three eichmanns
by Douglas Messerli
Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
The Viking Press, 1963; revised and enlarged edition, 1965).
Deborah E. Lipstadt The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken
Books, 2011)
Bettina Stangneth Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined
Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
Eichmann represents a highly disturbing
phenomenon, not only because he was such a thorough and seemingly incorruptible
believer in the necessity of destroying an entire people— which, had the
Germans won the War might also have included the Poles and citizens of other
cultures which Hitler’s Aryan fantasies perceived as inferior—but was proud of
continuing to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution even after most all of the
other despicable Nazi’s still living at the time of Germany’s defeat, had
abandoned such activities or ordered them to be ceased.
And yet, as Arendt’s arguments indicate, the ordinary-looking man
Eichmann, had fate simply dealt him a different set of cards, might have never
even reached the position in which he found himself. Certainly few others, with
far greater intelligence and ambitions, might not have been so eager to
accomplish the destruction of so many human beings, while remaining so distant
from the actual horrors as they took place. In short, he was a monster who
didn’t reveal himself to be one, a very contradiction of the root meaning of
the word (monstre, to warn by
showing). Yet he didn’t exactly shirk his involvement or blame only others, as
did so many at the Nuremberg Trials, but proclaimed that because it was his
sworn duty, he felt proud in helping to carry out the round-ups and shipping of
Jews to the camps such as Aushwitz, Chelmno, and Theresienstadt.
From Strangneth’s book, we now know that, whether or not he was
intelligent, he was a wily actor who knew how to twist history so that what
might appear as totally absurd might be represented as somewhat reasonable and
logical, at least from his point of view; and the personality he portrayed in
Jerusalem had been practiced and crafted from this on-tape interviews with Nazi
supporters in Buenos Aires, the so-called Sassen tapes, after the war. He was
not stupid, and, if nothing else, we now know, he was seldom banal, in the
sense of being trite or unoriginal. Eichmann’s planning and organizing
abilities, often requiring him to work apart and even against other departments
of the Nazi bureaucracy, were astounding, particularly with regard to his
ability to convince some Jewish leaders to actually engage in playing a role in
their own and their compatriots’ destruction. And, finally, we now know that,
even if he had been given another deck of cards which would have made his life
far different, he worked extraordinarily hard to keep playing out the game with
the same players and the rules that had been ordained.
Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial is
a seemingly straight-forward and highly informative summary of Eichmann’s
war-time activities, a succinct account of his arrest, years later, in
Argentina, and of the Jerusalem trial itself; and as such is perhaps the best
place to begin any study of Eichmann and the events surrounding him for today’s
everyman reader.
Her book begins with a quite startling announcement in 1960 by Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion to Israel’s Knesset:
I have to inform the Knesset that
a short time ago one of the great
Nazi war criminals, Adolf
Eichmann, the man responsible together
with the Nazi leaders for what
they called the Final Solution, which
is the annihilation of six
million European Jews, was discovered
by the Israel security services.
Adolf Eichmann is already under
arrest in Israel and will be
placed on trial shortly under the terms
for the trail of Nazis and their
collaborators.
The shock was palpable as a confused
silence spread over the parliament, followed a few moments later by, as
Lipstadt describes it, an “eruption”: “People wept, hugged, and marveled.”
What follows is a clearly expressed summary of how Eichmann’s Argentina
address was discovered—a series of events which began in the late 1950s when
Sylvia Hermann began dating Eichmann’s son Klaus, who, in turn, bragged to
Sylvia’s family that his father had been a high-ranking Waffen-SS officer. The
girl’s father, Lothar Hermann, a nearly-blind German half-Jew, was appalled by
Klaus’ suggestion that the German’s “should have finished the job of
exterminating the Jews,” connected up the boy’s statements with what we soon
after read in the German-language newspaper, Argentinisches Tageblatt, that Eichmann was one of Nazi criminals
still at large, and wrote to the Frankfurt prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, who
responded by suggesting that Hermann should attempt to locate Eichmann’s
address. The daughter was sent into the run-down neighborhood where Klaus
lived, where she “asked around until she located the ‘ramshackle’ Eichmann
home.” At the house, she was met by a middle-aged man, who described himself as
Klaus’ uncle, and invited the girl to wait for his nephew’s return. When Klaus
finally returned, he suggested he might accompany Sylvia to the bus, and as
they left, addressed the man as “Father.”
