three eichmanns
Hannah
Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963; revised and
enlarged edition, 1965).
Deborah
E. Lipstadt The Eichmann Trial (New
York: Schocken Books, 2011)
Bettina
Stangneth Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The
Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
Eichmann represents a highly disturbing
phenomenon, not only because he was such a thorough and seemingly incorruptible
believer in the necessity of destroying an entire people— which, had the
Germans won the War might also have included the Poles and citizens of other
cultures which Hitler’s Aryan fantasies perceived as inferior—but was proud of
continuing to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution even after most all of the other
despicable Nazi’s still living at the time of Germany’s defeat, had abandoned
such activities or ordered them to be ceased.
And yet, as Arendt’s arguments indicate,
the ordinary-looking man Eichmann, had fate simply dealt him a different set of
cards, might have never even reached the position in which he found himself.
Certainly few others, with far greater intelligence and ambitions, might not
have been so eager to accomplish the destruction of so many human beings, while
remaining so distant from the actual horrors as they took place. In short, he
was a monster who didn’t reveal himself to be one, a very contradiction of the
root meaning of the word (monstre, to
warn by showing). Yet he didn’t exactly shirk his involvement or blame only
others, as did so many at the Nuremberg Trials, but proclaimed that because it
was his sworn duty, he felt proud in helping to carry out the round-ups and
shipping of Jews to the camps such as Aushwitz, Chelmno, and Theresienstadt.
From Strangneth’s book, we now know that,
whether or not he was intelligent, he was a wily actor who knew how to twist
history so that what might appear as totally absurd might be represented as
somewhat reasonable and logical, at least from his point of view; and the
personality he portrayed in Jerusalem had been practiced and crafted from this
on-tape interviews with Nazi supporters in Buenos Aires, the so-called Sassen
tapes, after the war. He was not stupid, and, if nothing else, we now know, he
was seldom banal, in the sense of being trite or unoriginal. Eichmann’s
planning and organizing abilities, often requiring him to work apart and even
against other departments of the Nazi bureaucracy, were astounding,
particularly with regard to his ability to convince some Jewish leaders to
actually engage in playing a role in their own and their compatriots’
destruction. And, finally, we now know that, even if he had been given another
deck of cards which would have made his life far different, he worked
extraordinarily hard to keep playing out the game with the same players and the
rules that had been ordained.
Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial is a seemingly straight-forward and highly
informative summary of Eichmann’s war-time activities, a succinct account of
his arrest, years later, in Argentina, and of the Jerusalem trial itself; and
as such is perhaps the best place to begin any study of Eichmann and the events
surrounding him for today’s everyman reader.
Her book begins with a quite startling
announcement in 1960 by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to Israel’s Knesset:
I have to inform the Knesset that
a short time ago one of
the great Nazi war criminals, Adolf
Eichmann, the man
responsible together with the Nazi leaders for what
they
called the Final Solution, which is the annihilation of
six
million European Jews, was discovered by the Israel
security services.
Adolf Eichmann is already under
arrest in Israel and will be
placed on trial shortly under
the terms for the trail of Nazis and their
collaborators.
The
shock was palpable as a confused silence spread over the parliament, followed a
few moments later by, as Lipstadt describes it, an “eruption”: “People wept,
hugged, and marveled.”
What follows is a clearly expressed
summary of how Eichmann’s Argentina address was discovered—a series of events
which began in the late 1950s when Sylvia Hermann began dating Eichmann’s son
Klaus, who, in turn, bragged to Sylvia’s family that his father had been a
high-ranking Waffen-SS officer. The girl’s father, Lothar Hermann, a
nearly-blind German half-Jew, was appalled by Klaus’ suggestion that the
German’s “should have finished the job of exterminating the Jews,” connected up
the boy’s statements with what we soon after read in the German-language
newspaper, Argentinisches Tageblatt,
that Eichmann was one of Nazi criminals still at large, and wrote to the
Frankfurt prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, who responded by suggesting that Hermann
should attempt to locate Eichmann’s address. The daughter was sent into the
run-down neighborhood where Klaus lived, where she “asked around until she
located the ‘ramshackle’ Eichmann home.” At the house, she was met by a
middle-aged man, who described himself as Klaus' uncle, and invited the girl
to wait for his nephew's return. When Klaus finally returned, he suggested he might
accompany Sylvia to the bus, and as they left, addressed the man as “Father."
