The Eichmann Trial (20 page)

But her critique of the relationship between Nazis and Jews reached its pinnacle in her attack on the Jewish Councils. She held them responsible for the death of millions, contending that, “if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” According to her, their “pathetic and sordid” behavior was the “darkest chapter” of the Holocaust. For her, it was darker than the mass shootings and the gas chambers, because it showed how the Germans could turn victim against victim. There are many problems with her argument. She ignored the fact that the Einsatzgruppen murdered tens of thousands of Jews during the first months after their entry into the eastern territories in the summer of 1941 without Jewish councils or community leaders serving, in her words, as “instruments of murder.”
¹⁹
She not only ascribed to the councils more power than they had, but depicted thousands of council members with the same broad ahistorical brush. Some members acted heroically and some contemptuously. Some preserved lives, others worried only about their own. Some combined these traits. Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Łodź Judenrat, enjoyed a surfeit of material comforts while ghetto inhabitants starved. Showing megalomaniacal tendencies, he printed postage stamps embossed with his image and ordered the composition of odes of praise to him. He was convinced he could save the ghetto by transforming it into a vital economic resource that the Germans would be loath to destroy. When the Germans wanted to deport Jews, he gave up the elderly and demanded that parents surrender their children. Only workers were protected.

Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children.… I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid … (terrible wailing)…. Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved who can be saved and who have a chance of being saved and not those whom there is no chance to save in any case.…
²⁰

Though he is personally reviled, his plan almost succeeded. In August 1944, long after every ghetto had been liquidated, the Łodź Ghetto held thousands of Jews. With defeat in the offing, the Germans shipped them to Auschwitz. Had Soviet forces reached the city a bit earlier, Rumkowski
might
be lauded, not reviled. (During the final deportations, Rumkowski, who had become so habituated to obeying German orders, demanded that ghetto inhabitants obey German orders.) The ambiguity about this man was revealed to me early in my career, when I met a survivor of Łodź who told me where she had been. With a know-it-all cockiness all too symptomatic of young scholars, I contemptuously intoned, “Ah, Łodź. Rumkowski,” as if nothing more needed to be said. With an unvarnished rebuke, she declared: “By me he is a hero. I am alive because of him.” I was silent.

Arendt’s anger about the Judenrat issue was certainly exacerbated by what she considered the prosecution’s staged silence on the topic. She believed that Hausner was avoiding the issue because of Ben-Gurion’s desire not “to embarrass the Adenauer administration.” It is unclear, if not illogical, why Adenauer would have been embarrassed by this topic. The notion of Jewish “cooperation” would probably have been most comforting to many Germans: it might have soothed their consciences by suggesting that the victims were complicit in their own murder.
²¹
Hausner did consciously avoid the topic because, unlike the Kasztner trial, this was to be a trial of the perpetrators, not the victims.

The members of the Judenrat were not the only Jews Arendt condemned. She also took aim at the Sonderkommandos, those Jews selected to work in the gas chambers. Their job was to deceive the victims before the gassing, so that they would go more submissively to the gas chambers. Before cremating the bodies, they checked their teeth for gold fillings and bodily orifices for sequestered valuables. Arendt described them as doing “the actual work of killing,” but somewhat cavalierly dismissed this as “no moral problem,” because, she declared with no historical proof, the SS chose “the criminal elements” for the job. Some indeed were criminals. Many were not. Arendt also failed to mention that they all would be dispatched to the gas chambers every few months, because they knew too much. A new group would replace them, until it, too, was sent to death. Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi offered a radically different assessment of Sonderkommandos, whom he, unlike Arendt, actually encountered in Auschwitz. His words penned in 1986 may have been written for her:

No one is authorized to judge them, not even those who lived through the experience of the Lager and even less those who did not live through it. I would invite anyone who dares pass judgment to … imagine, if he can, that he has lived for months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue, promiscuity and humiliation; that he has seen die around him, one by one, his beloved; that he is cut off from the world, unable to receive or transmit news; that finally he is loaded on to a train, eighty or a hundred persons to a boxcar; that he travels towards the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and that he is thrown at last inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno.
²²

Arendt was also wrong in the case of Yehiel Dinur, Auschwitz survivor and author of popular novels on the Holocaust. (Arendt justifiably considered his work borderline pornographic.) He asked the court’s permission to testify using his pen name, Ka-Tzetnik, an inhabitant of the
Konzentrationslager
(concentration camp), but the court refused. As soon as he entered the witness box, he launched into a description of “the planet of Auschwitz.… The inhabitants … had no names.… They did not dress as we dress here.” Arendt believed that Dinur had insisted on testifying and Hausner had accepted even though Dinur had no connection to Eichmann. She fumed at his lyrical testimony. Dinur, she charged, could not distinguish “between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen … years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime.” She legitimately found it hard to abide his mythologizing of the Holocaust in lieu of testimony. Even Hausner recognized that Dinur’s metaphor-laden narrative would not please the court. The prosecutor rather demurely asked Dinur if he might “perhaps put a few questions to you, if you will consent?” Ignoring him, Dinur simply plowed on. When an impatient Judge Landau intervened to ask some questions, Dinur collapsed. Arendt described the moment:

[H]e started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted name.… He continued with a little excursion into astrology.… When he arrived at “the unnatural power above Nature” which had sustained him … even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this “testimony” and very timidly, very politely, interrupted.… Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as well.… In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions.

Contrary to what Arendt believed, Dinur had not volunteered: Hausner had pressured him to testify. Furthermore, he had actually met Eichmann, making his testimony relevant even according to Arendt’s limited scope for the trial. Dinur had a South American passport, which he took to Gestapo headquarters. Eichmann, who happened to be there, took the passport, tore it into little pieces, threw it in the garbage, and then mockingly asked, “Are you still a foreigner?”
²³
Finally, he did not just faint but fell into a deep coma, a fact reported in the Israeli press.

