“Yes,” agreed Hagen. “And yet there was a certain cold logic to his madness, wouldn’t you say?”
“Logic?” I repeated, slightly incredulous. “How do you mean ‘logic’?”
“I agree with Gunther,” said Reichert. “It all sounded like complete madness to me. Like something from the First Crusade. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m no Jew lover, but, really, you can’t just liquidate a whole race of people.”
“Stalin liquidated a whole class of people in Russia,” said Hagen. “Two or three if you stop to think about it. He might just as easily have fixed on the Jews as on peasants, kulaks, and the bourgeoisie. And liquidated them instead. He’s spent the last five years starving the Ukrainians to death. There’s nothing to say you couldn’t starve the Jews to death in just the same way. Of course, that kind of thing presents enormous practical problems. And essentially my opinion remains unchanged. We should try to send them to Palestine. What happens when they get here is hardly our concern.”
Hagen came over to the window and lit a cigarette.
“Although I do think that the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine must be resisted at all costs. That’s something I’ve realized since we got here. Such a state might actually be capable of diplomatic lobbying against the German government. Of suborning the United States into a war against Germany. That possibility ought to be resisted.”
“But surely you haven’t changed your opinion about de facto Zionism,” said Eichmann. “I mean, clearly, we’re going to have to send the bastards somewhere. Madagascar makes no sense. They’d never go there. No, it’s here, or the other—what Haj Amin was talking about. And I can’t see anyone in the SD agreeing with that solution. It’s too far-fetched. Like something out of Fritz Lang.”
Reichert picked up the Mufti’s letter. There were two words on the envelope: Adolf Hitler. “Do you suppose he’s said any of that in his letter?” he asked.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt of it,” I said. “The question is, what are you going to do with it?”
“There can be no question of not handing this letter to our superiors.” Hagen sounded shocked at the very idea of not delivering the Mufti’s letter—more shocked at my implied suggestion than anything the Grand Mufti had said. “That wouldn’t do at all. This is diplomatic correspondence.”
“It didn’t sound all that diplomatic to me,” I said.
“Perhaps not. Nevertheless the letter still has to go back to Berlin. This is part of what we came for, Gunther. We have to have something to show for our mission here. Especially now that we know we’re being watched by the Gestapo. Fiddling expenses is one thing. Coming down here on a wild-goose chase is something else. That would make us look ridiculous in the eyes of General Heydrich. Our careers in the SD can’t afford that.”
“No, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Eichmann, whose sense of career was as developed as Hagen’s.
“Heydrich may be a bastard,” I said. “But he’s a clever bastard. Too clever to read that letter and not know the Mufti is a complete spinner.”
“Maybe,” said Eichmann. “Maybe, yes. Fortunately the letter isn’t addressed to Heydrich, is it? Fortunately the letter’s addressed to the Führer. He’ll know best how to respond to what—”
“From one madman to another,” I said. “Is that what you’re suggesting, Eichmann?”
Eichmann almost choked with horror. “Not for one moment,” he spluttered. “I wouldn’t dream—” Blushing to the roots of his hair, he glanced uncomfortably at Hagen and Reichert. “Gentlemen, please believe me. That’s not what I meant at all. I have the greatest admiration for the Führer.”
“Of course you do, Eichmann,” I said.
Finally, Eichmann looked at me. “You won’t tell Flesch about this, will you, Gunther? Please say you won’t tell the Gestapo.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Look, forget about that. What are you going to do about Fievel Polkes? And Haganah?”
Eliahu Golomb joined Polkes in Cairo for the meeting with Eichmann and Hagen. He only just made it before the British closed the border after a number of bomb attacks in Palestine by Arabs and Jews. Before the meeting, I met with Golomb and Polkes at their hotel and told them everything that had been said at the meeting with Haj Amin. For a while Golomb called down plagues from heaven on the Mufti’s head. Then he asked for my advice on how to handle Eichmann and Hagen.
