The Eichmann Trial (12 page)

A few days later, the resistance fighters, those to whom this question did not have to be asked, testified. On that day Kol Yisrael, Israel’s radio station, which had halted its continuous broadcasts of the trial, resumed them. Now, many Israelis anticipated, would come respite from the unrelenting stories of victimhood. Yet these witnesses also spoke of suffering and humiliation. Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto, could hardly contain his emotions when he described learning of the mass murder in Ponary Forest, outside of Vilna. “I left my parents and my family in Vilna.… As a child, I played nut games in Ponary. And here … they were putting to death Jews of Vilna in Ponary.” His wife, ghetto fighter Zivia Lubetkin-Zuckerman, described the “fear of being collectively responsible for the acts of each individual Jew.” Fifty Jews might be shot if one Jew resisted. She recalled the “strong young” German guards and the “cruelty” they directed “against helpless people.” But then she added something that expanded the traditional concept of heroism. Initially, Jews in the ghetto thought that the Germans’ objective was to “degrade … depress … starve us.” By closing all educational institutions they would “change us into a nation of slaves, ignorant people, lacking culture.” At that point, they decided to “develop a spirit of revolt.” But the revolt of which she spoke was not the subsequent battle that would become an iconic element of the history of the Holocaust. “When I say ‘revolt’ I do not refer … to a particular rebellion but rather to preserve the human, social, and cultural character of the youth.”
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She, who fought with arms, insisted that heroism came in many forms. This was something young Israelis—and so many others—needed to hear.

Shortly thereafter, the leader of the Vilna resistance fighters, Abba Kovner, testified. In December 1941, he had called for active resistance against the Nazis. This was probably the first such call in all of Europe. In it, he used a phrase that subsequently was used colloquially as a means of denigrating the victims: “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.” After leading the Vilna uprising, he joined a Soviet resistance group. He subsequently became a kibbutznik and one of Israel’s leading poets. As a man of the land, arms,
and
letters, he epitomized the “new Jew.” Yet his testimony was riddled with pain. He told of his student Tsherna Morgenstern, a “tall upstanding girl” with “wonderful eyes,” who was taken with her classmates to Ponary. An SS officer ordered her to step forward: “Don’t you want to live—you are so beautiful.… It would be a pity to bury such beauty in the ground. Walk, but don’t look backwards.” As she walked away, her classmates watched with envy until the officer shot her in the back. Kovner told all this and more. Toward the end of his speech—it was more that than anything resembling testimony—he turned to the judges and declared, “A question is hanging over us here in this courtroom: How was it that they did not revolt?” As a “fighting Jew,” he would “protest with all my strength” if someone asked that question with even “a vestige of accusation.” In fact, rather than question why most Jews did not rise up, people should recognize that not resisting was the rational thing to do. Resistance organizations are created by calls from a “national authority.” There was no Jewish authority to issue that call. There was no one to organize an uprising. Rather than demean the victims, contemporary generations should recognize how “astonishing” it was that “there was a revolt. That is what was not rational.”
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Kovner’s words, together with Beisky’s earlier testimony, constitute eloquent responses to a question that people who live privileged and secure lives seemed to have few compunctions about asking.

Kovner had barely left the witness box when there was an unexpected turn of events. Judge Landau turned to Hausner and attacked not just Kovner’s testimony but the entire premise of Hausner’s prosecutorial strategy. With undisguised fury, Landau lectured Hausner. Kovner had “strayed far from the subject of this trial.” Hausner should have controlled the witness and eliminated the portions of his testimony that were “not relevant.” Landau warned him not to place the court “in such a situation” again. Hausner, visibly nonplussed, protested that his summation would demonstrate the testimony’s relevance. Landau would have none of it. Hausner’s indictment was the framework for the trial and he could not now add extraneous matters. Hausner, unwilling to concede, argued that the judges might not be fully aware of all he “intend[ed] to bring” to the court. An exasperated Landau cut off the exchange by noting, with decided condescension, “We heard your opening address which, it seems to me, lays down the general line of what you wish to place before the court.” With that, Landau ended the session.