She was even more contemptuous of Rabbi Leo Baeck, the revered leader of German Liberal Judaism. Reluctant to abandon his flock, Baeck shunned multiple opportunities to emigrate. Imprisoned in Theresienstadt, he did not inform Jews there who volunteered for deportation that this meant an almost certain death. He feared that such knowledge would have rendered their last hours unbearable. Baeck was so pervasively attached to the idea of order that he may have been unable to fathom that Jews might somehow resist. He had, after all, asked the officers who came to deport him to wait while he paid his utility bills. Arendt accused him of compounding his failure to inform the victims of their fate by having the deportations organized by the Jewish policemen because “he assumed that they would be ‘more gentle and helpful’ and would ‘make the ordeal easier.’ ” In fact, Arendt posits they were often more brutal and corruptible, because “so much more was at stake for them.” (Though the Jewish police were often quite brutal, it is hard to imagine that they were
more
brutal than SS men.)

In
The New Yorker
she described Baeck, whom she met in 1945 in New York when she attended a dinner party in his honor, as being, “in the eyes of both Jews and Gentiles, the ‘Jewish Führer.’ ” There are legitimate grounds to question Baeck’s decisions, which denied the victims a chance to rise up, escape, or take some other action. However, Arendt’s description of him echoed the language of the enemy and suggested—whether she intended it or not—a siding with the Nazis. However, it did more than just that. It also came close to constituting plagiarism. Raul Hilberg had used this term to describe Baeck in his magnum opus,
The Destruction of European Jews
. He, however, was quoting “one of Eichmann’s people,” who coined the title for Baeck. In the first edition of her book, Arendt retained the phrase. In subsequent editions, she dropped it. This was one of her only concessions to her critics.
²⁴

She was incensed when critics accused her of closing the gap between perpetrator and victim. However, sometimes it is hard not to interpret her statements as doing precisely that—such as when she wrote that the “majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.” She excoriated Hausner for asking witnesses why they did not resist. Yet her description of Jews going to their death with “submissive meekness,” “arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot” is riddled with the same contempt that she claimed Hausner showed for the victims. In an expression of her deep-seated ambivalence about the trial, she twice described the trial as a “court of the victors.”
²⁵

Though she correctly deduced that, contrary to Hausner’s exaggerated claims, Eichmann was not the linchpin of the Final Solution, she veered in the opposite direction. Using her
Origins
thesis as a context, she declared him a desk-level bureaucrat who showed little initiative and had few talents. (Hausner also called him a desk killer, but one possessed of great initiative and talents.) “Everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” She may well have reached this conclusion before coming to Jerusalem. Prior to the trial, she wrote that she did not want to miss the opportunity to analyze “this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.”
²⁶
She concluded that he showed no “fanatical anti-Semitism” and did not have an “insane hatred” of Jews. He exemplified the “banality of evil,” in which normal bureaucrats were simply unaware of the evil that they were doing. His seemingly out-of-touch comments—the train could hold three hundred extra Jews because they did not have luggage, he should have arrested a rabbi rather than try to hire one, and his horror that Less’s father was deported—led her to conclude that he could not “think”—that is to say, understand how he sounded to others. She failed to explain why, if Eichmann was unaware that what he was doing was wrong, he and other Nazi officials labored to destroy the evidence. Surely Arendt knew that Eichmann and his cohorts were aware of opposition to the Final Solution. Eichmann received communiqués from the Foreign Office relaying other governments’ distress at what was being done to their Jewish citizens. The only way she could have concluded that Eichmann was unaware was to give more credence to his demeanor and testimony at the trial than to what he actually did during the war. His words seemed to hold more sway with her than those of the victims. The memoir released by Israel for use in my trial reveals the degree to which Arendt was wrong about Eichmann. It is permeated with expressions of support for and full comprehension of Nazi ideology. He was no clerk. This was a well-read man who accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.

Yet there is another side to Arendt’s analysis, one that has been unduly ignored by her critics. Her evaluation of the trial is actually more complex than those who have vilified her would acknowledge. Lost in the furor was the fact that not only did she and her most ardent critics share certain opinions, but that she powerfully articulated some of the most basic lessons of this horrific moment in history.

Though she was castigated as being anti-Israel, she believed that Israel was justified in kidnapping Eichmann, since there was no alternative route to bring him to justice. She supported holding the trial in Israel, the “country in which the injured parties and those who happened to survive are.” When Karl Jaspers disagreed, she wrote him a letter that is remarkable for its use of the first person plural. “
We
kidnapped a man who was indicted in the first trial in Nuremberg.…
We
abducted him from Argentina because Argentina has the worst possible record for the extradition of war criminals.…
We
did not take the man to Germany but to our
own
country.” (Emphasis added.)
²⁷
Israel, she insisted, “had as much right to sit in judgment on the crimes committed against their people, as the Poles had to judge crimes committed in Poland.” She considered the charge that Jewish judges would be biased “unfounded,” wondering why the partiality of Jewish judges should be any more in question than that of the Polish or Czech judges who had presided over war-crimes trials in their countries. She dismissed the contention that, since Israel did not exist at the time of the crime, it did not have jurisdiction, as “legalistic in the extreme,” as well as “formalistic [and] out of tune with reality and with all demands that justice must be done.” She articulated what Israel’s critics ignored: there was no international court to preside, and no other country, Germany included, wanted to host it. For Arendt, having this trial in Israel had profound—if not metahistorical—significance. As she wrote in a too frequently overlooked passage in
Eichmann in Jerusalem: