• Menu

  • Shop

  • Languages

  • Accessibility
Visiting Info
Opening Hours:

Sunday to Thursday: ‬09:00-17:00

Fridays and Holiday eves: ‬09:00-14:00

Yad Vashem is closed on Saturdays and all Jewish Holidays.

Entrance to the Holocaust History Museum is not permitted for children under the age of 10. Babies in strollers or carriers will not be permitted to enter.

Drive to Yad Vashem:
For more Visiting Information click here

No Middle Ground for the Eichmann Männer

George C. Browder

  1. First published as Hitlers Bürokraten: Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker und die Banalität des Bösen (Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 2000).
  2. For a complete and most current historiography, Gerhard Paul, “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen. Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung,” in idem, ed., Die Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Göttengen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002), pp. 13-90.
  3. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann Männer (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1993).
  4. Christopher R. Browning, review of Hitlers Bürokraten in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 16 (Spring 2002), 1, p. 126.
  5. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1965).
  6. Quoting Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 288. Arendt herself apparently had some second thoughts; see her introduction to Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. xx-xxiv.
  7. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), vol. I.
  8. Michael Wildt, Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938: Eine Dokumentation (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995).
  9. Paul, “Täter der Shoah.”
  10. For example, Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 166-169, 175.
  11. Paul, “Täter der Shoah,” pp. 50-66.
  12. A massive body of theory and research on intellectual and ethical development has emerged largely since the 1960s. One school of post-Piagetian theory involving a stagedevelopment process is that of William G. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), and research growing from it, such as Carol Gilligan, “Moral Development,” in Arthur W. Chickering, ed., The Modern American College (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981), which has offered different approaches to ethical development from those of Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-developmental Approach to Socialization,” in David Goslin, ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969). The dialectical-development theory of Michael Basseches, Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984) offers an alternative approach to stage theory, but, unfortunately, has not stimulated much subsequent research.
  13. Herbert C. Kelmann and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
  14. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) argues this concerning the appeal of Nazism in general. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge Peter Longerich’s argument that there was a consensus among Nazis about the goal of achieving a Volksgemeinschaft that explicitly involved purging all alien and degenerative elements, among whom the Jews were preeminent; Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998). Embracing the “higher goal” of Volksgemeinschaft did not, however, always require immediate recognition of Jews and others as hateful threats requiring physical extermination; becoming involved in its implementation did.
  15. For the entire SS in 1937 alone, fifty-four were expelled for having contact (Verkehr) with Jews, five for racial shame (Rassenschande), thirty-six were released for ideological unsuitability; and 160 withdrew on their own accord, often giving ideology as the grounds; SS-Statistisches Jahrbuch, 1937. As for early SD members, 1.5 percent would be released and 2.8 percent expelled for political unsuitability or other causes; based on quantitative analysis of early SD members, George C. Browder, Hitler’s Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Appendix C, pp. 259-281.
  16. For example, the records of Albert Reinke, (born October 29, 1877) Geheime Staatsarchiv Berlin-Dahlem, 90P/7/221-51; and former U.S. Document Center Berlin, SSO and RuSHA files.
  17. Kelmann and Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience.
  18. Browder, Hitler’s Enforcers, pp. 151-152.
  19. Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and W.H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
  20. Saul Friedländer, “Ideology and Extermination: The Immediate Origins of the Final Solution,” in Ronald Smelser, ed., Lessons and Legacies, vol. V, The Holocaust and Justice (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), pp. 31-48. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) has most recently demonstrated how the public media was used to “sell” the police state and the persecution of Nazism’s ideological enemies to the general public by building upon widely held fears and prejudices.
  21. Claudia Steur, Theodor Dannecker. Ein Funktionär der “Endlösung” (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1997).
  22. Ibid., pp. 15, 17-21, 153.
  23. Ibid., pp. 16, 151-152; and Dannecker’s SS officer and RuSHA files in the former U.S. Document Center, Berlin, now held by the Bundesarchiv Berlin.
  24. Browder, Hitler’s Enforcers, pp. 180-181, 189-192.
  25. Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Redikalismus, Wletanschauung und Vernunft, 1903-1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), on the influence of this thinking among the leaders and shapers of the SD and Gestapo.
  26. “Bericht des SS-Scharf. Kaulard …,” February 15, 1935, Landes Hauptarchiv Koblenz, 662.6./45/3.
  27. Yaacov Lozowick, “Reflections on the Historical Significance of Adolf Eichmann,” presented at the Tagung, “Rolle und Politik des SD im NS-Regime,” October 11-13, 2001, at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, publication forthcoming.
  28. For a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of monocausal versus complex, interactive analyses, see Thomas Blass, “Psychological Perspectives on the Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and their Interactions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7 (1993), 1, pp. 30-50.
  29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), aphorism 146, p. 85.
  30. Rudolf J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
  31. Gellately, Backing Hitler, demonstrates involvement by the non-Nazi press that looks more “universal” than unique to a dictatorship.