Summary
Chapter 4: The First Solution: Expulsion
Arendt’s narrative continues by summarizing the lackluster character of the defense for Eichmann’s trial. The defense’s weakness makes the narrative more difficult to put together because there is none of the usual perspectival back-and-forth between the prosecution’s version of events and that of the defense.
Arendt sets about trying to reconstruct how Eichmann might have defended himself had he had a competent lawyer. Eichmann believes that he “cooperated” with the Jews and helped hundreds of thousands of Jews “escape.” Eichmann also claims that he played no decisive role in the planning of the Holocaust, which is plainly not true. Arendt observes that in this, he is no different from most Germans.
Eichmann might also credibly claim that the Nazis’ position towards the Jews at the time he joined the party was pro-Zionist: the goal was the expulsion of the Jews either to their homeland, or to a surrogate one. For this reason, in the early days of the regime, only Zionists could negotiate with the government, including the Jewish Agency for Palestine. (Arendt notes that this is an uncomfortable fact for Israel.) Individual Jews already living in Palestine negotiated with Eichmann, trying to get the “best” Jews they could to help populate their homeland, effectively selecting Jews for survival.
Eichmann’s problem was that he could remember none of these facts. The only aspect of his life he had any solid memory of was his career. All he remembered of this phase of his life was being able to visit Palestine and Egypt, an honor for any Nazi. By the same token, the claim that he had “collaborated” with Jewish authorities for a mutually beneficial emigration was obviously false, given that the heads of most of these authorities were soon themselves put into camps and killed.
Once the negotiations with Palestine were underway, Eichmann’s career, such as it was, began in earnest. From 1937-41 he was quickly promoted from second lieutenant to captain, and then lieutenant. He was recognized as “an expert on the Jewish question,” as well as an authority on the practical, financial, and legal difficulties of moving so many people.
After Kristallnacht—an organized attack on Jewish shop owners in 1938—Jews were desperate to leave Germany. Eichmann’s boss, Heinrich Müller, was put in charge of deporting them. Based on this experience, Eichmann was put in charge of a similar center in Prague when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and established a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia. The center was soon overwhelmed by refugees.
The possibility of smooth transport was further interrupted by the outbreak of war which froze borders and meant that trains were largely requisitioned for military supplies. What is more, by conquering Poland, Germany had absorbed another two and a half million Jews.
It was clear that expulsion would not work. Though the “final” solution had not yet been conceived, Jews were already being concentrated into ghettos, and the Einsatzgruppen, small groups of soldiers armed with machine guns, had already begun their killing work.
Chapter 5: The Second Solution: Concentration
Once World War II broke out in 1939, the policies of the Nazi party became openly critical. It is at this point that consideration of a more extreme solution began. The Head Office of Reich Security, of which Eichmann is a part, did not see removing the Jews as an emotional issue, but rather as a purely practical one that required detached administration, and whose economic side needed to be carefully considered. This was a positive development for Eichmann. As the Jewish question became more and more central to the Nazis, his job grew in importance.
Arendt observes that it is typical of Nazism to have created a great number of parallel institutions to oversee “the Jewish question,” each in perpetual conflict with the others. This way, each one was shielded from culpability, and no one branch had the power to stop the Holocaust. Each outfit had as its task to remove more Jewish people than all the others; at the Nuremberg trial, each branch of the bureaucracy accused all the others.
When Eichmann took his new post in Section IV of the Head Office for Reich Security, the official policy towards Jews was that they would be expelled. Because of the war, however, expulsion was obviously impossible. Provisionally, the policy was to remove all of the Jews from Germany and to ship them to Poland, which was occupied territory.
Eichmann’s superior, Brigadier General Stahlecker, first struck on the idea of using Einsatzgruppen, police units, to simply shoot Jewish prisoners. His larger plan was to gain influence in the East and carve out a homeland for the Jews. The Nazi high command approved at first, embracing a plan that would involve concentrating Jews in ghettos, establishing councils of Jewish Elders, and deporting all Jews to Poland.
Arendt believes that Eichmann’s zeal for this solution was career-motivated. He hoped to be appointed the governor of a Jewish state. According to Eichmann, this plan was ruined by Hans Frank, a rival functionary who considered occupied Poland his territory.
The next plan consisted of trying to ship all of Europe’s Jews to Madagascar. Eichmann was fond of this plan because it allowed him to demonstrate his knowledge of Theodor Herzl, one of the founding thinkers of Zionism. Arendt rejects the possibility that this plan could ever have been taken seriously by anyone except Eichmann himself. It would have required moving millions of people in the midst of war to a country controlled by France.
