Excerpted from:
Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A Report on the Banality of Evil
By Hannah Arendt
(full text available at the link above)
Soviet soldiers regard a pile of ashes at Majdanek, a concentration camp in Eastern Poland
XIII : The Killing Centers in the East
When the Nazis spoke of the East, they meant a huge area that embraced Poland, the Baltic States, and occupied Russian territory. It was divided into four administrative units: the Warthegau, consisting of the Polish Western Regions annexed to the Reich, under Gauleiter Artur Greiser; the Ostland, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the rather indefinite area of White Russia, with Riga as the seat of the occupation authorities; the General Government of central Poland, under Hans Frank; and the Ukraine, under Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. These were the first countries on which testimony was presented in the case for the prosecution, and they were the last to be dealt with in the judgment. No doubt both the prosecution and the judges had excellent reasons for their opposite decisions. The East was the central scene of Jewish suffering, the gruesome terminal of all deportations, the place from which there was hardly ever any escape and where the number of survivors rarely reached more than five per cent. The East, moreover, had been the center of the prewar Jewish population in Europe; more than three million Jews had lived in Poland, two hundred and sixty thousand in the Baltic states, and more than half of the estimated three million Russian Jews in White Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea. Since the prosecution was interested primarily in the suffering of the Jewish people and "the dimensions of the genocide" attempted upon it, it was logical to start here, and then see how much specific responsibility for this unmitigated hell could be blamed upon the accused. The trouble was that the evidence relating Eichmann to the East was "scanty," and this was blamed on the fact that the Gestapo files, and particularly the files of Eichmann's section, had been destroyed by the Nazis. This scarcity of documentary evidence gave the prosecution a probably welcome pretext for calling an endless procession of witnesses to testify to events in the East, though this was hardly its only reason for doing so. The prosecution - as had been hinted during the trial but was fully described later (in the special Bulletin issued in April, 1962, by Yad Vashem, the Israeli archive on the Nazi period) - had been under considerable pressure from Israeli survivors, who constitute about twenty per cent of the present population of the country. They had flocked spontaneously to the trial authorities and also to Yad Vashem, which had been officially commissioned to prepare some of the documentary evidence, to offer themselves as witnesses. The worst cases of "strong imagination," people who had "seen Eichmann at various places where he had never been," were weeded out, but fifty-six "sufferings-of-the-Jewish-people witnesses," as the trial authorities called them, were finally put on the stand, instead of some fifteen or twenty "background witnesses," as originally planned; twenty-three sessions, out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were entirely devoted to "background," which meant they had no apparent bearing upon the case. Though the witnesses for the prosecution were hardly ever cross-examined by either the defense or the judges, the judgment did not accept evidence that had bearing on Eichmann unless it was given some other corroboration. (Thus, the judges refused to charge Eichmann with the murder of the Jewish boy in Hungary; or with having instigated the Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, of which he certainly knew nothing at the time and, even in Jerusalem, knew considerably less than the least wellinformed student of the period; or with the murder of ninety-three children of Lidice, who, after Heydrich's assassination, were deported to Lódz, since "it has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, according to the evidence before us, that they were murdered"; or with responsibility for the hideous operations of Unit 1005, "amongst the most horrifying parts of all the evidence submitted by the prosecution," which had had the task of opening the mass graves in the East and disposing of the corpses in order to efface all traces of slaughter, and was commanded by Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who, according to his own testimony at Nuremberg, took orders from Müller, the head of Section IV of the R.S.H.A.; or with the dreadful conditions under which Jews left alive in the extermination camps were evacuated to German concentration camps, especially to Bergen-Belsen, during the last months of the war.) The gist of the background witnesses' testimony about conditions in the Polish ghettos, about procedures in the various death camps, about forced labor and, generally, the attempt to exterminate through labor, was never in dispute; on the contrary, there was hardly anything in what they told that had not been known before. If Eichmann's name was mentioned at all, it obviously was hearsay evidence, "rumors testified to," hence without legal validity. The testimony of all witnesses who had "seen him with their own eyes" collapsed the moment a question was addressed to them, and the judgment found "that the center of gravity of his activities was within the Reich itself, the Protectorate, and in the countries of Europe to the west, north, south, southeast and Central Europe" - that is, everywhere except in the East. Why, then, did the court not waive these hearings, which lasted for weeks and months on end? In discussing this question, the judgment was somewhat apologetic, and finally gave an explanation that was curiously inconsistent: "Since the accused denied all the counts in the indictment," the judges could not dismiss "evidence on the factual background." The accused, however, had never denied these facts in the indictment, he had only denied that he was responsible for them "in the sense of the indictment." Actually, the judges were faced with a highly unpleasant dilemma. At the very beginning of the trial, Dr. Servatius had impugned the impartiality of the judges; no Jew, in his opinion, was qualified to sit in judgment on the implementers of the Final Solution, and the presiding judge had replied: "We are professional judges, used and accustomed to weighing evidence brought before us and to doing our work in the public eye and subject to public criticism. . . . When a court sits in judgment, the judges who compose it are human beings, are flesh and blood, with feelings and senses, but they are obliged by the law to restrain those feelings and senses. Otherwise, no judge could ever be found to try a criminal case where his abhorrence might be aroused. . . . It cannot be denied that the memory of the Nazi holocaust stirs every Jew, but while this case is being tried before us it will be our duty to restrain these feelings, and this duty we shall honor." Which was good and fair enough, unless Dr. Servatius meant to imply that Jews might lack a proper understanding of the problem their presence caused in the midst of the nations of the world, and hence would fail to appreciate a "final solution" of it. But the irony of the situation was that in case he had felt inclined to make this argument, he could have been answered that the accused, according to his own, emphatically repeated testimony, had learned all he knew about the Jewish question from Jewish-Zionist authors, from the "basic books" of Theodor Herzl and Adolf Böhm. Who, then, could be better qualified to try him than these three men, who had all been Zionists since their early youth? It was not with respect to the accused, then, but with respect to the background witnesses that the fact of the Jewishness of the judges, of their living in a country where every fifth person was a survivor, became acute and troublesome. Mr. Hausner had gathered together a "tragic multitude" of sufferers, each of them eager not to miss this unique opportunity, each of them convinced of his right to his day in court. The judges might, and did, quarrel with the prosecutor about the wisdom and even the appropriateness of using the occasion for "painting general pictures," but once a witness had taken the stand, it was difficult indeed to interrupt him, to cut short such testimony, "because of the honor of the witness and because of the matters about which he speaks," as Judge Landau put it. Who were they, humanly speaking, to deny any of these people their day in court? And who would have dared, humanly speaking, to question their veracity as to detail when they "poured out their hearts as they stood in the witness box," even though what they had to tell could only "be regarded as by-products of the trial"? There was an additional difficulty. In Israel, as in most other countries, a person appearing in court is deemed innocent until proved guilty. But in the case of Eichmann this was an obvious fiction. If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him; Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, explaining to the President of Argentina, in a letter dated June 3, 1960, why Israel had committed a "formal violation of Argentine law," wrote that "it was Eichmann who organized the mass murder [of six million of our people], on a gigantic and unprecedented scale, throughout Europe." In contrast to normal arrests in ordinary criminal cases, where suspicion of guilt must be proved to be substantial and reasonable but not beyond reasonable doubt - that is the task of the ensuing trial - Eichmann's illegal arrest could be justified, and was justified in the eyes of the world, only by the fact that the outcome of the trial could be safely anticipated. His role in the Final Solution, it now turned out, had been wildly exaggerated - partly because of his own boasting, partly because the defendants at Nuremberg and in other postwar trials had tried to exculpate themselves at his expense, and chiefly because he had been in close contact with Jewish functionaries, since he was the one German official who was an "expert in Jewish affairs" and in nothing else. The prosecution, basing