The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Behind me, like soft surf, I could hear women in the audience, an indrawn sob of horror and grief. Horror and grief were the common daily emotions in that courtroom.

  It is impossible to convey the anguish felt only by hearing of the anguish suffered. Despair for mankind, a real darkening of the mind, would have drowned us, had it not been for the few, beautiful examples of human solidarity against human evil.

  The Danes, led by their King Christian X, saved their Jews—to the furious rage of Eichmann. The Jews in Denmark never wore a yellow star, because the King said he would be the first to wear one, if such an order was imposed on any of his people; nor were they herded into Ghettos. The Nazis tried, as usual, to inflame the Danes into anti-Semitism by publishing obscene lies about Jews. The Danes, without hesitation, ferried their Jews across the water to Sweden. They hid old Jews in their hospitals, under Danish gentile names; they saved the sacred objects of the synagogue in the crypt of a Lutheran church. No Dane disgraced himself or his nation by betraying a Jew to the Gestapo. Many Danes paid for their humanity with their lives.

  Those few hundred Danish Jews—out of some seven thousand—whom the Gestapo managed to capture while escaping were deported to Theresienstadt, the least murderous of the German concentration camps. When the Danes learned of the hunger there, everyone from King to cobbler contributed money and sent to their people in captivity the food they needed to remain alive. The Danes see nothing extraordinary in their record.

  The Swedes, though neutral in war, were not neutral in their humanity. They gave asylum to any Jew who could reach their shores; they were so freehanded in creating sudden Jewish Swedish citizens that Eichmann issued special orders against them—any Jew known to be obtaining neutral citizenship must be deported to the East; to the gas chambers, immediately. And the Swedes produced a saint, named Raoul Wallenberg, the Counselor of the Swedish Legation in Budapest. At the rate of 12,000 a day, Eichmann was sending Hungarian Jewry to its death—this was when the war was clearly lost, in the summer and autumn of 1944. Raoul Wallenberg rented houses in Budapest, flew the Swedish flag over them, and filled them with Jews who were now called Swedes. When, at last, freight cars were unobtainable and Auschwitz was closed down before the approach of the Russian armies, Eichmann—still determined to eradicate surviving Jews—ordered the atrocious winter death march of Jews from Hungary to Austria. This was such open and appalling murder, for everyone to see, that Himmler finally commanded Eichmann to stop it. Wallenberg drove beside the stumbling column of people and distributed food, blankets, medicines. He was a fanatic too, on the side of the angels. The Russians captured Wallenberg in Hungary, and he is dead. It passes understanding how the Russians, who had themselves suffered so fearfully from the Germans, could have harmed this noble man.

  The Nazis swooped fast in Norway, but even so, the Norwegian underground managed to lead half of Norway's Jews to safety in Sweden, over terrible mountain country in sub-zero weather, past a dangerously patrolled frontier. The Dutch staged general strikes, in protest against the treatment of Jews; the strikes were repressed by the usual German firing squads. The Nazis raised the bribe for betraying Jews; the Dutch continued to hide Jews; always more Jews were found. Grumbling documents from Eichmann's office discussed this maddening attitude of the Dutch, who refused to “sympathize” with the German policy. There are countless examples of Italian humaneness which neither a Fascist government, nor war, nor defeat (twice defeated, by the Germans, by the Allies), nor the incomprehensible official silence of the Pope could weaken.

  An Italian Jewess, the daughter of a university professor, found herself alone (the rest of her family lost, caught) with five small children, her own and her missing brother's: “I wish to add that I saved my children by handing them over to Christian families whom I did not know before—different strata of life of the gentile population. . . . Each child with another family. My children and my brother's children. . . . I was helped by the clergy and also the lay population—laborers and others, in the city of Rome, the intellectuals. . . . The goodness, the kindheartedness I met with on my way. Every Italian Jew owes his life to the Italian population.”

  The gates of Luxembourg were open to all fleeing Jews. There, in that tiny defenseless country, they could rest, hide, remember-in the kindness of the Luxembourg people—that they were human beings, not hunted animals; and with time and luck, some could obtain visas to safety in neutral territory. Under the moral leadership of Elizabeth, Queen Mother of the Belgians, and with the support of the Primate of Belgium, the Belgian underground aided groups of Jews to escape and managed to derail several death trains.

