A lesson in self-justification: Adolf Eichmann

The brutality of the Nazi programme to eliminate the Jews from Europe was not particularly new. What was ingenious about their evil was its efficiency. Genocide, as you know, is not an invention of the modern era. But doing it with train timetables is. The shuffling of a million pieces of paper in a thousand boring half-lit offices in the service of the final solution was in fact as savage as firing of bullets. If Zyklon B was to be used to exterminate the Jews, then Zyklon B needed to be ordered, manufactured and supplied; the whole process needed to be overseen. And these overseers and paper-shufflers were every bit as complicit in mass murder as those who actually killed people physically.
It was the young officer Adolf Eichmann’s particular role to be the overseer of the entire terrible process. He became known indeed as ‘The Specialist’ in the logistics of expatriation, the expropriation and the deportation of the Jewish people. Born in 1906, this unremarkable man had dropped out of high school without a diploma; but his rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party was rapid. He was a willing servant of their processes, and proved a very capable organizer and strategist.

The story of his flight to Argentina and his later capture by the Israeli secret service agency Mossad is well known. Amid great controversy, Eichmann was brought back to Israel to face trial - a country which had not existed when he committed his crimes. It was there that he began to construct his defence. Eichmann did not attempt to make a denial of the fact of his involvement in the transportation and exportation of millions of Jews. His strategy was on two fronts. On the one hand, his defence team argued against the right of the court to sit in judgment on him, since he had not committed his alleged crimes under their jurisdiction. The second strategy was the one that had been famously deployed in the Nuremburg trials in the 1940s: ‘I was just following orders’.

Both of these are clever strategies – though in the case of Eichmann it can never have seemed realistic to him that Israel would let him go. What was the right of this court to judge him, in a technical, legal sense? How was that established? And yet: the court was simply answering the call of a kind of natural justice. The blood of millions of human beings was crying out from the ground: there may have been a shaky legal ground for the trial, but not many people would admit to feeling that it wasn’t a good thing that such a person was being brought before a court, especially when there had been inaction from those who may well have been responsible. The right of a court to judge? Certainly, it is a question that needs to be asked; but there needs to be judgement.

But what of ‘I was just following orders’? Or, Befehl ist Befehl, ‘an order is an order’? A keen observer of the trail, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that in his written statements Eichmann seemed more concerned for his own career than anything else. He was not denying his involvement, at a very high level, in the system that led to the extermination of millions of people – how could he, since the evidence so plainly told against him? – nor was he particularly ashamed of his role in it. He simply claimed that he was doing what he had to. He was answering the call of the system in which he had to live; and he was doing what any of us might do in the same situation.

What was really chilling about this was not that Eichmann had horns on his head and forked tail, but that he didn’t. Arendt argued that he was astonishingly, boringly normal. His petty selfishness and his ambition made him capable of extraordinary evil; and then capable of justifying extraordinary evil to himself as an ordinary day at the office. He did not deny the truth of his own actions. He simply had no interest in widening his vision and taking in the human consequences of his actions. He shut himself off from empathy because it was too inefficient and ineffective. And, somewhere in the recesses of his conscience, he was able to shut down that sense of taking responsibility for one’s actions and say to himself: I am just part of the system, a cog in a machine. Who can blame me for that?

The Eichmann story has been told several times in books and films, and some might argue it is exhausted as a morality tale. But Eichmann still has a number of lessons for us. Eichmann shows us that you can confess the truth without owning the truth. Telling the story of your past actions truthfully is more than simply saying ‘I did it’. It is also giving a true explanation of your motives and your responsibilities in each case. ‘Just following orders’ is deeply disturbing, because it implies that a human being can somehow shut off responsibility in this way, and hand it over to someone else. It is a denial of human freedom – which in other instances we would love to uphold. We see this increasingly with the introduction of genetics and neuroscience into the mix to explain human behaviour. We are wrestling with the possibility, it seems, that our choices are not ever chosen by us. Of course, this will always be extremely one-sided, because we will be quick to take the credit for our achievements. We will still want praise for the things we do well, and we will accept the praises and the prizes, even if we decide that the things we do badly are not our fault.

The great mistake here is that we confuse explanation and context with causes. There may be a number of things that causes us to do what we do; and these causes are external to us. I may have been beaten as a child; I may come from a family of drunks; I may be part of a system that demands that I do what it says or it will punish me; but a true story of my life is not reducible to these forces acting upon me. We know this, at the very basic level, because we know that there are others who have the same circumstances in play (or very similar), and do not act similarly. That there are choices being made in the opposite direction to the ones I have made proves that my actions are not predestined by my genes or my upbringing or my culture.

There are orders, and they have a force upon us. They have the authority given to them by human institutions. They have the threat of punishment and the promise of reward, in earthly terms. But that is all. They do not penetrate beyond that. ‘Orders’ are temporal: they have their time and their place. But they too are subject to judgement, a judgement which Eichmann had a responsibility as a human being to foresee. Eichmann had no right to question the court’s authority and its jurisdiction, since he did not question the authority and jurisdiction of the orders that he himself had followed without question. If anyone was being arbitrary, it was he.

Eichmann failed to see the true context in which his actions might be judged, and by whom; but he also failed to see how far his actions reached. He was willfully blind to the knock-on effects of the things he organized. The inability to trace through the things that his actions caused made his denial more appalling. All he could see in front of him, day by day, was the paper he was signing, the meetings he was chairing, the world of briefcases and minutes and desks and lunches and train-rides home in the evening. His defence that he was merely a cog in the wheel was the wrong metaphor; he was in fact an engine turning a whole system of cogs and pulleys, not ever pulling a trigger or popping a Zyklon tablet in to a room, not ever hearing the screams of the dying, but nevertheless supplying the power that made those things possible.

We are not Eichmann’s of course. But like Eichmann we are prone to a failure of insight in to our own actions. It is a very human tendency to live with moral blinkers on; or to want to blame the system or the rules. This is why confession, when it comes, so often involves self-justifications. Explanation becomes justification; and responsibility simply disappears. This is where telling the truth becomes a screen for the deeper truth.