Books: No Better? No Worse?

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM (275 pp.)—Hannah Arendt—Viking ($5.50).

As an executioner, Adolf Eichmann was a flop. He got queasy at the sight of corpses, and when a fellow Nazi invited him to peep at some Jews being gassed in a truck, he ran away in terror. "If today I am shown a gaping wound," he declared, "I can't possibly look at it. I am that type of person."

Reassessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in her own original fashion (in a book first serialized in The New Yorker), Political Philosopher Hannah Arendt cites these and other facts and concludes that Eichmann's version of his role in the murder of 5,000,000 Jews was closer to the truth than the Israeli prosecution's. He was not the mastermind, she is convinced. He was simply a cog in the machinery of murder.

Plots Against Hitler. Dr. Arendt, a Jew who herself fled Germany in 1933 and now lives and teaches in the U.S., takes Eichmann at his word that he did not really hate Jews. Not only did he have some Jewish friends; he even had a Jewish mistress. Eichmann's trouble, argues Arendt, was his overdeveloped sense of duty. He blindly obeyed orders —any orders.

Eichmann's first big job was to resettle German Jews in other countries. Eichmann was genuinely proud of his work; he thought he was doing the Jews a favor. He admired Zionists as "idealists" and said that he, too, wanted to give the Jews a home of their own. He was sincerely shaken, Arendt believes, when he learned of the Führer's "Final Solution"—to kill the Jews. "I now lost everything," he moaned, "all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out." But he quickly made the adjustment. He became as efficient at transporting Jews to the death camps as he had earlier been at relocating them. Orders, after all, were orders.

All this is perceptive, if arguable. What is startling is that Arendt goes on to suggest that most Germans were no better than Eichmann, and some were considerably worse. They could have resisted the orders of Hitler, she says, but none of them did. Arendt claims (in the face of documented evidence to the contrary — by Allen Dulles and Hans Rothfels, among others) that a German underground did not develop until the war went against Germany. She fails to mention a well-organized plot to overthrow Hitler in 1938, which was sabotaged by Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich. She goes so far as to charge the Resistance leaders with sharing Hitler's aims, since they referred to him as a "swindler" and a "madman," but never as a "murderer." This seems a smug academic distinction in view of the fact that no people were tortured more horribly by the Gestapo than Germans who opposed Hitler.

The Question of Courage. Arendt has a romantic notion that it was simple to stand up to Hitler, and that those who did usually made Hitler back down. As an example, she cites the heroic refusal of the Danes to deliver up Jews. Confronted with Danish obstinacy, she writes, "Nazi toughness melted like butter." But the fact is that the Danes were able to protect the Jews because they had much more autonomy than most of the Nazi satellite nations; and they had been granted this autonomy by Hitler because they had not opposed the Nazi invasion.