Unmasking a monster

Everyone has seen the photographs of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organisers of the Nazi Holocaust, in the bulletproof glass cage at his trial in Jerusalem in 1960-62.

While the capture, trial, and execution of Eichmann (1906-62) remains one of the defining moments of 20th-century history, arguably doing more than even the Nuremberg Tribunal to make the Nazi Holocaust the very symbol of evil and inhumanity, the figure of Eichmann has remained extraordinarily vague, ambiguous, and even mysterious.

Remarkably, Eichmann - who was chiefly responsible for organising the "Final Solution" of sending Europe's Jews to the gas chambers with ruthless efficiency - has never before been the subject of a detailed biography, probably the only senior Nazi involved in the Holocaust with his degree of culpability and infamy to lack a searching study.

David Cesarani, professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University, has tackled this omission with considerable skill, producing a gripping and sophisticated biography, one of the best I have seen of a major Nazi.

Eichmann has remained an opaque figure, in part because of the sharply differing opinions held of his career and crimes.

When the Israelis kidnapped him in Argentina and put him on trial in Jerusalem, they sincerely believed that, even apart from organising many of the deportations of Jews to the gas chambers, Eichmann was a monster of evil, a fanatical Nazi who outdid most of his colleagues in enthusiasm for mass murder, and who once boasted that he would jump into his grave happy in the knowledge that - in his estimate - he had murdered five million Jews.

During the war, Eichmann's private life increasingly revolved around drunken sexual orgies, held as tens of thousands died at his hands. Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at his trial, summarised Eichmann as having a "Satanic personality".

In startling contrast to this image, however, the man who sat in the bullet-proof glass cage in Jerusalem seemed not a monster but the epitome of the mild, middle-aged bureaucrat, seemingly incapable of killing a fly, who invariably addressed the wholly Jewish court in respectful, subservient terms.

The sheer insignificance and ordinariness of this alleged Satan led to the writing of one of the most famous of all works on the Holocaust (indeed, next to The Diary of Anne Frank, arguably the best known) Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt, an influential German-born Jewish intellectual socialist living in the United States, with a distaste for either modern capitalism or Zionism, saw in Eichmann, in her famous phrase, the embodiment of "the banality of evil".