EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:51 am

8. Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen

So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer's order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it. The well-worn coins of "superior orders" versus "acts of state" were handed back and forth; they had governed the whole discussion of these matters during the Nuremberg Trials, for no other reason than that they gave the illusion that the altogether unprecedented could be judged according to precedents and the standards that went with them. Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions and to strike out on his own. Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had also acted upon orders - always so careful to be "covered" - he became completely muddled, and ended by stressing alternately the virtues and the vices of blind obedience, or the "obedience of corpses," Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it.

The first indication of Eichmann's vague notion that there was more involved in this whole business than the question of the soldier's carrying out orders that are clearly criminal in nature and intent appeared during the police examination, when he suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty. This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. The examining officer did not press the point, but Judge Raveh, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann's having dared to invoke Kant's name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the accused. And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws" (which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him). Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer "was master of his own deeds," that he was unable "to change anything." What he failed to point out in court was that in this "period of crimes legalized by the state," as he himself now called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land - or, in Hans Frank's formulation of "the categorical imperative in the Third Reich," which Eichmann might have known: "Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it" (Die Technik des Staates, 1942, pp. 15-16). Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act: by using his "practical reason" man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law. But it is true that Eichmann's unconscious distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant "for the household use of the little man." In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law - the source from which the law sprang. In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer. Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution - a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically German, or else as characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat - can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legisator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do.

Whatever Kant's role in the formation of "the little man's" mentality in Germany may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions. In Jerusalem, he admitted only two such exceptions during the time when "eighty million Germans" had each had "his decent Jew": he had helped a half-Jewish cousin, and a Jewish couple in Vienna for whom his uncle had intervened. This inconsistency still made him feel somewhat uncomfortable, and when he was questioned about it during cross-examination, he became openly apologetic: he had "confessed his sins" to his superiors. This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions - this was the proof that he had always acted against his "inclinations," whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his "duty."

Doing his "duty" finally brought him into open conflict with orders from his superiors. During the last year of the war, more than two years after the Wannsee Conference, he experienced his last crisis of conscience. As the defeat approached, he was confronted by men from his own ranks who fought more and more insistently for exceptions and, eventually, for the cessation of the Final Solution. That was the moment when his caution broke down and he began, once more, taking initiatives - for instance, he organized the foot marches of Jews from Budapest to the Austrian border after Allied bombing had knocked out the transportation system. It now was the fall of 1944, and Eichmann knew that Himmler had ordered the dismantling of the extermination facilities in Auschwitz and that the game was up. Around this time, Eichmann had one of his very few personal interviews with Himmler, in the course of which the latter allegedly shouted at him, "If up to now you have been busy liquidating Jews, you will from now on, since I order it, take good care of Jews, act as their nursemaid. I remind you that it was I - and neither Gruppenführer Müller nor you - who founded the R.S.H.A. in 1933; I am the one who gives orders here!" Sole witness to substantiate these words was the very dubious Mr. Kurt Becher; Eichmann denied that Himmler had shouted at him, but he did not deny that such an interview had taken place. Himmler cannot have spoken in precisely these words, he surely knew that the R.S.H.A. was founded in 1939, not in 1933, and not simply by himself but by Heydrich, with his endorsement. Still, something of the sort must have occurred, Himmler was then giving orders right and left that the Jews be treated well - they were his "soundest investment" - and it must have been a shattering experience for Eichmann.

Eichmann's last crisis of conscience began with his missions to Hungary in March, 1944, when the Red Army was moving through the Carpathian Mountains toward the Hungarian border. Hungary had joined the war on Hitler's side in 1941, for no other reason than to receive some additional territory from her neighbors, Slovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. The Hungarian government had been outspokenly anti-Semitic even before that, and now it began to deport all stateless Jews from the newly acquired territories. (In nearly all countries, anti-Jewish action started with stateless persons.) This was quite outside the Final Solution, and, as a matter of fact, didn't fit in with the elaborate plans then in preparation under which Europe would be "combed from West to East," so that Hungary had a rather low priority in the order of operations. The stateless Jews had been shoved by the Hungarian police into the nearest part of Russia, and the German occupation authorities on the spot had protested their arrival; the Hungarians had taken back some thousands of able-bodied men and had let the others be shot by Hungarian troops under the guidance of German police units. Admiral Horthy, the country's Fascist ruler, had not wanted to go any further, however - probably due to the restraining influence of Mussolini and Italian Fascism - and in the intervening years Hungary, not unlike Italy, had become a haven for Jews, to which even refugees from Poland and Slovakia could sometimes still escape. The annexation of territory and the trickle of incoming refugees had increased the number of Jews in Hungary from about five hundred thousand before the war to approximately eight hundred thousand in 1944, when Eichmann moved in.

As we know today, the safety of these three hundred thousand Jews newly acquired by Hungary was due to the Germans' reluctance to start a separate action for a limited number, rather than to the Hungarians' eagerness to offer asylum. In 1942, under pressure from the German Foreign Office (which never failed to make it clear to Germany's allies that the touchstone of their trustworthiness was their helpfulness not in winning the war but in "solving the Jewish question"), Hungary had offered to hand over all Jewish refugees. The Foreign Office had been willing to accept this as a step in the right direction, but Eichmann had objected: for technical reasons, he thought it "preferable to defer this action until Hungary is ready to include the Hungarian Jews"; it would be too costly "to set in motion the whole machinery of evacuation" for only one category, and hence "without making any progress in the solution of the Jewish problem in Hungary." Now, in 1944, Hungary was "ready," because on the nineteenth of March two divisions of the German Army had occupied the country. With them had arrived the new Reich Plenipotentiary, S.S. Standartenführer Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, Himmler's agent in the Foreign Office, and S.S. Obergruppenführer Otto Winkelmann, a member of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Corps and therefore under the direct command of Himmler. The third S.S. official to arrive in the country was Eichmann, the expert on Jewish evacuation and deportation, who was under the command of Müller and Kaltenbrunner of the R.S.H.A. Hitler himself had left no doubt what the arrival of the three gentlemen meant; in a famous interview, prior to the occupation of the country, he had told Horthy that "Hungary had not yet introduced the steps necessary to settle the Jewish question," and had charged him with "not having permitted the Jews to be massacred" (Hilberg).

Eichmann's assignment was clear. His whole office was moved to Budapest (in terms of his career, this was a "gliding down"), to enable him to see to it that all "necessary steps" were taken. He had no foreboding of what was to happen; his worst fear concerned possible resistance on the part of the Hungarians, which he would have been unable to cope with, because he lacked manpower and also lacked knowledge of local conditions. These fears proved quite unfounded. The Hungarian gendarmerie was more than eager to do all that was necessary, and the new State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, Lászlo Endre, was a man "well versed in the Jewish problem," and became an intimate friend, with whom Eichmann could spend a good deal of his free time. Everything went "like a dream," as he repeated whenever he recalled this episode; there were no difficulties whatsoever. Unless, of course, one calls difficulties a few minor differences between his orders and the wishes of his new friends; for instance, probably because of the approach of the Red Army from the East, his orders stipulated that the country was to be "combed from East to West," which meant that Budapest Jews would not be evacuated during the first weeks or months - a matter for great grief among the Hungarians, who wanted their capital to take the lead in becoming judenrein. (Eichmann's "dream" was an incredible nightmare for the Jews: nowhere else were so many people deported and exterminated in such a brief span of time. In less than two months, 147 trains, carrying 434,351 people in sealed freight cars, a hundred persons to a car, left the country, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz were hardly able to cope with this multitude.)

The difficulties arose from another quarter. Not one man but three had orders specifying that they were to help in "the solution of the Jewish problem"; each of them belonged to a different outfit and stood in a different chain of command. Technically, Winkelmann was Eichmann's superior, but the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were not under the command of the R.S.H.A., to which Eichmann belonged. And Veesenmayer, of the Foreign Office, was independent of both. At any rate, Eichmann refused to take orders from either of the others, and resented their presence. But the worst trouble came from a fourth man, whom Himmler had charged with a "special mission" in the only country in Europe that still harbored not only a sizable number of Jews but Jews who were still in an important economic position. (Of a total of a hundred and ten thousand commercial stores and industrial enterprises in Hungary, forty thousand were reported to be in Jewish hands.) This man was Obersturmbannführer, later Standartenführer, Kurt Becher. Becher, an old enemy of Eichmann who is today a prosperous merchant in Bremen, was called, strangely enough, as a witness for the defense. He could not come to Jerusalem, for obvious reasons, and he was examined in his German home town. His testimony had to be dismissed, since he had been shown, well ahead of time, the questions he was later called on to answer under oath. It was a great pity that Eichmann and Becher could not have been confronted with each other, and this not merely for juridical reasons. Such a confrontation would have revealed another part of the "general picture," which, even legally, was far from irrelevant. According to his own account, the reason Becher joined the S.S. was that "from 1932 to the present day he had been actively engaged in horseback riding." Thirty years ago, this was a sport engaged in only by, Europe's upper classes. In 1934, his instructor had persuaded him to enter the S.S. cavalry regiment, which at that moment was the very thing for a man to do if he wished to join the "movement" and at the same time maintain a proper regard for his social standing. (A possible reason Becher in his testimony stressed horseback riding was never mentioned: the Nuremberg Tribunal had excluded the Reiter-S.S. from its list of criminal organizations.) The war saw Becher on active duty at the front, as a member not of the Army but of the Armed S.S., in which he was a liaison officer with the Army commanders. He soon left the front to become the principal buyer of horses for the S.S. personnel department, a job that earned him nearly all the decorations that were then available.

Becher claimed that he had been sent to Hungary only in order to buy twenty thousand horses for the S.S.; this is unlikely, since immediately upon his arrival he began a series of very successful negotiations with the heads of big Jewish business concerns. His relations with Himmler were excellent, he could see him whenever he wished. His "special mission" was clear enough. He was to obtain control of major Jewish business concerns behind the backs of the Hungarian government, and, in return, to give the owners free passage out of the country, plus a sizable amount of money in foreign currency. His most important transaction was with the Manfred Weiss steel combine, a mammoth enterprise, with thirty thousand workers, which produced everything from airplanes, trucks, and bicycles to tinned goods, pins, and needles. The result was that forty-five members of the Weiss family emigrated to Portugal while Mr. Becher became head of their business. When Eichmann heard of this Schweinerei, he was outraged; the deal threatened to compromise his good relations with the Hungarians, who naturally expected to take possession of Jewish property confiscated on their own soil. He had some reason for his indignation, since these deals were contrary to the regular Nazi policy, which had been quite generous. For their help in solving the Jewish question in any country, the Germans had demanded no part of the Jews' property, only the costs of their deportation and extermination, and these costs had varied widely from country to country - the Slovaks had been supposed to pay between three hundred and five hundred Reichsmarks per Jew, the Croats only thirty, the French seven hundred, and the Belgians two hundred and fifty. (It seems that no one ever paid except the Croats.) In Hungary, at this late stage of the war, the Germans were demanding payment in goods - shipments of food to the Reich, in quantities determined by the amount of food the deported Jews would have consumed.

The Weiss affair was only the beginning, and things were to get considerably worse, from Eichmann's point of view. Becher was a born businessman, and where Eichmann saw only enormous tasks of organization and administration, he saw almost unlimited possibilities for making money. The one thing that stood in his way was the narrow-mindedness of subordinate creatures like Eichmann, who took their jobs seriously. Obersturmbannführer Becher's projects soon led him to cooperate closely in the rescue efforts of Dr. Rudolf Kastner. (It was to Kastner's testimony on his behalf that Becher later, at Nuremberg, owed his freedom. Being an old Zionist, Kastner had moved to Israel after the war, where he held a high position until a journalist published a story about his collaboration with the S.S. - whereupon Kastner sued him for libel. His testimony at Nuremberg weighed heavily against him, and when the case came before the Jerusalem District Court, Judge Halevi, one of the three judges in the Eichmann trial, told Kastner that he "had sold his soul to the devil." In March, 1957, shortly before his case was to be appealed before the Israeli Supreme Court, Kastner was murdered; none of the murderers, it seems, came from Hungary. In the hearing that followed the verdict of the lower court was repealed and Kastner was fully rehabilitated.) The deals Becher made through Kastner were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew - not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to thinking big. The price finally arrived at was a thousand dollars, and one group, consisting of 1,684 Jews, and including Dr. Kastner's family, actually left Hungary for the exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen, from which they eventually reached Switzerland. A similar deal, through which Becher and Himmler hoped to obtain twenty million Swiss francs from the American Joint Distribution Committee, for the purchase of merchandise of all sorts, kept everybody busy until the Russians liberated Hungary, but nothing came of it.

There is no doubt that Becher's activities had the full approval of Himmler and stood in the sharpest possible opposition to the old "radical" orders, which still reached Eichmann through Müller and Kaltenbrunner, his immediate superiors in the R.S.H.A. In Eichmann's view, people like Becher were corrupt, but corruption could not very well have caused his crisis of conscience, for although he was apparently not susceptible to this kind of temptation, he must by this time have been surrounded by corruption for many years. It is difficult to imagine that he did not know that his friend and subordinate Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny had, as early as 1942, accepted fifty thousand dollars from the Jewish Relief Committee in Bratislava for delaying the deportations from Slovakia, though it is not altogether impossible; but he cannot have been ignorant of the fact that Himmler, in the fall of 1942, had tried to sell exit permits to the Slovakian Jews in exchange for enough foreign currency to pay for the recruitment of a new S.S. division. Now, however, in 1944, in Hungary, it was different, not because Himmler was involved in "business," but because business had now become official policy; it was no longer mere corruption.

At the beginning, Eichmann tried to enter the game and play it according to the new rules; that was when he got involved in the fantastic "blood-for-wares" negotiations - one million Jews for ten thousand trucks for the crumbling German Army - which certainly were not initiated by him. The way he explained his role in this matter, in Jerusalem, showed clearly how he had once justified it to himself: as a military necessity that would bring him the additional benefit of an important new role in the emigration business. What he probably never admitted to himself was that the mounting difficulties on all sides made it every day more likely that he would soon be without a job (indeed, this happened, a few months later) unless he succeeded in finding some foothold amid the new jockeying for power that was going on all around him. When the exchange project met with its predictable failure, it was already common knowledge that Himmler, despite his constant vacillations, chiefly due to his justified physical fear of Hitler, had decided to put an end to the whole Final Solution - regardless of business, regardless of military necessity, and without anything to show for it except the illusions he had concocted about his future role as the bringer of peace to Germany. It was at this time that a "moderate wing" of the S.S. came into existence, consisting of those who were stupid enough to believe that a murderer who could prove he had not killed as many people as he could have killed would have a marvelous alibi, and those who were clever enough to foresee a return to "normal conditions," when money and good connections would again be of paramount importance.

Eichmann never joined this "moderate wing," and it is questionable whether he would have been admitted if he had tried to. Not only was he too deeply compromised and, because of his constant contact with Jewish functionaries, too well known; he was too primitive for these well-educated upper-middle-class "gentlemen," against whom he harbored the most violent resentment up to the very end. He was quite capable of sending millions of people to their death, but he was not capable of talking about it in the appropriate manner without being given his "language rule." In Jerusalem, without any rules, he spoke freely of "killing" and of "murder," of "crimes legalized by the state"; he called a spade a spade, in contrast to counsel for the defense, whose feeling of social superiority to Eichmann was more than once in evidence. (Servatius' assistant Dr. Dieter Wechtenbruch - a disciple of Carl Schmitt who attended the first few weeks of the trial, then was sent to Germany to question witnesses for the defense, and reappeared for the last week in August - was readily available to reporters out of court; he seemed to be shocked less by Eichmann's crimes than by his lack of taste and education. "Small fry," he said; "we must see how we get him over the hurdles" - wie wir das Würstchen fiber die Runden bringen. Servatius himself had declared, even prior to the trial, that his client's personality was that of "a common mailman.")

When Himmler became "moderate," Eichmann sabotaged his orders as much as he dared, to the extent at least that he felt he was "covered" by his immediate superiors. "How does Eichmann dare to sabotage Himmler's orders?" - in this case, to stop the foot marches, in the fall of 1944 - Kastner once asked Wisliceny. And the answer was: "He can probably show some telegram. Müller and Kaltenbrunner must have covered him." It is quite possible that Eichmann had some confused plan for liquidating Theresienstadt before the arrival of the Red Army, although we know this only through the dubious testimony of Dieter Wisliceny (who months, and perhaps years, before the end began carefully preparing an alibi for himself at the expense of Eichmann, to which he then treated the court at Nuremberg, where he was a witness for the prosecution; it did him no good, for he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, prosecuted and executed in Prague, where he had no connections and where money was of no help to him). Other witnesses claimed that it was Rolf Günther, one of Eichmann's men, who planned this, and that there existed, on the contrary, a written order from Eichmann that the ghetto be left intact. In any event, there is no doubt that even in April, 1945, when practically everybody had become quite "moderate," Eichmann took advantage of a visit that M. Paul Dunand, of the Swiss Red Cross, paid to Theresienstadt to put it on record that he himself did not approve of Himmler's new line in regard to the Jews.

That Eichmann had at all times done his best to make the Final Solution final was therefore not in dispute. The question was only whether this was indeed proof of his fanaticism, his boundless hatred of Jews, and whether he had lied to the police and committed perjury in court when he claimed he had always obeyed orders. No other explanation ever occurred to the judges, who tried so hard to understand the accused, and treated him with a consideration and an authentic, shining humanity such as he had probably never encountered before in his whole life. (Dr. Wechtenbruch told reporters that Eichmann had "great confidence in Judge Landau," as though Landau would be able to sort things out, and ascribed this confidence to Eichmann's need for authority. Whatever its basis, the confidence was apparent throughout the trial, and it may have been the reason the judgment caused Eichmann such great "disappointment"; he had mistaken humanity for softness.) That they never did come to understand him may be proof of the "goodness" of the three men, of their untroubled and slightly old-fashioned faith in the moral foundations of their profession. For the sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war, as it had prompted him to move in the opposite direction for a short time three years before. Eichmann knew that Himmler's orders ran directly counter to the Führer's order. For this, he needed to know no factual details, though such details would have backed him up: as the prosecution underlined in the proceedings before the Supreme Court, when Hitler heard, through Kaltenbrunner, of negotiations to exchange Jews for trucks, "Himmler's position in Hitler's eyes was completely undermined." And only a few weeks before Himmler stopped the extermination at Auschwitz, Hitler, obviously unaware of Himmler's newest moves, had sent an ultimatum to Horthy, telling him he "expected that the measures against Jews in Budapest would now be taken without any further delay by the Hungarian government." When Himmler's order to stop the evacuation of Hungarian Jews arrived in Budapest, Eichmann threatened, according to a telegram from Veesenmayer, "to seek a new decision from the Führer," and this telegram the judgment found "more damning than a hundred witnesses could be."

Eichmann lost his fight against the "moderate wing," headed by the Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police. The first indication of his defeat came in January, 1945, when Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher was promoted to Standartenführer, the very rank Eichmann had been dreaming about all during the war. (His story, that no higher rank was open to him in his outfit, was a half-truth; he could have been made chief of Department IV-B, instead of occupying the desk of IV-B-4, and would then have been automatically promoted. The truth probably was that people like Eichmann, who had risen from the ranks, were never permitted to advance beyond a lieutenant colonelcy except at the front.) That same month Hungary was liberated, and Eichmann was called back to Berlin. There, Himmler had appointed his enemy Becher Reichssonderkommissar in charge of all concentration camps, and Eichmann was transferred from the desk concerned with "Jewish Affairs" to the utterly insignificant one concerned with the "Fight Against the Churches," of which, moreover, he knew nothing. The rapidity of his decline during the last months of the war is a most telling sign of the extent to which Hitler was right when he declared, in his Berlin bunker, in April, 1945, that the S.S. were no longer reliable.

In Jerusalem, confronted with documentary proof of his extraordinary loyalty to Hitler and the Führer's order, Eichmann tried a number of times to explain that during the Third Reich "the Führer's words had the force of law" (Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft), which meant, among other things, that if the order came directly from Hitler it did not have to be in writing. He tried to explain that this was why he had never asked for a written order from Hitler (no such document relating to the Final Solution has ever been found; probably it never existed), but had demanded to see a written order from Himmler. To be sure, this was a fantastic state of affairs, and whole libraries of very "learned" juridical comment have been written, all demonstrating that the Führer's words, his oral pronouncements, were the basic law of the land. Within this "legal" framework, every order contrary in letter or spirit to a word spoken by Hitler was, by definition, unlawful. Eichmann's position, therefore, showed a most unpleasant resemblance to that of the often-cited soldier who, acting in a normal legal framework, refuses to carry out orders that run counter to his ordinary experience of lawfulness and hence can be recognized by him as criminal. The extensive literature on the subject usually supports its case with the common equivocal meaning of the word "law," which in this context means sometimes the law of the land - that is, posited, positive law - and sometimes the law that supposedly speaks in all men's hearts with an identical voice. Practically speaking, however, orders to be disobeyed must be "manifestly unlawful" and unlawfulness must "fly like a black flag above [them] as a warning reading: `Prohibited!' " - as the judgment pointed out. And in a criminal regime this "black flag" with its "warning sign" flies as "manifestly" above what normally is a lawful order - for instance, not to kill innocent people just because they happen to be Jews - as it flies above a criminal order under normal circumstances. To fall back on an unequivocal voice of conscience - or, in the even vaguer language of the jurists, on a "general sentiment of humanity" (Oppenheim-Lauterpacht in International Law, 1952) - not only begs the question, it signifies a deliberate refusal to take notice of the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century.

To be sure, it was not merely Eichmann's conviction that Himmler was now giving "criminal" orders that determined his actions. But the personal element undoubtedly involved was not fanaticism, it was his genuine, "boundless and immoderate admiration for Hitler" (as one of the defense witnesses called it) - for the man who had made it "from lance corporal to Chancellor of the Reich." It would be idle to try to figure out which was stronger in him, his admiration for Hitler or his determination to remain a law-abiding citizen of the Third Reich when Germany was already in ruins. Both motives came into play once more during the last days of the war, when he was in Berlin and saw with violent indignation how everybody around him was sensibly enough getting himself fixed up with forged papers before the arrival of the Russians or the Americans. A few weeks later, Eichmann, too, began to travel under an assumed name, but by then Hitler was dead, and the "law of the land" was no longer in existence, and he, as he pointed out, was no longer bound by his oath. For the oath taken by the members of the S.S. differed from the military oath sworn by the soldiers in that it bound them only to Hitler, not to Germany.

The case of the conscience of Adolf Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in heaven." (Thus General Alfred Jodl, hanged at Nuremberg. ) Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry or thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.

And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:52 am

9. Deportations from the Reich-Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate

Between the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942, when Eichmann felt like Pontius Pilate and washed his hands in innocence, and Himmler's orders in the summer and fall of 1944, when behind Hitler's back the Final Solution was abandoned as though the massacres had been nothing but a regrettable mistake, Eichmann was troubled by no questions of conscience. His thoughts were entirely taken up with the staggering job of organization and administration in the midst not only of a world war but, more important for him, of innumerable intrigues and fights over spheres of authority among the various State and Party offices that were busy "solving the Jewish question." His chief competitors were the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, who were under the direct command of Himmler, had easy access to him, and always outranked Eichmann. There was also the Foreign Office, which, under its new Undersecretary of State, Dr. Martin Luther, a protege of Ribbentrop, had become very active in Jewish affairs. (Luther tried to oust Ribbentrop, in an elaborate intrigue in 1943, failed, and was put into a concentration camp; under his successor, Legationsrat Eberhard von Thadden, a witness for the defense at the trial in Jerusalem, became Referent in Jewish affairs.) It occasionally issued deportation orders to be carried out by its representatives abroad, who for reasons of prestige preferred to work through the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders. There were, furthermore, the Army commanders in the Eastern occupied territories, who liked to solve problems "on the spot," which meant shooting; the military men in Western countries were, on the other hand, always reluctant to cooperate and to lend their troops for the rounding up and seizure of Jews. Finally, there were the Gauleiters, the regional leaders, each of whom wanted to be the first to declare his territory judenrein, and who occasionally started deportation procedures on their own.

Eichmann had to coordinate all these "efforts," to bring some order out of what he described as "complete chaos," in which "everyone issued his own orders" and "did as he pleased." And indeed he succeeded, though never completely, in acquiring a key position in the whole process, because his office organized the means of transportation. According to Dr. Rudolf Mildner, Gestapo head in Upper Silesia (where Auschwitz was located) and later chief of the Security Police in Denmark, who testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, orders for deportations were given by Himmler in writing to Kaltenbrunner, head of the R.S.H.A., who notified Miller, head of the Gestapo, or Section IV of R.S.H.A., who in turn transmitted the orders orally to his referent in IV-B-4 - that is, to Eichmann. Himmler also issued orders to the local Higher S.S. and Police Leaders and informed Kaltenbrunner accordingly. Questions of what should be done with the Jewish deportees, how many should be exterminated and how many spared for hard labor, were also decided by Himmler, and his orders concerning these matters went to Pohl's W.V.H.A., which communicated them to Richard Glücks, inspector of the concentration and extermination camps, who in turn passed them along to the commanders of the camps. The prosecution ignored these documents from the Nuremberg Trials, since they contradicted its theory of the extraordinary power held by Eichmann; the defense mentioned Mildner's affidavits, but not to much purpose. Eichmann himself, after "consulting Poliakoff and Reitlinger," produced seventeen multi-colored charts, which contributed little to a better understanding of the intricate bureaucratic machinery of the Third Reich, although his general description - "everything was always in a state of continuous flux, a steady stream" - sounded plausible to the student of totalitarianism, who knows that the monolithic quality of this form of government is a myth. He still remembered vaguely how his men, his advisers on Jewish matters in all occupied and semi-independent countries, had reported back to him "what action was at all practicable," how he had then prepared "reports which were later either approved or rejected," and how Müller then had issued his directives; "in practice this could mean that a proposal that came in from Paris or The Hague went out a fortnight later to Paris or The Hague in the form of a directive approved by the R.S.H.A." Eichmann's position was that of the most important conveyor belt in the whole operation, because it was always up to him and his men how many Jews could or should be transported from any given area, and it was through his office that the ultimate destination of the shipment was cleared, though that destination was not determined by him. But the difficulty in synchronizing departures and arrivals, the endless worry over wrangling enough rolling stock from the railroad authorities and the Ministry of Transport, over fixing timetables and directing trains to centers with sufficient "absorptive capacity," over having enough Jews on hand at the proper time so that no trains would be "wasted," over enlisting the help of the authorities in occupied or allied countries to carry out arrests, over following the rules and directives with respect to the various categories of Jews, which were laid down separately for each country and constantly changing - all this became a routine whose details he had forgotten long before he was brought to Jerusalem.

What for Hitler, the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war's main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world. For hundreds of years, they had been used to understanding their own history, rightly or wrongly, as a long story of suffering, much as the prosecutor described it in his opening speech at the trial; but behind this attitude there had been, for a long time, the triumphant conviction of "Am Yisrael Chai," the people of Israel shall live; individual Jews, whole Jewish families might die in pogroms, whole communities might be wiped out, but the people would survive. They had never been confronted with genocide. Moreover, the old consolation no longer worked anyhow, at least not in Western Europe. Since Roman antiquity, that is, since the inception of European history, the Jews had belonged, for better or worse, in misery or in splendor, to the European comity of nations; but during the past hundred and fifty years it had been chiefly for better, and the occasions of splendor had become so numerous that in Central and Western Europe they were felt to be the rule. Hence, the confidence that the people would eventually survive no longer held great significance for large sections of the Jewish communities; they could no more imagine Jewish life outside the framework of European civilization than they could have pictured to themselves a Europe that was judenrein.

