Adolf Eichmann Was No Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt either did not know what she was talking about (at best) or was a deliberate liar (at worst). Because her concept of “banality of Evil” had nothing to do with history – or with psychology, for that matter. It was a rather crude anti-Nazi propaganda, cut and dry, plain and simple, loud and clear.

Nazi decisions actions that resulted in deliberate murder of millions, were monstrously, unspeakably evil – no doubt about that. Both of the Nazis in general – and of Adolf Eichmann in particular.

However, there was nothing “banal” about that Evil – in fact, exactly the opposite was true. In reality, Nazi evil was unique, because it was perpetrated by very smart, supremely intelligent, very gifted, highly educated individuals (more than half of Wannsee Conference attendees had doctorates – as did most commanding officers of Einsatzgruppen) who sincerely, deeply and passionately loved their country.

Their fundamental problem was that they were national-sociopaths and that their decisions and actions were based on misinterpreted facts, faulty logic – and did not use enough common sense. Adolf Eichmann included.

In reality, Eichmann was a talented, highly competent and very successful logistics and transportation manager who planned and executed shipment of over a million Jews to SS killing centers, mostly to Auschwitz (contrary to a popular misconception, he had little to do with Operation Reinhard).

On Heydrich’s orders, he put together Wannsee Conference, oversaw the stenographer who took the minutes (and other support staff), and prepared the official distributed record of the meeting.

True, Adolf Eichmann was no genius, sure – but he was no banality (or mediocrity) either. He did have some talents, but his most important qualities were that he was highly ambitious, very driven, very determined, very daring (to put it mildly) individual committed to accomplishing something really great. Ideally, something absolutely unique in human history. And he did – to the utter horror of mankind.

It is important to note that, unlike his boss Reinhard Heydrich (who was a genuine patriot of Germany), Eichmann did what he did not for his country – he did it for himself. For fame and recognition, sure – but mostly for the feeling of accomplishment – the key driving force for high achiever (which Eichmann was).

I seriously doubt that Eichmann hated the Jews (such characters are rarely, if ever, capable of intense hatred) or loved his country (ditto). I also doubt that Eichmann believed in (or even cared about) the “existential threat of Jews to Germany”, “existential racial war” or any other construct of Nazi ideology (that stemmed from perverted Nazi imagination). I do not think that he cared about ideology at all – most likely he even wasn’t a Nazi.

Both Nazis and the Jews (in radically different ways, of course) were mere tools for him. Tools to achieve what he wanted – a grandiose accomplishment, ideally absolutely unique in human history. Nothing more.

In his childhood, Otto Adolf Eichmann played the violin – as did Reinhard Heydrich all his life. This, most likely, established a certain bond between the two that ultimately resulted in genuinely diabolical partnership.

His poor school performance (happens all the time to gifted individuals) resulted in his father’s withdrawing him from the Realschule and enrolling him in the vocational college. It also gave him additional drive to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

He left without attaining a degree and joined his father’s new enterprise, the Untersberg Mining Company, where he worked for several months. Subsequently, he worked in sales for a number of companies which gave him excellent people skills that he utilized very successfully in his murderous activities.

His decision to pursue a career in the Nazi Party was made for him by a family friend and local SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner (later RSHA Chief and Eichmann’s boss). On his strong advice (order, actually – it appears that Kaltenbrunner found that Eichmann had potential to bring enormous value to NSDAP), Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party in April of 1932.

A few months after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, NSDAP was banned in Austria. In addition, Eichmann lost his sales job… so he decided to move back to his native Germany.

Most likely due to some serious influence from Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann decided to join the SS – and did. After he attended a training program at the SS depot in Klosterlechfeld in August, Eichmann returned to the Austrian border in September, where he was assigned to lead an eight-man SS liaison team to guide Austrian Nazis into Germany and smuggle propaganda material from there into Austria.

When this unit was dissolved, he found himself guarding the Dachau concentration camp. He did not like it very much (to put it mildly), so requested transfer to the SD, to escape the “monotony” of military training and service at Dachau.

Eichmann was accepted into the SD and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organizing seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organizations.

He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann G;ring, Heinrich Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Which provided Eichmann with excellent connections.

Von Mildenstein (the leading supporter of Zionists in NSDAP and in the SS), was so impressed with Eichmann that he invited him to join his Jewish Department, Section II/112 of the SD, at its Berlin headquarters.

Eichmann’s was assigned to prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organizations. He took his job very seriously and even learned a modicum of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters… which was not exactly true (but still way better than anyone else’s).

In 1938, Eichmann was posted to Vienna to help organize Jewish emigration from Austria, which had just been integrated into the Reich through the Anschluss.[43] Jewish community organizations were placed under supervision of the SD and tasked with encouraging and facilitating Jewish emigration.

Funding came from money seized from other Jewish people and organizations, as well as donations from overseas, which were placed under SD control. Eichmann was very successful in his endeavor – the time he left Vienna in May 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had left Austria legally, and many others had been smuggled out to Palestine and elsewhere.

After a posting in Prague to assist in setting up an emigration office there, Eichmann was transferred to Berlin in October 1939 to command the short-lived (because of the war) “Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration” for the entire Reich under Heydrich and M;ller.

In December, Eichmann was given the command of “Jewish” RSHA Referat IV B4 nominally under Gestapo Chief Heinrich M;ller (in reality, Eichmann reported directly to RSHA Chief Reinhard Heydrich).

Heydrich announced Eichmann to be his “special expert”, in charge of arranging for all deportations into occupied Poland. The job entailed co-ordinating with police agencies for the physical removal of the Jews, dealing with their confiscated property, and arranging financing and transport.

Within a few days of his appointment, Eichmann formulated a plan to deport 600,000 Jews into the General Government. Which was not to be as it met stiff resistance from Hans Frank (governor of occupied Poland not annexed into the Reich) and Hermann G;ring.

On March 24, 1940, the latter (the second-in-command in the Reich) forbade any further transports into the General Government unless cleared first by himself or Hans Frank.

Transports continued, but at a much slower pace than originally envisioned. From the start of the war until April 1941, around 63,000 Jews were transported into the ghettos of occupied Poland. On many of the trains in this period, up to a third of the deportees died in transit.

Eichmann’s most visible achievement was deportation of 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in May-July of 1944… after which things got really bizarre even by the standards of the Third Reich.

According to Eichmann, Himmler authorized him to allow emigration of a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks equipped to handle the wintry conditions on the Eastern Front. Nothing came of the proposal, as the Western Allies refused to consider the offer.

In June 1944 Eichmann was involved in negotiations that resulted in the rescue of 1,684 people, who were sent by train to safety in Switzerland in exchange for three suitcases full of diamonds, gold, cash, and securities. These valuables disappeared into the thin air after the war.

At the end of the war, Eichmann was captured by US forces and spent time in several camps for SS officers using forged papers that identified him as Otto Eckmann. He escaped from a work detail at Cham, Germany, when he realized that his identity had been discovered.

In 1948, Eichmann obtained a landing permit for Argentina and false identification under the name Ricardo Klement through the (in)famous Ratlines. He departed from Genoa by ship on June 17, 1950 and arrived in Buenos Aires a month later.

On May 11, 1960, Eichmann was captured near his house on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando, Buenos Aires and smuggled out of the country to Israel. The legality of his trial in Jerusalem left much to be desired, but Eichmann earned the hangman’s noose more than a million times – so he got what he deserved.

Eichmann was hanged at an Israeli prison a few minutes past midnight on June 1, 1962. Within hours Eichmann’s body was cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters, by an Israeli Navy patrol boat.