The Nazi Hunters (28 page)

One of the immediate consequences of Arendt’s writing was to stimulate new studies about the propensity of those average citizens to obey orders without thinking. Most famously, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted experiments in the early 1960s with unsuspecting volunteers who were led to believe that they were administering powerful electric shocks to people in a separate room. Told they were participating in an educational experiment, the participants could back out at any time—yet in most cases they kept following orders to administer what they believed were increasingly painful shocks, even when they heard screams or banging on the wall. The subjects were actors and they were not receiving real shocks.

Milgram concluded that such behavior indicated “
that Arendt’s conception of the
banality of evil
comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.” Nazi Germany and other societies were able to make people obey blindly, he explained, by taking advantage of “the disappearance of a sense of responsibility” in modern societies; instead, individuals are focused on narrow technical tasks, responding to orders from above. “
The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has evaporated,” he wrote. “Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.”

Milgram’s described his experiments in his book
Obedience to
Authority
, which, just like Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, stirred new impassioned debates. His conclusions were clearly aligned with a point of view on human behavior and totalitarian systems that had begun to emerge even before the Holocaust. After witnessing the rise of Hitler in Germany, Sinclair Lewis published his novel
It Can’t Happen Here
in 1935—with the exact opposite message of its title: a Nazi-like regime
could
come to power in the United States. In other words, the greatest danger facing mankind is not represented by monsters, but by those who would blindly obey their monstrous orders.

The urge to identify evil traits in particular human beings is a powerful one, especially when confronted with truly horrifying behavior. Few people want to believe that they or their neighbors could be capable of seemingly senseless violence merely because some authority figure decided such acts were necessary. Most people instinctively agreed with British Prime Minister David Cameron’s characterization of the terrorists who beheaded both American and British hostages in 2014 as “
monsters,” just as many people were prone to categorize top Nazis as monsters earlier.

But the efforts to identify personality traits peculiar to the major Nazi war criminals, wherever they were caught and tried, produced no consensus among the psychiatrists and investigators who questioned them. There were some recurring characteristics: their zealous dedication to what they saw as their work, a complete lack of empathy for their victims, the sense that they were not responsible for their actions since there was always someone higher up to blame, and hefty doses of self-pity. Also, in many cases, there was an astonishing capacity for self-delusion. Göring, who was seen as the most intelligent and social of the defendants in Nuremberg, told the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley that he was “
determined to go down in German history as a great man.” Even if he failed to convince the court, he would convince the German public, he insisted. “In fifty or sixty years there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany,” he said. “Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”

Fellow American psychiatrist G. M. Gilbert concluded that someone like Auschwitz commandant Höss exhibited the traits of “
a frank psychotic.”
But Kelley was persistently frustrated in his efforts to identify anything that would indicate that these criminals were insane in any way—or that they fundamentally differed from other human beings. In other words, they were not the products of any “monster gene.”

“
Insanity is no explanation for the Nazis,” Kelley wrote. “They were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are; and they were also—to a greater degree than most humans are—the makers of their environment.” For someone who had hoped to find rigorous scientific answers using Rorschach tests, this vague explanation was a de facto admission of failure.
But it also led Kelley to a more clear-cut and frightening conclusion: if there was no indication of outright madness among the Nazis, the argument that “it can happen here”—or anywhere, for that matter—was right.

Those kinds of debates were certainly not resolved by the Eichmann trial, or by Arendt’s interpretation and early criticisms of it. In fact, her televised discussions in the decade following the trial indicated that she had revised much of her thinking about the value of the whole exercise. Despite her stinging critique of many aspects of the trial, she was increasingly appreciative of the role it played, serving “
as a catalyst” for future trials in Germany itself—and for the beginning of the moral self-examination that would allow her former country to begin to regain its international standing.

Arendt was not alone in revising her view. Much of the initial skepticism about Israel’s ability to conduct a fair trial, so evident in the early coverage of Eichmann’s abduction, faded away once the proceedings started.
About six weeks into the trial, a Gallup survey showed that 62 percent of those polled in the United States and 70 percent of those polled in Great Britain believed Eichmann was getting a fair hearing.

On December 15, 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging, marking the first and only time that an Israeli court approved the death penalty. On May 29, 1962, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal and two days later, at 7 p.m. on May 31, he was told that Ben-Gurion had rejected his plea for clemency. But the world was only informed about this decision at 11 p.m., without any mention of how long it would be before
the actual execution. Bach had suggested an interval of no more than two hours in order to prevent any Eichmann sympathizers from having a chance to seize a hostage to try to stop the hanging. “I was afraid that if there is a long period they might take a Jewish child somewhere, whether in Hawaii, Portugal, or Spain,” the deputy prosecutor said.

Bach did not know exactly when Eichmann would be hanged until the announcement was made. On May 30, he had visited the prisoner for what turned out to be the final time. He was in his bath the following evening at 11, in the same apartment near the presidential residence in Jerusalem where the Bachs still live today, when his wife. Ruth, called out that she had just heard the news on the radio about the president’s rejection of the clemency plea. Bach was among the small group of officials who knew this meant the execution would follow within an hour or two. “Look, I had no doubts about the matter, but I did grow pale a little bit,” he recalled. “When you’ve met a person practically every day for two years . . .”

The designated hangman was Shalom Nagar, a twenty-three-year-old Yemenite Jew who was one of the prison guards. Eichmann’s last request was for white wine and cigarettes. When he was offered a hood, he refused it. To Nagar, this indicated that he did not fear his fate.

Eichmann made a final declaration: “
Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria . . . I had to obey the laws of war and my flag. I am ready.”

