There comes a point in the
film, Eichmann
(2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf
Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the
Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged;
the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in
the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again.
Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they
were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda
reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as
a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the
mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they
were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the
statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the
state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed
being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really
believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of
disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State
ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the
vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than
can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe
crimes against humanity.
Ironically, in the third
decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman
stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to
be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also
in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood
as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis
to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is
obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage,
two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance
is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the
hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord
is that?
Eichmann was evidently an
atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian,
the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and
manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the
name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home.
Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less
in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to
the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists
in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and
therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held
morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death
camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.
In fact, the narrative’s
pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which
is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders
on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded
power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering
and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even
just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally
responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering
the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a
duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite.
In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India,
Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting
evil.
Although Eichmann strangely
volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less
dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially,
anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the
nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly
from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and
Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling
all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department
has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with
having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted,
high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say
something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann
covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders
he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over
70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann
actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place!
Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side
by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially
with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in
the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair,
knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and
therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy
of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in
the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.
The film ends with Avner Less
mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s
own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the
more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the
interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the
grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of
the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg
trial.
In the film, and perhaps in
the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated
Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps
Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for
the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate
means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible. Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so
late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way
could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann
was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding
Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists
the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with
ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but,
strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology
should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect
the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”
In The Reader, released in
2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on
trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the
judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone
could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people
needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that
presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The
pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we
let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we
were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape.
This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda
of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to
its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely
self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as
well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human
ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.
