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This book presents you with the background profiles of those mass exterminators of National Socialism who wound up in court. It pictures their 'route to crime' and explains why their court room profiles have always remained so controversial in the eyes of post-war observers and commentators. Both inside and outside academia, this controversy continuous to flare up every now and then. It invariably focusses on Hannah Arendt's famous thesis about the personality of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's manager of mass destruction. We will take a closer look at the arguments involved in this 'debate' on the Banality of Evil and see how Arendt's interpretation of Eichmann relates to the perspectives of the post-war courts who tried other exterminators of Hitler's empire.
List of contents
I The veiled image 7
1. Little lumps of reality 7
2. The equilibrium of madness 13
3. The Laocoön in Nuremberg 22
4. The carrousel of fate 28
5. The opportunist route to crime (and back) 39
6. 'Show me yourself with your dog, and I'll tell you what you are' 53
II Pars pro toto: Franz Stangl 60
1. Conversations with the executioner 60
2. 'The Lord God knows me' 62
3. The dynamics of evil 65
The Austrian prologue 65
Hartheim and beyond 73
4. Truth and fiction 77
Duress of orders 79
The incorruptible policeman: Stangl's self-portrait 86
The awareness of injustice 90
III The Palmström Syndrome 96
1. A magical encounter 96
2. The criminal of the century 99
3. 'That which must not, cannot be' (I) 111
4. 'That which must not, cannot be' (II) 119
5. Facing 'impossible' facts 124
Postscript: the measure of all things 128
Appendix 132
Notes 150
Bibliography 152
Index on persons 170
About the author
Dick de Mildt is a historian and co-editor of the multi-volume documentation series of post-war German trial judgments concerning Nazi crimes, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen.
