ANew York TimesNotable Book of 2014
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 'Manager of the Holocaust', he was able to portray himself, from the defendant's box in Jerusalem in 1960, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders no more, he said, than 'just a small cog in Adolf Hitler's extermination machine'.
How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a principal architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? How had he occupied himself in hiding?
Drawing upon an astounding trove of newly discovered documentation, Stangneth gives us 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, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes to discuss past glories and vigorously planning future goals.
Bettina Stangneth wrote her dissertation on Immanuel Kant and the concept of 'Radical Evil' and has written extensively about anti-Semitism in 18th century and National Socialist philosophy. In 2000 she was awarded first prize by the PhilosophicalPolitical Academy, Cologne. She lives in Hamburg.
A total reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann, revealing his activities and notoriety following the collapse of the Third Reich and permanently undermining Hannah Arendt's often-cited notion of the 'banality of evil'.>
