The View from the Ground by Martha Gellhorn

Author:Martha Gellhorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Eichmann and the Private Conscience

THE ATLANTIC, February 1962

In the bulletproof glass dock, shaped like the prow of a ship, sits a little man with a thin neck, high shoulders, curiously reptilian eyes, a sharp face, balding dark hair. He changes his glasses frequently, for no explicable reason. He tightens his narrow mouth, purses it. Sometimes there is a slight tic under his left eye. He runs his tongue around his teeth, he seems to suck his gums. The only sound ever heard from his glass cage is when—with a large white handkerchief—he blows his nose. People, coming fresh to this courtroom, stare at him. We have all stared; from time to time we stare again. We are trying, in vain, to answer the same question: how is it possible? He looks like a human being, which is to say he is formed as other men. He breathes, eats, sleeps, reads, hears, sees. What goes on inside him? Who is he; who on God's earth is he? How can he have been what he was, done what he did? How is it possible?

The normal reaction to a man alone, in trouble, is pity. One man, caught, held to account for his crime, one small creature, however odious his wrongdoing, becomes pitiful when faced by society in all its power. His loneliness compels pity. Yet this man in the dock arouses no such feeling, not once, not for an instant. Day after day he leans back in his chair, impassive, and listens to the testimony of men and women he tormented. Usually their words seem to weary him; sometimes there is a flicker of irritation, a frown. He comes awake only when documents are submitted in evidence, when he can shift the piles of folders on his desk, sort, search for a paper, make notes: the organization man at his chosen task. No single gesture, no passing expression of his face lays claim to our sympathy—an emotion men feel for each other because they need it, they could not live together without it, they recognize themselves in each other. This man is exempt from our pity, as he was pitiless beyond the reaches of imagination. We cannot understand him because of this; and we fear him.

We have cause for fear, and what we fear is deeper and stronger than the tangible terrors we live with: menacing struggles between rival states, weapons which pre-empt nature's own rights. We fear him because we know that he is sane. It would be a great comfort to us if he were insane; we could then dismiss him, with horror, no doubt, but reassuring ourselves that he is not like us, his machinery went criminally wrong, our machinery is in good order. There is no comfort.

This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model of inhumanness; but he was not alone.

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