Notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann executed
It’s been 56 years since Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi, was executed in Israel. His death still resonates today in New Zealand as a reminder of the Holocaust and the debate of whether his evil was banal.
Eichmann was an SSObersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant colonel) in the Nazi Reich who organised the logistics of the Holocaust. He took the minutes at the Wannsee Conference, the January 1942 meeting of Nazi ministries that decided upon the Final Solution to the Jewish question.
He ‘‘masterminded the apparatus for concentrating, expropriating and deporting millions of Jews to the ghettoes of Eastern Europe and the extermination camps’’, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem.
He made the trains run on time. Late in the war, he personally oversaw aspects of the on-again, offagain expulsion of Jews from Budapest in Hungary, an effort cut short when Soviet armies overran the city in February 1945.
After the war Eichmann lived in Europe under assumed names.
In 1950, he used false papers to move to Argentina and his family joined him there a few years later.
By then, Israelis and others were actively seeking Nazis who had escaped justice, Eichmann among them. But it was unclear if he had survived the war.
Eichmann told the world he still lived by giving interviews to a Nazi journalist named Willem Sassen who got some articles published in Life magazine but didn’t disclose Eichmann’s location.
By various means, Israel found Eichmann living in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement.
On May 11, 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped him and later smuggled him on to a plane bound for Israel.
His capture was announced by the Israeli prime minister on May 23. The operation probably violated international law and Argentina was particularly upset. Israel didn’t care. Eichmann was put on trial 11 months later and convicted of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other offences. He was sentenced to death and hanged just after midnight on June 1, 1962.
Eichmann’s capture, trial and execution were front page news all over the world, including in New Zealand.
New Zealanders of the day were ‘‘shocked as stories emerged and refugees made their way here’’, says Chris Harris, national director of education at the Wellington-based Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.
‘‘We want to empower people to take a stand against prejudice, discrimination and apathy but to do this they need to be informed, so we educate on how they can use evidence of the past,’’ Harris says by email. An Anne Frank exhibition currently touring New Zealand is a good example.
‘‘I don’t believe that New Zealanders know enough about the Holocaust,’’ says Harris.
‘‘We hear from people who seem to believe that the Holocaust was just about death, murder, genocide, but not about aspects like resistance, righteous people, the way that people tried to make life as normal as possible. Our schools are not teaching it well.’’
The Holocaust Centre sees a ‘‘small amount’’ of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial in New Zealand, most of it online.
However, demons have been awakened overseas and that’s having an impact here. ‘‘People are starting to feel like that it is OK to question the facts.’’ The phrase ‘‘fake news’’ is being applied to the Holocaust, Harris says.
That’s not banal, the word infamously used by Hannah Arendt to describe Eichmann’s character. A German-Jewish philosopher who escaped Europe in 1940, Arendt covered Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for a magazine and in 1963 at book length.
The ‘‘banality of evil’’ has been hotly debated since. During months of interrogations and at trial, Eichmann presented himself as a passionless bureaucrat who had no real power in Nazi Germany and should be excused for his unknowing role in the Holocaust.
Arendt argued his ‘‘crimes resulted not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer ‘thoughtlessness’. He was simply an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing’’, argues the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a paraphrase of Arendt’s book.
Eichmann, she found, was not ‘‘inwardly’’ evil.
Many found this unacceptable. Eichmann helped kill millions and he knew what he was doing at the time. Arendt’s banal bureaucrat was largely overturned by a 2014 book called Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life Of A Mass Murderer.
Author Bettina Stangneth got access to what are now called the Argentina Papers – Eichmann’s writings in Argentina, the full transcripts of his discussions with that Nazi journalist and other materials from an active group of Nazis living there in the 1950s.
They reveal a ‘‘group of Nazis who aimed to bring back the idea of National Socialism’’, Stangneth told The Atlantic magazine. ‘‘Eichmann was a part of this group, consulted because of his firsthand knowledge of the Jewish question.’’
He was, she concluded, a committed Nazi, an anti-semite and an all-too convincing liar.
Exhibition: Anne Frank: Let Me Be Myself
Wellington: Dominion Museum Building, until June 22 Christchurch: Air Force Museum, Wigram, July 29-Sept 22 Whangarei: Kiwi North Museum and Heritage Park, Oct 1-Feb 8