Hannah Arendt Answered
Ezorsky, Gertrude
Never, to my knowledge, in the history of intellectual controversy has any book met such devastating refutation as Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in Jacob Robinson's critique, And the...
...and if there are not enough of them, the mortally ill...
...And sometimes I have as many as I have to report...
...There were cases of Jewish officials who refused to obey Nazi orders...
...ed, p. 218...
...Robinson takes up every important feature of Miss Arendt' Eichmann portrait...
...p. 46...
...To do nothing in the face of an order is disobedience to that order...
...Walter Laqueur asserts that many people did not object to what Miss Arendt said but to the manner in which she said it...
...Robinson produces massive evidence to prove that her view is contradicted by Eichmann's deeds, his own statements and reports by those who knew him...
...Miss Arendt retorts that she herself enumerated just these vulnerabilities in Eichmann in Jerusalem...
...murderer...
...Then I can take the criminals...
...Let us imagine the situation of a Jewish Council member who contemplates doing nothing when ordered by the Nazis to participate in the process of deporting Jews...
...But, to set the record straight, Robinson does have credentials...
...I am no master (balabos) over human life...
...assistant to Hausner at the Eichmann trial...
...Arendt, rev...
...For example, Dr...
...For example: An anti-Nazi German writer who visited the Lodz ghetto twice quoted from the Jewish police chief this statement of the moral problem involved in selecting victims for deportation: And I must select the people for it [deportation for gassing...
...Robinson uncovered, as one observer has put it, an Arendt of errors...
...By Jacob Robinson...
...Robinson p. 187) [Italics added] Miss Arendt complains that she took this description of Jewish behavior word for word from Attorney General Hausner himself and " 'that this picture contrasts radically with reality' ..., of course, was my whole point to begin with...
...convinced that this extermination action was necessary in order to preserve the German people in the future from the destructive intentions of the Jews . . . He was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on...
...But what happens then...
...Moreover, Robinson wonders why—since Miss Arendt admits Eichmann's untruthfulness on so many occasions—she complains because neither the prosecutor, the defense nor the judges took his word concerning his attitude toward the Jews...
...She must also know that Rabbi Leo Baeck of Berlin could have escaped Nazi persecution but refused to abandon the German Jews...
...In the revised paperback edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem Miss Arendt concedes that in Eastern Europe "The Jewish bureaucracy...
...Robinson pp...
...and in Poland...
...But if I stay, I can take the volunteers...
...Owsiej Izikson, chairman of the Baranowicze Judenrat and his secretary were shot for refusing to deliver children, the sick, and the aged...
...Rabbi Ezekiel Levin, chief rabbi of Lvow, was offered safety by the Metropolitan Szepticki during the Nazi organized pogrom in 1941 when Jews were being killed and tortured in the streets by Ukrainians...
...an expert on the treatment of minorities and the author of several volumes on that question...
...A ghetto Jew who volunteered for deportation was surely not making a protest against deportation...
...He appeared in his burial clothing and died under torture...
...The SS has already said it: then they'll make the selections...
...The rabbis I have cited—no doubt there were many others equally heroic, whose names may never be entered into the archives of history— showed, Miss Arendt must concede, a certain degree of courage under conditions of Nazi terror...
...And if you don't know a better one, tell me: shall I stay or shall I have myself shot...
...452, Meridian reprint, 1957...
...murderers also possessed, as we now know, a limited choice of alternatives...
...Even Hitler's anti-Semitism didn't satisfy Eichmann...
...Robinson, p. 44...
...For Robinson the issue raised by Miss Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is the falsity of her thesis...
...30-32) . 1 Eichmann, it appears, showed "extraordinary loyalty" to Hitler, as long as Hitler ordered the murder of Jews...
...they have all agreed with me, Mr...
...Coordinator of Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in four institutes in New York, London, Paris, and Jerusalem...
...Hence, Miss Arendt's own reports show that Jewish assistance could not have played a significant role in the annihilation of ninety per cent of the Jews killed by the Nazis...
...I think not...
...He then declined an offer of escape for himself and his family saying that he wished to remain with his communty...
...Miss Arendt's generalization that the members of Jewish Councils were "as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders" (Arendt, p. 104) — for which she offers no proof—also fails to withstand Robinson's examination...
...Was this really her "whole point to begin with...