its case upon sufferings that were not a bit exaggerated, had exaggerated the exaggeration beyond rhyme or reason - or so one thought until the judgment of the Court of Appeal was handed down, in which one could read: "It was a fact that the appellant had received no, `superior orders' at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs." That had been precisely the argument of the prosecution, which the judges in the District Court had not accepted, but, dangerous nonsense though it was, the Court of Appeal fully endorsed it. (It was supported chiefly by the testimony of Justice Michael A. Musmanno, author of Ten Days to Die [1950], and a former judge at Nuremberg, who had come from America to testify for the prosecution. Mr. Musmanno had sat on the trials of the administrators of the concentration camps, and of the members of the mobile killing units in the East; and while Eichmann's name had come up in the proceedings, he had mentioned it only once in his judgments. He had, however, interviewed the Nuremberg defendants in their prison. And there Ribbentrop had told him that Hitler would have been all right if he had not fallen under Eichmann's influence. Well, Mr. Musmanno did not believe all he was told, but he did believe that Eichmann had been given his commission by Hitler himself and that his power "came by speaking through Himmler and through Heydrich." A few sessions later, Mr. Gustave M. Gilbert, professor of psychology at Long Island University and author of Nuremberg Diary [1947], appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He was more cautious than Justice Musmanno, whom he had introduced to the defendants at Nuremberg. Gilbert testified that "Eichmann . . . wasn't thought of very much by the major Nazi war criminals . at that time," and also that Eichmann, whom they both assumed dead, had not been mentioned in discussions of the war crimes between Gilbert and Musmanno.) The District Court judges, then, because they saw through the exaggerations of the prosecution and had no wish to make Eichmann the superior of Himmler and the inspirer of Hitler, were put in the position of having to defend the accused. The task, apart from its unpleasantness, was of no consequence for either judgment or sentence, as "the legal and moral responsibility of him who delivers the victim to his death is, in our opinion, no smaller and may even be greater than the liability of him who does the victim to death." The judges' way out of all these difficulties was through compromise. The judgment falls into two parts, and the by far larger part consists of a rewriting of the prosecution's case. The judges indicated their fundamentally different approach by starting with Germany and ending with the East, for this meant that they intended to concentrate on what had been done instead of on what the Jews had suffered. In an obvious rebuff to the prosecution, they said explicitly that sufferings on so gigantic a scale were "beyond human understanding," a matter for "great authors and poets," and did not belong in a courtroom, whereas the deeds and motives that had caused them were neither beyond understanding nor beyond judgment. They even went so far as to state that they would base their findings upon their own presentation, and, indeed, they would have been lost if they had not gone to the enormous amount of work that this implied. They got a firm grasp on the intricate bureaucratic setup of the Nazi machinery of destruction, so that the position of the accused could be understood. In contrast to the introductory speech of Mr. Hausner, which has already been published as a book, the judgment can be studied with profit by those with a historical interest in this period. But the judgement, so pleasantly devoid of cheap oratory, would have destroyed the case for the prosecution altogether if the judges had not found reason to charge Eichmann with some responsibility for crimes in the East, in addition to the main crime, to which he had confessed, namely, that he had shipped people to their death in full awareness of what he was doing. Four points were chiefly in dispute. There was, first, the question of Eichmann's participation in the mass slaughter carried out in the East by the Einsatzgruppen, which had been set up by Heydrich at a meeting, held in March, 1941, at which Eichmann was present. However, since the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen were members of the intellectual élite of the S.S., while their troops were either criminals or ordinary soldiers drafted for punitive duty - nobody could volunteer - Eichmann was connected with this important phase of the Final Solution only in that he received the reports of the killers, which he then had to summarize for his superiors. These reports, though "top secret," were mimeographed and went to between fifty and seventy other offices in the Reich, in each of which there sat, of course, some Oberregierungsrat who summarized them for the higher-ups. There was, in addition to this, the testimony of Justice Musmanno, who claimed that Walter Schellenberg, who had drawn up the draft agreement between Heydrich and General Walter von Brauchitsch, of the military command, specifying that the Einsatzgruppen were to enjoy full freedom in "the execution of their plans as regards the civil population," that is, in the killing of civilians, had told him in a conversation at Nuremberg that Eichmann had "controlled these operations" and had even "personally supervised" them. The judges "for reasons of caution" were unwilling to rely on an uncorroborated statement of Schellenberg's, and threw out this evidence. Schellenberg must have had a remarkably low opinion of the Nuremberg judges and their ability to find their way through the labyrinthine administrative structure of the Third Reich. Hence, all that was left was evidence that Eichmann was well informed of what was going on in the East, which had never been in dispute, and the judgment, surprisingly, concluded that this evidence was sufficient to constitute proof of actual participation. The second point, dealing with the deportation of Jews from Polish ghettos to the nearby killing centers, had more to recommend it. It was indeed "logical" to assume that the transportation expert would have been active in the territory under the General Government. However, we know from many other sources that the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were in charge of transportation for this whole area - to the great grief of Governor General Hans Frank, who in his diary complained endlessly about interference in this matter without ever mentioning Eichmann's name. Franz Novak, Eichmann's transportation officer, testifying for the defense, corroborated Eichmann's version: occasionally, of course, they had had to negotiate with the manager of the Ostbahn, the Eastern Railways, because shipments from the western parts of Europe had to be coordinated with local operations. (Of these transactions, Wisliceny had given a good account at Nuremberg. Novak used to contact the Ministry of Transport, which, in turn, had to obtain clearance from the Army if the trains entered a theater of war. The Army could veto transports. What Wisliceny did not tell, and what is perhaps more interesting, is that the Army used its right of veto only in the initial years, when German troops were on the offensive; in 1944, when the deportations from Hungary clogged the lines of retreat for whole G an armies in desperate flight, no vetoes were forthcoming.) But when, for instance, the Warsaw ghetto as evacuated in 1942, at the rate of five thousand people a day, Himmler himself conducted the negotiations with the railway authorities, and Eichmann and his outfit had nothing whatever to do with them. The judgment finally fell back on testimony given by a witness at the Höss trial that some Jews from the General Government area had arrived in Auschwitz together with Jews from Bialystok, a Polish city that had been incorporated into the German province of East Prussia, and hence fell within Eichmann's jurisdiction. Yet even in the Warthegau, which was Reich territory, it was not the R.S.H.A. but Gauleiter Greiser who was in charge of extermination and deportation. And although in January, 1944, Eichmann visited the Lódz ghetto - the largest in the East and the last to be liquidated - again it was Himmler himself who, a month later, came to see Greiser and ordered the liquidation of Lódz. Unless one accepted the prosecution's preposterous claim that Eichmann had been able to inspire Himmler's orders, the mere fact that Eichmann shipped Jews to Auschwitz could not possibly prove that all Jews who arrived there had been shipped by him. In view of Eichmann's strenuous denials and the utter lack of corroborative evidence, the conclusions of the judgment on this point appeared, unhappily, to constitute a case of in dubio contra reum. The third point to be considered was Eichmann's liability for what went on in the extermination camps, in which, according to the prosecution, he had enjoyed great authority. It spoke for the high degree of independence and fairness of the judges that they threw out all the accumulated testimony of the witnesses on these matters. Their argument here was foolproof and showed their true understanding of the whole situation. They started by explaining that there had existed two categories of Jews in the camps, the so-called "transport Jews" (Transportjuden), who made up the bulk of the population and who had never committed an offense, even in the eyes of the Nazis, and the Jews "in protective custody" (Schutzhaftjuden), who had been sent to German concentration camps for some transgression and who, under the totalitarian principle of directing the full terror of the regime against the "innocents," were considerably better off than the others, even when they were shipped to the East in order to make the concentration camps in the Reich judenrein. (In the words of Mrs. Raja Kagan, an excellent witness on Auschwitz, it was "the great paradox of Auschwitz. Those caught committing a criminal offense were treated better than the others." They were not subject to the selection and, as a rule, they survived.) Eichmann had nothing to do with Schutzhaftjuden; but Transportjuden, his speciality, were, by