Heinemann £20 pp352

Adolf Eichmann was a relatively unknown figure until his appearance in the bullet-proof dock of a Jerusalem courtroom on April 11, 1961 after his kidnapping the year before by the Israelis. The man who 15 or 20 years earlier had terrified his Jewish interrogators was in his mid-fifties, balding and bespectacled, reminding courtroom observers of “everyone’s next-door neighbour”. Astutely, the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal suggested dressing Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann in his former SS uniform to counter precisely that untoward impression.

Eichmann’s ordinariness set perceptive minds cogitating. Wasn’t there something revealing in how he meticulously arranged his papers, books and pencils each day in court, his chill composure, so much at odds with the heightened emotions within and without the courtroom? In a controversial piece of reportage, Hannah Arendt distilled and patented the term “banality of evil” from Dostoevsky and Conrad to account for the disparity between this innocuous-seeming figure and the crimes he had committed. The human conundrum that was Eichmann assumed life even as the man dropped through the floor on the end of a noose in May 1962. The artist Francis Bacon managed a few Eichmanns in glass boxes to go along with Baroque popes in gilded cages on the walls of multimillionaires. He’s an icon, like it or not.

Any number of more or less tawdry biographies of Eichmann appeared after his trial, together with memoirs of his kidnapping in Argentina, although few mentioned that the impetus to do this came from the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer rather than from the Israelis, a detail supplied by David Cesarani’s valuable book.

Professor Cesarani has earned himself a high profile as a commentator on the Holocaust and as a rather good historian of the ebb and flow of public, media and scholarly interest in that event. Although his writing frequently stoops to street-smart slang, he has a fine line in black humour, as when Eichmann commiserates with an Israeli interrogator, “I was once a policeman myself.”

Nothing in Eichmann’s Protestant background in provincial Austria suggests why he became a mass murderer; his family was unexceptional, and he experienced no difficulties in his chosen line of work as a salesman of fuel oils, a job that familiarised him with distribution and transportation.

People of his own social standing were in the Nazi party and the SS, it being coincidental that the intelligence branch he joined, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, would assume ominous responsibilities in the “Jewish question”. As Cesarani says, Eichmann was not clairvoyant. Although his initial remit was to monitor the alleged machinations of freemasons, he was undoubtedly exposed to the SD’s coldly controlled brand of anti-semitism, whose objective was to excise the Jews from Germany through coerced emigration. This entailed crushing assimilationist organisations, while exploiting Zionists, with whom the SD had an instrumental coincidence of interests.

By late 1937 Eichmann was giving other SD personnel lectures on the “Jewish question”, having learnt Yiddish and a smattering of Hebrew in the interim. Posted to Vienna, Eichmann and Jewish communal officials developed a system of emigration based on extortion that could be writ large, his superiors saw, for the Reich as a whole. His expertise at shifting people around was then used to ethnically cleanse Poles and Jews from parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, during which he acquired considerable technical expertise and the requisite hardness of heart. Deliberate destruction was built into the scheme to deport 4m Jews to the insalubrious island of Madagascar during wartime, or hazier plans to relocate them to vacant Stalinist camps in Siberia once the 1941 invasion soured relations with the comrades.

As the acknowledged expert on deportations, Eichmann toured various hellholes in Germany’s eastern imperium as the war progressed, dealing with authorities that had decided to kill Jews who were occupying spaces to which Jews in the West were to be temporarily dispatched, while their ultimate fate was decided. Eichmann was shaken by what he saw, but the career calculus won out over retching or weak knees. When Eichmann then put his capabilities, and indefatigable ambition and energy, at the disposal of a continent-wide process of deportation and destruction, he knew exactly what was the victims’ destination. So far from troubling him, in his farewell address to his SD team Eichmann averred “that the knowledge of having 5m Jews on his conscience gave him such extraordinary satisfaction that he would leap into his grave laughing”.

While Cesarani adds little to mostly German research about the evolution of the Final Solution, he comes into his own from the point where Eichmann was bundled into a car by Mossad agents, interrogated and put on trial. He is sensitive to the politics of the trial in Israel, vividly evoking the characters of the judges and prosecutor, as well as Servatius, Eichmann’s able German lawyer.

Where his account fails to satisfy is at the level of higher philosophical reflection on the human condition. Cesarani’s own attempt to universalise Eichmann as the representative homme genocidaire is no more convincing than Arendt’s banality of evil (or the “totalitarian man” of the cold war), but this insufficiency of explanation does not detract from the grim facts of the life Cesarani so skilfully evokes.

Michael Burleigh is on the academic advisory council of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. Available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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