Throughout
the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point
in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment
implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out
of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As
for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an
innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for
his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad
conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship
millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the
most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen
psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“More normal, at any rate, than I
am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while
another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his
wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not
only normal but most desirable”—and finally the minister who had paid regular
visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal
reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive
ideas.” Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was
obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity. (Mr. Hausner’s recent
revelations in the Saturday Evening Post of things he “could not bring out at
the trial” have contradicted the information given informally in Jerusalem.
Eichmann, we are now told, had been alleged by the psychiatrists to be “a man
obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill,” “a perverted, sadistic
personality.” In which case he would have belonged in an insane asylum.) Worse,
his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical
anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything
whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for
not being a Jew hater. To be sure, there were fanatic anti-Semites among his
closest friends, for instance Lászlo Endre, State Secretary in Charge of
Political (Jewish) Affairs in Hungary, who was hanged in Budapest in 1946; but
this, according to Eichmann, was more or less in the spirit of “some of my best
friends are anti-Semites.” Alas, nobody believed him. The prosecutor did not
believe him, because that was not his job. Counsel for the defense paid no
attention because he, unlike Eichmann, was, to all appearances, not interested
in questions of conscience. And the judges did not believe him, because they
were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their
profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded
nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right
from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a
liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case.
Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal
persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann
was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.”
However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be
expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma
for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape. He was born on
March 19, 1906, in Solingen, a German town in the Rhineland famous for its
knives, scissors, and surgical instruments. Fifty-four years later, indulging
in his favorite pastime of writing his memoirs, he described this memorable
event as follows: “Today, fifteen years and a day after May 8, 1945, I begin to
lead my thoughts back to that nineteenth of March of the year 1906, when at
five o’clock in the morning I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human
being.” (The manuscript has not been released by the Israeli authorities. Harry
Mulisch succeeded in studying this autobiography “for half an hour,” and the
German-Jewish weekly Der Aufbau was able to publish short excerpts from it.)
According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period
(in Jerusalem Eichmann declared himself to be a Gottglaubiger, the Nazi term
for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused to take his oath on
the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to “a higher Bearer of Meaning,” an
entity somehow identical with the “movement of the universe,” to which human
life, in itself devoid of “higher meaning,” is subject. (The terminology is quite
suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnestrager meant linguistically to give him
some place in the military hierarchy, since the Nazis had changed the military
“recipient of orders,” the Befehlsempfanger, into a “bearer of orders,” a
Befehlsträger, indicating, as in the ancient “bearer of ill tidings,” the
burden of responsibility and of importance that weighed supposedly upon those
who had to execute orders. Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone connected with the
Final Solution, was officially a “bearer of secrets,” a Geheimnisträger, as
well, which as far as self-importance went certainly was nothing to sneeze at.)
But Eichmann, not very much interested in metaphysics, remained singularly
silent on any more intimate relationship between the Bearer of Meaning and the
bearer of orders, and proceeded to a consideration of the other possible cause
of his existence, his parents: “They would hardly have been so overjoyed at the
arrival of their first-born had they been able to watch how in the hour of my
birth the Norn of misfortune, to spite the Norn of good fortune, was already
spinning threads of grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind, impenetrable
veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.”
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