definition, condemned to death, except for the twenty-five per cent of especially strong individuals, who might be selected for labor in some camps. In the version presented by the judgment, however, that question was no longer at issue. Eichmann knew, of course, that the overwhelming majority of his victims were condemned to death; but since the selection for labor was made by the S.S. physicians on the spot, and since the lists of deportees were usually made up by the Jewish Councils in the home countries or by the Order Police, but never by Eichmann or his men, the truth was that he had no authority to say who would die and who would live; he could not even know. The question was whether Eichmann had lied when he said: "I never killed a Jew or, for that matter, I never killed a non-Jew. . . . I never gave an order to kill a Jew nor an order to kill a non-Jew." The prosecution, unable to understand a mass murderer who had never killed (and who in this particular instance probably did not even have the guts to kill), was constantly trying to prove individual murder. This brings us to the fourth, and last, question concerning Eichmann's general authority in the Eastern territories - the question of his responsibility for living conditions in the ghettos, for the unspeakable misery endured in them, and for their final liquidation, which had been the subject of testimony by most witnesses. Again, Eichmann had been fully informed, but none of this had anything to do with his job. The prosecution made a laborious effort to prove that it had, on the ground that Eichmann had freely admitted that every once in a while he had to decide, according to ever-changing directives on this matter, what to do with the Jews of foreign nationality who were trapped in Poland. This, he said, was a question of "national importance," involving the Foreign Office, and was "beyond the horizon" of the local authorities. With respect to such Jews, there existed two different trends in all German offices, the "radical" trend, which would have ignored all distinctions - a Jew was a Jew, period - and the "moderate" trend, which thought it better to put these Jews "on ice" for exchange purposes. (The notion of exchange Jews seems to have been Himmler's idea. After America's entry into the war, he wrote to Müller, in December, 1942, that "all Jews with influential relatives in the United States should be put into a special camp . . . and stay alive," adding, "Such Jews are for us precious hostages. I have a figure of ten thousand in mind.") Needless to say, Eichmann belonged to the "radicals," he was against making exceptions, for administrative as well as "idealistic" reasons. But when in April, 1942, he wrote to the Foreign Office that "in the future foreign nationals would be included in the measures taken by the Security Police within the Warsaw Ghetto," where Jews with foreign passports had previously been carefully weeded out, he was hardly acting as "a decision-maker on behalf of the R.S.H.A." in the East, and he certainly did not possess "executive powers" there. Still less could such powers or authority be derived from his having been used occasionally by Heydrich or Himmler to transmit certain orders to local commanders. In a sense, the truth of the matter was even worse than the court in Jerusalem assumed. Heydrich, the judgment argued, had been given central authority over the implementation of the Final Solution, without any territorial limitations, hence Eichmann, his chief deputy in this field, was everywhere equally responsible. This was quite true for the framework of the Final Solution, but although Heydrich, for purposes of coordination, had called a representative of Hans Frank's General Government, Undersecretary of State Dr. Josef Bühler, to the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution did not really apply to the Eastern occupied territories, for the simple reason that the fate of the Jews there had never been in the balance. The massacre of Polish Jewry had been decided on by Hitler not in May or June, 1941, the date of the order for the Final Solution, but in September, 1939, as the judges knew from testimony given at Nuremberg by Erwin Lahousen of the German Counterintelligence: "As early as September, 1939, Hitler had decided the murder of Polish Jews." (Hence, the Jewish star was introduced into the General Government immediately after the occupation of the territory, in November, 1939, while it was introduced into the German Reich only in 1941, at the time of the Final Solution.) The judges had before them also the minutes of two conferences at the beginning of the war, one of which Heydrich had called on September 21, 1939, as a meeting of "department heads and commanders of the mobile killing units" at which Eichmann, then still a mere Hauptsturmführer, had represented the Berlin Center for Jewish Emigration; the other took place on January 30, 1940, and dealt with "questions of evacuation and resettlement." At both meetings, the fate of the entire native population in the occupied territories was discussed - that is, the "solution" of the Polish as well as the "Jewish question." Even at this early date, the "solution of the Polish problem" was well advanced: of the "political leadership," it was reported, no more than three per cent was left; in order to "render this three per cent harmless," they would have "to be sent into concentration camps." The middle strata of the Polish intelligentsia were to be registered and arrested - "teachers, clergy, nobility, legionaries, returning officers, etc." - while the "primitive Poles" were to be added to German manpower as "migratory laborers" and to be "evacuated" from their homes. "The goal is: The Pole has to become the eternal seasonal and migratory laborer, his permanent residence should be in the region of Cracow." The Jews were to be gathered into urban centers and "assembled in ghettos where they can be easily controlled and conveniently evacuated later on." Those Eastern territories that had been incorporated into the Reich - the so-called Warthegau, West Prussia, Danzig, the province of Poznan, and Upper Silesia - had to be immediately cleared of all Jews; together with 30,000 Gypsies they were sent in freight trains into the General Government. Himmler finally, in his capacity as "Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Folkdom," gave orders for the evacuation of large portions of the Polish population from these territories recently annexed to the Reich. The implementation of this "organized migration of peoples," as the judgment called it, was assigned to Eichmann as chief of Subsection IV-D-4 in the R.S.H.A., whose task consisted in "emigration, evacuation." (It is important to remember that this "negative demographic policy" was by no means improvised as a result of German victories in the East. It had been outlined, as early as November, 1937, in the secret speech addressed by Hitler to members of the German High Command - see the so-called Hössbach Protocol. Hitler had pointed out that he rejected all notions of conquering foreign nations, that what he demanded was an "empty space" [volkloser Raum] in the East for the settlement of Germans. His audience - Blomberg, Fritsch, and Räder, among others - knew quite well that no such "empty space" existed, hence they must have known that a German victory in the East would automatically result in the "evacuation" of the entire native population. The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews - genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, as we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction.) An express letter, sent to the commanders of the mobile killing units after the September meeting, was among the documents submitted at the trial and was of special interest. It refers only to "the Jewish question in occupied territories" and distinguishes between the "final goal," which must be kept secret, and "preliminary measures" for reaching it. Among the latter, the document mentions expressly the concentration of Jews in the vicinity of railroad tracks. It is characteristic that the phrase "Final Solution of the Jewish question" does not occur; the "final goal" probably was the destruction of Polish Jews, clearly nothing new to those present at the meeting; what was new was only that those Jews who lived in newly annexed provinces of the Reich should be evacuated to Poland, for this was indeed a first step toward making Germany judenrein, hence toward the Final Solution. As far as Eichmann was concerned the documents clearly showed that even at this stage he had next to nothing to do with what happened in the East. Here, too, his role was that of an expert for "transportation" and "emigration"; in the East, no "Jewish expert" was needed, no special "directives" were required, and there existed no privileged categories. Even the members of the Jewish Councils were invariably exterminated when the ghettos were finally liquidated. There were no exceptions, for the fate accorded the slave laborers was only a different, slower kind of death. Hence the Jewish bureaucracy, whose role in these administrative massacres was felt to be so essential that the institution of "Jewish Councils of Elders" was immediately established, played no part in the seizure and the concentration of the Jews. The whole episode signals the end of the initial wild mass shootings in the rear of the armies. It seems that the Army commanders had protested against the massacres of civilians, and that Heydrich had come to an agreement with the German High Command establishing the principle of a complete "cleanup once and for all" of Jews, the Polish intelligentsia, the Catholic clergy, and the nobility, but determining that, because of the magnitude of an operation in which two million Jews would have to be "cleaned up," the Jews should first be concentrated in ghettos. If the judges had cleared Eichmann completely on these counts connected with the hair-raising stories told over and over by witnesses at the trial, they would not have arrived at a different judgment of guilt, and Eichmann would not have escaped capital punishment. The result would have been the same. But they would have destroyed utterly, and without compromise, the case as the prosecution presented it.