The end of the world, though carried through with remarkable monotony, took almost as many different shapes and appearances as there existed countries in Europe. This will come as no surprise to the historian familiar with the development of European nations and with the rise of the nation-state system, but it came as a great surprise to the Nazis, who were genuinely convinced that anti-Semitism could become the common denominator that would unite all Europe. This was a huge and costly error. It quickly turned out that in practice, though perhaps not in theory, there existed great differences among anti-Semites in the various countries. What was even more annoying, though it might easily have been predicted, was that the German "radical" variety was fully appreciated only by those peoples in the East - the Ukrainians, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and, to some extent, the Rumanians - whom the Nazis had decided to regard as "subhuman" barbarian hordes. Notably deficient in proper hostility toward the Jews were the Scandinavian nations (Knut Hamsun and Sven Hedin were exceptions), which, according to the Nazis, were Germany's blood brethren.

The end of the world began, of course, in the German Reich, which at the time embraced not only Germany but Austria, Moravia and Bohemia, the Czech Protectorate, and the annexed Polish Western Regions. In the last of these, the so-called Warthegau, Jews, together with Poles, had been deported eastward after the beginning of the war, in the first huge resettlement project in the East "an organized wandering of nations," as the judgment of the District Court in Jerusalem called it - while Poles of German origin (Volksdeutsche) were shipped westward "back into the Reich." Himmler, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom, had entrusted Heydrich with this "emigration and evacuation," and in January, 1940, Eichmann's first official department in the R.S.H.A., Bureau IV-D-4, was set up. Though this position proved administratively to be the stepping-stone to his later job in Bureau 1V-B-4, Eichmann's work here was no more than a kind of apprenticeship, the transition between his old job of making people emigrate and his future task of deporting them. His first deportation jobs did not belong to the Final Solution; they occurred before the official Hitler order. In view of what happened later, they can be regarded as test cases, as an experiment in catastrophe. The first was the deportation of thirteen hundred Jews from Stettin, which was carried out in a single night, on February 13, 1940. This was the first deportation of German Jews, and Heydrich had ordered it under the pretext that "their apartments were urgently required for reasons connected with the war economy." They were taken, under unusually atrocious conditions, to the Lublin area of Poland. The second deportation took place in the fall of the same year: all the Jews in Baden and the Saarpfalz - about seventy-five hundred men, women, and children - were shipped, as I mentioned earlier, to Unoccupied France, which was at that moment quite a trick, since nothing in the Franco-German Armistice agreement stipulated that Vichy France could become a dumping ground for Jews. Eichmann had to accompany the train himself in order to convince the French stationmaster at the border that this was a German "military transport."

These two operations entirely lacked the later elaborate "legal" preparations. No laws had yet been passed depriving Jews of their nationality the moment they were deported from the Reich, and instead of the many forms Jews eventually had to fill out in arranging for the confiscation of their property, the Stettin Jews simply signed a general waiver, covering everything they owned. Clearly, it was not the administrative apparatus that these first operations were supposed to test. The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions - whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish "refugees." As far as the Nazis could see, everything turned out very satisfactorily. In Germany, there were a number of interventions for "special cases" - for the poet Alfred Mombert, for instance, a member of the Stefan George circle, who was permitted to depart to Switzerland - but the population at large obviously could not have cared less. (It was probably at this moment that Heydrich realized how important it would be to separate Jews with connections from the anonymous masses, and decided, with Hitler's agreement, to establish Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.) In France, something even better happened: the Vichy government put all seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden in the notorious concentration camp at Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had originally been built for the Spanish Republican Army and had been used since May of 1940 for the so-called "r& &s provenant d'Allemagne," the large majority of whom were, of course, Jewish. (When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.) The Nazis, always eager to generalize, thought they had demonstrated that Jews were "undesirables" everywhere and that every non- Jew was an actual or potential anti-Semite. Why, then, should anybody be bothered if they tackled this problem "radically"? Still under the spell of these generalizations, Eichmann complained over and over in Jerusalem that no country had been ready to accept Jews, that this, and only this, had caused the great catastrophe. (As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes - penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!) However, to the never-ending surprise of the Nazi officials, even the convinced anti- Semites in foreign lands were not willing to be "consistent," and showed a deplorable tendency to shy away from "radical" measures. Few of them put it as bluntly as a member of the Spanish Embassy in Berlin - "If only one could be sure they wouldn't be liquidated," he said of some six hundred Jews of Spanish descent who had been given Spanish passports, though they had never been in Spain, and whom the Franco Government wished very much to transfer to German jurisdiction - but most of them thought precisely along these lines.

After these first experiments, there followed a lull in deportations, and we have seen how Eichmann used his enforced inactivity to play around with Madagascar. But in March, 1941, during the preparation for the war against Russia, Eichmann was suddenly put in charge of a new subsection, or rather, the name of his subsection was changed from Emigration and Evacuation to Jewish Affairs, Evacuation. From then on, though he was not yet informed of the Final Solution, he should have been aware not only that emigration had definitely come to an end, but that deportation was to take its place. But Eichmann was not a man to take hints, and since no one had yet told him differently, he continued to think in terms of emigration. Thus at a meeting with representatives of the Foreign Office in October, 1940, during which it had been proposed that the citizenship of all German Jews abroad be canceled, Eichmann protested vigorously that "such a step might influence other countries which to date were still ready to open their gates to Jewish immigrants and to grant entry permits." He always thought within the narrow limits of whatever laws and decrees were valid at a given moment, and the shower of new anti-Jewish legislation descended upon the Reich's Jews only after Hitler's order for the Final Solution had been officially handed down to those who were to implement it. At the same time, it had been decided that the Reich was to be given top priority, its territories made judenrein with all speed; it is surprising that it still took almost two years to do the job. The preparatory regulations, which were soon to serve as models for all other countries, consisted, first, of the introduction of the yellow badge (September 1, 1941); second, of a change in the nationality law, providing that a Jew could not be considered a German national if he lived outside the borders of the Reich (whence, of course, he was to be deported); third, of a decree that all property of German Jews who had lost their nationality was to be confiscated by the Reich (November 25, 1941). The preparations culminated in an agreement between Otto Thierack, the Minister of Justice, and Himmler whereby the former relinquished jurisdiction over "Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies" in favor of the S.S., since "the Ministry of Justice can make only a small contribution to the extermination [sic] of these peoples."

(This open language, in a letter dated October, 1942, from the Minister of Justice to Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, is noteworthy.) Slightly different directives had to be issued to cover those who were deported to Theresienstadt because, Theresienstadt being on Reich territory, the Jews deported there did not automatically become stateless. In the case of these "privileged categories," an old law of 1933 permitted the government to confiscate property that had been used for activities "hostile to the nation and the State." This kind of confiscation had been customary in the case of political prisoners in the concentration camps, and though Jews did not belong in this category - all concentration camps in Germany and Austria had become judenrein by the fall of 1942 - it took only one more regulation, issued in March, 1942, to establish that all deported Jews were "hostile to the nation and the State." The Nazis took their own legislation quite seriously, and though they talked among themselves of "the Theresienstadt ghetto" or "the ghetto for old people," Theresienstadt was officially classified as a concentration camp, and the only people who did not know this - one did not want to hurt their feelings, since this "place of residence" was reserved for "special cases" - were the inmates. And to make sure that the Jews sent there would not become suspicious, the Jewish Association in Berlin (the Reichsvereinigung) was directed to draw up an agreement with each deportee for "the acquisition of residence" in Theresienstadt. The candidate transferred all his property to the Jewish Association, in consideration whereof the Association guaranteed him housing, food, clothing, and medical care for life. When, finally, the last officials of the Reichsvereinigung were themselves sent to Theresienstadt, the Reich simply confiscated the considerable amount of money then in the Association's treasury.

All deportations from West to East were organized and co-ordinated by Eichmann and his associates in Section IV-B-4 of the R.S.H.A. - a fact that was never disputed during the trial. But to put the Jews on the trains he needed the help of ordinary police units; in Germany the Order Police guarded the trains and posted escorts, and in the East the Security Police (not to be confused with Himmler's Security Service, or S.D.) stood ready at the places of destination to receive the trains and hand their inmates over to the authorities in the killing centers. The Jerusalem court followed the definitions of "criminal organizations" established at Nuremberg; this meant that neither the Order Police nor the Security Police were ever mentioned, although their active involvement in the implementation of the Final Solution had by this time been amply substantiated. But even if all the police units had been added to the four organizations recognized as "criminal" - the leadership corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the S.D., and the S.S. - the Nuremberg distinctions would have remained inadequate and inapplicable to the reality of the Third Reich. For the truth of the matter is that there existed not a single organization or public institution in Germany, at least during the war years, that did not become involved in criminal actions and transactions.

After the troublesome issue of personal interventions had been resolved through the establishment of Theresienstadt, two things still stood in the way of a "radical" and "final" solution. One was the problem of half-Jews, whom the "radicals" wanted to deport along with the full Jews and whom the "moderates" wished to sterilize - because if you permitted the half-Jews to be killed, it meant that you abandoned "that half of their blood which is German," as Stuckart of the Ministry of the Interior phrased it at the Wannsee Conference. (Actually, nothing was ever done about the Mischlinge, or about Jews who had made mixed marriages; "a forest of difficulties," in Eichmann's words, surrounded and protected them - their non-Jewish relatives, for one, and, for another, the disappointing fact that the Nazi physicians, despite all their promises, never discovered a quick means of mass sterilization.) The second problem was the presence in Germany of a few thousand foreign Jews, whom Germany could not deprive of their nationality through deportation. A few hundred American and English Jews were interned and held for exchange purposes, but the methods devised for dealing with nationals of neutral countries or those allied with Germany are interesting enough to be recorded, especially since they played a certain role in the trial. It was in reference to these people that Eichmann was accused of having shown inordinate zeal lest a single Jew escape him. This zeal he shared, as Reitlinger says, with the "professional bureaucrats of the Foreign Office, [to whom] the flight of a few Jews from torture and slow death was a matter of the gravest concern," and whom he had to consult on all such cases. As far as Eichmann was concerned, the simplest and most logical solution was to deport all Jews regardless of their nationality. According to the directives of the Wannsee Conference, which was held in the heyday of Hitler's victories, the Final Solution was to be applied to all European Jews, whose number was estimated at eleven million, and such things as nationality or the rights of allied or neutral countries with respect to their citizens were not even mentioned. But since Germany, even in the brightest days of the war, depended upon local good will and cooperation everywhere, these little formalities could not be sneezed at. It was the task of the experienced diplomats of the Foreign Service to find ways out of this particular "forest of difficulties," and the most ingenious of these consisted in the use of foreign Jews in German territory to test the general atmosphere in their home countries. The method by which this was done, though simple, was somewhat subtle, and was certainly quite beyond Eichmann's mental grasp and political apprehension. (This was borne out by the documentary evidence; letters that his department addressed to the Foreign Office in these matters were signed by Kaltenbrunner or Müller.) The Foreign Office wrote to the authorities in other countries, saying that the German Reich was in the process of becoming judenrein and that it was therefore imperative that foreign Jews be called home if they were not to be included in the anti-Jewish measures. There was more in this ultimatum than meets the eye. These foreign Jews, as a rule, either were naturalized citizens of their respective countries, or, worse, were in fact stateless but had obtained passports by some highly dubious method that worked well enough as long as their bearers stayed abroad. This was especially true of Latin American countries, whose consuls abroad sold passports to Jews quite openly; the fortunate holders of such passports had every right, including some consular protection, except the right ever to enter their "homeland." Hence, the ultimatum of the Foreign Office was aimed at getting foreign governments to agree to the application of the Final Solution at least to those Jews who were only nominally their nationals. Was it not logical to believe that a government that had shown itself unwilling to offer asylum to a few hundred or a few thousand Jews, who in any case were in no position to establish permanent residence there, would be unlikely to raise many objections on the day when its whole Jewish population was to be expelled and exterminated? Perhaps it was logical, but it was not reasonable, as we shall see shortly.

On June 30, 1943, considerably later than Hitler had hoped, the Reich - Germany, Austria, and the Protektorat - was declared judenrein. There are no definite figures as to how many Jews were actually deported from this area, but we know that of the two hundred and sixty-five thousand people who, according to German statistics, were either deported or were eligible for deportation by January, 1942, very few escaped; perhaps a few hundred, at the most a few thousand, succeeded in hiding and surviving the war. How easy it was to set the conscience of the Jews' neighbors at rest is best illustrated by the official explanation of the deportations given in a circular issued by the Party Chancellery in the fall of 1942: "It is the nature of things that these, in some respects, very difficult problems can be solved in the interests of the permanent security of our people only with ruthless toughness" - rücksichtsloser Härte (my italics).
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:52 am

10. Deportations from Western Europe-France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy

"Ruthless toughness," a quality held in the highest esteem by the rulers of the Third Reich, is frequently characterized in postwar Germany, which has developed a veritable genius' for understatement with respect to her Nazi past, as being ungut - lacking goodness - as though nothing had been wrong with those endowed with this quality but a deplorable failure to act according to the exacting standards of Christian charity. In any case, men sent by Eichmann's office to other countries as "advisers on Jewish affairs" - to be attached to the regular diplomatic missions, or to the military staff, or to the local command of the Security Police - were all chosen because they possessed this virtue to the highest degree. In the beginning, during the fall and winter of 1941-42, their main job seems to have been to establish satisfactory relations with the other German officials in the countries concerned, especially with the German embassies in nominally independent countries and with the Reich commissioners in occupied territories; in either case, there was perpetual conflict over jurisdiction in Jewish matters.

In June, 1942, Eichmann recalled his advisers in France, Belgium, and Holland in order to lay plans for deportations from these countries. Himmler had ordered that FRANCE be given top priority in "combing Europe from West to East," partly because of the inherent importance of the nation par excellence, and partly because the Vichy government had shown a truly amazing "understanding" of the Jewish problem and had introduced, on its own initiative, a great deal of anti-Jewish legislation; it had even established a special Department for Jewish Affairs, headed first by Xavier Valiant and somewhat later by Darquier de Pellepoix, both well-known anti- Semites. As a concession to the French brand of anti-Semitism, which was intimately connected with a strong, generally chauvinistic xenophobia in all strata of the population, the operation was to start with foreign Jews, and since in 1942 more than half of France's foreign Jews were stateless - refugees and émigrés from Russia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Hungary - that is, from areas that either were under German domination or had passed anti-Jewish legislation before the outbreak of war - it was decided to begin by deporting an estimated hundred thousand stateless Jews. (The total Jewish population of the country was now well over three hundred thousand; in 1939, before the influx of refugees from Belgium and Holland in the spring of 1940, there had been about two hundred and seventy thousand Jews, of whom at least a hundred and seventy thousand were foreign or foreign-born.) Fifty thousand each were to be evacuated from the Occupied Zone and from Vichy France with all speed. This was a considerable undertaking, which needed not only the agreement of the Vichy government but the active help of the French police, who were to do the work done in Germany by the Order Police. At first, there were no difficulties whatever, since, as Pierre Laval, Premier under Marshal Pétain, pointed out, "these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France," so that the "French government was glad that a change in the German attitude toward them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them." It must be added that Laval and Pétain thought in terms of these Jews' being resettled in the East; they did not yet know what "resettlement" meant.

Two incidents, in particular, attracted the attention of the Jerusalem court, both of which occurred in the summer of 1942, a few weeks after the operation had started. The first concerned a train due to leave Bordeaux on July 15, which had to be canceled because only a hundred and fifty stateless Jews could be found in Bordeaux - not enough to fill the train, which Eichmann had obtained with great difficulty. Whether or not Eichmann recognized this as the first indication that things might not be quite as easy as everybody felt entitled to believe, he became very excited, telling his subordinates that this was "a matter of prestige" - not in the eyes of the French but in those of the Ministry of Transport, which might get wrong ideas about the efficiency of his apparatus - and that he would "have to consider whether France should not be dropped altogether as far as evacuation was concerned" if such an incident was repeated. In Jerusalem, this threat was taken very seriously, as proof of Eichmann's power; if he wished, he could "drop France." Actually, it was one of Eichmann's ridiculous boasts, proof of his "driving power" but hardly "evidence of . . . his status in the eyes of his subordinates," except insofar as he had plainly threatened them with losing their very cozy war jobs. But if the Bordeaux incident was a farce, the second was the basis for one of the most horrible of the many hair-raising stories told at Jerusalem. This was the story of four thousand children, separated from their parents who were already on their way to Auschwitz. The children had been left behind at the French collection point, the concentration camp at Drancy, and on July 10 Eichmann's French representative, Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, phoned him to ask what was to be done with them. Eichmann took ten days to decide; then he called Dannecker back to tell him that "as soon as transports could again be dispatched to the General Government area [of Poland], transports of children could roll." Dr. Servatius pointed out that the whole incident actually demonstrated that the "persons affected were determined neither by the accused nor by any members of his office." But what, unfortunately, no one mentioned was that Dannecker had informed Eichmann that Laval himself had proposed that children under sixteen be included in the deportations; this meant that the whole gruesome episode was not even the result of "superior orders" but the outcome of an agreement between France and Germany, negotiated at the highest level.

During the summer and fall of 1942, twenty-seven thousand stateless Jews-eighteen thousand from Paris and nine thousand from Vichy France - were deported to Auschwitz. Then, when there were about seventy thousand stateless Jews left in all of France, the Germans made their first mistake. Confident that the French had by now become so accustomed to deporting Jews that they wouldn't mind, they asked for permission to include French Jews also - simply to facilitate administrative matters. This caused a complete turnabout; the French were adamant in their refusal to hand over their own Jews to the Germans. And Himmler, upon being informed of the situation - not by Eichmann or his men, incidentally, but by one of the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders - immediately gave in and promised to spare French Jews. But now it was too late. The first rumors about "resettlement" had reached France, and while French anti-Semites, and nonanti- Semites too, would have liked to see foreign Jews settle somewhere else, not even the anti- Semites wished to become accomplices in mass murder. Hence, the French now refused to take a step they had eagerly contemplated only a short time before, that is, to revoke naturalizations granted to Jews after 1927 (or after 1933), which would have made about fifty thousand more Jews eligible for deportation. They also started making such endless difficulties with regard to the deportation of stateless and other foreign Jews that all the ambitious plans for the evacuation of Jews from France did indeed have to be "dropped." Tens of thousands of stateless persons went into hiding, while thousands more fled to the Italian-occupied French zone, the Côte d'Azur, where Jews were safe, whatever their origin or nationality. In the summer of 1943, when Germany was declared judenrein and the Allies had just landed in Sicily, no more than fifty-two thousand Jews, certainly less than twenty per cent of the total, had been deported, and of these no more than six thousand possessed French nationality. Not even Jewish prisoners of war in the German internment camps for the French Army were singled out for "special treatment." In April, 1944, two months before the Allies landed in France, there were still two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the country, and they all survived the war. The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain "tough" when they met determined opposition. The truth of the matter was, as we shall see, that even the members of the Gestapo and the S.S. combined ruthlessness with softness.

At the June, 1942, meeting in Berlin, the figures set for immediate deportations from Belgium and the Netherlands had been rather low, probably because of the high figure set for France. No more than ten thousand Jews from Belgium and fifteen thousand from Holland were to be seized and deported in the immediate future. In both cases the figures were later significantly enlarged, probably because of the difficulties encountered in the French operation. The situation of BELGIUM was peculiar in some respects. The country was ruled exclusively by German military authorities, and the police, as a Belgian government report submitted to the court pointed out, "did not have the same influence upon the other German administration services that they enjoyed in other places." (Belgium's governor, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, was later implicated in the July, 1944, conspiracy against Hitler.) Native collaborators were of importance only in Flanders; the Fascist movement among the French-speaking Walloons, headed by Degrelle, had little influence. The Belgian police did not cooperate with the Germans, and the Belgian railway men could not even be trusted to leave deportation trains alone. They contrived to leave doors unlocked or to arrange ambushes, so that Jews could escape. Most peculiar was the composition of the Jewish population. Before the outbreak of war, there were ninety thousand Jews, of whom about thirty thousand were German Jewish refugees, while another fifty thousand came from other European countries. By the end of 1940, nearly forty thousand Jews had fled the country, and among the fifty thousand who remained there were at the most five thousand nativeborn Belgian citizens. Moreover among those who had fled were all the more important Jewish leaders, most of whom had been foreigners anyway, so that the Jewish Council did not command any authority among native Jews. With this "lack of understanding" on all sides, it is not surprising that very few Belgian Jews were deported. But recently naturalized and stateless Jews - of Czech, Polish, Russian, and German origin, many of whom had only recently arrived - were easily recognizable and most difficult to hide in the small, completely industrialized country. By the end of 1942, fifteen thousand had been shipped to Auschwitz, and by the fall of 1944, when the Allies liberated the country, a total of twenty-five thousand had been killed. Eichmann had his usual "adviser" in Belgium, but the adviser seems not to have been very active in these operations. They were carried out, finally, by the military administration, under increased pressure from the Foreign Office.

As in practically all other countries, the deportations from HOLLAND started with stateless Jews, who in this instance consisted almost entirely of refugees from Germany, whom the prewar Dutch government had officially declared to be "undesirable." There were about thirty-five thousand foreign Jews altogether in a total Jewish population of a hundred and forty thousand. Unlike Belgium, Holland was placed under a civil administration, and, unlike France, the country had no government of its own, since the cabinet, together with the royal family, had fled to London. The small nation was utterly at the mercy of the Germans and of the S.S. Eichmann's "adviser" in Holland was a certain Willi Zöpf (recently arrested in Germany, while the much more efficient adviser in France, Mr. Dannecker, is still at large) but he apparently had very little to say and could hardly do more than keep the Berlin office posted. Deportations and everything connected with them were handled by the lawyer Erich Rajakowitsch, Eichmann's former legal adviser in Vienna and Prague, who was admitted to the S.S. upon Eichmann's recommendation. He had been sent to Holland by Heydrich in April, 1941, and was directly responsible not to the R.S.H.A. in Berlin but to the local head of the Security Service in The Hague, Dr. Wilhelm Harsten, who in turn was under the command of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Obergruppenführer Hans Rauter and his assistant in Jewish affairs, Ferdinand aus der Fünten. (Rauter and Fünten were condemned to death by a Dutch court; Rauter was executed and Fünten's sentence, allegedly after special intervention from Adenauer, was commuted to life imprisonment. Harsten, too, was brought to trial in Holland, sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment, and released in 1957, whereupon he entered the civil service of the Bavarian state government. The Dutch authorities are considering proceedings against Rajakowitsch, who seems to live in either Switzerland or Italy. All these details have become known in the last year through the publication of Dutch documents and the report by E. Jacob, Dutch correspondent for the Basler Nationalzeitung, a Swiss newspaper.) The prosecution in Jerusalem, partly because it wanted to build up Eichmann at all costs and partly because it got genuinely lost in the intricacies of German bureaucracy, claimed that all these officers had carried out Eichmann's orders. But the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders took orders only directly from Himmler, and that Rajakowitsch was still taking orders from Eichmann at this time is highly unlikely, especially in view of what was then going to happen in Holland. The judgment, without engaging in polemics, quietly corrected a great number of errors made by the prosecution - though probably not all - and showed the constant jockeying for position that went on between the R.S.H.A. and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders and other offices - the "tenacious, eternal, everlasting negotiations," as Eichmann called them.

Eichmann had been especially upset by the arrangements in Holland, because it was clearly Himmler himself who was cutting him down to size, quite apart from the fact that the zeal of the gentlemen in residence created great difficulties for him in the timing of his own transports and generally made a mockery of the importance of the "coordinating center" in Berlin. Thus, right at the beginning, twenty thousand instead of fifteen thousand Jews were deported, and Eichmann's Mr. Zöpf, who was far inferior in rank as well as in position to all others present, was almost forced to speed up deportations in 1943. Conflicts of jurisdiction in these matters were to plague Eichmann at all times, and it was in vain that he explained to anybody who would listen that "it would be contradictory to the order of the Reichsführer S.S. [i.e., Himmler] and illogical if at this stage other authorities again were to handle the Jewish problem." The last clash in Holland came in 1944, and this time even Kaltenbrunner tried to intervene, for the sake of uniformity. In Holland, Sephardic Jews, of Spanish origin, had been exempted, although Jews of that origin had been sent to Auschwitz from Salonika. The judgment was in error when it ventured that the R.S.H.A. "had the upper hand in this dispute" - for God knows what reasons, some three hundred and seventy Sephardic Jews remained unmolested in Amsterdam.

The reason Himmler preferred to work in Holland through his Higher S.S. and Police Leaders was simple. These men knew their way around the country, and the problem posed by the Dutch population was by no means an easy one. Holland had been the only country in all Europe where students went on strike when Jewish professors were dismissed and where a wave of strikes broke out in response to the first deportation of Jews to German concentration camps - and that deportation, in contrast to those to extermination camps, was merely a punitive measure, taken long before the Final Solution had reached Holland. (The Germans, as de Jong points out, were taught a lesson. From now on, "the persecution was carried out not with the cudgels of the Nazi storm troops . . . , but by decrees published in Verordeningenblad ... , which the Joodsche Weekblad was forced to carry." Police raids in the streets no longer occurred and there were no strikes on the part of the population.) However, the widespread hostility in Holland toward antiJewish measures and the relative immunity of the Dutch people to anti-Semitism were held in check by two factors, which eventually proved fatal to the Jews. First, there existed a very strong Nazi movement in Holland, which could be trusted to carry out such police measures as seizing Jews, ferreting out their hiding places, and so on; second, there existed an inordinately strong tendency among the native Jews to draw a line between themselves and the new arrivals, which was probably the result of the very unfriendly attitude of the Dutch government toward refugees from Germany, and probably also because anti-Semitism in Holland, just as in France, focused on foreign Jews. This made it relatively easy for the Nazis to form their Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, which remained for a long time under the impression that only German and other foreign Jews would be victims of the deportations, and it also enabled the S.S. to enlist, in addition to Dutch police units, the help of a Jewish police force. The result was a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country; it can be compared only with the extinction, under vastly different and, from the beginning, completely desperate conditions, of Polish Jewry. Although, in contrast with Poland, the attitude of the Dutch people permitted a large number of Jews to go into hiding-twenty to twenty-five thousand, a very high figure for such a small country - yet an unusually large number of Jews living underground, at least half of them, were eventually found, no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers. By July, 1944, a hundred and thirteen thousand Jews had been deported, most of them to Sobibor, a camp in the Lublin area of Poland, by the river Bug, where no selections of able-bodied workers ever took place. Three-fourths of all Jews living in Holland were killed, about two-thirds of these native-born Dutch Jews. The last shipments left in the fall of 1944, when Allied patrols were at the Dutch borders. Of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners - a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality.

At the Wannsee Conference, Martin Luther, of the Foreign Office, warned of great difficulties in the Scandinavian countries, notably in Norway and Denmark. (Sweden was never occupied, and Finland, though in the war on the side of the Axis, was the one country the Nazis hardly ever even approached on the Jewish question. This surprising exception of Finland, with some two thousand Jews, may have been due to Hitler's great esteem for the Finns, whom perhaps he did not want to subject to threats and humiliating blackmail.) Luther proposed postponing evacuations from Scandinavia for the time being, and as far as Denmark was concerned, this really went without saying, since the country retained its independent government, and was respected as a neutral state, until the fall of 1943, although it, along with Norway, had been invaded by the German Army in April, 1940. There existed no Fascist or Nazi movement in Denmark worth mentioning, and therefore no collaborators. In NORWAY, however, the Germans had been able to find enthusiastic supporters; indeed, Vidkun Quisling, leader of the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Norwegian party, gave his name to what later became known as a "quisling government." The bulk of Norway's seventeen hundred Jews were stateless, refugees from Germany; they were seized and interned in a few lightning operations in October and November, 1942. When Eichmann's office ordered their deportation to Auschwitz, some of Quisling's own men resigned their government posts. This may not have come as a surprise to Mr. Luther and the Foreign Office, but what was much more serious, and certainly totally unexpected, was that Sweden immediately offered asylum, and sometimes even Swedish nationality, to all who were persecuted. Ernst von Weizsacker, Undersecretary of State of the Foreign Office, who received the proposal, refused to discuss it, but the offer helped nevertheless. It is always relatively easy to get out of a country illegally, whereas it is nearly impossible to enter the place of refuge without permission and to dodge the immigration authorities. Hence, about nine hundred people, slightly more than half of the small Norwegian community, could be smuggled into Sweden.