Receiving the address, Bauer determined to further investigate, but not
through the German security services or even the German judicial system,
because both had proved wary of involving themselves in the trials of former
Nazis and some members of these organizations, still harboring Nazi sympathies,
might even warn Eichmann. Instead he passed on the information to Israel, and
the information was ultimately passed on to Isser Harel, the head of Mossad
(Israel’s security services). Four months later, however, when an Israeli
operative was ordered to check the address, he determined that such a
dilapidated building could not possibly be the home of such a former
high-ranking officer as Eichmann. When Bauer heard of this “lackadaisical
approach,” he insisted that Harel meet with the Hermanns directly to assess the
quality of his information.
Yet a few more months passed, and when the agent met with Herman, he was
“nonplussed to discover that their informant was blind.” Sylvia convinced him,
however, that there may be some truth to the matter, and he asked them to help
by checking the property records for Eichmann’s address, where they discovered
that the building was owned by an Austrian named Schmidt, but “that the utility
bill went to a Ricardo Klement” (Eichmann’s alias in Argentina). Hermann proposed
that Schmidt was Eichmann and suggested (without any evidence) that Eichmann
had had plastic surgery to disguise his appearance, ideas which, when the
Israelis looked into them, proved to be mistaken; accordingly they, once again,
dropped the case. In the meantime, however, Bauer was able to discover from
other sources that Eichmann, now known as Klement, was indeed living in
Argentina.
Visiting Israel in December 1959, Bauer met with General Haim Cohen,
expressing his disappointment with Harel’s inactivity. Summoned to Cohen’s
office, Harel once again took up the search, dispatching Mossad’s chief
interrogator, Zvi Aharoni, to Argentina, where he discovered that indeed
Eichmann and Klement were the same man. Upon hearing of this, Ben-Gurion
immediately ordered that Eichmann should be “apprehended and brought to Israel
to stand trial.”
Even after a group of Israeli security volunteers entered Argentina on
false papers, leasing houses, renting cars, and establishing other connections,
the entire project met with another snag when it was discovered that the
Eichmann family had now moved to another house, a hand-built construction of
cinder-block that had no electricity or running water. At that time Eichmann
was working at a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant, and took the bus home each
evening to his somewhat secluded domicile.
Lipstadt dramatically describes his arrest:
On May 11, 1960, the Israelis
parked two cars midway between the bus
stop and his home. One had its
hood up. The men assigned to grab him
huddled over the engine as if
they were checking a mechanical failure.
The second car parked down the
road, facing the first car. When Eichmann
neared the “disabled” car, the
driver of the second car switched on the
headlights, effectively
blinding him. Peter Malkin, a hand-combat
specialist and one of the
agents near the “disabled” car, jumped him.
While they struggled, Eichmann
emitted what Malkin described as “the
primal cry of a cornered
animal.”
And so, the discovery and abduction
that almost didn’t happen, was over. Eichmann, soon after brought to Israel,
was on trial for his life.*
Lipstadt’s most significant contribution, however, is her detailed
presentation of the trial, pointing to both the rationale of and errors made by
the prosecuting attorney, Gideon Hausner, who, with the support and likely
encouragement of Ben-Gurion, determined to make the Israeli trial very
different from the previous Nuremberg court procedures; the Israelis wanted to
make this a trial not just about the criminal and his horrific deeds, but to
allow for the trial itself to be an occasion
The jurors themselves, in fact, often stood at odds with the endless
testimonies of those called by the prosecution; while Eichmann’s lawyer, Robert
Servatius, at times seemed disinterested in asking specific questions or even
in challenging some of the accusations, while at other times steering his
client into long illogical harangues of self-justification. The very fact that
Israel had abducted Eichmann, moreover, and that, in a very real sense, the
victims were trying their murderer, brought international questions of whether
or not Eichmann could possibly get a fair trial. The fact, moreover, that the
trial was conducted in Hebrew (translated into not always perfect English and
even worse German in daily reports) before jurors, lawyers, and witnesses who
primarily spoke German seemed senseless to other critics such as Hannah
Arendt.
In her short text, nonetheless, Lipstadt brings clarity to the issues of
the trial, negotiating the complexities of a series of such horrific acts that,
in many senses, simply could be not possibly be coherently expressed. In the
end, the judges ruled Eichmann guilty, specifically noting that despite his
insistence that he wanted to tell the truth, and the fact that he had given
specific testimony about his activities, he was also a liar whose “entire
testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and to
conceal his real share of responsibility.” Eichmann’s arguments that in Vienna
his work to move the Jews to the camps had been for the “mutual benefit” of
Jews and Nazis were contradicted, so the court declared, by “witnesses and the
documents.” His plan to relocate thousands of Jews to Madagascar, which he
argued, if it had materialized, “everything would have been in perfect order to
the satisfaction of the Germans and the Jews,” was, in fact, “far from the
truth.” Eichmann’s argument that he reacted to the failure of the
trucks-for-lives negotiation concerning about-to-be-deported Hungarian Jews
with “sorrow,” “fury and…anger,” was “sheer hypocrisy,” particularly given the
fact that he was simultaneously working (even against Heinrich Himmler’s
orders) to deport Hungarian Jews as quickly as possible.
