The Eichmann Trial

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Yet there is another side to Arendt’s analysis, one that has been unduly ignored by her critics. Her evaluation of the trial is actually more complex than those who have vilified her would acknowledge. Lost in the furor was the fact that not only did she and her most ardent critics share certain opinions, but that she powerfully articulated some of the most basic lessons of this horrific moment in history.

  Though she was castigated as being anti-Israel, she believed that Israel was justified in kidnapping Eichmann, since there was no alternative route to bring him to justice. She supported holding the trial in Israel, the “country in which the injured parties and those who happened to survive are.” When Karl Jaspers disagreed, she wrote him a letter that is remarkable for its use of the first person plural. “We kidnapped a man who was indicted in the first trial in Nuremberg.… We abducted him from Argentina because Argentina has the worst possible record for the extradition of war criminals.… We did not take the man to Germany but to our own country.” (Emphasis added.)27 Israel, she insisted, “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.” She considered the charge that Jewish judges would be biased “unfounded,” wondering why the partiality of Jewish judges should be any more in question than that of the Polish or Czech judges who had presided over war-crimes trials in their countries. She dismissed the contention that, since Israel did not exist at the time of the crime, it did not have jurisdiction, as “legalistic in the extreme,” as well as “formalistic [and] out of tune with reality and with all demands that justice must be done.” She articulated what Israel’s critics ignored: there was no international court to preside, and no other country, Germany included, wanted to host it. For Arendt, having this trial in Israel had profound—if not metahistorical—significance. As she wrote in a too frequently overlooked passage in Eichmann in Jerusalem:

  [F]or 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, … 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] … and enforce their own laws.28

  Ben-Gurion, for whom Israel represented the Jewish emergence from powerlessness, could not have stated matters more forcefully. Her incisive assessment of the weakened circumstances of those who are forced to rely on the “rights of man” for their protection should have been welcomed warmly by any Zionist or, for that matter, by any person who accurately assessed how Jews had been abandoned by a so-called Enlightened Europe during World War II.

  Arendt’s criticism—both public and private—of Israel was harsh. However, as with so much else she wrote, there is another side to the story. By the time she came to the trial, she had already broken with mainstream Zionists. She had wanted a binational state, opposed Israel’s policies toward its Arab minority, and was troubled by the rigid control of the country by one party, which was dominated by one man. However, when the virulently anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism offered her a public forum to answer her critics, she declined, even though other Jewish organizations were attacking her and encouraging others to do likewise. At the height of the attacks on her, she wrote to Elmer Berger, the head of the organization:

  You know that I was a Zionist and that my reason for breaking with the Zionist organization was very different from the anti-Zionist stand of the Council: I am not against Israel on principle, I am against certain important Israeli policies. I know … that should catastrophe overtake this Jewish state, for whatever reasons … this would be the perhaps final catastrophe for the whole Jewish people.29

  Regarding postwar Germany’s attitude toward war criminals, she was often more forthright—honest—about Germany’s policies than Ben-Gurion had been. He felt it politically prudent to ignore West Germany’s lax attitude toward war criminals. In contrast, Arendt illuminated it. She observed that whereas Israel had to “ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places,” in Germany the murderers were more than hiding in plain sight, they were “flourishing in the public realm.” Those few who were tried received “fantastically lenient” sentences. Adenauer’s claim that only a “relatively small percentage” of Germans had been Nazis was a lie. The truth was “the exact opposite.” Adenauer’s historical revisionism reminded her of Eichmann’s. “Eichmann’s distortions of reality were horrible because of the horrors they dealt with, but in principle they were not very different from things current in post-Hitler Germany.” One of her harshest critics, Norman Podhoretz, described her comments as “perhaps the most severe indictment of Adenauer’s Germany that has yet been seen this side of the Iron Curtain.”

