Furthermore, 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” (Sonder-behandlung); deportation—unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the “old people's ghetto” for privileged Jews, in which case it was called “change of residence”—received the names of “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) and “labor in the East” (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily resettled in ghettos and that a certain percentage of them were temporarily used for labor. Under special circumstances, slight changes in the language rules became necessary. Thus, for instance, a high official in the Foreign Office once proposed that in all correspondence with the Vatican the killing of Jews be called the “radical solution”; this was ingenious, because the Catholic puppet government of Slovakia, with which the Vatican had intervened, had not been, in the view of the Nazis, “radical enough” in its anti-Jewish legislation, having committed the “basic error” of excluding baptized Jews. Only among themselves could the “bearers of secrets” talk in uncoded language, and it is very unlikely that they did so in the ordinary pursuit of their murderous duties— certainly not in the presence of their stenographers and other office personnel. For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. Moreover, the very term “language rule” (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie. For when a “bearer of secrets” was sent to meet someone from the outside world—as when Eichmann was sent to show the Theresienstadt ghetto to International Red Cross representatives from Switzerland—he received, together with his orders, his “language rule,” which in this instance consisted of a lie about a nonexistent typhus epidemic in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which the gentlemen also wished to visit. The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for “language rules.”
The system, however, was not a foolproof shield against reality, as Eichmann was soon to find out. He went to Lublin to see Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, former Gauleiter of Vienna— though not, of course, despite what the prosecution maintained, “to convey to him personally the secret order for the physical extermination of the Jews,” which Globocnik certainly knew of before Eichmann did—and he used the phrase “Final Solution” as a kind of password by which to identify himself. (A similar assertion by the prosecution, which showed to what degree it had got lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Third Reich, referred to Rudolf Höss, Commander of Auschwitz, who it believed had also received the Führer's order through Eichmann. This error was at least mentioned by the defense as being “without corroborative evidence.” Actually, Höss himself testified at his own trial that he had received his orders directly from Himmler, in June, 1941, and added that Himmler had told him Eichmann would discuss with him certain “details.” These details, Höss claimed in his memoirs, concerned the use of gas—something Eichmann strenuously denied. And he was probably right, for all other sources contradict Höss's story and maintain that written or oral extermination orders in the camps always went through the W.V.H.A. and were given either by its chief, Obergruppenführer [lieutenant general] Oswald Pohl, or by Brigadeführer Richard Glücks, who was Höss's direct superior. (Concerning the doubtful reliability of Höss's testimony see also R. Pendorf, Mörder und Ermordete, 1961.) And with the use of gas Eichmann had nothing whatever to do. The “details” that he went to discuss with Höss at regular intervals concerned the killing capacity of the camp—how many shipments per week it could absorb—and also, perhaps, plans for expansion.) Globocnik, when Eichmann arrived at Lublin, was very obliging, and showed him around with a subordinate. They came to a road through a forest, to the right of which there was an ordinary house where workers lived. A captain of the Order Police (perhaps Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth himself, who had been in charge of the technical side of the gassing of “incurably sick people” in Germany, under the auspices of the Führer's Chancellery) came to greet them, led them to a few small wooden bungalows, and began, “in a vulgar uneducated harsh voice,” his explanations: “how he had everything nicely insulated, for the engine of a Russian submarine will be set to work and the gases will enter this building and the Jews will be poisoned. For me, too, this was monstrous. I am not so tough as to be able to endure something of this sort without any reaction…. If today I am shown a gaping wound, I can't possibly look at it. I am that type of person, so that very often I was told that I couldn't have become a doctor. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself, and then I became physically weak, as though I had lived through some great agitation. Such things happen to everybody, and it left behind a certain inner trembling.”