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Landau’s attacks on Hausner’s expansive view of what was relevant did not end with this exchange. For much of the remainder of the trial, Hausner was in the court’s crosshairs. Such was the case when Zvi Zimmerman, a Knesset member and Ben-Gurion’s political ally, testified. Given the nature of his testimony, there is good reason to assume that Hausner had been under political pressure to include him. He had little to add, and his testimony came late in the trial. If Hausner’s objective was to give Zimmerman a platform, his efforts backfired. Zimmerman enraged Judge Landau by engaging in long discourses on his role in the underground even though the judge asked him not to do so. When he claimed to have heard about Eichmann from Gestapo men, Landau exploded. “The value of this evidence is, shall we say, next to nothing.… This is, in fact, gossip.”
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After the resistance fighters’ testimony, Hausner continued to paint a picture of the wider European tragedy. Most of the focus was on Eastern Europe, with virtually no mention of how the Holocaust spilled over into North Africa. There was little relief from the familiar story line: an overwhelmed Jewish population poised against an Eichmann-devised deportation system fully committed to ensnaring every Jew. Then into this unrelenting saga of grief and terror came a brief moment of emotional respite. Werner Melchior, son of Denmark’s chief rabbi, described the rescue of Danish Jewry. He related how bishops, ambulance drivers, fishermen, housewives, neighbors, and strangers facilitated the escape of these seven thousand Jews—almost the entire Danish Jewish community—to Sweden. Shortly before being ferried across the strait, Melchior, demonstrating what some might consider an aggravated sense of responsibility, went to the university to return library books. At the entrance, students whom he knew in passing stopped him. “In case there is anything at all which you think we can reasonably do … you can get in touch with us.” This, Melchior testified, happened not once but twice in the space of ten minutes. “During the preceding three and a half years of the occupation, there was not a single moment when the population was united so closely together” as during the rescue of the Jews. (After this rescue it was Eichmann who was dispatched to Denmark to determine precisely how this had happened and to prevent it from occurring again someplace else.) At last, into this Jerusalem courtroom, had come the uplift for which so many had thirsted. Haim Gouri described it as “artificial respiration.” Jews in the courtroom were reminded that they had not been
completely
abandoned. One woman was weeping. Asked why she was crying now: “I cry whenever someone is kind to me.”
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D
uring this long succession of witnesses, Servatius, who was supposed to be defending Eichmann, was hamstrung. Well aware that he was unlikely to garner sympathy for his client by aggressively challenging those who had endured such harrowing experiences, he conducted almost no cross-examinations. When he did challenge a witness’s testimony, his goal was to demonstrate that it bore no relevance to Eichmann’s activities. Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies. Servatius objected and argued that Wells could not connect Eichmann to this operation Furthermore, all the information Wells was imparting was already documented and well known. Though the judges rejected Servatius’s complaint, they did put Hausner on notice that he had to demonstrate the “personal responsibility of the Accused for the act.” Servatius had more latitude when cross-examining witnesses who were not survivors. During the testimony of an Israeli diplomat who had reviewed the eleven-thousand-page diary of Hans Frank, head of the Generalgouvernement, that area of Poland in which the death camps were located, Hausner had the witness expound on what Frank had called “our war against the Jews.” Servatius asked but one question: “Was Adolf Eichmann’s name mentioned in these twenty-nine volumes?” It was not. Servatius, having made his point, sat down. Servatius took the same approach with Judge Michael Musmanno. Immediately after the war, the United States Navy sent Musmanno to interview leading Nazis. He subsequently served as a judge at Nuremberg. According to Musmanno, the Nazi officials he interviewed all mentioned Eichmann’s “powerful and authoritative hand” in the Final Solution. Servatius suggested that these Nazis were trying to shift the blame to Eichmann. Musmanno insisted that Eichmann’s name had come up incidentally. Servatius, correctly dismissing this as hearsay, scored his point when he pointed out that at Nuremberg Musmanno presided over a murder trial for twenty-three defendants. Though a number of them testified about Eichmann’s role, “you yourself did not mention Eichmann in your judgment by so much as one word.” Judge Landau buttressed Servatius’s challenge when he asked whether Eichmann’s name appeared in the book Musmanno wrote regarding his experiences. It did not.
