Banality of evil summary. Review of Hannah Arendt's book The Banality of Evil. Grigory dashevsky exemplary idea of evil

29.08.2020

Hannah Arendt

Grigory Dashevsky

EXAMPLE OF EVIL

Hannah Arendt's book "The Banality of Evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem" about the trial of the "architect of the Holocaust" in 1961, which has just been published in Russian, has long become a classic of 20th-century political thought. This is not an "extremely meticulous study" of the Holocaust (as the publisher's abstract claims). Arendt wrote not a historical work, but a detailed discussion, divided into many cases and examples, about the reasons - primarily political - why people refuse to hear the voice of conscience and face reality. The heroes of her book are divided not into executioners and victims, but into those who have retained these abilities and those who have lost them.

The hard, often sarcastic tone of the book, the lack of reverence for the victims and the sharpness of the assessments outraged and still outrage many.

Arendt writes about the Germans - "German society, which consisted of eighty million people, was also protected from reality and facts by the same means, the same self-deception, lies and stupidity, which became the essence of his, Eichmann's, mentality." But it is also merciless to the self-deception of the victims, and especially to those who - like part of the Jewish elite - for "humane" or other reasons, supported this self-deception in others.

Judging by the annotation referring to "a bloody attempt by the Tbilisi authorities" and "stubborn attempts by the West to 'privatize' the topic of crimes against humanity", the publishers expected that the Russian edition of Arendt would strengthen our defense "against reality and facts", our "self-deception" and our "stupidity". It would be possible to ignore these calculations (after all, it is the book that matters to us, and not the calculations of the publishers), if, hoping to turn the publication into a timely ideological action, the publishers were not in a hurry and this haste would not affect the quality of the publication itself. Only in this way can I explain his many oddities.

In the Russian title, the title and subtitle for some reason switched places.

For some reason, the first, 1963, edition of the book was chosen for translation, and not the second, revised and supplemented by the Postscript, published in 1965, which has since been reprinted - and is the classic book that the whole world reads.

But the main thing is that for some reason the translation does not have an editor (they indicate "editor-in-chief - G. Pavlovsky" and "responsible for the release - T. Rappoport", but proofreading and reconciliation of the translation was clearly not part of their functions). Translating Arendt (I speak from my own experience) - especially not from her native German, but from English, in which she often expressed herself inaccurately - is a slow and difficult task. And in the absence of an editor, the translation came out not only bad or even inaccurate, but unreliable. The point is not that here, as in any translation, there are errors (for example, the "radical variety" of anti-Semitism has been turned into a meaningless "radical assortment"), but that these errors distort the tone and thought of the book, distort the author's voice. "Judges who remember too well the basics of their profession" are transformed by translators into "too conscientious for their profession" - and Arendt herself suddenly turns into a cynic. Instead of "the process began to turn into a bloody show", translators, confusing the literal and abusive meaning of the word "bloody", write "damn show" - and a harsh assessment turns into rude abuse.

But the main tendency of translational distortions is the banalization of Arendt's thought. Therefore, "plurality", the key concept of Arendt's political philosophy, turns into a stereotyped and here meaningless "pluralism of opinions".

Arendt writes: "There are many things in the world that are more terrible than death, and the SS men have already tried to ensure that these terrible things constantly await the consciousness and imagination of their victims." And in the Russian translation we read: "The SS tried to make their prisoners experience all imaginable and unimaginable suffering."

Speaking of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, Arendt writes: the feat of the rebels lies in the fact that they "refused the relatively easy death that the Nazis offered them - in front of a firing squad or in a gas chamber." And the translators write: “they refused to accept an “easy” death from the Nazis” - and these cheap rhetorical quotation marks betray the whole abyss between their text and Arendt's text.

The most annoying thing is that there are not so many such errors - if the translation were edited, then we would all use it with gratitude. But in the current state, each individual passage does not inspire confidence. And without such trust, one can get from the book only the most general - approximate - idea of Arendt's ideas. But if the publishers really refused to edit because they wanted to turn the Russian publication into an ideological action, then from their point of view they acted quite reasonably - such actions are usually addressed to those who have enough approximate ideas about everything.

Kommersant - Weekend", No. 38, 03.10.2008

Eichmann in Jerusalem. The banality of evil

"Oh Germany...