Well, he had been lucky, for he had still seen only the preparations for the future carbon-monoxide chambers at Treblinka, one of the six death camps in the East, in which several hundred thousand people were to die. Shortly after this, in the autumn of the same year, he was sent by his direct superior Müller to inspect the killing center in the Western Regions of Poland that had been incorporated into the Reich, called the Warthegau. The death camp was at Kulm (or, in Polish, Chelmno), where, in 1944, over three hundred thousand Jews from all over Europe, who had first been “resettled” in the Lódz ghetto, were killed. Here things were already in full swing, but the method was different; instead of gas chambers, mobile gas vans were used. This is what Eichmann saw: The Jews were in a large room; they were told to strip; then a truck arrived, stopping directly before the entrance to the room, and the naked Jews were told to enter it. The doors were closed and the truck started off. “I cannot tell [how many Jews entered], I hardly looked. I could not; I could not; I had had enough. The shrieking, and… I was much too upset, and so on, as I later told Müller when I reported to him; he did not get much profit out of my report. I then drove along after the van, and then I saw the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life. The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers. And then I was off—jumped into my car and did not open my mouth any more. After that time, I could sit for hours beside my driver without exchanging a word with him. There I got enough. I was finished. I only remember that a physician in white overalls told me to look through a hole into the truck while they were still in it. I refused to do that. I could not. I had to disappear.”
Very soon after that, he was to see something more horrible. This happened when he was sent to Minsk, in White Russia, again by Müller, who told him: “In Minsk, they are killing Jews by shooting. I want you to report on how it is being done.” So he went, and at first it seemed as though he would be lucky, for by the time he arrived, as it happened, “the affair had almost been finished,” which pleased him very much. “There were only a few young marksmen who took aim at the skulls of dead people in a large ditch.” Still, he saw, “and that was quite enough for me, a woman with her arms stretched backward, and then my knees went weak and off I went.” While driving back, he had the notion of stopping at Lwów; this seemed a good idea, for Lwów (or Lemberg) had been an Austrian city, and when he arrived there he “saw the first friendly picture after the horrors. That was the railway station built in honor of
the sixtieth year of Franz Josef's reign”—a period Eichmann had always “adored,” since he had heard so many nice things about it in his parents’ home, and had also been told how the relatives of his stepmother (we are made to understand that he meant the Jewish ones) had enjoyed a comfortable social status and had made good money. This sight of the railway station drove away all the horrible thoughts, and he remembered it down to its last detail—the engraved year of the anniversary, for instance. But then, right there in lovely Lwów, he made a big mistake. He went to see the local S.S. commander, and told him: “Well, it is horrible what is being done around here; I said young people are being made into sadists. How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and children? That is impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane, our own people.” The trouble was that at Lwów they were doing the same thing they had been doing in Minsk, and his host was delighted to show him the sights, although Eichmann tried politely to excuse himself. Thus, he saw another “horrible sight. A ditch had been there, which was already filled in. And there was, gushing from the earth, a spring of blood like a fountain. Such a thing I had never seen before. I had had enough of my commission, and I went back to Berlin and reported to Gruppenführer Müller.”
This was not yet the end. Although Eichmann told him that he was not “tough enough” for these sights, that he had never been a soldier, had never been to the front, had never seen action, that he could not sleep and had nightmares, Müller, some nine months later, sent him back to the Lublin region, where the very enthusiastic Globocnik had meanwhile finished his preparations. Eichmann said that this now was the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life. When he first arrived, he could not recognize the place, with its few wooden bungalows. Instead, guided by the same man with the vulgar voice, he came to a railway station, with the sign “Treblinka” on it, that looked exactly like an ordinary station anywhere in Germany—the same buildings, signs, clocks, installations; it was a perfect imitation. “I kept myself back, as far as I could, I did not draw near to see all that. Still, I saw how a column of naked Jews filed into a large hall to be gassed. There they were killed, as I was told, by something called cyanic acid.”
The fact is that Eichmann did not see much. It is true, he repeatedly visited Auschwitz, the largest and most famous of the death camps, but Auschwitz, covering an area of eighteen square miles, in Upper Silesia, was by no means only an extermination camp; it was a huge enterprise with up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, spared him the gruesome sights. He never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work—about twenty-five per cent of each shipment, on the average—that preceded it at Auschwitz. He saw just enough to be fully informed of how the destruction machinery worked: that there were two different methods of killing, shooting and gassing; that the shooting was done by the Einsatzgruppen and the gassing at the camps, either in chambers or in mobile vans; and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.
