Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

  I know of no attempt to explain the conduct of the Bulgarian people, which is unique in the belt of mixed populations. But one is reminded of Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist who happened to be in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and whom they chose to accuse of the Reichstagsbrand, the mysterious fire in the Berlin Parliament of February 27, 1933. He was tried by the German Supreme Court and confronted with Goring, whom he questioned as though he were in charge of the proceedings; and it was thanks to him that all those accused, except van der Lubbe, had to be acquitted. His conduct was such that it won him the admiration of the whole world, Germany not excluded. “There is one man left in Germany,” people used to say, “and he is a Bulgarian.”

  GREECE, being occupied in the north by the Germans and in the south by the Italians, offered no special problems and could therefore be left waiting her turn to become judenrein. In February, 1943, two of Eichmann's specialists, Hauptsturmführers Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, arrived to prepare everything for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika, where two-thirds of Greek Jewry, approximately fifty-five thousand people, were concentrated. This was according to plan “within the framework of the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe,” as their letter of appointment from IV-B-4 had it. Working closely with a certain Kriegsverwaltungsrat Dr. Max Merten, who represented the military government of the region, they immediately set up the usual Jewish Council, with Chief Rabbi Koretz at its head. Wisliceny, who headed the Sonderkommando für Judenan-gelegenheiten in Salonika, introduced the yellow badge, and promptly made it known that no exemptions would be tolerated. Dr. Merten moved the whole Jewish population into a ghetto, from which they could easily be removed, since it was near the railroad station. The only privileged categories were Jews with foreign passports and, as usual, the personnel of the Judenrat— not more than a few hundred persons all told, who were eventually shipped to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen. There was no avenue of escape except flight to the south, where the Italians, as elsewhere, refused to hand Jews over to the Germans, and the safety in the Italian Zone was short-lived. The Greek population was indifferent at best, and even some of the partisan groups looked upon the operations “with approval.” Within two months, the whole community had been deported, trains for Auschwitz leaving almost daily, carrying from two thousand to twenty-five hundred Jews each, in freight cars. In the fall of the same year, when the Italian Army had collapsed, evacuation of some thirteen thousand Jews from the southern part of Greece, including Athens and the Greek islands, was swiftly completed.

  In Auschwitz, many Greek Jews were employed in the so-called death commandos, which operated the gas chambers and the crematoria, and they were still alive in 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were exterminated and the Lódz ghetto was liquidated. At the end of that summer, when rumor had it that the gassing would soon be terminated and the installations dismantled, one of the very few revolts in any of the camps broke out; the death commandos were certain that now they, too, would be killed. The revolt was a complete disaster—only one survivor remained to tell the story.

  It would seem that the indifference of the Greeks to the fate of their Jews has somehow survived their liberation. Dr. Merten, a witness for the defense in Eichmann's trial, today, somewhat inonsistently, claims both to have known nothing and to have saved the Jews from the fate of which he was ignorant. He quietly returned to Greece after the war as a representative of a travel agency; he was arrested, but was soon released and allowed to return to Germany. His case is perhaps unique, since trials for war crimes in countries other than Germany have always resulted in severe punishment. And his testimony for the defense, which he gave in Berlin in the presence of representatives of both the defense and the prosecution, was certainly unique. He claimed that Eichmann had been very helpful in an attempt to save some twenty thousand women and children in Salonika, and that all the evil had come from Wisliceny. However, he eventually stated that before testifying he had been approached by Eichmann's brother, a lawyer in Linz, and by a German organization of former members of the S.S. Eichmann himself denied everything—he had never been in Salonika, and he had never seen the helpful Dr. Merten.

  Eichmann claimed more than once that his organizational gifts, the coordination of evacuations and deportations achieved by his office, had in fact helped his victims; it had made their fate easier. If this thing had to be done at all, he argued, it was better that it be done in good order. During the trial no one, not even counsel for the defense, paid any attention to this claim, which was obviously in the same category as his foolish and stubborn contention that he had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews through “forced emigration.” And yet, in the light of what took place in RUMANIA, one begins to wonder. Here, too, everything was topsy-turvy, but not as in Denmark, where even the men of the Gestapo began sabotaging orders from Berlin; in Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.

