John Sparrow's review of the books by Hannah Arendt and Moshe Pearlman on
the Adolf Eichmann trial appeared in the TLS of April 30, 1964.
MOSHE PEARLMAN: The Capture and Tried of Adolf Eichmann. 666pp. Weidenfeld and
Nicolson. £2 10s.
HANNAH ARENDT: Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil.
275pp. Faber and Faber. 25s.
CHRIST SAYS “JUDGE NOT; but we must judge”, so Dean Inge; and surely the
Decanal is to be preferred to the Divine injunction. Those who refuse ever
to pass sentence on their fellow-men may be actuated by the noblest of
motives, but they fail in their duty as members of a society acknowledging
the authority of a moral law. If, in this workaday world, we wait for the
sinless to cast the first stone, crime will remain unpunished and wickedness
go for ever unreproved. Perhaps, however, the Gospel exhortation should be
taken not as a guide to action but as a warning to those who are too ready
to condemn the erring, a plea for deeper understanding of impugned
behaviour: if you really understand, it may even imply, the grounds for
condemnation will disappear: tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.
But then, ought we to try to understand Hitler completely, if complete
understanding will lead us to tolerate or condone his actions? (Indeed, the
maxim really requires us to tolerate them even if our understanding is
imperfect, for it would be wrong that another should suffer for a failure in
our own percipience.) And why, after all, we may ask, should understanding
necessitate forgiveness? Forgiveness implies a recognition that guilt exists
– and a readiness to overlook it that springs not from the intelligence but
from the heart. If the understanding is to play any part in the process, it
must surely be at an earlier stage, by removing the concept of guilt itself;
full insight might reveal in human behaviour an ineluctable process of cause
and effect that negates the possibility of moral differentiation between one
action and another: tout comprendre, c’est rien pardonner – for him who
really understands, perhaps, there is nothing to forgive.
Those who believe in the existence of moral values will not be able to accept
this solution. So long as there are duties, they will insist, we have a duty
to judge – and to judge, so far as in us lies, correctly; but we may be
helped to right judgment – and Christ’s words may serve to remind us of the
fact – by humility and by that product of intelligence and sympathy that is
called imagination.
Mr. Moshe Pearlman, in his approach to Eichmann’s trial, does not seem to be
much troubled by imagination, by humility, or by awareness of the finer
issues involved in the act of moral judgment. His solid volume of more than
600 pages, which recounts Eichmann’s story from the moment when the
kidnappers pounced on their prey in an obscure suburb of Buenos Aires to the
dawn hour two years later when his ashes were scattered over the
Mediterranean, reads from beginning to end like nothing so much as a piece
of propaganda from the pen of an unofficial Public Relations Officer of the
State of Israel. He is assailed by no doubts about the juridical validity of
the proceedings or the ethical foundations upon which they were based; he
describes with unattractive relish the hunting-down and capture of the
fugitive; he records with apparent satisfaction the “roar of applause” that
broke out in the Knesset when the Prime Minister announced that Eichmann was
to be brought to trial; he regards the prisoner quite simply as “the man who
personified the forces of darkness”; and he exhibits his captive in the
glass dock in the Jerusalem courtroom as if he were a noxious insect in a
killing-bottle, spinning and twitching convulsively, in full view of a
gratified audience, who know as well as does their victim that he is doomed.
Mr. Pearlman’s book at least performs one service for the student who is
interested in the “literature” concerning Eichmann’s trial: it makes it
easier to understand, if not to accept, the spirit in which Dr. Hannah
Arendt composed her study of the proceedings. Eichmann in Jerusalem grew out
of the “eye-witness” account of the trial that its author wrote for the New
Yorker, but its primary purpose would seem to be to protest against just
such propaganda as is served up by Mr. Pearlman.
Dr. Arendt is well aware of the diffidence that should attend a moral judgment
on any issue, and in particular on the issues underlying the case before
her; she does not indeed defend Eichmann, but she is measured in her
condemnation of him; she does not see him as the personification of “the
forces of darkness” or, in the prosecution’s phrase, “a perverted sadist”;
she believes him to have been not a monster but (and this presumably is the
purport of her rather cheap subtitle) an ordinary man. She goes carefully
into the juridical foundations of the proceedings; she does not accept Mr.
