Furthermore, all correspondence referring to the matter was, subject to rigid "language rules,"
and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation" (Aussiedlung), and "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung); deportation - unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the "old people's ghetto" for privileged Jews, in which case it was called "change of residence" - received the names of
"resettlement" (Umsiedlung) and "labor in the East" (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily resettled in ghettos and that a certain percentage of them were temporarily used for labor. Under special circumstances, slight changes in the language rules became necessary. Thus, for instance, a high official in the Foreign Office once proposed that in all correspondence with the Vatican the killing of Jews be called the
"radical solution"; this was ingenious, because the Catholic puppet government of Slovakia, with which the Vatican had intervened, had not been, in the view of the Nazis, "radical enough" in its anti-Jewish legislation, having committed the "basic error" of excluding baptized Jews. Only among themselves could the "bearers of secrets" talk in uncoded language, and it is very unlikely that they did so in the ordinary pursuit of their murderous duties - certainly not in the presence of their stenographers and other office personnel. For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. Moreover, the very term "language rule" (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie. For when a "bearer of secrets" was sent to meet someone from the outside world - as when Eichmann was sent to show the Theresienstadt ghetto to International Red Cross representatives from Switzerland - he received, together with his orders, his "language rule," which in this instance consisted of a lie about a nonexistent typhus epidemic in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which the gentlemen also wished to visit. The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies.
Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."
The system, however, was not a foolproof shield against reality, as Eichmann was soon to find out. He went to Lublin to see Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, former Gauleiter of Vienna - though not, of course, despite what the prosecution maintained, "to convey to him personally the secret order for the physical extermination of the Jews," which Globocnik certainly knew of before Eichmann did - and he used the phrase "Final Solution" as a kind of password by which to identify himself. (A similar assertion by the prosecution, which showed to what degree it had got lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Third Reich, referred to Rudolf Höss, Commander of Auschwitz, who it believed had also received the Führer's order through Eichmann. This error was at least mentioned by the defense as being "without corroborative evidence." Actually, Höss himself testified at his own trial that he had received his orders directly from Himmler, in June, 1941, and added that Himmler had told him Eichmann would discuss with him certain "details." These details, Höss claimed in his memoirs, concerned the use of gas - something Eichmann strenuously denied. And he was probably right, for all other sources contradict Höss's story and maintain that written or oral extermination orders in the camps always went through the W.V.H.A.
and were given either by its chief, Obergruppenführer [lieutenant general] Oswald Pohl, or by Brigadefuhrer Richard Glücks, who was Hiss's direct superior. (Concerning the doubtful reliability of Höss's testimony see also R. Pendorf, Mörder and Ermordete, 1961.) And with the use of gas Eichmann had nothing whatever to do. The "details" that he went to discuss with Höss at regular intervals concerned the killing capacity of the camp - how many shipments per week it could absorb - and also, perhaps, plans for expansion.) Globocnik, when Eichmann arrived at Lublin, was very obliging, and showed him around with a subordinate. They came to a road through a forest, to the right of which there was an ordinary house where workers lived. A captain of the Order Police (perhaps Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth himself, who had been in charge of the technical side of the gassing of "incurably sick people" in Germany, under the auspices of the Führer's Chancellery) came to greet them, led them to a few small wooden bungalows, and began, "in a vulgar uneducated harsh voice," his explanations: "how he had everything nicely insulated, for the engine of a Russian submarine will be set to work and the gases will enter this building and the Jews will be poisoned. For me, too, this was monstrous. I am not so tough as to be able to endure something of this sort without any reaction.... If today I am shown a gaping wound, I can't possibly look at it. I am that type of person, so that very often I was told that I couldn't have become a doctor. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself, and then I became physically weak, as though I had lived through some great agitation. Such things happen to everybody, and it left behind a certain inner trembling."
Well, he had been lucky, for he had still seen only the preparations for the future carbon-monoxide chambers at Treblinka, one of the six death camps in the East, in which several hundred thousand people were to die. Shortly after this, in the autumn of the same year, he was sent by his direct superior Muller to inspect the killing center in the Western Regions of Poland that had been incorporated into the Reich, called the Warthegau. The death camp was at Kulm (or, in Polish, Chelmno), where, in 1944, over three hundred thousand Jews from all over Europe, who had first been "resettled" in the Lodz ghetto, were killed. Here things were already in full swing, but the method was different; instead of gas chambers, mobile gas vans were used. This is what Eichmann saw: The Jews were in a large room; they were told to strip; then a truck arrived, stopping directly before the entrance to the room, and the naked Jews were told to enter it. The doors were closed and the truck started off. "I cannot tell [how many Jews entered], I hardly looked. I could not; I could not; I had had enough. The shrieking, and . . . I was much too upset, and so on, as I later told Muller when I reported to him; he did not get much profit out of my report. I then drove along after the van, and then I saw the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life. The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers. And then I was off-jumped into my car and did not open my mouth any more. After that time, I could sit for hours beside my driver without exchanging a word with him. There I got enough. I was finished. I only remember that a physician in white overalls told me to look through a hole into the truck while they were still in it. I refused to do that. I could not. I had to disappear."
