Did Adolf Eichmann set up the Theresienstadt ghetto? I don’t think so.

Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary film, featuring Benjamin Murmelstein and the Theresienstadt ghetto, has been getting a lot of ink in the press lately.

This quote is from an article which you can read in full here:

For three and a half hours, the viewer [of Lanzmann's documentary] is taken through an exploration of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia.

Set up by SS colonel Adolf Eichmann as a bogus town run by Jews themselves – a Potemkin village designed to dupe the world – Theresienstadt was one of the grimmest chapters in the long record of Nazi atrocities.

Theresienstadt was not in “Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia” at that time; it was in the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  You can read all about Theresienstadt on my website here.

According to Wikipedia, Adolf Eichmann “was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.”

Nowhere on the Wikipedia page does it say that Eichmann SET UP the Theresienstadt ghetto.  He might have been in charge of the transports to and from Theresienstadt, but he did not have the authority to set up a ghetto or anything else.  Eichmann was “small potatoes,” not important enough to being setting up camps or ghettos.

This quote from the news article also resonated with me:

Murmelstein’s recollections, said Lanzmann, are doubly precious, as they prompt a new interpretation of Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and hauled to Israel for trial, culminating in his execution in 1962. [...]

If Eichmann was “small potatoes,” why did the Mossad go to the trouble of kidnapping him and taking him to Israel?  I think it was because Eichmann was the one who wrote the minutes of the Wannsee Conference where the genocide of the Jews was allegedly planned.

The Israelis wanted Eichmann to admit that he left out the part of the Conference where the men talked about killing the Jews, not “transporting them to the East,” as Eichmann wrote in the minutes.

Eichmann at his trial in Israel

During his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann testified as follows during session 107 on July 24, 1961:

What I know is that the gentlemen convened their session, and then in very plain terms – not in the language that I had to use in the minutes, but in absolutely blunt terms – they addressed the issue, with no mincing of words. And my memory of all this would be doubtful, were it not for the fact that I distinctly recall saying to myself at the time, Look, just look at Stuckart, the perpetual law-abiding bureaucrat, always punctilious and fussy, and now what a different tone! The language was anything but in conformity with the legal protocol of clause and paragraph. I should add that this is the only thing from the conference that still has stayed clearly in my mind.

When the Presiding Judge asked Eichmann what Stuckart had said “in general” “on this topic,” Eichmann answered, “The discussion covered killing, elimination, and annihilation.”

On the basis of Eichmann’s testimony, it is now accepted that the minutes of the Wannsee conference were written with euphemisms, instead of the actual words used at the conference.

50th anniversary of the execution of Adolf Eichmann, the “Architect of the Holocaust”

May 31st will mark the 50th anniversary of the hanging of Adolf Eichmann, who was charged with 15 crimes in an Israeli court, and convicted in 1962 of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization (the SS).

Eichmann’s crime was that he was the man in charge of the trains that transported the Jews to the concentration camps.  Who was the man in charge of the trains that took the Japanese-Americans, German-Americans and Italian-Americans to internment camps in America?  I don’t know, but I doubt that there was anyone in charge of scheduling the trains in America.  Americans are not as organized as the Germans are. Up until recently, you could set your watch by the arrival and departure of the trains in Germany. In America, not so much.

The three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann were Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh, all three of whom were German Jews who had left Germany in 1933 and escaped to the British Mandate of Palestine, soon after Hitler came to power.

This raises the question: Why didn’t all the German Jews just go to Palestine in 1933? The Holocaust could have been avoided altogether if the Jews had all emigrated to Palestine.  The answer is that the British would not allow it — they were trying to avoid the conflict that is still going on today.

As an officer in the SS, Eichmann had been assigned in 1938 to help organize SS Security Forces in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria with Germany. After that, Eichmann was selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration at the end of 1938.

According to Wikipedia: Eichmann was an “expert on Jewish matters” for the Third Reich, overseeing the concentration camps, the expropriation of Jewish property, and the deportation of Jews to ghettos and death camps. He played a major role in implementing the Final Solution.

In his capacity as the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Eichmann had tried to work with Zionist organizations to get Jews into Palestine.  In December 1939, Eichmann was assigned to head the RSHA Sub-Department IV-B4, which was the office of the German government that dealt with Jewish affairs and emigration. In 1940, Eichmann was in charge of the Madagascar Project, a plan to deport Jews to the island of Madagascar, but this plan was never put into effect. (Again, the British were against this plan.)

