Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth (review)

Abstract

EICHMANN BEFORE JERUSALEM: THE UNEXAMINED LIFE OF A MASS MURDERER Bettina Stangneth. New York: Knopf, 2014. xxvi + 576 pp.After his abduction by Mossad agents from Argentina to Israel and subsequent trial and execution in 1960-62, the figure of Adolf Eichmann became emblematic for a particular understanding of main aspects of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. That status was owed not just to his trial's spectacular public resonance, but to a singular episode of literary and philosophical reportage, namely, Hannah Arendt's account of the event in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), along with all of the surrounding divisive and angrily conducted controversy. In easily misconstrued terms, Arendt presented Eichmann as a goal-oriented functionary practicing happy allegiance to a criminal system, a profoundly limited but ambitious careerist, whose unthinking ordinariness-by which she meant moral incapacity rather than mere intellectual limitations-epitomized the Third Reich's true atrociousness. Eichmann embodied the banality of evil. Worked and reworked through the intervening decades of historiography and related commentary, this trope came to perform increasingly elaborate service. It licensed widely accepted definitions of a main type of SS perpetrator, namely, the paper-pushing desk killer supposedly removed from the face-to-face physical murderousness of Auschwitz and the eastern front. This figure of interpretation, often deployed with great insight and sophistication, bore an uncertain and varying relationship to either the terms of Arendt's original description or the way in which Eichmann sought to present himself at the trial.Amid a rash of recent publication, including Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (2011) and David Cesarani's Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a Desk Murderer (2006), Bettina Stangneth's book stands out for the fascinating new light it sheds on Eichmann's movements and outlook during the 1950s. After taking new identities and laying false trails, he left Europe in 1950 from Genoa for Argentina along a reliable and well-funded escape line for Nazi fugitives, helped by an elaborate network of German, Austrian, Italian, and Argentinian officials, Red Cross and Vatican representatives, shipping capitalists, and people smugglers. He entered Buenos Aires as Ricardo Klement, blending into a well-established milieu of ex-Nazis who by that time included the notorious Josef Mengele, Himmler's adjutant Ludolf von Alvensleben, Erich Rajakowitsch (responsible for deporting Dutch Jews under Eichmann), Eduard Roschmann (in charge of the Riga ghetto), Josef Schwammberger (head of Krakow district camps), Hans Fischbock (former Austrian finance minister), and others. …