Eichmann's Shock Poem by Paul Hartal

One of the chief organizers of the Holocaust,
SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann
joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became
a member of the SS, carrying the card number
45,326.

At the end of World War II, Colonel Eichmann
boasted that he would 'leap laughing into his
grave because the feeling that he had five,
or six million people on his conscience gives him
extraordinary satisfaction'.

SS colonel Adolf Eichmann was
a major perpetrator of Nazi crimes.
But fifteen years after the war,
during his trial in Jerusalem,
Eichmann refused to admit guilt
and showed no remorse for his role
in the horrible atrocities committed
by the Third Reich.

He presented himself as
an ordinary SS colonel, an obedient bureaucrat
in uniform, just a small cog in the Third Reich.
He put the blame for the crimes of the Reich
on his superiors in the Nazi leadership.
Trying to save his neck, Eichmann insisted
that he was only following orders.

At the court house in Israel, Eichmann sat
in a bulletproof glass booth to protect him
from assassination attempts.

The political theorist Hannah Arendt,
reporting for The New Yorker, was surprised
to see Eichmann's ordinary appearance.
He sat in his glass cell looking insignificant,
a nonentity, showing no emotions,
his monotonous voice impressing as much
as a flat affect.

And so, to her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Arendt gave the subtitle:
A Report on the Banality of Evil.

During the judicial proceedings
Eichmann displayed neither guilt nor hatred.
He insisted that he bore no responsibility
for the crimes of Nazi Germany
because he followed orders
and obeyed the laws of the state.

Before the trial, Eichmann was interrogated
for 275 hours by Captain Avner Less
of the Israeli Police.
Fluent in German and a former Berliner,
Less emigrated in 1938 to British Mandatory
Palestine.

Still, Adolf Eichmann respected uniforms,
including Israeli uniforms.
When Captain Less informed him
that his father was deported to Auschwitz
by the SS colonel's own headquaters,
Eichmann even tried to show a feeling of rapport.
His eyes opened wide and he exclaimed:
'But that's horrible, Herr Hauptmann (Captain) !
That's horrible! '

I never met personally Adolf Eichmann
but his 1944 visit in my native Hungary
resulted in terrible consequences.
In Operation Margarethe, on March 19,1944,
Hitler's armies occupied Hungary.
And a few days later Colonel Eichmann
arrived in Budapest to implement
what the Nazis euphemistically called
'the final solution'.

With the help of the Hungarian authorities,
in less than two months around 450,000 Jews
from Hungary were deported, most of them
to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
As a child I spent a dreadful year
in a slave labor lager near Vienna in Austria.
I was liberated in the spring of 1945
by the Russians.

After the war Eichmann managed to escape
to Argentina. He lived in his house with his
family in Buenos Aires at 14 Garibaldi Street.
In the spring of 1960 a team of Shin Bet and
Mossad agents captured him near his house
and brought him to Israel to face justice
in Jerusalem.

The judges found Eichmann responsible for
the deportation of Jews in the Holocaust,
for crimes against humanity and war crimes,
as well as crimes against Poles, Slovenes and
Gypsies.

He was sentenced to death and hanged.