Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

  Eichmann's cleverest trick in these difficult negotiations was to see to it that he and his men acted as though they were corrupt. The president of the Jewish community, Hofrat Samuel Stern, a member of Horthy's Privy Council, was treated with exquisite courtesy and agreed to be head of the Jewish Council. He and the other members of the Council felt reassured when they were asked to supply typewriters and mirrors, women's lingerie and eau de cologne, original Watteaus and eight pianos—even though seven of these were gracefully returned by Hauptsturmführer Novak, who remarked, “But, gentlemen, I don't want to open a piano store. I only want to play the piano.” Eichmann himself visited the Jewish Library and the Jewish Museum, and assured everybody that all measures would be temporary. And corruption, first simulated as a trick, soon turned out to be real enough, though it did not take the form the Jews had hoped. Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatever. In the words of the strange Mr. Kastner, “A Jew who trembles for his life and that of his family loses all sense of money.” (Sic!) This was confirmed during the trial through testimony given by Philip von Freudiger, mentioned above, as well as through the testimony of Joel Brand, who had represented a rival Jewish body in Hungary, the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee. Krumey received no less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Freudiger in April, 1944, and the Rescue Committee paid twenty thousand dollars merely for the privilege of meeting with Wisliceny and some men of the S.S. Counterin service. At this meeting, each of those present received an additional tip of a thousand dollars, and Wisliceny brought up again the so-called Europe Plan, which he had proposed in vain in 1942 and according to which Himmler supposedly would be prepared to spare all Jews except those in Poland for a ransom of two or three million dollars. On the strength of this proposal, which had been shelved long before, the Jews now started paying installments to Wisliceny. Even Eichmann's “idealism” broke down in this land of unheard-of abundance. The prosecution, though it could not prove that Eichmann had profited financially while on the job, stressed rightly his high standard of living in Budapest, where he could afford to stay at one of the best hotels, was driven around by a chauffeur in an amphibious car, an unforgettable gift from his later enemy Kurt Becher, went hunting and horseback riding, and enjoyed all sorts of previously unknown luxuries under the tutelage of his new friends in the Hungarian government.

  There existed, however, a sizable group of Jews in the country whose leaders, at least, indulged less in self-deception. The Zionist movement had always been particularly strong in Hungary, and it now had its own representation in the recently formed Relief and Rescue Committee (the Vaadat Ezra va Hazalah), which, maintaining close contact with the Palestine Office, had helped refugees from Poland and Slovakia, from Yugoslavia and Rumania; the committee was in constant communication with the American Joint Distribution Committee, which financed their work, and they had also been able to get a few Jews into Palestine, legally or illegally. Now that catastrophe had come to their own country, they turned to forging “Christian papers,” certificates of baptism, whose bearers found it easier to go underground. Whatever else they might have been, the Zionist leaders knew they were outlaws, and they acted accordingly. Joel Brand, the unlucky emissary who was to present to the Allies, in the midst of the war, Himmler's proposal to give them a million Jewish lives in exchange for ten thousand trucks, was one of the leading officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and he came to Jerusalem to testify about his dealings with Eichmann, as did his former rival in Hungary, Philip von Freudiger. While Freudiger, whom Eichmann, incidentally, did not remember at all, recalled the rudeness with which he had been treated at these interviews, Brand's testimony actually substantiated much of Eichmann's own account of how he had negotiated with the Zionists. Brand had been told that “an idealistic German” was now talking to him, “an idealistic Jew”—two honorable enemies meeting as equals during a lull in the battle. Eichmann had said to him: “Tomorrow perhaps we shall again be on the battlefield.” It was, of course, a horrible comedy, but it did go to show that Eichmann's weakness for uplifting phrases with no real meaning was not a pose fabricated expressly for the Jerusalem trial. What is more interesting, one cannot fail to note that in meeting with the Zionists neither Eichmann nor any other member of the Sondereinsatzkommando employed the tactics of sheer lying that they had used for the benefit of the gentlemen of the Jewish Council. Even “language rules” were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a spade. Moreoever, when it was a question of serious negotiations— over the amount of money that might buy an exit permit, over the Europe Plan, over the exchange of lives for trucks—not only Eichmann but everybody concerned: Wisliceny, Becher, the gentlemen of the Counterintelligence service whom Joel Brand used to meet every morning in a coffee house, turned to the Zionists as a matter of course. The reason for this was that the Relief and Rescue Committee possessed the required international connections and could more easily produce foreign currency, whereas the members of the Jewish Council had nothing behind them but the more than dubious protection of Regent Horthy. It also became clear that the Zionist functionaries in Hungary had received greater privileges than the usual temporary immunity to arrest and deportation granted the members of the Jewish Council. The Zionists were free to come and go practically as they pleased, they were exempt from wearing the yellow star, they received permits to visit concentration camps in Hungary, and, somewhat later, Dr. Kastner, the original founder of the Relief and Rescue Committee, could even travel about Nazi Germany without any identification papers showing he was a Jew.

