Eichmann Before Jerusalem

by Bettina Stangneth

  Adolf Eichmann came from a good middle-class home, and although National Socialist thought had taken hold even there, he had still learned enough about traditional bourgeois morality and general moral concepts to realize that most people would condemn what he had done. Even he knew that ideas like morality, conscience, justice, and so on existed, and he didn’t want to ignore fundamental questions pertaining to them. He had lofty aspirations for his worldview, and the set of ideological building blocks of National Socialism were never going to provide everything he needed. The court-appointed psychologist Shlomo Kulscár later said that Eichmann’s personality probably made him incapable of subordinating himself completely to any system he was presented with. Eichmann’s texts also demonstrate that he had reflected on National Socialist concepts and adapted them to his own ideas. In 1956, as a free man, he was above merely parroting the popular phrase about the “shame of Versailles.” Recently, the far right had begun to claim that the 1919 peace treaty was to blame for everything: it had been so unfair that it had driven the masses toward National Socialism. Eichmann’s use of the phrase is more differentiated: “Perhaps I was already an adherent of National Socialist thought before I properly grasped and understood the dishonor of Versailles.” He had other reasons for choosing his political direction, and in hindsight, National Socialism gave him an understanding of it: “To a certain extent, it molded into super-nationalism.”59 This was not the only way Eichmann remolded the National Socialist worldview to make it his own.

  Eichmann presents his answer to the question of his own personal guilt right at the start of this section. “Without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture, I find that I am not guilty before the law, and before my own conscience; and with me the people who were my subordinates during the war. For we were all … little cogs in the machine of the Head Office for Reich Security, and thus, during the war, little cogs in the great drivetrain of the murdering motor: war.” The oath of allegiance that bound everyone, “friend and foe,” was the “highest obligation that a person can enter into,” and everyone had to obey it. Across the world, leaders had really only given a single order: “the destruction of the enemy.”60 For Eichmann, the idea that the war had been a total, global one, in which the goal was to eliminate the enemy, was a simple statement of fact. His radical biologism led to the belief that a “final victory” was imperative: the unavoidable war between the races would leave only one remaining.

  The question Eichmann puts to himself in this section—“What about morality?”—is one for which he has a surprisingly provocative answer. “There are a number of moralities: a Christian morality, a morality of ethical values, a morality of war, a morality of battle. Which will it be?” Eichmann then applies his rhetorical skills to a complete demolition of the philosophical approach (even though he invokes philosophers to support his argument). What is the relative importance of morality versus power? Did not Socrates himself submit to law and order when he accepted his death sentence? “Socratic wisdom bows down before the law of the state. This is what the humanists teach us.” (In National Socialist thought, of course, humanists were effeminate fellows, with whom it would be impossible to win a war, as they refused to recognize that war was inevitable.) The leadership of the nation, Eichmann goes on to explain, has always stood above the thought of individuals. To illustrate, he brings in the Old Testament and also modern science: the church, too, recognizes the power of the state as the highest guiding principle on earth, and hierarchies exist even in an anthill. Eichmann founders only on the question of whether thinkers like Nietzsche and Kant could be useful to his argument. Did these two have “a clear German orientation”? “I doubt it,” he concludes, then encapsulates National Socialism’s basic mistrust of all scholarship in a single sentence: “I mean that philosophy is international,” and as such, he prefers to seek his answers without it.61 His own “inner morality” is all well and good, but the most important thing is always the will of the nation’s leaders—not simply because they have the power to force people to obey, but because they act only on behalf of the people. Therefore a person should not allow his inner morality to conflict with his orders; he should see that these orders are for the good of the people and carry them out with conviction. He, Eichmann, found an easy way to overcome this problem: “I found my parallels quite plainly and simply in nature. For the allegiance to the flag did not forbid self-willed [!] thought, even if the result of my thought and searching was somewhat negative for the will and the goals of the government, to which it was naturally subordinated. But the more I listened to the natural world, whether microcosm or macrocosm, the less injustice I found, not only in the demands made by the government of my people, to which I belong, but … also in the goals of our enemies’ governments and leaders. Everyone was in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.”62 In other words: everyone wanted total war, and that fact provided the legitimation for everyone to wage it, using every means necessary, both “conventional and unconventional.”63 A universal war of extermination also frees people to use unscrupulous violence. Even the use of death camps suddenly becomes an inventive battle tactic, made necessary by the “eternal fate of all organic beings, for which there is no consolation. It has always existed, and will always exist.” Eichmann has no trouble identifying with this notion or seeing the ideal parameters for his behavior within it. Thinking and morality are no longer international—only war. But it is völkisch alone that will be victorious, and only those who understand that fact will survive.