Listening to the speeches coming from your house, people laugh, However, when they meet you, they grab a knife ... "

Bertolt Brecht. "Germany" (translated by A. Steinberg)

This book, abridged and slightly modified, was first published as a series of articles in The New Yorker.

I covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, where this somewhat abridged report was originally published. The book was written in the summer and fall of 1962 and completed in the winter while I was at Wesleyan University as a Center for Advanced Study Fellow.

My main sources, of course, were various materials that the Jerusalem judicial authorities sent to the press, all in the form of rotaprint copies. Below is a list of them:

1) English and German translations from Hebrew of the transcripts of the process. When the meetings were held in German, I used the German transcript and did the translation myself.

2) Translation of the opening speech of the Prosecutor General into English.

3) Translation of the opinion of the district court into English.

4) Translation into English and German of the defense appeal before the Supreme Court.

5) Translation into English and German of the appeal hearings in the Supreme Court.

6) German version of the printout of the tape recording of the preliminary interrogation of the accused, which was conducted by the Israeli police.

7) Sworn affidavits of sixteen defense witnesses: Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Richard Baer, Kurt Becher, Horst Grell, Dr. Wilhelm Höttl, Walter Huppenkoten, Hans Jüttner, Herbert Kappler, Hermann Krumi, Franz Nowak, Alfred Josef Slavik, Dr. Max Merten, Prof. Alfred Sieks, Dr. Eberhard von Thadden, Dr. Edmund Weesenmeier and Otto Winckelmann.

In 1961, something strange was happening in Jerusalem.

The whole world seemed to be holding its breath as they watched the trial unfold against hellfire Adolf Eichmann. But yesterday's prisoners saw not a monster, but a notorious Nazi functionary; a faded, frightened, middle-aged bespectacled man who was neither the initiator of the "final solution" nor some exemplary sadist. This is what a quiet, homely accountant looked like. He was him, as Hannah Arendt convincingly writes, - just an executive cog, hiding humanity under a pile of other people's cliche slogans in an atmosphere of total self-deception. It must be admitted that this was not so difficult to do, given the then bestial situation in the world, where the value of one person stubbornly tended to zero and people like Eichmann easily found excuses for their actions by supposedly “forced measures” in the ring of enemies.

Of course, not he, but his bosses - Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler - conceived the "final solution", for this he was too down to earth and helpful. Not even he - Eichmann - decided where to send the Jews and how to treat them. At best, he "made suggestions", but his leadership did not always agree with them.

That was the horror. The court was faced not with the personification of evil, individual arbitrariness, which can be branded in one person and discarded, but with the phenomenon of collective dehumanization, a kind of Nazi situation in which crime became the norm and in which the doubts of weak Eichmanns were easily shattered against the steely stubbornness of all Heydrichs, Kaltenbrunners, Himmler. Therefore, the court in Jerusalem had to work hard and tediously through the intricacies of the Nazi bureaucracy and identify the measure of personal responsibility of Eichmann, whose routine activity of transferring Jews to concentration camps can hardly be called so odious. If it were not for Eichmann, then, undoubtedly, any other middle-ranking functionary would have coped with this. So, speaking of Eichmann, we are not dealing with a person, but with a huge group of the population, which in normal, healthy times conducts quite respectable activities - works in state institutions, etc.

Unfortunately, the question: "What happens to ordinary people in the conditions of state criminal debauchery" in the book is considered only in relation to Eichmann. If we put the question more broadly, then we can come to the disappointing conclusion that the transformation of a huge number of people into mass murderers is quite within the power of the state, and thousand-year-old attitudes like “Thou shalt not kill”, some kind of civilized raid will collapse under the weight of conformism.

But why is it even worse that in Russia, which is not at all prone to self-accusation, repentance, although moral commandments and spirituality are generally pedaled here with aplomb, the return of bestial, Stalinist times does not occur only by the good will of the state, and even, perhaps, because of the European fashion for humanism.

