Anything but Banal

By David Pryce-Jones
The Wall Street Journal
http://www.marketwatch.com/
March 11, 2011, 5:26 p.m. EST

The Eichmann Trial

By Deborah E. Lipstadt
Schocken, 237 pages, $24.95


Escaping to Argentina after World War II and adopting a false identity, Adolf Eichmann might never have been recognized as the Nazi criminal that he was. But in 1960, Mossad secret-service agents traced him in hiding and smuggled him to Israel. He was put on trial the following year for his crimes during the Nazi era. Israel was seen to be acting unilaterally in pursuit of its interests, and the furor that its actions aroused has never quite died down.

Eichmann was born in 1906 in Germany but moved as a child with his family to Austria. Until he became a clandestine member of the Nazi Party his path in life seemed destined to mediocrity and disappointment. Though intelligent, he took his opinions from those around him and believed anti-Semitic fantasies. The more successful Hitler was, the faster this henchman rose, from street brawler to Gestapo officer in the inner circle of Heinrich Himmler and Rein hard Heydrich.

At the close of the Wannsee conference of 1942, where the decision to exterminate all Jews had been taken, Eichmann drank two or three glasses of cognac with Heydrich to celebrate. For the rest of the war his special task was to organize the deportation of Jews to killing centers. Allies or neutral governments occasionally petitioned him to release a Jewish citizen of theirs. He refused invariably.

Many in the world argued that Israel had no legal right to capture Eichmann or to put him on trial for crimes committed before the state was founded in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, prime minister at the time of Eichmann's arrest, held strongly that Israel was the country of Jews and thus entitled to act on behalf of those killed for their Judaism. The permission he gave Mossad to seize Eichmann would ultimately color the world's perception of Israel and the country's view of itself.

In "The Eichmann Trial," Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history at Emory University, presents a thoughtfully researched and clearly written account of the courtroom proceedings and of the debates spurred by the trial. She begins with a brief reminder of how, in a law court a dozen years ago, she obtained a judgment against David Irving, a British writer with a line in Holocaust denial who claimed that she had libeled him in her 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust." The court found instead that Mr. Irving had falsified the historical record. Mr. Irving's relation to the Holocaust obviously cannot be com pared with Adolf Eichmann's, but Ms. Lipstadt argues that the motivations of both of these fanatics can be traced to the anti-Semitism endemic in European culture and religion.

In the Jerusalem court in 1961, the Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, made the trial into "a broad educational exercise" as well as place of judgment. He called about 100 Holocaust survivors to testify about their experiences. During the war, these people had surely been unaware of Eichmann's existence. Their harrowing ordeals had no bearing on his personal responsibility, but their public witness made the Holocaust a reality, and a moral issue, as never before.

Eichmann was "a disciplined and well-prepared defendant," Ms. Lipstadt writes. He obscured his anti-Semitism, she says, and manipulated the court to the best of his ability. Asked a difficult question, he would plead loss of memory. His consistent defense was that he had only carried out orders. Holocaust policy, he said, was outside his competence. He was "a little cog."

Ms. Lipstadt shows how Eichmann's self-portrait as an insignificant clerk, though contrary to the facts, came to be widely accepted. In large measure, she says, it was Hannah Arendt's doing. A German Jew who had fled her homeland for France and then the U.S. during the war, Arendt was by 1960 firmly established as a public intellectual in America. She reported on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker magazine and produced a book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963), in which she coined the phrase "the banality of evil."

For Arendt, Eichmann was just an ordinary man, and any ordinary man might have done what he did. This was a perverse reading of human nature. As I can testify from my attendance in that court, Eichmann was a cold figure, though often snarling with righteousness and resentment. "Banal" was not a term applicable to someone unable to recognize his limitless moral depravity.

Arendt accepted that Israel did have the right to kidnap, try and even execute Eichmann, but her own prejudices diverted her from central principles. She didn't even engage fully with the proceedings. After only four weeks of a trial that lasted from mid-April to mid-August, Ms. Lipstadt notes, Arendt was already away vacationing in Switzerland. Returning briefly to Jerusalem, she again left so early that she missed Hausner's cross-examination of Eichmann.

Jews, Arendt felt, had let her down. Instead of resisting, they had accepted what the Nazis had imposed on them. They believed that Eichmann had victimized them as Jews but she knew better—that he had invented the new and revolutionary "crime against humanity" that happened to have been perpetrated against Jews. After the war, the Jews in Israel, she thought, adopted the wrong kind of Zionism. Ms. Lipstadt describes her as "flippant," "cruel" and "glib."

The thrust of Arendt's critique is that Israel ought to have a higher national purpose than providing a refuge from anti-Semitism. These days, that critique is tediously familiar—which makes it all the more telling that an American professor of modern Jewish history should argue in a quiet but determined voice that, in the Eichmann case, Israel was identifying and defending a worthwhile national purpose.

Mr. Pryce-Jones's "Treason of the Heart: From Tom Paine to Kim Philby" will be published in May by Encounter.