Pearlman’s surprising description of the trial as “due process of law”, and
she deplores in particular the politically directed attempt to combine with
the prosecution of an individual a demonstration of what the Jewish race
suffered at the hands of Hitler and his followers – an attempt that involved
producing a huge volume of evidence concerning events with which the
prisoner himself had little or nothing to do.
Dr. Arendt considers at some length, but only to reject them, objections to
the proceedings based on their “irregularities and abnormalities”,
contrasting these (not very clearly, however) with “the central, moral,
political and even legal problem that the trial inevitably posed”. She
disposes, with a brisk petitio principii, of the objection that Eichmann was
tried under a retroactive law, and dismisses (rightly, no doubt) any
suggestion of “the possible partiality of Jewish judges”.
She is not so happy about the kidnapping of the prisoner, suggesting that it
might have been justified, or the Court’s jurisdiction established (her
argument does not seem quite coherent at this point), by a re-definition of
the territorial principle on the basis “that ‘territory’, as law understands
it, is a political and a legal concept, and not merely a geographical term”.
Her argumentation here is a good example of the lengths to which her
perverse cleverness can carry her. “No State of Israel”, she says, “would
ever have come into being if the Jewish people had not created and
maintained its own specific in-between space throughout the long centuries
of dispersion” – therefore Eichmann’s crimes, in the eyes of the law, were
committed (and he himself captured?) in Israeli territory: Q.E.D.
Jurisprudence is evidently not Dr. Arendt’s forte. She is on safer ground
when she suggests that “those who are convinced that justice, and nothing
else, is the end of law will be inclined to condone the kidnapping act,
though not because of precedents but, on the contrary, as a desperate,
unprecedented and no-precedent-setting act, necessitated by the
unsatisfactory condition of international law”. To accept this, however, is
(as Dr. Arendt herself seems to be aware) to insert into the concept of the
rule of law the thin end of a very penetrative wedge.
The most important juridical objection to the proceedings, in Dr. Arendt’s
opinion – and she believes it to be a valid one – is that Eichmann ought to
have been tried by an international court, not because he did not obtain
justice at the hands of his Israeli judges, but because his participation in
genocide was a crime against humanity and not merely a crime (the crime of
multiple murder) against the Jewish people: “In so far as the victims were
Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment;
but in so far as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an
international tribunal to do justice to it.” Dr. Arendt admits that the
actual court achieved without injustice “its main purpose” – “to prosecute
and to defend, to judge and to punish Adolf Eichmann”. But in her view the
proceedings did not “do justice “ (ambiguous phrase!) to the offence that he
had committed. Her argument appears to be that the exploitation of nuclear
energy makes the threat of genocide today more terrifying than it has been
in the past (but is the hydrogen bomb really capable of being used so
selectively?), that it is therefore more than ever important for the human
race to prevent a repetition of the crime, and that the judgment upon
Eichmann would have been more effective to prevent such a repetition had it
proceeded from an international tribunal. Surely the suggestion implies a
mistaken view of what it is that in practice exercises a deterrent effect
upon human beings. If recollection of the Eichmann case deters future
generations from planning and participating in the crime of genocide, what
will deter them will be the impression made upon them by the accumulated
horror of the evidence and by a realization of the fate of the accused; the
constitution of the court will neither add to nor detract from the
effectiveness of the record.
Dr. Arendt devotes something like half her book to a survey of the various
operations conducted against the Jewish people by the National Socialist
regime, analysing in detail the process of deportation to the eastern
killing centres from the Reich, from the Balkans, and from western and
central Europe. Her object (in which she succeeds) is to show that the part
played by Eichmann in these operations was a less authoritative one than
that attributed to him by the prosecution, and that his attitude towards the
whole process was very different from that depicted in the portrait painted
by the Attorney-General in Jerusalem. Eichmann never killed with his own
hands or gave direct orders for killing; his authority was limited to making
arrangements for the supply of victims (by rail) and coordinating these
arrangements in close cooperation with those actually in charge of the
slaughter-houses; his desire was to be “correct”, to see that Jews were
killed in an orderly and smooth-running fashion. Dr. Arendt also has no
difficulty in showing that much of the evidence was related to operations in
the east for which Eichmann’s responsibility was, to say the least, dubious.
Therefore Mr. Hausner’s rhetorical attempt to call down upon his head the
vengeance of six million persons, besides being founded, according to Dr.
