Book Review:
Bettina Stangneth's
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
[From article]
The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth's "Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer" responds to Hannah Arendt's extraordinarily and perversely influential "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."
Although, or perhaps because, Arendt was a philosopher, in her report on Israel's trial of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of industrialized murder, she accepted the facade Eichmann presented to those who could, and in 1962 would, hang him: He was a little "cog" in a bureaucratic machine. He said he merely "passed on" orders and "oversaw" compliance. Arendt agreed.
[. . .]
Arendt, however, did not have, as Stangneth has had, access to more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann's writings and taped musings among Argentina's portion of the Nazi diaspora, before Israeli agents kidnapped him in 1960.
Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the "final solution" even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. "His name," Stangneth notes, "appeared in David Ben-Gurion's diary only three months after the start of the war" in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a "campaign" of "mass murder."
[. . .]
"There are," Eichmann wrote, "a number of moralities." But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, "Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things."
[. . .]
Before he donned his miniaturizing mask in Jerusalem, Eichmann proclaimed that he did what he did in the service of idealism. This supposedly "thoughtless" man's devotion to ideas was such that, Stangneth says, he "was still composing his last lines when they came to take him to the gallows."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will111514.php3
A murderer's warped idealism
By George Will
Published Nov. 13, 2014
Jewish World Review
