Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass

Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmannâ€”a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendtâ€™s notion of the â€œbanality of evil.â€

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as â€œManager of the Holocaust,â€ in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendantâ€™s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following ordersâ€”no more, he said, than â€œjust a small cog in Adolf Hitlerâ€™s extermination machine.â€ How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding?

Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmannâ€™s own recently discovered written notesâ€” as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Airesâ€”draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself,Â an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives.

A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazisâ€”from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmenâ€”both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaustâ€™s principal organizers as no other book has done

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-09-02
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Vintage
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2014-09-02
Format	Kindle eBook

Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

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