The Eichmann Trial

by Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Turning from the fate of the Jews to Eichmann himself, Servatius argued that he had taken a loyalty oath and was, therefore, obligated to remain at his post. To have done otherwise would have constituted a “betrayal of comrades.” Servatius elided the fact that these comrades were the very people responsible for mass murder. Servatius’s strange manner of expression reached its nadir when he described the gassings as actions taken “within the medical sphere.” Halevi immediately interrupted to ask if this was a slip of the tongue. Servatius assured him it was not. The object of the gassings, he explained, was “killing, and killing is within the medical sphere.” None of the judges said anything, but it is not difficult to imagine their reaction. Servatius concluded by conjuring up the notion of the biblical Jubilee Year, which occurred every forty-nine years, during which prisoners were released. He asked the court, “not to pardon and to forget,” but “to heal wounds,” by issuing a “Solomonic” judgment that would erase the “blemish” caused by Israel’s abduction of Eichmann from Argentina. It was unclear whether his reference to a Solomonic judgment meant splitting the wrongs committed by each side—abduction versus mass murder—or to the wisdom of Solomon.32

  On the mid-December day when the judges were to issue their judgment, Beit Ha’am was packed. The judgment began with a reaffirmation of what had been evident throughout the trial. The judges’ perception of the trial was diametrically opposed to Hausner’s and, by extension, Ben-Gurion’s. A trial, they unequivocally declared, could not be a “forum for clarification of questions of great import.” The questions of great import that they believed did not belong were precisely the matters that Hausner considered fundamental to his case: anti-Semitism, the role of other nations in facilitating the Final Solution, and the Allies’ failure to assist the Jews. The court’s responsibility, they insisted, was to focus on the defendant’s actions and to “entirely eliminate” anything foreign to this process. In what may be the most “controversial” aspect of their ruling, they addressed the testimony of Holocaust survivors “who poured out their hearts as they stood in the witness box.” Their testimony would be valuable for historians and researchers, but the judges regarded it “as a by-product of the trial.” Having begun with this slap at the prosecution and its forensic strategy, they then addressed Servatius’s objections. The Holocaust was not a “new crime which had not hitherto been known,” but was a criminal act according to the laws of all civilized nations. This trial could not be said, therefore, to constitute retroactive justice. Eichmann and his compatriots knew their acts were wrong. Otherwise, why would they have tried to “efface the traces” of them? Not surprisingly, they also rejected Servatius’s contention that Israel had no link to the victims. The aim of the Final Solution was the destruction of the “entire Jewish people.” To argue that there was “no connection” between Jews in Israel and Jews murdered by the Nazis “is like cutting away the roots and branches of a tree and saying to its trunk: I have not hurt you.” Had the Gypsies, another group designated for annihilation, reconstituted themselves after the war as a sovereign state, they, too, would have had the “natural right” to punish those who murdered its people.

  Turning to the kidnapping, they ruled that Eichmann’s rights had not been violated in Argentina, since he never applied for asylum, lived there under an assumed name, and committed crimes that Argentina had condemned. Moreover, even if the kidnappers were judged to have violated Argentina’s sovereignty, according to international law the person arrested cannot exploit the irregular circumstances of his apprehension to fight the charges against him. The rights of asylum belong to the country, not the offender.33

  Eichmann’s claims that his efforts in Vienna had been for the “mutual benefit” of Jews and Nazis were contradicted by the “witnesses and the documents.” Eichmann’s assertion that, had the Madagascar plan “materialized, everything would have been in perfect order to the satisfaction of the Germans and the Jews,” was “far from the truth.” They ruled that Eichmann’s contention that Rademacher had forged the document that contained his comment that the Serbian Jews should be shot “lacked credibility.” Had it been a forgery, that would have been uncovered at the time. His claim that he reacted to the failure of the trucks-for-lives negotiation with “sorrow” and “fury and … anger” was “sheer hypocrisy,” given that while he was negotiating he was deporting Hungarian Jews as quickly as possible.34 His repeated declaration that all he had done was arrange timetables was thwarted by the evidence, which demonstrated that his office ordered which Jews were deported, when, and how. His task was not just to obtain freight cars, but also “Jews to fill them.” During his interrogation, Eichmann had told Less that it was his responsibility to “ensure that the freight cars should be used to their maximum capacity.” This, the judges declared, said “everything.” He commanded those who rounded up Jews, packed them onto the freight cars, without subsistence for the trip, and ensured that they arrived at the killing places in sufficient numbers so that the extermination equipment would operate at maximum capacity.35 The court ruled that “the legal and moral responsibility of a person who delivers the victim to his death is … no less, and maybe even greater than the liability of the one who does the victim to death.” Eichmann’s claim that he could ignore an order to permit the emigration of certain Jews from Hungary because it was given orally was, the judges declared, “more damning than a hundred witnesses.” The order to annihilate the Jews was also given orally, yet he felt entirely bound by it. He claimed he had no power to act on his own, yet he “ascribed to his own subordinates no small degree of initiative.”36

