.

Eichmann

What about him?

Questioner

He was shot by the Dutch.

Questioner

It never struck you that Müller had a woodworking hobby?

Eichmann

No.

Eichmann

I did not build the air-raid cellar, I only made the design. Originally he wanted just a small foxhole. I made a small [off the sheet] air-raid bunker where he could have room with his wife and his two children. Naturally the four people had to stand here packed close together, [off the sheet] reinforced it accordingly, filched the cement for myself, and then had the men do it. It had just hardened properly when there was another terrible air raid on Berlin. A direct hit struck his house, which was half blown to pieces, but the Müller family was in the air-raid bunker and came through that raid splendidly.

Questioner

And you were often in his house?

Eichmann

Yes, for a while even every Thursday with a few of my comrades. We also played chess then. I lost the games regularly, and I believe I never won a single one. He had the following tactic. It gave him a diabolical pleasure to let me come on so well at the start that by the end I became sure of winning. It was always the same. Again and again I galloped headlong into the whole business, I became sure of winning, and all at once he had me. I was checkmated. Now I must say, I am a chess player who once, when I was younger, played very gladly and very much, but then from about 24 or 25 years of age I played perhaps one game a year, perhaps none at all, or all at once 30 games straight off. I am that sort of occasional chess player. But I cannot tell you whether Müller was a keen chess player. I do not know that either. But he was a clever chess player, and that does mean that such a man has a capacity for concentration and for planning and also makes a certain tactic his own. And a chess player as a rule gives back in the game, in life, what he is.

Eichmann

Yes, with me it came very early, namely with the [not typed] affair

Questioner

So that was already the end of 39.

Eichmann

Stahlecker was already commander of the Sipo and SD in the Protectorate, March 39. We had several months' work in Prague there and in Bohemia and Moravia. Poland declared war on us in 39. The war was over at the end of September

Eichmann

In October I made that trip with Stahlecker, to pick out the [off the sheet] for us. I drove with Stahlecker in his car through the Russian corridor, and there we talked for a while with a [not typed] commissar. I can still see the man in front of me, a very tall, broad-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket, as a uniform, a brown leather jacket, and he stood there and in a manner of speaking ran the checkpoint at the entrance to the corridor. The corridor was several km long, about 2o km, and along the way we were gawked at by the [off the sheet] population. In a small village we had a breakdown, something was not in order, and so hundreds of these small-town people gathered around us. That was about that time. Then came the assembling of the transports, from Theresienstadt the [off the sheet], from the Moravian Ostrava region the craftsmen, because I said to myself, in this [off the sheet] region I have the best craftsmen. Then they were sent to [not typed]. It was already winter, with snow. The setting-up work took several weeks, and following one of my inspection trips, to see how far it had come along, I came through Krakow, and there Streckenbach told me [off the sheet] he wanted to tell me a good joke, he was an always cheerful man from Hamburg, and the joke was that the Governor General had ordered that on setting foot on Gen Gov soil I was to be arrested by him at once. That must have been at the end of 39, beginning of 40.

Questioner

Are you aware that on 12 Sep. 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was to be closed.

Eichmann

No, I don't know that.

Questioner

It is interesting how Frank says in Lublin on 22 April 1941, who among us can demand, now that we have stood in struggle with the Jew for 2o years, that we still show any consideration. When the Jews in the world ask for pity today, that leaves us cold. On 9 Sept. 1941 Dr. Humel, head of office in Warsaw, records that the dangers of typhus are becoming ever greater for the Polish population too, and that 2 4o5 cases of typhus have been reported in the ghetto, but that the actual figure is much higher, and so on. Besides that, a great many Poles have been found to have caught typhus, and that it is therefore important to press for the complete sealing off of the ghetto. Then an order of the [not typed] is issued, allowing Jews on the highway to be shot, which basically means imposing the death penalty for unlawfully leaving the ghetto. Was it like that with the ghettos at all, that permission to shoot was given?

Eichmann

I don't know that, because I never inspected ghettos. The only place where a restricted zone was set around the Jew, in my area of duty, that was Theresienstadt. But there the border police had no permission to shoot. And Theresienstadt was not so sealed off either, because the big Dresden-Prague motor road ran right through the middle of Theresienstadt.

Questioner

But here it comes out that in Warsaw, despite bringing in a [not typed], only 45 death sentences could be passed. Of those only 8 had been carried out, because the clemency commission in Krakow had to decide every single case. A further 600 applications for sentencing are pending.

Questioner

So a few things emerge from this. That is from 9 Sept. 41, so 2 months after the start of the eastern campaign, 2 months after the commissar order came into force. He goes on to say that from an estimated 2 1/2 million Jews who were said to be in the east, in Poland, he has now arrived at 3 1/2 million Jews. Probably these are Jews who have seeped through more and more. That is also made known from Jewish quarters, so that Poland became more and more a reservoir for Jews. That is not unimportant for the later calculation of the stated numbers of those destroyed. On the other hand there must also have been a large migration of Jews to the Russian side.

Eichmann

They piled up like swarms of bees, and the Russians gave them free passage at once if they gave them a watch. If I am not mistaken, Murmelstein told me that.

Questioner

Have you any idea on what scale?

Eichmann

Yes, I once estimated it, 100-200-250 000, in that order of magnitude. But that was guesswork on our part, we had no control at all, they went across along the whole broad line. That was back then, still before the Russian war. Later, when the Gen. Gov. began with the Jewish measures, then you can imagine, when so many had already cleared out beforehand, just because it came to a

Eichmann

local concentration or to a ghettoization, how many Jews then migrated into Russian territory, where they now felt pressure behind them. Namely when the physical destruction began.

Questioner

One moment, then they would have been in Russian territory, or rather in the zone of influence of the Einsatzkommandos, so out of the frying pan into the fire. If they now wanted to reach unoccupied Russian territory, then they would have had to [not typed] behind the Wehrmacht

Eichmann

No, in the period before that, there had been almost 2 years, up to June 41. What I am telling you about the 2oo or 250 000, that was the time of Nisko on the San, so shortly after the Polish campaign. So end of 39 to the middle of 41, that was when the figure was that I got told somehow. I believe we even carried it in our statistics. And I believe we put the figure there at 100 000, we didn't want to set it so high, that was safer. As for what crossed the border from the beginning of 1940, when the 2000 skilled workers were at Nisko on the San under the direction of [blotted], up to the outbreak of the Russian war, so June 1941, more than a year later, I don't know that, because the pressure kept getting stronger, the Jew could work out roughly what was still to come.

Questioner

He, Frank, speaks though of an increase in the Jews. He gives no indication at all that Jews had migrated to Russian territory. Now there could be 2 explanations for that, that for his part he sees it as a shortcoming that Jews slipped through.

Eichmann

Yes, out of his border area.

Questioner

Yes, but then I would say he was not responsible after all, it was not the Gen. Gov. after all.

Eichmann

Yes, but it was all his area after all, everything was subject to his decision, he was the sovereign authority after all.

Questioner

But beyond the D-Line, was that not a matter for the Wehrmacht.

Eichmann

Wehrmacht, yes, quite right. But I believe we had no border troops at that time. But the Gen Gov did have something similar in Krakow, like a [blotted]. He could do nothing, there was no war, without the approval of the Gen Gov authority. You can see from that that he cared not a jot about it, he had after all given an order to arrest a member of the RSHA, a desk officer in the senior service. You see this high-handedness from that. Frank had a sort of, how shall I say, a beginning megalomania, delusion of grandeur, to have me arrested just like that, although it is only a single case. He liked to show off, in contrast to the Frank in B.u.M., who was an extraordinarily

Eichmann

modest man. Who did not incline to exaggeration, was sparing with words. He, this Frank, was a powerful speaker, liked putting himself in the limelight. I believe Streckenbach told me that when the Poland Frank set off, from his office to home or wherever, it was an enormous motorcade, with sirens and police, and so on, rather like an oriental prince setting out on a journey. If 2 1/2 million Jews were too few for him, he added another 1 million without further ado. The Jewish problem was taken up by the Fuehrer in every speech, and in those days everything pressed towards contributing something to the solution. Just read the collection by Dr. Blau, there you see how everyone pushed his way in, how everyone also believed he had this and that as his own preserve. You see it too from the fact that Frank forbade me to set foot there and wanted to handle the matter himself. He obviously saw a competitor in me. If he had let the RSHA operate freely from the end of 39 to 41, if he had let the plan be carried out that I drew up and for which I had my superiors' approval, then Frank would have had nothing at all to do with it, for the whole question in the Gen. Gov. would have been solved completely bloodlessly. He would only have had to give me the Lublin district, and I had discussed that with the Jews, Murmelstein was enthusiastic at the time. I had to start small then. If I had asked straight away for the city of Radom [unclear], I would never have got it, because it first had to be cleared of the Polish population. But now that I had established myself at Nisko on the San, it was a small Jewish state in the making, just as I also started small in Vienna with the Central Office, but all at once they wanted the central offices everywhere too. Nisko was a little village, and I believe the Jews were entitled to a restricted zone of 10 km by 10 km. I simply took all that for myself. The Jews were provided with horses, I had a Jewish veterinarian there, so they had animals too. I also said to Murmelstein, here they must learn to ride and not just sit at a desk. Murmelstein got on a nag there for the first time. I rode myself too, there was not much to be done with vehicles. Murmelstein crawled onto the horse and sat there like a grease spot. I said to him then, well, Murmelstein, how is life on the back of a horse? Well, he was not delighted. But let me say why I am describing all this. If it had been a small piece of ground, then they would not have needed horses. Well, it was a piece of ground of 10 km by 10 km round about. That was the beginning. And I say once again, it would all have happened completely bloodlessly.

Eichmann

For it was to become an autonomous Jewish state in the District of Lublin. How we would then have employed the Jews, I thought about that too. That does not happen overnight either. I can't bring 1 million or 2 million or 500,000 Jews there in transports all at once, they'd die on me or I'd have nothing but epidemics. No, Nisko on the San, that's where the [not typed] specialists were, barracks were to be built there, it was to become a base, an industry was to grow up there. That's why the skilled workers came first, then you would have needed unskilled labor too, but it would have grown the way our big concentration camps grew, they grew to 100,000 and more and there had been nothing there before either. Only it wasn't to become a concentration camp, but an autonomous Jewish state, that one in the District of Lublin, [blotted] as a Protectorate for the German Reich. That was to be a final solution of the Jewish question. And so today I can't clear Poland-Frank of being the initiator at all of this enormous destruction of Jews in his General Government, which he set in motion with his orders and with his people. Because of his short-sightedness and because of his frantic fear that anyone at all might meddle in his area of command. That is the truth.

Questioner

Now when people came out of the General Government and made off eastward, into the Russian-occupied territory, they slipped through a barrier. Who was the barrier under, the OKW or a central office for border-police matters in Berlin, or Poland-Frank?

Questioner

When did Department IV get the border police?

Eichmann

Before the war

Speaker not established

Fine, it doesn't matter further. But I was at the demarcation line several times and you mustn't imagine it was a hermetically sealed territory. Here and there you had a couple of fellows standing at the main crossing points, and then for 10 or 20 kilometers you saw nothing at all, neither of the Russians nor of anyone else. Nisko on the San, for instance, there had been a small Wehrmacht unit there when I came up.

Speaker not established

It lies much further west

Speaker not established

Yes, but you could get into the Russian territory there across the San, it wasn't sealed off so hermetically

Questioner

But the question remains. Was Poland-Frank responsible for it, in which case he had reason not to talk about it at all, or was he not the competent authority?

Eichmann

I think he was competent, because it was his sovereign territory. There was no war on. The Reich Protector was competent too, for his Protectorate borders, so that not everything would come in from the Reich to

Eichmann

buy up the Protectorate, that's also why there were the transit permits and all those tricks. There the Reich Protector was competent, and of course he worked that out in the closest cooperation with the Reich Economics Ministry, because neither of them could have an interest in it.

Questioner

Then on Oct. 17, 1941, at a government session, the following matter is discussed. The city of Lublin counted around 40,000 Jews in 1939. About 12,000 of them have been resettled in the course of time, but almost the same number has moved in again by today

Speaker not established

From the flat hinterland

Questioner

When he says "resettled" there, is that Globocnik, Oct. 1941

Eichmann

That's possible. In any case that was a measure of the General Government's own.

Questioner

And it goes on to say that the Jews who moved in brought scabies and other diseases with them to a high degree, and were therefore carriers of these epidemics. There will only be a clarification of the Jewish question when the full transport away of all Jews can be carried out.

Eichmann

If Poland-Frank believed he could push his Jews off into the Russian-occupied territories, then he ran into the strongest resistance there, from Reich Commissar Rosenberg for the Russian-occupied territories. Nobody would take the Jews off anybody else, what is he supposed to do with them. Hence that drastic expression too, "liquidate them yourselves". That wasn't the RSHA, that was the Rosenberg office that said it, the office he wanted to hang them on. I reckon Heydrich let Poland-Frank be turned down flat. Do your own dirty work.

Questioner

Then at a police session on 18 June 1942 there is discussion of the problem of the resettlement of Jews in Kraków. For carrying out such an action the provision of sufficient transport trains is necessary. Although a train embargo has been ordered for the next 14 days, he has achieved in the negotiations with President [not typed] that trains will be made available from time to time for the transport away of Jews. After the embargo period expires the Jewish action must be carried out on a stronger scale.

Questioner

It is perhaps interesting to this extent, that even with the General Government's high-handedness the transport people still had to be brought in

Eichmann

Yes, you probably wouldn't even believe it when I describe the difficulties I had with the Reich Economics Ministry. It wasn't so simple when some Gauleiter who had gone wild suddenly wanted to evacuate 100,000 Jews. No, first the trains had to be provided. It was a central authority itself, the Reich Transport Ministry, and when they said no, and pointed to other orders

Eichmann

or embargoes, there was nothing at all you could do. There was only one thing you could do, keep kicking them or pestering them until you got a couple of trains, which were only a fraction of what you needed.

Questioner

Did you generally have to do with such embargoes yourself?

Eichmann

Yes, Hauptsturmführer Novak can testify to how that little man was pressed by me, he was to procure transport trains, because I was being pressed from above as well, and Novak was met with a flat no from the Reich Transport Ministry. I often had to step in myself, Günther too, so that we got somewhere

Questioner

Did these train embargoes take up a longer period?

Eichmann

Yes, often 4, 6, 8 weeks

Questioner

Not 3 or 4 months?

Eichmann

No, within 3 or 4 months I did get something after all, but not always the full number of trains. That happened. I remember once when I got nothing at all any more and gave up. Fine, I said to myself, then Heydrich will have to do it himself, and I put up a submission. What came of it I no longer know today.