...New York: Macmillan, 1965...
...Does Miss Arendt really want her readers to think that any Jew under the Nazis enjoyed privileges similar to those of an S.S...
...A few hours' reading of a partial list of the biographies of leaders of religious Jewry in Europe reveals the names of a number of rabbis, such as Rabbi Chaim Toib of Zavlin, Rabbi Elijah Lifshitz of Griza, Rabbi David Blather of Mezericz, and Rabbi Isaac Maharshon of The Hague who had opportunities to escape and chose to stay with their communities although they knew that only a miracle could save them...
...Hielscher...
...This would mean that those with unbroken spirits, the pregnant, the rabbis, the torah scholars, the professors, the poets would go into the oven first...
...The merit of Robinson's contribution to the controversy is that he showed the utter falsity of what she said...
...It seems there was not one Rabbi who did what Dompropst Bernhard Lichtenberg, a Catholic priest, or Propst Heinrich Gruber, a Protestant minister, had tried to do—to volunteer for deportation...
...Rabbis along with Jewish intellectuals, professionals and political leaders were among the first taken by the Nazis to serve as hostages or for deportation...
...He cites thirteen separate occasions during the trial concerning which Miss Arendt herself finds Eichmann guilty of untruthfullness (Robinson, p. 5-6...
...Arendt, p. 104...
...Is some philosophical view at stake in Eichmann in Jerusalem...
...Wasn't it her business to make sure...
...Arendt, p. 23...
...But one does not have to speculate in this matter...
...point out that on the basis of the evidence he [Eichmann] was not an inveterate liar and yet lied occasionally, and then proceed to give instances where he actually lied, Mr...
...So Eichmann, who Miss Arendt claims was motivated by loyalty to Hitler and was free of fanatical hatred of Jews, concluded that Hitler himself was a pawn of "infernal high-finance circles," that is international Jewry...
...Is there in fact any other issue raised by her book...
...stay and make the selections the way you have thought it out...
...He would seem, to this observer, the man best qualified to assess the truth of Miss Arendt's book...
...Here is an illustration of the way Miss Arendt does defend herself on the subject of Eichmann...
...2. Information about all the rabbis mentioned above can be found in These Will I Remember, edited by Dr...
...Most of Europe's rabbis were incarcerated in ghettos which were themselves concentration points for deportation...
...When the deportations began, Rabbi Lau tried to organize a mass rescue, but his effort failed...
...But—leaders or not—any judgment of the Jewish Councils, even from hindsight, requires an understanding of the situation in which they were trapped...
...But since Miss Arendt has now made it her business to raise the question of "the conduct of the European rabbinate during the catas trophe," let her be informed of the following pertinent data: • Rabbi Michal David Shtufel of Miretz, having been told that he could save his community by surrendering himself as a hostage, gave himself up to the Nazis, knowing that he would be killed...
...I implore you...
...This would be the simplest solution for me...
...She claims that Robinson is "psychologically color-blind...
...Rabbi Levin went into the streets to ask the Metropolitan to intercede with the Ukrainians...
...These people had still a certain limited freedom of decision and of action...
...assistant on Jewish affairs to Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg trials...
...2 The most well-known case is that of the last three rabbis of Warsaw, Rabbis Zemba, Stockhammer, and Szapiro who would not desert their congregations for the safety guaranteed them by the Court of Bishops in Warsaw...
...But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or people had behaved differently...
...Socrates, in refuting his opponents, emphasized that he had no credentials—even as he refuted them...
...Never, to my knowledge, in the history of intellectual controversy has any book met such devastating refutation as Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in Jacob Robinson's critique, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.* After Robinson's argument not a single one of Miss Arendt's main contentions can be credited...
...Consequently, he and his family were deported...
...Now, after being challenged, Miss Arendt would have her New York Review readers believe her "whole point to begin with" was that this picture of "submissive meekness" "contrasts radically with reality...
...I should like to know how anyone concerned with justice can ignore the whole truth...
...Italics added] Notice the fact with which Miss Arendt supports her view that the Jewish officials had the possibility of doing nothing...
...This means that the Jewish bureaucracy played no role in the murder of the 3,900,000 Jews in the occupied territories of the U.S.S.R...
...The parts of his dismembered body were assembled for burial...
