Eichmann in Jerusalem: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Eichmann was captured on May 11, 1960 outside Buenos Aires and brought to trial exactly 11 months later, on fifteen counts encompassing “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.” Each of these carried the death penalty, and Eichmann cryptically pleaded “not guilty in the sense of the indictment” to each of them. No one bothered to ask him what this meant, but Servatius explains this to the press by claiming that “Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law.”

Servatius’s own explanation centers on the notion that Eichmann was committing “acts of state,” not crimes, because he was quite literally carrying out the law. Eichmann insists that he never killed anyone, nor ordered anyone to kill anyone, and so was only guilty of “aiding and abetting” the Holocaust, which he admits was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of Humanity.” The defense ignores this question.

Meanwhile, the prosecution tries endlessly to prove that Eichmann had indeed killed people, and they end up focusing on a dubious handwritten note by a German official reading, “Eichmann proposes shooting.” In reality, the eight thousand Jews in question were already being shot, and when asked whether he would coordinate their deportation instead, Eichmann refused. Inexplicably, at the trial, he claims the document was forged; regardless, he clearly had no power to order around the Army generals who coordinated the shootings on the ground. Eichmann considers himself “a law-abiding citizen” following the Nazi regime’s highest law of all: Hitler’s orders. He never pretends to have opposed the Holocaust or to regret his actions, but does suggest he might “hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth.”

Eichmann tries to explain why he did not meet the indictment, which suggested that he acted “out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds.” He believes he had no base motives and in fact would have had a bad conscience had he refused to follow his orders “to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death.” The half-dozen psychiatrists who interview him consider him remarkably “normal,” indeed psychologically healthy (even though the prosecution later claims he is a bloodthirsty sadist). He also clearly has no particular hatred for Jews.

The court finds this all remarkably difficult to stomach—it seems impossible that a “normal” person “could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.” This draws them into a dilemma: Eichmann was “normal” because he followed the Nazi law, but “normal” also implies that he should have realized he was acting criminally—in fact, under the Third Reich, “only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally.’”

Eichmann was born in 1906; in his memoirs, despite his professed atheism, he credited “a higher Bearer of Meaning,” a term that echoes the language of Nazi military ranks. While his four siblings did fine in school, Eichmann failed out of both high school and the vocational school he attended instead. He finally admits this during his interview with the Israelis, which is remarkable, given how eagerly he tends to bend the truth. His father gave him a job at his mining company, and then in sales at the Austrian Elektrobau Company. Through Jewish relatives, Eichmann then found work as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. Indeed, he never forgot their contributions and emphasizes that he “never harbored any ill feelings against his victims”—he even had a Jewish mistress for a time in Vienna.

Although Eichmann was happy and enthusiastic in his job for some time, after being transferred from Linz to Salzburg in 1932 he suddenly “lost all joy” in work and was fired soon thereafter. He joined the Nazi Party and S.S. in the same year. Ernst Kaltenbrunner invited him, as the two men’s fathers were friends—but Kaltenbrunner treated Eichmann as a social inferior, which showing his demotion from his middle-class upbringing.

From his childhood until the end of World War Two, Eichmann was a “joiner,” always a member of some organization or another—in fact, in 1932 he was forced to choose between the Nazis and a Freemasons’ club organized “to cultivate merriment and gaiety,” but the latter kicked him out after he invited older members for a drink. He joined the Nazi Party without reading its platform or Hitler’s Mein Kampf; he joined the S.S. because, “why not?” Frustrated with his job, the Nazis offered him a chance to become part of History and, in particular, to “start from scratch and still make a career” despite his earlier failures. He says he likely would have preferred to be hanged as a high-ranking Nazi official than to die an irrelevant traveling salesman.

After Hitler’s election in 1933, Austria banned the Nazi Party, so Eichmann went to Germany, where he still had citizenship, and started military training with the S.S. But he hated “the humdrum of military service” and decided to apply for a job at the Reichsführer’s Security Service, or S.D.