Summary
Chapter 7: The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate
In Eichmann’s own account, the main change in his disposition came not during the incident with the Jews being transported to Riga and Minsk, but at the Wannsee Conference. The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of the Nazi Undersecretaries of State on the lake of the same name outside Berlin. The purpose of the conference was to plan the Final Solution throughout the entirety of Europe. The conference determined “complicated legal questions” like whether half- and quarter-Jews would be killed or sterilized. The best methods of killing were also debated.
The conference was a moment of great personal achievement for Eichmann. He was by far the lowest ranking person there, and so it presented him with an opportunity to mix with his social betters. In effect, he was the secretary of the meeting, recording the concrete proposals made there. The Conference also allayed Eichmann’s misgivings about the Final Solution. Here he heard the death of as many as eleven million Jews being discussed as both desirable and practically achievable by the most respected people in Germany.
Eichmann quickly mastered the necessary expertise to arrange the transports to the killing centers. While he did so, the legal experts of the Nazi regime set up the legal framework to strip the Jews of their legal rights as citizens, turning them into people belonging to no state. That made it impossible for any country to inquire into their fate. It also enabled Germany to confiscate their property. Eichmann used his contacts among the Jewish Elder councils to fill the trains. The Jews went without protest. Arendt observes that the Wannsee Conference took place well before the actual horrors of war had descended on Germany itself.
Arendt now turns her attention to the role of Jewish leaders in their own destruction. She notes Eichmann’s surprise at the readiness with which they negotiated with him, often helping to locate Jews. In each country all of the work was done with the assistance of a central Jewish office, which was then liquidated when the work was done.
This was the case in the assimilated West, as well as in the shtetls (Jewish villages) and small cities of the East. Jews themselves made lists all of the Jews in the area and all their property. Jews themselves distributed the yellow stars. They made no reports of what was happening to the outside world.
Arendt observes that this aspect of the Holocaust is largely left out of the Eichmann trial, and the Israeli prosecution goes to some length to avoid it. The prosecution calls many witnesses to the stand to talk about the horror of the round-ups in Vilna and Kovno. But these always elide the mention of the Jewish councils themselves, giving a stilted and incomplete version of what happened.
Arendt notes that the effect of these testimonies was to create more of a “meeting” of survivors than a trial. The Israeli prosecution is careful to add legally irrelevant testimony from Jewish resistance fighters, lest the Jews be portrayed as too weak. The question of why the Jewish councils cooperated in their own ruin remains unanswered during the trial.
Arendt closes by scornfully rejecting the defense of those who claim to have been “inner emigrants”—physically present in Nazi Germany, but participating in no substantive way with the regime. Silence was in effect complicity. She observing cuttingly that “inner emigration” was the best-kept secret of the Nazi regime.
Chapter 8: Duties of a Law Abiding Citizen
Arendt observes that Eichmann frequently uses the word "duty" to describe his work. Stronger than obeying orders, duty connotes obeying the law. Eichmann often mentions following orders, but this is a flimsy defense since it is not legally applicable when the orders followed are obviously criminal in intent (i.e., executing civilians).
She believes that Eichmann has something deeper in mind. During the police examination, he mentions that he has lived his whole life according to the precepts of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Arendt points out that, to anyone with a passing knowledge of Kant, this would be absurd. Kant’s moral philosophy stresses the human capacity for forming judgments. That means that moral duty is distinct from blind obedience. Eichmann successfully defines what Kant refers to as the categorical imperative: “the principle of my will must be such that it could be the basis of a general law.”
This, of course, precludes theft and murder, neither of which could be the basis for a general law. Eichmann admits that he ceased living according to this principle when he was tasked with implementing the Final Solution. At that point, he was no longer “master of his own deeds.”
Arendt argues that, typical of many “little men” in German history, Eichmann has gone beyond the law and identified himself with the principle behind it. For Kant, that principle is human reason. For Eichmann, that principle was Hitler himself.
