Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer - Hardcover

"Eichmann before Jerusalem is history at its best. Meticulously researched, compellingly argued, engagingly written. Bettina Stangneth confronts Hannah Arendt’s notion of the 'banality of evil' with important new evidence and nuanced insight, permitting a fresh and informed reassessment of this riven debate. Arendt would surely have applauded the Stangneth challenge" (Timothy W. Ryback)

"Stangneth has mined an extraordinary trove of new documentary material... Meticulous, scholarly and highly readable... A tour de force of historical revision" (Ben Macintyre The Times)

"Thanks to this brilliant book, exhaustively researched and convincingly argued, the veil has at last been lifted [on Eichmann's role in the Holocaust]" (Saul David The Daily Telegraph)

"Absorbing... Bettina Stangneth's disturbing account of Adolf Eichmann's years in exile reveals the full extent of his cynicism, inhumanity and moral self-deception" (Richard J Evans Guardian)

"Eichmann Before Jerusalem is both an unintimidated challenge to Hannah Arendt’s glib notion of Eichmann’s insignificance and a clear analysis of the origins and enduring uses of Holocaust Denial" (Times Literary Supplement)

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014

Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as 'Manager of the Holocaust', he was able to portray himself, from the defendant's box in Jerusalem in 1960, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders – no more, he said, than 'just a small cog in Adolf Hitler's extermination machine'.

How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a principal architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? How had he occupied himself in hiding?

Drawing upon an astounding trove of newly discovered documentation, Stangneth gives us a chilling portrait not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes to discuss past glories and vigorously planning future goals.