Yet the judges were not thoroughly persuaded by Hausner that Eichmann
actually murdered a small boy in Budapest, that he had been connected to
Kristallnact, or even that his deportation activities in Vienna, Prague, and
Nisko during the early years were “brutal,” given the fact there was no proof,
at that time, that it was part of a program to exterminate the Jewish people,
having occurred before Hitler’s announcement of The Final Solution.
It is in the last chapter of her book, however, that Lipstadt reveals
that she has another motivation for retelling the Eichmann story, which seems
to have more to do with settling scores that explaining history. Most notably
Lipstadt expresses her outrage against Hannah Arendt and her reports of the
trial in The New Yorker, furious that
Arendt pretends to report on the entire long months of the trial, much of which
she did not actually attend.
Lipstadt’s larger fury, moreover, arises from Arendt’s seemingly
predetermined intention of finding a man like Eichmann to be an ignorant and
lazy thinker who reveals the banality of evil. And, finally, Lipstadt, like so
many others, is angry at Arendt’s penchant for suggesting that hundreds of the
Jewish victims were themselves collaborators in their own and others’ deaths.
If at moments Lipstadt is quite fair-minded about Arendt, one clearly feels
that she still has a grudge to settle—one to which the reader, at least this
reader, is somewhat sympathetic. If nothing else, however, using Arendt’s
writing as an example of how the issues surrounding Eichmann remain, even
today, confused and conflicted is an important analysis of the Eichmann trial.
The author also presents, in the early chapters, specific details on Eichmann’s rise to power, often on the basis of false credentials, such as the notion that he was a skilled “Hebraist” (in fact, there is no reason, except for his purchase of a textbook, Hebräisch für Jedermann, “Hebrew for Everyone,” that he knew any but a few words of Hebrew and Yiddish), a myth which Eichmann promulgated and used to achieve his ultimate position as the man who met with the Jewish committees and arranged for the deportation transports in Austria, Hungary and elsewhere of Jews to the death camps.
Strangneth also reveals more clearly than other writers that he most
likely attended the meeting where Hitler outlined The Final Solution, and she
argues that Eichmann himself insisted that he had “coined” the term. Far more
in depth than Lipstadt, moreover, Strangneth’s research makes clear just how
resolved Eichmann was in his determination to send all the Jews to their death,
working against the expressed orders of his superiors to ship out Hungarian
Jews even as the War itself was drawing to a close.
Most importantly, Strangneth, for the first time in print, analyzes and
recreates the contents of over 1,300 pages of written notes and the
seventy-three audio reel recordings, the so-called Sassen tapes, upon which
Eichmann extensively outlined his war-time experiences, detailing many events
of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi group, headed by Wilhelmus Antonius Maria
Sassen and other Argentina-based or relocated Nazis who one-day hoped to revive
Nazism not only in Germany but throughout the world, and who were as equally
anti-Semitic, if not more than Eichmann, expressed their intrigue with the
famed Nazi figure among their midst. Many of them were slightly fearful of
Eichmann (he had known so many of the Nazi leaders), and, more importantly,
were curious as to what the actual truth of the Holocaust was—specifically with
regard to the actual numbers of Jews actually deported and killed—in their
attempts to discover the truth. Their hope, as the author suggests, was that
the numbers had been highly inflated, and if they could prove this, with
information from Eichmann, they felt they could surely resurrect their cause.
Strangneth explains the situation quite succinctly:
No topic provoked the Düurer
circle [the group of Argentinean Nazi supporters]
more than the number of Jewish
victims. By 1957, no one in Buenos Aires still
believed that articles like “The
Lie of the Six Million” and the Hester Report
could throw the genocide into
doubt—mainly because the Dürer circle had been
largely responsible for
manufacturing these revisionist denials. Once the new
body of source material became
available, all they could do was try to make
the scale of the genocide appear
as small as possible. It is difficult to understand
why the question of victim numbers
continues to occupy old and neo-Nazis, and
the New Right, like no other,
considering that the legal and moral problem of
the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews
does not depend on an absolute number. The
‘reparations’ negotiations would
hardly have had a different outcome if four or
eight million, rather than six, had been the figure under discussion. It is as if
these men, who had mastered the power of symbols with their cult of the
Führer, were always more afraid of the “enemy’s” powerful symbol—the
six million—than anything else.
