Adolf Eichmann

• 1. The Man in the Glass Booth

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  Adolf Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass in a Jerusalem auditorium called Beit Ha'am on the 11th of April 1961. The glass was there to protect him from any attempt on his life. The building had been modified so that journalists could follow the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Each day, videotape of the session was flown to the United States and broadcast the following day. The Israeli government had arranged for the trial to receive this kind of prominent coverage. The man in the booth was a German-Austrian SS officer. Prosecutors said he had managed the logistics that sent millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps. He answered that he had only followed orders. How did a poor student end up in such a role? How did he disappear after the war, and how did Israeli agents find him on another continent? And was the ordinary-looking defendant the faceless clerk he claimed to be, or had he built that image himself?

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• 2. From Linz to Passau

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  Otto Adolf Eichmann was born on the 19th of March 1906 in Solingen, Germany, the eldest of five children. His father, Adolf Karl, was a bookkeeper, and his mother, Maria, was a housewife. In 1913 the father took a post as commercial manager of the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company in Austria, and the family followed a year later. Maria died in 1916, and the father then married Maria Zawrzel, a devout Protestant with two sons.

  In Linz, Eichmann attended the Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule, the same school Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years earlier. He played the violin and joined sports and clubs, including a Wandervogel woodcraft and scouting group. Some older boys in that group belonged to right-wing militias. His grades were poor, so his father pulled him out and enrolled him in a vocational college for electrical and mechanical engineering and construction. He left without a degree and worked for several months at his father's Untersberg Mining Company. From 1925 to 1927 he was a sales clerk at the radio firm Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG. From 1927 until early 1933 he was a district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company in Upper Austria and Salzburg.

  During those oil-company years, Eichmann joined the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung, the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing veterans' movement. He also began reading newspapers published by the Nazi Party. Its platform called for ending the Weimar Republic and rejecting the Treaty of Versailles. It demanded radical antisemitism, opposition to Bolshevism, and a national community defined by race. Jews were to be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a family friend and local SS leader, advised Eichmann to join. On the 1st of April 1932 he entered the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party as member number 889,895. His SS membership was confirmed seven months later as number 45,326. He was placed in SS-Standarte 37, which guarded the party headquarters in Linz and protected speakers at rallies that often turned violent. He did this work on weekends while keeping his job in Salzburg.

  A few months after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, Vacuum Oil cut staff and Eichmann lost his position. The Nazi Party was banned in Austria around the same time. Like many other Nazis, he fled to Passau and joined Andreas Bolek at his headquarters. After a training programme at the SS depot in Klosterlechfeld in August, he returned to the Passau border in September. There he led an eight-man SS liaison team that guided Austrian National Socialists into Germany and smuggled propaganda back into Austria. When the unit was dissolved in late December, he was promoted to SS-Scharführer, equivalent to corporal. His battalion was then quartered in barracks beside Dachau concentration camp. By 1934 he was asking for a transfer to the SD, the SS security service, to escape the "monotony" of military training.

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• 3. Expert on Jewish Affairs

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  The Freemasons were Eichmann's first assignment inside the SD. His sub-office organised seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and built a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organisations. He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition that proved extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Kaltenbrunner and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein.

  Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join his Jewish Department, Section II/112, at the SD's Berlin headquarters. The transfer was granted in November 1934, and Eichmann later regarded it as his big break. He was told to study the Zionist movement and Jewish organisations and write reports on them. He picked up a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish. Colleagues came to see him as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.

  On the 21st of March 1935, Eichmann married. He and his wife, Vera, had four sons: Klaus, born in Berlin in 1936, Horst Adolf, born in Vienna in 1940, Dieter Helmut, born in Prague in 1942, and Ricardo Francisco, born in Buenos Aires in 1955. He was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer in 1936 and commissioned as a second lieutenant the following year. In 1937 he also left the church.

