Trudy Gold
Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner, and Other Austrians
Trudy Gold - Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner, and Other Austrians
- Well, good afternoon, good evening, everyone, or wherever you are. And of course, this is a very, very dark day for people who believe in freedom. We were expecting it, but we always go on hoping because that’s the human condition, and in a way, human behaviour. What was it Marx said? “History repeats itself. The first time is a tragedy. The second time is a farce.” And how many more times will we be in this kind of situation where power-crazy people take the destiny of ordinary folk and destroy their lives? What else is there to say? Are we ever, ever going to learn the lessons? And I’m not a preacher, but I think all of us are feeling quite sad, dark at this particular time. And why have I decided looking at Austria to go into these kind of characters? Hitler said something fascinating. He said, “We German Austrians understand nationalism more than the Reich Germans.” Important to remember that both Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner came from exactly the same area of the world as does Adolf Hitler. And ironically, they went to the same school in Linz that Adolf Hitler went to. And their backgrounds, they are both born. Can we see the first picture, please? Judy, thank you. Adolf Eichmann, you know what Leonard Cohen wrote of him? Colour of hair, brown, colour of eyes, brown, build medium. What did you expect, horns and talons? Adolf Eichmann, the grey little man, the arch bureaucrat who oversaw the murder of 6 million men, women, and children.
He had lost their humanity. He had lost his humanity. And of course, we had at the Eichmann trial the opportunity to study him, what Hannah Arendt later called the banality of evil. I always had problems with that term because is evil ever banal? But as a man, he was incredibly banal, his dates, 1906 to 1962. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who I’ll be coming on to later, his dates were 1903 to 1946. And as I said, they both went to the same school in Linz that Hitler went to. Not only that, they were all born in the dying days of the Habsburg Empire that we’ve spent so much time about, that multiethnic empire. They were very much Austrian Germans. Eichmann in particular was a mediocrity. So let’s look at his background to see what we can discover and try and work out what creates these kind of individuals. I feel so strongly that we should spend more time looking on those who turn to the good. We will, of course. We’ve already looked at some rescuers, and over Pesach, which is after all the Festival of Freedom. In my sessions, I’m going to be looking at the road to freedom. I’m going to be looking at responses to the Shoah. We’re not actually going to study the Shoah, per se. We’ve already looked at it and the films will be available once the website is up. But I want to look at responses, but also how people sought to rebuild their lives. And we will spend time looking at the good guys. And of course, we’ll be looking at the birth of Israel because it all pulls together.
So what do we know about this boy? Well, actually, he was born in Germany. He was the son of a businessman. But the family moved to Linz after the mother died. So he’s in Linz and he’s educated at the same school as Hitler. During World War I, his father was in the Austrian army. And after the war, his father returns to Linz where he had a business. So what happened in Austria at the end of the First World War? Well, Williams already began to discuss this with you. And when I look at Red Vienna, why Red Vienna, communist Vienna, I’ve also been discussing it. It’s very important to remember that what happens in Vienna the city was very different than what happened in the Rump Empire. Look, the empire is dismembered. New countries emerged. The Czechs, remember Wilson and his 14 pointers, the self-determination of peoples, all these new countries emerge out of the Habsburg empire. And Austria is left with 7 million people, 2 million in Vienna. And basically the city council becomes very progressive, very left wing, populated with a high number of Jews.
When I say Jews, most of these people had lost their Jewish identity. They were internationalists. They wanted to create a perfect setup to help the suffering poor, extraordinary characters. But outside of the capital, what about those other 5 million? The German Austrians in Catholic Austria, in conservative Austria, just as Hitler hated the capital, they hated the capital. So they’re born very much in this kind of bourgeois, Catholic, conservative, embittered area because they’ve lost their empire. And then they asked for Anschluss. Their dream was that Austria and Germany would be united by a president who would spend six months in Germany, six months in Austria. They wanted to come together with the Germans. But of course, the Allies, particularly the French and the Belgians who were so bitter, they vetoed it. And of course, one of the problems we face is that many of the seeds of the Second World War are found in the First World War, particularly in the peace treaties at the end of it. It led to the most extraordinary amount of bitterness, disappointed nationalism. These people thought of themselves as the lords of the Earth. They’d imbibed all this Volkisch literature. I’ve shown you some of the scenery amongst which they live, the wonderful Alps, this sort of clean countryside, in touch with the pure folk, not the corrupt city. Jews were corrupt. And also please don’t forget the Russian revolution. And it’s not just the Russian Revolution.
