Hannah Arendt's Eichmann

...To justify the seizure and the trial, the Israeli court had to emphasize the relationship of the accused to the prime victim, the Jews...

...Miss Arendt approaches the heart of the issue...

...guilt was whole and continuous, embracing all...

...The question evaded by her own formulation, as by that of the court, is whether the evil inheres in the acts themselves or in the identity of the victims...

...The purport of the prosecution's evidence and of the judicial decision was that Eichmann's acts were evil because they were part of a systematic plan to get rid of whole ethnic groups—among others, the Jews, the Poles and the Gypsies...

...The Nazis, after all, initially devised the instruments of extermination for the ill and the insane, the useless members of their own society...

...Miss Arendt points out that the narrow ground thus taken would not encourage the development of a future international penal code...

...That Eichmann was guilty of something and that his actions were evil are propositions beyond doubt...

...and the consequences drag on for decades in the unfolding, so that none are really bystanders to the play but all are participants...

...At no point . . . either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups . . . might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered...

...Yet a break there must be if we are to reject, as we should, Eichmann's plea that he only obeyed...

...The rulers and the people of the conquered territories either stood by or lent a hand...

...Only those like Anton Schmidt, a German sergeant executed for aiding the Jews, were absolved of a share in the guilt...

...In a world perilous beyond any earlier imagining, safety seems to rest in the intimate group, and the very concept of a general humanity grows vague and indistinct...

...Only the result was a monstrous crime...

...This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang...

...The crucial questions are, however, how to define the nature of the guilt and how to understand the character of the evil...

...There was no such finding...

...They labored earnestly to frame the Charter of the United Nations, and sat in judgment at the Nuremberg Trials believing that they were beginning to develop an international rule of law to prevent a repetition of the barbarities through which they had lived...

...but stretching also in ever widening circles to the timid civil servants like Hans Globke, to the misguided communal officials like Rudolf Kastner, and at the farthest extreme to Rabbi Leo Baeck who, out of love for his people, withheld the information that would have embittered the remaining days of their existence...

...Essentially, he was a bureaucrat of middle rank who implemented basic policies formulated by others...

...In Jerusalem Eichmann thus became Haman, Pharaoh—a symbol of the immemorial enemy of the Chosen People...

...Yet since Miss Arendt's book is about the trial, she returns again and again to the question raised by the prosecution: "Why did you not protest . . . why didn't you revolt and charge and attack...

...Would the gas chambers have been less clearly crimes against humanity had they received not Jews or Gypsies—ethnic groups —but some political or economic segment of the population or even men and women picked haphazardly from the street...

...And in any case, no rule of justice permits millions to take the life of the one they abhor any more than it permits one to take the lives of millions he hates...

...All those who live in highly organized societies, who do jobs, obey orders, and wish to get ahead, need desperately to learn when to say no, need desperately to understand how to control the immense power accumulated by harnessing the services of millions like themselves to the machinery of government...

...What is more, Miss Arendt's volume demonstrates the banality, that is, the commonplace quality, of the guilt for the catastrophe...

...Many only obeyed...

...Then, when she must sentence Eichmann to death, she supplies the court with the words she thinks it should have used in justifying the execution: "We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you...

...More important, Miss Arendt's dramatic finish evades the whole question of responsibility...

...About these issues the trial and its commentator have taught us nothing...

...Hitler and the Nazi party leaders were, in the first instance, responsible for the policy...

...But such instances were pitifully few...

...Totalitarian domination dragged all who were touched by it down into the same mire of guilt...

...Non sequitur...

...In 1945, those who had fought Fascism sometimes persuaded themselves that the sufferings of the past had been the price of a better future...

...From this point of view, the Nuremberg trials were more creative, for they defined as crimes against humanity acts which were themselves inhuman, whoever the victims...

...The Nazi himself died as he had lived—without the least understanding of his crime...

...countless people would have been perfectly willing to go on sharing the earth with Adolf Eichmann...

...It was as if, in those last desperate moments of fading hope, one could only cling to the wish that a memorial would survive from which "the historian of the future" might draw some meaning...

...She ascribes the catastrophe to no particular attributes of the Jews but to the evil consequences of Nazism, commonplace wherever the Germans ruled...

...In doing so, she often loses sight of her own comment, earlier in the discussion: "But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no nonJewish group or people had behaved differently...