Arendt, upon a juridical fallacy (for it is the State, she insists, and not
the victims, that should claim the penalty), was far from being justified by
the evidence that he invoked in order to support it.
Dr. Arendt, then, “cuts Eichmann down to size” and points out alleged
juridical defects in the proceedings against him; but she goes farther than
this. At times she seems to betray an excessive indulgence towards the
artificers and executants of the Final Solution. She devotes several pages
to expounding the thesis that extermination by gassing was a continuation of
a policy of euthanasia already practised by the Nazis on the “ mentally sick
– implying, apparently, that this explains and in some measure condones the
readiness of Germans to tolerate, and even, perhaps, their readiness to
operate, this method of eliminating the Jewish race. She goes so far as to
suggest that as the progress of the war made death and destruction and their
concomitant horrors more and more familiar, “the gassing centers in
Auschwitz and Chelmno, in Majdanek and Belzek, in Treblinka and Sobibor must
actually have appeared [“To whom?”, one is tempted to ask – “not, surely, to
their inmates?”] the ‘Charitable Foundations for Institutional Care’ that
the experts in mercy death called them”. Eichmann himself, she suggests,
“was probably relieved” when this merciful method of extermination was
substituted on an increasing scale for the crude murder by shooting
practised by the Einsatzgruppen.
Eichmann may possibly have been relieved to learn of the improvement in
method; he was, as Dr. Arendt insists, not a bloodthirsty monster but a
cold-blooded official – indeed, it is this that makes him such, a terrifying
figure, the more so because he was typical of hundreds of thousands of his
compatriots. But if Eichmann was an official, he was a highly placed and
very powerful one; he knew full well what went on in the Charitable
Institutions, and on several occasions visited them and saw with his own
eyes enough of their Institutional Care to make him physically sick, for he
was a squeamish person; then he went back to the work of supplying them with
human material for destruction, carrying out his task with undiminished
diligence and even, in Hungary, prolonging it after the order had been given
for the deportations to be halted. Dr. Arendt, for all her comprehension of
his “banality”, does not suggest that when he was sent to the scaffold he
met with anything more than his deserts.
There is another remarkable thing about Dr. Arendt’s anxiety to understand the
actors in her tragic drama: it is strangely eclectic; it does not extend,
unfortunately, to all her fellow-Jews. Surveying the whole vast panorama of
brutality and suffering that spread itself over Europe under Nazi
domination, what is it that she, as a Jewish observer, finds “the darkest
chapter in the whole dark story”? Not the maniacal ruthlessness of Hitler
and Goebbels and the “racial” theorists; not the bestialities of Himmler and
Streicher or the tyrannies of Kaltenbrunner and Hans Frank; not even the
grisly business conducted by those who operated the gas chambers and the
rest of the ghoulish apparatus of the extermination centres. No; for Dr.
Arendt the “darkest chapter” is the “collaboration” of the Jews themselves
with their destroyers. When she speaks of “collaboration” (and that is the
word she chooses regularly to employ) Dr. Arendt has not in mind the
“death-wish” that, according to the thesis of Bruno Bettelheim, deprived
whole communities of the power and even the wish to resist; she is not
thinking of the activities of the few real traitors (there are some such in
every community) ready to buy survival or special treatment for themselves
and their friends by betraying others to their death; she is referring
generally to the conduct of the Jewish councils set up by the Germans in the
areas from which Jews were collected for deportation, and to the
negotiations by Zionist leaders to procure permits for European Jews to
escape to Palestine. All over Europe, in circumstances of varying horror,
the only element common to them all being that the victims were utterly at
the mercy of their captors, Jewish leaders did their best to negotiate some
sort of terms to avert, or mitigate, or postpone, the common doom.
Sometimes, no doubt, this involved the making of bargains that in the cold,
safe light of today may appear ignoble. Dr. Arendt believes, or writes as if
she believed, that in the eyes of a Jew the conduct of the Jewish councils
in these circumstances must be accounted worse than anything perpetrated by
the Nazis.
It was this aspect of the book that aroused such bitter controversy when
Eichmann in Jerusalem was first published in the United States; the
pontifical rebukes of the League of B’nai B’rith, who pronounced it “an evil
book”, were matched by the raptures of the self-consciously “Gentile” Miss
Mary McCarthy, who thought it “splendid”, and managed to detect in its pages
“a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of
Figaro or the Messiah”.