When revolutions broke out in Russia, you had firstly the Democratic Revolution, and then of course the Bolshevik Revolution. The problem was this. Any Bolshevik, of course, has given up any notion of religion. We are one people now. Remember the first lines of the Communist Manifesto written by the grandson of rabbis on both sides, Karl Marx? What did he say? “People of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Forget all the boundaries. Forget all the divisions. And there were no people who were more ready to embrace this idea than these alienated non-Jewish Jews of Isaac Deutscher. And of the 11 who took power at the time of the revolution in Russia, six were of Jewish births. The most famous, of course, was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Trotsky. But so was Kamenev. So was Zinoviev. So was Radek. I can go on and on and on. And to make matters worse, there is revolution in Munich, three revolutions one after the other. The majority of the leadership were a people of Jewish birth. They’ve thrown aside their Jewishness, but that is not the point. That is not the point. They are seen by the outsider as Jews. Revolution breaks out in Hungary, in Red Vienna. Why do you think it’s called Red Vienna? Because it’s very left wing. So there’s this kind of distaste. These are conservatives. They want to hold on to a rural dream, a dream that is pre-industrial. And this is the world that both Adolf Eichmann and Ernst Kaltenbrunner imbibes.
And of course, that world was also deeply anti-Semitic. Now, another point I want to make, although the area was Catholic, important to remember that the actual inner circle of the Nazi party, the real adherents were not in any way Christian because they went beyond Christianity. They believed in a world where blood and race mattered, not what you believed in. That’s why it didn’t matter if you were a Jew, if you were a Hasid, rebbi or a convert. Edith Stein, one of the most famous of them, of those murdered at Auschwitz, did not die because she was a Catholic nun. She died because her parents were Jewish. It’s about race and blood. And of course, Catholicism believes in equality before the Lord. Okay, we can argue the nuances but we have to talk about a religion of morality. These people had a different kind of morality. They would try, we would call it completely immoral. But they believed they were going to create a brave new world full of brave people who would march into a future all together with one march, a classless society. Later on, of course, they create national socialism. It’s nationalism and socialism. So let’s go back to the personality of Adolf Eichmann and his particular story. So he goes to the same school as Adolf Hitler had gone to a few years before. He left without graduating. And then he trains to be a mechanic. He then discontinued. He tries lots of different jobs. His father has a small mining company. He tries to work for him.
And then he goes to work for an electrical company as a sales clerk. He works as a district agent for a vacuum oil company. It’s a subsidiary of Standard Oil, an American company. Of course, it’s fascinating how many big conglomerates, American and British, had money tied up in Austria and in Germany. In July, 1933, he moved back to Germany. He’d been dismissed from his job. Why? Because he’d been involved in training a very right wing youth group. By this time it’s 1933. He is 27 years-old. He’s already attracted and involved in right wing politics. The previous year, in 1932, a school friend and a family friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, had persuaded him to join the Nazi party. And for the next year, he was a member of the Austrian SS and actually served in a formation operation, a formation operating from Salzburg. Now, I’ve visited this part of the world. It is visually absolutely stunningly beautiful, and I’ve always found a disconnect. When I’m in an environment that is so beautiful, I’ve always found the fact that there’s such evil beneath the surface, terribly, terribly disquieting. So he enlisted in this group on April 1st, 1932. He becomes a full member of the Austrian SS in 1932 in November. And he leaves in 1933. Why? ‘Cause he goes to Germany. Hitler has come to power in Germany. He’s already involved in the Nazi party in Austria, which is illegal. So he crosses the border into Germany as a member of the SS. And he is already proving himself to be a very capable administrator with a huge eye for detail. So he was promoted to a sergeant in the SS, and he was assigned where? He is assigned to the staff at Dachau.
Dachau was the first of the German concentration camps. It was established on April the first, 1933, 12 kilometres from Munich. And who went to Dachau? Political opponents of Nazism, anyone who spoke out. And actually the establishment was reported in all the Western press. There was a small little piece on the front page of the Times. It’s very important, this. Knowledge was known. Knowledge is there. But then we can think about what’s happening in Eastern Europe at the moment, we know. So basically he is in Dachau, which is a correction centre. But the point is thousands of people die there from correction: artists, liberals, communists. It’s not specifically for Jews. But if Jews fall into the category, of course they are incarcerated in Dachau. By 1934, he requests a transfer to the Gestapo where Himmler was in control. Can we see a picture of Linz please, Judy? You see, that’s another picture of Linz, the very pretty town. I’ve already showed it to you when I looked at the last session. This was the town that Hitler loved. This was going to become, later on in the war, he wanted to create it as the capital of culture. Remember, he loathed Vienna. This is bourgeois little Linz. And now can we see the picture of Heinrich Himmler?