  Around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939, pushed by violence and economic pressure. In 1937 Eichmann and his superior Herbert Hagen travelled to British Mandatory Palestine to judge whether German Jews might emigrate there voluntarily. They came ashore at Haifa with forged press credentials and went on to Cairo. In Egypt they met Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, but could not reach a deal. Polkes suggested letting more Jews leave under the Haavara Agreement, each taking £1000 so they would qualify for a less restricted form of immigration. Hagen's report rejected this for two reasons. A strong Jewish presence might lead to an independent state, and Reich policy opposed the free transfer of "Jewish capital". When the two men tried to return to Palestine days later, British authorities refused them visas. Their report was not published until 1982.

  In 1938, after the Anschluss merged Austria into the Reich, Eichmann was posted to Vienna. Jewish community organisations there were put under SD supervision and ordered to promote emigration. The money came from property seized from other Jews and from overseas donations, all placed under SD control. Eichmann was promoted to first lieutenant in July 1938. In August the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration opened in a room of the former Palais Albert Rothschild at Prinz-Eugen-Straße 20-22, and he was appointed to it. By the time he left Vienna in May 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had left Austria legally, and many more had been smuggled out. A very different assignment in Berlin was only months away.

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• 4. Trains and Minutes

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  Within weeks of the invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939, Nazi policy turned from voluntary emigration to forced deportation. On the 21st of September, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, told his staff that Jews were to be gathered into Polish cities with good rail links. He announced plans for a reservation in the General Government, the part of Poland not annexed to the Reich. On the 27th of September the SD and the Security Police, which included the Gestapo and the Kripo, were merged into the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich.

  In October 1939, Eichmann was transferred to Berlin to command the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration under Heydrich and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. His first task was to organise the deportation of 70,000-80,000 Jews from the Ostrava district in Moravia and the Katowice district in newly annexed Poland. On his own initiative he also planned deportations from Vienna. Under what became the Nisko Plan, he chose Nisko as a transit camp. In the last week of October, 4,700 Jews were sent there by train. They were left in an open meadow with no water and little food, and the planned barracks were never finished. The SS drove many into Soviet-occupied territory, and others ended up in a nearby labour camp. The operation was called off, partly because Hitler decided the trains were better used for the military.

  On the 19th of December 1939, Eichmann was put in charge of Referat IV B4, the department for Jewish affairs and evacuation. Heydrich called him his "special expert" for all deportations into occupied Poland. Within days Eichmann drafted a plan to send 600,000 Jews into the General Government. Governor-general Hans Frank resisted, since the deportees would hurt economic development and his goal of Germanising the region. On the 24th of March 1940, Göring forbade further transports there unless he or Frank approved them. Until April 1941 only about 63,000 Jews were moved, and on many trains up to a third of the deportees died on the way. At his trial Eichmann claimed to be upset by the conditions. His own correspondence from the period shows his main concern was doing it cheaply and without disturbing military operations.

  On the 15th of August 1940, Eichmann issued a memorandum titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt. It called for resettling a million Jews a year in Madagascar for four years. Germany failed to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, so the invasion of Britain was postponed indefinitely. Britain still held the Atlantic, and its merchant fleet was unavailable for evacuations. The plan stalled. Hitler kept mentioning it until February 1942, when it was shelved for good. Meanwhile the ghettos, with their overcrowding, poor sanitation and hunger, produced a high death rate.

  The invasion of the Soviet Union began on the 22nd of June 1941, and Einsatzgruppen followed the army to round up and kill Jews, Comintern officials and senior Communists. Eichmann was among the officials who received regular detailed reports of their work. On the 31st of July, Göring gave Heydrich written authority to prepare a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" across German-controlled territory. Eichmann later said that Heydrich told him in mid-September that Hitler had ordered the physical extermination of all Jews in German-controlled Europe. "I never saw a written order," he said at his trial. No record has been found of when Hitler may have given such an order. Around this time Eichmann was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, lieutenant colonel, the highest rank he ever reached.

  drich hosted the Wannsee Conference on the 20th of January 1942 to coordinate the planned genocide with the regime's administrative leaders. Eichmann prepared for it by drafting a list of the numbers of Jews in each European country, along with emigration statistics. He attended, supervised the stenographer, and produced the official record that was circulated afterwards. Heydrich's covering letter named him as liaison with the departments involved. Large-scale deportations to Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka and other camps began almost immediately under his supervision. The killing was code-named Operation Reinhard in honour of Heydrich, who died in Prague in early June of wounds from an assassination attempt. Kaltenbrunner then took over the Reich Security Main Office.