...Her book contains some of the most perceptive comments we have yet had on the relationship of the totalitarian personality to the tragedy...

...We can, at least abstractedly, recognize her description of the banality of evil reaching from Hitler, the prime mover, to Himmler in his immediate circle, and down to Eichmann, one of those who implemented decisions...

...Nor do they contribute to an understanding of the nature of the evil...

...The trial elicited nothing not already known about the catastrophe, but instead confused the issues of guilt and responsibility...

...Had they won the War, they intended to use the same instruments to make living space for themselves in the East...

...Yet the crucial contradictions in her account of the trial prevent her from answering the questions raised by this chapter of modern history...

...History is less conveniently ordered...

...Every branch of the German government had a hand in its implementation...

...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," she writes, if only more men, Germans or Jews, had obeyed that imperative...

...His larger significance in the history of our times was lost...

...The inception of a chain of events is often obscure (who foresaw what would follow from the comic Munich Beer Hall Putsch...

...Miss Arendt writes with passion, brushes aside extenuating circumstances, ridicules the feeble rationalizations by which men justified their cowardice or greed, and refuses to take account of any consideration but the imperative to resist...

...She demonstrates what was already clear from the historical record: that Eichmann was far from the initiator of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem under the Third Reich...

...Every German, directly or indirectly, by acts of commission or omission, was also responsible...

...The evidence for any more substantial role is flimsy indeed...

...If the tragedy is to have any meaning, it must be regarded in terms more general than those of the individual who sat in the dock in Jerusalem...

...She tends to lose sight, in the discussion of individual cases, of the general dilemma totalitarianism poses for men who value order and rationality...

...It may all have been for nothing...

...Even the Zionists and the Jewish communal organizations bore a share of the blame, for without their aid "there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower...

...And, regrettably, Hannah Arendt's report on the trial does little to dispel the confusion...

...His abduction was a violation of all rules of law, a violation all the more disheartening because well-intentioned lawyers justified it by arguments that debased the very concept of law...

...But complicity spread throughout the society they dominated...

...Let the wasteful sacrifices of the present at least add to the understanding of posterity...

...Unfortunately, men were less likely to value the distinction in 1962 than a decade earlier...

...From the rage for destruction that took millions of lives, among them those of six million Jews, from the havoc wrought by marching armies and aerial armadas, we have learned little...

...Instead, among the byproducts of the War has been a heightened sense of nationalism and a strident insistence by each state on its unqualified right to regulate its own conduct...

...Therefore the Jewish people, as an entity, having been the victims most injured, were competent to sit in judgment...

...and they were not likely to have been swayed by ethnic niceties in their choice of victims...

...The drama enacted behind the footlights is self-contained so that the detached observer can perceive its beginning and its end and the connection between them...

...And she regrets that the court did not attempt a "valid definition of the 'crime against humanity.' " But her own effort to arrive at such a definition is disappointing, for it brings her back to genocide, acts aimed to "get rid of whole peoples...

...Neither the trial nor Hannah Arendt's book help to answer the question...

...Miss Arendt is partly to blame...

...The years since then have supplied us with an ironic commentary on their efforts...

...Her central theme, although it is sometimes obscured, is thus quite different from that set forth a year ago in Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews...

...But how do we recognize the break in this continuum of guilt...

...Reviewed by OSCAR HANDLIN Winthrop Professor of History Harvard University In the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto, the archivist Emmanuel Ringelblum noted that everyone was keeping diaries: "journalists and writers, of course, but also teachers, public men, young people—even children...

...The tragedies of life, alas, are less instructive than those of the stage...

...Rationally considered, the experience of the War and the consequences of Hitlerism should have persuaded us of the absolute urgency of developing an international code that would limit the immoral use of sovereign state power...

...The question is by no means idle...

...We are now some 20 years past the holocaust that swept across Europe after 1939...

...That hope too proved vain...

...These dismal reflections are evoked by the Eichmann trial and its aftermath...

...Why were some more guilty than others...

...Eichmann in Jerusalem has been severely criticized on this account, and particularly for its harsh words about the culpability of Jewish leadership...

...Until the peroration, Miss Arendt is consistent...

...An ordinary man like many others, doing a job like everyone else, obedient and anxious to further his career, he found himself signing papers, pushing buttons, speaking on the telephone, making calculations, arranging schedules—the usual tasks of civilized life...