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Eichmann undertook the job. At Lublin, he personally tested a closed truck that carried Jews to the burial pits and killed them en route by monoxide fumes. The prisoners screamed for minutes on end, and Eichmann, peeping through a window in the cab, saw "a grasping hand." He wrote later: "I wanted to get off. 'Don't worry,' said the driver, 'we are almost finished.' " At Auschwitz, always his favorite camp, Eichmann was impressed by the use of Cyclon B gas, which was first tried on 600 Russian prisoners of war. He ordered the building of gas chambers and crematoriums sufficient to "handle" 9,000 prisoners a day.
Then Eichmann scoured the Continent for Jews, who were jammed into cattle cars and sent east to Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald. Majdanek, Sobibor. In his fanatic dedication, he seemed to have no interest in the fact that Germany was fighting a war. The army high command protested Eichmann's seizure of trains that were needed to rush supplies to the Russian front. The economic ministers howled that Eichmann was grabbing highly skilled Jews off the assembly lines of slave factories important to the war effort. Pale-eyed Rudolf Hoess. commandant of Auschwitz, begged Eichmann to ease up because he was receiving more human "freight" than he could conveniently kill. At Majdanek. the tall, tapering crematorium chimneys belched flame day and night until "a light dust lay over the whole city" of Lublin. At Auschwitz, even Eichmann noted that the smell of burning flesh "was not very pleasant.'' On May 29, 1942. Czech partisans hurled a grenade at Eichmann's boss. Reinhardt Heydrich, near Lidice. His spine was severed, and it took him six days to die. In revenge, all the men of Lidice were killed on the spot. Eichmann sent the 302 women and children of Lidice to the death camps.
Money for Blood. After the attack on Heydrich. Eichmann himself began to get jumpy. Bodyguards surrounded him wherever he went. He drank heavily and developed a tic in his right eye. Some of his staff, sickened by their jobs, asked to be sent to the Russian front.
Never, cried Eichmann. "We're all in the same boat, and no one is entitled to leave it."
His last big job was the elimination of Hungary's Jews. While the Nazi armies stumbled backward in defeat, Eichmann arrived in Budapest to command the roundup. He conceived another farfetched idea, on a par with the Madagascar scheme. Summoning Jewish Leader Joel Brand, Eichmann said: "I'm prepared to sell you 1,000,000 Jews: blood for money, money for blood. Whom do you want to save? Men who can beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me."
In return, he wanted the Allies to supply 10,000 winterized trucks, which he promised would be used only against the Russians. Nothing came of the plan, and Hungary's Jews were shipped to the gas chambers. With the Reich visibly collapsing. Heinrich Himmler thought he might save himself by using the remaining Jews as hostages. He ordered the killing stopped. For once. Eichmann refused to obey an order. He sent word to Commandant Hoess: "No one will walk out of Auschwitz. There is only one way they will leave—through the smokestacks."