Adolf Eichmann: Mass Murderer of Conviction

Adolf Eichmann was not just a pen-pushing bureaucrat. Like many Nazi perpetrators, he was an educated man who acted out of intellectual conviction.

From an interview with Ulrich Herbert, Professor of History at the University of Freiburg, published in the Taz on April 11:

Taz: Herr Herbert, the trial of Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago today. Hannah Arendt described him as a bureaucrat incapable of moral judgment? Was that an accurate description?

Ulrich Herbert: No. The notion that a bureaucrat is not capable of moral judgment is in itself implausible. Eichmann did what he did because he was convinced that it was right, that it was serving a greater end, also a higher law, even if it transgressed the conventional morality with which he had been raised. He considered his bureaucratic organization of the transport of Jews to extermination camps in occupied Poland and the fact that the trains ran on schedule as progress over the chaotic way the death squads brought Jews to the execution pits.

At the Jerusalem trial, Eichmann portrayed himself as someone who received orders and did as he was told. Was this simply the impression he tried to cultivate?

It’s more complex than that. Eichmann certainly did take orders, but at the same time he was convinced of his actions; he was someone who actually wanted to follow these orders. However, in 1962 the Israelis were looking for a key individual responsible for the murder of the Jews, and in Eichmann they found a third-tier figure, not someone of standing. To a certain extent this seemed to add insult to the dead.

So Eichmann was not a central figure in the Holocaust?

He did not make key decisions, as Himmler and Heydrich did. Nor was he a regional warlord with almost unlimited power, such as Hans Frank in Poland or the higher SS and police officers in the Soviet Union. But in Vienna, Eichmann had developed a system for registering and deporting the Jews, which he and his staff were able to implement throughout Europe. In this regard he was very important – an organizer who played a clearly identifiable, driving role in both coordinating and escalating the deportation of West European Jews.

Why did Arendt’s catchphrase the “banality of evil” have such a resounding impact, when the image of the bureaucrat only partially corroborated with historical facts?

Simply because it was a catchphrase. On the one hand, it expressed the disappointment in the lack of magnitude, even if diabolical, which one would somehow expect from one of the most important organizers of the mass murders, given the millions of victims. On the other, it voiced a certain delayed sense of triumph in the observation: this great murderer, what a nobody! In Germany, however, the phrase readily corresponded with the image of the Nazis as “antisocial criminals.” So the perpetrators were bureaucrats and cretins.