January 2000 The "Real" Eichmann By Rabbi Alvin Kass Over the last few months, the German daily, Die Welt, has published excerpts from a diary that Adolf Eichmann wrote during his imprisonment. In them, Eichmann portrays himself as a man driven by a visceral sense of duty rather than hatred to organize the mass murder of Jews. Eichmann's effort in these memoirs to characterize himself as just an ordinary fellow with a hypercommitment to duty seems, however, more calculated to aid in his legal defense than to provide us with an objective description of who he really was. To be sure, some psychologists at the time were taken in by this pose and have viewed him merely as a normal fellow carrying out what he was asked to do. A far different picture of Eichmann emerges from the writing of Gideon Hausner, the Israeli Attorney General who prosecuted Eichmann as a Nazi war criminal. An excerpt from Hausner's remarkable book, Eichmann and His Trial, which I included in my anthology entitled Eyewitnesses to Jewish History (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1973), provides an astoundingly gripping account of the Gestapo colonel who supervised the mass deportation and extermination of the Six Million. Hausner could understand how superficial appearances might mislead observers as to Eichmann's true nature. As Hausner phrases it "...Eichmann looked like nothing much at all. The man facing me was the kind you might rub elbows with in the street any day and never notice." At the time of the trial, Eichmann was nondescript, in his middle fifties, of dark complexion and of medium height. But this was no ordinary man. Hausner administered to him a test, invented by the eminent Hungarian psychologist L. Szondi, in which the subject is shown a long series of photographs. He is then asked to select from each group two people who attract him the most and two other people who repel him the most. Eichmann was given the test a total of 240 times over forty days. In every group of these photographs he unerringly chose the murderer and the sadist as the people he liked the most. Dr. Szondi, to whom the results were sent and to whom the identity of the subject was not revealed, said this had never happened to him in twenty-four years as a criminal psychologist, a period in which he had tested over 6,000 criminals. Such data, said Dr. Szondi, indicated that the subject was "a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill, arising out of a desire for power." Eichmann also contends in his memoirs that his unwavering loyalty to the orders of his superiors is characteristic of the German people in general. Here too Eichmann is wrong, and appears to be trying to put the best light on his own conduct by showing that he was only acting the way most Germans do. The postwar history of West Germany surely showed that in a democratic environment Germans can be as self-critical and questioning as anyone else. Germany today would be unrecognizable to Eichmann. It is a vital, vibrant society characterized by an abundance of sharp and often caustic debate in the political and intellectual realm. No doubt there is room for legitimate debate about the proper relationship between order and freedom, and between initiative and obedience. We need to examine the point at which admirable loyalty to superiors becomes a heinous violation of higher ethical truths. However, notwithstanding his self-serving diary, Eichmann can never serve as an example of a decent, reasonable, normal functionary trying to resolve the tensions between the demands of duty and the call of a "higher authority." Far closer to the mark is Dr. G. M. Gilbert, the Long Island University professor who was prison psychologist at the Nuremberg trials, who defined a Nazi as "an inhuman, murderous robot, quiet and correct in military bearing, functioning intellectually on a high level of mechanical efficiency, utterly devoid of human empathy." It is impossible to find a more perfect embodiment of that paradigm than Adolf Eichmann.