Even if Alfred Eichmann was not as unremarkable and banal as Hannah Arendt paints him, he was still neither a hero nor any remarkable person. When this civil engineer (by education) and oilman had the opportunity to make a career in the Third Reich, he did not miss this chance, although he considered himself a failure after all. He was engaged in the "final solution of the Jewish question" - he led the search, registration, movement and destruction of Jews in European countries that fell under the rule of Nazi Germany. He rightfully owned the dubious honorary title of "architect of the Holocaust", which he, however, shared with Hitler and Himmler. But unlike these people, whom the whole world knew and deservedly hated, after the war, Eichmann managed to remain in the shadows, hide and live for another 15 years in Germany and Argentina. He lived under a false name, but did not hide much, was friends with former Nazis, and even traveled. In 1960, Israeli intelligence agents kidnapped him, secretly brought him to Israel, and here in the new "House of Justice" (it was even said that this "house" was built just in time for Eichmann's trial), he appeared before the court. After a long and intense trial, he was hanged; it was the only execution carried out in Israel by a civil court. The non-trivial process was observed by journalists from different countries. Hannah Arendt also came to Jerusalem as a correspondent for The New Yorker, and this book is based on her reports of the trial and the material she was exposed to as a correspondent.

Hannah Arendt herself, of course, had personal reasons to treat Eichmann, to put it mildly, with prejudice. A Jewess from Koenigsberg, she received a classical philosophical education (the history of her complex relationship with the great Martin Heidegger later became the subject of more than one study, stories and plays). In 1933, she was forced to leave the country, plunged into the darkness of Nazism. After a few years in Paris, Arendt moved to the United States, and after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she became one of the most influential political philosophers (or, more correctly, political philosophers?) of her generation and of the entire 20th century. She came to Jerusalem not so much as a reporter for an influential publication. The trial of Eichmann for her is an occasion for the study of power and justice. For her, "politics" is what free people do in a free society; this is the "classical" view of politics. What the whole world observed in the thirties and forties became some kind of completely new phenomenon, and Hana Arendt was one of the first thinkers who tried to understand what happened to humanity. She was in her place as an observer of the Eichmann trial, and her book is, despite all the many details of the investigation and trial, not a book about "punishment and crime", but a book about power.

In 1960, little was said about what is now recognized as such an important page in the history of Europe: the Holocaust. At that time it was considered in many ways still a "purely Jewish" problem, and the efforts of writers, philosophers, and journalists were needed to show the real meaning of the Holocaust. The problem of the Holocaust. Namely: how did it happen that in enlightened Europe the most enlightened nation (albeit in the power of insane rulers) built a machine for the purposeful and total destruction of such a large number of people? And what about a machine that uses the latest achievements of scientific and engineering thought?

The main task of Hannah Arendt is to understand precisely this machine, "everyday" nature of the Holocaust. This machine was not built by just a few villains (a Nuremberg thought), and not even by the non-human-hating Nazi Party. This machine was built by everyone who “simply followed orders”: built the brick buildings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, designed valves for gas chambers, took into account the population of Jewish quarters, transmitted telegraph instructions to improve and speed up this accounting, denounced neighbors hiding Jews in the attic or basement , dismissed the Jews from work by the highest command. ... All the numerous employees of the numerous enterprises and services of the Reich and the countries subject to it performed a lot of work assigned to them by job descriptions and labor contracts, and so, imperceptibly, by common efforts they built this whole mechanism, which turned out to be - then, when it was considered in detail - a machine for the organized destruction of people. Absolute evil came not in the form of a terrible threat, an evil rider with a flaming sword on horseback, but in the form of an everyday, banal set of orders, orders, construction projects.

SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann was such an everyday bearer of absolute evil. "Most terrible of all, he clearly did not have an insane hatred of the Jews, nor was he a fanatical anti-Semite or an adherent of some doctrine." In 1944, he helped a half-Jewish relative to emigrate from the Reich. He was almost not interested in metaphysics, even the semblance of mysticism and belief in predestination, which many high-ranking officials of the NSDAP and SS were fond of (later modern lovers of mysticism will find various conspiracy explanations for such a strange, for a normal human mind, occupation, as the organization of a system for the extermination of a large people by a country waging war with the whole world and having other opportunities to use the resources spent on this). He was interested in himself and also in the work, to the extent that it was necessary to do it well so as not to lose the position and prospects. The fact that this was the work of an executioner did not interest him. He even studied Jewish culture, although, being a mediocre person, he did not advance far in these studies (although he liked to brag about his knowledge of Hebrew to his colleagues). He could be involved in oil supplies to the Reich or public education. The fact that it fell to him to deal with the "final solution of the Jewish question" is nothing more than the vicissitudes of his personal biography. And so Arendt doesn't care about him either. The career of this man, which might not have been, is only an illustration of how now, in our time, powerful political and organizational mechanisms can be used for such incomprehensible phenomena.

