Eichmann Was Completely Unrepentant About The Extermination Of The Jews

Adolph Eichmann, like Mitt Romney, started off as an advocate of self-deportation

I never understood Roland’s interest in Jews-in-exotic-places but whenever we travel to off-the-beaten path countries, he always wants to visit synagogues— in places where you wouldn’t expect Jews, like Singapore, Yangon, and India. We still haven’t visited Madagascar but there’s even a small Jewish community there. Until Hitler decided to invade Russia, it looked like there was going to be a really big Jewish community in Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposed that Germany take over the French colony of Madagascar and resettle Europe’s Jews there (originally an idea that Poland’s right-wing government came up with in the late ‘30s. Half of Germany’s Jews had, in Mitt Romney’s timeless words, “self-deported” (to the U.S., Palestine, the U.K., Argentina and Brazil) in the 6 years after the Nazis took power. Hitler liked the Madagascar plan and Adolph Eichmann released a memorandum on 15 August 1940— Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years. His plan was to put the SS in charge of the island. In the end though, the Nazis got too busy with a two-front war and chose direct extermination over deportation. No European Jews were forced to resettle on Madagascar.

The plan was touched on by Bettina Stangneth in her new book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, reviewed yesterday by Richard Evans for The Guardian. The book covers Eichmann’s years in exile after the Holocaust and the Nazi defeat and before he was kipnapped in Argentina (1960) and brought to Israel to be hanged in 1962.

So what kind of a man was Adolf Eichmann? How and why did he become a mass murderer? The first and still the most famous and influential attempt to answer these questions came from the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who attended the trial as a correspondent for the New Yorker, subsequently publishing her articles in a revised book-length version as Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book stirred up a storm of criticism, particularly though not exclusively from Jewish intellectuals in the United States. There were many reasons for this. Reflecting what was known at the time, and in common with other early historians of the Nazis' genocide of the Jews, Arendt was highly critical both of the passivity of the great majority of European Jews in the face of persecution and extermination, and of the collaborationist administration of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos, whose tragic and impossible situation failed to arouse her sympathy. [She wouldn’t be a fan of gay Republicans like Aaron Schock, Lindsey Graham, Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei today.]

The judgments she offers in Eichmann in Jerusalem are utterly independent and totally unsparing. Time and again she raises questions that provoke and disturb. The abduction of Eichmann from Argentina was illegal; the trial was a show-trial; Israel's marriage laws were similar to the racist Nuremberg laws of the Nazis; Eichmann's crimes were crimes against humanity, so international law should have dealt with the case. Arendt's independence of mind is one of the most impressive features of her reporting. She writes as a detached philosophical inquirer, not as the representative of any particular group or political tendency.

Eichmann in Jerusalem bore the subtitle "A Study in the Banality of Evil.” What she meant by this was not that Eichmann was a mere bureaucrat, a conscienceless pen-pusher who was only obeying orders. On the contrary, she argued, he was an ideological antisemite, a man of overweening ambition who wanted not only power but also fame. He had a compulsion to "talk big,” she observed, and indeed "bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing.” Not a particularly intelligent man, he assimilated the ideology and behaviour of the evil system within which he sought to achieve distinction. He admired the Third Reich not least because it allowed men from a humble background like his own— or Hitler's, for that matter— to climb to the top. He was under no compulsion to act as he did: he could have opted out at any time; all his actions were voluntary. He deserved to die because he had failed, or refused, to exercise the kind of moral judgment Arendt herself showed in her book. His crimes were the crimes of a system, even a nation; as the psychologists who examined him in prison concluded, he was not a psychopath or a sociopath, though, as Arendt points out, he was most certainly, and frequently, a liar and a deceiver. This was the "banality of evil.”

In Argentina, Arendt notes, Eichmann did not go underground but occupied himself with "talking endlessly with members of the large Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity.” These conversations were recorded by a Dutch ex‑member of the SS, Willem Sassen, and edited extracts were published anonymously, though there could be little doubt about the identity of the principal participant. The existence of the original tapes and transcripts has long been known, but up to now their poor quality has defied systematic investigation. The German philosopher and historian Bettina Stangneth has now performed the invaluable service of deciphering them, putting them together with other, often little-known source material, and delivering a full analysis of Eichmann's ideas as he expounded them to his friends and former colleagues in exile.

