However, it was not just history that separated Arendt from the prosecution. Her view of how the trial should be constructed was as narrow and formalistic as Hausner’s was expansive. She believed the trial should be limited to Eichmann’s deeds—“not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.” Hausner’s decision to give pride of place to the victims, particularly those with no direct connection to Eichmann, infuriated her. She considered most of the witnesses entirely irrelevant. Her view of what the trial should be was far closer to the judges’ than Hausner’s. Not only did she completely differ with Hausner’s forensic premise, but she was incensed by his courtroom style. She grew infuriated as he allowed the witnesses to tell their stories in an unrestrained fashion. She considered the trial a Ben-Gurion–orchestrated and Hausner-executed “mass meeting” designed to affirm Zionist ideology and highlight the notion of us (Israelis) versus them (the rest of the world).9
In her letters from the trial, she voiced a personal disdain for Israel that bordered on anti-Semitism and racism. In a letter to her husband she complained that “honest and clean people were at a premium.” She described to her teacher and friend Karl Jaspers the “peies [side curl] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here.” She was full of praise for the judges, but even that contained a note of German Jewish disdain for Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews. The judges were “the best of Germany Jewry,” whereas Hausner was “a typical Galician Jew.… one of those people who don’t know any language.” (Since he presented his case in multiple languages, she may have meant that his German was not up to her standard.) He spoke “without periods or commas … like a diligent schoolboy who wants to show off everything he knows.… [He has a] ghetto mentality.”10 She had shown her contempt for East European émigrés and their concerns as early as 1944, when she denigrated the European émigré press in the United States for “worrying their heads off over the pettiest boundary disputes in a Europe thousands and thousands of miles away—such as whether Teschen belongs to Poland or Czechoslovakia, or Vilna to Lithuania instead of to Poland.” As Tony Judt observed, “No ‘Ost-Jud’ would have missed the significance of these disputes.”11 Her scorn for Hausner’s Eastern European roots are noteworthy given that she had Russian grandparents and her mother spoke German with a thick Russian accent. (It is striking that one of her closest friends, Alfred Kazin, who spent great swaths of time with Arendt and her husband, learned of this only in a 1985 biography.) Her comments about Hausner typified her inclination to adopt, according to Bernard Wasserstein, “the virulent vocabulary and imagery of anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont and J. A. Hobson in denouncing Jewish capitalists.”12
However, it was Middle Eastern, often called Oriental, Jews who elicited her most acerbic comments. “The country’s interest in the trial has been artificially whetted. An oriental mob that would hang around any place where something is going on is hanging around in front of the courthouse.” (In another letter, she again used the term “oriental mob.” It was clearly not a slip.) She felt as if she were in “Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.” She showed particular contempt for the Israeli police, many of whom were of Middle Eastern origin. “Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order.”13 Such a comment by Arendt, who believed this trial was about obeying orders, gives one pause. Her critic and longtime friend, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem would accuse her of “suffering from a lack of ahavat Yisrael,” love of the Jewish people.14 Had he known of these comments, he might have accused her of far more. Even the fact that the trial was being conducted in Hebrew, Israel’s official language and one she had trouble learning, irked her.15 She described the “comedy of speaking Hebrew when everyone involved knows German and thinks in German.”16
Her critique of Israel spilled over into her analysis of aspects of the trial. At one point, Hausner mentioned the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited marriages between Jews and “Aryans.” Arendt described his references to the law as “breathtaking” in both “irony” and “naïveté” because, she claimed, Israel had a similar law. How could the attorney general criticize Nazi Germany when Israel also banned such marriages? Arendt overstated the case. There is no Israeli agency empowered to perform civil marriages, even those between coreligionists of any faith. However, any marriage performed elsewhere, including a mixed marriage, is fully legal and is recognized as such by the Israeli government. (The fact that there is no civil authority in Israel that can perform marriages rightfully upsets many Israelis, as does the exclusive power the Orthodox rabbinate has in relation to Jewish marriages.17)
While these comments about Israelis are troubling, it was her evaluation of the relationship between the victims and the perpetrators that unleashed the avalanche of criticism. Where others saw Nazi intimidation of the Jewish leaders, she saw cooperation, if not collaboration. Whereas her critics saw one side holding all the cards and the other with none, she saw a level playing field. Her critique began with the Zionists. Arendt argued that the Nazis considered Zionists “decent” Jews because, in contrast to assimilated Jews, they thought in “national” terms. Without providing any data to justify her accusation, she charged that Zionists “spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann.” Accepting at full face value Eichmann’s protestation that his lifelong dream was to put land “under the feet of the Jews,” she described him as a Zionist. She asserted that his idea for settlements in Nisko and Madagascar were evidence of the Nazi regime’s “pro-Zionist policy.” She seemed to fail to consider the fact that the Third Reich was unequivocally opposed to the creation of an independent Jewish state and that the settlements envisioned by Eichmann and his cohorts would have been draconian police states in which the inhabitants would have been exterminated by “natural” means.
