Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress
Syrkin, Marie
The debate sparked by Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem* is almost as disturbing as the book itself. A good many qualified reviewers in various journals have attacked not only Miss...
...All the desperate abortive ransom negotiations, conducted by such noble figures as Gisi Fleischmann in Slovakia as well as Joel Brand in Hungary, appear in Miss Arendt's text as a chipper, self-seeking collaboration between privileged "Zionists" and the Nazis...
...In a sense the whole discussion of Jewish Councils is diversionary...
...Her references to Zionism can serve as an example...
...Far from being the "quiet, moral, rational" document commended by The New Yorker, the book is a tract in which the author manipulates the material with a high-handed assurance...
...To the man whose standing as original thinker and scholar is certainly no less than her own, she writes: "I cannot believe that had you read the book uninfluenced by so-called public opinion, manipulated in this case, you would have misunderstood the following...
...Nor has Miss Arendt deigned, thus far, to refute particulars...
...It was Eichmann who reported to Himmler in August, 1944, on the success of his program and gave the figure as six million killed...
...The negotiations of the Jewish Agency with the Nazi government before the war to enable German Jews to transfer goods to Palestine are described by the author as a "mutually highly satisfactory agreement...
...The Jewish Councils, established by Nazi decree in 1939, had to conduct community affairs and transmit Nazi orders...
...The victim comes out worst...
...Eichmann in Jerusalem is neither Finnegan's Wake nor The Waste Land...
...Emanuel Ringelblum (Notes From The Warsaw Ghetto), the archivist of the ghetto, asks in the diary discovered after his death: "A very interesting question is that of the passivity of the Jewish masses who expire with no more than a slight sigh...
...And for many readers even the "order" is beclouded...
...The New Yorker (July 20, 1963) in an unprecedented display of emotion mourned editorially the "breakdown" of communication which made possible the misunderstanding of a "historian, philosopher, and humanist" of Miss Arendt's caliber...
...with one exception, all communications, many of which expressed not merely disagreement, but cited flagrant and major errors...
...In her account the author has achieved the miracle of humanizing Eichmann, the mass-murderer who is not a "monster," and only the informed reader can take issue with her...
...Every time she is faced by evidence of his murderous initiative she explains that her subject is merely overconscientious...
...It was all irony...
...At the end of the script the only one who comes out better than when he came in is the defendant...
...The question that you have raised is a genuine one...
...According to Hilberg, "the Jewish Councils, in the exercise of their historic function, continued until the end to make desperate attempts to alleviate the suf fering and to stop the mass dying in the ghettos"—a statement which might seem to qualify Miss Arendt's somber vision of Jewish functionaries engrossed in writing deportation orders...
...Why should there be these difficulties...
...The cry of lcse-majeste is not an adequate rebuttal...
...It is clear to me, as to every thoughtful contemporary of these events, how bitterly serious, complex and not readily reducible this problem is...
...275 pp., $5.50...
...In her presentation of the question he finds no "considered judgment" but often "overstatement degenerating into demagogy...
...She thinks that Scholem's independence of judgment has been warped by the "American-Jewish" campaign of "misrepresentation...
...Robinson has pointed out that "not a single witness made such a statement," and that no other evidence to this effect exists...
...instead, they excoriated his failure to grasp the author's deep insights...
...anyone of us could do it under the pressures of a totalitarian state...
...See, for example, Jacob Robinson, special consultant to Justice Jackson at Nuremberg and to the prosecution at the Eichmann trial, Facts, August, 1963...
...Bruno Bettelheim, who agrees with Arendt in the main, granted in a laudatory review (The New Republic, June 15, 1963) that "Arendt at times creates an ambiguity in her evaluation of guilt...
...Dr...
...This "whole truth" illumines a lot of territory—Europe, America, Palestine (the "local and international level") and every aspect of Jewish life...
...In the Sassen Papers (Buenos Aires, 1957), accepted as authentic by both prosecution and defense, he stated: "Had I been just a recipient of orders, then I could have been a simpleton...
...The trial of Hirsh Barenblat of Bendzin is now in progress in Tel Aviv...
...This part of the record is not to be found in the Nazi documents on which Hilberg mainly based his study...
...The New Yorker, which devoted five issues to Miss Arendt's report of the trial, ignored, * Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt...
...5.) In a telegraphic report that Veesenmayer sent to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin (T1215—par 2), Eichmann is shown as questioning Hitler's concession and appealing to Himmler to get a new decision from the Fuhrer...
...But the Jews in their extremity are dehumanized, and again it is only the informed reader who is fully in a position to disagree...