  Eichmann did not set policy. He worked at the operational level, and specific deportation orders came from Müller, acting for Himmler. His office gathered information on the Jews in each area, organised the seizure of their property, and scheduled the trains. He kept in constant contact with the Foreign Office, because Jews from conquered countries such as France could not as easily be stripped of their possessions. He met regularly with department members in Berlin and travelled widely to visit camps and ghettos. His wife, who disliked Berlin, stayed in Prague with the children, and his visits dwindled from weekly to monthly. That machinery was about to be sent to a country the war had so far spared.

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• 5. Hungary, 1944

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  Germany invaded Hungary on the 19th of March 1944, and Eichmann arrived on the same day. Top members of his staff soon joined him, along with five or six hundred men from the SD, SS and Security Police. Until then Hungary's Jews had remained largely unharmed. Hitler installed a government more willing to cooperate, and the Jews there were now to be sent to Auschwitz as forced labour or to be gassed.

  Round-ups began on the 16th of April. Eichmann toured northeastern Hungary in the last week of April and visited Auschwitz in May to check the preparations. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, testified at the Nuremberg trials that Himmler told him to take all operational instructions for the Final Solution from Eichmann. From the 14th of May, four trains of 3,000 people each left Hungary every day. They arrived at Auschwitz II-Birkenau along a newly built spur line that ended a few hundred metres from the gas chambers. Between 10 and 25 per cent of each train were picked as forced labourers, and the rest were killed within hours. Most victims went to Auschwitz, where about 75 per cent were murdered on arrival.

  Under international pressure, the Hungarian government stopped the deportations on the 6th of July 1944. By then 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been deported. Despite the order to stop, Eichmann personally arranged more trains to Auschwitz on the 17th and the 19th of July.

  Eichmann also bargained. Starting on the 25th of April he met Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew on the Aid and Rescue Committee. Eichmann later testified that Berlin had authorised him to let a million Jews emigrate in exchange for 10,000 trucks fit for winter on the Eastern Front. The Western Allies refused to consider it, and nothing came of the offer. In June he took part in talks with Rudolf Kasztner that saved 1,684 people. They travelled by train to Switzerland in return for three suitcases of diamonds, gold, cash and securities.

  In July, Eichmann asked for reassignment. He resented Kurt Becher and others for muscling into emigration matters, and he was angry that Himmler had suspended deportations to the death camps. At the end of August he was given a commando squad to evacuate 10,000 ethnic Germans trapped on the Hungarian border with Romania. They refused to leave, so his men helped evacuate a German field hospital near the front instead. For this he received the Iron Cross, Second Class. Through October and November he arranged for tens of thousands of Jewish victims to be marched, in appalling conditions, 210 km from Budapest to Vienna.

  On the 24th of December 1944, Eichmann left Budapest just before Soviet forces surrounded it. In Berlin he arranged for the incriminating records of Department IV-B4 to be burned. When the war in Europe ended on the 8th of May 1945, he and his family were living in relative safety in Austria.

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• 6. Ricardo Klement

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  After Germany's defeat, US forces captured Eichmann. He passed through several camps for SS officers on forged papers that named him Otto Eckmann. When he realised his identity had been discovered, he escaped from a work detail at Cham. He took the name Otto Heninger and moved often over the following months, ending up on the Lüneburg Heath. He found forestry work and then leased a small plot of land at Altensalzkoth, where he stayed until 1950. Starting in 1946, others gave damning testimony about him at the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals.

  In 1948 Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina and false papers in the name Ricardo Klement. The help came through an organisation directed by Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian cleric and Nazi sympathiser living in Italy. Those documents led to a Red Cross humanitarian passport and the remaining entry permits in 1950. He crossed Europe staying in monasteries that served as safe houses. He sailed from Genoa on the 17th of June 1950 and reached Buenos Aires on the 14th of July. He first lived in Tucumán Province, working for a government contractor. His family joined him in 1952 in Buenos Aires. After a run of low-paying jobs, he found work at Mercedes-Benz and rose to department head. The family built a house on Garibaldi Street and moved in during 1960.