She considered the 1933 Ha’avara Agreement between the German and the Zionists an act of collaboration. As a means of enriching their own coffers and making life miserable for Jews, the Nazis blocked the funds of those Jews planning to emigrate. Most Jews could not get even a small portion of their assets out of Germany. (This is one of the enduring ironies of Nazi anti-Semitic policy. During the initial years of the Nazi regime, Reich policy was to get Jews to emigrate. Yet the Nazis placed numerous obstacles in the Jews’ path, often making it impossible for them to do so.) The Ha’avara Agreement allowed Jews immigrating to Palestine to transfer a portion of these blocked funds to the Zionist organization. The organization, in turn, bought German goods that were needed by the Palestinian Jewish community. When the émigrés arrived in Palestine, they received credit for their funds. This distasteful boycott-breaking arrangement was an effort to help Jews salvage some of their savings while developing the Yishuv’s infrastructure. At the same time, it worked to the Germans’ advantage by creating a market for German goods.18 However, it was hardly a form of collaboration. As with all other forms of negotiations Jewish groups had with the Reich during this period, the other side held all the cards.
But her critique of the relationship between Nazis and Jews reached its pinnacle in her attack on the Jewish Councils. She held them responsible for the death of millions, contending that, “if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” According to her, their “pathetic and sordid” behavior was the “darkest chapter” of the Holocaust. For her, it was darker than the mass shootings and the gas chambers, because it showed how the Germans could turn victim against victim. There are many problems with her argument. She ignored the fact that the Einsatzgruppen murdered tens of thousands of Jews during the first months after their entry into the eastern territories in the summer of 1941 without Jewish councils or community leaders serving, in her word
s, as “instruments of murder.”19 She not only ascribed to the councils more power than they had, but depicted thousands of council members with the same broad ahistorical brush. Some members acted heroically and some contemptuously. Some preserved lives, others worried only about their own. Some combined these traits. Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Łodź Judenrat, enjoyed a surfeit of material comforts while ghetto inhabitants starved. Showing megalomaniacal tendencies, he printed postage stamps embossed with his image and ordered the composition of odes of praise to him. He was convinced he could save the ghetto by transforming it into a vital economic resource that the Germans would be loath to destroy. When the Germans wanted to deport Jews, he gave up the elderly and demanded that parents surrender their children. Only workers were protected.
Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children.… I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid … (terrible wailing)…. Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved who can be saved and who have a chance of being saved and not those whom there is no chance to save in any case.…20
Though he is personally reviled, his plan almost succeeded. In August 1944, long after every ghetto had been liquidated, the Łodź Ghetto held thousands of Jews. With defeat in the offing, the Germans shipped them to Auschwitz. Had Soviet forces reached the city a bit earlier, Rumkowski might be lauded, not reviled. (During the final deportations, Rumkowski, who had become so habituated to obeying German orders, demanded that ghetto inhabitants obey German orders.) The ambiguity about this man was revealed to me early in my career, when I met a survivor of Łodź who told me where she had been. With a know-it-all cockiness all too symptomatic of young scholars, I contemptuously intoned, “Ah, Łodź. Rumkowski,” as if nothing more needed to be said. With an unvarnished rebuke, she declared: “By me he is a hero. I am alive because of him.” I was silent.
