The Eichmann film

A new film uses Adolf Eichmann's actual voice, expressing pride in his part in the Holocaust. From the Times of Israel:

Convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is heard but not seen in a new film as an actor mouths the words he used over 60 years ago to describe his key role in the Holocaust.

Eichmann, a key architect of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, went into hiding after the war and was snatched from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in May 1960 to be put on trial in Jerusalem. Israel executed the top Nazi official by hanging in 1962 for his role in the mass murder of six million Jews.

Four years before he was captured, Eichmann gave hours of interviews to Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen at the reporter’s home in Argentina. Sassen was one of many Nazis who also fled to the South American country after the war.

The recordings include remarks attributed to Eichmann that prosecutors presented at the trial, but that he denied at the time, including his clear declaration of having no regrets about the mass murder and even an expression of disappointment that millions more Jews were not killed.

Eichmann claimed in his defense during the trial that he was just a minor bureaucrat.

“In conclusion, I must say to you… I regret nothing. I have no desire to say that we did something wrong,” Eichmann said in the recordings.

“If we had killed 10.3 million Jews I would say with satisfaction ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission. And thus, to my regret, it was not to be,'” Eichmann is heard saying in parts of the recordings that feature in the film and in which he was apparently referring to the entire Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.

It all rather blows a hole in Hannah Arendt's famous "banality of evil" line. Here's what I wrote back in 2014:

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.

This was far from the truth, though. And Eichmann was certainly no fool. 

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.

Comments

[Joanne]

If Arendt's book Banality of Evil was this profoundly mistaken, it just goes to show how much damage a prestigious intellectual can cause when his/her influence is so pervasive and uncontested (or, at least, not effectively contested).

[Joanne]

Oops, I should add that perhaps Stangneth's book will turn out to be an effective counterweight. It's just that Eichhmann in Jerusalem is considered such a classic, and Arendt such a towering figure, that I don't know if any new book, however well researched and well argued, could have the same impact.

[Recruiting Animal]

Irving Howe said that "a civil war.. broke out among New York intellectuals over Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on the Eichmann trial".

Full details from his memoir at Dissent:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/banality-and-brilliance-irving-howe-on-hannah-arendt