This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHINGwww.picklepartnerspublishing.com
To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books picklepublishing@gmail.com
Or on Facebook
Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.
Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
THE CASE AGAINST ADOLF EICHMANN
EDITED AND WITH A COMMENTARY
BY
HENRY A. ZEIGER
With a Foreword by Harry Golden
INTRODUCTION
Eichmann...
THE MAN,
THE CRIMES.
This book is a documentary presentation of the case prosecuting attorneys could present against the greatly captured Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.
Using affidavits, testimony from the Nuremberg trials, captured German documents, statements made by ranking Nazis, reports from concentration camp commandants, guards, Einsatz groups and survivors, Henry A. Zeiger tells the whole Eichmann story.
There is a composite portrait of the man himself by the people who knew him intimatelyDieter Wisliceny, Eichmanns subordinate in Slovakia...Kaltenbrunner, Head of the Gestapo...Hss, commandant of Auschwitz. We are told how Eichmann, alone among the top-level masterminds of the anti-Jewish conspiracy, managed to escape allied retribution and was finally captured. We learn how the hideous Nazi plan for the mass murder of the Jews evolved. We see the major part Eichmann played in the abortive Nazi attempt to barter the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews for war supplies.
What emerges from the thorough documentation and terse, perceptive commentary is the complete Eichmann story from its historical beginnings to the present moment. It is not only the story of the man who is the current symbol of Nazi barbarism...It is, as well, the story of inhumanity in our time.
FOREWORD
We Jews have a Holy Day, Tishah bAb. Originally, it commemorated the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. After the fifteenth century, and especially after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the holiday took on its more somber and sad character, with mourning also for those who were killed during the Spanish Inquisition. Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes, an eminent Catholic historian, has estimated that between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand Jews were killed. Another hundred thousand were exiled. The world was shocked. Holland opened its doors to the refugees; the Sultan of Turkey invited Jews to take refuge in his domain on the island of Cyprus.
Even so, its terror had a function. Historians have argued that the Inquisition had a certain stabilizing effect on a Europe just emerging from the Dark Ages into a mercantile and urban society. The torturers of the Inquisition, cruel though they were, actually believed that God approved when they tore the breasts from Jewish mothers or put the torch to the heretic. The auto-da-f literally translates as an act of faith. It was always a well-publicised event, attended by church and state dignitaries. Whatever other vicious emotions it fed, it was supposed to strengthen religious resolve.
What can we say of Herr Eichmann who carried out the orders of the Nazis to kill six million Jews in the twentieth century? What can we say of the Germans who empowered him? They did not believe God approved. This was no act of faith. They themselves did not believe they were doing right. Hitler undoubtedly thought the murder of these Jews had political advantages, Goebbels, ideological advantages, and Eichmann, personal advantages. The German agencies did not release daily statistics of the Jews eliminated to the world, and Eichmann did his best not to sign his name to any of the orders which consigned car-load lots of Jews to the crematoria. For Eichmann, the murder of Jews was simply a way of advancing his career, of demonstrating his efficiency to his bosses. This book reproduces Rudolf Franz Hss testimony that every step was taken to keep Jews from knowing they were about to go to their death. The doors and walls of the gas chambers bore inscriptions that they were delousing stations. The gas chambers were hidden and strict security maintained that unauthorized German personnel might not know of the murders that went on. The Nazis knew it was wrong and they tried to hide it.
The Jews who went to the Inquisitional pyre of the heretic cried out: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one. They died for their faith with dignity. The Nazis not only committed these mass murders but stripped their victims of all dignity. They killed Jews not for their religious faith or for their political beliefs but because they had been born. The Nazis shaved the heads of these Jews to use the hair for mattresses; they pulled out the gold fillings of their teeth to send to the Reichsbank; they gathered up the toys of the Jewish children for use in the Nazi winter drive.
For these reasons, the forthcoming trial of Karl Adolf Eichmann in Israel is of monumental importance. Nothing else is more important in the history of human relations. What happens to Eichmann personally is of minor interest. But his story, his testimony, should be recorded, for civilization needs to know why the Nazis proceeded as they did.
It is unreasonable to suppose the Nazis undertook the final solution of the Jewish problem without some indication, some sign, that continental Europe would let them. If only by its silence, continental Europe gave its permission. It didnt care. In the early part of this century, in the Russian city of Kishinev, Cossacks swept down upon the Jewish Pale of Settlement and left forty-seven dead. The world stood aghast. Protest inundated Russia from every civilized country. The Czar was deafened by complaint. Public opinion in its shock made itself felt.
But the Germans in the 1930s, with their back-stairs mythology, persuaded Europe to turn its back on the pleas of the Jews. It is well to remember that anti-Semitism was a respectable profession in Austria as early as 1880only a few decades after Napoleons edicts emancipated the Jews and let them escape the ghettos; anti-Semitism divided France in the Dreyfus case; every time economic disequilibrium appeared, the Czar mounted a pogrom. But the Nazis added something: they made anti-Semitism a political cause instead of a religious and heretical problem.
The Eichmann trial, and certainly this book, will tell us as other historians have tried, that anti-Semitism wasnt a by-product of National Socialism, as the record of the Nuremberg trials might indicate, but as integral to it as Hitlers promises of lebensraum, full employment, and war.