Instead, the Madagascar plan was meant to be both an ideological and practical cover for the extermination of the Jews. By choosing a distant place, the Nazi high command warmed their followers up to the idea that Europe had to be cleansed of Jews completely. By choosing an impossible place, they readied them for the realization that relocation was impossible. Officially, the plan collapsed because of “lack of time,” since the war against Russia in 1941 drained all of the requisite resources.
Eichmann now found himself at an important point in his career. If “the Jewish question” could not be solved with expulsion, then in principle, that meant there was no need for him. Now, responsibility for the Jews would be transferred to another Head Office associated with the military. This office was responsible for setting up extermination camps, which doubled as labor camps overseen by many prominent German businesses. Eichmann’s job would be to oversee the Jews’ transport to these camps.
Chapter 6: The Final Solution: Killing
On June 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, opening up the war on two fronts. Eichmann’s superior, Reinhardt Heydrich, was commissioned by Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the air force, to develop a plan for a final solution to the Jewish question. Heydrich had organized the mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen, or task forces, in the East. During Heydrich’s interview with Eichmann, he tells Eichmann that Hitler has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.
Arendt observes that nearly all of the Nazi communication on the subject carefully avoids actually describing what is going to be done to the Jews. Killing is referred to as “evacuation” or ‘special treatment.” Deportation is referred to as “change of residence.” This was done, Arendt speculates, not only to keep the outside world in the dark about what was being done, but to maintain order among the enormous bureaucracies that were created to handle these tasks.
Gas is chosen as the method of killing. This is not Eichmann’s decision, though Eichmann is sent to various camps to inspect the chambers. At Kulm, in Poland, Eichmann witnesses Jews from the Lodz ghetto being gassed in mobile vans. He describes being horrified by the spectacle of corpses being flung. In Minsk and Lwow, he sees soldiers idly shooting at the few people still living in a ditch of corpses.
Not being a soldier, never having seen action, Eichmann is horrified by the spectacle. From then on, the commandants and high commanders are careful to spare him (and anyone else) the sights of the gassings and mass executions by shooting. This part of Eichmann’s examination proves that he knew precisely what was going to happen to the Jews it was his task to “relocate.” The sickening moral questions aside, Arendt writes that Eichmann’s admission raises two important legal questions.
The first: Will Eichmann claim that he went along in order to avoid being killed, as he may well have been, for going against the high command’s orders? And the second: will Eichmann appeal to another law, intended for Jewish collaborators, that he went along in order to mitigate even worse circumstances?
Arendt quickly answers both questions in the negative. Soldiers and officials frequently asked out of their jobs as exterminators, and not a single member of the S.S. had ever been executed for refusing to participate in an execution. Eichmann admits that he always thought requesting a transfer would be “inadmissible,” because it was not “admirable.”
Arendt notes that the high command had a very good sense of who was capable of what and was careful never to push anyone past their limits. It is Eichmann’s careerism and status-consciousness that kept him with the S.S.
From this admission in Eichmann's examination, the death penalty is a foregone conclusion. His lawyer attempts to claim that Eichmann’s crimes were “acts of state,” and so beyond any normal legal framework. Arendt points out that if this defense were accepted, then literally no one could be tried for the Nazi war crimes. Nonetheless, she expresses a political interest in trying to reconstruct just how long an ordinary person can overcome their “innate repugnance” towards crime.
Eichmann began his first deportations from Germany after his inspection of the centers. Hitler had just issued orders to make the Third Reich judenrein, or pure of Jews, as quickly as possible. It is at this time Eichmann made what is likely his only free decision. He redirected the first transports of Jews and Gypsies from Riga and Minsk, where they would have been immediately shot by the Einsatzgruppen, to Lodz, where there was only a ghetto, but as yet no extermination center.
The administrator of the ghetto complained to Heinrich Himmler, since the ghetto was overcrowded. Though Eichmann stood to get into considerable trouble, his superiors shielded him. Bafflingly, Eichmann fails to mention this incident at his trial.
Several weeks later, Eichmann recommended solving the problem at Lodz by sending the Jews to Riga and Minsk after all. Arendt concludes that Eichmann’s conscience functioned properly for about four weeks, though she adds that even before this Eichmann must have been aware of the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia. It was well known that these military units were killing Russian functionaries, all Polish professionals, and Jews. She surmises that what bothered him was the death of German Jews in particular.
