Eichmann's Lies

November 20, 2014 timothywstanley@me.com

As head of the Jewish Department within the Nazi SS, Adolf Eichmann held operational responsibility for the extermination of European Jewry through crucial years of World War II. To his chosen work of murder, Eichmann brought a zeal and commitment that he sustained even through 15 years of exile after the war. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1960, the Nazi leader attempted to present himself as a self-effacing servant of the German state, dutifully following orders from a higher command. The image of Eichmann as a technocratic bureaucrat has endured even as subsequently discovered testimony in his own handwriting and voice have revealed a man ferociously devoted to Nazi racial ideology—and utterly unrepentant for his vast crimes. Bettina Stangneth, a German philosopher and historian, undertook the daunting task of mastering the Eichmann archive, including his postwar writings and hours of tape-recorded discussions with fellow Nazi exiles in Argentina. Her work was published in Germany in 2011 and released this year in English as Eichmann Before Jerusalem, a title that invites comparison with the classic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt that did so much to fix and perpetuate the false image of Eichmann as a passionless bureaucrat.

"The Lies of Adolf Eichmann" The Atlantic - http://theatln.tc/1AqdbOD