Adolf Eichmann was put on trial fifty years ago on April 11, 1961, almost one year after he was kidnapped in Argentina and secretly transported to Israel. In her new book, The Eichmann Trial, Deborah Lipstadt recounts some of her own memories as she describes in detail the course of the trial from beginning to end. Specifically, she recalls her own legal encounter with anti-Semitism in 2000 in the libel suit which the British historian David Irving brought against her for describing him as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. An enormous literature about Eichmann, his life, the trial, the verdict against him rendered by the three Israeli judges, his execution, cremation, and the scattering of his ashes at sea (shades of Bin Laden) has appeared during these fifty years. Many of these texts and documents appear in the end notes to Lipstadt’s book, although, to my surprise, there is neither a bibliography nor index. The table of contents is bare and uninformative, and the chapters have no titles. These omissions make it more difficult for careful readers to follow the various themes scattered throughout her text and diminish the book’s usefulness for further study and research.
One would think that, after all this time, there would be nothing new to learn about the Eichmann affair. However, a front page story in the May 9th, 2011 edition of the New York Times reveals that the German foreign intelligence agency has refused to release a large number of secret files about what Eichmann was up to between 1945 and 1960 and that as early as 1952 West German intelligence officials knew he was living in Argentina. As far as I can tell, there are no new factual revelations in Lipstadt’s book. Many will be familiar with the story she tells, but those who are coming to it for the first time will find her book to contain a reliable and readable account of the highlights. Those who are familiar with the trial will be interested in her presentation of the major controversies and her own take on them.
In a clear and lively style, Lipstadt’s reviews the main events connected with the trial, The Introduction describes some of the controversies that it has stimulated and that she will take up in the course of the book. Chapter One tells about Eichmann’s discovery and capture in Argentina. Chapter Two focuses on the criticisms stemming from Argentina, from anti-Zionists, some of them Jewish, about the decision to kidnap and try Eichmann and Ben-Gurion’s defense of the right of Israel and the Jewish people to conduct this trial in Israel.
Chapter Three discusses how the trial is organized; it summarizes the pre-trial interrogation of Eichmann, the indictment read by the chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner, and the decision by Hausner and Ben-Gurion to paint a broad picture of the Holocaust during the trial. This decision involved allowing testimony by many victims whether or not the testimonies connected Eichmann directly with crimes against the Jewish people. This approach generated criticism as well as broad support.
Chapter four surveys the first part of the trial, including the efforts of the judges who had the duty to decide on the question of guilt or innocence and to restrict testimony not directly bearing upon this question. Chapter Five presents Eichmann’s own testimony that includes his claims that he was only obeying orders; that he never acted on own initiative; and that he is not an anti-Semite. It then describes the cross-examinations by Hausner and by the three judges, the summations by the prosecutor and the lawyer for the defense, the verdict of guilty, the death penalty and the controversy it generated, and, finally, the execution.
Those who are already familiar with the details of the trial will find Chapter Six in which Lipstadt discusses Hannah Arendt’s famous (or infamous) book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, extremely interesting. Arendt criticized the way the trial was conducted, and she portrayed Eichmann not as an evil fiend but as one of the cogs in the wheel of the Nazi bureaucracy that implemented the Holocaust. Finally, in the Conclusion, Lipstadt defends “Hausner’s determination that this trial would be founded on the human story of the Jewish victims’ suffering…as the trial’s most significant legacy.” (p. 192).
