Captive Eichmann
Mosse, George L.
Captive Eichmann Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, by Hannah Arendt. The Viking Press. 275 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by George L. Mosse 1%/fiss arendt's book, which first...
...And yet, a dimension of the Jewish catastrophe is missing, and it is this which has caused a storm of criticism...
...In giving us our best understanding of Eichmann the man, Miss Arendt has rendered a distinct service, cutting through the emotionalism of the trial, even though she has failed to understand those caught by the terror which he served so well and without pangs of conscience...
...Miss Arendt is theoretically right but wrong in practice, especially in her condemnation of, Jewish collaboration with the Nazis...
...We cannot be expected to share our small planet with such men...
...How could Eichmann have been tried differently...
...But this is hardly the point, for what is omitted, and it is a serious omission, is a sense of the extreme situation in which these officials found themselves...
...This is the true terror represented by Eichmann the man...
...he emerges as what he was: not the initiator of policy but its skillful executor, the bureaucrat par excellence concerned with transporting his victims to their end...
...He had no feeling of guilt about the horror and destruction of which he was a part...
...The passive resistance which, with hindsight, she would have substituted is hardly realistic on a continent which does not share the traditions which produced a Gandhi in India...
...One might well ask why this should be so, for the book, which ranges well beyond Eichmann himself, is factually accurate and based upon the latest sources...
...indeed, a reply has already been commissioned by a Jewish organization...
...If Eichmann was indeed symbolic for the "new type" of man living under modern totalitarianism, then this is small comfort indeed, for the modern trend towards allegiance to national ideology rather than universal standards of thought survived his death...
...To this the book gives an answer only in moral and not in legal terms...
...His was a self deception which was shared by most of the German nation...
...Miss Arendt deals perceptively with the changes in German policy towards the Jews, from expulsion to "the final solution...
...She often makes her point through innuendo: For example, Jewish officials "could be trusted" to compile deportation lists, and so indeed they could...
...What she has to say about the trial itself has also caused violent criticism, but here one can rise to her defense for she does understand Eichmann and his place in the whole dreadful story...
...But what Miss Arendt forgets is that his victims were also captives of a myth which would not let them see the true nature of their confrontation: All men, to them, were human beings and therefore had a measure of decency which might make negotiation possible, while the terror could be mitigated through cushioning the shock...
...She describes truthfully the resistance offered by a whole people to such measures (the unpar-alled heroism of the Danes), and the enthusiasm for pogroms in Rumania which frightened even the Germans...
...Moreover, Eichmann and his part in all of this are skillfully woven into the larger narrative...
...Miss Arendt is at her best when she dissects this new type as symbolized by Adolf Eichmann...
...Through such an unhistorical approach he missed the most damning point of all, that Eichmann was "terrifyingly normal," that he was indeed a new type of criminal so captive to an ideology that quite literally he did not know what he was doing when judged by the accepted canons of civilized law...
...As Miss Arendt also points out, the legal formula of "intent of guilt"—action taken with intention—is devoid of meaning in this context...
...Reviewed by George L. Mosse 1%/fiss arendt's book, which first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker, has reaped a whirlwind of criticism...
...Gideon Hauser, the prosecutor, did attempt to assign to Eichmann the principal role in the final solution, to paint him as a sadist and monster...
...Writing from Mount Olympus rather than putting herself into the inferno, Miss Arendt expects these Jewish leaders to rise dramatically above a historical situation for which they were entirely unprepared...
...She is prone to disapprove of any contact between Nazi and Jew, whether it be Zionist negotiation for emigration or the position of Jewish leadership in the face of extinction...
...This latter point was lost in the trial through the effort to spare the sensibilities of the Adenauer government, a point about which Miss Arendt is rightfully scornful...
...He was indeed a captive of the Nazi myth, and whatever he did was a matter of German destiny into which no other traditional, humanitarian criteria could enter...
...Men and women who were deeply imbued with the heritage of liberalism and the enlightenment, which had been held more tenaciously by the Jewish bourgeoisie than by any other class of the European population, were suddenly confronted with a new type of totalitarian man...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