Questioner

Do you have any idea what sort of average of embargoes was imposed in the course of a year, was it 1, or 2 or 5 or 8 embargoes?

Eichmann

No, I can't give you an average figure. With the beginning of the Russian campaign, that was the time when the rolling stock of the Reich Railway was made available almost without friction, and such requests were decided more often against than in favor

Questioner

Can one say that every larger offensive meant a train embargo for your office?

Eichmann

Yes, you can say that, though it shouldn't quite mean that I couldn't still get 2 or 3 trains now and then.

Questioner

You won't have got any trains before the western offensive

Eichmann

No

Questioner

You won't have got any when the Norway and Denmark business got going either

Eichmann

Yes, difficulties there too

Questioner

So in 1940, for most of 1940 you won't have got any trains, that is May, June, July, up to the end of the campaign in France?

Eichmann

No

Questioner

Then straight afterwards?

Eichmann

Not so straight afterwards. There were still the supply trains then, until I butted in and said, the trains go out full, with food supplies, with ammunition and every sort of equipment, and with soldiers,

Eichmann

They have to come back empty, surely. Yes, Novak told me then, that's how it is, he had heard it from Stange, they get loaded up again in Russia straight away. And it was like that with honey, they had no containers, it stood there in bathtubs, was then loaded into barrels and put on board. The trains brought back all sorts of things from Russia, fodder grain and so on. They all came back loaded.

Questioner

But why would empty trains coming back from Russia interest you?

Eichmann

Well, I could have put those to use somewhere in the Reich, where I had evacuation measures. Because the evacuations inside the Reich only ran from some place or other to Auschwitz, or. That's where I could have used them.

Questioner

So now we have got as far as deep into 1940, the western campaign, then there were the preparations for the leap across to England, which are then given up for good in September. So it's quite possible that you could run normally in September, October, November, December 1940. But you were running relatively little then, only out of the Reich

Eichmann

Yes

Questioner

Then at the beginning of 1941 you went over to transporting Jews from other countries too. But then in April 1941 came the Balkan campaign?

Eichmann

I don't think I really felt that one.

Eichmann

But I got nothing more after the beginning of the Russian campaign. For Operation Barbarossa enormous quantities of ammunition and materiel were brought up to East Prussia months in advance, into the forests. As far as I can remember, I got nothing at all then.

Questioner

Then you probably got nothing at all from May or June 41 until after the first great double battles?

Eichmann

No

Questioner

Did that last out the whole of 41, that you got no transports?

Eichmann

No, a whole year, no, I don't think so

Questioner

So from May possibly to the end of the year?

Eichmann

Yes, toward the end of the year there was something again now and then, that could well be

Questioner

Then Frank says on 2 Aug. 43, with us things stand quite clearly. If somebody asks what will become of the NSDAP, the NSDAP will certainly outlive the Jews. Here we began with 3 1/2 million Jews, and of them only a few [not typed] are left.

Eichmann

Everything was, let's say, emigrated.

Questioner

That's a fine way of putting it.

Questioner

But on 2 August 43 he states that 3 1/2 million Jews [not typed]

Eichmann

That's a figure where he wanted to report a success.

Questioner

Then on 4 March 44 he said, in Krakow, that the military situation was not very good now. When someone mourns after the Jews with tears in his eyes and says, isn't it dreadful what has been done to the Jews, then you have to ask that person whether he still holds the same opinion today. If we had the 2 million Jews in full activity today, and the few men and women in the country, we would no longer be masters of the situation. The Jews are a race that must be wiped out; wherever we catch even one of them, that is the end of him.

Questioner

There he suddenly goes from 3 1/2 million down to 2 million.

Eichmann

That fits with what I already said, reporting success, always dressing the figures up for those above.

Questioner

Both things were said at a gathering of Reich speakers.

Eichmann

The figures could never be dressed up enough for those above.

Questioner

Then it is said here, on the occasion of a picture of the entrance to the ghetto in Krakow, that it was to become a model ghetto.

Eichmann

That was on 20 March 1941. The gas chambers at Belzec, Majdanek, Auschwitz and elsewhere were not yet working. On 13 March 1943 the model ghetto was liquidated as well.

Questioner

On 31 October 41 the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories writes to the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland in Riga and says:

Questioner

Can a Reich Commissioner for the Ostland forbid executions of Jews?

Eichmann

Yes, certainly. It isn't clear to me who in the RSHA could have said that. Second, the Reich Commissioner was responsible for the occupied Russian territories, and the individual commissioners, and nobody in those territories could do as he pleased without the district commissioner giving his consent. If he entered a veto, nothing could be undertaken. This may have been the work of a single task group of the Security Police and the SD, or a task detachment subordinate to a task group. And if they wanted to settle the matter locally there, in accordance with an order of the Reichsführer, it must have been a general order, then this task group chief will have complained in Berlin. But the task group chief did not approach Department IV B 4; at most he approached Müller, though as a rule he approached the Chief of the Security Police and the SD.

Eichmann

Here he will have set out his difficulties and his successes as well. And so it may be right that he turned to the RSHA with a complaint, and that the RSHA then expressed its surprise to the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Russian territories, or something in that form. But from this affair one sees without doubt that, from a certain point at least, when the troops no longer had military operations but the civil administration took over more, that here nobody could do as he pleased any longer, not even on the part of the Security Police, as people sometimes generally believe.

Questioner

Fifteen days later this commissioner answers.

Questioner

I have forbidden the wild executions of Jews in Libau because the manner in which they were carried out could not be justified. I ask to be informed whether your inquiry is to be understood as a directive that all Jews in the Ostland are to be liquidated. Is this to happen without regard to age, sex and economic considerations? It goes without saying that cleansing the Ostland of Jews is an urgent task, but the solution must be brought into line with the needs of the war economy. Neither from the ordinances on the Jewish question in the brown folder, nor from other decrees, have I so far been able to derive such a directive.

Eichmann

The brown folder must be an ordinance from the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Russian territories to the offices under him.

Eichmann

That has nothing to do with us. I know of no brown folder.

Questioner

Then a reply comes to that, on 18 December 41, from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories:

Questioner

Clarity on the Jewish question should meanwhile have been created through oral discussions. Economic interests are to remain fundamentally disregarded in settling the problem. For the rest, you are asked to discuss questions that come up directly with the Higher SS and Police Leader.

Questioner

So that is clear proof that from October until 18 December 41 the RSHA pressed its case with Rosenberg, and that the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland is instructed that the Higher SS and Police Leader is the responsible authority. So the executive power of the Reich Commissioner is thereby restricted absolutely, and that of the Higher SS and Police Leader is widened in its place.

Eichmann

No, the Higher SS and Police Leader is attached to the Reich Commissioner. He can't do anything without the approval of the Reich Commissioner for the occupied [not typed] territories. Krüger in the General Government couldn't do anything either if he didn't have the authorization from the Governor General.

Questioner

The Reich Commissioner for the Ostland writes on 18 June 43 to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories: From General Commissioner Kube.

Eichmann

Yes, the one who was murdered, by a bomb that his Russian servant had placed under his bed.

Questioner

The attached secret reports have come in from General Commissioner Kube, and they deserve quite particular attention. That the Jews are given special treatment needs no further discussion, but that things occur such as those set out in the General Commissioner's reports of 1 June scarcely seems credible. What is [not typed] against that? One need only imagine such occurrences becoming known on the other side and being exploited there. Such propaganda would probably remain without effect only because listeners and readers would not be prepared to believe it.

Questioner

You know nothing about that?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

Then there is a letter here. Page 193.

Questioner

Ambassador Abetz [not typed]

Eichmann

I know nothing about it, but I could piece together roughly how it may have been. Either the Foreign Office acted on its own and instructed Abetz, or the RSHA approached the Foreign Office to say that the matter should now be examined on a question of principle, according to which [not typed] the de-Jewing of France in the occupied territories could be carried out. Thereupon the Foreign Office will have written to Abetz and will have passed these points, the ones you have just raised, to him for handling. For his part Abetz then passed the matter on to the responsible office, the military administration in Paris.

Questioner

Then there is one here to the Commissioner of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD for France and Belgium, Paris office, for the attention of Hauptsturmführer Dannecker.

Questioner

Subject: emigration of emigrants from Spain to America. Enclosed are copies of two confidential reports of the German Consulate General in Casablanca, letters of 25.3. and 8.6.42, transmitted to the Foreign Office, sent for your information. The conditions described in them are to be given attention from there as well, and to be countered so far as possible, so that emigration of that kind is stopped.

Questioner

IV B 4 wrote that to Dannecker. Who signed it? Suhr?

Eichmann

My Regierungsrat. Now what can this be? There is no earlier file on it, it is a new matter.

Eichmann

It can be one of two things. First, emigration was forbidden, or second, it was a matter of property rights, that the Jews dragged a great deal of property with them on this occasion, because it strikes me as odd that Suhr handled the matter and signed it.

Questioner

What interests me is that basically it was all the same to you how the Jews got away.

Eichmann

At what time?

Questioner

On 10 July 1942.

Eichmann

But I had the Reichsführer's order forbidding emigration. Around that time it had not yet been eased; that only came later, when the compensation deals with the Jews grew in scale. At the start of the Russian campaign the Reichsführer had issued a rigid ban on emigration, and it was kept to rigidly. This date seems to me a little too early.

Questioner

What is this?

Eichmann

That is the certifying stamp of my authority, of the RSHA in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, then the national emblem and beneath it Chief of the Security Police and the SD. That is the certifying stamp [blotted] of this letter, which was certified here by a clerk, nothing more.

Questioner

Can you read the signature?

Eichmann

Not properly. In any case one of my police staff.

Questioner

What does by order of Suhr mean? By your order?

Eichmann

No, by order of the RSHA.

Questioner

Do you not know what figures were involved in the emigration of Jews to Casablanca and so on?

Eichmann

No, those can only have been very few. It is not very significant and can be checked at any time. Those were small matters.

Questioner

But how so? There are tremendous numbers, thousands upon thousands.

Eichmann

But this is about Jews of Spanish nationality. How so?

Questioner

No, the emigration by way of Spain to America.

Eichmann

That is something else. Yes, that is the illegal emigration, that is the bolting. As I said before, in every country where measures began, everyone bolted at once across the green border. Yes, those are enormous numbers.

Questioner

Do you now know anything in figures?

Eichmann

Yes, so far as I know the statistician who worked for me worked out roughly the illegal migration, and that was a fixed item in our accounting.

Questioner

But that doesn't come out of his report.

Questioner

Did you study it carefully?

Questioner

Didn't you have any definite figures?

Eichmann

Of course we had figures on the illegal emigration.

Questioner

Yes, but I mean here specifically.

Eichmann

There were thousands, there were tens of thousands, not Jews now, who came out of Holland, Belgium, France, precisely through unoccupied France, into Spain and into Portugal, and into North Africa. Some of them then went on to England, to America and so on. So if that was already the case with people who were politically set against the Germans, and that's perhaps ten thousand, then there's no reason at all to be surprised that it was also ten thousand, perhaps even a hundred thousand Jews.

Questioner

Yes, that's right too.

Eichmann

Because I know from personal experience, Jews I knew who were in the cinema business, and they simply went to unoccupied France. That was very early on, 1941.

Eichmann

I already told you about Hungary. I did nothing to stop this illegal emigration. What got away over Romania, that's [blotted] legion.

Questioner

But wasn't there some figure available from that time?

Eichmann

We estimated it. Didn't I include it in the one thing I drew up statistically? The estimated number of those who emigrated illegally is known to me somewhere. That estimated figure wasn't just guessed at off the cuff, it was calculated somehow. It was a very high number, the illegal emigration overseas.

Questioner

In figures?

Eichmann

Don't you have my handwritten report to hand, with the tabulation?

Eichmann

Now this number of those who emigrated illegally, [not typed] with the aim of staying on the European mainland, and of those who got away to the overseas mainland, that still keeps us very busy in putting the statistics together. We'll come to it automatically.

Questioner

Have you ever heard of an institution called Hadamar?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

In May 1943 Mischlinge, half-Jews, all of them children, are supposed to have been housed there.

Questioner

Where, in which country? Who writes that?

Questioner

A head nurse. Almost all the children were healthy, only a few had skin rashes. The children were all killed by injections.

Questioner

Jews? Half-Jews?

Eichmann

That I don't know.

Eichmann

When I came back from Hungary, around that time, I found a letter from the Personnel Head Office, or was it from the Leadership Head Office. In any case not from the RSHA, so it probably came from the Personnel Head Office, didn't it.

Eichmann

So this letter was now in front of me. It had been sent out to all SS leaders, and enclosed were 5 or 6 or 8 sheets in large format with printed questions. There may have been about 50 to 60 questions. And in this letter it said that the officer being approached would no doubt be astonished to be bothered with such a thing at this time of intense war, at a moment when, by order of the Reich leadership, really only work important to the war was to be carried out and everything else had to wait until the war was over. But it went on to say that the Reichsführer had satisfied himself of the enormous importance of it, and for reasons that were listed one by one, which I can no longer remember today, it was absolutely essential that each officer approached answer these questions exactly and send them back through official channels by a stated date.

Eichmann

Along with me, plenty of other SS leaders will have thrown the thing into a corner of a desk in the first flush of anger when they got it. But one was so used to an order being an order, all the more so with a deadline attached, that after a few days one took the stuff out again and set about filling it in.

Eichmann

On this questionnaire everything was set out, from birth onward, the parents' standing, number of children, married, family, promotion dates, award of the Reichsführer's death's-head ring, dagger, SS sword, work assignment, postings, foreign travel. In short, everything was listed in this questionnaire, so that the SS man filling it in stood there from the cradle to the day he filled it in, naked and bare, so to speak.

Questioner

But how does one explain all that?

Eichmann

Even then one thought about how odd the thing was, but there was hardly any time, and besides it came from one's own organization. Afterwards, though, when I heard that the enemy side was informed about the whole life of every single SS officer, thoroughly and accurately, I began to have misgivings, and I said to myself that in drawing up this questionnaire, without a doubt, and the opposite would have to be proved first, though one can hardly prove it, that here, in drawing up the questionnaire, the SS office that drew it up, I have to say it unfortunately, without a doubt let itself be guided by enemy hands.

Eichmann

There is nothing else, because we had quite different, very important things, and under the order to put everything not essential to the war effort at the back of the queue, those got put at the back too. It was a waste of paper, it was a waste of the staff who then had to work the things through, and it was a theft of every SS officer's time.

Questioner

You mean that a more senior officer then went to the Reichsführer

Eichmann

It can only have happened that some high rank in the Reich leadership made this business sound plausible to the Reichsführer. How, I don't know. Perhaps that the files of the SS officers had been lost in an air raid, and so on, and the Reichsführer let himself be lulled. With the best will in the world I can't picture it any other way. And I tell you quite openly and freely, as a personal assumption of mine, when I heard that all of it had fallen into enemy hands in such good order, I thought to myself that one really ought to look into whether the tattooing of the blood group of the SS men, prepared by one hand, wasn't somehow suggested as well.