One does not have to be oneself a Jew – pace Miss McCarthy – to be both
shocked and puzzled by this element in Dr. Arendt’s book. Anyone, Jew or
Gentile, can appreciate her skill in selecting and fitting together the most
disparate and apparently insignificant pieces of evidence so that they
compose a telling picture; but no one, Jew or Gentile, can fail to see that
the picture is preconceived and the evidence chosen, and sometimes (no doubt
unconsciously) distorted, in order to fit in with the preconception. Dr.
Arendt writes as if her purpose were to launch, not directly but by
innumerable insidious touches, a bitter attack upon the Jews caught up in
the machinery of the Final Solution. Her main target is provided by the
leaders of the Jewish Councils, who stood, in an impossible position between
their people and the persecutors; they became, says Dr. Arendit in a
sweeping and ambiguously loaded phrase, “instruments of murder”, they
“enjoyed their new power”, and they played “a great and disastrous role” in
the destruction of their own people.
The items of evidence with which she constructs this picture hardly stand up
to examination. She attacks at all levels. For instance, Dr. Leo Baeck, one
of the most distinguished and deeply respected of the German Jewish leaders,
who at an advanced age refused, in order to be with his people, to be
evacuated from Berlin, is branded as being “in the eyes of both Jews and
Gentiles” the “Jewish Führer – and this simply (it appears) on the strength
of his having once been so described by the infamous Nazi Wisliceny. The
unhappy Dr. Kastner (he was afterwards murdered by an assassin who must have
shared Dr. Arendt’s opinion of his activities) does not escape her taunts:
because he managed by negotiation to save the lives of some 1,600 Jews in
Hungary, she contrives (by a dexterous transposition of poor Leo Gens’s plea
that “with a hundred victims” he might “save a thousand people”) to suggest
that Kästner was responsible for the deaths of all the Hungarian who
perished. “Dr. Kästner” she sneers, “saved exactly 1,684 people with 476,000
victims.” Even the wretched Sonder-kommandos, – detailed for grisly duties
in the killing centres, are made to appear worse than really were: Dr.
Arendt says at one point that they “often” operated “extermination
machinery” (allegation quite unsupported by evidence); a few pages later
“often” becomes “usually”, and the unsupported allegation become a
“well-known fact”.
It is a constant theme of Dr Arendt – and her belief in its truth is
presumably the motivating factor behind her whole attack – that if the Jews
had refused to serve on the Councils and had resisted all attempts at
organization, no large-scale massacres could have taken place. To suggest
that the Jewish communities in Europe could have existed through those years
of terror and privation without any organised leadership is quite
unrealistic; and the resulting chaos would have involved suffering to no
purpose, for lack of organization did not save nearly a million Jews in
Soviet Russia from wholesale liquidation. Dr. Arendt’s thesis, therefore, is
at best a very questionable one; yet she asserts roundly that it contains
“the whole truth” and declares that the “collaboration” of the Jewish lea
was evidence of “total moral collapse” as striking as was the behaviour of
their persecutors.
Why is it that this part of Dr. Arendt’s book should seem so shocking? The
answer is not to be found by examining her premise or her arguments; it is
her attitude that is at fault: her failure is a failure not of the
intelligence but of the imaginative understanding – the faculty that
operates so freely when it is Eichmann himself that she is considering. When
she is judging her less fortunate fellow Jews, she writes as if she were
unaware of the predicament in which they found themselves.
In her one published attempt self-explanation, a letter in reply to a
dignified protest from Professor Gershom Scholem Dr. Arendt suggests that
the right course for the millions of Jews in Europe (active resistance
being, as she admits, out of the question) was simply to do nothing. “And in
order to do nothing”, she proceeds, “one needed only to say: I am just a
simple Jew, I have no desire to play any other role.” One has, surely, to be
a very complicated Jew to suppose that in practice, things were as simple
for one’s fellow-Jews as that.
It is one of the horrors of the present age that it has thrust upon ordinary
citizen the necessity of making choices of a kind that used to be familiar
to us only from the pages of the historian or the casuist. Devotion to an
ideology, especially under a totalitarian regime, has revived the horrors of
the Inquisition and the old religious wars. Must you betray your family when
your country’s interests are at stake? Which comes first, the Party or your
friend? Questions like these are no longer mere topics of debate in the
schools, they have been put to men and women, in situatii of life and death,
all over Europe – and are still being so put to them farther east. “There
are some that a man should not do even to save his country” – that is no
longer mere rhetoric; each one of us may be a compelled to make out for
himself his own list of such things and to act upon his faith in it in the
presence of a torturer or with the knowledge that his friends and family are
held as hostages. Questions that, put to a witness by counsel, would be
deemed unfair, impossible to answer, were in occupied Europe continually
being asked, fair or unfair, by life itself and they had to be answered, one
or the other.