XIV : Evidence and Witnesses
During the last weeks of the war, the S.S. bureaucracy was occupied chiefly with forging identity papers and with destroying the paper mountains that testified to six years of systematic murder. Eichmann's department, more successful than others, had burned its files, which, of course, did not achieve much, since all its correspondence had been addressed to other State and Party offices, whose files fell into the hands of the Allies. There were more than enough documents left to tell the story of the Final Solution, most of them known already from the Nuremberg Trials and the successor trials. The story was confirmed by sworn and unsworn statements, usually given by witnesses and defendants in previous trials and frequently by persons who were no longer alive. (All this, as well as a certain amount of hearsay testimony, was admitted as evidence according to Section 15 of the law under which Eichmann was tried, which stipulates that the court "may deviate from the rules of evidence" provided it "places on record the reasons which prompted" such deviation.) The documentary evidence was supplemented by testimony taken abroad, in German, Austrian, and Italian courts, from sixteen witnesses who could not come to Jerusalem, because the Attorney General had announced that he "intended to put them on trial for crimes against the Jewish people." Although during the first session he had declared, "And if the defense has people who are ready to come and be witnesses, I shall not block the way. I shall not put any obstacles," he later refused to grant such people immunity. (Such immunity was entirely dependent upon the good will of the government; prosecution under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators [Punishment] Law is not mandatory.) Since it was highly unlikely that any of the sixteen gentlemen would have come to Israel under any circumstances - seven of them were in prison - this was a technical point, but it was of considerable importance. It served to refute Israel's claim that an Israeli court was, at least technically, the "most suitable for a trial against the implementers of the Final Solution," because documents and witnesses were "more abundant than in any other country"; and the claim with respect to documents was doubtful in any event, since the Israeli archive Yad Vashem was founded at a comparatively late date and is in no way superior to other archives. It quickly turned out that Israel was the only country in the world where defense witnesses could not be heard, and where certain witnesses for the prosecution, those who had given affidavits in previous trials, could not be cross-examined by the defense. And this was all the more serious as the accused and his lawyer were indeed not "in a position to obtain their own defense documents." (Dr. Servatius had submitted a hundred and ten documents, as against fifteen hundred submitted by the prosecution, but of the former only about a dozen originated with the defense, and they consisted mostly of excerpts from books by Poliakov or Reitlinger; all the rest, with the exception of the seventeen charts drawn by Eichmann, had been picked out of the wealth of material gathered by the prosecution and the Israeli police. Obviously, the defense had received the crumbs from the rich man's table.) In fact, it had neither "the means nor the time" to conduct the affair properly, it did not have at its disposal "the archives of the world and the instruments of government." The same reproach had been leveled against the Nuremberg Trials, where the inequality of status between prosecution and defense was even more glaring. The chief handicap of the defense, at Nuremberg as at Jerusalem, was that it lacked the staff of trained research assistants needed to go through the mass of documents and find whatever might be useful in the case. Even today, eighteen years after the war, our knowledge of the immense archival material of the Nazi regime rests to a large extent on the selection made for purposes of prosecution. No one could have been more aware of this decisive disadvantage for the defense than Dr. Servatius, who was one of the defense counsels at Nuremberg. Which, obviously, makes the question of why he offered his services to begin with even more intriguing. His answer to this question was that for him this was "a mere business matter" and that he wished "to make money," but he must have known, from his Nuremberg experience, that the sum paid him by the Israeli government-twenty thousand dollars, as he himself had stipulated - was ridiculously inadequate, even though Eichmann's family in Linz had given him another fifteen thousand marks. He began complaining about being underpaid almost the first day of the trial, and soon thereafter he openly voiced the hope that he would be able to sell whatever "memoirs" Eichmann would write in prison "for future generations." Leaving aside the question of whether such a business deal would have been proper, his hopes were disappointed because the Israeli government confiscated all papers written by Eichmann while in jail. (They have now been deposited in the National Archives.) Eichmann had written a "book" in the time between the adjournment of the court in August and the pronouncement of judgment in December, and the defense offered it as "new factual evidence" in the revision proceedings before the Court of Appeal - which of course the newly written book was not. As to the position of the defendant, the court could rely upon the detailed statement he had made to the Israeli police examiner, supplemented by many handwritten notes he had handed in during the eleven months needed for the preparation of the trial. No doubt was ever raised that these were voluntary statements; most of them had not even been elicited by questions. Eichmann had been confronted with sixteen hundred documents, some of which, it turned out, he must have seen before, because they had been shown to him in Argentina during his interview with Sassen, which Mr. Hausner with some justification called a "dress rehearsal." But he had started working on them seriously only in Jerusalem, and when he was put on the stand, it soon became apparent that he had not wasted his time: now he knew how to read documents, something he had not known during the police examination, and he could do it better than his lawyer. Eichmann's testimony in court turned out to be the most important evidence in the case. His counsel put him on the stand on June 20, during the seventy-fifth session, and interrogated him almost uninterruptedly for fourteen sessions, until July 7. That same day, during the eighty-eighth session, the cross-examination by the prosecution began, and it lasted for another seventeen sessions, up to the twentieth of July. There were a few incidents: Eichmann once threatened to "confess everything" Moscow style, and he once complained that he had been "grilled until the steak was done," but he was usually quite calm and he was not serious when he threatened that he would refuse to answer any more questions. He told Judge Halevi how "pleased [he was] at this opportunity to sift the truth from the untruths that had been unloaded upon [him] for fifteen years," and how proud of being the subject of a crossexamination that lasted longer than any known before. After a short re-examination by his lawyer, which took less than a session, he was examined by the three judges, and they got more out of him in two and a half short sessions than the prosecution had been able to elicit in seventeen. Eichmann was on the stand from June 20 to July 24, or a total of thirty-three and a half sessions. Almost twice as many sessions, sixty-two out of a total of a hundred and twenty-one, were spent on a hundred prosecution witnesses who, country after country, told their tales of horrors. Their testimony lasted from April 24 to June 12, the entire intervening time being taken up with the submission of documents, most of which the Attorney General read into the record of the court's proceedings, which was handed out to the press each day. All but a mere handful of the witnesses were Israeli citizens, and they had been picked from hundreds and hundreds of applicants. (Ninety of them were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in one form or another of Nazi captivity.) How much wiser it would have been to resist these pressures altogether (it was done up to a point, for none of the potential witnesses mentioned in Minister of Death, written by Quentin Reynolds on the basis of material provided by two Israeli journalists, and published in 1960, was ever called to the stand) and to seek out those who had not volunteered! As though to prove the point, the prosecution called upon a writer, well known on both sides of the Atlantic under the name of K-Zetnik - a slang word for a concentration-camp inmate - as the author of several books on Auschwitz that dealt with brothels, homosexuals, and other "human interest stories." He started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted name. It was not a "pen-name," he said. "I must carry this name as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation . . . as humanity has risen after the crucifixion of one man." He continued with a little excursion into astrology: the star "influencing our fate in the same way as the star of ashes at Auschwitz is there facing our planet, radiating toward our planet." And when he had arrived at "the unnatural power above Nature" which had sustained him thus far, and now, for the first time, paused to catch his breath, even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this "testimony," and, very timidly, very politely, interrupted: "Could I perhaps put a few questions to you if you will consent?" Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as well: "Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to Mr. Hausner and to me." In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions. This, to be sure, was an exception, but if it was an exception that proved the rule of normality, it did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story, let alone of the rare capacity for distinguishing between things that had happened to the storyteller more than sixteen, and sometimes twenty, years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime. These difficulties could not be helped, but they were not improved by the predilection of the prosecution for witnesses of some prominence, many of whom had published books about their experiences, and who now told what they had previously written, or what they had told and retold many times. The procession started, in a futile attempt to proceed according to chronological order, with eight witnesses from Germany, all of them sober enough, but they were not "survivors"; they had been high-ranking Jewish officials in Germany and were now prominent in Israeli public life, and they had all left Germany prior to the outbreak of war. They were followed by five witnesses from Prague and then by just one witness from Austria, on which country the prosecution had submitted the valuable reports of the late Dr. Löwenherz, written during and shortly after the end of the war. There appeared one witness each from France, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, and Soviet Russia; two from Yugoslavia; three each from Rumania and Slovakia; and thirteen from Hungary. But the bulk of the witnesses, fiftythree, came from Poland and Lithuania, where Eichmann's competence and authority had been almost nil. (Belgium and Bulgaria were the only countries not covered by witnesses.) These were all "background witnesses," and so were the sixteen men and women who told the court about Auschwitz (ten) and Treblinka (four), about Chelmno and Majdanek. It was different with those who testified on Theresienstadt, the old-age ghetto on Reich territory, the only camp in which Eichmann's power had indeed been considerable; there were four witnesses for Theresienstadt and one for the exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen. At the end of this procession, "the right of the witnesses to be irrelevant," as Yad Vashem, summing up the testimony in its Bulletin, phrased it, was so firmly established that it was a mere formality when Mr. Hausner, during the seventy-third session, asked permission of the court "to complete his picture," and Judge Landau, who some fifty sessions before had protested so strenuously against this "picture painting," agreed immediately to the appearance of a former member of the Jewish Brigade, the fighting force of Palestine Jews that had been attached to the British Eighth Army during the war. This last witness for the prosecution, Mr. Aharon Hoter-Yishai, now an Israeli lawyer, had been assigned the task of coordinating all efforts to search for Jewish survivors in Europe, under the auspices of Aliyah Beth, the organisation responsible for arranging for illegal immigration into Palestine. The surviving Jews were dispersed among some eight million displaced persons from all over Europe, a floating mass of humanity that the Allies wanted to repatriate as quickly as possible. The danger was that the Jews, too, would be returned to their former homes. Mr. Hoter-Yishai told how he and his comrades were greeted when they presented themselves as members of "the Jewish fighting nation," and how it "was sufficient to draw a Star of David on a sheet in ink and pin it to a broomstick" to shake these people out of the dangerous apathy of near-starvation. He also told how some of them "had wandered home from the D.P. camps," only to come back to another camp, for "home" was, for instance, a small Polish town where of six thousand former Jewish inhabitants fifteen had survived, and where four of these survivors had been murdered upon their return by the Poles. He described finally how he and the others had tried to forestall the repatriation attempts of the Allies and how they frequently arrived too late: "In Theresienstadt, there were thirty-two thousand survivors. After a few weeks we found only four thousand. About twenty-eight thousand had returned, or been returned. Those four thousand whom we found there - of them, of course, not one person returned to his place of origin, because in the meantime the road was pointed out to them" - that is, the road to what was then Palestine and was soon to become Israel. This testimony perhaps smacked more strongly of propaganda than anything heard previously, and the presentation of the facts was indeed misleading. In November, 1944, after the last shipment had left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz, there were only about ten thousand of the original inmates left. In February, 1945, there arrived another six to eight thousand people, the Jewish partners of mixed marriages, whom the Nazis shipped to Theresienstadt at a moment when the whole German transportation system was already in a state of collapse. All the others - roughly fifteen thousand - had poured in in open freight cars or on foot in April, 1945, after the camp had been taken over by the Red Cross. These were survivors of Auschwitz, members of the labor gangs, and they were chiefly from Poland and Hungary. When the Russians liberated the camp - on May 9, 1945 - many Czech Jews, who had been in Theresienstadt since the beginning, left the camp immediately and started home; they were in their own country. When the quarantine ordered by the Russians because of the epidemics was lifted, the majority left on its own initiative. So that the remnant found by the Palestine emissaries probably consisted of people who could not return or be returned for various reasons - the ill, the aged, single lonely survivors of families who did not know where to turn. And yet Mr. Hoter-Yishai told the" simple truth: those who had survived the ghettos and the camps, who had come out alive from the nightmare of absolute helplessness and abandonment - as though the whole world was a jungle and they its prey - had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again. They needed the emissaries of the, Jewish people in Palestine in order to learn that they could come, legally or illegally, by hook or by crook, and that they would be welcome; they did not need them in order to be convinced. Thus, every once in a long while one was glad that Judge Landau had lost his battle, and the first such moment occurred even before the battle had started. For Mr. Hausner's first background witness did not look as though he had volunteered. He was an old man, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail, with sparse white hair and beard, holding himself quite erect; in a sense, his name was "famous," and one understood why the prosecution wanted to begin its picture with him. He was Zindel Grynszpan, father of Herschel Grynszpan, who, on November 7, 1938, at the age of seventeen, had walked up to the German embassy in Paris and shot to death its third secretary, the young Legationsrat Ernst vom Rath. The assassination had triggered the pogroms in Germany and Austria, the so-called Kristallnacht of November 9, which was indeed a prelude to the Final Solution, but with whose preparation Eichmann had nothing to do. The motives for Grynszpan's act have never been cleared up, and his brother, whom the prosecution also put on the stand, was remarkably reluctant to talk about it. The court took it for granted that it was an act of vengeance for the expulsion of some seventeen thousand Polish Jews, the Grynszpan family among them, from German territory during the last days of October, 1938, but it is generally known that this explanation is unlikely. Herschel Grynszpan was a psychopath, unable to finish school, who for years had knocked about Paris and Brussels, being expelled from both places. His lawyer in the French court that tried him introduced a confused story of homosexual relations, and the Germans, who later had him extradited, never put him on trial. (There are rumors that he survived the war - as though to substantiate the "paradox of Auschwitz" that those Jews who had committed a criminal offense were spared.) Vom Rath was a singularly inadequate victim, he had been shadowed by the Gestapo because of his openly anti-Nazi views and his sympathy for Jews; the story of his homosexuality was probably fabricated by the Gestapo. Grynszpan might have acted as an unwitting tool of Gestapo agents in Paris, who could have wanted to kill two birds with one stone - create a pretext for pogroms in Germany and get rid of an opponent to the Nazi regime - without realizing that they could not have it both ways, that is, could not slander vom Rath as a homosexual having illicit relations with Jewish boys and also make of him a martyr and a victim of "world Jewry." However that may have been, it is a fact that the Polish government in the fall of 1938 decreed that all Polish Jews residing in Germany would lose their nationality by October 29; it probably was in possession of information that the German government intended to expel these Jews to Poland and wanted to prevent this. It is more than doubtful that people like Mr. Zindel Grynszpan even knew that such a decree existed. He had come to Germany in 1911, a young man of twenty-five, to open a grocery store in Hanover, where, in due time, eight children were born to him. In 1938, when catastrophe overcame him, he had been living in Germany for twenty-seven years, and, like many such people, he had never bothered to change his papers and to ask for naturalization. Now he had come to tell his story, carefully answering questions put to him by the prosecutor; he spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery, using a minimum of words. "On the twenty-seventh of October, 1938, it was a Thursday night, at eight o'clock, a policeman came and told us to come to Region [police station] Eleven. He said: `You are going to come back immediately; don't take anything with you, only your passports.' " Grynszpan went, with his family, a son, a daughter, and his wife. When they arrived at the police station he saw "a large number of people, some sitting, some standing, people were crying. They [the police] were shouting, `Sign, sign, sign.' . . . I had to sign, all of them did. One of us did not, his name was, I believe, Gershon Silber, and he had to stand in the corner for twenty-four hours. They took us to the concert hall, and . . . there were people from all over town, about six hundred people. There we stayed until Friday night, about twenty-four hours, yes, until Friday night. . . . Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners' lorries, about twenty men in each truck, and they took us to the railroad station. The streets were black with people shouting: 'Juden raus to Palestine!' . . . They took us by train to Neubenschen, on the German-Polish border. It was Shabbat morning when we arrived there, six o'clock in the morning. There came trains from all sorts of places, from Leipzig, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Biederfeld, Bremen. Together we were about twelve thousand people.... It was the Shabbat, the twenty-ninth of October. . . . When we reached the border we were searched to see if anybody had any money, and anybody who had more than ten marks - the balance was taken away. This was the German law, no more than ten marks could be taken out of Germany. The Germans said, `You didn't bring any more with you when you came, you can't take out any more.' " They had to walk a little over a mile to the Polish border, since the Germans intended to smuggle them into Polish territory. "The S.S. men were whipping us, those who lingered they hit, and blood was flowing on the road. They tore away our suitcases from us, they treated us in a most brutal way, this was the first time that I'd seen the wild brutality of the Germans. They shouted at us, `Run! Run!' I was hit and fell into the ditch. My son helped me, and he said: `Run, Father, run, or you'll die!' When we got to the open border ... the women went in first. The Poles knew nothing. They called a Polish general and some officers who examined our papers, and they saw that we were Polish citizens, that we had special passports. It was decided to let us enter. They took us to a village of about six thousand people, and we were twelve thousand. The rain was driving hard, people were fainting - on all sides one saw old men and women. Our suffering was great. There was no food, since Thursday we had not eaten. . . ." They were taken to a military camp and put into "stables, as there was no room elsewhere. . . . I think it was our second day [in Poland]. On the first day, a lorry with bread came from Poznan, that was on Sunday. And then I wrote a letter to France . . . to my son: `Don't write any more letters to Germany. We are now in Zbaszyn.' " This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over - the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours - one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell the story, that - at least outside the transforming realm of poetry - it needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one either before or after was to equal the shining honesty of Zindel Grynszpan. No one could claim that Grynszpan's testimony created anything remotely resembling a "dramatic moment." But such a moment came a few weeks later, and it came unexpectedly, just when Judge Landau was making an almost desperate attempt to bring the proceedings back under the control of normal criminal-court procedures. On the stand was Abba Kovner, "a poet and an author," who had not so much testified as addressed an audience with the ease of someone who is used to speaking in public and resents interruptions from the floor. He had been asked by the presiding judge to be brief, which he obviously disliked, and Mr. Hausner, who had defended his witness, had been told that he could not "complain about a lack of patience on the part of the court," which of course he did not like either. At this slightly tense moment, the witness happened to mention the name of Anton Schmidt, a Feldwebel, or sergeant, in the German Army - a name that was not entirely unknown to this audience, for Yad Vashem had published Schmidt's story some years before in its Hebrew Bulletin, and a number of Yiddish papers in America had picked it up. Anton Schmidt was in, charge of a patrol in Poland that collected stray German soldiers who were cut off from their units. In the course of doing this, he had run into members of the Jewish underground, including Mr. Kovner, a prominent member, and he had helped the Jewish partisans by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks. Most important of all: "He did not do it for money." This had gone on for five months, from October, 1941, to March, 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed. (The prosecution had elicited the story because Kovner declared that he had first heard the name of Eichmann from Schmidt, who had told him about rumors in the Army that it was Eichmann who "arranges everything.") 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 sixyear-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.
Eichmann in the dock, 1963
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 warfare 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 the 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 "divorcee" 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 TimeLife 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 BenGurion'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. On May 11, 1960, at six-thirty in the evening, when Eichmann alighted, as usual, from the bus that brought him home from his place of work, he was seized by three men and, in less than a minute, bundled into a waiting car, which took him to a previously rented house in a remote suburb of Buenos Aires. No drugs, no ropes, no handcuffs were used, and Eichmann immediately recognized that this was professional work, as no unnecessary violence had been applied; he was not hurt. Asked who he was, he instantly said: "Ich bin Adolf Eichmann," and, surprisingly, added: "I know I am in the hands of Israelis." (He later explained that he had read in some newspaper of Ben-Gurion's order that he be found and caught.) For eight days, while the Israelis were waiting for the El-Al plane that was to carry them and their prisoner to Israel, Eichmann was tied to a bed, which was the only aspect of the whole affair that he complained about, and on the second day of his captivity he was asked to state in writing that he had no objection to being tried by an Israeli court. The statement was, of course, already prepared, and all he was supposed to do was to copy it. To everybody's surprise, however, he insisted on writing his own text, for which, as can be seen from the following lines, he probably used the first sentences of the prepared statement: "I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, hereby declare out of my own free will that since now my true identity has been revealed, I see clearly that it is useless to try and escape judgment any longer. I hereby express my readiness to travel to Israel to face a court of judgment, an authorized court of law. It is clear and understood that I shall be given legal advice [thus far, he probably copied], and I shall try to write down the facts of my last years of public activities in Germany, without any embellishments, in order that future generations will have a true picture. This declaration I declare out of my own free will, not for promises given and not because of threats. I wish to be at peace with myself at last. Since I cannot remember all the details, and since I seem to mix up facts, I request assistance by putting at my disposal documents and affidavits to help me in my effort to seek the truth." Signed: "Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960." (This document, though doubtless genuine, has one peculiarity: its date omits the day it was signed. The omission gives rise to the suspicion that the letter was written not in Argentina but in Jerusalem, where Eichmann arrived on May 22. The letter was needed less for the trial, during which the prosecution did submit it as evidence, but without attaching much importance to it, than for Israel's first explanatory official note to the Argentine government, to which it was duly attached. Servatius, who asked Eichmann about the letter in court, did not mention the peculiarity of the date, and Eichmann could not very well mention it himself since, upon being asked a leading question by his lawyer, he confirmed, though somewhat reluctantly, that he had given the statement under duress, while tied to the bed in the Buenos Aires suburb. The prosecutor, who may have known better, did not cross-examine him on this point; clearly, the less said about this matter the better.) Mrs. Eichmann had notified the Argentine police of her husband's disappearance, but without revealing his identity, so no check of railway stations, highways, and airfields was made. The Israelis were lucky, they would never have been able to spirit Eichmann out of the country ten days after his capture if the police had been properly alerted. Eichmann provided two reasons for his astounding cooperation with the trial authorities. (Even the judges who insisted that Eichmann was simply a liar had to admit that they knew no answer to the question: "Why did the accused confess before Superintendent Less to a number of incriminating details of which, on the face of it, there could be no proof but for his confession, in particular to his journeys to the East, where he saw the atrocities with his own eyes?") In Argentina, years before his capture, he had written how tired he was of his anonymity, and the more he read about himself, the more tired he must have become. His second explanation, given in Israel, was more dramatic: "About a year and a half ago [i.e., in the spring of 1959], I heard from an acquaintance who had just returned from a trip to Germany that a certain feeling of guilt had seized some sections of German youth . . . and the fact of this guilt complex was for me as much of a landmark as, let us say, the landing of the first man-bearing rocket on the moon. It became an essential point of my inner life, around which many thoughts crystallized. This was why I did not escape ... when I knew the search commando was closing in on me... . After these conversations about the guilt feeling among young people in Germany, which made such a deep impression on me, I felt I no longer had the right to disappear. This is also why I offered, in a written statement, at the beginning of this examination . . . to hang myself in public. I wanted to do my part in lifting the burden of guilt from German youth, for these young people are, after all, innocent of the events, and of the acts of their fathers, during