In short, Adolf Eichmann was in charge of getting the Jews out of Germany, but was he eventually put in charge of killing all the Jews in Europe?  Yes! According to Wikipedia: “Reinhard Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be murdered. (Source: Browning, Christopher R. (2004), The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 362)”

Several years ago, I was staying in a hotel in Berlin, and I wanted to go to the newly-opened Museum in the house in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, where the Final Solution was planned.  I asked the two young people working at the front desk in the hotel how to get to the house in Wannsee where the Final Solution was planned.  I spoke to them in English because all young people in Germany speak English better than most Americans.  But the phrase “Final Solution” drew a complete blank: these young people had no idea what I was talking about.  So I said it in German:  “die Endlösung.”  Again, I drew a complete blank.

Finally, I asked the young woman at the front desk in the hotel to call me a taxi.  Surely, a taxi driver would know how to get there.  As it turned out, the cab driver did know, but he said it was 50 miles, each way.  “Das macht aber nicht,” I said, and away we went.

The point of this long digression from my subject is that a man was hanged for his role as the Architect of the Final Solution 50 years ago, but today’s young people in Germany don’t know what you are talking about when you say “die Endlösung der Judenfrage.”

Adolf Eichmann was a low-level bureaucrat in Nazi Germany. He never personally killed anyone and never ordered the death of anyone. He had no authority in Nazi Germany and was not a decision maker. So unimportant was Eichmann that he did not even leave Germany until 1950. When he finally emigrated to Argentina, he did so with the help of the International Red Cross.  His wife and children did not change their names when they left Germany, and that’s how Eichmann was tracked down by the Israeli Mossad in 1960.

Eichmann’s good friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was 6 levels above Eichmann in the Reich Security Main Office, was put on trial by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and specifically charged with gassing the Jews. Eichmann was not important enough to be hunted down and put on trial at Nuremberg. Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner had been friends from their school days in Linz, Austria, the city that was also the boyhood home of Adolf Hitler.  It was because of this boyhood friendship that Eichmann, who was a High School dropout, had gotten his job with RSHA.

So if Eichmann was such “small potatoes,” why was he kidnapped by the Mossad and put on trial in Israel?  There were hundreds of bureaucrats and technicians who were at the same level in the Nazi hierarchy as Eichmann.

In my humble opinion, the reason that Eichmann was put on trial was because he was the man who had typed up the minutes of the Wannseee Conference, the meeting where the Final Solution was planned on January 20, 1942. In the minutes of this meeting, a copy of which was discovered in 1947, the participants had used euphemisms such as “transportation to the East”  instead of talking about “the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers.” The Jews in Israel, who were survivors of the Holocaust, wanted to hunt down Eichmann, put him on trial, and establish that he had falsified the minutes of the Wannsee conference.

After 11 months in custody in Israel, during which time he was given Thorazine, a drug that is used to treat mental illness, Eichmann was finally put on trial. His facial tics (tartive dyskinesia) showed the effects of long term use of Thorazine.

With a little help from heavy doses of Thorazine, Eichmann confessed the truth, which was that the Wannsee Conference was held for the purpose of planning the genocide of the Jews. Up to that time, there had been no documentation found which showed that Hitler had ordered the killing of all the Jews. The Eichmann trial finally provided the proof of the systematic plan to exterminate the Jews; that is why Eichmann is regarded today as the second most important Nazi, next to Adolf Hitler.

The son of Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein defends his father’s reputation in a new essay

Several days ago, I received a new essay, written by Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, which I have put up on my website here. Dr. Wolf Murmelstein is defending his father against the slander of Vienna Jewish Community Secretary General Raimund Fastenbauer [who] thought it right to speak of Benjamin Murmelstein as a “Collaborateur” called “Murmelschwein.”

Gate into the walled town of Theresienstadt which became a concentration camp during World War II

To make a long story short, Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein was the last Jewish Elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.  He was arrested in June 1945 and accused of collaborating with the Nazis, but after a pre-trial investigation, the charge was dropped. (In December 1946, after eighteen months of investigation, the prosecutor had not found enough evidence for the case and Murmelstein was released.)

In 1947, Murmelstein was a witness in the trial of Karl Rahm, the last Commandant of Theresienstadt, who was convicted of Crimes against Humanity and executed.

This quote from Dr. Wolf Murmelstein’s essay is the most interesting part, as far as I am concerned:

H.G. Adler, in his very important history of Theresienstadt acknowledged that, in November and December 1944, there were many amazing improvements of conditions but failed to mention how those were due to the strong action of Benjamin Murmelstein.

It had been established in the People’s Court that Benjamin Murmelstein had the first alarming information about things going on when the first group of Slovakian Jews reached Theresienstadt at end of December 1944. So he could fully evaluate the danger connected to a strange building project as the work had to be done only following oral instructions without any written schemes and drawings.

[...]

Benjamin Murmelstein – after having given instructions in the event that he might be arrested – faced the Commander, reporting that inmates were startled and a mass escape would be difficult to avoid. Commander Rahm replied that he was following instructions to set up bombproof stores for the provisions (a version he held even when on trial in People’s Court in 1947!) and the Jews had to work instead gathering on the main square. But: the following day he left for Prague, returning after three days with the order to stop that work.

