Hannah Arendt and Responsibility

In 1961 Hannah Arendt, then a respected professor at the New School in New York, sought and received a commission from the New Yorker to report on the up-coming trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her reflections were reported in the magazine in early 1963 and her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” was published shortly afterward. A veritable storm over her writings erupted immediately among the Jewish people in the USA and abroad. Arendt was accused of betraying her people by writing about the role of Jewish elders in the Holocaust, an organizational role which facilitated the orderly capture and elimination of the Jewish masses. Moreover, her attempts to understand the mental and moral inner life of a bureaucrat like Eichmann appeared to some an exoneration of guilt. Friends and colleagues turned against her, accusing her of all manner of infamy. The period is captured in a recent film by Magarethe Von Trotta entitled Hannah Arendt.

A philosopher much engaged with moral issues, Arendt approached the trial differently than would another reporter more concerned, for example, in developing a particular narrative about Eichmann and the Holocaust for the editorial position of her paper or the political position of her government. Arendt sought her role at the trial as an opportunity to witness and to reflect upon various issues raised within the context of her own understandings of responsibility. Her loyalty was to the truth as it emerged rather than to the protection of particular people or narratives.

In the questioning of witnesses the judges or prosecutor sometimes asked, “Why did you not rebel?” but not, “Why was there so much complicity?” Why did the Judenrat, the Jewish councils of pre-Holocaust communities, later of the ghettos and of the camps, so entirely co-operate with the directives of the Nazis, thus facilitating the gathering and transportation of the Jews ultimately to their deaths. This issue was not pursued because it did not fit within the purpose of the trial: to find Eichmann guilty of sentencing the Jews to death. Arendt could see clearly that though truth was being told, it was not the whole truth. Nonetheless the issue of the complicity of the councils did come to the fore at various points, most markedly when former prisoners who were attending the trial yelled in anger and derision during the testimony of Pinchas Freudiger. A former member of the Judenrat in one of the camps, Freudiger was explaining the role of his council. The outbursts were passed over as the prosecutor and judges continued in their quest to find Eichmann responsible personally for the selection of individuals being transported to the death camps. The reality was in fact quite different. At Theresienstadt, for example, the numbers of inmates to be sent to Auschwitz with a break-down in terms of how many women, children, and men for a particular train were given to the Judenrat. The council had then the responsibility of choosing who among their fellow prisoners would be sent.

In outlining the tasks set by the Nazis and carried out by the Judenrat and their police, Arendt refers to detail already available in the work of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews. In all countries and communities Jewish officials complied by compiling list of people and their properties, collecting money from them for their transportation to promised areas of settlement, supplying police forces to assist in the rounding up of Jews to get them onto the trains, distributing Yellow Star badges, and even before leaving themselves, handing over documented Jewish properties to the Nazis.

Accustomed to a role of authority within their communities leaders responded positively to the “request” of the Nazi officials who approached them to maintain these roles as “solutions of the Jewish question” evolved from the earliest transportations to the east. At that point few would understand the direction that the logic of these operations ultimately would take but from the beginning the Nazi connection had the effect of underwriting the legitimacy of the councils’ work. As the Budapest Council proclaimed to their people, “The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower.” These “rights granted” by the Nazis far exceeded the levels of authority held previously by councils, authority which ultimately gave them some control over who lived and who died. In Hungary 476,000 Jews were sent to their deaths while 1,684 were saved through council selection. The council’s post-war apologist, Dr Kastner wrote that “truly holy principles” were required for the selection of those few who ought to be saved. These “principles” in fact protected the most prominent Jews of the community.

Despite the tendency to pass over the responsibility of the Judenrat, however, one judge did elicit from a witness an acknowledgement that the policy of the Judenrat was co-operation with the Nazis. In his cross-examination Eichmann himself confessed his surprise at the degree to which the elders worked with the systems put in place to transport the Jews to concentration, labour, or death camps. He admitted that the Nazis considered their co-operation, “the very cornerstone of their Jewish policy.” Arendt was flagging a known fact of the Holocaust, one even written about in textbooks then current in Israel. Her interest, I believe, was less one of pointing a finger at the elders than to open the difficult area of the nature of responsibility. It seems clear that the co-ordination of the Nazi systems with those already in place within Jewish communities across Europe facilitated the more or less orderly delivery of many of the millions of Jews who met their deaths in the camps. In Holland, for example, 103,000 Jews were sent to the death camps by this method; (5,000 were sent to Theresienstadt a different category of camp and inmate which I will discuss later), and about 25,000 went underground, escaping both the Nazis and the Judenrat and their organ, the Jewish police. Most, if not all of those sent to the death camps died; about 10,000 of those who went underground survived. Circumventing the Judenrat’s authority allowed a considerably higher ratio of survival. Arendt contends that had the Jewish elders not co-operated with the Nazis, the devastation of European Jewry would have been considerably lessened. There would have been chaos and death for many but the relatively small numbers of personnel at the disposal of the SS could not have encompassed such a Herculean task alone.