  There were these brave, isolated acts of humanity, and for them we must be eternally grateful.

  There were more, in all the German-occupied countries, nameless individuals who protected their fellowmen against the savages. The penalty for helping Jews was death. Everyone who took the risk, rather than aid barbarism or watch from a safe distance or close his eyes, bought back a piece of the honor of mankind. And they were effective; they did save lives; they did cheat Eichmann and his servants of their prey. If there had been many many more, millions more, could Eichmann have succeeded as he did?

  The Jews themselves were not sheep led to the slaughter. They were too civilized to believe that Germans, a reputedly civilized nation, could behave as these Germans did. The Germans tricked the Jews, lied, raised hope and destroyed it, mocked, lied again: the soap in the Auschwitz gas chambers, where the people expected a shower bath, was made of stone; on death trains the people were given picture postcards of an imaginary place, “Waldsee,” and forced to write cheerful news back to the Ghetto. No ruse was too mean if it served to lull the Jews and keep them from acts of desperation. There were not so many troops to allot to Jew-killing, despite the bureaucratic mania of Eichmann.

  And yet, broken in health, starving, and helpless, the Jews revolted, even in Auschwitz and Treblinka and Sobibor. The revolts could not be more than acts of undaunted defiance; few people survived. The uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto remains a monument to courage; and twenty people live to tell the tale, out of half a million. Jewish partisans, escaped from the massacre, fought in the woods of Poland, in Hungary, in France.

  The little man sits in the dock and listens, day after day; and he alone is unmoved; he alone is not burdened by the weight of grief and shame and outrage which we all carry. He proved this, without knowing what he did, on the first day of his testimony in his own defense.

  On the morning when we would finally hear the silent man in the glass dock, the courtroom was packed. Dr. Servatius, Eichmann's German lawyer, presented his client and his case. Dr. Servatius’ voice had changed, he became a quavering elderly gentleman, beseeching these honorable strong judges of Israel to pity an insignificant underling. All during the Trial, the Court treated Dr. Servatius with the most benign courtesy: one had the impression that everyone in the streetcar was rising to give his seat to an old lady. Dr. Servatius is the good, fat, honest German—a pre-war figure of affection or caricature, depending on taste. He could come here (fee of $25,000 paid by the Israeli government) to defend Eichmann because his own record is clean: he was lucky enough to be in a Wehrmacht regiment all during the war, and so had no hand in the horrors committed by and in the name of Germans.

  Eichmann looked different, yellowish-gray, afraid at last. His voice was low when he began to speak, telling us the story of his life and times. A modest young man, he saw an opening in a little-known field—the problem of the Jews. He chose this career, but he was nobody important; he just happened to have taken up Jews as his specialty. Nazism wasn't primarily against Jews, that was the second issue: Nazism was against Versailles, against the democracies. He was far too obscure to foresee where all this would lead; though, for himself, he went straight as an arrow into the SS.

  Recounting his early struggles to get ahead in life and the SS, Eichmann said that he desired to learn Hebrew and this provoked the ridicul
e and even the suspicion of his superiors. But he had seen a Hebrew newspaper published in Riga, and he thought if he could learn the language, he would get much useful information. He wanted to take lessons from a rabbi; his superiors feared that in close contact with a rabbi he might be influenced and talk of other things than the Hebrew language. Finally he overcame their doubts: “It would have been easy to say, let's grab a rabbi and lock him up and he'll have to teach me; but no, I paid three marks per hour, the usual price.”

  Eichmann was so startled by the low wave of sound this statement evoked from the courtroom that, for the first and only time, he turned his head, and stared in an instant's bewilderment at the public. How could he know, this hollow man, that what seemed to him a natural phrase exposed wastelands of feeling to people who, under no circumstances on earth, would have imagined that you could “grab” an innocent scholar and jail him in order to get lessons for nothing. After all the years in hiding, the weeks in this court, Eichmann was the same SS officer: he regarded Jews as objects, still. Being an honest man, he had treated an object correctly, though under no obligation to do so. He paid the object three marks: he refrained from seizing and locking up the object. The reaction in the courtroom was spontaneous and complex: disbelief, revelation, disgust—a groaning murmur. As time went on, we realized that Eichmann would never know why or how ordinary people reacted to him or his crimes.

