Gablenz 1

(Un)Ethical (In)Action: Leaders and ’s Fine Line between Resistance and Complicity

Neil G. Gablenz The State University of at Buffalo

Hannah Arendt crafted the expression “the banality of evil” in her 1963 essay : A Report on the Banality of Evil as an attempt to explain the disturbing contrast between ’s actions and behavior during both the years of Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-1945), as well as at his trial in Jerusalem (1961), and the indescribably horrific results they visited upon the world. Originally published as a series of essays for The New Yorker in 1961, Arendt’s goal, as she states in Eichmann in Jerusalem, was to both cover the court proceedings as well as discover who Adolf Eichmann was and how he came to play the role of architect in . Little did she know Gablenz 2 that this expression attached to Eichmann would bitterly and publicly divide American and European intellectuals for years to come. Attempting to encapsulate the palpable tension that surrounded Eichmann in Jerusalem, Amos Elon remarks in his introduction: “No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America” (vii). Eichmann in Jerusalem indeed caused an uproar— some audiences understood her self-expressed intent and declared her work a “masterpiece,” a “terrifying expressionist invention applied with a force no imitator could rival” (Berkowitz). Others, however, condemned Arendt’s commentary of the trial as the shameful work of a self-hating Jew. Perhaps one of her fiercest critics was noted Jewish playwright Lionel Abel who claimed that Eichmann “comes off so much better in her book than do his victims” (Ezra 149), referring to Arendt’s controversial portrayal of Eichmann not as a ruthless monster but as an ordinary man of low intellect. When Daniel Bell and Mary McCarthy publicly defended Arendt in a 1964 issue of Partisan Review, the debate between the two camps intensified. Irving Howe remarked at the time that nearly every major literary and philosophical figure in New York chose a side in what he called a “civil war among New York intellectuals” Gablenz 3

(Berkowitz). He later correctly predicted the controversy surrounding Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem would simmer and settle, only to eventually erupt again and again. Eichmann in Jerusalem has seen a renewed interest since the 2000 presidential election, the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American invasion of Iraq, sparking new critical readings and interpretation of the infamous essay. Soon after the 2016 United States presidential election, Eichmann in Jerusalem (along with Arendt’s earlier 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism) reentered the socio-political ethos as many public figures wondered if evil truly is banal to the point that most people would not recognize it. Like the public’s reaction to the initial publication, this new critical consensus is just as bitterly divided. Christopher Browning wrote charitably of Arendt in a June 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books, claiming that she “grasped an important concept but not the right example” (31), meaning that Arendt’s general claim that most evildoers are normal people is not incorrect but that she incorrectly applied this claim to Eichmann specifically. Following the debut of ’s film (2018), a historical drama that tells the story of Eichmann’s abduction from his home outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina from the perspective of the Israeli agents who Gablenz 4 spirited him to Jerusalem, Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial saw yet again renewed interest. While the film does initially paint Eichmann (portrayed by ) as Arendt’s uninteresting, nondescript bureaucrat, his monstrous and sadistic evil is exposed during the scenes he is interrogated by Mossad agents. Operation Finale was nonetheless met with mixed reviews regarding the portrayal of Eichmann, with some critics approving of Kingsley’s Eichmann while others wrote that it was much too similar to Arendt’s “humanizing portrait” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Alan Dershowitz lambasted Arendt in print, calling Eichmann in Jerusalem “a mendacious screed in which she constructed a stick-figure caricature of one of the most significant perpetrators of the Holocaust” and even accuses her of deliberately distorting the history of the Holocaust for the sake of her political agenda in what he deems a grave “moral and literary sin.” Once again, the public finds itself forced to take sides. Was Hannah Arendt willfully and immorally malicious or was she simply misunderstood? And how exactly did she intend “the banality of evil” to be interpreted? This was the original question I had sought to answer as I read Eichmann in Jerusalem for the first time. As I read, however, I found myself more interested in Arendt’s portraits of other Israeli and non-Israeli which reveal her own prejudices. Gablenz 5

Although Eichmann in Jerusalem is more (in)famous for the author’s portraiture of the so-called “architect of the Holocaust,” there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship interested in her own biases and positionality. Perhaps what is most striking and confusing in her essay is not her assessment of Eichmann, but her characterization of three specific Judenrat1 leaders—Jews who were ordered to maintain order in Jewish by Nazi leaders—as self-interested sycophants who relished their position of power in the ghettos. Arendt’s proclamation is, of course, striking because of its apparent callousness, but it is confusing because it contradicts assessments made elsewhere in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Moreover, such a judgment is hardly consistent with her philosophy regarding action as explained in her earlier seminal work The Human Condition (1958). As we see in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt seems to suggest that the Judenrat leaders had acted in the interest of the Nazi regime by virtue of occupying such a position. Of course, there were specific cases of Judenrat leaders abusing this power to exploit the detainees for whom they were deemed responsible, there are also specific cases of Judenrat leaders who used this power to act

