Summary
Chapter 9
Having examined Eichmann, Arendt now proceeds to examine the consequences of his actions. She begins in the Reich itself. Here, many of the practical questions, like how many Jews to kill and how many to sentence to hard labor, were not decided by Eichmann. Eichmann functioned as a conveyor belt. He requisitioned trains from railroads, making certain that each one was full, so that no trains were “wasted.”
Arendt stresses that, unlike previous pogroms or attempts to drive Jews from certain geographic areas, the Holocaust is unique in that its goal is to eradicate all Jewish people. Nonetheless, the Holocaust took different forms in each country in Europe, some more successful than others. This was a surprise to the Nazis, who believed that anti-Semitism would unite Europe.
The first Jews were deported from Germany to Poland. The second wave was deported to unoccupied France, in violation of Germany’s agreement with France. Both transports appeared to be test cases. The Nazis wanted to see whether Jews would resist, how regular Germans would react to find their neighbors suddenly missing, and whether foreign governments would protest.
Both operations were successful. Nonetheless, the Nazis quickly learned that even Nazi sympathizers in Western governments were less sanguine about the “radical” solution than were the governments in the East. The ticklish issues of personal interventions, of high-ranking Nazis asking that Jewish acquaintances and other special cases be granted exceptions, was quickly solved by the establishment Theresienstadt, which was a less severe camp, set up to accommodate inspections by the International Red Cross.
Other problems were posed by Jews of mixed marriages, as well as foreign nationals. The solution was to announce to their respective governments that Germany was about to be cleansed of Jews. The Nazis wanted to see whether these governments would call these Jews back. To the Nazis’ surprise, they did. In 1943, the German Reich was declared judenrein, pure of Jews.
Chapter 9: Deportations from Western Europe: France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy
Concurrently with the deportations in Germany, Eichmann organized deportations in the West, with top priority being given to the collaborationist government in Vichy France, which had already begun introducing anti-Jewish legislation on its own initiative. Hundreds of thousands of stateless Jews from the East had fled to France, and France began by turning them over in 1942.
This undertaking could not have been done without the help of the French police. The French refused, however, to reverse the naturalizations of Jewish citizens, or to locate French Jews. Consequently, two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in France survived the war.
Virtually every other Western European country turned over its stateless Jews. Holland was placed under a civil administration, leaving the country completely at the mercy of the Germans. Here, the Nazis learned that the work of rounding up Jews was best done by a Jewish council. The Nazis misled the councils into believing that they only wanted to deport the stateless and German Jews in Holland. Rather than send storm troopers through the streets, the Nazis posted advertisements in newspapers expressing their wishes and let the Dutch do the rounding up themselves.
Only in Denmark and Italy did the local authorities actively resist the Nazis. When the Germans wanted to introduce the yellow badge, they were told that the King of Denmark would be the first to wear it. Denmark refused to turn over the stateless Jews there. By 1943, the German military position had become more dire, and the Scandinavian governments canceled their occupation agreements with the Nazis. Only those Jews who voluntarily presented themselves were shipped, and then to Theresienstadt. In Italy, the Nazis encounted a similar situation. There the authorities were simply deliberately sluggish in fulfilling the German orders.
Chapter 10: Deportations from the Balkans
Arendt continues to explain that it was Nazi policy to distinguish between the east and south-east of Europe as zones of activity. The Southeast, i.e. what was left of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a complicated case because the individual nation-states that had emerged from it were hardly homogenous. Many of these nations had treaties recognizing minorities within them—like the Jews—which did not automatically render Jewish people non-citizens when they were identified as Jews.
Croatia introduced anti-Jewish legislation on Nazi initiative, and carried out the deportations themselves, in order to benefit from the Nazi law that each country would absorb the property of the Jews it deported. In Serbia, things were more difficult because of the bitter partisan warfare against Nazi occupation. There, the German army gathered and killed the Jews as a reprisal against these attacks, gassing women and children in mobile vans.
Bulgaria posed problems because there was virtually no German support within the country. The country was lax in proposing anti-Jewish legislation and let Jews convert to avoid deportation. Only under great duress from Germany did the local authorities introduce the yellow star, and then Jews were not actively forced to wear it. In response, Germans murdered the king of Bulgaria, but this did not materially change the situation, and Nazi attempts there came to nothing. Greece, on the other hand, offered no such problems.
Chapter 11: Deportations from Central Europe
Throughout the trial, Eichmann maintained that, because Hitler wanted it, the Jews were going to be killed one way or another, so it would be better for it to be done in an orderly and relatively humane fashion. Arendt observes that the example of Romania offered a grim confirmation of this belief: here, Jews were simply loaded onto trains and ridden around until they either suffocated or died of starvation.
Hungary, too, eagerly participated in deportations; here there were no problems because they were attended to last. In Slovakia, resettlement went smoothly, until the ostensibly Catholic government began resisting once it became widely known what “resettlement” in fact entailed. At that point, the resettled Jews Slovakia had already given up were already dead.
Chapter 12: The Killing Centers in the East
The “East” as the Nazis understood it consisted of Poland, the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and occupied Russian territory. The Nazis divided the territory more or less this way into administrative units. This is where the killings actually took place: nearly all of the concentration camps were in this area. Many residents in Israel are from this area, and much of the testimony consists in letting these people have their “day in court.”
