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.
*
The
“acquaintances in the outside world” did not necessarily live outside Germany;
according to Himmler, there were “eighty million good Germans, each of whom has
his decent Jew. It is clear, the others are pigs, but this particular Jew is
first-rate” (Hilberg). Hitler himself is said to have known three hundred and
forty “first-rate Jews,” whom he had either altogether assimilated to the
status of Germans or granted the privileges of half-Jews. Thousands of
half-Jews had been exempted from all restrictions, which might explain
Heydrich’s role in the S.S. and Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch’s role in
Göring’s Air Force, for it was generally known that Heydrich and Milch were
half-Jews.
*
The
examining officer did not press the point, but Judge Raveh, either out of
curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann’s having dared to invoke Kant’s
name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the accused. And, to
the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct
definition of the categorical imperative : “I meant by my remark about Kant
that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the
principle of general laws” (which is not the case with theft or murder, for
instance, because the thief or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live
under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him) .
Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant’s Critique of
Practical Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was
charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to
Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with
the thought that he no longer “was master of his own deeds,” that he was unable
“to change anything.” What he failed to point out in court was that in this
“period of crimes legalized by the state,” as he himself now called it, he had
not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had
distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as
that of the legislator or of the law of the land—or, in Hans Frank’s
formulation of “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich,” which Eichmann
might have known: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action,
would approve it” (Die Technik des Staates, 1942, pp. 15-16). Kant, to be sure,
had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every
man was a legislator the moment he started to act: by using his “practical
reason” man found the principles that could and should be the principles of
law. But it is true that Eichmann’s unconscious distortion agrees with what he
himself called the version of Kant “for the household use of the little
man.”
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