Perspectives on Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour

By Andrew Elsby

The purpose of this book is to assess the existing explanations of Adolf Eichmann’s perpetrator behaviour. These include Eichmann as a monster of abnormal personality, Arendt’s influential and controversial claim that Eichmann was entirely normal but devoid of capacity for moral reasoning, and Stangneth’s and Cesarani’s characterisation of Eichmann as an eliminationist antisemite. Arguments against these explanations are presented and the book argues that Eichmann was entirely normal not in the cognitive sense of limited moral awareness and poor appreciation of the consequences of his actions but in the sense of optimisation of his own outcomes in material, social and psychological terms regardless of the cost to others. This new argument is supported by reference to the social psychological experiments of Milgram on obedience to immoral authority and Zimbardo on the influence of role on behaviour, by reference to Browning’s research on the perpetrator behaviour of a German police reserve battalion in Poland, and by reference to research on Einsatzgruppen commanders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CentreHouse Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215507254

Book preview

Perspectives on Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour

by Andrew Elsby

The right of Andrew Elsby to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted herein in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The purpose of this book is to assess the existing explanations of Adolf Eichmann’s perpetrator behaviour. These include Eichmann as a monster of abnormal personality, Arendt’s influential and controversial claim that Eichmann was entirely normal but devoid of capacity for moral reasoning, and Stangneth’s and Cesarani’s characterisation of Eichmann as an eliminationist antisemite. Arguments against these explanations are presented and the book argues that Eichmann was entirely normal not in the cognitive sense of limited moral awareness and poor appreciation of the consequences of his actions but in the sense of optimisation of his own outcomes in material, social and psychological terms regardless of the cost to others. This new argument is supported by reference to the social psychological experiments of Milgram on obedience to immoral authority and Zimbardo on the influence of role on behaviour, by reference to Browning’s research on the perpetrator behaviour of a German police reserve battalion in Poland, and by reference to research on Einsatzgruppen commanders.

Published as an ebook by CentreHouse Press at Smashwords 2023.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Introduction

• Notes

Chapter Two

The initial impression. Arendt: Eichmann’s lack of moral reasoning

• Notes

Chapter Three

Stangneth. The Eichmann of the war years, the Eichmann of the Sassen interviews in Argentina in 1957, and the Eichmann of the Jerusalem trial in 1961

• Notes

Chapter Four

Cesarani: Eichmann’s journey to eliminationist antisemitism

• Notes

Chapter Five

Eichmann in Hungary in 1944. Evidence of eliminationist antisemitism?

• Notes

Chapter Six

Psychiatric and psychological assessments of Eichmann and their relationship to the evidence of Eichmann’s personality in his career in the SS

• Notes

Chapter Seven

Social psychological experimental evidence on human behaviour. The Milgram experiments and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment

• Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience to Authority

• Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment

• Milgram and Zimbardo

• Notes

Chapter Eight

The evidence of other German perpetrators. Browning’s ‘Ordinary Men’ and the Einsatzgruppen commanders

• Browning’s ‘Ordinary Men’

• The Einsatzgruppen Commanders

• Notes

Chapter Nine

Discussion of the historiographical, experimental and historical evidence and an alternative explanation of Eichmann’s behaviour

