And, far removed from all this sound and fury, in his Berlin office Adolf Eichmann is calm. From his desk he looks out over the linden trees that line the Kurfürstenstrasse. After Wannsee, as Cesarani recounts, he feels a weight of responsibility lifted from his shoulders. As he put it:
I felt something of the satisfaction of Pilate, because I felt entirely innocent of any guilt. The leading figures of the Reich at the time had spoken at the Wannsee Conference, the ‘Popes’ had given their orders; it was up to me to obey.
This view was certainly not shared by the court that tried him in Jerusalem nineteen years later and sentenced him to death. The prosecutor Gideon Hausner, as we know, had opened the trial with this analysis of the challenge that faced the court – of the need to look at murder in a different way:
In this trial we shall encounter a new kind of killer, the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind a desk, and only occasionally does the deed with his own hands … But it was his word that put gas chambers into action … Eichmann was the one who planned, initiated and organised, who instructed others to spill this ocean of blood. He is responsible, therefore, as though he with his own hands had knotted the hangman’s noose, lashed the victims into the gas chambers, shot and thrust into the open pits every single one of the millions who were murdered.
And the judgement that came at the end of Eichmann’s trial was absolutely groundbreaking in at last understanding the culpability of the desk killer – the person who rarely sees their victim but has causative responsibility for the death. It remains a radical statement on the nature of criminal responsibility, and one that continues to influence jurisprudence today – for instance in the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague:
In such an enormous and complicated crime as the one we are now considering, wherein many people participated, on various levels and in various modes of activity – the planners, the organisers, and those executing the deeds, according to their various ranks – there is not much point in using the ordinary concepts of counselling and soliciting to commit a crime … the extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.
10. Lichtenberg: Eastwards
30 December 2003, Berlin
Heading back north-east across the city now on the S-Bahn, exhausted, just staring out of the window in a kind of vacancy. The raised nature of these trains, fifty feet above the city, gives Berlin a theatricality that is absorbing. And this is only intensified at night. Remembering Wings of Desire – the illuminated angel above the trees of Tiergarten. Back across Friedrichstrasse – wondering exactly which building the SS statisticians worked in with their IBM Hollerith machines – over the River Spree, and soon we’re at Lichtenberg station. We could be in a different city altogether – a world away from the glass skyscrapers of Potsdamer Platz, the streets outside have a run-down feel, accentuated by dim lighting. We still have an hour before our night train to Poland leaves so we find a bar and ask whether they do any food because we doubt there’ll be anything on the train. They obviously don’t get many tourists in here as the bar owner, a woman in her fifties, is very solicitous, bringing over a tablecloth and even lighting a candle for us. This provokes a few ribald comments from the locals at the bar; I ask J. what they’re saying but he couldn’t catch it, though we can guess the meaning .
We mull over the last days. We discuss again the seriousness of intent of this society to try to come to terms with what was done here between 1933 and 1945 – the huge Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe at the absolute heart of the city, the Jewish Museum, the rebuilt synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse and the quietly inspiring educational programme at Wannsee that we heard about this afternoon. And yet it’s taken sixty years for this to happen – two whole generations since the end of the war. J. asks about the denazification process in the late 1940s – why was it so limited? I think the Allies concentrated, understandably, on the Nuremberg Trials. But there was a serious problem with these – however scrupulous the process of these trials were, they were always going to be seen by some as ‘victors’ justice’. We wonder what might have happened had the Allies handed Goering and company over to be tried by German judges. It has often been said that there were so few judges that retained any integrity through the Nazi years, but, if this obstacle could have been surmounted, it would have been remarkable to have witnessed German courts passing judgement on the Nazi leadership after the war.
Reading the accounts of those post-war years, two aspects become very clear. Firstly, there is a simple sense of exhaustion; particularly after 1947 and the first wave of trials, it’s as if the will to hold many accountable just fades away – not so much from the lawyers but particularly from the Allied politicians. Secondly, the start of the Cold War had a major impact, and pragmatism then replaced the need for justice. When the Allies became aware of the extent to which whole professions (like the judiciary, the police, academia) had been Nazified they were then faced with a dilemma – not so far from the situation in post-war Iraq – whether to go for root-and-branch reform (i.e. get rid of almost everyone and start again), or whether to remove only the most incriminated. Not surprisingly, the latter, the path of least resistance, won the day. It wasn’t until the 1960s – and the trial of Eichmann in 1961 marked the beginning of this shift – that the enormity of the Holocaust began to register with many Germans. And then, in 1964 came the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, and a renewed desire for justice. And, of course, the significance of this was that now it was German courts sitting in judgement on German perpetrators. But it’s still astonishing that it took twenty years for this to happen. And it’s still shocking, inexcusable, that so many senior Nazis, such as Abs and Globke, actually retained powerful positions in government and finance, and were even promoted. Not to forget our doctors of Wannsee.
Realising we only have fifteen minutes before our train leaves, we wolf down our food and get back to the station just in time to see the train arrive. We find our couchette and are relieved, as we pull out, drizzle now coming down across east Berlin, that we seem to have the cabin to ourselves. The lack of sleep over the last days has finally caught up with us. I hardly have time to register that the beds seem smaller than they used to be, that my feet now rest on the wall of the compartment, or that we’re now heading into Poland – new territory for me – before the rocking motion has lulled me to a deep sleep. The train gathers speed, rattling relentlessly eastwards …
14
Carpathian Days
31 December 2003, Krakow to Sanok
Gently rolling hills now as the afternoon light begins to fade. Over New Year we’re heading for the mountains in south-west Poland to pause for a couple of days before heading on to Auschwitz and Chelmno. Patches of snow visible on the higher ground now, dusting the forest. We change trains at a kind of halt outside a village, not a proper station, just a single platform, as we’re deeper into the countryside now. Onto a smaller two-carriage train that will take us on to the south-eastern corner of Poland. Another hour, another change of train; we get coffees from a little kiosk on the platform. Finally we reach the small industrial town of Sanok. This is as far as we can go before the year ends, no more local trains heading further south-east towards the mountains, which we were hoping to reach tonight.