Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

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  V: The Second Solution: Concentration

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  It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September 1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal. One of the most important steps in this direction, from an organizational point of view, was a decree, signed by Himmler, that fused the Security Service of the S.S., to which Eichmann had belonged since 1934, and which was a Party organ, with the regular Security Police of the State, in which the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, was included. The result of the merger was the Head Office for Reich Security (R.S.H.A.), whose chief was first Reinhardt Heydrich; after Heydrich's death in 1942, Eichmann's old acquaintance from Linz, Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, took over. All officials of the police, not only of the Gestapo but also of the Criminal Police and the Order Police, received S.S. titles corresponding to their previous ranks, regardless of whether or not they were Party members, and this meant that in the space of a day a most important part of the old civil services was incorporated into the most radical section of the Nazi hierarchy. No one, as far as I know, protested, or resigned his job. (Though Himmler, the head and founder of the S.S., had since 1936 been Chief of the German Police as well, the two apparatuses had remained separate until now.) The R.S.H.A., moreover, was only one of twelve Head Offices in the S.S., the most important of which, in the present context, were the Head Office of the Order Police, under General Kurt Daluege, which was responsible for the rounding up of Jews, and the Head Office for Administration and Economy (the S.S.Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or W.V.H.A.), headed by Oswald Pohl, which was in charge of concentration camps and was later to be in charge of the “economic” side of the extermination.

  This “objective” attitude—talking about concentration camps in terms of “administration” and about extermination camps in terms of “economy”—was typical of the S.S. mentality, and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of. By its “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit), the S.S. dissociated itself from such “emotional” types as Streicher, that “unrealistic fool,” and also from certain “Teutonic-Germanic Party bigwigs who behaved as though they were clad in horns and pelts.” Eichmann admired Heydrich greatly because he did not like such nonsense at all, and he was out of sympathy with Himmler because, among other things, the Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police, though boss of all the S.S. Head Offices, had permitted himself “at least for a long time to be influenced by it.” During the trial, however, it was not the accused, S.S. Obersturmbannführer a.D., who was to carry off the prize for “objectivity”; it was Dr. Servatius, a tax and business lawyer from Cologne who had never joined the Nazi Party and who nevertheless was to teach the court a lesson in what it means not to be “emotional” that no one who heard him is likely to forget. The moment, one of the few great ones in the whole trial, occurred during the short oral plaidoyer of the defense, after which the court withdrew for four months to write its judgment. Servatius declared the accused innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for “the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and similar medical matters,” whereupon Judge Halevi interrupted him: “Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter.” To which Servatius replied: “It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter.” And, perhaps to make absolutely sure that the judges in Jerusalem would not forget how Germans—ordinary Germans, not former members of the S.S. or even of the Nazi Party—even today can regard acts that in other countries are called murder, he repeated the phrase in his “Comments on the Judgment of the First Instance,” prepared for the review of the case before the Supreme Court; he said again that not Eichmann, but one of his men, Rolf Günther, “was always engaged in medical matters.” (Dr. Servatius is well acquainted with “medical matters” in the Third Reich. At Nuremberg he defended Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, Plenipotentiary for “Hygiene and Health,” and chief of the euthanasia program.)

  Each of the Head Offices of the S.S., in its wartime organization, was divided into sections and subsections, and the R.S.H.A. eventually contained seven main sections. Section IV was the bureau of the Gestapo, and it was headed by Gruppenführer (major general) Heinrich Müller, whose rank was the one he had held in the Bavarian police. His task was to combat “opponents hostile to the State,” of which there were two categories, to be dealt with by two sections: Subsection IV-A handled “opponents” accused of Communism, Sabotage, Liberalism, and Assassinations, and Subsection IV-B dealt with “sects,” that is, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons (the post remained vacant), and Jews. Each of the categories in these subsections received an office of its own, designated by an arabic numeral, so that Eichmann eventually—in 1941—was appointed to the desk of IV-B-4 in the R.S.H.A. Since his immediate superior, the head of IV-B, turned out to be a nonentity, his real superior was always Müller. Müller's superior was Heydrich, and later Kaltenbrunner, each of whom was, in his turn, under the command of Himmler, who received his orders directly from Hitler.