  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rumania was the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe. Even in the nineteenth century, Rumanian anti-Semitism was a well-established fact; in 1878, the great powers had tried to intervene, through the Treaty of Berlin, and to get the Rumanian government to recognize its Jewish inhabitants as Rumanian nationals—though they would have remained second-class citizens. They did not succeed, and at the end of the First World War all Rumanian Jews—with the exception of a few hundred Sephardic families and some Jews of German origin—were still resident aliens. It took the whole might of the Allies, during the peace-treaty negotiations, to “persuade” the Rumanian government to accept a minority treaty and to grant the Jewish minority citizenship. This concession to world opinion was withdrawn in 1937 and 1938, when, trusting in the power of Hitler Germany, the Rumanians felt they could risk denouncing the minority treaties as an imposition upon their ‘sovereignty,’ and could deprive several hundred thousand Jews, roughly a quarter of the total Jewish population, of their citizenship. Two years later, in August, 1940, some months prior to Rumania's entry into the war on the side of Hitler Germany, Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the new Iron Guard dictatorship, declared all Rumanian Jews to be stateless, with the exception of the few hundred families who had been Rumanian citizens before the peace treaties. That same month, he also instituted anti-Jewish legislation that was the severest in Europe, Germany not excluded. The privileged categories, war veterans and Jews who had been Rumanians prior to 1918, comprised no more than ten thousand people, hardly more than one per cent of the whole group. Hitler himself was aware that Germany was in danger of being outdone by Rumania, and he complained to Goebbels in August, 1941, a few weeks after he had given the order for the Final Solution, that “a man like Antonescu proceeds in these matters in a far more radical fashion than we have done up to the present.”

  Rumania entered the war in February, 1941, and the Rumanian Legion became a military force to be reckoned with in the coming invasion of Russia. In Odessa alone, Rumanian soldiers were responsible for the massacre of sixty thousand people. In contrast to the governments of other Balkan countries, the Rumanian government had very exact information from the very beginning about the massacres of Jews in the East, and Rumanian soldiers, even after the Iron Guard had been ousted from the government, in the summer of 1941, embarked upon a program of massacres and deportations that even “dwarfed the Bucharest outburst of the Iron Guard” in January of the same year—a program that for sheer horror is unparalleled in the whole atrocity-stricken record (Hilberg). Deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite follow-up to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops. Also, t
he horrors of Rumanian concentration camps, which were established and run by the Rumanians themselves because deportation to the East was not feasible, were more elaborate and more atrocious than anything we know of in Germany. When Eichmann sent the customary adviser on Jewish affairs, Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, to Bucharest, Richter reported that Antonescu now wished to ship a hundred and ten thousand Jews into “two forests across the river Bug,” that is, into German-held Russian territory, for liquidation. The Germans were horrified, and everybody intervened: the Army commanders, Rosenberg's Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, the Foreign Office in Berlin, the Minister to Bucharest, Freiherr Manfred von Killinger—the last, a former high S.A. officer, a personal friend of Röhm's and therefore suspect in the eyes of the S.S., was probably spied upon by Richter, who “advised” him on Jewish affairs. On this matter, however, they were all in agreement. Eichmann himself implored the Foreign Office, in a letter dated April, 1942, to stop these unorganized and premature Rumanian efforts “to get rid of the Jews” at this stage; the Rumanians must be made to understand that “the evacuation of German Jews, which is already in full swing,” had priority, and he concluded by threatening to “bring the Security Police into action.”