Receiving the address, Bauer determined to
further investigate, but not through the German security services or even the
German judicial system, because both had proved wary of involving themselves in
the trials of former Nazis and some members of these organizations, still
harboring Nazi sympathies, might even warn Eichmann. Instead he passed on the
information to Israel, and the information was ultimately passed on to Isser
Harel, the head of Mossad (Israel’s security services). Four months later,
however, when an Israeli operative was ordered to check the address, he
determined that such a dilapidated building could not possibly be the home of
such a former high-ranking officer as Eichmann. When Bauer heard of this
“lackadaisical approach” he insisted that Harel meet with the Hermanns
directly to assess the quality of his information.
Yet a few more months passed, and when
the agent met with Herman, he was “nonplussed to discover that their informant
was blind.” Sylvia convinced him, however, that there may be some truth to the
matter, and he asked them to help by checking the property records for
Eichmann’s address, where they discovered that the building was owned by an
Austrian named Schmidt, but “that the utility bill went to a Ricardo Klement”
(Eichmann’s alias in Argentina). Hermann proposed that Schmidt was Eichmann and
suggested (without any evidence) that Eichmann had had plastic surgery to
disguise his appearance, ideas which, when the Israelis looked into them,
proved to be mistaken; accordingly they, once again, dropped the case. In the
meantime, however, Bauer was able to discover from other sources that Eichmann,
now known as Klement, was indeed living in Argentina.
Visiting Israel in December 1959, Bauer
met with General Haim Cohen, expressing his disappointment with Harel’s inactivity.
Summoned to Cohen’s office, Harel once again took up the search, dispatching
Mossad’s chief interrogator, Zvi Aharoni, to Argentina, where he discovered
that indeed Eichmann and Klement were the same man. Upon hearing of this
Ben-Gurion immediately ordered that Eichmann should be “apprehended and brought
to Israel to stand trial.”
Even though a group of Israeli security
volunteers entered Argentina on false papers, leasing houses, renting cars, and
establishing other connections, the entire project met with another snag when
it was discovered that the Eichmann family had now moved to another house, a
hand-built construction of cinder-block that had no electricity or running
water. At that time Eichmann was working at a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant, and
took the bus home each evening to his somewhat secluded domicile.
Lipstadt dramatically describes his
arrest:
On May 11, 1960, the Israelis
parked two cars midway
between the bus stop and his home. One had its
hood up.
The men assigned to grab him huddled over the engine
as if
they were checking a mechanical failure. The second
car parked down the
road, facing the first car. When Eichmann
neared the “disabled” car, the
driver of the second car
switched on the headlights, effectively
blinding him. Peter
Malkin, a hand-combat specialist and one of the
agents
near the “disabled” car, jumped him. While they struggled,
Eichmann
emitted what Malkin described as “the primal cry
of a cornered
animal.”
And
so, the discovery and abduction that almost didn’t happen, was over. Eichmann,
soon after brought to Israel, was on trial for his life.*
Lipstadt’s most significant contribution,
however, is her detailed presentation of the trial, pointing to both the
rationale of and errors made by the prosecuting attorney, Gideon Hausner, who,
with the support and likely encouragement of Ben-Gurion, determined to make the
Israeli trial very different from the previous Nuremberg court procedures; the
Israelis wanted to make this a trial not just about the criminal and his
horrific deeds, but to allow for the trial itself to be an occasion
during which
surviving Jews from around the world might be able, for the first time, to
express their grievances, helping to insure that the true dimensions of the
Holocaust, in which Eichmann had such a significant role, would not go
unspoken or be forgotten. Lipstadt is particularly good at pointing up the
justifiable reasons for doing this, as well as expressing the views of those
who felt the whole affair to be only a show-trial that had lost its focus on
its one necessary duty, to lay out a coherent case for Eichmann’s criminal
guilt.
The
jurors themselves, in fact, often stood at odds with the endless testimonies of
those called by the prosecution; while Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert Servatius at
times seemed disinterested in asking specific questions or even in challenging
some of the accusations, while at other times steering his client into long
illogical harangues of self-justification. The very fact that Israel had
abducted Eichmann, moreover, and that, in a very real sense, the victims were
trying their murderer, brought international questions of whether or not
Eichmann could possibly get a fair trial. The fact, moreover, that the trial
was conducted in Hebrew (translated into not always perfect English in daily
reports) before jurors, lawyers, and witnesses who primarily spoke German
seemed senseless to other critics such as Hannah Arendt.