• Notes

Chapter Ten

Conclusion

• Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Chapter One

Introduction

Eichmann has been the subject of considerable controversy within academia and in the media since his apprehension by Mossad in Argentina and his abduction to Israel in 1960, a public trial that attracted worldwide attention in 1961 and his execution in Jerusalem in 1962. The opposing views on Eichmann seem to be well-represented by Hannah Arendt, a German American social philosopher and political theorist, who has claimed that Eichmann was entirely normal, and David Cesarani, a historian of the Holocaust, who claims that Eichmann’s involvement in the destruction of Europe’s Jews is explained by Eichmann’s eliminationist antisemitism. Cesarani neatly sums up the sequence of historiographical perspectives on Eichmann over time, identifying an immediate post-war period in which Eichmann was perceived as an ‘aberration – a pathological type’, an ensuing perception, influenced by Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, of Eichmann as an unreflective, compliant ‘totalitarian man’, a view of him as representing the tendency of bureaucracies to isolate individuals from the consequences of their actions and to facilitate immoral activity, an ensuing correction in the Eichmann case indicating the immediacy of the destruction of Europe’s Jews for him, and Cesarani’s own view, in 2005, that Eichmann ‘appears more and more like a man of our time. Everyman as genocidaire’, referring to the recent prevalence of brutal ethnic cleansing [1]. The inference is that Cesarani is referring to the influence of racial hatred on perpetrator behaviour, in the form of Nazi eliminationist antisemitism in Eichmann.

There have been various views on Eichmann from within the discipline of psychology. These moved from an initial view of him as a Nazi monster to a perception of Eichmann that has been very much influenced by the pioneering experiments on compliance with immoral commands of Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist. Milgram’s experiments, devised with variations to isolate the influences on obedience to immoral authority and conducted in the early 1960s, were intended to investigate the obedience to immoral authority of Eichmann and other Nazi perpetrators, and the astonishing levels of compliance with immoral authority Milgram found exerted enormous influence on the general understanding of Eichmann and of perpetrator behaviour for decades. More recently though Lang has claimed that Milgram’s referring to the Holocaust as a historical example of such compliance has ‘inadvertently deprived the Nazi genocide of its historical meaning and relegated perpetrator behaviour to a function of hierarchical social structures’ and has diminished any sense of human agency or personal responsibility because causation is attributed to organisational factors. I shall return to Milgram below, though it should be noted here that Lang seems to be rejecting the link between Milgram’s findings and Nazi perpetrator behaviour because the latter was located in a historical setting that exerted influence on perpetrators and because Milgram’s findings seem to deny any individual responsibility. Rejection of a theory because it denies individual responsibility is not of course a coherent argument against its causal validity. The reference to a specific historical setting is more germane, not least in the context of the Führerprinzip and the SS code of obedience and discipline. Such views challenge the earlier consensus so influenced by Arendt and Milgram and the view that Eichmann was normal rather than a historical construction of the Nazi state. [2]

In what follows I shall discuss the evidence for the two main views of Eichmann that have endured, with a detailed assessment of Arendt’s attribution of a banality of absence of moral reasoning to Eichmann and an assessment of Cesarani’s and Stangneth’s attribution of ideological antisemitism to Eichmann (derived from a specifically Nazi ideological context) as the decisive influence on his behaviour. [3] In contradistinction to both these views I shall argue that Eichmann’s behaviour is explained by a combination of a trait dominant in almost all human behaviour in all cultures, inadvertent or calculated optimisation of outcomes for the individual concerned, and societal context that dictates what is rewarded and what is punished in material, social and psychological terms. My argument does then take account of ordinary human characteristics and of the context of Nazi Germany, and to support it I shall present contextual evidence from Nazi Germany and from Milgram’s social psychological experiments on immoral behaviour.

For the purposes of this essay the term ‘eliminationist antisemitism’, originally used by Goldhagen in ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’, shall be understood as differentiating an antisemitism that dictated the extermination of the Jews of Europe from a cultural antisemitism of Jewish ‘otherness’ of the sort found in many European countries in the interwar period. [4]