...Here is some of that evidence: In his 1957 interview with Sassen, a Dutch journalist in Argentina, Eichmann said he was sorry only that he had not succeeded in exterminating all eleven million European Jews (Robinson, p. 52) . Rudolph Hoss, camp commandant of Auschwitz, said "Eichmann was...
...But two things are clear...
...was elaborating it for all it was worth...
...Eichmann stated his opposition to Hitler's decision sparing these Jewish families because, Eichmann claimed, the Jews involved were "without exception, biologically valuable mate rial" and he threatened to "seek a new decision from the Fuhrer...
...Exposed in so many errors, Miss Arendt yet insists that Mr...
...They could say: `I wish to be relieved of my murderous duties," and nothing happened to them...
...Moreover, even where there was a measure of continuity the Nazis, using the principle of "negative selection," repeatedly purged the Councils' members by replacing them with unknowns...
...But if there are still not enough, what then...
...Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed...
...Or he might just as well have said what Miss Arendt claims he was free to say, "I am just a simple Jew and I have no desire to play any other role...
...Not only was a Jewish Council member not free to disobey Nazi orders, he faced deportation if he failed to carry out Nazi orders to the hilt...
...Majblum, chairman of the Zloczbw Council was shot for refusing to sign a paper acknowledging that the reason for the deportation of Jews was a typhus outbreak in the ghetto...
...She had sketched Eichmann as an "average" man of "rather modest mental gifts" and "terribly and terrifyingly normal," who was "obviously...
...Here is what Robinson said: Miss Arendt writes of "the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their deaths—arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot" (Arendt, p. 9...
...If I refuse I'll be shot...
...Miss Arendt's moral prescription appears not in Eichmann in Jerusalem but in an exchange between herself and Gershom Scholem published in Encounter, January 1964...
...I know mothers who denounce their neighbors for a slice of bread, so their children won't starve to death...
...In her New York Review article, Miss Arendt castigates Robinson for criticizing her picture of the reaction of the Jewish victims to the Final Solution...
...Miss Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil," is, as I see it, so vague as to be barely intelligible...
...Here is what she wrote: The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death—arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot—seemed a fine point, and the prosecutor asking witness after witness, "Why did you not protest...
...6.95...
...He and his family were killed in Auschwitz...
...A straight statement of the moral choice that faced Judenrat officials was given by Tadeusz Pankiewicz a Polish pharmacist in the Cracow ghetto who witnessed its life throughout its existence: "To resign [from the Jewish Council] was equivalent to signing one's own death sentence" (Robinson p. 182) . One must therefore ask: Is this what Miss Arendt means when she says Jewish officials had "the possibility of doing nothing," and in taking that course did not have "to be a saint...
...So, Miss Arendt's generalization that Jewish administrative and police help was crucial for implementing the Final Solution makes no sense whatsoever...
...He told the Metropolitan "I shall return to my community where I belong...
...And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight...
...These are documented in Robinson's book (p...
...Miss Arendt must be familiar with this last case...
...Artur Rosenzweig, chairman for a period of the Cracow Judenrat was charged with laxity in oganizing the May 31, 1942 resettlement...
...Translation of passages relevant to this paper was made byEphraim Friend...
...Robinson does not have the proper credentials...
...Or is this what she means in claiming they could say, like the rebellious SS men, "I wish to be relieved of my murderous duties" and "nothing happened to them ?" Nothing...
...Rabbi Lau of Piotrokov had himself accepted as a substitute for fifty Jews whom the Nazis had taken as hostages...
...Who wants to sit in judgment here...
...181-182...
...She wrote then The alternative [under totalitarianism] is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder...
...He told the Nazis, "I gave you everything you asked from me, but I am not going to give you Jews...
...In 1938 during the Kristallnacht, when thousands of German Jews were imprisoned, Rabbi Karlback asked to be arrested so that he could be with the imprisoned Jews...
...Robinson, p. 5.) "Alas, nobody believed him...
...if you know a better way than the one I have found, show it to me...
...Will she have the courage, now that she has opened the question of the European Rabbinate's conduct, to close it, by admitting that she was wrong...
...Just as the S.S...
...She was wrong about Eichmann, she was wrong about international law, she was wrong about the Jewish leaders, she was wrong about Jewish resistance, she was wrong about Jewish "cooperation" with the Nazis, she was wrong about the alleged Jewish origins of Heydrich and Hans Frank, she was wrong about the activities of the Jewish SonderKommandos...