1 The German word Judenrat, or “Jewish council” composed of the German nouns Juden (Jews) and Rat (council), is a singular noun. Its plural inflection is Judenräte. Gablenz 6 in the best interest of Jewish detainees. However, as we will see, Arendt states in The Human Condition that an action demands that an individual takes an initiative to set something in motion. Simply occupying a position such as leader of a Judenrat does not constitute an action. In this paper, I intend to pair the concept of acts of resistance with the Arendtian ideas regarding action and inaction as described in The Human Condition and apply them to the cases of three Judenrat leaders mentioned by name in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Chaim Rumkowski (Łódź), Leo Baeck (Theresienstadt), and Adam Czerniaków (Warsaw). By doing so, I hope to bring clarity to the nuanced natures of action, inaction, and resistance that Arendt woefully ignores.

What does it mean to act?

Before we further discuss these three aforementioned Judenrat leaders and their actions or inaction, we must first familiarize ourselves with Arendt’s definitions of (in)action as described in The Human Condition. Whereas Arendt’s first and arguably most influential work The Origins of Totalitarianism is narrow in focus and addresses totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, The Human Condition is much broader in scope, Gablenz 7 interrogating how human activities have been and should be understood throughout Western history, from classical Greco- Roman antiquity to the 20th century (because of this, we will only be examining Arendt’s thinking regarding (in)action for the purposes of this paper). In order to better understand this history of human activities and their future(s), Arendt begins The Human Condition by introducing us to two ideas fundamental to the text and her argument: the vita activa (active life) and its contrast the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). Within the term vita activa, Arendt designates “three fundamental human activities: work, labor, and action” which are fundamental because “each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man” (Human Condition 7). Although these three conditions—work, labor, and action—may seem closely related because of their semantic definitions and connotations in English, we learn that each condition is, in fact, quite different. Arendt begins with labor, which she describes more or less as the biological nature of one’s existence: “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition is labor itself” (7). Simply put, labor consists of the scientific processes Gablenz 8 that our bodies either conduct subconsciously to ensure our bodies’ survival or that our bodies have no control over at all. Work, on the other hand, can be considered the opposite of labor. While labor is the activity tied to biological and material necessities for the human condition, work is the activity tied to the “unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever- recurring life cycle” (7). In this definition of work, the “unnaturalness” of the human existence should not be interpreted as not being of what occurs naturally, but as being outside of the scientific and biological processes that ensure the continued survival of a species. Arendt’s definition of work continues: “Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all” (7). In other words, work is tied to the ability to build and maintain a world fit for the biological processes of a species, such as humans. Finally, we come to the condition of action. If we consider the conditions of labor and work to be direct and accessible, action is more complex. First, Arendt establishes that action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter,” then explains that it Gablenz 9

“corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (7). It is noted that while the other two human conditions (labor and work) are merely “somehow related to politics,” the plurality described is the condition of all political life and has been as long as human history has been recorded. After all, Arendt reminds us, the language of the Romans, who she describes as “the most political people we have known,” used the expressions “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) and “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) interchangeably (7-8). She also adds that this human condition of action in its most basic form is implicit in Judeo-Christian scripture in which it is written in Genesis: “Male and Female created [God] them” (8). Today, we recognize that plurality is the human condition of action (whether one is conscious of this or not) because we know that we humans are “all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who has ever lived, lives, or will live” (8). Plurality, however, is not integral to the human condition of action simply because it exists. As we know, action cannot exist outside of a plurality because action is an activity that occurs between two or more individuals because the acting agent depends on the validation of others for an action to be Gablenz 10 meaningful. For if to act is, as Arendt states, is to demonstrate initiative and introduce something that is new into the world (9), it also stands to reason that an individual cannot carry out an action independently of plurality of individuals who, from their inherently different perspectives, can pass judgment on the action carried out. In this respect, an acting agent requires plurality the same way that performance artists require an audience; without the presence and acknowledgment of others, action would cease to be a meaningful activity. Thus, action, to the extent that it requires appearing in public, making oneself known through words and deeds, and eliciting the validation of others, can only exist in a context defined by plurality. Plurality is, as we have seen, a central feature of Arendt’s human condition of action. There is, however, a second central feature that is just as essential to action as plurality: freedom. To be sure, this notion of freedom is not a reference to the ability to choose among a set of possible alternatives (freedom of choice), nor is it a reference to the faculty of liberum arbitrium (free will) that many theological doctrines believe is given to humans by a specific deity. Instead, Arendt means to express with this term is the capacity of “beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (9), and states unequivocally that action and its two components, plurality and freedom (as well as the other two human Gablenz 11 conditions of labor and work) are rooted in natality, that is, the act of being born. This is because for an individual to be born, initiative (which she deems an element of action) is required, and the fact that each individual on the earth has completed the act of being born indicates to her that this aspect of action is inherent in all human activities. Since action is rooted in natality, and each individual on earth has completed the act of being born, Arendt concludes that action as the realization of freedom is inherent to all humans. In this sense, the act of not acting (inaction) would be seen by Arendt, perhaps paradoxically, as an action. This brings us now to our question: what does Arendt consider action? Simply put, action is the means by which an individual discloses oneself to others through both speech and the act of acting itself. Action is the means by which we as humans distinguish ourselves through speech and deeds from another as being distinct and wholly different individuals. It is how we humans discloses to others the ensemble of behaviors, beliefs, habits, and emotional patterns that we call “personality.” In terms of Arendt’s distinction, action reveals “who” individuals are as well as “what” they are—the latter referring to individual abilities and talents as well as shortcomings and deficiencies, traits that we humans all share. While we may use speech in the realms of labor and work, we do not use speech in Gablenz 12 these contexts to disclose our identities. Rather, when speech is used in the realms of labor and work, we do so in order to primarily—if not only—follow a set of prescriptive behaviors, or to “fill a role.” By her own logic, Arendt invalidates her claim made in Eichmann in Jerusalem that Judenrat leaders were all “Nazi-inspired leaders” who “enjoyed their new power” and comparable to captains “whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo” (118). Simply “filling a role,” such as occupying a position of leadership in a Judenrat, does not in itself constitute an action. As Arendt maintains in The Human Condition, it is only the realm of action that allows the acting agent to reveal who they are, what they are, and can affirm their unique and personal identities.

Rumkowski, Baeck, and Czerniaków: Their Stories

Understanding better Arendt’s definitions of (in)action, let us turn now to the cases of the three Judenrat leaders that she mentions specifically in Eichmann in Jerusalem: Leo Baeck, Chaim Rumkowski, and Adam Czerniaków. However, let us examine Gablenz 13 the cases of each of these men and let their words and their deeds disclose to us who and what they were rather than dwell on the appointed positions they were forced to accept. The Judenräte were Jewish administrative agencies that constituted a form of a self-enforcing intermediary between the German Reich and Jewish communities interned in ghettos. The Reich claimed the existence of the Judenräte was a collaborative effort between the Nazi government and Jewish community leaders. In reality, the Judenräte were organized and instituted in a by the Reich. It was also the Reich who appointed members to each Judenrat, often threatening to kill the appointee’s family and/or an arbitrary number of Jews in his ghetto if he refused. Members of a Judenrat were responsible for policing the Jews in their ghetto and for upholding the laws of the Reich, but were also charged with carrying out administrative tasks, such as compiling lists of Jews living in the ghetto that would ultimately end up in Nazi hands. In larger ghettos, a Judenrat would also function, albeit unwillingly, as spies for the Reich (Judenrat 1-13). It is the function of a Judenrat that we see Arendt focus on in Eichmann in Jerusalem, rather than the fact that Judenrat leaders were forced by the Nazi government under the threat of death to do its bidding. In fact, she does not even acknowledge any coercion on the part of the Reich, writing: Gablenz 14

[T]he members of the Jewish Councils were as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders, to whom the Nazis gave enormous powers—until they, too, were deported…. To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. […] In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of the vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. (Eichmann 117-18)