  Beginning in late 1956, the Nazi expatriate journalist Willem Sassen interviewed Eichmann for four months, planning a biography. Eichmann left tapes, transcripts and handwritten notes. In them he admitted he knew that millions were being killed. "I didn't care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died," he said. Asked whether the Final Solution meant they should be eradicated, he answered: "Yes." Articles drawn from the memoirs appeared in Life and Stern magazines in late 1960. The surviving audio became public in 2022 and anchored the Israeli television documentary series The Devil's Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, directed by Yariv Mozer.

  Simon Wiesenthal and other survivors devoted themselves to finding Eichmann. In 1953 Wiesenthal learned from a letter that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and in 1954 he passed this to the Israeli consulate in Vienna. The father of Eichmann died in 1960, and Wiesenthal arranged for private detectives to photograph family members in secret, since no recent photo of Eichmann existed. His brother Otto reportedly looked very like him. Wiesenthal gave the photographs to Mossad agents on the 18th of February.

  Lothar Hermann, a German Jew who had emigrated to Argentina in 1938, also played a key part. In 1956 his daughter Sylvia began dating Klaus Eichmann, who boasted about his father's Nazi past. Hermann alerted Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany. Hermann sent Sylvia to investigate, and Eichmann himself answered the door, claiming to be Klaus's uncle. When Klaus arrived moments later, he called the man "Father." Bauer distrusted the German police and legal system and feared a tip-off, so he went straight to the Israelis. In 1957 he passed the information to Mossad director Isser Harel, whose operatives found no firm evidence at first. West Germany rejected Bauer's request to seek extradition. Israel paid Hermann a reward in 1971. The German geologist Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann in the early 1950s, gave Bauer an address and photograph, but his identity only emerged in 2021.

  On the 1st of March 1960, Harel sent Shin Bet chief interrogator Zvi Aharoni to Buenos Aires, and after several weeks he confirmed Eichmann's identity. Argentina had a record of refusing to extradite Nazi criminals, so Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion chose to capture Eichmann and bring him to Israel instead. Rafi Eitan led an eight-man team, mostly from Shin Bet, with Harel arriving in May to oversee it. The agents had come in April and studied Eichmann's routine. They compared the shape of the ears in covert photographs of "Ricardo Klement" with pictures in his SS file and concluded he was the same man.

  The team seized Eichmann on the 11th of May 1960 near his home in San Fernando, an industrial community 20 km north of central Buenos Aires. He usually came home from work on the same bus each evening. The plan nearly collapsed when he was not on it, but he stepped off another bus about half an hour later. Mossad agent Peter Malkin asked him in Spanish if he had a moment. Eichmann panicked and tried to leave, but two more agents helped Malkin wrestle him to the ground. They hid him on the floor of a car under a blanket.

  For nine days Eichmann was held in a Mossad safe house while his identity was confirmed. Harel used the time to look for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, hoping to fly him to Israel on the same plane. Mengele had left his last known address, and the plan was dropped. Eitan told the newspaper Haaretz in 2008 that chasing Mengele might have endangered the Eichmann operation.

  Near midnight on the 20th of May, Israeli anaesthetist Yonah Elian, disguised as a flight attendant, sedated Eichmann. The team had prepared a fake Israeli passport and El Al identity card in the name "Zeev Zichroni" using his photograph. He was smuggled out on the El Al Bristol Britannia that had brought Israel's delegation to Argentina's celebration of the 150th anniversary of the May Revolution. After a tense wait for flight-plan approval, the plane took off and refuelled in Dakar, Senegal. It reached Israel on the 22nd of May, and Ben-Gurion announced the capture to the Knesset the next afternoon.

