“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Arendt rightly points out that Eichmann could just as easily have ended up a functionary in some mundane, superfluous agency of the German government rather than becoming who he became. Writing regarding Eichmann’s defense attorney, Arendt notes: “Servatius himself had declared, even prior to the trial, that his client’s personality was that of ‘a common mailman.’)”
Eichmann brags about his friendly relationships with prominent Jews who help him with deportations prior to the “Final Solution.” In another lifetime, Eichmann could easily have been a DMV employee or an assistant principal at a high school — though probably never a principal. When he says he never killed anyone, I believe him. When he says he doesn’t hate Jews, that’s clearly true. More than anything, he seems to be most concerned with setting the record straight about what he did do. This is certainly true after the Nuremberg trials in which high-ranking Nazis turned on one another and blame was thrown around like a hot potato.
Eichmann is so ordinary, so passionless and bland. At one point, a guard loans a copy of Lolita to Eichmann, who quickly returned it, “visibly indignant; ‘Quite an unwholesome book’—.“ He certainly doesn’t fit the mythos that popular culture has created in the years since World War II: occult-obsessed, fanatically racist, psychotically sadistic. I can’t begin to count the number of Nazis I’ve killed in video games over the years, starting with Wolfenstein 3-D way back in 1992. Nazis remain our representation and shorthand for Evil, that malevolent force which takes possession of entire peoples (never the United States, of course).
In painting the Nazis this way, we allow ourselves the luxury of assuming we could never be capable of such horrors. The Nazis were wholly and uniquely Evil, almost supernaturally so. Of course, this is absurd. All you need do is look at the syphilis studies the United States conducted in Guatemala in the late 1940s to see that it’s incredibly easy to justify almost anything. Those studies were on par with anything Josef Mengele might have done.
Eichmann is nothing special. He’s just a man in the same way that Israeli soldiers and commanders and politicians are just men and women, hardly outstanding in any way. Yet, as I write this, they are carrying out what seems to be their own “Final Solution,” the last phase of a decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestine. How far does the responsibility for this genocide go? To Netanyahu? To Joe Biden? To the US military or even the American taxpayer? I don’t know. But it seems that the liberal order that was established by the trials at Nuremberg, by the establishing of the UN, and by the “triumph” of democracy and the free market may have been a farce since its inception.
In closing, I’ll quote the band Andrew Jackson Jihad:
But there’s a bad man in everyone, no matter who we are
There’s a rapist and a Nazi living in our tiny hearts
Child pornographers and cannibals, and politicians too
there’s someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you.
An Unhappy Consciousness 