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Adolf Eichmann: Executing the "Final Solution" (Holocaust Heroes and Nazi Criminals)

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This is a book for school-children. Yet every adult should be forced to read it. Like most people, I was nearly as ignorant as most school-children about the sheer fate-fattedness, the brutal mechanics, the punished and unpunished heroes, and sickening near-misses of decency that happened all around the flames of the Holocaust. The facts presented by this book, and many others like it, make the Final Solution devised by the Third Reich to the "Jewish Problem," all the more an outrage. Adolf Eichmann betrayed even his own respect, and luke-warm fondness for the Jews, and repeatedly tried to establish Jewish homeland states by employing a series of lies, threats, outright coercions, to the various governments of Europe. He had an execeptional, Germanic genius for organization, but his conscience was perhaps just as exceptionally brittle and changeable. The saddest and sickest truth is that the Holocaust even within the brutal, bonecrushing gears of the Nazi machine needed NEVER to have happened.

As late as 1940, Eichmann loaded 1600 Jewish families onto trains in nazi-controlled, northern France bound for French ports in the Vichy terriority; he fully intended to transport these people to the island off the African coast named Madagascar, where they would enjoy self-government, but be under SS military protection to ward off natives, and anyone else, including African Muslims and even British combatants threatening them. Eichmann lied, bluffed, then threatened Vichy officials to move the trains through their districts, and to ready the French ports to ferry these first Jews and eventually all others to an island about the size of California, an island having the vanilla bean, scrubland/grassland, rainforest, desert, and mountains.

The Madagascar plan got chipped into destruction. Eichmann complained bitterly to his superiors, but evidently not forcefully enough. Most these Jews ended up dead in Poland. They never even got to port. Eichmann was under-cut and over-ruled by petty-bosses and mouthy officials, by party-fanatics and sadist-cretins, and finally by a clash of political vanities deploying every species of vileness conceivable. Eichmann should have appealed straight to Hitler via Heyrich and Goering (as they more endorsed deportation and statehood as a Final Solution), and superceded the tireless Robot-of-Evil, Himmler, who seemingly wanted to kill the Jews, Slavs, intellectuals, homosexuals, et al., more eagerly than any other Nazi including Hitler.

Every other "Jewish reservation" plan failed as well, The Nisko plan, The Russian plan, and most ironically, the Palestine Plan, the attempt to move the Jews back to what was ancient Judea, now Israel. This book devotes a page one Arab radical who loudly and effectively raged to the British--who controlled the area--that NO Jews were to be accepted back into Palestine. We may never know why the British gave in, but surely the British hated the idea (pre-WW2 mind you, 1937-8) of Germans transporting Jews to "their" colony, so close to their darling Suez canal. Once the mass-murdering began, this same Arab visited Eichmann for commendation (1941). Eichmann as shown in this book, slid and slimed from a partial apologist and protector of the Jewish people (even collecting their art & cultural works for a museum to be built in their homeland) into a relentless, savage, and talented murderer of the Jews, even harrassing, punishing pro-nazi countries protecting Jews, despite the clear defeat for Germany (Dec.1944), despite the strain on German resources--especially trains--needed to delay the Soviet slaughter of Germanic civilians east of the Oder.

The greatest tragedy of one of history's greatest tragedies was that it all very probably could have been avoided. Perhaps this is the best book of all for children.