Matthew Sharpe on Adolf Eichmann

For Arendt, Eichmann, the principal organiser of the trains that took millions of Jewish men, women and children to concentration camps was above all an efficient, bland bureaucrat. We may find many of his kind in the modern world, her argument implied, working away efficiently in their offices, interested in building careers and not rocking the boat. 

In Arendt’s version of Eichmann he was neither a convinced Nazi, nor a fanatical anti-Semite. He showed no sign of “indoctrination of any kind”, she wrote, as he testified to an Israeli court in Jerusalem. But he was unable to see the world, and what he was doing, from the perspective of others, including the victims of the actions of which he was a part. 

Whenever wider reality threatened to impose itself, Arendt wrote, Eichmann would retreat behind a wall of administrative jargon and mind-numbing “cliches”. And it was this “thoughtlessness”, she claimed, that enabled him to work so well, sending millions of innocent people to their deaths in precisely scheduled trains of cattle cars to places like Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

But the publication since Eichmann’s trial of the full transcripts of audio recordings and manuscripts he produced in the 1950s – when still at large in Argentina – show he was anything but a banal bureaucrat.

A ghastly confession

Eichmann in Jerusalem, published 60 years ago, has continued to generate enormous controversies. As the prosecution successfully established during his 1961 trial, Eichmann had not always mindlessly followed orders. He even defied the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler in the last days of 1944, ordering death marches of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. (With the Third Reich collapsing, Himmler had ordered a stop to the deportations in October 1944.) 

Indeed, by the time of the trial, Life magazine had published a “confession” Eichmann made to Nazi comrades in Argentina. It was drawn from the 70 so-called “Sassen tapes”, recorded in 1957, and amounting to around 1000 pages of transcript.

Even in this abridged version, the Eichmann who emerged was far from the bumbling, balding clerk who presented himself at Jerusalem. We learn that, when all was lost in the final days of the war, Eichmann told his SS coworkers that no matter what would now happen, he would “gladly jump into his grave” knowing he had been involved in the deaths of so many “enemies of the Reich”.

Concluding his ghastly confession, Eichmann went farther, underlining he regretted only that the Allies’ victory had prevented the “extermination” of all of those slated for this fate by the Nazi elites at the January 1942 Wannssea conference. 

Eichmann was sentenced to death by the court in Jerusalem and executed on 31 May, 1962. 

Deeply indoctrinated

In the decades since the Eichmann trial, the full transcripts of the Sassen tapes have become available for historical assessment. We also now have a 107-page political testament written by Eichmann in 1956, entitled “The Others Have Spoken, now I want to Speak!”

These documents establish that Eichmann remained a Nazi true believer throughout his life. As the retired SS Obersturmbannführer (“Senior Storm Leader”) told his comrades in Argentina, he had never been only a pen-pusher, just doing his job:

This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a […] fanatical warrior fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright […] what benefits my people is a sacred order and a sacred duty for me. Yes indeed.

Eichmann was still convinced, more than a decade after Hitler’s fall, there was a Jewish “world conspiracy” and the Holocaust was a justified act of war. He was, in short, a deeply indoctrinated individual, never walking back from his ideological training near Dachau and elsewhere in the 1930s. He would lament only having been too “weak” not to have done more to effect the total annihilation of Germany’s “racial enemy”.

When in 1960-61, he was captured by the arch enemy of “his blood” and taken to their Holy City to face justice, Eichmann and his defence did everything they could to keep his Argentinian musings hidden and have the Sassen tapes disallowed as evidence. The “fanatical warrior” also morphed into the ungainly clerk next door, the man behind the glass, giving his halting testimony. 

Eichmann would even try to persuade the court he was a moral universalist, a pacifist and a lover of nature who had been compelled to do bad things by a criminal government in which he never had believed.

~ Matthew Sharpe, "Is it time to reconsider 'the banality of evil'?," The Conversation, November 22, 2023