Eichmann, Bureaucracy and the Holocaust by Jonathan Stonehouse

S ometime in early 1960 members of the Israeli secret service, perhaps working on a tip-off from their Russian counterparts, flew to Argentina to conduct a surveillance operation, the subject being one Rikardo Klement, a resident of Buenos Aries. On May 11 that year, having satisfied themselves as to his true identity, the subject was kidnapped and taken to a safe house, where under questioning he admitted what his Israeli captors had suspected all along: "Ich bin Adolf Eichmann". The subsequent trial, conviction and execution of Lieutenant Colonel Otto Adolf Eichmann, the Gestapo officer responsible for deportations to the Third Reich's extermination facilities and the only Nazi war criminal to be prosecuted on Israeli soil, was an international sensation. In the decades that followed Eichmann would be the subject of an equally sensational number of more-or-less lurid books and documentaries, not to mention three full-length feature films. A surprisingly large number of historical works adopt a similarly simple and sensationalist view of Eichmann, one which elevates his skills, status, role and importance vis-à-vis the Nazi hierarchy and Final Solution, and explains his participation by denouncing him as an evil genius, rabid anti-Semite, fanatical National Socialist, and sadistic monster. Such views tend to be repeated over-and-over again ad nauseam despite, or perhaps in spite of, the rather less glamorous version of Eichmann found in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Sadly, this alternative account remains largely ignored: even those who acknowledge and cite the work invariably focus on Arendt's use of the term "evil" at the expense of her wider assessment of Eichmann's modest intellect and utterly mundane personality.
     
    Of course, in the cold light of day it is easy to understand why some rush to label Eichmann as evil or sadistic, given that his involvement and culpability is not in doubt. Yet these terms seem inconsistent with what we know about him. As Arendt observes, his ordinariness, normality, and total lack of any outstanding qualities disconcerted even his Israeli interrogators. However, it takes little effort or insight to look at the historical record and arrive at the 'commonsense' conclusion that somebody who participated in the Final Solution must be evil or sadistic. It's important to recognise that merely labelling somebody as this, that or the other does not, as some historians seem to assume, explain that person's actions and motivations. Accordingly, we must beware of falling prey to a tautology that attempts to explain Eichmann's actions in terms of some sadistic character trait and points to these same actions as 'proof' of his sadism. We should instead examine Eichmann's case from a sociological perspective and seek to analyse his actions within a theoretical framework. In so doing we can come to understand how and why a 'normal' individual could commit such acts, rather than merely draw conclusions from the historical record.
     
    One such perspective is that of Bauman, whose Modernity and the Holocaust utilises a broadly Weberian framework to demonstrate that the Holocaust was perpetrated using 'normal' yet uniquely modern methods, scientific procedures, and bureaucratic forms of organisation. The intention here is to analyse Eichmann's activities and behaviour in the context of Bauman's schema, and those other aspects of Weber's conceptualisation of bureaucracy and the bureaucrat, to see whether Eichmann's 'ordinariness' and 'normality' can be reconciled with his actions. Accordingly, in Part Two Eichmann's activities will be examined in the context of the bureaucratic ethos and concomitant consequences of the demand that bureaucrats keep separate their public and private lives. The effects of hierarchy and the chain of command will also be considered, with regard to the extent to which they facilitate the re-deployment of morality, reducing it to a