Eichmann’s account, during the police examination, of how he was introduced into the new department—an account that was, of course, distorted but not wholly devoid of truth—oddly recalls this fool’s paradise. The first thing that happened was that his new boss, a certain von Mildenstein, who shortly thereafter got himself transferred to Albert Speer’s Organisation Todt, where he was in charge of highway construction (he was what Eichmann pretended to be—an engineer by profession), required him to read Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann immediately and forever to Zionism. From then on, as he repeated over and over, he thought of hardly anything but a “political solution” (as opposed to the later “physical solution,” the first meaning expulsion and the second extermination) and how to “get some firm ground under the feet of the Jews.” To this end, he began spreading the gospel among his S.S. comrades—giving lectures and writing pamphlets. He then acquired a smattering of Hebrew, which enabled him to read, haltingly, a Yiddish newspaper—not a very difficult accomplishment, since Yiddish is basically an old German dialect written in Hebrew letters, and can be understood by any German-speaking person who has mastered a few dozen Hebrew words. He even read one more book, Adolf Böhm’s “The History of Zionism” (during the trial he kept confusing it with Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat”), and this was perhaps a considerable achievement for a man who, by his own account, had always been utterly reluctant to read anything except newspapers, and, to the distress of his father, had never paid any attention to the books in the family library. Following up Böhm, he studied the organizational setup of the Zionist movement—its parties, its youth groups, its different programs. This did not make him an “authority,” but it was enough to earn him an assignment as official spy on the Zionist offices and Zionist meetings. It is worth noting that his schooling in Jewish affairs was almost entirely concerned with Zionism.

Eichmann’s first personal contacts with Jewish functionaries, all of them well-known Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory. The reason he became so fascinated by the “Jewish question,” he explained, was his own “idealism;” these Jews, unlike the Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike the Orthodox Jews, who bored him, were “idealists,” like him. An “idealist,” according to Eichmann’s notions, was not simply a man who believed in an “idea” or a man who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea (hence he could not be a businessman, for example) and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. When he asserted during the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an “idealist” he had always been. Of course, the perfect “idealist,” like everybody else, had his personal feelings, but if they came into conflict with his “ideal,” he would never permit them to interfere with his actions.

Eichmann was given his first opportunity to apply in practice what he had learned during his apprenticeship when, after the Anschluss, or incorporation of Austria into the Reich, in March, 1938, he was sent to Vienna to organize a kind of emigration that had thus far been utterly unknown in Germany, where up to the fall of 1938 the fiction was maintained that Jews were permitted to leave the country if they wished but were not forced to do so. Eichmann was made head of what was called the Center for Jewish Emigration, and his task was defined as “forced emigration.” The words meant exactly what they said; all Jews, regardless of their wishes and regardless of their citizenship, were to be forced to emigrate—an act that in ordinary language is called expulsion. Whenever Eichmann thought back to the twelve years that were the core of his life, he declared this year in Vienna to have been its happiest and most successful period. Shortly before he left Berlin, he had been promoted to officer’s rank, becoming an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant, and he had been recommended for his “comprehensive knowledge of the methods of organization and ideology of the opponent, Jewry.” The job in Vienna was his first important one; his whole career, which had progressed rather slowly, was in the balance. He must have been frantic to make good, and certainly his success was spectacular. In eight months, forty-five thousand Jews left Austria, whereas no more than nineteen thousand Jews left Germany in the same period; in less than eighteen months, Austria was “cleansed” of close to a hundred and fifty thousand people (roughly fifty per cent of its Jewish population), all of whom left the country “legally.” How did Eichmann do it? The basic idea that made all this possible was not his but, almost certainly, was contained in a specific directive from Heydrich, who had sent him to Vienna in the first place. (Eichmann was vague about the question of authorship, though he claimed it by implication; the Israeli authorities, being bound to the fantastic “thesis of the all-inclusive responsibility of Adolf Eichmann,” as an Israeli judge who prepared material for the trial expressed it, and to the even more fantastic supposition that, in the words of another government-appointed researcher, “one [i.e. his] mind was behind it all,” helped him considerably in his efforts to deck himself in borrowed plumes.) The idea, as Heydrich explained it in a conference with Göring on the morning of the Kristallnacht, was simple and ingenious enough. “Through the Jewish Community, we extracted a certain amount of money from the rich Jews who wanted to emigrate,” Heydrich said. “By paying this amount, and an additional sum in foreign currency, they made it possible for a number of poor Jews to leave. The problem was not to make the rich Jews leave but to get rid of the Jewish mob.” Still, there remained enough problems that could be solved only in the course of the operation, and there is no doubt that here Eichmann, for the first time in his life, discovered in himself some special qualities. There were two things he could do well, or better than many other people: he could organize and he could negotiate.

Immediately upon his arrival in Vienna, Eichmann opened negotiations with the representatives of the Jewish Community—whom he had to liberate from prisons and concentration camps for the purpose, since the “revolutionary zeal” in Austria, greatly exceeding the early “excesses” in Germany, had resulted in the imprisonment of practically all prominent Jews. Having undergone such imprisonment, the Jewish functionaries did not need Eichmann to convince them of the desirability of emigration. Rather, their concern was to inform him of the enormous difficulties that lay ahead. Apart from the financial problem—already “solved”—the chief difficulty was the great number of papers every emigrant had to assemble before he could leave the country. Each of the papers was valid only for a limited time, and this meant that the validity of the first had usually expired long before the last could be obtained. Once Eichmann understood how the whole thing worked—or, rather, did not work—he “took counsel with himself,” as he said in Jerusalem, and “gave birth to the idea that I thought would do justice to both parties.” He imagined “an assembly line, at whose beginning the first document is put, and then the other papers, and at its end the passport would have to come out as the end product.” This plan could be realized if all the offices concerned—the Ministry of Finance, the income-tax people, the police, the Jewish Community, and so forth—were housed under the same roof and forced to do their work on the spot, in the presence of the applicant, who would no longer have to run from office to office, and who, presumably, would also be spared some humiliating chicanery and certain expenses for bribes. When everything was ready, the assembly line did its work smoothly and quickly, and Eichmann thereupon “invited” the Jewish functionaries from Berlin to inspect it. They were appalled. “This is like an automatic factory, like a flour mill connected with some bakery,” one of them said. “At one side you put in a Jew who still has some property and, let us assume, a factory, or a shop, or some bank account, and he goes through the whole building from counter to counter, from office to office, and he comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport in which it says: ‘You must leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise, you will go to a concentration camp!’ ” This, of course, was essentially the truth about the procedure, but it was not the whole truth. Actually, these Jews could not be left “without any money,” for the simple reason that no country at this date would have received them in that condition. They needed, and were given, their Vorzeigegeld—the amount they had to show in order to obtain their visas and to pass the immigration inspection of the recipient country. For this amount, they needed foreign currency, which the Reich had no intention of wasting on its Jews. These needs were not covered by Jewish accounts in foreign countries, which, in any event, were difficult to get at, because they had been illegal for many years. Eichmann therefore sent a number of Jewish functionaries abroad to solicit funds from the great Jewish organizations, and these funds were then sold by the Jewish Community to the prospective emigrants for a considerable profit. One dollar, for instance, was sold for ten or twenty marks when its market value was 4.20 marks. It was chiefly in this way that the Community acquired not only the money necessary for the poor Jews and people without accounts abroad but also the funds it needed for its own, hugely expanded activities. Eichmann had not arranged the deal without encountering considerable opposition from the German financial authorities, who, after all, could not remain unaware of the fact that these transactions amounted to a devaluation of the mark.