...Lionel Abel asks pointedly: why does the author ignore such massive evidence which invalidates her thesis...
...Nevertheless, those who admire her "insight"— the common nexus of guilt which supposedly binds Nazi and Jew, sinner and sufferer—and those who are deeply offended by it, are both entitled to a specific refutation of the bill of particulars which critic after critic has rendered against the work...
...This is clear enough...
...The exceptions involved permission for about 7000 Jewish families to leave Hungary, apparently via Rumania...
...To explain the comparative failure of the Nazi extermination program in Italy Miss Arendt makes one of the most sweeping declarations in a book notable for brushing aside obtrusive facts: "The Germans, yielding, as usual, when they met resistance...
...When German defeat became imminent Eichmann received orders to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the deathcamps...
...Why are they all so quiet...
...Miss Arendt is more given to categorical pronouncements than the seven types of ambiguity...
...The answer, insofar as I have one and which because I value you so highly I must give...
...The debate sparked by Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem* is almost as disturbing as the book itself...
...In arraigning their guilt she becomes hortatory instead of all-comprehending...
...Instead of obeying, he speeded up the transports...
...And it is this difference which brings into question the paradox of her position: To kill millions is banal...
...Postal cards, supposedly from previous deportees, kept arriving to prove that the writers were alive and working...
...Some kind of organization had to exist among the imprisoned Jewries of the ghettos for the distribution of food, sanitation, and even education...
...What then caused the "breakdown...
...the unceasing attempts of girls and boys posing as Aryans to link the severed ghettos by bringing information and smuggling in a pistol or two...
...Her explanations of the few occasions when Jewries were saved are as wilful as her reasons for their destruction...
...Consequently, Miss Arendt's elaborate structure (for Eichmann, the little bureaucrat, Hitler's word is sacred) crashes...
...Robinson has pointed out the astonishing negligence with which Miss Arendt has examined the relevant documents in order to reach this conclusion...
...Not at all...
...She ignores the constant struggle to organize spiritual and physical resistance long before the Warsaw Ghetto's last stand: the underground classes and lectures to maintain morale...
...Trial Doc...
...The trickery was maintained till the very entrance into the gas chambers: men and women undressed voluntarily in the belief that they were entering a shower bath...
...The Zionist organizers of illegal immigration into Palestine from Germany are shown as concerned only with their partisan political purposes...
...Why then, since we know this, does your book leave one with a feeling of shame and bitterness not in regard to what is reported but in regard to the reporter...
...A good many qualified reviewers in various journals have attacked not only Miss Arendt's views but the scholarship on which her conclusions are presumably based...
...Jon Kimche (The Secret Roads: The Illegal Migration of a People) is quoted to that effect...
...The Germans were more circumspect in Italy because they were dealing with an ally, not a conquered country...
...The Jewish Councils, forced to assume responsibility, had the agonizing task of fulfilling German orders and at the same time of trying to shield the ghetto from Nazi savagery...
...Eichmann found himself on trial in Jerusalem not because he was a chance Nazi captured indiscriminately by vengeful Israelis but because he was head of the Department of Jewish Affairs, the man in charge of rounding up all European Jews for their extermination...
...The evidence shows Eichmann as seeking to contravene Hitler himself...
...In the interests of clarification, The New Yorker helpfully offered a resume of Miss Arendt's ideas: "She recorded the behavior of individuals and of nations, and found within her story a moral for Germans, for citizens of other Western countries, and for Jews—in descending order of responsibility: It is evil to assent actively or passively to evil, as its instrument, its observer, or as its victim...
...Hilberg, Miss Arendt's chief source, writes of this phase, "Eichmann could not rest until all the Hungarian Jews were in their graves...
...The poet Robert Lowell, for example, while admitting that he was not "a suitable authority" to make a "point by point refutation," was impressed by "so much detail, profundity and intuition...
...Of the most degraded group, the Jewish commandos in the extermination centers, Miss Arendt writes: "The well-known fact that the actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos had been fairly and squarely established by witnesses for the prosecution...
...and she lists the by-now familiar areas of misunderstanding: her charges applied only to "Jewish functionaries...
...Jewish commandos were compelled to work on corpses...
...yet Miss Arendt views the uncontested evidence of his enterprise as further proof of his supine loyalty to Hitler—the Fi hrer's words are law and superseded all written instructions by others, be it Horthy or Himmler...
...Eichmann's celebrated admission, "I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction" is briskly explained by Miss Arendt as "sheer rodomontade...
...These are only a few instances of the author's technique...