In the conversations he had with Sassen and others, Eichmann was completely unrepentant about the extermination of the Jews, which he saw as historically necessary, a policy he was proud to have carried out in the interests of Germany. The cynicism, inhumanity, lack of pity and moral self‑deception of the conversations are breathtaking. This is a very disturbing book, and every now and then, as you read it, you have to pause in disbelief. Ten years and more after the war's end, Eichmann's lack of realism, typical for a political exile, even persuaded him that he could make a comeback, or that nazism could be rehabilitated, and he planned to launch a public defense of what he saw as its achievements.

In one of the conversations, Eichmann described himself as a "cautious bureaucrat" but also "a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood.” Stangneth dissents from Arendt's belief that Eichmann was unintelligent, and points out that he calculatedly presented himself only as the cautious bureaucrat during his trial, deliberately concealing his "fanatical" side. But his clumsy attempt to present himself as pursuing a Kantian "categorical imperative" does not show that he was in any way an intellectual; and his mendacious self-presentation as a mere pen-pusher did not convince anyone, least of all Arendt. What he lacked was moral intelligence, the ability to judge the system he worked for and whose ideology he assimilated so completely.

Stangneth's absorbing account of his years in exile, which is translated by Ruth Martin, adds considerably to our knowledge of Eichmann, but it is not a "total reassessment of the man", as the publishers claim, nor is it true to claim that the book "permanently undermines Hannah Arendt's notion of the 'banality of evil'." Half a century after it was written, Arendt's book, despite the fact that it has been overtaken in many of its details by research, remains a classic that everyone interested in the crimes of nazism has to confront.

How the "Hitler twisters" have helped me understand the Holocaust deniers

Just 'cause he's been gone for more than 60 years
doesn't mean Hitler can't still provide assistance to
his spiritual heirs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

by Ken

I used to wonder about Holocaust deniers. What I wondered was, why? While it's possible that some or even all of them actually believe the nonsense they spew, it can't be from some deep soul-defining sense of belief, because it is after all utter bullshit. Is it really possible to have a soul that is defined by bullshit? I mean, it's not as if there are any reasonable grounds for Holocaust denial. All too clearly what you've got is people who have decided first to believe in this crap and then searched out the kinds of ambiguities and cracks that exist in any kind of historical enquiry to justify the crap.

I know I'm not expressing this very well, but my question, you see, was why? Why do they choose, not only to believe but to stake large parts of their reputation and lives on the nonsense they choose to believe? Don't people normally act in their self-interest? Well, where's the self-interest in promulgating nonsense while in the process (a) making a mockery of the historical record and (b) inflicting such pain on so many millions of people with direct ties to that horror (and the many, many millions more who simply respect the pursuit of truth)?

The other day it suddenly occurred to me that there's nothing at all mysterious about it, now that we've landed ourselves in a time when we have an entire political wing, teetering out there on the precipice, shouting, "We'll believe whatever we damn well want to believe, and we'll bash the brains out of any commie homos who try to shove facts in our face!"

Now it all seems so simple. There probably isn't one uniform set of motives for Holocaust denial. There are anti-Semites so rabid that it just drives them nuts to see Jews get "credit" for all that suffering and dying, and so, what do you know, there was no Final Solution! Somebody, undoubtedly some dirty Jew, made it all up! Then there are Nazi sympathizers and other fans of authoritarianism who just don't like to see the reputation of one of their heroes sullied. And so they demand to see a single document signed by the Führer authorizing any aspect of the Final Solution. (Of course the Führer didn't generally transmit such instructions on paper over his signature. But hey, wait a minute -- you mean there was a Final Solution?)

I'm sure there are many other paths to Holocaust denial. The subject has become a lot less interesting to me, because I understand that all those paths can tell us is what kinds of psychological problems the people who follow those paths have.

