Eichmann Before Jerusalem The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer

A New York Times Notable Book
A National Jewish Book Award finalist

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann took to the defendant’s box in Jerusalem and insisted that he was no “manager of the Holocaust,” as his accusers claimed, just a smalltime bureaucrat following orders. Like countless others, Hannah Arendt—covering the trials for The New Yorker—believed him. Eichmann Before Jerusalem challenges this history for the first time, completely reassessing Eichmann’s story and drawing upon a wealth of newly uncovered materials that reveal his great deception, as well as bringing to light shocking truths about Nazis in the post-war world. Mapping out the astonishing links between innumerable past adherents—from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen—both in exile and in Germany, Bettina Stangneth reconstructs in detail the secret life of one of the Holocaust’s principal organizers.

Bettina Stangneth wrote her dissertation on Immanuel Kant and the concept of radical evil. Ever since then she has been researching a theory of the lie and has written widely on anti-Semitism in eighteenth-century and National Socialist philosophy. In 2000 she was awarded first prize by the Philosophical Political Academy, Cologne, and she received the German NDR nonfiction book award for Eichmann Before Jerusalem in 2011. Bettina Stangneth is an independent philosopher and lives in Hamburg, Germany.