...In a moving letter to Miss Arendt, who is his old friend, the great Jewish scholar and historian, Gershom Scholem, writes in German from Jerusalem (Mitteilungs Blatt, August 16, 1963): "Your book revolves around two centers, the Jews and their behavior during the catastrophe, and Eichmann and his responsibility...
...Every first hand account of the ghettos describes the ingenuity with which the Germans kept their victims from discovering their doom...
...Apparently the breakdown of communication lamented by The New Yorker extends not only to stolid Philistines who coarsely call an irony a spade, but to such leading members of the intellectual community as Scholem...
...Now, of this damaging report Miss Arendt writes: "When Himmler's order to stop the evacuation of Hungarian Jews arrived in Budapest, Eichmann threatened, according to a telegram that Veesenmayer sent to Himmler, `to seek a new decision from the Fiihrer.' " But notice that Miss Arendt has here switched the roles of Hitler and Himmler...
...When they discovered the truth, the "Jewish leaders" (Hilberg) implored the Allies to bomb the railway junctions...
...After making various specific objections, he writes: "In the camps men were degraded and, as you yourself say, brought to cooperating in their own destruction, the execution of their fellows and the like...
...Is therefore the boundary between victims and persecutors wiped out...
...By the time the realization of the truth was inescapable, the majority of survivors was too reduced by hunger, disease and incarceration for even a gesture of opposition to the Nazi machine...
...If so, it is a dubious kind of honor to accord an intellectual as widely praised as Miss Arendt...
...She writes: "But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare associations on both the local and international level...
...lies in the heartless, sometimes downright mean-spirited [hamische] tone with which you treat a matter at the very center of our lives...
...There is a problem in scholarship here, and the admirers of Miss Arendt ought to confront it...
...It is clear from all accounts that the ghettos became isolated worlds whose inhabitants clung to the illusion that some would survive until liberation...
...The Viking Press, New York...
...Eichmann had arrived in Budapest to form a Judenrat...
...The second question—would more Jews have survived if there had been no Councils or other forms of organization, as Miss Arendt states—requires only a reference to history...
...That he changed his tune in Jerusalem is not surprising...
...It can only be explained on the assumption that Miss Arendt is considered exempt from the criteria of reliability usually applied to any work which pretends to be objective scholarship rather than tendentious exposition...
...the would-be rescuer and the destroyer are presented as parallel "enemies...
...An awareness of these attempts is certainly relevant to an understanding of the role of Jewish "leaders" and "parties...
...Miss Arendt fails to quote—from the same page—that after 1938 the Palestinians changed their objective...
...As history, Eichmann in Jerusalem is shockingly inaccurate and insofar as her thesis depends on the objective marshalling of evidence it is on shaky ground...
...the Danes ferried the Jews across nightly...
...And she adds, "What confuses you is that my arguments and my way of thinking are unpredictable (nicht vorgesehen...
...To indicate how the Jewish Councils relished their authority, Miss Arendt comments as follows on the first announcement issued by the Budapest Council: "We still can sense how they enjoyed their new power—'The Central Jewish Council is granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower.' " But she does not bother to relate the circumstances (reported on the same page by the same Hilberg) which explain this announcement...
...And how curious it is that the gap in comprehension widens in direct proportion to the reviewer's competence in the area covered...
...En passant, she snipes industriously at Zionism, Israel, Ben-Gurion's "show trial," the witnesses, the prosecuting attorney, and the justice of the Judges...
...He boasts too when he "pretended" to have invented the ghetto-system or the plan to ship all Jews to Madagascar...
...Where the Jewish Councils did function, they were impotent...
...the reverse effort of volunteers outside Europe to breach the ghetto walls and to establish contact with the immured Jewries...
...One reason lies in the author's macabre humor, so tasteless in context...
...No cabal to hush up disclosures as to their failings exists—as Miss Arendt implies...
...This astonishing indifference to charges of gross inaccuracies and omissions of pertinent data— charges which, if sustained, seriously undermine the author's main theses— is a perplexing feature of the discussion...
...Just as the author obscures the distinction between persecutor and victim, she merges killer and savior...
...Is this characterization of the Nazi terror to be taken seriously...
...Yet the author's philosophic understanding of the banality of evil, so steadfast in regard to Eichmann, deserts her when she surveys the host of his victims...
...See Isaiah Trunk's Yiddish account, Tzukun f t, Vol...
...Times, June 23, 1963...
...Two questions are involved in the evaluation of the Councils...
...Everyman is merely boasting here, for as we all know "bragging is a common vice...
...Yet these searing portraits can be accepted not as libels but as authentic descriptions of ghetto life, and the reason is that the diarists present complete not partial pictures...
