New and events of the Philadelphia Bar Asso.
Issue link: https://thephiladelphialawyer.epubxp.com/i/434516
16 the philadelphia lawyer Winter 2015 Eichman is back in the news because there is a new book about him, "Eichman Before Jerusalem," by Bettina Stangneth. Her book is seen as a response of sorts to a big book of a previous generation, Hannah Arendt's portrait of him at his 1961 trial, "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Arendt coined the famous phrase, "banality of evil" to describe and to try to understand Eichman. Over the years it supported a view that he was a bland bureaucrat following orders – terrible orders – from on high. Stangneth apparently sees it differently. She recognizes that there were indeed non-ideological functionaries, but Eichman was not one of them. She sees in him a passionate, unrepentant Nazi leader who was a planner and executor of the Holocaust, proud of his murderous accomplishments until the end, or at least to the end of his post-war freedom and the beginning of his trial at which he tried to portray himself as the faceless functionary who was "only following orders." One bus stop photo shows him in a drab suit that he wore during his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. He looked anything but banal in the other photo in which he was dressed in his snazzy Nazi uniform. I am not sure whether it was designed by Hugo Boss who did the uniforms for Hitler's bodyguards and other SS members. Maybe it was done by a designer less known than Boss – a faceless functionary designer. The paragraphs next to the bus stop photos note that Eichman had his headquarters on that site where a luxury hotel, the Hotel Sylter Hof, now sits. Before the hotel and before Eichman the "former stately house of the Jewish Brotherhood" was there. In large letters on top of words and pictures are the words: I saw Adolph Eichman at a bus stop in Berlin. I did not really see him, of course, because the Nazi head of the Judenreferat – the Department of Jewish Affairs – the man who planned and executed the murder of millions of European Jews was hanged more than 50 years ago for war crimes and crimes against humanity. What I did see were several large photos of him plastered to the windows of the bus stop. EichmAn AT ThE Bus sToP B y M i c h a e l j . c a r r o l l