The Nazi Hunters (27 page)

Arendt, however, insisted that the local Jewish leaders and their organizations made it easier for Eichmann and others to reach their goal of rounding up just about everyone. If there had been no such Jewish leaders to help them, there still would have been “
chaos and plenty of misery,”
she wrote, “but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.”

• • •

As soon as Arendt published
Eichmann in Jerusalem
in 1963, she came under withering fire from her critics. The prosecutors, of course, had never subscribed to her thesis about Eichmann. “This idea of Hannah Arendt that he was just obeying orders is absolute rubbish,” Bach declared. He added that Eichmann would not have been left in charge of Jewish affairs in the security apparatus throughout the entire period of the Holocaust if he were not seen as completely dedicated to the cause of genocide. And he noted that Eichmann had continued his drive to murder Jews long after it was evident the war was lost and his superiors were already trying to cover up the physical evidence of the Holocaust. But it was left to others to mount the counterattacks on Arendt in the media and other public forums.

One of those who took the lead was Michael Musmanno, the judge in the Nuremberg trial of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen—the special squads that had carried out mass executions of Jews and others on the Eastern Front before the gas chambers were operational. Musmanno wrote a book after Eichmann’s capture that he titled
The Eichmann Kommandos
and testified for the prosecution in his trial in Jerusalem. When questioned by defense attorney Servatius, he described his conversations with the top Nazi prisoners at Nuremberg. Göring, he asserted, “
made it very clear that Eichmann was all-powerful on the question of the extermination of the Jews. . . . [He] had practically unlimited power to declare who was to be killed among the Jews.” This was a direct refutation of Eichmann’s repeated claims that had no authority to decide anything on his own.

On another occasion, Musmanno—who was never hesitant to strike the dramatic note—wrote that in Nuremberg Eichmann’s name “
kept recurring in the testimony like the sighing of the wind through a deserted, empty house, and the rustling of tree branches against the roof suggesting supernatural visitations.”

Musmanno was offered a major forum for his views when
The New
York Times
asked him to review Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
clearly knowing what to expect. He produced a predictably scathing review, contemptuously dismissing her arguments, as he put it, “
that Eichmann was not really a Nazi at heart, that he did not know Hitler’s program when he joined the Nazi party, that the Gestapo were helpful to the Jews in Palestinian immigration, that Himmler (Himmler!) had a sense of pity.” He added that Arendt sympathized with Eichmann when no one believed his protestations that he did not hate Jews, and that in general had fallen for Eichmann’s mendacious presentation of his personal history and views.

Musmanno reserved his most caustic remarks for her willingness to believe that Eichmann never saw “the killing installations” at Auschwitz, despite the fact that he “repeatedly” visited there. “Her observation is like saying that one repeatedly sojourned at Niagara Falls but never noticed the falling water,” he wrote. As for her condemnation of the Jewish councils, he echoed the sentiment of those who felt that her indignation was completely misdirected. “The fact that Eichmann with threats of death coerced occasional Quislings and Lavals in ‘cooperation’ only adds to the horrors of his crimes,” he concluded.

The review, as much as the book, was a huge sensation, with readers picking sides in this battle of two well-known public figures. In a subsequent
Book Review
section, the
Times
published a rebuttal by Arendt, a rebuttal of the rebuttal by Musmanno, and impassioned letters from both sides of the debate.
In her reply, Arendt castigated the newspaper for its “bizarre” choice of Musmanno as the reviewer, since she had earlier dismissed his views on totalitarianism and Eichmann’s role as “dangerous nonsense.” Yet neither the
Times
nor Musmanno bothered to inform readers of that fact, which suggested “a flagrant break with normal editorial procedure,” she charged. As for the review, it was an attack on “a book which, to my knowledge, was never either written or published.” In other words, Musmanno had totally misrepresented it.

