If the majority or the whole environment has prejudged then the question Who am 1 to judge becomes an issue. With the biblical call “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” and if this fear speaks in terms of “casting the first stone,” it takes this word in vain. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means.

We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. As long as one traces the roots of what Hitler did back to Plato or Hegel or Nietzsche, or to modern science and technology, or to nihilism or the French Revolution, everything is all right. But the moment one calls Hitler a mass murderer, then we are outraged, but not morally disturbed by the bestial behaviour of the storm troopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi bigwigs in power, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. The general question concerns “Personal Responsibility.” This term must be understood in contrast to social and political responsibility, which every government assumes for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor. It concerns every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past. Whoever takes upon himself political responsibility will always come to the point where he says with Hamlet:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!

Everybody else from high to low who had anything to do with public affairs was in fact a cog, whether he knew it or not. Does this mean that nobody else could be held personally responsible. To be sure, that the defence would try to plead that Adolf Eichmann was but a small cog was predictable. He did so up to a point; whereas the attempt of the prosecution to make him the biggest cog ever-worse and more important than Hitler was an unexpected curiosity. The judges did what was right and proper, they discarded the whole notion, and so, incidentally, all blame and praise to the contrary notwithstanding. If Eichmann answers: “It was not I as a person who did it, I had neither the will nor the power to do anything out of my own initiative; I was a mere cog, expendable, everybody in my place would have done it; that I stand before this tribunal is an accident”- this answer will be ruled out as immaterial.

If the defendant were permitted to plead either guilty or not guilty as representing a system, he would indeed become a scapegoat. Eichmann himself wished to become a scapegoat. He proposed to hang himself publicly and to take all “sins” upon himself. For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?” If the accused wishes to shift responsibilities, he must again implicate other persons, he must name names, and these persons appear then as possible co-defendants, they do not appear as the embodiment of bureaucracy or any other necessity. Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the “cogs” and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors.

If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionists and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent. Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, “Why did you obey?” but “Why did you support?” If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honour of man, not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.