A Man Lost in the Gray Zone

Law and History Review

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 161-176

  Luban, David ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85011531717     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744214     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Leora Bilsky, “Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastner,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 118.
2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1963), 197.
3. Quoted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 543, from Life, 5 Dec. 1960, 146. The six million pengo figure also comes from Hilberg. I have not examined the newly released Eichmann memoirs on this episode.
4. Bilsky says 1685 (“Judging Evil,” 126), but the sources I have consulted all say 1684.
5. Quoted in Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 724-25, from Alexander Weissberg, Die Geschichte von Yoel Brand (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1956).
6. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 542-44, 723-28; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 94. For a detailed discussion of the complex deliberations and machinations of the Allies in the trucks-for-blood deal, see Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 172-95.
7. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 728.
8. Destruction of the European Jews., 545.
9. Quoted in Segev, The Seventh Million, 269. Segev claims that Becher's help to the Jews was merely an effort to create an alibi for himself, and Bauer reaches the same conclusion. Becher, who had substantial blood on his hands, lived out his years as a “respectable” multimillionaire bon vivant, with a taste for horseback riding and adultery.
10. I am taking this account of the trial from Segev, The Seventh Million, 266-71.
11. The most famous of the paratroopers was the twenty-three-year-old poet and Israeli national heroine Hannah Senesh, who was captured by the Nazis, tortured (bearing up with legendary bravery and dignity), and executed.
12. Segev, The Seventh Million, 272.
13. The Seventh Million., 282.
14. Quoted in The Seventh Million., 282-83.
15. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 42, 143.
16. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 42. However, elsewhere in the book, apparently without noticing the inconsistency, Arendt also accepts Kastner's version that the deal was a strict cash-for-lives trade. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 143.
17. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 117, 118, 132.
18. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 132.
19. Bauer, Jews for Sale? 259.
20. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 125.
21. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 47-48. This central idea of the book was elaborated in her essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38 (1971): 417-46, perhaps her most important contribution to moral theory.
22. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 42.
23. Eichmann in Jerusalem., 54.
24. Quoted in Segev, The Seventh Million, 28. To be fair to Ben-Gurion, at the time he made this statement (December 1938), almost no one actually believed that Hitler meant to murder all the Jews. On the efforts of Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency to save Jews, even at the cost of nation building in Palestine, see Bauer, Jews for Sale? 184, 188.
25. Quoted in Segev, The Seventh Million, 100.
26. Bauer, Jews for Sale? 199.
27. Segev, The Seventh Million, 40-45, 99-109.
28. On this theme in the Kastner trial, see Asher Maoz, “Historical Adjudication: Courts of Law, Commissions of Inquiry, and ‘Historical Truth,'” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 598-99.
29. Bauer convincingly refutes all Tamir's assumptions; see Jews for Sale? 150-61.
30. According to Bauer, the answer is yes, although Brand was never under any similar illusions. See Bauer, Jews for Sale? 170.
31. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 544.
32. On this motivation, see Bauer, Jews for Sale? 167, 178, 186.
33. Bilsky, “Judging Evil,” 154-55.
34. Why did Kastner help Becher? His accusers intimated that it was to buy Becher's silence, while Segev quotes a friend of Kastner's who believed that Kastner wanted to experience one more time the power over life and death. See Segev, The Seventh Million, 268. Bauer believes that Kastner simply thought Becher deserved help because he had helped to save lives. See Bauer, Jews for Sale? 250.1 suspect Kastner had to believe that Becher was a worthy partner in order to believe that he himself played an honorable role working with him.
35. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40, 44.
36. As Maoz explains, this point was made in Justice Goitein's opinion in the Kastner appeal. See Maoz, “Historical Adjudication,” 593-94.