It was in DENMARK, however, that the Germans found out how fully justified the Foreign Office's apprehensions had been. The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe - whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. To be sure, a few other countries in Europe lacked proper "understanding of the Jewish question," and actually a majority of them were opposed to "radical" and "final" solutions. Like Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged in a complicated game of double-dealing and double-crossing. saving their Jews by a tour de force of sheer ingenuity, but they never contested the policy as such. That was totally different from what the Danes did. When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation. It was decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed in introducing the vitally important distinction between native Danes of Jewish origin, of whom there were about sixty-four hundred, and the fourteen hundred German Jewish refugees who had found asylum in the country prior to the war and who now had been declared stateless by the German government. This refusal must have surprised the Germans no end, since it appeared so "illogical" for a government to protect people to whom it had categorically denied naturalization and even permission to work. (Legally, the prewar situation of refugees in Denmark was not unlike that in France, except that the general corruption in the Third Republic's civil services enabled a few of them to obtain naturalization papers, through bribes or "connections," and most refugees in France could work illegally, without a permit. But Denmark, like Switzerland, was no country pour se débrouiller.) The Danes, however, explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Nazis could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them. Thus, none of the preparatory moves, so important for the bureaucracy of murder, could carried out, and operations were postponed until the fall of 1943.

What happened then was truly amazing; compared with what took place in other European countries, everything went topsy-turvy. In August, 1943 - after the German offensive in Russia had failed, the Afrika Korps had surrendered in Tunisia, and the Allies had invaded Italy - the Swedish government canceled its 1940 agreement with Germany which had permitted German troops the right to pass through the country. Thereupon, the Danish workers decided that they could help a bit in hurrying things up; riots broke out in Danish shipyards, where the dock workers refused to repair German ships and then went on strike. The German military commander proclaimed a state of emergency and imposed martial law, and Himmler thought this was the right moment to tackle the Jewish question, whose "solution" was long overdue. What he did not reckon with was that - quite apart from Danish resistance - the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same. Not only did General von Hannecken, the military commander, refuse to put troops at the disposal of the Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Werner Best; the special S.S. units (Einsatzkommandos) employed in Denmark very frequently objected to "the measures they were ordered to carry out by the central agencies" - according to Best's testimony at Nuremberg. And Best himself, an old Gestapo man and former legal adviser to Heydrich, author of a then famous book on the police, who had worked for the military government in Paris to the entire satisfaction of his superiors, could no longer be trusted, although it is doubtful that Berlin ever learned the extent of his unreliability. Still, it was clear from the beginning that things were not going well, and Eichmann's office sent one of its best men to Denmark - Rolf Günther, whom no one had ever accused of not possessing the required "ruthless toughness." Günther made no impression on his colleagues in Copenhagen, and now von Hannecken refused even to issue a decree requiring all Jews to report for work.

Best went to Berlin and obtained a promise that all Jews from Denmark would be sent to Theresienstadt regardless of their category - a very important concession, from the Nazis' point of view. The night of October 1 was set for their seizure and immediate departure - ships were ready in the harbor - and since neither the Danes nor the Jews nor the German troops stationed in Denmark could be relied on to help, police units arrived from Germany for a door-to-door search. At the last moment, Best told them that they were not permitted to break into apartments, because the Danish police might then interfere, and they were not supposed to fight it out with the Danes. Hence they could seize only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors. They found exactly 477 people, out of a total of more than 7,800, at home and willing to let them in. A few days before the date of doom, a German shipping agent, Georg F. Duckwitz, having probably been tipped off by Best himself, had revealed the whole plan to Danish government officials, who, in turn, had hurriedly informed the heads of the Jewish community. They, in marked contrast to Jewish leaders in other countries, had then communicated the news openly in the synagogues on the occasion of the New Year services. The Jews had just time enough to leave their apartments and go into hiding, which was very easy in Denmark, because, in the words of the judgment, "all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens," stood ready to receive them.

They might have remained in hiding until the end of the war if the Danes had not been blessed with Sweden as a neighbor. It seemed reasonable to ship the Jews to Sweden, and this was done with the help of the Danish fishing fleet. The cost of transportation for people without means - about a hundred dollars per person - was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens, and that was perhaps the most astounding feat of all, since this was a time when Jews were paying for their own deportation, when the rich among them were paying fortunes for exit permits (in Holland, Slovakia, and, later, in Hungary) either by bribing the local authorities or by negotiating "legally" with the S.S., who accepted only hard currency and sold exit permits, in Holland, to the tune of five or ten thousand dollars per person. Even in places where Jews met with genuine sympathy and a sincere willingness to help, they had to pay for it, and the chances poor people had of escaping were nil.

It took the better part of October to ferry all the Jews across the five to fifteen miles of water that separates Denmark from Sweden. The Swedes received 5,919 refugees, of whom at least 1,000 were of German origin, 1,310 were half-Jews, and 686 were non-Jews married to Jews. (Almost half the Danish Jews seem to have remained in the country and survived the war in hiding.) The non-Danish Jews were better off than ever before, they all received permission to work. The few hundred Jews whom the German police had been able to arrest were shipped to Theresienstadt. They were old or poor people, who either had not received the news in time or had not been able to comprehend its meaning. In the ghetto, they enjoyed greater privileges than any other group because of the never-ending "fuss" made about them by Danish institutions and private persons. Forty-eight persons died, a figure that was not particularly high, in view of the average age of the group. When everything was over, it was the considered opinion of Eichmann that "for various reasons the action against the Jews in Denmark has been a failure," whereas the curious Dr. Best declared that "the objective of the operation was not to seize a great number of Jews but to clean Denmark of Jews, and this objective has now been achieved."

Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their "toughness" had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage. That the ideal of "toughness," except, perhaps, for a few half-demented brutes, was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they "had always been against it" or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been "abused" by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused "those in power" of having abused his "obedience." "The subject of a good government is lucky, the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.") The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology. Werner Best claimed at Nuremberg that he had played a complicated double role and that it was thanks to him that the Danish officials had been warned of the impending catastrophe; documentary evidence showed, on the contrary, that he himself had proposed the Danish operation in Berlin, but he explained that this was all part of the game. He was extradited to Denmark and there condemned to death, but he appealed the sentence, with surprising results; because of "new evidence," his sentence was commuted to five years in prison, from which he was released soon afterward. He must have been able to prove to the satisfaction of the Danish court that he really had done his best.

ITALY was Germany's only real ally in Europe, treated as an equal and respected as a sovereign independent state. The alliance presumably rested on the very highest kind of common interest, binding together two similar, if not identical, new forms of government, and it is true that Mussolini had once been greatly admired in German Nazi circles. But by the time war broke out and Italy, after some hesitation, joined in the German enterprise, this was a thing of the past. The Nazis knew well enough that they had more in common with Stalin's version of Communism than with Italian Fascism, and Mussolini on his part had neither much confidence in Germany nor much admiration for Hitler. All this, however, belonged among the secrets of the higher-ups, especially in Germany, and the deep, decisive differences between the totalitarian and the Fascist forms of government were never entirely understood by the world at large. Nowhere did they come more conspicuously into the open than in the treatment of the Jewish question.

Prior to the Badoglio coup d'état in the summer of 1943, and the German occupation of Rome and northern Italy, Eichmann and his men were not permitted to be active in the country. They were, however, confronted with the Italian way of not solving anything in the Italian-occupied areas of France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, because the persecuted Jews kept escaping into these zones, where they could be sure of temporary asylum. On levels much higher than Eichmann's, Italy's sabotage of the Final Solution had assumed serious proportions, chiefly because of Mussolini's influence on other Fascist governments in Europe - on Pétain's in France, on Horthy's in Hungary, on Antonescu's in Rumania, and even on Franco's in Spain. If Italy could get away with not murdering her Jews, German satellite countries might try to do the same. Thus, Dome Sztojai, the Hungarian Prime Minister whom the Germans had forced upon Horthy, always wanted to know, when it came to anti-Jewish measures, if the same regulations applied to Italy. Eichmann's chief, Gruppenführer Müller, wrote a long letter on the subject to the Foreign Office pointing all this out, but the gentlemen of the Foreign Office could not do much about it, because they always met the same subtly veiled resistance, the same promises and the same failures to fulfill them. The sabotage was all the more infuriating as it was carried out openly, in an almost mocking manner. The promises were given by Mussolini himself or other high-ranking officials, and if the generals simply failed to fulfill them, Mussolini would make excuses for them on the ground of their "different intellectual formation." Only occasionally would the Nazis be met with a flat refusal, as when General Roatta declared that it was "incompatible with the honor of the Italian Army" to deliver the Jews from Italian-occupied territory in Yugoslavia to the appropriate German authorities.

It could be considerably worse when Italians seemed to be fulfilling their promises. One instance of this took place after the Allied landing in French North Africa, when all of France was occupied by the Germans except the Italian Zone in the south, where about fifty thousand Jews had found safety. Under considerable German pressure, an Italian "Commissariat for Jewish Affairs" was established, whose sole function was to register all Jews in this region and expel them from the Mediterranean coast. Twenty-two thousand Jews were indeed seized and removed to the interior of the Italian Zone, with the result, according to Reitlinger, that "a thousand Jews of the poorest class were living in the best hotels of Isère and Savoie." Eichmann thereupon sent Alois Brunner, one of his toughest men, down to Nice and Marseilles, but by the time he arrived, the French police had destroyed all the lists of the registered Jews. In the fall of 1943, when Italy declared war on Germany, the German army could finally move into Nice, and Eichmann himself hastened to the Côte d'Azur. There he was told - and believed - that between ten and fifteen thousand Jews were living in hiding in Monaco (that tiny principality, with some twenty-five thousand residents altogether, whose territory, the New York Times Magazine noted, "could fit comfortably inside Central Park"), which caused the R.S.H.A. to start a kind of research program. It sounds like a typically Italian joke. The Jews, in any event, were no longer there; they had fled to Italy proper, and those who were still hiding in the surrounding mountains found their way to Switzerland or to Spain. The same thing happened when the Italians had to abandon their zone in Yugoslavia; the Jews left with the Italian Army and found refuge in Fiume.

An element of farce had never been lacking even in Italy's most serious efforts to adjust to its powerful friend and ally. When Mussolini, under German pressure, introduced anti-Jewish legislation in the late thirties he stipulated the usual exemptions - war veterans, Jews with high decorations, and the like - but he added one more category, namely, former members of the Fascist Party, together with their parents and grandparents, their wives and children and grandchildren. I know of no statistics relating to this matter, but the result must have been that the great majority of Italian Jews were exempted. There can hardly have been a Jewish family without at least one member in the Fascist Party, for this happened at a time when Jews, like other Italians, had been flocking for almost twenty years into the Fascist movement, since positions in the Civil Service were open only to members. And the few Jews who had objected to Fascism on principle, Socialists and Communists chiefly, were no longer in the country. Even convinced Italian anti-Semites seemed unable to take the thing seriously, and Roberto Farinacci, head of the Italian anti-Semitic movement, had a Jewish secretary in his employ. To be sure, such things had happened in Germany too; Eichmann mentioned, and there is no reason not to believe him, that there were Jews even among ordinary S.S. men, but the Jewish origin of people like Heydrich, Milch, and others was a highly confidential matter, known only to a handful of people, whereas in Italy these things were done openly and, as it were, innocently. The key to the riddle was, of course, that Italy actually was one of the few countries in Europe where all anti- Jewish measures were decidedly unpopular, since, in the words of Ciano, they "raised a problem which fortunately did not exist."

Assimilation, that much abused word, was a sober fact in Italy, which had a community of not more than fifty thousand native Jews, whose history reached back into the centuries of the Roman Empire. It was not an ideology, something one was supposed to believe in, as in all German-speaking countries, or a myth and an obvious self-deception, as notably in France. Italian Fascism, not to be outdone in "ruthless toughness," had tried to rid the country of foreign and stateless Jews prior to the outbreak of the war. This had never been much of a success, because of the general unwillingness of the minor Italian officials to get "tough," and when things had become a matter of life and death, they refused, under the pretext of maintaining their sovereignty, to abandon this part of their Jewish population; they put them instead into Italian camps, where they were quite safe until the Germans occupied the country. This conduct can hardly be explained by objective conditions alone - the absence of a "Jewish question" - for these foreigners naturally created a problem in Italy, as they did in every European nation-state based upon the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of its population. What in Denmark was the result of an authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements and responsibilities of citizenship and independence - "for the Danes . . . the Jewish question was a political and not a humanitarian question" (Leni Yahil) - was in Italy the outcome of the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people.

Italian humanity, moreover, withstood the test of the terror that descended upon the people during the last year and a half of the war. In December, 1943, the German Foreign Office addressed a formal request for help to Eichmann's boss, Müller: "In view of the lack of zeal shown over the last months by Italian officials in the implementation of anti-Jewish measures recommended by the Duce, we of the Foreign Office deem it urgent and necessary that the implementation . . . be supervised by German officials." Whereupon famous Jew-killers from Poland, such as Odilo Globocnik from the death camps in the Lublin area, were dispatched to Italy; even the head of the military administration was not an Army man but a former governor of Polish Galicia, Gruppenführer Otto Wächter. This put an end to practical jokes. Eichmann's office sent out a circular advising its branches that "Jews of Italian nationality" would at once become subject to "the necessary measures," and the first blow was to fall upon eight thousand Jews in Rome, who were to be arrested by German police regiments, since the Italian police were not reliable. They were warned in time, frequently by old Fascists, and seven thousand escaped. The Germans, yielding, as usual, when they met resistance, now agreed that Italian Jews, even if they did not belong to exempted categories, should not be subject to deportation but should merely be concentrated in Italian camps; this "solution" should be "final" enough for Italy. Approximately thirty-five thousand Jews in northern Italy were caught and put into concentration camps near the Austrian border. In the spring of 1944, when the Red Army had occupied Rumania and the Allies were about to enter Rome, the Germans broke their promise and began shipping Jews from Italy to Auschwitz - about seventy-five hundred people, of whom no more than six hundred returned. Still, this came to considerably less than ten per cent of all Jews then living in Italy.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:53 am

11. Deportations from the Balkans -- Yugoslavia,Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania

To those who followed the case for the prosecution and read the judgment, which reorganized its confused and confusing "general picture," it came as a surprise that the line sharply distinguishing the Nazi-controlled territories to the east and southeast from the system of nation-states in Central and Western Europe was never mentioned. The belt of mixed population that stretches from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic in the south, the whole area most of which today lies behind the Iron Curtain, then consisted of the so-called Successor States, established by the victorious powers after the First World War. A new political order was granted to the numerous ethnic groups that had lived for centuries under the domination of empires - the Russian Empire in the north, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the south, and the Turkish Empire in the southeast. Of the nation-states that resulted, none possessed anything even approaching the ethnic homogeneity of the old European nations that had served as models for their political constitutions. The result was that each of these countries contained large ethnic groups that were violently hostile to the ruling government because their own national aspirations had been frustrated in favor of their only slightly more numerous neighbors. If any proof of the political instability of these recently founded states had been needed, the case of Czechoslovakia amply provided it. When Hitler marched into Prague, in March, 1939, he was enthusiastically welcomed not only by the Sudetendeutschen, the German minority, but also by the Slovaks, whom he "liberated" by offering them an "independent" state. Exactly the same thing happened later in Yugoslavia, where the Serbian majority, the former rulers of the country, was treated as the enemy, and the Croatian minority was given its own national government. Moreover, because the populations in these regions fluctuated, there existed no natural or historical boundaries, and those that had been established by the Treaties of Trianon and St. Germain were quite arbitrary. Hence, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria could be won as Axis partners by generous enlargements of their territories, and the Jews in these newly annexed areas were always denied the status of nationals; they automatically became stateless and therefore suffered the same fate as the refugees in Western Europe - they were invariably the first to be deported and liquidated. What also came crashing down during these years was the elaborate system of minority treaties whereby the Allies had vainly hoped to solve a problem that, within the political framework of the nation-state, is insoluble. The Jews were an officially recognized minority in all Successor States, and this status had not been forced upon them but had been the outcome of claims entered and negotiations conducted by their own delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference. This had marked an important turning point in Jewish history, because it was the first time that Western, or assimilated, Jews had not been recognized as the spokesmen for the whole Jewish people. To the surprise, and also sometimes to the dismay, of the Western-educated Jewish "notables" it had turned out that the large majority of the people desired some sort of social and cultural, though not political, autonomy. Legally, the status of the Eastern European Jews was just like that of any other minority, but politically - and this was to be decisive - they were the only ethnic group in the region without a "homeland," that is, without a territory in which they formed the majority of the population. Still, they did not live in the same kind of dispersion as their brethren in Western and Central Europe, and whereas there, prior to Hitler, it had been a sign of anti-Semitism to call a Jew a Jew, Eastern European Jews were recognized by friend and foe alike as a distinct people. This was of great consequence for the status of those Jews in the East who were assimilated, making it utterly different from that in the West, where assimilation in one form or another had been the rule. The great body of middle-class Jews, so characteristic of Western and Central Europe, did not exist in the East; in its stead we find a thin layer of upper-middle-class families who actually belonged to the ruling classes and the degree of whose assimilation - through money, through baptism, through intermarriage - to Gentile society was infinitely greater than that of most Jews in the West.

Among the first countries in which the executors of the Final Solution were confronted with these conditions was the puppet state of CROATIA, in Yugoslavia, whose capital was Zagreb. The Croat government, headed by Dr. Ante Pavelic, very obligingly introduced anti-Jewish legislation three weeks after its establishment, and when asked what was to be done with the few dozen Croat Jews in Germany, it sent word that they "would appreciate deportation to the East." The Reich Minister of the Interior demanded that the country be judenrein by February, 1942, and Eichmann sent Hauptsturmführer Franz Abromeit to work with the German police attaché in Zagreb. The deportations were carried out by the Croats themselves, notably by members of the strong Fascist movement, the Ustashe, and the Croats paid the Nazis thirty marks for each Jew deported. In exchange, they received all the property of the deportees. This was in accordance with the Germans' official "territorial principle," applicable to all European countries, whereby the state inherited the property of every murdered Jew who had resided within its boundaries, regardless of his nationality. (The Nazis did not by any means always respect the "territorial principle"; there were many ways to get around it if it seemed worth the trouble. German businessmen could buy directly from the Jews before they were deported, and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, initially empowered to confiscate all Hebraica and Judaica for German anti-Semitic research centers, soon enlarged its activities to include valuable furnishings and art works.) The original deadline of February, 1942, could not be met, because Jews were able to escape from Croatia to Italian-occupied territory, but after the Badoglio coup Hermann Krumey, another of Eichmann's men, arrived in Zagreb, and by the fall of 1943 thirty thousand Jews had been deported to the killing centers.

Only then did the Germans realize that the country was still not judenrein. In the initial anti-Jewish legislation, they had noted a curious paragraph that transformed into "honorary Aryans" all Jews who made contributions to "the Croat cause." The number of these Jews had of course greatly increased during the intervening years. The very rich, in other words, who parted voluntarily with their property were exempted. Even more interesting was the fact that the S.S. Intelligence service (under Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl, who was first called as a defense witness in Jerusalem, but whose affidavit was then used by the prosecution) had discovered that nearly all members of the ruling clique in Croatia, from the head of the government to the leader of the Ustashe, were married to Jewish women. The fifteen hundred survivors among the Jews in this area-five per cent, according to a Yugoslav government report - were clearly all members of this highly assimilated, and extraordinarily rich, Jewish group. And since the percentage of assimilated Jews among the masses in the East has often been estimated at about five per cent, it is tempting to conclude that assimilation in the East, when it was at all possible, offered a much better chance for survival than it did in the rest of Europe.

Matters were very different in the adjoining territory of SERBIA, where the German occupation army, almost from its first day there, had to contend with a kind of partisan warfare that can be compared only with what went on in Russia behind the front. I mentioned earlier the single incident that connected Eichmann with the liquidation of Jews in Serbia. The judgment admitted that "the ordinary lines of command in dealing with the Jews of Serbia did not become quite clear to us," and the explanation is that Eichmann's office was not involved at all in that area because no Jews were deported. The "problem" was all taken care of on the spot. On the pretext of executing hostages taken in partisan warfare, the Army killed the male Jewish population by shooting; women and children were handed over to the commander of the Security Police, a certain Dr. Emanuel Schäfer, a special protégé of Heydrich, who killed them in gas vans. In August, 1942, Staatsrat Harald Turner, head of the civilian branch of the military government, reported proudly that Serbia was "the only country in which the problems of both Jews and Gypsies were solved," and returned the gas vans to Berlin. An estimated five thousand Jews joined the partisans, and this was the only avenue of escape.

Schäfer had to stand trial in a German criminal court after the war. For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. The military governor of the region, General Franz Böhme, committed suicide, but Staatsrat Turner was handed over to the Yugoslav government and condemned to death. It is the same story repeated over and over again: those who escaped the Nuremberg Trials and were not extradited to the countries where they had committed their crimes either were never brought to justice, or found in the German courts the greatest possible "understanding." One is unhappily reminded of the Weimar Republic, whose specialty it was to condone political murder if the killer belonged to one of the violently anti-republican groups of the Right.

BULGARIA had more cause than any other of the Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany, because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. And yet Bulgaria was not grateful, neither her government nor her people were soft enough to make a policy of "ruthless toughness" workable. This showed not only on the Jewish question. The Bulgarian monarchy had no reason to be worried about the native Fascist movement, the Ratnizi, because it was numerically small and politically without influence, and the Parliament remained a highly respected body, which worked smoothly with the King. Hence, they dared refuse to declare war on Russia and never even sent a token expeditionary force of `volunteers" to the Eastern front. But most surprising of all, in the belt of mixed populations where anti-Semitism was rampant among all ethnic groups and had become official governmental policy long before Hitler's arrival, the Bulgarians had no "understanding of the Jewish problem" whatever. It is true that the Bulgarian Army had agreed to have all the Jews - they numbered about fifteen thousand - deported from the newly annexed territories, which were under military government and whose population was anti-Semitic; but it is doubtful that they knew what "resettlement in the East" actually signified. Somewhat earlier, in January, 1941, the government had also agreed to introduce some anti-Jewish legislation, but that, from the Nazi viewpoint, was simply ridiculous: some six thousand able-bodied men were mobilized for work; all baptized Jews, regardless of the date of their conversion, were exempted, with the result that an epidemic of conversions broke out; five thousand more Jews - out of a total of approximately fifty thousand - received special privileges; and for Jewish physicians and businessmen a numerus clausus was introduced that was rather high, since it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, rather than in the country at large. When these measures had been put into effect, Bulgarian government officials declared publicly that things were now stabilized to everybody's satisfaction. Clearly, the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them about the requirements for a "solution of the Jewish problem," but also to teach them that legal stability and a totalitarian movement could not be reconciled.

The German authorities must have had some suspicion of the difficulties that lay ahead. In January, 1942, Eichmann wrote a letter to the Foreign Office in which he declared that "sufficient possibilities exist for the reception of Jews from Bulgaria"; he proposed that the Bulgarian government be approached, and assured the Foreign Office that the police attaché in Sofia would "take care of the technical implementation of the deportation." (This police attaché seems not to have been very enthusiastic about his work either, for shortly thereafter Eichmann sent one of his own men, Theodor Dannecker, from Paris to Sofia as "adviser.") It is quite interesting to note that this letter ran directly contrary to the notification Eichmann had sent to Serbia only a few months earlier, stating that no facilities for the reception of Jews were yet available and that even Jews from the Reich could not be deported. The high priority given to the task of making Bulgaria judenrein can be explained only by Berlin's having received accurate information that great speed was necessary then in order to achieve anything at all. Well, the Bulgarians were approached by the German embassy, but not until about six months later did they take the first step in the direction of "radical" measures - the introduction of the Jewish badge. For the Nazis, even this turned out to be a great disappointment. In the first place, as they dutifully reported, the badge was only a "very little star"; second, most Jews simply did not wear it; and, third, those who did wear it received "so many manifestations of sympathy from the misled population that they actually are proud of their sign" - as Walter Schellenberg, Chief of Counterintelligence in the R.S.H.A., wrote in an S.D. report transmitted to the Foreign Office in November, 1942. Whereupon the Bulgarian government revoked the decree. Under great German pressure, the Bulgarian government finally decided to expel all Jews from Sofia to rural areas, but this measure was definitely not what the Germans demanded, since it dispersed the Jews instead of concentrating them.

This expulsion actually marked an important turning point in the whole situation, because the population of Sofia tried to stop Jews from going to the railroad station and subsequently demonstrated before the King's palace. The Germans were under the illusion that King Boris was primarily responsible for keeping Bulgaria's Jews safe, and it is reasonably certain that German Intelligence agents murdered him. But neither the death of the monarch nor the arrival of Dannecker, early in 1943, changed the situation in the slightest, because both Parliament and the population remained clearly on the side of the Jews. Dannecker succeeded in arriving at an agreement with the Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to deport six thousand "leading Jews" to Treblinka, but none of these Jews ever left the country. The agreement itself is noteworthy because it shows that the Nazis had no hope of enlisting the Jewish leadership for their own purposes. The Chief Rabbi of Sofia was unavailable, having been hidden by Metropolitan Stephan of Sofia, who had declared publicly that "God had determined the Jewish fate, and men had no right to torture Jews, and to persecute them" (Hilberg) - which was considerably more than the Vatican had ever done. Finally, the same thing happened in Bulgaria as was to happen in Denmark a few months later - the local German officials became unsure of themselves and were no longer reliable. This was true of both the police attaché, a member of the S.S., who was supposed to round up and arrest the Jews, and the German Ambassador in Sofia, Adolf Beckerle, who in June, 1943, had advised the Foreign Office that the situation was hopeless, because "the Bulgarians had lived for too long with peoples like Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies to appreciate the Jewish problem" - which, of course, was sheer nonsense, since the same could be said mutatis mutandis for all countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It was Beckerle too who informed the R.S.H.A., in a clearly irritated tone, that nothing more could be done. And the result was that not a single Bulgarian Jew had been deported or had died an unnatural death when, in August, 1944, with the approach of the Red Army, the anti-Jewish laws were revoked I know of no attempt to explain the conduct of the Bulgarian people, which is unique in the belt of mixed populations. But one is reminded of Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist who happened to be in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and whom they chose to accuse of the Reichstagsbrand, the mysterious fire in the Berlin Parliament of February 27, 1933. He was tried by the German Supreme Court and confronted with Göring, whom he questioned as though he were in charge of the proceedings; and it was thanks to him that all those accused, except van der Lubbe, had to be acquitted. His conduct was such that it won him the admiration of the whole world, Germany not excluded. "There is one man left in Germany," people used to say, "and he is a Bulgarian."

GREECE, being occupied in the north by the Germans and in the south by the Italians, offered no special problems and could therefore be left waiting her turn to become judenrein. In February, 1943, two of Eichmann's specialists, Hauptsturmführers Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, arrived to prepare everything for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika, where two-thirds of Greek Jewry, approximately fifty-five thousand people, were concentrated. This was according to plan "within the framework of the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe," as their letter of appointment from IV-B-4 had it. Working closely with a certain Kriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Max Merten, who represented the military government of the region, they immediately set up the usual Jewish Council, with Chief Rabbi Koretz at its head. Wisliceny, who headed the Sonderkommando für Judenangelegenheiten in Salonika, introduced the yellow badge, and promptly made it known that no exemptions would be tolerated. Dr. Merten moved the whole Jewish population into a ghetto, from which they could easily be removed, since it was near the railroad station. The only privileged categories were Jews with foreign passports and, as usual, the personnel of the Judenrat - not more than a few hundred persons all told, who were eventually shipped to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen. There was no avenue of escape except flight to the south, where the Italians, as elsewhere, refused to hand Jews over to the Germans, and the safety in the Italian Zone was short-lived. The Greek population was indifferent at best, and even some of the partisan groups looked upon the operations "with approval." Within two months, the whole community had been deported, trains for Auschwitz leaving almost daily, carrying from two thousand to twenty-five hundred Jews each, in freight cars. In the fall of the same year, when the Italian Army had collapsed, evacuation of some thirteen thousand Jews from the southern part of Greece, including Athens and the Greek islands, was swiftly completed. In Auschwitz, many Greek Jews were employed in the so-called death commandos, which operated the gas chambers and the crematoria, and they were still alive in 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were exterminated and the Lódz ghetto was liquidated. At the end of that summer, when rumor had it that the gassing would soon be terminated and the installations dismantled, one of the very few revolts in any of the camps broke out; the death commandos were certain that now they, too, would be killed. The revolt was a complete disaster - only one survivor remained to tell the story.