  In addition to his twelve Head Offices, Himmler presided over an altogether different organizational setup, which also played an enormous role in the execution of the Final Solution. This was the network of Higher S.S. and Police Leaders who were in command of the regional organizations; their chain of command did not link them with the R.S.H.A., they were directly responsible to Himmler, and they always outranked Eichmann and the men at his disposal. The Einsatzgruppen, on the other hand, were under the command of Heydrich and the R.S.H.A.—which, of course, does not mean that Eichmann necessarily had anything to do with them. The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen also invariably held a higher rank than Eichmann. Technically and organizationally, Eichmann's position was not very high; his post turned out to be such an important one only because the Jewish question, for purely ideological reasons, acquired a greater importance with every day and week and month of the war, until, in the years of defeat—from 1943 on—it had grown to fantastic proportions. When that happened, his was still the only office that officially dealt with nothing but “the opponent, Jewry,” but in fact he had lost his monopoly, because by then all offices and apparatuses, State and Party, Army and S.S., were busy “solving” that problem. Even if we concentrate our attention only upon the police machinery and disregard all the other offices, the picture is absurdly complicated, since we have to add to the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Corps the Commanders and the Inspectors of the Security Police and the Security Service. Each of these groups belonged in a different chain of command that ultimately reached Himmler, but they were equal with respect to each other and no one belonging to one group owed obedience to a superior officer of another group. The prosecution, it must be admitted, was in a most difficult position in finding its way through this labyrinth of parallel institutions, which it had to do each time it wanted to pin some specific responsibility on Eichmann. (If the trial were to take place today, this task would be much easier, since Raul Hilberg in his The Destruction of the European Jews has succeeded in presenting the first clear description of this incredibly complicated machinery of destruction.)

  Furthermore, it must be remembered that all these organs, wielding enormous power, were in fierce competition with one another—which was no help to their victims, since their ambition was always the same: to kill as many Jews as possible. This competitive spirit, which, of course, inspired in each man a great loyalty to his own outfit, has survived the war, only now it works in reverse: it has become each man's desire “to exonerate his own outfit” at the expense of all the others. This was the explanation Eichmann gave when he was confronted with the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, Commander of Auschwitz, in which Eichmann is accused of certain things that he claimed he never did and was in no position to do. He admitted easily enough that Hoss had no personal reasons
for saddling him with acts of which he was innocent, since their relations had been quite friendly; but he insisted, in vain, that Hösss wanted to exculpate his own outfit, the Head Office for Administration and Economy, and to put all the blame on the R.S.H.A. Something of the same sort happened at Nuremberg, where the various accused presented a nauseating spectacle by accusing each other— none of them blamed Hitler! Still, no one did this merely to save his own neck at the expense of somebody else's; the men on trial there represented altogether different organizations, with long-standing, deeply ingrained hostility to one another. Dr. Hans Globke, whom we met before, tried to exonerate his own Ministry of the Interior at the expense of the Foreign Office, when he testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Eichmann, on the other hand, always tried to shield Müller, Heydrich, and Kaltenbrunner, although the latter had treated him quite badly. No doubt one of the chief objective mistakes of the prosecution at Jerusalem was that its case relied too heavily on sworn or unsworn affidavits of former high-ranking Nazis, dead or alive; it did not see, and perhaps could not be expected to see, how dubious these documents were as sources for the establishment of facts. Even the judgment, in its evaluation of the damning testimonies of other Nazi criminals, took into account that (in the words of one of the defense witnesses) “it was customary at the time of the war-crime trials to put as much blame as possible on those who were absent or believed to be dead.”