Musmanno fired back that it had been his obligation to point out “Miss Arendt’s many misstatements of facts in the Eichmann case,” and that he was not guilty of any “misrepresentations of any kind.” Pro-Arendt readers called his review “a new low in reviewing,” “a gross misreading” of the
book, and indicated that he was “blind to her gift of irony.” Anti-Arendt readers praised Musmanno for his effort “to set the record straight” and accused Arendt of attempting “to lean over backwards” to understand Eichmann, and of “disregard for, or ignorance of, historical facts.”

The battle did not end there. Jacob Robinson, who had been a consultant on Jewish affairs to Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials, and later served as the legal advisor to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, wrote an entire book dedicated to demolishing Arendt’s arguments:
And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative,
published in 1965. As a lawyer and a scholar, he was intent on addressing almost every assertion, finding almost no detail too insignificant to dispute.

Robinson, of course, attacked her view that Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust had been exaggerated by the prosecution. “
One stands baffled before Hannah Arendt’s image of Eichmann,” he wrote, adding that the documents demonstrated that “the real Eichmann” was “a man of extraordinary driving power, master in the arts of cunning and deception, intelligent and competent in his field, single-minded in his mission to make Europe ‘free of Jews’ (
judenrein
)—in short, a man uniquely suited to be the overseer of most of the Nazi programs to exterminate the Jews.”

Robinson declared himself particularly “
aghast” at what he characterized as Arendt’s “distortion of the historical facts” in her discussion of the role of Jewish councils in occupied Europe. He offered a lengthy explanation on the origins of these Jewish organizations that the Germans used to administer the ghettos. He pointed out the councils’ “positive attempts to preserve the physical and moral existence of the communities in all circumstances,” although admitting that they “took pains to offer no open defiance to the Nazi masters, deeply convinced that this approach protected the community from greater misfortune.” He also tried to distance the councils from the Jewish police, which the Nazis frequently used in roundups for deportations, saying that the police reported directly to the Germans in such cases.

Arendt was not alone in finding such arguments unconvincing. Simon Wiesenthal similarly criticized the widespread reluctance to discuss the
role of the Jewish councils and Jewish police, rejecting the idea that to do so risked diminishing the guilt of the Nazi overlords who were the real perpetrators. “
We have done very little to condemn Jewish collaboration with the Nazis,” he wrote. “No one else has a right to blame us for it—but we ourselves must face up to it sometime.”

But such voices were usually in a distinct minority. As Robinson summed up the more widely accepted view: “
Legally and morally, the members of the Jewish Councils can no more be judged accomplices of their Nazi rulers than can a store owner be judged accomplice of an armed robber to whom he surrenders his store at gunpoint.”

Especially on the question of Eichmann and the nature of the evil that he represented, the anti-Arendt voices were often louder than those of people willing to come to her defense—at least in intellectual circles, where she was often treated like a pariah. In the 2012 feature film
Hannah Arendt,
German director Margarethe von Trotta conveyed the degree to which Arendt was deserted by former friends and colleagues, along with their increasingly poisonous sniping at each other.

But even among the Israeli agents who captured Eichmann, there was some sympathy for her view of what the man they hunted down represented. “
In a way she was right,” said Rafi Eitan, who led the Mossad team in Buenos Aires. “He himself never hated Jews—that was my feeling. That’s the banality of evil. Tomorrow tell him to kill French people, and he would do the same.”

That battle about what Eichmann really represented has continued for decades.
In 2011, another German philosopher, Bettina Stangneth, published a book based on extensive additional research into Eichmann’s records, including the transcripts of his interviews with Willem Sassen, the Dutch Nazi, focused on his time in Argentina. The English-language version, called
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer,
was published in 2014. It marshaled an impressive body of evidence to buttress the case that Robinson and others had made earlier.

Eichmann was hardly a mediocre bureaucrat who happened to become a critical part of the machinery of mass murder, Stangneth argued.
Instead, he was a rabid anti-Semite who was “
in thrall to totalitarian thought,” far from the image of someone who simply followed whatever orders he received. “An ideology that scorns human life can be very appealing if you happen to be a member of the master race that proclaims it, and if it legitimizes behavior that would be condemned by any traditional concept of justice and morality,” she wrote.