The impossible choice may present itself in many forms; here is one that is
taken from real life. A party of Jews was being hidden from the police in
the house of a Gentile; discovery meant certain death not only for them but
also for their protector; with the party was a baby, whose irrepressible
wailing was sure – the searchers were drawing near – to give their place
away. What was to be done? To allow the whole party, the child included, to
be consigned to extermination? Or . . .? Either course meant committing
murder, of a kind.
That cruel dilemma may serve as a type of the situation in which – with
infinite variations of circumstances and scale – the leaders of the Jewish
Councils found themselves. Even had they had full knowledge of the facts and
of their consequences, one could not say that one course was the “right” one
for them to take and the other the “wrong”. The Jewish leaders for the most
part had no such knowledge; they had to act in the dark, with only the light
of their consciences to guide them. If ever there was a case where the maxim
“Judge not” should be applied, or where judgment should be informed by
humility and imagination, it was surely here.
If Dr. Arendt’s attitude towards those faced with such dilemmas shocks, it
will also puzzle, the conscientious reader. Why is it that the fairness of
mind that she displays, almost ostentatiously, towards Eichmann and his
associates apparently deserts her when she comes to deal with the leaders of
the European Jews? Is it a case of “falling over backwards” in two
directions simultaneously? Of excessive anxiety not to be over-indignant in
the one case, not to be over-indulgent in the other? Dr. Arendt is capable,
one suspects, of such intellectual gymnastics; certainly she always gives
one side, and never the other, the benefit of the doubt. An anti-Zionist
attitude might explain why she is so bitter in her references to the
activities of the Zionist agencies in occupied Europe; but that is only one
part of the picture. Hostility to the policies of the State of Israel might
account for the zest with which she girds at Mr. Hausner, the
Attorney-General, and criticizes the conduct of the prosecution and the
set-up of the trial: certainly the propagandist atmosphere so vividly
reflected in Mr. Pearlman’s book might well have provoked a violent
reaction. But there is no apparent reason why such feelings should have been
visited on the Jewish leaders faced with the horrors of the Final Solution.
Dr. Arendt, a woman of subtle intelligence, is of course aware of the other
side of the picture she has chosen to paint of the part played by those who
served on the Jewish Councils; a sensitive person, she must be capable of
imagining the heroism displayed by many, the agony of mind and spirit
endured by all. How then can she have brought herself to write them off all
alike as “collaborators”, with no hint of sympathy for them in their
suffering nor any word of admiration for the way in which the best of them
endured it? One can hardly accept the bland extenuation offered by the
egregious Miss McCarthy: “the Jewish leadership are dead”, she says, “and
beyond being hurt by [Dr Arendt’s slander], if it is a slander”; and all
that she has said herself in answer to Professor Scholem on this point is
that as a reporter of the trial she was not in a position to go outside the
record: “In my report I have only spoken of things which came up during the
trial itself. It is for this reason that I could not mention the ‘saints’
about whom you speak” – in other words, “because I only spoke of certain
things, therefore I could not mention others”. Such an utterance suggests a
problem of personality more puzzling even, perhaps, than that presented by
Eichmann himself. It is worthy (might one say?) of Dr. Arendt’s own powers
of psychological analysis.
Both Dr. Arendt’s volume and Mr. Pearlman’s suggest a problem of which
Eichmann’s case is but a special instance: what judgment should be passed,
not by the student of criminal or international law but by the moralist,
upon those who conceived the Final Solution and those who carried it out?
And which kind of participation, the planning or the execution, deserves to
be the more strongly reprobated?