  When Eichmann entered his new office in Section IV of the R.S.H.A., he was still confronted with the uncomfortable dilemma that on the one hand “forced emigration” was the official formula for the solution of the Jewish question, and, on the other hand, emigration was no longer possible. For the first (and almost the last) time in his life in the S.S., he was compelled by circumstances to take the initiative, to see if he could not “give birth to an idea.” According to the version he gave at the police examination, he was blessed with three ideas. All three of them, he had to admit, came to naught; everything he tried on his own invariably went wrong—the final blow came when he had “to abandon” his private fortress in Berlin before he could try it out against Russian tanks. Nothing but frustration; a hard luck story if there ever was one. The inexhaustible source of trouble, as he saw it, was that he and his men were never left alone, that all these other State and Party offices wanted their share in the “solution,” with the result that a veritable army of “Jewish experts” had cropped up everywhere and were falling over themselves in their efforts to be first in a field of which they knew nothing. For these people, Eichmann had the greatest contempt, partly because they were Johnnies-come-lately, partly because they tried to enrich themselves, and often succeeded in getting quite rich in the course of their work, and partly because they were ignorant, they had not read the one or two “basic books.”

  His three dreams turned out to have been inspired by the “basic books,” it was also revealed that two of the three were definitely not his ideas at all, and with respect to the third—well, “I do not know any longer whether it was Stahlecker [his superior in Vienna and Prague] or myself who gave birth to the idea, anyhow the idea was born.” This last idea was the first, chronologically; it was the “idea of Nisko,” and its failure was for Eichmann the clearest possible proof of the evil of interference. (The guilty person in this case was Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland.) In order to understand the plan, we must remember that after the conquest of Poland and prior to the German attack on Russia, the Polish territories were divided between Germany and Russia; the German part consisted of the Western Regions, which were incorporated into the Reich, and the so-called Eastern Area, including Warsaw, which was known as the General Government. For the time being, the Eastern Area was treated as occupied territory. As the solution of the Jewish question at this time was still “forced emigration,” with the goal of making Germany judenrein, it was natural that Polish Jews in the annexed territories, together with the remaining Jews in other parts of the Reich, should be shoved into the General Government, which, whatever it may have been, was not considered to be part of the Reich. By December, 1939, evacuations eastward had started and roughly one million Jews—six hundred thousand from the incorporated area and four hundred thousand from the Reich—began to arrive in the General Government.

  If Eichmann's version of the Nisko adventure is true—and there is no reason not to believe him—he or, more likely, his Prague and Vienna superior, Brigadeführer (brigadier general) Franz Stahlecker must have anticipated these developments by several months. This Dr. Stahlecker, as Eichmann was careful to call him, was in his opinion a very fine man, educated, full of reason, and “free of hatred and chauvinism of any kind” —in Vienna, he used to shake hands with the Jewish functionaries. A year and a half later, in the spring of 1941, this educated gentleman was appointed Commander of Einsatzgruppe A, and managed to kill by shooting, in little more than a year (he himself was killed in action in 1942), two hundred and fifty thousand Jews—as he proudly reported to Himmler himself, although the chief of the Einsatzgruppen, which were police units, was the head of the Security Police and the S.D., that is, Reinhardt Heydrich. But that came later, and now, in September, 1939, while the German Army was still busy occupying the Polish territories, Eichmann and Dr. Stahlecker began to think “privately” about how the Security Service might get its share of influence in the East. What they needed was “an area as large as possible in Poland, to be carved off for the erection of an autonomous Jewish state in the form of a protectorate… This could be the solution.” And off they went, on their own initiative, without orders from anybody, to reconnoiter. They went to the Radom District, on the San River, not far from the Russian border, and they “saw a huge territory, villages, market places, small towns,” and “we said to ourselves: that is what we need and why should one not resettle Poles for a change, since people are being resettled everywhere”; this will be “the solution of the Jewish question”—firm soil under their feet—at least for some time.