the last war" - which, incidentally, he was still calling, in another context, a "war forced upon the German Reich." Of course, all this was empty talk. What prevented him from returning to Germany of his own free will to give himself up? He was asked this question, and he replied that in his opinion German courts still lacked the "objectivity" needed for dealing with people like him. But if he did prefer to be tried by an Israeli court - as he somehow implied, and which was just barely possible - he could have spared the Israeli government much time and trouble. We have seen before that this kind of talk gave him feelings of elation, and indeed it kept him in something approaching good spirits throughout his stay in the Israeli prison. It even enabled him to look upon death with remarkable equanimity - "I know that the death sentence is in store for me," he declared at the beginning of the police examination. There was some truth behind the empty talk, and the truth emerged quite clearly when the question of his defense was put to him. For obvious reasons, the Israeli government had decided to admit a foreign counselor, and on July 14, 1960, six weeks after the police examination had started, with Eichmann's explicit consent, he was informed that there were three possible counselors among whom he might choose, in arranging his defense - Dr. Robert Servatius, who was recommended by his family (Servatius had offered his services in a long-distance call to Eichmann's stepbrother in Linz), another German lawyer now residing in Chile, and an American law firm in New York, which had contacted the trial authorities. (Only Dr. Servatius' name was divulged.) There might, of course, be other possibilities, which Eichmann was entitled to explore, and he was told repeatedly that he could take his time. He did nothing of the sort, but said on the spur of the moment that he would like to retain Dr. Servatius, since he seemed to be an acquaintance of his stepbrother and, also, had defended other war criminals, and he insisted on signing the necessary papers immediately. Half an hour later, it occurred to him that the trial could assume "global dimensions," that it might become a "monster process," that there were several attorneys for the prosecution, and that Servatius alone would hardly be able "to digest all the material." He was reminded that Servatius, in a letter asking for power of attorney, had said that he "would lead a group of attorneys" (he never did), and the police officer added, "It must be assumed that Dr. Servatius won't appear alone. That would be a physical impossibility." But Dr. Servatius, as it turned out, appeared quite alone most of the time. The result of all this was that Eichmann became the chief assistant to his own defense counsel, and, quite apart from writing books "for future generations," worked very hard throughout the trial. On June 29, 1961, ten weeks after the opening of the trial on April 11, the prosecution rested its case, and Dr. Servatius opened the case for the defense; on August 14, after a hundred and fourteen sessions, the main proceedings came to an end. The court then adjourned for four months, and reassembled on December 11 to pronounce judgment. For two days, divided into five sessions, the three judges read the two hundred and forty-four sections of the judgment. Dropping the prosecution's charge of "conspiracy," which would have made him a "chief war criminal," automatically responsible for everything which had to do with the Final Solution, they convicted Eichmann on all fifteen counts of the indictment, although he was acquitted on some particulars. "Together with others," he had committed crimes "against the Jewish people," that is, crimes against Jews with intent to destroy the people, on four counts: (1) by "causing the killing of millions of Jews"; (2) by placing "millions of Jews under conditions which were likely to lead to their physical destruction"; (3) by "causing serious bodily and mental harm" to them; and (4) by "directing that births be banned and pregnancies interrupted among Jewish women" in Theresienstadt. But they acquitted him of any such charges bearing on the period prior to August, 1941, when he was informed of the Führer's order; in his earlier activities, in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, he had no intention "to destroy the Jewish people." These were the first four counts of the indictment. Counts 5 through 12 dealt with "crimes against humanity" - a strange concept in the Israeli law, inasmuch as it included both genocide if practiced against non-Jewish peoples (such as the Gypsies or the Poles) and all other crimes, including murder, committed against either Jews or non-Jews, provided that these crimes were not committed with intent to destroy the people as a whole. Hence, everything Eichmann had done prior to the Führer's order and all his acts against non-Jews were lumped together as crimes against humanity, to which were added, once again, all his later crimes against Jews, since these were ordinary crimes as well. The result was that Count 5 convicted him of the same crimes enumerated in Counts 1 and 2, and that Count 6 convicted him of having "persecuted Jews on racial, religious, and political grounds"; Count 7 dealt with "the plunder of property . . . linked with the murder . . . of these Jews," and Count 8 summed up all these deeds again as "war crimes," since most of them had been committed during the war. Counts 9 through 12 dealt with crimes against non-Jews: Count 9 convicted him of the "expulsion of . . . hundreds of thousands of Poles from their homes," Count 10 of "the expulsion of fourteen thousand Slovenes" from Yugoslavia, Count 11 of the deportation of "scores of thousands of Gypsies" to Auschwitz. But the judgment held that "it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction" - which meant that no genocide charge except the "crime against the Jewish people" was brought. This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it: he had remembered vaguely that this had been an order from Himmler, that no "directives" had existed for Gypsies as they existed for Jews, and that there had been no "research" done on the "Gypsy problem" - "origins, customs, habits, organization . . . folklore . . . economy." His department had been commissioned to undertake the "evacuation" of thirty thousand Gypsies from Reich territory, and he could not remember the details very well, because there had been no intervention from any side; but that Gypsies, like Jews, were shipped off to be exterminated he had never doubted. He was guilty of their extermination in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews. Count 12 concerned the deportation of ninety-three children from Lidice, the Czech village whose inhabitants had been massacred after the assassination of Heydrich; he was, however, rightly acquitted of the murder of these children. The last three counts charged him with membership in three of the four organizations that the Nuremberg Trials had classified as "criminal" - the S.S.; the Security Service, or S.D.; and the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. (The fourth such organization, the leadership corps of the National Socialist Party, was not mentioned, because Eichmann obviously had not been one of the Party leaders.) His membership in them prior to May, 1940, fell under the statute of limitations (twenty years) for minor offenses. (The Law of 1950 under which Eichmann was tried specifies that there is no statute of limitation for major offenses, and that the argument res judicata shall not avail - a person can be tried in Israel "even if he has already been tried abroad, whether before an international tribunal or a tribunal of a foreign state, for the same offense.") All crimes enumerated under Counts 1 through 12 carried the death penalty. Eichmann, it will be remembered, had steadfastly insisted that he was guilty only of "aiding and abetting" in the commission of the crimes with which he was charged, that he himself had never committed an overt act. The judgment, to one's great relief, in a way recognized that the prosecution had not succeeded in proving him wrong on this point. For it was an important point; it touched upon the very essence of this crime, which was no ordinary crime, and the very nature of this criminal, who was no common criminal; by implication, it also took cognizance of the weird fact that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded "the fatal instrument with [their] own hands." What the judgment had to say on this point was more than correct, it was the truth: "Expressing his activities in terms of Section 23 of our Criminal Code Ordinance, we should say that they were mainly those of a person soliciting by giving counsel or advice to others and of one who enabled or aided others in [the criminal] act." But "in such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated, on various levels and in various modes of activity - the planners, the organizers, and those executing the deeds, according to their various ranks - there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counseling and soliciting to commit a crime. For these crimes were committed en masse, not only in regard to the number of victims, but also in regard to the numbers of those who perpetrated the crime, and the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands [my italics]." What followed the reading of the judgment was routine. Once more, the prosecution rose to make a rather lengthy speech demanding the death penalty, which, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, was mandatory, and Dr. Servatius replied even more briefly than before: the accused had carried out "acts of state," what had happened to him might happen in future to anyone, the whole civilized world faced this problem, Eichmann was "a scapegoat," whom the present German government had abandoned to the court in Jerusalem, contrary to international law, in order to clear itself of responsibility. The competence of the court, never recognized by Dr. Servatius, could be construed only as trying the accused "in a representative capacity, as representing the legal powers vested in [a German court]" - as, indeed, one German state prosecutor had formulated the task of