  The organization of a Jewish Council was for Eichmann, with all his experience in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, a routine matter that took no more than two weeks. The question now was whether he himself would be able to enlist the help of Hungarian officials for an operation of this magnitude. For him this was something new. In the ordinary course of events, it would have been handled for him by the Foreign Office and its representatives, in this instance, by the newly appointed Reich plenipotentiary, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, to whom Eichmann would have sent a “Jewish adviser.” Eichmann himself clearly had no inclination for playing the role of adviser, a post that had nowhere carried a rank higher than Hauptsturmführer, or captain, whereas he was an Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, two ranks higher. His greatest triumph in Hungary was that he could establish his own contacts. Three men were primarily concerned—Lászlo Endre, who because of an anti-Semitism that even Horthy had called “insane” had recently been appointed State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior; Lászlo Baky, also an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, who was in charge of the Gendarmerie, the Hungarian police; and the police officer Lieutenant Colonel Ferenczy, who was directly in charge of deportations. With their help, Eichmann could be sure that everything, the issuance of the necessary decrees and the concentration of the Jews in the provinces, would proceed with “lightning speed.” In Vienna, a special conference was held with the German State Railroad officials, since this matter involved the transportation of nearly half a million people. Höss, at Auschwitz, was informed of the plans through his own superior, General Richard Glücks of the W.V.H.A., and ordered a new branch line of the railway built, to bring the cars within a few yards of the crematoria; the number of death commandos manning the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, so that everything was ready for killing between six thousand and twelve thousand people a day. When the trains began arriving, in May, 1944, very few “able-bodied men” were selected for labor, and these few worked in Krupp's fuse factory at Auschwitz. (Krupp's newly built factory near Breslau, in Germany, the Berthawerk, collected Jewish manpower wherever it could find it and kept those men in conditions that were unsurpassed even among the labor gangs in the death camps.)

  The whole operation in Hungary lasted less than two months and came to a sudden stop at the beginning of July. Thanks chiefly to the Zionists, it had bee
n better publicized than any other phase of the Jewish catastrophe, and Horthy had been deluged with protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. The Papal Nuncio, though, deemed it appropriate to explain that the Vatican's protest did not spring “from a false sense of compassion”—a phrase that is likely to be a lasting monument to what the continued dealings with, and the desire to compromise with, the men who preached the gospel of “ruthless toughness” had done to the mentality of the highest dignitaries of the Church. Sweden once more led the way with regard to practical measures, by distributing entry permits, and Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal followed her example, so that finally about thirty-three thousand Jews were living in special houses in Budapest under the protection of neutral countries. The Allies had received and made public a list of seventy men whom they knew to be the chief culprits, and Roosevelt had sent an ultimatum threatening that “Hungary's fate will not be like any other civilized nation… unless the deportations are stopped.” The point was driven home by an unusually heavy air raid on Budapest on July 2. Thus pressed from all sides, Horthy gave the order to stop the deportations, and one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Eichmann was the rather obvious fact that he had not obeyed “the old fool's” order but, in mid-July, deported another fifteen hundred Jews who were at hand in a concentration camp near Budapest. To prevent the Jewish officials from informing Horthy, he assembled the members of the two representative bodies in his office, where Dr. Hunsche detained them, on various pretexts, until he learned that the train had left Hungarian territory. Eichmann remembered nothing of this episode, in Jerusalem, and although the judges were “convinced that the accused remembers his victory over Horthy very well,” this is doubtful, since to Eichmann Horthy was not such a great personage.