So what, now, about the 2009 version of Holocaust denial? The new deniers don't seem to deny either that the mayhem caused by Adolf Hitler in his short time in power happened, or that it happened as a result of Hitler's will. No, they've simply invented a new Hitler -- apparently snipped hastily out of a sheet of construction paper -- and pasted their Hitleroid over the real Hitler's picture.

And as a result of this ingenious remaking of the historical record, you know what? Hitler has turned into a leftist!!! It's like a magic trick, only a really, really slow-acting one, because it didn't take effect until more than 60 years after the guy died. It's kind of as if a magician promised his audience to make his lovely assistant disappear, then told the folks to come back in 60, 70, 80 years -- send the grandkids if necessary -- to see the illusion completed.

Of course it's not quite like that, because when the man was alive, it never would have occurred to anyone to try to make believe that Hitler, who was not only unapologetic but proud to be the driving force behind a movement of the extreme Right, was a leftist.

That Hitler -- and his ideological soulmates Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain -- were die-hard rightists isn't a matter of opinion. There's nothing to debate. It's simply who and what they were. And in the economic mess that was Europe in the 1920s and '30s, with the specter of militant Bolshevism looming from the East, the Far Right could be a winning position to stake out.

I can't tell you how stunned I was when I first became aware that modern-day Movement Conservatives have chosen to invent such a battle and fight it. They have nothing going for them in the way of fact or historical argument. Because again, the history is straightforward and incontrovertible. It has never been challenged because there's nothing to challenge. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were never the least bit secretive about their political or economic philosophies. Does anyone really imagine that Franco fought the Spanish Civil War against Soviet-backed Republican forces because of his commitment to centrism?

Franco is an interesting case here, by the way, since his far-right-wing dictatorship in Spain endured until his death in November 1975. That extends the history of fascism an extra three decades. Is anyone suggesting that Franco was a leftist?

I'm forgetting, though, just how long ago 1975 was, at least in Movement Conservative-speak. They probably couldn't tell us how long ago it was either, because they're so proud of having no functional education. For all I know, they regard subtraction as a liberal plot -- to strip real American men and women of their real American manhood.

What I'm suggesting is that in a world where ignorance is not only bliss but a great blank slate on which to sketch whatever fantasy world you wish, not only is the Third Reich ancient history, but so is the Franco regime. To people who can't remember what happened yesterday -- even if it's by choice, as I would argue -- events of many, many years ago have no meaning, except as conveniently repackaged by their own propagandists.

As some of you may be aware, I had a visitation recently in our comments section from a commenter who helpfully debunked my proposition that Hitler was what he claimed to be, a man of the extreme Right. No, he corrected me, Hitler was a leftist, just not as far left as Stalin.

Just like the Holocaust deniers, he didn't give obvious evidence of being insane or unschooled, but the simple fact was that on a scale of zero to a million, he had no fucking clue what he was talking about. He was pulling it all out of his stinking butt. He might just as well have been arguing that gravity makes stuff go up rather than down, just not as far up as upsidasium. (By the way, I want to apologize for the crappy typing of my response to that visitor. I don't type well when I'm spluttering.)

All they have to go on is the fact that the Nazis were National Socialists, apparently not understanding that the whole point of the name was to offer a nice-sounding name that could be an alternative to (shudder) the other "socialism." As if Movement Conservatives didn't know about calling your political program the exact opposite of what it actually is -- what did their god George W. Bush do for eight years? You pollute, for example, in the name of "clean air."

Well, I guess it wasn't coming only out of his butt. It was coming from the same sets of talking points that Michele Malkin and Rush and Billo and Sean and Glenn use. And it's not hard to see how "Hitler twisting" has been of use to the Right-Wing Noise Machine. On the one hand, they have a Hitler Problem. They keep coming up against suggestions that they are the intellectual, political, and spiritual heirs of Hitler, as of course they are. As I've pointed out, the Right-Wing Noise Machine has to have come straight out of the dog-eared pages of their copies of Goebbels for Dummies.

At the same time, the one thing people really do remember about Hitler is that he was really, really bad. So why not do a Karl Rove presto change-o and turn your problem into the solution? Suddenly Hitler is a leftist! Just like Obama, who of course isn't much more of a leftist than Hitler was. But there we go with those pesky facts again!