Very soon after that, he was to see something more horrible. This happened when he was sent to Minsk, in White Russia, again by Müller, who told him: "In Minsk, they are killing Jews by shooting. I want you to report on how it is being done." So he went, and at first it seemed as though he would be lucky, for by the time he arrived, as it happened, "the affair had almost been finished," which pleased him very much. "There were only a few young marksmen who took aim at the skulls of dead people in a large ditch." Still, he saw, "and that was quite enough for me, a woman with her arms stretched backward, and then my knees went weak and off I went." While driving back, he had the notion of stopping at Lwów; this seemed a good idea, for Lwów (or Lemberg) had been an Austrian city, and when he arrived there he "saw the first friendly picture after the horrors. That was the railway station built in honor of the sixtieth year of Franz Josef's reign" - a period Eichmann had always "adored," since he had heard so many nice things about it in his parents' home, and had also been told how the relatives of his stepmother (we are made to understand that he meant the Jewish ones) had enjoyed a comfortable social status and had made good money. This sight of the railway station drove away all the horrible thoughts, and he remembered it down to its last detail - the engraved year of the anniversary, for instance. But then, right there in lovely Lwów, he made a big mistake. He went to see the local S.S.
commander, and told him: "Well, it is horrible what is being done around here; I said young people are being made into sadists.
How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and children? That is impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane, our own people." The trouble was that at Lwów they were doing the same thing they had been doing in Minsk, and his host was delighted to show him the sights, although Eichmann tried politely to excuse himself. Thus, he saw another "horrible sight. A ditch had been there, which was already filled in. And there was, gushing from the earth, a spring of blood like a fountain. Such a thing I had never seen before. I had had enough of my commission, and I went back to Berlin and reported to Gruppenführer Müller."
This was not yet the end. Although Eichmann told him that he was not "tough enough" for these sights, that he had never been a soldier, had never been to the front, had never seen action, that he could not sleep and had nightmares, Müller, some nine months later, sent him back to the Lublin region, where the very enthusiastic Globocnik had meanwhile finished his preparations.
Eichmann said that this now was the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life. When he first arrived, he could not recognize the place, with its few wooden bungalows. Instead, guided by the same man with the vulgar voice, he came to a railway station, with the sign "Treblinka" on it, that looked exactly like an ordinary station anywhere in Germany - the same buildings, signs, clocks, installations; it was a perfect imitation. "I kept myself back, as far as I could, I did not draw near to see all that. Still, I saw how a column of naked Jews filed into a large hall to be gassed.
There they were killed, as I was told, by something called cyanic acid."
The fact is that Eichmann did not see much. It is true, he repeatedly visited Auschwitz, the largest and most famous of the death camps, but Auschwitz, covering an area of eighteen square miles, in Upper Silesia, was by no means only an extermination camp; it was a huge enterprise with up to a hundred thousand inmates, and all kinds of prisoners were held there, including non-Jews and slave laborers, who were not subject to gassing. It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, spared him the gruesome sights. He never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work - about twenty-five per cent of each shipment, on the average - that preceded it at Auschwitz. He saw just enough to be fully informed of how the destruction machinery worked: that there were two different methods of killing, shooting and gassing; that the shooting was done by the Einsatzgruppen and the gassing at the camps, either in chambers or in mobile vans; and in the camps elaborate precautions were taken to fool the victims right up to the end.