But even more importantly was the
fact that it was Eichmann who first mentioned this number, and even during the
Nuremberg trials, Der Weg had argued
that it was a pity, “after the deaths of Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and
Kaltenbrunner,” that Eichmann might not be tracked down to testify as “the only
credible inside witness.”
Despite considerable prodding, argument, and intense questioning,
however, Eichmann—proud as ever for doing what he saw as his duty—could not be
dissuaded from the number of Jews who might have been destroyed, nor did he
fully perceive any true guilt for his efficiency in trying to carry out The
Final Solution. Yet, through the tough challenges of the several figures
attending these taping sessions—often consisting a significant number of
individuals from German community—including a quite mysterious figure who
clearly knew intimate details of Nazi structure (suggesting, obviously, that he
had been a figure of some importance in the Nazi hierarchy), Eichmann did, at
times, retract some of his enthusiasm, shift course in his extensive
discussions, and, most importantly, reevaluate the reception of his words and
ideas. It is clear, accordingly, that—even as some of the Jerusalem observers
had suspected—these important tapes served as a trial run for Eichmann’s
self-defense in Israel. If nothing else, we hear in these tapes, at least as
Stangneth reports their content, that Eichmann intimately learned just how
singular and unpopular his viewpoints and past activities were now perceived.
And Strangneth, without literally saying so, seems to indicate that the
Eichmann who survived the taping sessions was no longer the same man, in some
ways, having given up on some of his staunch convictions and, almost
intentionally putting himself in harm’s way, with expectation of the dramatic
arrest which Lipstadt so effectively describes.
By the time of the Jerusalem trial, having written out yet another
version of his experiences, Eichmann had indeed—either intentionally or
effectively—become a different person. Although, attempting still to characterize
his actions as justifiable and even moral (although based on a very twisted
notion of what that meant), he now seemed worn down, confused, even, sometimes,
rather stupid, representing himself as a kind of mere bureaucratic errand-boy
than as an actual player in the events of Nazi Germany which he was. This is
the Eichmann Arendt saw, and frankly misunderstood. He was no longer the
swaggering SS Obersturmbannführer, a
somewhat handsome young Nazi resolute to destroy every Jew he encountered in an
attempt to rise in the Nazi world. What Arendt saw in Eichmann—and as Lipstadt
argues, she wanted to see because it
might explain away the notion that an entire nation of individuals had been
swept-away by a suicidal pride and hate of others: the fact that anyone might
be evil, the possibility that evil itself was something trite and meaningless.
Yet that is not at all what Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem actually proclaims. Certainly there is much
to anger one about Arendt’s significant work. She begins her book like a
princess dowager, entering the room with the hot breath of utter disdain. After
being called to her feet with the words “Beth
Hamishpath,” Arendt immediately frets about the scene, the three judges
(who, German-speaking, she admires throughout), below which sit:
the translators, whose
services are needed for direct exchanges between
defendant or his counsel
and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking
accused party, like almost
everyone else in the audience, follows the
Hebrew proceedings through
the simultaneous radio transmission, which
is excellent in French,
bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently
incomprehensible, in
German. (In view of the scrupulous fairness of
all technical arrangements
for the trial, it is among the minor mysteries
of the new state of Israel
that, with its high percentage of German-born
people, it was unable to
find an adequate translator into the only language
accused and his counsel
could understand. For the old prejudice against
German Jews, once very
pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough
to account for it….)
For Arendt, a former Zionist, all
things Israeli are intolerable, and she often displays the German-Jewish pique
over what she describes as Eastern Jews.
Arendt was also strongly convinced that the trial should not have been
an Israeli one, but an international tribunal, with representatives from all
the countries who had been effected—an issue with which I might agree with her,
were it not that I can also completely comprehend why this necessarily had to be a trial in which the Jews
indicted one of their major murderers, finally being able to act after so many
decades of victimization.
And then, obviously, there are those final last words which weigh down
Arendt’s narrative with what none of us truly want to believe: that “this long
course in human wickedness….[was simply] a lesson of the fearsome,
word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
We might excuse Arendt today, since she had only a slight knowledge of
the Sassen tapes, as published in Life and
German magazines. And even after reading of all the seemingly unrepentant, yet
quite coherent statements of Eichmann before Jerusalem in Strangneth’s book, we
still realize that Eichmann was no genius. Might any of the Nazi leaders truly
be described as brilliant? Clever perhaps, charismatic, lucky; but such hate
seldom can cloak itself in a truly intelligent mind.