Speaker not established

That I would doubt, although I know from my own experience that in April 1945 it was proposed to the Reichsführer that in a rapid operation all 100,000 concentration camp inmates be tattooed, so as to create a certain confusion, so that not every SS man could be recognized by it at once. And that the Reichsführer personally refused. He didn't want to use tricks of that sort.

Questioner

Measures against the Jews in Belgium. On 10 May 1940, that is at the occupation of Belgium by the German Wehrmacht, 85,000 Jews were living in Belgium, most of them in the cities of Antwerp or Brussels. On 28 October the occupying troops ordered the registration of the Jews. Do you remember that

Eichmann

No, but it will have been done that way.

Questioner

Are you aware that no higher figure than 42,000 Jews could be established, although there were 85,000 Jews in Belgium.

Eichmann

Because they had fled. I wanted to tell you right at the start, in Belgium we had no success.

Questioner

Yes, that may well be right, they fled. But it says here that a large part of them managed to evade the registration

Questioner

Now a large part is played by the military governor, General von Falkenhausen, and the civil governor, Ekhardt Reeder.

Eichmann

Yes, I know about him, I had to write to him a few times on Heydrich's instructions.

Questioner

Falkenhausen is well known, of course, a 20 July man

Eichmann

Yes,

Questioner

Reeder always tried to hold his own against the encroachments of the Sipo. Do you remember any concrete cases?

Eichmann

No, not directly. I can only say it because on Heydrich's instructions I had to prepare a draft letter for Reeder a few times, in which he tried to settle in some form the [blotted] complaints he heard from the local Sipo offices in Belgium, and to push the Sipo interests forward.

Questioner

Do you remember that Reeder and Falkenhausen always refused to introduce the Jewish star?

Eichmann

That detail I can't recall, but it would be entirely possible.

Questioner

Reeder and Falkenhausen followed a policy aimed at winning over Belgian public opinion, but in doing so they had no scruples about giving up Jewish foreigners and Jewish refugees. And so Belgium is said to have been the first occupied country from which Jewish refugees were deported, namely 82 Polish Jewish families repatriated from Antwerp, and later a far larger number of Jews originating from Poland, in February and March 42, to be employed in the textile industry of Mo [not typed]

Eichmann

About that I'm also not informed, but it would certainly be possible

Questioner

Do you remember what the Jewish camp in Belgium was called? Marling?

Eichmann

No, I don't recall it.

Questioner

The deportation trains that left Marlin for Auschwitz from 4 August 42 were intended for a mass dispatch of the Jews without distinction of citizenship. And it was worked out by Eichmann's office

Eichmann

That I cannot believe

Questioner

Which even complained later to the Foreign Office that its orders were not being carried out properly. As a result Luther and Rademacher initialled on 2 [blotted] December a sharp protest addressed to Werner Balken, the representative of the Foreign Office with Falkenhausen, which related to the fact that the native Belgian Jews had [blotted] not been registered

Eichmann

Yes, now I understand. I had set myself against being sent foreigners and no Belgian Jews. Because the Jews of foreign citizenship, under the

Eichmann

guidelines had to be exempted anyway, they weren't allowed to be deported at all, unless of course that

Questioner

No, you understand that wrongly. Refugees and stateless Jews were deported, but Belgian Jews were not, and the Eichmann office protested against that.

Eichmann

Well, obviously. If they send me only stateless Jews or only Jews with foreign citizenship, but only so far as that citizenship extended to countries we had occupied and where we had an agreement with the individual governments anyway, or where it was a matter of countries from the east, that is from Poland, those could obviously be deported, they were not exempt from deportation. Naturally it annoyed me when I was sent only such Jews, because my order was to make Belgium free of Jews according to the guidelines issued. So the conduct of Falkenhausen and Reeder was directly contrary to the Reichsführer's order, so I had to act against it, so I had to call in the Foreign Office, and then the Foreign Office intervened in Belgium as described here. I would in no way dispute that the course and the path were like that.

Questioner

Here it is stated that native Belgian Jews arrived at the Auschwitz camp for the first time on 3 August 1943. Until then there had been only one single mass raid in Belgium. On 3 September several hundred Belgian Jews were taken in furniture vans from their homes to the barracks [not typed] at Marlin. The Queen and Cardinal van Roy then intervened, and Reeder ordered the release of these Belgian Jews again. The attempt at a mass raid was not repeated after that.

Eichmann

That may be

Questioner

Further privileged groups, 1,800, were taken in 1944 to Theresienstadt, Bergen Belsen and other German camps.

Eichmann

That I no longer know about. 1944, I don't need to know that at all any more, because for a large part of that year I was no longer serving in Berlin

Questioner

Are you aware that the Belgian population helped the Jews a great deal?

Eichmann

Yes. Individual cases I no longer know, but I still remember that the Belgian population stood very much on the side of the Jews.

Questioner

In any case, in the trial against Reeder and Falkenhausen that concluded in 1951, the Brussels court took the guilt of the two of them in the deportation of 25,000 Jews as proven, but did not hold them responsible for the later tortures and killings.

Questioner

Yes, nothing further is said about Belgium, and you don't remember anything either?

Eichmann

I'd be interested to know what the man from the Sipo was called.

Questioner

It isn't in here at all

Eichmann

Then there probably wasn't anyone down there. It was a very thin affair in Belgium. The only positive thing I can still remember is that I repeatedly had to write letters to Reeder for Heydrich, which he then signed.

Questioner

Now we come to a country that kept its monarchy, its neutrality and its constitution despite German occupation. Denmark. Here the resistance against the pressure of Himmler and the SS was 90% successful.

Eichmann

That's true as well.

Questioner

In 1942 the American press reported that the King of Denmark had threatened to abdicate if the Nuremberg Laws were introduced by the German side

Eichmann

That I don't know about

Questioner

Here it is claimed that Rademacher served as an informer for the SS in the diplomatic corps

Eichmann

That is not correct in any case, in no way at all. Rademacher comes from the diplomatic career, he was, I believe, a legation counsellor first class

Questioner

The first German envoy was called Cecil von Rendefink

Eichmann

I never had anything to do with him.

Questioner

On the basis of this experience with the King, Rademacher gave him the instruction to find a suitable opportunity to point out that it would be wise if Denmark prepared itself in good time for a European settlement of the Jewish question at the end of the war at the latest.

Questioner

Are you aware that in 1942 King Christian, when the Jewish star was to be introduced, declared that he would be the first to wear the Jewish star?

Eichmann

No, I don't know about that.

Questioner

Do you remember that Himmler, when he wasn't getting through with the normal measures that had worked in every country, ordered the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller in September 42 to include the names of Jews in a list of communists and Danish resistance leaders whom he intended to arrest

Eichmann

That is completely new to me. I never heard it. I also had nothing to do with it

Speaker not established

But where did the author get these things?

Eichmann

That is completely new to me

Questioner

Rendefink's successor was the famous K. W. Best. Did you have dealings with him?

Eichmann

Yes, under Best the Reichsfuehrer, or Heydrich, demanded that the Jews of Danish citizenship be brought into Reich territory. That went back and forth, with the result that through the office of the Commander of the Security Police and SD, Dr. Rudolf Mildner, and I visited him once in Copenhagen, I believe 2,000 or 1,500 Danish Jews were then shipped out. Now on this crossing I believe a few Jews also jumped into the water and killed themselves. The steamer arrived, but where they went first I don't know.

Questioner

You have the number wrong. There were only 202 Jews on the steamer.

Eichmann

Only 202? Possibly. In any case I then had to house these Jews in Theresienstadt on the Reichsfuehrer's orders. And then Denmark demanded the Jews back again. I traveled to Copenhagen once to discuss the matter there with the Commander of the Security Police and SD, so that I could give Mueller and Heydrich a proper oral report here and the next line of march could be settled. When I got back it was more or less the case that these Jews had to be sent back again. A few people died of natural causes, but only a few, and then of course the ones who jumped from the deck into the water.

Questioner

It is explained here that Himmler expected he could count on K. W. Best, because Best had earlier belonged to the Secret State Police. But Best, who had left the Gestapo to escape Heydrich's clutches, was freed from his fears for his career by the death of his worst enemy [blotted].

Eichmann

I heard that once before. That was higher politics. I couldn't see through it, I couldn't make sense of it.

Questioner

The author of this book defends Best a great deal.

Eichmann

I can well believe it. He attacks Heydrich, naturally.

Questioner

At one point he writes that Best wished to lead a quiet life as Reich Plenipotentiary in a half-neutral country, and that this was why the report he sent to Ribbentrop in January 1943 was quite bold. Best proposed [off the sheet]

Eichmann

Yes, in Denmark there was no Jewish question at all. Whoever put the flea in the Reichsfuehrer's ear about de-Jewing Denmark must have been a bad adviser, because these few Jews in Denmark, who had to be hunted for with a magnifying glass, caused the German government more trouble and headaches than if a thousand times that many had been shipped away.

Questioner

There were 6,500 Jews in Denmark altogether

Eichmann

I'm saying there was no Jewish question in Denmark.

Questioner

There were 1,350 refugees from Germany, who up to then had been protected by the Danish government. Now Best made the proposal that if German citizenship were given back to these refugees, the Danes would no longer be able to exercise that protection. But Best, who was an excellent lawyer, knew for certain that this was not possible under German law.

Eichmann

No, that didn't work. Now it works again. I read in the paper the other day that all those Jews who lost German citizenship through my department can now apply to get German citizenship back, because in the meantime a law has come out in West Germany that makes this legal repatriation possible. But that doesn't happen wholesale either. An individual application has to be made, so that the incorporation into the German body is also carried out individually. Only now, so long after the war, is it possible. But I already said about Denmark: first, it had no Jewish question at all. Second, we never intended to poke into it. Third, whoever inspired the Reichsfuehrer in this business was a bad adviser, and I may assume that this adviser acted either out of stupidity or on purpose. Fifth, it is also possible that the Reichsfuehrer came to it on his own, out of ignorance that in Denmark there really were only a few miserable thousand Jews. And however hard I examine myself as to whether and how far I might have played an initiating role here, I have to answer in the negative, if only because with the tremendous mess that came out of this business I would inevitably have caught something dreadful over the head from some office or other, whether the head of Office IV, or the Chief of the Security Police and SD, or the Reichsfuehrer, since I was after all the lowest rank who ate along at this whole lump. It would have been very cheap to give me one over the roof here, but because I stood so completely apart from any spark of ignition, they weren't able to do it, and with that I have amply proved how inactive my department was in this field. Naturally, once the basic order was given, the instruction, I came in on it, then I had to work the matter.

Questioner

They waited for an event on the strength of which one could move somewhat more sharply against the Jewish affairs, and this event was unrest brought on by a strike of the dock workers in Odense.

Questioner

The thing was set off by the Swedish government passing on to the soldiers stationed in Norway the right to use the Swedish railways. [not typed] There was unrest and there were arrests, and on August 9 the Danish prime minister threatened to resign if the Danish courts had to open criminal proceedings against those arrested. Martial law was then declared, and after that the Danish resistance movement blew up the German-occupied Vorum hall. The strike then grew stronger, so that the next day all the Danish shipyards were on strike. Then the government [not typed] resigned and General Hanneken declared martial law for all of Denmark. Danish government business was then in practice carried on by the ministerial directors, standing in for the ministers. Now Best thought this was a favorable opportunity for the deportations, and on September 8 he asked for police reinforcements and help from the Wehrmacht. Are you informed about all these matters, do you know or remember anything?

Eichmann

No, this business was finally too unimportant for it to have interested me much at the time, let alone for me to be able to bring up any recollection of it today.

Questioner

On September 18 Rolf Guenther arrived in Copenhagen with a delegation from [not typed] and Eichmann's office. The Commander of the Security Police in Copenhagen, SS-Standartenfuehrer Rudolf Mildner, saw at once what the intentions were and that they would then be laid at his door. He flew to Berlin to get Kaltenbrunner to call the people back, but had no success with it. In the meantime Best tried to cover himself on both sides. On the evening the raid took place he promised Swe. to pass on the King's wish that the Jews in Denmark be interned.

Eichmann

Yes, Guenther went to Copenhagen and set some sort of operation in motion there. What it was and how, I don't know either. I believe he got the transport on its feet. Doesn't the author write that?

Questioner

There was a transport, and it was explained that the soldiers who had been interned should be let out and the Jews locked up instead, to show the Danish soldiers that they were not the enemy but that the Jews were the enemy. It was also proposed that for every act of sabotage 50 to 100 Jews should be deported. Finally Best assured Ribbentrop that the deportations would begin as soon as the steamer Wartheland arrived in Copenhagen, and he complains about the lack of help from Hanneken.

Eichmann

Yes, they must have brought up quite a lot of guns to get those few

Eichmann

Jews out of Denmark

Questioner

Aren't you aware that they even wanted to send Gruppenfuehrer Berger to Denmark to carry the thing through?

Eichmann

No, I'm not aware of that. There seems to have been some office that had a quite particular interest in getting these few Jews transported out of Denmark.

Questioner

Berger was just the fellow with the idea of a Greater Germanic Reich. Might he not have hit on the idea that all the Scandinavian countries should be made Nordic-Germanic?

Eichmann

Possible, that it came from there.

Questioner

Because the idea of a Greater Germanic Reich comes from Berger.

Eichmann

There must have been some office, because we ourselves laughed at the enormous effort that was needed for those few Jews, who were then sent back again on top of it. But we, my department, we washed our hands in innocence, because we did nothing other than transport, orders are orders, and transport back again according to orders.

Questioner

Now this raid had the following non-success. 284 Jews were arrested, of whom 50 were released again as privileged Jews, and only 202 Jews were brought onto this steamer Wartheland. Occasional arrests raised this number to 470, but more than 6,000 full Jews and 1,376 half Jews were smuggled across the border into Sweden.

Eichmann

Well, that was always the reaction to our appearance.

Questioner

Best was less successful in his efforts to wrest a few Danish Jews from the clutches of Eichmann's office. There was, for example, a 102-year-old Jewish woman, and Best applied, after she had come to Theresienstadt, that this woman be released and sent back to lift the mood.

Eichmann

Yes, I recall it, and that was done.

Questioner

No, it wasn't done. It says here in a report [not typed] of October 25, that the RSHA absolutely disapproved of it, because it would make an impression of weakness among the Jews if some of them were brought back to Copenhagen.

Eichmann

But they were all given back again.

Questioner

There's nothing about that in this book.

Eichmann

But I would have let myself be crucified for it, that these few Danish Jews had to march back again

Eichmann

But they did come back after all. I still remember how angry I was about that idiot who sent these old people on the journey at all.