Before delivering a verdict in such a matter we should do our best,
remembering the Christian precept, to understand the point of view of those
that we are judging. The Final Solution was probably, it must be admitted,
the most exacting and most audacious enterprise ever embarked upon by the
leaders of a nation. The problem that offered itself might well have been
dismissed as insoluble: how to disinfect Europe of the evils engendered by a
race that had insinuated itself like a host of deadly microbes into every
class and every profession in each country, tightening its grip upon the
social organism by intermarriage and the power of money, and numbering, in
the area over which the operation was to be attempted, nearly eleven million
individuals. How was it possible to cleanse society of a pest so ubiquitous
and so deeply rooted? Various solutions had been put forward: first,
deportation – to Palestine, to Poland, to Madagascar – then, when war closed
those doors, concentration: the noxious tribe could be fenced off in special
areas, while strict laws against intermarriage, reinforced by sterilization
of the females of the species, safeguarded future generations from
infection.
These measures, however, called for an exorbitant expenditure of time, labour,
and money on the maintenance of camps and ghettos; moreover, they were at
best makeshift expedients, for so long as there existed even a remnant of
the Jewish race they were sure in the long run to reproduce themselves, like
rabbits, and offer a constant threat to the purity of the Aryan breed. So
Hitler, like Herod, decided to run no risks: there was nothing for it but
complete elimination; eleven million human beings must be systematically put
to death.
The difficulties that beset the execution of this project were of two kinds,
the practical and the psychological. Collecting, classifying, transporting,
and exterminating eleven million persons was a task that presented daunting
logistic and administrative problems, and it speaks volumes for the
organizing power and thoroughness of the Germans that they approached as
nearly to their target as they did; the figure of six million was only
attained by killing in the larger centres at the rate of 12,000 a day – an
astonishing achievement, considering the difficulty of maintaining a steady
flow of material in the face of military demands upon transport and manpower
and the awkward subsidiary tasks undertaken such as cutting off hair,
extracting teeth, and disposing of remains. The whole business called for
widespread cooperation, both military and civil – and it was here that the
psychological difficulty presented itself. The authorities had to ensure
that the general public, and in particular those called upon to give active
help, were favourably disposed, or at least not hostile, to an undertaking
from which any decent, rational human being might have been expected to
shrink with horror.
What proportion of the German people knew the truth about the Final Solution?
And how much of the truth about it did they know? And if the full facts had
been disclosed to the general public, what would their attitude have been?
The answer that those then in power would have given to this last question
is evident from the pains they took to conceal what was going on; they
instituted an elaborate scheme of deception and employed a special
vocabulary in order to preserve the façade: the Jews were being “resettled”,
or “rehabilitated”, or removed to “institutions for special treatment”, and
for words such as “ liquidation” and “extermination” (anything unequivocally
signifying death was at all costs to be avoided) “the Final Solution” was
itself the happy pseudonym. By this means not only the public at large but
the Jews themselves were protected from knowledge of the painful truth, many
of the deportees, it appears, being put on to the death-trains in ignorance
of what was in store for them when they reached their destination. Sometimes
the merciful illusion was further prolonged: signs on the railway-station
suggesting to new arrivals that they were being welcomed to a holiday-camp
or pleasure-resort, and even the final selection of victims being
accompanied by the strains of classical music.
This procedure was not only useful for the purpose of deception; it also
ministered to the national love of propriety, the desire of the Germans to
make everything as nice as possible, their tendency to mask and mitigate
(for themselves) the existence of brutal facts by the use of abstract nouns.
It thus fulfilled a double function, concealing the truth from those who did
not know it, and disguising it for those who did. In all official
correspondence, even between those actually engaged in organizing the
holocaust, the polite fiction was maintained, helping them to forget, or at
least to overlook, the unpleasantnesses involved in the execution of their
aim.
For those at the summit and at the centre of the organization, farthest away
from the actual doing of the grisly deeds, this feat of forgetfulness or
self-deception was easiest; for them a positive effort of the imagina tion
(though not, perhaps, an arduous one) was needed if they were to envisage,
in terms of suffering human flesh, the horrors for which they made
themselves responsible. No doubt they conceived it to be their duty not to
make that effort. If the means necessary for the achievement of an object
that you believe to be of high importance are such that to contemplate them
would lead you to waver in pursuing it, or to abandon it entirely, are you
to be blamed if you shut your eyes to the horror of the means for the sake
of achieving the over-riding aim? Ought Lenin to have counted the eggs he
had to break in order to prepare his totalitarian omelette? Should Stalin
have attempted to feel vicariously the sufferings of the Kulaks his policy
compelled him to liquidate? Was it the duty (to take an instance nearer
home) of a pilot embarking on a sortie of “saturation” bombing to pic ture
to himself the sufferings that would follow from the dropping of his cargo?