  This seems to have been the last train that left Hungary for Auschwitz. In August, 1944, the Red Army was in Rumania, and Eichmann was sent there on his wild-goose chase. When he came back, the Horthy regime had gathered sufficient courage to demand the withdrawal of the Eichmann commando, and Eichmann himself asked Berlin to let him and his men return, since they “had become superfluous.” But Berlin did nothing of the sort, and was proved right, for in mid-October the situation once more changed abruptly. With the Russians no more than a hundred miles from Budapest, the Nazis succeeded in overthrowing the Horthy government and in appointing the leader of the Arrow Cross men, Ferenc Szalasi, head of state. No more transports could be sent to Auschwitz, since the extermination facilities were about to be dismantled, while at the same time the German shortage of labor had grown even more desperate. Now it was Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, who negotiated with the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior for permission to ship fifty thousand Jews—men between sixteen and sixty, and women under forty—to the Reich; he added in his report that Eichmann hoped to send fifty thousand more. Since railroad facilities no longer existed, this led to the foot marches of November, 1944, which were stopped only by an order from Himmler. The Jews who were sent on the marches had been arrested at random by the Hungarian police, regardless of exemptions, to which by now many were entitled, regardless also of the age limits specified in the original directives. The marchers were escorted by Arrow Cross men, who robbed them and treated them with the utmost brutality. And that was the end. Of an original Jewish population of eight hundred thousand, some hundred and sixty thousand must still have remained in the Budapest ghetto—the countryside was judenrein—and of these tens of thousands became victims of spontaneous pogroms. On February 13, 1945, the country surrendered to the Red Army.

  The chief Hungarian culprits in the massacre were all put on trial, condemned to death, and executed. None of the German initiators, except Eichmann, paid with more than a few years in prison.

  SLOVAKIA, like Croatia, was an invention of the German Foreign Office. The Slovaks had come to Berlin to negotiate their “independence” even before the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, in March, 1939, and at that time they had promised Goring that they would follow Germany faithfully in their handling of the Jewish question. But this had been in the winter of 1938–39, when no one had yet heard of such a thing as the Final Solution. The tiny country, with a poor peasant population of about two and a half million and with ninety thousand Jews, was primitive, backward, and deeply Catholic. It was ruled at the time by a Catholic priest, Father Josef Tiso. Even its Fascist movement, the Hlinka Guard, was Catholic in outlook, and the vehement anti-Semitism of these clerical Fascists or Fascist clerics differed in both style and content from the ultramodern racism of their German masters. There was only one modern anti-Semite in the Slovak government, and that was Eichmann's good friend Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior. All the others were Christians, or thought they were, whereas the Nazis were in principle, of course, as anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish. The Slovaks' being Christians meant not only that they felt obliged to emphasize what the Nazis considered an “obsolete” distinction between baptized and nonbaptized Jews, but also that they thought of the whole issue in medieval terms. For them a “solution” consisted in expelling the Jews and inheriting their property but not in systematic “exterminating,” although they did not mind occasional killing. The greatest “sin” of the Jews was not that they belonged to an alien “race” but that they were rich. The Jews in Slovakia were not very rich by Western standards, but when fifty-two thousand of them had to declare their possessions because they owned more than two hundred dollars' worth, and it turned out that their total property amounted to a hundred million dollars, every single one of them must have looked to the Slovaks like an incarnation of Croesus.