Arendt notes that the Nazis largely overestimated the local and international resistance to its extermination of the Jews. Almost all of the resistance to Nazism was on the political left, which was destroyed by the secret police the moment the Nazis took power. Sympathy for the left was further undermined by Germany’s reaching full employment in the push for rearmament. In any case, this resistance was always anti-Fascist and never opposed the anti-Semitism of the Nazis specifically, only the class element of fascism.
Arendt also considers the assassination attempt against Hitler led by Count von Stauffenberg in 1944. She concludes the aristocrats behind Stauffenberg thought that Hitler’s disastrous military decisions had doomed Germany, and were trying to bring about peace on terms with the Allies by killing him.
Even after Hitler's major military blunders, the majority of the German people stood behind Hitler, making organized resistance against the political and moral catastrophe of Nazism impossible. Arendt admires the courage of the few who did resist, but does not believe that it was aroused by moral indignation about what was happening in the East.
Arendt singles out Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the S.S., as the Nazi official who was most adept at wearing down the conscience of his troops. Himmler did so by repeatedly claiming that the murder of the Jews was a terrifying historical task, a superhuman achievement. He gave historical scope to his soldiers’ struggles of conscience, portraying the murder of the Jews as a duty it was supposed to be difficult to discharge.
It is also no accident, she believes, that the most brutal aspects of the Holocaust only began during the war, once the soldiers carrying it out became inured against death. Nonetheless, she argues that the Final Solution had its roots not in military necessity, but already in the very ideology of Nazism itself.
Analysis
These three chapters outline the swift development of the Nazi position toward the Jewish people. In a matter of years, Nazi policy quickly intensified in brutality from expulsion, to concentration, and finally toward extermination.
Apart from the shocking details, these chapters also make difficult reading in that Arendt’s narrative lays numerous reflections over the chronological details of Eichmann’s involvement. Some of these reflections are broadly philosophical, others are historically specific. Again, some context about the debates around Nazism and the Holocaust as they stood in the early 1960s is illuminating.
First, we must note that the time between the years of the war and Arendt’s book was a time of virtual silence regarding the Holocaust. For obvious reasons, no one in Germany, East or West, wanted to sort through why fascism had happened. The East German government washed their hands of this question by arguing that Nazism was only the most aggressive form of capitalism, and therefore not a problem for a Communist country. The West German government simply concluded that Hitler and the Nazi high command had somehow tricked or swindled the German people, bringing them under their sway. Now they were gone, and Germany could be a prosperous, peace-loving nation once more.
The first question Arendt wants to answer is: who specifically was responsible for the Holocaust? The question is a difficult one to answer since the structure of the Nazi Part pitted redundant departments with elaborate hierarchies against one another. More broadly, the question is whether the Holocaust can be separated from the political philosophy of Nazism itself. Had Nazi Germany not entered the war, could Hitler have ruled a stable and prosperous Germany, as many Germans still believed in the late 1940s?
The answer is a decisive no. Arendt shows that the Holocaust had been conceived well before the war by the Nazi high command. Mass murder was part and parcel of the ideology of Nazism, which believed that ever more drastic measures had to be taken to defend the “master race” against its enemies. The Jews were not prisoners of war; they were civilian victims, targeted well before the escalation of hostilities. Therefore, there was never any possibility of a stable Germany under Hitler. Nazism, by its nature, is a political philosophy of extremity.
The second question is, besides the Nazi high command, who was aware of the Holocaust? And if others were aware, why didn’t they resist it? Most members of the West German government claimed that they had no idea what was going to happen to the Jews. They were busy with their administrative functions and were deliberately shielded from the truth.
Arendt exposes this national myth as a lie. The Holocaust could not have taken place without wholesale participation by all of the branches of the German government—the legislative and judiciary to pass laws dispossessing the Jews, and local authorities to round them up. No one with any power resisted the Holocaust, even though there were no instances of resistance being punished. The redundant bureaucracy let each agency believe that the Holocaust was simply a foregone conclusion.
The rapidly intensifying brutality of the various “solutions” to “the Jewish question” speaks to one of Arendt’s main arguments about Nazism, namely, the fundamental instability of its ideology. In the essay “Ideology and Terror,” and later, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that totalitarian governments like that of Nazi Germany consider themselves as enacting a higher law than any on earth. For that reason, their legal codes are always changing, becoming more and more brutal to bring about the ideal of this higher law, i.e., the master race, on earth.
This iron-clad ideological thinking, completely divorced from reality, is the reverse side of Eichmann’s inability to think. Nazi ideology does the work of thinking for men like Eichmann: the Jews are the enemies of the master race, therefore they must be exterminated—no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