Such an order could be given only by SS General K.H. Frank High SS and Police Commander and Reich Minister for the Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate. Indeed Frank considered the Ghetto a good trump card in order to reach a deal with Allied Commanders.

After an order from Himmler, the Auschwitz Gas Chambers had ceased the murder of Jews. Eichmann wanted to go on with the killing and, like some other Lager Commander, he thought to set up his own Gas Chamber. This fact, which proves Eichmann’s own wide power, never had been cleared.

It is very clear, in the quote above, that Dr. Wolf Murmelstein is writing about a Gas Chamber, that was being built in Theresienstadt in the last days of World War II, because Adolf Eichmann wanted to continue the killing of the Jews after the gassing had stopped in Auschwitz-Birkenau in November 1944.  The inmates were “startled” by this new development and Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein took it upon himself to save the inmates from a mass slaughter in case of an attempted mass escape.

I previously blogged about the Theresienstadt gas chamber here.  Now Dr. Wolf Murmelstein seems to be confirming that there was a gas chamber being built at Theresienstadt and that the inmates knew about it.   

How Adolf Eichmann saved the Danish Jews

Yesterday, I blogged about a 5th grade class that learned about the fate of the Danish Jews in World War II from a Holocaust survivor. I blogged about this because I was very surprised that a 5th grade teacher would introduce this subject to a class of 10-year-olds. The  true story of what happened to the Danish Jews disagrees with the official history of the Holocaust:  In order not to be branded a Holocaust denier, one must believe that “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” was the systematic plan to kill all the Jews in Europe, which later became known as the “genocide” of the Jews.  How can it be genocide when the Jews in one country in Europe were not killed?  That must be why these unsuspecting 10-year-old children were told, by an eyewitness Holocaust survivor, that a Danish Jew was gassed at Auschwitz.

The real story is that none of the Jews in Denmark were deliberately killed and none were sent to Auschwitz to be exterminated. The most amazing thing about the Danish Jews is that Adolf Eichmann, the so-called “mastermind” of the Holocaust, was involved in saving them from the gas chambers!  Did Eichmann get any thanks for this?  No, after he was tried and convicted, by an Israeli court, of  Crimes against Humanity, Eichmann was hanged.

A few years ago, I purchased a book entitled The Miracle in Denmark, The Rescue of the Jews by Christian Ejlers.  On page 46 of the book is a photo of Adolf Eichmann in his SS uniform.  The caption reads:  “SS-Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann (1906 – 1962) was the man behind the German genocide of six million Jews, the Roma people, and homosexuals in Europe.”

This quote is from page 47 of the book The Miracle in Denmark:

Adolf Eichmann arrived in Copenhagen (Denmark) on November 2, 1943.  Like (Werner) Best, he was an SS officer. He was head of the department of the Reichsichershauptamt (RSHA) that was entrusted with carrying out Hitler’s policies against Jews: having as many of them as possible annihilated.

[Werner Best was the German Reich Commissioner in occupied Denmark; he was the top civil authority in Denmark from 1942 to May 5, 1945.]

We do not know for certain the real reason why this mass murderer came to Copenhagen.  Some believe that his job was to try to find out why the action against the Jews had been a fiasco — seen from the Germans’ point of view.  Who was responsible?  Others believe that he came to support (Werner) Best in the internal power struggle that had begun among the SS, the German foreign Ministry, and the Wehrmacht.  [...]  No matter what the explanation, Best and Eichmann made an agreement at Hotel D’Angleterre on November 2, 1943.  This agreement was sent as a telegram to Berlin on November 3, 1943.  Its contents were as follows:

1.  Jews over 60 will no longer be arrested and deported.
2.  The deported half-Jews and Jews married to non-Jews will be released and sent back to Denmark.
3. All Jews who had been deported from Denmark will remain in Theresienstadt and within a reasonable length of time will be visited by representatives of the Danish authorities and the Danish Red Cross.   [...]
The last point in the telegram meant that no Jews from Denmark — including those who were not Danish citizens — were sent to Auschwitz or other extermination camps.

Chapter 4 in the book The Miracle in Denmark is entitled “Deportation.”  This quote is at the beginning of the chapter:  “Why did Adolf Eichmann and Werner Best ensure that 481 Jews in Theresienstadt were not sent to the extermination camps.” 

According to the book, tour guides at Theresienstadt tell visitors that “the Danish Jews were saved because they were protected by the Danish king.”  However, the author of the book explains that it was not King Christian X who saved the Danish Jews. The Danish Jews were sent to Theresienstadt in October 1943; the Danish government had resigned on August 29, 1943, so the Danish king did not have the authority to save the Jews.   No, it was Werner Best and Adolf Eichmann, both German SS officers, who decided that the Danish Jews would be sent to Theresienstadt and that they would not be transported to Auschwitz.

