EICHMANN BEFORE JERUSALEM
The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
Bettina Stangneth; translated
by Ruth Martin Alfred A. Knopf
579 pages; $35
Ever since his capture in the early 1960s, Otto Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of Jewish affairs during the Third Reich, has been the subject of unsettled and passionate controversy - centred, above all, on Hannah Arendt's portrait of him at his 1961 trial. Her Eichmann in Jerusalem in many ways mirrored Eichmann's own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, non-ideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt's insights - that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder - remain pertinent.
Yet as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in Eichmann Before Jerusalem, her critical - albeit respectful - dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist. He proudly signed photos with the title - "Adolf Eichmann - SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired)" and, quite unlike a plodding functionary, boasted of his "creative" work. At one point he described the mass deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews as his innovative masterpiece: "It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since."
The enduring image of Eichmann as faceless and order-obeying, Stangneth argues, is the result of his uncanny ability to tailor his narrative to the desires and fantasies of his listeners. Arendt was not the only one to be taken in, and Stangneth, an independent philosopher living in Hamburg, is able to present a more rounded picture on the basis of previously unmined archival sources, particularly Eichmann's own compulsive notes and jottings made in exile, in conjunction with the elusive series of taped conversations known as the Sassen interviews. It is in these interviews and Eichmann's own notes that he gave uninhibited vent to his version of the Holocaust and his involvement.
Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the "little man" portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him.
Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt's puzzling contention that he "never realized what he was doing").
In addition to minutely examining unknown aspects of Eichmann's furtive post-1945 life, up to his capture as Ricardo Klement in Argentina in 1960, Stangneth's book contains numerous other revelations. She exposes the - often shamelessly open - postwar networks of Nazis (who actually dreamed of regaining power in Germany) and their sympathisers (crucially, officials of the Roman Catholic Church). She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services - and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies - were aware of Eichmann's whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.
Adolf Eichmann may be dead, but the philosophical and psychological stakes surrounding him remain urgently charged and contested. No future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man's biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.
The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
Bettina Stangneth; translated
by Ruth Martin Alfred A. Knopf
579 pages; $35
Ever since his capture in the early 1960s, Otto Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of Jewish affairs during the Third Reich, has been the subject of unsettled and passionate controversy - centred, above all, on Hannah Arendt's portrait of him at his 1961 trial. Her Eichmann in Jerusalem in many ways mirrored Eichmann's own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, non-ideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt's insights - that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder - remain pertinent.
Yet as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in Eichmann Before Jerusalem, her critical - albeit respectful - dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist. He proudly signed photos with the title - "Adolf Eichmann - SS-Obersturmbannführer (retired)" and, quite unlike a plodding functionary, boasted of his "creative" work. At one point he described the mass deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews as his innovative masterpiece: "It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since."
The enduring image of Eichmann as faceless and order-obeying, Stangneth argues, is the result of his uncanny ability to tailor his narrative to the desires and fantasies of his listeners. Arendt was not the only one to be taken in, and Stangneth, an independent philosopher living in Hamburg, is able to present a more rounded picture on the basis of previously unmined archival sources, particularly Eichmann's own compulsive notes and jottings made in exile, in conjunction with the elusive series of taped conversations known as the Sassen interviews. It is in these interviews and Eichmann's own notes that he gave uninhibited vent to his version of the Holocaust and his involvement.
Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the "little man" portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him.
Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt's puzzling contention that he "never realized what he was doing").
In addition to minutely examining unknown aspects of Eichmann's furtive post-1945 life, up to his capture as Ricardo Klement in Argentina in 1960, Stangneth's book contains numerous other revelations. She exposes the - often shamelessly open - postwar networks of Nazis (who actually dreamed of regaining power in Germany) and their sympathisers (crucially, officials of the Roman Catholic Church). She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services - and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies - were aware of Eichmann's whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.
Adolf Eichmann may be dead, but the philosophical and psychological stakes surrounding him remain urgently charged and contested. No future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man's biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.
©2014 The New York Times News Service