Nagar, who had initially questioned why he had to carry out this assignment, pulled the lever at midnight. As he explained much later in an interview with the American Jewish magazine
Zman
, everyone present “felt the revenge; it’s only human.” He hastened to add: “But revenge wasn’t the point. If he could have, he would have done it to all of us. I would have been on his list, too. Yemenite or not.”

Nagar’s next job was to prepare the body for immediate cremation. As he noted, he was completely inexperienced in such matters, and he was terrified when he looked at the corpse that seemed to be staring at him. He also had no idea that when a person is strangled air remains in his lungs. “So when I lifted him, all the air that was inside came out in
my face and the most horrifying sounds was released from his mouth—‘grrrreeerrererere . . .’ It sounded like, ‘Hey, you Yemenite . . .’ I felt the Angel of Death had come to take me too.”

Two hours after the body was cremated, the ashes were collected in a canister and taken to a patrol boat that was waiting in the port of Jaffa. After the captain drove it out just beyond Israel’s territorial waters, Eichmann’s ashes were dumped from the canister into the sea.

As for Nagar, he had returned home and explained what he had done to his initially disbelieving wife. He was supposed to have gone to Jaffa for the final journey with the ashes, but he felt so shaken by the ordeal of hanging Eichmann and then handling his body that he was relieved of that duty. For the next year, he recalled, “I lived in terror.” When his wife asked why he was so jittery, he told her that he had the feeling that Eichmann might be chasing him.

“In truth, I don’t know what I was afraid of,” he admitted. “I just was afraid. An experience like that does things to you that you don’t even realize.”

“
What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews. . . . Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”

Bernhard Schlink,
The Reader
, a novel about Germany’s postwar generation that became an international bestseller

I
n the immediate aftermath of World War II, most West Germans were eager to put the memory of the Third Reich quickly behind them as their new democratic leaders produced what became known as an economic miracle. But Fritz Bauer was always an exception. Ensconced in his office in Frankfurt, Hesse’s attorney general was determined to use all means at his disposal to keep forcing his countrymen to confront their recent past. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t enough for them to view the Eichmann trial from afar; they needed to see perpetrators brought to trial at home.

Even before the Israelis acted on his lead and kidnapped Eichmann, Bauer was on the receiving end of a tip that would later lead to the filing of charges against twenty-four Auschwitz officials and guards, presenting exactly the kind of opportunity he had been looking for.

Thomas Gnielka, a young reporter for the
Frankfurter Rundschau
who had been investigating restitution cases and gathering evidence against former Nazis, interviewed Auschwitz survivor Emil Wulkan in early January 1959. At one point, Gnielka either asked about a stack of documents on his cupboard that was bound by a red ribbon or Wulkan simply handed them to him. “
Maybe this is something that interests you as a journalist,” he reportedly said.

The documents were Auschwitz records from August 1942 on the subject of the “Shooting of Fleeing Prisoners,” which had been collected as part of an unspecified internal investigation. They included lists of prisoners and the names of the SS officers who shot them. Whatever the reason for the Nazi investigators’ decision to examine such lists, there was little doubt that they constituted evidence of specific acts of murder. Wulkan explained to Gnielka that a friend of his had salvaged them from the burning rubble of a police court building in Breslau at the end of the war, and that he had held on to them as a “
souvenir.” Although Wulkan had later become a member of the Frankfurt Jewish Council, this was apparently the first time he recognized that those documents might be “of legal significance,” as Gnielka put it.

When Gnielka returned home after seeing those execution lists, his wife Ingeborg recalled, “
he was green in the face”—he looked sick. He had asked Wulkan for the chance to put the lists to good use, and he quickly passed them along to Bauer. This set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to West Germany’s longest and most publicized postwar trial. Although Bauer allowed two young members of his team to prosecute the case and never played an official role in the courtroom, he was the driving force behind the trial and the person who was most intent on making his countrymen understand what he saw as its lessons.

There was nothing simple about those lessons or the trial itself, which lasted from December 20, 1963, to August 20, 1965.
A total of 183 sessions were held in the Frankfurt courtroom, watched by more than
twenty thousand visitors and covered intensely by the German and international press. The twenty-two defendants who showed up in court were not like the top Nazis who had been the “stars” of Nuremberg; nor did they play
the kind of pivotal role in orchestrating the Holocaust that Eichmann did. Instead, they would become infamous because they had found themselves in the dock for their supporting roles in Auschwitz, their individual records of staggering brutality exposed by the list Gnielka had passed along to Bauer and by
211 concentration camp survivors who offered their testimony as witnesses.

For Bauer, the twenty-two defendants were “
really only the chosen scapegoats” who were supposed to expose the crimes committed in the name of all the German people. “The question is what will we do with these people,” he said, adding that he was not referring merely to the twenty-two defendants but to “50 million Germans, or more precisely said, for 70 million.” By throwing in the latter figure, he left no doubt that he was referring to the combined population of West and East Germany, and what they should conclude from the trial. The proceedings “can and must open the eyes of the German people to what happened.” The real lesson, he insisted, was “
whoever operated this murder machinery is guilty of participation in murder, whatever he did, of course provided he knew the aim of the machinery.”

But as Judge Hans Hofmeyer repeatedly stated, his vision of the trial was radically different: it was “
an ordinary criminal trial, regardless of its background.” When it pronounced its verdict, the court pointed out that it “
could consider only criminal guilt—that is, guilt in the sense of the penal code. Political guilt, moral and ethical guilt, were not the subject of its concern,” according to the summation by Bernd Naumann, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
reporter who provided the most detailed coverage of the trial. In other words, this was not a trial meant to establish a definitive account of Auschwitz or to demonstrate the principle that all the camp officers and guards were guilty; it was focused on the individual deeds of the defendants.