Was it not rather his duty to restrain his imagination lest it should deter
him from the execution of the necessary task?
Reflection upon questions such as these suggests that the guilt to be imputed
to the architects of the Final Solution is not to be measured simply by the
quantum of the suffering they inflicted, and that it is not mitigated by the
fact that they believed their aim to be a good one; it lies in the evil of
the aim itself; they must be judged ultimately by reference to the cause to
which they dedicated themselves. Hypocrisy, brutality, the desire for
personal or national aggrandisement, where they are present, afford material
for further counts in the indictment; but honesty, kindheartedness, selfless
devotion to his cause, will afford no defence on the main charge for one
whose aim (even if he thinks it virtuous) is evil.
If it seems hard to condemn a man on moral grounds for an intellectual error
in the choice of end – he was after all (he may plead) only doing what he
believed to be good – the answer is surely that the lie that betrays him is
a lie in the soul; that the causes men dedicate themselves to (at any rate
where their self-dedication is based on an intelligent evaluation of
alternatives) reveal the kind of person that they really are. True, the
weighing of ends against means – or of one end (for this is more often the
real choice) against another – is not always easy, and a man is not
necessarily to be branded as wicked simply because he has chosen wrong. But
if a ruler commits himself to the belief that a certain end is so desirable
that there is no need to count the cost of the human suffering (or of the
sufferings of a particular race) involved in attaining it, he cannot expect
indulgence from the moral arbiter who concludes that his aim, so far from
justifying the use of evil means, was itself so wicked that it could have
been conceived only by a monster or madman.
The case is different with those who were mere executives; the horror we feel
when we read of their doings is horror of a different kind – the simple
horror inspired by man’s inhumanity to man. Sadism apart – and we must
conclude that there was plenty of inconceivably sadistic brutality in the
Nazi camps, even if we allow for a degree of exaggeration on the part of
witnesses – vindictive pleasure at the death, or the prospect of the death,
of others is never, not even where it is felt in a good cause, an edifying
emotion. “Kill a good few for me!” said Miss Munro to her brother “Saki”,
seeing him off to the Front in 1914: the sentiment, of course, was
patriotic, but its utterance grates on a humane ear, like the applause that
filled the Court in Moscow, when sentence of death was passed on the
unfortunate Penkovsky.
The staffs of the extermination camps were, of course, far more deeply
involved than this; they were called upon not merely to applaud at a
distance but actually to do things that no man, one might have hoped, could
bring himself to do to other human beings. To marshal to their deaths, day
after day, in circumstances of unimaginable degradation, hundreds and
thousands of one’s fellow-creatures – against that, flesh and blood,
whatever the circumstances, must surely rise in irrepressible revolt. We all
know the pleas in extenuation: at any sign of humanity on the part of the
staff – a gesture of tenderness, perhaps, towards a child that refused to
enter the gas-chamber by a different door from its mother, or an old man who
faltered in digging his own grave, or a creature that, sniffing death like a
steer in the Chicago stockyards, tried to break away from the procession to
the human slaughterhouse – there would be at hand, no doubt, an
under-officer with a revolver, vigilant to impose an impeccably “objective”
view of the situation. Orders, no doubt, were orders; and “If I did not do
it, another would”; the grim tasks must often have been undertaken with
genuine reluctance and in the belief that they had to be performed in the
interests of the common cause. The classic dilemma– “There are some things a
man should not do even to save his country” – again presents itself: if by
so doing, and only by so doing, you could save humanity, would you kill, by
slow torture, a hundred innocent human beings? or twenty? or two? or one?
The question, it may be said, is not a fair one; but there is no guarantee
that the world is so constructed that it could not present itself in
practice, and it was in some such terms as these that the indoctrinated must
have seen their situation. For them, indeed, the overriding aim was not the
salvation of humanity, nor even the victory upon which they depended for
their own survival, but simply the elimination of a certain category of
their fellow-men. The end was a monstrous one: but even if it had been as
righteous as some of them at least believed it to be, ought any human being
to have been a party to such means of bringing it about?
There are those who will find it all too easy to assess the blame to be
allotted in such cases; others will find it difficult or impossible to judge
at all. “But we must judge”: for those who believe in the existence of moral
or of human values the obligation is inescapable.
