Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
Major Bergmann (right), played by Harry Feist, in Robert Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. Next to him is Ingrid, a German spy, played by Giovanna Galletti.
Rome, Open City – the 1946 Italian neorealist film directed by Roberto Rossellini – is ostensibly about resistance fighters in The Eternal City during the waning days of the Second World War. It’s also a film that epitomizes, at least from the vantage point of industrial and post-industrial societies, the seeming reality that bureaucracy is massive, mechanistic, and forever. It was especially so in regards to the complex, convoluted rabbit warren that was the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany.
What made the bureaucracy of the Nazi regime unique in its complexity was its highly centralized, authoritarian structure and its reliance on the führerprinzip, or “leader principle.” The idea was two-fold. First, it concentrated all state powers into the hands of Adolf Hiter (the Führer) while emphasizing absolute obedience to him; secondly, as a kind of guide star, individuals should (if lacking an order for action but required to do something) “act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve of it.”1
The führerprinzip seeped down, like cheesy Austrian Käsespätzle, into the entire administrative structure, promoting a hierarchical system where officials were expected to follow orders without question or dissent. The Nazi state also employed a complex system of overlapping agencies, each with specific responsibilities. For example, the SS, Gestapo, and German Army (all separate agencies, each with their own infrastructure, hierarchies, resources, logistical needs, etc) all took part in the Holocaust, each with different needs doing different things at different times. In short, the bureaucracy was made up of overlapping, parallel bureaucracies. It was bureaucracies all the way down.
In Rome, Open City, we find SS Major Bergmann (the film’s villain) hard at work trying to catch Italian resistance fighters. There is only one problem: the enemy is at the gates (i.e. the Allies) and he’s busy fulfilling his increasingly pointless role within the overall Nazi bureaucratic apparatus. He isn’t making plans to flee the city, to light out for the territory; nor is he busy dismantling his offices, burning papers, or setting his affairs in order. He isn’t even trying to make friends with his enemies, to eke out a good deal for himself and his cronies like the sinister SS officer Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. No, Bergmann, the quintessential Nazi functionary and card-carrying member of the Master Race, is too busy ferreting out those damned untermenschen resistance fighters to think (or do) anything else.
A thought I had multiple times throughout Rome, Open City, especially as Bergmann became more and more desperate in his quest, was: “Doesn’t he realize the war’s almost over? Hunting down members of the Italian Resistance will fix nothing. You’ve already lost the war.” If you think the rule of Genre Blindness (where a character in a story doesn’t know what type of story they’re in) applies here, then you’d be wrong.
Nazi’s in 1944 weren’t genre blind, they were genre savvy. At least those who were more than just cogs.
As ludicrous as it sounds, more than one Nazi higher-up saw the writing on the wall well before 1944. Even as early as 1942, Heinrich Himmler wanted a “special camp” just for “Jews with influential relatives.” In a particularly chilling line, from a letter to a subaltern, Himmler wrote that “such Jews are for us precious hostages.” No gambler hedges on a sure bet.
By 1944 the relationship between Italy and Germany had changed dramatically. Italy, ever the reluctant member of the Axis Powers, gave Mussolini the boot in mid-1943 and had, within a matter of months, signed onto the Allied cause. Hitler, the vampire-junky of Europe, was having none of that and occupied whatever sections of Italy he could. Enter Bergmann.
“…the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them,” writes Hannah Arendt, the battle-ready philosopher-theorist who escaped the Holocaust and lived to dissect it. Arendt, writing in her seminal Eichmann in Jerusalem, was speaking of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical führer behind the Holocaust. But the same holds true for Major Bergmann, Eichmann’s celluloid doppelganger.
Eichmann was the “logistical führer” of Nazi Germany’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people in a very literal sense. He was ultimately responsible for the logistical implementation of the Holocaust, overseeing the rounding-up and shipping, via train, of millions of Jews who would ultimately perish at camps like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Eichmann was a zealous cog like Major Bergmann – the only difference between the two was that Eichmann, a Lt. Col, outranked him.
“Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution” – the German code phrase for the Jewish Holocaust – “can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys,” writes Arendt. “Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do.”
Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem in 1961. He was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish People. He was hung in 1962 and remains Israel’s only judicial execution.
Even as the war wound down, Eichmann was adamant that he would continue following his primary mission directive. As an example, he organized a foot march of Jews from Budapest to the Austrian border after Allied bombing destroyed the rail system in the area. It was the fall of 1944 and Eichmann knew that Himmler, in an attempt to cover-up the Holocaust, had ordered the dismantling of Auschwitz’s extermination facilities. As Arendt puts it: it was obvious by now that “the game was up.”
One thing that stands out about both Eichmann and Bergmann is their shared inability, as administrative cogs, to think beyond the confines of their dictates, their programming. For Eichmann the trains to Auschwitz must continue to roll and if there are no trains the Jews must walk. For Bergmann, he must always find his mark and discover their secrets – rinse, wash, repeat. Failure isn’t an option.
And yet, throughout Rome, Open City we see Bergmann fail time and time again to get his man. He only finds his targets (and even then, he misses one) towards the very end of the film. He finds them, but they tell him nothing. He tortures them, yet they remain silent. He fails in his task to discover the resistance fighter’s secrets and, therefore, fails his primary mission directive. A cog like Bergmann is useless in the face of the genuine human spirit, just as an AI can be rendered inoperable by a human hand simply pulling a power cable from the wall.
The mechanistic Nazi’s – lost to the world of cogs, gears, and machines – tried to consume the human world of flesh-and-blood. They lost and the world is better for it. What you can see, although Arendt never spells it out, is that the Nazi bureaucracy itself is what ultimately undoes its functionaries; the gear grinds down the cog, rendering it useless, or the cog, if it still functions, simply does whatever it was mostly recently told to do. Eichmann moved trains around the board like a game of Ticket to Ride and Bergmann couldn’t help but round-up resistance fighters, even with the war’s end near at hand. The Nazi’s lost to the Allies, of course, but their need for a strict hierarchy and an unequivocal desire to follow the führerprinzip helped them along on their way to the abyss.
Bureaucracy, one can read into the works of Rosselini and Arendt, was an accidental and unacknowledged hero of the Second World War. The Nazi’s, whether in the form of the real-life Eichmann or the film’s Bergmann, became slaves to their functionary roles within the bureaucracy; the bureaucratic apparatus, created by the Nazi’s themselves, ultimately made slaves of the Master Race. And Nazi cogs, like cogs anywhere, can only spin in one direction: around and around and around.
- This comes from Hans Frank’s The Technic of the State published in Germany in 1942 and cited by Arendt in her book. ↩︎
[This essay first appeared on Desert Dispatch on January 9, 2024.]
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