The police tapes from which I have quoted were played in court during the tenth of the trial's hundred and twenty-one sessions, on the ninth day of the almost nine months it lasted. Nothing the accused said, in the curiously disembodied voice that came out of the tape-recorder - doubly disembodied, because the body that owned the voice was present but itself also appeared strangely disembodied through the thick glass walls surrounding it - was denied either by him or by the defense. Dr. Servatius did not object, he only mentioned that "later, when the defense will rise to speak," he, too, would submit to the court some of the evidence given by the accused to the police; he never did. The defense, one felt, could rise right away, for the criminal proceedings against the accused in this "historic trial" seemed complete, the case for the prosecution established. The facts of the case, of what Eichmann had done - though not of everything the prosecution wished he had done - were never in dispute; they had been established long before the trial started, and had been confessed to by him over and over again. There was more than enough, as he occasionally pointed out, to hang him. ("Don't you have enough on me?" he objected, when the police examiner tried to ascribe to him powers he never possessed.) But since he had been employed in transportation and not in killing, the question remained, legally, formally, at least, of whether he had known what he was doing; and there was the additional question of whether he had been in a position to judge the enormity of his deeds - whether he was legally responsible, apart from the fact that he was medically sane. Both questions now were answered in the affirmative: he had seen the places to which the shipments were directed, and he had been shocked out of his wits. One last question, the most disturbing of all, was asked by the judges, and especially by the presiding judge, over and over again: Had the killing of Jews gone against his conscience? But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
But if the facts of the case were now established, two more legal questions arose. First, could he be released from criminal responsibility, as Section 10 of the law under which he was tried provided, because he had done his acts "in order to save himself from the danger of immediate death"? And, second, could he plead extenuating circumstances, as Section 11 of the same law enumerated them: had he done "his best to reduce the gravity of the consequences of the offense" or "to avert consequences more serious than those which resulted"? Clearly, Sections 10 and 11 of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 had been drawn up with Jewish "collaborators" in mind. Jewish Sonderkommandos (special units) had everywhere been employed in the actual killing process, they had committed criminal acts "in order to save themselves from the danger of immediate death," and the Jewish Councils and Elders had cooperated because they thought they could "avert consequences more serious than those which resulted." In Eichmann's case, his own testimony supplied the answer to both questions, and it was clearly negative. It is true, he once said his only alternative would have been suicide, but this was a lie, since we know how surprisingly easy it was for members of the extermination squads to quit their jobs without serious consequences for themselves; but he did not insist on this point, he did not mean to be taken literally. In the Nuremberg documents "not a single case could be traced in which an S.S. member had suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in an execution" [Herbert Jäger, "Betrachtungen zum Eichmann-Prozess," in Kriminologie and Strafrechtsreform, 1962]. And in the trial itself there was the testimony of a witness for the defense, von dem Bach-Zelewski, who declared: "It was possible to evade a commission by an application for transfer. To be sure, in individual cases, one had to be prepared for a certain disciplinary punishment. A danger to one's life, however, was not at all involved." Eichmann knew quite well that he was by no means in the classical "difficult position" of a soldier who may "be liable to be shot by a court-martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it" - as Dicey once put it in his famous Law of the Constitution - if only because as a member of the S.S. he had never been subject to a military court but could only have been brought before a Police and S.S. Tribunal. In his last statement to the court, Eichmann admitted that he could have backed out on one pretext or another, and that others had done so. He had always thought such a step was "inadmissible," and even now did not think it was "admirable"; it would have meant no more than a switch to another well-paying job. The postwar notion of open disobedience was a fairy tale: "Under the circumstances such behavior was impossible. Nobody acted that way." It was "unthinkable." Had he been made commander of a death camp, like his good friend Höss, he would have had to commit suicide, since he was incapable of killing. (Höss, incidentally, had committed a murder in his youth. He had assassinated a certain Walter Kadow, the man who had betrayed Leo Schlageter - a nationalist terrorist in the Rhineland whom the Nazis later made into a national hero - to the French Occupation authorities, and a German court had put him in jail for five years. In Auschwitz, of course, Höss did not have to kill.) But it was very unlikely that Eichmann would have been offered this kind of a job, since those who issued the orders "knew full well the limits to which a person can be driven." No, he had not been in "danger of immediate death," and since he claimed with great pride that he had always "done his duty,"
obeyed all orders as his oath demanded, he had, of course, always done his best to aggravate
"the consequences of the offense," rather than to reduce them. The only "extenuating circumstance" he cited was that he had tried to "avoid unnecessary hardships as much as possible" in carrying out his work, and, quite apart from the question of whether this was true, and also apart from the fact that if it was, it would hardly have been enough to constitute extenuating circumstances in this particular case, the claim was not valid, because "to avoid unnecessary hardships" was among the standard directives he had been given.
