The Nazi Hunters (26 page)

Eichmann was eager to prove that he was not a killer in thought or deed. But under persistent questioning, the prisoner could not downplay his role anywhere near to the extent that he had hoped. Less came to the conclusion that all of Eichmann’s efforts were meant to conceal “
the cold sophistication and cunning with which he had planned and carried out the extermination of the Jews.” The trial would provide him another opportunity to offer similar rationales for his actions, and Eichmann’s only hope was that the much larger audience of the courtroom and beyond would be more receptive to them than Less was.

• • •

“
Thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise,” Hannah Arendt declared in what turned out to be her last television interview before her death in 1975, a conversation with French legal scholar Roger Errera. It certainly was for the German-born Jewish philosopher when she wrote her five-part series on Eichmann’s trial for
The New Yorker
, and when her book,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
, based on those articles, was published in 1963.

Arendt’s description of Eichmann as “
the most important conveyer belt” of Jews to the death camps, with its implication that the prisoner on trial was more a mechanical part of a killing machine than a human monster, generated both widespread acclaim and vitriolic denunciations, especially from fellow Jews—many of whom ostracized her for the rest of
her life. But whatever side people chose in this debate that has continued to the present, Arendt’s thesis has remained the focal point of their arguments. Every discussion about Eichmann and the nature of evil begins with Arendt’s interpretation of the man and his motives.

When Arendt arrived in Jerusalem shortly before the trial opened, deputy prosecutor Bach let her know that he was willing to meet with her. “Two days later I got the message that she is not prepared to talk to anyone from the prosecution,” Bach recalled. Nonetheless, he instructed the court to make all the prosecution and defense documents available to her, including the transcripts of Less’s interrogation of Eichmann.

Arendt was fascinated by the voluminous transcripts, which she read carefully. She may have been there to report for
The New Yorker
, but she was also on a mission to construct her own interpretation of the man who would be seated in the glass booth during the trial. She was intent on not allowing others, especially the prosecutors, to sway her thinking. By all indications, she was also predisposed to reach the conclusions that would trigger the most controversy. A decade earlier, she had published her widely acclaimed volume
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
which signaled her preoccupations with how both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union used a combination of terror and propaganda to impose a system that negated all traditional Judeo-Christian values. It also dealt extensively with the origins of anti-Semitism.

Her interest in such subjects was a natural outgrowth of her personal story. Born in 1906, Arendt told one interviewer that as a child growing up in Königsberg the word “
Jew” never came up. Her father died young, and her mother was not religious. It was only when other children directed anti-Semitic remarks at her that Arendt was “enlightened,” as she put it. When Hitler took power in 1933, she fled Germany. “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” she declared.

She landed in Paris, where she helped ferry German and Polish Jewish youngsters to Palestine. After Germany conquered France in 1940, she escaped again, this time to the United States, where she would start her new life. Despite her early involvement with the Zionist movement, she later became a harsh critic of Israel and many of its prominent figures,
particularly Eastern European Jews who occupied top leadership positions. This translated into personal contempt for Hausner, the chief prosecutor, who, as she put, was “
a typical Galician Jew” with a “ghetto mentality.”

From the beginning, Arendt was critical of his approach to the Eichmann trial, which opened on April 11, 1961. While Hausner focused on demonstrating the heinousness of Eichmann’s crimes, his personal responsibility for them, and his fervent anti-Semitism, she had a different intellectual construct in mind. “
One of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force,” she declared in her last television interview. On another occasion, she insisted: “
If there was ever anyone who deprived himself of any demonic aura, it was Herr Eichmann.”

In her articles and book, she portrayed Eichmann as a drab functionary with limited intellectual abilities. Pointing out that “
he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” she wrote: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to
think
, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” Then came the assertion that generated the greatest blowback: “
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” In fact, this seemingly ordinary man exemplified “the banality of evil.”

It was not ideological conviction and hatred of the Jews that were Eichmann’s motivating factors, she argued, it was careerism, a desire to get ahead within the Nazi bureaucracy. “
Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all,” she wrote. In other words, he would have sent millions of any other group of people, regardless of their race or religion, to their deaths if they had been targeted by the Nazi regime the way the Jews were.

In the courtroom, the prosecution pursued its dramatically different narrative, intent on offering stark illustrations of what Eichmann’s deep commitment to Nazi doctrine meant in practice. A procession of
witnesses offered heart-wrenching testimony about life and death in the camps, all of which contributed to the broader picture that has shaped the world’s understanding of the Holocaust ever since. Frequently accompanied by gasps and sobs from those in attendance, survivors shared their final memories of their loved ones. But unlike almost everyone else who was present, “
Eichmann displayed no sign of being affected,” Hausner pointed out. Until he testified himself, the man who had described himself to Less as “only a minor transport officer” sat through such proceedings “tense, rigid and silent in his glass cubicle.”

When the prosecution prepared a film about the Holocaust, they invited Eichmann and his lawyers to the courtroom to see it first, before it would be shown as part of the trial. Since Bach had watched the film already, he closely monitored the prisoner’s behavior as he saw it. Eichmann did not react at all to the footage showing gas chambers and corpses, but at one point he spoke excitedly to the prison warden. Later, Bach asked the warden why he had suddenly become so agitated. The explanation: Eichmann was incensed that he had been brought to the courtroom wearing a sweater and his gray suit; he reminded the warden that he had been promised that he would be allowed to wear his dark blue suit anytime he was to appear in court. With a sardonic laugh, Bach recalled that Eichmann had protested this alleged mistreatment, insisting that such promises had to be kept—while never saying a word about the film.

