Desk murderer

The term desk murderer (German: Schreibtischtäter), attributed to Hannah Arendt in the 1960s, subsequent to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, is used to describe state-employed mass murderers like Eichmann, who planned and organised the Holocaust without actively taking part in any killings.

The German translation of the term, Schreibtischtäter, was listed as one of the 100 most significant words in the German language in the 20th century and dates from around the same time as the English version. By the early 1970s the word Schreibtischtäter had become part of the German standard dictionary, the Duden.

History

The planning of the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, had one of its key points at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, of which only two of the participants actually took part in any killings while the rest wereinvolved in the planning and organisation of the Holocaust, a type of official later classified as desk murderers. Of these participants, Adolf Eichmann was seen as the prototype of a desk murderer. Despite his designation as desk murderer Eichmann did leave his desk and office and travelled to concentration camps like Sobibor, Auschwitz and Treblinka, getting actively involved and knowing exactly what went on in the extermination camps. For this reason, some modern historians like Bettina Stangneth deny that Eichmann was a desk murderer as he took too active an interest in the process of the Holocaust.

Maurice Papon, responsible for the deportation of Jews from France during the German occupation, was, like Eichmann, seen as a stereotypical desk murderer and, like Eichmann, long escaped justice. Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo and Eichmann's superior, described by British historian Robert S. Wistrich as somebody who made mass murder into an administrative task, was another high ranking desk murderer during World War II.

Hannah Arendt, who reported on Eichmann's trial for The New York Times, published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, a book sometimes falsely credited with being the source of the term desk murderer. In this book she described him and his associates as the "modern, state-employed mass murderers" and talks of the "bureaucracy of murder". She first used the term desk murderer in early 1965 but this was not translated into German at the time and she herself did not use Schreibtischtäter in any of her German language publications. She used the term desk murderer in an English introduction to the report by German journalist Bernd Naumann on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1966 and, from there, it was translated to the German Schreibtischtäter.

The German origin of desk murder dates from 1964, when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung used the term for the first time.

Criminal responsibility

Under West German criminal law, a distinction is made between those who order murder or commit murder on their own initiative. Desk murderers who pass on orders from above would therefore be guilty only as accomplices to murder, but if they ordered any murders, they would be fully liable for them even if someone else carried them out. Some people, including lawyer Jan Schlöss, have recommended reducing the scope of the term "desk murderer" to those who directly ordered murders. Others use the term to refer to anyone who was part of the bureaucracy engaged with carrying out criminal orders, no matter how indirect their involvement.

Other use

The term desk murderer has been used in non-Holocaust context, like during the Auschwitz trial when the defence lawyer Hans Laternser demanded the arrest of witness Erich Markowitsch, an Auschwitz survivor and East German politician, for his alleged role in approving the killings of refugees attempting to escape East Germany on the Berlin Wall.

German far-right politician Gerhard Frey used the term Schreibtischtäter for people supporting Israel as, in his view, they thereby became accomplices in crimes committed there.