Now he’s now going to be the boss of Eichmann. Himmler was one of the most extraordinarily impossible people to imagine he would ever have a position of power. He was a puny little thing. He was the son of a school teacher, actually a professor. He was an ardent nationalist. He was born in Germany. He was an ardent nationalist. He actually was involved in the Nazi party from the very beginning. He was involved with the Thule Society. He was involved in all sorts of strange occult rituals, which ironically he’s going to carry through into the SS. He was an absolute fanatic. He was a chicken farmer who was fascinated by selective breeding, eugenics, if you like, of animals. And how that man is going to become one of the most powerful men in the world, responsible for the murder of millions and millions of people, it really beggars belief or it should beggar belief. But tragically, and he obviously had a diseased soul. He’s transferred to the SD, the Gestapo, and his boss is Himmler. He worked first in the section that dealt with Freemasons. In 1935, he was moved to a new intelligence section, the Jewish section, under a man called Herbert Hagen. Can we see Hagen, please? Yeah, that’s Herbert Hagen. You notice dates 1913 to 1939. He was actually later on the personal assistant to the head of the SS in France. He escaped to South America, as did so many of them, through the Vatican.
I’ll be talking about that later today. And he was sentenced. Some of them went to South America. Some of them, by the way, went to Syria and Egypt and were recruited by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. Sometimes when I’m researching these kind of classes, it’s almost like reading a science fiction novel. You cannot believe it could possibly happen. But unfortunately it did. He was actually not caught and brought to jail until 1980 where he was sentenced to 12 years for the murder of thousands of Jews who he was responsible for their deportation from France. Now he’s then promoted, Eichmann is now promoted to the highest enlisted rank of the SS. And he comes into contact with Leopold von Mildenstein, who he’s going to work with. Can we see the next slide, please, Judy? Leopold von Mildenstein, he actually also came from the Habsburg Empire, but not from Austria. He was a minor aristocrat. He was Catholic, very Catholic. He’s trained as an engineer, joined the Nazi party in 1929. And he actually then moves to Austria, one of the first Austrians to join the SS. Now, what’s interested about him is he becomes, he is the expert on Jewish affairs, and soon it’s going to be Eichmann’s role. He visited Palestine many times. He was fascinated by Zionism. He even went to Zionist congresses. He believed he could solve the Jewish problem that way. It’s important to remember that at this stage, we’re now in the early '30s, the Nazis are in power in Germany, committed to a judenrein Reich. They have already begun the programme of the social and political exclusion and legal exclusion of the Jews from Germany.
Maybe murder was always in Hitler’s mind, but certainly at this stage of the game, the whole notion was to find a solution to get rid of the Jews. One of the problems was that after the Wall Street crash of 1929, very few people wanted to take in refugees. Nothing much changes. Consequently, he’s looking for other solutions. And Mildenstein happened to believe that Zionism might solve the problem. Later on, enemies of Israel use this kind of event because he’s going to visit Palestine with Eichmann, they use this kind of event to try and prove that the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis, which is to me, absolute calumny. We’re going to see, yes, there were meetings, but I don’t know about you, but I would trade with the devil if I thought it would save my family. So leave that point aside and let’s go on. So basically he even attends Zionist congresses. And a Zionist emissary, a man called Kurt Tuchler, was commissioned to make overtures and to meet with Mildenstein. And in spring 1933, he and his wife spent a month in Palestine. Now it was his department that Eichmann joined under Hagen. And he was given a new book on Judaism by Adolf Bohm, written by Adolf Bohm. He needs to find out everything he can about the Jews. Eichmann is going to become the expert on the Jews. Now, between the 9th of September '34, and the 9th of September to the 9th of October, 12 articles were published by Mildenstein, “A Nazi goes to Palestine”. In summer of 1935, Mildenstein attended the 19th Zionist Congress in Lucerne as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation. By 1936, this line is overtaken.
However, he and Eichmann actually make a visit to Palestine. The British don’t want them in, so they go to Haifa, and then they go off to Egypt for conversations with a man called Haj Amin al-Husseini. Now obviously Haj Amin al-Husseini is known to you because he was the Mufti of Jerusalem, completely opposed to Jewish immigration. And later on he’s going to become terribly dangerous for the Jewish people because he’s going to work for Hitler. He’s very useful recruiting Muslims in Albania, and he makes terrible antisemitic broadcasts from Berlin in the war. And to clear up any issues, and tragically, after the war, he is still the representative of the Palestinian people. They are people who have had the most tragic leadership. And now I’m going to read to you a broadcast that this man made to the Arab-speaking world. And this is the man that Mildenstein and Adolf Eichmann went to visit. “Before the outbreak of war and before the Axis took up arms to stop Anglo-Saxon Jewish greed, there was one nation who had fought alone against these forces for more than 20 years. That nation is our Arab nation, which has fought against the English and the Jews in Egypt, in Palestine, Iraq, and in Syria, and in all parts of the Arabian Peninsula. After the outbreak of the present war, our nation continued in their struggle, determined to achieve its aims.