Arendt’s anger about the Judenrat issue was certainly exacerbated by what she considered the prosecution’s staged silence on the topic. She believed that Hausner was avoiding the issue because of Ben-Gurion’s desire not “to embarrass the Adenauer administration.” It is unclear, if not illogical, why Adenauer would have been embarrassed by this topic. The notion of Jewish “cooperation” would probably have been most comforting to many Germans: it might have soothed their consciences by suggesting that the victims were complicit in their own murder.21 Hausner did consciously avoid the topic because, unlike the Kasztner trial, this was to be a trial of the perpetrators, not the victims.
The members of the Judenrat were not the only Jews Arendt condemned. She also took aim at the Sonderkommandos, those Jews selected to work in the gas chambers. Their job was to deceive the victims before the gassing, so that they would go more submissively to the gas chambers. Before cremating the bodies, they checked their teeth for gold fillings and bodily orifices for sequestered valuables. Arendt described them as doing “the actual work of killing,” but somewhat cavalierly dismissed this as “no moral problem,” because, she declared with no historical proof, the SS chose “the criminal elements” for the job. Some indeed were criminals. Many were not. Arendt also failed to mention that they all would be dispatched to the gas chambers every few months, because they knew too much. A new group would replace them, until it, too, was sent to death. Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi offered a radically different assessment of Sonderkommandos, whom he, unlike Arendt, actually encountered in Auschwitz. His words penned in 1986 may have been written for her:
No one is authorized to judge them, not even those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not live through it. I would invite anyone who dares pass judgment to … imagine, if he can, that he has lived for months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue, promiscuity and humiliation; that he has seen die around him, one by one, his beloved; that he is cut off from the world, unable to receive or transmit news; that finally he is loaded on to a train, eighty or a hundred persons to a boxcar; that he travels towards the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and that he is thrown at last inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno.22
Arendt was also wrong in the case of Yehiel Dinur, Auschwitz survivor and author of popular novels on the Holocaust. (Arendt justifiably considered his work borderline pornographic.) He asked the court’s permission to testify using his pen name, Ka-Tzetnik, an inhabitant of the Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), but the court refused. As soon as he entered the witness box, he launched into a description of “the planet of Auschwitz.… The inhabitants … had no names.… They did not dress as we dress here.” Arendt believed that Dinur had insisted on testifying and Hausner had accepted even though Dinur had no connection to Eichmann. She fumed at his lyrical testimony. Dinur, she charged, could not distinguish “between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen … years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime.” She legitimately found it hard to abide his mythologizing of the Holocaust in lieu of testimony. Even Hausner recognized that Dinur’s metaphor-laden narrative would not please the court. The prosecutor rather demurely asked Dinur if he might “perhaps put a few questions to you, if you will consent?” Ignoring him, Dinur simply plowed on. When an impatient Judge Landau intervened to ask some questions, Dinur collapsed. Arendt described the moment:
[H]e started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted name.… He continued with a little excursion into astrology.… When he arrived at “the unnatural power above Nature” which had sustained him … even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this “testimony” and very timidly, very politely, interrupted.… Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as well.… In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions.
Contrary to what Arendt believed, Dinur had not volunteered: Hausner had pressured him to testify. Furthermore, he had actually met Eichmann, making his testimony relevant even according to Arendt’s limited scope for the trial. Dinur had a South American passport, which he took to Gestapo headquarters. Eichmann, who happened to be there, took the passport, tore it into little pieces, threw it in the garbage, and then mockingly asked, “Are you still a foreigner?”23 Finally, he did not just faint but fell into a deep coma, a fact reported in the Israeli press.