Mossad opens its archive on the capture of Adolf Eichmann

Today I read in the Daily Mail online the news that the Mossad has opened its archive on the capture of Adolf Eichmann.  The Daily Mail explains that Eichmann was the Nazi in charge of Hitler’s plan to kill Europe’s Jews.  The news article in the Daily Mail is all about the capture of Eichmann with the details of how it was handled.  There are no details about the crimes committed by Eichmann; this quote is all the information provided:

Eichmann was in charge of implementing Adolf Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.

Eichmann was in charge of implementing Hitler’s plan?  What does that mean? Notice the use of the word “exterminate,” instead of the words “murder” or “kill.”  How do you say “exterminate” in German?  I don’t know, but both Hitler and Himmler were fond of the word “ausrotten,” which they both used in their speeches when they spoke of getting rid of the Jews.  Ausrotten is now defined by Holocaustians as meaning “to exterminate” when it is used in connection with the Holocaust.

Regarding the “extermination” of the Jews, we have to go back in time, to 1937, when Adolf Eichmann, along with his superior officer Herbert Hagen, was sent to Palestine, which was a British mandate at that time.  Eichmann’s assignment was to look into the possibility of sending the Jews in Germany to Palestine. They landed in Haifa, but were only given a transit visa. They went to Cairo where they met with a member of the Haganah.

Eichmann and Hagen were unable to meet with Arab leaders regarding the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.  However, Hitler managed to sneak some German Jews into Palestine in what is known as “The Transfer Agreement.”

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Eichmann was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to form the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” in Austria, which had been annexed into the Greater German Reich after the Anschluss in March 1938.  In only eight months, 45,000 Jews were expelled from Austria. In eighteen months, there were 150,000 Jews  (60% of the Austrian Jewish population) expelled under the authority of Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann was assisted in the expulsion of the Jews from Austria by Erich Rajakowitsch, a lawyer who came up with the idea of setting up a “fund of emigration,” with money given by the more affluent Jews to enable the poorest Jews to pay for their expulsion. One of the first steps, taken by Eichmann, was to free the Jewish leaders and then to convince them to cooperate in organizing the mass expulsion from Austria.

In 1939, Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmfhrer; he returned to Berlin after the formation of  RSHA (Reich Main Security Office), which united under one administration the various police and intelligence organizations:  SD , Gestapo , etc.. In December 1939, Eichmann was appointed the head of the RSHA Referat IV B4, the section of RSHA which dealt with “Jewish affairs and evacuation.”

In August 1940, Eichmann published the Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt which was the plan for the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Europe to the French island of Madagascar. At that time, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannfhrer; a year later he was promoted to Obersturmbannfhrer.  The Madagaskar plan had been started by the Polish government and it was taken over by the Hitler after the defeat of Poland.  Unfortunately, the plan came to naught.

On January 20, 1942, Eichmann attended the Wannsee Conference, the meeting where “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was planned. It was after the Wannsee Conference that Eichmann was appointed the director of transportation, responsible for all trains carrying Jews to the camps in what is now Poland.

In 1944, Eichmann was given the job of organizing the deportation of the Hungarian Jews.  In only 10 weeks, beginning in May 1944, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz and gassed. At Eichmann’s trial in Israel, there were 100 Holocaust survivors who testified about the crimes of Eichmann, the “Mastermind of the Holocaust.”

However, while the gassing of the Jews was in progress at Auschwitz, Eichmann was negotiating with Rudolf Kastner, the head of a Jewish organization.  As a result, around 1,700 Hungarian Jews were allowed to escape to Switzerland.   You can read about the negotiations to save the Hungarian Jews on my website here.

After Adolf Eichmann was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina, he was taken to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including Crimes against Humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962. 

Lipstadt compares “Demjanjuk in Munich” to Eichman in Jerusalem

In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, which you can read here, Deborah Lipstadt compared the recent trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.  In her article, Lipstadt pointed out that “Coincidentally, this year is the 50th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a case that, in its significance, appears to dwarf the Demjanjuk proceedings.” Lipstadt has recently published a book entitled “The Eichmann Trial.”

In comparing the two trials, Lipstadt wrote this:

But what happened at both of these trials is more important than the ultimate fates of the guilty. Now as then, the victims were given a chance to tell their story, not in a book, interview or speech, but in a court of law. At the Eichmann trial close to 100 witnesses testified about their suffering. At the Demjanjuk trial we heard from the victims’ children. They joined the prosecutor in pointing their fingers at the man who facilitated their parents’ murders. In other words, the Demjanjuk trial proves that while Eichmann himself may be history, the robust process that made Holocaust trials into something more than mere court proceedings is still effective.