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Eichmann's imaginative lies and maneuverings paid off in 1938, when Hitler occupied Austria. Eichmann flew to Vienna in the same plane with the top men in the SS, acidulous Heinrich Himmler and blond, willowy Reinhardt ("The Hangman") Heydrich, and was given the task of getting rid of the Austrian Jews but keeping their possessions. In dealing with Jewish leaders, Eichmann delighted in playing the role of unpredictable tyrant. One day, he would be soft-spoken and agreeable, even delaying a transport of Jews so that it would not start on Yom Kippur; the next, he would scream hysterically and emphasize his points by slamming the desk with his swagger stick. When war began, Eichmann was head of the SS bureau called IV A 4 b—in Teutonic officialese, IV stood for the Gestapo, A for Internal Affairs, 4 for religion, and b for Jews. Until war's end, all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were to be his responsibility.
On the job, he exemplified the characteristic that Germans call Kadaverge-horsam, i.e., the unquestioning obedience that enables even a corpse to do what it is told. If he had refused to obey Hitler, says Eichmann with an unaccustomed ring of truth, "I would have been not only a scoundrel but a despicable pig!" This, in effect, will be the argument of Eichmann's defense attorney, West Germany's Dr. Robert Servatius.
The Madagascar Plan. Then Poland fell, and there were another 3,000,000 Jews to dispose of. Eichmann lost himself in an elaborate and totally impractical plan to resettle 4,000,000 Jews under a Nazi overlord on the island of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. Says a laconic observer: "The year Eichmann wasted on the Madagascar scheme was the most harmless he ever spent." In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, the Madagascar scheme—and all other "soft" solutions of the Jewish question—went out the window. At the Wannsee conference in Berlin, Eichmann and 14 other Nazi chiefs heard Hitler's orders to apply the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem—death. To Eichmann, an order was an order.
Grasping Hand. Eichmann's first contribution was the organization of special SS Einsatzgruppen, who followed the Panzer columns as they rolled deep into the Soviet Union and machine-gunned all Jews they could lay hands on. The SS method for distinguishing between Jew and Gentile was quite simple: any Russian who "looked Jewish" was summarily shot.
Specialist Eichmann traveled to Minsk with Reichsfuhrer Himmler to study the situation. The SS demonstrated its skills for its visitors by slaughtering 400 Jews. Eichmann seemed unbothered, but Himmler nearly fainted. He even tried to save one young Jew because he was blond and seemed Aryan, but Himmler's shouts were drowned in the rattle of ma chine guns. Later, Himmler was to show more aplomb at massacres, but now he ordered a search for a more "humane method."