Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans

Author:Richard J Evans [Evans, Richard J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, History, Wars & Conflicts, World War II, General, Political
ISBN: 9780593296424
Google: YOfiEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593296427
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Heydrich’s search for power and recognition ultimately led him to order the deaths of millions, but even this was pursued within the boundaries of a policy ordained by his superiors.

14

The Bureaucrat: Adolf Eichmann

From 11 April 1961, when it began, to 15 December 1961, when it ended, the trial of Adolf Eichmann gripped viewers across the globe. Broadcast from the courtroom in Jerusalem on radio and television, reported on by legions of journalists, recounted at length in newspapers and magazines, it presented moving and harrowing testimony from some 112 surviving victims of the Holocaust, men and women who had been through the ghettos and camps and seen sadism and brutality almost beyond imagining, witnessing mass murder on a scale that almost defied comprehension. The Eichmann trial was perhaps the first occasion in which the full horror and extent of the Holocaust had been broadcast to the whole world. The defendant became notorious as the man who, more than any other, had orchestrated and organized the killing. And yet, at the end of the war, Adolf Eichmann had scarcely been known to the general public at all. Noticing his name on a draft of the judgement issued by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg shortly after the war, one of the judges, Francis Biddle, had scrawled next to it the words: ‘who was he?’[1] Eichmann featured only incidentally in the early histories of the Nazi regime or the Holocaust.[2] He lacked entirely the kind of notoriety accorded to Himmler or Heydrich. His name cropped up in many documents, but it was always in the background, never in the glare of publicity. Even at his trial, he presented himself above all as a bureaucrat, a transportation and emigration executive, a man who never fired a shot in anger or murdered anyone with his own hands. ‘I had nothing to do with killing Jews,’ he told his interrogator in Jerusalem. ‘I’ve never killed a Jew. And I’ve never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.’[3] The prosecution portrayed him as a new kind of killer, ‘the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind a desk’.[4] But this did not satisfy the media. Early, journalistic biographies, rushed out before the trial had even begun, argued, along the lines of other studies of Nazis at the time, that he was psychologically damaged, sexually perverted, violent and depraved. They failed to convince.[5] Nor was the prosecuting attorney’s claim that he had a ‘Satanic personality’ in any way persuasive.[6]

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