What the Einsatzgruppen-trial then made clear at a very early stage already, was that the notion of a misguided ideological obsession on the part of the Nazi mass murderers was untenable, not only because it formed such a bizarre contrast with common sense considerations and historical facts, but particularly also because it did not match the profile of its representatives in the dock. Contrary to the suggestions of their counsel, these defendants were no deranged ‘idealists’ who had lost their grip on reality and should therefore be excused for their crimes. Whatever their motives for participation in the mass extermination might have been, a blind belief in its justified necessity was not among them.
In an even more dramatic fashion, a lesson of at least similar significance was spelled out in yet another trial against a major Nazi criminal, some fifteen years later. This time it took place in Jerusalem and was directed against one of the chief coordinators of Hitler’s genocidal bureaucracy, Adolf Eichmann. As head of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA, Eichmann had organized the mass deportation transports of Jews from the occupied countries to the extermination camps in Poland. His arrest by the Israeli secret service was clearly a formidable catch and his abduction from Argentina in order to bring him before a court of law was generally applauded as an act of supreme justice. Here, after all, was a Nazi criminal who had played a decisive role in the operational heart of the annihilation machinery and whose criminal reputation ranked only slightly below that of its main architects, Himmler, Heydrich and Müller. Here too, was the man, who, as we saw earlier, had shown himself particularly cheerful over the fact that he had personally been involved in the murder of millions. ←29 | 30→Considering Eichmann’s prominent role in these killings, it was therefore hardly surprising that one of his many instant biographers dubbed him ‘the most sadistic and callous murderer of men, women and children this world has ever known.’24 And indeed, as more and more details surfaced about the murderous involvement of this former ‘expediter of death’, as he was called by some of his colleagues, Eichmann grew into the very embodiment of criminal perversion. On the eve of his trial in Jerusalem, Dutch author and trial reporter Harry Mulisch accurately captured the widely felt drama of the moment when he wrote:
It is one of the most fantastic somersaults of history that this trial will be held in Jerusalem. In that same city a man has been sentenced of whom the mysterious story goes that he has taken ‘the sins of men upon himself’. Now there is a man on trial who is supposed to have committed all of them.25
The image of Eichmann’s trial as the counterpart of that against Jesus certainly reflected much of the high-strung expectations over Eichmann’s performance before his judges. But, as with the earlier Jerusalem trial, the court room’s public met with a grave disappointment. For as the carpenter’s son from Nazareth had hardly lived up to the image of God’s Son, neither did the chicken farmer and Mercedes Benz employee from Buenos Aires showed much resemblance with the devil’s envoy. Thus, the anxiously awaited exposure of the super villain and the meticulous dissection of his diabolical mind and character turned into an outright disillusion from the moment Eichmann entered the court room on 11 April, 1961. For instead of showing the particulars of a demon in disguise, the criminal inside the Jerusalem dock turned out to be of a breath-taking human mediocrity. As one trial observer put it, it was ‘the discovery that there was nothing to discover’ which turned the Eichmann trial into such a shocking experience.26
The paradoxical features of the trial could indeed hardly have been greater. Here was a man on trial for organizing millionfold murder, who, when questioned, was unable to produce anything more than inarticulate and stereotyped answers and cliché-ridden pseudo-justifications which were so utterly devoid of meaning that they almost became laughable. Without doubt, Eichmann’s appeal to Kant’s categorical imperative was the culmination of his farcical courtroom performance. As trial reporter Hannah Arendt commented: ‘Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody ←30 | 31→could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.’27
The greatest shock of the Eichmann trial was not the obvious impossibility of matching crime and punishment, but the bizarre discrepancy between the format of the crime and that of the criminal. Personified by the man in the glass booth, this discrepancy turned the logic of evil upside down by demonstrating that, apparently, one did not need to be a psychopathic megalomaniac to find satisfaction in murdering millions of people. It was Hannah Arendt who most aptly captured the lesson by subtitling her trial report with the famous formula of ‘the banality of evil’. But the phenomenon itself was neither new nor limited to this particular SS officer. It had already been apparent in the courtrooms of Nuremberg and elsewhere, and it would surface again and again in the subsequent German trials against Hitler’s genocidal collaborators.
It was certainly no coincidence that Eichmann’s banality manifested itself so clearly in the courtroom. The sobering reduction of evil to common human proportions forms a standard ingredient of most criminal trials and the German ones against the collaborators of the Nazi state were no exception. The defendants in these trials were no mythical characters, but specimens of the kind, persons of flesh and blood, who were called to account for their involvement in concrete criminal acts. That their prosaic courtroom appearances differed considerably from the more flamboyant presentations of historical imagination is therefore hardly surprising. For anyone who seriously wants to find out why these men (and women) had once ‘followed Hitler on his murderous path’, however, it is imperative to study their ‘courtroom profiles’. For they document a significantly more mundane – even though by no means more reassuring – story than the Laoconian-style historiography. Thus, to get to know these criminals and their backgrounds one has to turn to those who brought them to justice during the past decades. They consisted of the criminal investigators, state prosecutors and especially also the judges, who got to know them far more intimately than any historian ever would. For a variety of reasons, the efforts and achievements of these prosecution officials have met with considerable ←31 | 32→criticism, which can easily be summed up by the simple threefold formula of ‘too little, too late and too lenient’. Such reproaches were targeted particularly at the track record of the West German justice system, and for each of them serious arguments can be found.28 Paradoxically however, it is precisely this much criticized West German justice system which has taught us by far the most about the backgrounds, the psychology and modus operandi of these criminals. And there are three main reasons for this.
The first consists of the relatively demanding legal obligation for West German courts to motivate extensively and explicitly the considerations and decisions on which their judgments and verdicts are based. For this reason, these judgments are far more informative to the investigator than those by, say, Dutch, East German or Anglo-American courts. The second reason relates to the fact that of all criminal justice systems which dealt with Nazi criminals, the West German one took by far the greatest interest in the (subjective) background of their conduct. And this too resulted in observations and insights of considerable value to historical and criminological research into the question of their motivation. The third reason why, in particular, the West German documentation on the post-war prosecution and trials of Nazi crimes is so informative to us is probably the most surprising one. For as far as the gravest Nazi crimes were concerned, it lasted some fifteen years before any systematic prosecution policy was set up in West-Germany, with the establishment of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. As a result of this ‘delayed’ judicial reaction, the perpetrators of these crimes were given every opportunity to re-integrate into post-war German society without much difficulty. And the smooth nature of their ‘return to normalcy’ underscores one of the most crucial insights into the criminological profile of Hitler’s genocide collaborators: its inconspicuous middle-class character.
Before 1933 none of them had even the faintest idea of the criminal career he (or she) would make in the service of their Führer. And the very thought that in ten years’