Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

  This was by no means the first time that help from the outside, non-Jewish world had been mentioned. Judge Halevi had been asking the witnesses: “Did the Jews get any help?” with the same regularity as that with which the prosecution had asked: “Why did you not rebel?” The answers had been various and inconclusive —“We had the whole population against us,” Jews hidden by Christian families could “be counted on the fingers of one hand,” perhaps five or six out of a total of thirteen thousand—but on the whole the situation had, surprisingly, been better in Poland than in any other Eastern European country. (There was, I have said, no testimony on Bulgaria.) A Jew, now married to a Polish woman and living in Israel, testified how his wife had hidden him and twelve other Jews throughout the war; another had a Christian friend from before the war to whom he had escaped from a camp and who had helped him, and who was later executed because of the help he had given to Jews. One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year-old Jewish girl. But this mention of Schmidt was the first and the last time that any such story was told of a German, for the only other incident involving a German was mentioned only in a document: an Army officer had helped indirectly by sabotaging certain police orders; nothing happened to him, but the matter had been thought sufficiently serious to be mentioned in correspondence between Himmler and Bormann.

  During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

  There are, of course, explanations of this devastating shortage, and they have been repeated many times. I shall give the gist of them in the words of one of the few subjectively sincere memoirs of the war published in Germany. Peter Bamm, a German Army physician who served at the Russian front, tells in Die Unsichtbare Flagge (1952) of the killing of Jews in Sevastopol. They were collected by “the others,” as he calls the S.S. mobile killing units, to distinguish them from ordinary soldiers, whose decency the book extols, and were put into a sealed-off part of the former G.P.U. prison that abutted on the officer's lodgings, where Bamm's own unit was quartered. They were then made to board a mobile gas van, in which they died after a few minutes, whereupon the driver transported the corpses outside the city and unloaded them into tank ditches. “We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. 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. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.” Needless to add, the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized “decency” in the absence of what he calls a “higher moral meaning.”

  But the hollowness of respectability—for decency under such circumstances is no more than respectability—was not what became apparent in the example afforded by Sergeant Anton Schmidt. Rather it was the fatal flaw in the argument itself, which at first sounds so hopelessly plausible. It is true that totalitarian 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 always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. 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.

  * * *

  * * *

  XV: Judgment, Appeal, and Execution

  * * *

  Eichmann spent the last months of the war cooling his heels in Berlin, with nothing to do, cut by the other department heads in the R.S.H.A., who had lunch together every day in the building where he had his office but did not once ask him to join them. He kept himself busy with his defense installations, so as to be ready for “the last battle” for Berlin, and, as his only official duty, paid occasional visits to Theresienstadt, where he showed Red Cross delegates around. To them, of all people, he unburdened his soul about Himmler's new “humane line” in regard to the Jews, which included an avowed determination to have, “next time,” concentration camps after “the English model.” In April, 1945, Eichmann had the last of his rare interviews with Himmler, who ordered him to select “a hundred to two hundred prominent Jews in Theresienstadt,” transport them to Austria, and install them in hotels, so that Himmler could use them as “hostages” in his forthcoming negotiations with Eisenhower. The absurdity of this commission seems not to have dawned upon Eichmann; he went, “with grief in my heart, as I had to desert my defense installations,” but he never reached Theresienstadt, because all the roads were blocked by the approaching Russian armies. Instead, he ended up at Alt-Aussee, in Austria, where Kaltenbrunner had taken refuge. Kaltenbrunner had no interest in Himmler's “prominent Jews,” and told Eichmann to organize a commando for partisan war-fare in the Austrian mountains. Eichmann responded with the greatest enthusiasm: “This was again something worth doing, a task I enjoyed.” But just as he had collected some hundred more or less unfit men, most of whom had never seen a rifle, and had taken possession of an arsenal of abandoned weapons of all sorts, he received the latest Himmler order: “No fire is to be opened on English and Americans.” This was the end. He sent his men home and gave a small strongbox containing paper money and gold coins to his trusted legal adviser, Regierungsrat Hunsche: “Because, I said to myself, he is a man from the higher civil services, he will be correct in the management of funds, he will put down his expenses… for I still believed that accounts would be demanded some day.”