Before considering the different explanations of Eichmann’s perpetrator behaviour, reference to Eichmann’s background and upbringing would seem to set the context for his trajectory to SS officer and Jewish expert and thence to arranging transportation of Jews to extermination camps. Eichmann was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Solingen, Germany, in 1906. His father was a bookkeeper who exerted strict patriarchal control over the family and there were four more children after Eichmann himself. In 1913 the family moved to Linz in Austria as Eichmann’s father had obtained a better job, as a manager, and in 1916 Eichmann’s mother died. His father remarried into an affluent family, and Eichmann’s stepmother was a strict Protestant. At school Eichmann had a Jewish friend but also other friends in a childhood that seems to have been entirely normal for the time. Eichmann did poorly at school and was removed by his father in 1921. At vocational college he did no better, left without qualifications and worked for his father in his various enterprises, many of which failed, though the family was never poor. In all these endeavours Eichmann seems to have done just what his father told him to do, which may also have been normal for the time. Eichmann was then found a job at an oil company by relatives of his stepmother, who had wealthy Jewish friends in Austria. There, between 1927 and 1933, Eichmann worked as a sales representative and in scheduled deliveries. There was then nothing in Eichmann’s childhood to indicate any abnormality of personality or upbringing that could explain his ensuing perpetrator behaviour. Cesarani concludes that Eichmann had a ‘normal upbringing and education’ and ‘an active social life, girlfriends, and, later, a wife and family’, that he was ‘conventionally bourgeois’, and that his ‘politicization’ was ‘normal’ in its right-wing nationalism and cultural antisemitism, [5] though the latter seems to have had no effect on his friendships or on his using Jewish family connections to obtain work. Eichmann’s joining the Nazi Party and SS in 1932 seems to have reflected the influence of friends of his father, for it was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the son of a friend of Eichmann’s father and at the time a leader in the SS, and a long-time national socialist named Andreas Bolek, another of his father’s friends, who introduced Eichmann to the Nazi Party and the SS. [6]

Notes

[1] See Cesarani, David, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage Books, 2005, page 368.

[2] See Miller, Arthur G. (ed.), The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, Second Edition, Guilford Publications, 2016, pages 189 and 190.

[3] See Deutschlandfunk.de, for Rolf Pohl’s review of Irmtrud Wojak’s ‘Eichmann’s Memoirs – A Critical Essay’, for reference to Wojak’s claim that Eichmann was a ‘fanatical National Socialist’ and that ideology was a decisive influence on Eichmann. For Wojak mere bureaucratic imperatives were not the decisive influence on Eichmann’s sending Jews to extermination centres. Though Wojak predicates her work on primary sources from Eichmann in the form of his memoir from Jerusalem and the Sassen interviews in Argentina and counsels against trusting anything Eichmann claims given his motives, the evidence of the Sassen interviews seems to be accepted as evidence of Eichmann’s antisemitism without interrogation as to context, an indication of biased treatment of evidence and selection of evidence that supports the case being made.

[4] See Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Little, Brown, New York, 1996. See also Eley, Geoff (ed.), The ‘Goldhagen Effect’: History, Memory, Nazism – facing the German Past, University of Michigan Press, 2000, page 5.

[5] See Cesarani, Eichmann op. cit., pages 16 and 19–23.

[6] Ibid, page 26.

Chapter Two

The initial impression. Arendt: Eichmann’s lack of moral reasoning

Arendt was the author of the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe her impression of Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem. The phrase was enormously influential in arguing against the idea that the Nazi hierarchy was composed exclusively of people of monstrous evil rather than mostly of ordinary human beings who would in other circumstances have lived entirely ordinary lives. The consensus in the psychological literature now is that the great majority of the major Nazis were entirely sane and rational, with just isolated instances of psychological abnormality, such as Hess, and one of the legitimate if hardly novel points in Goldhagen’s controversial ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ was his noting that the extermination of the Jews involved great numbers of ordinary Germans in both passive and active complicity, the latter as lawyers, doctors, nurses, bureaucrats, camp guards, workers and in other professions. Goldhagen goes on to attribute the involvement of ordinary Germans in the destruction of the Jews of Europe to a German ‘cultural norm’ of ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ that preceded the Nazis’ obtaining power in Germany, though nothing more than conformity to societal norms to avoid sanctions or meeting of role requirements to optimise personal outcomes was required for the passive or active complicity in the Holocaust of great numbers of ordinary Germans. The claims made by Goldhagen as to the motivation of German perpetrators shall be discussed in Chapter Eight below in connection with Browning’s work, which was the stimulus for Goldhagen’s ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’. [1]

Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann reflects her disciplinary background in social philosophy, from which Arendt attributed Eichmann’s perpetrator behaviour to a failure to reflect on what he was doing and its consequences, to ‘Eichmann’s moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void’. [2] Arendt claims that Eichmann ‘was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He personally never had anything whatever against Jews’, and that he was ‘normal insofar as he was no exception within the Nazi regime’. [3]

Arendt claims that the effect of moral reasoning on behaviour regarding the Jews is established by the Danish resistance to the surrender of Jews for deportation to the camps. In Denmark ninety-nine per cent of the country’s Jews survived the war, many having been helped to escape to neutral Sweden by the Danish resistance in 1943, and Danish Jews were received back into their pre-war positions in Danish society after the war.

The context is though indicative, for in the war Nazi control in Denmark was liberal by comparison with other countries in German-dominated Europe, in part it seems aimed at minimising the numbers of German troops needed to keep order there. The Danish government realised the hopelessness of resistance and surrendered to German occupation forces in hours, and the relationship between the local Nazi authorities and the Danish government was good. The result was that the Danish government remained in control of the country. There was also the value of Danish exports of agricultural products to Germany.

That relationship continued, despite the Wannsee Conference decision to eradicate the Jews of Europe and put pressure on the German authorities in Denmark to act against its Jewish population, to which they responded with ‘delaying tactics’, until August 1943. [4] Thereafter, following the major German defeat at Stalingrad and other reverses in the east and in North Africa, the Danish resistance began to be more active, and the result was the imposition of German rule and an order to round up Jews for deportation. Arendt notes that the Danish government gave the Danish Jews notice of their imminent arrest and deportation following a warning to that effect from a German shipping agent who could have been notified by Best, the Nazi Plenipotentiary in Denmark, who according to Arendt also went to Berlin to plead for Denmark as a special case (the Danish government would have been undertaking no risk as the source of the information on the imminent arrest and deportation of the Jews would have been very difficult to ascertain). Arendt notes too that von Hannecken, the German military commander in Denmark, refused to provide troops to Best. [5] Powers and Vogele claim that Best was ‘interested in maintaining the relative political peace of the country’ ‘to his own benefit’, which is consistent with Arendt’s reference to Best’s having claimed that the German objective had not been to ‘seize a great number of Jews but to clean Denmark of Jews’ and that the objective had been ‘achieved’ following the Jews’ escape to Sweden.

Powers and Vogele also claim that Best made it ‘known clandestinely that the seizure of Jews was about to begin’, which confirms Arendt’s reference to Best’s possible warning through a German intermediary of the imminent deportation of Denmark’s Jews. [6] From her own evidence Arendt concludes that it was the Danish resistance that was the cause of Nazi leniency, and even seems to indicate some moral influence from the Danes on the Germans in Denmark, rather than the more obvious inference that Nazi leniency predicated upon local Nazi interest in maintaining peace in Denmark resulted in a sense of no risk for aiding the Jews to escape amongst Danes, for instance because there would be no Nazi desire to apprehend those involved or to punish them. Arendt’s conclusion seems to be an indication of her treatment of evidence and tendency towards assertion without consideration of alternative explanations. [7]

The wartime context explains the relationship between the Danish government and the Nazi authorities in Denmark. The political context of Denmark was one of a tradition of liberal democracy, of individual rights and respect for minorities, and the cultural and social context was one of thorough integration into Danish society of the relatively small Jewish population of Denmark. There was then no history of ‘otherness’, separatism or pariah status for Danish Jews. Though the Danish case seems to indicate that there may have been some influence on the treatment of Jews from their low numbers, from the status of the Jewish population in terms of their integration rather than ‘otherness’, and from liberal cultural and political traditions, the most decisive factor would seem to be the extent of perceived risk of adverse consequences for assisting Jews to escape. For it seems plausible that the extent of Danish assistance to Jews was decisively influenced by there being no apprehension of adverse consequences for providing help to Jews to flee to Sweden, an inference drawn