“They don’t know that,” I said. “I think it would be a mistake to ask them for military aid. It would look like a sign of weakness. You must convince them that, if anything, you’re actually much better armed than you are. Tell them you have artillery. Tell them you have tanks. Tell them you have planes. They’ve no way of finding out if that’s true or not.”

“How does that help us?”

“If they think you will win,” I said, “then they’ll believe that their continued support of Zionism is the right policy. If they think you’ll lose, then frankly there’s no telling where they might send Germany’s Jews. I’ve heard Madagascar mentioned.”

“Madagascar?” said Golomb. “Ridiculous.”

“Look, all that matters is that you convince them that a Jewish state can exist and that it would be no threat to Germany. You don’t want them going back to Germany thinking the Grand Mufti is right, do you? That all the Jews in Palestine should be massacred?”

When it eventually took place, the meeting went well enough. To my ears, Golomb and Polkes sounded like fanatics. But as they had pointed out earlier, they didn’t sound like crazy, religious fanatics. After the Grand Mufti, anyone would have sounded reasonable.

A few days later, we sailed from Alexandria, on the Italian steamer Palestrina, for Brindisi, stopping at Rhodes and Piraeus on the way. From Brindisi, we caught a train and were back in Berlin by October 26.

I hadn’t seen Eichmann for nine months when, while working on a case that took me to Vienna, I bumped into him on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, in the Eleventh District, just south of what later became Stalin Platz. He was coming out of the Rothschild Palais, which (after the Wehrmacht’s popular invasion of Austria in March 1938) had been seized from the eponymous Jewish family that owned it, and was now the headquarters of the SD in Austria. Eichmann was no longer a lowly noncommissioned officer, but a second lieutenant—an Untersturmführer. There seemed to be a spring in his step. Jews were already fleeing the country. For the first time in his life, Eichmann had real power. Whatever he had said to his superiors upon his return from Egypt had obviously made an impression.

We only spoke for a minute or two before he stepped into the back of a staff car and drove away. I remember thinking, there goes the most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.

After the war, whenever I saw his name appear in a newspaper, that was always how I thought of him. The most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.