Eichmann’s Men (review)

Seventeen years after its original publication, Eichmanns Männer finally has been translated, thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Since this volume’s appearance as a pioneering work on the Gestapo-SD perpetrators most central to the planning and execution of the Holocaust, much German-language literature has expanded the field of Täterforschung (perpetrator studies) and Holocaust studies generally, asking how and why so many did what they did.

Regarding how they did it, Safrian focused primarily on the evolution of the Holocaust from its expulsionist origins and on the processes developed for its achievement. His highly detailed account of the process has been thoroughly developed and expanded by more recent literature. Written at a time when the intentionalist-functionalist debate was fizzling out, Safrian’s work offered a synthesis that differs only in detail from the current consensus among scholars.

Among Safrian’s enduring contributions to the narrative and analysis of the escalation process were his revisions of previously-held beliefs about Eichmann’s creative genius as the presumed author of several central developments. Specifically, Safrian criticized existing scholarship for crediting to Eichmann the “Vienna Model” for the forceful encouragement of Jewish emigration, and for assigning too much credit to Eichmann’s alleged organizational skills in putting it into effect. “Such explanations totally ignore the fundamental sociopolitical dimensions of the indigenous antisemitism of the Ostmark (Austria),” Safrian writes, “even though it is precisely the greed for loot and the Herrenmenschen-Allüren, the pretensions of the members of the ‘Master Race,’ on the part of Austrian antisemites, and their participation in racist policies that accelerated the criminal logic of exclusion” (p. 2). This one sentence contains Safrain’s primary explanation for the involvement of the Eichmann men and the virulence with which they performed their missions. Well before the Browning-Goldhagen debate over whether the perpetrators were “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans,” Safrian had portrayed Eichmann’s men as “ordinary Austrians.”

Safrian rejected both the simplistic demonization of the perpetrators that prevailed during the 1940s and 1950s, and, of course, Hannah Arendt’s replacement of that imagery with the imagery of mediocre bureaucrats diligently performing their jobs without any special antisemitic motivations—a model favored by many scholars from the 1960s into the 1990s. In Safrian’s model—which allows for many individual exceptions—antisemitism combined with the unhealthy ego needs of the perpetrators to motivate their behavior.

Safrian developed this theme after tracing Eichmann’s career from its origin in the SS-Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Section on Jewry, II-112. Unfortunately there is no analysis of his superiors and colleagues at this early stage, many of whom played key roles in the development and execution of the Holocaust without sharing Eichmann’s particular characteristics. Thereafter the focus is on Eichmann’s men, that is, those whom he recruited mostly from in and around Vienna to staff his Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration). This constitutes Safrian’s major contribution to Täterforschung and our understanding of the evolution of perpetrator mentality. With Safrian’s fine biographical sketches of these men and descriptions of their behavior during and after their Nazi careers, a convincing picture of their character and motivation emerges.

They turn out to have exemplified the SD’s propensity to develop “young boy’s clubs”—not the traditional “old boys’ clubs”—as recruitment circles drawing on particular socioeconomic and personality types. This cohort often defied that organization’s elitist intellectual self-image. Instead, it tapped young ne’er-do-wells whose origins in Austria’s antisemitic culture combined with their damaged egos to produce men who avidly acted out an ego-gratifying Herrenmensch identity by brutalizing the helpless Jews over whose fate they reigned. In essence, they were “little Eichmanns,” mostly somewhat younger than their model, without administrative experience, without previous membership in the police or SD (only a few from the SS), and not previously distinguished...