In her short text, nonetheless, Lipstadt
brings clarity to the issues of the trial, negotiating the complexities of a
series of such horrific acts that, in many senses, simply could be not possibly
be coherently expressed. In the end, the judges ruled Eichmann guilty,
specifically noting that despite his insistence that he wanted to tell the
truth, and gave specific testimony to his activities, he was also a liar whose
“entire testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and
to conceal his real share of responsibility.” Eichmann’s arguments that in
Vienna his work to move the Jews to the camps had been for the “mutual benefit”
of Jews and Nazis were contradicted, so the court declared, by “witnesses and
the documents.” His plan to relocate thousands of Jews to Madagascar, which he
argued, if it had materialized, “everything would have been in perfect order to
the satisfaction of the Germans and the Jews,” was, in fact, “far from the
truth.” Eichmann’s argument that he reacted to the failure of the
trucks-for-lives negotiation concerning about-to-be-deported Hungarian Jews
with “sorrow,” “fury and…anger,” was “sheer hypocrisy,” particularly given the
fact that he was simultaneously working (even against Heinrich Himmler’s
orders) to deport Hungarian Jews as quickly as possible.
Yet the judges were not thoroughly
persuaded by Hausner that Eichmann actually murdered a small boy in Budapest,
that he had been connected to Kristallnact, or even that his deportation
activities in Vienna, Prague, and Nisko during the early years were “brutal,”
given the fact there was no proof, at that time, that it was part of a program
to exterminate the Jewish people, having occurred before Hitler’s announcement
of The Final Solution.
It is in the last chapter of her book,
however, that Lipstadt reveals that she has another motivation for retelling
the Eichmann story, which seems to have more to do with settling scores that
explaining history. Most notably Lipstadt expresses her outrage against Hannah
Arendt and her reports of the trial in The
New Yorker, furious that Arendt pretends to report on the entire long
months of the trial, much of which she did not actually attend.
Lipstadt’s larger fury, moreover, arises
from Arendt’s seemingly predetermined intention of finding a man like Eichmann
to be an ignorant and lazy thinker who reveals the sometimes banality of evil.
And, finally, Lipstadt, like so many others, is angry at Arendt’s penchant for
suggesting that hundreds of the Jewish victims were themselves collaborators in
their own and others’ deaths. If at moments Lipstadt is quite fair-minded about
Arendt, one clearly feels that she still has a grudge to settle—one to which
the reader, at least this reader, is somewhat sympathetic. If nothing else,
however, using Arendt’s writing as an example of how the issues surrounding
Eichmann remain, even today, confused and conflicted, is an important analysis
of the Eichmann events.
The author also presents, in the early
chapters, specific details on Eichmann’s rise to power, often on the basis of
false credentials, such as the notion that he was a skilled “Hebraist” (in
fact, there is no reason, except for his purchase of a textbook, Hebräisch für Jedermann, "Hebrew for
Everyone," that he knew any but a few words of Hebrew and Yiddish), a myth which
Eichmann promulgated and used to achieve his ultimate position as the man who
met with the Jewish committees and arranged for the deportation transports in
Austria, Hungary and elsewhere of Jews to the death camps.
Strangneth also reveals more clearly than
other writers that he most likely attended the meeting where Hitler outlined
The Final Solution, and she argues that Eichmann himself insisted that he had
“coined” the term. Far more in depth than Lipstadt, moreover, Strangneth’s
research makes clear just how resolved Eichmann was in his determination to
send all the Jews to their death, working against the expressed orders of his
superiors to ship out Hungarian Jews even as the War itself was drawing to a
close.
Most importantly, Strangneth, for the
first time in print, analyzes and recreates the contents of over 1,300 pages of
written notes and the seventy-three audio reel recordings, the so called Sassen
tapes, upon which Eichmann extensively outlined his war-time experiences,
detailing many events of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi group, headed by
Wilhelmus Antonius Maria Sassen and other Argentina-based or relocated Nazis
who one day hoped to revive Nazism not only in Germany but throughout the
world, and who were as equally anti-Semitic, if not more than Eichmann,
expressed their intrigue with the famed Nazi figure among their midst. Many of
them were slightly fearful of Eichmann (he had known so many of the Nazi
leaders), and, more importantly, were curious as to what the actual truth of
the Holocaust was—specifically with regard to the actual numbers of Jews
deported and killed—in their attempts to discover the truth. Their
hope, as the author suggests, was that the numbers had been highly inflated,
and if they could prove this, with information from Eichmann, they felt they
could surely resurrect their cause. Strangneth explains the situation quite succinctly:
No topic provoked the Dürer
circle [the group of Argentinean
Nazi supporters] more than the number of Jewish
victims.
