20 April, 2002: Eichmann in Jerusalem
Halfway through Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, I came across a fact about World War II that I never would have suspected. Denmark's resistance to anti-Jewish edicts under Nazi rule is well-known, even if the story of King Christian's donning of the yellow star is an urban legend. The Italian government, as an ally of Nazi Germany, was in a position to ignore German edicts about Italian Jews, and seems to have largely done so while making a nominal effort to appear to comply, as when all Jews who were members of Mussolini's Fascist Party or relatives of same were exempted from the anti-Jewish statutes. Arendt notes that since membership in the Fascist Party was a condition of employment by the Italian state, this meant that a vast portion of Italian Jewry was able to escape these laws. But the Nazi-occupied country in outside Scandanavia that offered the most protection and solace to its Jewish population seems to have been, of all places, Bulgaria.
Arendt writes:
[T]he Bulgarians were approached by the German embassy, but not until about six months later did they take the first step in the direction of "radical" measures--the introduction of the Jewish badge. For the Nazis, even this turned out to be a great disappointment. In the first place...the badge was only a "very little star"; second, most Jews simpy did not wear it; and, third, those who did received "so many manifestations of sympathy from the misled population that they actually are proud of their sign"... Under great German pressure, the Bulgarian government finally decided to expel all Jews from Sofia to rural areas, but this measure was definitely not what the Germans demanded, since it dispersed the Jews instead of concentrating them.
Eventually King Boris of Bulgaria was assissinated and replaced with a Nazi catspaw, but even then "both Parliament and the population remained clearly on the side of the Jews". The native government, Orthodox religious hierarchy, and population at large were unique in Eastern Europe for their resistance to anti-Semitic laws.
This would be of only historical interest were it not for the fact that such resistance -- in Scandanavia, in Italy, in Denmark, and in Bulgaria -- seems to have worked. In fact, Germans assigned to those areas seem to have backslid from the German doctrine and ideology on the Jewish question. Despite the book's subtitle, "A Report on the Banality" of evil, Arendt doesn't really address much attention to the question of evil as such. She takes it, rightly, as a given that the Third Reich was evil. What she is interested in about Eichmann is not the man himself; very little about the man other than his involvement in the machinery of extinction exceeds being pathetic. Eichmann was a middle-level bureaucrat, a self-taught expert on Jewish affairs, a man who spoke almost exclusively in truisms (often mangled) and bureaucratic language. He seems to have been almost comically unskilled at the internal politics of the S.S.; his supervisors seem to have treated him, by and large, as a nuisance.
Arendt's focus, as I presume it was when she was examining the rise of Soviet totalitarianism, is really the creation of an inversely moral society, and Eichmann serves as an example of that. Her contempt for the practices of the Eichmann's trial itself (a televised spectacle in 1961), the array of witnesses called (few of whom had actually interacted with Eichmann or could testify about his personal involvement), the behavior of the prosecution, and the case's exclusive focus on Jewish genocide rather than a larger crime against humanity shines through; it was abundantly clear that Eichmann participated in the administration of Jewish removal to concentration camps, and she doesn't ever make a case for his innocence.
What she does say, however, is that the prosecution failed to make a case, and her opinion seems to be that the trial was not only a sham but one that was designed to bring a sense of closure for survivors but failed to serve any investigative purpose. I think Arendt hoped to see a refutation of the defense used at the Nuremberg Trials, that Nazi officials were "just following orders", which breaks down when if you accept that any system of organized resistance to the logic of the Final Solution caused backsliding, to lesser and greater extents, in its proponents.
Arendt's focus on Jewish tools of the Reich -- whether rabbis and Zionists duped by promises of more merciful treatment or outright collaborators -- and is part and parcel with her examination of Eichmann, a social climber with Jewish relatives by marriage who seems to have perfectly willing to work with Jews and even to treat some as his social superiors. The only way a system of evil can survive, Arendt argues, cannot succeed in a world were people merely "follow orders"; it requires a world in which even basic understandings of good and evil are jettisoned and morality comes to be understood entirely as following orders. Arendt's survey of occupied Europe's participation or lack thereof in the program of Jewish extermination shows that not every nation was willing to make this effort; some, whether through their leaders' innate goodness, national chauvenism against the Germans, or simple obstinancy, resisted, and there genocide did not succeed. What would have happened if a few more -- and Arendt seems to suggest that only a relative few would have been necessary -- had stood up in Germany?