Moreover, in reading Arendt’s often intelligent account of Eichmann’s
career in Eichmann in Jerusalem we
meet another woman, a conflicted being perhaps, but an often remarkably
perceptive figure who not only takes us, in her narrative, through the various
aspects of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic mania, but recounts, one by one, the various
theaters in which their attacks against Jews (and others) took place, and how
and why they worked—or in some extraordinary places didn’t succeed at all. The
Nazis simply presumed that their own view of anti-Semitism was so universally
shared that it would be easy to accomplish their extermination of all Jews (and
later, all Poles, all Gypsies, and all homosexuals) throughout Europe and, I
suppose, throughout the world. In fact, they were almost right in their
suppositions—except for the strange Mussolini concept that “his Jews” ought to
left alone, and the Danes’ willingness to take on a Jewish identity from their
King on down to every bicycle rider on the streets, and the pacifist Swedes’
endless willingness to take in everyone who no one else wanted, and the
majority of the Dutch...and, as I’ve expressed elsewhere in this volume, some
extraordinarily brave French Protestants who reacted quite differently—a
difference, I might suggest, that is similar to Derrida’s la différence, a difference which changes everything.
Arendt convincingly makes her case that not everyone went along so
pacifically with Hitler’s hatred. I find her accounting of the different fronts
and how its people were affected by the Nazi dictates to be one of the most
transparent evaluations of war-time behavior to have ever been written. And
these chapters, alone, make her problematic book worth the reading.
Finally, her Epilogue and Postscript analyze the legal and
jurisprudential issues with apparent sophistication.
The three versions of Eichmann represented in these 3 volumes, if
radically different, represent the impossibility of truly ever comprehending a
being like Eichmann—and, by extension any of Nazi hierarchy. As much as has
been written on Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Mengele, and Hitler himself, the
more impossible it becomes to comprehend their ideas and actions, which seem to
lie outside of human fellow-feeling and moral precepts. How did such sick
individuals come together at such a moment to destroy so many of their fellow
human beings?
In a terrible way, Eichmann, perceived in retrospect, was a bit like a
perfectly-made robotic creation who, brilliantly carrying out the behavior with
which he was programmed, could simply not comprehend why his actions might not
be perceived as anything but heroic. After all, he believed in a god whose name
was Hitler, and he had obeyed that god and did his very best to maintain his
faith. Might he too not quote Kant to argue that he had done his moral duty—even
if he forgot, as Arendt points out, Kant’s concept of moral duty is “bound up
with man’s faculty of judgement”? That his god was the devil himself, he simply
could not imagine, and only in that sense, was he banal; but at the same time,
through this fatal flaw, he was also a oddly tragic figure, someone who simply
could not comprehend the consequences of his own and others’ acts. An
unforgivable and unredeemable tragic monster is nearly impossible for most of
us to comprehend and, certainly, difficult for anyone with a conscience to
accept; one might even argue that in order to define beings or events as tragic
involves the monster’s awareness of and feeling of guilt for his acts. If
glimmers of guilt cracked through the armor of Eichmann’s personae, they seemed
always to be distorted by what he perceived as various overlays of changing
historical viewpoints. Within the claustrophobic confines of his Nazi mindset,
his truth never varied. His negotiation with reality was such a brutal one that
it left him outside of any other perspective of human behavior, turning him
into a kind of Macbeth without a hand-washing wife (which, perhaps, is why he
aligned himself, during the trial, with Pontius Pilate, washing his own hands
in mock reassignment of any guilt). In our daily reality, we cannot truly get a
fix on such a beast.
Perhaps one needs three books each presenting a different vision of such
a figure to even to begin to get a fix. But, of course, in another sense, there
can never be a fix, only a raw roar of sorrow and suffering.
Los Angeles, May 5-6, 2015
Reprinted in Green Integer Blog (May 2015).
*Lipstadt also chastises Naxi hunter
Simon Wiesenthal for claiming that he had known the whereabouts of Eichmann.
But Strangneth reveals that he may, indeed, have had knowledge, but was simply
ignored by numerous governments when he attempted to notify them of his
discovery. I should also add that Stangneth’s depiction of the series of events
that led up to Eichmann’s abduction are significantly different. She suggests
that Bauer, once he had the information, buried it, and no further action was
taken within the German system.