The sergeant in charge was Herbert Hagen. The other man was called Adolf Eichmann. Hagen was in his early twenties and a fresh-faced intellectual, a university graduate from an upper-class background. Eichmann was several years older and aspired to be something more than the Austrian petroleum salesman he had been before joining the Party and the SS. Both men were curious anti-Semites, being strangely fascinated with Judaism. Eichmann had the greater experience in the Jewish Department, spoke Yiddish, and spent most of the voyage reading Theodor Herzl’s book about the Jewish State, which was called The Jewish State. The trip had been Eichmann’s own idea and he seemed both surprised and excited that his superiors had agreed to it, having never been out of Germany and Austria before. Hagen was a more ideological Nazi who was an enthusiastic Zionist, believing, as he did, that there was “no greater enemy for the Party than the Jew”—or some such nonsense—and that “the solution of the Jewish question” could lie only in the “total de-Jewing” of Germany. I hated listening to him talk. It all sounded mad to me. Like something found in the pages of some malignant Alice in Wonderland.

Both men regarded me with suspicion, as I had imagined they would, and not just because I had come from outside the SD and their peculiar department, but also because I was older than them—by almost twenty years in the case of Hagen. And jokingly they were soon referring to me as “Papi,” which I bore with good grace—at least with a better grace than Hagen, who in retaliation, and much to Eichmann’s amusement, I quickly dubbed Hiram Schwartz, after the juvenile diarist of the same name. Consequently, by the time we reached Jaffa on or about October 2, Eichmann had a greater liking for me than his younger, less experienced colleague.

Eichmann was not, however, an impressive man, and at the time, I thought he was probably the type who looked better in uniform. Indeed, I soon came to suspect that wearing a uniform had been the principal reason he had joined the SA and then the SS, for I rather doubted he would have been fit enough to have joined the regular army, if army there had been at that time. Of less than medium height, he was bow-legged and extremely thin. In his upper jaw he had two gold bridges, as well as many fillings in his long, widow’s teeth. His head was like a skull, almost exactly like the death’s head on an SS man’s cap-badge, being extremely bony with particularly hollow temples. One thing that struck me was how Jewish he looked. And it occurred to me that his antipathy for the Jews might have had something to do with this.