It would seem that the indifference of the Greeks to the fate of their Jews has somehow survived their liberation. Dr. Merten, a witness for the defense in Eichmann's trial, today, somewhat inconsistently, claims both to have known nothing and to have saved the Jews from the fate of which he was ignorant. He quietly returned to Greece after the war as a representative of a travel agency; he was arrested, but was soon released and allowed to return to Germany. His case is perhaps unique, since trials for war crimes in countries other than Germany have always resulted in severe punishment. And his testimony for the defense, which he gave in Berlin in the presence of representatives of both the defense and the prosecution, was certainly unique. He claimed that Eichmann had been very helpful in an attempt to save some twenty thousand women and children in Salonika, and that all the evil had come from Wisliceny. However, he eventually stated that before testifying he had been approached by Eichmann's brother, a lawyer in Linz, and by a German organization of former members of the S.S. Eichmann himself denied everything - he had never been in Salonika, and he had never seen the helpful Dr. Merten.

Eichmann claimed more than once that his organizational gifts, the coordination of evacuations and deportations achieved by his office, had in fact helped his victims; it had made their fate easier. If this thing had to be done at all, he argued, it was better that it be done in good order. During the trial no one, not even counsel for the defense, paid any attention to this claim, which was obviously in the same category as his foolish and stubborn contention that he had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews through "forced emigration." And yet, in the light of what took place in RUMANIA, one begins to wonder. Here, too, everything was topsy-turvy, but not as in Denmark, where even the men of the Gestapo began sabotaging orders from Berlin; in Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rumania was the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe. Even in the nineteenth century, Rumanian anti-Semitism was a well-established fact; in 1878, the great powers had tried to intervene, through the Treaty of Berlin, and to get the Rumanian government to recognize its Jewish inhabitants as Rumanian nationals - though they would have remained second-class citizens. They did not succeed, and at the end of the First World War all Rumanian Jews - with the exception of a few hundred Sephardic families and some Jews of German origin - were still resident aliens. It took the whole might of the Allies, during the peace-treaty negotiations, to "persuade" the Rumanian government to accept a minority treaty and to grant the Jewish minority citizenship. This concession to world opinion was withdrawn in 1937 and 1938, when, trusting in the power of Hitler Germany, the Rumanians felt they could risk denouncing the minority treaties as an imposition upon their "sovereignty," and could deprive several hundred thousand Jews, roughly a quarter of the total Jewish population, of their citizenship. Two years later, in August, 1940, some months prior to Rumania's entry into the war on the side of Hitler Germany, Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the new Iron Guard dictatorship, declared all Rumanian Jews to be stateless, with the exception of the few hundred families who had been Rumanian citizens before the peace treaties. That same month, he also instituted anti- Jewish legislation that was the severest in Europe, Germany not excluded. The privileged categories, war veterans and Jews who had been Rumanians prior to 1918, comprised no more than ten thousand people, hardly more than one per cent of the whole group. Hitler himself was aware that Germany was in danger of being outdone by Rumania, and he complained to Goebbels in August, 1941, a few weeks after he had given the order for the Final Solution, that "a man like Antonescu proceeds in these matters in a far more radical fashion than we have done up to the present."

Rumania entered the war in February, 1941, and the Rumanian Legion became a military force to be reckoned with in the coming invasion of Russia. In Odessa alone, Rumanian soldiers were responsible for the massacre of sixty thousand people. In contrast to the governments of other Balkan countries, the Rumanian government had very exact information from the very beginning about the massacres of Jews in the East, and Rumanian soldiers, even after the Iron Guard had been ousted from the government, in the summer of 1941, embarked upon a program of massacres and deportations that even "dwarfed the Bucharest outburst of the Iron Guard" in January of the same year - a program that for sheer horror is unparalleled in the whole atrocity-stricken record (Hilberg). Deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite follow-up to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops. Also, the horrors of Rumanian concentration camps, which were established and run by the Rumanians themselves because deportation to the East was not feasible, were more elaborate and more atrocious than anything we know of in Germany. When Eichmann sent the customary adviser on Jewish affairs, Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, to Bucharest, Richter reported that Antonescu now wished to ship a hundred and ten thousand Jews into "two forests across the river Bug," that is, into German-held Russian territory, for liquidation. The Germans were horrified, and everybody intervened: the Army commanders, Rosenberg's Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office in Berlin, the Minister to Bucharest, Freiherr Manfred von Killinger - the last, a former high S.A. officer, a personal friend of Röhm's and therefore suspect in the eyes of the S.S., was probably spied upon by Richter, who "advised" him on Jewish affairs. On this matter, however, they were all in agreement. Eichmann himself implored the Foreign Office, in a letter dated April, 1942, to stop these unorganized and premature Rumanian efforts "to get rid of the Jews" at this stage; the Rumanians must be made to understand that "the evacuation of German Jews, which is already in full swing," had priority, and he concluded by threatening to "bring the Security Police into action."

However reluctant the Germans were to give Rumania a higher priority in the Final Solution that had originally been planned for any Balkan country, they had to come around if they did not want the situation to deteriorate into bloody chaos, and, much as Eichmann may have enjoyed his threat to use the Security Police, the saving of Jews was not exactly what they had been trained for. Hence, in the middle of August - by which time the Rumanians had killed close to three hundred thousand of their Jews mostly without any German help - the Foreign Office concluded an agreement with Antonescu "for the evacuation of Jews from Rumania, to be carried out by German units," and Eichmann began negotiations with the German railroads for enough cars to transport two hundred thousand Jews to the Lublin death camps. But now, when everything was ready and these great concessions had been granted, the Rumanians suddenly did an about-face. Like a bolt from the blue, a letter arrived in Berlin from the trusted Mr. Richter-Marshal Antonescu had changed his mind; as Ambassador Killinger reported, the Marshal now wanted to get rid of Jews "in a comfortable manner." What the Germans had not taken into account was that this was not only a country with an inordinately high percentage of plain murderers, but that Rumania was also the most corrupt country in the Balkans. Side by side with the massacres, there had sprung up a flourishing business in exemption sales, in which every branch of the bureaucracy, national or municipal, had happily engaged. The government's own specialty was huge taxes, which were levied haphazardly upon certain groups or whole communities of Jews. Now it had discovered that one could sell Jews abroad for hard currency, so the Rumanians became the most fervent adherents of Jewish emigration - at thirteen hundred dollars a head. This is how Rumania came to be one of the few outlets for Jewish emigration to Palestine during the war. And as the Red Army drew nearer, Antonescu became even more "moderate," he now was willing to let Jews go without any compensation.

It is a curious fact that Antonescu, from beginning to end, was not more "radical" than the Nazis (as Hitler thought), but simply always a step ahead of German developments. He had been the first to deprive all Jews of nationality, and he had started large-scale massacres openly and unashamedly at a time when the Nazis were still busy trying out their first experiments. He had hit upon the sales idea more than a year before Himmler offered "blood for trucks," and he ended, as Himmler finally did, by calling the whole thing off as though it had been a joke. In August, 1944, Rumania surrendered to the Red Army, and Eichmann, specialist in evacuation, was sent pellmell to the area in order to save some "ethnic Germans," without success. About half of Rumania's eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews survived, a great number of whom - several hundred thousand - found their way to Israel. Nobody knows how many Jews are left in the country today. The Rumanian murderers were all duly executed, and Killinger committed suicide before the Russians could lay their hands on him; only Hauptsturmführer a.D. Richter, who, it is true, had never had a chance to get into the act, lived peacefully in Germany until 1961, when he became a belated victim of the Eichmann trial.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:53 am

12. Deportations from Central Europe -- Hungary and Slovakia

HUNGARY, mentioned earlier in connection with the troublesome question of Eichmann's conscience, was constitutionally a kingdom without a king. The country, though without access to the sea and possessing neither navy nor merchant fleet, was ruled - or, rather, held in trust for the nonexistent king - by an admiral, Regent or Reichsverweser Nikolaus von Horthy. The only visible sign of royalty was an abundance of Hofräte, councilors to the nonexistent court. Once upon a time, the Holy Roman Emperor had been King of Hungary, and more recently, after 1806, the kaiserlichkönigliche Monarchie on the Danube had been precariously held together by the Hapsburgs, who were emperors (Kaiser) of Austria and kings of Hungary. In 1918, the Hapsburg Empire had been dissolved into Successor States, and Austria was now a republic, hoping for Anschluss, for union with Germany. Otto von Hapsburg was in exile, and he would never have been accepted as King of Hungary by the fiercely nationalistic Magyars; an authentically Hungarian royalty, on the other hand, did not even exist as a historical memory. So what Hungary was, in terms of recognized forms of government, only Admiral Horthy knew.

Behind the delusions of royal grandeur was an inherited feudal structure, with greater misery among the landless peasants and greater luxury among the few aristocratic families who literally owned the country than anywhere else in these poverty-stricken territories, the homeland of Europe's stepchildren. It was this background of unsolved social questions and general backwardness that gave Budapest society its specific flavor, as though Hungarians were a group of illusionists who had fed so long on self-deception that they had lost any sense of incongruity. Early in the thirties, under the influence of Italian Fascism, they had produced a strong Fascist movement, the so-called Arrow Cross men, and in 1938 they followed Italy by passing their first anti-Jewish legislation; despite the strong influence of the Catholic Church in the country, the rulings applied to baptized Jews who had been converted after 1919, and even those converted before that date were included three years later. And yet, when an all-inclusive anti-Semitism, based on race, had become official government policy, eleven Jews continued to sit in the upper chamber of the Parliament, and Hungary was the only Axis country to send Jewish troops - a hundred and thirty thousand of them, in auxiliary service, but in Hungarian uniform - to the Eastern front. The explanation of these inconsistencies is that the Hungarians, their official policy notwithstanding, were even more emphatic than other countries in distinguishing between native Jews and Ostjuden, between the "Magyarized" Jews of "Trianon Hungary" (established, like the other Successor States, by the Treaty of Trianon) and those of recently annexed territories. Hungary's sovereignty was respected by the Nazi government until March, 1944, with the result that for Jews the country became an island of safety in "an ocean of destruction." While it is understandable enough that - with the Red Army approaching through the Carpathian Mountains and the Hungarian government desperately trying to follow the example of Italy and conclude a separate armistice - the German government should have decided to occupy the country, it is almost incredible that at this stage of the game it should still have been "the order of the day to come to grips with the Jewish problem," the "liquidation" of which was "a prerequisite for involving Hungary in the war," as Veesenmayer put it in a report to the Foreign Office in December, 1943. For the "liquidation" of this "problem" involved the evacuation of eight hundred thousand Jews, plus an estimated hundred or hundred and fifty thousand converted Jews.

Be that as it may, as I have said earlier, because of the greatness and the urgency of the task Eichmann arrived in Budapest in March, 1944, with his whole staff, which he could easily assemble, since the job had been finished everywhere else. He called Wisliceny and Brunner from Slovakia and Greece, Abromeit from Yugoslavia, Dannecker from Paris and Bulgaria, Siegfried Seidl from his post as Commander of Theresienstadt, and, from Vienna, Hermann Krumey, who became his deputy in Hungary. From Berlin, he brought all the more important members of his office staff: Rolf Günther, who had been his chief deputy; Franz Novak, his deportation officer; and Otto Hunsche, his legal expert. Thus, the Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann (Eichmann Special Operation Unit) consisted of about ten men, plus some clerical assistants, when it set up its headquarters in Budapest. On the very evening of their arrival, Eichmann and his men invited the Jewish leaders to a conference, to persuade them to form a Jewish Council, through which they could issue their orders and to which they would give, in return, absolute jurisdiction over all Jews in Hungary. This was no easy trick at this moment and in that place. It was a time when, in the words of the Papal Nuncio, "the whole world knew what deportation meant in practice"; in Budapest, moreover, the Jews had "had a unique opportunity to follow the fate of European Jewry. We knew very well about the work of the Einsatzgruppen. We knew more than was necessary about Auschwitz," as Dr. Kastner was to testify at Nuremberg. Clearly, more than Eichmann's allegedly "hypnotic powers" was needed to convince anyone that the Nazis would recognize the sacred distinction between "Magyarized" and Eastern Jews; self-deception had to have been developed to a high art to allow Hungarian Jewish leaders to believe at this moment that "it can't happen here" - "How can they send the Jews of Hungary outside Hungary?" - and to keep believing it even when the realities contradicted this belief every day of the week. How this was achieved came to light in one of the most remarkable non sequiturs uttered on the witness stand: the future members of the Central Jewish Committee (as the Jewish Council was called in Hungary) had heard from neighboring Slovakia that Wisliceny, who was now negotiating with them, accepted money readily, and they also knew that despite all bribes he "had deported all the Jews in Slovakia...." From which Mr. Freudiger concluded: "I understood that it was necessary to find ways and means to establish relationships with Wisliceny."

Eichmann's cleverest trick in these difficult negotiations was to see to it that he and his men acted as though they were corrupt. The president of the Jewish community, Hofrat Samuel Stern, a member of Horthy's Privy Council, was treated with exquisite courtesy and agreed to be head of the Jewish Council. He and the other members of the Council felt reassured when they were asked to supply typewriters and mirrors, women's lingerie and eau de cologne, original Watteaus and eight pianos - even though seven of these were gracefully returned by Hauptsturmführer Novak, who remarked, "But, gentlemen, I don't want to open a piano store. I only want to play the piano." Eichmann himself visited the Jewish Library and the Jewish Museum, and assured everybody that all measures would be temporary. And corruption, first simulated as a trick, soon turned out to be real enough, though it did not take the form the Jews had hoped. Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatever. In the words of the strange Mr. Kastner, "A Jew who trembles for his life and that of his family loses all sense of money." (Sic!) This was confirmed during the trial through testimony given by Philip von Freudiger, mentioned above, as well as through the testimony of Joel Brand, who had represented a rival Jewish body in Hungary, the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee. Krumey received no less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Freudiger in April, 1944, and the Rescue Committee paid twenty thousand dollars merely for the privilege of meeting with Wisliceny and some men of the S.S. Counterintelligence service. At this meeting, each of those present received an additional tip of a thousand dollars, and Wisliceny brought up again the so-called Europe Plan, which he had proposed in vain in 1942 and according to which Himmler supposedly would be prepared to spare all Jews except those in Poland for a ransom of two or three million dollars. On the strength of this proposal, which had been shelved long before, the Jews now started paying installments to Wisliceny. Even Eichmann's "idealism" broke down in this land of unheard-of abundance. The prosecution, though it could not prove that Eichmann had profited financially while on the job, stressed rightly his high standard of living in Budapest, where he could afford to stay at one of the best hotels, was driven around by a chauffeur in an amphibious car, an unforgettable gift from his later enemy Kurt Becher, went hunting and horseback riding, and enjoyed all sorts of previously unknown luxuries under the tutelage of his new friends in the Hungarian government.

There existed, however, a sizable group of Jews in the country whose leaders, at least, indulged less in self-deception. The Zionist movement had always been particularly strong in Hungary, and it now had its own representation in the recently formed Relief and Rescue Committee (the Vaadat Ezra va Hazalah), which, maintaining close contact with the Palestine Office, had helped refugees from Poland and Slovakia, from Yugoslavia and Rumania; the committee was in constant communication with the American Joint Distribution Committee, which financed their work, and they had also been able to get a few Jews into Palestine, legally or illegally. Now that catastrophe had come to their own country, they turned to forging "Christian papers," certificates of baptism, whose bearers found it easier to go underground. Whatever else they might have been, the Zionist leaders knew they were outlaws, and they acted accordingly. Joel Brand, the unlucky emissary who was to present to the Allies, in the midst of the war, Himmler's proposal to give them a million Jewish lives in exchange for ten thousand trucks, was one of the leading officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and he came to Jerusalem to testify about his dealings with Eichmann, as did his former rival in Hungary, Philip von Freudiger. While Freudiger, whom Eichmann, incidentally, did not remember at all, recalled the rudeness with which he had been treated at these interviews, Brand's testimony actually substantiated much of Eichmann's own account of how he had negotiated with the Zionists. Brand had been told that "an idealistic German" was now talking to him, "an idealistic Jew" - two honorable enemies meeting as equals during a lull in the battle. Eichmann had said to him: "Tomorrow perhaps we shall again be on the battlefield." It was, of course, a horrible comedy, but it did go to show that Eichmann's weakness for uplifting phrases with no real meaning was not a pose fabricated expressly for the Jerusalem trial. What is more interesting, one cannot fail to note that in meeting with the Zionists neither Eichmann nor any other member of the Sondereinsatzkommando employed the tactics of sheer lying that they had used for the benefit of the gentlemen of the Jewish Council. Even "language rules" were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a spade. Moreover, when it was a question of serious negotiations - over the amount of money that might buy an exit permit, over the Europe Plan, over the exchange of lives for trucks - not only Eichmann but everybody concerned: Wisliceny, Becher, the gentlemen of the Counterintelligence service whom Joel Brand used to meet every morning in a coffee house, turned to the Zionists as a matter of course. The reason for this was that the Relief and Rescue Committee possessed the required international connections and could more easily produce foreign currency, whereas the members of the Jewish Council had nothing behind them but the more than dubious protection of Regent Horthy. It also became clear that the Zionist functionaries in Hungary had received greater privileges than the usual temporary immunity to arrest and deportation granted the members of the Jewish Council. The Zionists were free to come and go practically as they pleased, they were exempt from wearing the yellow star, they received permits to visit concentration camps in Hungary, and, somewhat later, Dr. Kastner, the original founder of the Relief and Rescue Committee, could even travel about Nazi Germany without any identification papers showing he was a Jew. The organization of a Jewish Council was for Eichmann, with all his experience in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, a routine matter that took no more than two weeks. The question now was whether he himself would be able to enlist the help of Hungarian officials for an operation of this magnitude. For him this was something new. In the ordinary course of events, it would have been handled for him by the Foreign Office and its representatives, in this instance, by the newly appointed Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, to whom Eichmann would have sent a "Jewish adviser." Eichmann himself clearly had no inclination for playing the role of adviser, a post that had nowhere carried a rank higher than Hauptsturmführer, or captain, whereas he was an Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, two ranks higher. His greatest triumph in Hungary was that he could establish his own contacts. Three men were primarily concerned - Lászlo Endre, who because of an anti-Semitism that even Horthy had called "insane" had recently been appointed State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior; Lászlo Baky, also an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, who was in charge of the Gerularmerie, the Hungarian police; and the police officer Lieutenant Colonel Ferenczy, who was directly in charge of deportations. With their help, Eichmann could be sure that everything, the issuance of the necessary decrees and the concentration of the Jews in the provinces, would proceed with "lightning speed." In Vienna, a special conference was held with the German State Railroad officials, since this matter involved the transportation of nearly half a million people. Höss, at Auschwitz, was informed of the plans through his own superior, General Richard Glücks of the W.V.H.A., and ordered a new branch line of the railway built, to bring the cars within a few yards of the crematoria; the number of death commandos manning the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, so that everything was ready for killing between six thousand and twelve thousand people a day. When the trains began arriving, in May, 1944, very few "able-bodied men" were selected for labor, and these few worked in Krupp's fuse factory at Auschwitz. (Krupp's newly built factory near Breslau, in Germany, the Berthawerk, collected Jewish manpower wherever it could find it and kept those men in conditions that were unsurpassed even among the labor gangs in the death camps.)

The whole operation in Hungary lasted less than two months and came to a sudden stop at the beginning of July. Thanks chiefly to the Zionists, it had been better publicized than any other phase of the Jewish catastrophe, and Horthy had been deluged with protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. The Papal Nuncio, though, deemed it appropriate to explain that the Vatican's protest did not spring "from a false sense of compassion" - a phrase that is likely to be a lasting monument to what the continued dealings with, and the desire to compromise with, the men who preached the gospel of "ruthless toughness" had done to the mentality of the highest dignitaries of the Church. Sweden once more led the way with regard to practical measures, by distributing entry permits, and Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal followed her example, so that finally about thirty-three thousand Jews were living in special houses in Budapest under the protection of neutral countries. The Allies had received and made public a list of seventy men whom they knew to be the chief culprits, and Roosevelt had sent an ultimatum threatening that "Hungary's fate will not be like any other civilized nation. . . unless the deportations are stopped." The point was driven home by an unusually heavy air raid on Budapest on July 2. Thus pressed from all sides, Horthy gave the order to stop the deportations, and one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Eichmann was the rather obvious fact that he had not obeyed "the old fool's" order but, in mid-July, deported another fifteen hundred Jews who were at hand in a concentration camp near Budapest. To prevent the Jewish officials from informing Horthy, he assembled the members of the two representative bodies in his office, where Dr. Hunsche detained them, on various pretexts, until he learned that the train had left Hungarian territory. Eichmann remembered nothing of this episode, in Jerusalem, and although the judges were "convinced that the accused remembers his victory over Horthy very well," this is doubtful, since to Eichmann Horthy was not such a great personage.

This seems to have been the last train that left Hungary for Auschwitz. In August, 1944, the Red Army was in Rumania, and Eichmann was sent there on his wild-goose chase. When he came back, the Horthy regime had gathered sufficient courage to demand the withdrawal of the Eichmann commando, and Eichmann himself asked Berlin to let him and his men return, since they "had become superfluous." But Berlin did nothing of the sort, and was proved right, for in mid-October the situation once more changed abruptly. With the Russians no more than a hundred miles from Budapest, the Nazis succeeded in overthrowing the Horthy government and in appointing the leader of the Arrow Cross men, Ferenc Szalasi, head of state. No more transports could be sent to Auschwitz, since the extermination facilities were about to be dismantled, while at the same time the German shortage of labor had grown even more desperate. Now it was Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, who negotiates with the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior for permission to ship fifty thousand Jews - men between sixteen and sixty, and women under forty - to the Reich; he added in his report that Eichmann hoped to send fifty thousand more. Since railroad facilities no longer existed, this led to the foot marches of November, 1944, which were stopped only by an order from Himmler. The Jews who were sent on the marches had been arrested at random by the Hungarian police, regardless of exemptions, to which by now many were entitled, regardless also of the age limits specified in the original directives. The marchers were escorted by Arrow Cross men, who robbed them and treated them with the utmost brutality. And that was the end. Of an original Jewish population of eight hundred thousand, some hundred and sixty thousand must still have remained in the Budapest ghetto - the countryside was judenrein - and of these tens of thousands became victims of spontaneous pogroms. On February 13, 1945, the country surrendered to the Red Army. The chief Hungarian culprits in the massacre were all put on trial, condemned to death, and executed. None of the German initiators, except Eichmann, paid with more than a few years in prison.

SLOVAKIA, like Croatia, was an invention of the German Foreign Office. The Slovaks had come to Berlin to negotiate their "independence" even before the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, in March, 1939, and at that time they had promised Göring that they would follow Germany faithfully in their handling of the Jewish question. But this had been in the winter of 1938-39, when no one had yet heard of such a thing as the Final Solution. The tiny country, with a poor peasant population of about two and a half million and with ninety thousand Jews, was primitive, backward, and deeply Catholic. It was ruled at the time by a Catholic priest, Father Josef Tiso. Even its Fascist movement, the Hlinka Guard, was Catholic in outlook, and the vehement anti- Semitism of these clerical Fascists or Fascist clerics differed in both style and content from the ultramodern racism of their German masters. There was only one modern anti-Semite in the Slovak government, and that was Eichmann's good friend Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior. All the others were Christians, or thought they were, whereas the Nazis were in principle, of course, as anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish. The Slovaks' being Christians meant not only that they felt obliged to emphasize what the Nazis considered an "obsolete" distinction between baptized and nonbaptized Jews, but also that they thought of the whole issue in medieval terms. For them a "solution" consisted in expelling the Jews and inheriting their property but not in systematic "exterminating," although they did not mind occasional killing. The greatest "sin" of the Jews was not that they belonged to an alien "race" but that they were rich. The Jews in Slovakia were not very rich by Western standards, but when fifty-two thousand of them had to declare their possessions because they owned more than two hundred dollars' worth, and it turned out that their total property amounted to a hundred million dollars, every single one of them must have looked to the Slovaks like an incarnation of Croesus.

During their first year and a half of "independence," the Slovaks were busy trying to solve the Jewish question according to their own lights. They transferred the larger Jewish enterprises to non-Jews, enacted some anti-Jewish legislation, which, according to the Germans, had the "basic defect" of exempting baptized Jews who had been converted prior to 1918, planned to set up ghettos "following the example of the General Government," and mobilized Jews for forced labor. Very early, in September, 1940, they had been given a Jewish adviser; Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, once Eichmann's greatly admired superior and friend in the Security Service (his eldest son was named Dieter) and now his equal in rank, was attached to the German legation in Bratislava. Wisliceny did not marry and, therefore, could not be promoted further, so a year later he was outranked by Eichmann and became his subordinate. Eichmann thought that this must have rankled with him, and that it helped explain why he had given such damning evidence against him as witness in the Nuremberg Trials, and had even offered to find out his hiding place. But this is doubtful. Wisliceny probably was interested only in saving his own skin, he was utterly unlike Eichmann. He belonged to the educated stratum of the S.S., lived among books and records, had himself addressed as "Baron" by the Jews in Hungary, and, generally, was much more concerned with money than worried about his career; consequently, he was one of the very first in the S.S. to develop "moderate" tendencies.

Nothing much happened in Slovakia during these early years, until March, 1942, when Eichmann appeared in Bratislava to negotiate the evacuation of twenty thousand "young and strong labor Jews." Four weeks later, Heydrich himself came to see the Prime Minister, Vojtek Tuka, and persuaded him to let all Jews be resettled in the East, including the converted Jews who had thus far been exempted. The government, with a priest at its head, did not at all mind correcting the "basic defect" of distinguishing between Christians and Jews on the grounds of religion when it learned that "no claim was put forward by the Germans in regard to the property of these Jews except the payment of five hundred Reichsmarks in exchange for each Jew received"; on the contrary, the government demanded an additional guaranty from the German Foreign Office that "Jews removed from Slovakia and received by [the Germans] would stay in the Eastern areas forever, and would not be given an opportunity of returning to Slovakia." To follow up these negotiations on the highest level, Eichmann paid a second visit to Bratislava, the one that coincided with Heydrich's assassination, and by June, 1942, fifty-two thousand Jews had been deported by the Slovak police to the killing centers in Poland.

There were still some thirty-five thousand Jews left in the country, and they all belonged to the originally exempted categories - converted Jews and their parents, members of certain professions, young men in forced labor battalions, a few businessmen. It was at this moment, when most of the Jews had already been "resettled," that the Bratislava Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, a sister body of the Hungarian Zionist group, succeeded in bribing Wisliceny, who promised to help to slow down the pace of the deportations, and who also proposed the socalled Europe Plan, which he was to bring up again later in Budapest. It is very unlikely that Wisliceny ever did anything except read books and listen to music, and, of course, accept whatever he could get. But it was just at this moment that the Vatican informed the Catholic clergy of the true meaning of the word "resettlement." From then on, as the German Ambassador, Hans Elard Ludin, reported to the Foreign Office in Berlin, the deportations became very unpopular, and the Slovak government began pressing the Germans for permission to visit the "resettlement" centers - which, of course, neither Wisliceny nor Eichmann could grant, since the "resettled" Jews were no longer among the living. In December, 1943, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer came to Bratislava to see Father Tiso himself; he had been sent by Hitler and his orders specified that he should tell Tiso "to come down to earth" (Fraktur mit ihm reden). Tiso promised to put between sixteen and eighteen thousand unconverted Jews in concentration camps and to establish a special camp for about ten thousand baptized Jews, but he did not agree to deportations. In June, 1944, Veesenmayer, now Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, appeared again, and demanded that the remaining Jews in the country be included in the Hungarian operations. Tiso refused again.