Hence, after the tape-recorder had addressed the court, the death sentence was a foregone conclusion, even legally, except for the possibility that the punishment might be mitigated for acts done under superior orders - also provided for in Section 11 of the Israeli law, but this was a very remote possibility in view of the enormity of the crime. (It is important to remember that counsel for the defense pleaded not superior orders but "acts of state," and asked for acquittal on that ground - a strategy Dr. Servatius had already tried unsuccessfully at Nuremberg, where he defended Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation in Göring's Office of the Four-Year Plan, who had been responsible for the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish workers in Poland and who was duly hanged in 1946. "Acts of state," which German jurisprudence even more tellingly calls gerichtsfreie or justizlose Hoheitsakte, rest on "an exercise of sovereign power" [E. C. S. Wade in the British Year Book for International Law, 1934] and hence are altogether outside the legal realm, whereas all orders and commands, at least in theory, are still under judicial control. If what Eichmann did had been acts of state, then none of his superiors, least of all Hitler, the head of state, could be judged by any court. The "act of state" theory agreed so well with Dr. Servatius' general philosophy that it was perhaps not surprising that he should have tried it out again; what was surprising was that he did not fall back on the argument of superior orders as an extenuating circumstance after the judgment had been read and before the sentence was pronounced.) At this point, one was perhaps entitled to be glad that this was no ordinary trial, where statements without bearing on the criminal proceedings must be thrown out as irrelevant and immaterial. For, obviously, things were not so simple as the framers of the laws had imagined them to be, and if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he has reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise.
In September, 1941, shortly after his first official visits to the killing centers in the East, Eichmann organized his first mass deportations from Germany and the Protectorate, in accordance with a
"wish" of Hitler, who had told Himmler to make the Reich judenrein as quickly as possible. The first shipment contained twenty thousand Jews from the Rhineland and five thousand Gypsies, and in connection with this first transport a strange thing happened. Eichmann, who never made a decision on his own, who was extremely careful always to be "covered" by orders, who - as freely given testimony from practically all the people who had worked with him confirmed - did not even like to volunteer suggestions and always required "directives," now, "for the first and last time," took an initiative contrary to orders: instead of sending these people to Russian territory, Riga or Minsk, where they would have immediately been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, he directed the transport to the ghetto of Lódz, where he knew that no preparations for extermination had yet been made - if only because the man in charge of the ghetto, a certain Regierungsprasident Uebelhör, had found ways and means of deriving considerable profit from "his" Jews. (Lódz, in fact, was the first ghetto to be established and the last to be liquidated; those of its inmates who did not succumb to disease or starvation survived until the summer of 1944.) This decision was to get Eichmann into considerable trouble. The ghetto was overcrowded, and Mr. Uebelhör was in no mood to receive newcomers and in no position to accommodate them. He was angry enough to complain to Himmler that Eichmann had deceived him and his men with "horsetrading tricks learned from the Gypsies." Himmler, as well as Heydrich, protected Eichmann and the incident was soon forgiven and forgotten.
Forgotten, first of all, by Eichmann himself, who did not once mention it either in the police examination or in his various memoirs. When he had taken the stand and was being examined by his lawyer, who showed him the documents, he insisted he had a "choice": "Here for the first and last time I had a choice... . One was Lódz. . . . If there are difficulties in Lódz, these people must be sent onward to the East. And since I had seen the preparations, I was determined to do all I could to send these people to Lódz by any means at my disposal." Counsel for the defense tried to conclude from this incident that Eichmann had saved Jews whenever he could - which was patently untrue. The prosecutor, who cross-examined him later with respect to the same incident, wished to establish that Eichmann himself had determined the final destination of all shipments and hence had decided whether or not a particular transport was to be exterminated - which was also untrue. Eichmann's own explanation, that he had not disobeyed an order but only taken advantage of a "choice," finally, was not true either, for there had been difficulties in Lódz, as he knew full well, so that his order read, in so many words: Final destination, Minsk or Riga.
Although Eichmann had forgotten all about it, this was clearly the only instance in which he actually had tried to save Jews. Three weeks later, however, there was a meeting in Prague, called by Heydrich, during which Eichmann stated that "the camps used for the detention of
[Russian] Communists [a category to be liquidated on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen] can also include Jews" and that he had "reached an agreement" to this effect with the local commanders; there was also some discussion about the trouble at Lodz, and it was finally resolved to send fifty thousand Jews from the Reich (that is, including Austria, and Bohemia and Moravia) to the centers of the Einsatzgruppen operations at Riga and Minsk. Thus, we are perhaps in a position to answer Judge Landau's question - the question uppermost in the minds of nearly everyone who followed the trial - of whether the accused had a conscience: yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.
