We arrived in Budapest around the middle of the afternoon and settled in quarters on the right bank, behind the castle, on the Schwabenberg where the SS had requisitioned the big hotels. I was temporarily assigned a suite at the Astoria, with two beds and three sofas for eight men. The next morning I went to find out what I could. The city was swarming with German personnel, officers from the Wehrmacht and from the Waffen-SS, diplomats from the Auswärtiges Amt, police functionaries, engineers from the OT, economists from the WVHA, agents from the Abwehr whose names were always changing. In all this confusion I didn’t even know to whom I was subordinate, and I went to see Geschke, who told me he had been named BdS, but that the Reichsführer had also appointed an HSSPF, Obergruppenführer Winkelmann, and that Winkelmann would explain everything to me. But Winkelmann, a plump career policeman with a crew cut and a jutting jaw, hadn’t even been informed of my existence. He explained to me that, despite appearances, we hadn’t occupied Hungary, but had come at Horthy’s invitation to advise and support the Hungarian services: despite the presence of an HSSPF, a BdS, a BdO, and all the related structures, we had no executive function, and the Hungarian authorities preserved the full prerogatives of their sovereignty. Any serious dispute should be submitted to our new ambassador, Dr. Veesenmayer, an honorary SS-Brigadeführer, or to his colleagues at the Auswärtiges Amt. Kaltenbrunner, according to Winkelmann, was also in Budapest; he had come in Veesenmayer’s special train car, which had been linked up to Horthy’s train on his return from Klessheim, and he was negotiating with Lieutenant General Döme Sztójay, the former Hungarian ambassador to Berlin, about the formation of a new government (Kállay, the fallen prime minister, had sought refuge in the Turkish legation). I had no reason to go see Kaltenbrunner, so instead I went over to introduce myself at the German legation: Veesenmayer was busy, and I was received by his chargé d’affaires, Legationsrat Feine, who took note of my mission, suggested I wait for the situation to become clearer, and advised that I stay in contact with them. It was a fine mess.

At the Astoria, I saw Obersturmbannführer Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy. He had already held a meeting with the leaders of the Jewish community and had emerged from it very satisfied. “They came with suitcases,” he explained to me with a big laugh. “But I reassured them and told them no one was going to be arrested. They were terrified of far right hysteria. We promised them that if they cooperated, nothing would happen, that calmed them down.” He laughed again. “They must think we’re going to protect them from the Hungarians.” The Jews were to form a council; so as not to frighten them—the term Judenrat, used in Poland, was known here well enough to provoke a certain anxiety—it would be called the Zentralrat. In the days that followed, as members of this new council brought mattresses and blankets to the Sondereinsatzkommando—I requisitioned several for our suite—then, in response to various requests, typewriters, mirrors, cologne, lingerie, and some very pretty little paintings by Watteau, or at least his school, I held meetings with them, especially with the president of the Jewish community, Dr. Samuel Stern, and had a series of consultations so that I could form an idea of the resources available. There were Jews, men and women, employed in Hungarian armaments factories, and Stern could provide me with approximate figures. But a major problem arose immediately: all the able-bodied Jewish men, who were without essential jobs and of working age, had for several years already been drafted into the Honvéd, to serve in labor battalions behind the lines. And it was true, I remembered, when we had entered Zhitomir, which was still held by the Hungarians, I had heard talk of these Jewish battalions; they infuriated my colleagues in Sk 4a. “Those battalions have nothing to do with us,” Stern explained. “You’ll have to see about that with the government.”

A few days after the formation of Sztójay’s government, the new cabinet, in a single eleven-hour legislative session, promulgated a series of anti-Jewish laws that the Hungarian police began to apply immediately. I saw little of Eichmann: he was always hidden away with officials, or else visiting the Jews, taking an interest, according to Krumey, in their culture, taking tours of their library, their museum, their synagogues. At the end of the month he addressed the Zentralrat himself. His whole SEk had just moved to the Majestic Hotel; I had remained at the Astoria, where I had been able to obtain two more rooms to set up offices. I wasn’t invited to the meeting, but I saw him afterward: he looked very pleased with himself, and assured me that the Jews would cooperate and submit to German demands. We discussed the question of workers; the new laws would allow the Hungarians to augment the civilian labor battalions—all Jewish civil servants, journalists, notaries, lawyers, accountants who were going to lose their jobs could be drafted, and that made Eichmann snigger: “Imagine, my dear Obersturmbannführer, Jewish lawyers digging antitank ditches!”—but we had no idea about what they would agree to give us; Eichmann feared as I did that they would try to keep the best for themselves. But Eichmann had found himself an ally, a functionary of the county of Budapest, Dr. Lászlo Endre, a fanatical anti-Semite whom he hoped to have appointed to the Ministry of the Interior. “We have to avoid repeating the mistake of Denmark, you know,” he explained to me, his head resting on his large veined hand as he chewed on his pinky. “The Hungarians must do everything themselves, they have to offer us their Jews on a plate.” Already, the SEk, along with the Hungarian police and the forces of the BdS, were arresting Jews who violated the new rules; a transit camp, guarded by the Hungarian police, had been set up in Kistarcsa, near the city; more than three thousand Jews had been interned there. On my side, I didn’t remain inactive: via the legation, I had made contact with the ministries of Industry and Agriculture to sound out their views; and I studied the new legislation in the company of Herr von Adamovic, the legation expert, an affable, intelligent man almost paralyzed by sciatica and arthritis. In the meantime I stayed in contact with my Berlin office. Speer, who by coincidence