By 1957, no one in Buenos Aires still believed that articles like
“The
Lie of the Six Million” and the Hester Report could
throw the genocide into
doubt—mainly because the Dürer circle
had been largely responsible for
manufacturing these revisionist
denials. Once the new body of source material became
available,
all they could do was try to make the scale of the genocide appear
as small as possible. It is difficult to understand why the
question of victim numbers
continues to occupy old and neo-Nazis,
and the New Right, like no other,
considering that the legal and
moral problem of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews
does not depend
on an absolute number. The ‘reparations' negotiations would
hardly have had a different outcome if four or eight million,
rather than six,
had been the figure under discussion. It is as if these
men, who had mastered the power of
symbols with their cult of the
Führer, were always more afraid of the
“enemy’s” powerful symbol
—the six million—than anything else.
But
even more importantly, was the fact that it was Eichmann who first mentioned this number, and even
during the Nuremberg trials, Der Weg argued
that it was a pity, “after the deaths of Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and
Kaltenbrunner,” that Eichmann might not be tracked down to testify as “the only
credible inside witness.”
Despite considerable prodding, argument,
and instense questioning, however, Eichmann—proud as ever for doing what he saw
as his duty—could not be dissuaded from the number of Jews who might have been
destroyed, nor did he fully perceive any true guilt for his efficiency in
trying to carry out The Final Solution. Yet, through the tough challenges of
the several figures attending these taping sessions, including a quite
mysterious figure who clearly knew intimate details of Nazi structure
(suggesting, obviously, that he was a personage of some importance), Eichmann did,
at times, retract some of his enthusiasm, shift course in his extensive
discussions, and, most importantly, reevaluate the reception of his words and
ideas. It is clear, accordingly, that—even as some of the Jerusalem observers
had suspected—these important tapes served as a trial run for Eichmann’s
self-defense in Israel. If nothing else, we hear in these tapes, at least as
Stangneth reports their content, that Eichmann intimately learned just how
singular and unpopular his viewpoints and past activities were now perceived.
And Strangneth, without literally saying so, seems to indicate that the
Eichmann who survived the taping sessions was no longer the same man, in some
ways, having given up his staunch convictions and, almost intentionally putting
himself in harm’s way, with the expectation of the dramatic arrest which Lipstadt
so effectively describes.
By the time of the Jerusalem trial, having
written out yet another version of his experiences, Eichmann had indeed—either
intentionally or effectively—become a different person. Although, attempting
still to characterize his actions as justifiable and even moral (although based
on a very twisted notion of what that meant), he now seemed worn down,
confused, even, sometimes, rather stupid, representing himself as a kind of
mere bureaucratic errand-boy than as an actual player in the events of Nazi
Germany which he was. This is the Eichmann Arendt saw, and frankly
misunderstood. He was no longer the swaggering SS Obersturmbannführer, a somewhat handsome young Nazi resolute to
destroy every Jew he encountered in an attempt to rise in the Nazi world. What
Arendt saw in Eichmann—and as Lipstadt argues, she wanted to see because it might explain away the notion that an
entire nation of individuals had been swept-away by a suicidal pride and hate
of others: the fact that anyone might be evil, the possibility that evil itself
was something trite and meaningless.
Yet that is not at all what Hannah
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem actually
proclaims. Certainly there is much to anger one about Arendt’s significant
work. She begins her book like a princess dowager, entering the room with the
hot breathe of utter disdain. After being called to her feet with the words “Beth Hamishpath,” Arendt immediately
frets about the scene, the three judges (who, German-speaking, she admires
throughout), below which sit:
the translators, whose
services are needed for direct
exchanges between defendant or his counsel
and the
court; otherwise, the German-speaking accused party,
like almost
everyone else in the audience, follows the
Hebrew proceedings through
the simultaneous radio
transmission, which is excellent in French,
bearable
in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehen-
sible, in
German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of
all technical arrangements
for the trial, it is among the
minor mysteries of the new state of Israel
that, with its
high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to
find an adequate translator into the only language
accused and his counsel
could understand. For the old
prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced
in
Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it….)
For
Arendt, a former Zionist, all things Israeli are intolerable, and she often
displays the German-Jewish pique over what she describes as Eastern Jews.
Arendt was also strongly convinced that the trial should not have been an
Israeli one, but an international tribunal, with representatives from all the
countries who had been effected—an issue with which I might agree with her,
were it not that I can also completely comprehend why this necessarily had to be a trial in which the Jews
indicted one of their major murderers, finally being able to act after so many
decades of victimization.