  In Israel, Eichmann told his astonished listeners that all his life he had oriented himself by Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. “I believe in Kant,” he said earnestly64—it was just that his orders had sometimes prevented him from acting according to his own beliefs. On being questioned further, he even managed to provide a passable definition of Kant’s categorical imperative, the wisdom of which he attempted to praise wholeheartedly.65 In 1956, as a free man, things were a little different.66 “The drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement,” he wrote.67 Who would choose to rely on an international approach like Kant’s, with his exhortations to individual responsibility and universal human categories, once you had realized it was all sophistry and levity? “From the tellurian worldview of Copernicus and Galileo, to the hyper-galactic worldview of Homo sapiens today: the law creates and expects order. The sick and the degenerate are the only exceptions.”68 This law, which creates order and destroys the sick and the “degenerate,” has nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. “I must obey it, so that a greater community, and I within it, can live. It was this thought that made me subordinate myself and obey.”69 A few weeks later, in the Sassen circle, Eichmann said that anyone claiming they had suffered a crisis of conscience during the war was lying: telling oneself in hindsight that one had only been acting on orders “is cheap hokum, it’s an excuse.” And “humanitarian views” only helped people “hide comfortably behind regulations, decrees and laws.”70

  Eichmann completely rejected traditional ideas of morality, in favor of the no-holds-barred struggle for survival that nature demanded. He identified entirely with a way of thinking that said any form of contemplation without clear reference to blood and soil was outdated and, most of all, dangerous. Here, reason, justice, and freedom were not permissable central concepts of human society. The very idea of a common understanding among all people was a betrayal—to the minds of both Eichmann and his Führer. For one thing, the Germans’ superior might came from their ethnicity, and for another, the world didn’t have room for everyone. The struggle among the races was in essence a struggle for resources—a basic idea familiar to many people concerned about future wars over oil and drinking water today. However, Eichmann refused to countenance the idea that there might be room for a mutually agreeable solution. The only thing that mattered was one’s own people. “What is right, is what aids the people,”71 and no one apart from one’s own people had any r
ights. Philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories and a global orientation, was an error, because it sought universals and did not accept dependence on ethnicity. Its outlook (and here Eichmann is quite correct) was fundamentally “international.” As such, philosophy has no homeland, but—and it is crucial to realize this connection—to the purveyors of Nazi ideology, philosophy had a people. According to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s tirades, there was one “race” that, having no homeland, had an international bent and revered the unbounded freedom of the mind: the Jews. “The Jewish intellect,” says a typical Nazi publication, “breaks away from the soil in which it is rooted and makes a rootless existence for itself.” Furthermore, the Jewish attitude of mind “breaks apart the German human and undermines the German way of life,” because it is not an “ethnically based thought.”72 Only an ethnic thought makes it possible to build a national character, and humanitarian talk only allows this character to become confused and weakened. In an ideology that sees reconnecting with “blood and soil” as the only means of survival, any international outlook mutates into the ultimate threat. This threat must be destroyed before a global morality destroys concepts of the German ethnic morality and undermines German defenses. Or as the head of the NSDAP Head Office for Racial Politics clearly stated in 1939: “There can be no possible agreement with systems of thoughts of an international nature, because at bottom these are not true and not honest, but based on a monstrous lie, namely the lie of the equality of all human beings.”73 In the Argentina Papers, Eichmann leaves us in no doubt about his own orientation toward these categories of thinking.