Questioner

That was probably Guenter's operation?

Eichmann

It doesn't matter, even if it was Guenter, he got his knuckles rapped just the same, because I still remember quite exactly the filthy mess and the dressings-down there were over sending these old sacks on the journey at all. With regard to Denmark we did nothing but disgrace ourselves, and I was always against sticking a thorn into a country for nothing whatever. It isn't worth it at all, over a couple of thousand Jews you can count on one hand.

Questioner

Do you remember that the Swedish envoy asked that Sweden be allowed to take at least the children?

Eichmann

That is not known to me, but it would lie absolutely in the nature of the intervention of that time.

Questioner

It was naturally rejected. And indeed by the Foreign Office.

Questioner

Later all these deported Danish Jews came to Theresienstadt.

Eichmann

Yes, I still know that, much to Eppstein's annoyance.

Questioner

And otherwise you know nothing more about Denmark.

Eichmann

No. Even today I can still be annoyed at the idiocy of deporting those old sacks back then.

Eichmann

But said today, in the sum of it all, where planing is done, shavings fall.

Eichmann

But I must nevertheless add that I am not certain Guenter carried out this operation with the old people. Perhaps it was another idiot after all.

Questioner

Is there anything else you remember about Norway?

Eichmann

There I know practically even less than about Denmark.

Questioner

Are you aware that there was a Jewish reception camp at Berg near D onsberg [not typed]?

Eichmann

No. Norway is a black cloth, I know nothing at all about it.

Questioner

Do you not recall that in Norway all German measures against Jews were carried out?

Eichmann

How many Jews were there?

Questioner

In Oslo 1,700, there were very few.

Eichmann

You must excuse me if, when I can often remember 20,000 or 30,000 Jews only very vaguely, I then no longer remember 1,000 or 2,000 Jews at all.

Questioner

Is the name Korherr known to you?

Questioner

Because a Dr. Korherr reported on Jewish matters to Himmler?

Eichmann

Unless that was the statistician? No.

Eichmann

Another Korherr I did not have.

Questioner

In a general raid only 725 Jews were discovered at all [blotted], and this raid was carried out mainly by members of the Qu. [not typed] Part [off the sheet].

Eichmann

Yes, perhaps it is the statistician after all?

Eichmann

Yes, that can only be the statistician.

Questioner

Do you recall that a transport took place with the steamer Donau of the Norddeutscher Lloyd from Belgen to a German port with the destination Auschwitz?

Eichmann

No, I have no memory of that at all.

Questioner

A second group was then deported in March 1943. Only 43 Jews deported from Norway survived the war.

Eichmann

I do not mean to say, when I do not remember, that I hold it to be untrue. No, I simply do not recall it any more. Just as I cannot grasp that anyone interfered in these countries at all.

Questioner

Do you know nothing of the negotiations, in the Norwegian case too, about the applications of the Swedish government stating that it was prepared to take in the Norwegian Jews?

Eichmann

No, I can no longer remember these Nordic matters. I can only condemn that anyone poked into them at all.

Questioner

It is also interesting that Herr Weizsaecker rejected precisely these applications of the Swedish government, and reported on it to Ribbentrop besides, and declared that such a plan had no prospect.

Eichmann

Weizsaecker, the man of the 20th of July. Now that lies entirely along the line.

Questioner

This Swedish proposal to take in Jews must surely be known to you somehow. It must have matched your original picture of what you wanted regarding emigration, and now there were the many difficulties with the receiving countries. It must have suited your wish, and you must surely remember it?

Eichmann

Yes, but the number was so small.

Questioner

Yes, but it is about this matter. And I can well imagine, because it matched your original picture of what you wanted, that you will remember this matter, because precisely in that period, when nothing at all could be done with any government,

Questioner

that this proposal must have been like a flower in the desert in your eyes. That was 1943.

Eichmann

Even if that were so, at that time the ban of the Reichsfuehrer stood. It would not have been possible at all.

Questioner

Yes, but the Reichsfuehrer ban was also such that not entirely. Look at the Hungarian case [off the sheet], and I seem to remember dimly that you did speak to me about it once, and that it was quite clear to you at the time, and that it was precisely this intervention by Weizsaecker that shot right across the efforts which your own office supported. And that your office then did not want to start a war with the all-powerful Under Secretary of State. So in that sense, for me to remember something would not be uninteresting.

Questioner

You mean that Weizsaecker set himself against Jews marching out of Norway to Sweden, and against the Danish Jews too, whom Sweden wanted to take in. Against all that Weizsaecker set himself?

Questioner

Yes, the author writes here: in agreement with his conduct otherwise, Weizsaecker refused to discuss the question at all.

Questioner

Because we have some other cases too where Weizsaecker was always against the Jews. In the Italian case we then see that he did something different.

Eichmann

So Weizsaecker was against it, and so against our intentions. Good, one can put it that way. It was all the same to us at that moment where they went. We had to make Norway free. If they marched off into neutral Sweden, that would have suited us. If they had gone a few years earlier we would have been glad, or if Sweden could have taken 30 or 40,000 off our hands a few years earlier we would have been glad. We would even have paid for it.

Questioner

So one could already say here that Weizsaecker, if it is true that these Jews came from Norway to Auschwitz, which I do not know, if that is true [blotted], then certainly a part of them will not have survived the war, perhaps all of them. But in any case Weizsaecker would then have set himself up here as the murderer of the Jews. For we would have let them go.

Questioner

That is what you meant? That is right.

Questioner

The first time the enquiry came from Sweden asking to be allowed to take the children, Stenkraft set himself against it.

Questioner

Why?

Questioner

Now another matter. Up to now it has emerged from our study that the registration of the Jews in the Reich territory and in all occupied territories, and their transport away, was the sole and exclusive field of work of your office.

Eichmann

Registration and transport? No, that is not quite right. In very many countries the registration was not my task.

Questioner

You mean the bringing together. Yes, that is right, there you are correct.

Eichmann

I mean transport now.

Questioner

But that has nothing to do with registration. The deportation, the transport.

Questioner

That was exclusively your field?

Eichmann

Yes indeed.

Questioner

Norway belonged to the occupied territory. You will not have transported people by ship every day?

Questioner

No, so that was already an extraordinary matter, something that fell outside the normal daily business. You ought to be able to remember that?

Eichmann

[blotted] Denmark yes, because a couple of old people jumped into the water on me there. Norway I cannot recall. If Sweden had taken them in, we would have handed them over gladly. If there was shooting against it, then surely only in order to make further difficulties for us.

Questioner

How does the matter between Norway and Denmark look in time, what was done first?

Eichmann

They ran at roughly the same time.

Questioner

That cannot be. Is no date given for when the Donau sailed, for instance?

Questioner

She sailed on 26 November 1942.

Eichmann

Now if the Danes sailed before the Norwegians, then Weizsaecker will have laughed up his sleeve and said to himself, now I will play the same filthy trick on them with the Norwegians. For the difficulties with the Danish Jews were unbelievable. One can hardly believe that the few [off the sheet] hundred Jews from Denmark caused us more trouble than the whole Hungarian evacuation.

Speaker not established

[off the sheet] but the status was quite different with the Danish government.

Eichmann

[off the sheet] I have said it many times, I do not know who the unlucky fellow can have been who bumped into this wasps' nest, which did not interest us in the slightest in terms of numbers, because in the Scandinavian states there was never a Jewish question.

Eichmann

[off the sheet] and if the Norwegians came after the Danes, then Weizsaecker was able to play his [handwriting] game here to the greatest perfection, and then it fits exactly that he sabotaged the taking over of the Jews from Norway by Sweden, in order to make fresh difficulties for us. Nothing else

Questioner

You never had anything to do with Reich Commissioner [too faint]?

Eichmann

Yes, he was written to fairly often. I had to draft a few letters for the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, addressed to [too faint].

Questioner

He was a Gauleiter?

Eichmann

Yes, he was Reich Commissioner for Norway.

Eichmann

Yes, I remember. I flew back from Copenhagen to Berlin at the time, it was a four-engined Condor, I think. It was one of my trips up there to have a look at what was going on, and travelling in the same aircraft was Gauleiter [blotted], who turned up at the Copenhagen airport, and the military commander Hanecken appeared at the airfield as well, to see the Reich Commissioner off officially. On that occasion I saw these two gentlemen, but I spoke with neither the one nor the other. Because at that time I had no wish at all to talk to anybody, since I had a nasty stink on my hands that other people had cooked up, and now I had to work out how to get it settled and cleared up again.

Eichmann

What did I discuss with Mildner in Copenhagen at the time? Well, first of all I looked into whether it was true that some of them had jumped from the ship into the water, whether it was true that the Jews really were that old. The birth registers had to be checked, and all these things, and all these things I had to discuss with Mildner on the spot. I, who never had to deal with individual cases, now had to concern myself with this here. That is why Denmark still rings horribly in my ears afterwards. Apparently Mildner was also very glad that he finally had a desk officer from the Reich Security Main Office in front of him, because I can imagine that Mildner, that his [not typed] had melted away under him too, since he was sitting in Copenhagen hearing nothing for days on end and probably trembling for his position and his life, after the world press

Questioner

He did go to see Kaltenbrunner.

Eichmann

Mildner had been [blotted]. I still remember

Questioner

Yes, because of the arrival of your people.

Eichmann

I did come up later to put the matter in order.

Eichmann

and he had been amiable and friendly, and the stones fell from his heart by the hundredweight, that he now had someone in front of him who came from the

Eichmann

central authority, to which he was answerable in his reporting, and to which he could now hand over everything, so to speak. And I then tried to put the matter in order, and I believe I can recall that the Jews then travelled back. I made that proposal.

Questioner

The author does not give that here.

Eichmann

I cannot swear to it, but I think that is how it was.

Questioner

Now there is another matter, that not only Weizsaecker but also the Reich Commissioner was opposed to emigration, or to the Swedes taking over the Norwegians. In 1943 he complained that the Swedish consulate was very liberal in issuing naturalization certificates.

Eichmann

Yes, Sweden was known for taking these people very much under its wing.

Questioner

Otherwise you have nothing further to say about the Scandinavian business?

Eichmann

No, I have said everything there is to say about it in principle.

Questioner

And you had no further conferences with Best?

Eichmann

Yes, I called on Best too in Copenhagen. I cannot now place this conversation with Best, because I cannot even see the room any more. Certainly I went there with Mildner. I can only give it back as a feeling. Best will perhaps have said to me, well, now see what you have got out of it, I said so right away.

Eichmann

And I will have said, Gruppenfuehrer, it was an order of the Reichsfuehrer, we had to carry it out. And I believe I can recall that the first proposal to bring the Jews back to Denmark came from Best, because it was the only alternative still left to us to save face, since too much nonsense had been committed for us to have been able to maintain the situation as it stood.

Eichmann

I myself supported the return, which at first struck me as something monstrous, something that had never happened before. And I believe I can recall that the Jews from Denmark, apart from the few individual cases who died of natural causes, actually were taken back again. In the meantime I had housed the Jews very well and properly in Theresienstadt, to the sorrow and distress of Dr. Eppstein, so that they would be preserved for me and would therefore stand under my control.

Eichmann

I have nothing more to say about it.

Questioner

We have discussed several times that the Italians acted as protectors of the Jews in Greece, Croatia and in the part of France occupied by the Italians. From September 1943 the picture naturally changed, since Italy was in practice treated as an occupied country.

Questioner

What measures in Italy can you remember that were taken from your side, from your office?

Eichmann

Did I not send Bosshammer down there?

Questioner

The name does not appear here.

Eichmann

Was he not in Verona?

Questioner

In Verona what comes up is Sandberger and the unavoidable Dannecker.

Eichmann

Italy was just as much a failure as Belgium, as the Nordic states. It was of no interest to me. I can tell you that I remember nothing whatever about Italy.

Questioner

Jewish sources give 15,000 Jews who perished, out of 57,000 in all. In Italy no more than 57,000 Jews, and the 15,000 are supposed to have all been deported, to Germany?

Speaker not established

Yes

Eichmann

I will not deny it, but I cannot recall anything.

Questioner

Are you aware that in Rome, when Rome was occupied by German troops, 8,000 Jews fell into German hands?

Eichmann

No

Questioner

Are you not aware that Himmler, in this case your work, intended to deport these 8,000 Jews to Auschwitz?

Eichmann

No, what year is it supposed to have been?

Questioner

In September 1943, after the occupation of Italy.

Questioner

When the plan came up to deport these 8,000 Jews found in Rome, on 30 September the well-known Bishop [too faint], director of the German church in Rome, drew the attention of the city commandant General Stahlem to the fact that the Pope might possibly speak out against the deportations. Whereupon the latter decided not to carry out Himmler's orders without the express agreement of the Foreign Office.

Questioner

Do you remember this matter?

Eichmann

No, nothing at all.

Questioner

Now Weizsaecker turns up again. He was by then already ambassador to the Holy See, and Weizsaecker and his deputy always stressed that he had always warned the Jews about deportations and the like

Questioner

What is certain is that he passed a copy of Bishop Judall's protest to the commander of the Security Police, to Obersturmbannfuehrer Kappler. And Kappler believed this warning came from the Pope himself, and the whole thing was a bluff by Judall.

Eichmann

I recall nothing of that.

Questioner

Then Weizsaecker writes to the Foreign Office that the Pope, although by all accounts pressed from many sides, had not let himself be carried away into any demonstrative statement against the deportation of the Jews.

Eichmann

No, I cannot remember anything.

Questioner

Now it is stressed again and again that the Jews were warned in good time to look for hiding places, that many were kept hidden in monasteries, that many fled to the south, which was already occupied by the Allies.

Eichmann

At what time was all this?

Questioner

In the autumn of 1943.

Eichmann

And when did the deportations start rolling?

Questioner

They started rolling in October. Then it says fewer than 1,000 of them were arrested on 18 October, of whom 615 arrived in Auschwitz on 22 October.

Eichmann

That may well be right, I cannot remember it any more.

Questioner

And from then on the Jews were said to be like hunted game in Italy. A chief witness, Max [not typed], reports that altogether 1,127 Jews were brought from Rome to Auschwitz and that only 15 of them returned.

Questioner

Can you also remember the shooting of the 350 hostages?

Eichmann

I got that from the newspaper, I had nothing to do with it. Only long after the war did I learn of it through the Kappler trial.

Questioner

Are you aware that after the occupation of Italy Jews were arrested at Lago Maggiore and drowned there by the police and the SS?

Eichmann

No, I know nothing of it.

Questioner

Occurrences of this kind were rather frequent. But this irregular murdering was then replaced by a systematic extermination. At the beginning of October Martin Sandberger, formerly commander of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, took over the direction of the Gestapo in Verona, while the apparently indispensable Dannecker became Jewish commissioner for Italy, in October 1943.