At the trial, many of the witnesses described the selection process as the bewildered, exhausted, starved victims were unloaded from the trains arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than half a century later, Bach recalled one witness who recounted how an SS officer instructed his wife and little girl to go left, while the witness, who was an engineer, was told to go right. The man asked the SS officer where his son should go, and, after briefly consulting his superior officer, he told the boy to run after his mother and sister. The witness said he was worried that the boy would not catch up with them because there were already hundreds of people in between them moving to the left—and the boy quickly disappeared into
the crowd. But he could track his daughter because she was wearing a red coat, which became a red dot that grew smaller and smaller. “This is how his family disappeared from his life,” Bach noted.

Steven Spielberg included a similar scene with a little girl in a red coat in his film
Schindler’s List
, and Bach is convinced that the director took the idea from the Eichmann trial.

Two weeks before hearing that witness, Bach had bought his own daughter, who was only two and a half at the time, a red coat. When he heard the witness’s testimony, “I couldn’t get any words out,” he recalled. He began fiddling with his documents until he managed to regain control of his emotions and ask a follow-up question. A widely published photo of a deeply pensive Bach during the trial was taken just after he had heard this shattering account. “To this very day, I can be in a football stadium, the street, a restaurant, and I suddenly feel my heart beating when I turn around and see a little girl or boy in a red coat,” he said during our interview a half a century later.

Those kinds of personal testimonies did nothing to shake Arendt’s conviction that Eichmann’s role was tied to his function within the Nazi bureaucracy, not a product of his personal views. At one point in the trial, Hausner confronted the accused with something he had told his men during the final days of the war: “
I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” According to the prosecutor, Eichmann tried to argue that he had said “enemies of the Reich” not Jews, but later admitted to one of the judges that he had indeed meant Jews. In any case, Hausner pointed out that the accused had a look of “utter amazement and, for a moment, of panic” when he heard the quote read to him.

For Arendt, such statements only demonstrated that “
bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing.” As he had grown increasingly comfortable in Argentina, a country that felt like such a safe haven for Nazis, Eichmann had even agreed in 1957 to be interviewed at length by Willem Sassen, a Dutch Nazi journalist. Sassen sold excerpts from
the interviews to
Life
magazine, and Eichmann may have imagined that at some point the full transcripts would help him present his version of events. But his self-aggrandizing tone in them was at odds with the tack he took in Jerusalem, where he was desperate to play down his role. Eichmann insisted that the interviews were held in “
a saloon atmosphere” and did not contain reliable information, even though he had reviewed and corrected some of the transcripts. As a result of his objections, the court ruled that they could not be admitted as evidence.

But, as Arendt saw it, Eichmann’s willingness to take such risks proved her point. “
What eventually led to his capture was his compulsion to talk big,” she wrote. She saw his eagerness to adapt and say whatever he felt would help him in any given situation—without thought to future consequences—as the explanation of the role he played in the Third Reich. “
He was not stupid,” she wrote. “It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period,” she concluded.

The other part of Arendt’s thesis that infuriated her critics, triggering the charge that she was a self-hating Jew, was her discussion of the complicity of Jewish councils in occupied Europe. One of their main tasks was to deliver whatever number of Jews the Germans demanded for transport to the death camps, making sure they met their grim quotas. During the trial, the prosecution called witnesses who testified to the lengths that the Germans went to deceive their victims as much as possible, compelling those who went east to send postcards to their relatives about the purported good living and working conditions in their new locations. And it was common for witnesses to explain how everyone hoped against hope that they could believe the German cover story.

But Arendt was having none of it, accusing Jewish leaders of taking part in this deliberate deception in the hopes of saving themselves. “
To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story,” she wrote. Arendt gave no indication that she understood how difficult it must have been for Jewish leaders to resist the relentless pressure of the Germans
to round up more people for the trains heading east, accompanied by a combination of escalating threats and what almost always turned out to be empty promises that some Jews would be spared.

This was a particularly sensitive topic in the Jerusalem courtroom. “
The tragedy of the trapped Jewish leaders in occupied Europe emerged again in all its nakedness,” Hausner recalled. One of the most prominent members of this group was the Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated with Eichmann as he was orchestrating the deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In the end, as Arendt acidly put it, Kastner “
saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims.” Those saved included Kastner and some of his family, along with other “prominent Jews,” as he called them. Kastner arranged to pay the Germans a hefty ransom in return for safe passage to Switzerland. He later settled in Israel, where he became a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

In 1953, Malchiel Gruenwald, a Hungarian-born Israeli freelance journalist, accused Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis. Since Kastner worked for the government, the Israeli authorities sued his accuser for libel. The court initially ruled in Gruenwald’s favor, with the judge asserting that Kastner had “
sold his soul to the devil.” The government appealed that decision. In 1957, while the legal battle was still unresolved, Kastner was assassinated in Tel Aviv. Shortly afterward, the case officially concluded with his exoneration.

But public opinion remained deeply divided on Kastner’s role. To Bach, who had helped with the appeal in the defamation case, and other members of the prosecution team in the Eichmann trial, Eichmann’s dealings with Kastner only underscored the nefarious methods the Nazi official employed. They were not about to condemn the desperate local Jewish leaders, and Kastner’s defenders viewed him as a hero for saving as many people as he did.