Summary
Chapter 13: Evidence and Witnesses
During the last weeks of the war, the S.S. was busy destroying all of the evidence that it possessed, trying to cover up the evidence of the Holocaust. All of this was pointless, since they had kept up correspondence with other government offices, whose correspondence fell into the hands of the Allies. This evidence is largely damning.
At the same time, Eichmann does not have the opportunity to cross-examine many of his witnesses, or to obtain documents that are crucial for him. The prosecution submits fifteen hundred documents in evidence; Eichmann’s lawyer submits only one hundred. There is clearly a difference in resources here. Eichmann’s lawyer claims that he is only in it for the money.
Up until this point, Arendt's narrative has relied largely on the Eichmann's extensive pre-trial statement to Israeli examiners. Now Eichmann himself is called to testify. He takes the stand at every session for a month. Arendt is unsurprised to find that he says absolutely nothing of substance—nothing that indicates that he grasps the severity of his crimes or the evil he has committed.
Arendt also notes that the witness testimony is often either suspiciously polished or extremely muddled. The majority of the witnesses are from Poland and Lithuania, where Eichmann had almost no influence. Only four of the witnesses testify about Theresienstadt.
The final witness is an Israeli lawyer. He testifies about his attempts find Holocaust survivors and convince them to come to Israeli. Arendt scornfully notes that his statement is more or less propaganda for Israel. He reports that many Jews want to go to a place where they would never have to lay eyes on a non-Jew again.
Arendt takes similar issue with the prosecution’s first witness, Zindel Grynszpan. His son assassinated a German secretary in Paris. In response to this assassination, the Nazi Party instituted the pogrom of Kristallnacht. The Israeli prosecution sees the younger Grynszpan as a martyr and a hero, ignoring the suffering that he caused. The German secretary he assassinated actually opposed the Nazis and was sympathetic to Jews.
There is also testimony from a writer who mentions a German sergeant named Schmidt. Schmidt forged papers for Jews and helped them escape from Poland. Arendt laments the fact that stories of German resistance to Nazism were not told more often. They are proof, she believes, that the desire of totalitarianism to create a world in which moral reflection, and therefore action, is impossible is always doomed to failure. Most people will comply, but some will not. And as long as some do not, the world remains habitable for human beings.
Chapter 14: Judgment, Appeal, Execution
Arendt closes by summarizing Eichmann’s activities for the remainder of the war, and afterward. Himmler puts a halt to the Holocaust, leaving Eichmann with nothing to do. He is shut out of his superiors’ daily lunches. After the war, he is caught by the Americans, but they cannot figure out who he is. A search began for him in earnest after the Nuremberg trials, where his name was repeatedly mentioned.
He worked as a lumberjack in Hamburg, and he soon contacted an underground organization for fleeing Germans that helped him relocate to Buenos Aires. There, he made contact with his family, who joined him. He worked for Mercedes-Benz, lived in poverty in a suburb of the city, and socialized with other ex-Nazis. He gave an interview to a Dutch journalist. Though it was anonymous, it gave his identity away.
Eichmann’s defense attacked the legality of his kidnapping from Argentina by the Israeli government. Arendt points out the irony that Israel’s claim that kidnapping Eichmann was an “act of state” is the same justification Eichmann gave for his own actions, and that Eichmann’s own statelessness after the war left him without rights, like Jews he had sent to their deaths. Eichmann signed a statement waiving his rights, and began cooperating with the authorities.
In December of 1961, Eichmann was found guilty of all charges. He was also found guilty of “crimes against the Jewish people” and “crimes against humanity." Arendt notes that this latter charge is redundant with the first one. He was also found guilty of belong to criminal organizations, i.e. the S.S., the S.D., and the Gestapo. The court acknowledged that Eichmann only “aided and abetted,” but argued that aiding and abetting the Nazi high command is tantamount to murder.