This wealth of testimony leads to the obvious problem that while according to Israeli law each defendant is innocent until proven guilty, in Eichmann’s case this is obviously untrue—in any case, Eichmann has confessed to shipping people to their deaths in full knowledge of what he was doing.
The judges therefore struggled to keep the proceedings within normal legal boundaries. The prosecution’s case rested on four questions. The first was whether Eichmann had any role with the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces that machine-gunned Jewish people in the East. In this case, the answer is no. Though Eichmann did read their reports, these groups were hand-picked by the upper echelons of the S.S.
The second was whether Eichmann had anything to do with shipping people from the Polish ghettos to the concentration camps in the east. Here, too, the answer was a likely no, because the deportations were often handled either by the S.S., or the local Nazi-installed governors.
The third was whether Eichmann had any authority about what happened at the extermination camps themselves. It was policy at the camps to separate harmless Jews, gas seventy-five percent of them, keeping the twenty-five percent that might useful for labor. Eichmann appears to have been telling the truth when he testified he did not set the policy at any of the centers, though he was fully informed as to what would happen to Jews who arrived there.
The fourth was whether Eichmann had any control over living conditions in the ghettoes in the East. Eichmann played no role here, either, in what happened in the East. Which, of course, is irrelevant: the judges could find Eichmann innocent of all charges and still be justified in giving him the death penalty.
Analysis
The four chapters describing the deportations, following by the description of the killing centers, constitute the climax of Arendt’s book, describing the actual implementation of the Final Solution. Arendt works through the Holocaust by geographic region, starting with the chronologically earliest cases, moving eastwards, where the treatment was far more brutal.
Considering the wealth of information that Arendt lays out here, the division of the material according to geography is a useful one. In effect, the geographical descriptions follow Eichmann’s career, as he had to travel to each country to make arrangements. And yet this division—as opposed to, say, a chronological breakdown of events from Eichmann’s perspective—also reveals several important things about Arendt’s view of the Holocaust.
The first is its universal, and not specifically German character. Each chapter describes the willful collaboration of local authorities. Here and there, Arendt mentions that certain countries—Hungary and Romania, for example—have rooted traditions of anti-Semitism, making Eichmann’s work easier. But largely every government and every local population submits—even the Jews themselves.
The Holocaust, as Arendt paints it, is therefore a universal moral (as well as legal) problem, not a uniquely German one. The “moral collapse” becomes more a condition of modernity than a specific event rooted in the unique views of the Nazi Party or the German populace. Anti-Semitism, as the actual hatred of Jewish people, consequently plays a lesser role in Arendt’s analysis.
The second reason for the geographical breakdown is that each country offers the opportunity to explore whether resistance to the Nazis was in fact possible. Arendt argues that it was—at least for national governments and non-Jewish local populations. Countries that refused to go along with Nazism were able to save their Jewish populations. Denmark, Italy and Bulgaria offer a counter-case to Eichmann. These histories show that even the most barbaric regimes work by shattering their victims’ sense of moral reasoning. They are proof that even in the face of the most iron-fisted dictatorship, there is room for resistance.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the narratives would be hotly contested for decades, at least into the 1990s, when France first publicly acknowledged and apologized for the Vichy regime. The question of France’s role is still hotly contested, while Poland recently passed a law making it illegal to discuss Poland’s role in the Holocaust.
This portion of the narrative also touches on Eichmann’s specific culpability in the East. Arendt believes that Israel is in the impossible position of trying to convict a mass murderer who has technically never murdered anyone, but who, at the same time, admitted openly to knowingly shipping millions of people to their death.
In the first chapter, Arendt refers to the trial as a “show trial”—the Communist trials in which purged bureaucrats were forced to give fake confessions before being executed. In fact, it is a “show trial” in the sense that Nazi victims, meant to be erased from the earth, are here given a forum and a stage.
Arendt clearly looks down on the ostensibly pedagogical aspect of the trial. She is unmoved by the part of the trial that is meant to teach Jewish people, and the world, about what happened in the Holocaust, as well as give people who suffered there a chance to face one of the men responsible for their suffering. Arendt believes that this pedagogical mission blurs the legal problems raised by Eichmann’s very existence, and winds up making the prosecution’s case seem questionable.
Once again, Arendt’s brusqueness can make it hard to sympathize with the larger point that she is making: that precisely because Nazism destroyed the distinction between legality and illegality, Eichmann represents an entirely new moral and legal phenomenon. Trying to slot him into old legal categories only damages the case of the prosecution.
The reader might be tempted to ask: since Eichmann admitted to helping organize the Holocaust, who cares what he did or did not do? Why is the prosecution wrong for wanting to publicize the story of the Holocaust at a time when it was by no means well-known, and when the danger of Germany collapsing again into Nazism was not unimaginable?
Arendt’s answer is that the transparent evil of someone like Eichmann does not free us of the responsibility of thinking through these contradictions—indeed, it makes the problem all the more pressing, and easy moral answers all the more suspect. Simply locking Eichmann up and throwing away the key is no solution.