Eichmann

I cannot recall anything. Perhaps it is possible that I remember nothing about it because the whole business was such a trifle that I did not concern myself with the whole thing at all, and my permanent deputy took this matter off my hands. Denmark was a trifle too, but it turned into an international stink.

Questioner

Now, a trifle is perhaps not the right word, because transports rolled to Auschwitz. Ten thousand alone have been established.

Eichmann

Oh well, it was a trifle after all, and so it will be, because I can remember nothing at all about it. Guenter took all the small matters off my hands.

Questioner

Here it says of one transport, a transport that Eichmann possibly organized himself, from which it follows that he was in northern Italy at the time?

Eichmann

No, I was never down there. Never, never.

Questioner

It is claimed here that 600 Jews, some of them from Tripoli, were deported on 22 February 1944, and that of these only 126 men and women survived the selections at Birkenau. And of this transport it is claimed that it was possibly organized by Eichmann himself.

Eichmann

No. February 1944, that was when I was sitting in the woods 60 or 80 kilometers east of Berlin. I had been in Italy privately at Easter 1939, and then I was not in Italy again until 1950, and I drove through Italy in 1937 when I came back from Egypt [off the sheet]

Questioner

Does the camp [not typed] mean anything to you, where the Italian Jews were concentrated, and as a second camp [not typed] near Bozen?

Eichmann

No, nothing. Only in 1945 was I at the Brenner, but on the Austrian side [off the sheet]

Questioner

The transports from Gris went to Mauthausen, 1944.

Eichmann

I must tell you that I hardly recall it, and also that in the year 194 [off the sheet] I was hardly acting as head of the section.

Questioner

Were you told that Jewish transports had to turn back because they could not pass the Brenner on account of the Allied bombing raids?

Eichmann

No, I know nothing of that.

Questioner

Did you have anything to do with the solution of the Jewish question in Trieste?

Eichmann

No, I had nothing to do with that either. In 1944 I was hardly acting at all. My permanent deputy had to do all of this, not I, and that is why I am not informed about any of these things. Besides, Guenter was not obliged to report everything to me, since in any case he was not permitted to ask a decision of me.

Questioner

And did Globocnik approach you in any way as Higher SS and Police Leader in Trieste?

Eichmann

No, never. He conducted no correspondence with me. Perhaps with IV B 4, that may be, but I know nothing of it.

Questioner

And in Rome with Kappler.

Eichmann

No, that neither. I only know that Kappler was an important man for Mueller. How, why, for what reason, that I do not know. I only kept hearing the name Kappler.

Questioner

Good, then let us conclude.

Questioner

Can you tell us something about the measures that were taken against the Jews in Holland?

Eichmann

In Holland we had SS-Brigadefuehrer Harster as Commander of the Sipo and SD. Then in The Hague there was a Regierungsrat, Zoepf, who had a very close personal connection with Harster. Somehow it was then decided at a higher level that this Regierungsrat Zoepf was to handle Jewish matters in Holland, and that for this purpose he was to consult with the responsible section of the RSHA.

Questioner

Was there not another colleague as well, Aus der Fuenden?

Eichmann

Yes, I remember, Aus der Fuenden. I believe he was Zoepf's deputy. He was a very simple fellow, and not blessed with intellectual gifts even in the slightest. I came to know Zoepf somehow, whether it was that he came to the RSHA and introduced himself there as the appointed adviser on Jewish affairs in the occupied Netherlands territories. At any rate he was there, and he drew his directives from my section.

Eichmann

Since Harster's time was very much taken up by the radio game he was running with England, and by the resulting number of enemy parachute agents he had secured after they dropped, Harster had little time to commit himself personally to the solution of the Jewish question. So Zoepf had a fairly free hand, and I know that Zoepf often went directly to the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands territories, Seising, and also to the economics minister there, Fischboeck. But Zoepf also had Dutch bodies at his disposal that were furnished with executive powers.

Eichmann

Zoepf was an extraordinarily soft man, distinguished by one thing only: his official zeal, his official punctuality and his official loyalty. In the period when he was acting alone, Zoepf produced more difficulties than practical results. Numerical quotas were agreed on, in the order of 20,000 to 50,000, and the practical end result was as a rule not even 10 percent. I myself had to travel to The Hague some five or six times, to keep pushing matters along through Zoepf and through the Commander, and to stiffen their backbones, and in that way to set them again on the offices that were responsible for the legislative underpinning and for the executive orders.

Eichmann

And no sooner had a figure of 20,000 to 40,000 been settled than I could establish with certainty that in reality only 10 to 15 percent were being transported away. So it dragged on a long time, to transport away the few thousand Jews from Holland.

Questioner

110,000 Jews out of 140,000 Jews altogether were transported away from Holland [off the sheet]

Eichmann

That many, though, 110,000 Jews. Well, I did say that I had to go to The Hague five or six times to keep pushing the matter along. So it did have its success after all.

Eichmann

Now I already told you, my efforts in Holland to sabotage the interventions extended from the [not typed] to the point of contempt for death [handwriting] Jewish [blotted] all the way to the mighty, in the old dusty but quite proper and respectable Hotel De [handwriting], and to journeys to Amsterdam, where Zoepf, by virtue of the powers of his chief, namely the Commander of the Sipo and SD, had a case officer there who had been wrested from the Commander of the Sipo. A Hauptsturmfuehrer, his name escapes me. He had been a very clever and very experienced detective, who was far ahead of Zoepf, and who to me, to my eyes at that time, was also the right man for Amsterdam, who grasped the right moment and set the right police measures in motion, and who also had the right successes.

Questioner

It was Lages.

Eichmann

Yes, right, Lages, that is what he was called. Hauptsturmfuehrer Lages.

Eichmann

In conclusion I can state that the BDS always showed the greatest readiness to serve, that Regierungsrat Zoepf was in no way behind him, and that the man who controlled the center of Jewish life in Holland, namely Amsterdam, was in my eyes always the right man as well. But once Zoepf had, and this lay in his character, worked out the legal underpinning for Holland and forced it through the official channels with many difficulties, from that moment on Zoepf was no longer the suitable man, because practice avoided him. He could carry legislative matters through, he could conduct negotiations reasonably well, but a man of practice he was not. And so I soon sent him up a whole string, so to speak, of dispensable advisers on Jewish affairs who had become available. Of these I remember the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Hauptsturmfuehrer Brunner, and I believe Hauptsturmfuehrer Burger as well.

Questioner

Aus der Fuenden?

Eichmann

Yes, I believe I sent him too. He does not come from Harster's office. One day Mueller told me I should place Aus der Fuenden somewhere. Aus der Fuenden had done his crash course with me, running through all the subject areas, and then I sent him up to Zoepf as support and as an aide, because Zoepf was already complaining about staffing difficulties in any case.

Eichmann

Novak was in The Hague for a time as well.

Eichmann

Now, out of this mass on offer that I sent up there, I would not want to hold to one or another of them, and here too I would like to include Novak and [off the sheet] Bosshammer.

Questioner

Bosshammer carried out some deportations in Italy in 1945.

Eichmann

So Bosshammer was in Italy after all. Then he can hardly have been in Holland as well, so I did remember rightly.

Eichmann

Now the game up there was played in such a way that Zoepf, after I sent reinforcements, had only to smooth the paths for settling the theoretical matters, by way of his BDS to the individual desk officers of the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands territories, and to the Higher SS and Police Leader in that territory, Rauter.

Eichmann

I still remember very clearly how the difficulties were once again very great, and difficulties were being made from the Dutch side, but that did not happen too often. We had far more difficulties from our own German economic offices, because they feared a handicap to the Dutch economic quota. And I know for certain that once, if not indeed twice, I was with Harster at Rauter's, and had to give an address to Rauter on the instructions of my chief. The address had as its theme that the patience of the RSHA was now nearing exhaustion, that we had done everything, that everything had now been settled in terms of personnel, and that it was now demanded with urgency that the solution of the question in the occupied Netherlands area finally be solved.

Eichmann

And I will probably have had a special program for Rauter, which I handed over to him, broken down point by point, so that he needed only to proceed according to the individual points in order to distribute his corresponding orders, and, if he did not yet have the corresponding powers, to obtain the individual powers so as to comply with the individual points I set out for him. Rauter was a very decent, pleasant person. We got on very well. He was the second of the people who set up the Styrian Heimatschutz, in contrast to [blotted] in Austria. The first was called Dr. [blotted], who had originally left the Heimwehr in order to set up the Heimatschutz in Austria, and Rauter was his subordinate, his military adviser. Out of the national Heimatschutz, in contrast to the Christian Social Heimwehr, these leaders were taken over into the SS, and so Rauter advanced into the SS.

Questioner

Rauter joined the party as early as 1932.

Eichmann

This whole outfit, the Heimatschutz, was national. The Heimwehr had gone through the same development and shaping as the German-Austrian front fighters' association had gone through some time earlier,

Eichmann

I brought up this little digression to explain why Rauter and I got along so well. I came from Linz, he [blotted] was Steyr, so the good relationship was there from the start, because for once you were quite glad when you could speak in dialect. You didn't feel you had to be so very careful and watch every word, so in a conference you could also make the negotiation a little easier for yourself, and as far as I can still remember, the negotiations with Rauter [blotted] were very proper and also very successful.

Eichmann

Then after my negotiations I drove back again and crawled away like a spider into its web and waited for the things that were supposed to come. I marched off with the figures they gave me, took Novak in hand in Berlin, threw the figures at his head, chased him off to the Reich Transport Ministry, and his job was now to get the necessary trains within the time I had agreed, to draw up the timetable, and then the trains had to roll. And they rolled, and there were many, many difficulties, where they were then suddenly broken off abruptly, and I then had to overturn the timetable again, much to the sorrow of the Reich Transport Ministry, because they had to put together not only this one timetable order in some form, but hanging on it was a whole string of other timetable conferences and timetable orders, so that they had to rearrange their whole structure, which was now geared to this entire train cycle.

Eichmann

That was very, very often the case in Holland or around Holland.

Questioner

So altogether you were at Rauter's two or three times?

Eichmann

Once for certain, perhaps twice, perhaps three times as well, I don't know.

Questioner

But only at his office?

Eichmann

Yes, only at his office.

Questioner

And you never found with Rauter that he did want a certain moderation of this evacuation program?

Eichmann

Certainly, because Rauter was one of the offices that had certain misgivings, and when I went to Rauter with Harstner, it was not a matter of paying a friendly visit here, but of dispelling these misgivings.

Questioner

Do you still remember the kind of misgivings he expressed.

Eichmann

It was now very difficult in this country to deport Jews with Dutch citizenship. The Dutchman knows no Jew with Dutch citizenship, he knows a Dutchman, or he knows someone who is not a Dutchman. And if there is a Dutchman, then the other Dutchman makes difficulties when another nation wants to go after that Dutchman.

Questioner

But you did deport Jews with Dutch citizenship after all

Eichmann

Yes, naturally, but people did resist that at first.

Questioner

And Rauter resisted it too?

Eichmann

Rauter as a person probably not, but he did also have to deal with the Dutch police, and apparently he felt the resistance there very strongly.

Questioner

Don't you remember any more how he expressed his individual misgivings, or how

Eichmann

No, not in detail any more.

Questioner

Or that he spoke of the political situation or of some large political plan?

Eichmann

No, I can't recall it.

Questioner

Here in a letter it is claimed, he wrote it to Himmler, that he would never allow a deportation train to be cancelled, "the way is gone". Exactly as he declared in a speech to SS leaders, "I will gladly atone in heaven with my soul for what I have done here against the Jews. Whoever has recognized the significance of Jewry as a people and as a race cannot act otherwise than we do."

Eichmann

Please, I said expressly, not as a person, but that he only voiced misgivings, because he obviously had to reckon with the Dutch police, and had to see things clearly there. And I said that I had to dispel misgivings with Rauter.

Questioner

But why did you have to dispel misgivings regarding the Dutch police?

Eichmann

A detailed order from the Reichsführer, that was enough.

Questioner

Isn't it known to you whether Rauter and Kaltenbrunner had a particularly close friendly relationship.

Eichmann

It isn't known to me, but nor is anything to the contrary. I can't recall that I had to be careful when writing to Rauter.

Questioner

Is it known to you that in Holland a Jewish [off the sheet] was created on the East European model?

Eichmann

Yes, that is known to me.

Questioner

And that the Jews were concentrated?

Eichmann

Zoepf arranged all that. They were concentrated in the ghetto in Amsterdam.

Questioner

Or what other kind of camps were made there? Have you heard anything about peat-cutting camps?

Eichmann

I don't know that. It may well be that the Jewish Council of Elders set up these peat-cutting camps itself, just as the Reich Association in Germany or the Council of Elders in Theresienstadt founded various labor camps. I don't think the Security Police concerned itself with peat-cutting camps.

Questioner

No, it did not come from the Jews themselves, because it says here, from the very beginning these atrocities called forth more than merely passive sympathy on the part of the [not typed] population.

Questioner

Do you know anything about the raid in the old Jewish quarter in Amsterdam on 9 February 1941?

Eichmann

No, it will have been a local measure.

Questioner

But that must be known to you, because after this raid the first Jewish transport rolled out of Holland, but then the railwaymen went on strike. You were supposed to get ten or twelve trains.

Eichmann

No, nothing of that is known to me.

Questioner

It says that the dock workers came to the Jews' aid from the islands Kattenburg, Wittenburg and Oostenburg, and in the course of it a certain Henry [not typed], a Dutch policeman, was wounded and died later. And this funeral was used for further unrest.

Eichmann

I'm sorry, but I can't remember anything.

Questioner

Isn't it known to you that after these incidents, on Himmler's order, 400 hostages were arrested, Jews?

Eichmann

No, nothing of that is known to me. Probably my section wasn't responsible for that at all. We only had the deportations, but we had nothing to do with any sabotage. There was another section for that. Also for the seizing of hostages. I only still remember the business with the Berlin exhibition, how it was established that Jews were involved in it. Then Müller instructed me that I was to inform Berlin, Vienna and Prague that the heads should come here, and then Müller disclosed to them, on the Reichsführer's order, that Jews had been involved in the business, in the sabotage at the Berlin exhibition, that six or eight Jews as [not typed]

Questioner

Yes, you have told that already.

Questioner

Did you ever have difficulties with Seys [not typed]?

Eichmann

Not I, but the people from the Commander of the Security Police. Difficulties you can't call it. These gentlemen Seys [not typed], Fischböck and so on, they were in principle primarily ready to do everything the Reich demanded. In that respect they were beyond reproach. But these people now had their missions to fulfill, and there one little cogwheel meshes with the next. If they now permit and release all the Jews straight away, then a few cogwheels drop out and the machine no longer runs so well and they have difficulties. So these people are restrained, calm, slow, step by step, building it in as it seems suitable to them in their economic-political or political intentions.