...and a great many of her minor contentions— including those irrelevant to her main theses—have also to be tossed out...
...played no part in the seizure and the concentration of the Jews...
...Finally, if the Jews involved did succeed in emigrating, Eichmann wanted to stop them outside of Hungary (Robinson, pp...
...Then I can take the dying...
...This picture contrasts radically with reality...
...406 pp...
...and director of a bibliographical series on the Catastrophe...
...In my opinion, the issue is not Miss Arendt's tone —objectionable as that may be—but the truth or falsity of her theses...
...Isaac Levin (in Hebrew), Research Institute of Religious Jewry, 1961, New York...
...How could rabbis whom the Nazis wanted to murder perform an act of protest by volunteering to be murdered...
...Take, for example, Miss Arendt's notion that Eichmann was not a fanatical anti-Semite but acted out of "extraordinary loyalty" to Hitler...
...they have all told me "You are doing the right thing...
...What would have happened to Jewish Council members after 1941, when the extermination drive began, if they had decided to do nothing...
...Now Miss Arendt is here, safe in the United States...
...He shows that the degree of continuity between the Councils and the pre-war Jewish leadership varied greatly in different areas...
...When S.S...
...New York Review of Books, January 20, 1966...
...Both Jews and non-Jews alike reacted to Nazism with "submissive meekness...
...What is it...
...The Nazis wanted Jews to volunteer and offered bribes of food to the starving ghetto inhabitants in order to get them to do so...
...no case of...
...Arendt, p. 9.) [Italics added] Not only did Miss Arendt in her book accept this picture of the "submissive meekness" of the Jewish victims, she added that "no nonJewish group or people had behaved differently...
...She was wrong, wrong, wrong...
...Hitler had agreed to spare the lives of 8,700 Jewish families and allow them to emigrate, if Horthy would agree to the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community...
...One of the most devastating sections in Robinson's book is his appraisal of Miss Arendt's charge that the cooperation of Jewish administrators was essential to the Final Solution...
...Rabbi Isaiah Englard of Sosnowitz had an opportunity to get out of a death train but chose to remain when he found out that another Jew would have to take his place...
...murderers asked to be relieved of their murderous duties, nothing happened to them...
...Robinson does not say that an inveterate liar is incapable of an occasional lie...
...On his way home he was killed...
...Had this Jewish police chief been able to consult Miss Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, he would have found that in 1951 she considered his moral dilemma to be insoluble...
...Robinson shows that this image has no foundation in the known facts about Eichmann...
...Miss Arendt wrote: Without Jewish help in administrative and police work [in the deportations...
...He is an international lawyer, with a mastery of East European as well as West European languages—hence (unlike Miss Arendt) , able to read material emanating from Jewish sources, written in a variety of languages...
...And in order to do nothing, one did not need to be a saint, one need only to say: I am just a simple Jew and I have no desire to play any other role .. . we should not forget that we are dealing here with conditions which were terrible and desperate enough, but which were not the conditions of concentration camps...
...Surely this casts doubt on her claim that Eichmann was not an inveterate liar...
...In her lengthy New York Review of Books article, where Miss Arendt devotes a good deal of space to attacking Robinson, she fails to take him up on a single major point concerning her view of Eichmann...
...Moreover, Eichmann reported that he had become disenchanted with Hitler: "I said that the real war agitators were the infernal high finance (die infernalische Hochfinanz) circles of the Western Hemisphere...
...To this figure one must add the 797,000 Jews killed in other areas where Miss Arendt does not claim that Jewish help in administrative and police work was an essential factor...
...He died in Auschwitz...
...During the deportation of the Hungarian Jews (whom Eichmann referred to as "Judischen Dreck," [Robinson, p. 4]), Eichmann thought Hitler was too weak on the question of murdering Jews...
...Only later does it become highly problematical...
...Often they urge to be taken...
...Would nothing have happened to them...
...Miss Arendt in the New York Review article complains that Walter Laqueur criticized her for "having been unaware of the 'particular vulnerability' of the Jewish communities in the face of organized persecution...
...Did they have that much "freedom of decision and of action...
...An account of it appears in Robinson's book as well as in other works...
...These decisions were made in an atmosphere of terror but not under the immediate pressure and impact of terror...
