Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [66]
When the Dutch made difficulties, he had to, as he put it, “fight for more [deportations].” His record in Hungary, where, even under the threat of the advancing Soviet Army, deportations were pressed with such urgency that at times five trains loaded with fourteen thousand people were arriving at Auschwitz daily, was climaxed by a maniacal effort, conceived and organized in minute detail by himself, to round up the four hundred thousand Jews of Budapest in a single day. “It needed something like genius,” wrote one observer at the trial, the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, “for a mere SS lieutenant-colonel to organize in the middle of war … and in fierce competition for the essential resources, the transport, concentration and murder of millions of people.”
Eichmann was an extraordinary, not an ordinary man, whose record is hardly one of the “banality” of evil. For the author of that ineffable phrase—as applied to the murder of six million—to have been so taken in by Eichmann’s version of himself as just a routine civil servant obeying orders is one of the puzzles of modern journalism. From a presumed historian it is inexplicable.
Any historian with even the most elementary training knows enough to approach his source on the watch for concealment, distortion, or the outright lie. To transfer this caution to live history—that is, to journalism—should be instinctive. That he was just an ordinary man, a “banal” figure, was of course precisely Eichmann’s defense, his assumed pose desperately maintained throughout his interrogation and trial. It was the crux of his lawyer’s plea. Hannah Arendt’s acceptance of it at face value suggests either a remarkable naïveté or else a conscious desire to support Eichmann’s defense, which is even more remarkable. Since simple caution warns against ascribing naïveté to the formidable Miss Arendt, one is left with the unhappy alternative.
The question that has raised further controversy—the extent of the Jews’ cooperation in their own destruction—is clarified here for anyone who wishes to understand rather than judge. Indeed, the dispute, it seems to me, is a matter of attitude rather than facts. There is a peculiar stridency about those who, having remained safe outside, now seize eagerly on the thesis that the Jews submitted too easily and were somehow responsible for their own slaughter. The attractiveness of the thesis is that by shifting guilt onto the victim, it relieves everyone else.
If by cooperation is meant that the Jews, at gunpoint and outside the ordinary protections of society, went where they were told and did what was ordered without organized resistance, then certainly they cooperated because this was their traditional means of survival. It was bred in the bone during two thousand years as an oppressed minority without territory, autonomy, or the ground of statehood under their feet.
Always helpless against the periodic storms of hate visited upon them, they chose compliance rather than hopeless battle out of the strongest instinct of their race—survival. Their only answer to persecution was to outlive it. Who was to know or believe that this time death was deliberately planned for all of them? At what stage is finality accepted? When as in the Warsaw Ghetto, it was accepted, the Jews fought as fiercely and valiantly as their own ancestors had against the Romans—and as hopelessly.
Inside the camps what motive was there for resistance or revolt when