Eichmann

To curb the impatience of the Security Police somewhat, driven as it was by the Reichsführer's order, without losing face with the Reichsführer in the process, that was their art. No Fischböck lost face, and no Seys [not typed] either.

Questioner

Did you also negotiate with Seys [not typed] more often?

Eichmann

No, never, not a single time. Not with Fischböck either, though I knew him from Austria, but I had nothing more to do with him.

Questioner

And with Schmidt, the Party Chancellery representative in Holland.

Eichmann

Yes, I had dealings with Schmid, but where and how I no longer know.

Questioner

But as such he had nothing to do in Jewish matters?

Eichmann

No, I applied my levers at the Commander of the Security Police, or when that wasn't enough, at Rauter. Beyond Rauter really never, I didn't need to.

Questioner

Here it says that Seys [not typed] and Rauter took a position on the hostage arrests, and both declared that it was politically unwise.

Eichmann

But I had nothing to do with the hostage arrests. It was another section, I've said so many times over.

Questioner

What do you say to the characterization of Rauter, in prison after 1945. It points to a man with strongly stressed but professionally limited notions of honor, who had no disagreeable nature, but was outright stupid and a worshipper of force.

Eichmann

Outright stupid is not how I would describe him. Rauter was a receiver of orders, though he only carried out the Reichsführer's order, whom he recognized as his superior. I said already, it was enough if I could prove to him that the Reichsführer had ordered it. That dispelled all his misgivings, and it also gave him the strength to gallop over the hurdles of a Reich Commissioner's misgivings, in order to carry the Reich Commissioner over these hurdles with him.

Questioner

That I believe, all the more surely, since Seys [not typed] and Rauter could certainly talk things out personally quite well.

Eichmann

No, they were two different characters.

Speaker not established

But both are from the Ostmark, and both Ostmarkers in very high posts were swimming alone on the little island in the so-called sea of Pifken, as people say. I say that because I am an Austrian myself, and because at my office I partly had Ostmarkers and partly had Altreich personnel. There were often frictions between the Ostmarkers and the so-called Pifken. My assessors and government councillors in particular had to needle. Wunsche less so, it was all fairly indifferent to him. Surr not, Surr was an outright, I would almost say nasty type of the Pifke. Boßhammer less so, he was a Rhinelander. At the start he made himself unpleasantly noticeable through his big mouth, only later through the music evenings did he win the [off the sheet]

Eichmann

of the other section members, so that later I heard nothing more about it, and so I took each one of them to task here, in all seriousness, whoever here reproached another with being Austrian or, the other way round, with being a Pifke. I stepped in between them, and I know it too, because I was a fighter against this plague, so I know it all too well, that when one had an Ostmark man [off the sheet] in the sea of Old Reich Germans, one who held roughly the same size of post as oneself, one could speak with him far more easily and openly than if it had been someone who came out of a different German living space. And so I believe that Seis. [not typed] and Rauter, who both stood in a very high post in the Netherlands occupied territory and were largely surrounded by non-South-Germans, got on quite well together here, although they were of opposite natures.

Questioner

But they come from two entirely different camps. Seis. [not typed] was Catholic and Rauter came from the German-national one.

Eichmann

That does not mean, though, that they did not get on well together in the Netherlands after all.

Questioner

Do you know nothing about the incident in Amsterdam, in which a German police patrol was doused with vitriol, whereupon 250 Jews were again arrested as hostages

Eichmann

No, I cannot remember that. Perhaps I read it, but it is not something I recall.

Questioner

After that it came to really wild incidents. Strikes by the workers in Amsterdam, crowds gathering, police firing into the crowd, and so on.

Eichmann

Yes, that I cannot know. The primary thing here is the attack, so the desk responsible for that was the one whose section handled attacks. The same with the strike business, none of that was my task.

Questioner

That is precisely what led to the dispatch of the [blotted] Jewish hostages to Mauthausen. Do you know nothing about it?

Eichmann

No, I did not have hostages to register, and when another desk arrested Jewish hostages, they were sent off separately and did not travel with the deportation trains. All persons picked up by other desks came to the Reich separately. If a matter was not purely a Jewish affair for the solution of the Jewish question, and therefore for me a matter of deportation, then I had nothing to do with such removals either, then I was not involved at all. For all questions that came up, the responsible desk for the particular subject area was responsible, whether they were Jews or non-Jews. And in the end I was no transport uncle for any

Questioner

Rauter defended himself at his trial by saying that he was against sending the Jews to the Mauthausen camp, into the quarry camps, that is to say death camps, and that this is why many Dutch Jews went to Sachsenhausen.

Questioner

Then the question would be, where did the transports actually go, the ones that are to be described as transports for the solution of the Jewish question. Where did they go.

Questioner

No, from 42 on the transports go to Auschwitz again, and Mr. Eichmann reported to Mr. Rademacher on 23 June 1942 that from the middle of July the trains would run daily, and that 40,000 from the Netherlands and 40,000 from occupied France and Belgium would be moved.

Eichmann

Now that would have been a program, but unfortunately it was not so. I then had to go back there again and get another 40,000 promised to me, and I was glad when I then got 10 to 15 percent. And in Holland I did at least still reach 110,000.

Eichmann

The Foreign Office, however, wanted at first, out of regard for the psychological effects, to deport only 25,000 stateless Jews and refugees from Holland.

Questioner

Whereas Zoepf and aus der Fuenden arrested everything they could lay hands on

Eichmann

One moment. Zoepf did what I had ordered. He had his guidelines, and I did not cut those out of my rib either. They came into being in the course of time through orders of the Reichsfuehrer, through supplementary decrees, and through my own thinking and drafting.

Questioner

So you were creatively active after all?

Eichmann

I told you back then already that I put the guidelines together, and indeed they were made up of the practical experience of the desk. Naturally those were our own. To that came the orders of the Reichsfuehrer, the supplementary orders. The Chief of the Security Police had had yet another idea, then the Chancellery of the Deputy of the Fuehrer came along as well, they also wanted to say something. Everything was added to it, it grew the way a cancer grows. And these guidelines stated that Jews of foreign nationality were not to be deported, and likewise that old and transport-unfit Jews were not to be transported, and also that avoidable hardships were to be avoided.

Eichmann

Further I must remark on this that Jews under foreign nationality is naturally to be understood in the sense that all those countries were then gradually excepted from this clause which we had occupied, or where we could reach an arrangement with the competent government, insofar as they were still autonomous, or as in the General Government, where we had the right to administer by our own authority, so that these former Polish Jews could no longer be described as foreign Jews.

Eichmann

Turkey, for example. Up to 44 a Jew with Turkish nationality would never have been [off the sheet]

Questioner

But English Jews were killed too.

Eichmann

Yes, but by mistake, not on purpose.

Eichmann

Incidentally, I have read the following here in those tomes of yours that you gave me. I believe from Holland, though it could also have been France, even if I do not think so, but the long time has made me forget. A matter was passed to me by Hoess, that a female person had been committed on the strength of transports and had declared there, cheerfully and brightly, that she was no Jewess at all. At that the camp staff grew suspicious and first of all put this female person on ice, and Hoess then wrote first to the Economic and Administrative Main Office and then it came to me, that a female person had been delivered here who claimed [blotted] to be a Jewess. That was against the guidelines. I then immediately ordered that she was to be sent off to Theresienstadt in the company of a person from the concentration camp. And I then had her put on ice in Theresienstadt as well and looked into the matter. Indeed, she was no Jewess.

Eichmann

I came to Theresienstadt again at some point and there Eppstein told me that they still had this female person there, and what was now to happen with her, because I had ordered that she was to be given preferential housing, in the prominent quarter. She had her room there, her food.

Questioner

So you got a room there?

Eichmann

I had had quarters assigned to me in Theresienstadt in the prominent district, and one day I was shown the result of the inquiries, which then stated that in this case it really was a matter of a non-Jew. This woman had visited a Jewish friend or family during the time of the evacuations and was then swept up wholesale, through ignorance or lack of time, or also because this non-Jewish woman had stood up for this family. On the occasion of my visit Eppstein asked me what was to be done about it, and when I knew one day that the case had been cleared up, I was, I believe, transferred back to her country of origin, or I left her in Theresienstadt for a while longer until the first impressions of her reception in Auschwitz might have faded. She got no further than being unloaded from the wagons, of course, since she was questioned by officials in Theresienstadt, and I assume, and hope, questioned skillfully, so that the files could show that she had noticed and could know nothing of the proceedings as such. I believe that is how it was and that she was then transferred back to her country of origin. For Eppstein pressed me very hard about it, because he would not tolerate non-Jews being carried along in his community. It is a counterpart to the business with the compensation for the Jews, where the Jews likewise do not wish others to travel on their account.

Eichmann

Now I will tell you how I come to this. That Jews of foreign nationality, the aged, the transport-unfit, that is to say they could still have a long time before old age, but still not be fit for transport any more. A fifty-year-old is perhaps not yet anywhere near aged, but if he is unfit for transport, if he cannot crawl any more for sheer gout, then he cannot be evacuated. That is what the guidelines state.

Eichmann

What happened in practice is not the responsibility of desk IV B 4. The guidelines came out. Where would we have got to if every desk officer of Office IV had had to run around the whole great German Reich, including the territories we had occupied, checking whether the guidelines he had issued in accordance with his instructions and orders were in fact being kept or not? The subordinate offices had to answer for that, and if the opposite had been the case they would have had to reckon under certain circumstances with disciplinary punishments.

Eichmann

In the cases of misconduct where I came upon them personally, I saw to the punishment, or at least I reported it, because such cases were not provided for in the guidelines. The Troestel example, the Jew with the burnt-off beard and so on, have already been mentioned.

Questioner

Was there a branch office of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Holland?

Eichmann

Yes, I believe so. I sent Dr. Jako [not typed] up to Holland. He was to set up the same thing up there, and it was set up, and for a while I think it even called itself the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. But nothing came of it, because it didn't work. People believe you can simply copy a Central Office for Jewish Emigration like a transfer picture at some other place, the way it was practiced in Vienna and forced through in Prague with great difficulty. That didn't work. The word is easy to say, but it is enormously hard. Vienna was an exception, it caused a stir, I was addressed like a small minister-president. What we had brought off in Vienna at breakneck speed, running people over, so to speak, and what once it had succeeded could no longer be undone, we brought off once more with the same speed, now supported as well by [blotted] the chief of the RSHA, Heydrich, because now he could throw his own person into it too, because he already knew the practice in Vienna. Until then he had watched the whole thing from a distance. Stahlecker and I had to do that alone. And so it worked in Prague one more time, although he was still far from being deputy Reich Protector then. In Berlin it no longer worked. There the central authorities refused, because they were putting their entire staff under us. But not only that. The personnel side would not have been so important. No, they were handing all their powers over to the authority of the police. That didn't work. [blotted] So they got wind of everything from Vienna, because at the beginning they perhaps thought differently about it. When they suddenly heard that Eichmann gives the economics fellow his wishes, or at the foreign exchange office, that I tell the head of the foreign exchange office, I have this and this and this here, I have 200,000 dollars, and I need 2 million marks, and at once. And I did get them, once even at an exchange rate of up to 20 marks to a dollar, that was the highest there had been. And that was when the penny dropped [blotted] with the people, and I got a knock on the head until my own people covered for me, my superiors. But these are encroachments on the most elementary and fundamental powers of these central authorities, and that they naturally had [off the sheet]

Eichmann

not expected, that the police would now pull out its own registers here.

Questioner

The head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Holland was [not typed]

Eichmann

Yes, that may be right. Jako [not typed] started it up there in any case. I believe we even had an administration and realization office up there. But just as little came of that central office as of the one in Berlin, because wherever I turned up in Berlin, I found frightened faces in the central authorities, and nobody dared do anything anymore. I was treated politely and obligingly, but people feared me and avoided me the way a child avoids fire. Even so, in Berlin and in The Hague we had no different experiences.

Questioner

Are you aware that with regard to the deportation of Jews with Dutch citizenship, the RSHA wanted a regulation under which the Jews would lose their Dutch citizenship the moment they crossed the [blotted] border?

Eichmann

Yes, I have some dim memory of that. It was an accommodation on our part, meant to free the Dutch of any [blotted] pangs of conscience. But today I can no longer say whether this idea came from me or from the Foreign Office.

Questioner

No, the Foreign Office was against it, it opposed it at once and pointed out that in that case Sweden would stop representing the interests of German citizens in the Dutch colonies, for instance in [not typed] [blotted]. Besides, at the same time the reports kept coming in about the death of the Dutch Jews from Nordhausen, and in that case Sweden intervened.

Eichmann

Yes, that's right. But perhaps it was Rei [blotted] auer who made the proposal. It is known to me.

Questioner

The Gestapo then found another solution, in connection with the issuing of the death certificates, which suddenly arrived in Holland in bundles, about the death of these hostages.

Eichmann

But not through us. The hostages are no concern of my section. No death certificates went through me either.

Questioner

Then the Foreign Office gave the Gestapo the good advice that no death certificates should be issued at all anymore, and that nothing at all should be let out about the place of accommodation, so that the Swedes [off the sheet]

Questioner

would have any chance of interfering. Have you heard nothing about that?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

Have you heard of the Jewish camp Ogreben [not typed]?

Eichmann

No.

Questioner

Westerburg?

Eichmann

Yes, Westerburg is known to me.

Questioner

Under whose control was it, German or Dutch?

Eichmann

I don't know that at the moment. It doesn't emerge [blotted] from this.

Questioner

Westerburg then got the role of collection point for the gas chambers of Auschwitz, for the [not typed]

Eichmann

Every day a train left either from France or from Holland. I didn't travel to Paris and The Hague so often for nothing, something did have to happen.

Questioner

From the middle of August there were difficulties, once the Jews had worked out what kind of transports these were.

Speaker not established

So, now the strange thing is that most Dutch Jews are still alive.

Speaker not established

Yes, but nowhere near. There were 140,000 and of those 110,000 disappeared.

Speaker not established

But they went somewhere else, they weren't all killed.

Speaker not established

This Mr. Reitlinger is not a very accurate gentleman.

Questioner

He only speaks here of how many Jews are still in Holland today, 35,000.

Speaker not established

But you can't say that 110,000 were killed.

Speaker not established

No, 80,000 were killed.

Speaker not established

Who says that, the Jews?

Speaker not established

No, that is the figure you can derive from it, from what was there. In these 140,000 the 50,000 with German citizenship who came to Holland after 36 are not counted at all.

Speaker not established

Those don't count anyway.