  With these words Eichmann had to conclude the autobiography he had spontaneously given the police examiner. It had taken only a few days, and filled no more than 315 of the 3,564 pages copied off the tape-recorder. He would like to have gone on, and he obviously did tell the rest of the story to the police, but the trial authorities, for various reasons, had decided not to admit any testimony covering the time after the close of t
he war. However, from affidavits given at Nuremberg, and, more important, from a much discussed indiscretion on the part of a former Israeli civil servant, Moshe Pearlman, whose book The Capture of Adolf Eichmann appeared in London four weeks before the trial opened, it is possible to complete the story; Mr. Pearlman's account was obviously based upon material from Bureau 06, the police office that was in charge of the preparations for the trial. (Mr. Pearlman's own version was that since he had retired from government service three weeks before Eichmann was kidnaped, he had written the book as a “private individual,” which is not very convincing, because the Israeli police must have known of the impending capture several months before his retirement.) The book caused some embarrassment in Israel, not only because Mr. Pearlman had been able to divulge information about important prosecution documents prematurely and had stated that the trial authorities had already made up their minds about the untrustworthiness of Eichmann's testimony, but because a reliable account of how Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires was of course the last thing they wanted to have published.

  The story told by Mr. Pearlman was considerably less exciting than the various rumors upon which previous tales had been based. Eichmann had never been in the Near East or the Middle East, he had no connection with any Arab country, he had never returned to Germany from Argentina, he had never been to any other Latin American country, he had played no role in postwar Nazi activities or organizations. At the end of the war, he had tried to speak once more with Kaltenbrunner, who was still in Alt-Aussee, playing solitaire, but his former chief was in no mood to receive him, since “for this man he saw no chances any more.” (Kaltenbrunner's own chances were not so very good either, he was hanged at Nuremberg.) Almost immediately thereafter, Eichmann was caught by American soldiers and put in a camp for S.S. men, where numerous interrogations failed to uncover his identity, although it was known to some of his fellow-prisoners. He was cautious and did not write to his family, but let them believe he was dead; his wife tried to obtain a death certificate, but failed when it was discovered that the only “eyewitness” to her husband's death was her brother-in-law. She had been left penniless, but Eichmann's family in Linz supported her and the three children.

  In November, 1945, the trials of the major war criminals opened in Nuremberg, and Eichmann's name began to appear with uncomfortable regularity. In January, 1946, Wisliceny appeared as a witness for the prosecution and gave his damning evidence, whereupon Eichmann decided that he had better disappear. He escaped from the camp, with the help of the inmates, and went to the Lüneburger Heide, a heath about fifty miles south of Hamburg, where the brother of one of his fellow-prisoners provided him with work as a lumberjack. He stayed there, under the name of Otto Heninger, for four years, and he was probably bored to death. Early in 1950, he succeeded in establishing contact with ODESSA, a clandestine organization of S.S. veterans, and in May of that year he was passed through Austria to Italy, where a Franciscan priest, fully informed of his identity, equipped him with a refugee passport in the name of Richard Klement and sent him on to Buenos Aires. He arrived in mid-July and, without any difficulty, obtained identification papers and a work permit as Ricardo Klement, Catholic, a bachelor, stateless, aged thirty-seven—seven years less than his real age.

  He was still cautious, but he now wrote to his wife in his own handwriting and told her that “her children's uncle” was alive. He worked at a number of odd jobs—sales representative, laundry man, worker on a rabbit farm—all poorly paid, but in the summer of 1952 he had his wife and children join him. (Mrs. Eichmann obtained a German passport in Zurich, Switzerland, though she was a resident of Austria at the time, and under her real name, as a “divorcée” from a certain Eichmann. How this came about has remained a mystery, and the file containing her application has disappeared from the German consulate in Zurich.) Upon her arrival in Argentina, Eichmann got his first steady job, in the Mercedes-Benz factory in Suarez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, first as a mechanic and later as a foreman, and when a fourth son was born to him, he remarried his wife, supposedly under the name of Klement. This is not likely, however, for the infant was registered as Ricardo Francisco (presumably as a tribute to the Italian priest) Klement Eichmann, and this was only one of many hints that Eichmann dropped in regard to his identity as the years went by. It does seem to be true, however, that he told his children he was Adolf Eichmann's brother, though the children, being well acquainted with their grandparents and uncles in Linz, must have been rather dull to believe it; the oldest son, at least, who had been nine years old when he last saw his father, should have been able to recognize him seven years later in Argentina. Mrs. Eichmann's Argentine identity card, moreover, was never changed (it read “Veronika Liebl de Eichmann”), and in 1959, when Eichmann's stepmother died, and a year later, when his father died, the newspaper announcements in Linz carried Mrs. Eichmann's name among the survivors, contradicting all stories of divorce and remarriage. Early in 1960, a few months before his capture, Eichmann and his elder sons finished building a primitive brick house in one of the poor suburbs of Buenos Aires—no electricity, no running water— where the family settled down. They must have been very poor, and Eichmann must have led a dreary life, for which not even the children could compensate, for they showed “absolutely no interest in being educated and did not even try to develop their so-called talents.”