In August, 1944, as the Red Army drew near, a full-fledged revolt broke out in Slovakia, and the Germans occupied the country. By this time, Wisliceny was in Hungary, and he probably was no longer trusted anyway. The R.S.H.A. sent Alois Brunner to Bratislava to arrest and deport the remaining Jews. Brunner first arrested and deported the officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and then, this time with the help of German S.S. units, deported another twelve or fourteen thousand people. On April 4, 1945, when the Russians arrived in Bratislava, there were perhaps twenty thousand Jews left who had survived the catastrophe.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:53 am

13. The Killing Centers in the East

When the Nazis spoke of the East, they meant a huge area that embraced Poland, the Baltic States, and occupied Russian territory. It was divided into four administrative units: the Warthegau, consisting of the Polish Western Regions annexed to the Reich, under Gauleiter Artur Greiser; the Ostland, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the rather indefinite area of White Russia, with Riga as the seat of the occupation authorities; the General Government of central Poland, under Hans Frank; and the Ukraine, under Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. These were the first countries on which testimony was presented in the case for the prosecution, and they were the last to be dealt with in the judgment.

No doubt both the prosecution and the judges had excellent reasons for their opposite decisions. The East was the central scene of Jewish suffering, the gruesome terminal of all deportations, the place from which there was hardly ever any escape and where the number of survivors rarely reached more than five per cent. The East, moreover, had been the center of the prewar Jewish population in Europe; more than three million Jews had lived in Poland, two hundred and sixty thousand in the Baltic states, and more than half of the estimated three million Russian Jews in White Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea. Since the prosecution was interested primarily in the suffering of the Jewish people and "the dimensions of the genocide" attempted upon it, it was logical to start here, and then see how much specific responsibility for this unmitigated hell could be blamed upon the accused. The trouble was that the evidence relating Eichmann to the East was "scanty," and this was blamed on the fact that the Gestapo files, and particularly the files of Eichmann's section, had been destroyed by the Nazis. This scarcity of documentary evidence gave the prosecution a probably welcome pretext for calling an endless procession of witnesses to testify to events in the East, though this was hardly its only reason for doing so. The prosecution - as had been hinted during the trial but was fully described later (in the special Bulletin issued in April, 1962, by Yad Vashem, the Israeli archive on the Nazi period) - had been under considerable pressure from Israeli survivors, who constitute about twenty per cent of the present population of the country. They had flocked spontaneously to the trial authorities and also to Yad Vashem, which had been officially commissioned to prepare some of the documentary evidence, to offer themselves as witnesses. The worst cases of "strong imagination," people who had "seen Eichmann at various places where he had never been," were weeded out, but fifty-six "sufferings-of-the-Jewish-people witnesses," as the trial authorities called them, were finally put on the stand, instead of some fifteen or twenty "background witnesses," as originally planned; twenty-three sessions, out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were entirely devoted to "background," which meant they had no apparent bearing upon the case. Though the witnesses for the prosecution were hardly ever cross-examined by either the defense or the judges, the judgment did not accept evidence that had bearing on Eichmann unless it was given some other corroboration. (Thus, the judges refused to charge Eichmann with the murder of the Jewish boy in Hungary; or with having instigated the Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, of which he certainly knew nothing at the time and, even in Jerusalem, knew considerably less than the least well-informed student of the period; or with the murder of ninety-three children of Lidice, who, after Heydrich's assassination, were deported to Lódz, since "it has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, according to the evidence before us, that they were murdered"; or with responsibility for the hideous operations of Unit 1005, "amongst the most horrifying parts of all the evidence submitted by the prosecution," which had had the task of opening the mass graves in the East and disposing of the corpses in order to efface all traces of slaughter, and was commanded by Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who, according to his own testimony at Nuremberg, took orders from Müller, the head of Section IV of the R.S.H.A.; or with the dreadful conditions under which Jews left alive in the extermination camps were evacuated to German concentration camps, especially to Bergen-Belsen, during the last months of the war.) The gist of the background witnesses' testimony about conditions in the Polish ghettos, about procedures in the various death camps, about forced labor and, generally, the attempt to exterminate through labor, was never in dispute; on the contrary, there was hardly anything in what they told that had not been known before. If Eichmann's name was mentioned at all, it obviously was hearsay evidence, "rumors testified to," hence without legal validity. The testimony of all witnesses who had "seen him with their own eyes" collapsed the moment a question was addressed to them, and the judgment found "that the center of gravity of his activities was within the Reich itself, the Protectorate, and in the countries of Europe to the west, north, south, southeast and Central Europe" - that is, everywhere except in the East. Why, then, did the court not waive these hearings, which lasted for weeks and months on end? In discussing this question, the judgment was somewhat apologetic, and finally gave an explanation that was curiously inconsistent: "Since the accused denied all the counts in the indictment," the judges could not dismiss "evidence on the factual background." The accused, however, had never denied these facts in the indictment, he had only denied that he was responsible for them "in the sense of the indictment."

Actually, the judges were faced with a highly unpleasant dilemma. At the very beginning of the trial, Dr. Servatius had impugned the impartiality of the judges; no Jew, in his opinion, was qualified to sit in judgment on the implementers of the Final Solution, and the presiding judge had replied: "We are professional judges, used and accustomed to weighing evidence brought before us and to doing our work in the public eye and subject to public criticism. . . . When a court sits in judgment, the judges who compose it are human beings, are flesh and blood, with feelings and senses, but they are obliged by the law to restrain those feelings and senses. Otherwise, no judge could ever be found to try a criminal case where his abhorrence might be aroused. . . . It cannot be denied that the memory of the Nazi holocaust stirs every Jew, but while this case is being tried before us it will be our duty to restrain these feelings, and this duty we shall honor." Which was good and fair enough, unless Dr. Servatius meant to imply that Jews might lack a proper understanding of the problem their presence caused in the midst of the nations of the world, and hence would fail to appreciate a "final solution" of it. But the irony of the situation was that in case he had felt inclined to make this argument, he could have been answered that the accused, according to his own, emphatically repeated testimony, had learned all he knew about the Jewish question from Jewish-Zionist authors, from the "basic books" of Theodor Herzl and Adolf Böhm. Who, then, could be better qualified to try him than these three men, who had all been Zionists since their early youth?

It was not with respect to the accused, then, but with respect to the background witnesses that the fact of the Jewishness of the judges, of their living in a country where every fifth person was a survivor, became acute and troublesome. Mr. Hausner had gathered together a "tragic multitude" of sufferers, each of them eager not to miss this unique opportunity, each of them convinced of his right to his day in court. The judges might, and did, quarrel with the prosecutor about the wisdom and even the appropriateness of using the occasion for "painting general pictures," but once a witness had taken the stand, it was difficult indeed to interrupt him, to cut short such testimony, "because of the honor of the witness and because of the matters about which he speaks," as Judge Landau put it. Who were they, humanly speaking, to deny any of these people their day in court? And who would have dared, humanly speaking, to question their veracity as to detail when they "poured out their hearts as they stood in the witness box," even though what they had to tell could only "be regarded as by-products of the trial"?

There was an additional difficulty. In Israel, as in most other countries, a person appearing in court is deemed innocent until proved guilty. But in the case of Eichmann this was an obvious fiction. If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him; Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, explaining to the President of Argentina, in a letter dated June 3, 1960, why Israel had committed a "formal violation of Argentine law," wrote that "it was Eichmann who organized the mass murder [of six million of our people], on a gigantic and unprecedented scale, throughout Europe." In contrast to normal arrests in ordinary criminal cases, where suspicion of guilt must be proved to be substantial and reasonable but not beyond reasonable doubt - that is the task of the ensuing trial - Eichmann's illegal arrest could be justified, and was justified in the eyes of the world, only by the fact that the outcome of the trial could be safely anticipated. His role in the Final Solution, it now turned out, had been wildly exaggerated - partly because of his own boasting, partly because the defendants at Nuremberg and in other postwar trials had tried to exculpate themselves at his expense, and chiefly because he had been in close contact with Jewish functionaries, since he was the one German official who was an "expert in Jewish affairs" and in nothing else. The prosecution, basing its case upon sufferings that were not a bit exaggerated, had exaggerated the exaggeration beyond rhyme or reason - or so one thought until the judgment of the Court of Appeal was handed down, in which one could read: "It was a fact that the appellant had received no, `superior orders' at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs." That had been precisely the argument of the prosecution, which the judges in the District Court had not accepted, but, dangerous nonsense though it was, the Court of Appeal fully endorsed it. (It was supported chiefly by the testimony of Justice Michael A. Musmanno, author of Ten Days to Die [1950], and a former judge at Nuremberg, who had come from America to testify for the prosecution. Mr. Musmanno had sat on the trials of the administrators of the concentration camps, and of the members of the mobile killing units in the East; and while Eichmann's name had come up in the proceedings, he had mentioned it only once in his judgments. He had, however, interviewed the Nuremberg defendants in their prison. And there Ribbentrop had told him that Hitler would have been all right if he had not fallen under Eichmann's influence. Well, Mr. Musmanno did not believe all he was told, but he did believe that Eichmann had been given his commission by Hitler himself and that his power "came by speaking through Himmler and through Heydrich." A few sessions later, Mr. Gustave M. Gilbert, professor of psychology at Long Island University and author of Nuremberg Diary [1947], appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He was more cautious than Justice Musmanno, whom he had introduced to the defendants at Nuremberg. Gilbert testified that "Eichmann . . . wasn't thought of very much by the major Nazi war criminals . at that time," and also that Eichmann, whom they both assumed dead, had not been mentioned in discussions of the war crimes between Gilbert and Musmanno.) The District Court judges, then, because they saw through the exaggerations of the prosecution and had no wish to make Eichmann the superior of Himmler and the inspirer of Hitler, were put in the position of having to defend the accused. The task, apart from its unpleasantness, was of no consequence for either judgment or sentence, as "the legal and moral responsibility of him who delivers the victim to his death is, in our opinion, no smaller and may even be greater than the liability of him who does the victim to death."

The judges' way out of all these difficulties was through compromise. The judgment falls into two parts, and the by far larger part consists of a rewriting of the prosecution's case. The judges indicated their fundamentally different approach by starting with Germany and ending with the East, for this meant that they intended to concentrate on what had been done instead of on what the Jews had suffered. In an obvious rebuff to the prosecution, they said explicitly that sufferings on so gigantic a scale were "beyond human understanding," a matter for "great authors and poets," and did not belong in a courtroom, whereas the deeds and motives that had caused them were neither beyond understanding nor beyond judgment. They even went so far as to state that they would base their findings upon their own presentation, and, indeed, they would have been lost if they had not gone to the enormous amount of work that this implied. They got a firm grasp on the intricate bureaucratic setup of the Nazi machinery of destruction, so that the position of the accused could be understood. In contrast to the introductory speech of Mr. Hausner, which has already been published as a book, the judgment can be studied with profit by those with a historical interest in this period. But the judgement, so pleasantly devoid of cheap oratory, would have destroyed the case for the prosecution altogether if the judges had not found reason to charge Eichmann with some responsibility for crimes in the East, in addition to the main crime, to which he had confessed, namely, that he had shipped people to their death in full awareness of what he was doing.

Four points were chiefly in dispute. There was, first, the question of Eichmann's participation in the mass slaughter carried out in the East by the Einsatzgruppen, which had been set up by Heydrich at a meeting, held in March, 1941, at which Eichmann was present. However, since the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen were members of the intellectual élite of the S.S., while their troops were either criminals or ordinary soldiers drafted for punitive duty - nobody could volunteer - Eichmann was connected with this important phase of the Final Solution only in that he received the reports of the killers, which he then had to summarize for his superiors. These reports, though "top secret," were mimeographed and went to between fifty and seventy other offices in the Reich, in each of which there sat, of course, some Oberregierungsrat who summarized them for the higher-ups. There was, in addition to this, the testimony of Justice Musmanno, who claimed that Walter Schellenberg, who had drawn up the draft agreement between Heydrich and General Walter von Brauchitsch, of the military command, specifying that the Einsatzgruppen were to enjoy full freedom in "the execution of their plans as regards the civil population," that is, in the killing of civilians, had told him in a conversation at Nuremberg that Eichmann had "controlled these operations" and had even "personally supervised" them. The judges "for reasons of caution" were unwilling to rely on an uncorroborated statement of Schellenberg's, and threw out this evidence. Schellenberg must have had a remarkably low opinion of the Nuremberg judges and their ability to find their way through the labyrinthine administrative structure of the Third Reich. Hence, all that was left was evidence that Eichmann was well informed of what was going on in the East, which had never been in dispute, and the judgment, surprisingly, concluded that this evidence was sufficient to constitute proof of actual participation.

The second point, dealing with the deportation of Jews from Polish ghettos to the nearby killing centers, had more to recommend it. It was indeed "logical" to assume that the transportation expert would have been active in the territory under the General Government. However, we know from many other sources that the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were in charge of transportation for this whole area - to the great grief of Governor General Hans Frank, who in his diary complained endlessly about interference in this matter without ever mentioning Eichmann's name. Franz Novak, Eichmann's transportation officer, testifying for the defense, corroborated Eichmann's version: occasionally, of course, they had had to negotiate with the manager of the Ostbahn, the Eastern Railways, because shipments from the western parts of Europe had to be coordinated with local operations. (Of these transactions, Wisliceny had given a good account at Nuremberg. Novak used to contact the Ministry of Transport, which, in turn, had to obtain clearance from the Army if the trains entered a theater of war. The Army could veto transports. What Wisliceny did not tell, and what is perhaps more interesting, is that the Army used its right of veto only in the initial years, when German troops were on the offensive; in 1944, when the deportations from Hungary clogged the lines of retreat for whole G an armies in desperate flight, no vetoes were forthcoming.) But when, for instance, the Warsaw ghetto as evacuated in 1942, at the rate of five thousand people a day, Himmler himself conducted the negotiations with the railway authorities, and Eichmann and his outfit had nothing whatever to do with them. The judgment finally fell back on testimony given by a witness at the Höss trial that some Jews from the General Government area had arrived in Auschwitz together with Jews from Bialystok, a Polish city that had been incorporated into the German province of East Prussia, and hence fell within Eichmann's jurisdiction. Yet even in the Warthegau, which was Reich territory, it was not the R.S.H.A. but Gauleiter Greiser who was in charge of extermination and deportation. And although in January, 1944, Eichmann visited the Lódz ghetto - the largest in the East and the last to be liquidated - again it was Himmler himself who, a month later, came to see Greiser and ordered the liquidation of Lódz. Unless one accepted the prosecution's preposterous claim that Eichmann had been able to inspire Himmler's orders, the mere fact that Eichmann shipped Jews to Auschwitz could not possibly prove that all Jews who arrived there had been shipped by him. In view of Eichmann's strenuous denials and the utter lack of corroborative evidence, the conclusions of the judgment on this point appeared, unhappily, to constitute a case of in dubio contra reum.

The third point to be considered was Eichmann's liability for what went on in the extermination camps, in which, according to the prosecution, he had enjoyed great authority. It spoke for the high degree of independence and fairness of the judges that they threw out all the accumulated testimony of the witnesses on these matters. Their argument here was foolproof and showed their true understanding of the whole situation. They started by explaining that there had existed two categories of Jews in the camps, the so-called "transport Jews" (Transportjuden), who made up the bulk of the population and who had never committed an offense, even in the eyes of the Nazis, and the Jews "in protective custody" (Schutzhaftjuden), who had been sent to German concentration camps for some transgression and who, under the totalitarian principle of directing the full terror of the regime against the "innocents," were considerably better off than the others, even when they were shipped to the East in order to make the concentration camps in the Reich judenrein. (In the words of Mrs. Raja Kagan, an excellent witness on Auschwitz, it was "the great paradox of Auschwitz. Those caught committing a criminal offense were treated better than the others." They were not subject to the selection and, as a rule, they survived.) Eichmann had nothing to do with Schutzhaftjuden; but Transportjuden, his speciality, were, by definition, condemned to death, except for the twenty-five per cent of especially strong individuals, who might be selected for labor in some camps. In the version presented by the judgment, however, that question was no longer at issue. Eichmann knew, of course, that the overwhelming majority of his victims were condemned to death; but since the selection for labor was made by the S.S. physicians on the spot, and since the lists of deportees were usually made up by the Jewish Councils in the home countries or by the Order Police, but never by Eichmann or his men, the truth was that he had no authority to say who would die and who would live; he could not even know. The question was whether Eichmann had lied when he said: "I never killed a Jew or, for that matter, I never killed a non-Jew. . . . I never gave an order to kill a Jew nor an order to kill a non-Jew." The prosecution, unable to understand a mass murderer who had never killed (and who in this particular instance probably did not even have the guts to kill), was constantly trying to prove individual murder.

This brings us to the fourth, and last, question concerning Eichmann's general authority in the Eastern territories - the question of his responsibility for living conditions in the ghettos, for the unspeakable misery endured in them, and for their final liquidation, which had been the subject of testimony by most witnesses. Again, Eichmann had been fully informed, but none of this had anything to do with his job. The prosecution made a laborious effort to prove that it had, on the ground that Eichmann had freely admitted that every once in a while he had to decide, according to ever-changing directives on this matter, what to do with the Jews of foreign nationality who were trapped in Poland. This, he said, was a question of "national importance," involving the Foreign Office, and was "beyond the horizon" of the local authorities. With respect to such Jews, there existed two different trends in all German offices, the "radical" trend, which would have ignored all distinctions - a Jew was a Jew, period - and the "moderate" trend, which thought it better to put these Jews "on ice" for exchange purposes. (The notion of exchange Jews seems to have been Himmler's idea. After America's entry into the war, he wrote to Müller, in December, 1942, that "all Jews with influential relatives in the United States should be put into a special camp . . . and stay alive," adding, "Such Jews are for us precious hostages. I have a figure of ten thousand in mind.") Needless to say, Eichmann belonged to the "radicals," he was against making exceptions, for administrative as well as "idealistic" reasons. But when in April, 1942, he wrote to the Foreign Office that "in the future foreign nationals would be included in the measures taken by the Security Police within the Warsaw Ghetto," where Jews with foreign passports had previously been carefully weeded out, he was hardly acting as "a decision-maker on behalf of the R.S.H.A." in the East, and he certainly did not possess "executive powers" there. Still less could such powers or authority be derived from his having been used occasionally by Heydrich or Himmler to transmit certain orders to local commanders.

In a sense, the truth of the matter was even worse than the court in Jerusalem assumed. Heydrich, the judgment argued, had been given central authority over the implementation of the Final Solution, without any territorial limitations, hence Eichmann, his chief deputy in this field, was everywhere equally responsible. This was quite true for the framework of the Final Solution, but although Heydrich, for purposes of coordination, had called a representative of Hans Frank's General Government, Undersecretary of State Dr. Josef Bühler, to the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution did not really apply to the Eastern occupied territories, for the simple reason that the fate of the Jews there had never been in the balance. The massacre of Polish Jewry had been decided on by Hitler not in May or June, 1941, the date of the order for the Final Solution, but in September, 1939, as the judges knew from testimony given at Nuremberg by Erwin Lahousen of the German Counterintelligence: "As early as September, 1939, Hitler had decided the murder of Polish Jews." (Hence, the Jewish star was introduced into the General Government immediately after the occupation of the territory, in November, 1939, while it was introduced into the German Reich only in 1941, at the time of the Final Solution.) The judges had before them also the minutes of two conferences at the beginning of the war, one of which Heydrich had called on September 21, 1939, as a meeting of "department heads and commanders of the mobile killing units" at which Eichmann, then still a mere Hauptsturmführer, had represented the Berlin Center for Jewish Emigration; the other took place on January 30, 1940, and dealt with "questions of evacuation and resettlement." At both meetings, the fate of the entire native population in the occupied territories was discussed - that is, the "solution" of the Polish as well as the "Jewish question."

Even at this early date, the "solution of the Polish problem" was well advanced: of the "political leadership," it was reported, no more than three per cent was left; in order to "render this three per cent harmless," they would have "to be sent into concentration camps." The middle strata of the Polish intelligentsia were to be registered and arrested - "teachers, clergy, nobility, legionaries, returning officers, etc." - while the "primitive Poles" were to be added to German manpower as "migratory laborers" and to be "evacuated" from their homes. "The goal is: The Pole has to become the eternal seasonal and migratory laborer, his permanent residence should be in the region of Cracow." The Jews were to be gathered into urban centers and "assembled in ghettos where they can be easily controlled and conveniently evacuated later on." Those Eastern territories that had been incorporated into the Reich - the so-called Warthegau, West Prussia, Danzig, the province of Poznan, and Upper Silesia - had to be immediately cleared of all Jews; together with 30,000 Gypsies they were sent in freight trains into the General Government. Himmler finally, in his capacity as "Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom," gave orders for the evacuation of large portions of the Polish population from these territories recently annexed to the Reich. The implementation of this "organized migration of peoples," as the judgment called it, was assigned to Eichmann as chief of Subsection IV-D-4 in the R.S.H.A., whose task consisted in "emigration, evacuation." (It is important to remember that this "negative demographic policy" was by no means improvised as a result of German victories in the East. It had been outlined, as early as November, 1937, in the secret speech addressed by Hitler to members of the German High Command - see the so-called Hössbach Protocol. Hitler had pointed out that he rejected all notions of conquering foreign nations, that what he demanded was an "empty space" [volkloser Raum] in the East for the settlement of Germans. His audience - Blomberg, Fritsch, and Räder, among others - knew quite well that no such "empty space" existed, hence they must have known that a German victory in the East would automatically result in the "evacuation" of the entire native population. The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews - genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, as we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction.)

An express letter, sent to the commanders of the mobile killing units after the September meeting, was among the documents submitted at the trial and was of special interest. It refers only to "the Jewish question in occupied territories" and distinguishes between the "final goal," which must be kept secret, and "preliminary measures" for reaching it. Among the latter, the document mentions expressly the concentration of Jews in the vicinity of railroad tracks. It is characteristic that the phrase "Final Solution of the Jewish question" does not occur; the "final goal" probably was the destruction of Polish Jews, clearly nothing new to those present at the meeting; what was new was only that those Jews who lived in newly annexed provinces of the Reich should be evacuated to Poland, for this was indeed a first step toward making Germany judenrein, hence toward the Final Solution.

As far as Eichmann was concerned the documents clearly showed that even at this stage he had next to nothing to do with what happened in the East. Here, too, his role was that of an expert for "transportation" and "emigration"; in the East, no "Jewish expert" was needed, no special "directives" were required, and there existed no privileged categories. Even the members of the Jewish Councils were invariably exterminated when the ghettos were finally liquidated. There were no exceptions, for the fate accorded the slave laborers was only a different, slower kind of death. Hence the Jewish bureaucracy, whose role in these administrative massacres was felt to be so essential that the institution of "Jewish Councils of Elders" was immediately established, played no part in the seizure and the concentration of the Jews. The whole episode signals the end of the initial wild mass shootings in the rear of the armies. It seems that the Army commanders had protested against the massacres of civilians, and that Heydrich had come to an agreement with the German High Command establishing the principle of a complete "cleanup once and for all" of Jews, the Polish intelligentsia, the Catholic clergy, and the nobility, but determining that, because of the magnitude of an operation in which two million Jews would have to be "cleaned up," the Jews should first be concentrated in ghettos.

If the judges had cleared Eichmann completely on these counts connected with the hair-raising stories told over and over by witnesses at the trial, they would not have arrived at a different judgment of guilt, and Eichmann would not have escaped capital punishment. The result would have been the same. But they would have destroyed utterly, and without compromise, the case as the prosecution presented it.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:54 am

14. Evidence and Witnesses

During the last weeks of the war, the S.S. bureaucracy was occupied chiefly with forging identity papers and with destroying the paper mountains that testified to six years of systematic murder. Eichmann's department, more successful than others, had burned its files, which, of course, did not achieve much, since all its correspondence had been addressed to other State and Party offices, whose files fell into the hands of the Allies. There were more than enough documents left to tell the story of the Final Solution, most of them known already from the Nuremberg Trials and the successor trials. The story was confirmed by sworn and unsworn statements, usually given by witnesses and defendants in previous trials and frequently by persons who were no longer alive. (All this, as well as a certain amount of hearsay testimony, was admitted as evidence according to Section 15 of the law under which Eichmann was tried, which stipulates that the court "may deviate from the rules of evidence" provided it "places on record the reasons which prompted" such deviation.) The documentary evidence was supplemented by testimony taken abroad, in German, Austrian, and Italian courts, from sixteen witnesses who could not come to Jerusalem, because the Attorney General had announced that he "intended to put them on trial for crimes against the Jewish people." Although during the first session he had declared, "And if the defense has people who are ready to come and be witnesses, I shall not block the way. I shall not put any obstacles," he later refused to grant such people immunity. (Such immunity was entirely dependent upon the good will of the government; prosecution under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators [Punishment] Law is not mandatory.) Since it was highly unlikely that any of the sixteen gentlemen would have come to Israel under any circumstances - seven of them were in prison - this was a technical point, but it was of considerable importance. It served to refute Israel's claim that an Israeli court was, at least technically, the "most suitable for a trial against the implementers of the Final Solution," because documents and witnesses were "more abundant than in any other country"; and the claim with respect to documents was doubtful in any event, since the Israeli archive Yad Vashem was founded at a comparatively late date and is in no way superior to other archives. It quickly turned out that Israel was the only country in the world where defense witnesses could not be heard, and where certain witnesses for the prosecution, those who had given affidavits in previous trials, could not be cross-examined by the defense. And this was all the more serious as the accused and his lawyer were indeed not "in a position to obtain their own defense documents." (Dr. Servatius had submitted a hundred and ten documents, as against fifteen hundred submitted by the prosecution, but of the former only about a dozen originated with the defense, and they consisted mostly of excerpts from books by Poliakov or Reitlinger; all the rest, with the exception of the seventeen charts drawn by Eichmann, had been picked out of the wealth of material gathered by the prosecution and the Israeli police. Obviously, the defense had received the crumbs from the rich man's table.) In fact, it had neither "the means nor the time" to conduct the affair properly, it did not have at its disposal "the archives of the world and the instruments of government." The same reproach had been leveled against the Nuremberg Trials, where the inequality of status between prosecution and defense was even more glaring. The chief handicap of the defense, at Nuremberg as at Jerusalem, was that it lacked the staff of trained research assistants needed to go through the mass of documents and find whatever might be useful in the case. Even today, eighteen years after the war, our knowledge of the immense archival material of the Nazi regime rests to a large extent on the selection made for purposes of prosecution.

No one could have been more aware of this decisive disadvantage for the defense than Dr. Servatius, who was one of the defense counsels at Nuremberg. Which, obviously, makes the question of why he offered his services to begin with even more intriguing. His answer to this question was that for him this was "a mere business matter" and that he wished "to make money," but he must have known, from his Nuremberg experience, that the sum paid him by the Israeli government-twenty thousand dollars, as he himself had stipulated - was ridiculously inadequate, even though Eichmann's family in Linz had given him another fifteen thousand marks. He began complaining about being underpaid almost the first day of the trial, and soon thereafter he openly voiced the hope that he would be able to sell whatever "memoirs" Eichmann would write in prison "for future generations." Leaving aside the question of whether such a business deal would have been proper, his hopes were disappointed because the Israeli government confiscated all papers written by Eichmann while in jail. (They have now been deposited in the National Archives.) Eichmann had written a "book" in the time between the adjournment of the court in August and the pronouncement of judgment in December, and the defense offered it as "new factual evidence" in the revision proceedings before the Court of Appeal - which of course the newly written book was not.

