Eichmann in Elmwood

Thoughts on Crimes Against Humanity

by Samuel Hux (March 2018)

Laufen, Josef Nassy, Undated

 

 

wo things found most offensive about Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ever since its publication in 1963 have been (1) the substance of the subtitle itself, A Report on the Banality of Evil, and (2) her assessment of the responsibility of the Judenräte (the Jewish councils) for the success of the Holocaust or, better, her tone toward the almost inevitably compromised Jewish leaders trapped behind Nazi borders. I have always thought the objection to her notion of the banality of evil absurd. Her critics seem to think characterizing Eichmann as banal was some odd left-handed compliment which diminished his evil, when clearly she meant to underline the enormous difference between the size of the crimes and the size of the criminals (an inadequate word!): Eichmann and the other Nazis were not epic figures of a Satanically heroic dimension appropriate to the epic dimension of their historic actions, but petty scumbags dwarfed by their deeds. I have little to say about the Judenräte question, because I have no new historical facts to offer, and because the relevance of any Jewish “co-operation” to Eichmann’s guilt or banality escapes me anyway—something gratuitous about it. But Michael Burleigh has a great deal to say: and anyone inclined to defend Arendt (whom I normally admire beyond measure) should read Chapter 16, especially the section “Choosing Deaths,” of his magisterial Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, an analysis so hard-headed and yet moving that it’s a shame Arendt is not alive to read it.

 

What I would like to discuss, because it has been bothering me for too many years now is the question of “crimes against humanity” as opposed to “crimes against the Jewish people”—and further and consequently the question of the justice of an Israeli, rather than an international, trial.

 

That’s putting the better face upon the matter. Being somewhat less generous, one might say that when Gentiles are incapable of saying that the Holocaust was principally, primarily, and in intention a crime against the Jewish people, and that that is horrible enough in itself and sufficient condemnation of it, and that, no matter what, worthy moral observation one has of it or what wisdom one can draw from it, it requires nothing more said of it than the above to be to be odious beyond imagination, then I suspect that those Gentiles ultimately cannot take the Holocaust with full seriousness if they think it “merely” a matter of Jewish suffering and not enhanced in its magisterial horror by having touched Gentiles as well.

 

Among the “fundamental issues” Arendt thought the Jerusalem court failed to come to grips with were “the problem of impaired justice in the court of the victors” and “a clear recognition of the new criminal who commits the crime.” I don’t see how the latter could be the court’s responsibility since the “clear recognition” would not have been of temporary insanity or some such in any case. To speak of the “problem of impaired justice in the court of the victors,” however, strikes me as not just judicially irrelevant but almost perverse. What can that mean? “Impaired justice” may make some sense in that, as Arendt notes, some possible defense witnesses for Eichmann could hardly appear without risking an Israeli jail (although on the other hand I don’t see how they could have “defended” him either). But, “in the court of the victors”? Nuremberg may have been a court of the victors . . . but Jerusalem? To see the Jews, diminished by millions, as victors may make some kind of sense as a theological notion, but as a legal or political concept it leaves me stunned. A court of the victims, I would say. And any court the scene of a trial for murder mass or single is in the deepest and most just sense a court of victims—which is one reason I would agree with Walter Berns (For Capital Punishment), that the ultimate and usually unspoken justification of capital punishment (or any punishment, I would add) is not deterrence but revenge. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Well now . . . we say. And I think we are right. All of which, rather than leading us into some digression, gets us directly into the question of crime against humanity.

 

And here she gives her summation: “We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

 

And while I don’t want to share the earth with Eichmann, I notice that what he is condemned for in this summation is really crimes against humanity instead of crimes against the Jewish people, and my agreement with her argument begins to grow compromised and then to disappear. Why am I so recalcitrant?

 

 

That is, when the Nazis killed Socialists, let’s say, there was something “reasonable” about it—if I will be allowed a grotesque irony to underline a major point. When one fights a war, whether a just one or not, it is “expected,” it has become common practice, that one will “neutralize” in some fashion one’s political enemies within one’s reach as a partial method of insuring victory. One does not, however (at least it is not expected that one will, it is not considered reasonable), spend energy and money and technical commitment gathering and disposing of political prisoners to such a degree that that effort hinders the war effort itself. But it is now historically obvious that the commitment to the extermination of the Jews was carried on with such resolve and with the expense of so much energy and time and rearrangement of strategic priorities that it did hinder the prosecution of the war. This is to say that the commitment was pathological—removed from anything even close to being reasonable. And it is this pathology that places Jews in a particular kind of exposure.

