Even more pertinent than Dr. Servatius’ question was what Eichmann said about this episode in his last statement: “Nobody,” he repeated, “came to me and reproached me for anything in the performance of my duties. Not even Pastor Grüber claims to have done so.” He then added: “He came to me and sought alleviation of suffering, but did not actually object to the very performance of my duties as such.” From Propst Grüber's own testimony, it appeared that he sought not so much “alleviation of suffering” as exemptions from it, in accordance with well-established categories recognized earlier by the Nazis. The categories had been accepted without protest by German Jewry from the very beginning. And the acceptance of privileged categories—German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.—had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society. (In view of the fact that today such matters are often treated as though there existed a law of human nature compelling everybody to lose his dignity in the face of disaster, we may recall the attitude of the French Jewish war veterans who were offered the same privileges by their government, and replied: “We solemnly declare that we renounce any exceptional benefits we may derive from our status as ex-servicemen” [American Jewish Yearbook, 1945].) Needless to say, the Nazis themselves never took these distinctions seriously, for them a Jew was a Jew, but the categories played a certain role up to the very end; since they helped put to rest a certain uneasiness among the German population: only Polish Jews were deported, only people who had shirked military service, and so on. For those who did not want to close their eyes it must have been clear from the beginning that it “was a general practice to allow certain exceptions in order to be able to maintain the general rule all the more easily” (in the words of Louis de Jong in an illuminating article on “Jews and Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Holland”).
What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged categories was that everyone who demanded to have an “exception” made in his case implicitly recognized the rule, but this point, apparently, was never grasped by these “good men,” Jewish and Gentile, who busied themselves about all those “special cases” for which preferential treatment could be asked. The extent to which even the Jewish victims had accepted the standards of the Final Solution is perhaps nowhere more glaringly evident than in the so-called Kastner Report (available in German, Der Kastner-Bericht über Eichmanns Menschenhandel in Ungarn, 1961). Even after the end of the war, Kastner was proud of his success in saving “prominent Jews,” a category officially introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one; to take upon himself such “responsibilities”—to help the Nazis in their efforts to pick out “famous” people from the anonymous mass, for this is what it amounted to—“required more courage than to face death.” But if the Jewish and Gentile pleaders of “special cases” were unaware of their involuntary complicity, this implicit recognition of the rule, which spelled death for all non-special cases, must have been very obvious to those who were engaged in the business of murder. They must have felt, at least, that by being asked to make exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of the lawfulness of what they were doing.
Moreover, Propst Grüber and the Jerusalem court were quite mistaken in assuming that requests for exemptions originated only with opponents of the regime. On the contrary, as Heydrich explicitly stated during the Wannsee Conference, the establishment of Theresienstadt as a ghetto for privileged categories was prompted by the great number of such interventions from all sides. Theresienstadt later became a showplace for visitors from abroad and served to deceive the outside world, but this was not its original raison d’être. The horrible thinning-out process that regularly occurred in this “paradise” — “distinguished from other camps as day is from night,” as Eichmann necessary because there was never enough room to provide for all who were privileged, and we know from a directive issued by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the R.S.H.A., that “special care was taken not to deport Jews with connections and important acquaintances in the outside world.” In other words, the less “prominent” Jews were constantly sacrificed to those whose disappearance in the East would create unpleasant inquiries. 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. (Among the major war criminals, only two repented in the face of death: Heydrich, during the nine days it took him to die from the wounds inflicted by Czech patriots, and Hans Frank in his death cell at Nuremberg. It is an uncomfortable fact, for it is difficult not to suspect that what Heydrich at least repented of was not murder but that he had betrayed his own people.) If interventions on behalf of “prominent” Jews came from “prominent” people, they often were quite successful. Thus Sven Hedin, one of Hitler's most ardent admirers, intervened for a well-known geographer, a Professor Philippsohn of Bonn, who was “living under undignified conditions at Theresienstadt”; in a letter to Hitler, Hedin threatened that “his attitude to Germany would be dependent upon Philippsohn's fate,” whereupon (according to H. G. Adler's book on Theresienstadt) Mr. Philippsohn was promptly provided with better quarters.
In Germany today, this notion of “prominent” Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of “famous” Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
VIII: Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen
So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many, and as the months and the years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all. This was the way things were, this was the new law of the land, based on the Führer's order; whatever he did he did, as far as he could see, as a law-abiding citizen. He did his duty, as he told the police and the court over and over again; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law. Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction, but neither the defense nor the judges ever took him up on it. The well-worn coins of “superior orders” versus “acts of state” were handed back and forth; they had governed the whole discussion of these matters during the Nuremberg Trials, for no other reason than that they gave the illusion that the altogether unprecedented could be judged according to precedents and the standards that went with them. Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions and to strike out on his own. Since, in addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he had also acted upon orders—always so careful to be “covered”—he became completely muddled, and ended by stressing alternately the virtues and the vices of blind obedience, or the “obedience of corpses,” Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it.