As to the position of the defendant, the court could rely upon the detailed statement he had made to the Israeli police examiner, supplemented by many handwritten notes he had handed in during the eleven months needed for the preparation of the trial. No doubt was ever raised that these were voluntary statements; most of them had not even been elicited by questions. Eichmann had been confronted with sixteen hundred documents, some of which, it turned out, he must have seen before, because they had been shown to him in Argentina during his interview with Sassen, which Mr. Hausner with some justification called a "dress rehearsal." But he had started working on them seriously only in Jerusalem, and when he was put on the stand, it soon became apparent that he had not wasted his time: now he knew how to read documents, something he had not known during the police examination, and he could do it better than his lawyer. Eichmann's testimony in court turned out to be the most important evidence in the case. His counsel put him on the stand on June 20, during the seventy-fifth session, and interrogated him almost uninterruptedly for fourteen sessions, until July 7.

That same day, during the eighty-eighth session, the cross-examination by the prosecution began, and it lasted for another seventeen sessions, up to the twentieth of July. There were a few incidents: Eichmann once threatened to "confess everything" Moscow style, and he once complained that he had been "grilled until the steak was done," but he was usually quite calm and he was not serious when he threatened that he would refuse to answer any more questions. He told Judge Halevi how "pleased [he was] at this opportunity to sift the truth from the untruths that had been unloaded upon [him] for fifteen years," and how proud of being the subject of a cross-examination that lasted longer than any known before. After a short re-examination by his lawyer, which took less than a session, he was examined by the three judges, and they got more out of him in two and a half short sessions than the prosecution had been able to elicit in seventeen. Eichmann was on the stand from June 20 to July 24, or a total of thirty-three and a half sessions. Almost twice as many sessions, sixty-two out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were spent on a hundred prosecution witnesses who, country after country, told their tales of horrors. Their testimony lasted from April 24 to June 12, the entire intervening time being taken up with the submission of documents, most of which the Attorney General read into the record of the court's proceedings, which was handed out to the press each day. All but a mere handful of the witnesses were Israeli citizens, and they had been picked from hundreds and hundreds of applicants. (Ninety of them were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in one form or another of Nazi captivity.) How much wiser it would have been to resist these pressures altogether (it was done up to a point, for none of the potential witnesses mentioned in Minister of Death, written by Quentin Reynolds on the basis of material provided by two Israeli journalists, and published in 1960, was ever called to the stand) and to seek out those who had not volunteered! As though to prove the point, the prosecution called upon a writer, well known on both sides of the Atlantic under the name of K-Zetnik - a slang word for a concentration-camp inmate - as the author of several books on Auschwitz that dealt with brothels, homosexuals, and other "human interest stories." He started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted name. It was not a "pen-name," he said. "I must carry this name as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation . . . as humanity has risen after the crucifixion of one man." He continued with a little excursion into astrology: the star "influencing our fate in the same way as the star of ashes at Auschwitz is there facing our planet, radiating toward our planet." And when he had arrived at "the unnatural power above Nature" which had sustained him thus far, and now, for the first time, paused to catch his breath, even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this "testimony," and, very timidly, very politely, interrupted: "Could I perhaps put a few questions to you if you will consent?" Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as well: "Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to Mr. Hausner and to me." In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions.

This, to be sure, was an exception, but if it was an exception that proved the rule of normality, it did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story, let alone of the rare capacity for distinguishing between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen, and sometimes twenty, years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime. These difficulties could not be helped, but they were not improved by the predilection of the prosecution for witnesses of some prominence, many of whom had published books about their experiences, and who now told what they had previously written, or what they had told and retold many times. The procession started, in a futile attempt to proceed according to chronological order, with eight witnesses from Germany, all of them sober enough, but they were not "survivors"; they had been high-ranking Jewish officials in Germany and were now prominent in Israeli public life, and they had all left Germany prior to the outbreak of war. They were followed by five witnesses from Prague and then by just one witness from Austria, on which country the prosecution had submitted the valuable reports of the late Dr. Löwenherz, written during and shortly after the end of the war. There appeared one witness each from France, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, and Soviet Russia; two from Yugoslavia; three each from Rumania and Slovakia; and thirteen from Hungary. But the bulk of the witnesses, fifty-three, came from Poland and Lithuania, where Eichmann's competence and authority had been almost nil. (Belgium and Bulgaria were the only countries not covered by witnesses.) These were all "background witnesses," and so were the sixteen men and women who told the court about Auschwitz (ten) and Treblinka (four), about Chelmno and Majdanek. It was different with those who testified on Theresienstadt, the old-age ghetto on Reich territory, the only camp in which Eichmann's power had indeed been considerable; there were four witnesses for Theresienstadt and one for the exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen.

At the end of this procession, "the right of the witnesses to be irrelevant," as Yad Vashem, summing up the testimony in its Bulletin, phrased it, was so firmly established that it was a mere formality when Mr. Hausner, during the seventy-third session, asked permission of the court "to complete his picture," and Judge Landau, who some fifty sessions before had protested so strenuously against this "picture painting," agreed immediately to the appearance of a former member of the Jewish Brigade, the fighting force of Palestine Jews that had been attached to the British Eighth Army during the war. This last witness for the prosecution, Mr. Aharon Hoter-Yishai, now an Israeli lawyer, had been assigned the task of coordinating all efforts to search for Jewish survivors in Europe, under the auspices of Aliyah Beth, the organisation responsible for arranging for illegal immigration into Palestine. The surviving Jews were dispersed among some eight million displaced persons from all over Europe, a floating mass of humanity that the Allies wanted to repatriate as quickly as possible. The danger was that the Jews, too, would be returned to their former homes. Mr. Hoter-Yishai told how he and his comrades were greeted when they presented themselves as members of "the Jewish fighting nation," and how it "was sufficient to draw a Star of David on a sheet in ink and pin it to a broomstick" to shake these people out of the dangerous apathy of near-starvation. He also told how some of them "had wandered home from the D.P. camps," only to come back to another camp, for "home" was, for instance, a small Polish town where of six thousand former Jewish inhabitants fifteen had survived, and where four of these survivors had been murdered upon their return by the Poles. He described finally how he and the others had tried to forestall the repatriation attempts of the Allies and how they frequently arrived too late: "In Theresienstadt, there were thirty-two thousand survivors. After a few weeks we found only four thousand. About twenty-eight thousand had returned, or been returned. Those four thousand whom we found there - of them, of course, not one person returned to his place of origin, because in the meantime the road was pointed out to them" - that is, the road to what was then Palestine and was soon to become Israel. This testimony perhaps smacked more strongly of propaganda than anything heard previously, and the presentation of the facts was indeed misleading. In November, 1944, after the last shipment had left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz, there were only about ten thousand of the original inmates left. In February, 1945, there arrived another six to eight thousand people, the Jewish partners of mixed marriages, whom the Nazis shipped to Theresienstadt at a moment when the whole German transportation system was already in a state of collapse. All the others - roughly fifteen thousand - had poured in in open freight cars or on foot in April, 1945, after the camp had been taken over by the Red Cross. These were survivors of Auschwitz, members of the labor gangs, and they were chiefly from Poland and Hungary. When the Russians liberated the camp - on May 9, 1945 - many Czech Jews, who had been in Theresienstadt since the beginning, left the camp immediately and started home; they were in their own country. When the quarantine ordered by the Russians because of the epidemics was lifted, the majority left on its own initiative. So that the remnant found by the Palestine emissaries probably consisted of people who could not return or be returned for various reasons - the ill, the aged, single lonely survivors of families who did not know where to turn. And yet Mr. Hoter-Yishai told the" simple truth: those who had survived the ghettos and the camps, who had come out alive from the nightmare of absolute helplessness and abandonment - as though the whole world was a jungle and they its prey - had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again. They needed the emissaries of the, Jewish people in Palestine in order to learn that they could come, legally or illegally, by hook or by crook, and that they would be welcome; they did not need them in order to be convinced.

Thus, every once in a long while one was glad that Judge Landau had lost his battle, and the first such moment occurred even before the battle had started. For Mr. Hausner's first background witness did not look as though he had volunteered. He was an old man, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail, with sparse white hair and beard, holding himself quite erect; in a sense, his name was "famous," and one understood why the prosecution wanted to begin its picture with him. He was Zindel Grynszpan, father of Herschel Grynszpan, who, on November 7, 1938, at the age of seventeen, had walked up to the German embassy in Paris and shot to death its third secretary, the young Legationsrat Ernst vom Rath. The assassination had triggered the pogroms in Germany and Austria, the so-called Kristallnacht of November 9, which was indeed a prelude to the Final Solution, but with whose preparation Eichmann had nothing to do. The motives for Grynszpan's act have never been cleared up, and his brother, whom the prosecution also put on the stand, was remarkably reluctant to talk about it. The court took it for granted that it was an act of vengeance for the expulsion of some seventeen thousand Polish Jews, the Grynszpan family among them, from German territory during the last days of October, 1938, but it is generally known that this explanation is unlikely. Herschel Grynszpan was a psychopath, unable to finish school, who for years had knocked about Paris and Brussels, being expelled from both places. His lawyer in the French court that tried him introduced a confused story of homosexual relations, and the Germans, who later had him extradited, never put him on trial. (There are rumors that he survived the war - as though to substantiate the "paradox of Auschwitz" that those Jews who had committed a criminal offense were spared.) Vom Rath was a singularly inadequate victim, he had been shadowed by the Gestapo because of his openly anti-Nazi views and his sympathy for Jews; the story of his homosexuality was probably fabricated by the Gestapo. Grynszpan might have acted as an unwitting tool of Gestapo agents in Paris, who could have wanted to kill two birds with one stone - create a pretext for pogroms in Germany and get rid of an opponent to the Nazi regime - without realizing that they could not have it both ways, that is, could not slander vom Rath as a homosexual having illicit relations with Jewish boys and also make of him a martyr and a victim of "world Jewry."

However that may have been, it is a fact that the Polish government in the fall of 1938 decreed that all Polish Jews residing in Germany would lose their nationality by October 29; it probably was in possession of information that the German government intended to expel these Jews to Poland and wanted to prevent this. It is more than doubtful that people like Mr. Zindel Grynszpan even knew that such a decree existed. He had come to Germany in 1911, a young man of twenty-five, to open a grocery store in Hanover, where, in due time, eight children were born to him. In 1938, when catastrophe overcame him, he had been living in Germany for twenty-seven years, and, like many such people, he had never bothered to change his papers and to ask for naturalization. Now he had come to tell his story, carefully answering questions put to him by the prosecutor; he spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery, using a minimum of words. "On the twenty-seventh of October, 1938, it was a Thursday night, at eight o'clock, a policeman came and told us to come to Region [police station] Eleven. He said: `You are going to come back immediately; don't take anything with you, only your passports.' " Grynszpan went, with his family, a son, a daughter, and his wife. When they arrived at the police station he saw "a large number of people, some sitting, some standing, people were crying. They [the police] were shouting, `Sign, sign, sign.' . . . I had to sign, all of them did. One of us did not, his name was, I believe, Gershon Silber, and he had to stand in the corner for twenty-four hours. They took us to the concert hall, and . . . there were people from all over town, about six hundred people. There we stayed until Friday night, about twenty-four hours, yes, until Friday night. . . . Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners' lorries, about twenty men in each truck, and they took us to the railroad station. The streets were black with people shouting: 'Juden raus to Palestine!' . . . They took us by train to Neubenschen, on the German-Polish border. It was Shabbat morning when we arrived there, six o'clock in the morning. There came trains from all sorts of places, from Leipzig, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Biederfeld, Bremen. Together we were about twelve thousand people.... It was the Shabbat, the twenty-ninth of October. . . . When we reached the border we were searched to see if anybody had any money, and anybody who had more than ten marks - the balance was taken away. This was the German law, no more than ten marks could be taken out of Germany. The Germans said, `You didn't bring any more with you when you came, you can't take out any more.' " They had to walk a little over a mile to the Polish border, since the Germans intended to smuggle them into Polish territory. "The S.S. men were whipping us, those who lingered they hit, and blood was flowing on the road. They tore away our suitcases from us, they treated us in a most brutal way, this was the first time that I'd seen the wild brutality of the Germans. They shouted at us, `Run! Run!' I was hit and fell into the ditch. My son helped me, and he said: `Run, Father, run, or you'll die!' When we got to the open border ... the women went in first. The Poles knew nothing. They called a Polish general and some officers who examined our papers, and they saw that we were Polish citizens, that we had special passports. It was decided to let us enter. They took us to a village of about six thousand people, and we were twelve thousand. The rain was driving hard, people were fainting - on all sides one saw old men and women. Our suffering was great. There was no food, since Thursday we had not eaten. . . ." They were taken to a military camp and put into "stables, as there was no room elsewhere. . . . I think it was our second day [in Poland]. On the first day, a lorry with bread came from Poznan, that was on Sunday. And then I wrote a letter to France . . . to my son: `Don't write any more letters to Germany. We are now in Zbaszyn.' "

This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over - the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours - one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell the story, that - at least outside the transforming realm of poetry - it needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one either before or after was to equal the shining honesty of Zindel Grynszpan.

No one could claim that Grynszpan's testimony created anything remotely resembling a "dramatic moment." But such a moment came a few weeks later, and it came unexpectedly, just when Judge Landau was making an almost desperate attempt to bring the proceedings back under the control of normal criminal-court procedures. On the stand was Abba Kovner, "a poet and an author," who had not so much testified as addressed an audience with the ease of someone who is used to speaking in public and resents interruptions from the floor. He had been asked by the presiding judge to be brief, which he obviously disliked, and Mr. Hausner, who had defended his witness, had been told that he could not "complain about a lack of patience on the part of the court," which of course he did not like either. At this slightly tense moment, the witness happened to mention the name of Anton Schmidt, a Feldwebel, or sergeant, in the German Army - a name that was not entirely unknown to this audience, for Yad Vashem had published Schmidt's story some years before in its Hebrew Bulletin, and a number of Yiddish papers in America had picked it up. Anton Schmidt was in, charge of a patrol in Poland that collected stray German soldiers who were cut off from their units. In the course of doing this, he had run into members of the Jewish underground, including Mr. Kovner, a prominent member, and he had helped the Jewish partisans by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks. Most important of all: "He did not do it for money." This had gone on for five months, from October, 1941, to March, 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed. (The prosecution had elicited the story because Kovner declared that he had first heard the name of Eichmann from Schmidt, who had told him about rumors in the Army that it was Eichmann who "arranges everything.")

This was by no means the first time that help from the outside, non-Jewish world had been mentioned. Judge Halevi had been asking the witnesses: "Did the Jews get any help?" with the same regularity as that with which the prosecution had asked: "Why did you not rebel?" The answers had been various and inconclusive - "We had the whole population against us," Jews hidden by Christian families could "be counted on the fingers of one hand," perhaps five or six out of a total of thirteen thousand - but on the whole the situation had, surprisingly, been better in Poland than in any other Eastern European country. (There was, I have said, no testimony on Bulgaria.) A Jew, now married to a Polish woman and living in Israel, testified how his wife had hidden him and twelve other Jews throughout the war; another had a Christian friend from before the war to whom he had escaped from a camp and who had helped him, and who was later executed because of the help he had given to Jews. One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year- old Jewish girl. But this mention of Schmidt was the first and the last time that any such story was told of a German, for the only other incident involving a German was mentioned only in a document: an Army officer had helped indirectly by sabotaging certain police orders; nothing happened to him, but the matter had been thought sufficiently serious to be mentioned in correspondence between Himmler and Bormann.

During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question - how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

There are, of course, explanations of this devastating shortage, and they have been repeated many times. I shall give the gist of them in the words of one of the few subjectively sincere memoirs of the war published in Germany. Peter Bamm, a German Army physician who served at the Russian front, tells in Die Unsichtbare Flagge (1952) of the killing of Jews in Sevastopol. They were collected by "the others," as he calls the S.S. mobile killing units, to distinguish them from ordinary soldiers, whose decency the book extols, and were put into a sealed-off part of the former G.P.U. prison that abutted on the officer's lodgings, where Bamm's own unit was quartered. They were then made to board a mobile gas van, in which they died after a few minutes, whereupon the driver transported the corpses outside the city and unloaded them into tank ditches. "We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning." Needless to add, the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized "decency" in the absence of what he calls a "higher moral meaning."

But the hollowness of respectability - for decency under such circumstances is no more than respectability - was not what became apparent in the example afforded by Sergeant Anton Schmidt. Rather it was the fatal flaw in the argument itself, which at first sounds so hopelessly plausible. It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres - through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents "disappear in silent anonymity" were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be "practically useless," at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:54 am

15. Judgment, Appeal, and Execution

Eichmann spent the last months of the war cooling his heels in Berlin, with nothing to do, cut by the other department heads in the R.S.H.A., who had lunch together every day in the building where he had his office but did not once ask him to join them. He kept himself busy with his defense installations, so as to be ready for "the last battle" for Berlin, and, as his only official duty, paid occasional visits to Theresienstadt, where he showed Red Cross delegates around. To them, of all people, he unburdened his soul about Himmler's new "humane line" in regard to the Jews, which included an avowed determination to have, "next time," concentration camps after "the English model." In April, 1945, Eichmann had the last of his rare interviews with Himmler, who ordered him to select "a hundred to two hundred prominent Jews in Theresienstadt," transport them to Austria, and install them in hotels, so that Himmler could use them as "hostages" in his forthcoming negotiations with Eisenhower. The absurdity of this commission seems not to have dawned upon Eichmann; he went, "with grief in my heart, as I had to desert my defense installations," but he never reached Theresienstadt, because all the roads were blocked by the approaching Russian armies. Instead, he ended up at Alt-Aussee, in Austria, where Kaltenbrunner had taken refuge. Kaltenbrunner had no interest in Himmler's "prominent Jews," and told Eichmann to organize a commando for partisan warfare in the Austrian mountains. Eichmann responded with the greatest enthusiasm: "This was again something worth doing, a task I enjoyed." But just as he had collected some hundred more or less unfit men, most of whom had never seen a rifle, and had taken possession of an arsenal of abandoned weapons of all sorts, he received the latest Himmler order: "No fire is to be opened on English and Americans." This was the end. He sent his men home and gave a small strongbox containing paper money and gold coins to his trusted legal adviser, Regierungsrat Hunsche: "Because, I said to myself, he is a man from the higher civil services, he will be correct in the management of funds, he will put down his expenses . . . for I still believed that accounts would be demanded some day."

With these words Eichmann had to conclude the autobiography he had spontaneously given the police examiner. It had taken only a few days, and filled no more than 315 of the 3,564 pages copied off the tape-recorder. He would like to have gone on, and he obviously did tell the rest of the story to the police, but the trial authorities, for various reasons, had decided not to admit any testimony covering the time after the close of the war. However, from affidavits given at Nuremberg, and, more important, from a much discussed indiscretion on the part of a former Israeli civil servant, Moshe Pearlman, whose book The Capture of Adolf Eichmann appeared in London four weeks before the trial opened, it is possible to complete the story; Mr. Pearlman's account was obviously based upon material from Bureau 06, the police office that was in charge of the preparations for the trial. (Mr. Pearlman's own version was that since he had retired from government service three weeks before Eichmann was kidnaped, he had written the book as a "private individual," which is not very convincing, because the Israeli police must have known of the impending capture several months before his retirement.) The book caused some embarrassment in Israel, not only because Mr. Pearlman had been able to divulge information about important prosecution documents prematurely and had stated that the trial authorities had already made up their minds about the untrustworthiness of Eichmann's testimony, but because a reliable account of how Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires was of course the last thing they wanted to have published.

The story told by Mr. Pearlman was considerably less exciting than the various rumors upon which previous tales had been based. Eichmann had never been in the Near East or the Middle East, he had no connection with any Arab country, he had never returned to Germany from Argentina, he had never been to any other Latin American country, he had played no role in postwar Nazi activities or organizations. At the end of the war, he had tried to speak once more with Kaltenbrunner, who was still in Alt-Aussee, playing solitaire, but his former chief was in no mood to receive him, since "for this man he saw no chances any more." (Kaltenbrunner's own chances were not so very good either, he was hanged at Nuremberg.) Almost immediately thereafter, Eichmann was caught by American soldiers and put in a camp for S.S. men, where numerous interrogations failed to uncover his identity, although it was known to some of his fellow-prisoners. He was cautious and did not write to his family, but let them believe he was dead; his wife tried to obtain a death certificate, but failed when it was discovered that the only "eyewitness" to her husband's death was her brother-in-law. She had been left penniless, but Eichmann's family in Linz supported her and the three children.

In November, 1945, the trials of the major war criminals opened in Nuremberg, and Eichmann's name began to appear with uncomfortable regularity. In January, 1946, Wisliceny appeared as a witness for the prosecution and gave his damning evidence, whereupon Eichmann decided that he had better disappear. He escaped from the camp, with the help of the inmates, and went to the Lüneburger Heide, a heath about fifty miles south of Hamburg, where the brother of one of his fellow-prisoners provided him with work as a lumberjack. He stayed there, under the name of Otto Heninger, for four years, and he was probably bored to death. Early in 1950, he succeeded) in establishing contact with ODESSA, a clandestine organization of S.S. veterans, and in May of that year he was passed through Austria to Italy, where a Franciscan priest, fully informed of his identity, equipped him with a refugee passport in the name of Richard Klement and sent him on to Buenos Aires. He arrived in mid-July and, without any difficulty, obtained identification papers and a work permit as Ricardo Klement, Catholic, a bachelor, stateless, aged thirty-seven-seven years less than his real age.

He was still cautious, but he now wrote to his wife in his own handwriting and told her that "her children's uncle" was alive. He worked at a number of odd jobs-sales representative, laundry man, worker on a rabbit farm - all poorly paid, but in the summer of 1952 he had his wife and children join him. (Mrs. Eichmann obtained a German passport in Zurich, Switzerland, though she was a resident of Austria at the time, and under her real name, as a "divorcee" from a certain Eichmann. How this came about has remained a mystery, and the file containing her application has disappeared from the German consulate in Zurich.) Upon her arrival in Argentina, Eichmann got his first steady job, in the Mercedes-Benz factory in Suarez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, first as a mechanic and later as a foreman, and when a fourth son was born to him, he remarried his wife, supposedly under the name of Klement. This is not likely, however, for the infant was registered as Ricardo Francisco (presumably as a tribute to the Italian priest) Klement Eichmann, and this was only one of many hints that Eichmann dropped in regard to his identity as the years went by. It does seem to be true, however, that he told his children he was Adolf Eichmann's brother, though the children, being well acquainted with their grandparents and uncles in Linz, must have been rather dull to believe it; the oldest son, at least, who had been nine years old when he last saw his father, should have been able to recognize him seven years later in Argentina. Mrs. Eichmann's Argentine identity card, moreover, was never changed (it read "Veronika Liebl de Eichmann"), and in 1959, when Eichmann's stepmother died, and a year later, when his father died, the newspaper announcements in Linz carried Mrs. Eichmann's name among the survivors, contradicting all stories of divorce and remarriage. Early in 1960, a few months before his capture, Eichmann and his elder sons finished building a primitive brick house in one of the poor suburbs of Buenos Aires - no electricity, no running water - where the family settled down. They must have been very poor, and Eichmann must have led a dreary life, for which not even the children could compensate, for they showed "absolutely no interest in being educated and did not even try to develop their so-called talents."

Eichmann's only compensation consisted in talking endlessly with members of the large Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity. In 1955, this finally led to the interview with the Dutch journalist Willem S. Sassen, a former member of the Armed S.S. who had exchanged his Dutch nationality for a German passport during the war and had later been condemned to death in absentia in Belgium as a war criminal.

Eichmann made copious notes for the interview, which was tape-recorded and then rewritten by Sassen, with considerable embellishments; the notes in Eichmann's own handwriting were discovered and they were admitted as evidence at his trial, though the statement as a whole was not. Sassen's version appeared in abbreviated form first in the German illustrated magazine Der Stern, in July, 1960, and then, in November and December, as a series of articles in Life. But Sassen, obviously with Eichmann's consent, had offered the story four years before to a Time- Life correspondent in Buenos Aires, and even if it is true that Eichmann's name was withheld, the content of the material could have left no doubt about the original source of the information. The truth of the matter is that Eichmann had made many efforts to break out of his anonymity, and it is rather strange that it took the Israeli Secret Services several years - until August, 1959 - to learn that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement. Israel has never divulged the source of her information, and today at least half a dozen persons claim they found Eichmann, while "well-informed circles" in Europe insist that it was the Russian Intelligence service that spilled the news. However that may have been, the puzzle is not how it was possible to discover Eichmann's hideout but, rather, how it was possible not to discover it earlier - provided, of course, that the Israelis had indeed pursued this search through the years. Which, in view of the facts, seems doubtful.

No doubt, however, exists about the identity of the captors. All talk of private "avengers" was contradicted at the outset by Ben-Gurion himself, who on May 23, 1960, announced to Israel's wildly cheering Knesset that Eichmann had been "found by the Israeli Secret Service." Dr. Servatius, who tried strenuously and unsuccessfully both before the District Court and before the Court of Appeal to call Zvi Tohar, chief pilot of the El-Al plane that flew Eichmann out of the country, and Yad Shimoni, an official of the air line in Argentina, as witnesses, mentioned Ben- Gurion's statement; the Attorney General countered by saying that the Prime Minister had "admitted no more than that Eichmann was found out by the Secret Service," not that he also had been kidnaped by government agents. Well, in actual fact, it seems that it was the other way round: Secret Service men had not "found" him but only picked him up, after making a few preliminary tests to assure themselves that the information they had received was true. And even this was not done very expertly, for Eichmann had been well aware that he was being shadowed: "I told you that months ago, I believe, when I was asked if I had known that I was found out, and I could give you then precise reasons [that is, in the part of the police examination that was not released to the press]. . . . I learned that people in my neighborhood had made inquiries about real-estate purchases and so on and so forth for the establishment of a factory for sewing machines - a thing that was quite impossible, since there existed neither electricity nor water in that area. Furthermore, I was informed that these people were Jews from North America. I could easily have disappeared, but I did not do it, I just went on as usual, and let things catch up with me. I could have found employment without any difficulty, with my papers and references. But I did not want that."

There was more proof than was revealed in Jerusalem of his willingness to go to Israel and stand trial. Counsel for the defense, of course, had to stress the fact that, after all, the accused had been kidnaped and "brought to Israel in conflict with international law," because this enabled the defense to challenge the right of the court to prosecute him, and though neither the prosecution nor the judges ever admitted that the kidnaping had been an "act of state," they did not deny it either. They argued that the breach of international law concerned only the states of Argentina and Israel, not the rights of the defendant, and that this breach was "cured" through the joint declaration of the two governments, on August 3, 1960, that they "resolved to view as settled the incident which was caused in the wake of the action of citizens of Israel which violated the basic rights of the State of Argentina." The court decided that it did not matter whether these Israelis were government agents or private citizens. What neither the defense nor the court mentioned was that Argentina would not have waived her rights so obligingly had Eichmann been an Argentine citizen. He had lived there under an assumed name, thereby denying himself the right to government protection, at least as Ricardo Klement (born on May 23, 1913, at Bolzano - in Southern Tyrol - as his Argentine identity card stated), although he had declared himself of "German nationality." And he had never invoked the dubious right of asylum, which would not have helped him anyhow, since Argentina, although she has in fact offered asylum to many known Nazi criminals, had signed an International Convention declaring that the perpetrators of crimes against humanity "will not be deemed to be political criminals."; All this did not make Eichmann stateless, it did not legally deprive him of his German nationality, but it gave the West German republic a welcome pretext for withholding the customary protection due its citizens abroad. In other words, and despite pages and pages of legal argument, based on so many precedents that one finally got the impression that kidnaping was among the most frequent modes of arrest, it was Eichmann's de facto statelessness, and nothing else, that enabled the Jerusalem court to sit in judgment on him. Eichmann, though no legal expert, should have been able to appreciate that, for he knew from his own career that one could do as one pleased only with stateless people; the Jews had had to lose their nationality before they could be exterminated. But he was in no mood to ponder such niceties, for if it was a fiction that he had come voluntarily to Israel to stand trial, it was true that he had made fewer difficulties than anybody had expected. In fact, he had made none.

