Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann is presented through a single politically charged episode: his 1937 attempt to visit Palestine and his later meeting in Cairo with Feivel Polkes. The account makes the journey significant not as a personal biography, but as evidence for the author’s argument that German and Zionist organizations could temporarily share an interest in Jewish emigration while pursuing different aims.

The 1937 Journey

On September 26, 1937, Eichmann and an assistant boarded a train in Berlin to travel toward Palestine. Reinhard Heydrich had authorized Eichmann to accept an invitation from Feivel Polkes, a senior member of Haganah, the Zionist organization identified in the account as clandestine. The proposed visit was to include Tel Aviv and discussions about coordinating German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine.

The journey did not lead to the planned visit. Violent unrest prompted the British to block access to Palestine, preventing Eichmann and Polkes from meeting there. Days later, they met in Cairo and discussed coordination between German and Zionist activities. The account names no further details of their conversation or any resulting agreement.

Different Aims, Temporary Convergence

The book distinguishes the parties’ reasons for supporting emigration. German officials wanted Jews to leave Western Europe; the Zionists, as the author describes their objective, wanted Jews in Palestine to outnumber Arabs as quickly as possible. Eichmann’s role in the episode was to represent the German side in discussions about coordinating activity toward the shared immediate outcome of emigration, not to demonstrate agreement between the parties on their broader political purposes.

The author interprets the encounter as an instance in which German and radical Zionist interests converged around changing the ethnic composition of a population. That interpretation is the book’s political argument about the episode; the concrete actions it recounts are Eichmann’s authorized journey, the blocked access to Palestine, and the subsequent Cairo meeting with Polkes.

Narrative Significance

The episode serves as a historical example in the book’s critique of claims that the establishment of Israel straightforwardly joined justice with victory. The author places Eichmann’s 1937 journey within a wider argument about European efforts to remove Jews and the political arrangements that shaped Jewish migration to Palestine. In this framing, Eichmann is significant as a participant in a documented encounter whose sharply different motives expose a temporary overlap of interests, rather than as the subject of a developed personal narrative.