Review: Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth
The Bodley Head, £25
When Adolf Eichmann stepped into the bullet-proof glass booth specially designed for his trial in Jerusalem on 11 April 1961, there was a universal sense of anti-climax. Was this soberly dressed, bespectacled and balding middle-aged man the same figure whose name terrified Jews in the Third Reich? Could this verbose bureaucrat be the same person who mercilessly drove hundreds of thousands of Jews to the death camps?
Hannah Arendt suggested that Eichmann was indeed an unthinking drone who robotically served a murderous totalitarian regime. In fact, she saw little of Eichmann giving testimony and her conclusions rested on partial evidence of his activities. Thanks to Bettina Stangneth's meticulously researched study, the image of Eichmann as the personification of banal evil-doing will no longer stand up.
Stangneth begins with a careful review of Eichmann's career in the SS and the Gestapo, where he ran the office for Jewish affairs. Contrary to suggestions that he was a pen-pusher who shunned the limelight, she reveals his flair for rhetoric and his talent for self-promotion. His trip to Palestine in 1937 to investigate the potential for German-Jewish emigration was a failure, but he turned it into the basis of his reputation as the expert on Zionism.
While she exaggerates by stating that he was "the face of Hitler's anti-Jewish policy", she adduces plenty of evidence that he was widely known in Jewish circles before 1939. In 1939, his name appeared in the press in relation to the deportation of German Jews and he remained extremely sensitive about how he was depicted in newspapers. When he supervised the destruction of the Jews in Hungary in 1944, he deceived the Jewish leadership with a series of bravura performances. This was anything but the behaviour of a dull-witted clerk.
By the war's end, the Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress, British and US military intelligence were all after him. Eichmann was named several times at Nuremberg. Chief prosecutor Robert Jackson referred to him as "the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination programme". He appeared in the tribunal's judgment and was one of five Nazis named by the state of Israel in support of its claim for reparations against West Germany in 1951.
Yet Eichmann was able to go into hiding and escape from Europe with the help of the Nazi underground. He knew too much and they were eager to ship him off to South America. His reputation preceded him to Buenos Aires, where he was welcomed by local neo-Nazis and fellow escapees. Stangneth overturns the picture of Eichmann scraping a living at the fringes of the expatriate community. He chose to live modestly but associated with the cream of displaced fellow Germans. They paid him the respect due to someone who served at the pinnacle of the Reich.
It was his pride (and vanity) that drove him to break cover. During the late 1950s, books appeared on the Jewish catastrophe that either overstated or underplayed his role. He was stung when former underlings fingered him in order to exonerate themselves. Irritated, he started to compose a book in which he could have his say. Unfortunately for him, a clique of ex-Nazis in Argentina were equally interested in getting him to put his experiences on record.
The subsequent tape-recording sessions were a tragi-comedy, reconstructed by Stangneth with much black humour. Whereas Eichmann was keen to take credit for anti-Jewish measures and boasted about the deportations, his interviewers wanted him to exonerate Hitler and diminish the toll of Jews who perished. When he insisted that millions of Jews had been murdered, with Hitler's approval, they were flummoxed. He hoped his recollections would earn him a pardon and a ticket home, but the transcripts were secured for his trial and only guaranteed him a place on the scaffold.
Stangneth has performed a great service by analysing the 25 hours of audio tape and wading through 1,300 pages of transcripts, including Eichmann's handwritten reminiscences.
Contrary to the pose he adopted in Jerusalem, which fooled Arendt, they expose him as "cynical, pitiless, misanthropic, morally corrupt". They show a man with considerable intellectual powers, "a trained ideological warrior" who served his masters with panache.
In this important, absorbing book Stangneth also adds to the story of Eichmann's detection, disclosing that West German intelligence concealed his whereabouts for years.