Even during those weeks when his conscience functioned normally, it did its work within rather odd limits. We must remember that weeks and months before he was informed of the Führer's order, Eichmann knew of the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen in the East; he knew that right behind the front lines all Russian functionaries ("Communists"), all Polish members of the professional classes, and all native Jews were being killed in mass shootings. Moreover, in July of the same year, a few weeks before he was called to Heydrich, he had received a memorandum from an S.S. man stationed in the Warthegau, telling him that "Jews in the coming winter could no longer be fed," and submitting for his consideration a proposal as to "whether it would not be the most humane solution to kill those Jews who were incapable of work through some quicker means. This, at any rate, would be more agreeable than to let them die of starvation." In an accompanying letter, addressed to "Dear Comrade Eichmann," the writer admitted that "these things sound sometimes fantastic, but they are quite feasible." The admission shows that the much more "fantastic" order of the Führer was not yet known to the writer, but the letter also shows to what extent this order was in the air. Eichmann never mentioned this letter and probably had not been in the least shocked by it. For this proposal concerned only native Jews, not Jews from the Reich or any of the Western countries. His conscience rebelled not at the idea of murder but at the idea of German Jews being murdered. ("I never denied that I knew that the Einsatzgruppen had orders to kill, but I did not know that Jews from the Reich evacuated to the East were subject to the same treatment. That is what I did not know.") It was the same with the conscience of a certain Wilhelm Kube, an old Party member and Generalkommissar in Occupied Russia, who was outraged when German Jews with the Iron Cross arrived in Minsk for "special treatment." Since Kube was more articulate than Eichmann, his words may give us an idea of what went on in Eichmann's head during the time he was plagued by his conscience: "I am certainly tough and I am ready to help solve the Jewish question," Kube wrote to his superior in December, 1941, "but people who come from our own cultural milieu are certainly something else than the native animalized hordes." This sort of conscience, which, if it rebelled at all, rebelled at murder of people "from our own cultural milieu,"
has survived the Hitler regime; among Germans today, there exists a stubborn "misinformation"
to the effect that "only" Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews, were massacred.
Nor is this way of thinking that distinguishes between the murder of "primitive" and of "cultured"
people a monopoly of the German people. Harry Mulisch relates how, in connection with the testimony given by Professor Salo W. Baron about the cultural and spiritual achievements of the Jewish people, the following questions suddenly occurred to him: "Would the death of the Jews have been less of an evil if they were a people without a culture, such as the Gypsies who were also exterminated? Is Eichmann on trial as a destroyer of human beings or as an annihilator of culture? Is a murderer of human beings more guilty when a culture is also destroyed in the process?" And when he put these questions to the Attorney General, it turned out "He [Hausner]
thinks yes, I think no." How ill we can afford to dismiss this matter, bury the troublesome question along with the past, came to light in the recent film Dr. Strangelove, where the strange lover of the bomb-characterized, it is true, as a Nazi type - proposes to select in the coming disaster some hundred thousand persons to survive in underground shelters. And who are to be the happy survivors? Those with the highest I.Q.!
This question of conscience, so troublesome in Jerusalem, had by no means been ignored by the Nazi regime. On the contrary, in view of the fact that the participants in the anti-Hitler conspiracy of July, 1944, very rarely mentioned the wholesale massacres in the East in their correspondence or in the statements they prepared for use in the event that the attempt on Hitler's life was successful, one is tempted to conclude that the Nazis greatly overestimated the practical importance of the problem. We may here disregard the early stages of the German opposition to Hitler, when it was still anti-Fascist and entirely a movement of the Left, which as a matter of principle accorded no significance to moral issues and even less to the persecution of the Jews -
a mere "diversion" from the class struggle that in the opinion of the Left determined the whole political scene. Moreover, this opposition had all but disappeared during the period in question -
destroyed by the horrible terror of the S.A. troops in the concentration camps and Gestapo cellars, unsettled by full employment made possible through rearmament, demoralized by the Communist Party's tactic of joining the ranks of Hitler's party in order to install itself there as a
"Trojan horse." What was left of this opposition at the beginning of the war - some trade-union leaders, some intellectuals of the "homeless Left" who did not and could not know if there was anything behind them - gained its importance solely through the conspiracy which finally led to the 20th of July. (It is of course quite inadmissible to measure the strength of the German resistance by the number of those who passed through the concentration camps. Before the outbreak of the war, the inmates belonged in a great number of categories, many of which had nothing whatsoever to do with resistance of any kind: there were the wholly "innocent" ones, such as the Jews; the "asocials," such as confirmed criminals and homosexuals; Nazis who had been found guilty of something or other; etc. During the war the camps were populated by resistance fighters from all over occupied Europe.)
Most of the July conspirators were actually former Nazis or had held high office in the Third Reich. What had sparked their opposition had been not the Jewish question but the fact that Hitler was preparing war, and the endless conflicts and crises of conscience under which they labored hinged almost exclusively on the problem of high treason and the violation of their loyalty oath to Hitler. Moreover, they found themse