On May 11, 1960, at six-thirty in the evening, when Eichmann alighted, as usual, from the bus that brought him home from his place of work, he was seized by three men and, in less than a minute, bundled into a waiting car, which took him to a previously rented house in a remote suburb of Buenos Aires. No drugs, no ropes, no handcuffs were used, and Eichmann immediately recognized that this was professional work, as no unnecessary violence had been applied; he was not hurt. Asked who he was, he instantly said: "Ich bin Adolf Eichmann," and, surprisingly, added: "I know I am in the hands of Israelis." (He later explained that he had read in some newspaper of Ben-Gurion's order that he be found and caught.) For eight days, while the Israelis were waiting for the El-Al plane that was to carry them and their prisoner to Israel, Eichmann was tied to a bed, which was the only aspect of the whole affair that he complained about, and on the second day of his captivity he was asked to state in writing that he had no objection to being tried by an Israeli court. The statement was, of course, already prepared, and all he was supposed to do was to copy it. To everybody's surprise, however, he insisted on writing his own text, for which, as can be seen from the following lines, he probably used the first sentences of the prepared statement: "I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, hereby declare out of my own free will that since now my true identity has been revealed, I see clearly that it is useless to try and escape judgment any longer. I hereby express my readiness to travel to Israel to face a court of judgment, an authorized court of law. It is clear and understood that I shall be given legal advice [thus far, he probably copied], and I shall try to write down the facts of my last years of public activities in Germany, without any embellishments, in order that future generations will have a true picture. This declaration I declare out of my own free will, not for promises given and not because of threats. I wish to be at peace with myself at last. Since I cannot remember all the details, and since I seem to mix up facts, I request assistance by putting at my disposal documents and affidavits to help me in my effort to seek the truth." Signed: "Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960." (This document, though doubtless genuine, has one peculiarity: its date omits the day it was signed. The omission gives rise to the suspicion that the letter was written not in Argentina but in Jerusalem, where Eichmann arrived on May 22. The letter was needed less for the trial, during which the prosecution did submit it as evidence, but without attaching much importance to it, than for Israel's first explanatory official note to the Argentine government, to which it was duly attached. Servatius, who asked Eichmann about the letter in court, did not mention the peculiarity of the date, and Eichmann could not very well mention it himself since, upon being asked a leading question by his lawyer, he confirmed, though somewhat reluctantly, that he had given the statement under duress, while tied to the bed in the Buenos Aires suburb. The prosecutor, who may have known better, did not cross-examine him on this point; clearly, the less said about this matter the better.) Mrs. Eichmann had notified the Argentine police of her husband's disappearance, but without revealing his identity, so no check of railway stations, highways, and airfields was made. The Israelis were lucky, they would never have been able to spirit Eichmann out of the country ten days after his capture if the police had been properly alerted.

Eichmann provided two reasons for his astounding cooperation with the trial authorities. (Even the judges who insisted that Eichmann was simply a liar had to admit that they knew no answer to the question: "Why did the accused confess before Superintendent Less to a number of incriminating details of which, on the face of it, there could be no proof but for his confession, in particular to his journeys to the East, where he saw the atrocities with his own eyes?") In Argentina, years before his capture, he had written how tired he was of his anonymity, and the more he read about himself, the more tired he must have become. His second explanation, given in Israel, was more dramatic: "About a year and a half ago [i.e., in the spring of 1959], I heard from an acquaintance who had just returned from a trip to Germany that a certain feeling of guilt had seized some sections of German youth . . . and the fact of this guilt complex was for me as much of a landmark as, let us say, the landing of the first man-bearing rocket on the moon. It became an essential point of my inner life, around which many thoughts crystallized. This was why I did not escape ... when I knew the search commando was closing in on me... . After these conversations about the guilt feeling among young people in Germany, which made such a deep impression on me, I felt I no longer had the right to disappear. This is also why I offered, in a written statement, at the beginning of this examination . . . to hang myself in public. I wanted to do my part in lifting the burden of guilt from German youth, for these young people are, after all, innocent of the events, and of the acts of their fathers, during the last war" - which, incidentally, he was still calling, in another context, a "war forced upon the German Reich." Of course, all this was empty talk. What prevented him from returning to Germany of his own free will to give himself up? He was asked this question, and he replied that in his opinion German courts still lacked the "objectivity" needed for dealing with people like him. But if he did prefer to be tried by an Israeli court - as he somehow implied, and which was just barely possible - he could have spared the Israeli government much time and trouble. We have seen before that this kind of talk gave him feelings of elation, and indeed it kept him in something approaching good spirits throughout his stay in the Israeli prison. It even enabled him to look upon death with remarkable equanimity - "I know that the death sentence is in store for me," he declared at the beginning of the police examination.

There was some truth behind the empty talk, and the truth emerged quite clearly when the question of his defense was put to him. For obvious reasons, the Israeli government had decided to admit a foreign counselor, and on July 14, 1960, six weeks after the police examination had started, with Eichmann's explicit consent, he was informed that there were three possible counselors among whom he might choose, in arranging his defense - Dr. Robert Servatius, who was recommended by his family (Servatius had offered his services in a long-distance call to Eichmann's stepbrother in Linz), another German lawyer now residing in Chile, and an American law firm in New York, which had contacted the trial authorities. (Only Dr. Servatius' name was divulged.) There might, of course, be other possibilities, which Eichmann was entitled to explore, and he was told repeatedly that he could take his time. He did nothing of the sort, but said on the spur of the moment that he would like to retain Dr. Servatius, since he seemed to be an acquaintance of his stepbrother and, also, had defended other war criminals, and he insisted on signing the necessary papers immediately. Half an hour later, it occurred to him that the trial could assume "global dimensions," that it might become a "monster process," that there were several attorneys for the prosecution, and that Servatius alone would hardly be able "to digest all the material." He was reminded that Servatius, in a letter asking for power of attorney, had said that he "would lead a group of attorneys" (he never did), and the police officer added, "It must be assumed that Dr. Servatius won't appear alone. That would be a physical impossibility." But Dr. Servatius, as it turned out, appeared quite alone most of the time. The result of all this was that Eichmann became the chief assistant to his own defense counsel, and, quite apart from writing books "for future generations," worked very hard throughout the trial.

On June 29, 1961, ten weeks after the opening of the trial on April 11, the prosecution rested its case, and Dr. Servatius opened the case for the defense; on August 14, after a hundred and fourteen sessions, the main proceedings came to an end. The court then adjourned for four months, and reassembled on December 11 to pronounce judgment. For two days, divided into five sessions, the three judges read the two hundred and forty-four sections of the judgment. Dropping the prosecution's charge of "conspiracy," which would have made him a "chief war criminal," automatically responsible for everything which had to do with the Final Solution, they convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, although he was acquitted on some particulars. "Together with others," he had committed crimes "against the Jewish people," that is, crimes against Jews with intent to destroy the people, on four counts: (1) by "causing the killing of millions of Jews"; (2) by placing "millions of Jews under conditions which were likely to lead to their physical destruction"; (3) by "causing serious bodily and mental harm" to them; and (4) by "directing that births be banned and pregnancies interrupted among Jewish women" in Theresienstadt. But they acquitted him of any such charges bearing on the period prior to August, 1941, when he was informed of the Führer's order; in his earlier activities, in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, he had no intention "to destroy the Jewish people." These were the first four counts of the indictment. Counts 5 through 12 dealt with "crimes against humanity" - a strange concept in the Israeli law, inasmuch as it included both genocide if practiced against non-Jewish peoples (such as the Gypsies or the Poles) and all other crimes, including murder, committed against either Jews or non-Jews, provided that these crimes were not committed with intent to destroy the people as a whole. Hence, everything Eichmann had done prior to the Führer's order and all his acts against non-Jews were lumped together as crimes against humanity, to which were added, once again, all his later crimes against Jews, since these were ordinary crimes as well. The result was that Count 5 convicted him of the same crimes enumerated in Counts 1 and 2, and that Count 6 convicted him of having "persecuted Jews on racial, religious, and political grounds"; Count 7 dealt with "the plunder of property . . . linked with the murder . . . of these Jews," and Count 8 summed up all these deeds again as "war crimes," since most of them had been committed during the war. Counts 9 through 12 dealt with crimes against non-Jews: Count 9 convicted him of the "expulsion of . . . hundreds of thousands of Poles from their homes," Count 10 of "the expulsion of fourteen thousand Slovenes" from Yugoslavia, Count 11 of the deportation of "scores of thousands of Gypsies" to Auschwitz. But the judgment held that "it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction" - which meant that no genocide charge except the "crime against the Jewish people" was brought. This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it: he had remembered vaguely that this had been an order from Himmler, that no "directives" had existed for Gypsies as they existed for Jews, and that there had been no "research" done on the "Gypsy problem" - "origins, customs, habits, organization . . . folklore . . . economy." His department had been commissioned to undertake the "evacuation" of thirty thousand Gypsies from Reich territory, and he could not remember the details very well, because there had been no intervention from any side; but that Gypsies, like Jews, were shipped off to be exterminated he had never doubted. He was guilty of their extermination in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews. Count 12 concerned the deportation of ninety-three children from Lidice, the Czech village whose inhabitants had been massacred after the assassination of Heydrich; he was, however, rightly acquitted of the murder of these children. The last three counts charged him with membership in three of the four organizations that the Nuremberg Trials had classified as "criminal" - the S.S.; the Security Service, or S.D.; and the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. (The fourth such organization, the leadership corps of the National Socialist Party, was not mentioned, because Eichmann obviously had not been one of the Party leaders.) His membership in them prior to May, 1940, fell under the statute of limitations (twenty years) for minor offenses. (The Law of 1950 under which Eichmann was tried specifies that there is no statute of limitation for major offenses, and that the argument res judicata shall not avail - a person can be tried in Israel "even if he has already been tried abroad, whether before an international tribunal or a tribunal of a foreign state, for the same offense.") All crimes enumerated under Counts 1 through 12 carried the death penalty.

Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of "aiding and abetting" in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he himself had never committed an overt act. The judgment, to one's great relief, in a way recognized that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving him wrong on this point. For it was an important point; it touched upon the very essence of this crime, which was no ordinary crime, and the very nature of this criminal, who was no common criminal; by implication, it also took cognizance of the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded "the fatal instrument with [their] own hands." What the judgment had to say on this point was more than correct, it was the truth: "Expressing his activities in terms of Section 23 of our Criminal Code Ordinance, we should say that they were mainly those of a person soliciting by giving counsel or advice to others and of one who enabled or aided others in [the criminal] act." But "in such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated, on various levels and in various modes of activity - the planners, the organizers, and those executing the deeds, according to their various ranks - there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counseling and soliciting to commit a crime. For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands [my italics]."

What followed the reading of the judgment was routine. Once more, the prosecution rose to make a rather lengthy speech demanding the death penalty, which, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, was mandatory, and Dr. Servatius replied even more briefly than before: the accused had carried out "acts of state," what had happened to him might happen in future to anyone, the whole civilized world faced this problem, Eichmann was "a scapegoat," whom the present German government had abandoned to the court in Jerusalem, contrary to international law, in order to clear itself of responsibility. The competence of the court, never recognized by Dr. Servatius, could be construed only as trying the accused "in a representative capacity, as representing the legal powers vested in [a German court]" - as, indeed, one German state prosecutor had formulated the task of Jerusalem. Dr. Servatius had argued earlier that the court must acquit the defendant because, according to the Argentine statute of limitations, he had ceased to be liable to criminal proceedings against him on May 7, 1960, "a very short time before the abduction"; he now argued, in the same vein, that no death penalty could be pronounced because capital punishment had been abolished unconditionally in Germany.

Then came Eichmann's last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about "responsibilities," and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had "escaped and deserted" them - by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) "I am not the monster I am made out to be," Eichmann said. "I am the victim of a fallacy." He did not use the word "scapegoat," but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his "profound conviction that [he] must suffer for the acts of others." After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o'clock in the morning, the death sentence was pronounced.

Three months later, on March 22, 1962, review proceedings were opened before the Court of Appeal, Israel's Supreme Court, before five judges presided over by Itzhak Olshan. Mr. Hausner appeared again, with four assistants, for the prosecution, and Dr. Servatius, with none, for the defense. Counsel for the defense repeated all the old arguments against the competence of the Israeli court, and since all his efforts to persuade the West German government to start extradition proceedings had been in vain, he now demanded that Israel offer extradition. He had brought with him a new list of witnesses, but there was not a single one among them who could conceivably have produced anything resembling "new evidence." He had included in the list Dr. Hans Globke, whom Eichmann had never seen in his life and of whom he had probably heard for the first time in Jerusalem, and, even more startling, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who had been dead for ten years. The plaidoyer was an incredible hodgepodge, full of errors (in one instance, the defense offered as new evidence the French translation of a document that had already been submitted by the prosecution, in two other cases it had simply misread the documents, and so on), its carelessness contrasted vividly with the rather careful introduction of certain remarks that were bound to be offensive to the court: gassing was again a "medical matter"; a Jewish court had no right to sit in judgment over the fate of the children from Lidice, since they were not Jewish; Israeli legal procedure ran counter to Continental procedure - to which Eichmann, because of his national origin, was entitled - in that it required the defendant to provide the evidence for his defense, and this the accused had been unable to do because neither witnesses nor defense documents were available in Israel. In short, the trial had been unfair, the judgment unjust.

The proceedings before the Court of Appeal lasted only a week, after which the court adjourned for two months. On May 29, 1962, the second judgment was read - somewhat less voluminous than the first, but still fifty-one single-spaced legal-sized pages. It ostensibly confirmed the District Court on all points, and to make this confirmation the judges would not have needed two months and fifty-one pages. The judgment of the Court of Appeal was actually a revision of the judgment of the lower court, although it did not say so. In conspicuous contrast to the original judgment, it was now found that "the appellant had received no `superior orders' at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs"; he had, moreover, "eclipsed in importance all his superiors, including Müller." And, in reply to the obvious argument of the defense that the Jews would have been no better off had Eichmann never existed, the judges now stated that "the idea of the Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his accomplices." Israel's Supreme Court had not only accepted the arguments of the prosecution, it had adopted its very language.

The same day, May 29, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, President of Israel, received Eichmann's plea for mercy, four handwritten pages, made "upon instructions of my counsel," together with letters from his wife and his family in Linz. The President also received hundreds of letters and telegrams from all over the world, pleading for clemency; outstanding among the senders were the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the representative body of Reform Judaism in this country, and a group of professors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, headed by Martin Buber, who had been opposed to the trial from the start, and who now tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to intervene for clemency. Mr. Ben-Zvi rejected all pleas for mercy on May 31, two days after the Supreme Court had delivered its judgment, and a few hours later on that same day - it was a Thursday - shortly before midnight, Eichmann was hanged, his body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside Israeli waters.

The speed with which the death sentence was carried out was extraordinary, even if one takes into account that Thursday night was the last possible occasion before the following Monday, since Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are all religious holidays for one or another of the three denominations in the country. The execution took place less than two hours after Eichmann was informed of the rejection of his plea for mercy; there had not even been time for a last meal. The explanation may well be found in two last-minute attempts Dr. Servatius made to save his client - an application to a court in West Germany to force the government to demand Eichmann's extradition, even now, and a threat to invoke Article 25 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Neither Dr. Servatius nor his assistant was in Israel when Eichmann's plea was rejected, and the Israeli government probably wanted to close the case, which had been going on for two years, before the defense could even apply for a stay in the date of execution.

The death sentence had been expected, and there was hardly anyone to quarrel with it; but things were altogether different when it was learned that the Israelis had carried it out. The protests were short-lived, but they were widespread and they were voiced by people of influence and prestige. The most common argument was that Eichmann's deeds defied the possibility of human punishment, that it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such magnitude - which, of course, was true, in a sense, except that it could not conceivably mean that he who had murdered millions should for this very reason escape punishment. On a considerably lower level, the death sentence was called "unimaginative," and very imaginative alternatives were proposed forthwith - Eichmann "should have spent the rest of his life at hard labor in the arid stretches of the Negev, helping with his sweat to reclaim the Jewish homeland," a punishment he would probably not have survived for more than a single day, to say nothing of the fact that in Israel the desert of the south is hardly looked upon as a penal colony; or, in Madison Avenue style, Israel should have reached "divine heights," rising above "the understandable, legal, political, and even human considerations," by calling together "all those who took part in the capture, trial, and sentencing to a public ceremony, with Eichmann there in shackles, and with television cameras and radio to decorate them as the heroes of the century."

Martin Buber called the execution a "mistake of historical dimensions," as it might "serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany" - an argument that oddly echoed Eichmann's own ideas on the matter, though Buber hardly knew that he had wanted to hang himself in public in order to lift the burden of guilt from the shoulders of German youngsters. (It is strange that Buber, a man not only of eminence but of very great intelligence, should not see how spurious these much publicized guilt feelings necessarily are. It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky - not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. Those young German men and women who every once in a while - on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial - treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.) Professor Buber went on to say that he felt "no pity at all" for Eichmann, because he could feel pity "only for those whose actions I understand in my heart," and he stressed what he had said many years ago in Germany - that he had "only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part" in the acts of the Third Reich. This lofty attitude was, of course, more of a luxury than those who had to try Eichmann could afford, since the law presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn. As far as I know, Buber was the only philosopher to go on public record on the subject of Eichmann's execution (shortly before the trial started, Karl Jaspers had given a radio interview in Basel, later published in Der Monat, in which he argued the case for an international tribunal); it was disappointing to find him dodging, on the highest possible level, the very problem Eichmann and his deeds had posed.

Least of all was heard from those who were against the death penalty on principle, unconditionally; their arguments would have remained valid, since they would not have needed to specify them for this particular case. They seem to have felt - rightly, I think - that this was not a very promising case on which to fight.

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore no "time to waste." He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. "I don't need that," he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was "elated" and he forgot that this was his own funeral.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:55 am

PART 1 OF 2

Epilogue

The irregularities and abnormalities of the trial in Jerusalem were so many, so varied, and of such legal complexity that they overshadowed during the trial, as they have in the surprisingly small amount of post-trial literature, the central moral, political, and even legal problems that the trial inevitably posed. Israel herself, through the pre-trial statements of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and through the way the accusation was framed by the prosecutor, confused the issues further by listing a great number of purposes the trial was supposed to achieve, all of which were ulterior purposes with respect to the law and to courtroom procedure. The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else; even the noblest of ulterior purposes - "the making of a record of the Hitler regime which would withstand the test of history," as Robert G. Storey, executive trial counsel at Nuremberg, formulated the supposed higher aims of the Nuremberg Trials - can only detract from the law's main business: to weigh the charges brought against the accused, to render judgment, and to mete out due punishment.

The judgment in the Eichmann case, whose first two sections were written in reply to the higher-purpose theory as it was expounded both inside and outside the courtroom, could not have been clearer in this respect and more to the point: All attempts to widen the range of the trial had to be resisted, because the court could not "allow itself to be enticed into provinces which are outside its sphere. . . . the judicial process has ways of its own, which are laid down by law, and which do not change, whatever the subject of the trial may be." The court, moreover, could not overstep these limits without ending "in complete failure." Not only does it not have at its disposal "the tools required for the investigation of general questions," it speaks with an authority whose very weight depends upon its limitation. "No one has made us judges" of matters outside the realm of law, and "no greater weight is to be attached to our opinion on them than to that of any person devoting study and thought" to them. Hence, to the question most commonly asked about the Eichmann trial: What good does it do?, there is but one possible answer: It will do justice. The objections raised against the Eichmann trial were of three kinds. First, there were those objections that had been raised against the Nuremberg Trials and were now repeated: Eichmann was tried under a retroactive law and appeared in the court of the victors. Second, there were those objections that applied only to the Jerusalem court, in that they questioned either its competence as such or its failure to take into account the act of kidnaping. And, finally, and most important, there were objections to the charge itself, that Eichmann had committed crimes "against the Jewish people," instead of "against humanity," and hence to the law under which he was tried; and this objection led to the logical conclusion that the only proper court to try these crimes was an international tribunal.

The court's reply to the first set of objections was simple: the Nuremberg Trials were cited in Jerusalem as valid precedent, and, acting under municipal law, the judges could hardly have done otherwise, since the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 was itself based on this precedent. "This particular legislation," the judgment pointed out, "is totally different from any other legislation usual in criminal codes," and the reason for its difference lies in the nature of the crimes it deals with. Its retroactivity, one may add, violates only formally, not substantially, the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege, since this applies meaningfully only to acts known to the legislator; if a crime unknown before, such as genocide, suddenly makes its appearance, justice itself demands a judgment according to a new law; in the case of Nuremberg, this new law was the Charter (the London Agreement of 1945), in the case of Israel, it was the Law of 1950. The question is not whether these laws were retroactive, which, of course, they had to be, but whether they were adequate, that is, whether they applied only to crimes previously unknown. This prerequisite for retroactive legislation had been seriously marred in the Charter that provided for the establishment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and it may be for this reason that the discussion of these matters has remained somewhat confused.

The Charter accorded jurisdiction over three sorts of crimes: "crimes against peace," which the Tribunal called the "supreme international crime . . . in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"; "war crimes"; and "crimes against humanity." Of these, only the last, the crime against humanity, was new and unprecedented. Aggressive warfare is at least as old as recorded history, and while it had been denounced as "criminal" many times before, it had never been recognized as such in any formal sense. (None of the current justifications of the Nuremberg court's jurisdiction over this matter has much to commend it. It is true that Wilhelm II had been cited before a tribunal of the Allied powers after the First World War, but the crime the former German Kaiser had been charged with was not war but breach of treaties - and specifically, the violation of Belgium's neutrality. It is also true that the Briand-Kellogg pact of August, 1928, had ruled out war as an instrument of national policy, but the pact contained neither a criterion of aggression nor a mention of sanctions - quite apart from the fact that the security system that the pact was meant to bring about had collapsed prior to the outbreak of war.) Moreover, one of the judging countries, namely, Soviet Russia, was open to the tu-quoque argument. Hadn't the Russians attacked Finland and divided Poland in 1939 with complete impunity? "War crimes," on the other hand, surely no more unprecedented than the "crimes against peace," were covered by international law. The Hague and Geneva Conventions had defined these "violations of the laws or customs of war"; they consisted chiefly of ill-treatment of prisoners and of warlike acts against civilian populations. No new law with retroactive force was needed here, and the main difficulty at Nuremberg lay in the indisputable fact that here, again, the tu-quoque argument applied: Russia, which had never signed the Hague Convention (Italy, incidentally, had not ratified it either), was more than suspected of mistreatment of prisoners, and, according to recent investigations, the Russians also seem to be responsible for the murder of fifteen thousand Polish officers whose bodies were found at Katyn Forest (in the neighborhood of Smolensk, in Russia). Worse, the saturation bombing of open cities and, above all, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly constituted war crimes in the sense of the Hague Convention. And while the bombing of German cities had been provoked by the enemy, by the bombing of London and Coventry and Rotterdam, the same cannot be said of the use of an entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful weapon, whose existence could have been announced and demonstrated in many other ways. To be sure, the most obvious reason that the violations of the Hague Convention committed by the Allies were never even discussed in legal terms was that the International Military Tribunals were international in name only, that they were in fact the courts of the victors, and the authority of their judgment, doubtful in any case, was not enhanced when the coalition that had won the war and then undertaken this joint enterprise broke up, to quote Otto Kirchheimer, "before the ink on the Nuremberg judgments had time to dry." But this most obvious reason is neither the only nor, perhaps, the most potent reason that no Allied war crimes, in the sense of the Hague Convention, were cited and prosecuted, and it is only fair to add, that the Nuremberg Tribunal was at least very cautious about convicting the German defendants on charges that were open to the tu-quoque argument. For the truth of the matter was that by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of "criminal" warfare inevitable. It was precisely the distinction between soldier and civilian, between army and home population, between military targets and open cities, upon which the Hague Convention's definitions of war crimes rested, that had become obsolete. Hence, it was felt that under these new conditions war crimes were only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated.

This factor of gratuitous brutality was a valid criterion for determining what, under the circumstances, constituted a war crime. It was not valid for, but was unfortunately introduced into the fumbling definitions of, the only entirely new crime, the "crime against humanity," which the Charter (in Article 6-c) defined as an "inhuman act" - as though this crime, too, were a matter of criminal excess in the pursuit of war and victory. However, it was by no means this sort of wellknown offense that had prompted the Allies to declare, in the words of Churchill, that "punishment of war criminals [was] one of the principal war aims" but, on the contrary, reports of unheard-of atrocities, the blotting out of whole peoples, the "clearance" of whole regions of their native population, that is, not only crimes that "no conception of military necessity could sustain" but crimes that were in fact independent of the war and that announced a policy of systematic murder to be continued in time of peace. This crime was indeed not covered by international or municipal law, and, moreover, it was the only crime to which the tu-quoque argument did not apply. And yet there was no other crime in the face of which the Nuremberg judges felt so uncomfortable, and which they left in a more tantalizing state of ambiguity. It is perfectly true that - in the words of the French judge at Nuremberg, Donnedieu de Vabres, to whom we owe one of the best analyses of the trial (Le Procès de Nuremberg, 1947) - "the category of crimes against humanity which the Charter had let enter by a very small door evaporated by virtue of the Tribunal's judgment." The judges, however, were as little consistent as the Charter itself, for although they preferred to convict, as Kirchheimer says, "on the war crime charge, which embraced all the traditional common crimes, while underemphasizing as much as possible the charges of crimes against humanity," when it came to pronouncing sentence, they revealed their true sentiment by meting out their most severe punishment, the death penalty, only to those who had been found guilty of those quite uncommon atrocities that actually constituted a "crime against humanity," or, as the French prosecutor François de Menthon called it, with greater accuracy, a "crime against the human status." The notion that aggression is "the supreme international crime" was silently abandoned when a number of men were sentenced to death who had never been convicted of a "conspiracy" against peace.

In justification of the Eichmann trial, it has frequently been maintained that although the greatest crime committed during the last war had been against the Jews, the Jews had been only bystanders in Nuremberg, and the judgment of the Jerusalem court made the point that now, for the first time, the Jewish catastrophe "occupied the central place in the court proceedings, and [that] it was this fact which distinguished this trial from those which preceded it," at Nuremberg and elsewhere. But this is, at best, a half-truth. It was precisely the Jewish catastrophe that prompted the Allies to conceive of a "crime against humanity" in the first place, because, Julius Stone has written, in Legal Controls of International Conflict (1954), "the mass murder of the Jews, if they were Germany's own nationals, could only be reached by the humanity count." And what had prevented the Nuremberg Tribunal from doing full justice to this crime was not that its victims were Jews but that the Charter demanded that this crime, which had so little to do with war that its commission actually conflicted with and hindered the war's conduct, was to be tied up with the other crimes. How deeply the Nuremberg judges were aware of the outrage perpetrated against the Jews may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the only defendant to be condemned to death on a crime-against-humanity charge alone was Julius Streicher, whose specialty had been anti-Semitic obscenities. In this instance, the judges disregarded all other considerations.