Arendt looks at the responsibility of Eichmann and of the elders in human terms. How could it be that under these circumstances of war and of the criminal pursuit of an entire people, people who had by and large been raised with admonitions against the killing of others, could nonetheless engage themselves in decisions absolutely contrary to this morality? She understands Eichmann within the context of our ability to conform to the prevailing wisdoms of our culture or historical period. It is this ability that would allow, for example, an adherent to the tenets of a particular religion against murder, to simultaneously believe that the murder of members of another religious group is not only justified but virtuous and “holy.” Eichmann openly admitted to his questioners that he had reservations about the morality of the “Final Solution” to be organized at the Wannsee Conference. At the event itself, however, he experienced the enthusiastic certainty with which not just his superior officers like Heydrich and Himmler espoused that cause, but the unambiguous manner in which all levels of the administration present entered into plans and suggestions for its furtherance. Who am I, in essence he asked himself, to question the legality and rightness of this project if these others whom I respect and who have the clear will of my ultimate superior, Hitler, behind them, are certain that this direction is the proper one for our nation. From that day Eichmann said that his conscience was clear. Arendt concludes that Eichmann did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience’ as his judges stated, “not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”

The case of others involved through various levels of co-operation with the Nazis and the SS Arendt understands within the same context that she views Eichmann. In its determination to judge Eichmann’s guilt, to place him as it were “over there,” as the evil one, the judges and prosecutors missed the opportunity to open the broader issues of complicit responsibility. She states clearly, “I have dwelled on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem trial failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimension, 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.”

Under terrible circumstances most of us will do whatever is necessary to stay alive, even if what we do transgresses the values upon which we have previously anchored our lives. We recognize the heroism of individuals who refuse to co-operate with the expectations of an evil system but most of us are not so clearly grounded in principles. Ultimately if at all levels – the Judenrat, the Jewish police (often more brutal and feared than even the SS), and the prisoners selected to facilitate the function of the camps: harrying arrivals into barracks, collecting and sorting their discarded clothing, shaving their heads and removing their gold teeth, herding them into the gas chambers, removing the corpses, and, presiding over the crematoria, -- if all these had refused to co-operate, their own lives might have been forfeited but the evil work which they accepted as the price of delaying their own demise would have been in great part thwarted.

Taking ourselves mentally into these circumstances forces the question, “What would I have done?” Placing ourselves there as honestly as we are able we can experience at least to some degree the horror of the choices available to those who were caught up within this diabolical universe. T.S.Eliot once famously wrote, “Man cannot take too much reality.” There is a strong impulse within us to avoid looking at whatever might overwhelm and destabilize us. Confronted with evidence of the Holocaust or other extreme situations of horror our reaction can easily be one of dismissal, disbelief, avoidance, or, of understanding the situation within a simple division of the actors. These are the victims and these are the perpetrators. These people are good; these are evil. With this division we divide also our own selves, aligning ourselves usually on the side of those who bear few responsibilities. It saves us those uncomfortable questions about the possibility that we might under certain conditions and stresses find ourselves complicit to various degrees with what we lump together as the “figures of evil,” those ones “over there.”

At age 19 I was first made aware of this human propensity to view threatening circumstances through a split, black and white lens that removes us from any connection with people who openly carried a perceived stain. In the fall of 1959 I spend three months affiliated as a student nurse at what was then called the Kingston Mental Hospital. I was struck with the multitude of subtle and overt ways that staff and students made clear a sharp division between themselves and the patients. The latter are “The Mentally Ill,” the division pronounced, and we are “The Mentally Healthy.” I had some doubts about my own status at the time, enough to let me realize that maybe I also could in some circumstances find myself within the first category. The idea of moving over there was very frightening. The methods of treatment at the time were few and drastic: electric shock therapy, insulin shock therapy, and medications that seemed to numb the “patients,” the women we were caring for, into a zombie-like state. To be with them would be to dwell in a place of helplessness and shame. I could understand why we of the “helping” classes might want to distinguish ourselves from those being “helped,” but I could also understand it as a method of defense.

In my next post I will look at what Arendt considered a prime example of the moral collapse within the sphere of Nazi domination: the acceptance of the principle that the lives of some were of greater value than those of others. The concentration camp at Theresienstadt was established because of this idea.

A Post-Script: It has been pointed out to me that the 1977 book by Isaiah Trunk entitled Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation has refuted Arendt's conclusion that without the activities of the Jewish Councils more Jews would have survived the Holocaust.