  In Jerusalem, Eichmann spoke rather differently of philosophy and philosophers, in particular Kant, who he said had always provided the guiding principle of his thought. This statement was a bit much to swallow coming from a mass murderer, and even if Eichmann did manage to demonstrate considerable knowledge of Kant’s fundamental moral concepts, his views on philosophy and National Socialism drew sneers from the trial observers. Hannah Arendt wrote of Eichmann’s “rather modest mental gifts” and his “vague notion” of the philosophical dimension of the obedience issue.74 The historians followed her lead, dismissing Eichmann’s words as paradoxical drivel and pseudophilosophy, rendering them a mere curiosity for the footnotes. But this was both overly hasty and dangerous. Arendt judged him on the basis of the few statements he made during his interrogation and trial. She was unaware of Eichmann’s lengthy essays. She didn’t know about the pieces he wrote in Israel, in which he elaborated on his supposed love of Kant, or about his debate on religious philosophy with the radical theologist William L. Hull. These texts, along with other sources, were withheld from the trial observers, so Arendt couldn’t know that Eichmann planned to base his closing statement almost entirely on Immanuel Kant, before his lawyer talked him out of the idea.75 What Arendt did correctly observe was that Eichmann was deliberately posturing as a student of philosophy. She just drew the wrong conclusion, imagining that the main reason for this pose was foppish vanity and a lack of rhetorical skill and philosophical knowledge. A person who does philosophy herself is often reluctant to accept that someone could be familiar with the basics of philosophy but not willing to embrace its guidance, and this must have played a role in Arendt’s assumption that hers was the only possible conclusion. But Eichmann, as the records from Israel reveal, was capable of powerful arguments. Avner W. Less, who spent almost three hundred hours interrogating him, described him as a “self-made man, with good knowledge, very intelligent, very skillful.… He tends to listen for the form my question will take, and adjust himself to it accordingly.”76 Eichmann was familiar with philosophical ideas that were by no means part of a general education: in addition to Kant, Nietzsche, and Plato, he also mentioned Schopenhauer and—in all seriousness—Spinoza, the greatest Jewish philosopher. From his cell, he conducted a debate on the principles of religious philosophy with a fundamentalist Christian. He was desperate to win him over to the far-right cause, and some of his arguments were so masterfully constructed that the theologian exclaimed in exasperation: “If you had stuck to your childish beliefs and not gotten involved in the philosophical ideas of Spinoza and Kant, you could now be living a normal, happy life.”77 Religion is seen as a private matter in enlightened nations, so even Eichmann-in-Jerusalem didn’t have to hide what he thought—especially as this religious debate began only after the trial was over. In contrast to his writing on the question of guilt, Eichmann didn’t have to think tactically to avoid incriminating himself. If he seems far more cautious and wooden in his other texts, that is because everything he said in Israel was an attempt to disguise his own systematic thinking. Such thought obviously existed, as a comparison with the Argentina Papers shows, but in Israel he took pains to paint himself as precisely the type of benevolent humanist and admirer of philosophy that he had sought to destroy while the Nazis were in power. He just hadn’t had much of a chance to practice this role.

