The Eichmann Trial
And the Crooked shall be made straight.
by Jacob Robinson.
Macmillan. 406 pp. $6.95.
Justice in Jerusalem.
by Gideon Hausner.
Harper & Row. 472 pp. $12.50.
Jacob Robinson’s extraordinarily erudite book might have become the classic work on the Jewish catastrophe of the last war, had not its author limited himself to a very specific objective: a critique, or, more accurately, a total demolition, of Hannah Arendt’s by now famous Eichmann in Jerusalem. To write a book against another book is a delicate undertaking. A work of this sort easily leaves itself open to the suspicion of being merely an ad hominem polemic, not to say a rather petty quarrel with an author whose chief failing might have been nothing more than her success. The task is rendered all the more thankless, moreover, by the fact that in an attempt of this kind, it is not the challenger, but rather his adversary, who has the choice of terrain and weapons. The critic, for his part, forced into the role of arbitrator between the two, does not have an easy task of it.
By now, the principal conclusions reached by Hannah Arendt are well known. In brief, she suggested that the trial of Eichmann suffered from serious juridical deficiencies; that the accused was neither more nor less evil than the average man (“the banality of evil”); and that, participating in this banality, the Jews of Europe in various ways, shared the responsibility for their own plight. These conclusions she derives from an examination of the historical facts emerging either out of the trial itself, or from her own reading. Mr. Robinson, who knows more facts, and knows them better than she does, addresses himself to demonstrating systematically that Miss Arendt’s book abounds in errors, and that as a philosopher, she lacks both training and a sense of historic prudence. But in doing so, what does he in turn finally succeed in proving? Here is an example: Eichmann affirmed in the course of his trial that he had had nothing to do with the deliveries of the lethal Zyklon B gas to the death camps, and Miss Arendt takes his word for this, as well as for other statements. Mr. Robinson, however, objects that the administrator of the Final Solution could not have been unimplicated in this aspect of the undertaking, and he cites documents in support of this. He is no doubt right. But wherein does this particular error of Hannah Arendt, any more than her numerous other errors, disqualify her principal claims? What difference does it make, to take another example, if the number of Jews deported from France was about 80,000, and not 52,000? When in the annals of scholarship, have technical errors ever hindered people of talent from arriving at valid and fruitful results? And where is that historical work in which a badly-intentioned, dedicated, hostile critic could not find a certain number of errors? Miss Arendt’s book, after all, did not pretend to be a work of historic erudition. It appeared first, let us recall, as a series of articles in the New Yorker, and in fact it amounts to a kind of philosophic reportage on the problem of good and evil, in the context of the Hitlerian enterprise of genocide.
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Essentially, therefore, the issue comes down to a moral debate devolving more upon judgments of value than on facts. Robinson addresses himself primarily to the matter of factual errors; yet it is in the passages where he raises the moral questions that he is—and by far—at his most interesting and most convincing. On these points, his work is remarkably effective in shedding light on the deepseated bias of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Thus, he carries great conviction, for example, when he reproaches Miss Arendt for showing consistent hostility to the witnesses in the trial—that is, the spokesmen for the victims; for referring ironically to Abba Kovner, a Jew who resisted, while invoking the name of a German counterpart, Anton Schmidt, with emotion; for treating her venerable compatriot, the late Rabbi Leo Baeck of Berlin, very cavalierly; for tending to deny the very fact of Jewish resistance, and for retrojecting this tendency into the past by maintaining that at the time of the Tsarist pogroms, the Jews let themselves be butchered without offering the slightest resistance.
Here we approach the central point of the debate, the one that in all the polemics about Eichmann in Jerusalem has proven the most explosive: is it correct that the Jews through their own leaders [i.e., the Jewish councils], “cooperated in their own destruction”—whence their complicity with the Nazi evil? As a philosopher, Miss Arendt has a tendency to systematize and to generalize (especially in connection with the role and the moral conduct of the Jewish councils), thus offering Mr. Robinson as a historian ample opportunities to question her findings.
Mr. Robinson has no difficulty in compiling a long list of errata on this score, and he shows himself the more prudent in abstaining from asking the reasons for Miss Arendt’s one-sided distortion of the past. For my part, I think it is the Jew in her that sharpens her critical sense where her fellow Jews are concerned, to the point where she practices a kind of double standard, very much in the manner of certain prominent Jewish intellectuals of the past and present. (The list of these would be long and brilliant; perhaps it is not entirely accidental that the first historical essay written by Hannah Arendt should have been devoted to the fascinating, and tragic, Rachel Varnhagen von Ense, nee Rachel Lewin, the first of the great German-Jewish “self-haters.”)
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The critical chapter of And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight is the one devoted to “Jewish Behavior before the Disaster.” To Miss Arendt’s thesis about the “specter of universal cooperation of the Jews” (“the stifling, poisoned atmosphere which has surrounded the Final Solution”), Robinson opposes a far more comforting view of things, multiplying examples of resistance active or passive, of sacrifices made by rabbis and community leaders, in conformity with talmudic precepts and glorious historical precedents. He, too, can be reproached with a tendency to one-sided selection of facts, for there is no denying that his vision of the confrontation between the Nazis and the Jews is perfectly Manichean. Still, in the infinitely rich fabric of history, there are situations for which such an approach and its corresponding clichés, irritating though they may be, constitute a better approximation of the truth than a more subtly shaded picture would.