The police tapes from which I have quoted were played in court during the tenth of the trial's hundred and twenty-one sessions, on the ninth day of the almost nine months it lasted. Nothing the accused said, in the curiously disembodied voice that came out of the tape-recorder—doubly disembodied, because the body that owned the voice was present but itself also appeared strangely disembodied through the thick glass walls surrounding it—was denied either by him or by the defense. Dr. Servatius did not object, he only mentioned that “later, when the defense will rise to speak,” he, too, would submit to the court some of the evidence given by the accused to the police; he never did. The defense, one felt, could rise right away, for the criminal proceedings against the accused in this “historic trial” seemed complete, the case for the prosecution established. The facts of the case, of what Eichmann had done—though not of everything the prosecution wished he had done—were never in dispute; they had been established long before the trial started, and had been confessed to by him over and over again. There was more than enough, as he occasionally pointed out, to hang him. (“Don't you have enough on me?” he objected, when the police examiner tried to ascribe to him powers he never possessed.) But since he had been employed in transportation and not in killing, the question remained, legally, formally, at least, of whether he had known what he was doing; and there was the additional question of whether he had been in a position to judge the enormity of his deeds whether he was legally responsible, apart from the fact that he was medically sane. Both questions now were answered in the affirmative: he had seen the places to which the shipments were directed, and he had been shocked out of his wits. One last question, the most disturbing of all, was asked by the judges, and especially by the presiding judge, over and over again: Had the killing of Jews gone against his conscience? But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
But if the facts of the case were now established, two more legal questions arose. First, could he be released from criminal responsibility, as Section 10 of the law under which he was tried provided, because he had done his acts “in order to save himself from the danger of immediate death”? And, second, could he plead extenuating circumstances, as Section 11 of the same law enumerated them: had he done “his best to reduce the gravity of the consequences of the offense” or “to avert consequences more serious than those which resulted”? Clearly, Sections 10 and 11 of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 had been drawn up with Jewish “collaborators” in mind. Jewish Sonderkommandos (special units) had everywhere been employed in the actual killing process, they had committed criminal acts “in order to save themselves from the danger of immediate death,” and the Jewish Councils and Elders had cooperated because they thought they could “avert consequences more serious than those which resulted.” In Eichmann's case, his own testimony supplied the answer to both questions, and it was clearly negative. It is true, he once said his only alternative would have been suicide, but this was a lie, since we know how surprisingly easy it was for members of the extermination squads to quit their jobs without serious consequences for themselves; but he did not insist on this point, he did not mean to be taken literally. In the Nuremberg documents “not a single case could be traced in which an S.S. member had suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in an execution” [Herbert Jäger, “Betrachtungen zum Eichmann-Prozess,” in Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, 1962]. And in the trial itself there was the testimony of a witness for the defense, von dem Bach-Zelewski, who declared: “It was possible to evade a commission by an application for transfer. To be sure, in individual cases, one had to be prepared for a certain disciplinary punishment. A danger to one's life, however, was not at all involved.” Eichmann knew quite well that he was by no means in the classical “difficult position” of a soldier who may “be liable to be shot by a court-martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it”—as Dicey once put it in his famous Law of the Constitution—if only because as a member of the S.S. he had never been subject to a military court but could only have been brought before a Police and S.S. Tribunal. In his last statement to the court, Eichmann admitted that he could have backed out on one pretext or another, and that others had done so. He had always thought such a step was “inadmissible,” and even now did not think it was “admirable”; it would have meant no more than a switch to another well-paying job. The postwar notion of open disobedience was a fairy tale: “Under the circumstances such behavior was impossible. Nobody acted that way.” It was “unthinkable.” Had he been made commander of a death camp, like his good friend Höss, he would have had to commit suicide, since he was incapable of killing. (Höss, incidentally, had
committed a murder in his youth. He had assassinated a certain Walter Kadow, the man who had betrayed Leo Schlageter—a nationalist terrorist in the Rhineland whom the Nazis later made into a national hero—to the French Occupation authorities, and a German court had put him in jail for five years. In Auschwitz, of course, Höss did not have to kill.) But it was very unlikely that Eichmann would have been offered this kind of a job, since those who issued the orders “knew full well the limits to which a person can be driven.” No, he had not been in “danger of immediate death,” and since he claimed with great pride that he had always “done his duty,” obeyed all orders as his oath demanded, he had, of course, always done his best to aggravate “the consequences of the offense,” rather than to reduce them. The only “extenuating circumstance” he cited was that he had tried to “avoid unnecessary hardships as much as possible” in carrying out his work, and, quite apart from the question of whether this was true, and also apart from the fact that if it was, it would hardly have been enough to constitute extenuating circumstances in this particular case, the claim was not valid, because “to avoid unnecessary hardships” was among the standard directives he had been given.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Page 13