Questioner

But then they took the number of those who were still in Holland, who stayed, of those who returned to Holland, and of those who came illegally, because the whole thing is an illegal emigration

Questioner

been.

Eichmann

Fine, then they shouldn't question the security police, they should question other offices.

Questioner

Are you aware that at the end of the year there were 14,500 employees at the Jewish Council?

Eichmann

Yes, that is quite possible.

Questioner

They were protected from deportation, but were then cut back by the Gestapo to 13,000.

Eichmann

Possible. Half of Amsterdam was Jewish officials. There you see the tolerance of the Security Police.

Questioner

The peat cutters were also exempted, and with their family members they came to 30,000 people.

Eichmann

They were exempted too. There you have it [not typed]. There was a great outcry against the peat-cutting camps, and now it turns out, after the whole deportation is being run down here, that the workers in the peat-cutting camps and their relatives were exempted from the deportation measures. So I ask myself, was it really so terrible?

Eichmann

These peat-cutting camps were labor camps and were exempted from the deportation measures.

Questioner

But which camp can it have been?

Eichmann

Westerburg was a peat-cutting camp.

Questioner

And the Security Police even protected these people.

Eichmann

Yes, the relatives were for the time being exempted from the deportation measures.

Questioner

On 10 July Rauter wrote to Mueller that pulling the Jews together was causing them the very greatest headaches.

Eichmann

Yes, of course. I didn't hear that, but I did hear of the other difficulties.

Questioner

He explained that three trains a week were needed for the deportation of the Jews. He then proposed declaring the Jews outlaws. After 15 October the Jews could be taken into custody not only by members of the police, but also by members of the Wehrmacht and of the Party.

Eichmann

After which 15 October, in which year?

Questioner

1943. These measures had only limited success. Combing out the labor camps produced not 30,000 but only 17,000, and at the end of the year the total number of Jews deported from the Netherlands was 38,606, at the end of 1943. So in the year 44, in the invasion and so on, then the

Eichmann

But I know that some time ago there was talk about the Jewish protection measures, where among other things in Holland the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan also sent his emissaries out. Here they tracked down gem dealers, antique dealers, art painting dealers, who then received their protective pass at once here. That falls under this heading. If of course it is the Reich Marshal doing it here, who pursued his passions like this, then one must not be surprised that any Tom, Dick and Harry helped himself out of this pot here for his personal or official interests. That can be left open. And it was simply very hard to judge here what is right and what is wrong in the sense of National Socialist intent. I raised this subject weeks and months ago already, because this Dutch example was known to me.

Questioner

Did you have to send Jews from the West to Auschwitz, who had to work there for the newly built B. works?

Eichmann

What they had to work for did not interest me in the slightest.

Questioner

Have you never heard of this Bun [blotted] works?

Eichmann

Yes, I have. That was presumably a works there with the ones belonging to Hein [blotted]. But I had to deliver my transports there to the places the WVHA prescribed for me. What the WVHA needed them for was in no file, and it was none of my business either.

Questioner

Because of the difficulties, Harster in fact reduced the May quota, which had been set at 12,000, down to 8,000.

Eichmann

Yes, there were difficulties already.

Questioner

One then had to take out exempted, privileged Jews, and that is how the 8,000 were brought together.

Eichmann

Really, I doubt that.

Questioner

Yes, the list of the exempted was combed through, and at first they claimed to have had only 6,000.

Eichmann

Yes, by privileged you now mean exempted. When I say privileged about these Jews, I mean it in quotation marks, with [off the sheet]. When I say privileged, I mean it according to the laws. Those are two different concepts. What they call privileged is because they are classified as indispensable, because they produced something, let us say, of some size, let us say on a Reich scale, since it was published that way too. That is how they were then raised into the privileged category.

Eichmann

They were in truth not privileged before the law.

Questioner

From the beginning of May weekly transports of 2,000 Jews were rolling again. And in fact they did not go to Auschwitz, but to So. [not typed]. Have you perhaps heard of this camp?

Eichmann

Actually I no longer remember it that well.

Questioner

Because in Auschwitz the crematoria were fully occupied by the shipments from Berlin and Sa. [not typed].

Eichmann

Really?

Questioner

And the inmates of this camp So. [not typed] were almost all killed. There were no survivors. Only 16 women and 3 men came back from there after the war. So. [not typed] was in Poland, and these trains all arrived from Westerburg.

Eichmann

So Westerburg was cleared?

Questioner

Nothing here says anything about clearing. It only says here that a train left Westerburg every Tuesday. And on Friday it arrived at the remote place in So. [not typed], 110 kilometers from Lublin.

Eichmann

So Globocnik, but I never…

Questioner

On some Tuesdays two trains went off. In this way a total of 34,313 Jews from Holland reached the secret death camp on the bank of the [not typed].

Eichmann

How exactly…

Questioner

Well, these figures. Westerburg was recorded very precisely from the German side. Now, a great many Jews were also claimed back from the German side, and indeed as so-called exempted Jews, ethnic Jews. The Wehrmacht demanded people, the economy did. There were people in the government, in the Dutch party, who were Jews. Thirteen old party members had permission not to wear the Jewish star. Likewise a picture expert and an Olympic champion.

Eichmann

The picture expert goes on Goering's account.

Questioner

Then a German Olympic champion demanded it, and the son-in-law of a former royal librarian. Besides that, Dr. [too faint]almeier of the German commissariat for justice demanded that 370 members of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community, who had no points of contact with the eastern Jews, be put separately into an internment camp, and he succeeded with his demand. In contrast to the largest community in the Balkans, the [handwriting] community in Salonika, which was wiped out completely.

Eichmann

I cannot possibly remember all of that. It did not interest me in the slightest.

Questioner

[not typed] the diamond polishers.

Eichmann

Yes, yes, I know. When I was in Amsterdam today, or in The Hague, or the other way round, when Zoepf had been with me, then it only interested me to know, first, do you have difficulties, and if so, which ones. Second, how many units do I get, and in what time. I was not responsible for local difficulties. I had nothing to do in Holland.

Questioner

If such a Portuguese community is now to be exempted, on grounds of principle, then…

Eichmann

The guidelines were there, and one had to proceed according to them.

Questioner

There were no guidelines for those who were to be destroyed and for those who were to be exempted.

Eichmann

Of course the guidelines were there in Holland, but of course those were not mentioned in the guidelines. Naturally not. On principle it was not mentioned.

Questioner

But then the whole thing is confused. If I destroy over there and exempt again over there…

Eichmann

Of course it is confused. But in the guidelines I did not issue that recognition goes by Jewish [blotted], but only by grounds of merit toward the Reich and by keeping face before world opinion.

Questioner

But racial grounds are decisive here.

Eichmann

Jewish racial grounds. What is the difference to me between [not typed] in the deportations. Of course I knew about it, but it is none of my business, it does not interest me in the slightest.

Questioner

But why were they destroyed in Salonika and the others exempted?

Eichmann

That is exactly what I am saying. The local offices are the ones to ask about that. That concerns the central authorities. We did not bother with this small stuff. Who sat there, whom they exempted there, it did not interest us. Unless by chance Goering wanted to direct his picture Jews through us, or some top stone polisher Jews. That was a group that polished some kind of stone. I have forgotten the name of this odd stone. That much I still know.

Eichmann

But otherwise that was the business of the subordinate offices, not the central authorities, of the Higher SS and Police Leader, to carry out the classification. With the exception of the General Government and the occupied Russian territories. Not there. There my guidelines were not recognized anyway, and they were not followed either.

Eichmann

Now just a moment, this Portuguese community. The gentleman from the Foreign Office has nothing to decide.

Eichmann

Were they Jews with Portuguese citizenship?

Questioner

No.

Eichmann

Or was it only a spiritual orientation?

Questioner

No, origin in Portugal.

Eichmann

Then the Foreign Office had nothing to decide.

Questioner

No, it was also the German commissariat for justice.

Eichmann

But bueno, he cannot decide that either.

Questioner

No, he cannot decide that either.

Questioner

So IV B 4 must have given its approval to it in principle?

Eichmann

No, that was the man from justice in Holland.

Questioner

He demanded it.

Eichmann

Then it was Harstner [blotted]. That was then not my task.

Questioner

And Harstner could do that without…

Eichmann

Yes, of course, he had his guidelines. If Harstner granted it to him, then the matter is none of my business.

Questioner

As far as I know Harstner, he brought the case to Berlin by teleprinter. I am 100 percent convinced of that.

Eichmann

If he had not had the guidelines, assuming that, everyone has to do that.

Questioner

What does guidelines mean. It is a matter of se [not typed] Jews.

Eichmann

So it did not say in there that they must be evacuated.

Questioner

But they were not evacuated.

Eichmann

Then Harstner did it at his own discretion.

Questioner

He asked in Berlin. I am convinced of that.

Eichmann

I am not. If he had asked me, I would have given him no [handwriting]. It did not stand in the guidelines.

Questioner

Yes, that is just it. It is impossible that the commander of the Security Police says to himself, yes, I see the point, those are different people, they have nothing to do with eastern Jewry, so we will exempt them.

Eichmann

but he had to turn to Berlin, and if he did that, then to IV B 4

Eichmann

He can do as he likes. What interested me was, do you have difficulties, and if so, where, and how much do I get from you, and when. Nothing else interested me. He had the guidelines, after all. But if there is something like this business with the communities, something that isn't provided for

Questioner

Then he has to check back with you

Eichmann

No, he doesn't need to at all. Where would we end up in Berlin if everyone came running over every trifle, over every Kohn or Kuhn who belongs to some monarchist party and got handed some Order of Leopold from Buxtehude. And it says so right in there, holders of bravery decorations are to be exempted. So where are the guidelines then?

Questioner

Agreed, from the moment the people had been deported, but they were exempted

Questioner

Harstner just said, let's put them back, we have enough others

Eichmann

But he didn't have enough others at all. That was exactly the difficulty, raising that many people, because so many were protected. He never delivered me the full number either. When he told me 40,000 I was already glad to get 2,000. I knew that from experience. If I had negotiated 40,000 with him, then I was glad when he sent me 5,000 or 8,000. Fine.

Eichmann

And then I drove out there again and negotiated again

Eichmann

In Holland it was always a figure of 4 again. The number 40,000 follows me through all the countries, again and again the figure 40,000 comes up. It almost seems to me that the people did get together, Dannecker and Zoepf, and they will have talked to one another, well, what did you report? 40,000, yes, 40,000 as well. They always notified me by teleprinter, not always, but mostly, and they will have arranged a meeting with Harstner and asked, what do we tell [blotted]ichmann now when he comes? I would have done the same, that's clear, and they will have agreed among themselves on 40,000. Of course I already knew from practice, when they gave me a made-up figure, how much I would actually get..

Eichmann

Naturally I did not then have the timetable drawn up for 40,000 on the strength of experience. If they really sent 40,000, I would have a supplementary timetable drawn up. A supplementary timetable for 30,000 added to an operation of 10,000 already rolling was easier to draw up than a timetable for 5,000. Do you understand that?

Questioner

Yes, you hang on a few more wagons

Eichmann

I don't know about that, I know too little about timetable technique. It works out better in travel or traffic terms. They were freight wagons, and the principle was that no wagon was allowed to run empty. But building something new into the timetables that already existed, that I think was the hard part

Eichmann

I have this to say about it. I once drew up an instruction booklet in the SD, and in it I described the history of the Jewish people, and I came to it and said that after the destruction of Jerusalem the Jews were driven out by the Romans. One part moved across the North African coastal region, then came to Spain, and was driven out from there by Isabella the Catholic and Franz of Aragon within a quarter of a year. Of those, one part then went over to Western Europe and came as far as into Germany, and one part went over later by way of England to America, the so-called [not typed] emigration, as the Jews themselves call it. The other part went over through the Turkic lands and settled in our former territories, European Russia, Poland, the Baltic states and so on. There they amused themselves mainly with craft work, where the number of children was enormous, where they had to struggle with nature, against the hardships of the human surroundings. The Jews drew together and clung to the traditions of their spiritual leaders. There they also had orthodoxy take root. There the Talmudic schools were founded, there the [not typed] was taught, and the smallest Jewish children were equipped with the knowledge of several languages, not only the language of the people they were living among, whether Russian or Polish or the like, but English, French and German, and mainly German, because Germany was the first territory they made for. They came to Breslau, and Breslau took them in first.

Eichmann

out of that came Yiddish later on, not Hebrew and not German, but written down in Hebrew letters. Whole daily newspapers grew out of it. Whereas the Western Jew, the S [too faint], he came into a region that stood culturally far higher than the East. Because what once stood higher in the East, let us say the religion of the Turkic peoples, was already condemned to decline by that time.

Eichmann

They came to France and learned the so-called fine life there, assimilated soon enough and had no desire at all for religious activity of any kind, still less for forced religious activity, unlike their racial brothers in the East. Instead they tried to disappear into the host people. The Sephardim are in themselves the prime type for merging into a host people. Just tell a distinguished Sef [blotted] Jew that he is a Jew, and he tells you, I am a Spaniard, or I am of Spanish descent. That you will hear, but not Jew

Questioner

But just a moment, a large part

Eichmann

There is no large part

Questioner

Among the rabbis

Eichmann

Yes, yes, name me Spinoza. That is one exception, and he gets named often enough, and apart from a few minor side rabbis he is put forward as the chief rabbi again and again

Questioner

When Spinoza was precisely the one the rabbis cast out

Eichmann

Those are exactly the same kind of exception. As I am telling you, the counterpart is that among the [blotted] you find those Jews where at first glance you cannot say at all that you have a Jew in front of you, but rather a noble Germanic descendant. Those are the sheikhs with blue eyes, freckles and red hair. They mingled and mixed there with the native population, and over hundreds of years this type came out. Do you know this type?

Questioner

Yes, yes

Eichmann

Up there you also still have remnants of Khazars. Those are originally not Jews at all, they are an eastern population that professed Judaism. Of course today, after so many years, they count among the Jews. As far as they have not mixed with Jewish blood they are in themselves not Jews, looked at logically, but under the Nuremberg laws they are, as a matter of course.

Eichmann

Although that isn't right, the law isn't right there, because that very law wants to go by the blood.

Questioner

But that would surely be a mistake here, because with this Jewry in particular it is the spirit that decides.

Eichmann

Yes, but it is a blood protection law, and the spirit does not decide the blood. And I only brought that up as proof, [blotted] against the assertion that the Se [not typed] Jew, and not the assimilated one, is the brutal type

Questioner

Do you know of any Jewish influence that argued for singling out the Se [not typed], the liberal Jews?