Believe it or not, I have a suggestion for restoring rationality to discussion of such subjects, and I'm going to share it in my next post.

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So you see, the Vatican isn't anti-Semitic! Some of its best friends, maybe -- but no, that's a misunderstanding too. If you took offense, sorry!

Stop the presses! It appears, from the testimony of no less than Pope Cardinal Ratguts himself, that at some point inside the Vatican, um, er, mistakes were made.

"I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them."

-- un-excommunicated Bishop Richard Williamson, in a Feb. 26 "apology" for his holocaust-denying remarks on Swedish TV in January, several days before his un-excommunication

by Ken

In my house, growing up, the standard way of expressing disagreement with a public figure's politics was to call him/her "a miserable anti-Semite." Needless to say, the range of offenses that qualified a person for the charge was exceedingly broad, not to mention hair-triggered. With the passage of time I came to disagree with many of the imputations, though not necessarily aloud. On the charge of "miserable anti-Semitism," my mother was pretty much judge and jury.

Well, my mother seems pretty much past that now. When I speak to her on the phone, I think she knows who I am, but not much more. So let me say it for her: Pope Cardinal Ratguts I is a miserable anti-Semite.

I was just reading on the NYT website where His Holiness "has written an unusually personal letter to bishops worldwide," scheduled for release today, "explaining why he revoked the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case."

These are the four bishops, you'll recall, who were excommunicated by that flaming liberal, Pope John Paul II. I devoured Rachel Donadio's account, in feverish expectation of hearing the current pope's explanation of the Vatican's mistakes in handling the case.

However, as far as I can tell, the mistake consisted of not handling the flow of information better -- notably the embarrassing circumstance by which one of the "traditionalist" bishops (members of the Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970 to wipe out the liberalizing "reforms" that had crept into the Church), including a Swedish TV interview this past January, several days before the scheduled un-excommunication, in which former Bishop Richard Williamson (according to a useful NYT online account updated to February 27) "denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and the scope of the Holocaust."

As best I can tell, what Pope Cardinal Ratguts regrets is the unfortunate coincidence in the timing -- that and the regrettable circumstance that, thanks to modern technology (i.e., YouTube), the bishop's indiscreet remarks quickly lit up the Internet.

Well, there seems to be one other thing that PCR regrets: the failure of those damn hot-headed Jews -- unlike the friendly ones who by contrast have been so understanding and supportive in this trying affair -- to understand that the excommunication and the un-excommunication were merely fairly trivial matters of doctrinal technicalities. The four bishops, you see, had been ordained without the blessing of the pope, in whom they don't believe, of course. Well, that was a big fat "oops!" as far as the Vatican is concerned. (Apparently. It was enough to send John Paul II into an excommunicating hissy fit, throwing around nasty words like "schism.")

Now, you see, the Schismatic Four haven't been un-excommunicated because of their views about the Holocaust. Oh, no no no no! As Ms. Donaudio put it:

In passages from the pope’s letter posted Wednesday on the blog of a veteran Vatican reporter, Andrea Tornielli, Benedict said he considered revoking the excommunication “a modest act of mercy” toward the bishops, whose ordinations were “valid but illicit.”

“Instead,” Mr. Tornielli quotes the letter saying, “it suddenly appeared something completely different: as the denial of reconciliation between Christians and Jews.”

You see, then, it was all a misunderstanding. Nothing to do with the holocaust to begin with! And really, the pope apparently believes, there are Catholics who should have known better. And those trouble-making Jews, what, really, is such a philo-Semitic pope to do about them?

By the way, the above-quoted "apology" issued by Bishop Williamson on February 26 was, according to the NYT account, judged by the Vatican "not sufficient to restore him to full communion with the church." Even though it included this heartfelt addendum: "To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize."

Bishop Williamson holocaust-denying on Swedish TV in January -- he later apologized "to all souls that took honest scandal" from what he said. So that's OK, right?

Perhaps this small matter will be cleared up with the release of this virtually unprecedented letter of the pope's, deigning to explain his, er, "thinking." But on the whole I think we've got the basic points down:

* Um, mistakes were, you know, made.

* If anyone was offended, well, the bishops are real, real sorry.

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