Eichmann in Jerusalem: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

The S.S. spent the war’s final weeks forging papers for themselves and destroying evidence of their crimes. While Eichmann’s office did this successfully, many of the people who received his correspondence did not, and so the documentary evidence of his actions lived on to be corroborated by witness testimony. The defense witnesses could not come to Israel, lest they be arrested and tried themselves. This puts significant pressure on Servatius, as does his inability to access most of the documents he wanted. Like at the Nuremberg Trials, the defense also lacks the prosecution’s advantage of research assistants.

In fact, Servatius was also a defense attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, which makes his willingness to defend Eichmann strange—he claims he’s in it for the money, but the Israeli government and Eichmann’s family pay him a “ridiculously inadequate” sum.

The trial’s most important evidence is Eichmann’s own long statement to the Israeli police, over the eleven months he spent in detention. He testified for 33½  sessions, from June 20 to July 20, but ultimately the judges “got more out of him in two and a half short sessions than the prosecution had been able to elicit in seventeen.”

The prosecution’s hundred witnesses spend 62 sessions, more than half the trial, talking about “their tales of horrors.” Many more had applied, quite a few share ridiculously polished stories—one even faints when told to listen to the judges and answer some questions—and a number are prominent in Israel, but the majority of the stories are muddled, both narratively and in the witnesses’ memories. More than half of the 100 witnesses are “from Poland and Lithuania, where Eichmann’s competence and authority had been almost nil.” Only four testify about Theresienstadt, which Eichmann actually ran, and “the right of the witnesses to be irrelevant” is well-established.

The final prosecution witness, an Israeli lawyer and former British Army officer, speaks of his efforts to find surviving Jews and convince them to come to Israel instead of returning to their homes in Europe. His testimony is blatant propaganda for Israel, a way of suggesting that survivors “had only one wish, to go where they would never see a non-Jew again.” Arendt declares that “every once in a long while one was glad that Judge Landau had lost his battle” to keep the witnesses relevant.

A more serious instance of this is the first prosecution witness, the elderly and frail Zindel Grynszpan, whose son assassinated a German secretary in Paris in 1938—which triggered the Kristallnacht pogrom. The prosecution portrays Grynszpan’s son as a hero, but he was in fact a psychopath, and his victim was famously opposed to the Nazis and sympathetic to Jews. Grynszpan himself had moved from Poland to Germany in 1911 and never naturalized. He recounts being approached by the police, ordered to sign documents at the police station, and then deported on a train to a village back in Poland. His eloquent and honest story suggests to the audience that “everyone should have his day in court,” but no subsequent witnesses live up to him.

There is “a ‘dramatic moment’” some weeks later, when a self-described poet and author mentions the German sergeant Anton Schmidt, who helped Jews escape by forging identity papers and providing transport out of Poland, until the Nazis executed him. Other witnesses testify that Christian families and the Polish underground helped them hide and escape, but Schmidt’s story is the only about a German. The courtroom falls silent when he tells it, and Arendt can only think “how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.”

There are many explanations for the lack of such stories; a representative one comes from the German Army physician Peter Bamm. Bamm argues that anyone who dared to protest “would have disappeared” because Nazi totalitarianism refused to hear its critics, so protest would be “practically useless” and therefore not worthwhile even “for the sake of a higher moral meaning.”

Schmidt’s example disproves Bamm’s perspective, though. “Totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion in which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear,” but it could never succeed. There are too many people for resistance to amount to naught, Arendt says; it is never “practically useless,” and telling more stories about it would prove to the world that “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not,” that the genocide “‘could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere.” This is all that is necessary, Arendt says, “for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”