That is liberty, independence, unity, and sovereignty. From the outbreak of this war, the Arab nation has had neither peace nor neutrality. It was engaged alone in the hardest struggle against the Anglo-Saxon Jewish policies. This war was for the Arab people, none other than the continuation of the uninterrupted struggle, which it has sustained alone for 20 years. Today, the Arab people has at its side the powerful enemies of its own enemy. In this war, the Arabs are not neutral. They cannot be neutral. For that reason, I’ve already given and for the interest they have in the results of this war, if God forbid England should be victorious, the Jews would dominate the world. England and her allies would deny the Arabs any freedom and independence and would strike the Arab fatherland to its heart and would tear away parts of it to form a Jewish country whose ambition would not be limited to Palestine, but would extend to all Arab countries. But if on the contrary, England loses and its allies are defeated, the Jewish question which for us constitutes the greatest danger, would be finally resolved, all threats against the Arabs would disappear and millions of Arabs would be freed, and many Muslims in Asia and in Africa would be saved.”
So this is the man that Eichmann meets, and they actually came on a ship called “The Romania” to Haifa. It’s fascinating. They did spend one night on Mount Carmel. And as I said, then they met up with the Mufti and a Zionist representative. Eichmann was asked to write a report on the visit. And he said that the economic situation of the Jewish settlement was dire. He blamed it on the destructive nature of the Jews. It’s interesting because he’s a bureaucrat. That’s why he’s in the job he’s in. He’s brilliant at detail, but he’s already obsessed with antisemitism. Later on at the trial, you know, there’s a lot of debate. Was he actually following orders? Of course, he was one of the worst monsters the world has ever known. But what I want to prove to you, that he actually was from the beginning an appalling anti-Semite. And he goes on to them. He said that he was beginning to be against any Jewish settlement in Palestine. He said he had a fear that German Jews would contribute to the establishment of a stronger and prosperous Jewish entity, which would eventually become a threat to Germany. Okay, so already he’s playing around with other things. Now, after the Anschluss, he is sent in to Austria. And I mentioned yesterday the great greeting that was given to the German army and to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis when they marched into Austria, and now he’s to organise Jewish immigration from Austria.
All Jewish organisations are now placed under the control of the Gestapo, the funding of it, of this whole operation because it’s a bureaucracy. He sets up his headquarters on the Wienstrasse, I think in the Rothschild mansion. And the money already comes from, the money to finance comes from the money and goods that have already been seized from German Jews. One of the issues of Hitler’s Germany, it’s not just the legal, social, and political exclusion of the Jews to make them leave Germany. It’s to make them leave Germany and leave their goods behind. It’s also envy. I don’t have to tell you the number of wonderful art collections, jewellery, everything that was destroyed and taken away. He is so good at it, the setting up of this organisation. He needs the names of every Jew in Austria, every Jew in Vienna. He’s promoted to the first lieutenant. He is now responsible for the Central Agency, they called it, for Jewish Immigration. It’s created in Austria. By the time he left in May, 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had got out of Austria, most of them penniless. Most of them though got out legally. Others were smuggled out through a few extraordinary characters. I know that Helen Fry will be talking later on about the extraordinary Kendrick who worked at the British Embassy in Vienna and even got people out of concentration camps. So at the start, I’m not going to spend too much time on his war, what went on in the war, because what I’m more interested in is because as I said, we’ve covered the Shoah in a lot of detail, I just want to try and get behind the man and also what happened to him after the war.
He’d married. He married a woman called Veronika Liebl. Later on they would have four sons. She of course was a member of the Nazi party. World War II, he is now a captain and he’d made a great name for himself with the Office of Jewish Immigration. He also set up a bureau in Berlin at the beginning of '39 to facilitate Jewish immigration out of Germany. In fact, Jews left Germany as late as October, 1941, which is after the beginning of the so-called Final Solution. Now. So he’s heading up now, he’s promoted again. He’s now in charge of all Jewish affairs. His immediate boss is Heydrich. After Heydrich’s assassination, his immediate boss is going to be his friend, Kaltenbrunner. And of course, after the invasion of Poland, you now have 3 million Jews under German control. So from now on, the policy changes from forced immigration to forced deportation. And Heydrich organises the collection of Jews from cities with good railways. Remember, this tragically is a bureaucratic, modern crime. They use the railway systems. They use bureaucracy. They use modern technology. So all organisations in the Gestapo, the SD, they’re all now under the control of Heydrich. And he is his man. And he flies all over the empire working on deportations, Adolf Eichmann. He’s assigned to deport 80,000 Jews from Moravia and Tocatavits, in that recently annexed portion of Poland. At that time, they’re transferring them to something in an area in Poland called the Nisko Reservation. He’s told to lay plans to deport the Jews from Vienna. The Nisko is in Lublin. At one stage they’re thinking of making this a sort of, I don’t know, no man’s land for Jews.