  However reluctant the Germans were to give Rumania a higher priority in the Final Solution that had originally been planned for any Balkan country, they had to come around if they did not want the situation to deteriorate into bloody chaos, and, much as Eichmann may have enjoyed his threat to use the Security Police, the saving of Jews was not exactly what they had been trained for. Hence, in the middle of August—by which time the Rumanians had killed close to three hundred thousand of their Jews mostly without any German help—the Foreign Office concluded an agreement with Antonescu “for the evacuation of Jews from Rumania, to be carried out by German units,” and Eichmann began negotiations with the German railroads for enough cars to transport two hundred thousand Jews to the Lublin death camps. But now, when everything was ready and these great concessions had been granted, the Rumanians suddenly did an about-face. Like a bolt from the blue, a letter arrived in Berlin from the trusted Mr. Richter—Marshal Antonescu had changed his mind; as Ambassador Killinger reported, the Marshal now wanted to get rid of Jews “in a comfortable manner.” What the Germans had not taken into account was that this was not only a country with an inordinately high percentage of plain murderers, but that Rumania was also the most corrupt country in the Balkans. Side by side with the massacres, there had sprung up a flourishing business in exemption sales, in which every branch of the bureaucracy, national or municipal, had happily engaged. The government's own specialty was huge taxes, which were levied haphazardly upon certain groups or whole communities of Jews. Now it had discovered that one could sell Jews abroad for hard currency, so the Rumanians became the most fervent adherents of Jewish emigration—at thirteen hundred dollars a head. This is how Rumania came to be one of the few outlets for Jewish emigration to Palestine during the war. And as the Red Army drew nearer, Antonescu became even more “moderate, he now was willing to let Jews go without any compensation.

  It is a curious fact that Antonescu, from beginning to end, was not more “radical” than the Nazis (as Hitler thought), but simply always a step ahead of German developments. He had been the first to deprive all Jews of nationality, and he had started large-scale massacres openly and unashamedly at a time when the Nazis were still busy trying out their first experiments. He had hit upon the sales idea more than a year before Himmler offered “blood for trucks,” and he ended, as Himmler finally did, by calling the whole thing off as though it had been a joke. In August, 1944, Rumania surrendered to the Red Army, and Eichmann, specialist in evacuation, was sent pell-mell to the area in order to save some “ethnic Germans,” without success. About half of Rumania's eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews survived, a great number of whom—several hundred thousand —found their way to Israel. Nobody knows how many Jews are left in the country today. The Rumanian murderers were all duly executed, and Killinger committed suicide before the Russians could lay their hands on him; only Hauptsturmführer a.D. Richter, who, it is true, had never had a chance to get into the act, lived peacefully in Germany until 1961, when he became a belated victim of the Eichmann trial.

  * * *

  * * *

  XII: Deportations from Central Europe—Hungary and Slovakia

  * * *

  HUNGARY, mentioned earlier in connection with the troublesome question of Eichmann's conscience, was constitutionally a kingdom without a king. The country, though without access to the sea and possessing neither navy nor merchant fleet, was ruled— or, rather, held in trust for the nonexistent king—by an admiral, Regent or Reichsverweser Nikolaus von Horthy. The only visible sign of royalty was an abundance of Hofräte, councilors to the nonexistent court. Once upon a time, the Holy Roman Emperor had been King of Hungary, and more recently, after 1806, the kaiserlichkönigliche Monarchie on the Danube had been precariously held together by the Hapsburgs, who were emperors (Kaiser) of Austria and kings of Hungary. In 1918, the Hapsburg Empire had been dissolved into Successor States, and Austria was now a republic, hoping for Anschluss, for union with Germany. Otto von Hapsburg was in exile, and he would never have been accepted as King of Hungary by the fiercely nationalistic Magyars; an authentically Hungarian royalty, on the other hand, did not even exist as a historical memory. So what Hungary was, in terms of recognized forms of government, only Admiral Horthy knew.

