Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

  On May 11, 1960, at six-thirty in the evening, when Eichmann alighted, as usual, from the bus that brought him home from his place of work, he was seized by three men and, in less than a minute, bundled into a waiting car, which took him to a previously rented house in a remote suburb of Buenos Aires. No drugs, no ropes, no handcuffs were used, and Eichmann immediately recognized that this was professional work, as no unnecessary violence had been applied; he was not hurt. Asked who he was, he instantly said: “Ich bin Adolf Eichmann,” and, surprisingly, added: “I know I am in the hands of Israelis.” (He later explained that he had read in some newspaper of Ben-Gurion's order that he be found and caught.) For eight days, while the Israelis were waiting for the El-Al plane that was to carry them and their prisoner to Israel, Eichmann was tied to a bed, which was the only aspect of the whole affair that he complained about, and on the second day of his captivity he was asked to state in writing that he had no objection to being tried by an Israeli court. The statement was, of course, already prepared, and all he was supposed to do was to copy it. To everybody's surprise, however, he insisted on writing his own text, for which, as can be seen from the following lines, he probably used the first sentences of the prepared statement: “I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, hereby declare out of my own free will that since now my true identity has been revealed, I see clearly that it is useless to try and escape judgment any longer. I hereby express my readiness to travel to Israel to face a court of judgment, an authorized court of law. It is clear and understood that I shall be given legal advice [thus far, he probably copied], and I shall try to write down the facts of my last years of public activities in Germany, without any embellishments, in order that future generations will have a true picture. This declaration I declare out of my own free will, not for promises given and not because of threats. I wish to be at peace with myself at last. Since I cannot remember all the details, and since I seem to mix up facts, I request assistance by putting at my disposal documents and affidavits to help me in my effort to seek the truth.” Signed: “Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960.” (This document, though doubtless genuine, has one peculiarity: its date omits the day it was signed. The omission gives rise to the suspicion that the letter was written not in Argentina but in Jerusalem, where Eichmann arrived on May 22. The letter was needed less for the trial, during which the prosecution did submit it as evidence, but without attaching much importance to it, than for Israel's first explanatory official note to the Argentine government, to which it was duly attached. Servatius, who asked Eichmann about the letter in court, did not mention the peculiarity of the date, and Eichmann could not very well mention it himself since, upon being asked a leading question by his lawyer, he confirmed, though somewhat reluctantly, that he had given the statement under duress, while tied to the bed in the Buenos Aires suburb. The prosecutor, who may have known better, did not cross-examine him on this point; clearly, the less said about this matter the better.) Mrs. Eichmann had notified the Argentine police of her husband's disappearance, but without revealing his identity, so no check of railway stations, highways, and air-fields was made. The Israelis were lucky, they would never have been able to spirit Eichmann out of the country ten days after his capture if the police had been properly alerted.

  Eichmann provided two reasons for his astounding cooperation with the trial authorities. (Even the judges who insisted that Eichmann was simply a liar had to admit that they knew no answer to the question: “Why did the accused confess before Superintendent Less to a number of incriminating details of which, on the face of it, there could be no proof but for his confession, in particular to his journeys to the East, where he saw the atrocities with his own eyes?”) In Argentina, years before his capture, he had written how tired he was of his anonymity, and the more he read about himself, the more tired he must have become. His second explanation, given in Israel, was more dramatic: “About a year and a half ago [i.e., in the spring of 1959], I heard from an acquaintance who had just returned from a trip to Germany that a certain feeling of guilt had seized some sections of German youth… and the fact of this guilt complex was for me as much of a landmark as, let us say, the landing of the first man-bearing rocket on the moon. It became an essential point of my inner life, around which many thoughts crystallized. This was why I did not escape… when I knew the search commando was closing in on me…. After these conversations about the guilt feeling among young people in Germany, which made such a deep impression on me, I felt I no longer had the right to disappear. This is also why I offered, in a written statement, at the beginning of this examination… to hang myself in public. I wanted to do my part in lifting the burden of guilt from German youth, for these young people are, after all, innocent of the events, and of the acts of their fathers, during the last war”—which, incidentally, he was still calling, in another context, a “war forced upon the German Reich.” Of course, all this was empty talk. What prevented him from returning to Germany of his own free will to give himself up? He was asked this question, and he replied that in his opinion German courts still lacked the “objectivity” needed for dealing with people like him. But if he did prefer to be tried by an Israeli court—as he somehow implied, and which was just barely possible—he could have spared the Israeli government much time and trouble. We have seen before that this kind of talk gave him feelings of elation, and indeed it kept him in something approaching good spirits throughout his stay in the Israeli prison. It even enabled him to look upon death with remarkable equanimity—“I know that the death sentence is in store for me,” he declared at the beginning of the police examination.