  The judges were not completely persuaded by Hausner, however. They did not believe that Hausner had conclusively proved that Eichmann murdered the small boy in Budapest. More important, Hausner had not proved that Eichmann was connected to Kristallnact, had helped establish the Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka), participated in the sterilization program, or arranged the death marches. Though his deportation activities in places such as Vienna, Prague, and Nisko during the early years of the war were brutal, the judges correctly reasoned that Hausner had not proved that they were part of the program to exterminate the Jewish people.37 Ultimately, they found him guilty of what the evidence could prove and, with but a few exceptions, rarely ventured beyond that.

  In the final paragraph of their decision, they addressed Eichmann’s character rather than his deeds. He had not offered “truthful evidence, in spite of his repeated declarations that … his only desire was to reveal the truth.… His entire testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and to conceal his real share of responsibility.” Even as they declared him a liar, they offered a backhanded compliment: “His attempt was not unskillful, due to those qualities which he had shown at the time of his actions—an alert mind; the ability to adapt himself to any difficult situation, cunning and a glib tongue. But he did not have the courage to confess to the truth.” On the following day, the court convened so that Eichmann could make a statement. Not surprisingly, he bemoaned his misfortune in having “become entangled in these atrocities.” He insisted that “guilt for the mass murders is solely that of political leaders,” and, reiterating a theme he had adopted from the outset, declared himself one of “the victims.” Rather than a monster, he was “the victim of an error in judgment.” In short, he was “being sentenced for the ‘deeds of others.’ ”38

  The sole matter remaining to be determined was his punishment. When the court reconvened to pass sentence, Judge Landau’s opening words offered Eichmann some hope. He noted that the Israeli Penal Code gave courts the option to impose any penalty up to but not exceeding the penalty prescribed by law. Therefore, despite having found him guilty, the court was not obligated to impose death, even though the law under which he was being tried provided for capital punishment. Landau seemed to suggest that they might have decided to spare Eichmann’s life. But this was not the case. Death, though not mandatory, Landau con
tinued, was warranted. With a “deep feeling of the burden of responsibility,” the judges chose to impose it. They were the first judges in Israel’s history to do so.39

  Eichmann immediately appealed to the High Court. In the interim, a vigorous debate erupted over the death sentence. Some of Israel’s leading scholars, including Martin Buber, Yesayahu Leibowitz, and Gershom Scholem, petitioned Israeli president Ben-Zvi to commute the death sentence. They were joined by others, including the poet Leah Goldberg, and the artist Yehuda Bacon, who had testified at the trial about being deported to Auschwitz at age fourteen. Professor of philosophy Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, who organized the protest, found Bacon’s efforts to spare Eichmann’s life deeply moving. “This was, in my eyes, proof that the Judaism of love and compassion still lived and breathed even after the Holocaust.” In addition to the academics and artists, a number of rabbis declared that only a Sanhedrin had the right to impose a death sentence. During the debate, Buber approached Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the Bible-study group in which they participated and asked if he could meet with him in order to argue for the commutation of the death sentence. When the prime minister agreed, Buber offered to come to his office. Ben-Gurion decided that since, at age seventy-five, he was younger than the eighty-four-year-old Buber, he would come to Buber. During their two-hour meeting, the secular Buber cited Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kosov: “What the Torah teaches us is this: none but God can command us to destroy a man.” BenGurion, who had strongly opposed including the death penalty in the Israeli Penal Code, was not convinced by these arguments. Nonetheless, he thought enough of them to bring the matter to a Cabinet meeting. The Cabinet rejected awarding clemency. Many Israelis agreed. Maariv left no question about its editorial stance: “A pardon for Eichmann? No! Six million times no!” The poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, an Israeli national icon, expressed a similar view when he condemned Buber. “I am not speaking on behalf of the Jewish people and not on behalf of the millions. I am speaking for myself. The murder of my father and my mother is my affair. Buber can waive retribution for his parents’ death if they were exterminated by Eichmann, but neither he nor other Bubers can demand amnesty for the murderer of my parents.”40 Eventually President Ben-Zvi rejected Eichmann’s appeal for a commutation of the sentence. A gallows mechanism was erected—Israel had none—and on May 31, 1962, precisely two years after his capture, the sentence was carried out. His body was then cremated. A mechanism for cremation had to be jury-rigged, since Israel had none. According to Rafi Eitan, the leader of the abduction team, they used a thirty-inch pipe approximately three meters long with burners on both sides, “something like flamethrowers that ran on gas.” The hangman was assigned the task of pushing his body into the oven. He was so nervous that he could not keep his hands from shaking and twice knocked the body off the gurney instead of into the crematory. Ultimately, Eichmann’s ashes were scattered in the sea to prevent his burial site from becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.41

  The trial had ended. The sentence had been carried out. Representatives of the international media who had been present for select moments of this long saga had departed. But the story was far from over. The debate about Adolf Eichmann and his trial was about to enter a new, far more vigorous, acerbic, and intellectually active phase, one that reverberates to this day.