  Behind the delusions of royal grandeur was an inherited feudal structure, with greater misery among the landless peasants and greater luxury among the few aristocratic families who literally owned the country than anywhere else in these poverty-stricken territories, the homeland of Europe's stepchildren. It was this background of unsolved social questions and general backwardness that gave Budapest society its specific flavor, as though Hungarians were a group of illusionists who had fed so long on self-deception that they had lost any sense of incongruity. Early in the thirties, under the influence of Italian Fascism, they had produced a strong Fascist movement, the so-called Arrow Cross men, and in 1938 they followed Italy by passing their first anti-Jewish legislation; despite the strong influence of the Catholic Church in the country, the rulings applied to baptized Jews who had been converted after 1919, and even those converted before that date were included three years later. And yet, when an all-inclusive anti-Semitism, based on race, had become official government policy, eleven Jews continued to sit in the upper chamber of the Parliament, and Hungary was the only Axis country to send Jewish troops—a hundred and thirty thousand of them, in auxiliary service, but in Hungarian uniform—to the Eastern front. The explanation of these inconsistencies is that the Hungarians, their official policy notwithstanding, were even more emphatic than other countries in distinguishing between native Jews and Ostjuden, between the “Magyarized” Jews of “Trianon Hungary” (established, like the other Successor States, by the Treaty of Trianon) and those of recently annexed territories. Hungary's sovereignty was respected by the Nazi government until March, 1944, with the result that for Jews the country became an island of safety in “an ocean of destruction.” While it is understandable enough that—with the Red Army approaching through the Carpathian Mountains and the Hungarian government desperately trying to follow the example of Italy and conclude a separate armistice—the German government should have decided to occupy the country, it is almost incredible that at this stage of the game it should still have been “the order of the day to come to grips with the Jewish problem,” the “liquidation” of which was “a prerequisite for involving Hungary in the war,” as Veesenmayer put it in a report to the Foreign Office in December, 1943. For the “liquidation” of this “problem” involved the evacuation of eight hundred thousand Jews, plus an estimated hundred or hundred and fifty thousand converted Jews.

  Be that as it may, as I have said earlier, because of the greatness and the urgency of the task Eichmann arrived
in Budapest in March, 1944, with his whole staff, which he could easily assemble, since the job had been finished everywhere else. He called Wisliceny and Brunner from Slovakia and Greece, Abromeit from Yugoslavia, Dannecker from Paris and Bulgaria, Siegfried Seidl from his post as Commander of Theresienstadt, and, from Vienna, Hermann Krumey, who became his deputy in Hungary. From Berlin, he brought all the more important members of his office staff: Rolf Günther, who had been his chief deputy; Franz Novak, his deportation officer; and Otto Hunsche, his legal expert. Thus, the Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann (Eichmann Special Operation Unit) consisted of about ten men, plus some clerical assistants, when it set up its head-quarters in Budapest. On the very evening of their arrival, Eichmann and his men invited the Jewish leaders to a conference, to persuade them to form a Jewish Council, through which they could issue their orders and to which they would give, in return, absolute jurisdiction over all Jews in Hungary. This was no easy trick at this moment and in that place. It was a time when, in the words of the Papal Nuncio, “the whole world knew what deportation meant in practice”; in Budapest, moreover, the Jews had “had a unique opportunity to follow the fate of European Jewry. We knew very well about the work of the Einsatzgruppen. We knew more than was necessary about Auschwitz,” as Dr. Kastner was to testify at Nuremberg. Clearly, more than Eichmann's allegedly “hypnotic powers” was needed to convince anyone that the Nazis would recognize the sacred distinction between “Magyarized” and Eastern Jews; self-deception had to have been developed to a high art to allow Hungarian Jewish leaders to believe at this moment that “it can't happen here” —“How can they send the Jews of Hungary outside Hungary?”—and to keep believing it even when the realities contradicted this belief every day of the week. How this was achieved came to light in one of the most remarkable non sequiturs uttered on the witness stand: the future members of the Central Jewish Committee (as the Jewish Council was called in Hungary) had heard from neighboring Slovakia that Wisliceny, who was now negotiating with them, accepted money readily, and they also knew that despite all bribes he “had deported all the Jews in Slovakia….” From which Mr. Freudiger concluded: “I understood that it was necessary to find ways and means to establish relationships with Wisliceny.”