And I said `I don't care if my office is bugged or not, I don't want you in there and I don't want to get involved'."Asked whether he was surprised that the men claimed to be electronically sweeping his office in the early hours, Mr Goldberg replied: "Those are the hours these people work."Mr Goldberg resigned as chairman of Crystal Palace yesterday after a disastrous year which saw the club go into administration and his fortune almost wiped out.Goldberg resigns,Sport, page 26. When challenged, the men claimed to be there on instruction from Mr Goldberg, a claim he denied."I was called at 2am by a security guard to say somebody had broken in under my authority and I told him .. he was not there on my authority," Mr Goldberg said. SECURITY GUARDS at Crystal Palace Football Club have thwarted an attempt to bug the offices of senior management. The Independent has learnt that two intruders were apprehended in a night raid, but there is a dispute among directors and the outgoing chairman, Mark Goldberg, over whose office was the target. According to a board-level source, two men were caught in the offices of Phil Alexander, the club's managing director, in the early hours of the morning a month ago with what security men described as electronic listening equipment. The jurisdiction of the SS police stood guard over that." The head of the Gestapo's Jewish Department afraid of the SS? Pull the other one, Adolf.David Aaronovitch, page 3. "I knew what I was allowed to do and what was forbidden," he confesses "Between these two boundaries I could live freely.

For instance, the one from Himmler towards the end of the war, ordering the suspension of gassing at concentration camps.And sometimes Eichmann's retrospective cringing is just too obviously faked. He just does not boast about the way he countermanded some orders when it suited him. that a life of obedience, led by orders, instructions, decrees and directives, is a very comfortable one in which one's creative thinking is diminished."As we might expect of a mass murderer who went to his death unrepentant, Eichmann's memoirs treat the events of which they tell with a degree of poetic licence But his is the art of selectivity, rather than creativity He does not deny giving instructions to gas Jews. In the memoirs, he admits that maybe there was a personality flaw, but claims that it had been his destiny to follow orders, and that is all he had done."Today, 15 years after 8 May 1945, I know ... Even as he was led to the gallows, on 31 May 1962, he proclaimed: "I had to obey the rules of war and my flag."And that, unfortunately, is about all he has to say to future generations.

The lasting memory is of Eichmann standing in the dock, insisting throughout that he really had only been following orders. A Mossad team was sent to kidnap him, bringing him to Israel, where he penned his memoirs while awaiting public trial.The trial itself turned into a cathartic experience for the young Jewish state, shattering the long silence over the Holocaust. With Soviet troops approaching, Eichmann wiped out three-quarters of Hungary's Jewish population in less than a year.After the war he somehow got away, persuading the Americans that he was only a minor filing clerk He washed up in Argentina, where the Israelis spotted him. In March 1944, he was given the whole of Hungarian Jewry to take care of - a job he took on with a sense of foreboding, as he recalls in the book: "It was my fate, to start anew something I could not complete." This failure would not be for lack of effort on his part, however. An inferno, a hell, and I did not know at first whether I was mad, or if everything was, after all, unreal."In fact, it was neither.

Everything was real and Eichmann was completely sane - and he was deeply appreciated by his peers. Shot, gassed, corpses in a state of decomposition, and blood fantasies pressing up from the mass graves. There were no excuses for camps that did not fulfil their quotas. Eichmann badgered commanders and complained bitterly that friendly countries, such as Vichy France, Italy and Hungary, were not pulling their weight. He travelled from camp to camp, on what he calls "business trips", to make sure no one was falling behind.What he saw in the camps did make some impact, however, as he writes in the memoirs."Corpses, corpses, corpses. From his tidy office desk in Berlin, Eichmann laid on the trains, the barbed wire, the gas to complete the diabolical plan.He turned out to be good at giving orders, too.

The initial "mass evacuations" - the shunting of Jews from one country to another - turned into mass murder after the Wannsee Conference of 1942. In December 1939, he took over Jewish affairs and evacuation at the Gestapo.That made Eichmann the chief technician of the Holocaust. His talent for organising the large-scale transport of reluctant humans came to the fore in 1938, when he was put in charge of Vienna's "Office for Jewish Emigration". Within a year, he became the official in charge of "Jewish questions". After a 14-month military training, Eichmann joined Himmler's Security Service. We shall never be party to Kaltenbrunner's version of events, because he was one of the first Nazis to be hanged in Nuremberg after the war.Thanks to him though, Eichmann raced up the National Socialist career ladder.