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October 19 - November 20, 2019
Three years after the publication of the book, people were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar passions.
The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.
“It still seems to me unbelievable, that I could achieve both a great love, and a sense of identity with my own person,” she wrote Blücher in 1937 in what is one of the most remarkable love letters of the twentieth century.
Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
Nearly everybody who attended the trials of mass killers after the war, some of them respected doctors and pharmacists, came away with the disconcerting impression that the killers looked pretty much like you and me.
Her position was that if you say to yourself, “Who am I to judge?” you are already lost.
Justice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
It was Realpolitik without Machiavellian overtones, and its dangers came to light years later, after the outbreak of the war, when these daily contacts between the Jewish organizations and the Nazi bureaucracy made it so much easier for the Jewish functionaries to cross the abyss between helping Jews to escape and helping the Nazis to deport them.)
It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm-to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations and, generally, in public office whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime. True, if the Adenauer administration had been too sensitive about employing officials with a compromising Nazi past, there might have been no administration at all.
the almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of Party membership.
He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do.
he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.
He went to considerable lengths to prove his point: he had never harbored any ill feelings against his victims, and, what is more, he had never made a secret of that fact.
“I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay before me.”
whenever he was asked to give his reasons, he repeated the same embarrassed clichés about the Treaty of Versailles and unemployment;
(Incidentally, an eagerness to establish museums commemorating their enemies was very characteristic of the Nazis. During the war, several services competed bitterly for the honor of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries.
An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody.
Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it, had sacrificed his fellow-Jews to his “idea,” and this was as it should be. Judge Benjamin Halevi, one of the three judges at Eichmann’s trial, had been in charge of the Kastner trial in Israel, at which Kastner had to defend himself for his cooperation with Eichmann and other high-ranking Nazis; in Halevi’s opinion, Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.” Now that the devil himself was in the dock he turned out to be an “idealist,” and though it may be hard to believe, it is quite possible that the one who sold his soul had also been an “idealist.”
The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program. Even before the Nazis’ rise to power, these Twenty-Five Points had been no more than a concession to the party system and to such prospective voters as were old-fashioned enough to ask what was the program of the party they were going to join.
Rather, they informed him of the enormous difficulties which lay ahead. Apart from the financial problem, already “solved,” the chief difficulty lay in the number of papers every emigrant had to assemble before he could leave the country. Each of the papers was valid only for a limited time, so that the validity of the first had usually expired long before the last could be obtained. Once Eichmann understood how the whole thing worked, or, rather, did not work, he “took counsel with himself” and “gave birth to the idea which I thought would do justice to both parties.” He imagined “an assembly
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Talk about red tape
“This is like an automatic factory, like a flour mill connected with some bakery. At one end you put in a Jew who still has some property, a factory, or a shop, or a bank account, and he goes through the building from counter to counter, from office to office, and comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport on which it says: ‘You must leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise you will go to a concentration camp.’
Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal
Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality.
But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.
What were you doing those twelve years outside Germany? We know what we were doing here in Germany”—with complete impunity, without anybody’s batting an eye, let alone reminding the member of the Bonn government that what Germans in Germany were doing during those years has become notorious indeed.
it is as though Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals had fled a country that was no longer “refined” enough for them.
Zionists, according to the Nazis, were “the ‘decent’ Jews since they too thought in ‘national’ terms.”
It was not until the outbreak of the war, on September 1, 1939, that the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal.
in the space of a day a most important part of the old civil services was incorporated into the most radical section of the Nazi hierarchy.
This “objective” attitude—talking about concentration camps in terms of “administration” and about extermination camps in terms of “economy”—was typical of the S.S. mentality, and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of. By its “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit), the S.S. dissociated itself from such “emotional” types as Streicher, that “unrealistic fool,” and also from certain “Teutonic-Germanic Party bigwigs who behaved as though they were clad in horns and pelts.”
“Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter.” To which Servatius replied: “It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter.”
Furthermore, it must be remembered that all these organs, wielding enormous power, were in fierce competition with one another—which was no help to their victims, since their ambition was always the same: to kill as many Jews as possible.
Eichmann and Dr. Stahlecker began to think “privately” about how the Security Service might get its share of influence in the East.
The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!),
since there existed no territory to which one could “evacuate,” the only “solution” was extermination.
“this basic idea was already rooted in the minds of the higher leaders, or the men at the very top.” This might indeed have been the truth, but then he would have had to admit that the Madagascar project could not have been more than a hoax. Well, he did not; he never changed his Madagascar story, and probably he just could not change it. It was as though this story ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind.
And then it was too late; the war against Russia “struck suddenly, like a thunderclap.” That was the end of his dreams, as it marked the end of “the era of searching for a solution in the interest of both sides.” It was also, as he recognized in the memoirs he wrote in Argentina, “the end of an era in which there existed laws, ordinances, decrees for the treatment of individual Jews.”
“absorptive capacity” of the various killing installations
(Apart from the not very important industrial enterprises of the S.S., such famous German firms as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke had established plants in Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps. Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent;
evacuation and deportation were no longer the last stages of the “solution.” His department had become merely instrumental. Hence he had every reason to be very “embittered and disappointed” when the Madagascar project was shelved;
Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich. And it was characteristic of his kind of memory that he could absolutely not recall the year in which this memorable day fell, on which “the hangman” was shot by Czech patriots.
“The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.”
For I had never thought of such a thing, such a solution through violence. I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest;
But Eichmann, as he vainly tried to explain in Jerusalem, had never belonged to the higher Party circles; he had never been told more than he needed to know in order to do a specific, limited job.
“bearers of orders,” but were advanced to “bearers of secrets,”
Secret combinations.
Moreover, the very term “language rule” (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie.
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.”
in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.
he had seen the places to which the shipments were directed, and he had been shocked out of his wits.
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.
