Kastner, apparently emboldened by the new turn of affairs, had asked Eichmann to stop "the death mills at Auschwitz," and Eichmann had answered that he would do it "with the greatest pleasure" (herzlich gern) but that, alas, it was outside his competence and outside the competence of his superiors - as indeed it was. Of course, he' did not expect the Jews to share the general enthusiasm over their destruction, but he did expect more than compliance, he expected - and received, to a truly extraordinary degree - their cooperation. This was "of course the very cornerstone" of everything he did, as it had been the very cornerstone of his activities in Vienna. Without Jewish help in administrative and police work - the final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police - there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. ("There can be no doubt that, without, the cooperation of the victims, it would hardly have been possible for a few thousand people, most of whom, moreover, worked in offices, to liquidate many hundreds of thousands of other people. . . . Over the whole way to their deaths the Polish Jews got to see hardly more than a handful of Germans." Thus R. Pendorf in the publication mentioned above. To an even greater extent this applies to those Jews who were transported to Poland to find their deaths there.) Hence, the establishing of Quisling governments in occupied territories was always accompanied by the organization of a central Jewish office, and, as we shall see later, where the Nazis did not succeed in setting up a puppet government, they also failed to enlist the cooperation of the Jews. But whereas the members of the Quisling governments were usually taken from the opposition parties, the members of the Jewish Councils were as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders, to whom the Nazis gave enormous powers - until they, too, were deported, to Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, if they happened to be from Central or Western Europe, to Auschwitz if they were from an Eastern European community.
To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, "the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable." In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power - "The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower," as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder - like captains "whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo"; like saviors who "with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand." The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to "blind fate," "truly holy principles" were needed "as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the
'unknown person and with this decides his life or death." And whom did these "holy principles"
single out for salvation? Those "who had worked all their lives for the zibur [community]" - i.e., the functionaries - and the "most prominent Jews," as Kastner says in his report.
No one bothered to swear the Jewish officials to secrecy; they were voluntary "bearers of secrets," either in order to assure quiet and prevent panic, as in Dr. Kastner's case, or out of
"humane" considerations, such as that "living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be the harder," as in the case of Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin. During the Eichmann trial, one witness pointed out the unfortunate consequences of this kind of "humanity" -
people volunteered for deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried to tell them the truth as being "not sane." We know the physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi period very well; they ranged all the way from Chaim Rumkowski, Eldest of the Jews in Lódz, called Chaim I, who issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his portrait, and who rode around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage; through Leo Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who believed Jewish policemen would be "more gentle and helpful" and would "make the ordeal easier" (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them); to, finally, a few who committed suicide - like Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who was not a rabbi but an unbeliever, a Polish-speaking Jewish engineer, but who must still have remembered the rabbinical saying: "Let them kill you, but don't cross the line."
That the prosecution in Jerusalem, so careful not to embarrass the Adenauer administration, should have avoided, with even greater and more obvious justification, bringing this chapter of the story into the open was almost a matter of course. (These issues, however, are discussed quite openly and with astonishing frankness in Israeli schoolbooks - as may conveniently be gathered from the article "Young Israelis and Jews Abroad - A Study of Selected History Textbooks" by Mark M. Krug, in Comparative Education Review, October, 1963.) The chapter must be included here, however, because it accounts for certain otherwise inexplicable lacunae in the documentation of a generally over-documented case. The judges mentioned one such instance, the absence of H. G. Adler's book Theresienstadt 1941-1945 (1955), which the prosecution, in some embarrassment, admitted to be "authentic, based on irrefutable sources." The reason for the omission was clear. The book describes in detail how the feared "transport lists" were put together by the Jewish Council of Theresienstadt after the S.S. had given some general directives, stipulating how many should be sent away, and of what age, sex, profession, and country of origin. The prosecution's case would have been weakened if it had been forced to admit that the naming of individuals who were sent to their doom had been, with few exceptions, the job of the Jewish administration. And the Deputy State Attorney, Mr. Ya'akov Baror, who handled the intervention from the bench, in a way indicated this when he said: "I am trying to bring out those things which somehow refer to the accused without damaging the picture in its entirety." The picture would indeed have been greatly damaged by the inclusion of Adler's book, since it would have contradicted testimony given by the chief witness on Theresienstadt, who claimed that Eichmann himself had made these individual selections. Even more important, the prosecution's general picture of a clear-cut division between persecutors and victims would have suffered greatly. To make available evidence that does not support the case for the prosecution is usually the job of the defense, and the question why Dr. Servatius, who perceived some minor inconsistencies in the testimony, did not avail himself of such easily obtainable and widely known documentation is difficult to answer. He could have pointed to the fact that Eichmann, immediately upon being transformed from an expert in emigration into an expert in "evacuation,"
appointed his old Jewish associates in the emigration business - Dr. Paul Eppstein, who had been in charge of emigration in Berlin, and Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, who had held the same job in Vienna - as "Jewish Elders" in Theresienstadt. This would have done more to demonstrate the atmosphere in which Eichmann worked than all the unpleasant and often downright offensive talk about oaths, loyalty, and the virtues of unquestioning obedience.