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were being transported into the annexed lands. Ethnic Poles, ethnic Jews are being turned out. It’s absolutely extraordinary that this whole swathe of population, this is how you fight a race war. Hitler was fighting a race war. The Slavs, remember, were at the bottom of the racial pile. They are expendable. So what happens too, the occupation of Eastern Europe is far more harsh than the occupation of the West. Heydrich announces that Eichmann is his special expert in charge of arranging deportations. So this man Adolf Eichmann is now in charge of all deportations. His job was a very complicated job and he assiduously worked at the job. He coordinates with police agencies. He deals with their confiscated property. He arranges and he has to finance the transport from the wealth of the Jews. In Nisko, he runs into trouble with Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, who was terrified of the economic ramifications. They’re still not sure what they’re going to do. There’s another plan to send all the Jews to the island of Madagascar. That plan had actually first been muted by the French. In 1938, a right wing French government had talked about transporting Eastern European Jews who’d only arrived in France after the first World War to the island of Madagascar. But it came to nothing.
The Nazis took it up, but they couldn’t because they didn’t control it because of the shipping lanes that the British controlled. And of course, this is where marked the invasion of Russia, the Einsatzgruppen are established, and we begin that terrible process of death by bullets, where over a million men, women, and children are shot as the army would advance, special Einsatzgruppen units would enter into Russia on that huge front, mopping up, 3,000 men, 750 each in four units. The majority of them had PhDs from top German universities. I keep on stressing to you the high level of education of the majority of the perpetrators. Academic education means absolutely nothing if there is no empathy. Now the point is were these people devoid of empathy, or did they learn to become monsters? However, there were problems. The problems were that some of these great marvel of manhood were going mad. They were drinking too much. And that is of course, when Eichmann is ordered by his boss to do what? To create a conference to decide on the solution of the Jewish problem. And that, of course, is at Wannsee on the 17th of January, 1942. It is reactive because it’s already started. And this is when 16 people sit around a table representing every government organisation in Germany. Think about it. Those of you who have a company, you’ve got a problem. You call together your department heads. That’s exactly what happened at Wannsee. Two-thirds of them were lawyers. And they sat down. It took them 90 minutes and they worked out the solution, which meant the mass murder of the Jews of Europe.
And Eichmann was the bureaucrat. With his attention to detail, he gave the lists country by country of the Jews, where they lived, including the Jews in neutral countries and the Jews in countries at war. So of course, England, Ireland, they’re all listed in the Wannsee document. And he is the bureaucrat working for his boss. He drafted all the information. He was the liaison between all the departments in what became known as Operation Reinhard after Heydrich. He didn’t make the policy, but he was the bureaucrat in charge of the operation of the policy. He’s constantly in touch with the Foreign Office, of the stripping of Jewish assets in conquered territories. He had extensive meetings. He went from camp to camp. And of course in Hungary, Hungary was the last of the communities to be attacked because Hungary was allied to Germany. But as the Hungarian alliance wavered, he goes in and of course he is in charge of the murder of the Jews of Hungary. And he prepared for Auschwitz to be ratcheted up so the numbers could be murdered even more quickly. In fact, as the war comes to the end and Himmler stops the deportations, against orders, Eichmann goes back to Hungary, and he is responsible for that terrible death march out of Hungary towards Austria. What happens to him after the war? I’m not going to deal with the Eichmann trial. We’ve already dealt with it. And those of you who want it, you’ll be able to, after the website’s up, you’ll be able to listen. In Austria, he meets up with Kaltenbrunner.
