Eichmann Was Completely Unrepentant About The Extermination Of The Jews

Adolph Eichmann, like Mitt Romney, started off as an advocate of self-deportation

I never understood Roland’s interest in Jews-in-exotic-places but whenever we travel to off-the-beaten path countries, he always wants to visit synagogues— in places where you wouldn’t expect Jews, like Singapore, Yangon, and India. We still haven’t visited Madagascar but there’s even a small Jewish community there. Until Hitler decided to invade Russia, it looked like there was going to be a really big Jewish community in Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposed that Germany take over the French colony of Madagascar and resettle Europe’s Jews there (originally an idea that Poland’s right-wing government came up with in the late ‘30s. Half of Germany’s Jews had, in Mitt Romney’s timeless words, “self-deported” (to the U.S., Palestine, the U.K., Argentina and Brazil) in the 6 years after the Nazis took power. Hitler liked the Madagascar plan and Adolph Eichmann released a memorandum on 15 August 1940— Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years. His plan was to put the SS in charge of the island. In the end though, the Nazis got too busy with a two-front war and chose direct extermination over deportation. No European Jews were forced to resettle on Madagascar.

The plan was touched on by Bettina Stangneth in her new book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, reviewed yesterday by Richard Evans for The Guardian. The book covers Eichmann’s years in exile after the Holocaust and the Nazi defeat and before he was kipnapped in Argentina (1960) and brought to Israel to be hanged in 1962.

So what kind of a man was Adolf Eichmann? How and why did he become a mass murderer? The first and still the most famous and influential attempt to answer these questions came from the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who attended the trial as a correspondent for the New Yorker, subsequently publishing her articles in a revised book-length version as Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book stirred up a storm of criticism, particularly though not exclusively from Jewish intellectuals in the United States. There were many reasons for this. Reflecting what was known at the time, and in common with other early historians of the Nazis' genocide of the Jews, Arendt was highly critical both of the passivity of the great majority of European Jews in the face of persecution and extermination, and of the collaborationist administration of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos, whose tragic and impossible situation failed to arouse her sympathy. [She wouldn’t be a fan of gay Republicans like Aaron Schock, Lindsey Graham, Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei today.]

The judgments she offers in Eichmann in Jerusalem are utterly independent and totally unsparing. Time and again she raises questions that provoke and disturb. The abduction of Eichmann from Argentina was illegal; the trial was a show-trial; Israel's marriage laws were similar to the racist Nuremberg laws of the Nazis; Eichmann's crimes were crimes against humanity, so international law should have dealt with the case. Arendt's independence of mind is one of the most impressive features of her reporting. She writes as a detached philosophical inquirer, not as the representative of any particular group or political tendency.

Eichmann in Jerusalem bore the subtitle "A Study in the Banality of Evil.” What she meant by this was not that Eichmann was a mere bureaucrat, a conscienceless pen-pusher who was only obeying orders. On the contrary, she argued, he was an ideological antisemite, a man of overweening ambition who wanted not only power but also fame. He had a compulsion to "talk big,” she observed, and indeed "bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing.” Not a particularly intelligent man, he assimilated the ideology and behaviour of the evil system within which he sought to achieve distinction. He admired the Third Reich not least because it allowed men from a humble background like his own— or Hitler's, for that matter— to climb to the top. He was under no compulsion to act as he did: he could have opted out at any time; all his actions were voluntary. He deserved to die because he had failed, or refused, to exercise the kind of moral judgment Arendt herself showed in her book. His crimes were the crimes of a system, even a nation; as the psychologists who examined him in prison concluded, he was not a psychopath or a sociopath, though, as Arendt points out, he was most certainly, and frequently, a liar and a deceiver. This was the "banality of evil.”

In Argentina, Arendt notes, Eichmann did not go underground but occupied himself with "talking endlessly with members of the large Nazi colony, to whom he readily admitted his identity.” These conversations were recorded by a Dutch ex‑member of the SS, Willem Sassen, and edited extracts were published anonymously, though there could be little doubt about the identity of the principal participant. The existence of the original tapes and transcripts has long been known, but up to now their poor quality has defied systematic investigation. The German philosopher and historian Bettina Stangneth has now performed the invaluable service of deciphering them, putting them together with other, often little-known source material, and delivering a full analysis of Eichmann's ideas as he expounded them to his friends and former colleagues in exile.

In the conversations he had with Sassen and others, Eichmann was completely unrepentant about the extermination of the Jews, which he saw as historically necessary, a policy he was proud to have carried out in the interests of Germany. The cynicism, inhumanity, lack of pity and moral self‑deception of the conversations are breathtaking. This is a very disturbing book, and every now and then, as you read it, you have to pause in disbelief. Ten years and more after the war's end, Eichmann's lack of realism, typical for a political exile, even persuaded him that he could make a comeback, or that nazism could be rehabilitated, and he planned to launch a public defense of what he saw as its achievements.

In one of the conversations, Eichmann described himself as a "cautious bureaucrat" but also "a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood.” Stangneth dissents from Arendt's belief that Eichmann was unintelligent, and points out that he calculatedly presented himself only as the cautious bureaucrat during his trial, deliberately concealing his "fanatical" side. But his clumsy attempt to present himself as pursuing a Kantian "categorical imperative" does not show that he was in any way an intellectual; and his mendacious self-presentation as a mere pen-pusher did not convince anyone, least of all Arendt. What he lacked was moral intelligence, the ability to judge the system he worked for and whose ideology he assimilated so completely.

Stangneth's absorbing account of his years in exile, which is translated by Ruth Martin, adds considerably to our knowledge of Eichmann, but it is not a "total reassessment of the man", as the publishers claim, nor is it true to claim that the book "permanently undermines Hannah Arendt's notion of the 'banality of evil'." Half a century after it was written, Arendt's book, despite the fact that it has been overtaken in many of its details by research, remains a classic that everyone interested in the crimes of nazism has to confront.