 

Crimes against the Gentile people too? Another way to consider it: I generally dismiss that mod ethical notion, pop profundity, that gives a curious pleasure to people who like to think they’re living dangerously with their psyches—“We are all guilty.” I was born a Southern white, but I am in no way guilty for chattel slavery nor even for the injustices that blacks suffered when I was a kid and powerless to do anything about those injustices. I become guilty only when I commit those injustices myself or when with some power to attempt to change things I refuse to do so. I am not guilty, as a Gentile, for the Ukrainian pogroms far from my country or the lynching of Leo Frank in my country, both before I was born. Nor am I guilty for Auschwitz far from my country nor for the stingy entrance quotas imposed by the government of my country which in effect trapped many Jews within final Nazi reach. Some Gentiles, of course, were guilty. But we-are-all-guilty is nonsense. And if we are not all guilty simply because some were—then the fact that some Gentiles were victimized does not mean that all were. Yes, yes, I know: in some sense the entire human race was and remains victimized by the Holocaust. Later, please. But to say that all we Gentiles were victimized is to lay claim to a kind of tragic dignity that some paid for, and none of us, as Gentiles, would have been asked to pay for.

 

I realize there’s something crude about my moral mathematics as I’ve developed it so far, so I should refine it. The fact that there was no crime against the Gentile people as there was against the Jewish people does not of itself mean there was no crime against humanity, or rather against all people. Humanity is not a mathematical entity like 100 from which you can subtract 20 and say that you no longer have 100 but only 80: you can’t say that when you set the Jews aside you have only Gentiles but not humanity. And furthermore, since we are all humans, Jew and Gentile, and “if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or thine own were . . .” then is not the Gentile diminished by the death of the Jew so that we have to say that all people were victimized by the Holocaust?

 

Well, yes, but . . . that doesn’t seem to me quite fair. I don’t think one can say that the Nazi insistence that the Jews are not to be amongst us was an offense against “us” unless we had been insisting that they must be amongst us! And this Gentiles collectively had never insisted upon, in so far as a seriality of groups as amorphous as “Gentiles” can be said to act collectively. To contain the amorphousness somewhat, let’s think only of the “Christian” nations of the West.

 

“You must decide what being Jewish means, since it’s your identity. But understand and rest assured that whatever you decide—that there’s a Jewish ‘church’ or a Jewish people or some accommodation of faith and ethnicity that we can’t really understand—whatever you decide, we repeat, it is important to us that you live amongst us, because the principle of lively human diversity is precious to us.”

 

And if it can’t, then how and for what should Eichmann have been tried, other than as mass murderer, which terminology I take it everyone recognizes was inadequate?

 

He should have been tried precisely by whom he was tried: the state of Israel (as Arendt agreed), the only body which could lay claim to both spiritual and political stewardship of the interest of the Jewish people against whom the crime had been committed, and the only Jewish body which could have conceivably held a trial. Those suggestions of an international court, such as Karl Jaspers and others made at the time, were presumptuous. Eichmann should have been tried as he was by the only conceivable powerful-enough representative of the victims. Hence, we are back to a “court of the victims.” And in a court of the victims he should have been tried—as I think he was, in spite of any understandable verbal gestures about “deterrence” and about “in the name of humanity,” and such—on the grounds that victims must be avenged. And viewing the matter this way, one might see that, for all the apparent difference and exceptionableness and legal oddity and jurisprudential uncertainty, the trial was really fundamentally in rhythm with the deepest and most just urges of trial-and-punishment.

 

If someone kills my wife, lover, parent, offspring, or whatever, and the state brings that someone to trial, finds him guilty, and punishes him, then in so far as the state is speaking for me and punishing for me it is exacting a revenge I am not empowered to exact, and all talk about deterrence is ultimately a fiction we agree to honor because we are, after all, civilized people, and civilization is among other things a configuration of necessary fictions. And in this hypothetical case (I have never had a loved one murdered), when the state announces that society cannot countenance the crime tried here, that society has the right to demand penalty, I agree—for I know that were it another’s loved one who’d been murdered I as a member of society would want the murderer punished as I assume other members of society want the murderer of mine punished. But I know as well that this is for me a secondary consideration at the moment, and that what I want most is that the murderer suffer because my loved one is dead. Revenge.

 

And, quite frankly, if I sense that the officers of the court are acting primarily for the society, and that my dead loved one is to them a secondary consideration since he or she was finally but a member, then I will feel that although “justice is done” in action it has not, somehow, been done in spirit. “They just don’t understand,” I’ll feel. By extrapolation: had Eichmann been tried and sentenced by an international court speaking in the name of world society primarily, and the Jewish dead as members of that world society (we’ve now decided, a bit late) ultimately a secondary consideration, then I think the surviving Jewish people might legitimately feel that although “justice is done” it wasn’t really. And they might legitimately say, “They don’t really understand.” Consequently, the only real problem I have with the Jerusalem trial is that Eichmann was physically alone in the docket, his cohorts absent.