The purely Russian mystery of this book lies in the fact that it was published by the Europe publishing house. Recently, it has specialized in bright propaganda publications, intolerant, loud and imperial. This is a real imperial publishing house, and it publishes such an anti-totalitarian book. What for? The cover says that it becomes especially relevant in a situation where "the West is trying hard to 'privatize' the topic of crimes against humanity." Why should we, after all, read now about the events of forty years ago?

At the time when Arendt was preparing this book for work, "with us" Solzhenitsyn was thinking about another anti-totalitarian book - The Gulag Archipelago. It is terrible to think about the similarity of two systems that were born at the same time, helped each other and had much in common. If in Europe they tried not to forget the Holocaust and did a lot to ensure that such events do not happen again, in Russia much is now being done to forget the banal evil of the same time. And Arendt's book has much more to do with us, with our immediate history, than it might seem to someone who is carried away by historical details, descriptions of the everyday life of the "Final Solution" in Germany and Eastern Europe at the end of the thirties. And how far have we gone from those events? “Stalin died yesterday” (M. Gefter). The banal, the ubiquitous and the modest evil is always there, and the banal careerist Eichmanns are always ready.

Original language: Interpreter:

Sergei Kastalsky, Natalia Rudnitskaya

Series:

Holocaust

Publisher: Pages: Carrier:

Print (paper)

ISBN:

978-5-9739-0162-2

The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem- a book written by Hannah Arendt, who was present as a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a former SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) who was in charge of the IV-B-4 Gestapo department, responsible for the "final solution of the Jewish question". The trial took place in Jerusalem in 1961.

In the book written by her at the end of the process, Arendt analyzes the events that took place, trying to give them a third-party assessment.

Brief summary of the contents of the book

In her book, Hannah Arendt argues that, in addition to the desire to rise up the career ladder, Eichmann did not have any traces of anti-Semitism or psychological handicap in his personality. The book's subtitle refers the reader to the idea of "the banality of evil," and this phrase serves as her final words in the last chapter. So, she cites the words of Eichmann, said by him during the trial, which demonstrate the absence of any addiction to his criminal acts, the absence of any measure of responsibility for what he did: after all, he only “did his job”:

Criticism of the edition and the book

Criticism of Arendt's book

According to critical media publications, the book about the 1961 Israeli trial of the "architect of the Holocaust" has long been a classic of 20th-century political thought. According to critics, the book is not, as stated in the author's annotation, an "extremely meticulous study" of the Holocaust, but is a detailed discussion, divided into many cases and examples, about the political and moral causes of the phenomenon, when people "refuse to hear the voice of conscience and look in the face of reality." According to critics, the heroes of her book are divided not into executioners and victims, but into those who have retained these abilities and those who have lost them.

Criticism of the Russian edition of 2008

The hard, often sarcastic tone of the book, the lack of reverence for the victims and the sharpness of the assessments outraged and still outrage many.
Arendt writes about the Germans - "German society, which consisted of eighty million people, was also protected from reality and facts by the same means, the same self-deception, lies and stupidity, which became the essence of his, Eichmann's, mentality." But it is also merciless to the self-deception of the victims, and especially to those who - like part of the Jewish elite - for "humane" or other reasons, supported this self-deception in others ...
... But the main thing is that for some reason the translation does not have an editor (they indicate “editor-in-chief - G. Pavlovsky” and “responsible for the release - T. Rappoport”, but proofreading and reconciliation of the translation was clearly not part of their functions). Translating Arendt (I speak from my own experience) - especially not from her native German, but from English, in which she often expressed herself inaccurately - is a slow and difficult task. And in the absence of an editor, the translation came out not only bad or even inaccurate, but unreliable. It's not that here, as in any translation, there are errors (for example, " radical variety"anti-Semitism turned into meaningless" radical assortment”), but in the fact that these errors distort the tone and thought of the book, distort the author's voice. " Judges who remember too well the basics of their profession”, turn for translators into “ too conscientious for their profession- and Arendt herself suddenly turns into a cynic. Instead of " the process began to turn into a bloody show", translators, confusing the literal and abusive meaning of the word" bloody", they write" "damn show" "- and a tough assessment turns into rude abuse ...

