No mere pencil pusher, Eichmann was, as he put it: “a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood.” He remained a committed Nazi even after the Reich collapsed and stayed true while on the run and right up to the end. Only his tactics changed as he posed in a humble demeanor after his capture in 1960. In Argentina, he attempted to publish his unapologetic memoir, which in 1957 even shocked some of his fellow Fourth Reich advocates.
They wanted to claim the holocaust was a Jewish lie. Some actually believed that and then tried to imagine the perpetrators, including Eichmann who refused to deny it occurred, as agents under the control of an outlandish Jewish conspiracy that perpetrated the holocaust on themselves through a secret control of SD & SS lackeys. Poor Hitler was hoodwinked!
If you’re crazy enough to be a racist, believing in genetic inbreeding as superior to swimming in a diverse gene pool, then you’re crazy enough to swallow these wild conspiracy theories! We can see parallels to current hard-line fanatics who will twist facts or refuse to believe them and cling to the wildest theories that defy the laws of logic and even gravity.
Nazi racial Anti-Semitism claimed the superiority of an imagined, somehow pure, “Aryan” race, but in Eichmann‘s rationale for genocide, he painted the Jews as “intellectually superior to” themselves and therefore a most dangerous and cunning enemy. See page 304 for a speech that he hoped would be his book‘s conclusion. ( )

Paraphrasing Eichmann:
"Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that I was an active piece of shit before the war years?"

"Eichmann Before Jerusalem" by Bettina Stangneth, the important work illuminating the real Eichmann, and respectfully disagreeing with Hannah Arendt and the naive/ignorant misapplication of her banality theory.

A little chatty and opinonated, but very readable and wholly interesting account of Eichmann immediately following the war and then his 15! years of hiding (without much effort).

Even though this is a modest "attack" on Arendt and her use of "the banality of evil" specifically for Eichmann (at the very beginning of the book), Stangeneth is mostly very respectful. In my 15 yrs of reading in depth about the Nazis, I was always at a huge advantage to Arendt (and 1960!) in knowing how very wrong she was. ( )

What can you say about a fifty-six-year-old National Socialist who died? Apparently, quite a lot. Speed-read the early years in Argentina and the Nazi cocktail parties and you've got a real good book.
( )

Eichmann Before Jerusalem

For the last 50 years we have looked at Adolf Eichmann through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s reporting for the New Yorker on his trial and later her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

This was her examination of Eichmann as someone who was a bored bureaucrat who felt neither guilt or hatred. That he was an obedient servant who was ignorant of what was happening to the Jews, that he was nothing more than a state flunky who operated from a desk unquestioning the regime and submissive to the dehumanisation of the Reich bureaucracy. He book was controversial and has had a lasting effect, so much so that has only recently been published in Israel for the first time.

One thing that cannot be denied is that Arendt’s book has held a lot of sway for the last 50 years on how we think of Eichmann and the Holocaust. Bettina Stangneth’s book Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life Of A Mass Murderer looks to challenge previous misconceptions. Stagneth has been able to use recently opened archives as well as the infamous Sassen Interviews which really shows what Eichmann thought and said while he was in Argentina.

Bettina Stagneth through her well researched, excellent and incisive argument has written a book that challenges the “banality of evil” with new evidence, some of which has always been available but ignored; this is a fresh and informed reassessment of the Eichmann historical debate. When talking about Eichmann not only will Arendt’s work be used but Stangneth’s work will be required reading for the debate.

Bettina Stagneth through her book and her well written argument shows that Eichmann constructs a defence in Jerusalem is a reinvention of his persona something that when your life is on the line it is a throw of the dice. Stagneth takes you through Eichmann the person from the beginning to the end and does not fall for the show he put on in Jerusalem to show that he was anything but a boring bureaucrat, or technocrat that was just performing his job as ordered by the state.

By reconstructing Eichmann’s history Bettina Stagneth is able to demolish the long health myth that he was just a “small cog” and showing how evil and manipulative he really was. That even when he has escaped the clutches of the allies he still held the view that Jews were evil and needed destroying. Which is opposed to the picture of Eichmann set in the dock as a cautious bureaucrat and tried to hide his fanatical side.

Stagneth guides us through Eichmann’s life as the renowned Jewish expert in the SD machine and this was acknowledged in the newspapers in 1937 and 1938 by newspapers in London and Paris. They name him and know that before he moved to Berlin he was based in the SD office in Vienna and it was from here that his infamy grew. He was one that wanted the oxygen of publicity to feel important to the Reich and the growing power of the Gestapo.

Through the many documents that are available about Eichmann Bettina Stagneth reconstructs his life through the 1930s his war years and what he was doing, again showing that his name was well known by German and Jew alike, striking fear in to the Jewish community.

We are taken through his capture and his time as a POW and how he used a different name to hide who he really was and knew he need to escape if he were to survive. We are also shown how previous SS colleagues and comrades helped to hide in plain sight under another assumed name, even when the newspapers were reporting stories about him. How with the aid of the rat runs he was able to a escape to Argentina via Genoa, that he never met Bishop Hudal and how he was able to SS contacts to escape.

Stagneth also shows that with his new name in Argentina as Ricardo Klement he was able to move happily amongst fellow unrepentant Nazis. How those unrepentant Nazis were able to help him find work, use their contacts to keep his family informed and eventually bring his family to him even while they were under surveillance by those searching for him.

Stagneth also highlights the fact that the West German Intelligence Service knew that Eichmann was in Argentina in 1952 and it was not until 1958 that the CIA found out via the dusty card references. What we do know is that German Intelligence Service hand in keeping Eichmann where he was and the moral dilemma behind it until the papers are declassified.

Eichmann like many leading Nazis believed that history would eventually exonerate him and the Third Reich and went as far as drafting a letter in 1957 to the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer suggesting that he returns to Germany to stand trial so that he would get a light sentence and be able to return home. Whether this was encouraged by the former Nazis in place in the German Foreign Affairs Office we will never know until the documents are declassified.

Eichmann before Jerusalem is one of the most readable historical accounts of one person’s life and at last breaks down the myths that grew around him. Bettina Stagneth shows how he signed pictures of himself for his friends showing his former rank. This book is one of the most meticulously researched books that has not been blown off course by what has been written before. This book proves the case for Eichmann’s guilt and shows what he did and how he tried to mask it, if you have done nothing wrong you do not need to hide.

Bettina Stagneth breaks the Hannah Arendt’s myth on the “banality of evil” and lays out the case to show without doubt that he was guilty as charged. Stagneth shows that Eichmann knew exactly what he was doing before, during and after the war and he was more than a bureaucrat but the author of his own downfall.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, one of the best history books I have read this year. ( )