While Eichmann may never have encountered an “inner emigrant,” he must have been well acquainted with many of those numerous civil servants who today assert that they stayed in their jobs for no other reason than to “mitigate” matters and to prevent “real Nazis” from taking over their posts. We mentioned the famous case of Dr. Hans Globke, Undersecretary of State and from 1953 to 1963 chief of the personnel division in the West German Chancellery. Since he was the only civil servant in this category to be mentioned during the trial, it may be worth while to look into his mitigating activities. Dr. Globke had been employed in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior before Hitler's rise to power, and had shown there a rather premature interest in the Jewish question. He formulated the first of the directives in which “proof of Aryan descent” was demanded, in this case of persons who applied for permission to change their names. This circular letter of December, 1932—issued at a time when Hitler's rise to power was not yet a certainty, but a strong probability—oddly anticipated the “top secret decrees,” that is, the typically totalitarian rule by means of laws that are not brought to the attention of the public, which the Hitler regime introduced much later, in notifying the recipients that “these directives are not for publication.” Dr. Globke, as I have mentioned, kept his interest in names, and since it is true that his Commentary on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was considerably harsher than the earlier interpretation of Rassenschande by the Ministry of the Interior's expert on Jewish affairs, Dr. Bernhard Lösener, an old member of the Party, one could even accuse him of having made things worse than they were under “real Nazis.” But even if we were to grant him all his good intentions, it is hard indeed to see what he could have done under the circumstances to make things better than they would otherwise have been. Recently, however, a German newspaper, after much searching, came up with an answer to this puzzling question. They found a document, duly signed by Dr. Globke, which decreed that Czech brides of German soldiers had to furnish photographs of themselves in bathing suits in order to obtain a marriage license. And Dr. Globke explained: “With this confidential ordinance a three-year-old scandal was somewhat mitigated”; for until his intervention, Czech brides had to furnish snapshots that showed them stark naked.
Dr. Globke, as he explained at Nuremberg, was fortunate in that he worked under the orders of another “mitigator,” Staatssekretär (Undersecretary of State) Wilhelm Stuckart, whom we met as one of the eager members of the Wannsee Conference. Stuckart's attenuation activities concerned half-Jews, whom he proposed to sterilize. (The Nuremberg court, in possession of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, may not have believed that he had known nothing of the extermination program, but it sentenced him to time served on account of ill health. A German denazification court fined him five hundred marks and declared him a “nominal member of the Party”—a Mitläufer— although they must have known at least that Stuckart belonged to the “old guard” of the Party and had joined the S.S. early, as an honorary member.) Clearly, the story of the “mitigators” in Hitler's offices belongs among the postwar fairy tales, and we can dismiss them, too, as voices that might possibly have reached Eichmann's conscience.
The question of these voices became serious, in Jerusalem, with the appearance in court of Propst Heinrich Grüber, a Protestant minister, who had come to the trial as the only German (and, incidentally, except for Judge Michael Musmanno from the United States, the only non-Jewish) witness for the prosecution. (German witnesses for the defense were excluded from the outset, since they would have exposed themselves to arrest and prosecution in Israel under the same law as that under which Eichmann was tried.) Propst Grüber had belonged to the numerically small and politically irrelevant group of persons who were opposed to Hitler on principle, and not out of nationalist considerations, and whose stand on the Jewish question had been without equivocation. He promised to be a splendid witness, since Eichmann had negotiated with him several times, and his mere appearance in the courtroom created a kind of sensation. Unfortunately, his testimony was vague; he did not remember, after so many years, when he had spoken with Eichmann, or, and this was more serious, on what subjects. All he recalled clearly was that he had once asked for unleavened bread to be shipped to Hungary for Passover, and that he had traveled to Switzerland during the war to tell his Christian friends how dangerous the situation was and to urge that more opportunities for emigration be provided. (The negotiations must have taken place prior to the implementing of the Final Solution, which coincided with Himmler's decree forbidding all emigration; they probably occurred before the invasion of Russia.) He got his unleavened bread, and he got safely to Switzerland and back again. His troubles started later, when the deportations had begun. Propst Grüber and his group of Protestant clergymen first intervened merely “on behalf of people who had been wounded in the course of the First World War and of those who had been awarded high military decorations; on behalf of the old and on behalf of the widows of those killed in World War I.” These categories corresponded to those that had originally been exempted by the Nazis themselves. Now Grüber was told that what he was doing “ran counter to the policy of the government,” but nothing serious happened to him. But shortly after this, Propst Grüber did something really extraordinary: he tried to reach the concentration camp of Gurs, in southern France, where Vichy France had interned, together with German Jewish refugees, some seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden and the Saarpfalz whom Eichmann had smuggled across the German-French border in the fall of 1940, and who, according to Propst Griiber's information, were even worse off than the Jews deported to Poland. The result of this attempt was that he was arrested and put in a concentration camp—first in Sachsenhausen and then in Dachau. (A similar fate befell the Catholic priest Dompropst Bernard Lichtenberg, of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin; he not only had dared to pray publicly for all Jews, baptized or not—which was considerably more dangerous than to intervene for “special cases”—but he had also demanded that he be allowed to join the Jews on their journey to the East. He died on his way to a concentration camp.)
Apart from testifying to the existence of “another Germany,” Propst Grübber did not contribute much to either the legal or the historical significance of the trial. He was full of pat judgments about Eichmann—he was like “a block of ice,” like “marble,” a “Landsknechtsnatur,” a “bicycle rider” (a current German idiom for someone who kowtows to his superiors and kicks his subordinates)—none of which showed him as a particularly good psychologist, quite apart from the fact that the “bicycle rider” charge was contradicted by evidence which showed Eichmann to have been rather decent toward his subordinates. Anyway, these were interpretations and conclusions that would normally have been stricken from any court record— though in Jerusalem they even found their way into the judgment. Without them Propst Grüber's testimony could have strengthened the case for the defense, for Eichmann had never given Grüber a direct answer, he had always told him to come back, as he had to ask for further instructions. More important, Dr. Servatius for once took the initiative and asked the witness a highly pertinent question: “Did you try to influence him? Did you, as a clergyman, try to appeal to his feelings, preach to him, and tell him that his conduct was contrary to morality?” Of course, the very courageous Propst had done nothing of the sort, and his answers now were highly embarrassing. He said that “deeds are more effective than words,” and that “words would have been useless”; he spoke in clichés that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, where “mere words” would have been deeds, and where it had perhaps been the duty of a clergyman to test the “uselessness of words.”