The subtitle of Arendt’s book which designates the banality of evil as a major theme is somewhat ambiguous. Does she mean to refer to Eichmann alone or to other groups of people in general who commit evil deeds? In a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1946, Arendt writes: “The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may be essential to hang Goring, but it is totally inadequate. That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems.” [1] In reply, Jaspers says: “a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of ‘greatness’ – of satanic greatness – which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the ‘demonic’ element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that is what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.” [2] Perhaps Jaspers convinced her to abandon the ‘demonic’ theory of Nazi crimes in favor of his banality theory, for in the postscript to her book she writes: “for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all….He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” [3] Perhaps, for Arendt, only Hitler realized what he was doing since he was “the only one really responsible in the full sense.” [4]
When Arendt claims that Eichmann’s banality “stared one in the face,” she neglects to mention that she was in Jerusalem for only part of the trial. Lipstadt reports that she missed Hausner’s cross-examination of Eichmann. “If she had been present when Eichmann was locked in an adversarial exchange with Hausner, might she have gathered some insight from his demeanor and body language? Might she have seen the ‘passion and rage’ described in France-Soir?” (p. 179) Not only did she miss events that might have provided some support to the ‘demonic’ theory, but “her failure to report that she was not there for significant portions of the proceedings constituted a breach of faith with readers.” (p. 180)
Lipstadt argues that the banality theory may apply to many of the Nazis involved in murdering Jews and others. She says that Arendt’s “contention that many of the perpetrators were not innately monsters or diabolical creatures but ‘ordinary’ people who did monstrous things not only seems accurate but is the accepted understanding among most scholars of the perpetrators.” (p. 169) But Lipstadt denies that ‘banal’ represents an accurate description of Eichmann. “Though he might not have started out as a virulent anti-Semite, he absorbed this ideology early in his career and let it motivate him to such an extent that even well after the war he described for Sassen, the Dutch Nazi who interviewed him in Argentina, the joy he had felt at moving Hungarian Jews to their death at an unprecedented clip and his pleasure at having the death of millions of Jews on his record.” (pp. 169-170)
In discussing the question of the banality of evil, it is important to distinguish between function and motivation. Arendt points out that during the trial “we heard only the protestations of the defense that Eichmann was after all only a ‘tiny cog’ in the machinery of the Final Solution, and of the prosecution, which believed it had discovered in Eichmann the actual motor….the whole cog theory is legally pointless, and therefore it does not matter at what order of magnitude is assigned to the ‘cog’ named Eichmann.” Why doesn’t it matter? Because, she answers, “the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” [5] This is a strange argument since ‘the essence of totalitarian government’, whatever it is, is an abstraction, not an agent capable of doing anything to anyone. Eichmann, along with other cogs and motors, did not cease to be a human being with motives and intentions and awareness of what he was doing. And such awareness included not only mundane matters of fact about his daily activities arranging for the transportation of living human beings to the death camps, but also his awareness that his actions were in violation of the moral law. Why else would he offer as his chief defense that he was only obeying orders? He obviously thought that the plea of obedience would mitigate his guilt or even exculpate him entirely. But his plea concedes that what he was doing was criminal in nature. That he was following orders did not make him any the less criminal; he claimed that it merely cancelled his responsibility. Did he really believe that? The court did not, and decided to hang him.
The decision to hang him was controversial. A group of Israeli scholars and artists petitioned the president of Israel to commute the death sentence. The protest was organized by professor of philosophy Shmuel Hugo Bergmann who, according to Lipstadt, found efforts to spare Eichmann’s life deeply moving. She quotes him as saying: “This was, in my eyes, proof that the Judaism of love and compassion still lived and breathed even after the Holocaust.” (p. 145) Was Bergmann reading from the right book? Isn’t there also a Judaism of justice which constrains and trumps love and compassion? In a conversation with Ben-Gurion, Martin Buber argued against the death sentence by citing Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kosov: “What the Torah teaches us is this: none but God can command us to destroy a man.” (p. 146) In opposition to Buber’s selective reading of the Torah, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg asserted: “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 murder of my parents.” (p. 146) Greenberg was correct in bringing retribution into the picture since the necessary and sufficient condition for executing a criminal is that he deserves it on moral and legal grounds. I think I can infer that, by giving Greenberg the last word, Lipstadt endorses his sentiments.
If, after having read Lipstadt’s compelling account of the trial, the reader wishes to delve further into the life and death of Eichmann, let me recommend David Cesarani’s outstanding biography Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”.
Note: I would like to thank Arlyne Landesman for her help in preparing this review both in respect to style and content.
[1] Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969, eds. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 54.
[2] Ibid., p. 62.
[3] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised and enlarged edition, Viking Press, 1969, p. 287.
[4] Ibid., p. 290.
[5] Ibid., p. 289.
Charles Landesman
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York
clandesm@aol.com
