Eichmann in Jerusalem

Review

I’m not going to write a long review of Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s trial as I picked it up specifically to explore the elements of justice that are described therein. I also feel this is a difficult book to review; I have no historical expertise on the subject and am unqualified to evaluate anything about it other than, maybe, the prose. And the prose, I like. Arendt’s writing here—despite the topic—is quite a bit more “fun” than her writing in The Human Condition, in that she writes with a lot of irony and a dry humor.

There are a few passages I want to highlight:

Page 79:

Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died.

The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate their property.

The distinction between an order and the Fuhrer’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 Fuhrer’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.

[Discussing Denmark’r resistance.] 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 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. . .

Notes

• p5 - Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import . . . be left in abeyance. Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann . . . On trial are his deeds, not the suffering of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
• p6 - Justice . . . demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
• p43 - Jews . . . who had acquired German citizenship after August 2, 1914 . . . were to be denaturalized, which meant they were subject to expulsion.
• p48 - The German text of the taped police examination . . . constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.
• p48 - Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school—it amounted to a mild case of aphasia—he apologized, saying “Officialese” [Amtssprache] is my only language.” But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not cliché.
• p52 - And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.
• p53 - This outrageous cliché was no longer issued to them from above . . . you could almost see what an “extraordinary sense of elation” it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his mouth.
  • TB: referring to earlier Eichmann saying he wished to find peace with his former enemies.
• p57 - [Eichmann’s colleagues] were “nothing but office drudges,” for whom everything was decided “by paragraphs, by orders, who were interested in nothing else,” who were, in short, precisely such “small cogs” as, according to the defense, Eichmann himself had been.
  • TB: Odd desire for these people to claim to be “small cogs” when machinery breaks when even a small cog goes missing or pops from alignment.
• p79 - Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died.
• p85 - . . . all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid “language rules,” and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing” occur. The prescribed code names for killing were “final solution,” “evacuation” (Aussiedlung), and “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung). . .
• p95 - Thus, we are perhaps in a position to answer Judge Landau’s question—the question uppermost in the minds of nearly everyone who followed the trial—of whether the accused had a conscience: yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.
• p102 - In his almost totally unknown “Diary of a Man in Despair”, Reck-Malleczewen wrote, after he had heard of the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life, which of course he regretted: “A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of Germany and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who . . . without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal who is guilty of the murder of hundreds of thousands, burdened with the lamentations and the curse of the whole world; now you have betrayed him. . . . Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves—the same me who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.”
• p115 - The legal experts drew up the necessary legislation for making the victims stateless, which was important on two counts: it made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate, and it enabled the state in which they were resident to confiscate their property.
• p127 - The sinister Dr. Otto Bradfisch, former member of one of the Einsatzgruppen, who presided over the killing of at least fifteen thousand people, told a German court that he had been “inwardly opposed” to what he was doing. Perhaps the death of fifteen thousand people was necessary to provide him with an alibi in the eyes of “true Nazis.” (The same argument was advanced . . . by former Gauleiter Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau: only his “official soul” had carried out the crimes for which he was hanged in 1946, his “private soul” had always been against them.)
• p149-150 - The distinction between an order and the Fuhrer’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 Fuhrer’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.
  • TB: emphasis mine.
• p161 - 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 ([Arendt’s] italics).
• p165 - 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.
• p169 - 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 widespread hostility in Holland toward anti-Jewish 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.
• p171 - One is tempted to recommend the story [Denmark] 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. . . . only the Danes dared speak out on the subject [anti-Semitism, and their opposition to it] to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged ina 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. . . . When the Germans approached [the Danes] 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. [TB: emphasis mine] 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 had now been declared stateless by the German government.
  • TB: This whole range on the Danish government is really interesting as a study in lack of compliance, not complying in advance, etc.
• p175 - [Discussing Denmark’r resistance.] 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 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. . .
• p185 - Schäfer had to stand trial . . . For the gassing of 6,280 women and children, he was sentenced to six years and six months in prison.
• p190 - 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.
  • TB: should give real pause to the thought of mitigation, at least reflection as to what mitigation means and what is actually being done.
• p254 - 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.
• p289 - Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.