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Servatius’s cross-examination of Dr. Heinrich Grüber, Protestant dean of Berlin, was less productive. During the war, Grüber, then a parson at a Berlin church, frequently intervened with Eichmann on Jews’ behalf. Eventually he was imprisoned and tortured in Sachsenhausen and Dachau for his actions. He described Eichmann to the court as “a block of ice, or a block of marble, and everything you tried to get through to him just bounced off him.” During the cross-examination, Servatius posited that Eichmann’s animus toward the Jews was no different from the attitude of respectable and distinguished segments of German society, including academic and church leaders. To illustrate his point, Servatius read from the
Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt
(Berlin Evangelical Sunday Gazette). Showing its satisfaction with the regime’s anti-Semitism, the paper observed that in all “the dark events of the past fifteen years the Jewish element played a leading role.” Regarding the April 1933 government-sponsored boycott of Jewish stores, the paper celebrated the fact that now there would be “a containment of Jewish influence in Germany’s public life. Nobody will seriously be able to object to this.” Given that such sentiments, Servatius continued, were harbored by scholars and respected members of German society, shouldn’t Eichmann, who never finished high school, have been justified in thinking they were correct? How could he be condemned for views that were espoused by leading members of society? Grüber would have none of it. It was one thing, he told Servatius, to be enthusiastic about National Socialism in 1933, and quite another to facilitate murder, as Eichmann had done.
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Grüber’s testimony also gave expression to something quite chilling about contemporary Germany. It illustrated the extent to which the anti-Semitic views which were fundamental to National Socialism were still extant there. Grüber mentioned, but declined to name, a German who had helped Jews during the war. Grüber explained that the man was still alive, and he wanted to “spare him” any trouble. Judge Halevi, troubled by these comments, asked Grüber if it was not considered an “honor today that one risked oneself to rescue people?” The churchman explained that he was speaking from experience. When the German press reported that he was to testify against Eichmann, he had received a “thick file” of “threatening … [and] insulting letters” from fellow Germans. Before stepping down, the pastor, who had been so badly beaten in the concentration camp that when he returned he could not ascend the stairs without assistance, asked to make a personal statement. As “the first German [citizen] to stand before this high court and one who has found it hard to come here … my heartfelt entreaty [is] that we see to it that forgiving love [in Israel] and forgiven sin [in Germany] shall meet before the throne of God.” Spectators wept. Israelis showered him with thank-you notes. One Foreign Ministry official observed that the Israeli public embraced Grüber as a sign that there was “no need to cry ‘despair’ over the human race and the Christian world.” Martha Gellhorn, writing in
The Atlantic
Monthly
, put it more succinctly, though a bit hyperbolically: “One good man redeemed a nation.”
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He may not have redeemed a nation, particularly one in which people who saved Jews still had to hide their deeds, but he injected a note of hope into the hearts of many people.

I
t was in Hungary in 1944 that Adolf Eichmann reached the pinnacle or the abyss—depending on one’s perspective—of his career. In the space of two months, with portions of Hungary on the verge of being liberated by the Soviets, Eichmann organized the dispatch of 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 75 percent of them, about 330,000, were gassed. The fate of Eichmann’s deportees gave Auschwitz its legendary status in the annals of genocide. The crematoria, despite having been designed to burn multiple bodies simultaneously, could not handle the load. Fire pits were used to supplement the ovens. The smoke from them was so intense that it was visible in the reconnaissance pictures taken by American planes.