Eichmann appealed the judgment. Servatius launched an incompetent defense with a faulty list of witnesses who do nothing to help his case. Eichmann sent the Israeli prime minister a hand-written letter begging for clemency. His pleas were echoed by Jewish leaders in America and Israel. These pleas were all ignored, and Eichmann was hanged. Many people worldwide object to this punishment. Some believe that what Eichmann did was beyond the measure of the death penalty, while others think he should have been tortured.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whom Arendt holds in high esteem, worries that the death penalty for Eichmann will absolve German people of their guilt. Arendt believes that “guilt,” especially for collectives, is a useless sentiment. Buber claims to feel no pity for Eichmann, but Arendt thinks that precisely this sentiment misses the larger point of Eichmann’s trial, which is that we must at all cost try to feel sympathy with those on whom we pronounce our judgments.
Eichmann delivers pompous and pointless final words, and is executed. Arendt closes by observing that his absurd final moments prove the terrifying banality of evil.
Epilogue
In her epilogue, Arendt argues that many of the irregularities in Eichmann’s case wound up obscuring the legal, political, and moral issues around his trial. There were three major objections to the court's proceedings. The first was that Eichmann was tried under laws that were only retroactively applicable to him. Had the Nazis won the war, the argument runs, none of Eichmann’s actions would have been illegal. The second was that Eichmann’s kidnapping was illegal. The third was that, because Eichmann was being tried for “crimes against the Jewish people,” he should have faced an international court, not an Israeli one.
The Israeli court replied that the Nuremberg Trials set a precedent for their trial. If the legitimacy of that judgment was thrown out, then it would be impossible to try any Nazis, since they created a legal framework to enable them to murder the Jews with impunity.
To the second objection, Arendt considers it totally appropriate that the Jews, who now have a state, try Eichmann for crimes specifically against the Jewish people. There is no reason to presuppose that Jewish judges cannot be impartial.
The Jerusalem court argues that, since Eichmann’s crimes were against the Jews, only a Jewish state could speak for the victims. Arendt disagrees, noting that courts speak for the general public order, that is, for the law. Israel speciously claims “universal jurisdiction,” drawing on a legal precedent used to try piracy, and other crimes that do not occur on the soil of the country trying them.
Arendt speculates that Israel might have claimed that nationhood is not tied directly to territory, but observes that Israel was reluctant to try and establish any new kind of legal precedent. The kidnapping itself might be defended because, given Argentina’s laws, there would have been no other way to bring Eichmann to justice.
Arendt writes that Jews were largely resistant to the idea of Eichmann’s crimes being unprecedented anyway. Many Jewish people saw Eichmann simply as a continuation of the pogroms and expulsions that they’d faced for their entire history. Arendt argues that what is unprecedented about Eichmann’s case is the attempt to wipe all Jewish people off the face of the earth. For this reason, an international court might have been more advisable. But Israel refused to cede the opportunity to allow Jews to sit in judgment on a man like Eichmann.
Arendt believes that Israel threw away the opportunity to set a new legal precedent for genocide, choosing instead to try Eichmann as a murderer. This legal precedent might, like the laws against murder, serve as a deterrent. She argues that the legal community needs to address the growing possibility of trying more crimes against genocide. She also believes that Israel failed to understand that “crimes against the Jewish people” were, in their way, a crime against the entirety of humanity.
Arendt also aruges that the court failed to understand the new type of criminal that Eichmann represented. In her view, Eichmann and his like are not monsters, but completely normal. This realization requires a redefinition of crime, since crime is usually understood as the intent to do wrong. Eichmann is a criminal not because he intended to do wrong, but in a larger, more primordial sense: he violated the moral order of the world.
Arendt closes by reading her own judgment on Eichmann. She pronounces him guilty of having participated in the greatest crime in the history of the world, regardless of his motives. He refused to share the earth with the Jewish people, and so no one can be expected to share the earth with him. He must hang.
Analysis
The final three chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem return the focus to the specifically legal problems posed by the Eichmann and his trial. Here Arendt explains in detail the legal thinking of the Israeli court, her own legal thinking, and the legal thinking of Eichmann and his lawyer Servatius—albeit to a lesser extent, in that she considers their arguments to be clumsy, and made largely in bad faith.