  Eichmann's only compensation consisted in talking endlessly with members of the large Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity. In 1955, this finally led to the interview with the Dutch journalist Willem S. Sassen, a former member of the Armed S.S. who had exchanged his Dutch nationality for a German passport during the war and had later been condemned to death in absentia in Belgium as a war criminal. Eichmann made copious notes for the interview, which was tape-recorded and then rewritten by Sassen, with considerable embellishments; the notes in Eichmann's own handwriting were discovered and they were admitted as evidence at his trial, though the statement as a whole was not. Sassen's version appeared in abbreviated form first in the German illustrated magazine Der Stern, in July, 1960, and then, in November and December, as a series of articles in Life. But Sassen, obviously with Eichmann's consent, had offered the story four years before to a Time-Life correspondent in Buenos Aires, and even if it is true that Eichmann's name was withheld, the content of the material could have left no doubt about the original source of the information. The truth of the matter is that Eichmann had made many efforts to break out of his anonymity, and it is rather strange that it took the Israeli Secret Services several years—until August, 1959—to learn that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement. Israel has never divulged the source of her information, and today at least half a dozen persons claim they found Eichmann, while “well-informed circles” in Europe insist that it was the Russian Intelligence service that spilled the news. However that may have been, the puzzle is not how it was possible to discover Eichmann's hideout but, rather, how it was possible not to discover it earlier—provided, of course, that the Israelis had indeed pursued this search through the years. Which, in view of the facts, seems doubtful.

  No doubt, however, exists about the identity of the captors. All talk of private “avengers” was contradicted at the outset by Ben-Gurion himself, who on May 23, 1960, announced to Israel's wildly cheering Knesset that Eichmann had been “found by the Israeli Secret Service.” Dr. Servatius, who tried strenuously and unsuccessfully both before the District Court and before the Court of Appeal to call Zvi Tohar, chief pilot of the El-Al plane that flew Eichmann out of the country, and Yad Shimoni, an official of the air line in Argentina, as witnesses, mentioned Ben-Gurion's statement; the Attorney General countered by saying that the Prime Minister had “admitted no more than that Eichmann was found out by the Secret Service,” not that he also had been kidnaped by government agents. Well, in actual fact, it seems that it was the other way round: Secret Service men had not “found” him but only
picked him up, after making a few preliminary tests to assure themselves that the information they had received was true. And even this was not done very expertly, for Eichmann had been well aware that he was being shadowed: “I told you that months ago, I believe, when I was asked if I had known that I was found out, and I could give you then precise reasons [that is, in the part of the police examination that was not released to the press]…. I learned that people in my neighborhood had made inquiries about real-estate purchases and so on and so forth for the establishment of a factory for sewing machines—a thing that was quite impossible, since there existed neither electricity nor water in that area. Furthermore, I was informed that these people were Jews from North America. I could easily have disappeared, but I did not do it, I just went on as usual, and let things catch up with me. I could have found employment without any difficulty, with my papers and references. But I did not want that.”

  There was more proof than was revealed in Jerusalem of his willingness to go to Israel and stand trial. Counsel for the defense, of course, had to stress the fact that, after all, the accused had been kidnaped and “brought to Israel in conflict with international law,” because this enabled the defense to challenge the right of the court to prosecute him, and though neither the prosecution nor the judges ever admitted that the kidnaping had been an “act of state,” they did not deny it either. They argued that the breach of international law concerned only the states of Argentina and Israel, not the rights of the defendant, and that this breach was “cured” through the joint declaration of the two governments, on August 3, 1960, that they “resolved to view as settled the incident which was caused in the wake of the action of citizens of Israel which violated the basic rights of the State of Argentina.” The court decided that it did not matter whether these Israelis were government agents or private citizens. What neither the defense nor the court mentioned was that Argentina would not have waived her rights so obligingly had Eichmann been an Argentine citizen. He had lived there under an assumed name, thereby denying himself the right to government protection, at least as Ricardo Klement (born on May 23, 1913, at Bolzano—in Southern Tyrol—as his Argentine identity card stated), although he had declared himself of “German nationality.” And he had never invoked the dubious right of asylum, which would not have helped him anyhow, since Argentina, although she has in fact offered asylum to many known Nazi criminals, had signed an International Convention declaring that the perpetrators of crimes against humanity “will not be deemed to be political criminals.” All this did not make Eichmann stateless, it did not legally deprive him of his German nationality, but it gave the West German republic a welcome pretext for withholding the customary protection due its citizens abroad. In other words, and despite pages and pages of legal argument, based on so many precedents that one finally got the impression that kidnaping was among the most frequent modes of arrest, it was Eichmann's de facto statelessness, and nothing else, that enabled the Jerusalem court to sit in judgment on him. 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 Jews had had to lose their nationality before they could be exterminated. But he was in no mood to ponder such niceties, for if it was a fiction that he had come voluntarily to Israel to stand trial, it was true that he had made fewer difficulties than anybody had expected. In fact, he had made none.