Read it again

Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist who wrote a rather disorganized book about Hitler nearly 20 years ago, has a lot of scorn for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem…but he also has a mistaken idea of its contents. Maybe if he’d read it more attentively he’d have less contempt for it.

I’d been asked to write an introduction to a fiftieth-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a longtime bestseller first published in 1961, a book that had shaped my and subsequent generations’ picture of Hitler and the war for some time thereafter. I don’t think I would have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction, but I found myself impressed with Shirer’s reporter’s eye. For Hitler. For the still inexplicable power of the “spell.”

Shirer, who had been stationed in Berlin during Hitler’s rise, also had a take on Eichmann before he became Eichmann, the icon of evil, and of controversy over evil. Shirer’s book had been completed before Eichmann’s capture, when he was known to Shirer as Karl Eichmann — his rarely used first name. Shirer had his number in a way Hannah Arendt never would. He found the key damning document — the testimony of a fellow officer who quoted the Chief Operating Officer of the Final Solution toward the end of the war. Here was Eichmann not experiencing any regret or any of the misattributed “banality.” Instead, with a vengefully triumphant snarl (he knows who’s really won the war), Eichmann declared “he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” O happy Eichmann.

This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense…

Cool story, except for one thing: Arendt includes that declaration of Eichmann’s as a central part of her analysis of him. Her analysis was nothing like “poor schlub, pen pusher” – that’s the hostile version of Arendt’s book, it’s not the book itself.

This, of course, is not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub,” pen pusher trial defense — just following orders, moving things along deep within the bureaucracy, “nothing against the Jew” facade.

That misrepresents her analysis. She wasn’t defending him or minimizing him; she was pointing out that it doesn’t take a thrillingly evil genius to do what the Nazis did, because dim-witted conformist self-admiring bureaucrats will do just as well. The point wasn’t that Eichmann was innocent or morally neutral, it was that he wasn’t special.

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