As mentioned before, one aspect of the trial that continuously draws Arendt’s ire is its pedagogical function. The Israeli prosecution continuously turns over testimony to Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe whose contributions to the legal proceedings are, in Arendt’s view, dubious. Eichmann had no influence in the East, and the witness testimony is often muddled (when it isn’t obviously coached), giving it no legal bearing on the trial. It is there only to remind the world, which is watching, about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Arendt believes that, whatever emotional (or political) service the testimony serves, it actually underscores the legal difficulties of trying Eichmann, precisely because the implementation of the Holocaust was specifically designed in such a way as to shield men like Eichmann, without whom the exterminations could never have happened, from the consequences of their actions. By using the traditional legal category of murder to try and tie Eichmann directly to the killing centers in the East, the Israeli government is weakening its case, and often devolving into political propaganda.
Arendt gives particular attention to three cases of resistance described. The first, that of the Grynszpan, is that of violent resistance—characterized by the Israeli government as heroism. Arendt rejects this case because the young Grynszpan was a psychopath, who murdered a sympathetic German secretary and brought on Kristallnacht.
The second witness is the physician for the Germany Army, Bamm. Bamm says that resistance against the Nazis was completely impossible. Even the suspicion of disagreement would have been met with imprisonment or death.
Both examples are contradicted by the third, that of the German Sergeant Schmidt. Schmidt forged papers for Jews and helped them escape from Poland until he was caught and executed. Arendt holds up his very existence as proof of the self-defeating nature of totalitarianism. It was the aim of the German government under Hitler to dominate its citizens completely and totally. But this is, and always will be, impossible. Most people will always comply. But so long as there are individuals who refuse to cede their moral judgment, the earth will remain habitable. The existence of Schmidt stands as a counter-example both to Bamm and to the bluster of the Israeli prosecution.
Arendt takes larger issue with the failure of the Israeli government on two points. The first is their distinction of “crimes against the Jewish people” from “crimes against humanity.” Characterizing Eichmann as a criminal who has transgressed against the Jewish people specifically wastes the opportunity to deal head-on with the fact that Eichmann’s very existence is a threat to all of humanity. With the advent of nuclear weapons, which allow for the eradication of millions of people at a stroke, Arendt predicts there will be more Eichmanns to come.
Arendt is sympathetic to Israel’s desire to stress the specifically Jewish experience of the Holocaust. But by linking the Holocaust to the long history of pogroms and expulsions faced by the Jewish people, Israel has overlooked the terrifying newness of modern totalitarianism.
By the same token, Arendt believes that Israel has committed a serious error in attempting to use the legal categories of murder to try someone guilty of genocide. Genocide is distinct from murder in that it seeks to wipe a group of people out of existence entirely. It is committed by governments who inevitably do everything in their power to shield themselves from culpability—by establishing redundant bureaucracies, by having their judiciaries pass laws justifying the extremity of their actions. Israel might have collaborated with an international criminal court to create a legal framework against such actions. Instead, Israel found itself trying to prove that Eichmann had personally murdered a boy in Hungary.
Today, this suggestion sounds quaint. Such a court exists, at the Hague in the Netherlands. It has, in fact, tried numerous war criminals, most notably members of the Serbian leadership who carried out genocidal attacks against Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The existence of the Hague failed, however, to prevent these genocides in the first place—nor did it deter governments in Rwanda, Myanmar, Iraq, and Syria.
Arendt is right, however, to point out that trying such cases poses extreme legal difficulties because they are often carried out by militaries with the imprimatur of government legitimacy. We might consider America’s bombing of civilian populations in Cambodia during the Vietnam War as an example here.
Considering the technical legal analysis of these last chapters, the reader might be surprised by the metaphysical flavor of Arendt’s final pronouncement on Eichmann. Eichmann has transgressed the moral order of the world, in Arendt’s view. That the world has a moral order might come as a surprise to someone who has finished Eichmann in Jerusalem. The very concept has some of the grandeur of the “higher law” invoked by the Nazis to justify their crimes. By invoking pre-historic, Biblical categories to justify the eradication of the Jewish people—as being “unclean” or “vermin”—the Nazis brought these categories onto themselves. This ironical reversal is fitting, given the Eichmann ended his life as a dispossessed and stateless person himself.