  In Argentina the news set off a violent wave of antisemitism by far-right groups, including the Tacuara Nationalist Movement. Argentina asked the United Nations Security Council to meet in June 1960, calling the capture a violation of its sovereignty. Israeli representative Golda Meir, later a prime minister, said the abductors were private individuals and that the act was an "isolated violation of Argentine law." On the 23rd of June the Council passed Resolution 138, agreeing that Argentine sovereignty had been violated and asking Israel for reparations. On the 3rd of August the two countries admitted the violation in a joint statement and ended the dispute. The Israeli court later ruled that the manner of the capture did not affect the legality of the trial.

  US Central Intelligence Agency documents declassified in 2006 show alarm at the CIA and West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst. Both had known for at least two years that Eichmann was in Argentina but did nothing because it did not suit their Cold War interests. They worried about what he might say about Hans Globke, West Germany's national security advisor, who had co-authored antisemitic Nazi laws including the Nuremberg Laws. Special investigator Eli Rosenbaum has challenged the claim that the CIA withheld Eichmann's location. He points to an unreliable 1958 source who said Eichmann was born in Israel and was living in Jerusalem.

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• 7. Jerusalem, 1961

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  At the fortified police station in Yagur, Eichmann spent nine months before his trial. Israeli officials did not want to rely only on documents and witnesses, so he was questioned daily, producing transcripts of over 3,500 pages. His interrogator was Chief Inspector Avner Less of the national police. Using documents supplied mainly by Yad Vashem and the Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, Less often caught Eichmann lying or dodging. When confronted, Eichmann insisted he had no authority in the Nazi hierarchy and was only following orders. Less saw no remorse and felt Eichmann did not grasp the scale of his crimes. Eichmann's pardon plea, released in 2016, fits that picture: "I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty." Mickey Goldman, a Holocaust survivor on the police interrogation staff, wore short sleeves on purpose so his camp tattoo showed. "I assume he was wondering to himself how I managed to escape his clutches," he said.

  The 1950 Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law supplied the legal basis, and it produced an indictment on 15 criminal charges. They included crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organisation. Three judges presided: Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh. Attorney General Gideon Hausner led the prosecution, assisted by Gabriel Bach and Yaakov Bar-Or. The defence was the German lawyer Robert Servatius, his assistant Dieter Wechtenbruch, and Eichmann himself. Foreign lawyers could not then appear in Israeli courts, so the law was changed for capital cases. Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen told the cabinet he doubted any Israeli lawyer, Jew or Arab, would agree to defend him.

  The prosecution took 56 days and offered hundreds of documents and 112 witnesses, many of them Holocaust survivors. Hausner overruled police advice to call only 30, and just 14 of those who testified had seen Eichmann during the war. His aim was to prove Eichmann's guilt and to build a record of the whole Holocaust. He opened with the words: "It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history." Servatius repeatedly tried to hold back material unconnected to Eichmann and largely succeeded. Of the Sassen interviews, only Eichmann's handwritten notes were admitted. Depositions from leading Nazis were also offered. The defence asked that the deponents be brought to Israel for cross-examination, but Hausner replied that he would have to arrest any war criminal who entered the country. The prosecution showed that Eichmann had visited Chełmno, Auschwitz and Minsk, where he saw a mass shooting of Jews, so he knew the deportees were being killed.

  The defence then examined Eichmann at length. Observers including Moshe Pearlman and Hannah Arendt remarked on his ordinary appearance and flat manner. He maintained he had no choice, bound as he was by an oath of loyalty to Hitler. This was the same superior-orders defence used by some defendants at Nuremberg in 1945-46. He said the decisions belonged to Müller, Heydrich, Himmler and ultimately Hitler. Servatius added that acts of the Nazi government were acts of state and beyond normal courts. About the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann said he felt satisfaction and relief at its end. The matter was out of his hands, and he felt cleared of guilt. On the last day of his examination he said he was guilty of arranging the transports but not of their consequences.

  Under cross-examination, Hausner pressed Eichmann to admit personal guilt, and no such admission came. Eichmann conceded he disliked the Jews and saw them as adversaries, but denied ever thinking their annihilation justified. Dieter Wisliceny had reported at Nuremberg a remark Eichmann made in 1945, and Hausner put it to him: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction." Eichmann first said he meant enemies of the Reich such as the Soviets. Under questioning from the judges he admitted he meant the Jews and that the remark matched his views then.

