“This book is an accident.”

Few authors, let alone one of a well-received, ground-breaking history, would begin an interview that way.

But Bettina Stangneth is no ordinary author. For one, she freely concedes that she’s not a historian but a philosopher. Her areas of study are Immanuel Kant’s concept of radical evil, and the theory of lying. A German non-Jew, she’s also written about anti-Semitism.

So one might say that her book about Adolf Eichmann was a natural progression.

After hundreds of books on him, what’s left to say about Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Final Solution. Plenty, it turns out.

Famously, Eichmann, who was in charge of Jewish affairs during the Third Reich, escaped from Europe to Argentina in 1950 and lived in Buenos Aires under the alias Ricardo Klement. The story is the stuff of Hollywood: he was abducted by Mossad agents in a top secret operation in 1960 and brought to Israel for what was billed as the trial of the century. Found guilty of war crimes, he was hanged in 1962.

Probably the most famous book on the trial was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

But what about that brief Argentine interregnum? What did Eichmann do, say, write and think during that lost decade? Was he the banal clerk in private life as he would later present in the witness box?

The voluminous answer is contained in Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (Vintage Books), a compelling and upending look at a man widely believed to have kept a low profile, but didn’t.

“I had no intention to write a book about Eichmann. This book is an accident,” Stangneth, a 49-year-old resident of Hamburg told The CJN in Toronto, where she had come as one of three finalists for the prestigious Cundill Prize in History (she did not win the grand prize, which went to a book on the League of Nations).

“I am a philosopher. I am not a historian. My main subject…is the way humans deal with truth and honesty. I figured out a special way to read lies, to decipher lies. I wanted to show that my method works.” She sought a way to employ this program (too complex to explain here) as a source for those who rely on hard truths, such as historians and judges.

After reading Arendt, she thought, “take Eichmann, for example. I was absolutely sure that historians’ work was done, that there was no need to go to archives.” But after reading everything she could get her hands on about the subject, “I found so many mistakes. I said, ‘OK, I have to learn how to be a historian. I have to go to the archives.’ ”

She was glad she did because “everything changed.”

Stangneth found a man at odds with the enduring images that had grown around him, of a recluse who lived in constant fear of capture, and the one nurtured by Arendt: that during the war, he had been merely a dull, plodding bureaucrat who was simply following orders – a “small cog in the machine.”

To the contrary, in the words of one reviewer, Stangneth reveals “a skilled social manipulator with a pronounced ability to reinvent himself, an ideological warrior unrepentant about the past and eager to continue the racial war against the Jews.”

Throughout his exile, Eichmann remained a passionate and open Nazi. He proudly signed photos with the flourish, “Adolf Eichmann – SS-¬Obersturmbannführer (retired),” and even boasted that the deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews was his masterpiece. He never denied his true identity.

“The fanatical National Socialist was still on active duty,” Stangneth writes. “One thing in particular stands out: Not once during his escape and exile did Eichmann seek the shadows or try to act in secrecy. He wanted to be visible in Argentina and he wanted to be viewed as he once had been: as the symbol of a new age.”

The real gold mine for Stangneth was listening to taped conversations with Eichmann made by a Dutch former SS journalist, Willem Stassen during salons attended by a small group of Nazis and their sympathizers.

Eichmann’s only regret, he told Sassen, was not killing more Jews. “If we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say, ‘good, we have destroyed an enemy.’ We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people…if we had exterminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects alive today.”

Stangneth admits she was surprised by Eichmann’s brazenness but also by the fact that he was surrounded by many other German Nazis who had been shielded by Argentine president Juan Peron and the Vatican.

“There was a large community of Nazis, sitting there in Buenos Aires, talking and thinking and discussing like [it was] 1940,” she said. “What you have to understand is there was no voice of reason in this room. They were all evil.”

Eichmann was a compulsive writer, always jotting and making notes. Convinced of his innocence, he even drafted a letter to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer offering to return to Germany to stand trial.

And as Stangneth further discovered, he wasn’t the dullard portrayed by Arendt but a well-read mind who had studied Judaism and its texts, and expounded on Kant, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Spinoza.

 

“I discovered Eichmann the thinker,” Stangneth told The CJN.

But as an expert on lying, Stangneth knew a liar when she encountered one. Eichmann “lied over 2.5 million people to their deaths.”

Germany, she went on, knew of his exact location as early as 1952. “We know perfectly well that had no consequences,” the author noted. “The Germans kept it a secret even from the United States.”

With the veil lifted on Eichmann in Argentina, is there anything left to say about one of history’s greatest monsters?

“Perhaps the story is finished,” Stangneth said, “but there could be so many more details. I do not believe in big surprises anymore. But who knows?”


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