The testimony of Mrs. Charlotte Salzberger on Theresienstadt, from which I quoted above, permitted us to cast at least a glance into this neglected comer of what the prosecution kept calling the "general picture." The presiding judge did not like the term and he did not like the picture. He told the Attorney General several times that "we are not drawing pictures here," that there is "an indictment and this indictment is the framework for our trial," that the court "has its own view about this trial, according to the indictment," and that "the prosecution must adjust to what the court lays down" - admirable admonitions for criminal proceedings, none of which was heeded. The prosecution did worse than not heed them, it simply refused to guide its witnesses -
or, if the court became too insistent, it asked a few haphazard questions, very casually - with the result that the witnesses behaved as though they were speakers at a meeting chaired by the Attorney General, who introduced them to the audience before they took the floor. They could talk almost as long as they wished, and it was a rare occasion when they were asked a specific question.
This atmosphere, not of a show trial but of a mass meeting, at which speaker after speaker does his best to arouse the audience, was especially noticeable when the prosecution called witness after witness to testify to the rising in the Warsaw ghetto and to the similar attempts in Vilna and Kovno - matters that had no connection whatever with the crimes of the accused. The testimony of these people would have contributed something to the trial if they had told of the activities of the Jewish Councils, which had played such a great and disastrous role in their own heroic efforts. Of course, there was some mention of this - witnesses speaking of "S.S. men and their helpers" pointed out that they counted among the latter the "ghetto police which was also an instrument in the hands of the Nazi murderers" as well as "the Judenrat" - but they were only too glad not to "elaborate" on this side of their story, and they shifted the discussion to the role of real traitors, of whom there were few, and who were "nameless people, unknown to the Jewish public," such as "all undergrounds which fought against the Nazis suffered from." (The audience while these witnesses testified had changed again; it consisted now of Kibbuzniks, members of the Israeli communal settlements to which the speakers belonged.) The purest and clearest account came from Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman, today a woman of perhaps forty, still very beautiful, completely free of sentimentality or self-indulgence, her facts well organized, and always quite sure of the point she wished to make. Legally, the testimony of these witnesses was immaterial - Mr. Hausner did not mention one of them in his last plaidoyer - except insofar as it constituted proof of close contacts between Jewish partisans and the Polish and Russian underground fighters, which, apart from contradicting other testimony ("We had the whole population against us"), could have been useful to the defense, since it offered much better justification for the wholesale slaughter of civilians than Eichmann's repeated claim that
"Weizmann had declared war on Germany in 1939." (This was sheer nonsense. All that Chaim Weizmann had said, at the close of the last prewar Zionist Congress, was that the war of the Western democracies "is our war, their struggle is our struggle." The tragedy, as Hausner rightly pointed out, was precisely that the Jews were not recognized by the Nazis as belligerents, for if they had been they would have survived, in prisoner-of-war or civilian internment camps.) Had Dr.
Servatius made this point, the prosecution would have been forced to admit how pitifully small these resistance groups had been, how incredibly weak and essentially harmless - and, moreover, how little they had represented the Jewish population, who at one point even took arms against them.
While the legal irrelevance of all this very time-consuming testimony remained pitifully clear, the political intention of the Israeli government in introducing it was also not difficult to guess. Mr.