He changes his name to Otto Eckmann. He gets out of his SS uniform. He’s captured by the Americans. He escapes with the help of SS colleagues, and then he manages to get to North Germany into the British section where he gets a job. He’s felling trees and raising chickens. He travels around in 1950. Meanwhile, Simon Wiesenthal has gone to Linz to look up his family. And I’ll be spending a whole session on the extraordinary work of Simon Wiesenthal. But meanwhile, he’s on the move around Germany. He then in 1950 manages to make it to Italy with documents that are provided by a man called Alois Hudal. Now can we go on with the slides please, Judy? There’s Haj Amin al-Husseini, much more about him later on in other sessions. There of course, I just wanted you to visually see the Anschluss. All right. Now let’s have a look at this man, Alois Hudal. He is the man responsible for the ratline out of the Vatican. And one of the questions will always be, to what extent was Pius XII involved? And of course there is that brilliant book by Philippe Sands, “The Ratline”. So he’s the son of a shoemaker. He was born in Graz in Austria. Again, his dates are 1885. He’s four years older than Hitler. He has very much that he’s a conservative. He studies theology. The church would take in very bright boys. And he’s ordained as a priest. He becomes an expert on the liturgy.
He’s very interested in Slavic Orthodox Christianity. His dream is the reunification of the Eastern church with the Catholic church. He becomes a Doctor of Sacred Theology at the University of Graz. He enters the Teutonic College of Santa Maria in Rome and he’s the chaplain. And of course he attends. And of course he is a chaplain in the First World War. He publishes a book of sermons for the soldiers, “Loyalty to the flag is loyalty to God”. He is a nationalist. He remains rector of the college in Rome, which is a seminary for Austrian and German priests. And he’s appointed the consultant on Austria and Germany to the Vatican. He’d actually been introduced to Pius IX in 1922, also an incredibly conservative pope, Pius XI, beg your pardon. What are they up against? They’re up against communism. They’re up against liberalism. This is a threat to Catholicism. He became the public face of advocacy for Austria. He’s incredibly conservative. And from 1933 onwards, he publicly embraces national socialism. We begin to see terrible invective against the Jews. Remember, this is the representative of the Austrian churches in Rome. Linking so-called “Semitic race,” and I’m quoting, “which sought to set itself apart and dominated, Jewish bankers,” he wrote, “planned to become financial masters of the Vatican.” He blamed the Jews for communism. He’s critical of parliamentary democracy. He’s against freedom of thought. He wanted a German victory over Russia.
He believed in the evil of Russian communism. And as I said, his dream was to bring Rome into union with the Slavic church. He publishes “The Foundations of National Socialism” with an imprimatur from the Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer. He enthusiastically endorses Hitler and sent Hitler a handwritten copy with a dedication, quote, “the new Siegfried of Germany’s greatness.” He was very against Rosenberg, who was one of the main theoreticians of the Nazi party because he was a pagan. He was completely Christian, and frankly, he was sidelined by the Nazis. But the point is he’s in Rome in 1945 and he creates a ratline, out of which some of the most infamous characters that walked the earth found freedom. He arranged financial deals with people like Peron, with the Syrian regime. Later on, after Farouk’s fall, Egypt is going to be an incredible haven. Some Nazis went to Egypt under Farouk, but the bulk are going to go under Nasser when he’s actively looking for Nazi scientists. No, this is not the fantasy of Frederick Forsyth. It’s all documented history. Anyway, we know that on the 31st of of August, 1948, he asked Peron for 5,000 visas for Germans and Austrians. They are the anti-communists, he told the right wing dictator, who saved Europe from the Soviets. Anyway, who are the people?
Characters like Stangl, Roschmann, Mengele, Wagner, Brunner, Eichmann, Otto Wachter. Eichmann was actually brought, he was actually brought out of Italy to South America with a Red Cross permit by Bishop Alois Hudal. And of course in South America, he gets a job eventually working for the Mercedes car company. And he is on the top wanted list. And eventually of course he is brought to justice. And he is brought to justice mainly through a man known as the general, an extraordinary German Jew who survived the war and became a prosecutor back in Germany, and of course through Simon Wiesenthal working with the Mossad. He’s finally brought to justice by a kidnap of the Israelis. But what I wanted to establish is how the arch bureaucrat, one of the most evil men I think in history, is brought to justice. And what is absolutely fascinating is how he gives himself away. What really seals it, what happened was remember Simon Wiesenthal had met up with the Eichmann family in Linz. In 1952, Eichmann actually brought his wife to Argentina, having arranged the paperwork through the Argentinian consulate in Vienna.