...Harder to understand is the omniscient confidence with which Miss Arendt brushes aside the historical record...
...Yet in the face of all the evidence, in her answer to Professor Scholem who reminds her of her statements in regard to the helplessness of the individual before total terror, Miss Arendt writes: "These people were not under the direct pressure of terror but only of indirect...
...Nor does Miss Arendt's transformation of this hyperactive agent of the Nazi terror into an automaton jibe with Eichmann's view of himself...
...To sustain her twin theses—the normality of Eichmann and the moral aberrations of the Jews—Miss Arendt, basing herself largely on Raoul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, recapitulates the familiar events of the Nazi holocaust...
...If this be irony, at whom is it directed...
...When, despite Nazi adroitness, the truth began to filter back to the ghettos from the extermination centers, many rejected the information as atrocity propaganda...
...III Miss Arendt's second thesis—that of Jewish collaboration—is expounded in as arbitrary a style as the first, but with one significant difference...
...But a characteristic of the debate is that it is not "the cursory readers" who have made the most devastating indictments of the author's method...
...Thus on cursory reading she seems to plead that Eichmann was a victim and that Jewish leaders were heavy with guilt...
...she never said Eichmann was a Zionist, and she did not mock Zionism...
...The most that can be said is that in some instances they determined the place in the death march...
...Those who refused to fulfill German orders were immediately shot (Paul Eppstein, Theresienstadt) or deported...
...N.Y...
...Public trials of individual Council members have taken place repeatedly in Israel...
...But to be among the sufferers is somehow culpable...
...Youth Aliyah, the rescue operation which saved thousands of Jewish children by arrangement with the Nazis, meant "selection...
...All are involved in a symbiosis of guilt...
...900,000 Soviet Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the first months of the Nazi-Soviet war...
...She credits Hilberg with revealing it...
...No single answer can be given...
...Numerous vital errors and misstatements of fact have been pointed out by her critics...
...ists in contemporary Jewish history...
...The indignation aroused by Miss Arendt stems from her charge of total Jewish collaboration: leaders, parties, organizations, and associations on the "local and international level" constitute the people...
...Or in other words that I am independent...
...Miss Arendt has no difficulty in explaining Eichmann's enthusiasm: "For the uncomfortable truth of the matter is that not Eichmann's fanaticism but his very conscience had prompted him to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war...
...The document leaves no doubt that it is Hitler, not Himmler, who had given the order to stop the deportation...
...they are selecting only "would-be pioneers...
...He is "terrifyingly normal," a conscientious little cog in the Nazi murder machine...
...He answers: "the fear of mass reprisals" and the "physical passivity" of those dying of hunger...
...One never forgets that the cowering Council member is as much a victim of the Nazi terror as the fellow victim whose name he inscribes...
...This capsule formulation has its uses, for in the widespread discussion of the book it is precisely the "evil" of the victim that is at issue— whether in descending or ascending order of responsibility...
...men did the killing...
...Ringelblum, Kaplan and other firsthand reporters vehemently denounced individual members of the Councils...
...Everyman, given the conditions, is capable of unspeakable evil and she tries to demonstrate that Eichmann is everyman...
...For a Jew, and one trusts a non-Jew, the "darkest chapter" is the Nazi murder of six million...
...Some men were noble, like Adam Czerniakow who killed himself to alarm the world...
...Writing of the Jewish Councils Miss Arendt declares: "To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story...
...To sustain her charge of total collaboration Miss Arendt manages to transform every positive attempt to save Jews from the Nazis into something suspect...
...It is the scholars, the special...
...One of the most abject episodes in the Kaplan Diary is his account of a terrified Council member huddling with his wife in his office, afraid that the Germans will seize her the moment she steps from his side...
...any one of us would have faced death more valiantly, else what point is there to the author's accusations...
...In the Warsaw Ghetto people who reported voluntarily to the transfer center were given bread and marmalade as an indication of Nazi kindliness...
...The legerdemain with which Miss Arendt shuffles evidence to sustain her image of Eichmann as an obedient underling, neither a fanatic nor an anti-Semite, is impressive to any one who has examined the sources she uses...
...Miss Arendt is equally skeptical of Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, who testified to Eichmann's ingenuity in introducing Cyclon B, the gas used in the gas chambers, and of the Lutheran Minister Heinrich Griiber who had tried to help the Jews and who characterized Eichmann as "a block of ice...
...The 8000 Jews of Denmark escaped because they were in the midst of a brave, friendly population located on the coast opposite Sweden...
...T1214—par...