“I think you should make them believe that in any civil war with the Arabs, it’s Haganah that will win,” I said. “Germans admire strength. And they like winners. It’s only the British who like the underdog.”
“We will win,” insisted Golomb.
“They don’t know that,” I said. “I think it would be a mistake to ask them for military aid. It would look like a sign of weakness. You must convince them that, if anything, you’re actually much better armed than you are. Tell them you have artillery. Tell them you have tanks. Tell them you have planes. They’ve no way of finding out if that’s true or not.”
“How does that help us?”
“If they think you will win,” I said, “then they’ll believe that their continued support of Zionism is the right policy. If they think you’ll lose, then frankly there’s no telling where they might send Germany’s Jews. I’ve heard Madagascar mentioned.”
“Madagascar?” said Golomb. “Ridiculous.”
“Look, all that matters is that you convince them that a Jewish state can exist and that it would be no threat to Germany. You don’t want them going back to Germany thinking the Grand Mufti is right, do you? That all the Jews in Palestine should be massacred?”
When it eventually took place, the meeting went well enough. To my ears, Golomb and Polkes sounded like fanatics. But as they had pointed out earlier, they didn’t sound like crazy, religious fanatics. After the Grand Mufti, anyone would have sounded reasonable.
A few days later, we sailed from Alexandria, on the Italian steamer
Palestrina,
for Brindisi, stopping at Rhodes and Piraeus on the way. From Brindisi, we caught a train and were back in Berlin by October 26.
I hadn’t seen Eichmann for nine months when, while working on a case that took me to Vienna, I bumped into him on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, in the Eleventh District, just south of what later became Stalin Platz. He was coming out of the Rothschild Palais, which (after the Wehrmacht’s popular invasion of Austria in March 1938) had been seized from the eponymous Jewish family that owned it, and was now the headquarters of the SD in Austria. Eichmann was no longer a lowly noncommissioned officer, but a second lieutenant—an Untersturmführer. There seemed to be a spring in his step. Jews were already fleeing the country. For the first time in his life, Eichmann had real power. Whatever he had said to his superiors upon his return from Egypt had obviously made an impression.
We only spoke for a minute or two before he stepped into the back of a staff car and drove away. I remember thinking, there goes the most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.
After the war, whenever I saw his name appear in a newspaper, that was always how I thought of him. The most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.
There’s one more thing I always remembered about him. It was something he told me on the boat from Alexandria. When he wasn’t being seasick. It was something of which Eichmann was very proud. When he lived in Linz, as a boy, Eichmann had gone to the same school as Adolf Hitler. Maybe it explains something of what he was to become. I don’t know.
ONE
Munich 1949
W
e were just a stone’s throw from what had once been the concentration camp. But when we were handing out directions, we tended not to mention that, unless it was absolutely necessary. The hotel, on the east side of the medieval town of Dachau, was down a cobbled, poplar-lined side road, separated from the former KZ—now a residential settlement camp for German and Czech refugees from the communists—by the Würm River canal. It was a half-timbered affair, a three-story suburban villa with a steep saddle roof made of orange tiles, and a wraparound first-floor balcony overflowing with red geraniums. It was the kind of place that had seen better days. Since the Nazis and then the German prisoners of war had left Dachau, nobody came to the hotel anymore, except perhaps the odd construction engineer helping to supervise the partial erasure of a KZ where, for several very unpleasant weeks in the summer of 1936, I myself had been an inmate. The elected representatives of the Bavarian people saw no need to preserve the remnants of the camp for present or future visitors. Most residents of the town, including myself, were of the opinion, however, that the camp presented the only opportunity for bringing money into Dachau. But there was little chance of that happening so long as the memorial temple remained unbuilt and a mass grave, where more than five thousand were buried, unmarked. The visitors stayed away, and despite my efforts with the geraniums, the hotel began to die. So when a new two-door Buick Roadmaster pulled up on our little brick driveway, I told myself that the two men were most probably lost and had stopped to ask directions to the U.S. Third Army barracks, although it was hard to see how they could have missed the place.