  She also fearlessly condemned the Vatican, which in 1944 joined Roosevelt, Churchill, and others in demanding that Horthy halt the deportations—but with a proviso added by the Papal Nuncio assuring the Hungarians that this protest did not spring from a “false sense of compassion.” Arendt describes this noxious phrase as a “lasting monument to what 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.”30 She was condemned for dismissing the victims’ testimony as emotional and out of place in the courtroom, but so did the Israeli judges, who deemed it irrelevant to the legal proceedings. In contrast to Hausner, she considered Eichmann a “tiny cog.” However, she thought this was “legally pointless” as a justification for his actions, because “all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant,” were necessary for it to operate.31 Eichmann’s assertion that his only alternative to following orders was to commit suicide was, according to her, a “lie” unsupported by the evidence. SS members, she noted, could “quit their jobs without serious consequences.” They might be shamed before their colleagues or sent to the Eastern front, which was no small matter, but they were not killed. That was reserved for the victims. No defendant in a Nazi war-crime trial has documented a single instance in which someone who refused to kill Jews was executed. The classic excuse—“I had no option”—was not true.32

  Much scorn was heaped on her for supposedly suggesting that the Nazis’ evil was “banal.” She thought nothing of the kind. She used the term “banal” to bolster her contention that Eichmann did not act out of a deep ideological commitment or because he was inherently evil. Had he acted out of such motivations, his actions would have made “sense.” She tried to understand how he, and so many other Germans, so seamlessly became killers. They were seemingly normal people who performed unprecedentedly evil acts. She believed that many of them acted in this fashion even though they were not initially motivated by an irrational, deep-seated hatred. It was the transformation of seemingly normal people into killers that rightfully intrigued her. Though much of what she said about the Jewish victims and the manner in which she said it is disturbing, her contention that many of the perpetrators were not innately monsters or diabolical creatures but “ordinary” people who did monstrous things not only seems accurate but is the accepted understanding among most scholars of the perpetrators. It is precisely their ordinariness—their banality—that makes their horrific actions so troubling. In many respects it is the behavior of these people—and there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of them—that constitutes the unfathomable question at the heart of the Final Solution.

  However, in Eichmann’s case her analysis seems strangely out of touch with the reality of his historical record. Though he may not have started out as a virulent anti-Semite, he absorbed this ideology early in his career and let it motivate him to such an extent that even well after the war he described for Sassen, the Dutch Nazi who interviewed him in Argentina, the joy he had felt at moving Hungarian Jews to their death at an unprecedented clip and his pleasure at having the de
ath of millions of Jews on his record.

  Some of the most powerful moments of her book, for example, her expressions of reverence for those who refused to participate in the killing operation and instead reached out to help Jews, were also lost in the cacophony of criticism. In his testimony, Abba Kovner told the story of Anton Schmidt, a German sergeant, who supplied Jews with money, arms, and forged papers until he was caught and executed. Schmidt received no financial gain. Writing with uncharacteristic emotion, Arendt described the courtroom’s reaction:

  [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, irrefutable, 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 [emphasis added].

  If there are any “lessons” to be gleaned from the Holocaust, this is the central one. She contrasted Eichmann’s “I had no choice” with Schmidt’s example to the contrary and offered a searing condemnation of her fellow Germans: “Many Germans … 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 … and not to become accomplices in all these cases by benefitting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.” She linked Anton Schmidt to the Bulgarian government and the Danish people, all of whom refused to comply. Using italics to ensure that her words would literally thunder from the page, she declares that the actions of Schmidt, the Bulgarians, and the Danes demonstrated that, when faced with Nazi-like terror, “most people will comply but some people will not.” The Final Solution could have “happen[ed] in most places,” but, once again Arendt put her words in italics, “it did not happen everywhere.” Eichmann could have said no but chose otherwise. Arendt invests the dissenters’ actions with almost cosmic significance. “Humanly speaking, no more is required and no more can reasonably be asked for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” I have read few more eloquent paeans to the small number of individuals who refused to participate in the Holocaust or a more devastating condemnation of those who did.33 It has joined in my lecture folder the eloquent responses to Hausner’s query why they did not resist given by the witness Moshe Beisky, the magistrate who refused to escape because he knew it would mean death to the other eighty men in his barracks, and the witness Ya’akov Gurfein, who after being pushed from a deportation train by his mother made his way through Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary to Palestine. Yet I added Arendt’s comments to the folder with some hesitation, for while she had unlimited admiration for non-Jews who acted heroically, she seemed unable to find any Jewish heroes. She did approve of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Zivia Lubetkin-Zuckerman, because her testimony was “free of sentimentality or self-indulgence, her facts well organized, and always quite sure of the point she wished to make.”34 Yet Arendt seemed unmoved by Lubetkin-Zuckerman’s record of participating in the first armed uprising against the Nazis anywhere in Europe. The ghetto fighters knew that most of them would die. Nonetheless, they fought in order to reclaim Jewish pride. Arendt seemed not to find this worthy of notice.