 

Now I would like to gather up all the ifs and qualifications I have made and go somewhere else with them. To Elmwood, so to speak.

 

crime against humanity, even when one is reading humanity to mean all people: for all people usually means, quite simply and superficially, “everyone who’s living,” whereas if you give humanity the emphasis I’ve given it, the plural twist, it suggests instead “all who have lived, are living, and will live,” the humanities as the civilized virtues being what makes us creatures of the past, the present, and the future. So that the Holocaust was a crime even greater: a corruption of whatever pride one can take in being human, and a corrosion of hope.

 

But . . . “a crime even greater” is insufficient. I think it was the greatest crime in human history—although I understand how some might disagree. Some Christian might, I imagine: might note, for instance, the Crucifixion and say that on Calvary the son of God was killed. On the other hand, I have heard it said that God died at Auschwitz—or, if one imagines Him with “privileged” status, disappeared at Theresienstadt.

 

Now, I confess—without claiming any equality of suffering with Jews—that I am obsessed with the Holocaust. Not wishing to over-dramatize a pain I’ve not paid for the way others have, I still should not undervalue, through some sense of respectful proportion, the horror I feel. Nor should I ascribe to it a human dignity and moral disinterestedness it does not have. That’s by way of confessing, and in the process revealing, the silly self-flattery one is liable to indulge in trying to grapple with something he’s not suffered. That is, one fierce and natural reaction to the murder or brutalization of someone you don’t know—so that vengeful anger is not your immediate response—is a kind of defensive anger, “there but for the grace of God . . . ” But since I knew it wasn’t the grace of God that had spared me the gas or any threat of it, that it was my not being Jewish that had spared me that, then I could feel that my horror, not motivated by either vengefulness or defensiveness, must be somehow “purer” than a Jew’s, than a potential victim’s, more elevated and transcendent. The lengths one will go to in service of nonsense!

 

 

When I observe “what’s best in us” in what we casually call Western civilization, I am struck by how—in several senses, with religious, biblical references aside for the moment—“Jewish” it is. On one level I suppose I mean that it’s hard for me to imagine the world of discourse and cultural assumption we inhabit without such figures as Spinoza, Freud, Einstein, even, God help me, Marx, to name only the obvious. But I observe something more demanding than that: there’s something essentially “Hebraic” about “what’s best in us.”

 

Clearly Arnold believed that that these two fundamental impulses in Western culture (“the best that has been thought and said”) were, had to ne, connected, each although different implicit in the other. Now . . . it is my contention (although who the hell am I to contend with Matthew Arnold!?) that for complicated historical and theological reasons the two impulses became largely separated in Western culture—so that one could be intellectually cultivated without any concern for what’s ethical, or one could be moral without any concern for intellectual-cultural values. To defend this generalization in the most reader-convincing way I would have to compose another essay altogether as long as what’s already here: so, I either have to ask the reader to take on faith there is substance to this generalization, or—with more labor entailed—invite the reader’s examination of my essay “The Gentile Problem” in New English Review, September 2017.

 

It is my contention that the insistence that the ethical and the intellectual have a necessary connection one with the other, that the ethical and the intellectual are not just quite sunderable faculties or dispositions, is essentially a “Hebraic” credo, and consequently a fundamental belief in the Jewish tradition: an objection to the isolation or divorce of one impulse from the other which would allow (let us be dramatic) that a Nazi could be “cultivated” if he collected art or listened to Lieder, the true banality of our time.

 

Should one protest that this insistence on integrated faculties or impulses is equally a Christian ideal, I would suggest (or more than suggest) that that is true to the degree that Christianity remains “Hebraic,” for there is also a sub-tradition, so to speak, in Christianity, the too-literal reading of the Pauline line that faith alone is required for salvation and not moral behavior, good works.

 

It requires nothing more to weigh the horror of the Holocaust, as I said upon beginning, than to know that it was in intention a genocidal crime against the Jewish people, to know that that is sufficient condemnation of it, that there is nothing gained but unearned pathos in adding “against Gentiles too.” This is not to say there are not manifold lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, although it’s heart-sickening beyond cure that the lessons were so costly, with the price paid not by the instructed.

 

One such lesson: the crude irony that given people in “Ulmewald” (so to speak) who would will to act even though they were incapable, through choice or psychological impairment, of making moral distinctions, it’s terribly logical that their victims should have been their polar opposites, those who in integrating mind and heart were the great offenders against the new order of sundered faculties.

 

Another: as we in “Elmwood” have never said to the Jews, firmly and unmistakably, “It is of absolute importance to us that you, while remaining true to yourselves, live amongst us,” we have in effect not held very dear that ideal which represents what is, or ought to be, “best in us.” And this would still be true had no madman ever said, “They must not live.”

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

 

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