The term "desk murderer" (german: Schreibtischtäter) is attributed to
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Arendt was born ...
and is used to describe state-employed mass murderers like
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
without taking part in killings personally.
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. In the early 1970s the word ''Schreibtischtäter'' was included in the German standard dictionary, the ''
Duden
The Duden () is a dictionary of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880, and later by Bibliographisches Institut GmbH. The Duden is updated regularly with new editions appearing every four or five years. , i ...
''.
History
The planning of the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, had one of its key points at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Only two of the participants actually took part in any killings. The other participants were involved in the planning and organisation of the Holocaust. This second group of officials was later classified as "desk murderers"; of this group, Adolf Eichmann was seen as the prototype of a desk murderer. Despite his designation as a desk murderer, Eichmann did leave his desk and office and traveled to extermination camps such as Sobibor, Auschwitz and Treblinka, becoming actively involved and knowing exactly what went on there. For this reason, some modern historians such as
Bettina Stangneth
Bettina Stangneth (born 1966) is a German philosopher. Known for her work on antisemitism and National Socialism, she is the author of several books, including '' Eichmann Before Jerusalem'' (2014), which won an NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis (non-fict ...
dispute that Eichmann was a desk murderer, as he took too active an interest in the process of the Holocaust.
Maurice Papon
Maurice Papon (; 3 September 1910 – 17 February 2007) was a French civil servant who led the police in major prefectures from the 1930s to the 1960s, before he became a Gaullist politician. When he was secretary general for the police in B ...
, 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 Heinrich Müller may refer to:
* Heinrich Müller (cyclist) (born 1926), Swiss cyclist
* Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1888) (1888–1957), Swiss football player and manager
* Heinrich Müller (footballer, born 1909) (1909–2000), Austrian ...
, chief of the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
and Eichmann's superior, described by British historian
Robert S. Wistrich
Robert Solomon Wistrich (April 7, 1945 – May 19, 2015) was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study ...
as somebody who made mass murder into an administrative task, was another high-ranking desk murderer during World War II.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Arendt was born ...
, who reported on Eichmann's trial for ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'', published ''
Eichmann in Jerusalem
''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers ...
'' 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 on the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trials
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as ''der Auschwitz-Prozess'', or ''der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess,'' (the "second Auschwitz trial") was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants unde ...
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
The ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'' (; ''FAZ''; "''Frankfurt General Newspaper''") is a centre-right conservative-liberal and liberal-conservativeHans Magnus Enzensberger: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen' (in German). ''Deutschland Radio'', ...
'' used the term for the first time.
Criminal responsibility
Under West German criminal law, a distinction is made between those who order murder and those who 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. One example is Ingeburg Werlemann, who took notes at the ill-famed Wannsee Conference of 1942.
Other use
The term "desk murderer" has also been used in non-Holocaust contexts, such as during the Auschwitz trial when the defence lawyer
Hans Laternser Hans Laternser (3 August 1908 in Diedenhofen – 21 July 1969 in Frankfurt am Main) was a German lawyer who specialised in Anglo-Saxon law. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, this made him especially qualified to defend Germans pro ...
demanded the arrest of witness , 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
The Berlin Wall (german: Berliner Mauer, ) was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and East Germany (GDR). Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government ...
.
The book ''I YOU WE THEM - Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today'', by Dan Gretton, is a layered investigation into the phenomenon of the 'Schreibtischtäter'. ''I You We Them'' focuses beyond the intentionality of murder and examines the more complicated, and politically urgent, question of distanced killing, of how organisations and the individuals within them have been able to 'compartmentalise', to evade responsibility for their actions – whether in the rigid bureaucracies of the Third Reich or within the complex structures of corporations today. By foregrounding the role of white-collar perpetrators in the Holocaust and other historical genocides, and by highlighting the collaboration between corporations and the state in history and today, it raises urgent questions about the meaning of responsibility and the deeply problematic nature of contemporary corporate behaviour.
In his book, Gretton notes that: "In the early stages of this research I used the term 'desk murderer'. However, it soon became apparent that many of the individuals who kill from their desks do not have the criminal intent to do so, therefore ‘desk killer’ is a more accurate term, Desk murderers do exist, but, thankfully, are very few. On the other hand, desk killers are all around us."Extract fro 'I You We Them: Journeys Beyond Evil' by Dan Gretton
German far-right politician
Gerhard Frey
Gerhard Frey (; born 1 June 1944) is a German mathematician, known for his work in number theory. Following an original idea of Hellegouarch, he developed the notion of Frey–Hellegouarch curves, a construction of an elliptic curve from a pur ...
used the term ''Schreibtischtäter'' for people supporting Israel, as, in his view, they thereby became accomplices in "crimes committed there".