  There was some truth behind the empty talk, and the truth emerged quite clearly when the question of his defense was put to him. For obvious reasons, the Israeli government had decided to admit a foreign counselor, and on July 14, 1960, six weeks after the police examination had started, with Eichmann's explicit consent, he was informed that there were three possible counselors among whom he might choose, in arranging his defense—Dr. Robert Servatius, who was recommended by his family (Servatius had offered his services in a long-distance call to Eichmann's stepbrother in Linz), another German lawyer now residing in Chile, and an American law firm in New York, which had contacted the trial authorities. (Only Dr. Servatius’ name was divulged.) There might, of course, be other possibilities, which Eichmann was entitled to explore, and he was told repeatedly that he could take his time. He did nothing of the sort, but said on the spur of the moment that he would like to retain Dr. Servatius, since he seemed to be an acquaintance of his stepbrother and, also, had defended other war criminals, and he insisted on signing the necessary papers immediately. Half an hour later, it occurred to him that the trial could assume “global dimensions,” that it might become a “monster process,” that there were several attorneys for the prosecution, and that Servatius alone would hardly be able “to digest all the material.” He was reminded that Servatius, in a letter asking for power of attorney, had said that he “would lead a group of attorneys” (he never did), and the police officer added, “It must be assumed that Dr. Servatius won't appear alone. That would be a physical impossibility.” But Dr. Servatius, as it turned out, appeared quite alone most of the time. The result of all this was that Eichmann became the chief assistant to his own defense counsel, and, quite apart from writing books “for future generations,” worked very hard throughout the trial.

