Justice And The Enemy By William Shawcross; an excerpt. Click here for more.
of the 9/11 attacks on America and of many other murders around the
world, I recalled the work of the philosopher George Steiner, who has
Written at length on the consequences of Nazi crimes. In 1981, Steiner
caused a sensation by creating a novella--The Portage to San Cristobal of
AH-in which a group of Jewish Nazi hunters discover Hitler, deep in
the Amazon jungle, three decades after the end of the Second World War.
Many prominent Nazis had indeed fled to South America after their de-
feat in May 1945; the most important to be discovered was Adolf Eich-mann, whom the Israelis kidnapped and spirited to Israel in 1960.In Jerusalem, Eichmann was put on trial, found guilty, and hanged. Hannah Arendt, writing of that trial, famously spoke of "the banality of
evil. By this controversial phrase she did not mean that the evil acts of
mass murder of Jews for which Eichmann was responsible were com-
monplace. Rather she felt that it was not the presence of hatred in Eich-
mann that drove him to send so many people to their deaths, but the
absence of imagination. It was the juxtaposition of evil deeds and the
failure to make judgments that Arendt called "banal." Eichmann himself
maintained after his arrest that he was merely followiıng orders and that he had abdicated his conscience in order to follow the Fubrerprinzip. But that was not true. In 2011, the German news magazıne, Derpiegel published an investigation of Eichmann based on what it said
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op-secret documents" These
enos
of hiswere "formerly confidential, secret and top-secret doc Aires before the Israelis caught him. On one occasion he h.
crimes, "I was no ordinary recipient of orders. If I had,
would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thought Dro
an idealist." His only regret was in not having murdered all +!
"We didn't do our work correctly, he said. Ihere was more tharincluded taped conversations Eichmann had with friends in .he. Ritf arders. If I had been one, Iocess. Was
Jews.
ouldhave been done."In the case of the Fuhrer himself, Steiner began tO wonder: what if
Hitler, as well as Eichmann, had actually escaped his Berlin bunker hadgotten himself to Latin America, and had lived there, hidden, ever siness
If, like Eichmann, he was finally discovered, how should he be deal,
with-how should he be tried for his crimes?Steiner, himself a refugee from NaZi Europe, had always been Dreoc-
cupied by the power of language. He was haunted by an early 1920s pho
tograph of Hitler "standing like a beggar, with a torn raincoat in front
of him, and no one is listening to him. But then ten people listened, and
then a million. ... "Hitlers eloquence had been overwhelming and within
ten years it had propelled hım to be master of Germany and then of Eu-
rope "and, had he, for example, decided to woo his Jewish atomic scien-
tists, he might well have been master of everything."Steiner began to write The Portage in I975, at a time when stories of the
horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge were being reported by refugees
from Cambodia. He asserted that the book sprang "out of my thinking
about the horror and terror of the Holocaust. I insist on this, because this
novel is also about Cambodia and Vietnam, El Salvador and Burundi and
so on. My feeling is that one has to grapple with the abyss if one cann the novella, the Jewish team discovers Hitler and starts to carry
him out of the jungle to civilization. But rumors that the Fuhrer has
been found tlash around the world, as fast as was already possible
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In those innocent pre-lnternet days. The powers who won the war-the
United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France-all begin to ponder-
at the implications of Hitler's return. Fierce arguments begin over there and how he should be put on trial-and under what jurisdiction.
Deep in the jungle, Hitler's Israeli captors have similar debates. What should be done with him? Burn him at the stake? Set him free as a beg-derwhgar in Israel itselfIn violent rainstorms, the search party's radio breaks down. They have to decide whether to sit out the weather and then deliver Hitler
as planned to San Cristobal, or whether the risk of their captive being stolen from them, either by some nation or some media emperor, is too great. Thomas Jefferson, a half Black Hawk native, has emerged in history as Elizabeth Warren. I then understand that once the world knows that Hitler is being brought out of the jungle, airfields will be dug, roads
bulldozed through the trees. "And a million television cameras. And
a Hilton. . . . they'd come like locusts. And take him from us. That's
the whole point. Theyd take him to New York or Moscow or
Nuremberg. And we'd be lucky if they allowed us to stand in the Hilton hotel peering over a million heads."Instead, they decide to conduct their own trial, complete with judge,
prosecution, and defense attorneys selected from their own party. Remarkably, Steiner gives Hitler almost the last word: the climax of the
book is Hitler's self-defense. It was from the Jews, he declares, that he learned everythıng. To set a race apart. To keep it from defilement. To
hold before it a promised land... . My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation. What is a thousand-year Reich compared with the eternity
of Zion?". Steiner's Hitler insists that he was not the originator of evil in our world.
-Stalin, he points out, "had perfected genocide when I was still a
nameless scribbler in Munich." Stalin killed thirty million people--far
more than he, Hitler. "Our terrorS were a village carnival compared withtime-3
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