  During their first year and a half of “independence,” the Slo-aks were busy trying to solve the Jewish question according to their own lights. They transferred the larger Jewish enterprises to non-Jews, enacted some anti-Jewish legislation, which, according to the Germans, had the “basic defect” of exempting baptized Jews who had been converted prior to 1918, planned to set up ghettos “following the example of the General Government,” and mobilized Jews for forced labor. Very early, in September, 1940, they had been given a Jewish adviser; Haupt-sturmfiihrer Dieter Wisliceny, once Eichmann's greatly admired superior and friend in the Security Service (his eldest son was named Dieter) and now his equal in rank, was attached to the German legation in Bratislava. Wisliceny did not marry and, therefore, could not be promoted further, so a year later he was outranked by Eichmann and became his subordinate. Eichmann thought that this must have rankled with him, and that it helped explain why he had given such damning evidence against him as witness in the Nuremberg Trials, and had even offered to find out his hiding place. But this is doubtful. Wisliceny probably was interested only in saving his own skin, he was utterly unlike Eichmann. He belonged to the educated stratum of the S.S., lived among books and records, had himself addressed as “Baron” by the Jews in Hungary, and, generally, was much more concerned with money than worried about his career; consequently, he was one of the very first in the S.S. to develop “moderate” tendencies.

  Nothing much happened in Slovakia during these early years, until March, 1942, when Eichmann appeared in Bratislava to negotiate the evacuation of twenty thousand “young and strong labor Jews.” Four weeks later, Heydrich himself came to see the Prime Minister, Vojtek Tuka, and persuaded him to let all Jews be resettled in the East, including the converted Jews who had thus far been exempted. The government, with a priest at its head, did not at all mind correcting the “basic defect” of distinguishing between Christians and Jews on the grounds of religion when it learned that “no claim was put forward by the Germans in regard to the property of these Jews except the payment of five hundred Reichsmarks in exchange for each Jew received”; on the contrary, the government demanded an additional guaranty from the German Foreign Office that “Jews removed from Slovakia and received by [the Germans] would stay in the Eastern areas forever, and would not be given an opportunity of returning to Slovakia.” To follow up these negotiati
ons on the highest level, Eichmann paid a second visit to Bratislava, the one that coincided with Heydrich's assassination, and by June, 1942, fifty-two thousand Jews had been deported by the Slovak police to the killing centers in Poland.

  There were still some thirty-five thousand Jews left in the country, and they all belonged to the originally exempted categories—converted Jews and their parents, members of certain professions, young men in forced labor battalions, a few businessmen. It was at this moment, when most of the Jews had already been “resettled,” that the Bratislava Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, a sister body of the Hungarian Zionist group, succeeded in bribing Wisliceny, who promised to help to slow down the pace of the deportations, and who also proposed the so-called Europe Plan, which he was to bring up again later in Budapest. It is very unlikely that Wisliceny ever did anything except read books and listen to music, and, of course, accept whatever he could get. But it was just at this moment that the Vatican informed the Catholic clergy of the true meaning of the word “resettlement.” From then on, as the German Ambassador, Hans Elard Ludin, reported to the Foreign Office in Berlin, the deportations became very unpopular, and the Slovak government began pressing the Germans for permission to visit the “resettlement” centers—which, of course, neither Wisliceny nor Eichmann could grant, since the “resettled” Jews were no longer among the living. In December, 1943, Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer came to Bratislava to see Father Tiso himself; he had been sent by Hitler and his orders specified that he should tell Tiso “to come down to earth” (Fraktur mit ihm reden). Tiso promised to put between sixteen and eighteen thousand unconverted Jews in concentration camps and to establish a special camp for about ten thousand baptized Jews, but he did not agree to deportations. In June, 1944, Veesenmayer, now Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, appeared again, and demanded that the remaining Jews in the country be included in the Hungarian operations. Tiso refused again.