Was the trial of Eichmann a fair trial? Did Israel trample international law underfoot? During 1960 and 1961 this debate raged among specialists on the subject. Not being a jurist, I confess I was often incapable of following their reasoning, or of verifying the validity of the precedents they invoked apropos a trial whose salient feature was the legally unprecedented nature of the crime involved. Can human justice function in a satisfactory way without relying upon legal precedents? It must be acknowledged that Mr. Robinson is a better jurist than Miss Arendt, and that the eighty pages he devotes to the defense both of the Nuremberg trials and the one at Jerusalem are probably a model of juridical discussion: but the few words with which a French philosopher not long ago characterized the Eichmann Trial—“a trial both indispensable, and impossible”—seem to me to constitute a more adequate judgment.
And it is a judgment which could perhaps be applied equally to Robinson’s book. A methodical correction of Miss Arendt’s oversights and errors in judgement was indispensable; nevertheless, given the force of her dialectic, the sincerity of her convictions, and the solace which she doubtless provides to a certain class of readers, I ask myself whether, on both sides of the Atlantic, a vast public will not continue to base its judgment of who bears the responsibility for genocide upon the paradoxical Eichmann in Jerusalem.
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Gideon Hausner, prosecuting attorney of the Eichmann trial and himself a target of Miss Arendt’s criticism, has undertaken yet another refutation of her thesis. Justice in Jerusalem is a lawyer’s book, tightly argued and richly documented. Mr. Hausner, unlike Jacob Robinson, has taken pains to set his argument within the framework of a comprehensive survey of the Final Solution, which he narrates with a literary skill far superior to that displayed in similar treatments of this subject. In addition, he makes use of several previously unpublished documents, including sections of the confession dictated by Eichmann, shortly before his capture in Buenos Aires, to the newspaperman Sassen.
Although moderately successful as a narrative, however, Justice in Jerusalem suffers perceptibly from a tendency toward oversimplification and a lack of historical perspective. Mr. Hausner’s main premise is that Eichmann was the very embodiment of anti-Semitic evil (hence perfectly suited to his role of executor of the Final Solution) and that Germany itself, ever since the middle ages, has been a hotbed of anti-Jewish feeling. In making this second point, Mr. Hausner compresses a millennium of German history into two pages, in the course of which he commits at least two minor errors (Heinrich von Treitschke was a historian, not a “political scientist”; Paul Boetticher-Lagarde was not a “novelist” but an orientalist). But, more seriously, it is his first point, concerning Eichmann as the personification of absolute Evil, which Mr. Hausner fails to make plausible, despite the abundance and the variety of his arguments. Indeed, some of the evidence he produces conveys the opposite impression:
Sometimes, he [Eichmann] provided a droll illustration of the way his mechanistic mind operated. One morning he was given by mistake six slices of bread for breakfast instead of the usual two. He ate all six. When the guard asked him whether he would like to have six slices in the future, he replied, “Oh, no. Two are quite enough. But when you give me six, I have to eat them.”
Such a pitiful display of servility, one cannot help but feel, ill becomes a candidate for the office of Evil Genius. (One is reminded of the sense of incongruity felt by many spectators at the trial—including, most notably, Miss Arendt—between the man and the job he performed.) The question of innate evil aside, one inclines to agree with the defense attorney’s contention that in a normal political order Eichmann—whatever his private opinions—would have led a model existence. We might also recall that Eichmann assured the court that he was not an anti-Semite, an assertion that might be taken as further proof of his mendacity, but which also raises the question of what it means to be an anti-Semite under a regime which virtually proclaims anti-Semitism as the official religion. Intense hatred, like intense love, seems to flourish on contradiction; once sanctioned by public authority, it loses a great deal of its attraction—a phenomenon which appears to be confirmed by everything we know about the psychological character of those responsible for carrying out the genocide.
The crucial problem, then remains that of the criminal state, a state which can allow a person like Eichmann to assume satanic proportions. The mass murders were a collective crime, perpetrated by innumerable persons, and involving the tacit complicity of an entire nation. (Mr. Hausner, it must be said, harbors no great affection for the Germans, and indeed is as hard on present-day Germany as on the Germany of 1933; he refuses to believe that the “national spirit” has undergone any substantial change since the time of Hitler.)
There remains to be considered the attitude of the Western countries toward the genocide. The indictment is a familiar one, and has been made before, although Mr. Hausner adds a number of new documents to the dossier, taken in particular from the wartime English and American press. Even at a distance of twenty-five years, it makes for depressing reading, a timely reminder of the way in which every armed conflict seems to extend indefinitely the normal boundaries of hypocrisy and barbarity.
Justice in Jerusalem is a useful contribution, no less so for being readily accessible to the intelligence of an average schoolboy. That its accessibility is achieved at great price, through a radical simplification of the issues—both social and ethical—raised by the Nazi genocide, will no doubt be accounted its greatest fault. Mr. Hausner might equally be reproached for having cultivated to excess the epic style, and for failing to achieve a truly profound understanding of the problem he raises. Yet if the danger exists that we might forget the lessons of the Holocaust, it is at least equally dangerous for us to “understand” it too well, by committing the error of over-sophistication.
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