Stangneth credited Arendt with launching a much needed discussion in that early period of Holocaust studies. Her book “
achieved the primary goal of philosophers since Socrates: controversy for the sake of understanding.” But her conclusion was that Arendt had fallen into a trap set by her subject as he constructed a deliberately false narrative of his life. “Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was little more than a mask,” Stangneth wrote. “She didn’t recognize it, although she was acutely aware that she had not understood the phenomenon as well as she had hoped.”

• • •

There is little doubt that Arendt, who relied primarily on the transcripts of Eichmann’s interrogation along with his direct testimony in the latter part of the trial, accepted at face value some of his protestations about his purportedly subordinate role and lack of personal enmity against Jews. She was eager to prove her thesis about how totalitarian systems made effective use of mediocre individuals who lacked genuine convictions of their own. She was also undeniably arrogant, convinced that she had provided the only proper intellectual framework for understanding the man and his role in history.

But Arendt was correct in saying that her views were often distorted beyond recognition by her angry critics, and she fought back in a series of interviews for German and French television during the decade that followed the publication of
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
She was easily misunderstood, and she did not help her case by repeating the phrases that caused some of the confusion in the first place.
In an early interview, she continued to insist that Eichmann was “a buffoon,” adding that she “laughed out loud” when she read the transcript of his interrogation.

In subsequent interviews, she offered clearer explanations of what she meant. Speaking with the German historian Joachim Fest, she pointed
out that by banal behavior she didn’t mean anything positive—quite the contrary. She decried the “
sham existence” of Eichmann and the earlier Nuremberg trial defendants, who claimed they weren’t responsible for mass murders because they were simply obeying orders, freeing them of any responsibility for their actions. “There’s something outrageously stupid about this,” she added. “The whole thing is simply comical!” In her interviews, “comical” clearly doesn’t mean funny.

Nonetheless, she stuck with her thesis that Eichmann was a “
mere functionary” and that ideology did not play a major role in his behavior. The interpretation of many of her critics—that he was a monster, the devil incarnate—was highly dangerous because it offered Germans an alibi for their behavior, she maintained. “If you succumb to the power of the beast from the depths, you’re naturally much less guilty than if you succumb to a completely average man of the caliber of an Eichmann,” she declared. That was why she was so intent on rejecting the demonic explanation of him and his ilk.

While Arendt presented a highly sophisticated argument about her view of Eichmann that, at the very least, should have made some of her overwrought accusers pause, she did not back off much on her charge about Jewish collaboration. Still, she exhibited more understanding of the Jewish council leaders as “
victims,” pointing out that, however questionable their behavior, they can never be equated with the perpetrators. This represented an indirect concession that her original account came across as too harshly judgmental.

One overlooked passage in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
demonstrates that Arendt was not blaming the victims, as her critics so frequently maintained. As Bach pointed out, one of the goals of the Israeli leaders in holding the trial was to demonstrate to the younger generation the methods the Germans used, dangling the illusion of hope to their victims until the last moment. While Arendt mentioned the popular perception that Jews “
went to their death like sheep,” she wrote: “But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or people had behaved any differently.” In that sense, Arendt and the prosecutors were in agreement.

From the perspective of a half century later, there is a credible argument to be made that Eichmann embodied many of the traits of the competing versions of him—Arendt’s version and her critics’ version. He was both a careerist in a totalitarian system, willing to do anything to please his superiors, and a virulent anti-Semite who reveled in his powers to dispatch his victims to their deaths, systematically tracking down anyone who sought to elude the Nazi net. He was more consciously evil than Arendt was willing to admit, and yet he embodied her concept of the banality of evil. Those two notions are not necessarily contradictory. He committed monstrous acts in the name of a monstrous system, but labeling him a monster lets too many others off the hook and ignores how easily tyrannical regimes can enlist average citizens in their criminal behavior.