First of all, the annotation of the Europa publishing house was criticized, speaking about the “bloody attempt of the Tbilisi authorities” and about the “stubborn attempts of the West to“ privatize ”the topic of crimes against humanity” . The opinion of a journalist from the Kommersant newspaper is that this edition of Arendt's book is a hastily prepared ideological action - this haste affected the quality of the publication itself. So, in the Russian title, the title and subtitle for some reason switched places.

Also, for some unknown reason, the first, 1963, edition of the book was chosen for translation, and not the second, revised and supplemented by the Postscript, which was published in 1965, which has since been reprinted - and is the classic book that the whole world reads.

Related publications

Jochen von Lang, Eichmann Interrogated(1982) ISBN 0-88619-017-7 - book written in response to Eichmann in Jerusalem containing excerpts from the materials of the pre-trial investigation.
Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil(erstmals 1963. Die Aufl. seit 1965 mit der dt. "Vorrede" als "Postscript" in der "rev. and enlarged edition.") Penguin Books, 2006 ISBN 0143039881 ISBN 978-0143039884 . Die Seiten 1 bis 136 (teilw.), das berühmte Zitat auf Seite 233 engl. (entspricht S. 347 deutsch) und vor allem das Stichwortverz. sind online lesbar: (English) - English edition
David Cesarani: Becoming Eichmann. Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer" Da Capo, Cambridge MA 2006
Gary Smith: H.A. revisited: "Eichmann in Jerusalem" und die Folgen ed. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2000 ISBN 3518121359
Walter Laqueur: H. A. in Jerusalem. The Controversy Revisited in: Lyman H. Legters (Hg.): Western Society after the Holocaust Westview Press, Voulder, Colorado USA 1983, S. 107-120

Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen Aus dem amerikanischen Englisch von Brigitte Granzow (v. d. Autorin überarb. Fassung im Vgl. zur engl. Erstausgabe; neue Vorrede). Seit 1986 mit einem "einleitenden Essay" von Hans Mommsen. Erweiterte Taschenbuchausgabe. Piper, Munich u. a. 15. Aufl. (German)
Auszüge: Eichmann and the Holocaust(Reihe: Penguin Great Ideas) Penguin, 2005 ISBN 0141024003 ISBN 978-0141024004 (German)
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Leben, Werk und Zeit Fischer, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3596160103. S. 451-518. (Aus dem American.: Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World Yale Univ. Press 1982) (German)
Julia Schulze Wessel: Ideologie der Sachlichkeit. H.A.s politische Theorie des Antisemitismus Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2006 (Reihe: TB Wissenschaft 1796) ISBN 3518293966 Rezension von Yvonne Al-Taie (German)
David Cesarani: Adolf Eichmann. Burokrat und Massenmörder. Propyläen, München 2004 (German)
Steven A. Aschheim (Hg): H.A. in Jerusalem Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkely u.a. 2001 (engl.) ISBN 0520220579 (Pb.) ISBN 0520220560 (German)
Dan Diner: Hannah Arendt Reconsidered. On the Banal and the Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative in: New German Critique No. 71 (Spring/Summer 1997) S. 177-190
Richard J. Bernstein: Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil in: Hannah Arendt. Twenty years later MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. & London 1996, pp. 127-146
Claudia Bozzaro: H.A. und die Banalität des Bösen Vorw. Lore Huhn. FWPF (Fördergemeinschaft wissenschaftlicher Publikationen von Frauen) Freiburg 2007 ISBN 978-3939348092

Hannah Arendt's book, The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the 1961 trial of the "architect of the Holocaust," published in Russian, has long become a classic of 20th-century political thought. This is not an "extremely meticulous study" of the Holocaust (as the publisher's abstract claims). Arendt wrote not a historical work, but a detailed discussion, divided into many cases and examples, about the reasons - primarily political - why people refuse to hear the voice of conscience and face reality. The heroes of her book are divided not into executioners and victims, but into those who have retained these abilities and those who have lost them.

