Adolf Eichmann: The Mind of a War Criminal

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• 1. Early influences
• 2. Drawn to the Nazis
• 3. The Jewish question
• 4. Business practice
• 5. The Final Solution
• 6. Tape recordings
• 7. Find out more
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Business practice

In March 1938, Germany occupied Austria and a reign of terror broke over the Austrian Jews. Eichmann was given the task of accelerating Jewish emigration and easing the numerous bottlenecks through which aspiring emigrants had to pass. Eichmann used business practice to create order. He surveyed the relevant agencies and ordered them to locate their offices in one place. He ordered the creation of a central Jewish organisation so that he would have leaders with whom to negotiate, and allowed Zionist organisations to operate. Money was extracted from well off Jews to fund the emigration of the mass of poor Jews.

'Eichmann explored a fresh option: deporting the Jews to a designated Jewish territory.'

Finally, he established an 'assembly line' system whereby a Jew could up at the Central Emigration Office with his papers and proceed from desk to desk until he arrived at the end, with a passport and an exit visa but stripped of his property, cash and rights. Within a few months, the office had emigrated 150,000 Jews.

After this triumph, Eichmann was ordered to set up a similar office in occupied Prague, and in October 1939 was appointed to Department IV D 4 of the Gestapo in Berlin, which handled emigration from the Reich. The rational 'Jewish policy' advocated by the SD men now held sway, but emigration opportunities were few and Germany had just acquired over a million more Jews in conquered Poland. Eichmann explored a fresh option: deporting the Jews to a designated Jewish territory. He travelled to Poland to identify an appropriate location and then ordered that thousands of Czech and Viennese Jews be rounded up and sent eastwards to lay the basis for this 'territorial solution'.

Within a few months, however, the plan was scrapped. Eichmann's office lacked the resources for it and other SS projects had preference. At the same time he was brutally evicting hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews to make way for ethnic Germans transplanted from Eastern Europe into the newly annexed areas of the Reich. As a temporary measure the displaced Jews were packed into ghettos, but where would they go eventually? After the fall of France, Eichmann took up a plan emanating from the German Foreign Office to ship four million European Jews to Madagascar. He devoted great energy and research skills to the scheme, but it too foundered.

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