Ordinary evil

Rochus Misch is nostalgic about his former boss.

Misch recalls:
“He had a deep and quiet voice. There was no need to be scared if you made a mistake”

His boss

particularly enjoyed the parties thrown by his wife

and the boss was something of an egalitarian:

Nobody saluted their higher-ranking colleagues within the building.

And given that he worked for his boss in Berlin during the Nazi era, well, his boss was quite open minded. One of his boss’s

favorite songs was composed by a Jew, and revealed that his personal cook was not a “real Aryan”

His boss even “had a small fund of jokes,”

His boss though wasn’t a terribly sensitive sort as he

“… cracked jokes about concentration camp inmates.”

Actually Rochus Misch’s boss was Hitler, who was evil incarnate. By presenting these impressions through Mr.Misch’s eyes news organizations are minimizing the enormity of Hitler’s crimes.

And no, the sentence:

The war crimes that occurred under Hitler’s leadership, including the Holocaust, go almost unmentioned in the book.

doesn’t sufficiently detract from the narrative of an old man reliving the glory of his youth.

Back in 1983, Commentary magazine published “Interrogating Eichmann” taken from a book by Avner Less, who’s job it was to build the case against Eichmann.

The book itself was reviewed by the New York Times. Two paragraphs in the review stick out in particular. First there’s Less’s description of Eichmann.

”My first reaction when the prisoner finally stood facing us in the khaki shirt and trousers and open sandals was one of disappointment. I no longer know what I had expected -probably the sort of Nazi you see in the movies: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes and brutual features expressive of domineering arrogance. Whereas this rather thin, balding man not much taller than myself looked utterly ordinary. The very normality of his appearance gave his dispassionate testimony an even more depressing impact than I had expected.”

Then there’s this incident which still boggles my mind:

There is unexpected drama in the relationship between the police captain and his prisoner. Eichmann respected his interrogator while trying to save his own neck. He felt that one uniform was speaking to another, that rank had its privileges, even for a prisoner. The reader watches for the cat-and-mouse interplay. When Captain Less tells him that his father had been deported to Auschwitz by Eichmann’s own headquarters, Eichmann opens his eyes wide and cries out: ”But that’s horrible, Herr Captain! That’s horrible!”

So the Nazis did not come out of central casting. If anything their appearances seemed to have inspired Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” observation. But in Avner Less’s telling, the ordinariness of Eichmann served to underscore the enormous evil he had committed. In the recollections of Rochus Misch, the ordinariness he describes allows him and the reporters covering him to put a soft focus around the Holocaust. They are sentimentalizing genocide.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.