celebrated his birthday on the same day as Eichmann, had left Hohenlychen to spend his convalescence in Meran, in Italy; I had sent a congratulatory telegram and some flowers to him, but hadn’t received a reply. I had also been invited to attend a conference in Silesia, on the Jewish question, headed by Dr. Franz Six, my very first department head in the SD. He now worked at the Auswärtiges Amt, but from time to time still lent a hand to the RSHA. Thomas had also been invited, along with Eichmann and some of his specialists. I arranged to travel with them. Our group left by train, passing through Pressburg, then changing in Breslau for Hirschberg; the conference was being held in Krummhübel, a well-known ski resort in the Silesian Sudeten Mountains, now largely occupied by the foreign ministry’s offices, including Six’s, evacuated from Berlin because of the bombings. We were put up in a crowded Gasthaus; their new barracks weren’t yet ready. I was glad to find Thomas there; he had arrived a little before us and was taking advantage of the occasion to ski in the company of beautiful young secretaries or assistants, including one of Russian origin whom he introduced to me, and who all seemed to have very little work to do. Eichmann had gathered colleagues from all over Europe and was strutting about. The conference began the day after we arrived. Six opened the discussions with a speech on “the tasks and aims of anti-Jewish operations abroad.” He spoke to us about the political structure of world Jewry, asserting that Jewry in Europe has finished playing its political and biological role. He also made an interesting digression on Zionism, which was still not well known at the time in our circles; for Six, the question of the return of the remaining Jews to Palestine should be subordinate to the Arab question, which would take on importance after the war, especially if the British withdrew from part of their empire. His speech was followed by that of the specialist from the Auswärtiges Amt, a certain von Thadden, who explained the standpoint of his ministry on “the political situation of Jews in Europe and the situation in relation to anti-Jewish executive measures.” Thomas spoke about the security problems raised by the Jewish rebellions of the previous year. Other specialists or advisors explained the present situation in the countries where they were posted. But the high point of the day was Eichmann’s speech. The Hungarian Einsatz seemed to have inspired him, and he painted us a nearly complete picture of anti-Jewish operations as they had unfolded from the beginning. He quickly passed over the failure of ghettoization and criticized the inefficiency and confusion of the mobile operations: “Whatever the successes racked up, they remain sporadic, they allow too many Jews to escape, to reach the woods to swell the ranks of the partisans, and they sap the morale of our men.” Success, in foreign countries, depended on two factors: mobilizing local authorities and securing the cooperation, even the collaboration, of the Jewish community leaders. “As to what happens, when we try to arrest the Jews ourselves, in countries where we have insufficient resources, it’s enough to look at the example of Denmark, a complete failure, or the South of France, where we got very mixed results, even after our occupation of the former Italian zone, or Italy, where the population and the Church hide thousands of Jews that we can’t find…. As for the Judenräte, they permit a considerable savings in personnel, and they harness the Jews themselves to the task of their destruction. Of course, these Jews have their own aims, their own dreams. But the dreams of Jews serve us too. They dream of grandiose corruptions, they offer us their money, their property. We take this money and this property and we pursue our own task. They dream of the economic needs of the Wehrmacht, of the protection provided by work certificates, and we, we use these dreams to feed our armaments factories, so that we are offered the labor we need to build our underground complexes, and also to get the weak and the old, the useless mouths, handed over to us. But understand this too: the elimination of the first one hundred thousand Jews is much easier than getting rid of the last five thousand. Look at what happened in Warsaw, or during the other rebellions that Standartenführer Hauser told us about. When the Reichsführer sent me the report on the fighting in Warsaw, he noted that he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Jews in a ghetto could fight like that. Yet our late lamented Chief, Obergruppenführer Heydrich, had understood this long before. He knew that the strongest Jews, the toughest, the cleverest, the wiliest, would escape all selections and would be the hardest to destroy. And it is precisely those who form the vital reservoir from which Jewry could spring back, the germ cell for Jewish regeneration, as the late Obergruppenführer said. Our struggle prolongs that of Koch and Pasteur—we have to follow it through to the end…” A thunder of applause welcomed these words. Did Eichmann really believe in them? It was the first time I heard him talk this way, and I had the impression that he had gotten carried away, let himself be swept along by his new role, that he liked the game so much that he ended up becoming one with it. But his practical comments were far from idiotic; it was obvious that he had attentively analyzed all the past experiences to draw the essential lessons from them. At dinner—Six, out of politeness and for old time’s sake, had invited me along with Thomas to a little private supper—I remarked favorably on Eichmann’s speech. But Six, who never abandoned his glum, depressed air, thought much more negatively of it: “Intellectually uninteresting. He’s a relatively simple man, not particularly gifted. Of course, he is snappish, and he’s good at what he does, within the limits of his specialization.”—“Precisely,” I said, “he’s a good officer, motivated and talented in his way. In my opinion, he could go far.”—“That would surprise me,” Thomas dryly interrupted. “He’s too stubborn. He’s a bulldog, a gifted executor. But he has no imagination. He is incapable of reacting to events outside his field, of evolving. He built his career on Jews, on the destruction of Jews, and for that he’s very efficient. But once we’ve done with the Jews—or else if the wind shifts, if the time comes no longer to destroy Jews—then he’ll be unable to adapt, he’ll be lost.”