Hausner (or Mr. Ben-Gurion) probably wanted to demonstrate that whatever resistance there had been had come from Zionists, as though, of all Jews, only the Zionists knew that if you could not save your life it might still be worth while to save your honor, as Mr. Zuckerman put it; that the worst that could happen to the human person under such circumstances was to be and to remain
"innocent," as became clear from the tenor and drift of Mrs. Zuckerman's testimony. However, these "political" intentions misfired, for the witnesses were truthful and told the court that all Jewish organizations and parties had played their role in the resistance, so the true distinction was not between Zionists and non-Zionists but between organized and unorganized people, and, even more important, between the young and the middle-aged. To be sure, those who resisted were a minority, a tiny minority, but under the circumstances "the miracle was," as one of them pointed out, "that this minority existed."
Legal considerations aside, the appearance in the witness box of the former Jewish resistance fighters was welcome enough. It dissipated the haunting specter of universal cooperation, the stifling, poisoned atmosphere which had surrounded the Final Solution. The well-known fact that the actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos had been fairly and squarely established by witnesses for the prosecution - how they had worked in the gas chambers and the crematories, how they had pulled the gold teeth and cut the hair of the corpses, how they had dug the graves and, later, dug them up again to extinguish the traces of mass murder; how Jewish technicians had built gas chambers in Theresienstadt, where the Jewish "autonomy" had been carried so far that even the hangman was a Jew. But this was only horrible, it was no moral problem. The selection and classification of workers in the camps was made by the S.S., who had a marked predilection for the criminal elements; and, anyhow, it could only have been the selection of the worst. (This was especially true in Poland, where the Nazis had exterminated a large proportion of the Jewish intelligentsia at the same time that they killed Polish intellectuals and members of the professions - in marked contrast, incidentally, to their policy in Western Europe, where they tended to save prominent Jews in order to exchange them for German civilian internees or prisoners of war; Bergen-Belsen was originally a camp for "exchange Jews.") The moral problem lay in the amount of truth there was in Eichmann's description of Jewish cooperation, even under the conditions of the Final Solution:
"The formation of the Jewish Council [at Theresienstadt] and the distribution of business was left to the discretion of the Council, except for the appointment of the president, who the president was to be, which depended upon us, of course. However, this appointment was not in the form of a dictatorial decision. The functionaries with whom we were in constant contact - well, they had to be treated with kid gloves. They were not ordered around, for the simple reason that if the chief officials had been told what to do in the form of: you must, you have to, that would not have helped matters any. If the person in question does not like what he is doing, the whole works will suffer. . . . We did our best to make everything somehow palatable." No doubt they did; the problem is how it was possible for them to succeed.
Thus, the gravest omission from the "general picture" was that of a witness to testify to the cooperation between the Nazi rulers and the Jewish authorities, and hence of an opportunity to raise the question: "Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?" The only witness who had been a prominent member of a Judenrat was Pinchas Freudiger, the former Baron Philip von Freudiger, of Budapest, and during his testimony the only serious incidents in the audience took place; people screamed at the witness in Hungarian and in Yiddish, and the court had to interrupt the session. Freudiger, an Orthodox Jew of considerable dignity, was shaken: "There are people here who say they were not told to escape. But fifty per cent of the people who escaped were captured and killed" - as compared with ninety-nine per cent, for those who did not escape. "Where could they have gone to? Where could they have fled?" - but he himself fled, to Rumania, because he was rich and Wisliceny helped him. "What could we have done? What could we have done?" And the only response to this came from the presiding judge: "I do not think this is an answer to the question" - a question raised by the gallery but not by the court.
The matter of cooperation was twice mentioned by the judges; Judge Yitzak Raveh elicited from one of the resistance witnesses an admission that the "ghetto police" were an "instrument in the hands of murderers" and an acknowledgment of "the Judenrat's policy of cooperating with the Nazis"; and Judge Halevi found out from Eichmann in cross-examination that the Nazis had regarded this cooperation as the very cornerstone of their Jewish policy. But the question the prosecutor regularly addressed to each witness except the resistance fighters which sounded so very natural to those who knew nothing of the factual background of the trial, the question "Why did you not rebel?," actually served as a smoke screen for the question that was not asked. And thus it came to pass that all answers to the unanswerable question Mr. Hausner put to his witnesses were considerably less than "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." True it was that the Jewish people as a whole had not been organized, that they had possessed no territory, no government, and no army, that, in the hour of their greatest need, they had no government-in-exile to represent them among the Allies (the Jewish Agency for Palestine, under Dr. Weizmann's presidency, was at best a miserable substitute), no caches of weapons, no youth with military training. But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level.
Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish Councils. This is of course a mere estimate, which, however, oddly jibes with the rather reliable figures we have from Holland and which I owe to Dr. L. de Jong, the head of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. In Holland, where the Joodsche Raad like all the Dutch authorities very quickly became an "instrument of the Nazis," 103,000 Jews were deported to the death camps and some five thousand to Theresienstadt in the usual way, i.e., with the cooperation of the Jewish Council. Only five hundred and nineteen Jews returned from the death camps. In contrast to this figure, ten thousand of those twenty to twenty-five thousand Jews who escaped the Nazis - and that meant also the Jewish Council - and went underground survived; again forty to fifty per cent. Most of the Jews sent to Theresienstadt returned to Holland.) I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem trial failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society - not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims. Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by "good society,"
and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors. He was not at all, as one witness called him, a "Landsknechtnatur," a mercenary, who wanted to escape to regions where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst. What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of "good society" as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler - whom he and his comrade Sassen had agreed to "shirr out" of their story; Hitler, he said, "may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man." His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which "good society" everywhere reacted as he did.
He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him.
That there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience was one of Eichmann's points, and it was the task of the prosecution to prove that this was not so, that there were voices he could have listened to, and that, anyhow, he had done his work with a zeal far beyond the call of duty. Which turned out to be true enough, except that, strange as it may appear, his murderous zeal was not altogether unconnected with the ambiguity in the voices of those who at one time or another tried to restrain him. We need mention here only in passing the so-called "inner emigration" in Germany - those people who frequently had held positions, even high ones, in the Third Reich and who, after the end of the war, told themselves and the world at large that they had always been "inwardly opposed" to the regime. The question here is not whether or not they are telling the truth; the point is, rather, that no secret in the secret-ridden atmosphere of the Hitler regime was better kept than such "inward opposition." This was almost a matter of course under the conditions of Nazi terror; as a rather well-known "inner emigrant," who certainly believed in his own sincerity, once told me, they had to appear "outwardly" even more like Nazis than ordinary Nazis did, in order to keep their secret. (This, incidentally, may explain why the few known protests against the extermination program came not from the Army commanders but from old Party members.) Hence, the only possible way to live in the Third Reich and not act as a Nazi was not to appear at all: "Withdrawal from significant participation in public life" was indeed the only criterion by which one might have measured individual guilt, as Otto Kirchheimer recently remarked in his Political Justice (1961). If the term was to make any sense, the "inner emigrant"
could only be one who lived "as though outcast among his own people amidst blindly believing masses," as Professor Hermann Jahrreiss pointed out in his "Statement for All Defense Attorneys" before the Nuremberg Tribunal. For opposition was indeed "utterly pointless" in the absence of all organization. It is true that there were Germans who lived for twelve years in this
"outer cold," but their number was insignificant, even among the members of the resistance. In recent years, the slogan of the "inner emigration" (the term itself has a definitely equivocal flavor, as it can mean either an emigration into the inward regions of one's soul or a way of conducting oneself as though he were an emigrant) has become a sort of a joke. The sinister Dr. Otto Bradfisch, former member of one of the Einsatzgruppen, who presided over the killing of at least fifteen thousand people, told a German court that he had always been "inwardly opposed" to what he was doing. Perhaps the death of fifteen thousand people was necessary to provide him with an alibi in the eyes of "true Nazis." (The same argument was advanced, though with considerably less success, in a Polish court by former Gauleiter Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau: only his
"official soul" had carried out the crimes for which he was hanged in 1946, his "private soul" had always been against them.) -
While Eichmann may never have encountered an "inner emigrant," he must have been well acquainted with many of those numerous civil servants who today assert that they stayed in their jobs for no other reason than to "mitigate" matters and to prevent "real Nazis" from taking over their posts. We mentioned the famous case of Dr. Hans Globke, Undersecretary of State and from 1953 to 1963 chief of the personnel division in the West German Chancellery. Since he was the only civil servant in this category to be mentioned during the trial, it may be worth while to look into his mitigating activities. Dr. Globke had been employed in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior before Hitler's rise to power, and had shown there a rather premature interest in the Jewish question. He formulated the first of the directives in which "proof of Aryan descent" was demanded, in this case of persons who applied for permission to change their names. This circular letter of December, 1932 - issued at a time when Hitler's rise to power was not yet a certainty, but a strong probability - oddly anticipated the "top secret decrees," that is, the typically totalitarian rule by means of laws that are not brought to the attention of the public, which the Hitler regime introduced much later, in notifying the recipients that "these directives are not for publication." Dr. Globke, as I have mentioned, kept his interest in names, and since it is true that his Commentary on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was considerably harsher than the earlier interpretation of Rassenschande by the Ministry of the Interior's expert on Jewish affairs, Dr.