Although there are documented cases of Judenrat leaders abusing their people and their power, as we will see, many contemporary scholars challenge the belief that the Judenräte were willing and happy to assist the Reich. Despite their elevated status among Gablenz 15 other Jews living in ghettos, the Judenrat leaders were viewed no differently by the Nazi government than any other detained Jew. Even though they might have been granted “enormous powers” by the Reich to govern their ghettos, they had no power or influence outside of the ghetto. Moreover, their actions or inaction certainly had “no substantial influence—one way or the other—on the final outcome of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe” (Robinson xlviii). Whether or not Judenrat leaders believed they could affect the outcome of deportations or the Holocaust in Europe, we can still evaluate through their words and their actions who and what they were. The first Judenrat leader Arendt introduces to us is Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Judenrat in Łódź, , who she calls by the moniker “King Chaim.” Unfortunately, the case of Rumkowski is one that deserves Arendt’s fierce criticism, as we will see. Before the war, Rumkowski was an insurance agent in Łódź, a member of the Qahal (a theocratic politically autonomous body that exercised regulatory control over Jewish communities), and the head of a Jewish orphanage who, according to Dr. Edward Reicher, a Holocaust survivor from Łódź, had an “unhealthy interest in children” (47-48). When the Łódź ghetto was established and the Qahal was dissolved, Rumkowski was appointed the head of the Judenrat, becoming Gablenz 16 overnight the “sole figure of authority in managing and organizing internal life in the ghetto” (Unger 22). He wasted no time in circulating the “Rumki,” an informal currency bearing his signature (as all legal currency had been confiscated by the Nazis) as well as ghetto postage stamps engraved with his portrait. According to eyewitness and survivor accounts, Rumkowski conducted himself in a stern and arrogant manner. He “treated the ghetto Jews like personal belongings,” often speaking to them rudely and sometimes even beating them (Unger 33). He was known to send those who opposed him or those he simply disliked to concentration camps and had a reputation for sexually abusing young vulnerable girls (Łódź Ghetto 52). He rode around the ghetto in a broken-down horse drawn carriage (Eichmann 119), prohibited public protests expressing dissent, and essentially transformed the Łódź ghetto into an industrial base manufacturing war supplies for the , supposedly guided by the belief that productivity and usefulness was the key to Jewish survival. In order to prove the ghetto’s usefulness to the Reich, Rumkowski instituted forced labor and 12-hour workdays. By 1943, nearly 95% of the adult population was employed in 117 workshops, which—as “King Chaim” himself once boasted to the mayor of Łódź—were a “gold mine” (Łódź Ghetto xlii). Gablenz 17

It should be noted, however, that not all of Rumkowski’s actions were made without any consideration to the Jews interned in the ghetto. In order to maintain as large of a workforce as possible, Rumkowski also established many welfare and health systems inside the ghetto, which, for a time, consisted of seven hospitals, seven pharmacies, and five clinics that employed hundreds of doctors and nurses between them (Unger 30). He ensured that 47 schools remained open, which schooled 63% of the ghetto’s school-age children. He even established a “culture house” where theatrical productions and musical performances could take place, although he personally hired and fired performers and edited the content of shows to agree with his strict policies. Despite the animosity directed towards him by the Jews interned in the Łódź ghetto, Rumkowski maintained that he did his best to resist the Nazis by trying to make life “as normal as possible” in ghetto and by attempting to convince the Reich that the ghetto’s armament production would be invaluable to the Wehrmacht, but ultimately failed to do so. Whether he truly believed this or not, his government of the Łódź ghetto was nevertheless marked by abuse of his own people, the physical liquidation of his political opponents, and apparent subservience to the Nazi regime (Unger 57). However, all his self-described resistance and self- Gablenz 18 proclaimed efforts to save the Jews of Łódź were in vain. In 1944, Rumkowski and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where he was beaten to death by prisoners. Chaim Rumkowski’s regime in the Łódź ghetto is a perfect—albeit horrific—example of a Judenrat leader who uses his position to further victimize the Jews interned in his ghetto. While there are historic records of such Judenrat leaders, we know that Rumkowski’s actions as the sole authority figure in the Łódź ghetto does not accurately represent how the majority of Judenrat leaders (re)acted. Such is the case of Leo Baeck, head of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, whose actions Arendt judges less collaborationist than those of Rumkowski. Before the war, Baeck was a noted Jewish theologian born and raised in what is today central Poland who served as chief rabbi in Oppeln, Düsseldorf, and Berlin, and taught at the renowned Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies), a rabbinical seminary in Berlin. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Baeck was elected president of the newly founded Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), an independent organization that sought to represent Jewish political and religious groups and provided legal defense in the face of mounting persecution. In 1938, this organization was co- Gablenz 19 opted by the Reich, disbanded, and promptly reestablished as the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), an organization operated by the Reich which all German Jews were required to become members in order to facilitate their deportation. The Reich “allowed” Baeck to serve the new Reichsverinigung as its president, which he did until his deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 (Baker 244). At Theresienstadt, Baeck became the leader of its Judenrat, a position which gave him better accommodation, better food, and mail service. Most importantly, he was protected from being transported to a death camp and had the authority to protect others from being transported (Adler 287). It is Baeck’s knowledge of the concentration camps and the fact that he withheld this knowledge from the other prisoners that Arendt specifically criticizes. She names him one of the voluntary “bearers of secrets,” one of those who withheld the truth of the extermination camps and the ultimate fate awaiting the prisoners from the camp detainees. Nevertheless, these decisions were made with the prisoners’ well-being in mind, as these “bearer of secrets” believed that living with the expectation of death by gassing would only make their existence in the camp even more unimaginably unbearable. In addition, Arendt criticizes Baeck’s formation of a Jewish police force in the Gablenz 20