  Hourly, Eichmann grew surer of himself. His grasp of the complexities of Nazi bureaucracy was dazzling. He never faltered when explaining a machinery which seems too involved to have been workable: but it was, it was. The workings of his own department—RSHA IV B of the Gestapo, charged with the “Final Solution"—were so efficient that Eichmann stands out as the greatest organization man of all time. One branch of the Nazi government, dedicated to the extinction of one branch of the population of Europe, killed six million civilians, of whom one million were children, in six years. In World War II, spread over the entire globe, the total of the dead combatants of twenty-four nations was 14,700,000.

  Eichmann's memory was fabulous, when he so desired. It gave out, when expedient. And even replying to his own lawyer, he would not speak to the point. It took him five minutes of double-talk not to answer a simple question as to whether he had, or had not, been in Berlin on a certain date.

  Dr. Servatius bumbled; he mixed documents; he could not find the paper he wanted. Eichmann, in control of all papers always, sent the required document from his glass dock to his attorney's desk. Very soon, he was conducting his own defense, saying, “The assertions I am making will be proved in later documents.”

  His voice is ugly, with a hard R, a sound that makes one think of a hammer and a knife. Neither by voice, accent, nor vocabulary is he an educated man. As Dr. Servatius fumbled, Eichmann's voice sharpened: the cold snarl, the bark that many of the witnesses remembered was there, one tone beneath what we heard. From the first day of his testimony, we could imagine Eichmann clearly as an old Hungarian Jewish aristocrat had described him: “an officer in boots, with one hand on his pistol, in all the pride of his race.”

  On the second day, Eichmann established his line of defense and stuck to it until the end: “I had no special positions or privileges—they gave me instructions.” Furthermore, he was exclusively concerned “with matters of pure transport.” This is the reverse of Goebbel's Big Lie; this is the Little Lie. He was not unnerved by the testímony of witnesses who knew him and dealt with him in his years of power, or saw him on his concentration camp visits, nor by the avalanche of documents showing that he commanded the fate of the Jews as no general was able to command a whole theater of war. He wriggled, he talked a great deal; he returned again and again to the same lies. He was only a minor bureaucrat. It is possible that the outside world—lazy, busy with other things, glancing briefly at headlines—will believe him. Should the State of Israel execute this man, there may well be an outcry in the unharmed, spectator countries, and the adjective vengeful will be applied to the Jews. I am not inventing this peculiar if not perverse line of thought: I have already heard it bruited about. People who are forever opposed to the death penalty, anywhere for any crime, have the right to this opinion. Others should study the entire trial, as a moral obligation, before they dare to condemn the punishment meted out to Eichmann. In that courtroom in Jerusalem, there could be no doubt as to Eichmann's guilt, nor the immensity of his guilt. We were not impressed by the Little Lie.

  It was no small railway clerk who dealt directly on the highest level with foreign governments. Again and again, through diplomatic channels, Eichmann was requested to locate and spare one Jew, or two or three, by name. For some reason, these individuals troubled the conscience of Germany's allies. Again and again, Eichmann replied icily that these Jews could not be found; his local representatives were instructed to discourage “on principle” such time-wasting demands for mercy. If the named Jew or Jews were not already dead, Eichmann ordered immediate deportation to the gas chambers, thus closing the file against future intrusion on his work.

  The Laval government tried to save one Jew—a man whose gallantry in the French Army could not be forgotten. Eichmann answered officially that the whereabouts of this hero was unknown, but arranged for his instant, secret removal to Auschwitz and Cyclon B. Admiral Horthy, the Fascist dictator of Hungary, directed his police to stop a death train of 1200 Jews and return the Jews to their camp near Budapest. That night Eichmann sent buses to collect these reprieved people and drive them to rejoin the train far from the capital. Horthy's interference annoyed and hampered Eichmann; soon Horthy was deposed and a thoroughly cooperative puppet was installed.