Bernhard Lösener, an old member of the Party, one could even accuse him of having made things worse than they were under "real Nazis." But even if we were to grant him all his good intentions, it is hard indeed to see what he could have done under the circumstances to make things better than they would otherwise have been. Recently, however, a German newspaper, after much searching, came up with an answer to this puzzling question. They found a document, duly signed by Dr. Globke, which decreed that Czech brides of German soldiers had to furnish photographs of themselves in bathing suits in order to obtain a marriage license. And Dr. Globke explained: "With this confidential ordinance a three-year-old scandal was somewhat mitigated"; for until his intervention, Czech brides had to furnish snapshots that showed them stark naked.
Dr. Globke, as he explained at Nuremberg, was fortunate in that he worked under the orders of another "mitigator," Staatssekretär (Undersecretary of State) Wilhelm Stuckart, whom we met as one of the eager members of the Wannsee Conference. Stuckart's attenuation activities concerned half-Jews, whom he proposed to sterilize. (The Nuremberg court, in possession of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, may not have believed that he had known nothing of the extermination program, but it sentenced him to time served on account of ill health. A German denazification court fined him five hundred marks and declared him a "nominal member of the Party" - a Mitläufer - although they must have known at least that Stuckart belonged to the "old guard" of the Party and had joined the S.S. early, as an honorary member.) Clearly, the story of the "mitigators" in Hitler's offices belongs among the postwar fairy tales, and we can dismiss them, too, as voices that might possibly have reached Eichmann's conscience.
The question of these voices became serious, in Jerusalem, with the appearance in court of Propst Heinrich Grüber, a Protestant minister, who had come to the trial as the only German (and, incidentally, except for Judge Michael Musmanno from the United States, the only non-Jewish) witness for the prosecution. (German witnesses for the defense were excluded from the outset, since they would have exposed themselves to arrest and prosecution in Israel under the same law as that under which Eichmann was tried.) Propst Grüber had belonged to the numerically small and politically irrelevant group of persons who were opposed to Hitler on principle, and not out of nationalist considerations, and whose stand on the Jewish question had been without equivocation. He promised to be a splendid witness, since Eichmann had negotiated with him several times, and his mere appearance in the courtroom created a kind of sensation. Unfortunately, his testimony was vague; he did not remember, after so many years, when he had spoken with Eichmann, or, and this was more serious, on what subjects. All he recalled clearly was that he had once asked for unleavened bread to be shipped to Hungary for Passover, and that l e had traveled to Switzerland during the war to tell his Christian friends how dangerous the situation was and to urge that more opportunities for emigration be provided. (The negotiations must have taken place prior to the implementing of the Final Solution, which coincided with Himmler's decree forbidding all emigration; they probably occurred before the invasion of Russia.) He got his unleavened bread, and he got safely to Switzerland and back again. His troubles started later, when the deportations had begun. Propst Grüber and his group of Protestant clergymen first intervened merely "on behalf of people who had been wounded in the course of the First World War and of those who had been awarded high military decorations; on behalf of the old and on behalf of the widows of those killed in World War I." These categories corresponded to those that had originally been exempted by the Nazis themselves. Now Grüber was told that what he was doing "ran counter to the policy of the government," but nothing serious happened to him. But shortly after this, Propst Grüber did something really extraordinary: he tried to reach the concentration camp of Gurs, in southern France, where Vichy France had interned, together with German Jewish refugees, some seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden and the Saarpfalz whom Eichmann had smu