  6

  The cover of the February 16, 1963, New Yorker featured an artist’s rendering of the recently completed and much-debated Pan Am building looming over the iconic Grand Central Terminal and a beflowered Park Avenue. Inside was the first of a series of five articles by Hannah Arendt on the trial. Eventually published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, they would generate a virulent public debate. Arendt’s perspective would be condemned as “tasteless,” “wicked,” “pervaded by vanity,” “inaccurate and curiously unfeeling,” “gratuitous and distorted.”1 Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed her as “arrogant” and her book as filled with “half-truths … loaded language and … double standards of evidence.”2 Her most extreme critics branded her as “sympathetic” to Eichmann and her writings as “claptrap.”3 Her fans were no less effusive. Stephen Spender, who would become Poet Laureate of the United States, described her work as “brilliant.”4 Former Poet Laureate Robert Lowell deemed it a “masterpiece.” Arendt’s close friend, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy, proclaimed it “splendid and extraordinary.” McCarthy did more than just praise Arendt. She defended Arendt, by categorizing her critics according to their ethnic identity. Describing the attacks as a “pogrom,” McCarthy contended that Jews were critical of Arendt. Non-Jews, on the other hand, apparently able to see the bigger picture and to react unemotionally, were favorable. Non-Jews who opposed Arendt were summarily dismissed by McCarthy as “special cases.” Dwight MacDonald, a former editor of Partisan Review and a New Yorker and Esquire writer, who declared the book “a masterpiece of historical journalism,” joined McCarthy and dubbed the “hostile” reviews an expression of “Jewish patriotism,” and the non-Jews who criticized Arendt as “Honorary Semites.”5

  Today the passion has ebbed but echoes of that debate linger. To many people, Arendt was a more central character in the Eichmann story than Eichmann himself. And certainly, from an intellectual perspective, she was. Her book and the controversy it aroused put this trial on the intellectual map. Her perspectives on both perpetrators and victims continue to constitute the prism through which many people’s view of the Holocaust is refracted.

  Arendt was the product of a highly acculturated upper-class German Jewish family in which, she claimed, the word “Jew” was never spoken. She said that she first encountered the term when children taunted her. A Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on Saint Augustine, she had studied philosophy and Protestant theology. As Bernard Wasserstein notes, during her educational career she was exposed to and absorbed a view of Jewish history that ends shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 C.E.) with the rise of Christianity. According to this Weltanschauung, Judaism emerged into a higher and more finely developed form—that is to say, Christianity.6

  She watched her homeland begin its seamless slide into anti-Semitic totalitarianism. Incarcerated briefly in 1933 for helping Zionists, she fled to Paris. There her Zionism became more pronounced. Working for Youth Aliyah, she helped refugee children reach Palestine. When the Nazis invaded France, she was briefly interned. She obtained an American emergency visa and settled in New York, where she taught at Brooklyn College and wrote for Aufbau, a German Jewish newspaper. She fought for the creation of a Jewish army to fight in Europe alongside the Allies. Though many of the supporters of a Jewish army were Zionists, her reasoning was different: “You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.” For Jews to defend themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen, when they were being attacked as Jews, would be to fail to defend themselves.7 After the war, she became executive director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which tried to recover the Judaica the Nazis had looted. In 1951, she published Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argued that totalitarian societies, such as the Third Reich, by totally dominating all aspects of an individual’s life, are capable of compelling people not only to perform horrific acts, but to perceive them as essential. This book established her academic reputation.

  When Israel announced the date for Eichmann’s trial, she proposed to New Yorker editor William Shawn that she cover it for the magazine. Shawn, who had just published James Baldwin’s series on the African American community, accepted readily. For Arendt this was to be both an intellectual and a personal excursion. She considered her presence in Jerusalem as a chance both to validate her theories of totalitarianism and to fulfill “an obligation” that “I owe my past.”8 Her expectation that the trial would illuminate the nature of totalitarianism put her at immediate odds with both Ben-Gurion and Hausner, who were not interested in proving anything about the
nature of totalitarian societies. Her perception of what should happen in Jerusalem, like her sense of the Final Solution itself, was diametrically opposed to theirs. She wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings, while the prosecution wanted a laserlike focus on Nazi Germany’s wrongs against the Jewish people. Moreover, she perceived of the Holocaust not as a crime against the Jews but a “crime against humanity,” perpetrated on the Jews. Eichmann, Arendt posited, was not another link in the long line of anti-Semites but someone who participated in a revolutionary new crime. Hausner, as he made clear from the very first paragraph of his speech, believed him to be the ultimate link in that chain.