Inspirations

But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann’s character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of the Vienna episode. He and his men and the Jews were all ‘pulling together’, and whenever there were any difficulties the Jewish functionaries would come running to him ‘to unburden their hearts’, to tell him ‘all their grief and sorrow’, and to ask for his help. The Jews ‘desired’ to emigrate, and he, Eichmann, was there to help them, because it so happened that at the same time the Nazi authorities had expressed a desire to see their Reich judenrein. The two desires coincided, and he, Eichmann, could ‘do justice to both parties’. At the trial, he never gave an inch when it came to this part of the story, although he agreed that today, when ‘times have changed so much’, the Jews might not be too happy to recall this ‘pulling together’ and he did not want ‘to hurt their feelings’.

The German text of the taped police examination, conducted from 29 May 1960 to 17 January 1961, each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist – provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of ‘winged words’ (geflügelte Worte, a German colloquialism for famous quotes from the classics) when he means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte. It was funny when, during the cross-examination on the Sassen documents, conducted in German by the presiding judge, he used the phrase ‘kontra geben’ (to give tit for tat), to indicate that he had resisted Sassen’s efforts to liven up his stories; Judge Landau, obviously ignorant of the mysteries of card games, did not understand, and Eichmann could not think of any other way to put it. Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school – it amounted to a mild case of aphasia – he apologized, saying, ‘Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.’ But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. (Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so ‘normal’ and ‘desirable’? Are these the ‘positive ideas’ a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? Eichmann’s best opportunity to show this positive side of his character in Jerusalem came when the young police officer in charge of his mental and psychological well-being handed him Lolita for relaxation. After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant; ‘Quite an unwholesome book’ – ‘Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch’ – he told his guard.) To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told

the accused that all he had said was ‘empty talk’ – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Thus, confronted for eight months with the reality of being examined by a Jewish policeman, Eichmann did not have the slightest hesitation in explaining to him at considerable length, and repeatedly, why he had been unable to attain a higher grade in the SS, and that this was not his fault. He had done everything, even asked to be sent to active military duty – ‘Off to the front, I said to myself, then the Standartenführer [colonelcy] will come quicker.’ In court, on the contrary, he pretended he had asked to be transferred because he wanted to escape his murderous duties. He did not insist much on this, though, and, strangely, he was not confronted with his utterances to Captain Less, whom he also told that he had hoped to be nominated for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units in the East, because when they were formed, in March 1941, his office was ‘dead’ – there was no emigration any longer and deportations had not yet been started. There was, finally, his greatest ambition – to be promoted to the job of police chief in some German town; again, nothing doing. What makes these pages of the examination so funny is that all this was told in the tone of someone who was sure of finding ‘normal, human’ sympathy for a hard-luck story. ‘Whatever I prepared and planned, everything went wrong, my personal affairs as well as my years-long efforts to obtain land and soil for the Jews. I don’t know, everything was as if under an evil spell; whatever I desired and wanted and planned to do, fate prevented it somehow. I was frustrated in everything, no matter what.’ When Captain Less asked his opinion on some damning and possibly lying evidence given by a former colonel of the SS, he exclaimed, suddenly stuttering with rage: ‘I am very much surprised that this man could ever have been an SS Standartenführer, that surprises me very much indeed. It is altogether, altogether unthinkable. I don’t know what to say.’ He never said these things in a spirit of defiance, as though he wanted, even now, to defend the standards by which he had lived in the past. The very words ‘SS’, or ‘career’, or ‘Himmler’ (whom he always called by his long official title: Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police, although he by no means admired him) triggered in him a mechanism that had become completely unalterable. The presence of Captain Less, a Jew from Germany and unlikely in any case to think that members of the SS advanced in their careers through the exercise of high moral qualities, did not for a moment throw this mechanism out of gear.

Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results in stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humour easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the story told by Eichmann during the police examination about the unlucky Kommerzialrat Storfer of Vienna, one of the representatives of the Jewish community. Eichmann had received a telegram from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently requested to see Eichmann. ‘I said to myself: OK, this man has always behaved well, that is worth my while… I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says – I remember it only vaguely – “If only he had not been so clumsy; he went into hiding and tried to escape,” something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done, neither Dr Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz and asked Höss to see Storfer. “Yes, yes [Höss said], he is in one of the labour gangs.” With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow. I said: ‘Well, my dear old friend [ Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!’ And I also said: ‘Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders from the Reichsführer nobody can get out. I can’t get you out. Dr Ebner can’t get you out. I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.’ [Eichmann meant that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation.] I forget what his reply to this was. And then I asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn’t be let off work, it was heavy work. And then I said to Höss: “Work – Storfer won’t have to work!” But Höss said: “Everyone works here.” So I said: “OK,” I said, “I’ll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom” – there were little gravel paths there – “and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.” [To Storfer] I said: “Will that be all right, Mr Storfer? Will that suit you?” Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other.’ Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead – not gassed, apparently, but shot.

Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevsky once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? Yet Eichmann’s case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of ‘the battle of destiny for the German people’ (der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes), coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.

Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. ‘Of course’ he had played a role in the extermination of the Jews; of course if he ‘had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher’. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is there to “admit”?’ Now, he proceeded, he ‘would like to find peace with [his] former enemies’ – a sentiment he shared not only with Himmler, who had expressed it during the last year of the war, or with the Labour Front leader Robert Ley (who, before he committed suicide in Nuremberg, had proposed the establishment of a ‘conciliation committee’ consisting of the Nazis responsible for the massacres and the Jewish survivors) but also, unbelievably, with many ordinary Germans, who were heard to express themselves in exactly the same terms at the end of the war. This outrageous cliché was no longer issued to them from above, it was a self-fabricated stock phrase, as devoid of reality as those clichés by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an ‘extraordinary sense of elation’ it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his mouth.

Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such sentences. His memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happened; in a rare moment of exasperation, Judge Landau asked the accused: ‘What can you remember?’ (if you don’t remember the discussions at the so-called Wannsee Conference, which dealt with the various methods of killing) and the answer, of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but that they did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with the turning points in history. (He always had trouble remembering the exact date of the outbreak of the war or of the invasion of Russia.) But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of the sentences of his that at one time or another had served to give him a ‘sense of elation’. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judges tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with ‘elation’, and they were outraged as well as disconcerted when they learned that the accused had at his disposal a different elating cliché for each period of his life and each of his activities. In his mind, there was no contradiction between ‘I will jump into my grave laughing’, appropriate for the end of the war, and ‘I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth’, which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift.

These habits of Eichmann’s created considerable difficulty during the trial – less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar – which he obviously was not. His own convictions in this matter were far from modest: ‘One of the few gifts fate bestowed upon me is a capacity for truth insofar as it depends upon myself.’ This gift he had claimed even before the prosecutor wanted to settle on him crimes he had not committed. In the disorganized, rambling notes he made in Argentina in preparation for the interview with Sassen, when he was still, as he even pointed out at the time, ‘in full possession of my physical and psychological freedom’, he had issued a fa

ntastic warning to ‘future historians to be objective enough not to stray from the path of this truth recorded here’ – fantastic because every line of these scribblings shows his utter ignorance of everything that was not directly, technically and bureaucratically connected with his job, and also shows an extraordinarily faulty memory.

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (‘Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement, to declare something under oath as a witness. I refuse it, I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or any other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me’), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defence he might ‘do so under oath or without an oath’, declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy – and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document, containing his plea for mercy?

As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content, without ever becoming aware of anything like ‘inconsistencies’. As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés did not leave him in the hour of his death.

W.B. YEATS

from Selected Poems

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,