Naturally, I granted this request, and the same uncle came also to see me to ask me to intervene for some Viennese Jewish couple. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. After more than six weeks of detailed testimony, the prosecutor demanded the maximum penalty—a life sentence, to be served at hard labor. Eichmann’s astounding willingness, both in Argentina and in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. Rather, “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision,” he said in court, adding, “it happened so quickly and suddenly.” He had no time and less desire to be properly informed; he did not even know the Party program, and he had not read (as he never did read) “Mein Kampf.” Kaltenbrunner had said to him, Why not join the S.S.? 50 Jahre „Eichmann in Jerusalem ... die Arendt 1961 als Berichterstatterin für The New Yorker über den Prozess gegen den ehemaligen SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann schrieb. Get the ... Eichmann in Jerusalem—III. They were to watch a spectacle as sensational as the Nuremberg Trials; only this time, Mr. Hausner noted, “the tragedy of Jewry as a whole was the central concern.” In fact, said Hausner, “if we charge him [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews . (This fact was of some relevance to the trial. No one knew this better than the presiding judge, before whose eyes the trial began to deteriorate into a bloody spectacle, or, as the judgment called it, “a rudderless ship tossed about by the waves.” But if his efforts to prevent this were often defeated, the defeat was, strangely, in part the fault of the defense, which hardly ever rose to challenge any testimony, no matter how irrelevant or immaterial it might be. It was one thing to ferret out mass murderers and other criminals from their hiding places, and it was another thing to find them prominent and active in the public realm—to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administrations whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime. While the German Federal Republic has not yet recognized the State of Israel—presumably out of fear that the Arab countries might thereupon recognize Ulbricht’s Germany—it has paid seven hundred and thirty-seven million dollars in reparation to Israel during the last ten years; the reparation payments will soon come to an end, and Israel is now trying to arrange with West Germany for a long-term loan. Der Originaltitel lautet „Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil“. Ad Choices, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. There was, finally, his greatest ambition—to be promoted to the job of police chief in some German town. The German Army had occupied the Serbian part of Yugoslavia six months earlier, and had been plagued by partisan warfare ever since. Eighty million Germans had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s nature. It was the fact that “here matters of emigration were dealt with by a man who did not belong to the police force” that made Eichmann indignant, “because I had to help and to implement deportation, and matters of emigration, where I considered myself an expert, were assigned to a man who was new to the unit. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? New York: The Viking Press, 1963. The two desires coincided, and he, Eichmann, could “do justice to both parties.” At the trial, he never gave an inch when it came to this part of the story, though he agreed that today, when “times have changed so much,” the Jews might not be too happy to recall this “pulling together,” and he said he did not want “to hurt their feelings.”. Im Jahr darauf erschien die Studie in Deutschland: „Eichmann in Jerusalem. Once Eichmann understood how the whole thing worked—or, rather, did not work—he “took counsel with himself,” as he said in Jerusalem, and “gave birth to the idea that I thought would do justice to both parties.” He imagined “an assembly line, at whose beginning the first document is put, and then the other papers, and at its end the passport would have to come out as the end product.” This plan could be realized if all the offices concerned—the Ministry of Finance, the income-tax people, the police, the Jewish Community, and so forth—were housed under the same roof and forced to do their work on the spot, in the presence of the applicant, who would no longer have to run from office to office, and who, presumably, would also be spared some humiliating chicanery and certain expenses for bribes. Read more from Hannah Arendt on The New Yorker . We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history.” Finally, one of the motives in bringing Eichmann to trial was “to ferret out other Nazis—for example, the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers.”. Nüchtern war auch Hannah Arendt bei der Prozessbeschreibung für den New Yorker vorgegangen, aus der 1963 ihr berühmtes Buch Eichmann in Jerusalem wurde. The audience is supposed to represent the whole world, and in the first few weeks it indeed consisted chiefly of newspapermen and magazine writers who had flocked to Jerusalem from the four corners of the earth. Log In. This was also the year when Germany, having left the League of Nations in 1933, prepared, far from secretly, the occupation of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. The insight of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” … The trial was supposed to show them what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life. Eichmann in Jerusalem - Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen. “Is the name Adolf Eichmann, the name of the accused, mentioned in those twenty-nine volumes [in fact, it was thirty-eight]? 1976, Neuausg. We owe to this strange craze the preservation of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry.) Its author, Doris Lankin, cites a decision of Israel’s Supreme Court whereby two fathers who had “abducted their children and brought them to Israel” were directed to send them back to their mothers, living abroad, who had a legal right to their custody. Die Politologin Hannah Arendt, die den Nationalsozialisten knapp über Frankreich nach New York entkommen war, schrieb über den Prozess ursprünglich im Auftrag der Zeitschrift The New Yorker Reportagen, dann das Buch Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt was a journalist for the newspaper “The New Yorker” when she saw the Eichmann Trial in Israel in 1961. Green . Dezember 1961 für den millionenfachen Mord an Juden zur Verantwortung gezogen wurde. Get email notification for articles from David B. The results were amazing. All rights reserved. And then I asked him how he was. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi murderers, it was difficult not to suspect that this objection was made in bad faith. “When the high Party officials drove along,” he said, “there were commando guards with them, men standing on the running boards of the cars. Immediately below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct exchanges between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, Adolf Eichmann, the German-speaking accused party, like all the other foreigners in the courtroom, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy—frequently incomprehensible—in German. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. The New Yorker, March 16, 1963 P. 58. According to what he told Captain Less, he joined the S.D. 15 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (fourth edition). Eichmann, of course, could not at that time have known anything of this, but he seems to have known nothing even of the nature of the S.D. Rademacher himself explained the incident much more reasonably at his own trial, before a West German court in 1952: “The Army was responsible for order in Serbia and had to kill rebellious Jews by shooting.” (This sounded more plausible but was a lie, for we know—from Nazi sources—that the Jews were not “rebellious.”) If it was difficult to interpret a remark made over the phone as an order, it was more difficult to believe that Eichmann had been in a position to give orders to Army generals. p. 260 Trude Feldman (1,197 words) [view diff] exact match in snippet view article find links to article Middle East since she covered the 122 sessions of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem . What Eichmann failed to tell the presiding judge in cross-examination was that he had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as travelling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company became fed up with him, and that from a humdrum life without significance or consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it; namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and make a career. . : Eichmann in Jerusalem. Thus, Eichmann’s repeated violent denunciations, in Jerusalem, of Julius Streicher, the insane and obscene editor of Der Stürmer, and Streicher’s pornographic anti-Semitism were perhaps personally motivated, expressive of more than the routine contempt that an “enlightened” S.S. man was supposed to show toward the vulgar passions of lesser Party luminaries. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen, München: Piper 1964, 4. Seven months after Eichmann’s arrival in Jerusalem—and four months before the opening of the trial—Richard Baer, successor to Rudolf Höss as commandant of Auschwitz, was finally arrested. Als Reporterin für den New Yorker beobachtet sie 1961 in Jerusalem den Prozess gegen den Naziverbrecher Adolf Eichmann. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him. They lived in a fool’s paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a “legal solution” of the Jewish problem. Eichmann was properly grateful; in fact, the Jews in his family were among his “private reasons” for not hating Jews. The Jews “desired” to emigrate, and he, Eichmann, was there to help them, because it happened that at that time the Nazi authorities had expressed a desire to see their Reich judenrein. The moment when this idyll came to an end—on Pentecost, 1933—was among the few dates he always remembered. In brief, I had mistaken them [Himmler’s S.D. ] Hannah Arendt schlägt dem Magazin The New Yorker vor, über den Prozess in Jerusalem zu … I can’t get you out. The poet Robert Lowell proclaimed Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” a “terrifying expressionist … It was now supposed to consist of Israelis, and, specifically, of those who were too young to know the story or, as in the case of Oriental Jews, had never been told it. He was able to make a good living during a time of severe unemployment, and he was still living with his parents, except when he was out on the road. He told me all his grief and sorrow. Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964. (He always had trouble remembering the exact date of the outbreak of the war or of the invasion of Russia.) Whenever Eichmann thought back to the twelve years that were the core of his life, he declared this year in Vienna to have been its happiest and most successful period. “At one side you put in a Jew who still has some property and, let us assume, a factory, or a shop, or some bank account, and he goes through the whole building from counter to counter, from office to office, and he comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport in which it says: ‘You must leave the country within a fortnight. Of course, the perfect “idealist,” like everybody else, had his personal feelings, but if they came into conflict with his “ideal,” he would never permit them to interfere with his actions. “Whatever I prepared and planned, everything went wrong,” he said. . Das … is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. . that I had not once to do it”—for he said explicitly that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect. New York: Penguin Books. Credit. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Of these provisions, only the last was of practical significance; the others merely legalized a de-facto situation. And then I said to Höss, ‘Work—Storfer won’t have to work!’ Höss said, ‘Everyone works here.’ So I said, ‘O.K. In Eastern Europe killing of Jews & other so-called enemies of the state had been going on in an unorganized way, usually by shooting. This edition contains further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript commenting on the controversy that arose over her book. Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong)—of the wrongdoer who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? Are these the “positive ideas” a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? When Eichmann was captured, Chancellor Adenauer had foreseen embarrassment and had voiced a fear that the trial would “stir up again all the horrors” and produce a new wave of anti-German feeling throughout the world—as it did. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. At any rate, he did not enter the Party out of conviction, nor did he ever become convinced by it; whenever he was asked to give his reasons, he repeated a set of embarrassed clichés about the Treaty of Versailles and unemployment. “I cannot remember speaking to a Christian during all my journeys over Germany.” Now, the Jews felt, having been given laws of their own, they would no longer be outlawed; if they kept to themselves—as they had been forced to do anyhow—they would be able to live unmolested. The journalists remained faithful for no more than two weeks, and then the audience changed drastically. She later expanded it into her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I mention this only to show that I myself had no hatred against Jews, for my whole education through my mother and my father had been strictly Christian, and my mother, because of her Jewish relatives, had different opinions from those current in S.S. circles.” He went to considerable lengths to prove that he had never harbored any ill feelings against his victims, and, what is more, had never made any secret of that fact: “I explained this to Dr. [Josef] Löwenherz [head of the Jewish Community in Vienna] as I explained it to Dr. [Rudolf] Kastner [associate president of the Zionist Organization in Budapest]; I think I told it to everybody, each of my men knew it, they all heard it from me sometime.