She was even more contemptuous of Rabbi Leo Baeck, the revered leader of German Liberal Judaism. Reluctant to abandon his flock, Baeck shunned multiple opportunities to emigrate. Imprisoned in Theresienstadt, he did not inform Jews there who volunteered for deportation that this meant an almost certain death. He feared that such knowledge would have rendered their last hours unbearable. Baeck was so pervasively attached to the idea of order that he may have been unable to fathom that Jews might somehow resist. He had, after all, asked the officers who came to deport him to wait while he paid his utility bills. Arendt accused him of compounding his failure to inform the victims of their fate by having the deportations organized by the Jewish policemen because “he assumed that they would be ‘more gentle and helpful’ and would ‘make the ordeal easier.’ ” In fact, Arendt posits they were often more brutal and corruptible, because “so much more was at stake for them.” (Though the Jewish police were often quite brutal, it is hard to imagine that they were more brutal than SS men.)
In The New Yorker she described Baeck, whom she met in 1945 in New York when she attended a dinner party in his honor, as being, “in the eyes of both Jews and Gentiles, the ‘Jewish Führer.’ ” There are legitimate grounds to question Baeck’s decisions, which denied the victims a chance to rise up, escape, or take some other action. However, Arendt’s description of him echoed the language of the enemy and suggested—whether she intended it or not—a siding with the Nazis. However, it did more than just that. It also came close to constituting plagiarism. Raul Hilberg had used thi
s term to describe Baeck in his magnum opus, The Destruction of European Jews. He, however, was quoting “one of Eichmann’s people,” who coined the title for Baeck. In the first edition of her book, Arendt retained the phrase. In subsequent editions, she dropped it. This was one of her only concessions to her critics.24
She was incensed when critics accused her of closing the gap between perpetrator and victim. However, sometimes it is hard not to interpret her statements as doing precisely that—such as when she wrote that the “majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.” She excoriated Hausner for asking witnesses why they did not resist. Yet her description of Jews going to their death with “submissive meekness,” “arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot” is riddled with the same contempt that she claimed Hausner showed for the victims. In an expression of her deep-seated ambivalence about the trial, she twice described the trial as a “court of the victors.”25
Though she correctly deduced that, contrary to Hausner’s exaggerated claims, Eichmann was not the linchpin of the Final Solution, she veered in the opposite direction. Using her Origins thesis as a context, she declared him a desk-level bureaucrat who showed little initiative and had few talents. (Hausner also called him a desk killer, but one possessed of great initiative and talents.) “Everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” She may well have reached this conclusion before coming to Jerusalem. Prior to the trial, she wrote that she did not want to miss the opportunity to analyze “this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.”26 She concluded that he showed no “fanatical anti-Semitism” and did not have an “insane hatred” of Jews. He exemplified the “banality of evil,” in which normal bureaucrats were simply unaware of the evil that they were doing. His seemingly out-of-touch comments—the train could hold three hundred extra Jews because they did not have luggage, he should have arrested a rabbi rather than try to hire one, and his horror that Less’s father was deported—led her to conclude that he could not “think”—that is to say, understand how he sounded to others. She failed to explain why, if Eichmann was unaware that what he was doing was wrong, he and other Nazi officials labored to destroy the evidence. Surely Arendt knew that Eichmann and his cohorts were aware of opposition to the Final Solution. Eichmann received communiqués from the Foreign Office relaying other governments’ distress at what was being done to their Jewish citizens. The only way she could have concluded that Eichmann was unaware was to give more credence to his demeanor and testimony at the trial than to what he actually did during the war. His words seemed to hold more sway with her than those of the victims. The memoir released by Israel for use in my trial reveals the degree to which Arendt was wrong about Eichmann. It is permeated with expressions of support for and full comprehension of Nazi ideology. He was no clerk. This was a well-read man who accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.
The Eichmann Trial Page 15