Warning to my blog readers. I haven't even started to take the Holocaust class at UW but ... there will be images. I just finished Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1962. I remember hearing about it on the radio, I was 10 years old.Eichmann was not the 'mastermind of the Holocause', he was a bureaucrat who headed the office which arranged the deportation of the Jews. He was mostly interested in status and promotion, he had led a generally unsuccessful undistinguished life until he 'got his chance' with the S. S.
The transportation network that concentrated Jews in one place and then easily deported them to their final destination provided an extremely crucial link. In fact, 25 years ago or so, when I watched the long documentary Shoah, the image of those horrible trains made you never ever want to get on a train again, ever.
Eichman did not have an ideological genocidal attitude, he just wanted to do his job the best he could so that the really important Nazis might pay attention to him. I think he loved all of the attention that he got and the cameo he got to play during his highly publicized trial. Even his death my hanging caused him 'elation' because of his place on history's stage. Really, that was all he really wanted.
Arendt coined the phrase "banality of eveil". Was Eichmann a bad man, a monster, a murderer? Not even, he was completely boring and uninteresting. Definition from dictionary 'drearily commonplace.'
A picture of him from his up-and-coming Nazi days.
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