Theresienstadt concentration camp. She charitably acknowledges Baeck’s probable line of thought—that Jewish policemen would be “more gentle” and “make the whole ordeal easier” because they understood all too well the hopeless situation of the camp's prisoners. However, she claims, these Jewish police forces were in reality “more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them” (Eichmann 119). To her credit, Arendt writes that Baeck mostly likely harbored a sincere interest in the welfare of the Jewish prisoners and other detainees at Theresienstadt and regrets having once calling him “the Jewish Führer” in an article for (Elon ix). Baeck successfully discloses this part of his identity through his actions during his tenure as the head of the camp’s Judenrat. It is also worth mentioning that prior to his deportation, many organizations offered to help him emigrate from Germany and apply for asylum, but he refused to leave his suffering people, even after Jewish businesses and synagogues were burned and looted in November 1938. According to the German-American organization that bears his name, Baeck declared that he would only leave Germany when he was the last Jew remaining there. If Chaim Rumkowski is representative of the lower extreme of the spectrum of Judenräte leadership, then Arendt’s Gablenz 21 final example Adam Czerniaków is perhaps the closest case we have to a positive example of such leadership. A chemical engineer by trade, Czerniaków taught at a Jewish vocational school in his native Warsaw. He eventually left teaching to pursue a career in politics and served seven years as a member of the city’s municipal council. In 1930, he was elected to the Polish senate (Urynowicz 138). When Poland surrendered to the Reich in October 1939, the Nazis rounded up and interned Warsaw’s Jews in a ghetto, where a Judenrat consisting of 24 members was formed, and Czerniaków was appointed its head. Under his leadership, the Warsaw Judenrat established social services and law enforcement in the ghetto, but it also covertly sponsored more subversive activities, such as organizing an underground resistance force creating a secret archive. Like other Judenrat leaders, he attempted to broker deals with the Reich in the interest of Jews in the ghetto, but he was often unsuccessful, which, along with his unfamiliarity with Yiddish, contributed to his unpopularity in the ghetto (Tartakower 55-67). In 1942, the German Reich implemented their infamous liquidation of the ghetto called Großaktion Warschau and informed Czerniaków that all Warsaw Jews were to be “resettled in the East,” which he recognized was a euphemism for deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Czerniaków succeeded Gablenz 22 in obtaining exceptions for Jews working in munitions factories, hospital staff, sanitation workers, vocational students, members of the Judenrat and their families as well as members of the force, but he initially failed to obtain an exception for children of the Jewish orphanages. As a result of Großaktion Warschau, Czerniaków was thus given an ultimatum: the Warsaw Judenrat was to facilitate deportations at a rate of 6,000 people per day, or 100 Jews in the ghetto, and members of the Judenrat and their families would be executed. Understanding that he could not save all of the ghetto’s Jews from deportation to death camps, he once again begged the Reich to spare the orphans. In response, the Reich demanded that he, on-the-spot, sign deportation orders for these children. He subsequently pleaded with a host of Nazi offices in the hopes that the orders would be somehow countermanded, all to no avail. In the end, he returned to his office and committed suicide by ingesting a cyanide capsule. His final action before the one that would take his life was to write a note to his wife, which read: “They demand me to kill children of my own nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but die. I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do” (Gutman 200- 203). Czerniaków’s vacated position as head of the Warsaw Judenrat was, of course, filled in short order by his deputy Marek Gablenz 23

Lichtenbaum, and the Großaktion Warschau deportations were not prevented. Because of this, Czerniaków’s death was controversial in the ghetto. Some, particularly those active in the militant underground resistance, criticized his suicide as an expression of personal weakness that had absolutely no impact on life in the ghetto or the viability of Großaktion Warschau. Those who were sympathetic viewed his suicide as an act of personal courage and an expression of his integrity and public responsibility. Arendt’s own judgment is ambiguous—she does not paint an overwhelming positive image of Czerniaków but, at the same time, she does not outright criticize him as she criticizes Rumkowski and Baeck. The only judgment she passes on Czerniaków is a single remark: “[he] must have remembered the rabbinical saying: “Let them kill you, but don’t cross the line” (Eichmann 119).