What distinguished the trial in Jerusalem from those that preceded it was not that the Jewish people now occupied the central place. In this respect, on the contrary, the trial resembled the postwar trials in Poland and Hungary, in Yugoslavia and Greece, in Soviet Russia and France, in short, in all formerly Nazi-occupied countries. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had been established for war criminals whose crimes could not be localized, all others were delivered to the countries where they had committed their crimes. Only the "major war criminals" had acted without territorial limitations, and Eichmann certainly was not one of them. (This - and not, as was frequently maintained, his disappearance - was the reason he was not accused at Nuremberg; Martin Bormann, for instance, was accused, tried, and condemned to death in absentia.) If Eichmann's activities had spread all over occupied Europe, this was so not because he was so important that territorial limits did not apply to him but because it was in the nature of his task, the collection and deportation of all Jews, that he and his men had to roam the continent. It was the territorial dispersion of the Jews that made the crime against them an "international" concern in the limited, legal sense of the Nuremberg Charter. Once the Jews had a territory of their own, the State in Israel, they obviously had as much right to sit in judgment on the crimes committed against their people as the Poles had to judge crimes committed in Poland. All objections raised against the Jerusalem trial on the ground of the principle of territorial jurisdiction were legalistic in the extreme, and although the court spent a number of sessions discussing all these objections, they were actually of no great relevance. There was not the slightest doubt that Jews had been killed qua Jews, irrespective of their nationalities at the time, and though it is true that the Nazis killed many Jews who had chosen to deny their ethnic origin, and would perhaps have preferred to be killed as Frenchmen or as Germans, justice could be done even in these cases only if one took the intent and the purpose of the criminals into account.

Equally unfounded, I think, was the even more frequent argument against the possible partiality of Jewish judges - that they, especially if they were citizens of a Jewish State, were judging in their own cause. It is difficult to see how the Jewish judges differed in this respect from their colleagues in any of the other Successor trials, where Polish judges pronounced sentence for crimes against the Polish people, or Czech judges sat in judgment on what had happened in Prague and in Bratislava. (Mr. Hausner, in the last of his articles in the Saturday Evening Post, unwittingly added new fuel to this argument: he said that the prosecution realized at once that Eichmann could not be defended by an Israeli lawyer, because there would be a conflict between "professional duties" and "national emotions." Well, this conflict constituted the gist of all the objections to Jewish judges, and Mr. Hausner's argument in their favor, that a judge may hate the crime and yet be fair to the criminal, applies to the defense counsel as well: the lawyer who defends a murderer sures outside the courtroom made it inadvisable, to put it mildly, to charge an Israeli citizen with the defense of Eichmann. ) Finally, the argument that no Jewish State had existed at the time when the crime was committed is surely so formalistic, so out of tune with reality and with all demands that justice must be done, that we may safely leave it to the learned debates of the experts. In the interest of justice (as distinguished from the concern with certain procedures which, important in its own right, can never be permitted to overrule justice, the law's chief concern), the court, to justify its competence, would have needed to invoke neither the principle of passive personality - that the victims were Jews and that only Israel was entitled to speak in their names - nor the principle of universal jurisdiction, applying to Eichmann because he was hostis generis humani the rules that are applicable to piracy. Both theories, discussed at length inside and outside the Jerusalem courtroom, actually blurred the issues and obscured the obvious similarity between the Jerusalem trial and the trials that had preceded it in other countries where special legislation had likewise been enacted to ensure the punishment of the Nazis or their collaborators.

The passive-personality principle, which in Jerusalem was based upon the learned opinion of P. N. Drost, in Crime of State (1959), that under certain circumstances "the forum patriae victimae may be competent to try the case," unfortunately implies that criminal proceedings are initiated by the government in the name of the victims, who are assumed to have a right to revenge. This was indeed the position of the prosecution, and Mr. Hausner opened his address with the following words: "When I stand before you, judges of Israel, in this court, to accuse Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. Here with me at this moment stand six million prosecutors. But alas, they cannot rise to level the finger of accusation in the direction of the glass dock and cry out J'accuse against the man who sits there. . . . Their blood cries to Heaven, but their voice cannot be heard. Thus it falls to me to be their mouthpiece and to deliver the heinous accusation in their name." With such rhetoric the prosecution gave substance to the chief argument against the trial, that it was established not in order to satisfy the demands of justice but to still the victims' desire for and, perhaps, right to vengeance. Criminal proceedings, since they are mandatory and thus initiated even if the victim would prefer to forgive and forget, rest on laws whose "essence" - to quote Telford Taylor, writing in the New York Times Magazine - "is that a crime is not committed only against the victim but primarily against the community whose law is violated." The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole, and not because, as in civil suits, damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation. The reparation effected in criminal cases is of an altogether different nature; it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being "repaired," and it is the general public order that has been thrown out of gear and must be restored, as it were. It is, in other words, the law, not the plaintiff, that must prevail.

Even less justifiable than the prosecution's effort to rest its case on the passive-personality principle was the inclination of the court to claim competence in the name of universal jurisdiction, for it was in flagrant conflict with the conduct of the trial as well as with the law under which Eichmann was tried. The principle of universal jurisdiction, it was said, was applicable because crimes against humanity are similar to the old crime of piracy, and who commits them has become, like the pirate in traditional international law, hostis humani generis. Eichmann, however, was accused chiefly of crimes against the Jewish people, and his capture, which the theory of universal jurisdiction was meant to excuse, was certainly not due to his also having committed crimes against humanity but exclusively to his role in the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. Yet even if Israel had kidnaped Eichmann solely because he was hostis humani generis and not because he was hostis Judaeorum, it would have been difficult to justify the legality of his arrest. The pirate's exception to the territorial principle - which, in the absence of an international penal code, remains the only valid legal principle - is made not because he is the enemy of all, and hence can be judged by all, but because his crime is committed on the high seas, and the high seas are no man's land. The pirate, moreover, "in defiance of all law, acknowledging obedience to no flag whatsoever" (H. Zeisel, Britannica Book of the Year, 1962), is, by definition, in business entirely for himself; he is an outlaw because he has chosen to put himself outside all organized communities, and it is for this reason that he has become "the enemy of all alike." Surely, no one will maintain that Eichmann was in business for himself or that he acknowledged obedience to no flag whatsoever. In this respect, the piracy theory served only to dodge one of the fundamental problems posed by crimes of this kind, namely, that they were, and could only be, committed under a criminal law and by a criminal state.

The analogy between genocide and piracy is not new, and it is therefore of some importance to note that the Genocide Convention, whose resolutions were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, expressly rejected the claim to universal jurisdiction and provided instead that "persons charged with genocide . . . shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the States in the territory of which the act was committed or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction." In accordance with this Convention, of which Israel was a signatory, the court should have either sought to establish an international tribunal or tried to reformulate the territorial principle in such a way that it applied to Israel. Both alternatives lay definitely within the realm of possibility and within the court's competence. The possibility of establishing an international tribunal was cursorily dismissed by the court for reasons which we shall discuss later, but the reason no meaningful redefinition of the territorial principle was sought - so that the court finally claimed jurisdiction on the ground of all three principles: territorial as well as passive-personality and universal-jurisdiction, as though merely adding together three entirely different legal principles would result in a valid claim - was certainly closely connected with the extreme reluctance of all concerned to break fresh ground and act without precedents. Israel could easily have claimed territorial jurisdiction if she had only explained that "territory," as the law understands it, is a political and a legal concept, and not merely a geographical term. It relates not so much, and not primarily, to a piece of land as to the space between individuals in a group whose members are bound to, and at the same time separated and protected from, each other by all kinds of relationships, based on a common language, religion, a common history, customs, and laws. Such relationships become spatially manifest insofar as they themselves constitute the space wherein the different members of a group relate to and have intercourse with each other. No State of Israel would ever have come into being if the Jewish people had not created and maintained its own specific in-between space throughout the long centuries of dispersion, that is, prior to the seizure of its old territory. The court, however, never rose to the challenge of the unprecedented, not even in regard to the unprecedented nature of the origins of the Israel state, which certainly was closest to its heart and thought. Instead, it buried the proceedings under a flood of precedents - during the sessions of the first week of the trial, to which the first fifty-three sections of the judgment correspond - many of which sounded, at least to the layman's ear, like elaborate sophisms.

The Eichmann trial, then, was in actual fact no more, but also no less, than the last of the numerous Successor trials which followed the Nuremberg Trials. And the indictment quite properly carried in an appendix the official interpretation of the Law of 1950 by Pinhas Rosen, then Minister of Justice, which could not be clearer and less equivocal: "While other peoples passed suitable legislation for the punishment of the Nazis and their collaborators soon after the end of the war, and some even before it was over, the Jewish people . . . had no political authority to bring the Nazi criminals and their collaborators to justice until the establishment of the State." Hence, the Eichmann trial differed from the Successor trials only in one respect - the defendant had not been duly arrested and extradited to Israel; on the contrary, a clear violation of international law had been committed in order to bring him to justice. We mentioned before that only Eichmann's de facto statelessness enabled Israel to get away with kidnaping him, and it is understandable that despite the innumerable precedents cited in Jerusalem to justify the act of kidnaping, the only relevant one, the capture of Berthold Jakob, a Leftist German Jewish journalist, in Switzerland by Gestapo agents in 1935, was never mentioned. (None of the other precedents applied, because they invariably concerned a fugitive from justice who was brought back not only to the place of his crimes but to a court that had issued, or could have issued, a valid warrant of arrest-conditions that Israel could not have fulfilled.) In this instance, Israel had indeed violated the territorial principle, whose great significance lies in the fact that the earth is inhabited by many peoples and that these peoples are ruled by many different laws, so that every extension of one territory's law beyond the borders and limitations of its validity will bring it into immediate conflict with the law of another territory.

This, unhappily, was the only almost unprecedented feature in the whole Eichmann trial, and certainly it was the least entitled ever to become a valid precedent. (What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as a precedent?) Its justification was the unprecedentedness of the crime and the coming into existence of a Jewish State. There were, moreover, important mitigating circumstances in that there hardly existed a true alternative if one indeed wished to bring Eichmann to justice. Argentina had an impressive record for not extraditing Nazi criminals; even if there had been an extradition treaty between Israel and Argentina, an extradition request would almost certainly not have been honored. Nor would it have helped to hand Eichmann over to the Argentine police for extradition to West Germany; for the Bonn government had earlier sought extradition from Argentina of such well-known Nazi criminals as Karl Klingenfuss and Dr. Josef Mengele (the latter implicated in the most horrifying medical experiments at Auschwitz and in charge of the "selection") without any success. In the case of Eichmann, such a request would have been doubly hopeless, since, according to Argentine law, all offenses connected with the last war had fallen under the statute of limitation fifteen years after the end of the war, so that after May 7, 1960, Eichmann could not have been legally extradited anyway. In short, the realm of legality offered no alternative to kidnaping. Those who are convinced that justice, and nothing else, is the end of law will be inclined to condone the kidnaping act, though not because of precedents but, on the contrary, as a desperate, unprecedented and no-precedent-setting act, necessitated by the unsatisfactory condition of international law. In this perspective, there existed but one real alternative to what Israel had done: instead of capturing Eichmann and flying him to Israel, the Israeli agents could have killed him right then and there, in the streets of Buenos Aires. This course of action was frequently mentioned in the debates on the case and, somewhat oddly, was recommended most fervently by those who were most shocked by the kidnaping. The notion was not without merit, because the facts of the case were beyond dispute, but those who proposed it forgot that he who takes the law into his own hands will render a service to justice only if he is willing to transform the situation in such a way that the law can again operate and his act can, at least posthumously, be validated. Two precedents in the recent past come immediately to mind. There was the case of Shalom Schwartzbard, who in Paris on May 25, 1926, shot and killed Simon Petlyura, former hetman of the Ukrainian armies and responsible for the pogroms during the Russian civil war that claimed about a hundred thousand victims between 1917 and 1920. And there was the case of the Armenian Tehlirian, who, in 1921, in the middle of Berlin, shot to death Talaat Bey, the great killer in the Armenian pogroms of 1915, in which it is estimated that a third (six hundred thousand) of the Armenian population in Turkey was massacred. The point is that neither of these assassins was satisfied with killing "his" criminal, but that both immediately gave themselves up to the police and insisted on being tried. Each used his trial to show the world through court procedure what crimes against his people had been committed and gone unpunished. In the Schwartzbard trial, especially, methods very similar to those in the Eichmann trial were used. There was the same stress on extensive documentation of the crimes, but that time it was prepared for the defense (by the Comité des Délégations Juives, under the chairmanship of the late Dr. Leo Motzkin, which needed a year and a half to collect the material and then published it in Les Pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens 1917-1920, 1927), just as that time it was the accused and his lawyer who spoke in the name of the victims, and who, incidentally, even then raised the point about the Jews "who had never defended themselves." (See the plaidoyer of Henri Torrès in his book Le Procès des Pogromes, 1928).

Both men were acquitted, and in both cases it was felt that their gesture "signified that their race had finally decided to defend itself, to leave behind its moral abdication, to overcome its resignation in the face of insults," as Georges Suarez admiringly put it in the case of Shalom Schwartzbard.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Postby admin » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:55 am

PART 2 OF 2

The advantages of this solution to the problem of legalities that stand in the way of justice are obvious. The trial, it is true, is again a "show" trial, and even a show, but its "hero," the one in the center of the play, on whom all eyes are fastened, is now the true hero, while at the same time the trial character of the proceedings is safeguarded, because it is not "a spectacle with prearranged results" but contains that element of "irreducible risk" which, according to Kirchheimer, is an indispensable factor in all criminal trials. Also, the J'accuse, so indispensable from the viewpoint of the victim, sounds, of course, much more convincing in the mouth of a man who has been forced to take the law into his own hands than in the voice of a government-appointed agent who risks nothing. And yet - quite apart from practical considerations, such as that Buenos Aires in the sixties hardly offers either the same guarantees or the same publicity for the defendant that Paris and Berlin offered in the twenties - it is more than doubtful that this solution would have been justifiable in Eichmann's case, and it is obvious that it would have been altogether unjustifiable if carried out by government agents. The point in favor of Schwartzbard and Tehlirian was that each was a member of an ethnic group that did not possess its own state and legal system, that there was no tribunal in the world to which either group could have brought its victims. Schwartzbard, who died in 1938, more than ten years before the proclamation of the Jewish State, was not a Zionist, and not a nationalist of any sort; but there is no doubt that he would have welcomed the State of Israel enthusiastically, for no other reason than that it would have provided a tribunal for crimes that had so often gone unpunished. His sense of justice would have been satisfied. And when we read the letter he addressed from his prison in Paris to his brothers and sisters in Odessa - "Failes savoir daps les villes et dans les villages de Balta, Proskouro, Tzcherkass, Ouman, Jitomir . . . , portez-y le message édifiant: la colère juive a tiré sa vengeance! Le sang de l'assassin Petlioura, qui a jailli daps la ville mondiale, a Paris, . . . rappellera le crime féroce . . . commis envers le pauvre et abandonné people juif " - we recognize immediately not, perhaps, the language that Mr. Hausner actually spoke during the trial (Shalom Schwartzbard's language was infinitely more dignified and more moving) but certainly the sentiments and the state of mind of Jews all over the world to which it was bound to appeal.

I have insisted on the similarities between the Schwartzbard trial in 1927 in Paris and the Eichmann trial in 1961 in Jerusalem because they demonstrate how little Israel, like the Jewish people in general, was prepared to recognize, in the crimes that Eichmann was accused of, an unprecedented crime, and precisely how difficult such a recognition must have been for the Jewish people. In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered. This misunderstanding, almost inevitable if we consider not only the facts of Jewish history but also, and more important, the current Jewish historical self-understanding, is actually at the root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, these were "crimes" different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legalized the discrimination practiced before that by the German majority against the Jewish minority. According to international law, it was the privilege of the sovereign German nation to declare to be a national minority whatever part of its population it saw fit, as long as its minority laws conformed to the rights and guarantees established by internationally recognized minority treaties and agreements. International Jewish organizations therefore promptly tried to obtain for this newest minority the same rights and guarantees that minorities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe had been granted at Geneva. But even though this protection was not granted, the Nuremberg Laws were generally recognized by other nations as part of German law, so that it was impossible for a German national to enter into a "mixed marriage" in Holland, for instance. The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations. "Enforced emigration," however, or expulsion, which became official policy after 1938, did concern the international community, for the simple reason that those who were expelled appeared at the frontiers of other countries, which were forced either to accept the uninvited guests or to smuggle them into another country, equally unwilling to accept them. Expulsion of nationals, in other words, is already an offense against humanity, if by "humanity" we understand no more than the comity of nations. Neither the national crime of legalized discrimination, which amounted to persecution by law, nor the 'international crime of expulsion was unprecedented, even in the modern age. Legalized discrimination had been practiced by all Balkan countries, and expulsion on a mass scale had occurred after many revolutions. It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity - in the sense of a crime "against the human status," or against the very nature of mankind - appeared. Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity' would be devoid of meaning.

Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion, and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people, and that only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it. (The failure of the court to draw this distinction was surprising, because it had actually been made before by the former Israeli Minister of Justice, Mr. Rosen, who in 1950 had insisted on "a distinction between this bill [for crimes against the Jewish people] and the Law for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide," which was discussed but not passed by the Israeli Parliament. Obviously, the court felt it had no right to overstep the limits of municipal law, so that genocide, not being covered by an Israeli law, could not properly enter into its considerations.) Among the numerous and highly qualified voices that raised objections to the court in Jerusalem and were in favor of an international tribunal, only one, that of Karl Jaspers, stated clearly and unequivocally - in a radio interview held before the trial began and later published in Der Monat - that "the crime against the Jews was also a crime against mankind," and that "consequently the verdict can be handed down only by a court of justice representing all mankind." Jaspers proposed that the court in Jerusalem, after hearing the factual evidence, "waive" the right to pass sentence, declaring itself "incompetent" to do so, because the legal nature of the crime in question was still open to dispute, as was the subsequent question of who would be competent to pass sentence on a crime which had been committed on government orders. Jaspers stated further that one thing alone was certain: "This crime is both more and less than common murder," and though it was not a "war crime," either, there was no doubt that "mankind would certainly be destroyed if states were permitted to perpetrate such crimes." Jaspers' proposal, which no one in Israel even bothered to discuss, would, in this form, presumably have been impracticable from a purely technical point of view. The question of a court's jurisdiction must be decided before the trial begins; and once a court has been declared competent, it must also pass judgment. However, these purely formalistic objections could easily have been met if Jaspers had called not upon the court, but rather upon the state of Israel to waive its right to carry out the sentence once it had been handed down, in view of the unprecedented nature of the court's findings. Israel might then have had recourse to the United Nations and demonstrated, with all the evidence at hand, that the need for an international criminal court was imperative, in view of these new crimes committed against mankind as a whole. It would then have been in Israel's power to make trouble, to "create a wholesome disturbance," by asking again and again just what it should do with this man whom it was holding prisoner; constant repetition would have impressed on worldwide public opinion the need for a permanent international criminal court. Only by creating, in this way, an "embarrassing situation" of concern to the representatives of all nations would it be possible to prevent "mankind from setting its mind at ease" and "massacre of the Jews . . . from becoming a model for crimes to come, perhaps the small-scale and quite paltry example of future genocide." The very monstrousness of the events is "minimized" before a tribunal that represents one nation only.

This argument in favor of an international tribunal was unfortunately confused with other proposals based on different and considerably less weighty considerations. Many friends of Israel, both Jews and non-Jews, feared that the trial would harm Israel's prestige and give rise to a reaction against Jews the world over. It was thought that Jews did not have the right to appear as judges in their own case, but could act only as accusers; Israel should therefore hold Eichmann prisoner until a special tribunal could be created by the United Nations to judge him. Quite apart from the fact that Israel, in the proceedings against Eichmann, was doing no more than what all the countries which had been occupied by Germany had long since done, and that justice was at stake here, not the prestige of Israel or of the Jewish people, all these proposals had one flaw in common: they could too easily be countered by Israel. They were indeed quite unrealistic in view of the fact that the U.N. General Assembly had "twice rejected proposals to consider the establishment of a permanent international criminal court" (A.D.L. Bulletin). But another, more practical proposition, which usually is not mentioned precisely because it was feasible, was made by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress.

Goldmann called upon Ben-Gurion to set up an international court in Jerusalem, with judges from each of the countries that had suffered under Nazi occupation. This would not have been enough; it would have been only an enlargement of the Successor trials, and the chief impairment of justice, that it was being rendered in the court of the victors, would not have been cured. But it would have been a practical step in the right direction.

Israel, as may be remembered, reacted against all these proposals with great violence. And while it is true, as has been pointed out by Yosal Rogat (in The Eichmann Trial and the Rule of Law, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, 1962), that Ben-Gurion always "seemed to misunderstand completely when asked, `Why should he not be tried before an international court?,' " it is also true that those who asked the question did not understand that for Israel the only unprecedented feature of the trial was that, for the first time (since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans), Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people, that, for the first time, they did not need to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man - rights which, as no one knew better than they, were claimed only by people who were too weak to defend their "rights of Englishmen" and to enforce their own laws. (The very fact that Israel had her own law under which such a trial could be held had been called, long before the Eichmann trial, an expression of "a revolutionary transformation that has taken place in the political position of the Jewish people" - by Mr. Rosen on the occasion of the First Reading of the Law of 1950 in the Knesset.) It was against the background of these very vivid experiences and aspirations that Ben-Gurion said: "Israel does not need the protection of an International Court."

Moreover, the argument that the crime against the Jewish people was first of all a crime against mankind, upon which the valid proposals for an international tribunal rested, stood in flagrant contradiction to the law under which Eichmann was tried. Hence, those who proposed that Israel give up her prisoner should have gone one step further and declared: The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 is wrong, it is in contradiction to what actually happened, it does not cover the facts. And this would indeed have been quite true. For just as a murderer is prosecuted because he has violated the law of the community, and not because he has deprived the Smith family of its husband, father, and breadwinner, so these modern, state - employed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of mankind, and not because they killed millions of people. Nothing is more pernicious to an understanding of these new crimes, or stands more in the way of the emergence of an international penal code that could take care of them, than the common illusion that the crime of murder and the crime of genocide are essentially the same, and that the latter therefore is "no new crime properly speaking." The point of the latter is that an altogether different order is broken and an altogether different community is violated. And, indeed, it was because Ben-Gurion knew quite well that the whole discussion actually concerned the validity of the Israeli law that he finally reacted nastily, and not just with violence, against the critics of Israeli procedures: Whatever these "so-called experts" had to say, their arguments were "sophisms," inspired either by anti-Semitism, or, in the case of Jews, by inferiority complexes. "Let the world understand: We shall not give up our prisoner."

It is only fair to say that this was by no means the tone in which the trial was conducted in Jerusalem. But I think it is safe to predict that this last of the Successor trials will no more, and perhaps even less than its predecessors, serve as a valid precedent for future trials of such crimes. This might be of little import in view of the fact that its main purpose - to prosecute and to defend, to judge and to punish Adolf Eichmann - was achieved, if it were not for the rather uncomfortable but hardly deniable possibility that similar crimes may be committed in the future. The reasons for this sinister potentiality are general as well as particular. It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. The particular reasons that speak for the possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population "superfluous" even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

It is essentially for this reason: that the unprecedented, once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future, that all trials touching upon "crimes against humanity" must be judged according to a standard that is today still an "ideal." If genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth - least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere - can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the protection of international law. Success or failure in dealing with the hitherto unprecedented can lie only in the extent to which this dealing may serve as a valid precedent on the road international penal law. And this demand, addressed to the judges in such trials, does not overshoot the mark and ask for more than can reasonably be expected. International law, Justice Jackson pointed out at Nuremberg, "is an outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of accepted customs. Yet every custom has its origin in some single act.... Our own day has the right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthened international law." What Justice Jackson failed to point out is that, in consequence of this yet unfinished nature of international law, it has become the task of ordinary trial judges to render justice without the help of, or beyond the limitation set upon them through, positive, posited laws. For the judge, this may be a predicament, and he is only too likely to protest that the "single act" demanded of him is not his to perform but is the business of the legislator.

And, indeed, before we come to any conclusion about the success or failure of the Jerusalem court, we must stress the judges' firm belief that they had no right to become legislators, that they had to conduct their business within the limits of Israeli law, on the one side, and of accepted legal opinion, on the other. It must be admitted furthermore that their failures were neither in kind nor in degree greater than the failures of the Nuremberg Trials or the Successor trials in other European countries. On the contrary, part of the failure of the Jerusalem court was due to its all too eager adherence to the Nuremberg precedent wherever possible.

In sum, the failure of the Jerusalem court consisted in its not coming to grips with three fundamental issues, all of which have been sufficiently well known and widely discussed since the establishment of the Nuremberg Tribunal: the problem of impaired justice in the court of the victors; a valid definition of the "crime against humanity"; and a clear recognition of the new criminal who commits this crime.

As to the first of these, justice was more seriously impaired in Jerusalem than it was at Nuremberg, because the court did not admit witnesses for the defense. In terms of the traditional requirements for fair and due process of law, this was the most serious flaw in the Jerusalem proceedings. Moreover, while judgment in the court of the victors was perhaps inevitable at the close of the war (to Justice Jackson's argument in Nuremberg: "Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves," should be added the understandable feeling on the part of the Allies that they "who had risked everything could not admit neutrals" [Vabres]), it was not the same sixteen years later, and under circumstances in which the argument against the admission of neutral countries did not make sense.

As to the second issue, the findings of the Jerusalem court were incomparably better than those at Nuremberg. I have mentioned before the Nuremberg Charter's definition of "crimes against humanity" as "inhuman acts," which were translated into German as Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit - as though the Nazis had simply been lacking in human kindness, certainly the understatement of the century. To be sure, had the conduct of the Jerusalem trial depended entirely upon the prosecution, the basic misunderstanding would have been even worse than at Nuremberg. But the judgment refused to let the basic character of the crime be swallowed up in a flood of atrocities, and it did not fall into the trap of equating this crime with ordinary war crimes. What had been mentioned at Nuremberg only occasionally and, as it were, marginally - that "the evidence shows that . . . the mass murders and cruelties were not committed solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition" but were "part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations" - was in the center of the Jerusalem proceedings, for the obvious reason that Eichmann stood accused of a crime against the Jewish people, a crime that could not be explained by any utilitarian purpose; Jews had been murdered all over Europe, not only in the East, and their annihilation was not due to any desire to gain territory that "could be used for colonization by Germans." It was the great advantage of a trial centered on the crime against the Jewish people that not only did the difference between war crimes, such as shooting of partisans and killing of hostages, and "inhuman acts," such as "expulsion and annihilation" of native populations to permit colonization by an invader, emerge with sufficient clarity to become part of a future international penal code, but also that the difference between "inhuman acts" (which were undertaken for some known, though criminal, purpose, such as expansion through colonization) and the "crime against humanity," whose intent and purpose were unprecedented, was clarified. At no point, however, either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups - the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies - might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered.

Closely connected with this failure was the conspicuous helplessness the judges experienced when they were confronted with the task they could least escape, the task of understanding the criminal whom they had come to judge. Clearly, it was not enough that they did not follow the prosecution in its obviously mistaken description of the accused as a "perverted sadist," nor would it have been enough if they had gone one step further and shown the inconsistency of the case for the prosecution, in which Mr. Hausner wanted to try the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen and, at the same time, try in him "many like him," even the "whole Nazi movement and anti-Semitism at large." They knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel's case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly an terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual act hostis generis humani, commits his crime - under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. In this respect, the evidence in the Eichmann case was even more convincing than the evidence presented in the trial of the major war criminals, whose pleas of a clear conscience could be dismissed more easily because they combined with the argument of obedience to "superior orders" various boasts about occasional disobedience. But although the bad faith of the defendants was manifest, the only ground on which guilty conscience could actually be proved was the fact that the Nazis, and especially the criminal organizations to which Eichmann belonged, had been so very busy destroying the evidence of their crimes during the last months of the war. And this ground was rather shaky. It proved no more than recognition that the law of mass murder, because of its novelty, was not yet accepted by other nations; or, in the language of the Nazis, that they had lost their fight to "liberate" mankind from the "rule of subhumans," especially from the domination of the Elders of Zion; or, in ordinary language, it proved no more than the admission of defeat. Would any one of them have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won?

Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions "that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal" (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain "races" from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated. And if it is true that "justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done," then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address their defendant in something like the following terms:

"You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don't understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of `collective guilt,' according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them - things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.

"Luckily, we don't have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Political Science

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests