Zionism: Past and Present

The Individual and Personal Responsibility

The Individual and Personal Responsibility I The question of the personal responsibility of a certain individual, says John Doe, concerning acts that were done by a group of individuals, a society, a people, or a state—necessarily arose in and around the proceedings of the Eichmann Trial. It arose in circles of those who are interested in such questions, and in circles of political and moral thinkers, who wish to establish principles concerning the behavior of the individual and his position. As regards those who would lessen the responsibility cast on an individual for acts in which he participated, there are two opinions between which we must differentiate: (a) The first one being that acts of an individual, performed as a part of an organized state (as the Nazi regime was organized); or the acts of an individual who is carried away on a wave of general irrationality (ideological and psychological), such as marked the atmosphere and the so-called worldview (Weltanschauung) of the Nazi movement ; or an individual involved in a cruel war, who is necessarily attached to one of the warring camps, and the side to which he is attached has iron discipline and customs—there is no way of holding such an individual personally and humanly responsible, and thus there certainly can be no legal responsibility. This is one thesis that we must be concerned with, and we must evaluate its weight, both intellectual and human. 137 This paper was first published in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 5, 1963. Reprinted here with permission of the publisher. 138 Zionism (b) There is a second opinion, which was brought out during the proceedings of the Trial itself, in an exchange between a prosecution witness Professor Salo Baron, and the accused’s attorney, Dr. R. Servatius. The intention of this opinion is different from that of the one previously mentioned. It also states, like the first thesis, that the individual is carried away by factors, commonly called “historical factors” beyond his control, such as, relations of the generation, traditions, climates of opinion, and so on. Thus the acts of man, whose behavior is determined by these factors, sometimes have results that are outside his declared intentions. Just as a man has no control over the factors that guide his acts and determine his behavior, thus he has no control over the results of the acts he performs, so sometimes the results in the future stands in blatant contradiction to the content and intention of the forces that determine his behavior in the present. As the defense counsel said: “Look, they wanted to destroy and to exterminate the people of Israel, but the scheme of the plotters was frustrated; a flowering state arose instead of this plot succeeding .”1 In stating this fact there is a certain attempt to lessen the guilt, and also the responsibility of the doer—for certainly there is room, and rightly so, to argue that a deed is judged not only by the intentions of the doer, but also by its results; even when there is a contradiction between the intentions and the results. According to the first thesis, one cannot hold a man responsible because of his place in the historical process of the past, while according to the second thesis, one cannot hold him responsible—or at least there is a diminution of responsibility—because of the historical process from present to future. During the courtroom proceedings, a reliance upon the Historical School of Law (Rechtsschule) slipped in, in support of this thesis. We should set aside some space to the clarification of the connections between the ideas that were presented here, not to put this matter in its correct historical and factual order context, but to clarify the fundamental question before us. Seeing the moral meaning of the problem before us depends on this clarification. 139 The Individual and Personal Responsibility II At the heart of the Historical School’s discussion of Law is the view that Law is not created by a directed and executed act of man, but is shaped in the historical process of the generations by internal powers, operating unostentatiously, as Savigny said. The human existence of each individual is, according to the view, linked to a whole, higher than himself: the wholeness of a family, a people or a state. Every period in the existence of a people is the continuation and development of...