  The trial adjourned on the 14th of August, and the verdict came on the 12th of December. Eichmann was convicted on all 15 counts. The judges found him not guilty of personally killing anyone and of directing the Einsatzgruppen. They held him responsible for the dreadful conditions on the deportation trains and for supplying the Jews who filled them. He was also convicted of crimes against Poles, Slovenes and Roma. He was found guilty of membership in the Gestapo, the SD and the SS, all declared criminal organisations at Nuremberg. The judges rejected the claim that he merely followed orders, concluding that he believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly. On the 15th of December 1961, he was sentenced to death.

  A five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court heard the appeal: President Yitzhak Olshan with Shimon Agranat, Moshe Zilberg, Yoel Zussman and Alfred Witkon. The defence leaned mainly on arguments about Israeli jurisdiction and the legality of the laws behind the charges. Hearings ran from the 22nd to the 29th of March 1962. Vera Eichmann flew to Israel and saw her husband for the last time at the end of April. On the 29th of May the court rejected the appeal on every count.

  Eichmann petitioned President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi for clemency. Servatius, Eichmann's wife and his brothers also wrote to the president. Hugo Bergmann, Pearl S. Buck, Martin Buber and Ernst Simon spoke out against the death penalty. Ben-Gurion convened a special cabinet meeting, which recommended refusing clemency, and Ben-Zvi did so. At about 7:00 p.m. on the 31st of May, Eichmann ate his last meal with a bottle of wine. At 8:00 p.m. he was told the petition had been denied.

  The hanging at a prison in Ramla was scheduled for midnight and took place a few minutes after, on the 1st of June 1962. A small group attended, including four journalists and the Canadian clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had counselled Eichmann in prison. Rafi Eitan, who accompanied him to the gallows, claimed in 2014 that he heard Eichmann mumble, "I hope that all of you will follow me." A prison guard named Shalom Nagar carried out the execution. Within hours the body was cremated. An Israeli Navy patrol boat scattered the ashes in the Mediterranean, outside Israeli territorial waters.

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• 8. The Banality Debate

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  West German newspapers covered the trial extensively, and many schools added the subject to their curricula. In Israel, the witnesses' testimony taught younger citizens more about how the Holocaust had affected survivors. It also weakened the once-popular notion that Jews had gone "like sheep to the slaughter".

  Ricardo Eichmann, the youngest son, has said he bears Israel no resentment for executing his father. He rejects the argument that following orders excuses what his father did. His father's lack of remorse, he says, caused the family "difficult emotions". Ricardo worked as a professor of archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute until 2020.

  Hannah Arendt reported on the trial for The New Yorker and then wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. In it she coined the phrase "the banality of evil". She thought Eichmann seemed to have an ordinary personality and showed neither guilt nor hatred. In his 1988 book Justice, Not Vengeance, Simon Wiesenthal wrote: "The world now understands the concept of 'desk murderer'. We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty." Out of this came the pejorative "little Eichmanns", meaning bureaucrats who harm others indirectly and systematically.

  Bettina Stangneth challenged this picture in her 2011 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Drawing largely on the Sassen interviews and the notes Eichmann made in exile, she argues that he was an ideologically driven antisemite and lifelong committed Nazi. In her account he deliberately built a persona as a faceless bureaucrat for the courtroom. Historians including Christopher Browning, Deborah Lipstadt, Yaacov Lozowick and David Cesarani reached similar conclusions.

  Barbara W. Tuchman wrote that the evidence showed Eichmann pursuing his job "with initiative and enthusiasm that often outdistanced his orders." She pointed to his learning Hebrew and Yiddish to deal better with his victims. Of Arendt's phrase she wrote: "For the author of that ineffable phrase, as applied to the murder of six million, to have been so taken in by Eichmann's version of himself as just a routine civil servant obeying orders is one of the puzzles of modern journalism."

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