They actually travelled on the ship Salter from Genoa under their real names. They were reunited with Eichmann and they travelled with him. First of all, they worked for a company that was set up by a man called Fulda who had been sent to Madrid and then to South America by Heinrich Himmler. Once they’re losing the war, Himmler wants to set up this huge financial network. They have a dream of creating a fourth Reich in South America. I’m afraid this is not fantasy, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, what happens is that there are very few photographs, but in the end they’re pretty sure they’ve got their man. The proof is because the story given is that Eichmann divorces his wife and he remarries in South America. On the anniversary of the first marriage, Adolf Eichmann takes a bouquet of flowers home to his wife. That’s when they realise it’s him. And that is of course when the Israelis decide to bring him to justice, not to execute him. Mossad carried out all sorts of executions. So did other groups, and I’ll be talking about that over Pesach time. But the reason they decided to bring him to justice, they wanted the world to know the story of the Shoah. And this grey little man who walked the world is brought to justice in Jerusalem. There was an outcry in the United Nations because Israel broke international law. Golda Meir made a passionate speech and they put him on trial. And after a long period of trial, which was reported, it was the centre of the world’s spread, and in many ways it really stirred an interest in the Holocaust.
I may have told you, but when I studied the Holocaust, it was regarded with respect, but very little was really known. No one took on that the Nazis were fighting a war against the Jews that was just as important to them as a war against the Allies, as fighting a world war. And anyway, in the end, he’s brought to justice. And you can make your own minds up. He never really recanted. This arch bureaucrat, this grey little man who came from conservative Austria, who was actually helped out of Europe by a bishop, worked through the ODESSA and finished up in an Israeli jail. He was executed, and actually his body, he was cremated, his body, his ashes were thrown outside of Israeli territorial waters. I’m afraid I have mistimed this session. I will come back to the others. But next session I want to talk about Red Vienna. So I’m going to take questions now. Let’s see what questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Yes, Putin mirrored the invasion of Poland in 1939.
Yes, James is saying, “I echo Trudy’s point. We never learn the lessons from the past, once again, appeasement of bloodthirsty dictators.”
Q: Saul says, “To stop Putin, bomb Moscow.” Oy, whatever way we deal. You know when this happened?
A: It happened when we pulled out of Afghanistan with such, ay.
Q: Tablet Magazine has an excellent article on the history of Ukrainian pogroms. May I make a comment?
A: You might have heard Wendy talk about Jewish Book Week. We’re going to be running five events next week at the lunchtime session at 2:30 English time. And on the Thursday, I’m interviewing this man. I’m interviewing, Jeffrey Veidlinger. He is the writer of the book “In the Midst of Civilised Europe”, which is the story of the pogroms in the Ukraine between 1918 and '21. You see, tragically from a Jewish point of view, Ukraine has a terrible history, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648, then terrible massacres. But that doesn’t stop the fact that a lot of innocent men, women and children are going to die. And that’s what really matters.
Q: Yes, Margaret says, “Don’t you think for Eichmann the killing became so normal? That’s the meaning of banality.”
A: Yes, it could be, Margaret. Yeah. You see in the end, he’s doing a job. When you read the memoirs of some of these characters like Hoess, the Commandant in Auschwitz, he was asked, how could you do this? And he described the process, their numbers, do the trains run on time, the dehumanisation. But never forget how many millions were involved in the dehumanisation process. And this is the problem. And a question we have to ask ourselves, are the people who know these terrible events going on and really do nothing about it, and that includes all of us, do we share any guilt? It’s a question for you, something I wrestle with. I don’t know.
Susan’s saying “We lost Gabriel Bach this week, the assistant prosecutor at the Eichmann trial. May his memory be a blessing.” Thank you for that knowledge, Susan Altred.
Abigail, “I just discovered this series on Netflix, 'Hitler’s Circle of Evil’.” Yes it is very good Abigail, and it’s on Netflix, Hitler and his circle of evil. But look, I needed to include this lecture in Vienna so that you understood the absolute nationalism and what happens when a nation is pummelling into the ground, what it does to people. But we don’t just want to dwell on the dark.
Debbie, “Margaret MacMillan’s book, ‘Paris 1919’ details how the peace treaties created the problems that lead to World War I.” Yes. “It’s the backbone of history,” says Ellie.
Dr. Colleen Leki, suggest one reads “Putin’s People” by Catherine Belton. Get the original edition, not the one the UK banned because of its action by the so-called Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich. The book is full of these Jewish oligarchs, two sanctioned this week by the UK. Many take Israeli citizenship but do not reside in Israel. It tells it all and the world ignored this evil man.“ All right, that’s "Putin’s People”.
Oh, beg your pardon, Teddy, workers of the world unite, not people of the world unite. Of course you are right, Teddy.
Linda, “President Zelensky compares Putin’s invasion to Hitler’s invasion right before World War II.” Hm.
Morris, “The Ukraine has suffered most severely in the last hundred years. A terrible manmade famine under Stalin, yeah, the Holodomor, and the massacres by the Russians and the Germans during World War II and now.”
Jonathan, “It’s interesting that Putin is a fluent German speaker, having spent some years there with the KGB.”