  The duties, the authority of a minor bureaucrat? A new emotion spread and became common to us all: flat contempt for the man who had valued no other lives but so shamelessly cherished his own.

  Eichmann knew what was happening; he states this himself in his deposition—a four-volume document, covering months of questioning during which the Israeli police superintendent acted as a gently prodding psychiatrist and Eichmann talked and talked. He deplored what he saw: he found the screams of people strangling in the gas trucks in Poland unbearable; a fountain of blood, which gurgled up through the ground of a mass grave, revolted him. Specifically, somewhere near Minsk, he saw naked Jews moving forward to the edge of a pit where the SS riflemen shot them; some shots were sloppy, the half-dead squirmed, so they fired into the heaped bodies as well. Eichmann reported this scene to an SS leader in Lemberg. “ ‘Yes, that is horrible,’ I said to him. ‘There the young people are being educated to become sadists. . . . How can you just bang into a pile of people, women and children, how is that possible!’ I said. ‘This can't be. The people must either turn crazy or become sadists. Our own people.’ “ Everything about this man is the stuff of nightmare: he never thought of the murdered; he thought of the effect they made on him, and the probable bad effect on the nerves of the young SS.

  He said he was too squeamish for this sort of thing; “people have told me I could never have been a doctor.” So, instead of watching exterminations, he increased the range of the operation, speeded it up, wove a net meant to catch every living Jew, and sent them to what he knew but really could not bear to look at.

  In a single sentence, Eichmann divided the world into the powers of light and darkness. He chose the doctrine of darkness, as did the majority of his countrymen, as did thousands throughout Europe—men with slave minds, pig-greedy for power: the Vichy police, the Iron Guard, big and little Quislings everywhere. He stated their creed in one line: “The question of conscience is a matter for the head of the state, the sovereign.”

  Absolved of thought, of responsibility, of guilt, and finally of humanity, all is well: the head of the state thinks for us, we need only obey. If the head of the state happens to be criminally insane, that is not our affair.

  The purpose of all education and all religion is to fight that creed, by every act of life and until death. The private conscience
is not only the last protection of the civilized world, it is the one guarantee of the dignity of man. And if we have failed to learn this, even now, Eichmann is before us, a fact and a symbol, to teach the lesson.

  Is There a New Germany?

  THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, February 1964

  To criticize, to doubt, to probe the Germans is by now not only anti-German but apparently un-American. In eighteen years, we have turned an astonishing emotional and intellectual somersault. Have the Germans done anything of the sort? Is there a “New Germany,” or is there simply another Germany? My acquaintance with Germany began in 1924 and continued until the end of the Nürnberg Trials, though from the summer of 1936 until American troops entered Germany during the war, I watched from a distance and listened to those who had escaped the fatherland. In these post-war years, while the United States has become officially more loving every minute toward its former enemy, I have been reading of this New Germany, and wondering. Last winter I returned to West Germany to try to find what must be New Germans, those who were children or newly born at the end of the Second World War, so young then as to be untouched by the poison their people fed on for twelve years.

  I had one introduction, to a Hungarian journalist established in Germany after the Hungarian revolution of 1956. My plan was to visit universities; I meant to meet Germany's future rulers. Hitler was a freak in German history in the sense that he was semiliterate; Germany is normally directed by university graduates, and the academic title Doctor has always abounded in German governmental circles. From the University of Hamburg, through those of Free Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, and Munich, I was passed along by students, either casually met or introduced by the student self-government in each university. We were strangers, they having no ideas about me and I no ideas about them. There was nothing official in this tour. I would wander into a student government office and chat with anyone I could find, and in turn they whistled up anyone they could find with spare time and a wish to talk; though I did try to meet all kinds, ranging from socialist to nationalist to don't-know. These boys and girls were in their twenties; they had known no other form of government than “democracy.” They had also grown up in an affluent society, though few of them were rich, but none was miserably poor as were the European students of my youth. I liked some of them very much, and thought some almost as detestable as their fathers had been in their brand-new brown uniforms in the pre-war universities.