Adolf Eichmann is an icon of the 20th century and of the genocide the Nazis waged against the Jews. The image of the murderer sitting inside a bulletproof glass booth at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 has come to encapsulate the
satisfying story of the perpetrator meeting justice at the hands of his victims. Eichmann today is the face of Nazi mass murder.
Yet Eichmann was not always among the pantheon of Nazi killers, and few have been so mythologized and misunderstood.
Although he was a colonel in the Nazi security service and chief of the Jewish Department, Bureau IVB4, of the SS head office, he scarcely figured at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Even though he was responsible for driving through the "Final Solution," Eichmann was almost unknown. He had always operated in the background and covered his tracks well.
In the years immediately after the end of World War II, it was widely argued and generally believed that the Third Reich was created by a gang of pathologically inclined misfits who seized a modern state and bent it to their demented purposes. This top-down model informed the charges against the Nazi leadership. The worst crimes were blamed on the SS, whose members were characterized as fanatical robots or sadistic monsters.
Eichmann made only a perfunctory appearance in early histories of the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. As late as 1957, when Isser Harel, head of the Israeli secret service, received a tip about Eichmann's hiding place in Argentina, he had little idea of his quarry's significance.
But after the Mossad's dramatic kidnapping of Eichmann from a Buenos Aires street in 1960 and the sensational criminal trial that followed -- beginning 45 years ago this month -- his obscurity came to an end. In the rush to satiate public curiosity, several journalists churned out biographies that cumulatively turned him into an iconic figure.
Much of their information came from a largely spurious prison statement by Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann's subordinates. Eichmann's hasty biographers uncritically slotted this information into the early psychological explanations of fascism, especially the theories of Theodor Adorno, who had developed the model of the "authoritarian personality." A 1960 pot-boiler by NBC correspondent John Donovan typified the genre. According to Donovan, Eichmann presented the "classic pattern of the disturbed, introverted personality which so often produced the larvae of fanaticism." Eichmann "drifted around in a world without hope" until he "traded a threadbare suit for the splendid SA uniform." This was nonsense. Eichmann's interrogation and examination in court revealed a normal childhood. True, he lost his mother at a vulnerable age, but he got on with his stepmother. Although his father experienced economic vicissitudes during the 1920s, the family was never destitute. On the contrary, they were pillars of the bourgeoisie in Linz, Austria.