The driver stepped out of the Buick, stretched like a child, and looked up at the sky as if he was surprised that birds could be heard singing in a place like Dachau. I often had the same thought myself. The passenger stayed in his seat, staring straight ahead, and probably wishing he was somewhere else. He had my sympathies, and possessed of the shiny green sedan, I would certainly have kept on driving. Neither man was wearing a uniform but the driver was altogether better dressed than his passenger. Better dressed, better fed, and in rather better health, or so it seemed to me. He tap-danced up the stone steps and through the front door like he owned the place, and I found myself nodding politely at the hatless, tanned, bespectacled man with a face like a chess grandmaster who had considered every possible move. He didn’t look lost at all.
“Are you the owner?” he asked as soon as he came through the door, without making much of an effort at a good German accent and without even looking at me while he awaited an answer. He glanced idly around at the hotel decor which was supposed to make the place feel more homey, but only if you roomed with a milkmaid. There were cowbells, spinning wheels, hemp combs, rakes, sharpening stones, and a big wooden barrel on top of which lay a two-day-old
Süddeutsche Zeitung
and a truly ancient copy of the
Münchener Stadtanzeiger.
On the walls were some watercolors of local rural scenes from a time when painters better than Hitler had come to Dachau, attracted by the peculiar charm of the Amper River and the Dachauer Moos—an extensive marsh now mostly drained and turned into farmland. It was all as kitsch as an ormolu cuckoo clock.
“You could say that I’m the owner,” I said. “At least while my wife is indisposed. She’s in the hospital. In Munich.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” said the American, still not looking at me. He seemed more interested in the watercolors than in the health of my wife.
“I imagine you must be looking for the U.S. military barracks, at the old KZ,” I said. “You turned off the road when you should have just driven across the bridge, over the river canal. It’s less than a hundred yards from here. On the other side of those trees.”
Now he looked at me and his eyes became playful, like a cat’s. “Poplars, aren’t they?” He stooped to stare out of the window in the direction of the camp. “I bet you’re glad of them. I mean, you’d hardly know the camp was there at all, would you? Very useful.”
Ignoring the implied accusation in his tone, I joined him at the window. “And here I was thinking you must be lost.”
“No, no,” said the American. “I’m not lost. This is the place I’m looking for. That is, if this is the Hotel Schroderbrau.”
“This is the Hotel Schroderbrau.”
“Then we are in the right place.” The American was about five-feet-eight, with smallish hands and feet. His shirt, tie, pants, and shoes were all varying shades of brown, but his jacket was made of a light-colored tweed and nicely tailored, too. His gold Rolex told me there was probably a better car than the Buick in his garage back home in America. “I’m looking for two rooms, for two nights,” he said. “For me and my friend in the car.”
“I’m afraid we’re not a hotel that is approved for Americans,” I said. “I could lose my license.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said.
“Don’t think I’m being rude, please,” I said, trying out the English I’d been teaching myself. “But to be honest, we are almost closing. This was my father-in-law’s hotel, until he died. My wife and I have had very little success in running it. For obvious reasons. And now that she’s ill—” I shrugged. “I’m not much of a cook, you see, sir, and I can tell you’re a man who enjoys his comfort. You would be better off at another hotel. Perhaps the Zieglerbrau or the Hörhammer, on the other side of town. They are both approved for Americans. And they both have excellent cafés, too. Especially the Zieglerbrau.”
“So am I to take it that there are no other guests in the hotel?” he asked, ignoring my objections and my attempts to speak English. His German accent may have been nonexistent, but there was nothing wrong with his grammar or his vocabulary.
“No,” I said. “We’re empty. As I said, we’re on the verge of closing.”
“I only asked because you keep on saying ‘we,’” he said. “Your father-in-law is dead and you said your wife is in the hospital. But you keep on using the word ‘we.’ As if there’s someone else here.”
“Hotelier’s habit,” I said. “There’s just me and my impeccable sense of service.”