For Eichmann, “doing his duty” consisted of making as few exceptions as possible to the general rule that all Jews were to be exterminated. That brought him into conflict with his superiors, who often asked for such exceptions, especially once it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war. In 1944, Heinrich Himmler began issuing demands that the Jews be treated well, in hopes of favorable surrender terms with the Allies. These demands led to a “crisis of conscience” for Eichmann.
Eichmann ran into further difficulties when he was expected to set up a separate deportation operation in Hungary. This operation was meant to deal with Jews that Hungary had deported East, but who were now being sent back because of the Red Army’s advance westward. Eichmann was called in, despite the fact that killing the 800,000 Jews there would have entailed contradicting a direct order from Himmler.
The operation brought him into direct contact with another S.S. officer, Kurt Becher, whose job was to negotiate escapes for wealthy Jews. Becher’s activities outraged Eichmann. Ransoming the Jews could create difficulties with the Hungarian authorities, who expected to confiscate the Jews’ property.
Becher, currently living as one of the wealthiest men in Germany, was following Himmler’s new orders, which consisted of ransoming Jewish lives for money. Though Eichmann was involved in a scheme to trade a million Jews for ten thousand trucks for the German army, he never joined this more moderate wing of the S.S. He continued to defy Himmler by carrying on with the Final Solution. Eventually the moderate wing won out, with Becher being promoted over Eichmann.
The documents proving Eichmann’s commitment to the Final Solution (against the “moderate” orders issued by Himmler) are damning at his trial. Eichmann tries to explain that Hitler’s words had the force of law—the simple fact that he said something, or was likely to have believed something, was legally binding.
Arendt mentions the voluminous scholarship that attempts to preserve a law above and beyond that of the law of the land, to which a soldier can appeal when ordered to do something manifestly unlawful. She feels that such legal scholarship fails to reckon with totalitarianism, which sets about destroying these very distinctions.
Analysis
Together with the analysis of Eichmann’s “banality,” the “Wannsee Conference” chapter, which detailed the roles of the Jewish councils in the Holocaust, was considered by far the most inflammatory chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem upon its publication. Many Jewish readers noted Arendt’s provocative choice of words. Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi, was merely “banal,” a word free of moral connotations. Jews, on the other hand, were “responsible” for their own destruction.
Such a response is understandable. Arendt approaches this highly sensitive subject polemically and carelessly. She does not linger for long on the impossible moral position in which the Jewish councils found themselves, since the penalty for non-compliance would have been death.
The actual facts have been hotly debated. But it is more productive to approach the book not as a work of history, or journalism, but a work of political philosophy. Arendt herself observes that the accounts of Jewish cooperation are missing from the trial. Why, then, does she bother to drop them back in, and why does she color them as she does?
Leaving aside the unanswerable cultural-psychological question of whether Arendt is a “self-hating Jew,” we can find an answer in Arendt’s contemporaneous work on totalitarianism. What interests her is the way that Nazism was able to effect a complete and total collapse of moral judgment.
No one, not even the victims, spoke up against the Holocaust. The purpose of Nazi “terror,” i.e., concentration, brutal interrogation by the secret police, imprisonment, and murder, was to eradicate the distinction between murderer and victim. The suffocating atmosphere of violence, surveillance, and imprisonment in Nazi Germany was meant to drive home to everyone living in it that, at any moment, they might be called upon to kill or, alternately, to be killed. Crimes of the magnitude of the Holocaust can only occur by effectively destroying the distinctions between good and evil, legal and illegal. Making the victims complicit was necessary to demonstrate the Holocaust’s necessity and inevitability.
Less controversial, though also worth noting, is Arendt’s defense of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the emblem of the Enlightenment in Germany. Kant was famous for the moral dictum that we should always act in such a way that our actions could be the basis of a law—not according to our emotions. The defense itself comes later, but here Arendt takes seriously the possibility that his thought could have led to Nazism.
She points out that much violence in Germany history—referring implicitly to the religious wars of the 17th century, or the aggressive Prussian militarism of the nineteenth century—demanded the abdication of free judgment, and the free identification with a higher principle, whether the Protestant Reformation, or military honor. Later in Eichmann, she will defend Kant against this charge.
