AESTHETICS
O .F
EVIL
221
ing. For quite obviously a man
In
charge of the extermination
of all European Jewry could hardly have been committed
"forever" to the Zionist ideology. The Zionists could hardly be
assisted by millions of Jewish corpses; their need was for living
Jews. But what is most striking in Miss Arendt's picture of Eichmann
is
her omission of any reference to the man's ideology; he was a Nazi
and most certainly must have been imbued with Nazi ideology to
achieve the position he attained in the Nazi hierarchy; the hatred of
Jews was an essential part of this ideology. Now instead of depicting
Eichmann as ideological, Miss Arendt insists on describing the man
as a comical, mediocre, and dutiful servant of Hitler, whose word for
him, according to Miss Arendt, was law. Now Miss Syrkin has pointed
out the many facts Miss Arendt glossed over, to arrive at such
a judgment of Eichmann: Her picture of him is the very one Eich–
mann himself presented in Jerusalem at his trial. Now obviously he
could not have justified himself morally or politically; thus his only
tactic was to present himself as not such a bad fellow after all, as a
mere administrator with a high sense of duty, who had done what
his superiors had told him to do in service to a regime whose
objectives at the time he could not even suspect were evil. Why
did Eichmann not suspect that the killing of so many defenseless
persons was evil? This Miss Arendt never tries to explain. She says
that Eichmann deceived himself, like the eighty million other Germans
subject to Hitler's orders. That the eighty million other Germans
deceived themselves about what was happening in the Reich and in
Nazi occupied Europe may be perfectly true. But what did Eichmann
for their destruction with the hope, even if mistaken, of Jewish revival is out
of the realm of decent argument." On Miss Arendt's second point, that
Eichmann allowed Zionists to come and go practically as they pleased in
Nazi Europe, Miss Syrkin's answer is equally decisive: "Joel Brand had
tried to negotiate with regard to the ransom of a million Jews for ten
thousand trucks. Only a few Zionist leaders, such as Brand, were allowed
into Nazi territory for a brief period .. . during which the hopeless negotia–
tions were conducted. . . ." Marie Syrkin points out too, that they were
permitted to circulate during the negotiations, but only as long as the ex–
change of prisoners for trucks was considered by the Nazis. Miss Syrkin
writes: "Miss Arendt manages to imply that 'Zionists' as such were a
privileged group enjoying Nazi favor, instead of being the spearheads of
whatever resistance to the extermination program was offered."
