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October 19 - November 20, 2019
Jewish Sonderkommandos (special units) had everywhere been employed in the actual killing process, they had committed criminal acts “in order to save themselves from the danger of immediate death,” and the Jewish Councils and Elders had cooperated because they thought they could “avert consequences more serious than those which resulted.”
“acts of state,” and asked for acquittal on that ground—a strategy Dr. Servatius had already tried unsuccessfully at Nuremberg, where he defended Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation in Goring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, who had been responsible for the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish workers in Poland and who was duly hanged in 1946. “Acts of state,” which German jurisprudence even more tellingly calls gerichisfreie or justizlose Hoheitsakte, rest on “an exercise of sovereign power” [E. C. S. Wade in the British Year Book for International Law, 1934] and hence
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if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point.
who never made a decision on his own, who was extremely careful always to be “covered” by orders,
yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.
“I am certainly tough and I am ready to help solve the Jewish question,” Kube wrote to his superior in December, 1941, “but people who come from our own cultural milieu are certainly something else than the native animalized hordes.”
What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the
Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.
What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain.
“Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich.”
“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”?
absorptive capacity
As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.
If the person in question does not like what he is doing, the whole works will suffer.... We did our best to make everything somehow palatable.”
“What could we have done? What could we have done?”
He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.
only his “official soul” had carried out the crimes for which he was hanged in 1946, his “private soul” had always been against them.)
And the acceptance of privileged categories—German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.—had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society.
as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one;
There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
he had also acted upon orders—always so careful to be “covered”—
he became completely muddled, and ended by stressing alternately the virtues and the vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it.
“Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it”
it was “not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander.
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe—whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.
When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation.
It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
The Chief Rabbi of Sofia was unavailable, having been hidden by Metropolitan Stephan of Sofia, who had declared publicly that “God had determined the Jewish fate, and men had no right to torture Jews, and to persecute them” (Hilberg)—which was considerably more than the Vatican had ever done.
In Israel, as in most other countries, a person appearing in court is deemed innocent until proved guilty. But in the case of Eichmann this was an obvious fiction.
His role in the Final Solution, it now turned out, had been wildly exaggerated —partly because of his own boasting, partly because the defendants at Nuremberg and in other postwar trials had tried to exculpate themselves at his expense, and chiefly because he had been in close contact with Jewish functionaries, since he was the one German official who was an “expert in Jewish affairs” and in nothing else.
It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity.
domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis’ feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres—through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery—were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents “disappear in silent anonymity” were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will
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Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
Eichmann, though no legal expert, should have been able to appreciate that, for he knew from his own career that one could do as one pleased only with stateless people;
The irony
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.
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.
“I am not the monster I am made out to be,” Eichmann said. “I am the victim of a fallacy.”
Martin Buber called the execution a “mistake of historical dimensions,” as it might “serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany”—
Those young German men and women who every once in a while—on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial—treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers’ guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.)
Not only does it not have at its disposal “the tools required for the investigation of general questions,” it speaks with an authority whose very weight depends upon its limitation.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you.
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
