Op-Ed: The Men Who Enjoy Killing Jews

[ Like Eichmann, they don’t murder Jews for their money. ]

Eichmann’s passport, used to flee to Argentina

There is no greater temptation than explaining a mass murderer through his childhood’s ghosts. Palestinian terrorists slit the throats of the Fogels till the last baby they find? It is because of the checkpoints around Nablus. Mohammed Deif built the tunnels of death in southern Israel? It is because of the “occupation”.

Of Adolf Eichmann it has been said that he was an unhappy child, an unfriendly and lonely student, a sexually inhibited boy frustrated by the financial crisis of his father. For fifty years, since Colonel Eichmann was hanged by the Israelis and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean, the architect of the Holocaust has been portrayed as a gray bureaucrat, an ordinary human being, a faceless wheel of a larger project, driven by cowardice, desire for social advancement and bourgeois moral myopia.

Now a book by the German scholar Bettina Stangneth, “Eichmann Before Jerusalem”, tells us the truth.

“If 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed – Eichmann said of the Jews – then we would have fulfilled our duty. We could have said: ‘We destroyed an enemy’”.

This is not the same Eichmann who is “incapable of thinking” in Hannah Arendt’s words.

“We could have done more”, Eichmann went on to say after the war. “I was an idealist, I was part of the thinking process”.

Bettina Stangneth discovered a letter of 1956 where Eichmann asked then Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, to return to his fatherland claiming do deserve it because of what he did to the Jews. We have two images of Adolf Eichmann. The first, dating back to 1942, has been reproduced millions of times. The Chief of the Jewish Affairs office at the Gestapo has the cap and the dead head of the SS, he looks arrogant, haughty, his smile looks more like a sneer. Twenty years later, Eichmann is a man without a face, accommodating and condescending, sitting behind the crystal slabs. Eichmann here resembled those Indian fakirs covered with ashes, sitting along the banks of the Ganges at Benares. During the war, while the extermination factories accumulated his Jewish victims, Eichmann collected media clippings on his “performance”. He directed the deportations of all Jewish children from France. One of his directives was a sentence of death to the French Jews: “If you want to solve once and for all the Jewish problem for no reason we must withdraw from the line previously established in areas occupied by the Italians”.

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