HUE AND CRY
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though you did something infinitely worse, like a person who is accused
of murder and robbery and feels put upon because it was not he but
his confederate who stole the victim's watch-he "only" committed the
murder.
But suppose this were only a quarrel about terms. Suppose by
"monster" Abel means someone who is capable of murdering four and
a half to six million Jews. There is no argument if that is the definition
-only a tautology. But if he means an exceptionally depraved and
wicked creature, like Iago or Richard
III
(his examples), then it is he,
it seems to me, who is building Eichmann up and making him an
object of aesthetic interest.
The difficulty many people experienced in thinking about the Eich–
mann trial was to "make the punishment fit the crime." The desire of
Abel and other critics is to make the
criminal
fit the crime. And just
as any punishment seemed grotesquely small and insignificant beside
the murder of millions of helpless people, so the criminal seemed
grotesquely small and insignificant. This was not because he had shrunk
in the interim. The disproportion between the doer and the deed is a
disturbing fact of contemporary history-an effect of advanced tech–
nology, like automation. On the Allied side, you had Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, where our boys in the bombers and Mr. Truman in the
White House were simply incommensurable with what they had done.
Not that Mr. Truman and Eichmann can be considered equally as
mass murderers; Mr. Truman had a motive which at least was good–
the quick ending of the war.
It
is just that the human scale is no longer
in focus, and to measure an Eichmann by the number of his victims
and his individual power by their multiplied helplessness is to magnify
both him and it.
On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never
presents him a "dutiful clerk"; his work was important, indeed crucial,
in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was
making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer's task. He mayor may
not have conceived of himself as irreplaceable; if he did this was one
of his delusions-a delusion no doubt shared by other Nazi functionaries,
each of whom, on the lower levels, was replaceable while all of them
together were not. Eichmann was free to quit his desk and his "great
responsibilities" at any time, as Miss Arendt shows; no one forced him
to do this particular work. Yet his staying on the job, and the zeal he
brought to it, do not prove that he liked killing Jews, even at a distance.
He liked being a functionary and "necessary," and if this entailed a
certain amount of self-sacrifice he liked it even more, for he saw it
in
the