Jerusalem. Dr. Servatius had argued earlier that the court must acquit the defendant because, according to the Argentine statute of limitations, he had ceased to be liable to criminal proceedings against him on May 7, 1960, "a very short time before the abduction"; he now argued, in the same vein, that no death penalty could be pronounced because capital punishment had been abolished unconditionally in Germany. Then came Eichmann's last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment. (He did not go quite as far as many of the other low-ranking war criminals, who complained bitterly that they had been told never to worry about "responsibilities," and that they were now unable to call those responsible to account because these had "escaped and deserted" them - by committing suicide, or by having been hanged.) "I am not the monster I am made out to be," Eichmann said. "I am the victim of a fallacy." He did not use the word "scapegoat," but he confirmed what Servatius had said: it was his "profound conviction that [he] must suffer for the acts of others." After two more days, on Friday, December 15, 1961, at nine o'clock in the morning, the death sentence was pronounced. Three months later, on March 22, 1962, review proceedings were opened before the Court of Appeal, Israel's Supreme Court, before five judges presided over by Itzhak Olshan. Mr. Hausner appeared again, with four assistants, for the prosecution, and Dr. Servatius, with none, for the defense. Counsel for the defense repeated all the old arguments against the competence of the Israeli court, and since all his efforts to persuade the West German government to start extradition proceedings had been in vain, he now demanded that Israel offer extradition. He had brought with him a new list of witnesses, but there was not a single one among them who could conceivably have produced anything resembling "new evidence." He had included in the list Dr. Hans Globke, whom Eichmann had never seen in his life and of whom he had probably heard for the first time in Jerusalem, and, even more startling, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who had been dead for ten years. The plaidoyer was an incredible hodgepodge, full of errors (in one instance, the defense offered as new evidence the French translation of a document that had already been submitted by the prosecution, in two other cases it had simply misread the documents, and so on), its carelessness contrasted vividly with the rather careful introduction of certain remarks that were bound to be offensive to the court: gassing was again a "medical matter"; a Jewish court had no right to sit in judgment over the fate of the children from Lidice, since they were not Jewish; Israeli legal procedure ran counter to Continental procedure - to which Eichmann, because of his national origin, was entitled - in that it required the defendant to provide the evidence for his defense, and this the accused had been unable to do because neither witnesses nor defense documents were available in Israel. In short, the trial had been unfair, the judgment unjust. The proceedings before the Court of Appeal lasted only a week, after which the court adjourned for two months. On May 29, 1962, the second judgment was read - somewhat less voluminous than the first, but still fifty-one single-spaced legal-sized pages. It ostensibly confirmed the District Court on all points, and to make this confirmation the judges would not have needed two months and fifty-one pages. The judgment of the Court of Appeal was actually a revision of the judgment of the lower court, although it did not say so. In conspicuous contrast to the original judgment, it was now found that "the appellant had received no `superior orders' at all. He was his own superior, and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs"; he had, moreover, "eclipsed in importance all his superiors, including Müller." And, in reply to the obvious argument of the defense that the Jews would have been no better off had Eichmann never existed, the judges now stated that "the idea of the Final Solution would never have assumed the infernal forms of the flayed skin and tortured flesh of millions of Jews without the fanatical zeal and the unquenchable blood thirst of the appellant and his accomplices." Israel's Supreme Court had not only accepted the arguments of the prosecution, it had adopted its very language. The same day, May 29, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, President of Israel, received Eichmann's plea for mercy, four handwritten pages, made "upon instructions of my counsel," together with letters from his wife and his family in Linz. The President also received hundreds of letters and telegrams from all over the world, pleading for clemency; outstanding among the senders were the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the representative body of Reform Judaism in this country, and a group of professors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, headed by Martin Buber, who had been opposed to the trial from the start, and who now tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to intervene for clemency. Mr. Ben-Zvi rejected all pleas for mercy on May 31, two days after the Supreme Court had delivered its judgment, and a few hours later on that same day - it was a Thursday - shortly before midnight, Eichmann was hanged, his body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside Israeli waters. The speed with which the death sentence was carried out was extraordinary, even if one takes into account that Thursday night was the last possible occasion before the following Monday, since Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are all religious holidays for one or another of the three denominations in the country. The execution took place less than two hours after Eichmann was informed of the rejection of his plea for mercy; there had not even been time for a last meal. The explanation may well be found in two last-minute attempts Dr. Servatius made to save his client - an application to a court in West Germany to force the government to demand Eichmann's extradition, even now, and a threat to invoke Article 25 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Neither Dr. Servatius nor his assistant was in Israel when Eichmann's plea was rejected, and the Israeli government probably wanted to close the case, which had been going on for two years, before the defense could even apply for a stay in the date of execution. The death sentence had been expected, and there was hardly anyone to quarrel with it; but things were altogether different when it was learned that the Israelis had carried it out. The protests were short-lived, but they were widespread and they were voiced by people of influence and prestige. The most common argument was that Eichmann's deeds defied the possibility of human punishment, that it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such magnitude - which, of course, was true, in a sense, except that it could not conceivably mean that he who had murdered millions should for this very reason escape punishment. On a considerably lower level, the death sentence was called "unimaginative," and very imaginative alternatives were proposed forthwith - Eichmann "should have spent the rest of his life at hard labor in the arid stretches of the Negev, helping with his sweat to reclaim the Jewish homeland," a punishment he would probably not have survived for more than a single day, to say nothing of the fact that in Israel the desert of the south is hardly looked upon as a penal colony; or, in Madison Avenue style, Israel should have reached "divine heights," rising above "the understandable, legal, political, and even human considerations," by calling together "all those who took part in the capture, trial, and sentencing to a public ceremony, with Eichmann there in shackles, and with television cameras and radio to decorate them as the heroes of the century." Martin Buber called the execution a "mistake of historical dimensions," as it might "serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany" - an argument that oddly echoed Eichmann's own ideas on the matter, though Buber hardly knew that he had wanted to hang himself in public in order to lift the burden of guilt from the shoulders of German youngsters. (It is strange that Buber, a man not only of eminence but of very great intelligence, should not see how spurious these much publicized guilt feelings necessarily are. It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky - not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. Those young German men and women who every once in a while - on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial - treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.) Professor Buber went on to say that he felt "no pity at all" for Eichmann, because he could feel pity "only for those whose actions I understand in my heart," and he stressed what he had said many years ago in Germany - that he had "only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part" in the acts of the Third Reich. This lofty attitude was, of course, more of a luxury than those who had to try Eichmann could afford, since the law presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn. As far as I know, Buber was the only philosopher to go on public record on the subject of Eichmann's execution (shortly before the trial started, Karl Jaspers had given a radio interview in Basel, later published in Der Monat, in which he argued the case for an international tribunal); it was disappointing to find him dodging, on the highest possible level, the very problem Eichmann and his deeds had posed. Least of all was heard from those who were against the death penalty on principle, unconditionally; their arguments would have remained valid, since they would not have needed to specify them for this particular case. They seem to have felt - rightly, I think - that this was not a very promising case on which to fight. Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore no "time to waste." He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. "I don't need that," he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was "elated" and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.