  She supported the death penalty imposed upon Eichmann, though she disagreed with the court’s rationale for it. She argued that Eichmann should have been found guilty, not of crimes against the Jewish people, but of crimes against humanity carried out on the body of the Jewish people. She would have had the judges declare:

  Even if eighty million Germanys had done as you did, this would not be an excuse for you.… You have carried out … a policy of mass murder.… 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. That is the reason, and the only reason you must hang.

  Hardly the words of someone who “defend[ed] Eichmann” or was “pro-Eichmann,” as one Jewish newspaper in the United States labeled her.35

  Arendt’s critics ignored her support of Israel’s right to judge and to impose the death penalty. With few exceptions, they elided her condemnation of Eichmann’s lies, Adenauer’s duplicity, the Vatican’s ethical compromises, and the failure of most Europeans to aid desperate Jews. They lost sight of her eloquent praise of those who did break with the majority and her citation of them as proof that something could have been done. Though she castigated Jews for not resisting, she tempered her critique with the very accurate observation that “no non-Jewish group or people had behaved differently.”36 Her critics castigated her for condemning the Judenräte, but failed to consider that she was not alone in doing so. In fact, some of the most ardent attacks on them came from the victims themselves. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, creator of the famed Oyneg Shabes Archive, refused to interact with the Judenrat. Ghetto fighters Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin-Zuckerman, and Abba Kovner accused them of betrayal. As we have seen, Halevi clearly felt this way and made sure that the trial addressed the topic. One of the main disruptions of the trial had come when a member of the public began to shout and hurl abuse at a member of the Hungarian Judenrat who was testifying. The spectator accused the witness of being complicit in the murder of his relatives.

  Why, then, was her critique singled out? Why did her critics ignore these aspects of her views? Jews were particularly sensitive to the fact that her platform was The New Yorker, which, despite being edited by a Jew, was a publication that then epitomized the Jewish fantasy of the stereotypical dominant culture of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Eustace Tilley, the “dandy” who is the magazine’s icon, represents everything the stereotypical Jew was not and, try as he or she might, could never be. Arendt claimed that she purposely chose a non-Jewish publication for which to write in order to maintain her “distance,” but others considered her to have washed dirty linen in public.37 There were certainly readers who delighted in such criticism of Jews by a Jew. R. H. Glauber, writing in The Christian Century, used her theory both to absolve Christianity for having fostered and legitimized anti-Semitism and to blame the victims. Writing about the “part the Jews played in their own destruction through the willing help they offered the Nazis,” Glauber mused, “If Eichmann was guilty … are not those Jews also guilty?”38 Many Christian Century readers probably found her insistence that anti-Semitism was not at the heart of the Holocaust particularly appealing. Arendt’s comments were embraced by theologians, intellectuals, and humanists, among others, who welcomed a universal explanation for genocide that freed them from having to grapple with the anti-Semitic legacy of a European culture they extolled.

  However, it was not just where she voiced her comments but how she voiced them that aroused such passions. Even her supporters acknowledge that she “bears some of the responsibility for how her book was read (and even misread) and why it caused so much pain and anger.” A sympathetic biographer described her as “imperious in tone” and “peculiarly insensitive.”39 Her friend Alfred Kazin, who had covered the trial for The New Republic, faulted her for projecting an air of “detachment” when, in actuality, she was “as distraught as the rest of us.” In an appreciative essay, Tony Judt described her remarks about Jewish responsibility as “insensitive and excessive.”40 The attacks on her, many of which were over the top, elicited responses from her that were borderline—it’s unclear which side—anti-Semitic. In a comment that lends credence to Wasserstein’s claim that she absorbed the anti-Semitism of the historians on whose work she depended, she wrote Jaspers, “In the long run it’s perhaps beneficial to sweep out a little of that u
niquely Jewish rubbish.”41