Bevor ich Hannah Arendts Buch "Eichmann in Jerusalem" gelesen habe, las ich das Buch von Götz Aly "Europa gegen die Juden". That surprises me very much indeed. Newsletter. The Jewish emigrants, unless they were political refugees, were mostly young people who realized that there was no future for them in Germany—and since they soon found out that there was hardly any future for them in other European countries either, some of them actually returned during this period. At length, the military authorities had decided to solve two problems at a stroke by shooting a hundred Jews and Gypsies as hostages for every dead German soldier. Writing in The New Yorker, she expressed shock that Eichmann was not a monster, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Her reports for the magazine were compiled into a book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” published in 1963. As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, not of inconsistencies, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content. Nearly 15 years after the publication of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt wrote another long essay for The New Yorker, “Thinking,” in … During a discussion of the offer Heinrich Himmler had made to Zionist representatives in Hungary, in 1944, to exchange a million Jews for ten thousand trucks, and of Eichmann’s role in this plan, Dr. Servatius asked, “Mr. It was not that the trial in Jerusalem produced any important new evidence of the kind needed for the discovery of Eichmann’s associates but that the news of Eichmann’s sensational capture and the prospect of his trial had an impact strong enough to persuade the local courts to use Mr. Schüle’s findings and to overcome the native reluctance to do anything about the “murderers in our midst” by the time-honored expedient of posting rewards for the capture of well-known criminals. They are so evidently three good and honest men that one is not surprised to see that none of them yields to the greatest of all the temptations to play-act in this setting—that of pretending that they, all three born and educated in Germany, must wait for the Hebrew translation of anything said in German. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen“. The emigration of Jews in these years proceeded, on the whole, in an orderly and not unduly accelerated fashion, and the currency restrictions that made it difficult, but not impossible, for Jews to take their money—or, at least, the greater part of it—out of the country were the same for non-Jews; they dated back to the days of the Weimar Republic. For this amount, they needed foreign currency, which the Reich had no intention of wasting on its Jews. It took the organized pogroms of November, 1938—the so-called Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop-windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps—to expel them from it. As for the base motives, he was sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund—a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart—and as for his conscience, he recalled perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and most meticulous care. Beyond the understanding of a human being?” Is not there perhaps something like “the spirit of history, which brings history forward . They had been second-class citizens, to put it mildly, since January 30, 1933; their almost complete separation from the rest of the population had been achieved in a matter of weeks, through terror but also through the more than ordinary connivance of those around them. The Nazi plan to physically exterminate the Jews of … Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Eichmann trial had its deepest and most far-reaching consequences in Germany. The two desires coincided, and he, Eichmann, could “do justice to both parties.” At the trial, he never gave an inch when it came to this part of the story, though he agreed that today, when “times have changed so much,” the Jews might not be too happy to recall this “pulling together,” and he said he did not want “to hurt their feelings.”. Their walk is unstudied; their sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening under the impact of grief as they listen to the tales of suffering, is natural; their impatience with the prosecutor’s attempt to drag out the hearings is spontaneous and refreshing; their attitude toward the defense is perhaps a shade over-polite, as though they had it always in mind that, to quote the judgment they handed down, “Dr. Forgot your username? And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says—I remember it only vaguely—‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if only he had not been so clumsy! He even read one more book, Adolf Böhm’s “The History of Zionism” (during the trial he kept confusing it with Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat”), and this was perhaps a considerable achievement for a man who, by his own account, had always been utterly reluctant to read anything except newspapers, and, to the distress of his father, had never paid any attention to the books in the family library. And then I said to Höss, ‘Work—Storfer won’t have to work!’ Höss said, ‘Everyone works here.’ So I said, ‘O.K. And if he did not always like what he had to do (for example, dispatching people to their death by the trainload instead of forcing them to emigrate); if he guessed, rather early, that the whole business would come to a bad end, with Germany losing the war; if all his most cherished plans came to nothing (an evacuation of European Jewry to Madagascar, the establishment of a Jewish territory in the Nisko region of Poland, an experiment with carefully built defense installations, around his Berlin office, to repel Russian tanks); and if, to his great “grief and sorrow,” he never advanced beyond the grade of S.S. Obersturmbannführer (a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel)—in brief, if, with the exception of one year in Vienna, his life was beset with frustrations, he never forgot what the alternative would have been. had made the same mistake. They lived in a fool’s paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a “legal solution” of the Jewish problem. Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and the result is stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. His memory proved to he very unreliable about what actually happened. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen, München: Piper 1964, 4. It was the year of Hitler’s peace speeches (“Germany needs peace and desires peace,” “We recognize Poland as the home of a great and nationally conscious people,” “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss”), and, above all, it was the year when the Nazi regime won general and genuine recognition both in Germany and abroad, Hitler being admired almost everywhere as a great national statesman. In eight months, forty-five thousand Jews left Austria, whereas no more than nineteen thousand Jews left Germany in the same period; in less than eighteen months, Austria was “cleansed” of close to a hundred and fifty thousand people (roughly fifty per cent of its Jewish population), all of whom left the country “legally.” How did Eichmann do it? Unter den zahlreichen Prozessbeobachtern aus aller Welt war auch Hannah Arendt. © 2021 Condé Nast. . Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem. Every morning, the words “Beth Hamishpath” (“The House of Justice”), shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice, make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bare-headed and in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform at the front of the long hall. (Along with other departmental heads, he had once been introduced to the Mufti during a reception at an S.S. office in Berlin.) What eventually led to his capture in Argentina was his compulsion to talk big, even there—he was, he said at the time, “fed up with being an anonymous wanderer between two worlds”—and the compulsion must have grown considerably stronger as time passed, not only because he had nothing to do that he could consider worth doing but also because the postwar era had bestowed so much unexpected “fame” upon him. When everything was ready, the assembly line did its work smoothly and quickly, and Eichmann thereupon “invited” the Jewish functionaries from Berlin to inspect it. . He then acquired a smattering of Hebrew, which enabled him to read, haltingly, a Yiddish newspaper—not a very difficult accomplishment, since Yiddish is basically an old German dialect written in Hebrew letters, and can be understood by any German-speaking person who has mastered a few dozen Hebrew words. I said, ‘Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein Lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. Thus, confronted for eight months with the reality of being examined by a Jewish policeman, Eichmann did not have the slightest hesitation in explaining to him at considerable length, and repeatedly, how he had been unable to attain a higher grade in the S.S., and why this was not his fault. Is this a textbook case of bad faith combined with outrageous stupidity? When Eichmann was asked how he had reconciled his personal feelings about Jews with the outspoken and violent anti-Semitism of the Party he had joined, he replied with the proverb “Nothing is as hot when you eat it as when it’s being cooked”—a proverb that was then on the lips of many Jews as well. One frequently forgotten point of the matter is that the famous Nuremberg Laws, issued in the fall of 1935, had failed to do the trick. . Eichmann, of course, could not at that time have known anything of this, but he seems to have known nothing even of the nature of the S.D. Dr. Ebner can’t get you out. Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. Among the new arrests were people of great prominence under the Nazis, most of whom had already been denazified by the German courts. Ad Choices, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. . The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death—arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power 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 telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, “Why did you not protest?,” “Why did you board the train?,” “Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,” harped on it for all it was worth. After more than six weeks of detailed testimony, the prosecutor demanded the maximum penalty—a life sentence, to be served at hard labor. Der Prozess gegen den ehemaligen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, der in der internationalen Öffentlichkeit als einer der Hauptverantwortlichen für die »Endlösung« der Juden in Europa galt, fand 1961 in Jerusalem statt. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar—which he obviously was not. Get email notification for articles from David B. Would Eichmann, then, have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Log In. And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. Als Eichmann-Prozess wird das Gerichtsverfahren gegen den ehemaligen deutschen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann bezeichnet, in dem dieser vor dem Jerusalemer Bezirksgericht zwischen dem 11. Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. Heinrich Himmler, SS head, was in charge of the program. But bragging is a common vice. Among many other foreign correspondents, Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to report for The New Yorker on the trial whose dramatic announcement in Israel had provoked an international excitement and captured the world's attention. without the influence of men?” Is not Mr. Hausner basically in agreement with “the school of historical law”—an allusion to Hegel—and has he not shown that what “the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and destination they wanted?” And Dr. Servatius added, “Here the intention was to destroy the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and a new flourishing state came into being.” The argument of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest anti-Semitic theory about the Elders of Zion, which had been set forth in all seriousness a few weeks earlier in the old Egyptian National Assembly by Hussain Zulficar Sabri, Nasser’s Deputy Foreign Minister: Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was a victim of the Zionists, who had compelled “Hitler to perpetrate crimes and to create the legend that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim—the creation of the State of Israel.” Except that Dr. Servatius, following the philosophy of history expounded by the prosecutor, had put History in the place of the Elders of Zion. She later expanded it into her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Eichmann therefore decided to go to Germany—a decision that was all the more natural because his family had never given up its German citizenship. Hence, it was felt that the Nuremberg Laws stabilized the new situation of Jews in the German Reich. Das … We owe to this strange craze the preservation of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry.) 50 Jahre „Eichmann in Jerusalem ... die Arendt 1961 als Berichterstatterin für The New Yorker über den Prozess gegen den ehemaligen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann schrieb. A trial resembles a play in that both focus on the doer, not on the victim. Dr. Servatius (as everybody invariably addressed him) was a bit bolder when it came to the submission of documents, and the most impressive of his rare interventions occurred when the prosecution introduced as evidence the diaries of Hans Frank, wartime Governor General of Poland and one of the major war criminals hanged at Nuremberg. No one knew this better than the presiding judge, before whose eyes the trial began to deteriorate into a bloody spectacle, or, as the judgment called it, “a rudderless ship tossed about by the waves.” But if his efforts to prevent this were often defeated, the defeat was, strangely, in part the fault of the defense, which hardly ever rose to challenge any testimony, no matter how irrelevant or immaterial it might be. Library Information. He thought, as did the others, that this was a humane way of killing - it developed out of a Nazi euthanasia program between 1939 & 1941 for mentally ill Germans. The Israeli Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, under which he was tried, provides that “a person who has committed one of the . In November, 1962, shortly after the purging of the judiciary and six months after Eichmann’s name had disappeared from the news, the long awaited trial of Martin Fellenz took place at Flensburg in an almost empty courtroom. Arendt's study of Adolf Eichmann at his trial---Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)---part of which appeared originally in The New Yorker, was a painfully searching investigation into what made the Nazi persecutor tick. I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history.” Finally, one of the motives in bringing Eichmann to trial was “to ferret out other Nazis—for example, the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers.”. 1976, Neuausg. (He was also the only such leader who in 1952 had denounced himself publicly for mass murder, but he was never prosecuted for it.) Her book is based on a series of … Eichmann in Jerusalem - Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative - a meticulous and unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century. “Is the name Adolf Eichmann, the name of the accused, mentioned in those twenty-nine volumes [in fact, it was thirty-eight]? The latters rule, as Mr. Hausner is not slow in demonstrating, is permissive; it permits the prosecutor to give press conferences and interviews for television during the trial (the American program, sponsored by the Glickman Corporation, is constantly interruptedbusiness as usualby real-estate advertising), and even spontaneous outbursts to reporters in the court building (he is sick of cross-examining Eichmann, who answers all qu… Whenever Eichmann thought back to the twelve years that were the core of his life, he declared this year in Vienna to have been its happiest and most successful period. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. See what's new with book lending at the Internet Archive. I decided that I had to do something to take matters of emigration into my own hands.”, Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, the point in his plea of his being “in the sense of the indictment, not guilty.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but that he had acted out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. It was filled with “survivors”—middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself—who knew by heart all that there was to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Hannah Arendt beschreibt in ihrem Bericht zudem noch, das die Judenverfolgung, also der Holocaust, in verschiedenen Regionen, also Ländern, stattfand, und es kein Schema, also Vorgabe, gab, denn das Verhalten der örtlichen Bevölkerung hatte auf das … He must have been frantic to make good, and certainly his success was spectacular. After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant; “That is quite an unwholesome book [Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch],” he told his guard.) Even in elementary school, I had a [Jewish] classmate with whom I spent my free time, and he came to our house—a family in Linz by the name of Sebba. What rotten luck!’ And I also said, ‘Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders of the Reichsführer nobody can get you out. At the trial, the testimony of three witnesses from Germany—former high-ranking officials of the Zionist Organization who left Germany shortly before the outbreak of the war—gave only the barest glimpse into the true state of affairs during the first five years of the Nazi regime. That must have been obvious to everyone who heard him utter his absurd claim.) “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone,” Ben-Gurion said, “but anti-Semitism throughout history.” The tone set by Ben-Gurion was faithfully followed by Hausner. Alas, nobody believed him. The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk”—except that they thought the emptiness feigned, and believed that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts, which were not empty but hideous. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions, though they may seem to be of greater import—of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations?” and “What was the extent to which the Allies shared the responsibility?,” of “How could the Jews, through their own leaders, coöperate in their own destruction?” and “Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?”—be left in abeyance. An “idealist,” according to Eichmann’s notions, was not simply a man who believed in an “idea” or a man who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant, linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, because the Nazis had changed the military “recipient of orders,” the Befehlsempfänger, into a Befehlsträger, “bearer of orders,” indicating, as in the ancient phrase “bearer of ill tidings,” the importance and the burden of responsibility that were supposedly conferred upon those who had to execute orders. But even without this new calamity a career in the Austrian Nazi Party would then have been out of the question; those who enlisted in the S.S. went on working at their regular jobs. Ihr Prozessbericht – zunächst in mehreren Folgen im New Yorker … In Jerusalem wurde der Prozessbeob-achterin augenblicklich bewusst, dass es ein Irrweg war, den Judenmord als letztlich metaphysisches Geschehen zu deuten und Täter wie Eichmann zu bösen Dämonen … It spent more time, more successfully, on a note that Franz Rademacher, the Jewish expert in the German Foreign Office, had scribbled on a document dealing with Yugoslavia, made during a telephone conversation, which read, “Eichmann proposes shooting.” This turned out to be the only “order to kill,” if that is what it was, for which there existed a shred of evidence. (Thus, Dr. Hunsche, who was personally responsible for a last-minute deportation of some twelve hundred Hungarian Jews, of whom at least six hundred were killed, received a sentence of five years of hard labor; Dr. Otto Bradfisch, of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units of the S.S. in the East, was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for the killing of fifteen thousand Jews; and Joseph Lechthaler, who had “liquidated” the Jewish inhabitants of Slutsk and Smolevichi, in Russia, was sentenced to three years and six months.) Sie war von der angesehenen amerikanischen Wochenzeitschrift "The New Yorker" entsandt worden. The German Army had occupied the Serbian part of Yugoslavia six months earlier, and had been plagued by partisan warfare ever since. In the words of the Reichsvertretung of the Jews in Germany (the national association of all communities and organizations, which had been founded in September, 1933, on the initiative of the Berlin Community, and was in no way Nazi-appointed), the intention of the Nuremberg Laws was “to establish a level on which a bearable relationship between the German and the Jewish people [became] possible”—to which, around the same time, a member of the Berlin Community who was a radical Zionist added, “Life is possible under every law. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him. Among the reasons he cannot always succeed is the simple fact that the proceedings happen on a stage before an audience, with the usher’s marvellous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of a rising curtain. “Of course” he had played a role in the extermination of the Jews; of course if he “had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher.” He went on to ask, “What is there to ‘admit’?” Now, he proceeded, he “would like to find peace with [his] former enemies”—a sentiment he shared not only with Himmler (who had expressed it during the last year of the war) and with the Labor Front leader Robert Ley (who, before he committed suicide in Nuremberg, had proposed the establishment of a “conciliation committee” consisting of the Nazis responsible for the massacres and the Jewish survivors) but also, unbelievably, with many ordinary Germans, who were heard to express themselves in exactly the same terms at the end of the war. Green Follow. And Justice turns out to be a much sterner master than the Prime Minister. And, according to Mr. Hausner, that amounted to the same thing, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction, whose role in the establishment of the iniquitous regime had been limited to them. Enter your email address below and we will send you your username. That was Adolf Eichmann.” Was it not logical to bring before the court all the facts of Jewish suffering (which, of course, were never in dispute) and then look for evidence that, in one way or another, would connect Eichmann with what had happened? Published on 16.02.2016. Did Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? This did not make him an “authority,” but it was enough to earn him an assignment as official spy on the Zionist offices and Zionist meetings. . One dollar, for instance, was sold for ten or twenty marks when its market value was 4.20 marks. He still awaits trial. The Nuremberg Laws had deprived the Jews of their political rights but not of their civil rights; they were no longer citizens (Reichsbürger), but they remained members of the German state (Staatsangehörige)—which meant that if they emigrated, they were not automatically stateless. He and his men and the Jews were all “pulling together,” and whenever there were any difficulties, the Jewish functionaries would come running to him “to unburden their hearts,” to tell him “all their grief and sorrow,” and to ask his help. Dezember 1961 für den millionenfachen Mord an Juden zur Verantwortung gezogen wurde. For the first time since the close of the war, German newspapers were full of stories about trials of Nazi criminals—all of them mass murderers—and the reluctance of the local courts to prosecute these crimes still showed itself in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out to those convicted. This, too, came unexpectedly; he himself had “never thought of such a thing, such a solution through violence,” and he described his reaction in almost the same words: “I lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out.” A similar blowing out must have occurred in 1932 in Salzburg, and from his own account it is clear that he cannot have been very much surprised when he was fired, though one need not believe his testimony that he had been “very happy” about his dismissal.