  Of course, the task of listening carefully to a man like Adolf Eichmann as he expounds his philosophical thoughts is far from easy, but the fact that he wrote about them gives us a rare chance to take a peek behind the front he presented in Jerusalem. His real convictions are to be found in the Argentina Papers, which describe a nonvitalist philosophy of inescapable natural laws. Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things. But if we call this thought “pseudo-philosophy,” we run the risk of underestimating a dangerous dogma of pure natural causality that does not allow for freedom. We are also wasting the opportunity to fight this revocation of the Enlightenment and the proclamation of a science with no moral requirement. Instead of countering this declaration of war on philosophy with something better, we expose ourselves to the suspicion that we are idealizing philosophy in and of itself. But philosophy is not automatically good. There, too, we find dangerous wrong turns, for which dilettantes in SS uniforms like Eichmann are not the only ones to blame. “We have freed ourselves from the idealization of a groundless and powerless thought. We are seeing the end of a philosophy that is subservient to it.” These words were spoken in 1933 by a man who not only called for an “ethnic science,” but was also convinced that the “mental world of a people” was “the power of preserving the strength that lies in its blood and soil,” understood as “the power that excites the deepest feeling and shakes the furthest reaches of existence.” This man was Martin Heidegger.78 His name was also known to Adolf Eichmann. Shortly before his execution, Eichmann asked his brother to find out what this German philosopher thought about the last rites. “Not that I would presume to liken myself to this great thinker in anything, but it would be important to me with regard to my relationship with Christianity.”79 It is not known whether Heidegger replied.

  For Eichmann, ideology was not a pastime or a theoretical superfluity but the fundamental authorization for his actions. Explaining, disseminating, and implementing it was therefore also a means of gaining power. Eichmann wanted power but not via capricious acts, ruthless aggression, a uniform, or an order; it had to be legitimated by a system of thought and values that allowed his actions to seem “right.” He wanted his authorization to come from within. He was seeking self-authorization, to act according to his own convictions. He didn’t make things easy for himself, as his theory of legitimation didn’t conform to the usual Nazi slogans. What Eichmann presents in his 1956 draft is a National Socialist worldview that deviates from the worldview of other National Socialists on crucial points. Unlike Alfred Rosenberg and the official propaganda (which attempted to co-opt every famous German for the Nazi cause), he didn’t think Kant could simply be incorporated into the new “German thought.” Eichmann didn’t subscribe to the notion that the categorical imperative actually meant “live according to your nature and defend the values of your race,” as the self-appointed mastermind of the Third Reich proclaimed.80 He obviously realized that neither Kantian teaching nor any other philos
ophy could be reconciled with the racial-biological struggle. For him, Kant represented the same “so-called” morality that made life difficult when you were trying to implement an extermination policy. Kant’s thinking was not “ethnic” but “international.” This position is evidence of Eichmann’s consistently National Socialist attitude but also the consistency in his desire for total power. The power of fundamentalist thought is much greater than the power of an order given by a superior. That authority would still hold when all his superiors were dead and he was sitting on a rabbit farm in Argentina. With this in mind, Simon Wiesenthal was wrong to suggest that Eichmann would have persecuted red-haired or blue-eyed people with the same commitment if someone had ordered him to. The reason Eichmann was so receptive to the totalitarian system was that he was already in thrall to totalitarian thought. An ideology that scorns human life can be very appealing if you happen to be a member of the master race that proclaims it, and if it legitimates behavior that would be condemned by any traditional concept of justice and morality. Eichmann wanted to do what he did, but above all, he wanted respect for having done the right thing. And he wanted to proselytize. That is what makes his writings so sickening.

  Eichmann consistently placed his hope in “generations to come”—a phrase he never tired of repeating. He wanted to change the way they thought, if only so that they would acquit him of this charge of mass murder. That charge could be made only by people who had not yet grasped true National Socialism, and who were still being spoon-fed by foreign powers. If you believed in the final battle of the races, the battle could never be over as long as a single enemy was still alive. On his farm, surrounded by thousands of rabbits and chickens, Eichmann no longer had much chance to exterminate the enemy, so all that remained to him was to argue against what he saw as the “intellectual schooling” of Judaism. In 1956 he arrived back where he had started in the early 1930s: waging “ideological warfare.” He wanted to win this battle for interpretational sovereignty “using conventional and unconventional means.” The immense quantity of text he produced expresses his need to justify his actions, but even more his desire to become a demagogue, forcing his vision upon people with the power of his persuasive rhetoric. This desire also came from inside the hermetic seal of racial theory: having a strong argument in a closed system means having power, and power over people was something Eichmann missed terribly, now that he was anonymous.