So much for Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’

‘This Adolf too was a Nazi piece of work’ Anna Heyward’s review of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: the Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Trans., Ruth Martin, Scribe, 2014, The Weekend Australian Review, November 15-16, 2014

Adolf Eichmann, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, was one of the Nazis primarily responsible for the mass deportation and murder of European Jews between 1939 and 1945.

After the Allied victory he went into hiding, first in Austria, where he farmed eggs, and later in Argentina, where he lived with his wife and children as part of Juan Peron’s community of Nazi sympathisers.

Eichmann was absent from the Nuremberg war crimes trials and came to be known as “the Nuremberg ghost”. In 1960, he was kidnapped by a Mossad team and taken to Israel, where he was put on trial in 1961. Most observers of the trial noted that he showed no remorse and…