...but the chief reason is that her accusation of the Jews, far from being ironic or even subtle, is explicit and unequivocal, and is not at all limited to "Jewish functionaries...
...Of Eichmann she writes that he read Herzl and was converted "immediately and forever to Zionism...
...To enlist the unwitting cooperation of the Jews in their eventual destruction he assured them that they had nothing to fear unless they refused and that "after the war the Germans would be gutmutig [amiable] again...
...Kimche writes: "The aim was no longer the need of the Jewish community in Palestine but to save what they could of the Jews in German hands...
...They could alter no one's fate, not even their own...
...She refers to the Nazi expulsions, which preceded extermination, as the "pro-Zionist" stage of the Nazi movement, and she describes one of Eichmann's concentration schemes for his captives as "(a Jewish homeland, a gathering in of the exiles of the Diaspora...
...I will die anyhow...
...The first is moral...
...Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and these leaders, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis...
...The ghettos not only segregated the Jews but divided them into manageable groups before whom the Nazis held out the promise of "resettlement" in the East...
...One does not have to be a Zionist to be shocked, or to "misunderstand" the author's intent...
...As a responsible writer, Miss Arendt should offer it...
...Miss Arendt's answer (in the same issue of M. B.) indicates her view of the controversy...
...Her champions, however, have in no instance bothered to take cognizance of such factual objections...
...To combat doubts the Nazis showed motion pictures of the comfortable life in the "work camps...
...When I reached the conclusion that it was necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism a man expects from himself as a devoted national-socialist...
...The courage of the Danes and the accident of geography, not the quality of their "leaders," proved the salvation of the Danish Jews...
...I have considered the problem of the Jews for many years and have studied no small measure of the literature on the subject...
...The Budapest Council members asked for compliance because they honestly believed that obedience would save Jewish lives...
...In a sense, every Jew who fled with his family on a quota to the United States "selected" himself in preference to another...
...Admittedly, every effort to save, tragically inadequate despite its heroism, implied "selection" since, legally or illegally, only a few could escape...
...How indirect is shooting...
...When he threatened angrily "to drop France" from his program because the French were not delivering Jews fast enough to him—a statement which the Jerusalem Court viewed as evidence of his authority—he was again boasting...
...page 162...
...most honestly believed that they protected the ghettos from immediate and complete annihilation through the sequence established by the Nazis, and that each deferral promised survival for some...
...Suddenly everyman, the conscientious cog, appears to have become a zealot...
...II The author's theme, the "banality of evil," is developed in her account of how Jews behaved and what Eichmann did...
...The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million...
...The extensive Yiddish and Hebrew documentary literature of the period — which Miss Arendt apparently did not consult— does provide the material...
...The question of Miss Arendt's bewildering originality I shall here leave aside, but the "irony" missed by Scholem and so many other readers is more to the point since it is the most frequent defense offered against jarring citations from her work...
...What perversity...
...After a review of the entire testimony, Dr...
...Why does the father die, and the mother, and each of the children, without a single protest...
...So much for their "enjoyment...
...In a communication (quoted also by Hilberg) from Ribbentrop to Veesenmayer, the Nazi plenipotentiary in Hungary, the German Foreign Minister warns: "The Fuhrer expects that the measures against the Budapest Jews will now be taken without any further delay by the Hungarian government, with those exceptions which were allowed to the Hungarian government by the German government...
...In the recently discovered Kaplan Diary, we read (July 30, 1942): "Amid all the tragedy of sudden expulsion, one minor detail is perhaps the most tragic of all: people come to the transfer point voluntarily, saying, Take me from the quagmire of the ghetto...
...Dwight Macdonald confined himself to discussing Miss Arendt's theory of totalitarianism...
...some were weaklings who tried to save their own families and themselves...
...Having omitted this essential corrective, Miss Arendt proceeds to moralize about the evil of Jews "selecting" Jews for survival, an error which led to a situation in which "the non-selected majority of Jews found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities...
...It has already been shown (Hilberg, Robin son, and particularly Lionel Abel in Partisan Review, Summer, 1963) that in Russia where no Jewish Councils had been set up, the unorganized Soviet Jews were massacred by the advancing Nazis at an even more rapid rate than in Poland...
...They could not believe the humanly unbelievable...
...another in her bland omission and distortion of relevant data...
...Regardless of the effect of their actions, how did they behave...
...Eichmann's elaborate deception was typical of the Nazi technique...
...The readers outraged by Justice Musmanno's harsh review in The New York Times Book Review made no attempt to argue on the basis of the factual material adduced by the Justice...
...So much for "fairly and squarely...
Vol. 10 • September 1963 • No. 4