...Robinson raises one of the most disturbing "problems" of the whole issue, a problem I had been careful not to raise because it was not raised at the trial and therefore was not my business: the conduct of the European rabbinate during the catastrophe...
...I have asked the congregations . . . the old people, the condemned, the mortally ill...
...Miss Arendt claims that the "cooperation" between the Jewish Councils and the Nazis is "To a Jew . . the darkest chapter of the whole dark story" (Arendt p. 104) . To my mind, the most moving section of Robinson's book is his account of the desperation which beset Jewish officials when the extermination drive was launched...
...fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind," but had "extraordinary loyalty to Hitler and the Fuhrer's order...
...Moreover, Eichmann planned to frustrate Hitler's decision by having these Jews, whom Hitler was willing to spare, deported to death camps before emigration formalities had been completed...
...I said that there was no possibility of resistance but there existed the possibility of doing nothing...
...Rabbi Mordecai Ruttenberg of Antwerp would not allow the French Maquis to rescue him from the transitional assembly camp of Vital unless everyone in his group could be saved...
...Moreover, what is the point of her comparison of rabbis under the Nazis with a Catholic priest and Protestant clergyman...
...Robinson is firmly convinced that there are "contradictions," "hopping back and forth...
...Robinson shows that Miss Arendt's own reports on different areas belie her conclusion that Jewish assistance in administrative and police work was essential to the Nazi extermination drive...
...I have asked the leaders of the community, the rabbis, the torah scholars...
...To my mind this is somewhat comical...
...Works of refutation, and Robinson's is frankly a work of refutation, do not have to be backed up by a history of achievements...
...Hence, the question becomes: would nothing have happened to a Council member who disobeyed Nazi orders...
...But her castigation of the Jewish Councils for not acting as if they possessed the freedom from punishment enjoyed by the S.S., shows just how unaware she actually is of the "particular vulnerability" of the Jewish communities under the Nazis...
...This same incident also displays just how much "loyalty" Eichmann had to Hitler...
...Did Miss Arendt really claim in her book that this picture of "submissive meekness" on the part of the Jewish victims "contrasts radically with reality...
...At this point, not knowing what he is doing, Mr...
...So much for Miss Arendt's notion that Eichmann was motivated not by fanatical anti-Semitism but "extraordinary loyalty" to Hitler...
...Rabbi Karlback of Hamburg refused to escape, saying he would not abandon his oppressed brothers as long as they needed him...
...Daniel Bell, who grants that Miss Arendt's account of the Jewish leadership is not the whole truth, claims nevertheless that she is concerned with justice...
...5,100,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis...
...Sometimes though there are less...
...111 Arendt) . Let us assume however, that after 1951 she discovered a solution to the "moral dilemma" she at that time declared insoluble...
...Miss Arendt in a passage where she begins by denouncing Robinson for his "moral obtuseness" goes on to make a charge against the rabbis of Europe, who lived under Hitlerism...
...Italics added] Notice Miss Arendt says it only "seems" that not one Rabbi volunteered for deportation...
...So, according to Miss Arendt, the picture of "submissive meekness" fits not only the facts about Jewish behavior, it is even a bigger and truer picture than the Attorney General imagined...
...She writes: In other words, until 1939 and even until 1941 whatever Jewish functionaries did or did not do is understandable and excusable...
...Hence [she writes] when I...
...there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower...
...First, Miss Arendt grounded her theory of the banality of evil on her portrait of Eichmann, and second her portrait of Eichmann has not stood up under Robinson's logical and factual criticism...
...But when Miss Arendt came to write Eichmann in Jerusalem she castigated the Jewish Councils who chose "between murder and murder" for their "moral collapse" (p...
...For Miss Arendt now to attack the rabbis of Europe for not doing just what the Nazis in fact wanted them to do reveals her insensitivity to the situation of the Jewish victims...
...According to Raul Hilberg, on whom Miss Arendt relies heavily, 1. Eichmann's attitude toward Hitler's decision concerning the Hungarian Jews isdescribed in a telegram from Veesenmayer, Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, which is available at the YIVO office in New York...
...but, God protect us, who does not become criminal here...
...Robinson 166-168...
...170-171) when he describes the savagery and repression suffered by many Judenrat officials at the hands of the Nazis...
...whose pawns in this game of theirs, are Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and Chamberlain...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