And then, obviously, there are those
final last words which weigh down Arendt’s narrative with what none of us truly
want to believe: that “this long course in human wickedness….[was simply] a
lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
We might excuse Arendt today, since she
had only a slight knowledge of the Sassen tapes, as published in Life and German magazines. And even
after reading of all the seemingly unrepentant, yet quite coherent statements
of Eichmann before Jerusalem in Strangneth’s book, we still realize that
Eichmann was no genius. Might any of the Nazi leaders truly described as
brilliant? Clever perhaps, charismatic, lucky; but such hate seldom can cloak
itself in a truly intelligent mind.
Moreover, in reading Arendt’s truly
brilliant account of Eichmann’s career in Eichmann
in Jerusalem we meet another woman, a conflicted being perhaps, but an
often astoundingly perceptive figure who not only takes us, in her narrative,
through the various aspects of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic mania, but recounts, one
by one, the various theaters in which their attacks against Jews (and others)
took place, and how and why they worked—or in some extraordinary places didn’t
succeed at all. The Nazis simply presumed that their own view of anti-Semitism
was so universally shared that it would be easy to accomplish their
extermination all Jews (and later, all Poles, all Gypsies, and all homosexuals)
throughout Europe and, I suppose, throughout the world. In fact, they were
almost right in their suppositions—except for the strange Mussolini concept
that “his Jews” ought to left alone, and the Danes’ willingness to take on a
Jewish identity from their King on down to every bicycle rider on the streets,
and the nonaligned Swedes endless willingness to take in everyone who no one
else wanted, and the majority of the Dutch..., and, as I’ve expressed elsewhere
in this volume, some extraordinarily brave French Protestants who reacted
differently—a difference, I might suggest, that is similar to Derrida’s la difference, a difference which
changes everything.
Arendt stunningly makes her case that not
everyone went along so pacifically with Hitler’s hatred. I find her accounting
of the different fronts and how its people were affected by the Nazi dictates
to be one of the most transparent evaluations of war-time behavior to have ever
been written. And these chapters, alone, make her problematic book worth the
reading.
Finally, her Epilogue and Postscript
analyzes the legal and jurisprudential issues with remarkable
sophistication.
The three versions of Eichmann represented
in these 3 volumes, if radically different, represent the impossibility of
truly ever comprehending a being like Eichmann—and, by extension any of Nazi
hierarchy. As much as has been written on Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Mengele,
and Hitler himself, the more impossible it becomes to comprehend their ideas
and actions, which seem to lie outside of human fellow-feeling and moral precepts.
How did such sick individuals come together at such a moment to destroy so many
of their fellow human beings?
In a terrible way, Eichmann, perceived in
retrospect, was a bit like a perfectly-made robotic creation who, brilliantly
carrying out the behavior with which he was programmed, could simply not
comprehend why his actions might not be perceived as anything but heroic. After
all, he believed in a god whose name was Hitler, and he had obeyed that god and
did his very best to maintain his faith. Might he too not quote Kant to argue
that he had done his moral duty—even if he forgot, as Arendt points out, Kant’s
concept of moral duty is “bound up with man’s faculty of judgement”? That his
god was the devil himself, he simply could not imagine, and only in that sense,
was he banal; but at the same time, through this fatal flaw, he was also a
oddly tragic figure, someone who simply could not comprehend the consequences
of his own and others’ acts. An unforgivable and unredeemable tragic monster is
nearly impossible for most of us to comprehend and, certainly, difficult for
anyone with a conscience to accept; one might even argue that in order to
define beings or events as tragic involves the monster’s awareness of and feeling
of guilt for his acts. If glimmers of guilt cracked through the armor of
Eichmann’s personae, they seemed always to be distorted by what he perceived as
various overlays of changing historical viewpoints. Within the claustrophobic
confines of his Nazi mindset, his truth never varied. His negotiation with
reality was such a brutal one that it left him outside of any other perspective
of human behavior, turning him into a kind of Macbeth without a hand-washing
wife (which, perhaps, is why he aligned himself, during the trial, with Pontius
Pilate, washing his own hands in mock reassignment of any guilt). In our daily
reality, we cannot truly get a fix on such a beast.
Perhaps one needs three books each
presenting a different vision of such a figure to even to begin to get a fix.
But, of course, in another sense, there can never be a fix, only a raw roar of
sorrow and suffering.
Los Angeles, May
5-6, 2015
*Lipstadt also
chastises Naxi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for claiming that he had known the
whereabouts of Eichmann. But Strangneth reveals that he may, indeed, have had
knowledge, but was simply ignored by numerous governments when he attempted to
notify them of his discovery. I should also add that Stangneth’s depiction of
the series of events that led up to Eichmann’s abduction are significantly
different. She suggests that Bauer, once he had the information, buried it, and
no further action was taken within the German system.