Hannah Arendt famously saw in Eichmann the “banality of evil,” an ordinariness that terrified, and his hands were stained with ink as much as with blood. No Nietzschean superman, amoral to the end, he was a villain who paled at his crimes after capture – but committed them without compunction. The Final Solution that he described in court was more a force of nature than an act of mass murder, a phenomenon that had “crystallized gradually” and “resulted automatically” from Nazism. Even his use of the word “I” in letters had been bureaucratic jargon and had  had “nothing to do with Eichmann as a person.” Although the Nazi treatment of Jews had certainly been monstrous, he had been a soldier rather than a lawyer and had relied for moral guidance on his oath alone. When Reinhard Heydrich had told him that “the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews,” he had therefore felt no personal responsibility. In fact, after taking the minutes at the Wannsee Conference – the 1941 meeting that had set the Final Solution into motion – he had felt like Pontius Pilate because he had become “a tool in the hands of others,” and was therefore innocent “from the point of view of my inner self.” He had even been able to celebrate with “a glass of brandy, or a couple of glasses of brandy – three, perhaps.”

             Eichmann claimed to have voiced discontent about the genocide on several occasions, but only one example that he gave rang true. The occasion had come in Lwów, as he was returning to Germany from a tour of occupied Belarus, where he had been shown an SS death squad at work. As he had watched the soldiers scything men and women with gunfire and unloading rosy corpses from mobile carbon-monoxide chambers, he had finally been struck by the human meaning of genocide. Unable to contain himself, he had confronted one of the commanding officers. “This is terrible,” he had thundered. “We [are] educat[ing] . . . young people to grow up as sadists. . . . [O]ur own people.” No answer better encapsulates the malevolence and blindness that combined in Eichmann – someone who not only saw the butchers as victims, but thought that it might help his case to tell that to an Israeli court.

. . . The last hopes of avoiding a calamity in Yugoslavia evaporated in March 1992, when Bosnians voted for independence by a two-to-one majority. Serb gunmen fired on peace demonstrators in the capital of Sarajevo, while forces allied to them but reporting to Miloševič began rampaging through the republic’s northern towns. Croat irregulars, backed by President Tudjman, meanwhile instituted a land grab of their own to the east. The Bosnian government, lacking armies, factories and a coastline, was reduced to begging for international assistance as mosques were dynamited, thousands of women were raped, and communities that had been working, marrying, and mourning together for centuries disintegrated. Nowhere was the agony more protracted than in Sarajevo itself. Serb forces sealed off the cluster of minarets and spires and mansions in April 1992, and over the next twenty-two months a city as pretty as a postcard turned into a landscape as ugly as hell. From artillery positions in the mountains that girdled the town, shifts of slivovitz-swigging gunners sent half a million bullets and bombs splashing into the markets and streets, turning the municipal library into a furnace and countless gardens into graveyards. It would become the world’s most emblematic siege since Leningrad. Then, in the summer of 1992, the Western media obtained and published images of skeletal captives gazing through the barbed wire fences of Serb prison camps in northern Bosnia. Five decades after scenes from Buchenwald and Belsen had first flickered through the courtroom at Nuremberg, it seemed as though the continent had begun, by some terrible magic, to tock and tick back through time.

 

War crimes trials