Eichmann Revisited: The Motivations of a Mass Murderer

There is no contemplating Adolf Eichmann without thinking of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil,” the subtitle of her seminal and sensational Eichmann in Jerusalem. The theory needs little explanation, but caused a firestorm of controversy: Eichmann, head of the T4 euthanasia program and responsible for the deportation of the European Jews to the extermination camps during the “Final Solution,” was without motives, a clown, a bureaucrat, and a professional climber who became central to mass murder only because he wanted to succeed in life. Understandably, this theory—or at least this understanding of it—met with enormous resistance not only from those who were victims of the Holocaust and could not accept the idea that their fate had not been in the hands of a monster, but also from scholars who had struggled to emphasize what antisemitism had wrought upon civilization—in a world where people were much more consumed with Joseph Stalin and the Cold War than with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. Other studies—most famously Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust—then expanded upon and refined Arendt’s theory, explaining the Holocaust as a result of modern society—bureaucracy, technocracy, banality—rather than as an aberration of it. During the escalating Cold War, historians and philosophers all had “eureka” moments in which they recognized the paralyzing and binding effects of totalitarianism, with its millions of silently complicit, passive minions, who allowed themselves to be swept into collective indifference toward, or worse, collaboration with and participation in, acts of mass atrocity.

Much has changed since then. Without exception, recent literature examining Eichmann’s life, career, behavior, and motivations has sought to show that Arendt was utterly wrong about Eichmann’s supposed banality. He was, according to Hans Safrian, Irmtrud Wojak, and David Cesarani, a calculating, merciless (if weak-stomached) antisemite, who was firmly convinced by Hitler’s vision of a judenreines Reich. Two of the four books reviewed here—Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, and Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann vor Jerusalem—uphold this interpretation in different ways and to varying degrees. Through the examination of new evidence (Eichmann’s testimony, his personnel files, and, most important for Stangneth, the William Sassen interviews discussed later), these books all show a very different Eichmann from the one Arendt presented. It would follow that Arendt’s theory of banality is thoroughly discredited, dead, and finally long gone. But that is not the case. Her infuriating observations of a man somewhat befuddled by the charges against him, and only partially responsible for his actions—responsibility shared, in her view (as well as that of Raul Hilberg) by the victims and their leaders themselves—cannot be completely shaken. Sergio Minerbi’s The Eichmann Trial Diary, and the letter exchange recently published as Hannah Arendt und Joachim Fest: Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit: Gespräche und Briefe, the other two books reviewed here, demonstrate the lasting legacy of her argument. How and why can this be?

In fact, much of the scholarship on the Holocaust in general is shaped by this tug of war between those historians, social scientists, and philosophers who, on the one hand, wish to pull the rope toward ideological arguments (see, for example, the work of Michael Thad Allen, Edward Westermann, and, most spuriously, Daniel J. Goldhagen), and those who, on the other, pull the rope back to discuss utterly different and varying types of perpetrator motivation: careerism, opportunism, peer pressure...