Were They Complicit? or, Hannah Arendt’s “Preferred Jews”

Now that we have examined in greater detail the lives and the actions of these three Judenrat leaders, we must ask ourselves if we can agree with Arendt’s blistering judgment. Were they Gablenz 24 indeed “Nazi-inspired figures” who “enjoyed their new power,” no better than captains “whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo” (Eichmann 118), or worse? Where they complicit simply by virtue of their position in a social hierarchy? It is puzzling that Arendt draws such conclusions in Eichmann in Jerusalem because they seem to contradict other arguments of her texts. For example, she criticizes Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s characterization that Jews in the ghettos and the concentration camps did not adequately defend themselves against the Nazis as being “cruel and silly” (12), yet she specifically claims that the Judenrat leaders played a role in the destruction of their own people. Moreover, we know that such judgments are not consistent with her philosophy regarding action as explained in her earlier work The Human Condition that predates Eichmann in Jerusalem by three years. We know that she views action as the means by which an individual discloses oneself to others through both speech and the act of acting itself, it is how one reveals the “who” and “what” they are. We know that simply having been appointed the head of a Judenrat does not in itself constitute an action; therefore, we cannot conclude that the Judenrat leaders were active participants in the destruction of their own people, as Arendt Gablenz 25 does. Rather, we must assess the ethics and morality of a Judenrat leader by weighing his actions as a Judenrat leader, on a case-by- case basis. We can argue that Chaim Rumkowski performed dubious actions motivated more by self-interest rather than the overall well-being of the Jews interned in the Łódź ghetto. We can also argue that Leo Baeck and Adam Czerniaków were more effective leaders who tried hard to improve the quality of life of the Jewish prisoners in Warsaw and Theresienstadt, but we cannot claim that all Judenrat leaders were complicit in the destruction of Jewish people during the Holocaust because the actions of an individual can only be judged individually, just as the larger actions of a group cannot be ascribed to an individual. Simply put, Arendt should have known better. Then why is Arendt so fiercely critical of the Judenräte and why has she never retracted or regretted these judgments? If we assume that she is not motivated by her own philosophy of action, we are only left with one possible explanation: personal discriminations. This is the most likely explanation, as even her most ardent defenders admit: “She had a tendency to draw absolute conclusions on the basis of casual evidence” (Elon xvii). As previously stated, there is a growing scholarly interest in Arendt’s portrayals of the historical figures other than the accused in Eichmann in Jerusalem. What has been discovered is Gablenz 26 that Arendt writes with an obvious bias in favor of Jews of German extraction while she writes with distrust and disgust of Jews of any other ethnic background. For instance, she has nothing but praise for the three presiding judges, all of whom were immigrants from Weimar Germany, writing to Karl Jespers that they exemplified “the best of German Jewry” (Elon xviii). Yet to Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who are both Ostjuden (Jews of Eastern European extraction), she is far less complementary. She constantly belittles Hausner, describing him as “a typical Galician Jew, unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who don’t know any language” (Elon xviii) while she outright accuses Ben-Gurion of having turned Eichmann’s trial into the Eichmann Trial; that is to say, an international spectacle for political gain and monetary reparations from the West German government. She is horrified by the Israeli Jews who only speak Hebrew and, to her, look Asian or Arab, writing that they were making life difficult for all the German-speaking immigrant Jews from Germany and Austria. Given these beliefs she held as well as the fact that the three Judenrat leaders she mentioned were Ostjuden, it is likely that her personal biases clouded her judgments regarding the Judenräte. Despite her previous work on ideas of action, Hannah Gablenz 27

Arendt’s fine line between resistance and complicity could just as well be the fine line on a map separating Germany from Poland.

WORKS CITED

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Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1968. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985.

---. The Human Condition. 1958. U of Chicago P, 2018.

---. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1977. Penguin, 2006.

Baker, Leonard. Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews. Macmillan, 1978.

Berenbaum, Michael. “Judenrat.” Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/about-aice.

Berkowitz, Roger. “Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem.’” New York Times, 7 July 2013, Gablenz 28

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