  Everything seemed to go very well at first. They went to Heydrich, and Heydrich agreed and told them to go ahead. It so happened—though Eichmann, in Jerusalem, had completely forgotten it—that their project fitted very well in Heydrich's over-all plan at this stage for the solution of the Jewish question. On September 21, 1939, he had called a meeting of the “heads of departments” of the R.S.H.A. and the Einsatzgruppen (operating already in Poland), at which general directives for the immediate future had been given: concentration of Jews in ghettos, establishment of Councils of Jewish Elders, and the deportation of all Jews to the General Government area. Eichmann had attended this meeting setting up the “Jewish Center of Emigration”—as was proved at the trial through the minutes, which Bureau 06 of the Israeli police had discovered in the National Archives in Washington. Hence, Eichmann‘s, or Stahlecker‘s, initiative amounted to no more than a concrete plan for carrying out Heydrich's directives. And now thousands of people, chiefly from Austria, were deported helter-skelter into this God-forsaken place which, an S.S. officer —Erich Rajakowitsch, who later was in charge of the deportation of Dutch Jews—explained to them, “the Führer has promised the Jews as a new homeland. There are no dwellings, there are no houses. If you build, there will be a roof over your heads. There is no water, the wells all around carry disease, there is cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. If you bore and find water, you will have water.” As one can see, “everything looked marvelous,” except that the S.S. expelled some of the Jews from this paradise, driving them across the Russian border, and others had the good sense to escape of their own volition. But then, Eichmann complained, “the obstructions began on the part of Hans Frank,” whom they had forgotten to inform, although this was “his” territory. “Frank complained in Berlin and a great tug of war started. Frank wanted to solve his Jewish question all by himself. He did not want to receive any more Jews in his General Government. Those who had arrived should disappear immediately.” And they did disappear; some were even repatriated,
which had never happened before and never happened again, and those who returned to Vienna were registered in the police records as “returning from vocational training”—a curious relapse into the ro-Zionist stage of the movement.

  Eichmann's eagerness to acquire some territory for “his” Jews is best understood in terms of his own career. The Nisko plan was “born” during the time of his rapid advancement, and it is more than likely that he saw himself as the future Governor General, like Hans Frank in Poland, or the future Protector, like Heydrich in Czechoslovakia, of a “Jewish State.” The utter fiasco of the whole enterprise, however, must have taught him a lesson about the possibilities and the desirability of “private” initiative. And since he and Stahlecker had acted within the framework of Heydrich's directives and with his explicit consent, this unique repatriation of Jews, clearly a temporary defeat for the police and the S.S., must also have taught him that the steadily increasing power of his own outfit did not amount to omnipotence, that the State Ministries and the other Party institutions were quite prepared to fight to maintain their own shrinking power.

  Eichmann's second attempt at “putting firm ground under the feet of the Jews” was the Madagascar project. The plan to evacuate four million Jews from Europe to the French island off the southeast coast of Africa—an island with a native population of 4,370,000 and an area of 227,678 square miles of poor land—had originated in the Foreign Office and was then transmitted to the R.S.H.A. because, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther, who was in charge of Jewish affairs in the Wilhelmstrasse, only the police “possessed the experiences and the technical facilities to execute an evacuation of Jews en masse and to guarantee the supervision of the evacuees.” The “Jewish State” was to have a police governor under the jurisdiction of Himmler. The project itself had an odd history. Eichmann, confusing Madagascar with Uganda, always claimed to having dreamed “a dream once dreamed by the Jewish protagonist of the Jewish State idea, Theodor Herzl,” but it is true that his dream had been dreamed before-first by the Polish government, which in 1937 went to much trouble to look into the idea, only to find that it would be quite impossible to ship its own nearly three million Jews there without killing them, and, somewhat later, by the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, who had the more modest plan of shipping France's foreign Jews, numbering about two hundred thousand, to the French colony. He even consulted his German opposite number, Joachim von Ribbentrop, on the matter in 1938. Eichmann at any rate was told in the summer of 1940, when his emigration business had come to a complete standstill, to work out a detailed plan for the evacuation of four million Jews to Madagascar, and this project seems to have occupied most of his time until the invasion of Russia, a year later. (Four million is a strikingly low figure for making Europe judenrein. It obviously did not include three million Polish Jews who, as everybody knew, had been being massacred ever since the first days of the war.) That anybody except Eichmann and some other lesser luminaries ever took the whole thing seriously seems unlikely, for— apart from the fact that the territory was known to be unsuitable, not to mention the fact that it was, after all, a French possession —the plan would have required shipping space for four million in the midst of a war and at a moment when the British Navy was in control of the Atlantic. The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage with respect to the army of trained anti-Semites, who, try as they might, always found themselves one step behind the Führer, was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do—no special legislation, no “dissimilation,” no ghettos would suffice. When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become “obsolete,” everybody was psychologically, or rather, logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could “evacuate,” the only “solution” was extermination.