“Having watched the first session last night,” this is from Abigail, “I find it quite revealing in terms of the role of Herman Hess. Hess and Hitler were in prison together because of the Putsch, the early rows of Goring, Himmler and Bohme also.” Yes, of course. What does it get? Does it get us anywhere?
This is Ellie. He’s saying Ukrainians were the worst anti-Semites. They worked with the Nazis, but we have to stand up to madmen like Putin. Yes. The head. Yes, yes, in 1930. So did I say? Oh, I misspoke. Teddy, you are right.
Ellie. “My mother briefly met Eichmann in Budapest. He was totally passionate about finishing the job he didn’t quite do in Holland and elsewhere.” It’s extraordinary. Under what circumstances asked Monica, did she meet him?
This is from Elliot. He wants to know where I’m located. I’m in London. “My mother was born in Minsk but our family emigrated to New York when she was an infant, really a devoted American.” Thank you for responding.
Joan, “The young man from Bamberg who was taken to Dachau in 1933 and brought back in a sealed coffin was a communist. And my grandfather said to my father, ‘That’s what happens to the communists.’ Why haven’t we learned anything? The people in the heartland of America are no different from the rural Austrians and Germans, misplaced patriotism.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, Joan. “For those interested read ‘The Kersten Memoirs’. Himmler negotiated with a Jew for the release of Jews of Hungary.” That is a very long complicated story.
Myra. In fact, I spent four sessions on the Kastner affair, which you will have after the website’s up. And there’s someone online called Tommy Kamoli, whose uncle was head of the rescue committee.
“Why did Hagen only get 12 years? Why did Austria put itself out as the first victim of Nazism and the West let it happen?”
Oh yes, Abigail, “I appreciated the PBS series ‘Rise of the Nazis’ about Adolf Hitler.” Yes. There are so many good documentaries on the Nazis.
This is Monique. She’s saying, “It was mentioned that Hitler came to power only because the various German Democrats were all aristocrats and totally underestimated him as he was from the lower class.” Hitler was a genius. He played the aristos, he played the industries, he played everyone.
This is from Maddie. “My grandmother at age eight, left Belarus in 1933 for Canada with my grandmother. She never forgot how as the train passed through Germany, she saw judenrein scribbled across the walls of the train stations.” Yes. Horrible memories.
Q: Isn’t that Haj Amin formed the Bosnian SS?
A: Yes. Did I misspeak? Oh Michael, you are so right. No, no, no, no. The Albanians were brilliant to the Jews. Oh, that’s terrible misspeaking. Yes, of course, it’s the Bosnian SSD, the Muslim unit. Yes. The Albanians were extraordinary. They had a notion of Besa and if they’d given people bread and water, they had to save them. They saved quite a few thousand Jews, the Albanians.
This is Mitzi Alvin. “If you get MEMRI, Middle East Media Research Institute, a website run by honest reporters, a Jewish group that translates what Arab leaders say, you would hear vicious antisemitic broadcasts they put out on a daily basis.” Unfortunately, yes.
This is from Mr. Heller. “A thorough analysis of Nazis is well beyond this context and what any single mind could possibly achieve. But you are correct that unanalyzed envy is ferociously destructive because it’s projecting and tacked out there. On a deeper level, the brilliant psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who witnessed World War I and World War II wrote that if we do not learn to control our destructiveness and learn from experience, we are doomed.” Yes. And on that tack, Einstein and Freud shared letters in 1932, very much on this level. They were asked by the League of Nations to go into debate as to why we need war. Well, Freud was asked and he chose Einstein. You can get those letters on the net. They are incredible, the Freud Einstein correspondence, very much the same sort of thing. Yes.
Teddy is calling us to notice how involved IBM were involved. Yes. It’s mind boggling how many big firms were involved. And Michelle is saying “the difference with reports on similar topics on Al Jazeera and Arab Channel evident.”
Q: Yes, Eve’s saying IBM facilitated Eichmann’s list. How on earth did Eichmann get lists of Jews in the Arab countries?
A: He applied to the Board of Deputies, presumably. All the lists are available, you know.
Oh, actually, I think we have to stop here, I’m afraid, because Judy said I have to stop at six o'clock tonight for all sorts of reasons. So Judy, thank you very much for facilitating that, a dark subject for a dark day. And my next session, I’m going to be looking at Red Vienna. And don’t forget, next week there are five separate sessions to look out for at 2:30 English time in conjunction with Jewish Book Week. And on the Thursday, I’m going to be looking with the author at his extraordinary book on the pogroms in the Ukraine.
Anyway, let’s pray for all those innocent victims, whoever they are. And be safe. Goodnight.