Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Eichmann in Jerusalem" in English language version.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death - arriving on time at the transportation points, walking on their own feet to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot - seemed a fine point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, "Why did you not protest?," "Why did you board the train?," "Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you - why didn't you revolt and charge and attack?," was elaborating it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or people had behaved differently. Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, David Rousset, a former inmate of Buchenwald, described what we know happened in all concentration camps: "The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the S.S. men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their deaths" (Les lours de notre mort, 1947). The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal and they were literally tortured to death, first in Buchenwald and then in the Austrian camp of Mauthausen. For months on end they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz and even in Riga and Minsk. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims' minds and imagination. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in others, the deliberate attempt at the trial to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth. The glory of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the heroism of the few others who fought back lay precisely in their having refused the comparatively easy death the Nazis offered them-before the firing squad or in the gas chamber. And the witnesses in Jerusalem who testified to resistance and rebellion, to "the small place [it had] in the history of the holocaust," confirmed once more the fact that only the very young had been capable of taking "the decision that we cannot go and be slaughtered like sheep."
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)This was the tone set by Ben-Gurion and faithfully followed by Mr. Hausner, who began his opening address (which lasted through three sessions) with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman's decree "to destroy, to slay, and to cause them to perish." He then proceeded to quote Ezekiel: "And when | [the Lord] passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, | said unto thee: In thy blood, live," explaining that these words must be understood as "the imperative that has confronted this nation ever since its first appearance on the stage of history." It was bad history and cheap rhetoric; worse, it was clearly at cross-purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously foreordained destiny, or, for that matter, even of anti-Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the trail of "the bloodstained road traveled by this people" to fulfill its destiny. A few sessions later, when Professor Salo W. Baron of Columbia University had testified to the more recent history of Eastern European Jewry, Dr. Servatius could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions: "Why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people?" and "Don't you think that irrational motives are at the basis of the fate of this people? Beyond the understanding of a human being?" Is not there perhaps something like "the spirit of history, which brings history forward . . . without the influence 'of men?" Is not Mr. Hausner basically in agreement with "the school of historical law" - an allusion to Hegel - and has he not shown that what "the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and destination they wanted? . . . Here the intention was to destroy the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and a new flourishing State came into being." The argument of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest anti-Semitic notion about the Elders of Zion, set forth in all seriousness a few weeks earlier in the Egyptian National Assembly by Deputy Foreign Minister Hussain Zulficar Sabri: Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was a victim of the Zionists, who had "compelled him to perpetrate crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim - the creation of the State of Israel." Except that Dr. Servatius, following the philosophy of history expounded by the prosecutor, had put History in the place usually reserved for the Elders of Zion. Despite the intentions of Ben-Gurion and all the efforts of the prosecution, there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh and blood; and if Ben-Gurion did "not care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann," it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court to deliver one.
But quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels, it was in those years a fact of everyday life that only Zionists had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities, for the simple reason that their chief Jewish adversary, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, to which ninety-five per cent of organized Jews in Germany then belonged, specified in its bylaws that its chief task was the "fight against anti-Semitism"; it had suddenly become by definition an organization "hostile to the State," and would indeed have been persecuted - which it was not - if it had ever dared to do what it was supposed to do. During its first few years, Hitler's rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as "the decisive defeat of assimilationism." Hence, the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that "dissimilation," combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a "mutually fair solution." At the time, many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung had been composed of both Zionists and non-Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were "the 'decent' Jews since they too thought in 'national' terms." To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as "mere propaganda." There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine - a Ha'avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods "made in Germany." Of greater importance for Eichmann were the emissaries from Palestine, who would approach the Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist help for the illegal immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S. were helpful. They negotiated with Eichmann in Vienna, and they reported that he was "polite," "not the shouting type," and that he even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. ("On one occasion, he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews," and on another "a special train [was made available] and Nazi officials accompanied" a group of emigrants, ostensibly headed for Zionist training farms in Yugoslavia, to see them safely across the border.) According to the story told by Jon and David Kimche, with "the full and generous cooperation of all the chief actors" (The Secret Roads: The "Illegal" Migration of a People, 1938-1948, London, 1954), these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations: "That was not their job." They wanted to select "suitable material," and their chief enemy, prior to the extermination program, was not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries, Germany or Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland; that enemy was definitely Britain, not Germany. Indeed, they were in a position to deal with the Nazi authorities on a footing amounting to equality, which native Jews were not, since they enjoyed the protection of the mandatory power; they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual interests and were certainly the first to be given permission "to pick young Jewish pioneers" from among the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, they were unaware of the sinister implications of this deal, which still lay in the future; but they too somehow believed that if it was a question of selecting Jews for survival, the Jews should do the selecting themselves. It was this fundamental error in judgment that eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies - the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities. As far as the Viennese episode is concerned, Eichmann's preposterous claim to have saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, which was laughed out of court, finds strange support in the considered judgment of the Jewish historians, the Kimches: "Thus what must have been one of the most paradoxical episodes of the entire period of the Nazi regime began: the man who was to go down in history as one of the arch-murderers of the Jewish people entered the lists as an active worker in the rescue of Jews from Europe."
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and the result is stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the story that Eichmann told during the police examination about the unlucky Commercial Councillor Bertold Storfer, one of the representatives of the Viennese Jewish Community. Eichmann had received a telegram from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently requested to see Eichmann. "I said to myself, O.K., this man has always behaved well; that is worth my while. . . . I'll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says—I remember it only vaguely—'Yes,' he said, 'if only he had not been so clumsy! He went into hiding and wanted to escape,' or something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done; neither Dr. Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz, looked up Höss, and said: 'Storfer is here?' 'Yes, yes [he replied], he is in one of the labor gangs.' With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human; we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow. I said, 'Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein Lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!' And I also said, 'Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders of the Reichsführer nobody can get you out. I can't get you out. Dr. Ebner can't get you out. I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.' [Eichmann meant that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation.] I forget what his reply to this was. And then I asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn't be let off work; it was heavy work. And then I said to Höss, 'Work—Storfer won't have to work!' Höss said, 'Everyone works here.' So I said, 'O.K. I'll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom'—there were little gravel paths there—'and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.' I said, 'Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?' Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on the bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other." Six weeks after this normal, human encounter, Storfer was dead—not gassed, apparently, but shot.
Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and the result is stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the story that Eichmann told during the police examination about the unlucky Commercial Councillor Bertold Storfer, one of the representatives of the Viennese Jewish Community. Eichmann had received a telegram from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently requested to see Eichmann. "I said to myself, O.K., this man has always behaved well; that is worth my while. . . . I'll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says—I remember it only vaguely—'Yes,' he said, 'if only he had not been so clumsy! He went into hiding and wanted to escape,' or something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done; neither Dr. Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz, looked up Höss, and said: 'Storfer is here?' 'Yes, yes [he replied], he is in one of the labor gangs.' With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human; we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow. I said, 'Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein Lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!' And I also said, 'Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders of the Reichsführer nobody can get you out. I can't get you out. Dr. Ebner can't get you out. I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.' [Eichmann meant that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation.] I forget what his reply to this was. And then I asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn't be let off work; it was heavy work. And then I said to Höss, 'Work—Storfer won't have to work!' Höss said, 'Everyone works here.' So I said, 'O.K. I'll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom'—there were little gravel paths there—'and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.' I said, 'Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?' Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on the bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other." Six weeks after this normal, human encounter, Storfer was dead—not gassed, apparently, but shot.