ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
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councils did "co-operate;" and this cooperation was regarded by the Nazis
as the cornerstone of their Jewish policy. It is true, for example, that
in Russia there was no organized Jewish community, and almost
the entire community of leaderless Russian Jewry was still wiped
out. But in Russia the Nazis embarked on a policy of wholesale
shootings, often, as Alex Dallin has pointed out in his
German Rule in
Russia,
1941-1945, making little distinction between Jews and Russians.
In the other countries, the Nazis set out to round up, tag, classify
and arrange time-schedules for deportation
to
the death camps and
to confiscate, in orderly fashion, the assets of the Jewish community.
And in such instances, cooperation facilitated their task.
A different point, perhaps, is that what could have been left
as historical fact or evaluation is converted by Miss Arendt into a
moral judgment and opprobrium. And this is more difficult to accept.
The effort by various Jewish community leaders, such as Rabbi Leo
Baeck of Berlin, to ease the plight of their members may have been a
terrible mistake, but it is an understandable one ; and who can set
himself up as judge?
What is apparent, in retrospect, both as moral value and sociological
truth, is that victims should not cooperate with their executioners.
Where resistance was possible, as in Denmark, the Nazis gave way.
The historical point, perhaps, is that European Jewry, especially in the
West, had become bourgeois and had lost the sense of solidarity of the
people. In Holland, for example, the Jewish Council came into being
on the assumption that only "foreign J ews" would be deported. In
Germany, Jews sought
to
attain privileged status as war veterans
or decorated Jews against ordinary J ews, as families whose ancestors
were German-born against those recently naturalized, or as German
Jews against Polish Jews. The only memorable resistance was
in
Poland
where the ideological orientation and the proletarian outlook had been
shaped by the Bund and the Socialist Zionists. But all this is a lesson
for the living, not for the dead.
IV. EICHMANN
Central to the trial-and to our conception of human nature and
politics-is the enigma of Eichmann, the man and the Nazi. For Gideon
fIJausner, "there was only one man who had ever been almost entirely
concerned with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction"
and that was the "perverted sadist," the "monster," Adolf Eichmann.
It would be comfortable for all of us if this were true. Then
we could believe that such behavior was aberrant, that Hitlerism and
