ARGUMENTS
271
to the typical hater of Jews any incidental personality traits such as
brutality, viciousness, sadism: Sartre nonetheless called his anti-Semite
a "murderer." Why that? Because, said Sartre, the anti-Semite would
like to appear to those of his fellows who are Jews, not as a man, but
as a sheer force of nature, like lava, like rock. I am reminded here that
the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Gruber testified that in his dealings with
Eichmann he found him "like marble," "like a block of ice." That
Eichmann was a monster, I say, can be inferred merely from the task
he took on himself as a Nazi, for he was not conscripted into serving
the "Final Solution." And in fulfilling his task, Eichmann was not an
underling, one who took orders. He said .of himself: "I would have been
a simpleton if I had just taken orders." And there is the telling fact
that Eichmann planned to block Hitler's order when the Fuhrer him–
self wanted to spare some seven thousand families of Hungarian Jews.
Eichmann was not without political conviction: to Sassen-he had no
reason to lie to Sassen, as he did have reason to lie in the Jerusalem
court-Eichmann remarked: "When I came to the conclusion that we
had
to
do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism of
a true National Socialist." Eichmann was neither so uninterested in
ideas, nor so ill-read, as to have been incapable of reading
Mein Kampf.
Miss McCarthy, who thinks otherwise, writes :
According to Abel, Eichmann must have thought about Nazism
politically since he thought about Zionism. But Eichmann's
"thought" was a parody of the idea of thinking. Had
Mein
Kampf
been his "Bible," he might have pressed a flower in it.
I suggest that ¥iss McCarthy look again into Miss Arendt's
Eichmann
in Jerusalem,
for in that work Miss Arendt implies that Eichmann had
actually read Kant's
Critique of Practical R eason,
and that under
questioning he " . . . came up with an approximately correct definition
of the Categorical Imperative" (p. 121). Now a man who could give
an approximately correct definition of the Categorical Imperative must
surely have been capable of assimilating the contents of
Mein Kampf,
which was read by millions.
Eichmann was not as Miss Arendt portrayed him; her judgments
of him, on every crucial point, are clearly at variance with the facts.
Yet many people want to agree with Miss Arendt on Eichmann. Why?
What is there about her portrait of him which they find appealing?
Whence the desire to accept her view of the man as ordinary, normal,
and lacking in Nazi conviction? I think that what is at issue here is
brought out clearly by Miss McCarthy when she says I tried to fit
Eichmann to his crime, as if this were some intellectual aberration of