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem. The banality of evil

Europe, Moscow, 2008
ISBN 978-5-9739-0162-2

Hannah Arendt EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. A Report on the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem - The Banality of Evil - Contents

Grigory Dashevsky EXAMPLE OF EVIL
Eichmann in Jerusalem. The banality of evil
FROM THE AUTHOR
Chapter One "House of Justice"
Chapter Two "The Accused"
Chapter Three "An Expert on the Jewish Question"
Chapter Four "Decision One: Exile"
Chapter Five "Decision Two: Concentration"
Chapter Six "Decision is Final: Murder"
Chapter Seven "The Wannsee Conference, or Pontius Pilate"
Chapter Eight "The duty of a law-abiding citizen"
Chapter Nine “The Deportation of Their Reich. Germany, Austria and the Protectorate"
Chapter Ten "Deportations from Western Europe: France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Italy"
Chapter Eleven "Deportations from the Balkans: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania"
Chapter Twelve "Deportations from Central Europe: Hungary and Slovakia"
Chapter Thirteen "Death Centers in the East"
Chapter Fourteen "Evidence and Witnesses"
Chapter Fifteen "Sentence, Appeal and Execution"
EPILOGUE
Ephraim Zuroff AFTERWORD

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Banality of Evil - Chapter Two "The Accused"

Otto Adolf, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann and Maria, nee Schefferling, captured in the suburbs of Buenos Aires on the evening of May 11, 1960, nine days later brought to Israel and brought before the district court of the city of Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, was accused of fifteen counts: “ among other things," he committed crimes against the Jewish people, against all mankind, a number of war crimes during the Nazi regime, and especially during the Second World War. He was tried on the basis of the Law on the Nazis and their accomplices of 1950, and according to this law, "whoever committed one of these ... crimes ... is subject to the death penalty." And to each of the points brought against him, Eichmann replied: "Not guilty on the merits of the charge."

And in essence what did he consider himself guilty of? During long cross-examinations of the accused - as he himself said, "the longest interrogations in history" - no one asked him this seemingly obvious question - neither the defense lawyer, nor the prosecutor, nor one of the three judges.

Defender Robert Servatius - he was hired by Eichmann, but the Israeli government paid for the services (following the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials, when the defenders were paid by the tribunal of the victors), he answered the question asked at the press conference: “Eichmann considers himself guilty before the Lord God, but not before the law,” however, the defendant himself did not confirm this opinion. The defender - and this is obvious - would prefer his client to plead not guilty on the grounds that, according to the laws that existed under Nazism, he did not do anything illegal, that he is accused not of crimes, but of "laws adopted in the state" that are not subject to jurisdiction of another state (par in parent imperium non habet *), that it was his duty to obey these laws and that, in the words of Servatius, he committed actions "for which, in case of victory, they reward, and in case of defeat, they are sent to the gallows" .

Outside of Israel (at a meeting at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, devoted, as the Rheinischer Merkur put it, to "the delicate question of the possibilities and limits of considering historical guilt during criminal trials"), Servatius went even further and declared that "the only legitimate problem in considering Eichmann's case was a legal assessment of the actions of the Israelis who abducted him, which has not yet been made ”- a statement hardly consistent with his widely quoted statements made in Israel itself, when he called the process a “great spiritual achievement” comparable to the Nuremberg process.

Eichmann's own approach was quite different. First of all, he did not agree with the accusation of murder: “I did not kill the Jews. I have not killed a single Jew and not a single non-Jew - I have not killed a single human being. I did not give the order to kill either the Jew or the non-Jew; I just didn't do it." Or, as he clarified later: “It so happened ... that I never had to do this” - for there was no doubt that if he had received an order to kill his own father, he would have carried out this order. As he repeatedly repeated (in particular in the so-called Sassen documents - in an interview given in 1955 in Argentina to the Dutch journalist Sassen, also a former SS fugitive - published after Eichmann's capture by the American magazine Life and the German Der Stern), he can it would only be accused of "aiding and instigating" the extermination of the Jews, which he already in Jerusalem declared "one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind."

The defense did not take Eichmann's theory into account, and the prosecution spent too much time unsuccessfully trying to prove that Eichmann at least once killed a Jew with his own hands (meaning a Jewish boy in Hungary), and spent even more time - albeit with with great success - in response to a remark that Franz Rademacher, an expert on Jews in the German Foreign Office, scribbled on a document concerning Yugoslavia - this note was made during a telephone conversation, it read: "Eichmann proposes executions." This entry turned out to be the only "kill order" - if there was one at all - for which there was any hint of evidence.