Eichmann

No, but I can only say that Storfer in Vienna told me one day, Herr Obersturmführer [not typed]. He brought me a book that his former divisional chief had published, an Austrian field marshal and lieutenant general, whatever his name was, and he leafs through it and shows me a photograph. Storfer in the uniform of a major in the Imperial and Royal Hungarian Austrian army, a major of the supply troops of course, but decorated with all sorts of medals all the same, and he looked dashing. And then he said to me, Herr Oberstf., I am a Western Jew, I take the assimilated view, I want nothing to do with Jewry. And in fact Storfer was torpedoed and turned down by Loewenherz for a long, long time. Only because Loewenherz brought along this Dr. Neumann, the famous surgeon, who was hard of hearing. I still remember a debate, when I spoke to a man somehow, a Jew, and I said to Neumann, yes, the fellow has already cleared off. And then he says, turning to Storfer, excuse me, what did the gentleman just say? And Storfer says, the Herr Oberstf. said that a Herr Sack has already cleared off. I still remember it because we had to laugh so much. That was Storfer, and that sentence too is characteristic of Storfer. That was the Herr Kommerzialrat who could afford to buy himself the title, who wanted nothing to do with the dirty, stinking Eastern Jew, who would have been positively insulted if anyone had named him in the same breath as that whole pack. All the same he worked very properly and diligently for Jewry, although he was doubtless confirmed accordingly by Loewenherz and his people.

Eichmann

The best proof of that is Chaim Weizmann's book on the founding of Israel, where he actually writes about Western Jewry in the foulest terms.

Eichmann

that is, he does not take German Jewry as fully valid, but only Eastern Jewry.

Eichmann

Because for the most part they were trying to forget their Jewishness and to disguise themselves as Germans. And that was also the great danger for us, which is why I said: allow the Zionists everything, why forbid the Orthodox. No, the ones we have to step on the tail of are the assimilationist-minded Jews, they harm us, that is the danger. And the assimilationist-minded Jews were rejected by Orthodoxy and by Zionism.

Speaker not established

But I believe it has succeeded in bringing the Jews completely back together again.

Speaker not established

Yes, in bringing them together over us.

Eichmann

What would have happened to Jewry if it had shown the lukewarmness that, say, the Indian in South America showed? What is the Indian. The Indian once called the whole territory his own. They had great cultural empires. Through a few Spaniards, and later others came along, they let themselves be subjugated, let themselves be pushed back. Today they are absorbed [blotted] into the South American region, they live exactly like the Italian, the Spaniard. In short, they have no importance any more.

Eichmann

The Jew would certainly have been condemned to insignificance if he had not managed to have spiritual centers here, especially in the East. If through the centuries Orthodoxy had not preached ghettoization, voluntary ghettoization first of all, a dissolution would already have come about in the earliest times of the Middle Ages.

Eichmann

So they came together like the Swabians in the southeastern region on the military frontier which [blotted] since Maria Theresa, [handwriting], and the children today still speak almost the original Swabian, as if they had grown up in their homeland.

Eichmann

There the children were pressed into the Talmud [blotted] schools, and had their subjects taught to them. Later they were also separated off toward the West, because the colonies were far too numerous and the children could not be fed, and what did they become (on the strength of their brain training from earliest youth, when our children were still playing with dolls) doctors, lawyers and other such stuff, and if he was a merchant, then certainly not the worst one.

Eichmann

And now through the forced migration to the West, which again and again

Eichmann

new ones I drew after me. That when a Dr. Loewenherz, born in Lemberg, when he came to Vienna and took his doctorate in law here [not typed] and was a high official of the Jewish religious community here, what other occupation he had I do not know, later he was office director, in the course of his career, which certainly lasted 30 years, he certainly had other relatives brought after him as well. Others did the same, and insofar as they did not remain in Jewish political work they partly assimilated. What a dreadful thought for a Jewish political leader. Lost blood, and they did not have so much blood to lose at that time.

Eichmann

Now, after the seizure of power, a calamity threatened them, a calamity such as they knew from the time of the Middle Ages, for war had been declared on them and now it was a matter of arming themselves against it, and so they tried. Perhaps the thesis is right that they tried it through the stupid German Michel, who in himself can think thoroughly and comprehensively, but cannot think deeply enough. They tried to buy him and, over a momentary suffering, they saved their existence, in that through the momentary suffering they have the pity of the whole world on their side. And with it all the material advantages. Advantages that the clever intellectual leadership of Orthodoxy has in any case always been able to book to itself through 2,000 years, by way of Christianity.

Questioner

What do you understand by the term exchange Jews?

Eichmann

Exchange Jews? The term existed, that I know, and it was in fact coined by the Foreign Office.

Questioner

Yes, where it was planned to exchange Jews for Germans. Do you recall anything about that, was anything planned there?

Eichmann

Yes, I can remember it so dimly, in connection with an exchange of children with England for German men fit for military service. But who fathered that, whether it was Reischauer or the Reichsfuehrer, I can no longer say. But it is established that something really did exist, children for German men fit for military service, for German blood that was in English hands, to be given for that.

Eichmann

Those were the first exchange plans.

Questioner

But there were not many exchange Jews. But did you know a Miss Schlottke?

Questioner

Schlottke?

Questioner

That was Zoepf's secretary. She drew up a list of 298 Jews born on British soil. They were to go onto the list of exchange Jews, but in doing so it was established that 96 of them had already been gassed. Those are the only British citizens who were gassed.

Eichmann

British? Where were they born?

Questioner

They had British citizenship and another one as well.

Eichmann

They bought the British citizenship.

Questioner

In any case they were put here on this list as British citizens and were to count as exchange Jews. Do you know nothing about that?

Eichmann

It is not in my memory. Zoepf did not report that to me at all either, because he deported them himself.

Questioner

Then a new list was drawn up, with 400 Jews living in Holland. Who also had a claim to British protection.

Eichmann

I know nothing about that either.

Questioner

Now a large collection operation was to take place, of Jews who were to be taken as exchange Jews. Do you know nothing about the fact that 30,000 exchange Jews were to be found in the Allied countries, the Soviet Union included?

Eichmann

No, I cannot recall anything. It may be that the Reichsfuehrer once handled the matter personally, but officially nothing about it is known to me.

Questioner

Kaltenbrunner had even gone so far as to order the head of the Security Police in Russia to pick out suitable Jews in the ghettos.

Eichmann

No, nothing is known to me. In what year, 1943. The Reichsfuehrer will have said that to Kaltenbrunner, and Kaltenbrunner then wrote to his group chiefs. Those are the things I do not know, they did not go through my section.

Questioner

Does the term Honduras and the Paraguay Jews mean anything to you?

Eichmann

Now, the Honduras and the Paraguay Jews mean nothing to me, but I will say the following about it, I know what that means. Those are Jews who got a passport or a citizenship from some embassy official or legation official for money, which made them a national of the country whose [not typed] they had just slipped into the hollow hand.

Eichmann

They knew of course, when they referred to such a [not typed], they had to be accepted. Only at the end, when the matter got on top of me, I wrote to the Foreign Office, first about those offices that were running most freely, but which countries those were individually I cannot recall, and I demanded that these heads of mission be instructed that in future these things would no longer be accepted. And what reprisals the Foreign Office took against them I no longer know. Besides, in examining the documents presented to us we no longer took the trouble that one might otherwise have taken, because for us they counted as stateless, or as Jews of German, Hungarian or other citizenship. In Hungary the Legation Counsellor once told me quite plainly that whoever has a document from any country from a certain date on is a Jew of Hungarian citizenship.

Questioner

Himmler then ordered Eichmann to find a special camp for the additional, if not genuine, foreigners.

Eichmann

What? I would surely have to know of such a camp.

Questioner

Affidavit of von Thadden.

Eichmann

Von Thadden, you have probably questioned him on the matter.

Questioner

But such a camp did exist.

Eichmann

But not with me.

Questioner

Bergen Belsen, and 367 Jews with [too faint] passports were [blotted] brought there from Salonika.

Eichmann

Yes, that is right, but I did not have to set up any camp. The Reichsfuehrer will certainly have told Pohl, and Pohl brought them together in some concentration camp, in that case Bergen Belsen. But I myself had no such camp, I only had Theresienstadt.

Questioner

From the outset the intentions that were held for Bergen Belsen were confused and undetermined. On 9 November 1943 Untersturmfuehrer Novak of Eichmann's office wrote to Zoepf that only the Jews who were on the exchange list, Jews with relatives in Palestine, Honduras and Paraguay Jews, were to be used. And your office was involved in the matter after all.

Eichmann

Well, all right, but the camp never came into being, I had no instruction.

Questioner

But what did Novak have to do with it? He was there for transport.

Eichmann

Well now, if Guenter as his superior told him to draft a letter, because Guenter had no time, then Novak simply wrote that letter. Novak was after all a desk officer for his subject area. It was not the case that a desk officer handled a matter from A to Z, or only from A to K, and that he could then not even handle a case starting with Y on the instruction of his superior. Of course he has to work on it if he gets the instruction.

Eichmann

In reality, though, quite different categories came in: the diamond workers, the holders of the German Iron Cross, half-Jews. Yes, so that we would be quite safe, so that they would not be gassed, so that no harm would come to them. I still remember the famous diamond cutters. They had to be kept separate so that nothing would happen to them.

Speaker not established

The fact that in August 1943 an operation was still carried out in the district of Sosnowitz, to collect the Jews still resident there and transport them to Auschwitz, and it is exactly determinable what distance Sosnowitz lies from Auschwitz, is to be used in a clever way, indirectly, when it comes to making the argument that the transport difficulties make the figure given by the enemy side impossible from the outset. It would be a worthwhile example to illustrate the difficulties that existed, that as late as August 1943 there were still, at a relatively short distance from Auschwitz, by my estimate some 15 to 20 kilometers, that [blotted] had still not caught the Jews at that distance, because all of it was only a question of transport difficulties.

Eichmann

Do you know what that can have been? Hadamar, because it says mentally ill, because it was an institution. On that I remember the following. What was the name of the head of the Chancellery of the Deputy of the Fuehrer? I mean the SA Brigadefuehrer of the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, and he conducted the administrative work for the killing of idiots in idiot homes. His superior was some Hauptamtsleiter or something similar, and these exterminations were carried out from that office. The RSHA had nothing to do with it. They had their own doctors in the institutions and also carried out the transfers and so on.

Questioner

The name Greiser, Reichsstatthalter in the Reichsgau Wartheland.

Eichmann

Yes, that is known to me. I do not know him personally. He was a high superior of C[too faint]eid, and not that I know of did I have any official dealings with him.

Questioner

He writes, on 1 May 1942, that the operation of special treatment of around 100,000 Jews in this area, approved by Heydrich, can be completed in the next two or three months. He asks for permission, with the special commando that has been worked in, to be allowed to free the Gau, following that operation, of a danger that takes on more catastrophic forms every week. There are in the Gau up to now 230,000 tubercular patients of Polish nationality. The number of Poles being treated for open tuberculosis is estimated at 35,000. Germans who came into the Warthegau completely healthy are being infected. The danger of infection exists particularly for the German children. A whole series of prominent men, including from the police, have been infected recently, and are lost to the war effort through the treatment that has become necessary. The effectively ever-growing danger has also been recognized by the deputy Reich Health Leader Prof. Dr. Blo[too faint]er, and by the leader of the X-ray Sturmbann, Standartenfuehrer Dr. Prof. Hohlfelder. Although even [blotted] in the Altreich no decisive action can be taken with appropriate measures against this plague of the people, I believe I can still take the responsibility of proposing to you that within the Warthegau the cases of open tuberculosis among the Polish people be eradicated. Naturally only that Pole should be made subject to such an operation for whom not only the open tuberculosis but also its incurability has been certified and established by an official medical examination. Given the urgency of this undertaking I ask for your approval in principle as quickly as possible.

Questioner

That went to the Reichsfuehrer.

Eichmann

On that I have the following to say. That was the Reichsgau Wartheland, that was the place, and the town was called something like Kulm. I was sent down there by Mueller, and when I got there I saw something I had not seen before, namely these hermetically sealed trucks, where they put the Jews in and killed them with the exhaust gases. That was where I was supposed to look through the peephole. When this business was finished, I remember that Regierungsrat Daeumling, who ran the [blotted] desk in the RSHA, was the one who dealt with this tuberculosis business of the sick Poles. How it turned out I cannot say, and whether

Eichmann

it was only approved and carried out. I was not responsible for it, nor for the treatment of the Jews in the Warthegau. That was an order that came from [blotted] above. The trucks were built for it in Berlin, but I had no idea of that in the RSHA. We were told nothing about it. Only down there did I see them, when they were in use. Mueller had known about it much earlier, but I was not involved. And of the other matter I know nothing further, only that it had come up.

Eichmann

But you see from the letter that this is again a clear confirmation of what I have said so often. People always think the section must always have stepped in first, on its own initiative and as the cause. And I only say it was not like that. Some Reichsleiter and Fuehrer met at shared meals, at discussions, at official meetings, at lectures, on official trips, wherever these people came together, and these matters were settled with the gentlemen directly. This letter too is such an example of how these things were settled between them, and how the Reichsfuehrer either ordered something or decided against it, and how then this man who had asked about it now ordered everything in his own area of responsibility as he pleased, and put to it everything he had available in his area of responsibility and thought expedient. The RSHA section was simply passed over, and at most it was presented with an accomplished fact, where they could change nothing more, where they could only say to themselves, well, that violates this decree again or that regulation, well, another order has been given, now we just have to build it in that way. That is what I have said so often, this muddle, which we in the RSHA could only recognize at all if we found something written to go on in the files.

Questioner

Now here is something from the WVHA, Amt D II, of 9 March 1943, Oranienburg, removal of Jewish armaments workers. On 5 and 7 March the following transports of Jewish prisoners arrived. Transport from Berlin, arrival 5 March, 1,128 Jews. 329 men and 96 women went to labor deployment. Special treatment, 151 men and 592 women and children. Transport from Breslau, 5 March, 1,405 Jews. Labor deployment 406 men and 190 women. Special treatment 125 men and 634 women and children. Transport from Berlin, 7 March, 690 including 25 protective-custody prisoners. Labor deployment 153 men, 25 protective-custody prisoners, 65 women. Special treatment 30 men, 417 women and children.

Questioner

Do you know that special treatments were also carried out in Oranienburg?

Eichmann

Yes, I am hearing it now for the first time. Possible? Well, that was probably possible in every concentration camp. There were no gas chambers in Oranienburg, but perhaps they shot them, I do not know. I do not know my way around the WVHA. There is no paperwork, there is no reference, nothing at all. It would be possible that in 1943 Amtsgruppe D had its office in Oranienburg, because Gruppenfuehrer Gluecks, the inspector for the concentration camp system, sat with his office in the Oranienburg camp. He was not in Berlin "unter den Eichen". He was in Oranienburg. One also does not necessarily have to assume that these transports came to Oranienburg. It may well be that Amtsgruppe D had its seat there