Mick Hartley

Can we now finally drop the "banality of evil" nonsense?

German historian Bettina Stangneth's new book "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" takes a more detailed look at the Nazi bureaucrat:

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible?

Well, it was possible – or at least became the accepted post-hoc truth – mainly as a result of Hannah Arendt, who swallowed wholesale and then successfully propagated Eichmann's carefully crafted defence in her 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem", popularising the "banality of evil" catchphrase as an explanation and exculpation of Eichmann. He was, she believed, a foolish man who was capable of thinking only in trite cliches and banalities, someone who saw his job as a Nazi functionary simply as a matter of doing his job well: of doing what he was told, and obeying orders. 

Arendt's hugely influential book had the effect of somehow diminishing the Jerusalem trial. Eichmann's kidnapping by Israeli agents in Argentina was an illegal act, she said, and he was tried in Israel even though he was not accused of committing any crimes there. "If he had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him in formal violation of Argentine law." She described the trial as a show trial arranged and managed by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, which Ben-Gurion wanted, for political reasons, to emphasize not primarily what Eichmann had done, but what the Jews had suffered during the Holocaust. She pointed out that the war criminals tried at Nuremberg were "indicted for crimes against the members of various nations," without special reference to the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

But those foolish Israelis hadn't got themselves a monster like Goering. Rather, they'd got themselves a clown. In her words:

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.

So a major trial of a man guilty of helping to plan the Holocaust, and put into action the murder of some six million Jews, becomes in Arendt's telling a rather petty exercise in Israeli vindictiveness and self-serving publicity.

In fact, as Stangneth now shows, Eichmann was by no means a foolish man:

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. These were exchanges organized in Argentina by the Dutch Nazi journalist Wilhelm Sassen and attended by a small group of old Nazis and their sympathizers.

The story of the Sassen interviews, one of the most important post-Holocaust documents, is itself a kind of cloak-and-­dagger account as Stangneth tells it, featuring hidden or lost tapes, faulty transcriptions, furtive meetings, profiteering and various other kinds of intrigue. One highly truncated version of the interviews and notes was published in Life in 1960. Another, containing 796 pages, reached Israel in time for the Jerusalem trial, but because Eichmann constantly denied the veracity of the documents and the original recordings could not be found, they were judged unreliable. Only through painstaking digging have Stangneth and other researchers been able to patch together close to the entirety of the material.

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. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

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”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?

So, he refused to go along with the plan of his fellow Nazi emigres to downplay the Holocaust because he was proud of the role he'd played. 

Arendt mocked Eichmann's appeal to Immanuel Kant in his trial: the poor man simply didn't understand Kant's argument about the categorical imperative. But Eichmann was just playing to the gallery there. Stangneth, in her research, came across a long note he'd written, dismissing Kantian moral philosophy.

In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”

There was nothing at all banal about the evil of Adolf Eichmann.