  On June 29, 1961, ten weeks after the opening of the trial on April 11, the prosecution rested its case, and Dr. Servatius opened the case for the defense; on August 14, after a hundred and fourteen sessions, the main proceedings came to an end. The court then adjourned for four months, and reassembled on December 11 to pronounce judgment. For two days, divided into five sessions, the three judges read the two hundred and forty-four sections of the judgment. Dropping the prosecution's charge of “conspiracy,” which would have made him a “chief war criminal,” automatically responsible for everything which had to do with the F
inal Solution, they convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, although he was acquitted on some particulars. “Together with others,” he had committed crimes “against the Jewish people,” that is, crimes against Jews with intent to destroy the people, on four counts: (1) by “causing the killing of millions of Jews”; (2) by placing “millions of Jews under conditions which were likely to lead to their physical destruction”; (3) by “causing serious bodily and mental harm” to them; and (4) by “directing that births be banned and pregnancies interrupted among Jewish women” in Theresienstadt. But they acquitted him of any such charges bearing on the period prior to August, 1941, when he was informed of the Führer's order; in his earlier activities, in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, he had no intention “to destroy the Jewish people. These were the first four counts of the indictment. Counts 5 through 12 dealt with “crimes against humanity”—a strange concept in the Israeli law, inasmuch as it included both genocide if practiced against non-Jewish peoples (such as the Gypsies or the Poles) and all other crimes, including murder, committed against either Jews or non-Jews, provided that these crimes were not committed with intent to destroy the people as a whole. Hence, everything Eichmann had done prior to the Fiihrer's order and all his acts against non-Jews were lumped together as crimes against humanity, to which were added, once again, all his later crimes against Jews, since these were ordinary crimes as well. The result was that Count 5 convicted him of the same crimes enumerated in Counts 1 and 2, and that Count 6 convicted him of having “persecuted Jews on racial, religious, and political grounds”; Count 7 dealt with “the plunder of property… linked with the murder… of these Jews,” and Count 8 summed up all these deeds again as “war crimes,” since most of them had been committed during the war. Counts 9 through 12 dealt with crimes against non-Jews: Count 9 convicted him of the “expulsion of… hundreds of thousands of Poles from their homes,” Count 10 of “the expulsion of fourteen thousand Slovenes” from Yugoslavia, Count 11 of the deportation of “scores of thousands of Gypsies” to Auschwitz. But the judgment held that “it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction”—which meant that no genocide charge except the “crime against the Jewish people” was brought. This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it: he had remembered vaguely that this had been an order from Himmler, that no “directives” had existed for Gypsies as they existed for Jews, and that there had been no “research” done on the “Gypsy problem”—“origins, customs, habits, organization… folklore… economy.” His department had been commissioned to undertake the “evacuation” of thirty thousand Gypsies from Reich territory, and he could not remember the details very well, because there had been no intervention from any side; but that Gypsies, like Jews, were shipped off to be exterminated he had never doubted. He was guilty of their extermination in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews. Count 12 concerned the deportation of ninety-three children from Lidice, the Czech village whose inhabitants had been massacred after the assassination of Heydrich; he was, however, rightly acquitted of the murder of these children. The last three counts charged him with membership in three of the four organizations that the Nuremberg Trials had classified as “criminal”—the S.S.; the Security Service, or S.D.; and the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. (The fourth such organization, the leadership corps of the National Socialist Party, was not mentioned, because Eichmann obviously had not been one of the Party leaders.) His membership in them prior to May, 1940, fell under the statute of limitations (twenty years) for minor offenses. (The Law of 1950 under which Eichmann was tried specifies that there is no statute of limitation for major offenses, and that the argument res judicata shall not avail—a person can be tried in Israel “even if he has already been tried abroad, whether before an international tribunal or a tribunal of a foreign state, for the same offense.”) All crimes enumerated under Counts 1 through 12 carried the death penalty.

  Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of “aiding and abetting” in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he himself had never committed an overt act. The judgment, to one's great relief, in a way recognized that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving him wrong on this point. For it was an important point; it touched upon the very essence of this crime, which was no ordinary crime, and the very nature of this criminal, who was no common criminal; by implication, it also took cognizance of the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded “the fatal instrument with [their] own hands.” What the judgment had to say on this point was more than correct, it was the truth: “Expressing his activities in terms of Section 23 of our Criminal Code Ordinance, we should say that they were mainly those of a person soliciting by giving counsel or advice to others and of one who enabled or aided others in [the criminal] act.” But “in such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated, on various levels and in various modes of activity —the planners, the organizers, and those executing the deeds, according to their various ranks—there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counseling and soliciting to commit a crime. For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands [my italics].”

  What followed the reading of the judgment was routine. Once more, the prosecution rose to make a rather lengthy speech demanding the death penalty, which, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, was mandatory, and Dr. Servatius replied even more briefly than before: the accused had carried out “acts of state,” what had happened to him might happen in future to anyone, the whole civilized world faced this problem, Eichmann was “a scapegoat,” whom the present German government had abandoned to the court in Jerusalem, contrary to international law, in order to clear itself of responsibility. The competence of the court, never recognized by Dr. Servatius, could be construed only as trying the accused “in a representative capacity, as representing the legal powers vested in [a German court]”—as, indeed, one German state prosecutor had formulated the task of Jerusalem. Dr. Servatius had argued earlier that the court must acquit the defendant because, according to the Argentine statute of limitations, he had ceased to be liable to criminal proceedings against him on May 7, 1960, “a very short time before the abduction”; he now argued, in the same vein, that no death penalty could be pronounced because capital punishment had been abolished unconditionally in Germany.

  Then came Eichmann's last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about “responsibilities,” and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had “escaped and deserted” them—by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) “I am not the monster I a made out to be,” Eichmann said. “I am the victim of a fallacy.” He did not use the word “scapegoat,” but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his “profound conviction that [he] must suffer for
the acts of others.” After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o'clock in the morning, the death sentence was pronounced.