Tape recordings
In hiding in Argentina in the mid 1950s, Eichmann recorded on tape his recollections of these final days. 'I called my men into my Berlin office ... and formally took leave of them. 'If it has to be', I told them, 'I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.' This statement gives a clue to how Eichmann's mind worked. The Jews were the enemy. He had nothing against them personally, but in war the enemy has to be destroyed. Eichmann did not kill a single Jew with his own hands and he was often courteous towards Jewish leaders who did his bidding. Yet he could also be abusive and violent: as his power burgeoned and his bourgeois inhibitions were eroded, he became increasingly coarse.
'Eichmann learned to hate, and to hate in a controlled and impersonal way.'
Even so, Eichmann was not the central, demonic figure of the Nazi regime he was made out to be in his trial, and as he has become in popular memory. He did not make any key decisions on Jewish policy and at no point before mid 1941 could he have known where it was leading. The genocide was set in motion by others and at first proceeded independently from his office.
That he committed atrocities before then is beyond doubt, and there is no disputing the fact that he became an accomplice to a widening circle of mass murder that he helped to sustain with all his might. What makes his crimes so chilling is that they were not preordained by any evident pathology or inbuilt racism. Eichmann learned to hate, and to hate in a controlled and impersonal way. He applied business methods to the handling of human beings who, once they had been dehumanised, could be treated no differently from cargoes of kerosene. In his mind there was little difference between setting up a petrol station or a death camp.
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